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This reminds me to a) run more sessions in urban environments, and b) appreciate how Gygax keyed Hommlet, and how Bledsaw keyed some of the JG cities. The low level thief ability percentages shine just fine in open urban environments.

Following from EOTB’s last paragraph, that’s exactly what Chivalry & Sorcery and Runequest were, and the respective authors say as much (directly and indirectly) in contemporaneous articles. I get a kick out of imagining the veins popping out on the foreheads of Edward Simbalist and Steve...

“Fun,” with its flexible meaning, stands too high a chance for my listener to project their own preferences over my statement’s intent, so I avoid using it. (Tangent: I avoid “role playing” as a verb, and “OSR,” for the same reasons.) I play D&D because it’s worthwhile, despite not always being...

Alarums & Excursions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarums_and_Excursions

Reading through vintage fanzines again recently, from roughly 1975-1979*. The overwhelming majority of scenarios and descriptions of play fall into a “dungeon” or “challenge-based play” category. The descriptions of play read more like a sporting event recap, as opposed to a story; though both...

Not sure this helps, but I'd classify the problem as myopic design, overly focusing on the play pieces that the rulebooks list out for the referee or make implicit in the game procedures. For example: dungeon rooms/doors/cooridors, monsters, treasures. Interactivity comes from those, yes, and...

The ogf-d20-l archives capture back to before 3e released, where various publishers were asking questions and brainstorming on possibilities: https://www.mail-archive.com/ogf-d20-l@opengamingfoundation.org/mail10.html Before 3e got released, somebody was already brainstorming about turning the...

This mis-characterizes things. I might find some contemporaneous links later. It’s true WotC hoped the module load would be carried by other companies, but it was also clear WotC understood the breadth of product enabled by the SRD + OGL. They said as much on their OGL and/or SRD FAQs of the...

That Hickman Pharaoh intro was published 1980, and the early Rahasia was 1979 (according to Designers & Dragons, which unfortunately lacks sourcing for its assertions). For anyone interested in play style research (like actual research) in the 1974-1980 period, plenty of fanzines and other...

Will post more later when I’m finished reading it, but it begs for a brief referee summary of the reality of the site/situation. Presumably that’s on one of the pages not-yet-included. If you want prose feedback, the tone feels a little odd. The Welcome info could be for any modern...

@The1True that seemed to me like a pretty even-handed, thoughtful critique. Gann, like anything else, is only gonna work for some people. Not the first complaint about repetition either; I heard about someone who chopped it up and made it significantly smaller, with less repetition. Anyway, I...

Drive-by posting, sorry: Early Judges Guild cities are not terribly different from Hommlet in what they cover, and predated T1 by a couple years or more. Might be educational to do a side-by-side comparison of Hommlet and one of the early JG cities: Thunderhold (1976 Dec) Haghill (1977 Feb)...

Unfortunately my free time is really erratic these days, so I couldn’t possibly commit to judging. Even if I could, my tastes are kind of narrow, and I wouldn’t want that to skew the results.

@DangerousPuhson where are the maps from? You made them? The first one (Statuary of the Viridescent Grotto?) keeps scratching at my brain. Definitely can't commit to a contest with a deadline, but I am working on a lair for my current campaign, so if it's in sharable form by the deadline, I...

Removing the ceiling height is better than an "impossible" 12 ft height. Don't get me wrong — D&D dungeons absolutely can have space distortion areas, but ought to note them explicitly, so the referee can make them interact with various spells (even as mundane as detect magic), magic negation...

@RoeeAV what does "narrow stairway" mean specifically? Why not say the width instead, or draw it to scale on the map? Both of those would use less space. How far up/down do the stairs travel? Most dungeons assume 45 degree inclines, though modern stairs are not quite that steep. Either way, the...

Meta: Since the trees & guards function separately from the pit (and reaction to the pit), I'd key them as two separate entries. But carrying on with just the one assuming we have to stick with the caves of chaos map as-is, and trying to make it shorter... Specify the height of the branch tips...

FWIW, the internet archive has a capture of the wizards.com page with the argument against long boxed text: https://web.archive.org/web/20051215014928/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20050916a

I stay with only the map much longer, transitioning to the text later. To that end, I generally give special doors a unique appearance on the map or their own keyed entry. I know un-marked doors are conventional, which simplifies the back-and-forth. Hyqueous Vaults shows some of this technique...

I don't think I understand the mechanics of how you present the information to the players. When do you tell them about positions of other doors/exits/corridors within a room? (When, that is, relative to telling them the room's dimensions/shape and contents.) A room's key does not usually say...