My Response to Zak S.: His OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire

Zak posted this here.


Thanks Zak for giving me something to blog about today.

OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire


1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
Good gravy, that's a tall order. There's hundreds of things I could list here, but I don't have the time to be overly pedantic, so I'm going with what I thought of first: The Unexpurgated Dragon Generator

2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark: 

How to Awesome Up Your Players by the incomparable Jeff Rients. 

3. Best OSR module/supplement:

Fuck. 

Module: Death Frost Doom. 

Supplement: The entire run of Fight On!

4. My favorite house rule (by someone else): 

Class based weapon damage. Here's Akrasia's version.

5. How I found out about the OSR: 

Fiddling about online one day several months after my last 3.5 campaign wrapped up. I ran AD&D 1e till about 2001, then ran 3e till 2009. WotC had put out 4e and I wasn't interested. I was looking about online and wondering what I was going to run for my next campaign and stumbled onto Grognardia. And thought, "Oh, yeah. Right. I'll run 1e again, or maybe one of these clone thingamajigs." By the end of the day I had a folder full of retro clones and associated OSR stuff. 

6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:

  Meatshields!

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

Up until last week, this was Google+. MeWe has the heat and the numbers, at the moment. It's decent.

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games: 

Every once in a while I might drop by the OD&D Discussion forum. This and the Swords & Wizardry Forums are the only ones I keep up with at all. The Goblinoid Games forum used to be pretty cool, though, but I haven't peeked into it in years and from a quick look see, it's not very active.  

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

High level play rocks! DMing high level play rocks! Crank the dial up to 11 and embrace the chaos!

10. My favorite non-OSR RPG: 

Not sure how to define this. I'll go with Deadlands. 

11. Why I like OSR stuff: 

Well, I have really, really liked TSR era D&D my whole life. I really, really like seeing new, creative material for these games, as well as new interpretations, off-shoots, hacks and the like. I like making stuff for games. I like using stuff other people make for games. I love running D&D. And the OSR is where it's at for creativity, pushing the envelope and coming up with ideas I hadn't thought of, or wouldn't have thought of. OSR stuff is fun. 

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Anything by Matt Finch. The Tome of Adventure Design and The Spire of Iron and Crystal, for instance.

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

Playing D&D with Porn Stars, but that's almost too obvious an answer. Grognardia and Planet Algol are pretty much defunct, but if you haven't read them go do so. Jeff's Gameblog, but he doesn't post very often.

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

The Random Planetary Angel Generator. Link to the PDF is over there on the left. And right here.

15. I'm currently running/playing:

A 1e campaign for my son. Set in Greyhawk. We play every Sunday. Merlin is 13th level now and really, really trying to stay alive to see 18th.

16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

This is such a bizarre hill to die on. I'll use either. In my 1e campaign we use descending. A few months ago, I ran a side campaign using my own OSR rules hack and ascending AC.

 

To which my son immediately replied in the mildly put out tone teenagers sometimes evince with their parents, "Why haven't we been doing it this way the whole time?"

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

Umm... I think I'll go with this Robert Altbauer piece.