“The Original Adult Fantasy Role-Playing Game” was a tagline TSR used for some early D&D products Boy, does that land different in 2025 compared to 1980! I imagine most people today would snickeringly insist that D&D was, in fact, NOT the original adult fantasy role-playing game. Unintentionally spicy marketing aside, what TSR was trying to […]
Who else mixed a little Metamorphosis Alpha (MA) into their AD&D games? It was one of the first things we tried back in the day. Yeah, the systems didn’t mesh all that well—but since when did “rules” ever stop a bunch of 13-year-olds? MA was actually the first RPG I ever bought, and that photo […]
B4: The Lost City by Tom Moldvay is, without question, my favorite and most played Dungeons & Dragons module. Though originally designed for Basic D&D, I’ve run AD&D campaigns in it, used it for Fantasy Hero, and even shoehorned it into a Gamma World session. It’s a near-perfect example of a lean, sandbox-style campaign with […]
In one of the earlier iterations of QuestRex I toyed around with a “universal table” (UTs) ala Marvel Superheroes and later versions of Gamma World. I built out the chart (below) and then came up with the idea for a nifty wheel players could used to zoom in on columns. I dubbed it the “Wondrous […]
Movements rules have changed quite a bit in various versions of D&D over the years.Here’s a breakdown of some of them. Original D&D (OD&D) 1st Edition AD&D BECMI D&D 3rd Edition D&D 5th Edition D&D (5E) Comparison Table (Including BECMI and OD&D) Type OD&D 1st Edition 2nd Edition BECMI 3rd Edition 5th Edition Indoor 120′ […]
It’s interesting how the four main classes progression in combat has changed over time. This table shows the first three editions in the format of percentage of level as attack bonus. So for 3E at 12th level a fighter would be +12, clerics & thieves +9, and magic-users +6. It should be noted that on […]
I’m including this illustration in the next version to afford players a better sense of darksight’s low fidelity. Can you fight using it? Absolutely. But finer discernment like reading scrolls or noticing subtle details on the walls are right out. Older versions were a bit cagey on exactly what a character with infravision or ultravision […]
One of biggest goals of QuestRex was to both simplify and expand the Dungeons & Dragons classes system. To offer players more options with fewer rules. Out of curiosity, I put together a list of every official Dungeons & Dragons character class from the original edition through Fifth Edition. I excluded most splat book classes […]