Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Allow me to preface this post with the (probably needless) statement that I truly love B/X D&D. It was the edition which introduced me to the game, and still the one I consider the most perfect in its RAW form as well as the most customizable.  But it does have a few glaring flaws. They don't make it unplayable by any means, but they make certain elements perhaps less enjoyable than they might be (but see above about the ease of customization via house rules!) One of those flaws is the design of the fighter class relative to the other classes. In the rules as written, the fighter has three advantages over other classes: a d8 Hit Die, the ability to use any weapon, and the ability to wear any armor. You could add a fourth, better attack probabilities, but that doesn't kick in until 4th level, so for the first three levels, arguably some of the most fun to play through as well as the most vulnerable of a character's career, it doesn't count. Excepting Strength bonuse...

 It's been said, by myself and by many others, that the demihuman races represent particular aspects of humanity: virtues, vices, traits, and viewpoints. But what would humanity represent to the demihumans? Just for fun, let's put ourselves in the shoes of elves, dwarves, and halflings (who don't wear shoes, but it's only a metaphor, after all), and try to imagine what they'd see in us. These are, obviously, my personal takes on the subject; you may have different insights, and if so, please feel free to share them in the comments. To elves , humans might represent mortality and the sense of urgency that comes with it. They are motivated, fired with a sense of the shortness of their time, driven to make something of their limited lives. Where an elf has literally almost all the time in the world, with centuries or millennia both behind and ahead of them, humans are the present, the now , seizing the moment, because they know they may not have many more. Of course, e...

 Yesterday, I read this post at DM David, talking about the evolution of the non-human player character races in D&D. (He focuses much more on 5E and modern sensibilities than on anything I'd call old school, but generally has interesting things to say, even if not always directly useful to an old schooler such as myself.) Of course, I have some observations and opinions of my own on this topic. On the one hand, we have D&D's most prominent founder, Gary Gygax, whose preference for a human-centric game prompted him to impose strict limits on the demihuman races. On the other, we have modern games, in which almost anything distinguishing dwarf, elf, halfling, or other fantastic folk from humankind is to be spurned as too restrictive to player freedom, if not somehow a manifestation of real-world racism.  I reject both those views. I can certainly respect Gygax's affection for human-centric fantasy, emulating some of his favorite literary sources (which, as I underst...

 There are two basic approaches I've identified to creating tabletop RPG characters, and these approaches inform the entire play style of a game or a group which focuses on either of them.  The approach that seems most popular these days is the one I call the "hot rodder." Character creation is not just something you do as a prerequisite for playing the game; in many ways, it IS the game. Ability score generation is heavily weighted to produce ideal or near-ideal arrays for your chosen class or type of character. Classes, if they exist at all, are bare-bones templates meant to be heavily customized with subclasses and lists of feats and skills, both at initial creation and at level-ups and between actual game sessions. An inexperienced player could easily wind up with an inferior character by choosing suboptimal skills and skill combinations. The primary challenge for the player is to build the perfect character so he can show off what it can do during the game, much like...