Alex Schroeder 🧞‍♂️ @kensanata@tabletop.social

#RPG related apps I host:
https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Apps

Jitsi sounds great!
https://jitsi.org/

As for dice rolling, we could all join a dice room on rolz, “special chat rooms designed to facilitate pen&paper roleplaying online, in groups - here you can have joined sessions with other players.”
https://rolz.org/

Oh wow, https://dungeonscrawl.com/ looks fancy!

A nice discussion of XP for Gold. I really liked the part about greed and plunder: "… the worry is that this rule … invites us to … casually treating something bad as if it were good to do … insulting … the people who actually suffered these things (exploitation and colonization) and would appear to endorse, even if only in imaginative play, the thought that what they underwent was not really an injustice, or one not worth taking seriously."
https://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2020/06/xp-for-gp-and-retro-gaming-what-are.html

I mean, both aspects are interesting, and there are many other facets besides that I find interesting. But my actual game at the table doesn't really care about AD&D. Except for the AD&D Monster Manual II, perhaps. Demons and Modrons, those were cool ideas. 😄

And lest you think I'm here for the Gary bashing, I'm definitely not interested that. I don't think Lich van Winkle is, either. Just look at that post where he talks about meeting Gary Gygax himself. I think that the "old school" is different things to different people. For me, it's that "alternate future", to explore what we could have played, had D&D not gone the way it did. To others, it's the hermeneutics of figuring out what Gygax really said and how to apply it…
https://lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/2020/02/that-time-i-met-gary-gygax.html

I think if you're looking for a simple D&D like experience you should probably pick something small. Even OSE or all of B/X D&D is too weird. If you speak German I'd suggest Dungeon Slayers. The name is terrible, but the game is good. 😄

All of this makes me think back to that year when I was 15 or 16 and we switched from "Das Schwarze Auge" to AD&D 1st ed. and then to AD&D 2nd ed. We felt that this was the superior rules! It had to be! And yet, there was always more to discover (positive spin), or enough rules to feel forever inadequate (truth be told). What a terrible introduction into the hobby. Still not very different from today.

Hah, my favourite grognard is posting again. Read if you're in the mood for grouchy! 😄 «Moore felt outraged when Mentzer revealed that even Gygax did not play by the rules as written, but he justified it by alleging, in effect, that Gygax was a being of superior creativity. Moore was calling out hypocrisy. For me, it is especially interesting as a testimony to the fact that probably most people still did not play D&D by the book, whatever TSR mandated, even in 1982.»
https://lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/2020/06/gygax-was-too-creative-to-play-ad-by.html

Adding @velexiraptor ‘s blog posts to Links to Wisdom!
https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2020/03/giant-robots-deserve-giant-monsters.html
https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2019/10/having-mechs-on-first-date.html
https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/LinksToWisdom/HomePage

I updated the page where I list all the campaigns I ran or played in. For some context: during the crazy years, I played about 13 times per month. Now? Maybe twice per month.
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/MyCampaigns

The problem with 504 is the massive investment in rules reading and setup. 😫

I also told that I was feeling uninspired, that I had no further plans for the campaign (I have been thinking about ending it a few times now) and was surprised by the players all saying they liked it, listing unexplored corners and roads not taken, suggesting a summer break, one of them volunteering to run a campaign (German gothic steampunk skill based) for a bit and another for offering to set up a board-game-via-video-conferencing. Feeling better already. 😅

Big boss fight – the end of the big campaign arc, after nearly sixty sessions, with the Kraken avatar rising from the sea and approaching the city – ended in the first round with a failed save vs petrification as I rolled a 1. Oh wow. 🙈