The future of fantasy roleplaying

I’ve played various incarnations of the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper roleplaying game since I was 14, and I’ve never been entirely happy with any of them. The old AD&D 2nd Edition rules that I started with were clunky and haphazard, often requiring some pretty annoying charts, and some fancy number-juggling on the players’ parts. Sometimes rolling high was better, and sometimes rolling low was better. That -5 to my armor class…yeah, that negative number was actually a good thing. And I don’t know why exactly I needed to roll a saving throw vs. rods, staves, and wands to avoid getting wuss-slapped by some damn monster, but that’s what the rules said…so that’s what I did. I certainly have some great nostalgic memories of playing and running AD&D 2E games aplenty back in high school (which I plan to one day relate on this blog), but in retrospect, the game’s mechanics made very little logical sense.

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