I'm finally working on the long-awaited "revised and expanded" Microlite74 2.0. You can follow progress, comment, and make suggestions on my Microlite74 board at Retroroleplaying.com. There will not be a lot of changes to the current M74 rules, but there will be a number of new optional rules and the monster list is being completely reworked to be much closer to 0e and 0e retroclones.

I've decided to move my RPG blog to here: http://oldguyrpg.blogspot.com/

I'm not giving up on microlite20! I'll still be here adding stuff to the Macropedia and participating, but I wanted to get some blogging going on where I could customize the look/feel and do some things that Drupal doesn't support. Greywulf's been nothing short of wonderful and I greatly appreciate his hospitality of my ramblings here.

I've moved some of my older posts there. Anything related to m20, the m20chargen and m20npcgen will still be posted here!

Long live microlite!

I've discovered the blog "The Tao of D&D" and this post on injuries got me to thinking.

I know that I'm not as learned as some on the fine arts of D&D, but one thing I do appreciate are light rules and quick gameplay. There's alot that can go on in combat, and when there are opportunities to inject some additional role playing elements into it, I'll take those opportunities, but not at the expense of making the game harder or more rules bound.

In the tradition of Oakspar7777 (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=471897), I thought I would put down some of my thoughts, ideas and game replays of an OD&D campaign I'm running with my wife. It's a one-on-one game, using a mashup of microlite74, OD&D according to the Little Brown Books and Holmes Basic, as well as Swords & Wizardry and some house rules. My wife played D&D as a teenager in highschool, much as I did, although I've spoken a bit about my history as an RPG'er on this blog.

[[Read more to read the full blog story]]

Just my opinion.

Old school D&D has the emphasis on the setting. Megadungeons, fantastic castles, Tombs of horror and Temples of evil - these were the things that players hurled themselves against to gain gold, glory and the satisfaction of saying "I survived."

Makes sense when you look at it from the aspect of a wargamer - wargames are about surviving the scenario. The scenario is all - players are merely units to perform orders and fight battles to see who will overcome the whole of the scenario. You might make history, you might rewrite history.

.....and with 179 to 108, Orcs clearly beat Hobgoblins with an overwhelming 62% of the vote!

Orcs go on to face off against Kobolds in a future vote-off. This one, I suspect, will be too close to call.

What do you think?

.... and that's not all. Microlite20 has had a make-over under the hood (a make-under?) too, upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Drupal along the way. What this means, along with tighter internal security, is access to Yet More addons, modules, themes and other cool stuff I'll be introducing over the next few weeks.

First on the list is the ability to customize the look and feel, not only of this site, but your individual blogspace on it. Just go to your user profile to change your blog's theme and the overall look-and-feel on the site. If there's any themes you particularly like, or any you find for Drupal that you'd like adding into the mix, just let me know in the comments below.

Don't have a blog here on Microlite20 but want one? Make a donation in support of Microlite20 (at least a dollar makes me smile), mail me (greywulf (at) gmail.com) your preferred username and password and all this and more, dear boy, will be yours.

As with everything techie, there might well be some hiccoughs following the upgrade. If you spot any bugs or problems, please let me know asap. Thanks!

In the meantime, to coin a phrase, Make Mine Microlite!

I'm about 3 years late coming to this thread, and it's not as "old school" oriented as, say, Grognardia; however, this thread http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=471897 is one of the most informative, thought provoking and well written threads on the fine art of DM'ing as I've ever seen. I've spent the last 2 hours reading it and I'm maybe halfway through. Amazing stuff.

Incidentally, the Dragon humor came from someone's signature in that thread, I don't know whom to credit, so I'll just say it came from this participant's profile:

In discussing Magic Attacks vis-a-vis microlite20/74's "Magic Attack" mechanic, the subject of "natural 1s/20s" came up. If you are performing a Magic Attack (that subject itself has caused a bit of discussion when/how to use in the microlite forums), and the player rolls a natural 1/20, the GM might decide to invoke a houserule of fumble/critical hit.

My D&D module Ultima 1 recreation is dead. Long live Ultima 1!

Back early this year, I worked hard on an implementation of Ultima 1. I had the world of Sosaria written out. I had maps. I had a game flowchart, an outline, a schedule of events in the world, I had hooks, main quests, sub-quests. I had a freakin' SPREADSHEET with every encounter, gold piece, treasure item and monster tied to macros and calculations to make sure that everything was "balanced" and that the CRs worked out and that the likelihood of leveling would allow someone to go to the next area. I even had flowcharts for if the PCs really screwed things up and failed quests - I hadn't written out those story lines, but I was ready for it. This thing was *tight*...

... except that it was really suited for a computer game and not a role playing game. (Continued in full view)