An exercise in futility...

There has been much throwing about of brains on the OSR blogs over the DCCRPG's use of Zocchi dice.  The most common complaint seems to be that the Zocchi dice add nothing to the game and their use is an attempt to be different for the sake of being different.  While it may be too late to weigh in on this, I'm going to anyway.  I suspect that there's another element to this decision: a desire to act in the spirit of Gygax and Arneson.  Let me explain further. 

When OD&D was developed in the early 1970s, there was no need to use those "weird" dice that are now so familiar to us (i.e. the d4, d8, d12, and d20). If I remember right, Chainmail doesn't use them, and in any case one could design a roleplaying game system that only used d6; Ken St. Andre did just that in 1975 with the first edition of Tunnels and Trolls.  But OD&D used them anyway. Whether this arose out of a desire for more flexibility than a d6 would give, or a desire to be different, or some other issue, I don't know, but the fact remains that OD&D used these weird and rare dice.   And TSR didn't put them in the box sets, either; you had to get them from educational suppliers, as I recall.

I think Goodman Games is doing the same sort of thing: they intend to use all of the dice out there, just like OD&D used all of the dice out there in 1974.  Do they have to? No.  Is it a bad idea to? Maybe.  But just like TSR did in 1974, Goodman Games is setting their product apart by using "weird" dice.

Forward Into The Void...

Welcome to Old School Eclectic, yet another blog devoted to old-school roleplaying games.  I've called the blog this because it reflects my early experience with RPGs; I played a lot of different games from the time I started RPGs in 1979, and I'll probably be talking about all of them here. 

I think I'm a bit atypical in the old-school community because D&D was not my first RPG; that honor goes to The Fantasy Trip (or the combo of Wizard and Melee, really).  In addition, I played hex-and-chit wargames before ever playing any RPGs, which is what led me to Wizard. Going from wargames to role-playing is probably not that odd, but being a ten-year-old wargamer was definitely weird.  It also meant that I hung around with older gamers sometimes (as often as they would let me), which helped expose me to lots of different games early on.  Within my first year of gaming, I had played D&D (Holmes edition, followed quickly by AD&D), TFT, Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, and The Complete Warlock (sort of, anyway).  I actually played TFT and T&T more than D&D/AD&D at first; I would have kept doing that, except that soon all anyone wanted to play was AD&D.  Oddly, there wasn't much B/X action among people I knew, with one important exception to be covered in a future post.  So, as you can see, I have roots in a lot of different games, and I'll have something to say about all of them here.  I particularly intend to do several posts about The Complete Warlock, since I've never seen it discussed in any old-school blog.  It's not a great game, but it is important as an early response to OD&D