On the other hand, I have no idea what the Australian AD&D scene looked like back then. For all I know, their local zines featured endless variations of vicious marsupials.

Or maybe they didn't, because #Australians can't bring themselves to hurt even fictional koalas. I just don't know!

I'm genuinely surprised no outraged Antepodean ever wrote a "Animals of Australia" article for Dragon Magazine. (Looks like @bruceheard.bsky.social did a few for #BECMI, though, because the Princess Ark went everywhere.)

I'm only like half-joking. There's a psionic discipline in the AD&D Players Handbook that goes out of its way to imply #marsupials are harder to control than other mammals, but the game didn't have any marsupials to control.

What marketing are you talking about?

Who is "they" in this question?

It goes back to the 1990s (maybe even 1980s) because USENET and FidoNet didn't support ampersands in newsgroup and channel names.

It's not a bad-faith criticism just because you disagree with it. I've lived through every version of D&D since 1983. When I say 4E is the most video-gamey version, it's because that's the genuine reaction I had at Origins 2008.

Well, that's just a shallow lie, because D&D is older than any fantasy video or computer games.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon...

But most editions aren't about fighting like a computer game. That was the issue for many people.

#Gygax either changed his mind about the most realistic way to break initiative ties, or simply didn't care. That's #TTRPG #gamedesign for you: sometimes you design for realism and sometimes you design for expediency.

I think most game designers would avoid a revision so diametrically opposite of the original rule, but #Gygax wasn't always that dogmatic. As he often said in his later years, #ADnD is a game not a combat simulator.

www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewt...

Favoring longer weapons obviously gives the advantage to the combatant with the *least* small weapon. Gygax completely reversed how ties break in his #ADnD games, but that change never made it into the rulebook.

In the Speed Factor rules, *smaller* weapons are "faster," because they're easier to handle than larger weapons. So the rules-as-written generally break ties to the benefit of the combatant with the smallest weapon.

Anyway, the interesting thing about replacing Speed Factor with Weapon Length for breaking #ADnD initiative ties is that two systems will produce completely opposite results!

Clyde Caldwell sells prints of that art. You should give a proper shout-out next time.

clydecaldwell.com/product/pot-...

grognardia.blogspot.com/2020/10/pulp...

Isn't that already the plot of every third #WorldOfDarkness campaign?

I don't know how cheap you have to make a #DnD Hugh Grant action figure before a kid will buy it, and I don't think this store knows, either.