We’re back to levels this week in Legends and Lore as Monte looks at high level play. There are shades of BECMI all over this post. First off a bit of history, since BECMI is a term I only learned in the past few years. BECMI is short for Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal: the series of box sets released from 1983 to 1986 breaking down Dungeons & Dragons (as opposed to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) into level bands of play. Basic featured levels 1-3, Expert was 4-14, Companion had 15-25, Master was 26-36, and Immortal was “beyond levels.” Each one of these games had not only different levels of play but...

It's probably good I didn't get around to posting this Indies & More post yesterday. This week's Legends and Lore was interesting to say the least (so interesting it has an addendum). I usually let Monte's posts stand on their own and keep recapping to a minimum, but there's enough history with this one that I think it needs a little detail. The original post deals with what to leave behind and what new stuff to add, and mentions THAC0 and gender-based ability caps as things to leave behind. This is already slightly problematic since it puts funky math and sexism in the same category.

Monte's Legends and Lore piece this week is mostly clarification about what they mean by modular for D&D Next. So this Indies & More post looks at how indie games deal with those same topics.

When talking about defaults in rules in his Legends and Lore column, Monte Cook used the analogy to a thermostat (my corresponding Indies & More post is here). I've seen that term used as a shorthand a bit now, and I'm not sure it's actually a great analogy.

As always, I'm posting some thoughts on this week's Legends and Lore post for my Indies & More series. This week: uniting the editions, part 1.

In this week’s Legends and Lore Monte talks about The Genius of D&D, more specifically the elements of a character: class, race, abilities, and so on. This Indies & More post will take a look at what makes a character in some other games and how they approach it differently. As Monte points out, class has always been the defining bit of a character (even when the classes included Elf). The interesting thing about class is that it covers a lot of ground. Take the Cleric for example: it not only defines ability to withstand damage, ability to resist damage (saves), and ability to attack, but also a place in the world, a role in...