There's a community and play-style called OSR or "old school renaissance," that recreates versions of the earliest editions of D&D, and encourage a style of play that's heavily oriented around few rules and the DM making quick decisions/rulings on the spot, rather than lots of rules and lots of time spent mining the rulebooks. In fact, the expression is "rulings over rules." This might appeal to you.
There's a dichotomy here that I have always found amusing. To me, the older style of play felt crunchier, despite there being less of a rule focused. The most common style of play back then was more of a dungeon crawl, closer to "roll playing", low fantasy, usually lower level, murder hobos were very common, and all of that.
Whereas today's game is far more complicated rules-wise by most measures yet it tends to be more storytelling & *role* playing focused: flower-y, superhero-y, high fantasy
Today's game can be just as much roll-playing, it highly depends on the group. One of the things that drove me back to B/X and ADD was the sheer number of min-max players and rise(!) of murder hobos in 5e vs. even 3e/3.5/pf1
Most of the early old-school stuff was way too deadly for players to be murder hobos or try to solve everything with combat - if you went into Caverns of Thracia at level 2 as a murder hobo you're just going to die over and over and over again. It'll be endless TPKs. Right now I'm two years into DM'ing an Arden Vuul campaign, running a mix of OSE (Streamlined B/X) and OSRIC (ADD 1e) rules, and it's really only the past 6 months or so that my players have felt comfortable engaging in regular combat - before then they might have spent a whole session or two trying to stack up every advantage they could because they never wanted to be in a fair fight.
And from my experience with a whole lot of OSR play over the past 6-7 years is that this is the sort of feel most OSR players are after. They're not wanting to play late ADD 2e, Dragonlance era, where the shift to the more heroic play started happening - they want to have to think and outsmart things. Faction interaction was also huge in the more sandbox environments, and that was where most of the roleplaying occurred then, and occurs now in the games I run. The players RP a bit with each other, but not as much.
Modern D&D is a kitchen sink approach that tries to solve every possible playstyle, and that makes it popular and reasonably good at most anything people want to do with it. But I don't know that there's any facet of it that it does as well as other systems.
> Today's game can be just as much roll-playing, it highly depends on the group.
Yeah this is kind of my point, that I think a lot of the contemporary play style is cultural and not ruleset driven. And thus I'm skeptical that merely doing something playing 1e AD&D is going to feel exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. That said, I may be overstating how typical this is in the modern game, I haven't played in 30-ish years, my take is driven by observation purely.
And also, even back then some of the more modern improv-y play style existed, it just wasn't the norm. I remember when my main play group had a session with one member's brother & friends and there was a very clear culture mismatch from the start. They were acting, with voices and all of that. We ... did not. To each their own but combining the two didn't work.
I’m using Jekyll for includes and so I can use Ruby to render pages from yaml data. I’m sure Pandoc can do this too one way or another but it’s dead simple out of the box in Jekyll.
Thank you so much for that! I've actually been debating starting a self hosted blog (or maybe a Substack...) to capture and document my process and provide more context around the music I'm producing, maybe I'll spend some time working on that this weekend!
Upvoted because it’s a thoughtful question, but honestly I think it’s just that this book and many others like it are addressed primarily to people who are going to use tools like SuperCollider or CSound or raw dsp to create their own entirely original technology stacks for creative work, and an understanding of the physics/math of sound is pretty key to that kind of work, regardless of the musicality of their later creative production.
Might just be a question of taste or personal predisposition. I’m only in Obsidian for the canvas, and I spend almost all my time in it. It’s extremely helpful for me to be able to put all of my buckets up in front of me at once, resize them, rearrange them, color-code them.
I already commented about Expect elsewhere in this thread, so I should probably pipe down, but thought it might be worth it here as well because Expect has been handling these kinds of exceptions and control transfers/flows with the full power of a robust programming language for decades. You might have a look at it for ideas and inspiration.
Looks neat, thx. It is really interesting how many facets the same kind of issue can produce. I think using expect from baker is a great way to deal with some steps that are hard to automate otherwise.
I see the point and I wouldn't want to belabor the metaphor, but I really feel like guitar is actually extremely difficult to even get started with. Between the awkward stretching of the fingers, how difficult/painful it is to hold down strings hard enough (and close enough to the fret) to get a clean, clear note, and how hard it is to hold those strings down in such a way that your fingers don't brush against other strings, I'd say guitar is crazy hard to start. I'm saying this as someone who has been playing and enjoying guitar for decades. Beginners have a rough time of it for awhile.
Lot of good, standard-issue advice in your replies already, so I think all I'll add is: (1) Everybody's mind is a little different, so you're likely to need to experiment with many things for a long time before you start converging on stable insights into what your specific needs are, and they're likely to be somewhat context-dependent, so they're likely to evolve over time; so above all else, be patient and go easy on yourself and focus on your long-term progress rather than your short-term frustrations; (2) ...I forgot (not joking)
Thanks very much, this sub-thread has been illuminating for me, and has the compelling quality of being obvious-in-retrospect. I now wonder what my MPC is doing, exactly, when I make an action at what appears to be a zero point. Thanks.
