Alex Schroeder: Halberds & Helmets

Rolling starting gold and thinking of your parent's background. Social standing? How to buy equipment. The benefits of a character generator, again. The weapons. Fighting from the second rank, again.

Elves are basically fighters and magic users. Halflings and dwarves have better saves and some abilities here and there. Limits on the weapons you can wield. What about armour size? I don't care about level limits since all my games end before we get to level 10.

Thieves and normal humans. How do skill checks work, thieves have better skills, how does surprise work, substituting a d30 for a d20 once a day, max damage, +4 to hit, two handed swords, again; and torch bearers and porters, and magic users wielding weapons, or thieves and magic users wearing armour fight like normal humans

Fighters and magic users. Using descending armour class, to-hit tables, all weapons do 1d6 damage, adding explosions and rays to the saving throws, not having unified advancement tables

Race as class, elves and dwarves in particular. Talking about the gender of elves and dwarves. Talking about the questions Judd proposed for classes, a long time ago.

Talking about the six standard ability scores and wishing I could just rename Intelligence and Wisdom to Education and Yoga. But my players didn't pick it up.

Talking about why we want to write our homebrew games and what old school D&D means to me.