Retrospective: The Complete Psionics Handbook

The Complete series of rules supplements for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition was, at the time of its inception at the tail end of the 1980s, a genuine innovation – supplements specifically focused on a particular character class or race and providing new ideas, rules, and options for use with them. Later, thanks in large part to White Wolf's "World of Darkness" games, this type of book would become commonplace in the hobby, but, when the Complete series first appeared, there were few prior examples of these "splatbooks," as they'd become known in the gamer argot.

Despite my TSR fanboy proclivities, I never embraced the Complete books. I liked them in principle but was never impressed with their actual content. I also recognized quite early on that their mere existence would likely place a lot of pressure on Dungeon Masters to adopt them, since many players would want access to new options for their characters. Furthermore, I anticipated an inevitable power creep in these options, as each new book in the series tried to outdo its predecessors.

Because of this, I didn't consider the Complete books must-buys and, after the first two, intended to avoid them entirely. However, early in 1991, TSR released the fifth book in the series, The Complete Psionics Handbook, and I was sufficiently intrigued that I bought it as soon as I saw a copy. Written by Steve Winter, this 128-page book presents a completely new system for introducing "extraordinary psychic powers" – psionics – into AD&D, with an eye toward making their use clearer and easier to use for both players and DMs. Psionics had been a part of Dungeons & Dragons since the publication of Eldritch Wizardry in 1976. That original version, created in part by Steve Marsh, served as the foundation upon which the AD&D Players Handbook would later build its own expanded version of psionics. Neither version was, in the opinions of many, clear or easy to use, so a revision was definitely needed.

Winter's psionics system took a lot of inspiration from the earlier versions but was nevertheless its own thing. He carried over a lot of the names and concepts found in Eldritch Wizardry and the Players Handbook, like ego whip and tower of iron will, for example, and placed them within a large, better conceived mechanical framework. One of the biggest problems with the earlier systems was that they felt very ad hoc and unbalanced. There was scarcely any attention given to how psionics would work in relation to other aspects of the AD&D rules. By contrast, these concerns seem to have been at the forefront of Winter's mind as he wrote The Complete Psionics Handbook and it shows.

First and foremost, psionics in this book are primarily the purview of a single character class: the psionicist. While it's still possible for members of other classes to possess a "wild talent," that's unusual. By taking this approach, Winter analogizes psionics with spellcasting and indeed could be said to have reimagined psionics as an alternate magic system – the points-based system that so many D&D players had been desiring almost since the game's beginning. One of the advantages of this approach is that it enabled psionicists to operate as just another character class alongside all the "standard" ones rather than being these weird – and potentially overpowered – outliers whose presence was likely to upset a campaign.

Reimagined as members of a new class, psionic characters' powers and abilities are now tied to level, just like all the classes. As a psionicist advances, he gains new psionic disciplines, devotions, sciences, and defense modes, as well as more psionic strength points (PSPs) in pretty much the same way a cleric or a magic-user gains new spells with experience. This is a simple and frankly obvious change that turns psionics into something that's workable even at low levels of play, something that was often not true in previous versions. In additional, all psionic powers are better detailed and described, giving players and DMs a better handle on what they can and cannot do within the game. It's all very well done.

At the time of its release, I had nothing but praise for The Complete Psionics Handbook. It had managed to take a strange edge case within the rules of First Edition AD&D (and OD&D before it) and convert it into a system that I could actually imagine myself using and enjoying. Not only that but I found myself actively thinking of ways I could do so. Winter's version of psionics felt fresh and fun and, above all, playable, a word I'd never have used to describe any previous version of psionics. That's no small feat and one of many reasons why I am ever more convinced that, despite the distaste many show for it in this corner of the hobby, I can't bring myself to say that Second Edition was an unmitigated disaster. If it was capable of fixing psionics, how bad could it be?

Polyhedron: Issue #13

Issue #13 of Polyhedron (August 1983) is dubbed a "special issue," because, in the words of its editor, Mary Kirchoff, more "strictly gaming aid articles." What that means is that, unlike previous issues, this one includes no RPGA ephemera, only articles for use with TSR's various roleplaying games. This is precisely what I'd hoped to see in the pages of Polyhedron when I first started to subscribe to it. Alas, the 'zine would return to its earlier form with issue #14, but I nevertheless enjoyed this one, singular though it was.

The letters page contains two letters of note. One asks about the possibility of a D&D movie, while the other questions why Deities & Demigods includes "fighting abilities and statistics" for the gods described therein. Here's the response regarding a D&D movie:

The story of the D&D movie Gary Gygax was supposedly working on during his time in Hollywood is the stuff of legend. I know very little about it myself, but Jon Peterson, has written a lengthy essay about its history and development that's well worth your time. 

The Deities & Demigods question is interesting, both for the answer (provided by DDG co-author James M. Ward) and for its asker, a name that might be recognizable to those familiar with the luminaries of the OSR:

And here is Ward's answer:

This is pretty much the same logic employed by Tim Kask in the foreword to Gods, Demigods & Heroes, the predecessor to the DDG. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, except that it suggests TSR felt a need to police the boundaries of power within D&D. What an odd thing!

"Dispel Confusion" contains the usual assortment of questions about TSR's stable of roleplaying games. Of these, one stands out as worthy of being highlighted:

One can quibble about whether these are indeed "the two most important concepts in the D&D game," but I find it difficult to disagree that both of these concepts in the answer are indeed significant ones, particularly the second one. My ongoing House of Worms campaign – which will celebrate its ninth year of continuous play in March 2024 – is largely propelled by player choice and the consequences of those choices, for example.

Mary Kirchoff provides another installment of "Under Construction," this one being something of a follow-up to the one that appeared in issue #10. Like its predecessor, it's clever and flavorful – a good example of a dungeon "special." The issue also includes a "policy statement" from the publishing division of TSR, regarding Dragon and the newly-acquired Ares:

In short, TSR decided to focus Dragon solely on fantasy RPGs, shifting science fiction RPGs over to Ares. This was a huge disappointment to me at the time, because then, as now, I prefer SF to fantasy and I had no interest in subscribing to yet another gaming magazine. Ultimately, like everything else TSR did with the former SPI's properties, this move was ill-considered and failed. In time, Ares would cease to exist as a stand-alone magazine and sci-fi content would be re-incorporated into Dragon in the form of the Ares Section, which would become one of my favorite parts of the magazine.

Roger E. Moore's "Gods, Demigods, and DMs" is yet another look at the apparently vexed question of how to handle interactions between deities and powerful player characters. Moore's advice is generally very good, relying on both mythological tales, the AD&D rules, and common sense as guides. He quite reasonably believes that the gods should not be seen as "pushovers" even by the mightiest PCs and that the DM should pull out all the stops when roleplaying gods and demigods that their awesomeness is fully manifest. As I said, he provides lots of solid advice and examples, but I still have to wonder: were battles with the gods so commonplace that TSR needed to address it again and again?

"Spelling Bee" by James M. Ward looks at just two spells: continual light and its reverse, continual darkness, in order to show how versatile and useful they can be in play. I appreciate articles like this, because I've long felt that (A)D&D has too many spells, especially when one considers how many ways even a handful of spells can be used by a clever caster. Pointing out all the ways existing spells might be employed goes some way, I think, toward alleviating the need for further, ever more specific, spells – at least that's my feeling.

"The Hive Master" by Harold Johnson is an unusual four-page adventure for use with Gangbusters. I say "unusual," because, unlike all previous scenarios written for the game, this one doesn't deal with bootlegging or bank robbery but instead with efforts by a mad scientist – Professor Abe Malefica – to get his revenge on the world who mocked him by releasing a specially-bred type of harvester bee into the world. It's pulp nonsense of the highest order and I hated it at the time. Looking at it now, though, I have a better appreciation for what Johnson was doing, even if he refers to Malefica as an "entymologist." 

The issue includes a double-sided cardstock reference sheet of Dawn Patrol rules and tables. I still have mine inside my game box to this day. "Ecosystem," another by Ward, looks at the ramifications of the environment in Gamma World on adventure scenarios. "Go West, Young Gamer" by Steve Winter suggests the inclusion of four new ability scores to Boot Hill – Coordination, Observation, Stature, and Luck – as a way to further differentiate characters in the game. Given that BH is a very primitive game in terms of mechanics, this makes some sense. Does anyone know if these were these incorporated into the third edition of the game by chance?

"Raid on Theseus" by Doug Niles is a starship combat scenario for use with Knight Hawks. Kim Mohan's "Psionic Pspells" is a lengthy (four pages) article looking at "spells resembling psionic powers" from every possible angle. These spells are enumerated in Appendix C of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, but Mohan is, for some reason, interested in explaining the logic behind each spell's inclusion in the list in order to better understand AD&D magic, psionics, and the interplay of the two. I cannot say I share his enthusiasm for the topic. "The Condor Assignment" by Allen Hammack is ostensibly a Top Secret article, but it's mostly a review of then-current espionage media, like the Bond novel, Icebreaker. 

Other than the obligatory RPGA catalog at the end, that's issue #13. Though no longer than its immediate predecessors, it certainly feels meatier to me, probably because of the lack of RPGA ephemera that didn't interest me at the time and interests me even less four decades later. This issue represents what I always wanted Polyhedron to be, but very rarely got – a pity.

Retrospective: Pool of Radiance

My late childhood and early teen years coincided not just with the ascent of fantasy and science fiction in popular media but with the (likely related) ascents of RPGs and video/computer games. By the time I first encountered roleplaying games, there were already serious efforts to combine these two hobbies – and my friends and I were very interested in seeing what they had to offer. That's why we greedily snapped up Wizardry and Telengard and Adventure and many more, all of which we enjoyed but none of which fulfilled our dreams of an electronic entertainment that truly brought the fun of a fantasy RPG to a console or desktop.

There were many reasons why we felt this way, most of them related to the technical limitations of computers in the early to mid-1980s. Another reason was that none of the computer or video games at the time made use of a rules system as complex as that of most pen-and-paper RPGs, which had a negative impact on their depth of play. Wizardry was a solid step in this direction, which is why I loved it, but it was still sufficiently primitive in the scope of its rules that it couldn't hold a candle to Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop roleplaying game.

This largely remained the state of affairs until the late 1980s, when advances in both computer technology and program design saw the rise of increasingly sophisticated offerings. By this time, I was away at college and, while I didn't have a desktop computer of my own, many of my friends did so. It was through one of them that, in the Fall of 1988, I was first laid eyes on Pool of Radiance. Produced by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), Pool of Radiance was the first official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game. Unlike the AD&D-branded Intellivision games of earlier in the decade, this one made use of the actual AD&D rules available at the time. This was a huge selling point to me, since all previous fantasy computer games used their own rules systems, which, as I noted above, were much less robust. 

The other thing that caught my attention was that Pool of Radiance was not a generic fantasy game. Instead, it made use of the then-new official AD&D setting of the Forgotten Realms. I'd been a fan of the Realms since I first encountered Ed Greenwood's articles in the pages of Dragon, so the use of the setting in Pool of Radiance was also a point in its favor. Further, the overall scenario of the game was designed not by the staff of SSI but by a team of RPG designers working at TSR, among them James Ward, David Cook, and Steve Winter. TSR fanboy that I was, this last fact assured me that, with Pool of Radiance, we were finally getting the goods: an honest to Crom digital adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons rather than a knock-off.

As one might expect, the centerpiece of Pool of Radiance was its character generator. The player is given the ability to generate up to six characters for use as his party of adventurers in the game. Ability scores are generated randomly, though the player possesses some capacity to alter them according to his preferences. Characters can belong to any of six races (human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, and halfling) and any of four classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief, with demihumans given the opportunity to multiclass). Though representing only a portion of AD&D's full possibilities – there are no sub-classes or half-orcs, for instance – everything included in Pool of Radiance works the way it ought to in the tabletop version of the game. This was not a version of the game simplified for computers but the Real Deal™.

The game assumes the characters have come to the city of New Phlan and entered into the service of its council to reclaim the Old City, which has fallen into ruin and is now inhabited by a variety of monsters and evil humanoids. As the characters venture into these ruins, they gain experience and treasure, which enables them to explore ever more dangerous – and lucrative – areas. In time, they become sufficiently powerful and accomplished to move beyond Phlan and explore other locales that likewise would benefit from their presence. In short, Pool of Radiance is a good translation of the structure of most D&D campaigns into computerized form. 

The game's scenario is not groundbreaking or revolutionary in any real way, but it is nonetheless quite enjoyable, precisely because it is so similar to many people's experiences of playing AD&D. This similarity is buttressed by the inclusion of myriads of little rules and game elements, like saving throws, spell selection, magic items, and even demihuman level limits. To play Pool of Radiance is to play AD&D, albeit one that lacks the social interactivity that is, in my opinion, the foundation of why roleplaying is such a fun hobby. Even so, the game had a lot to offer and my friends and I spent far more time playing it than we probably ought to have.

In the decades since its release, computer RPGs have become vastly more sophisticated and immersive than was Pool of Radiance. Everything from their graphics, scenario design, and rules implementation have advanced by leaps and bounds, strengthened by improvements in technology and years of experience. Because of this, I doubt I could go back and play Pool of Radiance (or any of the many SSI AD&D computer games that followed in its wake) with any enjoyment. Yet, there's no question that this game was an important milestone in the development of the CRPG genre and for introducing a wider audience to Dungeons & Dragons – quite the legacy, if you ask me.

Howling Tower

No, not the Arduin adventure -- the blog of long-time TSR and WotC employee Steve Winter. If you haven't been reading it, you really ought to do so. This week, Mr Winter began a series of posts about his thoughts and experiences of the various revisions to D&D over the years. His post today, entitled "Dysfunctional and Co-Dependent," is of particular interest to those of us in the old school world, since it mirrors a lot of what we've been saying over the last few years, such as:

In short, the types of things that players want are bad for the game. They'd be fine if published in moderation, but moderation is a luxury only small companies can afford. Big companies have big monthly bills. The types of supplements that would be healthy for the game, players won't buy in sufficient quantity to keep the company or the game alive at the corporate level. To keep the engine running, the company must publish what customers want, and thereby cut its own throat.

That's as true a statement about D&D thirty years ago as it is today.

Anyway, head on over to his blog and take a look at what he's got to say. Having been involved with D&D as long as he has, I think he's got quite a few insights to share. I interviewed Mr Winter back in 2009, in case you're keen to learn a little more about the man and his involvement in both the hobby and the industry.

Open Friday: Three Castles Award

As some of you may be aware, Rob Kuntz conceived of a new award, the Three Castles Award (so named after Castles Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and El Raja Key -- yeah, I too think it's a bit much to insert one's own creation into such a pantheon too, even when, as in this case, there's certainly merit to the cause for doing so), which is intended to honor "designers of the highest merit for outstanding work in the industry of Role Playing Game design." You can read more specific details about the award here, including its submission guidelines.

According to those guidelines, gaming products -- meaning "RPG rules, settings, adventures, sourcebooks and/or combinations of these" -- published between October 1, 2009 and October 1, 2010 are eligible for consideration for the 2011 award. The submission window is between October 1 and December 31, 2010, meaning that we're just at the start of it now.

I'll admit that I personally find the scope of the award a bit too broad, since, theoretically, any RPG product could be submitted and win, but I also think that alternatives to awards like the Origins and ENnie Awards are a good thing. For today's question, though, I thought I'd ask: what products published within the aforementioned dates do you think are worthy of recognition by this award? If you had the ability to do so, which products would you submit for consideration?

Interview: Steve Winter

Steve Winter worked at TSR for nearly twenty years as an editor, developer, and creative director. Along with David Cook, he was very heavily involved in the production of the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and remained with TSR throughout that edition's reign, shepherding many of its products to release. Mr Winter was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his time at TSR, particularly about the process of creating both Second Edition and other D&D products from that era.

1. How did you become involved in the hobby of roleplaying?

Like pretty much everyone else at that time, I just stumbled into it.

I was always interested in games and puzzles, especially mazes. I started playing Avalon Hill wargames in high school. The big strategic games were fun as puzzles, but it was Tobruk that really hooked me. It's an ultra-tactical tank combat game. You roll dice to track every shot fired. I hadn't heard of roleplaying yet, but Tobruk was almost like roleplaying a tank commander.

When I headed for Iowa State University as a journalism major, I landed a gig as an editor on the college newspaper. One of my first jobs was proofreading classified ads. That's where I read about the Iowa State Gamers club. It sounded like a good place to find wargamers, so I went to a meeting. A few people were playing Avalon Hill and SPI games, but most were gathered around a grad student who was maniacally sketching rooms and corridors and monsters on a blackboard. That was my introduction to D&D.

The DM at the blackboard was Corbin. Take away his glasses and shoes and he looked exactly like the centaur from the cover of the original Monster Manual. Corbin would stand in front of a blackboard like a professor and run enormous dungeon crawls with 15 or 20 players at a time. A few of the players had high-level characters (as in, level 5 or so). The rest of us played 1st- and 2nd-level henchmen -- NPCs, essentially -- and we died like flies. We didn't even name our characters until they reached 2nd level. It was nothing to burn through two or three characters in an afternoon. Your goal was to live long enough to become a real member of the adventuring party and not just another nameless corpse on the heap. The only characters who got respect from the higher-level PCs were clerics. As long as you had a healing spell, you were useful. Otherwise, there was no pity in Corbin's dungeons. Low-level characters were there to open doors, peek around corners, and walk down corridors ahead of the heroes, poking everything within reach with a 10-foot pole.

2. You were a newspaper reporter before you became involved in the RPG industry. Do you think your background in journalism adequately prepared you for the crazy world of game design?

Yes and no. Yes because the industry badly needed a dose of professionalism in those days. I think that I was the first person hired at TSR who had actual job experience in writing and editing. Several people had English degrees, including a few who'd been teachers, and I'd never minimize what a tough job that is. But as a reporter, you write every day, and the deadline is king.

On top of that, journalists are trained to write for clarity and directness. Flowery phrases and clever wordplay are things to avoid. The same is true in games; the language needs to be direct and clear.

On the other hand, I don't know what would adequately prepare someone for working at a place like TSR in those early years. Those of us in R&D complained a lot about people in other parts of the company who had no qualifications for the jobs they were doing, but really, none of us did. We were inventing the RPG hobby and industry on the fly; how do you prepare for that? In R&D, our chief qualifications were that we knew and loved AD&D, we had some gift for words or art, and we were bursting with imagination. Beyond that, the biggest measure of whether you had "what it takes" was whether you could keep up.

3. How did you become employed by TSR?

I was working as a city-desk reporter for the Journal Star newspaper in Peoria, Illinois, playing D&D and The Fantasy Trip as much as possible, and doing some writing for The Space Gamer magazine. One day I spotted an ad in The Dragon (#47, the issue with Zeb's "Crimefighters" in it) -- TSR was looking for editors. It seemed like a golden opportunity, so I sent a resume. The interview process was an adventure in itself, involving two separate car breakdowns, but at the end of it, I got the job. Doug Blume, who was head of personnel at the time, told me that they had hundreds of applicants, but I was the only one with professional editing and publishing experience. So it was pretty mundane, really. I saw an ad, I applied, I got the job.

4. One of your earliest credits is as an editor on module I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, by David Cook, which is one of my favorite modules of all time. Can you tell us a little about the editing process at TSR back in those days? Where did editing fit into the production process?

The process was less compartmentalized then than it would become. People were labeled as designers and editors, but the job descriptions for those titles were intentionally vague. Development as a separate, dedicated step in the process was eliminated shortly after I was hired.

The designer wrote the original manuscript; a random assortment of people gave input; then an editor took over and managed everything about the manuscript from that point on (additional development, editing, layout, ordering art and maps, proofreading, and typefitting). It was utterly informal, though; there was tremendous crossover at every stage. Manuscripts got passed back and forth and sideways between editors and designers. Once the original design was done, anyone might be asked to rewrite an encounter, to flesh out a section, to create sample PCs … and anyone might pop by and say, "ooh, let me see that" and then scribble some notes in the margin. That's why the credits for those early products, such as I1, list so many people doing so many jobs. Sometimes the same person shows up in multiple categories. "Special Thanks" were there to cover those people who'd contributed something, even if it was just a suggestion offered up over beer and pizza.

The fact that none of the editors had much training in graphic design should be obvious to anyone who looks at those early adventures. Stephen Sullivan did double duty as both an editor and an illustrator, so he had some artistic sense. I had training in newspaper layout and in measuring and sizing type to fit it into a fixed space. We drove the illustrators crazy with our requests for illos in ridiculous sizes to fill holes.

It was a slow process, but eventually we created a system in what had previously been a sort of medieval workshop where each item was individually crafted and completely non-interchangeable with anything else.

5. David Cook credits you with the organization of AD&D Second Edition. What principles did you bring to bear when undertaking the task of making such a complex game easier to understand?

Rulebook organization was a regular subject for theological debate among the editors, and I preached the Gospel of Steve to anyone who would listen. Here's the quick version.

A set of game rules needs to decide up front whether its job is teaching the material to newcomers or serving as a reference manual for people who already know the fundamentals. I don't believe it can do both. All through the '80s, we'd been producing D&D products aimed at teaching the basics to newcomers. That's not what AD&D was about. We assumed that AD&D players already understood roleplaying and had at least a rudimentary grasp on the rules. They didn't need a training manual; they needed a reference book that made information easy to find during play. Reading the original hardcover books was like having a one-on-one conversation with Gary. They were charming but not much help when a question arose in the middle of a battle.

When we got the green light to start working on 2nd Edition, the first thing I did was grab spare copies of the PHB and DMG, slice them into pieces, and start taping them back together the way they belonged. (We were working on word processors by then, of course, but the PHB and DMG didn't exist in electronic form.) It didn't take long to fill a big, fat, 3-ring binder with clippings of rulebooks, all taped together like some insane kidnapper's ransom-note manifesto. Some material from both books was combined into one section, some material that had been joined was split between the books, some sections were torn apart sentence by sentence and reassembled in more logical order. It was terribly tedious work, but it was also something I'd wanted to do for a decade.

The point of this exercise wasn't really to reorganize the books; that was done (eventually) with a massive outline that stretched down the wall and across the floor on about a dozen sheets of accordion-fold paper. The giant cut-and-paste was done to demonstrate to those up the chain of authority that the job was too big to be handled by a simple reorganization, which is what some of them were hoping for at the time.

Through the whole 2nd Edition development process, the goal was to put everything the players needed into the PHB and everything else into the DMG. Players needed the rules on creating and equipping characters, on magic, and on combat. The DM needed the rules on world building, running adventures, and all the little things that crop up often enough to need rules but not often enough to deserve space in the PHB.

Finally, I wanted both books to have comprehensive indexes. They were created the old-fashioned way, by actually reading the final galleys of the books and noting down every instance of a rule or a subject that should be indexed, under every category where someone might search for it. That job took several days, but the resulting indexes were well worth it.

6. You're a fan of Victorian era miniatures. Is this a hobby you've had for a long time or something you've only acquired recently?

I've had this particular hobby for close to 30 years, and the yearning for it was percolating in my brain for years before that. One of my earliest memories is my dad reciting a line from a poem: "A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers; There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears." It was a popular schoolyard rhyme when he was a kid. That image of the French Foreign Legionnaire in a far-off corner of the world got jammed in my imagination. It's funny to think that something so small can make such a dent in your psyche. Be careful what you say around your kds!

So I've always been drawn to that sort of exotic, military romance: anything written by Rudyard Kipling or G. A. Henty, and movies like Gunga Din and Beau Geste. I didn't realize there was a whole hobby devoted to miniature colonial wargaming until I encountered a copy of The Sword and the Flame in the Dungeon Hobby Shop in 1981. From the moment that I started flipping through TS&TF, I knew that I was home. Jim Ward and Tom Moldvay turned out to be big fans, too. I recall one summer afternoon when Zeb Cook and I were returning to TSR after lunch. We swung by my place to drop something off, and Zeb flipped on the TV. The movie Zulu was just beginning … so instead of going back to work, we plunked down on the couch, opened a couple of beers, and took the afternoon off. Eventually I had my own armies of Zulus and red-coated British that I hauled to every convention in the area, and I still do.

I was born about a century too late.

7. Do you still play RPGs these days and, if so, which ones?

Lots!

I play D&D 4th Edition with a crew from Wizards of the Coast. If it doesn't make me sound too much like a corporate shill, I'd say that 4E is the best D&D has been since the red-box, 1981 edition of D&D Basic (the one with the cover painting by Erol Otus). That '81 edition is still my favorite, so consider this high praise.

I also play an every-other-week game with some fellow codgers. All we play is obsolete RPGs, starting with the original, three little books of D&D. We didn't even allow the Greyhawk or Blackmoor supplements. Those were too progressive. Eventually we moved on to The Fantasy Trip from Metagaming, with an interlude for some classic Traveller. I believe that Metamorphosis Alpha is next on our list, when we wrap up the current TFT campaign. As you might expect, that's a very low-key group. To keep the mood right, we use dice with the corners worn off and lumpy miniatures made of real lead and badly painted with glossy Testor's paints.

There's also a Call of Cthulhu group that meets irregularly about once a month.

Finally, I play quite a bit of Savage Worlds these days. I run a lunchtime Savage World of Solomon Kane game at the office and joined a homegrown campaign that meets a few times a month. That last group is the only one where none of the other players has any connection to the hobby games industry. It's refreshing to game with people who don't do this for a living.