There are some great blogs about RPGing. One of the best, especially for OD&D (Chainmail, OD&D, AD&D) is Daniel Collin's Delta's D&D Hotspot. It is excellent for
- Analysis of historical or experimental data to compare with game mechanics. For exapmle on falling damage, demographics, coinage, labor, armor and equipment costs and on the cost and time to build castles, medieval magic beliefs, burning oil. On accuracy of bows over distance, throwing spears, rates of fire or rates of attacks in combat, time, movement rates, travel speed. These are super valuable, no matter what rules system you use, as they provide benchmarks.
- Extremely throurough statistical analysis and clarification of the Chaimail / OD&D /AD&D game system and classic dungeons (GC, B1, B2, Zenopus), for example on monsters, and dungeon stocking. Gygax' actual dungeon stocking stats (he did not exactly follow his own advice), monster hd per level, treasure and magic item output, expected treasure, empty rooms and so on. Includes Investigation of historical oddities and glitches like skeleton hit dice, weapons vs armor, initiative and in cases where rules are unclear also polls. These are useful for clear understanding of both the history and the workings of these systems. The amount of effort put into these is significant, for example he developed various software packages to heuristically simulate and determine combat strength and survival between groups of monsters and characters, assingning an Equivalent Hit Dice challenge rating to each monster.
- Comparison of versions of rules over time, for example aging, damage dice, hit dice, support costs, scale, 1" (and here), of monsters like mummy, harpies, ghouls, wraiths and of spell lists, durations and spells like Fireball, Counterspell, Protection from Evil, Teleport, Charm Person (unfortunately only up to 3e). And correlating them with the historical and real world data (see above), for mechanical elegance. These are more for historic entertainment and often include thoughtful discussion.
In addition, the writing is extremely clear. Also superb are the discussions. This is a highly informed readership that is often enriching the article further. They know their grammar and spelling, and the comments are largely devoid of unreflected babblings about vaguely related things that happend in someone's home campaign or about arbitrary home rules.
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