I was wondering if anyone else has played Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom (ToaSK) and had it revolutionize your approach to D&D? I was raised on AD&D, but I had owned OD&D for years and never really cracked it open and tried it out. Then I played ToaSK and it all suddenly clicked. I picked up Encounter Critical (an OD&D cum Arduin homage that is the predecessor to ToaSK's homage to text-based adventures of the early 1980's) and it clicked even more. OD&D wasn't just some clunky predecessor to AD&D... it was really its own, free-wheeling, corny and amazing experience. Now I absolutely adore OD&D. Has anyone else been inspired by ToaSK to look at D&D differently?

OD&D is my jam (especially via Swords & Wizardry: White Box), but what is Treasures of the Slaver's Kingdom???

Quote from: Spinachcat;1113970OD&D is my jam (especially via Swords & Wizardry: White Box), but what is Treasures of the Slaver's Kingdom???

As best as I can tell, it's a computer game from 2007 that pretends like it was done in 1979. Looks like a text-based adventure game. The download of the "Encounter Critical" RPG supposedly comes with this game as an extra?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203877/Encounter-Critical-A-ScienceFiction-Fantasy-Role-Play-Game

Quote from: finarvyn;1113982As best as I can tell, it's a computer game from 2007 that pretends like it was done in 1979. Looks like a text-based adventure game. The download of the "Encounter Critical" RPG supposedly comes with this game as an extra?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203877/Encounter-Critical-A-ScienceFiction-Fantasy-Role-Play-Game

Yep, you can play ToaSK for free on some websites, although now that I am looking it seems like the original site has sadly gone away. Both ToaSK and EC are their own odes and works of art, but my understanding was the other way... that ToaSK was meant to be a gateway into EC. I could be wrong about that thought (and notably, one is fantasy and the other is sci-fi, so there is reason enough to treat them separately).

Encounter Critical (and through its connection, ToaSK) was basically a satire of 1970's gaming before RPGs became professionalized. In that sense, it is an anti-retroclone. Retroclones try to clean up old games, removing their crazy artwork that looked like it was scrawled on the back of a 9th grade textbook by a bored teenager, and distilling the game into some imagined "core" experience. In that sense, retroclones are really no different at all than WotC D&D, which did the same (albeit for commercialist reasons). EC does the opposite. It relishes in the absurd, cringey, awkward, contradictory aspects of the hand-produced, thoroughly unprofessional, mimeographed games of yore. In doing so, it does not dismiss these elements, but ends up bringing forward their wild and largely unfulfilled promise. It honestly taught me not to ignore the crazy, absurd and incomprehensible parts of OD&D... it showed me how those were the game itself. For example, we often taken "fighter, wizard, cleric!" to be a purist mantra, ignoring all the OD&D apocrypha from Arduin, Alarums & Excursions, Judges Guild etc. that exploded the premise of these core classes. Or we often read "human, dwarf, elf, hobbit!" as being unquestionable, but we ignore the next paragraph that literally talks about Balrog player-characters. I mean, OD&D assumes so many things that downright trigger people today... like the idea that players are meant to be running around with a coterie of monsters at their beck and call, or that the magic system described in Men & Magic is actually not Vancian at all (that only comes in later with a Gygax Q&A in Strategic Review).