What can you do right now?
International Traditional Gaming Week starts tomorrow. Perhaps you’d like to participate but you don’t have a game organized. Jump in Head First! If you start organizing a game right now, you may be able to get something up and running by the end of the week. Don’t hesitate! And if you can’t get something going before ITGW is over, who cares? We surely don’t! Any old school game you can get up and running is a victory, whatever the date. Or use this coming week as a way of strengthening your resolve to get a game up and running. Do you have a game group that plays other games? Maybe its time to pitch some OD&D or Classic Traveller to them. Or do you have friends or coworkers who you think might dig gaming if they tried it? Promise yourself this week to finally bring up the subject. Or maybe you can devote this week to sitting down and working on that adventure you’ve been meaning to get to.
Remember the first rule of getting something done is to actually do something. Don’t just think about how nice it would be to finally run that Tunnels & Trolls or Runequest campaign. This week take some step, no matter how small, towards making that goal a reality. And whatever you do, please let us know about it! Either leave a comment here or post over on TARGAtalk, so that we can celebrate your work and share your accomplishments with others. We’re all in this together and one of the easiest ways we can support the hobby is just showing other people that it can be done.
TARGA 
Last night I took my (not exactly) regular Xcrawl group–through bald contrivance–into The Keep on the Borderlands, or the humanoid lairs thereabouts, with fresh characters rolled-up using OD&D.
Though they’re willing to continue trying to get the hang of the ‘new’ rules, something was clearly not done right, as they were all killed in the first encounter in the orc lair ‘B’–even with the assistance of J. Brian Murphy’s shield rules from Fight On! #2.
Suggestions?
Aaron, suggest to the players that they avoid rolling the dice.
Thanks for the tip, Jeff. I wonder how common it is to play with the mindset described in that post, that the way to survive is to avoid having the lethal combat rules applied to you. I mean, is this a novel point of view or is it something well known be people experienced in old-style play?
I’ve encountered that approach in many places. I would say it is a pretty widespread attitude among successful longterm players of old school games, even if they learned it ad hoc and couldn’t express themselves as clearly as Trollsmyth does.