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"Some kind of hybrid with rules from both and poo poo" seems to have been what a lot of people actually played. I think it was in some other TGD thread here where they said that playing AD&D 1E with things like weapon speed modifiers, you know, "used at all" actually created a lot of interesting emergent tactical gameplay and made it easier to overcome monsters if you played right. But folks didn't on account of they were children.
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Apr 3, 2017 10:09
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Nessus posted:"Some kind of hybrid with rules from both and poo poo" seems to have been what a lot of people actually played. I think it was in some other TGD thread here where they said that playing AD&D 1E with things like weapon speed modifiers, you know, "used at all" actually created a lot of interesting emergent tactical gameplay and made it easier to overcome monsters if you played right. Also the weapon type vs. armor class tables.  For every type of armor there's a weapon that will give you a +3 or a +2 to-hit, and that's enough to push level 1 characters to 60-70% hit rates. I've always wanted to try running with it, because it reinforces the "golf bag weaponmaster Fighter" theme and gives them a nod to their high Strength encumbrance levels, but it requires a level of engagement with rules that, as you said, most people don't bother with because it's too complex.
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Apr 3, 2017 10:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also the weapon type vs. armor class tables. And the right answers seems to be "Zweihander with a pick for platemail."
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Apr 3, 2017 10:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also the weapon type vs. armor class tables.  and it means poo poo like "the thief sneaks past the orc/bandit encampment and scopes out their gear, then silently comes back to report" is a real loving advantage if you have a toolkit.
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Apr 3, 2017 10:35
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I like especially how they actually seemed to believe that being hit frontal by a mounted lance while wearing platemail wouldn´t be easier. Those fuckers are ramming with 60 miles an hour and sure as hell no amount of platemail will help you against that. +0 ....pfff
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Apr 3, 2017 10:48
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Kavak posted:And the right answers seems to be "Zweihander with a pick for platemail." If you want to hold a Shield, you'll want to have a Flail instead of the Two-Handed Sword, though.
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Apr 3, 2017 11:19
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Mr.Misfit posted:I like especially how they actually seemed to believe that being hit frontal by a mounted lance while wearing platemail wouldn´t be easier. Those fuckers are ramming with 60 miles an hour and sure as hell no amount of platemail will help you against that. +0 ....pfff
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Apr 3, 2017 11:21
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I don't think the lance rules take into account mounted combat, which is generally an issue with attempts at trying to cover every possible interaction like these - there's always something you forgot.
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Apr 3, 2017 11:34
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Dareon posted:You had me at Squord. What was that in Japanese? I could make a few painful guesses: Takochi? Takotana? 'Geso-do'. Geso is a culinary term for squid legs, that has come to refer to squids in general. Lovers of dumb anime memes may remember the 'de geso' meme from Squid Girl. So: Geso-do = Gesword = Squord. And you are correct about the cards being their own skills. If you have the skill for the card the difficulty of the roll is 5. If you don't, you look at the skill grid and figure out how many spaces away your closest skill is and add 1 difficulty for every space between them.
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Apr 3, 2017 12:11
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13 True Wars is awful but yes, Drakkenhall owns. The Blue is great and deserves a better game/setting with her rad city of monsters.
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Apr 3, 2017 13:14
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Speaking as someone who started playing back in the day with a Moldivay boxed set from Toy's R Us: the reason we kept playing was because it was just me and my friends who were in my age bracket. I wasn't introduced to the hobby by someone in their late 20's/early 30's who was approaching things in a kill-em-all mindset, we were a bunch of kids in middle school who were doing the best we could with a boxed set that didn't explain things too well and only got you to level 3. To be honest, that's one of the reasons why I always have a hard time with OSR games and the "this is how we played RPGs back in MY DAY" mindset. There wasn't a universal "this is how we played D&D" because there wasn't any way to spread that universal playstyle. There wasn't an internet and the instructions on how to run games weren't that good, so each group had to either a) figure it out for themselves, or b) luck into meeting someone from another group who knew what they were doing.
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Apr 3, 2017 14:40
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I started D&D with these bad boys:  I then bought the 2nd edition DM's Guide (the one with the monsters bursting through the door) and realized I had no idea how the game worked, exactly. The fact that you had to buy the Monster Manual separately to actually do anything was a pretty big turn-off, considering how expensive the rulebook was back then. I'd only ever start to understand how D&D 2nd edition worked thanks to Baldur's Gate, and through that I also realized that a lot of the underlying systems are incredibly clunky and hard to adjudicate without deep system mastery (see: weapon speed, casting speed, and interrupting spellcasts).
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Apr 3, 2017 15:56
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Night10194 posted:13 True Wars is awful but yes, Drakkenhall owns. The Three and their related stuff is way better than anything else in the game.
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Apr 3, 2017 17:48
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I started DnD by inheriting a shitload of modules, weirdass monster books, and random one off junk books for settings or features and not one single DMs guide or Players Handbook. I backsolved everything for our group and man was it weird. Out wizard didnt know any basic spells like magic missle but had like the entire esoteric bigbys collection. Our fighter always ran exotic weaponry since i had like 5 times the rules for those and we assumed turns were measured in discrete chunks of time so like attacking was X units, each square of movement was a unit, investigating things in combat cost units etc. OSR games cant give me back my bootleg game where someone played a halfbird with the completely misunderstood rules for cleave in it. We quit playing around the time somebody found the actual rules and we agreed they were dumb and videogames were great.
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Apr 3, 2017 18:24
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Barudak posted:I started DnD by inheriting a shitload of modules, weirdass monster books, and random one off junk books for settings or features and not one single DMs guide or Players Handbook. I backsolved everything for our group and man was it weird. Out wizard didnt know any basic spells like magic missle but had like the entire esoteric bigbys collection. Our fighter always ran exotic weaponry since i had like 5 times the rules for those and we assumed turns were measured in discrete chunks of time so like attacking was X units, each square of movement was a unit, investigating things in combat cost units etc. I made a similar bootleg adventure for my gifted program back in Elementary school based upon my entirely flawed understanding of how the game worked via the above-mentioned FastPlay books. The adventure basically sent the party through said Elementary school to... You know what? Looking back on it, I don't think I had a hook other than 'explore all the rooms, laugh at all of the in-jokes'. I don't even know how it worked, because I never actually ran it. My favorite was the cafeteria with the gelatinous cube posing as a bunch of harmless Jell-O cups (or whatever cut-rate gelatin they provided to make $1.25 lunches break-even), followed by poking around under desks and getting mauled by the horde of gum-on-desk creatures. It was, in a word, terribad. I may have put a bullshit wizard in there with 1 hp who could cast Lightning Bolt for 6d6 damage. I forget where I placed him, though.
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Apr 3, 2017 18:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:They've maybe gotten a little better at it, insofar as passive Perception is now a thing and Take 10 used to be a thing in 3e and 4e, and then I saw someone on another forum bitch about how the 5e version of Tomb of Horrors was piss-weak because the traps deal damage instead of just killing you outright, but there's still a lot for a DM to learn as far as giving the players a fair shot at hurdling a difficult obstacle without coming off as a total dick that sprung some gas because the Thief didn't specify the correct verb when checking the floor or whatever. I don't normally do this, but I have to side with the anonymous grog. Tomb of Horrors is an important enough part of the game's history that it's worth preserving its reputation as a PC meatgrinder. That said, when I was doing the conversion of the dungeon I condensed down mechanics in several places to move things along. The best example is the Stone Juggernaut. There's at least 3 die rolls, probably more, when all that really needs to be determined is "how many PCs get crushed before they wake up".
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Apr 3, 2017 19:23
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SirPhoebos posted:I don't normally do this, but I have to side with the anonymous grog. Tomb of Horrors is an important enough part of the game's history that it's worth preserving its reputation as a PC meatgrinder. Well...contrarian for oppositions sake. Here I go... I don´t think so. In fact, I think hat Tomb of Horror has an entirely undeserving and overblown position in DnD history. It was a tourney module based on and built for Gygax´s personal group and frankly, it´s rather uninspiring to waltz through with a normal group who hasn´t caught on that it´s a middle finger to players. Toning it down to humane levels makes it at least mediocre, but can´t save it from the fact that its whole existence is based on something of a very personal arms race that simply cannot be replicated. But because Grogs continue to hold up all by old Gary himself as the divine Moccha of Pleasure itself, it obviously must be a good, great or perfect thing that shall never be touched. I mean, even the bible was revised, so Tomb of Horrors definitely should be. PS.: 
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Apr 3, 2017 19:47
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I like super lethal Tomb of Horrors ( I had the temple of elemental evil module and man that was a blast with no understanding of the real rules) but the problem is character creation is massively more involved in DnD than it used to be. If you ran tomb and got meat grinded you were out only a couple of turns of gameplay while you frantically rolled 6 attributes and tried to come up with a new name. Now if you wipe youve got all sorts of stats and feats and level bonuses to tabulate and track even if you arent a spellcaster. Like, new tomb can absolutely be just as lethal, but it should come with a rapid random character generator.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm guessing it was for more common for people to just not be playing these rules as strictly as we might think of them now. I've also heard a lot of stories where people bought "Advanced D&D", thought it was supposed to be some kind of add-on to "Basic D&D", and ended up playing some Frankenstein's hybrid with rules cherry-picked from both. I got into D&D from my dad, who was in college when the game first came out. On top of that, I had both the AD&D 2nd edition player's handbook and the AD&D 1st edition player's handbook, and had NO IDEA that they were of different editions, and so used both freely and interchangeably. So for most of my childhood, I played a weird mashup of the rules my dad remembered and played with (which were their own hodgepodge of house rules, misunderstood stuff and basic+ad&d mixed), plus the various Dragon magazine articles, handbooks (I loved the Complete Humanoid book) and the multiple-editions worth of player's handbooks. It wasn't until I played Neverwinter Nights (which was 3e) that I even knew wizards were supposed to have spellbooks they picked spells from, rather than just knowing and using a fixed list.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:52
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High lethality generally works in two circumstances: 1) Character creation is quick and effortless, and the game puts little focus on character growth, individual stories, and focuses more on group success (letting you go with a line of characters conga-ing into their certain dooms), or 2) combat and similar high-risk activities are rare and generally initiated when players decide to push the envelope (or at the climax of an adventure). Honorable mention goes to games where "dying" doesn't actually remove your character from play, a la Paranoia or Dark Souls.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:07
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High lethality really doesn't work since 3.X, where character generation not only took longer, but basically forced you to map out your character's growth in advance.Nessus posted:I think the conceit of AC is that you have to beat it to hit and hurt the opponent, not "get hit at all." Maybe that changed after 2E, I dunno. "Getting hit at all" and "Getting hurt" are one and the same when it comes to a mounted lance charge.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:15
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Kaza42 posted:I got into D&D from my dad, who was in college when the game first came out. On top of that, I had both the AD&D 2nd edition player's handbook and the AD&D 1st edition player's handbook, and had NO IDEA that they were of different editions, and so used both freely and interchangeably. So for most of my childhood, I played a weird mashup of the rules my dad remembered and played with (which were their own hodgepodge of house rules, misunderstood stuff and basic+ad&d mixed), plus the various Dragon magazine articles, handbooks (I loved the Complete Humanoid book) and the multiple-editions worth of player's handbooks. It wasn't until I played Neverwinter Nights (which was 3e) that I even knew wizards were supposed to have spellbooks they picked spells from, rather than just knowing and using a fixed list. PurpleXVI posted:5E was designed by committee and had no idea what it wanted to be, which meant they ended up with an edition that did a lot of things "okay," did nothing really well or uniquely and ultimately did a lot of things worse than already-existing editions. Like, I find it hard to come up with any reason to not just play 2E, 4E or even 3E instead of 5E. On every single metric it's beaten by one of those three editions, it has no stand-out point where you can go: "Well if you want THIS" or "If you want this done REALLY WELL," then you have to play 5E over the other three, while I'd say that those other three all have something going for them in terms of being different. In this sense, perhaps 5E is the Oldest School Rules of All given that its design-by-committee nature ensures it's a hodgepodge of house rules, misunderstood stuff, and basic+AD&D mixed into a slurry in a hurry. No dig against you and your dad - if you enjoyed what you were playing, then you were playing your D&D right.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:25
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Doresh posted:High lethality really doesn't work since 3.X, where character generation not only took longer, but basically forced you to map out your character's growth in advance. Also as the guy upthread said, it was probably not intended for the specifics of a mounted attack.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:27
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every time you write the name of the blessed TOMB OF HORRORS with lowercase letters, acererak kills and reanimates a puppy as a winter-wight please, think of the blackfire-infused puppies
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Apr 3, 2017 20:28
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Nessus posted:If we crack open the versimilitude argument we're going to be here all week! At least back in the old school poo poo HP was explicitly "consequential impact or erosion of your edge" until you got down to the last few, at which point yeah you're probably getting meat burned off/cut off. Word of god. And lances might not hurt your meat, but they hurt your feelings. Because charging at you is just rude.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't think the lance rules take into account mounted combat, which is generally an issue with attempts at trying to cover every possible interaction like these - there's always something you forgot. It doesn't - there are additional bonuses for being on the horse. 2e DMG posted:In mounted fighting, a character gets a +1 bonus to his chance to hit creatures smaller
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Apr 3, 2017 20:51
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Is it alright to ask for opinions on a specific system in this thread? Heavy Gear 3e and most/all(?) of its supplements is up on Bundle of Holding for dirt cheap. Is it worth buying? Is this the kind of game I could sit down and play with some friends if only I had a copy of the rules or is it pretty crunchy?
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Apr 3, 2017 20:53
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Getsuya posted:Is it alright to ask for opinions on a specific system in this thread? Well, this largely depends on how much your friends are into Armored Trooper Votoms, since Heavy Gear is basically that. This is not a setting about badass Gundams, but about what is basically oversized power armor on skates who need to be really careful around enemy tanks. Crunch is largely focused on vehicle creation, which you don't really have to do with all dem Gears already statted out. 3rd edition muddied the rules a bit with a Complexity rating for each skill, but it's no biggie. The crunchiest part aside from vehicle creation is probably the damage resolution revolving around multiplying your weapon's base damage with the margin of success, but that shouldn't be too hard to get used to. Other than that, the rules are based on a rather fast and clear - if a bit lethal - wargame, so things should work out. (The wargame is also really fond if using lots of abbreviations for weapons, but the RPG statblocks write them out in full.) Doresh fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 21:18
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Awesome, thanks! I'll pick it up and see what I can do with it. Our current DM is having trouble keeping up a weekly campaign so I might offer to run this every other week to give him some down time. I think the guys in the group would love a not-too-crunchy mech game with good metaplot.
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Apr 3, 2017 21:26
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also the weapon type vs. armor class tables. Here are the Player combat charts from Greyhawk (Supplement I to the original White Box set) if you want to compare... 
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Apr 3, 2017 21:28
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Getsuya posted:Awesome, thanks! I'll pick it up and see what I can do with it. Our current DM is having trouble keeping up a weekly campaign so I might offer to run this every other week to give him some down time. I think the guys in the group would love a not-too-crunchy mech game with good metaplot. Metaplot's kinda weird in Heavy Gear since most of the later stuff got retconned when the wargame got a facelift. Though the premise is still the same.
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Apr 3, 2017 21:36
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I can't remember ever using those weapon type tables back in the day. Do any of the recent OSR retro-clones use that table or similar? Material Components is another one I never remember seeing used, except for a one-off with a clearly OCD GM who had carefully worked out in advance on a seperate sheet all the Material Components for the pre-gen'ed Druid he gave me to play.
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Apr 3, 2017 22:10
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Doresh posted:It's totally realistic to assume that a hardened veteran can take 10 axe hits to the face without issues.
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Apr 3, 2017 22:23
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13 True Ways has a goonmade dungeon in it. 13th Age is basically 'DnD5e but better' which isn't a terribly hard hurdle to clear but it works well enough if your requirements are the following: - Every class can contribute meaningfully (everyone has backgrounds, and while some classes are eh, the challenge scaling is actually on the easy side) - Math mostly works - is recognisably DnD-style fantasy with wizards and rogues and fighters - is less crunchy than other editions of DnD - has rules for non-grid combat that aren't just handwavey and are actually gridless - has a free SRD For all those reasons, it works for a lot of former-DnD groups. Also the monster design/layouting is good.
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Apr 4, 2017 01:47
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The gridless bit is important. Almost everyone effectively played D&D 3.5 or whatever gridless, and man it was not made for that.
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Apr 4, 2017 01:58
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13th Age is like a Michigan Koney/Coney Island diner: the substance is kind of generic and very hit-or-miss at times, but there's enough variety on the menu and some unique stuff offered there that it's still a thing you'll go back to once in a while. This is compared to D&D 5th Edition, the Denny's of RPGs. Nobody with a sound mind and any knowledge of anything else choose to go there, they just end up there as a last resort.
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Apr 4, 2017 01:59
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Spiderfist Island posted:13th Age is like a Michigan Koney/Coney Island diner: the substance is kind of generic and very hit-or-miss at times, but there's enough variety on the menu and some unique stuff offered there that it's still a thing you'll go back to once in a while. Or when they are drunk in college after partying from 8pm to 4am and know there is a Denny's at the edge of campus.
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Apr 4, 2017 02:02
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Doresh posted:It's totally realistic to assume that a hardened veteran can take 10 axe hits to the face without issues.
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Apr 4, 2017 02:30
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Halloween Jack posted:Idunno if you're serious of not, but "HP = Meat Points???" is the silliest D&D argument to have, because Gygax said "Of course not" right in the AD&D1e DMG. counterpoint: it's a thing gary gygax wrote in the AD&D 1e DMG, so it is exceedingly statistically likely to be a terrible idea
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Apr 4, 2017 02:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Idunno if you're serious of not, but "HP = Meat Points???" is the silliest D&D argument to have, because Gygax said "Of course not" right in the AD&D1e DMG. On one hand, of course not. On the other hand, everyone describes a successful attack as hitting, and uses words like damage, scratches, and bleeding all the time. Saying, "you feel his ability to dodge a final, fatal blow decreasing," just doesn't have the same panache.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:59
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