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Reading about West Marches made me really want to try a good hexcrawl sandbox some time. The group I play in uses their scheduling system (which works really well), but we're way more megadungeon-centric. I'd love to hear more on the topic from Whitemage. One solid retroclone not mentioned so far is ACKS/Adventurer, Conqueror, King, which is something between a retroclone (it uses Basic's core rules, although it does a few things like killing descending AC that are much needed) and a splatbook, in that it does a ton to flesh out kingdom management and general economics and make it much more gamey.
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Jul 11, 2012 04:18
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Mikan posted:Can you post a bit more about Adventurer/Conqueror/King? A cleaned up Basic sounds nice and I'm curious about the additions. Is it worth packing around over the Rules Cyclopedia? Sure thing! The core is very obviously B/X, but there are a decent number of differences. I'll list out the ones that stuck out to me here. A Few Cleaned Up Mechanics: Attack rolls are now about beating a target number on your sheet + your opponent's AC, which works really smoothly. No THAC0 awfulness or anything like that. Also some stuff like Encumbrance has been made less of a pain in the rear end to deal with, although honestly it's still something everyone just ignores unless it's obvious someone is overdoing it. More classes: The core of the classes are Fighter, Mage, Cleric, and Thief, but there are hybrid versions of each. Also, Elves and Dwarves (Halflings got taken out, although the Explorer fills their mechanical niche) each have a few classes they can be, as a sort of half-way-point between 'my class is elf' and race/class being completely separate. Fighters also get a small tweak that ends up being pretty brutal in practice, a damage boost and the ability to keep attacking whenever they finish off an enemy. I was playing a test-class level 5 Barbarian for a sea-adventure and was pretty good at taking down 2-4 level 1 creatures per turn. Proficiencies: Sort of like limited feats? There's a bit more character customization than in normal Basic. You get Class Proficiencies, which are generally about making you better at your niche, and General Proficiencies, which are more things like tracking, theology, or navigation. Sensible Economy: A ton of attention went into figuring out a 'realistic' economy for the game-world, including things like figuring out how much money a peasant generates per week and rational prices for objects and so on. This isn't so much a verisimilitude thing as it is an attempt to make merchantry and land governance into a balanced and workable game itself. Character Progression Support: The name of the system (Adventurer, Conqueror, King) is meant to be the three stages that characters typically go through. Your first few levels are spent as an adventurer/mercenary/merchant, then as you level up you start building up a presence within the world and start expanding your territory via wilderness clearing or warfare or higher merchantry, and then by the time you're at your 'name' levels you're managing the kingdom that you've built for yourself and doing things like fighting great dragons threatening your settlements and engaging in inter-empire politics. Your owned territory actually factors into your level, meaning that the big way you gain XP late-game is by growing your civilization. Plenty of rules for stronghold-building. Each class gets their own late-game, where wizards build a big tower with a dungeon beneath it, thieves start a guild that they can use to perform all sorts of mischief, and fighters just rule a kingdom. Campaign-Building Tools & Guidelines: These are. . .impressive, but honestly a little too intimidating. The book does a really good job of laying out what a game-world should look like, with guides for how kingdoms of different sizes are built, how much economic power cities of different sizes have, etc, but I do wish they did a better job of guiding you along actually making one from scratch. Since the various nearby kingdoms in the game end up being loosely equivalent to late-game monsters and NPCs it's a little harder to just wing them, but if you're not planning on running a multi-year campaign that's really not something you need to worry about. I Think The Player Handbook Has A Bunch Of Cool Stuff?: I know it has rules for making your own classes, and I think it might have the rules for mass combat, which looked super cool from the few scraps I saw of them. I think it's supposed to be out soonish? Basically, ACKS is great if you want to run a game of semi-Medieval merchantry or Conan-style barbarians-to-kings progression. It works fine even if you aren't doing that, with the revised attack rolls and so on, but what it's really all about is just turning the non-dungeon game world into something with way more guidelines for interacting with as a game that go beyond the DM just waving their hand and deciding what happens arbitrarily.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:28
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jigokuman posted:I played 2nd edition. It was what I started with. I was a teenager, and I obviously didn't read things very carefully. Character death was rare. Was I playing the game wrong? I am honestly not seeing how people got through these adventures. I do wonder how this came about. All the poo poo I hear about super-early campaigns leads to them being hyper-deadly, but that's somehow different than this 'touch a door-knob, locked in a dark forever covered with anti-adventurer countermeasures' garbage. I honestly like deadly dungeons stuffed with things that will gently caress up non-careful players, but I feel like what 'non-careful' meant changed over the years. Traps and cursed treasures and poo poo should encourage smart play, but they also define smart play, and the playstyle they define needs to be fun. Deadly traps on random segments of hallway or inconspicuous doors is terrible, because it really does encourage that 'too scared to move 5 feet without 30 minutes of trap-checking' mentality, and traps that are explicit 'gotcha!'s to careful players are even worse because they actively gently caress over people playing the way that you probably actually want them to be playing.
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Jul 20, 2012 16:13
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Hellequin posted:I've always been the group DM, and I've DM'd several campaigns of 3/3.5 that were months long, a few games of 4th and a few one-offs in other systems, but I've never DM'd a game of 1e or 2e. I really don't want to ask at rpg.net; so are there any considerations or common house rules I should be maybe looking into as a newcomer to AD&D? My (B/X) group uses Special Powers to individualize our characters a bit and it works really well.
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Jul 30, 2012 19:32
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Red_Mage posted:Hey I actually need this thread's help. Being as it is of dubious legality to provide straight AD&D stats for monsters, if I were converting an adventure, what retroclone would probably provide the most universal base so lots of retroclone players could use it. I am leaning toward S&W, but if anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. Is this something you're publishing/selling, and if so in what context? From most of the retroclone-style modules I've seen they generally at most provide a tiny 1/2 line statblock that lists the creature's Hit Dice, Armor Class, any attacks they can do, Morale, and maybe like movement speed and a class level it saves like and reminders of special abilities and stuff. If you just went with something along the lines of "6 Goblins (HD:1-1,AC:6,1 Club(1d6),M:7,Playing Dice)" you'd be pretty universally usable. If this is something you're going to be selling for profit you might want to look at some other published modules out there and see how they handled it, but just that level of detail should keep you from emulating any one specific product (be in D&D or a retroclone or whatever).
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Aug 1, 2012 20:29
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Red_Mage posted:I really just need to provide a statline for monsters as it is a thing I will be publishing. Any suggestions for a universal module with some monster variety? I'm actually not sure, then. I know that the One Page Dungeon Contest just asks people not to give any stats at all, which isn't as cruel for a module to do with a retroclone as it normally would be since you really just need to hold 3 numbers in your head (hit dice, armor class, attack damage) per monster type (of which there's usually only one) plus any special abilities, which tend to be straightforward. If you don't want to do that I'd say your best bet would be to just get in contact with the publisher of the retroclone you want to work with, since presumably you're going to have to do that anyway, and see if they have any standard formatting they use. Hell, even if you just want to publish 'generic' you should probably talk to a publisher just for general advice--they're all very much in the 'we just want to get cool stuff out there' mindset, so I'm sure they'd be helpful even if you're not going to publish for their system. For module examples I guess I'd just check out the free/cheaper samples out there for Swords and Wizardry, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Laybrinth Lord. If you see two people using the same notation it's probably generic enough you can use it, and it should give you some idea of the info that people expect to have instant access to.
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Aug 1, 2012 21:47
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SavageMessiah posted:So does anybody know anything about Rappan Athuk or Tome of Horrors Complete (the Swords and Wizardy versions, of course)? They both seem pretty awesome but $99 + shipping is pretty steep sight unseen! I played one session with Rappan Athuk, and enjoyedish it. It was pretty cruel (the first thing that happened in the game was we got torn to bits by gargoyles), and we never did find any of the keys to any of the entrances to the dungeon, but it had a fairly nice mood to it. It's being run in Pathfinder, and 3e is pretty unpopular with our larger group (including me, but the dungeon sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try it out), so the game's having trouble finding players, but if it survives I can maybe give you a more meaningful opinion in a few sessions. Any NYC goons want to try it out? The next session's scheduled for the 22nd.
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Sep 11, 2012 21:18
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it's like the loving Demon Souls of dungeons. I like a lot of the ideas but I'm not sure I'd really enjoy running it - I'm generally not a killer DM.
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Evil Sagan posted:So I'm preparing to run my first 1st Edition AD&D game in a two-session romp at the second half of the month. I'm still going through the amazing Dungeon Master's Guide, but I had some questions that I don't think I'll find the answers to within. Balance in 1e is really tricky if you try to think of it the same way you'd think of it in 3/4e. Fights are really swingy and one result on the wandering monster chart can result in 1 goblin as easily as it can 8 goblins. The big answer I've found for it is to just make absolutely sure that there's no encounter the PCs 'need' to have. Give the dungeon multiple paths to their goal, and be extremely open to letting them make it past monsters they deem too tough via methods other than combat; a troll is way too drat tough for a first level party to fight, but a troll they've lured in a closet that they then barricaded with heavy stone sarcophagi is just as defeated as one they reduced to 0hp and lit on fire. Hell, a troll that chased the party out of the dungeon the first time they met it, but that they snuck past as it slept the next day is just as defeated as one they killed. Every monster is a potential combat encounter, but it can also be a potential puzzle. Just avoid any situation where the players basically get told 'okay, well, you can either fight this dude or go home I guess' (other than maybe the setpiece final battle) and the unpredictable balance won't be an issue.
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Oct 7, 2012 20:08
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Dear You posted:Summer is here and that means University is almost over. I'm going to start up an old school game with some friends. I'm thinking OD&D, only because statting poo poo up is insanely easy. All the OSR blogs I've found with the best advice are the ones with the worst tone, sadly. What type of game are you thinking of running?
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Nov 1, 2012 06:53
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Dear You posted:Hm, I was afraid of that. I'm not too sure what can be done, which is why I'm searching for ideas, or what would be fun. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, if you have any. To me, 'old school gaming' is all about empowering the players to make meaningful choices (not that other modes of gaming aren't, but it takes an especially front seat position here). You, as a GM, do this by giving them a setting with meaningful and predictable consequences and letting them completely drive the action. Basically, you give them a fairly passive setting and let them write a story with it. Giving them a full-blown fantasy world is ridiculous, though, so you generally narrow the focus way down or use techniques to 'cheat' without actually harming the player experience. Here are a few ways people do that: Dungeon-Crawl: The part of the setting that's really developed are the dungeons. Since dungeons by their very natures restrict movement/perception/action it's easy to create a 'complete' little space in which you can absolutely guarantee that the players will run into lots of interesting stuff without you needing to secretly steer them into it. This can be as low or high prep as you want, since there are tons of free dungeons online you can just borrow (google 'One Page Dungeon' for a nice starting point). Also, if you really want to get into it you can hunt down and buy some old D&D modules--the good ones are basically just little maps full of cool poo poo that someone drew so you didn't have to. Hex-Crawl: A lot like the dungeon-crawl, but way less compressed and with less movement restrictions between the points of interest. Just draw up a map on some hex paper, think up something cool to exist in every slot, and let people loose on it. I'm still figuring out my philosophy on how to make these fun, but noted 'blogger with horrible tone' The Alexandrian has some really fantastic posts on running a hex-crawl. These have a bit more pre-campaign prep work, but tend to be very low maintenance once you've started running it. City-Crawl: These are tough. Vornheim, by another blogger with a tone that drives people crazy, Zak S., is pretty good at getting you set up for one of those, though. Megadungeon: Like a dungeon crawl, but you build the entire campaign around one giant one that they're meant to slowly map out over hundreds of visits. These actually end up functioning pretty differently than normal dungeons since they need a few extra techniques applied to them to keep them engaging, but they're actually my personal favorite type of campaign. I can go way deeper into this if you're interested, since the game I'm running currently is based around one. gently caress It, Just Ask The Dice Things: This isn't so much a campaign style as a GM-technique. Since the GM is generally sole creator of the setting it's real easy to end up with some pretty ugly GM-fiat. To mitigate this somewhat you try to avoid making flat declarations when moments of setting ambiguity and instead just set odds that you roll on instead to decide what the PCs find as they explore the setting. When they try to find shelter from the elements in a cave instead of asking yourself "do I feel like loving them over with a monster who already lives there? Y/N?" you ask yourself "what are the odds the cave is already inhabited", decide there's a 30% chance it's a monster lair, and slap a monster in there if you roll a 8+ on a d10. Also, this blog post by Zak S. remains one of the best I've seen on the topic of different styles of campaign setting and how they inform player agency. Oof, I stayed up way too late writing this. I can get deeper into any of these if you're interested, but I'm worried that I'm already maybe losing some clarity to sleep deprivation so I'll leave it at this for now. Edit: Oh, I guess there's also stuff like Traveler-style merchant-crawling, but I know very little about that.
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Nov 1, 2012 09:59
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Dear You posted:To be honest, I'm not sure I would run it in a trad way, I've already got some basic houserules worked out that change things quite a bit. This is very helpful though, thank you. I'm already getting some ideas peculating, I'm not typically worried about playing into insane levels but what do you think is a more polished starting point, whitebox or RC? I'd be using their respective clones. My favorite is Moldvay Red Box, and I'm not really familiar with the particulars of White Box (a guy in my group runs it monthly, but it's so houseruled I'm not sure what's him and what's the system and I've only played in it once), but RC seems really solid. Dear You posted:These are what interest me most. My idea for a setting works with either option. Is it possible to combine the two approaches? I can't really see how going back to the same dungeon would be fun, so I'm pretty interested in unpacking that. That's actually more or less what I do for my campaign, and I'm really happy with how it works. The dungeon is a place to get money and is full of danger, hardship, and constraints (which only exist to be overcome, of course), while the city offsets it by being a place where the players can spend their newfound cash to actually get poo poo done in a much more free-form and collaborative-worldbuildingish fashion. They play off each other really well, where the cities are sandboxes for the players to do whatever they want in, but whatever they do is going to end up costing huge amounts of money that they can only really get from raiding the dungeon. Here are a few of the things I try to do/think about for each of the two: The City Tables and Tables and Tables: Designing a whole city is too much work, but completely coming up with it as you go along is too hard. Make a bunch of lists of names for people/places, lists of jobs people might have, lists of personality quirks for NPCs/neighborhoods, and so on, so you can keep a nice balance between flexibility and preparation. I try to keep a list of 10 of each of these things on hand, and whenever I end up using an entry I erase it and write a new one in its place when I'm prepping for the next session. Weekly Events: One of the d10 tables I keep is a 'weekly events' table, that's just made of 10 notable things that people might be talking about having just happened in the city. At the end of each session I roll on it, tell the players what happens, and tell them that if they want to investigate it next week they should let me know so I can turn it into an actual session. It's a nice little way to give the players tons of low-prep plot hooks that they are under no obligation to pursue (maintaining full player agency in a way that normal plot hook delivery methods can easily erode somewhat), but then to also have fully fleshed sessions ready for them when they do bite. There's actually a little bit more to it than that, where it ties into the rumor system, but I just posted about that in my game thread so I'll just link that post instead of retyping it. Carousing/Socializing/Integrating Rules: One of the big things your players are going to want to do is get in cozy with existing city factions. I made some quick and easy rules for doing this, where how much money you spend schmoozing compared to how important the people you're trying to impress are determines your odds of making contacts. Again, I've already written that up elsewhere, so here's a link to my wiki. The Megadungeon First off, my DM for my IRL weekly game just wrote a few blog posts about megadungeon design. It's still in progress, but here it is so far. I'll probably repeat some of it, but it's a nice read. Mini-Setting: First off, megadungeons do risk being a bit boring if done as just a really big dungeon. Keep in mind that it should be a little setting in and of itself, full of factions and potential allies and non-hostile NPCs who could none the less be big liabilities to the party if interacted with wrong. Monsters who are willing to talk the the party instead of (or before?) eating them are good dungeon design in general, but it's especially important in a megadungeon. The party should probably spend at least as much time talking to dungeon citizens as they do killing them. Living Dungeon: Also, it shouldn't be static. Areas the players have cleared out will sometimes be restocked as new monsters move in. Killing the goblin chieftan on the first level of the dungeon gives the gnolls on the second level a chance to try to expand their influence. Other adventurers show up and threaten to loot rooms before the players do if they PCs start slacking off (although keep a very, very light touch with this--it lights a fire under the asses of the players that's fun in small quantities but turns horrific very quickly). The PCs go back to the same location over and over again, but that doesn't mean they need to go to the same situation over and over again. Interconnectedness: Freedom of motion is a huge part of dungeon crawling, but it's already incredibly restricted by just the fact that the players don't know where anything is. It's a good idea to make the map as non-linear as possible, so that once the players do know their way around they can move through the areas they've already explored very quickly, but so that it still takes a long time to fully explore any given level. Choke points can be good, since they end up opening up big new unexplored sections of the dungeon when they are finally found, but shouldn't be excessive. The most convenient paths between parts of the dungeon should often be blocked by especially dangerous monsters/hidden by secret doors/etc, so they can be slowly unlocked as the players explore and conquer their way through the dungeon. Don't be shy with passages to lower levels, either, as the natural danger will be plenty to keep your players from going too deep too quickly anyway. Mapping: Unlike one or two-shot dungeons, mapping is amazingly important to Megadungeon play. Mapping is crazy fun, but also not for everyone, so it's a good idea to figure out early on if you have someone who really wants to do it or if you should just hand-wave moving from one part of the already-explored dungeon to another. I picked up the mapping mantel from my group around maybe six months ago and its become easily my favorite part of the game. Here's an example of what a player map from about three years into a campaign starts to look like. Treasure Metrics: In general you want each level of the dungeon to roughly correspond to the level of the players exploring it, and since a megadungeon is meant to be able to take the party from 1st to last level by itself you can have a pretty good idea of how much treasure you need to have on every level (assuming you're using a gp=xp system). In general you can expect maybe 40-50% of the gold/xp you put in a dungeon to be wasted by character death or never being found or whatever, so to figure out how much gold to put on a level you can pretty much just figure out how much XP your party needs to level up and double it. To figure out the number of rooms a dungeon should have you can just multiply the number of sessions you want them to level up by the number of rooms you think they'll clear per session. Stocking: This is more generic dungeon advice than megadungeon-specific, but a good density guide to what should be in a dungeon is this: One third of all rooms should contain a monster (potential ally or not). One third should contain some sort of interactive thing like a trap or a magic fountain or a secret door or a puzzle. Another third should just be empty (and by empty I mean full of flavorful descriptions, but nothing the players are expected to actually spend time interacting with). Of those monsters half should have treasure. Of your special rooms about one third should have treasure. Of your empty rooms about one in six should have treasure. This balance seems best to me at keeping things tense and fresh.
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Nov 1, 2012 22:58
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Dear You posted:This is good stuff man, thank you. Just two more questions and I think I've got enough to start out. Are there any good resources on mapping or is it something you just get better at with practice? Are there any rules of thumb to balancing out fights or is this also something you just gotta' feel out? I'm still learning how to balance fights myself, but it isn't nearly as important as it is in other editions if you're not a jerk about letting the PCs evade/negotiate out of/flee fights (as in, maybe throw in some complications or costs, but never just make not having a fight impossible) and the PCs will be able to choose their own fights, making having a large range of different difficulties a good thing rather than a bad one. They can always just come back when they're higher level if the monster's guarding an especially tempting hoard/passageway. Also, with the comparative lack of healing in the game and no encounter powers the power level of the group itself varies wildly from moment to moment. For your first fight of the day a party of 5th level characters will have high HP and lots of options for support spells/etc, but by your fourth you might be looking at a party that's all at 6-10ish HP and has only one or two low level spells at their disposal--in other words identical to a first level party. It's hard to balance fights because it's hard to know how strong they'll be at any point of the session. The good news is that even a moderately easy fight has the chance to knock off a dozen or so HP from the party, making every further fight harder and rendering that first fight still tense. I guess my last note is that I always overestimate high level creatures--fights with things like dragons or a single troll can be very swingy for low level creatures--they'll just mob them, nail them with all their best spells, and very often kill what you thought was a creature about 4 levels over their capabilities in a round or two, but then go back and almost party wipe against 4 level-appropriate cougars. Pay a lot of attention not only to the toughness of the creatures you place, but also their numbers. Also, Rythlondar is amazing, thanks!
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Nov 2, 2012 17:04
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jadarx posted:Which version of OD&D came in a bunch of folders (for lack of a better word). I'm remembering something from high school and it's a bit hazy. Could you be thinking of 2e monster manual stuff? Where each monster was just on a Wildlife Fact File-esque piece of 3-hold punched paper so you could add supplements you bought directly to your main file? Because now there was an idea that's brilliant in a world full of digital tablets but godawful in the 90's if ever I heard one. Also, Basic and Expert and so on came out in 64-page so-softcover-they're-almost-ashcan 3-hole punched booklets in at least some versions, which I legit love and wish more campaign-centric RPGs would do. Oh, and I forgot one general RPG tip that's especially useful for any campaign where you're going to be doing a lot of impromptu worldbuilding--make a d666 chart of just cool concepts and moods and so on, then whenever you want inspiration for what should be in a hex/what type of personality a NPC should have/etc just roll on it twice and try to rationalize the interaction of the concepts into something cool. I fall into ruts really easily when trying to come up with too many ideas at once or if I'm improvising, so having a way to force me to mix it up is invaluable. I divided mine into six sub-sections, so I can just roll a d66 if I need a more targeted burst of inspiration. They're Personality Traits, Problems/Conflicts, Primal/Wilderness, Civilization, Artists/Genres To Style-Emulate, and Misc. Here's my personal list, but since each campaign is going to have a different style I figure each campaign should have its own: 
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Nov 4, 2012 00:26
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Zerilan posted:Thanks. Also is Ravenloft a setting where a campaign should start in if I run that later, or is it something I can transport players to at a higher level? A big part of Ravenloft's conceit is that the adventurers are all somehow brought there from other dimensions and can't leave until they beat the castle or whatever, so that sounds good. Keep in mind that (good) 1e modules are more locations than plots, so they're actually better for a sandboxy game than they are as things that create storyplot. I've played B1, B2, and T1 and enjoyed them all--more or less. In Search of the Unknown has a reputation with my group for being frustrating and bloody, and so we all hate it with a passion (in a kind of a good way?), but that's probably more our personal experiences with it than anything else (we had a few moments of bad bad luck there). Honestly, I'm not sure how hard I recommend any of the books outside of core. Fiend Folio monsters are kind of bad in play most of the time and there's very little in any sourcebook you probably can't make up for yourself and have it mesh way better with your game and group.
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Nov 19, 2012 00:16
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AlphaDog posted:Not necessarily. AD&D has a lot of tools that make "unknown wilderness exploration" pretty easy to set up if you're fine with semirandom everything (which is one of the appeals of hexcrawl). I want to hear how people do this. This isn't how I did it in my current campaign, where I just wrote a thing for every hex (of which a bunch were relatively minor, like landmarks rather than adventures), but I'm not sure that was the best way to do it. I think if I did it again I'd just make a stable of like 6 or 10 locations per zone/climate and roll randomly on that chart every time they get a "you find the hex's feature!" encounter roll or learn a rumor about the area. I feel bad about "prepare an encounter, wherever they go next they find it" types of encounter preps since they feel a bit railroady (oof, not that just rolling on a chart really makes a huge difference since it's still just luck--what actually puts power in the hands of the players is intelligence gathering), but as long as the encounter charts vary from zone to zone and there are plenty of ways to scout around it's fairly functional. Even so, keeping 10 well prepped interesting encounters in reserve at all times is a bit tiring. I handle city stuff by dropping a hint of something going on in the city at the end of each session and then making the players decide if they want to investigate it further at least a few days beforehand so I can have time to make it more full-bodied, but that's really not an option in wilderness exploration.
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Nov 19, 2012 08:04
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Zerilan posted:EDIT: Also what character ability generation tends to work well with 1e beyond the rolling methods in the book? I've never been a fan of die rolling for PC stats. One thing I like to do with random stat generation is let people retire any character they want after they play them one session and turn them into a Shadowrun-style contact. It's a cool way to let your players add to the setting while making poorly rolled characters still fun to have created. AlphaDog posted:The way I used to do it with AD&D, and then Hackmaster is a bit like the parts you've mentioned you don't like, but I'll put my process here anyway. This is for "explore the wilderness, find the dungeon, get the treasure back to town" hexcrawling. This sounds really solid! I'll try it out next time I'm working on a wilderness!
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Nov 19, 2012 17:34
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Zerilan posted:edit: Also other big question I guess is now much grids are needed for combat. Our group usually ends up playing over Skype/IRC. Would Maptools or Roll20 be pretty mandatory? Theater of the Mind sucks. You can play just fine without a grid, but minis are incredibly helpful.
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Nov 19, 2012 18:37
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DalaranJ posted:Question the second: I get most of the thief skills, but I didn't understand how "Hear Sounds" (or similarly Notice Secret Door for elves) One option is to make it a time thing. Anybody can listen to a door, but most people take a long time to be sure--they aren't good at it, so they have to spend some time double-checking and making sure they weren't imagining anything. Specifically, it takes a full turn. Thieves and elves just do it instantly. Same deal with, like, unlocking a door--anybody can do it with some time, but thieves can just have it done in the time it takes to ask them to do it. This method works best if you're using wandering monster checks based on time, though, otherwise it's kind of a bad deal for the thieves. Edit: I guess I never went into what actually happens. I'd probably describe it like your fighter description: you can hear a few figures in the room, maybe some muttering in a goblinish tongue. Remember that some monsters, like inactive undead, don't make any sounds at all. OtspIII fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Dec 21, 2012 |
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Dec 21, 2012 03:16
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Swim Good posted:Wondering if you guys in the know would be able to help me. I want to play an old school sandbox that is less focused on dungeons and more on going from village to village getting into mischief. What do system do you suggest for that sort of game? S&W whitebox or B/X? What sort of mischief are you thinking? Is this the type where each village has some sort of hidden plot going on with a few hooks looking to draw players into it, or is it more focused on the players having some overarching goal and you reacting to them stirring up trouble? Either way, both systems are about equally good for that in a "there aren't a lot of bad rules that make running a game like that actively hard" sort of way. Both can work really well for it, but I suggest looking into both loose (general GMing advice) and relatively strict (like, how Dogs in the Vineyard handles town creation) town and conflict generation guidelines. D&D is very much optimized for dungeon-crawling, but early editions are simple enough that if you're cool with winging non-combat stuff they can work just fine as combat adjudication systems.
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Jan 1, 2013 10:05
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ProfessorCirno posted:One thing I've been looking into a bit and finding somewhat interesting is old old school style locational play for lack of better word, or I guess multi-DM play. The idea being that you have more then one character and there is more then one DM and more then one game going on. So Tuesday I might put my dwarf fighting man into the dungeon Bob is running, Wednesday I put an elf M-U into a game that Sue is running, and on Friday I go to Misha's table and play...my dwarf fighting man again! The idea was that there were no real long term storylines or even "sandbox" style adventures, but rather potentially a few MEGADUNGEONS and whatever adventures could be made from the surrounding lands, and that characters weren't devoted to one DM's game but instead simply adventured where it took him, teaming up with different groups or teams to get that wonderful wonderful wealth. My group does this in theory, but the only case I can actually remember of anybody taking advantage of it is one mage in the group's other long-running campaign who would accidentally sneeze his way between dimensions/campaign worlds every now and then. That said, we do cycle DMs out pretty frequently--each week we take a tally of who is free during which days, and if the regular DM is busy on the day with the most people available (or if the regular DM just wants a break) somebody else runs a session or two in one of their own dungeons. What I'm actually working on doing is almost the opposite of this, though--having one big self-restocking megadungeon and running it for different groups, so that the actions of one group can actually leave effects for the other groups to find on their next visits.
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Mar 1, 2013 09:01
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One minor variation on it that I like a lot is 'roll Xd6 and get under your stat'. If you're using 3d6 to roll for ability scores it means that you have a pretty easy set of difficulty levels--a 3d6 check will be passed basically exactly 50% of the time since the probability curve for the check is the same as the probability curve for stats. If you want to make it an easy check that's only a risk if the character has a major weakness you can make it a 2d6 check, and if you want to make it something so hard that even a super competent person might easily fail at it you can make it a 4d6 check. It makes it just a tiny bit easier for me to understand the implications of difficulty changes than a d20 +- 2 roll, and it also emphasizes the rarity of really high or low stats, which can either be a good or a bad thing.
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Apr 23, 2013 18:36
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Payndz posted:I've now got it into my head to convert the whole of Basic into a 'roll below ability' system with the goal of not having to look anything up on tables during combat. Heartbreaker ahoy! It should be fairly straightforward - enemy AC (recalculated to start from 0 and go up) becomes the modifier to hit, saving throws are somehow derived from specific abilities (CON against poison, INT against spells) plus the PC's level, monster to-hit rolls are based on 8 or 9 plus their hit dice, etc. ACKS kind of does this, and it's. . .really good when playing online, but maybe a bit confusing for tabletop. You have a Attack Throw or something that starts at 10+ and you need to beat that by the target's AC to hit them. In Roll20 it means if you just type /roll 1d20-10 the result is the AC you hit, but it's a bit wonky to do in your head. I just like having everything on my character sheet. A few stats/saves and a attack roll -> AC chart and I'm good to go.
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Apr 23, 2013 18:56
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AlphaDog posted:If your whole system is "roll below ability", why derive the saving throws? Just roll below your CON to save against poison. Roll below your DEX to dive out the way of something. Roll against STR to resist being knocked down or pushed along. Roll below INT/WIS/CHA for spells / mind controls / social pressure (or whateverthefuck, I dunno). This gets real dangerous at higher levels, I think. You're pretty much expected to fail your saves at low levels, but that's okay because a ghoul's attack is only marginally more effective at killing your character than an attack by a gnoll. At high levels bypassing HP through a SoS spell needs to be super unreliable or spells like Finger of Death suddenly get just ridiculously overpowered. The big advantage older games have over, say, 3e is that you can't really mess with save ratings, so the fact that you start getting ridiculously powerful spells at higher levels is balanced by the fact that your peers can shrug them off fairly effectively through sheer force of Being A Hero/Really Scary Monster. Also, monsters don't have stats, although they would be easy enough to bullshit once you got used to the system. Edit: I guess you could just use stats for saves and just give people a, like, level / 3 bonus or something.
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Apr 24, 2013 05:09
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Payndz posted:revealed just how weak Basic characters are - even at L3, they're the equivalent of a sub-1HD monster if they don't get any to-hit bonuses, and with +3 to hit will still miss 50% of the time against anything of AC6 or above. (Eg, a bog-standard orc.) There are really just two things that make low-level PCs powerful--plate armor and Sleep. I keep running games where I think 'oh, 6 1HD monsters versus 6 level 1 players--a totally even fight', but 9 times out of 10 the PCs wipe the floor with that fight, and I think it's mostly because the monsters usually have to roll a, like, 18 to hit them. I kinda like it this way, since it makes things tense but not as deadly as it could be, while still giving the party big unarmored weak-spots. It sure does suck for thieves, though. Poor loving thieves.
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Apr 24, 2013 08:36
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Ravendas posted:There's a rule in the 2e DMG (optional) that says fighters can get their level in number of attacks vs creatures under 1hd. So a 7th level fighter surrounded by kobolds can take 7 whacks, plus whatever other bonuses he'd get from specialization/dual wielding/level. I don't like that rule, since it makes gnolls suddenly hugely more dangerous than orcs, despite only being one HD larger. I like the ACKS solution pretty well, though--fighter types get a number of cleaves per round equal to their level. If you're fighting goblins and have good bonuses this means you can kill a ton of them each round, but it also gives you nice boosts to the number of gnolls and ogres you can mow through in a fight, as well. In this system guys with mid-level attack progressions like Clerics also get to cleave a number of times equal to half their level--I can take or leave this, since Clerics are already crazy good and Thieves are just so bad I can't even feel like I can help them.
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May 9, 2013 05:35
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Project1 posted:So what's the difference between BECMI and the Moldvay and whatever other D&Ds there were? I only ever played/read BECMI. This gets super complicated and I'm not sure I'm 100% clear on it, even. The BE part of BECMI had at least two big printings presented by different designers--Moldvay and Mentzer. They both are amazing for their efforts to actually communicate how to play the game clearly and effectively. Ugh, the history of effective playstyle communication is really weird, where most of the big steps forward actually look pretty ineffective to us now, but these two hold up fairly well even today. The Rules Compendium is basically a single big book that put a lot of the BECMI system all in one place, and isn't hugely different from either of those. There are also some other versions like the Holmes Basic one that I know very little about. There are lots of little differences if you really look for them (I think Clerics get a half dozen new spells in Mentzer or something), but you could really have a big group of players who all use different editions play together with minimal friction between them, I feel like. What do you mean by 'other D&Ds', though? This is all Basic D&D, which isn't quite the same as either D&D or AD&D. If you ask me this question again in 3 or 4 months I'll probably be able to answer it much more clearly. In preparation for grad school I'm slowly working my way through Playing at the World by Jon Peterson, which is a fantastic book on the history of wargaming and early D&D, but all of the info in it that's relevant to this discussion is right up in the last chapter.
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May 9, 2013 07:22
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Payndz posted:Ran another test of my system, and drat, Sleep is so overpowered in B/X against low-level monsters that it's not even funny. I put my four generic guys against six kobolds, four orcs and an ogre, and in the very first round the wizard took down every one of the kobolds and orcs. (RAW, there's no save.) At the end of the fight (which didn't last long), only one character had taken any damage. Sleep is kind of dumb RAW, but just giving monsters a save to resist it brings it pretty well in line. It's still probably the best 1st-level spell, since it's pretty much a free 1/day 'let's skip this encounter' card the party can play, but that just means you can suddenly cram one extra encounter into the day's session.
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May 9, 2013 20:40
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whydirt posted:Black Box D&D is awesome. It was my first set and I still have my dogeared copy of the main rulebook, although my cover has long since fallen off and I've lost track of the map and other parts. It's honestly what I'd probably use as a core book if/when I ever run a campaign again. I'd just work up some Attack Bonus/Ascending AC tables and maybe convert Saving Throws to a single number that various classes just get conditional bonuses to. Saving throws seem like such a waste in early D&D. In all the versions I've seen they stay more or less consistent in their relationships to each other across class/level, so reducing them to a single stat does seem like a good plan. When I first read them I assumed that some classes would specialize in some saves--clearly Fighters would have a great save vs. breath weapons, so you could be that iconic knight blocking a dragon's breath with a shield, and then thieves must be good vs. wands, because that'd let you be the agile guy that's really hard to draw a bead on, and maybe clerics can resist spells really well due to the blessings of their gods or something. Oh well.
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May 10, 2013 03:07
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DalaranJ posted:Because attributes rarely change my players expressed concern that they wouldn't feel like they were growing over time. (We're all used to 3rd and 4th ed though.) Yeah, it does set a really specific tone for your game. I kinda like that low level characters can contribute every bit as much as high level ones with skills, and that the big advantage high-level characters is survivability--to mix genres pretty messily, it makes sense that Han Solo would be as likely as Random Stormtrooper to get blown off the side of a cliff by the wind from a Roc's wings, but it also makes sense that Han Solo would be the one to miraculously survive and get to use the fall as a prompt for further adventure. I like games where high-level characters are just low-level guys who have survived so much poo poo that they've become pretty dangerous and hard to kill, though, so if you're playing a game where high level guys are just all-around Better than low level guys I wouldn't recommend flatly using stats as skills.
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May 10, 2013 07:37
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Ratpick posted:Does this sound completely stupid, and if so, does it at least sound completely stupid in a good way? Ooh, I really like this and might start using a variant of it in future ACKS games I run. I actually really like how little mechanical control you have over character customization in baseline B/X, since it keeps people from falling into the 'my character concept is that I am mechanically optimized' trap that happens with 3e and onwards, and giving people too many classes and proficiencies to deal with starts to risk them falling into that mindset, in addition to making character creation take too long. That said, some of the classes in ACKS are really fun, so I think I might start a 'by default, you can only make a core class' policy, but then make it so that there will be plenty of NPCs with fancy classes that the party can befriend and potentially start playing as. I'm realizing I really don't like proficiencies, though. They feel better balanced to me than feats, but you still end with with weirdness like players who stack bonuses to reaction rolls and are suddenly averaging an 11-12 result on them. The fact that B/X works just fine without them means I think I might just cut them completely the next time I run an ACKS game and let people have one special ability that they get to design every 4 levels. VacuumJockey posted:Alternatively you could steal a page from GW's Mordheim game and set the campaign in the ruins of a recently nuked metropolis. Every session would then revolve about finding a good ruin/dungeon, plundering it, and then getting home in one piece. With a good random dungeon generator, and stuff like that found at wizardawn.com, it wouldn't even take all that much prep. Wizardawn is amazing. My DM ran us a game in one of their dungeons recently and none of us had any idea it was randomly generated/populated until he told us.
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May 24, 2013 15:52
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Oh, that looks really cool! Would you mind giving us a quick summary of where to look for changes--it's a pretty big document. So far I've seen the whole central 'roll under' part and the bonuses/restrictions that classes get.
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May 29, 2013 19:19
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Payndz posted:BTW, I created seven test characters (one of each class) for my game in about 45 minutes today, so even though it's a different system it's still as fast as B/X. The most time-consuming part was buying equipment. I think chargen equipment-picking is a time you can throw some abstraction into B/X without hurting things at all. Just say new characters start with a weapon they can use, the best armor they can use, a set of Adventurer's Basics (torches, rope, rations, etc), and then something like 2 or 3 items from a list (shield, bow + arrows, 10' pole, hammer and spikes, thieves tools, etc). Maybe even give each class an item or two it can get for free on top of that (shield for fighter/cleric, bow and thieves tools for thieves, etc).
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Jun 1, 2013 21:12
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Payndz posted:Just made an addition to my system: at the end of a combat the PCs won (in the remainder of the turn; per B/X, battles and their clean-up last one turn), they recover a small amount of HP. The formula is 1/4 of their base Hit Die (ie, d4 for Wizards, d10 for Fighters, etc) rounded down, plus any CON bonus. This way, as long as someone's still alive after a fight, they won't be limping around on 1HP, and nobody has to spend any healing on very minor injuries. Ooh, my party does this too, but we just have a 1-hp bandage option you can do if you took damage. Scaling it to hit-die size sounds like a good deal. Maybe it should cap at the HP you started the fight with, so people don't actively heal from easy fights?
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Jun 4, 2013 19:02
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Just gonna post this here, both for the thread and so I can find it easily later: Mapping is weird. It's so so so important for a megadungeon-type game, but it's simply not interesting for most players. I don't think the "too much power in one person's hands" thing comes up too often, but the "role that nobody's really into filling" problem can be a huge issue. That said, mapping is my favorite part of the game in my regular megadungeon game. Maybe a year and a half ago I took over mapping duty and assembled a great Master Map from all the other player's scraps and it has made an amazing difference in how the game plays. It's a ton of work and incredibly frustrating trying to figure out how to fix things when corridor A and corridor B end up connecting despite being 80 feet from each other on your map, but for some reason that type of frustration really appeals to me. Also, getting lost is easily the most deadly thing in a big dungeon game--far more dangerous than SoD poison (although nothing is as bad as level drain), so I'd actually say that not only having a map of your current delve, but also one of where you think everything is over the whole dungeon is incredibly important. The most deadly session I think we've had so far was just when we fell in a chute that took us from Level 2 to Level 5. It wasn't even the trolls that were so scary, it was the fact that being able to leave when the party resources begin to drain is so amazingly important in Basic, and removing that option from people makes TPKs really likely. If I didn't already have a map of where I expected a nearby elevator to be we probably wouldn't have made it out of that trap alive. Every time I lose my map to a fireball or water elemental or something it's incredibly tense as I have to try to guide us out by memory, too--all in a way that I feel like is really fun. For reference, here's Level 4 of our map. It's maybe 2/3 done, with levels 1-3 being more or less complete and level 5 just started (and 6/7 barely even scratched into).  And here's the rest of the map. OtspIII fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 23:22
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Halloween Jack posted:Since a lot of what's in Basic is implied rather than explicitly communicated, much less instructed, are there some blogs or handbooks that give a good intro to mapping without it being a major headache? I just don't have the chops or the time to do maps with the level of detail that Otsp pulls off, and I don't intend to do overland maps to the point of assigning terrain types and random encounter tables. Are you talking about mapping as a player or a DM? It's not too tough as a player--keep in mind the map I posted was literally the result of over two years of play. It can get a bit more intense as a DM, but the map-drawing isn't going to ever take as much time as the content-designing. I have been working on a set of metrics to make content population quicker for big projects, though--if people are interested I could totally write up a quick version of my process. I've been tempted to make a map thread as a sort of zoomed in sibling to the worldbuilding thread as a place to talk about different map creation mindsets and a place to share whatever maps you make for your home games.
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Jun 11, 2013 20:26
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Ah hell, I'll just post my quick dungeon-creation guide whatever question you were asking. A Quick Disclaimer I should mention that I'm starting a MFA in Game Design in the fall, and I'm hoping to specialize in procedural level design, which makes dungeon-crawl D&D a perfect thing for me. I can't really think of another style of game where the gap between theory and actual play is quite as tight as in tabletop roleplaying. Anyway, it means that I do a lot of trying to take a semi-artistic creative process and reduce it down to a core set of cold hard rules while sacrificing as little of the fun as possible. I know that this is basically impossible, but I figure that it can be useful to establish this set of rules as a baseline and just encourage people to break the rules as often as possible. I see content creation rules as a thing that you should stick to if (and only if) you don't have any better plans. Being aware of the rules can make you aware of design concepts you'd have never thought of otherwise, and they can help get you through writer's block, but they should never constrain you--only inspire. I guess I'll mention one big way I differ from the 'baseline' of B/X dungeon-building--every monster in my dungeon has a lair, and usually I have a few encounters worth of monsters in each lair. Whenever the party enters the lair I roll for each encounter to see if it's home or out hunting, and whenever I roll up a wandering monster I pick a random lair in the same zone and pull an encounter from it. It means I have more monsters in my dungeon than the B/X guidelines call for, but at the same time I don't have any infinite Wandering Monster hose feeding additional monsters into the dungeon. Each week there's a chance that each monster that died might be replaced by a newcomer, repopulating the dungeon with more monsters and treasure. I do it this way because the plan is for me to only run one dungeon, no matter which group of players I'm playing with, and I like the idea that one party might find the corpses or damage left behind by the other party. Other than this I actually stick pretty close to the population guidelines suggested by B/X and AD&D. Quotas Anyway, I cut up dungeons into 20-room 'zones'. I chose 20 rooms because I can just barely fit all the info I need to describe those 20 rooms onto a single two-page spread with the layout I use, but it's not hard to adjust up or down. Basic suggests that your dungeon should be 1/3 empty rooms, 1/3 monster rooms, 1/6 trapped rooms, and 1/6 'special' rooms, so I rolled with this and figured that for each 20-room zone I place should have 10 monster encounters (which should clump up enough to create ~6-7 lairs) and 7 rooms that are in some way interactive (be it trap or puzzle or hidden compartments full of treasure or NPC or whatever). It also suggests that 1/2 of monsters should have treasure, 1/3rd of traps, and 1/6th of empty rooms, so I try to make 7 treasure parcels per zone, 3 of which are in monster lairs, 2 of which are in interactive rooms, 1 of which is unguarded, and 1 of which is a wildcard. I also try to put 3 consumable item parcels (potions and scrolls and stuff) and 2 magic items in each zone. I also make sure there's at least one NPCish figure in each zone--someone who may take up either a Monster or a Special slot, but who will by default be a diplomatic challenge rather than a combat one. Ideally I should have more than just one guy with a personality per 20 rooms, but one is the bare minimum. I usually figure out treasure values after I decide on the treasure types, but in a gp/xp system you've got to watch your distribution fairly closely. In general, you ask yourself what level you're expecting the party to be when they arrive in a zone, and how many rooms you think they get through in an average session, and how many sessions you want it to take them to level up, then do math at it until you figure out how much treasure an 'average' room should have in it. Then you double that amount, because about half the gold in the dungeon will either be too well-hidden for them to find or they'll 'lose' the XP from it by dying or something. I won't get into the specifics of how I calculated this, but in general I want a 20 room zone of the following levels to have the following total amounts of treasure: 1:7272gp, 2:8889gp, 3:11,100gp, 4:19,040gp, 5:33,333gp, 6:59,259gp, 7:93,333gp, 8+:181,818gp. Again, these totals aren't something you should sweat too much, but they should give a rough idea of how much treasure you should put in a dungeon depending on what level the PCs are supposed to be when visiting it. The Creative Process I condensed all of this into, like I said, a two-page spread, making it easy to have all in front of me at once. One of the pages is just a list of all 20 rooms with a very brief description of their contents, while the other lists Special Rooms, Treasure, and Monsters. It ends up looking something like this. So, when I want to actually start work on a zone the first thing I do is figure out a basic theme for it, then complicate it a little. I'm using this to make a megadungeon, so I actually have a murderously huge 82 of these zones as my target number, so thinking up good ideas can be a bit stressful, but in general this should be a relatively easy part of the dungeon-making process. 20 rooms is nice, since it's small enough that the rooms can all have a theme in common without that theme getting old, and it's big enough that you have room to fit a few things that don't really pay attention to the theme in on the side as well. If I'm having trouble coming up with a theme, or if I feel like it's not interesting enough yet, I'll roll on my giant d666 chart of inspirational concepts until I feel like I have something memorable. Then I'll do a quick scan of all the slots I have to fill in and write up any monsters/treasure/special rooms/decorations that immediately come to me. At about this time I'll start mapping out what I want the dungeon to look like. I'll draw a quick outline on a piece of graph paper of where I want the major travel paths (generally 20' hallways) to be, then start budding rooms off of them. If a room I drew looks like it should be one of the rooms I've already described I'll assign it to be so, and if not I'll try to think up a new room that'd fit in its shape--mapping always gives me a lot of ideas for what types of rooms I need to add. I do this half-mapping half-designing process up until I've drawn out 20 rooms, then I go back and fill out all the remaining blank slots left on my zone description spread. Once I've done all that I'll go over everything I've written so far and try to imagine how it all fits together. What's the relationship between the various monsters I've listed? What do each of them want? I'll roll up a random inspirational word for each monster and see if it gives me any ideas on how to make them more interesting than just a sack of damage and hit-dice in a room. If I come up with any ideas I wish I had thought of earlier I'll just cut out a room I've already designed and store it away for later use. And, of course, the last step is always looking back over at what you just made and seeing if you've hosed it all up or not. In my experience it takes about two hours to design a zone, and one zone will last you about 2-4 sessions of play for the players to more or less work their way through.
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Jun 11, 2013 23:13
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Payndz posted:Per Mirthless's suggestion in the Wizard King thread, I've added a rule to TAAC that allows a CON save for PCs (and key NPCs) who are reduced to 0HP, rather than the previous "splat, dead" lethality of B/X. I'll update the PDF at some point, as I made a bunch of other little changes too. A CON save sounds good. I think the two other ways I've seen this dulled a bit are giving characters negative HP equal to their level (which works well with the whole '1st level characters are tissue, but make it to 3 and you're more or less okay' way Basic already works) and the ACKS mortal wounds table. The ACKS table is interesting--it makes it very hard to die even as a first level character, but it also opens the door for lingering wounds that basically require the game's Raise Dead equivalent cast on you before you can return to adventuring. It makes for less death but more retired characters at low levels, which is actually pretty fun.
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Jun 25, 2013 16:26
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Dear You posted:I've been playing a lot of Chronicles of Mystara a lot lately and it's got me wanting to play some old-school D&D. The problem is, I'd like the classes to have a bit more combat flavour (like 4E or something). Are there any games/hacks out there that incorporate this sort of thing? I'm going for a beat-em-up style of class. I'll probably end up doing silly stuff like giving Elves unlimited arrows but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do everything from the ground up. In a lot of ways old school is more of a set of techniques you use in play than an edition, so depending on what you mean by 'old school' you could probably pull it off with almost any system. That said, are you looking for combat flavor of tactical combat depth? If you want tactical depth you probably want to just play a 4e dungeon-crawl with some old-school assumptions laid out for the group, but if you're looking for flavor there's already a lot baked into the system, and it's easy to add even more with a few houserules (like the elf arrow thing you mentioned).
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Jun 26, 2013 05:41
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Payndz posted:When I was re-reading B/X to make TAAC, that really jumped out at me. It's basically "You want to play an elf so you can wear armour and use swords, and cast spells? Have fun taking twice as long as anyone else to level up and never being able to access high-level spells, you greedy rear end in a top hat!" On the topic of taking twice as long to level, Elves are still really overpowered. The 4k XP track is really just a -1 Level Adjustment in a system where baseline XP is 2k and level XP requirements are exponential. If I could play a fighter who got a wizard's spellcasting abilities in 3e for just a -1 LA I would do it in a heartbeat.
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Jul 9, 2013 23:13
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Xir posted:1. If I wanted to play D&D as a pseudo-board game, sorta like recreating HeroQuest but with a little more depth, which version should I look into? B/X, BECMI (RC), one of the clones, AD&D? You're going to have to do a bit of a hack to make the board game thing work in any of them, but it actually seems probably pretty easy to pull off--they're all designed to be hacked. I'd personally vote for either B/X or RC. B/X and RC are basically clones of each other--the first two letters of each are both '[B]asic / [E][X]pert'. BECMI just takes things to slightly higher levels. I haven't played RC itself yet, but I get the feeling you could easily run a campaign where half the players were using RC and the other half were using B/X. The clones are just there for publishing reasons. The first wave of clones were just so that you could publish a D&D module without needing to call it a D&D module. Later ones tend to be more about focusing the game on a specific type of play--ACKS is basically a empire-building splatbook for Basic that includes Basic's core rules within it. If you can find cheap RC/BX books on ebay there's no reason not to use them, though. I just don't like running from a PDF. I think I actually just have some hate (not really hate--both are really fun games) on AD&D in general more than on 2E in particular. Basic is just amazingly streamlined, and with 1E you started getting a bunch of bloaty extra rules that bog the game down too much for my taste. The reason some people who like 1E didn't like 2E wasn't really related to rules things, though--the rules are pretty similar. It's that 2E was where a fairly big mindset shift happened with the game. It became much more about playing through stories and creating a much larger (and less focused) world to live in, and a lot of people felt like this made the game too railroady and took too much focus away from the one thing that D&D really shined at (dungeon crawls).
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Oct 17, 2013 19:17
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