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I keep hearing that OSR adventures are amazing but every one I've read is garbage and boring? They all seem to fit in the category of A) boilerplate sword and sorcery poo poo with maybe a dash of Lovecraft if you want to call your game "weird"* or B) A classic children's tale but with violence and loving. Like, the OP asserts that the OSR's adventures are way better than WotC stuff but I haven't found an OSR adventure that's even close to engaging as something like Tomb of Annihilation or Red Hand of Doom or whatever. Even Paizo's overblown adventure paths have a bunch of ambition. The only adventure I've seen that even had mildly engaging elements was Better Than Any Man with the broad Wurzberg setting even if it was slathered in Raggi's wannabe artist provocateur bullshit. I know I'm being belligerent here but honestly I'm happy to be proven wrong with some good recommendations! I might not be particularly interested in OSR systems but I'm happy to nick stuff I like and run it with a system I enjoy. Preferably nothing written by shitheads.
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May 29, 2018 08:52
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Xotl posted:I'd love to get into this but it deserves a thorough answer because once again it touches on the subject of fundamentally different playstyles between old and new school, and I'm heading to bed. The first two reviews seem to just be mostly "the module has interesting room descriptions" which yeah, I think it does a decent job of, while engaging in a lot of the hyperbole poo poo that makes the OSR community super off-putting to folks who don't think slapping some houserules onto OD&D is some kind of pinnacle of the hobby. Having looked at the adventure I basically have to agree overall with the last review. Like, the adventure seems like a serviceable update on something like Keep on the Borderlands, I'd certainly run this before that, but it doesn't change the fact that in terms of substance it's nothing that hasn't been seen before. It's fine. Edit: Also lol at the comments being full of folks being mad that the guy didn't give this one full marks including Venger "I'm an adult man who calls myself Venger Satanis" Satanis. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 10:47 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 10:11
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I don't want pages of backstory or read-aloud text, I want something a bit more than a hole in the ground with some orcs in it. Like, Juntu's Floating Ice Hell for Dungeon World is only slightly larger than Mines, Claws, Princess and yet manages to be far more interesting.
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May 29, 2018 11:29
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Glorified Scrivener posted:*snip* Thank you for doing what I thought was a fairly straightforward request (recommend me some cool adventures) instead of assuming that I just don't understand the lost art of moose head searching, or that I just wanted adventures with tons of backstory and read-aloud text because that's clearly what someone would enjoy about modern adventures.
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May 30, 2018 08:06
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Glorified Scrivener posted:*snip* Thank you for the continued recommendations! Death Frost Doom (at least the original, which is the only one I've read) is definitely the epitome of extremely boring yet inexplicably overhyped OSR module I'm used to seeing. Warlocktopus posted:Good poo poo This is exactly what I'm interested in, thank you! I'm definitely into weird stuff, faction heavy sandboxes and so on.
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May 31, 2018 08:44
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andrew smash posted:time traveling god that gets stronger every subsequent time you fight it because from its perspective you are slowly killing it This was the only bit I thought was any good, honestly. I agree with the idea that it seems like at best a one shot thing. Honestly not sure if the sheer bathos of that one mutation where you're constantly drinking your own urine which is also your brain is intentional.
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Jun 3, 2018 14:10
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Halloween Jack posted:BSD is so over the top that I can't take it seriously and find it actually depressing. (Reading the OSR blogosphere's take on it, well, I can't believe anyone who's actually read Ligotti or Disch would call this the most brutally bleak depressing thing they've ever read.) In a way I think BSD is the logical conclusion of a certain fixation that a portion of the OSR has with adventuring being pointless as a quick and in my opinion kind of lazy route to establishing they're not making games about world-shaping heroics. I'm talking stuff like the Hubris setting's "your deeds will be forgotten tomorrow" or LotFP's explicit conceit where adventuring is a thing done solely by desperate shitheads who will probably just end up dying in the process. It's easy to see BSD's "everything sucks, there's nothing to do but dig in the dirt and drink your brainpee until you just curl up in a hole and die" as a contnuation of that.
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Jun 7, 2018 08:43
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So it's possible this stuff was brought up in the old thread but these mercenaries from the Into the Odd dude own and I'm putting them and their gadgets in any game I run from now on.
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Jun 8, 2018 08:27
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Xotl posted:Despite what one poster complained about earlier, yes, there are tons of people out there that want linear railroads with tons of box text; that's the reason the drat things keep getting made, not just officially, but by fans and third-party sellers as well. My dude my point was that when I said I hadn't seen any OSR adventures that I'd liked as much as WotC ones, the fact that you reached for "ah, they just don't get it" is kind of a condescending assumption to make, especially with the way you responded. You didn't even bother asking follow up questions, you just linked a Bryce Lynch review and one by a dude who leads off by saying WotC employees make up for their lack of talent by sucking dicks. Seriously, even if I *were* someone who needed to be taught how to suck eggs this would have been an awful approach and maybe "what kind of things do you like?" or "what didn't you like about some of the stuff you've read?" would have been more helpful.
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Jul 18, 2018 10:27
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Also, it wasn't what I said, but I will say it here: Folks don't want linear railroads, what most modern audiences want are hooks and a purpose behind their adventuring. Linear railroads are a cheap and easy way of doing that, but hardly the only way. Take WotC's two most recent adventures, Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd. Both of these are sandboxes, decidedly not linear stories, but in both the adventuring is driven by an overarching purpose. Heck, this describes most OSR adventures I've read as well, whether the hook is "save the princess kidnapped by orcs", "oh poo poo, giant shark aliens are attacking in their spaceship" or "map out this creepy Oompa Loompa rape factory please". Edit: I think the best way to introduce purely location based sandboxes to folks who haven't done them before is to establish right at the beginning that your goal should, at least initially, be "gots to get paid". Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jul 18, 2018 |
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Jul 18, 2018 11:22
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Pollyanna posted:Why wouldn’t wacky gonzo bullshit work in a PbtA game like Dungeon World or something? Seems to be like it would be easier to pull crazy poo poo out of your rear end that way. I'm going to second the endorsement of Johnstone Mentzger, who works with both Labyrinth Lord/Nightmares Underneath and PbtA. There's more genuinely weird poo poo in any of his Dungeon World monster books than in 99% of anything in the OSR that doesn't have Patrick Stewart's name on it. If you absolutely have to run it in an OSR compatible system, I haven't read over it properly Dungeon Full of Monsters appears to basically be a collection of stuff that's also in these monster books. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 01:57
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Even if it weren't for the Oompa Loompa rape stuff Blood in the Chocolate would still be bad because it's a Charlie and the Chocolate homage that punishes players for acknowledging this at multiple points. Also "the bad thing isn't bad because it's in a nice quality hardcover and you can change it if you want" is a wonderfully bad take, good work TheDiceMustRoll. In discussion about modules that aren't bad, I got my hands on Operation Unfathomable recently and it's some good poo poo. I want to thank Warlocktopus for getting me onto Hyrda Collective's stuff, I've loved all of it.
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Aug 11, 2018 03:18
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Are you seriously trying to tell me you don't take a good idea and edit the things that aren't great? Do you have a list of perfect modules? I run Vornheim all of the drat time, but it's pretty unrecognizable at times from the original product, because it's my drat game and it's a tool. How is that a bad take? Just because you can edit something out doesn't mean it wasn't bad in the first place, and I hate to break it to you, there are literally hundreds of other adventures that, whatever flaws they may have, don't force you to deal with or edit around the author's fetishes. It's a bad take because "it comes in hard cover and you can take it out if you want to" aren't actually good responses to "this adventure is gross". TheDiceMustRoll posted:Also, it doesn't really punish you...the boat rocks really heavily if you quote the movie while on the riverboat ride, and if you try to play "pure imagination" on the keyboard as the password to Lucia's room, but why would it be Pure Imagination, a song from hundreds of years in the future? A module where you can bypass the door to the treasure room because you've caught the reference sounds terrible. "It doesn't really punish you, except of course for the two examples I literally just said". If you're seriously going to use that argument to defend the piano trap I'd point out that by that logic it's equally stupid to have a song from hundreds of years in the future be more dangerous to play than any other piano piece.
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Aug 11, 2018 06:34
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:1. "This adventure is gross" is hardly a vlid criticism, lmao TheDiceMustRoll posted:and I hate to break it to you, but those "hundreds of other adventures" haven't gotten critical acclaim. The Ennies are decided by popular vote and I imagine this line of reasoning wouldn't fly if I waltzed into this thread and, I dunno, talked about how popular Pathfinder Adventure Paths are. TheDiceMustRoll posted:2. So...should a combination lock trap NOT punish you for entering the wrong combination? Especially when its trapped to protect 40,000 silver, your recipe and a personal interdimensional portal??? The trap springs if you put the wrong combination in three times, except if you play something from the film, which triggers it immediately. There's no in-fiction reason for this. If you're going to defend the bad adventure then you should probably actually know what's in it my guy.
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Aug 11, 2018 08:20
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Mirthless posted:
If you don't want folks winking and nodding at you, don't write wink and nod adventures. If you don't want Python quotes at your table and then suddenly have a bunch of knights show up with coconuts instead of horses that's probably your fault.  I don't know where folks are getting this idea that I want 'Pure Imagination' to be the solution to the piano puzzle, I just pointed out that going "well, you played a movie reference so now you have the fetish disease" makes no sense. The players might have a legitimate single crack at the puzzle or even solve it immediately and then one might, as a little joke, plonk out something from the film and then get punished for it, whereas doing the same with, I dunno, Chopsticks or Greensleeves or a piano cover of Rush's 2112 won't do the same. Mirthless posted:also i'm not really sure rape is as common in LotFP material as some of you guys are implying here. a fair amount of sexual content, though, sure. I don't know where you're getting the idea that anyone's saying this just because folks have argued that BitC specifically is bad. I overall am not a massive fan of games where it's clear that the author desperately wants to be an artist provocatuer as a substitute for creating anything that's actually any good which writes off a whole bunch of LotFP and anything written by Raggi especially. But stuff like Veins in the Earth demonstrates that when you spend less time waggling your eyebrows at the reader and asking if you've triggered them yet you can actually write something folks other than the ones who all got kicked out of their local munches will enjoy.
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Aug 12, 2018 01:42
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VacuumJockey posted:none of which contain the name of the accuser(s). I was going to post a big thing about how innocent until proven guilty is part of placing the burden of proof on the state before it uses its vast power to punish potential crimes and how that differs significantly from the decisions we make in our day to day lives, but given that you saw two Facebook posts and couldn't figure out who posted them despite the names being right there at the top I realised you're dumb as a bag of loving rocks and that would be a huge waste of time.
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Feb 13, 2019 08:41
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FRINGE posted:You should do this anyway. There needs to be a well-written and convenient copy/paste-able blurb about this floating around for likely future needs. I'm definitely not going to promise this will be well-written, and also I'm not a lawyer or legal type person but: This isn't really hard. "Innocent until proven guilty" is an important principle underlying how court systems work because if the State decides someone is a criminal they can do some Serious poo poo to them up to and including seizing large amounts of their property, imprisoning them and just straight-up killing them. It's also important to consider that as a necessary part of this and also the whole "reasonable doubt" thing that a court declaring someone "not guilty" isn't the same thing as "we don't think you did this" it's "we can't prove you did this and thus must treat you as if you were innocent". The thing is nobody consistently applies this to their individual, day-to-day lives. Put aside the fact that the consequences of an individual deciding someone is guilty of something are far, far less than that of the State. Imagine being that person. Imagine if your friend goes "some rear end in a top hat almost slammed into me running a red light" and then instead of going "wow, yeah, what an rear end in a top hat" you go "hmmm, think I need to see some proof before I pass judgement". You might respond "well this is a bit more serious than that, we're talking accusations against a known individual of domestic or sexual violence", but that's a lovely way of approaching things. What kind of proof, exactly, is it going to take before you believe the accuser and how likely is it to be available? Unless somebody was recording things at the time, how do you definitively prove somebody was screaming threats or belittling their partner? How do you prove somebody did not in fact consent to a sexual act? At the end of the day you might believe that the burden of proof for the real serious poo poo is higher than the jackass cutting your friend off in traffic, but at the end of the day what you'll have to go on in both cases the only evidence you'll receive for both is the same, a testimonial. And it'll be up to you to use your judgement to figure out if somebody is telling the truth or if they're lying. You might think by refusing to condemn or defend you're exercising some kind of higher ethical principle, but mostly you're just engaging in a cowardly abdication of the need to exercise reason and judgement that you engage in every day. Oh, also in social situations, deciding someone is innocent until proven guilty is exactly the same as calling the accuser a liar. So don't do that "I refuse to condemn or defend" poo poo. Either the people saying "x person is an abuser" is telling the truth or they aren't. Again, you're just engaging in a more cowardly form of calling them a liar.
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Feb 13, 2019 11:31
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Olympia posted:I think you are talking about Dragon Union, roles were structured exactly like that in it. Holy poo poo I've also been intermittently thinking about this ever since it showed up in that thread, thank you!
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May 2, 2020 05:16
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mellonbread posted:There's a disconnect between "old school" meaning intentional design with multiple paths and methods of resolution, versus the actual rules in some of the older editions that could spit out Wights and other level draining undead as part of the random encounter tables. I'm looking at the tables for Moldvay B/X now and it looks like you could get a flock of Wights as wandering monsters on Dungeon Level Level 3. Part of actual old school D&D as opposed to the revisionist perception is that sometimes the game Just Fucks You and there really isn't much you can do about it. Tying this back, this is why funnels are fun, it wholeheartedly embraces that aspect.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:14
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