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Previous thread (thanks to the late Rulebook Heavily): https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495106 What Do We Discuss? The OSR (Old-School Renaissance) was originally an attempt to move away from the tonal and mechanical changes of 2nd edition and later and get back to D&D as its original designers intended it to be played--as opposed to how it was actually played, which varied wildly. Since then the concept of OSR has drifted into "vaguely rules-light vaguely fantasy game". Broadly, this thread covers any pre-3rd edition version of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, as well as the phenomenon known as retroclones (see below) and OSR gaming in general. Later editions are well covered elsewhere: 3rd edition thread: here (dead; nominally continued in the Pathfinder thread). 4th edition thread: here. Retroclones? Although D&D is a set of interrelated copyrights and trademarks, the base mechanics of the game can't be copyrighted. Combined with the release of the Open Gaming License (OGL) and accompanying d20 System Resource Document (SRD) in 2000, creators were free to copy the bits they liked from the various older editions, maybe add in something newfangled, and publish the result as their own totally original donut steel game. It also meant that fans of older editions of D&D could publish third-party products designed to be used with their favourite base version of the game. Why Bother? Old-school D&D is not less-evolved modern D&D. Instead, it offers a different play experience altogether, one that focuses on player scheming and DM rulings rather than rules mechanics ("rulings, not rules" is a common, if somewhat deceptive, mantra). Compared to later editions, the rules are extremely simplistic (and somewhat hodgepodge). There's almost no focus at all on character builds/optimization. This could easily strike players of later editions as too barebones/inconsistent to bother with, but has the advantage of very fast character creation, fewer rules arguments, far fewer unexpected game breaking rules synergies, and often a much lower page count to wade through. Gameplay tends to be fast, loose, more improvisational, less plot-directed and more player-directed, with a focus on treasure gain rather than automatically being heroes or killing everything in sight (though combat is definitely not ignored). Additionally, the OSR community is putting out the best adventure modules and supplements in D&D today. Items like Hot Springs Island, Veins of the Earth, Peril on the Purple Planet and many others beat the pants off of anything WotC is releasing. If you’d like a list of excellent OSR adventures, see here: http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page_id=844 What Old Editions of D&D are we Talking About? Glad you asked! OD&D / Original D&D / 0Ed / Brown Box / White Box / Little Brown Books (LBB) (1974)  This is the very first one, the thing that started it all. Written by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, with input from their gaming groups, this game was an evolution of the Chainmail wargame ruleset, but instead of commanding a bunch of units you’d command a single individual. The initial release was a box with three little booklets, featuring an extremely vague ruleset. Notable supplements include Greyhawk and Blackmoor—also the oldest supported settings for D&D—and Eldritch Wizardry, the reason why to this day we keep getting supplements for psionics (a reasonably common element of SF and fantasy from the 50s to the 70s) that no one ever uses. TSR was formed to publish these rules. ”Basic”: Holmes (1977) / B/X (1981) / BECMI (1983-86) / Rules Cyclopedia (1991)      Though it sold like mad, OD&D was successful in spite of its layout and clarity, not because of it, and this confusion led to wildly divergent playstyles and rules interpretation in the early days of the game. Soon it was realized that some sort of introductory product that took OD&D and its supplements and made something understandable out of the mess would be a good idea. This would become broadly known as the “Basic” line. Basic went through a ton of revisions over the years. The first version was by Eric Holmes (and is usually called Holmes for this reason). The original intent was for it to be an introduction to Advanced D&D (being written at the same time). Holmes is the closest to OD&D in style than any of the other offshoots, though it only covered levels 1-3. However, the Basic line diverged away from AD&D pretty much immediately: Holmes was abandoned for a new release by editors Moldvay and Cook of two box sets, Basic (also for levels 1-3) and Expert (for levels 4-14). This release is often referred to as either “Moldvay/Cook” or “B/X”, and is the most popular to use as a base for retroclones because it succinctly covers what most people will use for play and leaves out a lot of the increasingly edge-case cruft. While AD&D piled on the options and complexity, B/X took pains to streamline and cut (for example, race and class were combined for all non-humans, so that instead of Elven Mages you just had Elves, which were all spellcasters). As such, it's a much simpler game than AD&D. Since Basic was intended not just to introduce people to D&D but to the hobby in general, B/X was re-edited in 1983 by Frank Mentzer to be clearer to people who'd never played any RPG at all. This new line had five box sets—Basic (in the famous red box they printed by the millions that was available in every department store), Expert, Companion, Master and Immortals—and its own setting (The Known World/Mystara, no longer officially supported). This line is commonly referred to as either “Mentzer” or “BECMI”. The rules for the BE part are 99% identical to B/X. However, the C and M sets added more and more stuff, so that by the end of the line you had a ruleset that rivalled AD&D in size. The BECMI line culminated in 1991 with the release of the Rules Cyclopedia, which gathered together four of the five sets (no Immortals) into a single big hardcover, made some revisions, and was released at the same time as a new Basic Box in 1991 (referred to as the Black Box; not pictured). This (and another 1994 box redo) signalled the last hurrah for Basic. Though Basic (in its Red Box form) was the best-selling version of D&D ever produced, it was essentially non-existent through the rest of the 90s, and was officially killed off when WotC bought TSR and released its single unified 3rd edition “Dungeons & Dragons”. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons / First Edition / 1e (1977)   Arneson sort of went away early in the history of TSR, and a few years later Gygax wrote his own update: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This is the definite Gygax edition, purple Jack Vance-based prose and all. A far cry from the sparse OD&D, AD&D was jam-packed with all sorts of rules, corner cases and crazy additional detail, like pages dedicated entirely to the minute differences of various polearms, jokey cantrips (like one that created a little fire with the magic word Zip-Po), completely inexplicable poo poo (the original Modrons, Druids who get to go to the Seventh Dimension which is not detailed anywhere in the game, Lovecraftian Bard class rules), outright contradictions, dense two-column formatting, haphazard editing, and one of the most (in)famous grab-bag supplements ever produced, Unearthed Arcana. In many ways this is the gold standard by which most D&D is judged, the origin of a lot of the game’s legacy. This edition was second only to Basic in terms of sales and success. There's a separation commonly drawn between late 70s 1st ed and the 1984+ 1st ed (which had more railroaded/plot-heavy adventures including the birth of Dragonlance, as well as supplements adding proto-skill systems and an increasing number of class and rules options in the form of Unearthed Arcana and the various hardbacks that followed), sometimes seen as essentially proto-second edition and the end of the old-school in D&D. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition (1989)     This edition was published a few years after Gygax was maneuvered out of/left TSR, and thus is the first D&D to ever be called a betrayal of his legacy. Second edition excised things like demons and devils due to the 1980s satanic-panic thing, and also cut a great many things out of the game in general (Gygaxian prose, half-orcs, assassins, monks, most of the Unearthed Arcana stuff). What it gave us instead was an explosion of variant settings. Beyond old standby Greyhawk and the railroad adventure land of Dragonlance, we now had the increasingly NPC-heavy Forgotten Realms (which steadily eclipsed Gygax’s Greyhawk in this period as the pre-eminent D&D setting), grimdark psionic Dark Sun, gothic horror Ravenloft, hippos in Ptolemaic space Spelljammer, outerplanar Shadowrun/WoD-lite Planescape, the kingdom management of Birthright, Arabic Al Qadim, Aztec Maztica, and even licensed settings like Diablo. While clearer and easier to use than 1st, the tone of the game markedly changed. Gone was the murderhobo sandbox style of play, replaced with one of heroic adventure played out via heavily plotted scripted adventures; this reflected the stylistic shift in adventure module design that had been taking place in TSR throughout the 80s, especially from 1984 onwards. The main method of gaining XP in 2nd ed was changed from finding/stealing gold to defeating monsters and getting story rewards, which led to a very noticeable change in playstyle. Dungeon exploration movement speed became literally 10 times faster, and wandering monster checks also dropped by two-thirds, which made it easy to race through dungeons. Skill systems were introduced. Encumbrance became optional. As such, while the base structure of 2nd ed is extremely similar to 1st (there's tons of subtle differences, but it's more of a re-edit than anything else), the tonal shift brought about by what rule and adventure design changes there were has often led 2nd edition to be considered not really old-school by OSR fans. The “Black Book” version (1995) was distinguished by the thick black borders around its new cover art and the “This is not AD&D third edition!” essay at the front. It’s also been called v2.5, though it’s exactly the same rules as the 1989 printings: just re-laid out to make it easier to read (hence the expanded page counts). However, it received a series of optional supplements in the same black-border style that added a ton of broken options, and these tainted the view of the re-release and are what really created the feeling that this wasn’t the same as regular old second ed. This re-release was also the final gasp of TSR as a company, as dodgy business practices led to it collapsing and being bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Though the base rulebooks for 2nd ed sold in volumes that most any other game company could only dream of, it was the least successful of all D&D editions and never viewed as old-school by the original OSR crowd (which was concerned with playstyle just as much as it was mechanical compatibility), and so has been largely passed over in the retroclone explosion. Retroclones and their Ilk                 Retroclones came about in the mid-2000s, in the days when older editions were no longer in print and not available legally in PDF. BFRPG and OSRIC (2006) are generally considered the first, with Labyrinth Lord (2007) and Swords & Wizardry (2008) completing the big four. A zillion more followed on from there, and over time they became less concerned with cloning a particular ruleset precisely (since that after all had been done) and more about introducing spins on a particular rules base. If they still hew close to a particular old-school ruleset then they still tend to be referred to as clones, however, even if not cloning anything per se. Initially retroclones were merely frameworks to allow the publication of new supplements for the particular edition being cloned, rather than games in and of themselves. For example, OSRIC (a 1st ed AD&D clone) was not originally complete as a game, because it was never originally intended to be played. The OGL allows you to use tons of D&D concepts, but one of the things it expressly forbids you from doing is making any direct comparison between what you make using it and any WotC trademark (such as “Dungeons & Dragons”). So, OSRIC was only supposed to enable people to write new adventure modules that would be “compatible with OSRIC”, which everyone would understand really meant “compatible with 1st ed AD&D”. The legal niceties having been observed, people could start enjoying new product intended for AD&D. However, OSRIC did such a nice job cleaning up the unholy mess that AD&D 1st ed was that people clamoured for it to be completed, and so it was. In those days there was less certainty that WotC wouldn’t sue the pants off people (like TSR was infamous for), so OSRIC made a very few and minor changes to the 1st ed rules over and above what the OGL called for to help make it legally distinct; most retroclone authors nowadays don’t bother, as WotC has never seriously reacted to the retroclone movement in a legal sense. There’s a lot of clones, and more appearing all the time. I’m only going to cover the biggest ones; even then, that will be plenty. For a more thorough list, see Taxidermic Owl Bear's list, and Ynas Midgard's list. The links at TOB are not all up to date, so if something appears dead that you’re interested in, try googling it to see if it just moved. Retroclones of OD&D and Holmes Unlike B/X clones, which tend to vary based on the mood, genre, or playstyle they're attempting to capture, clones of OD&D wildly vary mostly due to mechanical reasons. This is because the vague text of OD&D left a great deal of room for interpretation and because each of that edition’s five supplements radically changed the game (well, okay, Swords & Spells might not count and hardly matters, but still). When combined with issues of the Strategic Review magazine, which had OD&D writings by Gygax, you can assemble wildly different games from this base content (for example, thieves or no thieves, psionics or no psionics, small or large stat adjustments, spells level 1-6 or 1-9, etc). Swords and Wizardry Whitebox: A cleaned-up version of the LBB. Core: As above, plus the Greyhawk supplement. Complete: First three books plus select supplement info from the entire line. Basically lightweight AD&D 1st ed. Light: Free four-page fast-play S&W. Continual Light: 20-page super-stripped-down alternate version of S&W, with some fluffier advancement rules. (The S&W link is to an archive page, because for some reason they've taken down their single portal page. Alternatively you can go here, which has most of the base S&W line, supplements, and detail on each product on their individual pages.) Crypts & Things: A sword & sorcery adaptation of Swords and Wizardry. Delving Deeper: A 3-LBB clone, with an emphasis on emulation accuracy backed by a hefty scholarly effort. For Coin and Blood: A S&W clone, modified to be more lethal, designed explicitly for grimdark campaigns. Full Metal Plate Mail: Another 3-LBB clone. Iron Falcon: A 3-LBB + Greyhawk clone, from the maker of BFRPG. Microlite74: Like Swords & Wizardry, an OD&D clone in three different versions with scaling complexity. Ruins & Ronin: A variant of S&W Whitebox, designed for medieval Japan-style adventuring. Seven Voyages of Zylarthen: OD&D minus clerics in a new setting, with the usual series of additional small rules changes and edits on top. White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game: A variant of S&W Whitebox, with the changes listed here Whitehack: 3-LBBish, but modernized. Blueholme: The most well supported Holmes clone. Most people either choose OD&D or B/X to riff off of instead. Mazes & Perils Deluxe Edition: The other big Holmes clone. A little less faithful than Blueholme, but with more stuff. Retroclones of B/X and BECMI Adventurer Conqueror King System: Aka “ACKS”. B/X with proficiencies, more classes, and a unique focus on world economics and the D&D “endgame”—the 9th level+ part where you gain titles, holdings, followers, and other world-affecting bits (aka domain play)—that most games brush over. Has its own forum and lots of support. One of its founders worked for a long time for Milo Yiannopoulos, so if that bothers you then this is not the game for you; in this case, the non-ACKS supplement "An Echo Resounding" offers players an alternate method of handling domain play. B/X Essentials: A 100% accurate clone of B/X, divided into LBB-style booklets. Re-edited and re-released as Old-School Essentials. Basic Fantasy (BFRPG): An early work, predating even OSRIC. Not a direct clone of B/X (though that was its main inspiration) but a re-edit of the 3.5 SRD to make it old-school. Has lots of sourcebook support and a forum. Everything is free, it’s constantly updated, and print copies are available at cost. Essentially B/X with ascending AC, race and class separate, gold for XP reduced to optional, and buffed clerics. Dark Dungeons: A Rules Cyclopedia clone. Labyrinth Lord: The original B/X clone. Like OSRIC, it makes minor changes for legality reasons. Despite its age it doesn’t have a lot of support direct from the creator, because like OSRIC it was more intended to allow for stuff to be created than to be its own thing, and the author has had personal issues. But there’s tons of 3rd-party support for it (mostly adventures). Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Fairly straightforward B/X clone rules-wise, with an emphasis on toning down the egregiously fantastic (no fireballs and lightning bolts, for instant). Marketed as in support of weird tales-style games in a Darklands-style Thirty Years War European setting, though ruleswise it does little to support this. Creator James Raggi goes out of his way to publish unique modules instead of Kobold Raid #30672, though which are good (generally seen as the early ones) and which are empty outrage / gore / fetish bait will vary wildly depending on who you talk to. Notable supplements include Broodmother SkyFortress, Carcosa, Death Frost Doom, Tower of the Stargazer, Veins of the Earth. Carcosa is noted as being especially grimdark and offensive, while others dislike the gory art of the main rule book (though the free PDF version is artless) or the creator/publisher's back-and-forth stance on Zak S / being a Jordan Peterson fan. Once quite big, it's largely faded to the background in the past few years. Wolfpacks & the Winter Snow: Late Ice-Age caveman adventures. Very nice departure from the usual fantasy tropes. Retroclones of AD&D 1st and 2nd Editions OSRIC: The granddaddy of them all. A straight 1st ed clone (minus Unearthed Arcana). Adventures Dark & Deep: An attempt to create a speculative Gygax-headed AD&D 2nd ed. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea: Huge-rear end sword & sorcery clone. Three editions, the first being a box set and the second and third enormous 600+ page hardcovers (the third just being called "Hyperborea"). For Gold & Glory: Straight 2nd ed clone. Hackmaster: As it pretends to be a sort of alternate universe AD&D, its first edition was called "4th edition". It's a semi-gonzo take on 1st ed, based on the popular Knights of the Dinner Table comic. Its newest (5th) edition went off to become more of its own thing. 5th Edition Backclones There's been a recent burst of people attempting to take the 5th ed SRD and hack, chop, and optional-rule their way to an old-school experience. I don't think any of them work very well that I can see, but the demand is clearly there and maybe you'll feel differently (or have players who won't try anything unless it can be sold as related to 5e): 5e HARDCORE MODE: As extreme as a day-glo BMX. Actual in-depth reviews have not been favourable. Deathbringer: Four-page collection of mods to 5th ed, rather than a complete game book by itself. Dungeonesque: Red box AND little booklets. Reviewed rather harshly as cramped, overpriced, and with minimal changes to the SRD. Five Torches Deep: 48 pages, landscape format. Into the Unknown: A five-booklet release. Olde Swords Reign: A new one; too new to say much right now. The Hacks Old-school D&D was never really rules-light except in comparison to the editions prominent when the OSR kicked off, namely 3rd and 4th edition. All the same, "rules-light" has become an OSR meme and has led to the creation of a lot of popular rulesets along those lines. They tend to be lean and mean, as little as one page in length. They typically achieve this by cutting away most everything the older OSR games contained that gave them fidelity to old D&D, and so are not very popular with the old guard but are extremely well regarded in other circles. Microlite20: A “rulings not rules”-style d20 streamline, one of the first of its kind. Searchers of the Unknown: A D&D variant that's just one page, this is the other big originator of this approach to the OSR. See also Swords & Wizardry Light and Continual Light. The Black Hack: 20-page highly-influential ultralight. Second edition raises it to 30 pages. Bluehack: 24-pager based on the Black Hack but with a Holmes emphasis. Cairn: 22-pager derived from Knave and Into the Odd. Knave: Ben Milton's seven-page ultra-light. Second edition coming soon. Maze Rats: Ben Milton's twelve-page ultra-light. Close Enough There are several games that are mechanically and/or stylistically close enough to various versions of old-school D&D (or its themes) that many are comfortable inviting them to the party. What differs most of them from strict retroclones is that they don’t base themselves on any single D&D ruleset, instead taking a grab-bag of rules from many editions and often mashing those together with the author’s own ideas. These include, but are not limited to: Beyond the Wall: Designed for low-prep games, focused on young heroes leaving their villages and venturing out into the wild, inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin. Blood & Treasure: Stealing bits from pretty much everything before 4e. Castles & Crusades: Predating all the clones, C&C is heralded by many of its fans as a spiritual successor to AD&D. Dungeon Crawl Classics: Built on a 3rd edition skeleton, DCC is essentially old-school nostalgia filtered through an exaggerated Fantasy loving Vietnam lens (e.g. character creation involves playing the survivor of a pool of lambs you generate and lead to the slaughter). Over and above the gonzo rules (spell mishaps! mutations! tables for everything! D7s and D16s!) and resulting playstyle, it’s notable for its extensive module support (nearly a hundred adventures, which tend to be linear but a few of which are some of the best in the field). The emphasis is on sword & sorcery action/adventure rather than old-school resource management. See also Mutant Crawl Classics, for a Gamma-Worldesque version. Fantastic Heroes & Witchery: An all-editions-D&D knock-off, with the added benefit of having classes for planetary adventure, a la John Carter of Mars. 666 spells! Into the Odd: A very popular rules-light take on some of the themes of old-school D&D. Low-Fantasy Gaming: Another rules mashup, this one focuses on (spoiler) low-magic settings. Not a big following, but lots of support by its author, and a good sandbox medieval England setting--the Midderlands--that goes with it. Mazes & Minotaurs: An Ancient Greece/Ancient D&D mash-up. Tomb of the Bull King is a superb module. Mutant Future: Combines classic D&D playstyle with a futuristic post-apocalypse. Pits & Perils: A rules-light fantasy engine (original rules) modelled on the look of OD&D. Scarlet Heroes: An OSR game by Kevin Crawford designed to allow you to play through old-school modules with just one player. Be a one-man wrecking machine. Spears of the Dawn: African-themed OSR game, also by Kevin Crawford. Bonus level: See a list of science-fiction OSR games here. Some Useful Blogs & Forums The Alexandrian: Theory. Ars Ludi: More of a storygame blog actually, but this links specifically to the now-legendary West Marches series of posts, which is pretty much *the* modern guide to understanding and running an open-table sandbox game. Beyond Fomalhaut: Reviews, adventures, and resources. The Blue Bard: Writer of interesting modules also records the experience of running a by-the-book 1st ed AD&D campaign. Coins and Scrolls: A heavy medieval focus. Delta’s D&D Hotspot: Lots of in-depth mathematical and historical examination of OD&D. Dragonsfoot: Forum covering 2nd ed and earlier. Superb amount of resources, including free adventures, lots of archived posts from various ex-TSR members including Gygax, and so on. Dungeon of Signs: Recently defunct, but with good theory and resources and some great free adventures. Dyson’s Dodecahedron: Resources, including awesome maps. Elfmaids & Octopi: Resources. False Machine: Theory, reviews, angst. From the writer of Deep Carbon Observatory, Veins of the Earth, and more. Goblin Punch: Resources. Grognardia: Great in-depth stuff about old-school gaming. Considered one of the foundational bits of the OSR movement. Strongly recommend trolling through the archives. Hack & Slash: Theory. Jeff’s Gameblog: Theory and resources. Knights & Knaves Alehouse: Forum covering 1st ed and earlier. Monsters and Manuals: Theory and resources, from the creator of Yoon-Suin. ODD74: Forum devoted solely to OD&D. Its main forums can only be viewed by registered members. Philotomy's Musings: An archived collection of musings from respected OD&D player Philotomy. Robe of Useful Items: Resources. Amazing resources, with particularly fabulous random generators. Formerly Wizardawn. The Ruins of Murkhill: Another forum primarily dedicated to OD&D. Tenfootpole.org: Adventure reviews, with OSR play being his gold standard. Has gone through literally every issue of Dungeon (the poor bastard), and some 1,500 adventures in all. Tenkar’s Tavern: OSR RSS and drama aggregator. Zenopus Archives: The premiere resource for Holmes Basic. Xotl fucked around with this message at 08:44 on May 4, 2023 |
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May 28, 2018 22:16
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Reserved for future playstyle post.
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May 28, 2018 22:17
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Yeah, that's definitely a good one. Will add now.
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May 28, 2018 23:50
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alg posted:Two blogs I follow have recently posted about the alt-right in the OSR. Pham Nuwen posted:*OP says no OSR politics* Also, Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Do you guys think the greater druid community would be for or against nuclear power plants? I think the relatively low footprint of uranium mining compared to fossil fuels means that fey creatures with any intelligence ought to be on board. Druids would obviously be into wind power via harnessed air elementals, duh. Also also:  No OSR Politics
Xotl fucked around with this message at 02:41 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 02:38
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Fair enough, no worries.
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May 29, 2018 02:59
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No, I don't think it would behoove us, because there's other places that could be and are used to talk about OSR drama, and it's naive to think that we would be able to talk about it without things spiralling further down the well. If politics are important enough to you that you have to vet your elfgames for ideological propriety, I can respect that even if I don't understand it, but it's on you to do the checking and you can and should do it on your own. It's irrelevant to gaming discussion. Take it to RPG.net or G+ or any one of a number of blogs, please, just as the last thread asked everyone to do and people for the most part did just fine. Xotl fucked around with this message at 04:08 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 03:50
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I'm sorry to see you go, gradenko, but do what you feel you need to. Hopefully you change your mind at some point.DalaranJ posted:E: I have some more questions coming up after having purchased Hot Springs Island, but I thought I'd wait a day or two to spring them. I have copies of both books, so ask away whenever.
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May 29, 2018 04:16
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Evil Mastermind posted:I don't care how good a product is; if the creator is a terrible person I want to know so I don't give them any support. I get that. But why not go and find out, then? Why the need to drag it here as well? I didn't introduce a new rule to the thread; I only copied one over (that I heartily agree with and that people seemed fine with at the time). Nothing is stopping anyone here from going to one of several gaming places and finding out all the juicy drama and scumbaggery X dev is up to lately. Everyone here who is inclined to hate Zak or Macris or Raggi already knows about them and has made that decision; no one posting here is going to go "What do you mean that Macris is a shithead: why wasn't I informed?" G+ devolves into this horseshit constantly, as does RPG.net, and it's never just "one small post". There are blogs to follow with an interest in OSR drama. There's our own industry thread specifically intended to cover stuff like this. No one can pretend that this is an unexplored topic. Quite the other way around; this thread could be the one place free of that cruft, instead of following exactly what everyone else--including this forum in another thread--is already doing. I'm no mod, and I'm not interested in being the guy at odds with everyone at the expense of good conversation, so if everyone is set on this then I'll stand aside and edit the OP to match, but I don't get how anyone thinks it will be an improvement. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:05 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 04:53
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Hostile V posted:Should probably change some of the word choices in the OP to be less beating about the bush about it/playing coy and just be honest about who's a shitheel and who isn't. "Infamous Zak S" carries the wrong semantics for who he is and what he done, it's like when people call a gunman a "frustrated individual". He'd embrace "infamous". Not everyone's gonna come to this thread having taken the prep classes on Fantastic Dickbags And Where To Find Them 101, folks come around here to dip their toes into the waters of knowledge. If you wanna call a moratorium on the recurring flag-waving okay and I get that, better an admission of problems than 400 new posts about the same poo poo, but just like at the very least acknowledge the basic criticisms of notable people up front with "we've said all that needs to be said at the moment, there's somewhere else we can argue this, this is more about the games than anything else". I put "infamous" because, in following from my previous post, everyone I know of that posts here is already aware of who he is and what he does, and has their own personal feelings about him. More detail just seemed at once redundant and breaking the thread's own rules. But I'm willing to be more upfront if people think that would actually be helpful. I'll go and do that now. I'll also link to the industry thread so that people don't think I'm trying to shut them down or what have you.
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May 29, 2018 05:14
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Pham Nuwen posted:So the OP kind of makes 1e sound a little weirder, a little more murderhobo, than 2e... Is there really that much difference? I have always had a soft spot for the monk, for instance. How tough would it be to drop a 1e monk into a 2e game? It's a bit weirder. Psionics are corish (main book, but shuffled off to an appendix). The Bard is an incredibly bizarre multiclass experiment. There's coverage of disease, and a random harlot subtable, to give two examples of the sort of extra detail you'll see. It's written in a very baroque style throughout. Unearthed Arcana really introduces the most changes from 2nd, since almost all of that was cut from 2e core (thief-acrobats, cavaliers that start at -2 level, etc). But while Unearthed was always controversial, it was much more widely adopted than, say, the v2.5 Options books or any one Complete Book of X that 2nd ed had so many of. Gameplay wise, the base rules are quite similar, so much so that you'd have little trouble doing what you asked with a monk (though 2nd ed had one or two versions of its own you could use instead). (The addition of skills in 2nd also heralded a big change, but that's something I want to cover another time.) As for murderhoboness, that's trickier: - In terms of the *core rules*, counter to the standard anti-grog view the older 1st ed is less murderhoboey. I can't emphasize enough how much the moving from gold as the primary source of XP (the 1st ed way) to monsters as the primary source (the 2nd ed way) really changed the dynamics of play. What players were rewarded for pursuing really shifted. Naturally combat was much more encouraged by a game that said that the best way to progress was to kill things. Gold for XP was still present, but it was optional only. There were also story-based XP awards introduced, but they were minor. - In terms of *modules*, 2nd ed is less murderhoboey. This is because of the shift in module design I reference in the OP. For people writing their own adventures this was irrelevant, but for the big market that scooped up modules, their games would be transformed as module writing was transformed. Look at something old like B1, B2, or B4: very open sandbox style stuff, where the players have a lot of freedom to tackle things. Look at the S-series: all dungeons of varying sorts, with a high lethality focus. Yes, they were written for tournaments and so the lethality was purposely exaggerated, but if you have thousands upon thousands of non-tourney players buying and playing them, that can't help but shape things. In all of these you're getting little to no read-aloud box text. Setup for the adventure is often as little as a paragraph (and that includes backstory). But around 1983 you see a marked shift. Look at something like the Dragonlance series, or Desert of Desolation, or Ravenloft, and you'll see what an official adventure was changing very rapidly. Railroaded plots where the PCs must do X and if they don't then the module forces them to start to appear (even popular favourite B10 has a bit of this). You also start seeing NPCs with plot armour that can't die before they're "supposed to", longer and longer blocks of read-aloud text, and longer backstories. The stories are increasingly centred around heroics, rather than looting: save the town, save the princess, save the kingdom, defeat the ultimate evil, save the world. A character's dungeon exploration movement speed increases noticeably in 2nd ed IIRC (another small change that could really affect play), but that hardly matters because the game hardly seemed to care about dungeons anymore. Something like the D-series just wasn't being published any longer, except as repackagings. So while this evolution happened under late 1st ed's watch, it was solidly in place for the writing of 2nd and informed the design of it and most of its supplements, which people are referring to as much as they are the core rulebooks when they refer to an edition. Things like Night Below, Nightmare Keep, Dragon Mountain, or Ruins of Undermountain were outliers in a much larger catalogue. I should do up a module comparison to give a better, visual-based evolution of module design from 78 to 98. Xotl fucked around with this message at 17:55 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 06:00
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FRINGE posted:These were in very wide use in every group I ran into. Me too, but that's why I specified any given one. The line was so large (16 books over six years, not including the setting-specific ones) and so varied in quality and power (for example, compare the Complete Book of Elves with the Complete Thief's Handbook) that it didn't have the same effect that the single Unearthed Arcana did. You could count on running into them in general, but you couldn't be sure of seeing them all.
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May 29, 2018 08:08
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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. I can't be sure if you think the ones you've seen truly suck, or if you're used to a different style of play than what OSR gaming provides and so are bouncing off of them due to a clash of expectations. In case of the latter, I'll leave this here for now as a sort of chaser: http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=4214 Extremely enthusiastic review of a new module by an OSR-centred reviewer. The guy has given out 4 perfect scores in his 1,500 reviews; this gets one of them. https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/review-mines-claws-princesses-5e-3pp-holy-oldschool-holy-grail-batman/ Equally enthusiastic review, again by an OSR reviewer. Note what qualities the two are remarking on when they talk about what makes it good. Now read this guy's take on it for a completely different (modern) view. Ignoring the quibble about age-appropriateness, you're still dealing with a fundamentally different set of criteria. http://www.wizardslaboratory.com/review-of-mines-claws-princesses-adventure/ Lastly, the module is pay what you want, so get it and consider it for yourself. What do you think about it? http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/240094/Mines-Claws--Princesses I'll cover some of the better OSR modules (say, Deep Carbon Observatory, or Fate's Fell Hand) and why I think they're great later on.
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May 29, 2018 09:13
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drrockso20 posted:Complete Book of Humanoids is a book that would have been so much better if it hadn't made most of the races it included pretty much useless thanks to the combination of class restrictions and level restrictions(the latter is something I absolutely despise when it's used in systems where Race and Class are separate) Yeah, I've always viewed racial level limits as a painful mechanical kludge. I love having weird races: the moment I saw thri-kreen I was delighted. I get not wanting people to be able to play dragons or whatever when the rest of the party is much weaker, but an all-monster party could be fun. We know they have their own heroes after all; who are the PCs fighting all the time? And if you're playing a game where everyone is willing to ignore inter-party balance, then that doesn't matter either. Gygax’s justification for level limits was that it was impossible to imagine a world in which non-humans had not taken over the world without them. However, that completely ignores racial, cultural, and environmental factors, such as wars or disasters, low birth rates, a tendency towards short-sighted thinking, or a lack of curiosity or drive holding a race back from expansion and/or technological development, none of which are reflected in a level limit rule (or even ability score adjustments). Using limits to worldbuild also isn't setting-neutral: it assumes you want a human-dominated world in the first place, which might not be true. Maybe the humans do lose out to some other species, and you're trying to build a setting around that. I ran a campaign where elves had driven humans into the wilderness and barbarism, rather than the usual other way around, and it was fun. Overall, I’d prefer to cut cruft whenever possible; non-human ascendancy is better treated as a worldbuilding issue than a mechanical balance one. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:49 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 18:16
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Was there a certain tone you were after? Because DCC sounds excellent if you're purely concerned with giving your players some nice 3rd-edish material they're familiar with to ease a transition, but it plays very differently than most games.
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May 30, 2018 06:27
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They're kind of weird books. You know you have too much fine-grained detail when even most grogs find it overmuch.
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May 31, 2018 02:28
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Halloween Jack posted:I like Dying Earth fantasy--hell, for the past decade plus I pretty much only run fantasy Dying Earth style. Are there some good OSR products written in that style, with a "sci-fi and magic are indistinguishable" and/or adding high-tech gear to a fantasy setting? There's always been a few Expedition to the Barrier Peaks-style modules that scatter tech in your D&D, but for all the Vance is constantly cited as an Appendix N-type influence, I'm not aware of a OSR ruleset that actually does Dying Earth-type games at all, which is pretty weird. Pelgrane Press did a Dying Earth RPG (Robin Laws) back in '01, but I have no idea if it's any good, though it seems to have been well received. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:22 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 17:46
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Halloween Jack posted:I like Dying Earth fantasy--hell, for the past decade plus I pretty much only run fantasy Dying Earth style. Are there some good OSR products written in that style, with a "sci-fi and magic are indistinguishable" and/or adding high-tech gear to a fantasy setting? I got too hung up on the ruleset part and forgot about some perfectly good adventure settings, namely Misty Isles of the Eld (a pointcrawl with otherdimensional bastard elves and their magitech ships) and Anomalous Subsurface Environment (a very DCC-like megadungeon with definite tech elements).
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Jun 2, 2018 05:01
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I just looked it up and it's third-party, which explains why I'd never heard of it. It's specifically advertised as "The Blackest Nihilism for your DCC gaming!" so obviously the designer knew what he was going for, and any GM buying this should realize the same. Definitely not my thing, but at the same time I've never seen a book specifically designed to be run this way (not even Carcosa), so I'm kind of curious.
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Jun 3, 2018 08:33
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:How exactly does one run an OSR game, having no real understanding of one? It's an interesting thing I've noticed, and most advice is really vague. I've been meaning to cover that in the playstyle post I reserved on the first page. I find the primers are useful, but mix in too much generic advice (or what sounds like it) that should apply to any ideally good game, or make it come across as pointless elitism/grogism. Old-school games are a bit of mechanics, but more so a playstyle and inherent set of assumptions. I'll add some basic stuff here. Note that when I say old-school I mean D&D of about 1983 and earlier and, more specifically, as the game was intended to be played by its creators. Playstyle begins to shift around after this point, based on offical modules and Dragon magazine articles putting out a different kind of content, new designers coming in and the old guard leaving or getting fired (there were major hiring waves and purges at TSR at this time which rapidly changed the design character of the company), and so on. That's 1st ed AD&D, B/X, and OD&D. After this period you see a decreased emphasis on many of these points and an increased emphasis on new things. Lastly, I want to emphasize that this is a taxonomical description, not a proscription. Play how you want; this just happens to be what old-school play was *supposed* to be like (again, going by design intent). At the same time, remember that the scene stopped being monolithic as soon as it expanded beyond Lake Geneva and people were just as happy to house-rule then as they are now; overall there were a decent variety of playstyles based on regions and of course individual GMs even back in the day. I'm just aiming at a broad set of accurate generalities for OSR play specifically. 1) Balance is nebulous. You don't run into liches on the 1st level of any module. At the same time, there's no challenge ratings, and wandering monster tables can throw something at you that will slaughter you in no time; you're assumed to bargain or run for your life when these occur (hence the playstyle divide between new-school and old that is often summed as combat as war vs. combat as sport). Treasure is often random: you might make out a like a bandit with a good roll (including with magic items). Lots of things are random. 2) XP primarily from gold, not combat. This makes the game about treasure hunting, not killing things. It's so simple, but so huge in terms of shifting gameplay style. You often try to avoid fights (doubly so when you consider this with #1; there's no guarantee that the encounter is a "level-appropriate" encounter). There's a saying in the OSR that "combat is a failure state", i.e. it's a penalty that ultimately says you did something wrong (you didn't bargain right, or you didn't avoid them when you should have, or trick them into moving off or running away, and so on). That can be overstated, but at the heart of things it's correct. It's also funny because old-school D&D has a reputation as a hackfest, when that's the charge old-school players level against modern (2nd ed+) D&D and its combat = progress design philosophy. 3) Reaction and Morale. With these rules, creatures now talk and bargain and threaten and flee and all sorts of other interesting things, rather than just exist to be killed. When combined with #2, you get a much different playstyle involving encounters. Yes, you could work this into any game, but in old-school D&D the game mechanically puts this into play (though it's easier to do and appears more prevalently in some editions than others). 4) Resource management. This is one of those things inherent in old-school D&D that modern players have tended to dismiss as pointless tedium and modern designers have steadily removed. In modern games, healing is something that happens with trivial ease, and there are at-will powers; none of this exists in old-school games. Modern games often handwave your ammunition, your food, your encumbrance, and your light sources. Old-school games require all this to be tracked. There are no 0-level cantrips and free magic items that create all the light you ever need. Now you need to think about who is holding the torch or lamp. Do we hire a torchbearer to keep our hands free and maybe carry more stuff? We better protect him, because he's some NPC schlub. Time ticks down in those ten-minute portions, and is watched carefully, because it means that your lamp has that much less light in it, and you're that closer to a wandering monster check (which are assumed to be in play constantly: they exist to prod players onward, and to consume resources). Why track this, then? Because a) it reduces the amount of treasure you can carry (and so in turn the amount of XP you can earn; see #2) and b) it makes numerous threats have meaning that wouldn't otherwise. This inherently shifts play from a heroic style to a more cautious exploration style, where the players are constantly measuring the risks of moving on with the potential rewards. 5) Player agency. This is a good example of one of those bits that on the surface could sound like generic advice without further context, and something I've touched on a bit in earlier posts--I mean, players should always have agency, right? Modern adventures are largely plot-oriented. You have to do this, and you have to do that, and NPCs have to appear at X time, and sometimes can't be killed until the story said it's time for them to die, and if players can't figure something out then the plot often says to just give it to them anyways because the plot also says they need to figure this thing out. The GM has become more and more of a storyteller, with increasing amounts of read-aloud text to narrate to the players that tells them how they feel and what they are doing. Entire modules exist where the players' actions are literally meaningless. If you're running an old-school game, hard-coded plot is de-emphasized as much as possible. There can still be story, in that NPCs are doing things, stuff is happening, action and reaction and consequences exist. But when any of this collides with the players, nothing is guaranteed. There is nothing that is "supposed to happen". If you have a module that says that Lord Darkulon is readying his fell legions to conquer X, players may go "wow, sucks to be those guys: anyways, moving on" (though they may regret this later, but that's on them; agency doesn't mean freedom from consequences). If they instead decide to tackle it, and come up with a clever way of killing Lord Darkulon in the bath a week into his plan of ultimate conquest, then you go "cool" and throw the rest out. The players beat that challenge fair and square, and the fact that it torpedoes all this other material is irrelevant. Now you might say "all well and good, but this is a game and there's a clear social contract that says that this is the adventure I have ready and if you want to tell me to go to hell when I propose it then that's fine, but then we have nothing to do tonight, because this is a game and this is the content I've worked up". What is needed is to change your set of expectations as a GM. You don't come to the table with a bunch of plot-based scenarios in the first place. Instead, you are readying dungeons and other encounters that don't force the players' hands by mandating action. The social contract then shifts to them, as the flipside of player agency being dominant: "look, this is a game of exploring and looting, and you're explorers and looters, so you shouldn't need all this crap telling you *why* you need to go and explore and loot the Temple of Xlkjjl: just go and do it". Some old-school games are based entirely around what's known as a hexcrawl, which means that there is no one place to explore per session, but instead a whole land of brief encounters divided into hexes, seeded with more fleshed out dungeons here and there, and the players just explore it as they will. "What do you do today?" "We've decided to head east, to check out the rumours about that strange plague that's appearing." The GM doesn't dictate the action; they only facilitate it. This plays out radically different at the table than your typical later edition game. A more directionless set of players (or those trained by later modules to expect the adventure to be handed to them with bells and whistles on it) will likely find it boring, because they won't do what the game presumes they will, because they'll in turn have no reason to think it can or should work that way. It's thus vital that both the GM and the players understand this point more than any other, or your game will fall apart no matter what else you have right. A subset of this is that players don't have to be heroes. With plot often comes assumed heroism, because plot tends to be good at making heroic style of games where the PCs rescue or thwart something. At low levels you're saving villages and caravans. Then you move up to saving towns, then cities, then kingdoms, then the world. Instead, the players may be heroes, if they choose that path and work towards it, but it's up to them. The default is that they're simply explorers trying to get rich (gold for XP). 6) Life is cheap. This is often confused with antagonistic GMing, because death is one of the things an antagonistic DM delights in inflicting, but also because modern games have downplayed this. Rather, it's just that characters take 5-10 minutes to make, lots of danger is assumed, and there's a good chance that death will happen at the table. The GM lets it happen if it happens, accepting that it's an inherent part of the game. He doesn't go out of his way to kill characters, but neither does he fight to save them; that's not his job. Players in turn accept they they could croak at any time and are ready to roll up a new character without complaints. 7) Magic is magical. You can't easily make magic gear (or might not be able to at all). You can't buy it in shops. Any magic items you do get are assigned at random and you make the best of. Some of it may be cursed. There's no Knowledge: Arcana skill. There might not even be an Identify spell, depending on the ruleset; that's what sage NPCs are for. The game does not assume you have X amount of magic gear at X level. OSR writers in particular delight in creating non-standard magic items with weird and mythic-style effects. 8) Player skill over game skill. There aren't a lot of rules for characters in old games. Your sheets are pretty simple. There's no universal task resolution, except for the occasional handwaved bit. There's no skills (loose and optional systems begin to creep in in the mid 80s, but they're widely disliked; see below). You don't have much in the way of special abilities. This means that the player is generally the one overcoming challenges, rather than the mechanics your character possesses. It's easy to dress up this as elitism, but it's really a matter of making a virtue out of necessity: since there are no rules for it, what else are you going to do? It's a simple concept, but like many of these it has wider implications. Reading an old-school module, you'll see more things that state the challenge, but comparatively little about the "right way" to overcome it; what is there along those lines won't be mechanical "pass a DC 15 check to find the book on the shelf" but just simple statements about maybe a few things that would or would not work. It's assumed that if the players can think of a better way to do things, then they can do that. There's no perception mechanics, so it's up to the players to actually describe what they're doing; depending on the GM this can be as simple as "I search the room", but is assumed to be more like "lift the rug", and "I examine the bookshelf closely". There's no social skills, so you have to roleplay out your encounters instead of "I make my Bribery roll / Diplomacy check". Again, this can happen in any game, but in old-school play it's assumed and actively built in. Plenty of old-school players see this as a feature, not a bug, arguing that it results in fast play and, more importantly, when you add abilities (such as skills) what you're really doing is directing players increasingly towards their character sheet and their rulebook, rather than encouraging them to use their imagination. They argue that after a certain point you actually remove possibilities, as people begin to shift from seeing the rules as a set of guidelines for the most common actions and instead an exhaustive list of everything possible; when a rule is missing, players assume the action to be impossible. It's why you see older players often react with hostility when you suggest adding more combat options, skill lists, and so on: in their mind you're missing the point and inadvertently making the game more restricted. Xotl fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2018 19:29
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Only to a degree. We're talking about how the game used to be played (allowing for outliers), and that's objective. These elements have meaningful effects on your game, and out of all of them I'd argue that only #3 and some of #7 can be dropped with you still being able to say you've got an old-school game. People played 1st ed and BECMI who abandoned #4 (myself included), but it's a markedly different type of game, one that wasn't common in ye olden times (as any look at the modules released up to 1981 show). It's not about what's right or wrong, it's about attempting to define a playstyle. If you think those elements suck, then don't use them. At the same time, you could be playing out of the 1st DMG, but if you've houseruled it so that you've got infinite light, magic shops, no time tracking, quick rests to recover HP, and death being really unlikely, then you're not really playing old-school (which, again, is fine, because god I hate those "this is objectively the right way to play a game" arguments). It's not a matter of what's better, or what's more fun. Xotl fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jun 3, 2018 |
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Jun 3, 2018 22:19
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Payndz posted:This is pretty much the entire basis of my BX-inspired game You All Meet In A Tavern, which I mentioned a while back. Roll up your characters (which should hopefully take two minutes or less), then meet the patron in the aforementioned tavern who tells you what you're being asked to do in tonight's game and what victory condition you need to 'win' it. It might be something fairly open-ended like "find out what happened to the missing villagers", or very specific like "enter Castle Deathmaw and kill Lord Blackskull!" I'm going to go and download this now. Thanks. 
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Jun 3, 2018 22:40
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A Strange Aeon posted:I really appreciated this list, even with the caveat it's not hard and fast. It spelled out why I enjoy the OSR style without being the least bit antagonistic. Thanks. I hate that "one true way" crap. quote:Speaking of, what's a good way to handle potions? Is it always a guess as to what a given potion does? And how do you avoid the identification song and dance where the players smell it, taste it, etc.? Should all healing potions smell like oranges and heal minor cuts on taste? It just seems a silly ritual after the first one if that's the case. For me it depends on your players and the game. The way I see it there's two options: you takes your chances, or you properly identify it. One of my group really loves the "chaos reigns" part of old-school play and generally just chugs the stuff; if you die, oh well. But the less impetuous are more interested in finding out what it will do, because what's the point of finding out you downed a potion of flight if you don't need it at that point? I don't have the Identify spell in my personal homebrew: players are quick to search out the nearest sage who knows this stuff, which at once helps keep magic mysterious and serves to help use up all of the coin that the players have coming in. As for standardization, I do that only for the most common potions (like healing), and only to a certain area: in different places they'll use different ingredients, and so the healing potion of people X is different than those of people Y. It helps prevent a creeping reliable sameness from entering your world.
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Jun 3, 2018 23:57
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I've used converted DCC modules for a long time in my games, but I've never actually played a proper game of it myself. I signed up for three or four sessions at GenCon, though, so I'm excited to at last know how the hell it works.
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Jun 5, 2018 04:25
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I love the setting and atmosphere on People of the Pit, and the fact that it's can easily teach you not to get overly attached to your characters out of the gate, but the fact that it's just wave after wave of unreasoning instant-attack cultists makes it overly grindy, in my opinion.
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Jun 6, 2018 06:10
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the onion wizard posted:I'm interested in getting a game rolling. I'm leaning towards Labyrinth Lord or LotFP, though DCC is pretty appealing too. Here's a list of decent (or iconic) modules specifically designed for level 1 play that I made recently. Something on there should be suitable for you: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2lu9q0elm5ftszy/Useful%20Intro%20Adventures%20v1.3.pdf?dl=0 EDIT: link updated As for system, it really depends on what you want to do. LotFP is good, LL is good: they're both pretty close to B/X. DCC is very much it's own thing: more complex, wilder. quote:Edit: I also recently watch Roll20's Old School Adventures series where they played Keep on the Borderlands; over 60 hours they cleared maybe 40% of the caves and one character had made it to level 2. That can't possibly be typical can it? XP earned is divided amongst the party, so the more players the harder it is for anyone to level up. IIRC there's about 21K in gold (and so 21K in XP) in the module, not including any monster XP (though that assumes you find every last thing, which is unlikely). 40% would be 8,400 XP, divided amongst the party. Looks like they have 4 players, so that's divided by 4: 2,100 each. Yeah, if they missed some treasure, or the 40% progress doesn't correspond structurally to 40% of the treasure, they could all be on the cusp of levelling but not quite there yet. The thief needs 1,200 XP to hit level 2, but the Elf needs 4,000; about 2K is an average. 60 hours seems pretty slow even to me, but levelling is definitely slower in old-school games. The idea of levelling once a session just isn't a thing. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 10:48
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andrew smash posted:I haven't really looked into LotFP much but i've gathered the impression that it's shooting for a tone similar to shadow of the demon lord - is that wrong? the onion wizard posted:Is there any particular reason to choose LL over LotFP, or vice versa? With LotFP it's complicated. Technically it's going for "weird fantasy roleplaying". However, it believes that the best way to accomplish this is through play style, not mechanics. As such, the weirdness in the base rules only comes from the over the top gore art. But if you have the free edition of the rules (which have no art other than the cover IIRC) then all you're getting is a stripped down, generally B/Xish ruleset, and you'd be really left wondering how this is "weird" in any ways. In terms of mechanics, you have: - Only the Fighter gains an attack progression, so only it is good at hitting things at higher levels - The Thief is replaced by the Specialist, which uses an extremely simplified 1D6 skill system to handle all skills, thieving or not - Early firearms rules - Decent and widely adapted encumbrance rules (though it's a bit hard on carrying coinage, which is a big deal if you're using it for more of an old-school game and a gold = XP framework) - The spell list has been completely reworked to remove the most egregiously fantastic Forgotten Realmsy stuff (Fireball, Lightning bolt). Turn Undead is a spell rather than a class ability. Summoning is very different. - A general assumption of a very specific magical Thirty-Years War Europe, rather than the usual generic late-medieval/early Renaissance setting (e.g. some modules are set literally during the war) The unusual nature of the game really come from its modules, which are all over the place, with all sorts of innovation, horror, wank, and actual weirdness. Lots of gore, lots of otherworldly encounters and genre warping elements. The God that Crawls has the indestructible pagan-transmogrified St. Augustine lurking underneath an ancient church, guarding the Catholic Church's collection of potentially world-shattering magical artifacts; if you get down there, the entire game is about you running for your life. The Monolith from Beyond Space & Time is a collection of encounters with the genuinely Lovecraftian (e.g. not a bunch of frog men for you to stab, but time dilation and all sorts of other weirdness) and is more likely to be baffling than anything else. Carcosa is some kind of horrible nightmare realm where basically the Cthulhu Mythos reigns and you get all sorts of rapey blood magic. Isle of the Unknown is a hexcrawl full of strangeness. The Cursed Chateau is a funhouse haunted French manor based on Tegel Manor and Castle Amber. Death Frost Doom is a traditional dungeon crawl but can end with the players unleashing an undead apocalypse. Scenic Dunsmouth is a procedurally generated village with cannibals and weirdness whose encounters shift about depending on what you generate. Blood in the Chocolate is some dude's fetish put to paper. Veins of the Earth is a determined effort to make a weird and threatening underdark. There's lots more, but I trust you get the point: it's all over the place. About the only thing all that has in common is that it's all outside the norms in some way: none of it aims to be your generic dungeon crawl. You'll rarely say "oh, this again", but there's no guarantee you'll say "yeah, I can use this" either. At the same time, you could grab the system rules by themselves, ignore the modules, and run Keep on the Borderlands with it. As for LL? I have much less to say: it's the retroclone of B/X, designed to allow people to play B/X again before WotC decided to put out copies of the originals in their store. If you want a straight old-school ruleset, then it will work fine. It only makes a handful of tiny changes for legal reasons. Why choose one over the other? LL is more old-school. After narrating the mechanical differences above, I wouldn't go much beyond that: whatever arguments you'd use to play Moldvay/Cook are the same ones you'd use to argue for LL. I think you'd be fine with either.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:25
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Frostbitten and Mutilated is the only one that comes to mind, though I'm sure there's more. I quite like that one. Suppose it varies depending on what "death metal" means to you, though.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:28
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drrockso20 posted:The DCC setting Hubris is also pretty Metal influenced Is it any good?
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Jun 7, 2018 23:14
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thefakenews posted:Frostbitten and Mutilated is more black metal influenced than death metal. That distinction may or may not be meaningful to you. It does (and I agree). But like you I'm not sure who has a grounding in that here so I vaguely lumped things together. andrew smash posted:what kind of metal is dudes with surprisingly high voices singing three part melodies about elves? Power metal, usually. That's your Dragonforces and Manowars.
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Jun 8, 2018 05:17
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:probably because LotFP, according to Raggi, is BECMI. It's pure Mentzer. He probably meant that that was his starting base and general inspiration. Ruleswise, B/X and BE are almost 100% the same (something I should probably make clear in the OP). The only differences are that BE reformats the original books to add a choose your own adventure style intro to roleplaying (which makes them better for complete newbies to the hobby, but more annoying to navigate for experienced players), and reworks the thief skill percentages to operate over 36 levels instead of B/X's 14 (a mistake, as even Mentzer would eventually admit). I think there's one or two small differences in the spells, but we're really talking about the same game (the main differences really are in the support materials--the CMI part---which adds a lot more stuff but is rarely used because it doesn't even start kicking in until 15th level). LotFP departs markedly from this base in several areas (spell list, AC 12 instead of 10 as a base, ascending AC, firearms rules are core, completely different encumbrance, Turn Undead as a spell, attack progression only for the fighter, and so on). Halloween Jack posted:I think I need to give DCC another shot. I became aware of it during a time when the toxic aspects of the OSR community were really getting on my nerves, and the nostalgia marketing just rubbed me the wrong way. I really think that blurb at the start of every DCC module really does the game a disservice, to the point where it implies pretty much the opposite of how it works. Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG adventures don’t waste your time with longwinded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren’t meant to be killed. Lots of DCC stuff isn't underground, the NPCs are of varying importance and killability, dragons are almost unheard of, and of course, they go out of their way to emphasize the gonzo and the weird. About the only thing accurate in all that is that they do indeed avoid all the long-winding speeches: DCC modules tend to be superb in their terseness. The blurb emphasizes the standard grog nature of the scene, but DCC goes for anything but that.
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Jun 8, 2018 18:48
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B/X and BE are much simpler, yes. It's the CMI part that adds all sorts of extra stuff (of which all but "I" was all compiled into the Rules Cyclopedia, giving you a tome every bit as big as AD&D). Weapon Mastery is one of those later bits (from the Master set, for levels 26-36). Xotl fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 13, 2018 18:45
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I don't think it does. The hexcrawls I use are: Hex Crawl Chronicles Vols 1-7 (S&W) Isle of the Unknown (LotFP) Hot Springs Island (systemless) Nod Magazine (generic or Blood & Treasure)
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Jun 14, 2018 19:09
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That's been a long time in the making. I wonder if the text is getting a clean-up. I started with LL, and I found it a bit clumsy at times in terms of wording.
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Jun 17, 2018 03:19
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Radio Talmudist posted:Just pulled the trigger on buying the Dark of Hot Springs Island. This will be the first hex crawl I've ever run - any tips or resources y'all would recommend for hexcrawl sessions? Any crucial ways they diverge from other adventuring structures? The main thing about hexcrawls is that they take the general old-school idea of player-directed adventuring to its limit. You absolutely need to make sure your players are aware that they are the ones driving the game, and that if they sit around waiting for "stuff to happen" or some NPC to tell them what to do, there mostly won't be a game. Some hexcrawls have regional events, often time-tracked (e.g. "on day 20, Zorgnar finishes assembling his horde and begins to move south"), but generally the "module" is out there in the hexes, waiting for the players to come to it. You need players with initiative, but even then they need to be aware of the structure of what you're giving them. As for you, the GM, it's on you to have thoroughly read the crawl in order to understand the factions at play, so that you can dynamically improvise content once the players do start exploring. Something like Hot Springs Island is good about providing info on how to do this with each hex; others are a bit vaguer. But you need to be thinking of things like, "The players have now clearly allied with faction X; what is faction Y's response going to be?"; "They've drained the rejuvenation pool in Hex 14; who's pissed off by that?", etc.
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Jun 20, 2018 19:28
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Dr. Doji Suave posted:I created an Excel 2016 sheet a while back that allowed a DM/GM to generate random HP totals for creatures based on their HD and track them as combat progressed. It only works I think with Excel 2016 since it uses VBA Macro script, but I figured I'd post it here since I had posted it in one of the DCC Facebook groups. Just tried this on Excel 2013 and it works great. Thanks!
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Jun 21, 2018 05:07
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Can you explain Godbound? I keep hearing "Exalted" raised when people talk about it, which is pretty much the polar opposite of old-school style, but it keeps being raised in an OSR context, so I'm really curious as to how it squares that circle.
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Jun 22, 2018 18:04
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Oh goodie, more goddamn politics chat.WiiFitForWindows8 posted:You will provide me evidence this is factually true. I want you to draw the lines. If you do not, I'm upping my pledge x3. http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/21/the-man-behind-the-milo-a-chat-with-the-supervillain-ceo-of-milo-inc/ This lays out Macris' role in Milo's company. As you can see, it was a big role (CEO, in direct communication with Milo). Macris doesn't include any of these views in his ACKS work that I'm aware of, or talk about it in conjunction with the line's promotion; he goes out of his way to dodge such that I've seen (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I don't use ACKS). Nor is there any evidence I'm aware of that money for ACKS goes to propping up Milo. All the same, there's absolutely no doubt Macris is tied into that ideology. Even with the interview making him sound like a garden-variety modern US conservative, if you were that and that alone you wouldn't be working for Milo bloody Yiannopoulos: there's plenty of milquetoast Republicans out there instead if you're just into generic right-wingism. Macris stuck with Milo's company through the Nazi salute thing and every other controversy, only leaving when the company collapsed some two months back. There's also some stuff about video game/Gamergate drama of some sort due to Macris' involvement with the Escapist, but I'm not up on that. There's no mistaking the man for what he is. If this sort of thing affects what you purchase, then don't buy his books. Xotl fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 00:56
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:It doesn't. Not really. Sorry. I like his work, it's basically just an ADnD with more domain management. I like those rules and I like his modules. Dunno what you want from me.... I'm not asking you to do anything (other than not bring up politics in the thread). You asked, so I provided, in the hope that it would end the derail. What you do is your choice. Xotl fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 01:32
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Oh poo poo, that's horrible. As in, someone broke into your house and stole RPG stuff?
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Jun 28, 2018 02:29
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 01:46 |
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Someone probably thought it was a laptop, sadly. I had my car window shattered when I left a full backpack in my car; I hope the methheads were thrilled with a bunch of books on the Polish communist army. Did you lose anything particuarly valuable?
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Jun 28, 2018 02:35
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