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Tibalt posted:But it doesn't offer enough support either, in my opinion. I understand that a key point of the dungeon crawl play style is a focus on improvisation and "Rulings not rules", where you don't look at your character sheet for answers. But I do think that Into The Odd is lacking mechanical levers that players can use to push the action. Yeah, I think this can be tough for people new to the hobby/new to this style of play. I love it, but I've been doing it a long time, and it's definitely my experience that people freeze up easy. I think this problem is actually even worse on the GM side (I say this in the generic--your running it was solid). OSR style play is weird in that it tends to emphasize as light as possible player-facing rules, but is actually incredibly dense rules-wise on the GM's side. The only rule a player really needs to understand is "imagine you're in the fiction and tell me what you would do in this situation--I'll tell you if it works, doesn't work, or if you'll have to roll a die for it", but the GM's job is to be game designer, level designer, and keep the sim of the whole dungeon running in real time--all while walking a line between staying impartial and facilitating fun. Into the Odd really doesn't give you almost anything to help with this, and low-key seems to be expecting most of its players to just be plugged into the existing OSR blog network enough to already know how to do all this. This is actually relevant to why I'm running the spin-off where I keep playing ItO but with pre-existing modules--I'm working on a project that's all about helping ease GMs into open-ending dungeon crawling without being overwhelming. Tibalt posted:If you enjoyed this review and would like to help me out, please bookmark my recruitment thread and consider signing up for the next session. I haven't set a date or time for the next system, which will probably be the other OSR darling KNAVE, so I'd appreciate it if you put it on your radar. Join us! It's going to be fun!
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Jul 10, 2020 23:29
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It works really well if you're running a sandbox and want a default motivation for the players. In any campaign you're going to find motivations beyond just money or XP for characters pretty quickly, but in this style of play it's the players and not the GM who get to come up with those, and the XP=GP is great for giving the players motivation and an impulse to do something interesting (explore) as a default action until that starts to come together. It also doesn't hurt that GP is probably going to be useful for most bigger motivations the PCs come up with. I don't think it works well at all in systems 3e+, where the game is basically just an excuse to get into fun fights, but OSR stuff is very much about fights being undesirable (if often unavoidable). That's why spells that just bullshit out of encounters make sense in games like CG--if you can cast it once per day, then that's one encounter per day you basically just get to fast-forward, which lets you get to more exploring (the real reason you're there). This is why you have things like Into the Odd stating that it's goal is to make combat almost never last more than 3 (extremely quick to resolve) rounds--combat is meant to be a scary consequence, and the fun of it is more about figuring out how to stack the deck in your favor. One way that OSR stuff has gotten a bit unwieldy, though, is that since there's such a huge emphasis on OSR content being system-neutral, it becomes really hard to pace out treasure. Maybe a 1000gp golden tiara is half a level in one system, but not much at all in another, and totally irreverent in another. I've seen a lot of OSR modules (like A Wizard or Hot Spring Island) just sidestep it by basically ignoring treasure altogether. . .I think you're probably just supposed to skim the module before you run it and make small modifications wherever relevant to make it work for the precise system you're using (like the Wizardling pearl idea). This sort of works, but is pretty annoying and feels like one of the biggest weaknesses of this model for sure.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:47
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Falconier111 posted:For me, the problem is both that that boils down to relying on Rule Zero to make your module functional, which is just bad design, and it's fundamentally hostile to new DMs who don't have those instincts yet. I don't think you're wrong that it's a tough lift for new GMs--it feels like the secret final chapter of most OSR products is already being immersed in the big OSR blog culture or having tutored under an experienced GM. I don't think I'd call reliance on Rule Zero bad design, though. OSR is always all about 'shared imaginary space first, rules second'--while I think that in most RPGs people think of the rules as the highest authority in the game, OSR stuff is more about just giving the GM resources to use to keep things moving fairly/interestingly. The idea is that rules are inherently somewhat inflexible, and the players are very likely to actively fling themselves into situations the designers weren't designing for, so aiming for games text that covers all bases without forcing the GM to invoke Rule Zero is just pointless and counterproductive. I do 100% agree that most of these books should be doing more of the lifting in helping GMs adapt their material to their systems or campaigns, though. Even just an indication of what adaptations might need to be made would be helpful.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:26
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Could the intention possibly be that the shriekers are meant to make you run blindly into a pool if you get feared?
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Jul 20, 2020 17:13
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The level adjustment system in CG is pretty weirdly balanced. At level one, two guards at +3 levels is pretty brutal. A team of 4 level one players will have around 4 hit dice worth of hit points, while the guards will have 8, making them about twice as tough as the players. If they are level 4, though, they'll have a combined 16 hit dice, while the L7 guards will only have 14, making them slightly weaker than the party. I appreciate that the module is giving guidance on how to power the encounters relative to the players, but it seems like the way they're doing it has some real weird consequences
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Jul 22, 2020 04:11
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B2: Keep on the Borderlands -- Part 1: Introduction I’m going to do a deep dive into what is probably the most iconic classic D&D module of all time--B2: Keep on the Borderlands, also known as The Caves of Chaos. It was written in 1979 by Gary Gygax himself, making it over forty years old, and in some ways really sets the tone for module design from that point on. It’s also really weird in a lot of ways, and a lot of its design decisions seem utterly inexplicable at first glance, all of which comes together to make it a great fit for some analysis! What Am I Hoping To Accomplish? One of the big things you hear about the B line of modules is that they were meant in part to instruct GMs on how to properly run D&D sessions. B1 (Into the Unknown aka Quasqueton) provides an intricate map and room descriptions, but requires GMs to place monsters manually--supposedly to work as a training-wheels experience to teach them to design their own dungeons. B2 doesn’t do anything quite like that, but instead is all about teaching GMs how to run a dungeon as a sort of flexible interconnected ecosystem. My goal in doing this reading is to try to suss out what sort of playstyle B2 is attempting to teach, identify the procedures that are needed to make it work, and get a sense for how successful the module is--both at creating a fun playstyle and teaching it to novice GMs. The module is broken into three main locations: The Keep on the Borderlands: a human-controlled keep on the edge of civilization that acts to hold the forces of chaos at bay. The Wilderness: the areas surrounding the keep, full of monsters, bandits, and madmen. Includes the Caves of the Unknown, a blank spot for GMs to insert a dungeon of their own design The Caves of Chaos: the probable reason for the players to be here at all, a network of caves carved into a ravine that have been settled by a bunch of different factions of monsters Before we get into any of those, though, let’s take a look at the intro! Okay, so if we accept that a major purpose of this module is to teach novice GMs how to run dungeon crawls, then it makes sense to expect that the introductory section would have a ton of good advice and guidance within. Let’s take a look at what the module gives us! Or, if the size of this post is too much for you, go ahead and skip straight down to “Thoughts So Far” Part 1: Introduction Introduction: Tells players not to read this due to spoilers and establishes some real basic info (this is a module for D&D) Part 2: Notes for the Dungeon Master Basic Power Level: “This module has been designed to allow six to nine player characters of first level to play out many adventures, gradually working up to second or third level of experience in the process. The group is assumed to have at least one magic-user and one cleric In It.” Basic Premise: There’s a keep your players can use as a home base, and some caves they can adventure in! D&D Rules Rehash: The module recaps a bunch of D&D rules here? It explains what a statblock is (useful), and then goes over how armor, attacking, and movement speed works in D&D. It doesn’t really recap enough rules to let you play without the main book, so I’m honestly not sure what purpose this section serves. Some DM Advice: Quick summary of what to expect your first session or two to look like and some basic advice. . . Gygax posted:Make the encounter exciting with the proper dramatics of the animal sort - including noises! If the encounter is with an intelligent monster, it is up to the DM to not only provide an exciting description but also to correctly act the part of the monster. Rats, for instance, will swarm chitteringly from their burrows - a wave of liceridden hunger seeking to overrun the adventurers with sheer numbers, but easily driven off squealing with blows and fire. Goblins, on the other hand, will skulk and hide in order to ambush and trap the party - fleeing from more powerful foes, but always ready to set a new snare for the unwary character. Part 3:How To Be An Effective Dungeon Master Basic Advice: This is mostly just “what is a RPG?”-level stuff, but it does emphasize that the DM’s job is to be ‘neutral’. It explicitly tells the DM not to punish players for creatively sidestepping things that were supposed to be big challenges, but also not to go easy on the players if they’re doing badly. The module provides the setting, the players drive the action, and the DM’s job is just to try to make sure that the simulation runs smoothly. Time: Detailed rules on how time passes in a dungeon, including how many feet a party moves in 10 minutes--a thing I have never seen a GM actually track in my life. Interestingly enough, there’s no mention of wandering monster checks here--the prime reason any of this needs to be tracked in the first place. Dividing Treasure And Computing Experience: A bunch of guidelines on how to fairly divide up treasure. This feels like more player-facing info, so it’s a bit odd that it’s here. There’s also rules for calculating XP (including GP=XP stuff), but I think it’s also just following standard D&D rules. Preparation For The Use Of The Module: This is mostly generic DM advice on things like how to handle camping, mapping, character creation. It does open with this quote, however. . . Gygax posted:The use of this module first requires that the DM be familiar with its contents. Therefore, the first step is to completely read through the module, referring to the maps provided to learn the locations of the various features. A second (and third!) reading will be helpful in learning the nature of the monsters, their methods of attack and defense, and the treasures guarded. Background: Boxed text to read the players. . . Gygax posted:The Realm of mankind is narrow and constricted. Always the forces of Chaos press upon its borders, seeking to enslave its populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures. If it were not for a stout few, many in the Realm would indeed fall prey to the evil which surrounds them. Yet, there are always certain exceptional and brave embers of humanity, as well as similar individuals among its allies - dwarves, elves, and halflings - who rise above the common leveland join battle to stave off the darkness which would otherwise overwhelm the land. One really cool thing this section does, though, is have the players start the game by arriving at the keep’s gates, where the guards yell down at them to one-by-one identify themselves and state their business, which is actually a pretty great way to diegetically handle character introductions at the start of a campaign. DM Notes About the Keep: This is formatted to be a part of the Background, but it’s all about how the Keep is run so I’ll put off covering this until next time.  Thoughts So Far Alright, we would expect this to be the segment of the module that does the meat of the heavy lifting when it comes to teaching novice GMs how to run dungeon crawls. What does it seem to be teaching so far, and how successful is it at doing so? First off, I just want to say that I really dislike how this module handles information presentation. Everything is so dense! Trying to find specific information in real time is extremely difficult, since most of this section is just lines and lines of occasionally-labeled paragraphs. There is bolding, but seemingly for emphasis rather than clarity. The text is near-unskimmable. The sections aren’t really distinct, either. Notes for the Dungeon Master contains some basic info about the module, followed by some random D&D rules, followed by some advice on running encounters. The whole thing feels slightly stream-of-consciousness, placing the onus on the GM to study the module like a holy book in order to extract its secrets over time. Anyway, given what we’ve seen so far--what playstyle does the module seem to be teaching? The GM is a neutral party: The GM’s job may be to facilitate fun, but the GM’s job is more akin to a game engine than a party host. In the same way that it wouldn’t be fun for the computer to start pulling punches if it looks like you might lose in a hardcore video game, the GM refusing to let the PCs lose if things turn against them would deny a certain type of fun to the players. On the flip side, if the PCs find a way to ‘break’ the module, the GM’s job is to be happy for them rather than to punish them. The Players Default To Heroic: The module’s boxtext lays out that the PCs are expected, by default, to be here to fight back the hordes of Chaos. At the same time, it does seem to leave open the idea that they could switch sides if they wanted. Which brings us to. . . Sandbox Play: Players are expected to drive the action. They pick what their objectives are. They choose where to go, and when. There’s no time pressure or urgent quest that needs to be taken care of--just a home base, a dungeon, some monsters, and some treasure (which grant XP). While I love sandbox play, I think this is a pretty big ask on new players--a few more easily ignored signposts pointing at ‘default play’ feel like they’d be helpful. Monsters Have Inner Lives: Monsters aren’t just meant to be pure combat encounters--they’re meant to be full-blown (mostly hostile) NPCs that are pursuing their own motivations and actively trying to get one over on the players at the same time the PCs are trying to get one over on them. They shouldn’t fight to the death if they have nothing to gain, and once they go off-camera they should continue to be active parts of the game--recruiting backup, laying traps, moving out of the dungeon, inventing new defenses, and so on. Episodic Play: The PCs typically begin each session in a well-guarded Keep, then delve into a wholly distinct dungeon, only to return before the session’s end to recuperate and pawn off their loot. While what happens during one delve may impact what’s going on in the dungeon the next time the PCs return, each session is its own little self-contained story. This seems especially important when you’re expecting a party size of ‘six to nine player characters’ and you need to be able to allow players to drop in/out easily. Alright, that’s it for the intro. Next time we’ll take a look at the Keep itself--this is where the design philosophy of the module starts getting real weird and where the real fun of this reading begins.
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Jul 28, 2020 23:50
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Der Waffle Mous posted:You joke about the 20d6 rats but then you realize the original module expected you to fully run every one of the rats individually plus their blinged out rat lord. I will say, 20 giant rats is more reasonable to run in B/X than it is in a modern system, in that combat is just way faster. It's still pretty ridiculous if you just run it pure RAW. Which actually previews one of the big things I'm going to be talking about with B2! So much of the dungeon Just Doesn't Work if you run it like Diablo. It really exemplifies the "combat as written is tilted badly against the player, so it's the player's job to find creative ways to tilt combat back in their favor (if not outright sidestep it)" philosophy that old-school D&D has. Because, oh man, if you think the rat room is bad you should wait for Literally Just 40 Kobolds In A Medium Room.
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Jul 29, 2020 01:49
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MonsterEnvy posted:I quite enjoyed the reincarnated version of the book. Lots of Commentary and stuff for it. I haven't ever gotten a chance to read it--that pricing is pretty brutal. I'd be very curious to hear if any of what I say here goes against any of the official commentary, though. kommy5 posted:A 'sandbox' approach for one of the first modules is a bit of a surprise to me and it's one of the few cases I'd use a pre-made for GMing. Sandbox was actually pretty default when it comes to early modules! I believe the big shift to modules that were more linear and story-based was a 2e AD&D thing, and before that modules tended (although there are always exceptions in every era) to be more about just giving an interesting setting for PCs to make trouble in.
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Jul 29, 2020 02:32
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B2: Keep on the Borderlands -- Part 2: The Keep The name of this module always confused me a little. The whole point of the module is the dungeon, right? The keep is just there to act as a home base for the players to operate out of. Why isn’t this module named “B2: The Caves of Chaos”? That’s the mystery we’ll try to answer with this installment! First off, the Keep’s description starts on page 8 and ends on page 14, making it 7 pages long. For reference, the intro was 5 pages, while the caves themselves are going to be 10 pages. That’s pretty intense for a place just meant to serve as a safe camp for the PCs to rest at. Furthermore, it’s keyed in exactly the same manner as the dungeon, with exhaustive notes on how many gold pieces various bureaucrats' ink-wells are worth. It goes into a lot of detail about exactly where each NPC hides their personal savings, and exactly what those savings consist of. Huh No NPC within the Keep has a name. Some people praise this decision, because it means the Keep is generic enough that you can really run it in any kind of setting--it’d be trivially easy to drop this into a European, Arabic, East-Asian, etc themed setting. I’m not a fan, personally--it’s extremely easy to just ignore given names if they don’t fit the setting, and in practice this just leads to my brain seizing up periodically when my players ask what someone’s name is. DM Notes about the Keep The very first things we learn about the keep are its defenses, which are pretty overwhelming Human Guards: Professional soldiers guard the Keep. It gives some general tips on how the guards patrol and how frequent check-ins are. By a quick count there are over 200 guards/captains/etc, which is actually pretty close to how many sentient monsters there are in the Caves. Brave Civilians: many of the civilians living within will also take up arms if the keep is attacked, and those who don’t will assist as messengers / porters / medics / etc. If anybody causes trouble they call for guards, who arrive in 1-2 rounds. Ballista: They do 2d6+2 damage and can fire once every 4 rounds. Catapults: They do 1d6 splash damage and can fire once every 8 rounds. Magic Wards?: It says that you can have magic traps placed at your discretion that detect invisible creatures within 10’, but doesn’t give any guidance on where to put them It’s Just Hard To Get Into: Finally, the keep is just on a steep hill, with only one ramp leading up to it, and has huge walls fully surrounding it. It’s in an extremely defendable position. After that the module spells out a few other notes about the Keep as a whole. Floor Plans: There is a map of the Keep in the center of the book, but it also advises the GM to draw their own maps for any rooms in the Keep they’re expecting players to spend a lot of time in (the tavern, etc). There’s even graph paper and an example in the back of the book. I guess this is to help players practice mapping in a low-stakes environment? You have a general sense of the size of each building from the overmap, and you have a description of the buildings’ contents, so you only need to place internal walls/tables/etc. Rumor Table: Always one of the best parts of a module, it gives the GM a d20 table of rumors to feed their players, advising them to give each player one at the game’s start. Most of the rumors are true, but plenty are misleading or irrelevant. It also says that more rumors can be learned by talking to NPCs, and actually gives a tiny example of a sub-procedure for how to gain them--if a PC talks to the tavern keeper they roll a reaction check (2d6+CHA modifier). On a ‘good’ result the rumor they’re told is guaranteed true. Inner Bailey Entrance: The Keep is in two big segments--the Inner and Outer Bailey. The Outer Bailey is full of civilians, adventurers, merchants, and so on, while the Inner Bailey is where the Castilian and the guards operate from. PCs are initially barred from entering the Inner Bailey, but if they “perform a heroic act in behalf of the KEEP, if they bring back an exceptional trophy or valuable prisoners, or if they contribute a valuable magic item or 1,000 or more gold pieces to the place” then they’ll be invited to meet the Castilian, and if they behave themselves the Castilian will start feeding them ‘suitable’ quests. If they prove themselves further they’ll even be able to ask the Castilian for assistance from Keep soldiers when raiding an especially dangerous part of the dungeon. This feels a little backwards to me. Once the players have made it to the Caves a few times they’re likely to be intertwined enough to not need much motivation to go back, but this module tends to have a pretty rocky start without the GM inventing an initial quest wholesale to give the PCs. I think that’s pretty easy for A Good DM to come up with one, but I do wish the module did more to signpost that this is something a novice GM should be doing. After The Caves: The module also gives advice that, once the Caves have been completed, the PCs might continue to use the Keep as their base of operations as they delve deeper into the realms of chaos.  Areas of the Keep I’m not going to list out all 27 buildings in the Keep, but I will note some of the more interesting ones. Gate: A few rooms are dedicated to really detailing the protocols for letting in visitors to the Keep. There’s a Corporal of the Watch who’s grumpy, but has a soft spot for flashy adventurers and pretty women. Storage Places: There are stables and a warehouse where people can leave low-value items under lock and key. Each ‘wagon-load’ of stuff stored here is worth an average of 100gp. Private Apartments: There are two fancy apartments used to hold wealthy NPCs. The first has a Jewel Merchant (along with his wife and some bodyguards), but the second is a jovial and respected Priest who is secretly a spy sent by the Chaos Cultists. If the players ask him for help he’ll accompany them with two other clerics, then turn on them “during a crucial encounter with monsters” and try to kill them all. Shops: There’s a smithy and a trader, who the players can buy and sell from but who are otherwise unremarkable. The trader likes furs? A slightly strange detail, given that this module is almost entirely about fighting intelligent monsters, and I don’t remember any trade-worthy skins listed in the dungeon. Loan Bank: You know what’s a staple of D&D? Taking out loans. This heavily guarded bank gives out loans, trades cash & gems (for a 10% fee), and stores valuable items--for free if the item is being left for at least a month, and for a 10% fee otherwise. There are also a bunch of exotic (but not useful) items for sale, and a list of what’s in each safety deposit box. These stored valuables are worth a lot. Like, ~$27k gold pieces a lot. Enough to take six first level characters straight to level three in one go. Tavern/Inn: These are both pretty generic, although the book does include a pretty exhaustive menu of all the food and drink for sale in the tavern, along with their prices. There are also a bunch of percentage chances that different groups of people are present getting drunk--rolling these gets pretty annoying, but has good adventure hook potential. Guild House: The module goes deep into how being a trader or artisan works in the Keep--what your dues are, what services are offered, and so on. This is all seemingly pretty irrelevant to the PCs, but one of the prisoners you can rescue from the Caves just offers to get you all registered as an official merchant company with the Guild House when freed, so maybe it can come up? Chapel: The Curate is a 5th level priest with a ton of magic items. If he likes you, he might tell you that he distrusts the traveling Priest (the one who’s secretly a cultist). The module also goes into detail on how much money is in the Chapel at any given time, when it gets transferred into the bank, and who does so. A Ton of Guard Stations, Towers, Gatehouses, Calvary Stables, Etc: Tons of details on the defenses of the fort, where each guard is stationed, where guards perform weapons practice, etc. The Fortress: This is where the Castellan (the guy who runs the keep) operates. He’s a 6th level fighter, with a 3rd level elf assistant, and a 2nd level cleric scribe. Their rooms are probably some of the densest concentrations of treasure in the module. The Castellan “is a very clever fellow, but at times he can be too hasty in his decisions. His bravery and honesty are absolute. If a guest asks him any question, he will do his best to answer, providing that it does not compromise the security of the KEEP.” And that’s the Keep! Why So Much Detail? My first reaction to the Keep was confusion. Why is it so densely keyed? Why are you telling me that the tavern keeper has 82cp, 29sp, 40ep, and 17gp hidden in an old crock under a flour bag in their back room? Why talk so extensively about exactly how many guards there are and what their patrols and strategies are? I’ve talked to people a fair bit about this, and I think there are a few possible explanations (and that the truth is probably some combination of all of them). Gygaxian Naturalism: Gary Gygax is infamous for his love of fantasy realism--maybe all this detail work is just Gary being Gary? I think this answer is a bit of a cop-out; Gygax’s preferred style was definitely detail-heavy, but it’s probably the case that he liked naturalistic details because they encouraged cool things to happen in-play, rather than being for its own sake. Keep As Campaign HQ: Maybe all this detail is because the PCs are supposed to continue operating out of the Keep long after they’ve cleared the Caves. This module is named after the Keep itself, rather than after the Caves--maybe the main focus of this module is to lay out an example home base for GMs to use, with the dungeon as bonus content. Monsters Attack: Could all the detail be relevant because it’s intended that the monsters might attack the Keep itself if provoked by the players? Why would the module go into depth on which NPCs would or wouldn’t defend against an attack if no attack is ever meant to happen? I don’t think this explanation is especially convincing, although it is pretty cool. Although the Keep and Cave forces are at about the same level of strength at the campaign’s start, the populations of monsters in the Caves tend to drop fast as PCs show up, and the Keep’s defenses are so strong that it really doesn’t feel like a monster attack is a credible threat. Keep As Dungeon: All the details on exactly what’s in each room of the Keep, how the guards patrol, whose treasure is stored where--it’s because the PCs are low-key expected to treat the Keep as the true dungeon of the module. This module isn’t about a dungeon-crawl--it’s about a heist. This is my favorite interpretation, and it’s backed up by a few things. First off, the Keep has a crazy amount of treasure in it--the bank vault alone has more treasure in it than any individual cave in the dungeon, and the Castellan’s room has more than (I believe) all but one. There’s a lot of gp to be earned by heisting the Keep. The bank’s loaning policies also point at something weird going on. Why would storage of treasure be free, but only if kept for a long period of time? Is the hope that adventurers are just going to put their stuff in storage here, go into the caves, and then all die? It’s not especially supported by any other part of the text, but how I’ve decided to run the Keep from now on is as a place dedicated to extracting as much treasure from adventurers as possible--the whole economy is propped up on confiscating the property of dead adventurers, charging all sorts of nonsensical administrative charges, and just generally trying to exploit adventurers as much as possible. Just really emphasize how hungrily the Keep’s NPCs treat the players, and flaunt just how much money there is flowing ostentatiously around the Keep, with the hopes that the players gain a few levels going into the Caves and then turn their attention to the “true” final boss of the module--the Castellan himself. Final Thoughts The Keep is fine. I think there are some cool things you could do with what they’ve given you here, but it does feel like there are a few opportunities seriously missed here. NPC Motivations: The NPCs in this module are almost all pretty flat as written. Some have small details provided (the tavern keeper hates small beer and loves honey mead), but there just isn’t that much going on at the Keep itself for the PCs to intertwine themselves with. No hidden intrigue or factions at odds with one another or secrets being kept or NPCs with urgent requests for the PCs to attend to. Just people doing their jobs, sometimes quietly judging you based on your drink choices. They give the Castellan a sliver of a personality, but it’s pretty boring and more or less what you’d come up with on the spot. The one obvious exception to this is the evil Priest, who’s great. His gimmick of going along with the PCs and trying to kill them is fine, but the fact that there’s an enemy spy hidden in the Keep is good fodder for all sorts of hijinks. I really wish there was more like that going on. Unlabeled Map: This is more of a gripe, but I really don’t like how the Keep’s map is numbered. It’s just a huge smush of buildings next to each other with only numbers for identification, meaning that any attempt to describe what the PCs can see from any given spot in the Keep requires thirty seconds of flipping between pages figuring out which buildings are which. Too Safe: The Keep is a little too competent-feeling for me. It’s described as being one of the most remote bastions of humanity, but it’s also this super wealthy place full of banks and cavalry battalions and 200 soldiers. This is a personal opinion, but I think it’d be way more compelling if it started off more precariously, with the threat of monster invasion looming, and was able to truly control the surrounding areas only through the help of adventurers. Next time we’ll take a look at the smallest section of the Module: Wilderness Adventures!
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Jul 30, 2020 02:03
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B2: Keep on the Borderlands -- Part 3: The Wilderness Of all the parts of this module, this is the one I know least what to do with. It’s got a fair number of custom rules, and I’m not sure to what extent they all add up. The module comes with a map of the wilderness surrounding the Keep and the Caves, numbered with the locations of the Keep, the Caves, four non-Caves points of interest, and the Cave of the Unknown. There’s a big old road connecting the Keep and the Caves, although the Caves are set off from the road by about a half-hours walk worth of forest. The module doesn’t seem entirely clear to me on how easy the Caves are supposed to be to find. Presumably they aren’t trivial to locate, since the book talks a bit about how the players are likely to find trouble as they attempt to find it. When I’ve run it, I ruled that there are a few NPCs in the Keep who know where the caves are and can be hired by the PCs as guides, but that the general location of the caves (about two days east along the road) is pretty well-known. This approach does have a downside, though, which I’ll get to in a bit. Adventures Outside the Keep There’s a little bit of advice on wilderness travel before it launches into the various sites of interest. A fair amount of it is what-you-would-expect filler (there’s a map), but there are a few interesting things going on here. Caves of the Unknown: There’s a site marked “Caves of the Unknown” on the map, and the GM is supposed to design their own dungeon to be placed here. That’s pretty cool, and meshes well with the idea of this as a bridge for new GMs to help them transition to creating their own content. If the GM hasn’t had the chance to do this yet the module advises them to prevent the players from finding it due to “a magical illusion”. Overland Movement Speeds: You can move three squares on the wilderness map in one hour by default, or two in the forest, or one in the fens. This means that it takes around 15 hours of travel to get to the Caves from the Keep by road, which feels like a lot. I don’t think I ever noticed these rules before, so I’ve pretty much always just said it took 3-4 hours to get there or back. I may have been underselling the wilderness part of this game. Camping Rules: Or not. There are explicitly no random wilderness encounters in this module, unless you’re sleeping within six tiles of one of the four sites marked on the map. There’s a cool little mechanic for that (you roll a d6 and if you get the equivalent of your distance from the camp or higher they find you), but it does mean that most of the map is just a big sprawling void of gameplay. This gets weirder, because none of the four sites are anywhere near the path to the Caves. Three out of the four are actually across a big honking river to the south, and the fourth is dead north of the Keep. None are within six tiles of the road that connects the Caves and Keep.If the PCs have even the lightest clue of where the Keep is (far to the northeast) there’s basically zero chance they would ever happen on any of these by chance. There are also some rules for standing watch, tracking food, foraging, and some advice that the GM just tells the PCs not to bother foraging and go back to the Keep instead if they run low on food. Going Off-Map: If the party gets so lost they go fully off the map provided by the module, the GM is advised: ”Gygax” posted:If the party attempts to move off the map, have a sign, a wandering stranger, a friendly talking magpie, or some other “helper” tell them that they are moving in the wrong direction.  Area Map Encounter Areas Here are the four points of interest listed on the map. Mound of the Lizard Men: A bunch of “exceptionally evil” lizardmen. They’re nocturnal and don’t mess with people during the day unless their mound is distrubed. 7 males, 3 females, 8 children, and 6 eggs. The males attack if you get too near, and the females defend the nest if you try to enter it. This leads to a whole hosed up rabbit-hole I’ll talk about in a bit--I really don’t like how this module tries for ‘naturalism’ by having a bunch of monster women and kids everywhere. Spiders’ Lair: Two spiders (I assume giant?) and an elf skeleton with a magic shield. Raiders’ Camp: About a dozen “chaotic fighters” spying on the Keep. They have some pocket change and a cask of wine. They don’t seem to be related to the Caves at all. I could see them being interesting if there was a chance they waylay you on the road each time you travel or something, but as is they’re pretty much just a random encounter with no treasure you only find by walking in the opposite direction of the Caves. The Mad Hermit: A crazy 3rd level Thief with a pet mountain lion, who lives in a tree. He pretends to be a holy man living in isolation (and might even believe it), but will attack the party unprovoked at a random time, calling for help from his cat. He has some gold, a potion of Invisibility, and a +1 dagger under his bed. This is the only encounter the PCs might conceivably run into while looking for the Caves of Chaos (although they’d have to be really lost to do so), and is also probably the most interesting of the wilderness encounters. That isn’t really saying a lot, though. And that’s it for the wilderness section. These all pretty much feel like filler. I could see some Keep NPC giving the PCs a quest to deal with one of them, but given that none of them really have any ties to the Caves, the Keep, or any other encounter they just feel like a distraction from what’s interesting about the module. 3 females, 8 children, and 6 eggs: where things get indefensible The lizardmen having women and children is just the first instance of something this module is going to be doing a lot. This module loves dividing up monsters into male warriors and female civilians, as well as having a ton of humanoid children running around. I am not a fan of this for a whole bunch of reasons--there’s the obvious sexism, but also it means that you kick off a mini refugee crisis every time you clear out a cave. Unless you just butcher the women and children, which. . .well, I’ll let these Gygax quotes speak for themselves (from a Q&A forums thread about D&D in general, and isn’t specifically about this module). TW: Gary Gygax being just mind-blowingly racist, genocide apologia, endorsement of slavery Gygax posted:Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old adage about nits making lice applies. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before they can backslide. loving yikes. A lot of this write-up has been me trying to figure out the module’s original intended playstyle, but that raises Big loving Questions when what you find is poo poo like this. What do you even do when you find out that the father of D&D (and, by extension, the father of both tabletop and digital RPGs in general) was not only pretty pro-war crime in his RPG work, but also actively drew positive comparisons between RPG war crime and real-world genocide? I don’t have a great answer for this. Okay, so if looking for the intended original playstyle on the topic of how to handle lizardman children isn’t going to take us anywhere good, how do we salvage things? Pretty much no matter what, I’d just cut the children out of the module when I run it wholesale--that lack of agency or ability to survive on their own really just leads to nothing good. I’d also run the male/female divide as a “warrior/civilian” split, without the division of labor being gendered. I’m still not sure if there’s anything interesting to be added by having noncombatant monsters. What happens when you kill all the warriors--do you just tip your hat to them and move onto the next cave? That’s awkward. Do they fight back, or run to bring over humanoids from other factions? Then you pretty much just need to butcher them--I don’t see the benefit to differentiating them from the warriors. Do you take them as prisoners of war? What would you even do with them afterwards? Hold them in PoW camps? Do prisoner exchanges with the Goblin Empire? Take them back to the Keep, just to be hung and buried in a mass grave? The implication of having noncombatants also just makes the whole module a lot more sinister-feeling. If the Caves of Chaos are a staging ground for goblins, orcs, and chaos cultists to make raids into human territory, then a bunch of adventurers going into them and pushing them back (while pocketing their treasure) makes perfect sense. If the Caves of Chaos are just a goblin village on the edge of goblin territory, then going into the caves and killing everyone just becomes home invasion. I can almost justify noncombatant orcs as just being the support staff to the orc soldiers, but if there are kids running around I’ve got nothing. I don’t even think there are any children listed anywhere in the Keep. The more I think about it, the less I can justify having noncombatant monsters in the game--I just can’t think of anything fun to do with them, and I can think of a lot of ways they’d derail the game in deeply unfun ways. I’d probably just cut them out wholesale and maybe replace them with half their number in warriors. I’m trying to come into this module with a “let’s try it RAW” attitude, but this is just too much. On that bad tasting note, next up is the Caves of Chaos themselves. I’m honestly unsure how long it’ll take to get through them; although there are 64 rooms in the dungeon, they follow some extremely clear and regular patterns. I guess we’ll see next time.
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Aug 9, 2020 05:52
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Ithle01 posted:WOW. Just, holy-loving-poo poo-what WOW. Yeah. I had heard people call him racist recently for the "nits make lice" quote, but didn't fully appreciate just how explicitly, truly, undeniably real-world racist his statement was until writing this up. Like, it's not even a "some fantasy races are just irredeemably evil" statement you could bad-faith claim has nothing to do with the real world--he's just straight up saying that the reason it's lawful good to kill orc prisoners and children in D&D is because it was real life lawful good to massacre native american women and children. Honestly, I'm still digesting just how hosed up it was. It's leaving a real bad taste
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Aug 9, 2020 06:55
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Comstar posted:Did the various edition remakes of Keep of the Borderlands...deal with that? I think the Hackmaster version gets rid of the children at any rate. To be clear, the hosed up quote is from a 2005 Q&A on Dragonsfoot--a full 26 years after B2 was first published--and wasn't directly referring to B2 itself. I am curious how the reprints handled this, as well, though.
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Aug 9, 2020 07:16
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Night10194 posted:I think that's an excellent insight about the danger of low chances of success in horror games leading to overly conservative players. Because you don't want the players to be hyper-conservative in a horror game; you want them taking risks so that the horror happens, and fun things occur. Give players a 70% chance to do something and they'll try it much more often, and if you have players taking risks consistently something terrible is going to happen to them eventually anyway. This feels like a few lines of thought (that I'm generally into) combining into something that doesn't fully come together. I think it's pretty common in OSR games to think of skill checks/dice rolls as a backup plan. The "real" gameplay is positioning the fiction so that you have an overwhelming advantage--playing pure RAW and relying on your stats to overcome challenges is as boring and underpowered as playing 4e and only ever using basic attacks. It sounds like the 'advantage' system intrudes on this a lot, though. It's normally a great system, even for OSR games, since it takes you from "the odds are 50/50, but you only need to lose a few times to be hosed" to "the odds are strongly in your favor, but there's always a chance for things to go wrong" really elegantly--which can be a nice 'default' way of representing having found an advantageous position (but not one so strong that you just don't roll). It sounds like here it just takes you from "you're probably hosed" to "your odds are 50/50", while also discouraging you from letting good ideas lead to auto-successes. That is annoying. BinaryDoubts posted:Maybe you'll discuss more when you get to Stress and Panic, but I really hate the old-school D&D separate save system. If you want a class to be good at taking damage/fighting in melee but are worried that if they roll bad stats they'll be useless - maybe guarantee they have a good fighting stat rather than having a separate save vs. toughness system. (I also don't like the Fear and Sanity saves either: I wrote a small hack aimed at getting rid of them). I'm generally really against having stats, skills, and saves all in the same system. Hell, I love systems that can get it down to just one of those three (using stats as both saves and skills). That said, Mothership's set of saves is pretty evocative--the four saves are probably the most clear "hey, this is what this game is going to be about" statement on the character sheet. Making them distinct from the skill system does feel a little unnecessary mechanically, but seems like it's probably good from a "communicating what the game's about" perspective
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Aug 19, 2020 19:18
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Falconier111 posted:Sometimes I wish somebody would make a SRPG engine that ran off a version of DnD and gave OSR designers a bunch of coding lessons. That emphasis on randomization and probability manipulation that keeps coming up feels more suited to a video game where the computer can crunch the numbers for you. Granted, I gather running the numbers in your head and feeling smart when they work out right is part of the appeal. That is actually pretty much the opposite of how OSR stuff works. Like, fundamentally OSR stuff is all about how to fairly adjudicate fiction-first roleplaying. Hard mechanics exist to give guidance, but are never binding in the way that they are in digital games. To put it to a practical example, let's talk about how you might manage the question of "does the xenomorph check under the bed"? Option A is to make it based off a stealth roll, possibly opposed. This is okay, but in some ways is a weak fit for OSR play because you're spending the encounter thinking about game rules and abstract numbers instead of imagining and manipulating the shared imaginary space. The more that doing stuff in the fiction can give you bonuses to the roll (or negate the need for it wholesale) the more OSR this is, but the more time that you're consulting your character sheet and realizing that you have a +2 to stealth in the Mushroom Fields biome you're doing the less OSR it is Option B is to give people a sort of narrative stealth HP and make a whole sort of alt-combat system for hide and seek between the player and monster. This is even less of a good fit for OSR systems since it just drags more and more attention away from the fiction and towards abstract math systems, and can pretty easily result in events that work well on a pacing level but make no sense on a common-sense level--basically no matter what you do at the encounter's start there's no chance the monster's going to find you for at least a few beats Option C is GM Fiat--the GM just decides if you succeed or fail. This is obviously pretty lovely and railroady and unfair--it turns big resolution system of the game into playing the GM's whims, and even if you're trying to be objective it's real hard to adjudicate "do I decide to gently caress them over this time or later" in a way that's fun or fair. It's also a strawman option--while there are probably plenty of assholes and teenagers who use this, nobody's advocating for it as a legitimate way for resolving conflicts in RPGs, and those lovely GMs are going to lovely GM. Option D is that the player describes how they're hiding and the GM just makes a snap "on a scale from 1 to 10, how good of an idea does this sound like?" judgement, then just sets that as the number they need to beat on a d10 for the xenomorph not to find them. It's not really a formal mechanic, more of a luck check with the odds set by how clever the player is being. It's in some ways similar to option C, since it is still very fiat-driven, but it's way easier to rule "what are the odds this would work" fairly than it is to rule "do I gently caress you over this time or not". You is pretty much the core of OSR play--if you don't know what should happen during a game you just think up a range of possible options and then roll a die to figure out which of them happens. Option E is that you have a bespoke mechanic or table or something that you roll on to determine where the xenomorph checks. The OSR loves poo poo like this, but it's real important to note that it's more meant to be a writing prompt than world physics. If Option D is that you just improv a range of things that might happen and then roll to see which happens, OSR tables are just this but prepped before the game instead of on the fly. They let you set a tone for the setting and some default consequences for certain types of actions without being binding. They're also extremely GM-facing, and not the types of things players should have knowledge of.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:52
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B2: Keep on the Borderlands -- Part 4: The Caves of Chaos Okay, I’ve thought a while about continuing this review after reaching a dark place last time, and ultimately I’ve decided that Gygax is enough of a household name among anybody who’s ever going to read this that I’m not meaningfully giving clout to a racist by discussing B2 (and that he’s dead enough that he couldn’t use the clout to continue harm). It does mean I’m going to be a bit more skeptical while trying to find the ‘intended’ playstyle, however. Today’s topic is the big focus of the whole module: the Caves of Chaos themselves. A canyon hidden a bit away from the main road lined with almost a dozen different cave entrances, each containing a different faction of monsters to deal with. The module starts with some general info about the Caves, then quickly dives into the room keys. Let’s start with the general info. The Caves of Chaos Start: There’s some box text to read the players when they finally find the Caves. An oppressive aura, dead trees, and scattered bones line the canyon floor. The canyon itself is about 440’ wide, 200’ across, and 100’ deep. Notes for the DM: There’s basic description of how to read the topographic lines on the map (use them for outdoors, ignore them for the dungeon itself). The dungeon walls are rough-cut stone unless stated otherwise. Basic stuff. Ransoming Prisoners: There are actually rules for the monsters to ransom captured player characters--they charge 10-100gp or a magic item to release the players, and the clout they gain from this causes an extra 2d6 monsters to move in with them. That’s actually a pretty cool mechanic! Tribal Alliances and Warfare: This is, in my eyes, the most important paragraph in the book. ”B2” posted:You might allow player characters to somehow become aware that there is a constant fighting going on between the goblins and hobgoblins on one side and the orcs, sometimes with gnoll allies, on the other - with the kobolds hoping to be forgotten by all, and the bugbears picking off any stragglers who happen by. With this knowledge, they might be able to set tribes to fighting one another, and then the adventurers can take advantage of the weakened state of the feuding humanoids. Be careful to handle this whole thing properly; it is a device you may use to aid players who are few in number but with a high level of playing skill. It will make it too easy if there are many players, or if players do not actually use wits instead of force when the opportunity presents itself. There’s a lot going on in that tiny block of text. For one thing, none of these alliances or rivalries are mentioned anywhere else in the book (although some of it is hinted at--the bugbears have a bunch of kidnapped members of the other factions in their slave pens). Beyond that, it’s weird to me how downplayed this playstyle is--I’ve generally heard of this module as one all about monster faction play, but even as the module encourages you to “allow player characters to somehow become aware” of the factions, it tells you only to do this as a handicap for small/low level groups. Monsters Learning From Experience: The module encourages the GM to have the monsters learn from the behavior of the players--if a faction is attacked with burning oil during the first delve, they may find some of their own and use it against the players on the second delve. They should also try to counter whatever strategies the players are employing (setting up noise traps if the players are being stealthy, etc) and just generally be responsive to what the players are up to. “This method of handling monsters is basic to becoming a good DM.” This all seems like solid advice, and is really important to keeping this module from just being a bunch of rooms full of monsters to hack through. Emptied Areas: If the PCs clear out a cave, it should stay empty for “1-4 weeks”, at which point a new faction should move in (bringing new treasure). I’m not entirely sure what to make of this--it does give the dungeon an ever-evolving feeling, but it also makes the whole thing feel like a bit of a treadmill. If monsters just replace whoever you kill, are you even making things meaningfully safer for the Keep by coming here and killing these goblins? Encounter Areas Now begins the keyed room descriptions. There are 11 different zones, each given a letter (A-K) and a faction that lives within it, making up a total of 64 rooms. I’m not going to go super deep into each room, though, because there’s actually a lot of patterning here. All but a few of the zones follow almost exactly the same pattern. Cave Instructions: Some custom rules for the cave. There may be an active wandering guard patrol, or an ambush set up near the entrance, or maybe some magical effect going on in the cave. A Defense: Some sort of guard or trap set up at the cave’s entrance. Guard Stations: Rooms full of guards. Sometimes there’s one of these, sometimes several, and sometimes this is folded into the Defense. Storage Room: A room full of food/supplies/etc, usually with a locked door. Usually, but not always, has little to no treasure. Living Quarters: A room with a poo poo-ton of monsters in it, split between male guards and female/child civilians. These rooms are pretty goofy--it’s not unusual to find 40 monsters in a 30’x40’ room. These are probably the most confusing and hardest to run rooms in the dungeon. Faction Leader: The faction leader has their own room, usually with one to several lovers accompanying/guarding them. This is usually where the treasure is. Something Thematic: The factions will often have a single room that follows the faction’s theme. Prisoners, tamed beasts, feast halls, stuff like that. Each different group of monsters has a different random range of coins in their purses. So kobold guards in one room might have 1d6 silver, while guards in another room might have 1d6 gold. I guess maybe this is a way to show social hierarchies (those second guards are the trusted personal guards of the chieftain!), but in practice it’s pretty fiddly, annoying, and low-impact. If a faction has something cool going on with one of these room types I’ll mention it, otherwise you can assume it’s there and just kind of unremarkable. The Factions A. Kobold Lair There’s a ⅓ chance kobolds are hiding in the trees outside their lair, ready to attack if you try to intrude. Their defense is a pit trap with a loud enough mechanism that it’ll alert 6 kobold guards and 18 giant rats if you fall into it. The rats are led by a cowardly extra-giant rat wearing jewelry. Already, we’re in for a weird time if you’re running this as a straight tactical combat game--18 rats (2hp, 1d3 damage) is pretty brutal for a party of first level players, and if half your party’s locked in the pit trap it’s even worse. That said, it’s not as bad as it might seem on first glance--it’s basically expected that you’ll be bringing things like burning oil that can prevent more than a handful of them from attacking at a time, and that you’re using things like morale checks to make it likely they run away if you can survive the first round or two/kill a decent number of them. More on this topic at the end. Their common chambers are some of the densest in the dungeon--17 males, 23 females, and 8 children in a 40’x50’ room. It’s a dead end, too, so if you charge in at them they’re totally cornered. The Chieftain has some guards outside his room who hide behind cover and try to drive you off with a volley of ranged attacks. B. Orc Lair Their defense is one of the big iconic moments from the module--a row of decapitated heads line the entrance to their cave. One of those heads is actually a living orc who’s just sticking his neck through a hole in the wall, and if intruders show up he’ll quietly replace his head with a dead goblin and run to alert two sets of guards for a pincer ambush. Classic. They have a big old banquet hall, with an extra fancy chair for their leader. Their living quarters have 12 males, 18 females, and 9 kids, and their storage has some nice (but mundane) weapons. Their leader is extra big and tough, with a magic shield, but if he starts to lose he’ll run away through a secret door and beg the orc leader from zone C for help. He’s got a decent little treasure stash and a scroll with a 6-die fireball in it, which is basically a free one-time-use ‘one-shot everyone in this room’ card in a module of this level. C. Orc Lair (again) These orcs are rivals of the orcs from cave B, but they seem to like each other more than any of the other factions. That’s a cool dynamic--it seems like the actions of the players could easily either put them at each other’s throats or force them to drop their differences and team up. Their defenses is a bunch of trip-wires attached to an alarm and a weighted net trap. Their civilians and backup males are spread between two rooms, each with ~10 orc guards. Their leader has a magic throwing axe, some treasure, and a rope of climbing. D. Goblin Lair The goblin lair is super busy, to the point where you have a 50/50 chance of running into a patrol of 6 goblins for every thirty feet you walk. If they see you they’ll yell “BREE-YARK”--an alarm, but a potentially confusing one since one of the false rumors you can learn in village is that this translates to “we surrender”. If the goblins seem to be losing they’ll throw a big bag of money through a secret door to hire an ogre to help out. More on him in a bit. Their living quarters have 10 males, 14 females, and 6 children. The storage room has guards posted outside of it, seemingly because someone keeps stealing from it. It turns out there’s a secret door in the storage room’s back that leads to the hobgoblin caves, and if you linger in the room there’s a good chance hobgoblin thieves will sneak in to grab some snacks. E. Ogre Cave The ogre’s just a one-man faction living in a one-room cave. He works as a mercenary for whoever will hire him (including, potentially, the players). He’s got a bunch of treasure and a sweet cave-bear bed-pelt. A big, dumb, greedy, dangerous, untrustworthy mercenary is good stuff in a module like this. F. Hobgoblin Lair Their defense is a locked iron door with the message “Come in--we’d like to have you for dinner” written on it. There are a ton of small guard stations all over the caves. They have a bunch of prisoners stored in a room labeled as “Torture Chamber/Playroom/Food Storage”. Some of them are humans who will pay you for rescuing them with treasure/service, while some are humanoids of varying levels of grudge held against their hobgoblin captors. They have an armory with a bunch of weapons/armors in it. These are labeled exhaustively, but none of them are especially valuable or magical. G. Shunned Cavern This cave is the lair of some tough-rear end monsters. There’s a Gray Ooze hiding in the bottom of a pool of water, and an angry owlbear. There’s also some rats and some minor treasures. H. Bugbear Lair The bugbears are fun. Their deal seems to be that they just love loving with/kidnapping the other factions Their defense is a bunch of bugbears having a feast. If you show up they’ll put aside their weapons and offer you some big hocks of meat, but if you take them up on it they just sneak attack you with the giant hock of ham and try to murder you. There’s a good deal of treasure spread between the storage room/chief’s lair/etc, but the big prize seems to be the slave pens. There’s a whole bunch of humans/monsters locked in there, all super pissed at the bugbears and willing to help you drive them out if liberated. One of the humans is a 4th level fighter who’s secretly evil and will try to betray you if possible.  I. Caves of the Minotaur This cave is just a minotaur and some stirges/fire beetles that the minotaur seems to keep as food. That said, the cave is enchanted with Confusion, so whenever the players attempt to navigate around they end up moving in a random direction. The cave is small and optional enough that this seems like a cool labyrinth gimmick rather than a big annoyance. There’s a ton of treasure in a side-cave hidden behind a giant boulder. This is one of the bigger jackpots you can find in the module. J. Gnoll Lair Their defense is some archers. Their storage room has some cursed ale that will compel anyone who has a taste to drink so much they get wasted. They’re not too notable beyond that, though. Their males and females seem to both be warriors? Although the females are a lot weaker, which doesn’t really make any sense for a hyena race. K. Shrine of Evil Chaos This is the cave of cultists and undead, and is by far the biggest/most developed. It also has the lion’s share of the treasure in the module, easily more than all the other caves combined. That’s not even counting the huge numbers of Amulets of Protection from Turning that the majority of the undead are wearing. Its defense is a strange (seemingly magical) echo, magnifying any sounds the party makes, making it easier for monsters to surprise the party, and drawing the attention of a roaming zombie patrol. There’s a throne room full of bones that animate into skeletons as soon as you inevitably try to steal the gems from the throne, a crypt with a wight, a torture chamber with a torturer, and a storage room guarded by a gelatinous cube. There are scattered living quarters for cultist Acolytes around. The higher leveled of these can cast some cleric spells on you. There’s a Chapel of Evil Chaos with some cursed goblets and spooky tapestries. Anyone who touches a goblet will come to covet it, and if not saved by a dispel magic and a bless spell they will eventually become NPCs and return to the Caves as antagonists. There’s a Temple of Evil Chaos with some cursed candles that will hypnotize you into chanting evil hymns and alerting nearby guards. It’s attached to the Chambers of the Evil Priest, who will hit a gong and summon 20 skeletons and 20 zombies from adjacent rooms if he notices you. If you fight the priest and he’s losing he’ll run through a secret door and throw a ton of treasure behind him to try to distract you. There’s also a prison with a surprise medusa, sitting so you can’t see her face (and think she’s a normal human) until it’s too late. If she stones any of your party members she’ll try to blackmail you into helping her escape, promising to turn them back with potions of Stone to Flesh if you do so. This is a bit cruel, since it comes without warning, but the blackmail aspect is actually pretty cool and seems ripe for interesting outcomes. And those are the Caves of Chaos! This has gotten pretty huge, so I’ll save my commentary on how to actually run this for a future post.
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Sep 12, 2020 01:07
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Bieeanshee posted:This was tough to keep track of when you were ten. This could honestly be B2's motto. Some cool ideas, barely explained, and unnecessarily hard to keep track of.
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Sep 12, 2020 02:39
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MonsterEnvy posted:I actually like this one. Yeah, the problems that come from the AC treadmill are way worse than the ones that come from bounding. The fact that it makes summoning really strong is fair, but should probably be addressed from the summoning side instead. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I cannot tell you what the Athletics DC to scale a chain-link fence is I almost feel like the issue with skill DCs is almost too much useless guidance. Like... DC 5: Very Easy. An ordinary person could gently caress this up in a high-stress situation, but anyone competent never will DC 10: Moderate. An ordinary person would struggle with this, but could also totally succeed at it DC 15: Hard. An ordinary person would probably fail at this, but someone with training has decent odds at success. DC 20: Very Hard. A trained person would probably fail, but someone superhuman has decent odds of success. DC 25: Legendary. Someone superhuman would probably fail at this And, like, that's kind of all you need for everything? How hard is it to scale a chain-link fence? Well, I can imagine an ordinary person doing that, but I can also imagine them loving it up. DC 10. If there's barbed wire on top then DC 15. If they only have a few seconds to do it before the guard tower's spotlight notices them then DC 20. Trying to get into a rules-as-physics listed DCs for every possible action just muddies up what's actually pretty easy.
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Nov 18, 2020 08:00
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm already having trouble with whether, using your guidelines, scaling a chain-link fence should be DC 5 or DC 10. In fact, I'd lean towards DC 5 and you put it down as an obvious DC 10, which I think indicates how hard stuff like this actually is: I can't agree with you using the rules you wrote! I guess it depends on what you're rolling to avoid--what are the consequences of failure? If a failure is a setback (your bag gets caught in the fence and you lose an item, you freeze for a bit and lose some time in a time sensitive situation, etc) then that's something I can imagine happening to a pretty normal person. If the consequence is "you fall off it and hurt your leg" or "you try and fail and give up" then, yeah, that's a DC 5. Which is still kind of my point--context changes DCs. Climbing a fence with no time pressure is a completely different difficulty than climbing it while rushed than climbing it with the hounds on your heels. Trying to give it an 'official' difficulty doesn't really help people make good calls, and also requires a bunch of RPG-book memorization. And, honestly, it's okay if people have different rulings on what falls into what category. As long as you're internally consistent, that's just what sets the tone of your campaign. The DCs in a Coen Brothers-style game are higher than the ones in a LotR-style one, even for the same actions. (Please don't run a Coen Brothers movie RPG in D&D--there are such better systems for it)
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Nov 18, 2020 10:10
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Ultiville posted:Yeah, a more forward-thinking way to do a similar thing would be to remove to-hit rolls entirely. HP scaling already means individual threats develop into mob threats. Then you could tie secondary effects to the rolls, and offer guidance on how to simplify combat with tons of mooks by assuming average damage and secondaries never hitting, letting you kind of elegantly use mobs of low-level monsters as pseudo-minions. And this is literally just off the top of my head. Electric Bastionland (which is sort of Into the Odd+) does some interesting things with this. No to-hit rolls, PC health is capped at 20, armor is damage mitigation and only goes up to 3, damage rolls are always just an unmodified die, and a character only takes the highest damage rolled against them in a turn. The last one especially creates some cool dynamics, where ganging up on someone creates big diminishing returns. It's a game with a very focused combat flow, though--combats usually go super fast, and are more about the fallout from pre-fight positioning than getting to use a bunch of sweet powers mid-combat. It'd be hard to imagine WotC, which is so beholden to avoid ever actually endorsing a specific playstyle, going in that direction.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:12
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Ithle01 posted:I guess 4th was decently balanced, but that's in comparison to other editions of dnd and it also had a totally different set of problems on top of balance. 4e really felt like the extremely flawed but groundbreaking first entry in a new genre of RPGs, and it was a bummer that for like a decade after it came out there was so little other stuff coming out in that vein (I'm not sure I can think of anything other than Strike). I'm real glad that this seems to be changing, with stuff like Lancer (and, in some ways, Gloomhaven) getting big.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:40
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Ithle01 posted:Hypnotic Pattern is a great example of a spell that is far more powerful at lower levels than higher levels where more enemies will just be able to no-sell it instantly, but they can't exactly shrug off a Cone of Cold or something else. What are people's experiences (in play) of how much of an impact stuff like legendary resistances have on all this? Do they make damage a viable way to beat enemies, or does it just devolve into 2-3 turns of the party mages burning the resistances down before ending it all?
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Nov 22, 2020 22:45
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hectorgrey posted:Depends on what exactly you're after mechanically. Yeah, if you're looking for a dnd-like in terms of "rpg in a fantasy setting with a focus on tactical combat and a massive set of chargen customizability (but good)" it's hard to find something that hits all three, but there's tons of stuff that hit 2/3. To list a few I haven't seen in this thread (although I only started following it reliably a few months ago, so it's very likely some of these have been written up and I just didn't see) Lancer is the big hot thing in tactical combat games right now, but it's a scifi setting with weird reality-breaking mech-suits. Quest was touted as a possible D&D-killer a few months ago, and is all built around being easy to learn/optimized for streaming. Goblin Laws of Gaming is an enormous stone soup of a fantasy RPG system (there have to be over a thousand classes at this point, with multiclassing as a default) that tends towards the high weird while staying pretty rules-light.
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Nov 24, 2020 19:27
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JcDent posted:Isn't that one from the days where thieves sucked at thief stuff et al? I'm 100% of the opinion that B/X is the best and most coherently designed edition of D&D, but Thieves really don't work to the point that you should maybe pretend they don't exist. The best fix I have for them is to treat their Thief Skills as a sort of. . .roll this to auto-succeed instantly/superhumanly, otherwise use the same system anyone would for attempting one of these actions. Even with that, though, they still have wizard HP-scaling and near-wizard armor ratings. JcDent posted:What about Torchbearer and Strike? I don't know Strike well enough to comment on it, but I've played a ton of Torchbearer. Torchbearer is a weird beast. It's possibly the most system-mastery driven game I've played, where a whooooole lot of the strategy is not intuitive and is about juggling the various game resources (successes and failures, checks, conditions, gear, etc) effectively. It manages to walk this weird line between storygame, elfgame, and boardgame, and pulls it off by being extremely tightly and smartly designed. It's really good, but it's definitely one that you need to play a few times before it starts to click.
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Nov 25, 2020 09:36
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Epicurius posted:It stems from the anti-robot stories, which are themselves stories about industrialization...that modern factories and modern technology is stripping people of their humanity, making them just cogs in this vast, impersonal machine. I think that's where a lot of the underlying sentiment comes from., even if it carries with it the unfortunate implication that somebody who has an insulin pump, an artificial leg or wears glasses is somehow "less human" than someone who doesn't. Yeah, it feels like there's this conflation going on in the mechanic. Being able to use technology to modify your body isn't inherently dehumanizing--a prosthetic limb or gender reassignment surgery are both all about modifying yourself to be more 'you'. Replacing your hand with a gun isn't about being more you, though--it's about turning yourself into a specialized tool that performs a specific task (probably one decided on by the corp that paid for your surgery, and not you in the first place). Like, I'd argue that a gun arm is absolutely dehumanizing, but not because of any sort of 'essential humanity' coursing through your body. It's dehumanizing because you're now forever really good at shooting people and really bad at opening jars/carrying large objects/giving non-painful hugs/not constantly muzzle sweeping people/etc. It's dehumanizing because it changes your relationship with the world, not because of anything residing within your body. RPGs can be bad at tracking those sorts of soft contexts, though. Making it an objective bio-essence that you can deplete makes sense from an ease-of-bookkeeping perspective, it just gets real lovely once you start to think through the implications.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:08
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Legends of the Wulin is hands-down the densest concentration of eye-opening mechanics I've experienced in my evolution as a RPG person. The ways it gives players control over the narrative are all extremely cool and completely unlike almost anything I've seen in the storygame world. It's been a real long time since I've read it, and I've never been able to get a group together to play it, but I remember being pretty blown away by how they formalize player backstory/worldbuilding, the whole secret arts system, and above all the whole way that players get to choose one of two ways to engage with Ki conditions. I'm pretty sad it never got bigger than it did, but I'm real excited to see this writeup here.
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Apr 4, 2021 02:55
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Just Dan Again posted:Something I mention a lot in these reviews is that stuff is left up to the GM to figure out on their own. Leaving a bit of grey space in published modules or campaigns for GMs to slot in something of their own is actually something I really like. Here, though, it's very difficult to tell what's actually left unresolved and what's simply not mentioned in one place but appears at random hundreds of pages later. Also, none of these bits of missing information are presented explicitly as such. In 13th Age books there are often a bunch of story seeds that are designed as jumping-off points for GMs. You know for sure that there is no "official" explanation and you're given the tools to figure out one you like for your own world. Here you're left guessing: is there a solution to this somewhere else? Does this NPC have a relationship with this other NPC? Will these creatures care if I kill those others? The amount of information provided is inconsistent, which leads less to the feeling of openness and opportunity and more to a feeling of confusion and frustration. I really enjoy Stuart's modules, but this specifically is my biggest gripe about them. I've been running a game of Deep Carbon Observatory, and even having done a bunch of prep-reading, I'm constantly running into moments where I realize that character X that we're just now getting into the background of now was actually this throw-away encounter I ran two sessions ago without realizing it, or needing to pause play to desperately flip through the book because some vital piece of info about the current situation is actually on some page in a random and unlinked part of the book. I've also definitely found that the characters/situations are weird and complex enough that they really, really are not easy to run improv--they tend to be really compelling adventure seeds, but don't do a lot to help you convert the concepts they raise into an intelligible scene. I wasn't doing enough prep for the first few sessions I ran it, and ran into a bunch of really stilted moments where the PCs run into a buck-wild situation that the NPCs are unable to tell them about, so they just kind of wave as the PCs row past them onto the next encounter. I feel like those could have been way more interesting, but for them to work I really would have needed to think about coming up with a compelling hook that the PCs see upon arriving, and clues to drop as to what's really going on, and the moment to moment motivations of the various NPCs, and it just wasn't something I could manage mid-session. This is all largely on me, but PS modules really do tend to require a lot out of their GMs
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May 30, 2021 20:22
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Hipster Occultist posted:This of course, isn't what memes are and something like mind-control nanites would make a lot more sense, but I digress. The Degenesis conception of memes would be pretty cool in a game that was more. . .exaggerated? Like, a lot of fantasy is taking something complex and subtle and turning it into something more mythic and simple. A setting where you can craft advertising campaigns that take on a life of their own and aggressively infect people's minds isn't inherently dumb--it may not be realistic, but it's taking something real and making it more tangible and understandable. Saying that it fits badly with the otherwise 'realism' of Degenesis seems like a fair take, though.
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Jun 1, 2021 18:24
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DalaranJ posted:Edit: Like I think Mecha_Face admirably salvaged their review, but I'd also like to see someone review it in the context of whether it is a good adaption of Into The Odd. Personally, I was quite turned off by the tonal dissonance of cute mice using a ruleset as lethal as Int The Odd. Just based off the review, they look pretty similar but have a few differences--mostly focused on making the mice weaker than ItO adventurers. Using 2d6 instead of 3d6 for stats is pretty brutal. ItO uses the fact that character stat levels are effectively within the same 1-20ish range that a d20 has--skill checks are made with a d20, the highest damage you can do (and by extension, the most stat drain you can take) is a d20, etc. In ItO, an 'average' character is going to succeed ~50% of the time, while an exceptional one might succeed up to 90% of the time. Here, an average one is going to succeed ~35% of the time and an exceptional one might succeed 60% of the time. It also makes combat much more lethal, since STR is honestly your 'real' HP score. I think Armor might be a little weaker/inconvenient? I know it caps at 3 in ItO--although I think both tiers of armor in it also only give 1 defense, with the difference between them being that good armor doesn't encumber you. I think the idea in ItO is that 2 defense armor is magical, and 3 defense armor is mostly just for giant unstoppable monsters. Combat in the game is extremely designed to resolve quickly and decisively, with a near-guarantee that any attack you make on a target will drive the fight closer to completion. Armor is the one thing that breaks that rule, since if you roll less damage than your target's armor score your attack effectively 'misses', which is why it's kept real low. It's also why armor caps at 3, so that even a d4 damage attack has at least a chance of doing 1 damage. I want to say that the Backgrounds look a little weaker? ItO balances random stat and HP rolls by giving characters with lower HP and stats better items, so low-HP characters end up implicitly becoming wizards since they're the only ones who get magic, and stronger characters start off with less armor and crappier weapons and tools that are more flavor and less utility. The spread on starting gear here looks a lot tighter (and uses starting money instead of highest stat, which was correctly noted as being negligible even if you roll max-cash), and many characters seem to start with neither weapon nor armor, which is pretty brutal. This may have been a mistake on the part of the reviewer, but in ItO the PCs auto-win initiative (and can use that to auto-run-away, unless they're cornered). If that's not true here, that's an enormous increase to the game's difficulty. The game's combat is extremely swingy and dangerous, so in ItO the 'real' fight really comes down to coming up with some way to tilt the fight in the PCs' favor before it even begins. Not being able to abort a fight you don't have a plan for is kind of a death sentence in this kind of game.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:50
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Mecha_Face posted:7. Magic I hadn't noticed that this post had dropped when I wrote up my 'differences between ItO and Mausritter" post before, so I guess I'll add an addendum here. These magic rules are super different and also much weaker than ItO. In ItO, your magic items just give you special abilities, which I believe by default you can just do an unlimited number of times per day. The level-up rules are also different. ItO has you level up after just not dying from a certain number of dangerous adventures (with higher levels requiring that you've also trained up a sidekick up to a certain level). I love GP=XP, but I'm not entirely clear on what a pip represents in this game. Is it just a mouse-coin? Is the core gameplay dungeon-delving for tiny coins, but the dungeons are just animal themed? I think I'd probably enjoy Mausritter, but it's definitely a game that needs to be played with a certain mindset. It seems good for the tragicomedy telling of how 7 brave mice died stealing a small sack of corn from the barn, but maybe less good for anything with assumptions of heroism. The setting makes a certain amount of sense to me as a good vehicle for stories of (literally) small triumphs in a very large and hostile world, with the bravery of the characters underlined by how completely outmatched they are. I'd probably ask my players to roll up 3 characters from the start, so they can swap in a new one the moment their old one dies
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Jun 4, 2021 19:59
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By popular demand posted:One of the lessons that stuck with me from attempting software engineering studies is how you methodically reduce the number of components by identifying redundancies. Roll tables and GM-facing subsystems are both super useful, but both require a certain mindset to use that often isn't communicated well. If you take random roll tables as inspiration-lists and subsystems as tips on the types of things you should be factoring in when adjudicating a situation, they're both extremely useful learning tools. Maybe you roll on the table/use the subsystem in full the first few times, but after that you can just improvise in a way that gets you effectively the same results. They're great if treated as guidance/training wheels. If you're treating them as the inviolable physics of the game world then they start to get dumb and clunky, and there are definitely plenty of both GMs and designers who make that mistake, but they're incredibly useful if used right
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Jun 6, 2021 20:11
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Pvt.Scott posted:Maybe about 25% of the material is explicitly OSR rules, the rest is mostly system agnostic content generation tools and setting fluff. Stars Without Number has planet tags, and each tag has little blurbs about locations, complications, villains, allies, etc to give you a pile of ideas of what might be on that planet. Worlds Without Number has courts, where you can roll up details of the local power structure and their problems, etc. There’s generators for ruins and dungeons, stuff like that. There’s a faction system to run between adventures to help you simulate the local powers getting up to their own shenanigans unrelated to the players. Honestly, with lots of OSR games I think of all that system agnostic content gen stuff as "the game" more so than the play resolution rules. Many (but not all) OSR systems are designed as a sort of implicit bizarro-GURPS, where the meat of the game is a block of modular game-agnostic subsystems, and they just ship it with a set of "default" rules to run it alongside. If the core resolution system of something like SWN doesn't click for you, I don't think you're doing anything wrong by running it in another system.
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Jun 27, 2021 02:10
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Operant posted:All the NHP you interact with of note in LANCER are shackled or cascading. If you have one in your game it's likely to be in one of those states. Yeah, this is the thing that I think I'm still a little wobbly on. Is an unshackled NHP. . . 1) A superintelligent sentient being that's so smart most of its actions are incomprehensible in their complexity and subtlety, and that might do just about anything at a given time (it sounds like this one isn't the case) 2) An alien being that's so inhuman that its thought process that it just doesn't operate on the same layers of reality that humans do, and generally just manifests as effects that, while potentially grand in scope, lack any sort of aim and aren't really drivers of interactive events (think, like, Solaris, and how most of its oceanic actions are more like forms of weather than manifestations of will) 3) An alien being so inhuman that it really just doesn't affect the layers of reality that humans exist on in any meaningful way, and is more like invisible background radiation or an untapped fuel source until channeled into a human-designed vessel Or, to put it another way, with 1 you have a NPC that can just do whatever the story needs at any given time. With 2 you have an excuse for strange scenarios, but that act more as backdrop than NPC. With 3 you just have an abstract force.
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Jul 16, 2021 08:40
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Robindaybird posted:Pretty much, the Wall of the Faithless sticks in a lot of people's craw because it was solving a problem that didn't really exist, scans as fundamentally vile with a lot of ethical repercussions that the writers clearly hadn't thought out. I'm going to go against the grain on this one and say that I actually like the idea of the wall a lot. I just recently started playing in my first ever FR campaign, and the idea that each and every PC needs to tie themselves to a god has actually been surprisingly fun and interesting. Picking a god and figuring out what my relationship should be to them with my characters actually let to some pretty good places that I wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. To be fair, though, I didn't know the Wall was a thing up until this discussion, so I'm not sure that it's actually necessary. Just making picking a god as part of your character creation would probably be enough
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Sep 10, 2021 01:51
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Froghammer posted:Which is fine I guess? Par for the course for Cthulhu stuff; things tied to the Elder Gods are supposed to be powerful and unknowable and scary. If you wanted to craft a scenario where the PCs had to fail because you wanted to see their reactions to failure, an all-powerful ghost isn't the worst implementation of that I've ever heard. I've always felt like there's a tricky balance with CoC scenario design--the core of the setting are these enormous indifferent radioactive cosmic forces that the PCs can't really meaningfully effect, but you also want to let the PCs have some moment to moment agency so you often have a bunch of human cultists and evil wizards who are trying to spread that radiation but are small enough that they can be stopped. This is a weird worst-of-both-worlds, where you have a foe who is both non-interactively powerful, but is also just a petty (mostly) human with a mundane agenda (revenge). A CoC villain with the goal of 'gently caress you' doesn't really play to any of the strengths of the setting or system
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Sep 28, 2021 14:46
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Lemony posted:
Not going to lie, I can be a sucker for games with the premise of "a team of incompetents try to accomplish a mundane task, dozens die in the process", and some of the dumber rules here make a little more sense with that explicit design goal. I actually really like the "you have no inventory, pulling a random object from your pocket is a core action" system. It seems like a potentially good way to speed up chargen and cut out some of the fiddly bits of play. A bunch of the dumb stuff like instant death effects also make a little more sense if you view this as a Paranoia-style "you will die six times a session"-style game. I remember liking the concept of Kobolds Ate My Baby in this way, although I don't remember how well that one holds up on a design and taste level. That said, I feel like there's enough stuff contradicting that style of play in this game that I'm not sure it'd actually run. Chargen looks quick, but not quick enough for needing to do it multiple times in a few hours. Also, the, uhh, core premise makes this all a moot point. Yeesh
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Oct 11, 2021 21:54
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Down With People posted:For every faction, the book casts the agents as passive participants in the proceedings. Very little attention is paid to what the agents might try to do against each faction, instead allowing the faction to make all the first moves. Each progression also assumes that the average PC in this game just kind of bumbles their way through the story, naively trusting everyone they meet regardless of demeanour. It's like if instead of choosing whether you're in the FBI, CIA or DEA you're Larry, Curly or Moe. You don't fight the Lonely, the Lonely repeatedly punk you until you give up. You don't work with the Dream Syndicate, you get doxed by a gamer. You don't investigate the Sowers, you have dinner with them and act surprised when they ambush you (Jesus Christ there's a lot of loving ambushes in this book). I wonder if there's a better format for this? It sounds like these are all set up as basically linear stories, which is great from a 'reading for pleasure' perspective, okay from a 'reading for inspiration' perspective, and not great from an actual play perspective. Do you think it would work better for you as, like, a chain of possible things that could come up in play? Like. . . "If the players flash their badges, this is how the cult will try to diffuse them, but they'll also start to have them followed." "If the players notice their tail, the tail will do X." "If the players don't notice the tail, the tail will try to wait until one member of the group is isolated and then attempt to X." "If the players find out anything, the cult will attempt to murder member Y and blame it all on them. Here's how it goes wrong enough to just generate more clues." "If the players are discovered sneaking onto the compound, it'll kickstart X security protocols and character Y will panic and do Z." "If the players hit the DG library looking for a solution to CptnSnshn, here's how they might get pointed in the direction of Closing Of The Breach." "If the players do nothing, X happens on day 1, Y on day 2, and Z on day 3." And so on. It's basically the same content, just more explicitly not a railroad and offering ideas on things that might happen, rather than telling you what will happen. Just a little more permission to improvise, a little more player-focused, and a little more ability to address multiple contingencies.
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Oct 14, 2021 15:23
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Ithle01 posted:That is a crazy amount of page count for history that could have been dedicated to potential stories or more NPCs. Yeah, that's another section that really feels like it needs just a slightly different philosophy. History almost always feels like the least useful or interesting part of a setting to me. Like, if a history is more than a paragraph or two in complexity, I feel like it's becoming less and less usable mid-session and is just begging to either be misremembered or to gently caress up the flow of play by demanding book double-checking. Any history that goes beyond real basic premise feels like it needs to come with a 'hook tax' or something--for every historical event you mention, you have to include one interactive element in the current-time scenario. If there isn't a hook aggressively waiting for the PCs to stumble into it, it might as well not have happened, and if that hook doesn't lead to something potentially useful, there's no point to it (although I take a pretty broad view as to what's potentially useful--on some level finding ways to make things useful is half the PCs jobs). If one cofounder hosed over the other one in the past, that cofounder or their family needs to exist and have some info they're willing to give you for revenge, right? Otherwise, why even tell the GM? Maybe the opportunity is something the players need to pull on other threads to find, or maybe the book can just provide it as a "if the PCs start to flounder, you can use this to hook them back into the action", but if you can't think of a way it could be used in play it feels like a sign you should edit or cut it. All that said, I do think one of the cool things about RPGs is that they're a medium where absolutely any fact about the fiction can be used by the players to their advantage, with enough creativity. On some level, even history stuff you haven't done this to can still totally lead to good moments, and it's extremely likely that even the elements you came up with "this is how they could be used" plans for will get used for completely unrelated purposes, but it does feel like for each element in your game you should have at least one cool idea for what you could do with it, right? Just to make sure you have a proper concentration of useful options at hand
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Oct 15, 2021 05:22
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I went through a phase a few years ago where my group was playing way more Torchbearer (1e and then later 2e) than anything else, and it's a really weird beast. It has probably the tightest system I've ever experienced in a RPG, with both the good and bad things that come from that. As someone who mostly does OSR stuff, it's extremely uncanny--resembling old school play superficially, while being almost the least OSR thing I've ever played on a design philosophy level. My experience is that the game sets up an extremely complex and thought-through system of resource management, and that experienced play tends to be all about riding the rhythms of it as expertly as possible--you're trying to balance successes that accomplish your goals against failures that you need to level up stats against checks that you need to recover from conditions against a really stingy inventory system against the fact that every single roll you ever make progresses the attrition clock. It can feel really good when you get the hang of it, and it's clearly really well thought through and intentionally designed, but it's super opaque and unintuitive to learn. It honestly almost feels like a board game that uses narrative framing as interstitial tissue. I will say that I loved the way it used Instincts. Literally every die roll you make (even things that would be perception/insight/history/etc checks in D&D 5e) progresses the clock that burns out your torches and food, but if you have an Instinct you get to do the action for free whenever it becomes relevant. It really did make my characters feel focused and specialized in a way that few other RPGs have succeeded at
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Mar 13, 2022 21:21
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How good is the book (I guess either core or Book of Rooms) at explicit guidance on GM Moves? My read on this definitely moved through three main stages, reading through all this. First, the room descriptions did just come off like obnoxious edgy setpieces you steer the player through one after another--a bunch of descriptions of bad things happening to you one after another that you mostly just sit there and listen to. Then, with the move descriptions, it became clear that that's really not the case--the player moves sound pretty strong at, if not letting the player make their situation better, at least choosing which way it'll get worse. Which seems like it would actually do a pretty okay job at the whole "build the Bride's personality through play" thing people are saying they'd want. But now I'm just at the stage of wondering what the point of Book of Rooms is. Like, you said. . . Joe Slowboat posted:I think the woman in bondage (who shows up in some Actual Plays of the game with one of the authors playing the part of the GM is a good example of like, the point of that room is to ask 'was this an accident or did he kill his previous wife? Did she genuinely enjoy this intense fetish poo poo or was this coerced? What does being married to this man mean?' And that's a pretty clear and direct bit of guidance on how to run the scene, but if I tried to run the game without having read your posts I feel like I'd have had a really hard time coming up with how to present the scene, which then makes it sort of fall back towards a default edgy grindhouse style that feels like it would actively fight against the game's intended themes. Does the game give explicit help in understanding how to run rooms and what questions you're trying to get the players to answer (beyond just a big old binary 'do you trust or not')? Like, Dungeon World has its whole Instincts deal, which feels like a good way of letting the GM have a fall-back "if I don't know what a monster or faction would do, I can just fall back on this and it'll probably be interesting". Is there anything like this in BBB, or are they really just dropping some spooky imagery on you and hoping you can puzzle out the themes they wanted to explore with them through reverse engineering?
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Jul 25, 2022 05:53
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I think this gets at another of the reasons that Rooms is just a fundamentally kind of set up to fail--one of the really cool things about RPGs is that they're just toolkits a group uses to play out a story; ultimately it's the group that's coming up with the content of the game, and in a game with a lot of themes that different players will have different comfort levels with, the GM can to a large extent adjust things to taste. Some groups might want things more veiled and implied, others might distract from the real-world parallels of the abuse with over the top grindhouse imagery, and others might just be comfortable with taking it all head on. Also, importantly, the group can build a history of trust with the GM that they aren't just Piss Wizarding them. A book full of boxtexty descriptions of rooms can't really do any of that. It just seems like a recipe for making the game veer off into unwanted places unexpectedly.
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Aug 7, 2022 05:47
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