Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to TSR-era D&D, derived systems, and compatible content.

Broadly, OSR games encourage a tonal and mechanical fidelity to Dungeons & Dragons as played in the game's first decade—less emphasis on linear adventures and overarching meta-plots and a greater emphasis on player agency.

If you are new to the OSR, welcome! Ask us whatever you're curious about: we'll be happy to help you get started.

>Troves, Resources, Blogs, etc:
http://pastebin.com/9fzM6128

>Need a starter dungeon? Here's a curated collection:
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94994969/#95006768

>Previous thread:
>>95928925

>Thread Question
Pick your favourite:
- B1 In Search of the Unknown
- B2 Keep on the Borderlands
- B3 Palace of the Silver Princess
- B4 The Lost City
And tell us why, or give us a play report!

>What's an OSR?
>Don't know how to get started?
>The friendly n00b guide can be found here: https://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B until further notice.
(UPDATED TO VERSION 2.10 ON 2025-06-26)

Want to contribute to the thread but don't know where to start? Use this table.
>1. Make a spell
>2. Make a monster
>3. Make a dungeon special
>4. Make a wilderness location
>5. Make an urban set piece
>6. Make a magic item
>7. Make a class, race, or race-as-class
>8. Make a 4-10 room lair.
>9. Make a trap
>10. Roll 2D10 and combine

>>95955409
>Rappan Athuk
>the current 5e version has some extra entrances and areas now so that pic is also out of date.
Were these new areas only released for 5e? No old school version published?

>>95955556 (OP)
TQ: B2 is obviously the best of the bunch, and B3 is the weakest, in part because of its difficult publishing history. However, I think that DM Prata's B3.5 Palace of Queen Ehlissa is a good attempt to salvage it by combining the best parts of the original and revised editions. It still suffers in part from a fundamentally railroady premise, and additionally it can't decide whether it's for 1st-3rd or 4th-8th level characters, so it would need some extra tweaking to make it work well. It's a pity because it does have its share of iconic things, like the killer plants and Duchess and Candella.

>>95957008
Aren't the only differences in the revised version the removal of all the sexually explicit/suggestive material? Didn't realize it was substantively changed

>>95957017
Nope, there's several differences in the maps as well, rooms and stairways were added and/or removed. Notably, the Orange Cover one had an extra tower and two separate ways to access the upper level.

Would anyone mind giving me a run down of hyperborea and how it plays? Any comparisons ot osric or C&C? What books or resources would be good to have for it? I wanted to run a sword and sorcery setting and was kind of torn between that or mythras.

>>95955556 (OP)
Does D&D BX have SRDs? Like 5e?

A rule I thought was interesting was that if you win a melee combat you can push that enemy 1 inch away or retreat 1 inch (or 5 feet whatever distance measurement you will). That one thing massively increased the tactical complexity and interactivity of hand to hand.

>>95957584
No, but OSE does, and it's mechanically identical.

https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Main_Page

However, the OSE SRD uses the WotC OGL, which is a pain in the arse to use.

>>95955556 (OP)
From what I remember of it since it's been years, I like the original B3, just in tone it stands out the most. It reminds me of Castle Amber a bit and I think that, with a suitably shrewd party, you could reasonably construct a whole campaign that consists of these sorts of "fairy tale esque survival horror" locales.

It's also notable in that, to my understanding, it's one of the first old school items that WoTC uploaded in PDF format during the 3e era.

As a result of that, I strongly suspect that more people have read the original, cancelled B3 than the ones that was actually sold at retail PURELY because of how it was freely downloadable with no hoops to jump through for over a decade.

>>95957109
Did you just fucking make this? We might need some kind of /osrg/ mini-wiki or booru to hold all these cool diagrams. Shit's ephemeral at times and having to dig thru the arc is a bit annoying.

>>95957584
The closest you will get are retroclones like Labyrinth Lord or the new one I can't recall atm, but other people mentioned it has been effectively replaced by a better one.

>>95957610
>if you win a melee combat
Meaning?

>you can push that enemy 1 inch away or retreat 1 inch (or 5 feet whatever distance measurement you will)
Old School D&D uses 3.3 feet squares by default.

>>95955593
The S&W Addendum I mentioned in one of my posts was supposed to convert the new material from the 5th ed release to S&W. The listing says:

This volume includes the new Rappan Athuk levels converted for the Swords & Wizardry rules:

Level 0F: The Sea Cave Dungeon
Level 3D: The Gilded Demesne
Level 4C: The Last Stand
Level 5C: Syanngg a Song

However, since I don't have the 5th ed version, I can't do a direct comparison.

>>95957508
No

I found this in the archive. Was this something someone else made based on what they could find from Gary and so on, or was this the legit Zagig plan that never materialized?

>>95957680
meaning you rolled enough to hit.

>>95957508
OSRIC is an AD&D retroclone.

Hyperborea is a shitbrew based on "AD&D" 2e, and it includes bullshit like XP for story goals and showing up. Picrel. If you want to know what the problems are with that are from the /osrg/ point of view, it's discussed in detail in the n00b guide:
https://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B

>>95957760
>meaning you rolled enough to hit.
Not sure if EAFL or retarded. How is that different from hitting?

>>95957789
Forgot Picrel

>>95957789
That guide is noob terrible and incredibly misleading. It's how you end up with stunted losers who don't actually know what an OSR is or how to find the right way to play for themselves.

Calling it the /osrg/ point of view is also a fat lie.

>>95957680
It actually uses 10 feet/yard inches.

>>95958163
I'm sure you're going to give specific and constructive critique any minute now.
Any minute.

>>95958163
This is how you know it's excellent, by the way.

>>95958206
A quarter of it is mindless screeching about 2e, the remainder is a pretty flacid idea of what an OSR is.

It's a mix of superficial shit and the most lukewarm advice, particularly in the "how do I start" section, the part that new people would actually care about. Your definitions are all wrong, the actual games are barely described and definitely not given enough information to actually make an informed decision on, and I don't think you're even qualified to even provide that information considering how poor yet firmly-held your personal opinions are. You completely lack objectivity and just basic intelligence.

You're acting like it's some well constructed documented that deserves a point-by-point analysis when it's basically just you hoping you can inflict propaganda on people before they know any better.

>>95958304
You know it's bad because he kept trying to attach it to his failed OP takeover.

>>95958367
I think more than one person posts here besides you, anon

>>95958206
It's not a n00b guide. It's pure bullshit pretending to be one, and not doing a particularly good job at that.
If you're a n00b, you first get hit by his bullshit definition, one that's largely been rejected by the OSR and /osrg/ community by being far too narrow and strict in scope and doing nothing to actually lead towards fun or exciting games.
The start point being "just read b/x" is a joke. Not a funny one, mind you.
After that, we've got more bullshit that's trying to pretend that what makes an OSR an OSR is putting up with procedures. Following these procedures blindly with the faith that this is how all OSR are run is setting yourself up for a bad time, especially if you plan on playing with people who might not be so gung-ho on emulating an imaginary style of play that even Gygax disapproved of. You even included his "Strict time" quote that he's continually contradicted. It's incomprehensible, because even something as basic as the "rules not rulings" pillar is absent, when that is particularly something even Gygax considered was of vital importance and Matthew Finch put as his first and most important aspect of what an OSR was supposed to be. Somehow, you've managed to make a n00b quide so focused on rules that it's clear you've never had any idea of what an OSR actually was.
You've also filled it with various outright lies about stuff like C&C being a black sheep and inadvertently launching the OSR, and all just to try and prop up it's copycat OSRIC.
I'm amazed by how shameless it all is. It's not a /osrg/ guide. It's a fucking K&KA guide on how to be the dumbest little bitch.
Fuck off back to your dead forum.

>95958447
lol, 2efag has been hit with the K&K stick so many times he's started a one-man crusade to have them wiped from the history of the OSR, as if his hilariously and idiosyncratically revisionist version of history is the one trick osrg hates that's going to get his game at last accepted.

Anyways, the noob guide is solid and continues to be osrg approved. There's parts I'd quibble with (the 1:1 time outside of play thing is a particularly BrOSR item and should be highlighted as such, rather than a OSR universal, and then there's the CAG view that while B/X is simpler and thus a good thing to start with on paper, it teaches you bad habits that will hurt you in AD&D play), but overall, thanks for your work.

>>95958353
>>95958447
>Gets asked the mildest question in the world
>Immediately goes completely feral and schizos out
Maybe people would be more receptive to your inane faggotry if you tried being polite for a few threads.
Have you considered that?

>>95958533
Part of his insanity is that he's incapable of such. At least it makes him easy to spot when he inevitably starts shitting up the thread yet again.

>>95958527
>it teaches you bad habits that will hurt you in AD&D play

Like what anon?

>>95958678
I'd have to go back to the CAG arguments for that. Let me see what I can find and I'll repost later.

>>95958206
For a constructive critique:
1. Put away your ego. All of it. Especially the part where you think you can speak for all of /osrg/ but you then only give your very personal opinions.
2. Most of the opinions in this guide are wild and unhelpful. A guide should strive to be neutral, and should try to stick to facts, not super-opinionated opinions. You might need to actually try listening to more people before writing a guide, because then you'd realize that there's a lot more opinions on these topics than what you are portraying.
3. Focus on actually helping people start OSR games. You spend way too much time telling people what you think OSR should be and almost no time actually helping anyone new begin playing. There's many different ways for a person to start getting into OSR games, and it's not a bad idea to provide more options that can help ease in groups who are not all unified in their unabashed love for old school gaming, ie. gateway games with more modern approaches. People are going to be approaching OSR from many different backgrounds and with many different tastes, so a welcome guide should try to actually accomodate them.
More starting options and explanations of those starting options are what a n00b guide is actually for.
4. Make OSR actually sound appealing. I don't think anyone could read your guide and actually want to play an OSR. Even your one-sided gushing about what you think are staples is incredibly off-putting (particularly because it being all one-sided seems innately dishonest), especially because it comes after you started the whole guide just by complaining how people who don't play your way are simply confused and lazy.
5. I don't think your FAQs are actually FAQs. They are not the frequent questions new people ask here, and none are particularly helpful. Most real questions I've seen are stuff like "what's a good adventure" or "how do i get my group to play this" and not "tell me how I should feel about post-1983 books."

>>95958533
>Gets asked the mildest question in the world

>drops a load of shit on the floor
>"Please, Sir, whatever seems to be your displeasure?"

Wow you are fag.

>>95958745
I think this is a pretty reasonable set of critiques. We get constantly bombarded by people with incorrect ideas of what the OSR is, to the point that we've become extremely sensitive to it, but while it's useful to have some of that material, "Focus on actually helping people start OSR games" and "They are not the frequent questions new people ask here" are I think particularly key points.

>>95958527
It’s not a one man crusade, and your insistence it is and that your point of view is the right and proper one has been routinely challenged and even the nature of it being challenged refutes it. You keep lying to us about the history of this thread, the consensus of its members, and even trying underhanded tactics just to get your way.

Proven wrong about the definition of OSR? Well, this thread doesn't believe in OSR, it only believes in the OP.
The general argues how your interpretation of the OP is wrong? Well, that means I need to try and change the OP to use a definition no one else uses.
That gets completely rejected? No problem, I'll just keep trying by pointing people to an incredibly poorly written guide no one is going to read and I can pretend it has some degree of authority it definitely does not have.

If that's your new "tactic", to pretend we need to abide by that guide, then you are opening that guide up to scrutiny and debate that it clearly did not undergo.

>>95958823
Calling it a guide is wrong. It's practically pure propaganda.

Finally getting around to filling out the rest of my hex map now that the PCs are gearing up to leave the starting area. Are there any hexes you all have made that you're particularly proud of? Wilderness set pieces, encounters, etc.? Looking for inspiration.

>>95955556 (OP)
The guy at Wonderfilled Games, makers of the OSR game Giantlands, has been crashing out hard as fuck. It's kinda glorious.

>>95958823
I thought about writing a reply that once again tries to explain things to you, but then I realized that it's been done, a thousand times or more. All sorts of people have replied to you over and over, explaining why you're wrong, across hundreds of posts over dozens of threads, and you just keep bulling on, making the same weird and ahistorical arguments in your same weird style that makes you so easy to spot, and nothing will ever change until you move on to being obsessed with chemtrails or something more suitable for your schizo brain instead. You've proven nothing ever, except for the tragic effects of forgoing one's lithium prescription, and no one is ever going to accept your bizarre arguments.

>>95958959
I thought about writing a reply that once again tries to explain things to you, but then I realized that it's been done, a thousand times or more. All sorts of people have replied to you over and over, explaining why you're wrong, across hundreds of posts over dozens of threads, and you just keep bulling on, making the same weird and ahistorical arguments in your same weird style that makes you so easy to spot, and nothing will ever change until you move on to being obsessed with chemtrails or something more suitable for your schizo brain instead. You've proven nothing ever, except for the tragic effects of forgoing one's lithium prescription, and no one is ever going to accept your bizarre arguments.

>>95958929
>Hex maps
I found a good rule for overland travel is the players can see into all adjacent hexes. This gets exploring any dungeons littered about they may have missed but enemies in adjacent hexes can see them too and chases can start as a result.
>Notable hexes
A naked and wounded elf woman tied to a stake on top of a hill begging for help.

She is actually a sophisticated lure for the giant Land Angler that will swallow anyone who tries to untie her because the stake, rope, and elf are all just part of an organ. Just use an appropriately sized Beasty stats for the fish. Hell, just pumping up a giant toad works. Monsters themselves don't really need a unique stat array, it's about the spectacle really.

>>95959087
Funny that you went with giant toad

>>95959087
>>95959534
Alright, but what when one of your players inevitably tries to fuck the giant toad regardless?

>>95959542
The best answer to these kinds of players is always debilitating and non-curable sexually transmitted curses.

>>95958942
Lol, what happened?

B/X newfag here, you've already pointed out tobme how retarded the rule regarding two-handed weapons striking last is in general and I wanted to ask about the the rule (B22) regarding the maximum for 1 level up per adventure. My level 1 cleric player was a little upset that he only got 2999 XP compared to the 3300 XP the rest (level 2 characters) gained from the adventure today.

>>95957675
>Did you just fucking make this? We might need some kind of /osrg/ mini-wiki or booru to hold all these cool diagrams. Shit's ephemeral at times and having to dig thru the arc is a bit annoying.
Yes, I did. Glad you appreciated it. I have all of my infographics saved on my HD and cloud service, and I will repost them as needed whenever the appropriate topics come up. I actually keep updating them whenever I notice a passage I had missed, or when related questions pop up.

>>95958959
>I thought about writing a reply that once again tries to explain things to you, but then I realized that it's been done, a thousand times or more.
Yeah, we're all learning to ignore him. Particularly when he when starts whinging and lying about the n00b guide: The document speaks for itself, Anons can read it and decide whether they like it or not using their own judgement.

Is the n00b guide for everyone? Of course it isn't, it's an opinionated guide for a very specific style of play using a very specific set of D&D editions. Some people won't like it, maybe even the majority of people who play RPGs won't. So what? We're not here to convince anybody of anything, unlike a certain someone, we're just to discuss our own preferred style of play and help people who are curious about it try it.

We mostly just want to be left alone to discuss what we like without having to debate it and defend it. Every. Fucking. Thread.

>>95959820
>I wanted to ask about the the rule (B22) regarding the maximum for 1 level up per adventure. My level 1 cleric player was a little upset that he only got 2999 XP compared to the 3300 XP the rest (level 2 characters) gained from the adventure today.
No, that rule is absolutely solid, no levels skipped ever. Your player should be celebrating he got that many XP in one session rather than whine about it.

The rule is also important to slow down low-level characters tagging along with high-level parties to a more reasonable pace than a handful levels per sitting.

>>95959873
Calling it the /osrg/ n00b guide and then trying to demand people respect it is then incredibly dishonest and manipulative, especially when it's 90% not even a n00b guide.
Even making something like that in the first place is such incredibly shitbag behavior, on so many levels. The writer of that guide has his priorities so fucked up that he cares less about guiding n00bs and more about pushing his personal propaganda.

>>95959887
ok good, thank you. I've felt similarly but again I'm new to Old-School D&D and try stick to the rules as written for now assuming they are there for a reason.
I'm slowly studying the DMG apart from using the Appendices already but I feel the jump to AD&D will still take me some time (I've ran 8 session B/X so far). The only thing I've changed so far was removing the rule from 2H weapons striking last and having the first melee/charge round be in order of weapon length. Next I was thinking about giving axes a +1 to hit against shields if that makes any sense.

>/osr/ mini-wiki
Great idea in concept, particularly if certain fudge bandits are IP banned for inevitably starting shit on it and left to cope and seethe over people getting good advice in the OP going forward.
I wouldn't call it an all in one solution.
But it's got potential.

>>95959960
You're doing great, no rush adding rules from the DMG, only use it as needed or when inspiration strikes. You could perfectly well run pure KDD&D for a whole year while refining your DM chops in other areas.

I would resist the temptation to buff axes: The fact that they're worse than swords is an important balancing factor for Dwarves, who otherwise are just better Fighters all around*. The greater XP needed per level at not a factor in most sessions. Particularly when the party brings in a lot of loot in one go and the Fighter has to waste some XP while the Dwarf doesn't, making the whole balancing thing moot.

*B/X is unclear on what the full consequences of the Dwarves being unable to use 2H swords are. A common interpretation (house rule?) is that they have to use "normal" / "long" swords two-handed, while they can wield shortswords normally.

>>95959964
If you ban people for just disagreeing with some retarded purist then the wiki will be far less useful. A wiki worth a damn should at least try for some middle ground when it comes to viewpoints,

>>95959964
Alternatively, if there's some kinda mini-wiki, consider having variable colors for differing points of view/takes on OSR, like

>red box/red border indicates this hardline stance on osr
>green box/green border indicates this open/very flexible stance on osr
>everything else is roughly agnostic to your autistic screeching about what "must" or "can't" be included

>>95957803
Those all exist in AD&D

>>95960045
Know what, fantastic idea. Colour coding would please everyone.

I still, however, lodge my vote for fumigating the retard just to watch him stroke out over it. This is a far and distant second choice to 'I wish I could chokehold people through the internet'.

The fact the post above yours is him starting to sweat shows that it'd bother him at least and frankly? He deserves to be bothered given how much of a cock wart he's been across the past yea long.

>>95959873
>Of course it isn't, it's an opinionated guide for a very specific style of play using a very specific set of D&D editions.
And it isn't OSR or what this thread is about. The OSR is considerably more loose and open, and the /osrg/ has likewise had a history of being loose and open, a common standard of generals on 4chan. This is not a website for private chats. We have plenty of archived examples of civil discussion here from years ago about play styles that far exceed the incredibly limited and limiting scope outlined in that guide and the recent attempts to hijack the OP.

If you are not here to convince us of anything, than stick to discussing your mini-subset of OSR and don't attempt to convince us that it's either the totality of OSR, or when you're beaten down, try to tell us its the totality of the /osrg/. That guide even has the "advice" that if you disagree with it, people will shout at you, presenting the lame and only threat the writer has. Ironically, a guide should be telling people not to be such ridiculous spergs, not molding them into the kind of spergs that yell at people with different tastes in OSR while also trying to frighten people with these spergs it hopes to create.

>>95960058
Oh and for the record, that does mean other people that aren't him can still make the argument for 2e being included.

I'm talking a 'You cannot buy Black 3.0 if you are Anish Kapoor' rule not a 'Fuck 2e' rule.

>>95960039
He doesn't want a useful wiki. He wants an appeal to authority, even if that authority is a constructed lie.

>>95960058
What about just have you banned? If you are this of a retarded faggot then you probably have nothing useful to add to any wiki.

>>95960050
>Those all exist in AD&D
No, they don't. The ones in the red box are innovations from AD&D 2e. Crappy ones, of course, like most of AD&D 2e.

>>95960062
>us
lol
lmao even
Your style is immediately recognisable. We immediately know it's you.

>>95959946
>>95960062
>>95960082

Hi 2efag. Still seething over your game being off-topic, I see.

>>95960094
You spend all this effort lying and trying to trick people, and why? Because you want to drag every argument into people wasting energy combating your insane claims?

Do you ever do anything that isn't complete scumbag behavior?

>>95960034
Appreciate it, KDD&D means?
I can see the point made for axes only partly because in case of dwarves I understand they could wield both a normal sized 1d8 sword or a 1d6 hand axe (not a battle axe) which then only would reduce the AC of a shield by one with my idea. I have to admit I've only got the inspiration because I've read a note in the DMG about weapon types adjustment to AC which I haven't really studied, since I haven't touched the PHB, yet.

>>95960383
>Appreciate it, KDD&D means?
He means "kiddie D&D", which is how we sometimes jokingly refer to B/X.

I made something that can be used in the OP.

>>95960418
Very nice! I'll use it if I'm the one making next thread.

>>95960422
It could be bigger. I am working on it now.

>>95960418
You need to cut your nails, man.

>>95960418
Love this although one minor critique would be to make the text a bit bigger & bolder so you can see it better in the thumbnail

>>95960434
If we're nitpicking it could also use more raccoon.

>>95960434
Is this better?

>>95959738
Basically bragging about how all white people are dead and the USA never existed in the setting. When asked "Isn't that kinda racist to just kill an entire race of people" he referred to the complainers as "Trumpzis" and said he was happy "Whites are being bred out of existence" while also claiming Jim Ward (old TSR guard who made Gamma World) was always trying to do the correct thing by putting black characters in the game art but the racist Gygax would always shoot it down. So now even OSR fans are calling him out for bringing Ward's dead ass into the mix with zero evidence of him being "anti-white" (not pro-minority, but specifically anti-white). Fucker just keeps digging that hole and not taking back a word.

>>95960827
>politics drama
No thanks.

>>95960838
Funnily enough, overt racism isn't political no matter how much you want it to be. Likewise, it's more about a creator meltdown than anything else.

>>95958194
>It actually uses 10 feet/yard inches.
Wrong, it's 1" = 3.33 feet in combat. Picrel.

>>95960827
lol, he's pulled a Zegler

>>95960500
ye gj

>>95960418
How about an OP image which captures the tone of our little corner of the internet.

>>95960900

>>95957680
Wrong.

is Gucci Fuligin Cloak still around?

>>95961907
In our hearts maybe

>>95957760
What if the enemy hits too in simultaneous initiative? Do you push eachother back 10 or 3 yards (1 inch) like it's an anime fight?

>>95961523
That doesn't say anything about the scale used for combat, moron. Three humans can fight abreast in a ten-foot corridor, so the scale is that a human takes up 3.33 feet. Not 5 feet like the originating comment stated, that's a WotC thing.

>>95960827
That's extra funny considering Ward openly self-described as a "deplorable" after the 2016 election.

>>95962646
If you're as retarded as I am, you've never realised that Drawmij is Jim Ward spelled backwards.

how do I run ad&d with race-as-class?

>>95963402
You don't.

>>95963402
Other than disallowing anything but human PCs that is. I’d like to at least have Dorf and Elf as options. Maybe other races down the line as prestige class options if the characters meet and establish communication or trade with another intelligent monster race. But half orcs and half elf’s and shit out the gate are no thank you

>>95963402
You run Labyrinth Lord Advanced and keep race-as-class. It's better than AD&D anyway.

>>95957753
Sadly, my zoomer mind cannot comprehend this map. I've tried looking at it, assigning the isometric layouts to the depthometer, but I just can't.

>>95963418
That’s really lame. Kiddie d&d remains superior it seems

>>95963484
>Kiddie d&d remains superior it seems
I'm glad you're able to occupy yourself and your little friends with B/X anon. But soon it will be evening and the adults will get together and play AD&D. Try to quiet down, will you?

>>95962331
The way I deal with simultaneous initiative is that both/all actions take place, and anything that would prevent taking action taking place, be that death, movement or pushing takes place at the end of the round.

In this case, if two combatants choose to push each other, they both hit, then push each other back, ending up two squares apart.

>>95963495
Wow you sound like such a faggot. Did you think you owned him phrasing it like that?

>>95963495
>But soon it will be evening and the adults will get together and play AD&D. Try to quiet down, will you?

yeah you guys can put on your capes and suck Ernie's ghostly cock all you want. Half-blood games lel.

In todays episode of 'The Janny has no fanny, but there sure is a lot of sand in their front hole'
>Ban for trolling for mocking 2efag
You can wield your cudgel as much as you like, it doesn't make your dogshit opinion objective fact.

>>95963598
>>Ban for trolling for mocking 2efag
welcome back anon

i got a 24h ban for reposting the other anon's revised OP, so i have come to say i am reformed and i won't cause no trouble

>>95963713
>i got a 24h ban for reposting the other anon's revised OP, so i have come to say i am reformed and i won't cause no trouble
You're a far more forgiving man than I, I'm here to say:
>Jannies are subhumans
>This isn't your thread, it's ours
>2nd edition will never be relevant because Fuck You
>Having a wiki just to piss this dog fucker off would be the most based thing the general could do, we could make the wiki symbol a fish
>Hiroshimoot deserves a 3rd nuke all to himself for his choice in employees

>>95963402
How do I play football with a bicycle?

>>95960500
Just realized the title of the book in the lower left is "Moons & Stars & Stuff" lol

>>95963402
i dont understand how that would cause any difficulty other than coming up with an xp chart for the races (because directly copying bxs would be wrong)

>>95963402
Good question, since I also feel like moving to ad&d in the long run but I do really appreciate the race as class concept.

>>95964052
Sounds like a rejected Spelljammer boxed set

>>95955556 (OP)
Say, how would you break down the 576 Domain Of Greyhawk into provinces? Just curious, because I read that the Domain seems to be one of the few Oerth states without them

is nusr talk allowed?
if so is mothership any fun to play? does it actually give spoopy vibes??
if not i like thinking about probability mass functions to keep randomness but make tables more real feeling, but i feel like im wasting my prep time. should i elaborate?

>>95965118
Do you mean the Free City of Greyhawk? It's tiny, and over 75% of its population lives in the city proper. It doesn't make any sense to break it up into provinces.

>>95962346
20 people can fight in a 10 foot space in OD&D according to contemporary magazines. They basically start piling in there as long as they are within 30 feet (3 inches). The three people in a corridor thing and combat space are all fighting-man shadow nerfs.

>>95965190
That much? Well, damn. Administrative units wont make sense then

>>95955556 (OP)
Man OD&D is actually really cool. Dont know why it has a reputation of being a rules light game. It us a full game (with chainmail) and really smooth to prep with.

>>95957753
That's an old Castle Greyhawk layout, probably WotC-era (the vertical overview is definitely from Return to the Ruins of Greyhawk for 3e; I would think the level maps are too based on the tripartite layout, but I can't say with any certainty). In any case it's not authentic Gygaxian and definitely not from Castle Zagyg. The authentic level 1 of Gygax's Greyhawk Castle looks like pic related. The Castle Zagyg one looks different again.

Moreover, 2e is not an OSR game.

>>95957508
Anon's mistaken, Hyperborea is based on 1E, which is fortunate or else it'd be off topic. It does have some spectacularly shitty XP rules, however.

>>95958447
>one that's largely been rejected by the OSR and /osrg/ community
The solitary mad fag once again trying to pretend he represents the /osrg/ community even though literally everyone else is against him, I see. It's equally funny every time he just copycats the arguments against him.

>>95965165
Mothershit is one of the few nusr games that gets any discussion in its own threads.

>>95963892
A lot of sweep and counter mostly.

>>95965118
As Anon said, the Domain is literally just the immediate surroundings of the city, which it holds in the manner of a city-state. There's no call for divisions, which is why Gygax (who did his best to be a giga-autist about these things despite being hampered by a 1970s layman's level of access to information) didn't add them.

>>95965165
>is nusr talk allowed?
It's not.

>if not
Tbh, you're probably wasting your prep time, yes. Players can't tell. It's not even like, "99% of players can't tell", it's more like "literally no players run statistics on random encounter distributions per terrain in their heads".

>>95965510
LBB OD&D is super clean in some ways, yes (and messy as shit in other ways). It has a rep for being rules light because it lacks all of the rules from Greyhawk and forward, meaning that compared to AD&D it's about the weight of a feather. Compared to modern gamecrimes like FATE it's not rules light.

>>95962676
Kek, p. high tier.

>>95963402
Elf: Elf-Fighter/M-U converted to a single table with the racial bonuses prefactored, or just use the Basic Elf with a few mods to bring it in line with AD&D power levels, like raising its HD by one step.

Dwarf: Dwarf Fighter. Not difficult.

>>95965510
What edition of chainmail do you use?

>>95965510
OD&D is rules lite compared to AD&D.
By most modern gaming standards it isn't rules lite at all.
Hell, Basic is supposed to be even more lite and that cock sucker has very defined things that happen each round in and out of combat.

This is based.

>>95966281
What he hell is that from? Also, an infinite 1d4 damage auto-hit attack is broken as fuck.

>>95965165
>is nusr talk allowed?
No.
I personally like it though, if you want to make a thread go for it

>>95966166
Not him, i use 2nd edition, but it is the same for most purposes. 3rd edition adds rules that, technically, OD&D doesn't use. Like rolling to cast spells.

>>95966166
NAYRT but I'd go with 2E. 3E is exactly the same (there's even an error in the Fantasy Combat Table that was carried over) except contaminated with bloat.

>>95965519
Yep.

>>95965165
"NuSR" is just True Scotsman Fallacy manifesting. It's doesn't even make any sense as a term or as a concept.
It's essentially "It's OSR, but I don't like it, so I'm gonna call it something else to try and keep it out."

AD&D 2E with gold-for-experience rule engaged.

Isn't this basically 1E minus the Satanic Panic Vibe Shift?

Or is there more to it than that?

>>95965165
If you have to ask, obviously fucking not

>>95966824
You got the we-want-to-keep-it-out part right.

>>95967477
You mean "I" unless you're a schizo.

>>95967270
there are some small differences, mostly it comes down to whether you think 1e was mostly great but went a little too far to be perfect, or whether you think it was mostly great but just didnt go quite far enough to be perfect with the extra "kits" available as options etc,
the d10 initiative instead of d6 die technically also buffs spell casters and punishes melee users
im not certain about the precise rule differences otherwise, but i understand there shouldnt be too many, although dungeon design and encounter rate changes actually has a really big difference in actual play despite it essentially being a single line of rules text in several hundred pages

>>95967270
More to it but I can't be arsed to do a full write-up because I don't care enough about people who want to go on about it ad nauseam without ever actually running games to find out for themselves.
If you want some points of reference beyond it's cloying saccharine tone and whitewash of any pulp/D&D flavor whatsoever run a game using only the text from 1E's dungeon crawling movement speeds, overland movement rules and surprise rules and then do the same with 2E's texts of the same and see for yourself.

>>95966824
r/OSR sounds more your speed

>>95967270
>AD&D 2E with gold-for-experience rule engaged.
You'd also have to remove the additional XP for having fun, story goals, learning the rules of the game, and bringing snacks rules. Picrel.

>Isn't this basically 1E minus the Satanic Panic Vibe Shift?
No. It has more problems, like the movement speed in dungeons increased tenfold, some fundamental rules omitted, and so on. I have a PDF with 119 rule differences, obviously we're not going to discuss all of them, given it's not even on topic for the general in the first place. The n00b guide has a couple pages dedicated to the topic if you're really curious:
https://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B

In addition to the rule differences, you also have the issue that all the advice on how to run the game pushes you toward the Hickman manifesto, railroading, storytelling style of play, so you'd also have to ignore all of the advice as well. But how would you know what to ignore, since you've never played one of the good editions? For that, you'd have to read Gygax' DMG as well as his PHB. And then you'd have to understand why the differences matter, for which you'd have to run a campaign using AD&D first, to understand why and how AD&D 2e fucks it up the way it does.

So if you're interested in the old school style of play, there's really no point running AD&D 2e, and trying to fix it by rolling it back to AD&D is a huge waste of time: Just play the real deal without the extra steps.

If instead you do want to play a storytelling / railroading / narrativist / Hickman-style campaign, sure, go ahead and play AD&D 2e. But then you've come to the wrong place to ask for advice.

>>95967801
Truke

>>95967801
ive been convinced and have just purchased the POD 4 core books

looking forward to Gaming For Real™ now

maybe I can convince my players to chip in on the expense (HA!)

>>95967517
Read the op. Then either accept it or go elsewhere.

>>95967801
Holy fuck, I go away for a few months, learn Battletech rules, read 30 or so of the novels, run a months long campaign incorporating aerospace rules and salvage and then come back to /osrg/ to find you guys are still talking about the EXACT same fucking things.

...

I mean, you aren't wrong about 2e. BUT STILL.

>>95967801
You really are kind of insane. You only see drawbacks in the changes and no benefits, and you've gone ahead and shaped your entire understanding of what OSR is by "everything that isn't 2e", which is so fundamentally wrong that I'm not even sure if it's possible to communicate with you. Your circular logic of defining every change as being bad, and the proof of it being bad is that it was a change, make it understandable why your only way of communicating is throwing a shit fit and demanding everyone accept your point of view and they're not allowed to have their own. At the point where people can actually weigh the benefits and drawbacks into of buying into your "All of 2e is wrong" bitching and attempt to establish that as dogma is the point where you're left with a lot of Sacred Cows that don't actually make the game better.

Not every change 2e brought was universally good, but not every change it brought was universally bad, and more importantly you have completely lost all sight of what an OSR game actually is by your devotion to your altar of hatred. They really are just you hating an edition and with that as your goal filling in the rest, and your hypocrisy is kind of amazing. Any good that came from 2e is spun into being bad, while any drawbacks in the rules that were changed are not simply ignored, but treated as fundamental to your personal vision of OSR that you wish to inflict on everyone else.

Your bias is... it's a shame I already said you were insane, because there's really no better word for it. There's not even any subtlety to it.

>>95968778
Would you kindly highlight some of the good changes made in the second edition?

>>95968849
Improvements to layout

>>95968688
He is wrong about 2e. On many levels. His insistence on 2e being only about storytelling/railroading is completely wrong and is on the level of propaganda, not critique. He even attacks QoL changes just because he can't accept any reason why people should dare to play 2e.

2e is far from the best iteration of D&D, but it's actually surprisingly quite popular, especially among the OSR community. On the Dragonsfoot forums, it's actually more popular than OD&D and only 2nd to AD&D 1e.

But, at the end of it all, the exaggeration of how different 1e and 2e are has gotten kind of silly at this point.

>>95968849
One important one is that kits helped break the monopoly that casters had on having options.

>>95968902
Layout, editing, writing are all substantially improved. Better art too.

>>95968778
>>95968903
It doesn't matter whether or not you consider it osr, it is off topic for the thread as per op, so you can either learn to live with it or you can continue crying

>>95965519
HOLY SHIT THATS MY SCREENCAP!

... I think. Years ago I grabbed some screenshots of Gygax's map he had in a folder from an obscure video of him playing, and shared it around places. Its possible other people did as well. But still if it's the same one my word that feels nice to have tossed something out and it to come boomeranging back to me.

>>95968949
This is what I remember from childhood

Loved that art

>>95965519 this post is completely correct and available to be viewed at The Archives

>>95969100
Did you even read what he wrote? I didn't. His style is immediately recognisable from the first line, which is handy because I can just skip. I don't think there's anybody left wishing to engage.

It's also obvious that the post that started the comment chain was him samefagging.
>>95967270
As is clear from the "thanks, I've bought it" reply.

Just saying "read the OP" and/or "read the n00b guide" is really all there is to say on the topic. No point rehashing the arguments each time.

>>95969578
Yeah you are completely correct

>>95968688
>you guys are still talking about the EXACT same fucking things
There's ONE poster who's been obsessing over /osrg/ for years now and posting the exact same rants about how everybody MUST like 2e and MUST think it's OSR because plebbit says so. Once you start recognising his posting style, it's clear he doesn't post about anything else. Not even about 2e, that he only enjoys reading because of its literary value.

>>95969602
>Once you start recognising his posting style, it's clear he doesn't post about anything else.
No-no, let's be entirely fair. He does post about one other thing.
Any time ACKS comes up he melts down like the Chernobyl reactor being told it won Ms Universe.

There's a reason he earned himself the nickname Fishfag.

>Janny work up
No amount of deleting posts or being a faggot is going to change the way people feel on this.
Go make your own thread for 2e already.
Pin it to the top of the board for all I care. Just stop being a fuckhead.

Exactly the Modus Operandi described here:

>>95948142
>How to kill a general:
>1. Use a sockuppet to make a bait post.
>2. Post a samefag 2etard troll reply with lies and flamebait.
>>95968778
>>95968903
>3. Delete and ban everybody who replies, but leave the bait up:
>>95969578
>>95969969

He's been doing this every single thread now. Anybody wanna bet fishfag = 2etard will do it again in the next thread?

The Modus Operandi is EXACTLY the one described here:

>>95948142
>How to kill a general:
>1. Use a sockuppet to make a bait post.
>>95967270

>2. Post a samefag troll reply with lies and flamebait like calling people "insane"
>>95968778

3. Delete and ban everybody who replies, but leave the bait up.
>>95969578
>>95969969

Anybody wanna bet he's going to do the exact same thing in the next thread?

>>95970451
>>95970228
Intredasting.

would giving AD&D the OSE treatment be a noble pursuit? Is it even possible? Or is Ernie simply too verbose?

I know Gygaxian prose isn't the actual fault with 1E, it's the shit editing and layout. Would a modern pass for concise readability do the system a service, or is the fact that you have to decipher and annotate it part of the appeal?

>Jannyfaggotry has reached the point where it's straight up impossible to post in the thread
>Last 'acceptable' post was 8 fucking hours ago
This is absurd.

>>95970870
>I know Gygaxian prose isn't the actual fault with 1E,
It doesn't help, especially when it comes to explaining particularly technical rules. It's why there's forty different interpretations of how initiative works, and all of them are wrong. Even Gygax admitted that he didn't even use the more complicated rules in AD&D.

>>95970870
OSRIC 3.0 is pretty much meant to be that, an introduction for new players. (with some quirks like UA weapon specialization in the PHB and an alternate Monk class)

>He's still lurking this thread
No wonder the rest of the board is such a cesspit of trolling and bullshit. Our one Janny is busy obsessing over his own personal Moby Dick in /osrg/

>>95966281
>save vs. wand
gay.

>>95968902
>>95968949
>D E S I G N E R C H O I C E S
>>95968938
>character builds as splatbooks

These are not improvements and if you think they are you are part of the problem that already killed the osr.

>>95965519
HOLY SHIT THATS MY SCREENCAP!
... I think. Years ago I grabbed some screenshots of Gygax's map he had in a folder from an obscure video of him playing, and shared it around places. Its possible other people did as well. But still if it's the same one my word that feels nice to have tossed something out and it to come boomeranging back to me.

I think I may have took a few more back then, there may have been other frames (I don't exactly remember...)
Damn I think I had also saved a bunch of photos of original notes and materials from... mentzer? Kuntz? Some OG's notes that were on auction or something. Pretty sure I lost it in a HDD death at some point though.

>>95955556 (OP)
Is printing your illegal books with the PDF you downloaded off the internet OSR?

>>95971058
Yes. For the best experience read them under warm white LED filament bulbs to replicate (or, "retro clone bulbs") the glow of an incandescent off the printed pages.

>>95971124
I was thinking of doing this with deities and demigods

>>95970983
OSR doesn't have to be a singular extreme, especially when that extreme is adding gravel to your cereal.
It's pretty weird you don't like non-casters actually having any options to pick from and just want to keep that all in the realm of casters.

>>95970874
>>95971043
>HOLY SHIT THATS MY SCREENCAP!
Is it? You know it's been studied and people have made an actually readable version of that map?

>>95971152
GYG 2etard

>>95971169
Unless I'm misremembering (it's possible, it's been VERY long time) I think I uploaded it to G+ years ago. I'm also now remembering that I may have, poorly, done some editing of it way back then to try to clean it up, but I'm not actually sure if that was all I did or if I took the screenshots... I do remember seeing the larger video though, was some convention thing where the camera just happened to be behind gary.

But like I said it was on an old hard drive. Tears in the rain and all. There's a possibility I may have some of it still, but I'd have to dig through 10+ years of files.

>>95971152
>>95971176
GYG 2etard

>DMs who write your own "mega"dungeons
In your experience, how important is it that the "mega"dungeon have lots of creative and surprising ideas in it, an interesting backstory, and stuff like that? Do your players get bored if it's really rather generic?

E.g. One sub-level is a goblin lair with a king, bodyguards, wolves, a shaman, and a witch-doctor. Another one is kinda the same, but orcs. Another one is kinda the same, but hobgoblins. Another area is plants. Another one is slimes. Another one is undead. And so on and so forth. I can come up with some variation, but frankly not very much, and nothing particularly impressive.

I compare myself to authors like Michael Curtis (Stonehell) or Melan (Castle Xyntillan) or Rick Barton (Arden Vul), which makes me very self-conscious. I guess I'm on the level of Wandering DMs from the creativity point of view: Just not very impressive...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiclN_BSxoe98VjpSEp5nocN5eBNLo6SJ
But, again, better at maps.

I think I'm not bad at making maps that are interesting to explore, at least. Well Jelqed, interesting alignments and loops between levels, secret areas, stuff like that.

>>95971152
>>95971265
GYG 2etard

>>95971473
My stance:
Put the "more creative" stuff deeper.

Unless you have a highly experienced party (actually, even if you do), early levels should be more tutorial-oriented. On average, less-threatening. Less-powerful monsters, highly regular rooms and hallways. Secret door locations may be obvious from mapping or visible from the "back" side if they go around to it. Placing such things in patterns - like 3 rooms in a row, the first two of which have open pits and the last which has a trapped pit - helps them understand "ok we should be checking for these."
This helps them learn the ropes of not just the game but also your particular style.

As it gets deeper you can slowly start to make mapping harder. More angular rooms and hallways, round and curved ones, sloped halls, same-level passages that go over and under each other, natural caverns that incorporate such irregular directions, and traps that block simple backtracking like portculli, rotating rooms or teleporters. Or "traps" that dump you down levels, which can be useful for expediting transit deeper when the PCs are better equipped to delve past the initial areas.

In terms of the backstory-stuff, "show don't tell" is my preference, Fromsoft type of lore-provisions - few actual "lore dumps" and moreso indicators of activity from past actions. You can incorporate things that hint at story having happened with the background being only known to you, or if the PCs are so interested that they use advanced magic or capture intelligent creatures to interrogate (possibly with needing to drag them back out to get a translator).
For "groups", having multiple factions on one level, some that span multiple levels, is also a useful thing. Some barricade in an area because the denizens of this floor managed to contain an encroachment of something on the next floor, but not before it managed to take over 1/4 of this floor. Random encounter tables incorporating scouts or servants from a floor above or below. And so on

>>95971152
>>95971532
GYG 2etard

>>95971152
>>95971797
fuck off, 2etard

I wonder if we could move the thread to /trash/
Yeah it'd mean being stuck with the furry porn but I'd rather them than this Janny

>>95971992
Why? He has absolutely no power. Just ignore him and keep posting as usual. Even if your comment gets deleted, we can still read it and reply to it.

Considering the circular nature of the arguments on these threads how about we just all get together and work on an osrg wiki with cited rulings so we all stop quibbling over the same shit every day

Wait, who am I kidding? No one here actually plays/runs games.

>>95965165
Mothership works OK but it has some problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241113073339/https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2024/08/mothership-engine-malfunction.html

>>95972122
>he didn’t even post an osrg wiki page link

4/10

>>95965519
Not only is this post completely correct, but it is view able via 4chanX or the 4plebs archive
>>95972143
Completely irrelevant. Find another thread

>>95972259
>Completely irrelevant. Find another thread
Are there any Sci-fi OSR games then?

>>95971992
Or dumbasses like you could stop shitting up the thread. We are not asking you to love 2e or use it in your games. All we want is no more shitstorms because 2e came up for one reason or other.

>>95972296
>Or dumbasses like you could stop shitting up the thread. We are not asking you to love 2e or use it in your games. All we want is no more shitstorms because 2e came up for one reason or other.
>All wed desire is to be able to talk about off-topic shit and ding-dong-bannu anyone who points it out
1: Nah
2: Go fuck yourself
3: Make your own thread
How's that sound?

>>95972278
Yes, mutant future, ASE, gamma world (maybe wwn).
>>95972122
The opening post has determined the thread contents for years. People will learn to accept this or they will continue to cry about how they want this place to be more like Reddit.

>>95972307
It sounds like you admitted that you are only here to shit up the thread now because the thread will not conform to your retardation.

>>95972296
Just discuss 2e and other OSR as much as you want.

>>95968903
Like how 2e is where the Nat 20 is always a hit rule started. I kind of wonder how it even happened, like if players were suiting up to get their AC high enough to be functionally invincible against plebs and just murdering villages for the fun of it.

>>95972278
Traveller

>>95972616
that's not OSR, it's not D&D based

>>95968903
That list of differences is pretty big

>>95972335
>>95972335
>>95972296
Please stop ban evading just to trollpost off topic. If you're not going to talk about games then you should go to a different thread.
>>95972583
This post is also off topic

I have been using a somewhat of a countdown timer for Random Encounters during Wilderness travel, and I have been considering toying around with it for dungeoneering as well. Anybody have any experience with alternate random encounter checks?

>>95972583
Fuck off 2etard = fishfag.

>>95972674
The only ones who been ban evading are the tards upset about 2e being OSR. If you look at these thread in 4plebs you would see they admit to ban evading.

>>95972639
A long list, but it's mostly some pretty minor stuff.
>magic-users now called mages
Well, this change probably saved TSR thousands of dollars on ink.

>>95972633
Technically, all RPGs are based on D&D.

>>95972583
>>95972680
GYG 2etard = fishfag.

>>95972335
>It sounds like you admitted that you are only here to shit up the thread now because the thread will not conform to your retardation.
You mean like how (you) spent the last 3 years crybullying any time ACKS was mentioned?
Stop projecting and take being called a scumfuck like a man for once.

>>95972317
>gamma world
i dont really think there is much to talk about, but you can definitely argue that it is literally in the 1e books, therefore its part of "trve osr", though actually playing it is probably an entirely different effect

>>95972964
Yes I completely agree, while it is not entirely compatible 100%, it is still included in the DMG, and thus I believe it is completely up for grabs

>>95972780
I didn't evolve from no monkey

Would you mind talking about games instead of complaining?

I've been using a homebrewed countdown system for wilderness encounter checks and I've been considering modifying it for dungeon encounters.
Anyone have experience with this?

>>95955566
>>7. Make a class, race, or race-as-class
If you want a barbarian class, don't use the one in Unearthed Arcana. Go with the one in White Dwarf #4 (pic related). Pretty much everyone in the thread who isn't the 2efag troll agrees it is better.

>>95973195
>encounter counter mechanic
A different anon posted this last thread, I thought it was quite elegant. You should post yours!
I've started using a different approach for random encounters than the usual 1in6, and I wanted your opinions on it.
>roll what the random encounter will be, note it down secretly. Don't use overloaded encounter stuff: all encounters are monster related.
>roll 2d6, note it down secretly
>Every dungeon turn reduces that number by one.
>Every noisy/reckless action (bashing doors and chests, some spells) reduces number by one
>When number hits zero, random encounter arrives.
>When random encounted is dealt with, roll for next random encounter and fresh 2d6 for countdown
Crucially it means that as a DM I am not surprised by what's coming. Indeed, I can subtly flip to the right stats or think about how the arrival of the enemy will occur. It also means that because it's pretty reliably (but not perfectly) about six turns between encounters the party will naturally want to hole up about every six turns and rest/barricade themselves in a strong point.
Things like torch burning are tracked separately at their own set rates.

>>95973325
>Crucially it means that as a DM I am not surprised by what's coming
Sounds really fucking boring. Half the appeal of DMing old school stuff is that you're continously surprised yourself the way things go.

>>95973363
Cite an example perhaps

>>95973385
?
It's obvious if you've played. When you roll up something unexpected and have to deal with it on the spot.

Here another image that could be used in the OP

>>95973363
IMO it's a six to one, half a dozen to another situation. In one instance the "surprise" happens before the encounter, in another the "surprise" happens during. You're still rolling randomly for both and improvisational adapting the results to the game.

Here another image that could be used in the OP. This time with the image

Here it again with text more readable but not as cool.

>>95972736
>mages no longer have the ability to construct strongholds

>>95973492
this would be better

>>95973325
I think that was me! Appreciate any feedback or critique!

>1. Roll 1d20, this is the countdown.
>2. Subtract from this value on each hex moved, and once during the night, or once in the day and then again at night if no movement.
>2a. You subtract 1 for plains, 2 for hills, 3 for mountain, etc
>3. Wilderness encounter occurs when the countdown meets or crosses zero (0)

With an average of ~11 on 1d20, this results in an 82% chance of encounter during a day of plains travel and night of rest, versus an 83% using the normal system with 6 Mile hexes, but traveling for the same amount of time and distance

>>95973646
imo it's way more fun to have the players roll the random encounters.

Noticed ACKS II is available in print now, anyone played it? Thoughts?

>>95973801
Don't really like it as a base system. Whenever given the option to go simple or complex, it always go complex and then extra complex on top. You might find a chart you want to use with a different system, maybe. Pirate maybe, buy no way.
Side note: the presentation is terrible. The art is eye pain. The text is robotic and draining. Poorly written, poorly formatted, poorly explained.

>>95973801
I've played it and had a blast with it as far as level 6/7, complete with mass combats (including an attack on a Dwarfhold using the siege rules)
It was really solid and assuming you're player side fairly streamlined OSR play.

>>95973801
Been playing it for over a year now.
It's a good game, it is worth pirating, and the print books are very expensive though and unless you plan on running it as your main system, I wouldn't say it's exactly worth it to purchase

>>95973325
Yeah that is basically what I was thinking about doing for modifying my Wilderness countdown for dungeons

>>95973848
lol
Fishfag = 2etard is guaranteed to start screeching about ACKS within ten minutes of it being mentioned. Every single time. It's like he spends his days reloading /osrg/, looking for ways to diss ACKS or troll about "AD&D" 2e. You're a waste of air, just off yourself, you'll do the planet and your mother a favour.

>>95972278
Machinations of the Space Princess
>>95968903
>>95972736
There is a lot more than that, particularly if you look at the monstrous manual. Some of those points in the list are actually the size of multiple other points - really it looks like whoever put it together was primarily looking at it from a player's perspective, or was just getting tired partway through the PHB. The PHB items are given a lot more detail than the DMG items, by which point the list starts getting sloppy - the mislabelled numbering is a fine example. Not enough autism was invoked to handle the work.

One of the easy examples is the kobold entry. It takes about 2-3x as much text because it makes the language more flowery and also prints stats for the other types (bodyguards/etc) in a hard to read way instead of just writing "stats as goblin" or something. The rewrite makes them MUCH easier to deal with as their eyes glow in the dark, they are more cowardly, the numbers are subtle adjusted, and recolors them as less vicious. It also says that they're cruel because they get bullied by other monsters, which just makes them more of a joke and less of an actual low level threat. You might as well just use the 1e kobold because the stats are the same, they're much more monstrous, and the whole entry can be printed to fit on an index card longways.
Alternatively you could just go whole hog into the 3e kobold lore with them being kooky dragon-worshipping yappy lizard dudes, if you want them to be less-monstrous. The 2e kobold is just kind of a milquetoast "Radio Edit" midpoint that bleeps out the swear words without adding anything cool.

And that's JUST kobolds.

>>95974363
Nah fishfag is much stupider and less eloquent. Im an acksfag and the guy you quoted is fairly correct, but that doesn't make acks bad.

>>95974548
You can tell it wasn't fishfag by the fact that the reply is still up. If it had actually been fishfag it would have been taken down.

>>95973801
Scammy scummy shit. Worse than free homebrew.

>>95976401
>If it had actually been fishfag it would have been taken down.
Nah, the Janny always lets Fishfag have his massive sperg out to shit the thread up and then comes in afterwards with the '24 hours for him and 3 days for the rest of you. I'm doing my job :3c' bullshit.
It'd be at least a hundred posts of fuckheadery before you'd know if it was fishfag.

>>95973801
There's zero appeal. It's an anti-OSR that wants to be called an OSR game.
Don't like "buildfagging"? Too bad, check out 3.5 style feats and classes made just to sell more splatbooks.
Prefer "Rulings over Rules"? Sorry, you're looking at the very antithesis of that maxim.
Like charts and tables because you're a turbo autist? Then enjoy having your autism triggered by charts filled with inconsistencies and gaps that will recquire considerable amounts of rulings to patch over, making it the worst of both worlds.
Want slim simplicity? Forget it, and watch even basic combat needlessly stretched out by rolls and procedures that add no new depth, and see procedure-laden mass combat flow about as well as cold mollasses. Even just travelling has needless procedures tacked on, making you have to do the work of cutting the rules down to something you could actually use.
Enjoy nostalgic art styles, classic settings, innovative ideas and flavor? Too bad, here's AI-slop mixed with baby's first experiments with photoshop filters in a faux-Roman sea of generic cliche regurgitations.
Want something cheap and well-made? Try insultingly expensive because the game didn't even get 2000 backers so it needs to milk what few whales it did manage to snare.

>He's still at it with his list of repeatedly disproven talking points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyr2hiPWwBI

So, you going to delete him shitting up the thread with troll posts at any point? Or are you just going to delete people that mock him for doing so?

>>95977181
>Like charts and tables because you're a turbo autist? Then enjoy having your autism triggered by charts filled with inconsistencies and gaps that will recquire considerable amounts of rulings to patch over, making it the worst of both worlds.
I think this is a case of ambition exceeding grasp. There's a lot of material and it wants to be a lot of material, but that translates into exponentially more time and effort needed to refine the rules, and it just didn't get that.

However, there's also just a lot of design that seems incredibly misguided, regardless of time spent refining the rules, because the underlying design philosophy behind them is incomplete.The Proficiencies are particularly emblematic of that. It feels like every class has only a handful of good ones (albeit boring ones, like Divine Blessing or Fighting Style Specialization) and the rest are trap options (like Eavesdropping or Illusion Resistance), with more effort put into trying to give them some sort of flavor but making them incredibly undesirable mechanically. It's not easy to make a good feat-esque system, and ACKS2 didn't seem to learn anything from either the weaknesses of 3rd edition or ACKS1. Altogether, they end up being a lot of reading for a few bonuses and potentially a few mistakes.

Then there's stuff like the "Hijinks". It's a mystery how something could end up like that. It's an overcomplicated system that even tells you flat out that it's entirely unnecessary and that none of the decisions you could make matter all that much because it will produce the same averaged result of just getting tribute. It's essentially the option for completely unnecessary bookkeeping, with a designer note that just admits that. It's like they are aware there's a problem but they don't really understand what the problem is or how to fix it besides offering that you just skip it.

>>95977442
>He thinks a flat +1 to Attack or AC is objectively superior to automatic rolls to disbelieve illusions or having the thief listening skill
Ah. That explains it.

You're an actual mid-wit engaging in ivory tower design and thinking it's objective fact.
>B-but having a feat to listen is ba-
Listen As A Thief, not listen, retard, not that you can do either.

Thief listening is like Ranger tracking, it gives you vital information that could save your entire asshole.

But go on, keep trying, I'm sure you'll queef out an actual cogent point if you try long and hard enough.
Monkeys and typewriters as they say.

>>95977471
+1 to Attack or AC is generally superior because those rolls are considerably more common, and are generally guaranteed to be encountered, while also being useful and impactful. Meanwhile, the bonuses gained from Eavesdropping or Illusion Resistance do not come close considering their far more limited usability. Illusion Resistance is even an almost entirely passive ability that depends entirely on the DM to determine how useful it might be.

>objective
You don't seem to understand what that word is and you also seem to be implying I ever used it.

>>95977504
>+1 to Attack or AC is generally superior because those rolls are considerably more common, and are generally guaranteed to be encountered

Idk about you but I try to avoid combat since I’m not playing 5e

>>95977442
Hijinks were "I read Blades in the Dark but didn't learn anything from it.

>>95977537
I like combat and like systems with fun combat.

>>95977504
>Combat always happe-
Maybe if you had the listen proficiency then you wouldn't have strolled so casually into Incubus goon cave and gotten yourself in trouble?
And come to think of it, Illusion Resistance would've also saved you from your exciting new life as a fleshlight.

That's exactly what I mean.
You're not just stupid, you're too stupid to even notice your own biases because you think you're too smart to miss them.

Same with buildfagging, you hear of the concept and go 'Well golly gee that sounds like it could be applied to any game where you can make custom class content, I'll throw it at things I don't like, that'll win some points' without following through the implied parts of the discussion
>Can make custom classes
is a world away from
>PLAYERS can make custom classes

>>95977560
Oh, you're just trolling. Ha ha, got me. I should have guessed from your first reply.

>>95977557
Maybe OSR isn’t for you

>>95977568
>Shit, I can't actually come up with an argument against that
>Guess it's just trolling
3/10 - The number of replies you got from me

>>95977572
You might be playing wrong if you think "combat that sucks" is a pillar of OSR.
Actually, I definitely think you're playing wrong.
Have you tried Swords & Wizardry Complete? It's got kinda smoother AD&D combat with more tactical options.

>>95977578
You made an argument? You flatter yourself.

>>95977607
No, combat that sucks isn’t a pillar of OSR. It’s that combat is exceedingly deadly and should be avoided if possible.

If you think +1 to attack or an AC buff is what make combat exciting, then ???

>>95977708
Given what we've heard from him in past threads, I imagine his idea of exciting combat is full on key jangling.
It's the reason he despises the fishing story for one thing. The idea of interacting with the world in ways that aren't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hMjKP9Dsog just makes him angry on a deep, emotional level.

Been wanting to play solo OSR lately. Do you guys have any recommendations on what I should play or how I should go about playing it?

>N-no, you can't post about me showing my bias, that's ban evasi-
Can, shall and you can't do shit about it.
Cope, seethe and kill yourself.

>>95977708
>+1 to attack or an AC buff is what make combat exciting
That's actually a problem. It's not that they make it more exciting, and in fact the exact opposite. Boring, static bonuses just alter the combat math, but because the benefit is so mechanically good the game incentivizes it over options that could provide more depth.

Combat can be deadly and avoided if possible and still not be a complete drain to engage in when it does almost inevitably occur. You just need the right system/DM for it.

>>95977733
it depends on what you want. most of the fun of OSR gameplay is the cockamamie bullshit with friends aspect and the freedom OSR games afford
if you just want to manage a full party and see how far they can go into stonehell or whatever, you're fine with just B/X for the lightspeed character generation and minimal sheet complexity
if you want a solo character focused experience in a sandbox I'd suggest tales of argosa, as it has incredibly good tools for procedural/solo stuff and PCs are decently powerful (and there's a solo PC adjustment printed in the book) and have things on their sheet as part of their class (which some might say makes it not OSR)

>>95977733
scarlet heroes is a good jumping off point

>>95977733
>>95977774
>>95977934

OSR Solo Roleplay Guide from Arcane Sword Press has nice procedures. He includes a mechanic for your primary PC and then the adventuring party as well as other things like a simple and complex oracle mechanic for information. I’m not sure if the PDF is on the archiv, I have the physical book.

>>95972583
>2e and other OSR
Bait. 2e is not an OSR game, and it shouldn't be discussed in this general.

>>95971043
>>95971189
If yours was a screencap from a video, I don't think it is, sorry. That picture is a sharpened crop of a photo (namely, pic related) that an user Eridanis posted on DF in 2010, from a con game some of the ENWorld mods played with Gygax in 2007. Philotomy Jurament subsequently (the same day, in fact) posted the sharpened/cropped version on K&KA. The relevant threads all still exist, but since Philotomy's website doesn't, the original link in the K&KA thread is dead.

Links:
>https://www.enworld.org/threads/gaming-with-gygax.204729/
>https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=896675#p896675
>https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6981&start=0

*All that being said*, if you have a video and a screencap I would love to see them.

>>95978794
And, as a bonus, here's a redrawn version of Level 1. I'm about 98% certain that this was drawn by a guy who had a Blogspot blog with individual entries for each level of the original castle and what could be known about them, but unfortunately I can't remember the name of the blog and doing an image search now I can't find any exact match for this image either, so who the fuck knows what happened to it. I hope it didn't get wiped, it was a good resource.

Also, 2e isn't an OSR game.

>76 deleted posts in 4 days
We're below average!
Also weird the thread got bumped to page 1 within post. All kinds of strange moderation going on.

>>95977181
>Like charts and tables because you're a turbo autist? Then enjoy having your autism triggered by charts filled with inconsistencies and gaps that will recquire considerable amounts of rulings to patch over, making it the worst of both worlds.
As a turbo autist this has not been true in my experience, what tables are you talking about? Some things don't exist but I can't think of a table that just is missing a key part of something.

>Want slim simplicity? Forget it, and watch even basic combat needlessly stretched out by rolls and procedures that add no new depth
The only significant procedure added for combat is the rolling for initiative per round but that takes very little actual time to implement once you get used to it. Everyone just rolls and the GM ticks down from whatever the highest value could be, usually just 7 or 8. It's one of the differences I specifically appreciate because it means there aren't just solved turns. You can't plan exact order of operations because you know the goblin is always going to go after the healer. That is a taste thing for sure, but the implementation of it is not ridiculously stretched out.

I could quibble over the buildfagging and rulings over rules as not being entirely accurate but that's getting far more into less clear cut stuff that'd turn into a large back and forth I am wholly uninterested in. The art and expense are valid but the art doesn't impact the system and the expense doesn't matter when you pirate it which is what I would advise most people to do.

>>95972583
>2e and other OSR
Bait. 2e is not an OSR game, and it shouldn't be discussed in this general.

>>95971043
>>95971189
If yours was a screencap from a video, I don't think it is, sorry. That picture is a sharpened crop of a photo (namely, pic related) that user Eridanis posted on DF in 2010, from a con game some of the ENWorld mods played with Gygax in 2007. Philotomy Jurament subsequently (the same day, in fact) posted the sharpened/cropped version on K&KA. The relevant threads all still exist, but since Philotomy's website doesn't, the original link in the K&KA thread is dead.

Links:
>https://www.enworld.org/threads/gaming-with-gygax.204729/
>https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=896675#p896675
>https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6981&start=0

*All that being said*, if you have a video and a screencap I would love to see them.

>>95978879
Huh. Janny seethed hard enough this time that 4plebs didn't even have time to catch the first post. Repostan for reposterity.

>>95978906
Anon, don't bother, he's full of shit and intentionally baiting to get people banned.
He is, to put it lightly, a cunt.
He has always been a cunt.
He shall always be a cunt.
No amount of facts or explaining is going to make him less of one.
All it does is help him refine his cunt-arts.
And not the fun kind you see in Tijuana.
He has the Jannies on his side for some reason.
He will get you fucked over no matter how fair you are to him.
Do not engage. Do not pass go. Do not collect $500.

Because again.
He's a cunt.

>>95977442
It's entirely unnecessary to run hijinks for all the thieves in a thieves guild because by the sheer quantity of rolls it'll average out to the average, because that's all the tribute for thieves guilds are, the average of the hijinks calculated out. Individual hijinks for specific things are a single resolution and can give you a variety of outputs that people may be interested in doing. The abstraction is there if you just want to collect money from your thieves guild to answer the question "well how much money does my thieves guild make?" while the actual hijinks rules are there if you want to send a team to do something specific. Say a neighboring lord you want dead. If you don't want to handle it yourself since you have a more important lord to kill you send a henchmen to take care of it. The hijinks rules give you an outline of how long it'll take and how hard it'll be do get done. It's not an average since it's a single resolution of the system. Even if you send 10 Assassins to kill 10 different lords which would give you something closer to average, specific lords will be left alive that will cause specific consequences.

>>95977181
This post is nothing but salty cynical bullshit.
Nothing that you said is even remotely true

>>95978959
I'd say the most important part of hijinks isn't even the money frankly.
It's the information you get.
Details, secrets, specifics, rumours. All of it is worth more than cash.

>>95978922
>Janny deletes this and gives a warning for 'Trolling'
For it to be trolling it has to be insincere.
Believe me when I say this from the bottom of my heart; he's a cunt and you're an even bigger cunt. No amount of 'You're twowwing' will save you from me expressing my sincere opinion on this subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfaj8EPz9lM

As was said:
Anon, don't bother, he's full of shit and intentionally baiting to get people banned.
He is, to put it lightly, a cunt.
He has always been a cunt.
He shall always be a cunt.
No amount of facts or explaining is going to make him less of one.
All it does is help him refine his cunt-arts.
And not the fun kind you see in Tijuana.
He has the Jannies on his side for some reason.
He will get you fucked over no matter how fair you are to him.
Do not engage. Do not pass go. Do not collect $500.

Because again.
He's a cunt.

>>95977537
>Idk about you but I try to avoid combat since I’m not playing 5e
You are either a troll or a buffoon, and in either instance, you do not deserve us replying to you in good faith

lol they're here 24/7 trying to stem the tide and deleting posts before they even make it to the archive. It's why the thread sometimes ends up on page one with no new posts.
>3 minute ban for complaining about 4chan
lmao even
This isn't a complaint about 4chan, just the one mod who's clearly a fuckwit of the worst people you have never met.
Keep it up, they'll burn out well before we do.

Everyone that isn't the Janny, Troll, Fishfag, 2e, whatever it's called, should just add 'And Fuck 2e, it isn't OSR' to the end of every post from now on.

Let's see how far he's willing to take this retardation, if he'll delete each and every post going forward from here to eternity rather than admit he (and it is a He, no matter how many hormones you take Janny) is wrong.

Also, here's a different picture of Gygax from another occasion, showing level 3. It has likewise been reconstructed from cropping etc. Oh, and 2e is off-topic here, because it's not an OSR game and never has been.

>>95979019
I started adding some variety of it to all my effortposts after seeing Infographics Anon do something similar. I figure this way at least it'll be obvious from a look in the archive that everyone who actually contributes to these threads or tries to understands that 2e is, always was, and will continue to be off-topic for this general, since it's not an OSR game, whereas on the other hand those who claim the opposite are simply nothing but transexual trolls.

What are things you use to flesh out NPCs the party found interest in on the go?

>>95979065
Vornheim has a lot of tables that are useful for nobles. The die drop tables on the covers can help you figure out stats if the NPC being anything besides a normal man/elf/etc is important.

>Going back through the archives
>Janny is Polish
Janny. If you have Polio leg then I know who you are and I'm going to put you in a god damn asshole lock for all this bullshit.

>>95979090
Just checked it out, the page layout looks familiar. Nice tables to roll on, thanks anon

>Posts aren't being deleted
Uh-oh, stinky. Looks like our Janny is either off getting his pay cheque for the month (lel) or someone finally noticed him obsessively faggoting out over /osrg/ and has given him a smack around the back of the head over it.

Mods, assuming you're here, just ask and I'll happily provide evidence of the shitfuckery he's been up to for months so you can plough that bussy into submission.

I'm a good citizen of 4chan after all.

>>95979065
It's exponentially easier if you give the NPCs in question a hook to begin with. If you just say "a merchant" you're likely to be stuttering like an asshole if the players ask followup questions; "a fat merchant" is better, and "an obese merchant with gemstone teeth" can be immediately extrapolated into a full personality – it's obvious that the lard and gem teeth come from the same source: a barbaric, gross, excessive avidity. This person is clearly some kind of hideous Trimalchio, and you can imagine his voice, his gestures, his habits, his home easily from there. If you have trouble coming up with this kind of quick adjective you can probably find any number of random tables for it that'll spit you one or two. In fact, thinking about it, I feel like Vornheim and Yoon-Suin both contain tables of this nature.

And keep in mind that this is not only fantasy but first and last a matter of gaming; it's not only unnecessary to be some sort of Goncourt-ass subtle naturalist, it's downright counterproductive. Paint with bright colors and broad strokes; caricature.

Moreover, 2e is off-topic. I hope this helps.

>>95978921
Man my memory of that time is so fucked.
Yea it is that photo, christ. I thought it was a video for some reason. I think I either also warped the same photo without knowing it was already done, or maybe someone else grabbed both and I reshared it before doing the recreation. I never got as far as the hand-redone one, I was doing it in... paint.net or gimp or something and don't think I ever posted it.

I was never on enworld, dragonsfoot or knights n knaves myself. Was more of the blogzone and G+ era, and I (embarassingly) started more projects than I could ever hope to finish.

>>95979168
You're welcome. The covers being b/w too is kind of genius for a print-from-pdf standpoint. Raggi and Zak really had usability in mind no matter how you got the book.

>>95979102
KEK
Who even has polio lameness in this day and age? Was it really that bad behind the iron curtain?

>Janny is Polish
When was this mentioned?

>>95979202
>Who even has polio lameness in this day and age?
Some guy I knew from Poland.
Hey, if it is you out there being a faggot?
Blas.

Get in touch so I can call you an asshole in person as it were.

Alright here another pic for the OP This time D&D art.

My favorite book is definitely the fiend folio, it has some incredible entries, both silly and serious. I bought an extra copy on eBay because some guy Drew in it when he was a kid, and it had some really cool colorings to the black and white.

The unglossed semi-toothy paper of the first edition books is definitely superior to the paper of the second edition books, which don't even count as osr

>>95979189
>avidity
Not to be a jerk, but I think you meant avarice? Avidity means eagerness.
And either event, I completely agree with you about this system of descriptions and how it lets personalities organically flow. I will say however, that I believe the second edition of D&D is strictly inferior to those before it.

>>95979189
What in the world? Why would this post be deleted? This is extremely helpful, and on topic.

>>95979189
Why in the world with this supposed to get deleted? If it is both correct and helpful?

>>95979192
>Yea it is that photo, christ. I thought it was a video for some reason. I think I either also warped the same photo without knowing it was already done
Maybe you made this version (pic related)? I also had that one saved but I'm pretty sure the first one I posted was Philotomy's work. Either way bro, thanks for your help in archiving and analyzing these vital materials which, in stark contrast to 2e, are as on-topic as it's possible to be.

>>95979202
>another post was kill too fast for Plebs to catch it
God DAMN, hoes mad. Looks like Desu snagged it this time though.

>>95979264
No, I meant to write avidity (but no offense taken). It's often used to mean "greed, hunger", especially in older writing, c.f.
>https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avidity
for example. If anything I'm guilty of getting a bit too Gygaxian in voice here. But then again, where better?

What in the world is actually happening? Why are on topic helpful posts getting deleted?

>>95979358
Because the Janny has brainworms and any post with '2e is off topic' makes him throw a wobbly, no matter how otherwise on topic it is.

2e is both dogshit and off topic by the by.

>>95979366
You could try not adding your retarded butthurt about 2e to your posts. right now the only ones bringing up 2e is dumb faggots like you.

>>95979021
>Also, here's a different picture of Gygax from another occasion, showing level 3.
How do they know it's level 3 and not level 2 or 25?

>!Furthermore, "AD&D" 2e is a bowdlerised AD&D knock-off for the storygaming special education kids of Satanic Panic moms. So it's neither OSR nor on-topic.!<

>>95979432
>manglement of the human ass level: off the charts

>>95979432
By this point it's not about 2e.
It's about if the thread belongs to posters, or a tranny who has let a sliver of power go to his girlcock and his programmer sock-puppets.

2e is dogshit and only people that eat bran fibre for the pleasure of feeling the girth of their own shit cracking open their asshole like it by the way.

>>95979438
>Be (You).
>Use a plebbit-style spoiler tag.
>Call 2e out for what it is.
Picrel

>>95979459
Personally I like Swords & Wizardry Complete, with adding back in the evasion and pursuit rules from Delving Deeper (it's probably less than 100 words). To me, this offers the best possible OSR gaming experience. Other people's opinions will differ, I'm sure.

Oh, also, pic not related to what I am saying, but very important. Screen cap and save this discussion while you can.

>>95979438
I'm less sure of the exact circumstances of that one, but IIRC it's known from two or possibly three facts: firstly, the players on that second occasion encountered the evil dwarf Obmi, a known inhabitant of level 3; secondly the label "Obmi" can be just about made out in the bisected circular room labeled "7" in the lower right (see pic related reconstruction; I really wish I could relocate the blog where these were posted), and the possible third is that the players may have been told they'd ventured to level 3 by Gygax after the fact.

More circumstantially the description of this level also resembles that given by Gygax for level 3 in various early publications.

Finally, you are of course correct that 2e is not an OSR game, and as such, is off-topic for the purposes of this general.

>>95979459
This anon is also extremely correct.

>>95979466
kekk

>>95979514
Interesting. Both levels seem to be extremely minimally keyed. I don't think he was holding much information in his head, I suspect what this means is that his dungeons were very simple and probably heavily focused on combat. Anybody agree?

Ceterum censeo editionem secundam ludi "Catacumbae et Dracones Provecti" esse delendam.

I'm not trying to add fuel to the fire, but we seriously need posters to start sending feedback, or getting on the IRC and talking about what is happening here. No other threads on this board have this massive amount of deletions going on

O fuck, I found that blog!
>https://spellshare.blogspot.com/2020/08/old-greyhawk-castle-level-3.html
is the entry covering level 3, but it has a separate entry for each known level, compiling the known facts about that level.

This is as good as I remembered. Fuck yeah.

>>95979536
Based Cato Maior.

I don't think the "heavily focused on combat" part stands up (rather, the majority of dungeon encounters are random encounters of no profit which players are wise to avoid where possible), but yes, the keys are extremely minimalistic for these early levels, which as early as the publication of OD&D Gygax was describing as "a simple maze". The key for level 1 is available at
>https://spellshare.blogspot.com/2020/08/old-greyhawk-castle-level-1.html
and several other places including IIRC the K&KA thread linked above although I can't be bothered to go and check; it's also been posted in its entirety in this general before. It's short enough to fit easily in one post. 18 keyed areas.

Anyway, Gygax himself clearly outgrew this style of level design fairly quickly – not only was the second version of the Castle he designed together with Rob Kuntz by all accounts far more elaborate, the deeper levels of this first version were also more sophisticated – but for his totally fresh players encountering a new and unheard-of game it may have been ideal. It's likely that levels 1-3 are the only ones that fully adhere to this style, given Gygax's repeated advice to new referees to start by drawing the first three levels of their dungeons before beginning play; it's not unreasonable to assume this is what *he* did himself, and that these levels thus represent his first foray into dungeon design.

So, to sum up, 2e isn't an OSR game. That's the TL;DR here: it's off-topic in this general.

If I'm placing a holy font of carved stone in my dungeon that weighs 2500 lbs realistically how would the PCs get it out if at all? How many would be needed to move it? It seems like cart/wagon carrying weights are half of that

>>95979459
Oi, Janny, you missed giving me the bad of honour.
You're slacking, clean it up.

Or did my one make you laugh and you decided to leave it?

>>95977537
>you either avoid combat altogether or you like the easy combat of 5e with no middle ground
Some people enjoy tough battles where death is common.

>Had to point out my own post to the Janny to get it deleted
So you're not just a retarded man-baby, you're an incompetent, retarded man-baby.

>95979432
Normally I would say that you need genuine and immediate Mental Health treatment, but it is painfully obvious at this point that you are in autistic ESL that has a structural inability to create new or cohesive arguments or sentences

>>95979613
>O fuck, I found that blog!
>https://spellshare.blogspot.com/2020/08/old-greyhawk-castle-level-3.html
Amazing! Sadly we only have maps for levels 1 and 3. But surely those maps have survived, right? Doesn't the Gygax estate have any plans to publish them?

I concur with the other Anons who are saying that AD&D 2e is off-topic garbage.

>>95979619
I should think that it would be more likely the players would just absquatulate without it; it seems too heavy and large to be convenient as loot. This table of stone density:
>https://matmake.com/properties/density-of-rocks.html
suggests that 2500 lbs is about half a cubic meter of marble, which is... actually very big for a font, 50 x 100 x 100 cm. It does seem to me that that should be loadable on a four-wheeled oxcart – 2e is off-topic, incidentally – if it can just be levered or lifted up on it, though.

Through the dungeon they might have to use rollers or something, but honestly, it's not your job to come up with preset solutions. I'm only mentioning this stuff above as some sort of guidelines or rule of thumb for use in your ruling on whatever they do come up with.

>>95979572
Are you doing that yourself? How's it going?

>>95979727
>But surely those maps have survived, right?
Yeah, I think one full set of originals was sold to a collector at auction when the Gygax estate was sold off, possibly to Paul Stromberg or whatever the correct spelling of his surname is.

>Doesn't the Gygax estate have any plans to publish them?
My understanding is that Gygax's widow has a totally psychotic notion of their actual worth, something like eight figures instead of the likely real low-six, and is holding out like a retard for the jackpot she feels sure must be coming when people "stop trying to scam her". So we'll probably be waiting for a while yet, unfortunately.

>deletions are now so heavy that literally five of the last 25 posts have survived, all among the *least* effortful and in-depth discussions of OSR games and material
lmao

>>95979619
The amazing thing about OSR is that the DM doesn't have to come up with an idea on how to move such a thing, he can leave it to the players to figure it out. If they can surprise you and move it, cool. If they can't, also cool! You only have to come up with interesting situations, the solutions are not for you to figure out.

It would be different if you were playing one of the dogshit railroading editions like 2e, 3e, or 5e, but that's not how we play here, which is why those editions are off-topic here.

Do let us know if your players discover it and what they do about it!

>>95967801
>You'd also have to remove the additional XP for having fun, story goals, learning the rules of the game, and bringing snacks rules.
If you ran AD&D modules as written (yes even Pre-Dragonlance modules), you'd have those rules anyway.

>>95979619
You got some excellent advice here:
>>95979801
Don't miss it!

>>95979774
>Yeah, I think one full set of originals was sold to a collector at auction when the Gygax estate was sold off, possibly to Paul Stromberg or whatever the correct spelling of his surname is.
Do we know anything about what he plans to do with them? Just stick them in his private collection?

2e is off-topic dogshite.

>Giff are 9-feet tall
That's fucking huge.

>>95979619
Put it on logs and roll it out.

>>95979896
Giff exist in that weird space where you don't know if you're supposed to take them seriously. 90% of Spelljammer is that.
On one hand, ogre-sized bruisers who carry portable canons should be terrifying.
On the other hand, dopey hippo folk.

Test.

>>95979619
Option 1: Make the thing come apart in two or more sections. The upper bowl and the pedestal, or similar pieces. The sheer mass of one part, some clever keying of the stone pieces - masterfully carved - holds it together without it actually being masoned in place. A dwarf could probably notice this easily, assuming you are playing 0e where there's no indication that the dwarf has to actively search. Outside of that one, they do, but the chances would be fairly low RAW if playing B/X or RC/BECMI. 1e would be a little more complex as the probabilities are different for different things, but generally higher. But those are really your only options for going down this route unless you just houserule some other factor or are running a weird retroclone that alters it. Sometimes people get confused with how the dwarf stuff works because in 3e it became automatic, but besides retroclones that alter it, and a potential reading of 0e, it has to be declared.

Options 2: Some form of strong cloth or a sled, and some (a lot of) grease may also work to move it. Would be difficult to lug up stairs and you would need to have multiple horses, oxen, or laborers to move it. This is more for them to think up. But if you really want to hint at it you can have there be some construction happening in the home base where they're moving bins of gravel or stone via sled.

>>95979966
-icles.

>>95979896
>>95979954
Samefag cringe.

Last night, a character surrounded by 8'-tall stone constructs was slain by retainer's misplaced cone of cold, which was this player's first character death in almost a year. The retainer's player felt bad and briefly tried to argue they were confused how the magic cone passed go "through" the statues.

>>95979997
Retard spelling mistakes, but you know what I mean.

>>95979954
Hippos are fucking scary.

>>95979997
Honestly, DM should've probably made their ruling clear with a 'Are you sure you want to do that, it'll still hit your homie' before confirming.
Not often I say that but 'There's some big ass stone statues that create a wall between you and the caster' is a legit claim to cover.

>>95979997
A player shouldn't really make a mistake their character wouldn't make. If it was their first time casting the spell, maybe, but I don't think you get to the point of reliably casting it without knowing whether it would pass through certain enemies or not.

>>95977181
>Like charts and tables because you're a turbo autist? Then enjoy having your autism triggered by charts filled with inconsistencies and gaps that will recquire considerable amounts of rulings to patch over, making it the worst of both worlds.
name 5
>>95977442
>handful of good ones (albeit boring ones, like Divine Blessing or Fighting Style Specialization) and the rest are trap options (like Eavesdropping or Illusion Resistance)
they aren't trap options. eavesdropping is useful as hell as is illusion resistance

>>95980083
>they aren't trap options. eavesdropping is useful as hell as is illusion resistance
No-no anon, you don't understand.
Anything that isn't Numbers Go Up is actually a trap option.
Which is the reason that Fishfag chokes on fucking cocks all the time, he can't recognize a trap when he sees one

>>95979065
Universal NPC Emulator and/or common sense.

>>95980081
AYRT. It was a wand, and chaotic combat. I felt like telling the player the results of their action is holding their hand a bit.

>>95980155
Before it happens, I mean.

>>95980155
>I felt like telling the player the results of their action is holding their hand a bit.
Holding the players hands a bit isn't the worst thing in the world, especially when we're talking about someone making a life-or-death decision while operating on one type of logic and you're acting on another.

I guess my main question is whether the player asked you if he was going to hit the guy in the center and you answered "Try it and find out." If he just blasted with the cone first without asking, he'll have learned the valuable lesson of it being good to double-check rules before committing to an important action.

>>95980155
This depends highly on your table and how experienced the players are. Noobs need to be handheld a lot more because they're still learning what they can do, and there's a LOT of unlearning of habits and narrow context that comes videogame and non-OSR gaming that's been around since the 90s (such as but not exclusively things like WoD, BESM, GURPS, or more modern things like Lancer or Pathfinder) and then the building of NEW habits that don't go into "I can do anything lolrandumb" actions. Drunk players also sometimes need to be handheld a bit, if you're having game night as like a relaxed fun night type of deal.
Tone can also matter. Something like a classic LotFP meatgrinder adds tension with the "You sure?" questioning, but also can be better if recklessness is rewarded handsomely in every way it deserves. That's the extreme end of things, most stuff is quite dialed back.

>The quality of posts is extremely important to this community. Contributors are encouraged to provide high-quality images and informative comments. Please refrain from posting the following:

> - Ironic shitposting.

You degenerate, gill jerking, Innsmouth-look-having, wall-eyed, fish cock sucking, Dagon dicking, Mother-Hydra-fucker.

You think you can throw a warning like that my way with a straight face after the bullshit we've had to engage with from your fuckbuddy?

Janny. For the love of Pete.
At least pretend to have some dignity.
Some pride.
Some self-respect.

For tracking times in your games, do you make sure to keep track of the sun-time and not just the dungeon time? As in, when the party actually wakes up and arrives at the gates of the town to leave for adventure, when it's lunch time, when they need to sleep, etc.
What about for monsters? Like, would you keep track of, say,an ogre that roams an area, within 1 hex of a village of scholars that it regularly terrorizes (contrast - brains vs brute is a nice theme, made more complex if the villagers aren't particularly good aligned themselves, while not being evil). Perhaps it could sometimes be asleep, possibly during hours that don't synch with the party due to its monstrous physiology, roaming in the early morning hours, causing damage to the villagers and their property (at worst, their archives, which may have useful rewards for casters should they solve the issue...) and sleeping early, its natural brute strength and inflated bully-ego giving it an extra sense of security, but awake during the usual adventuring hours.

This might give the party upon arrival in the evening, if you place things strategically, to be informed and prepare themselves without disruption for the morning when the ogre causes havoc.

Just one example of time schedules, I'm not sure how to deal with stuff like that absent a spreadsheet or physical tracking tools.

Do you also happen to keep track of time zones for long distances, travelled via magic? Or no?

Tangentially related to this >>95980948
But how do you handle nonmagical character aging, especially without 1:1 time? Does each PC have a birthday? Have you ever had a character at your table die of old age from a combination of spells and time?

>>95980948
I would use the 4 hour watch timeframe at the wilderness level.
Dungeon turns are ten minutes. Wilderness turns are one day.
Intermediary for time keeping purposes would be the 4 hour watch. Divides your day into six unit which then allows for you to have monster schedules such as the one you proposed. I’m sure you could get more intricate than this but that seems like unnecessarily weighty bookkeeping

>>95980966
Does this really matter in the scope of your game? Are you downtiming month or years long spans of time? Are you doing narrative timeskips? Do you roll for character age at creation?

>>95980126
Good one, thanks

>>95981338
>Are you downtiming month or years long spans of time?
There's a lot of stuff that is multiple weeks, spell research for one. Enchanting items or scribing scrolls takes "weeks to months" for a M-U. Building a stronghold takes a bit. Certain classes (druids, assassins, monks) have to find specific NPCs in order to keep advancing and then fight off NPCs seeking to try to fight them. Long-span overland/sea travel. Recovering (or waiting for recovery of NPCs) from poisons/diseases, or just lots of people with HP damage. The need to find a healer for things like curses, dealing with Geas (on a PC or NPC)...
Heck Raise Dead or Resurrection costs more days on the part of the raised person or the cleric, respectively. A lot of stuff takes time.

Using the (digitized/update) 1981 map - Travelling from Karameikos to the Isle of Dread, exploring it, and then heading back, and then roaming up towards Glantri - which is effectively entirely hostile territory - and then back to Karameikos, or of to somewhere else... this can take a long loooong time, if you consider side-tracks along the journeys. Note the 24 mile hex scale.

Similarly, travelling from the Dutchy of Tenh up to Blackmoor to root around in the ruins would take a long ass time. Or going to any of the other "exotic" regions on Oerth. This is made worse by either the need for enough supplies to go long times without stopping or "island hopping" from village to village and hoping they have enough food and other supplies and enough need for gold.

>>95980158
>>95980323
You are very generous referees to allow drunk players and hypothetical questions at your gaming tables.

>>95980948
I track the time by hour and turn like this (with indented lists for round tracking):
+ 6:00 AM: Wake up
+ 7:00 AM: Spells memorized
+ 7:30 AM: Arrive in 6-141

Monsters, no. That's what wandering monster checks are for. No time zones. No age tracking- the players can track that if they want.

>>95981524
Meant to include >>95980236 in the first reply

>>95981523
I counted the hexes and from Specularum to the isle it's around 900-1000 miles depending on route. Meaning that, per B/X, with a small sailing ship, it would take 10 days on average, assuming no gales throw it off course (or into coastlines) or high winds fuck its movement up until it can be repaired. Or the ship gets capsized.

So you're looking at at MINIMUM with the most super duper lucky rolls 5 days out and back (2x speed roll) and if really fucked up somewhere around a month or two back and forth.

>>95981523
Okay all of that is neat and interesting, but are you just hand waving all of this time passage? Do your players not run multiple characters? If they run one character and you hand wave all this can they not track weeks or months themselves for age? Unless they rolled a near natural death aged year Magic User I don’t see why any of this matters from a game perspective

>>95981719
Why would this be handwaved?

>>95981877
I don’t know, but it seems like the only way you’d have trouble accounting for time passages that would influence natural aging (which doesn’t really impact gameplay at all unless you’re time skipping decades or whatever) is if you hand waved and then kept sloppy records.

>Are you doing narrative timeskips? Do you roll for character age at creation?
>Does this really matter in the scope of your game?

>>95979896
>>95980003
Giff are kinda sexy.

>>95979065
>flesh out NPCs the party found interest in on the go
Alignment
Cultural Origin (not just race, also geographical)
Significant magic carried (e.g. this is a fighter with ogre power gauntlets, that's why they call him Strongarm / Powerpunch / Shrek)
In this order. Everything else barely comes up and is almost never asked o the fly by my players.

>>95979997
>misplaced
Of course, "misplaced". It's not like the retainer is first in line to grab any surviving items of his late employer.

>>95979572
the shit explosion has caused over one hundred (>100) posts to be pruned

incredibly wild to have to view the live thread and the archive at the same time

>>95980012
>Not often I say that but 'There's some big ass stone statues that create a wall between you and the caster' is a legit claim to cover.
This. It's a DM issue (or a Kiddie D&D one).

>>95981524
>No age tracking- the players can track that if they want.
Great. I'm off to kill all the ghosts in the necropolis now. The worst they can do to me is age me, which is optional after all.
Silly DM won't know what hit him.
I hope one of the ghosts has a Haste or (limited) Wish scroll in their lair. I can't wait to start liberally using these particular magics!

>>95980948
>What about for monsters?
I use picrel (but roll 1d12, not 2d6) for fun stuff like that, eegardless of time of day.
Why is the ogre outside in daytime? Insomnia, the villagers' sheep keep him awake with their Bawing. Another reason why he feels justified in terrorizing them, not that he needed one, but now he has one in case a nosey prick like an adventurer asks.

>>95980386
>You think you can throw a warning like that my way with a straight face after the bullshit we've had to engage with from your fuckbuddy?
You know the leak revealed they have TWO reasons to ban, a public one that they show to the user and a private one that only janitors and mods can see, right?

2e is off-topic garbage.

>>95980081
>A player shouldn't really make a mistake their character wouldn't make.
In community theater/narrativist (2e/3e/5e) D&D, sure.

Not in old school D&D. "My character would remember the way back" when you don't map is like saying "my king would know how to promote that pawn" when you can't play basic endgames in Chess.

>>95982680
It wasn't even a ban, it was a warning.
But man.
Don't shit in my mouth then tell me it's chocolate mousse.

>>95980948
>For tracking times in your games, do you make sure to keep track of the sun-time and not just the dungeon time?
Obviously yes.

>What about for monsters? Like, would you keep track of, say,an ogre that roams an area
Obviously no. I can't keep track of the hour-by hour positions of thousands of monsters. That's what wandering monster tables are for: once monsters are out of sight, they are abstracted away.

>>95980966
>how do you handle nonmagical character aging, especially without 1:1 time? Does each PC have a birthday? Have you ever had a character at your table die of old age from a combination of spells and time?
I do use 1:1 time. No, we don't have birthdays, characters age on new year's day. Haven't had a character die yet, but it's not inconceivable with monsters like ghosts.

Furthermore, 2e is off-topic.

>>95982444
I think it's debatable whether it would apply in the case of Cone of Cold. Definitely not in the case of Fireball, since it expands to fill a volume, so it would go around the statue. Nor in the case of Lightning Bolt, since hitting a bunch of targets in a row is basically what it's for.

I also agree that 2e is off-topic.

Janny just woke up again it seems

>>95982723
Don't shit in my mouth then tell me it's chocolate mousse.
Their goal is to destroy this general through trolling and anti-moderation, so mocking you by giving you a troll reason to ban you is part of the game.

Second edition is rubbish.

>More deletions
Janny, Janny
Wherever you may be
You fuck dogs in your own country
Could be worse
You could be bored
Gooning out in a groomer discord

>>95980966
Like Anon, I don't find this matters in practice. I would not make this a primary concern of your game.

>>95955556 (OP)
Used chainmail terrain selection rules and wilderness wander monsters table from od&d to make this map and the lair treasures in like an hour. Quick and fun!

>>95982571
>Why is the ogre outside in daytime?
Maybe he can read, could be a two-headed ogre mage.
Perhaps the village formed near some giantish ruins to study it. The two-headed ogre may have started causing havoc because of his egotistical natures demanding ogre "society" be more important and his rampages intentionally including not just food and power-feeling, but the shredding of material that unfavorably mentions two-headed ogres.
Could make this even worse if the greater area were "owned" by some council of magic users who primarily kept themselves in a tower-complex, and the beast had convincingly sworn fealty to them, so they sent this two-headed ogre-mage to actually be the village's guardian, not realizing the problems it would cause because of how even two-headed ogres are not strictly giants due to how retarded they are, despite the superficial resemblance and large size. It's interesting chain-faction issues.

But maybe I've gone off the rails of relevance.

>>95982444
>>95982481
Yes, it's KDD&D. If we were using AD&D ghost stats, obviously age tracking becomes relevant, and we can resolve it in that moment.

>>95982441
I don't really understand why you want people to see how obsessed you are and how proud you are to be ban evading. It's like you genuinely don't appreciate how shameful your behavior is.

>>95984881
>How shameful your behaviour is
Spitting in the eye of someone who wants to bully you into submission is never shameful, it is, in fact, the least shameful thing humanly possible.

But do tell me how that boot tastes.

>Deleted by the Janny before I could reply
As contemptuous as I am of you Janny, I have to respect your quick draw on that one.

>Janny can't even take a compliment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7Myff5xAZM

>Ban for ban evasion when giving a compliment
Aww, come on, don't be like that.
Go get a snickers and a cup of tea, then come back and see how you feel then about what I said.

>>95979192
>for a print-from-pdf standpoint.
If only the margins of every page weren't a solid inch of ink-devouring black

>>95985147
B/W Laser Printers are the real OSR machines. Inkjets are disgusting endless consumption because they clog up if you don't use them frequently enough. And color laser printers have tiny yellow microdots that the feds colluded with manufacturers to implement for tracking the source of classified and copyright-breaking printouts.

>>95962331
you both stay in combat. push back/retreat only represents you putting decisively more pressure on your opponent then vis versa.

However, I especially have done it in mass combat where you roll 2 d20s at once and the higher outcome wins the fight. quickens things up when you got 12+ entities.

>>95979896
>>95982030
This is a giff appreciation thread now.
Seriously, I've always wanted to implement Giffs way back when I first learned about them in 5e (shame on me). The real question is whether I want them to be from spelljamer crashing their ship into my B/X hexcrawl or whether they're native to my world and actually fitting in since there's already gunpowder at least.

>>95987021
Crashed UFOs are about as classic as D&D gets.

>>95955556 (OP)
So, I heard there´s 37 extra levels (up to 50) for castle greyhawk somewhere?

>>95987071
This was shared earlier >>95957753
But I have no idea what it's actually from. The middle section is from 3e, the slanted maps are unknown. If you check the archive another anon shared some reproductions of the original greyhawk levels that were produced from studying photos of Gary with his map binder open in view, and neither the photos nor the reproductions look anything like that image's maps.

>>95979954
Hippos can easily fuck up a human. They kill more people than sharks

>>95957753
>>95987109
The slanted maps (not slanted in the source) are from the 1990 WGR1 Greyhawk Ruins which was not written by Gary Gygax.

>>95987194
>In his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, Lawrence Schick calls the adventure "a classic illogical "gilded hole" dungeon".
... I can't tell if that's a neutral statement of it being more of a 0e/1e-esque design or him ripping into it. Schick wrote White Plume Mountain but that was a decade+ earlier.

I might have to peek at it to see if it's more of a time capsule from before '84 (and worth backporting) or if it's just garbage.

>>95987069
You think it's worth taking a look at some of the original/Gygaxian adventure modules? I've just started reading through the DMG to see where I might take my B/X sandbox at some point.

>>95987517
G1 is 8 pages of actual written material, excluding the maps/cover/etc.
You can take the time to peek it, easily.

>>95987517
They're interesting to look through. A piece of D&D history.

They're terrible though. Some of the worst games in my life have been DMs trying to get Gygax adventures to work and they're all just so dumb. And then you read through them later on and discover how insane they are, because they work on some kind of random moon logic.

Extremely helpful lessons though. One of the fastest ways to become a much better DM is to suffer through a Gygax adventure and learn how to avoid all the mistakes he made before anyone knew any better.

Gonna be dming an osr for the first time soon. It's gonna have to be online over discord and foundry vtt. My two concerns are should I create a map and just turn exploring fog off to simplify the process online. And for combat should It be grid combat, theater of mind or a mix of both?

>>95987576
Do I really want to put my players through this ordeal though? Or what exactly makes them so terrible? I'm curious either way and some inspiration can't harm, I guess but not sure If I actually ever want to run a published module.

>>95987517
They're generally great and classics for a reason and still tend to be recommended as some of the best campaign starters like T1 and B2 or outright campaigns like G1-G3, D1-D3 and some great modules like S4 and WG4.
The few complaints you'll see about them are from retards who run them using rules they aren't fit for and who don't know how to run a real dungeon and wilderness adventure. The quintessential tourist example would be running the Tomb of Horrors in something not-AD&D 1E and for a party of players who don't know how to run high level 1E characters effectively.

>>95987604
>My two concerns are should I create a map and just turn exploring fog off to simplify the process online.
Yes, and remove stuff they wouldn't know about on sight like secret doors.
>And for combat should It be grid combat, theater of mind or a mix of both?
Grid combat/Mix. At least a visualization of what's present and where.

>>95987906
What about spider queen? T1–4 A1–4 GDQ1–7

So I hate to mention it since it'll result in a mass deletion over there, but if anyone does want to mention our Janny being a disreputable faggot to someone on the mod team?
There's a Lancer thread up on the board that's proof positive the abhuman is neglecting their duties to squat over /osrg/ seething and gooning.
Go take a look at the shitshow over there and see what it's like. It's absolutely fucking absurd.

And I bet now that I've mentioned it in here he'll be over there storming the beaches within 2-3 minutes.

What are the opinions about Dragonslayer by Greg Gillespie?

>>95987906
>They're generally great and classics for a reason
Wut. The only reason anyone would even consider them classics is because they're old or they like drinking greasy Gygax shits. They don't even have particularly good reputations, especially compared to other older adventures.
Comparing something like White Plume Mountain to Barrier Peaks or Tomb of Horrors is pretty wild, because WPM is actually fun and weird in a good way rather than a bad way. The difference in quality is extreme, which is why ToH and EttBP (and TLCoT) always come with asterisks as to why people are not supposed to say they're really bad in order to avoid hurting the Gygaxians feelings.

>>95987949
A1-A4 is great.
Q1 isn't imo and and I recall Gygax opining that he had more interesting overall ideas for the demonweb than what went into it, I think there are fanmade versions floating about trying to make it closer to that.
Some similar complaints with the latter half of Temple of Elemental Evil were Mentzer's did some half-assed work that can do with being amended but is great up until that point.
Incidentally WG6 is arguably his real hardass adventure above and beyond Tomb of Horrors, it's really meant to be a challenge for a high-level party by restricting their options.

>>95987517
God yes: they're all foundational to actual old-school play and one can accomplish more in as little as 8 pages as some writers do in their entire module-making careers. If you want to understand the playstyle the (original) OSR was attempting to recapture--D&D as its original designers broadly intended it to be played--you can't go wrong reading and better yet running/playing the original works of the most important designer of that style.

I like this set of reviews of the G series, which though short still takes the time to pull apart each module in places and show why they work, followed by good commentary in the feedback.

https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com/2020/12/19/review-g1-steading-of-the-hill-giant-chief-add-1e-the-birthplace-of-gygaxian-naturalism/

https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/review-g2-glacial-rift-of-the-frost-giant-jarl-add-kraftwerk/

https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/review-g3-hall-of-the-fire-giant-king-add-entry-of-the-gods-into-valhalla/

>>95987812
>Or what exactly makes them so terrible?
The better ones are just boring. The reason they weren't seen as boring in their time was because they were one of the few early sources of new official spells/monsters/items, but that just doesn't translate into the same shock and awe that it used to, especially when a lot of them didn't really bring anything exciting to the table. It takes a little more than some gray-furred snake or crystal ooze to turn heads these days.

The problem comes with the various experimental ideas, which tend to fall flat and require a lot of "Guess what I'm thinking" style of play rather than natural deduction using in-character logic. Gygax is just really bad at puzzles/unique challenges. He can stock a dungeon with basic monsters, sure, but anything beyond that and he struggled.

The kindest thing you could say is that the game just didn't have the language to communicate ideas clearly yet, because everything was so new. The adventures probably would have worked fine if he had been the one running the adventure, and I can understand it being difficult to convey a lot of complex and nuanced ideas and try to fit them into tiny paragraphs. But, other early designers managed to do this and do it quite well, so I can't keep finding excuses for Gygax.

>>95988330
I note there's nothing actually concrete or any real examples in this post. Very handwavy complaints.

>>95987576
Bait used to be believable.

>>95988369
Gray-furred snake and crystal ooze weren't specific enough for you?
I could probably point at the entirety of Tomb of Horrors as being awful and take any element from it as a specific example of really bad design, but those are some low hanging fruits.

Let's look at Barrier Peaks instead, and go through the process of learning how a newly discovered tech item functions. It takes the form of a mini-board game, which sounds like it could be fun, but it ends up just being a drawn-out series of intelligence rolls where your only options are "keep going or give up."

There's so much room for making something interesting and compelling, but the ultimate execution is just not very exciting and a tempo-killing time waster, especially since some of the items are basically duds. The biggest problem is that the longer versions of this minigame appear alongside some obviously good items, so it's less of a fun prelude and more of a not particularly entertaining impediment you have to roll through. Even just giving the player some extra choice beyond "stop or keep going" would at least make them feel more like they're actually involved in the process.

The idea is there. Making discovering how tech items work it's own special thing is.a great idea. The execution though is incredibly lacking, and manages to make the adventure less fun, rather than more.

>>95988632
>Barrier Peaks has a dumb Metamorphosis Alpha mechanic and is a weird off-beat scifi dungeon that's not as much of a funhouse puzzler as S2
>Tomb of Horrors has a lot of instant-death traps at levels where magical healing is plentiful
>this means Gygax's dungeons are all shit
Yeah nah, not buying it. The vast majority of his modules are just great off the bat without any caveats at all and what little there is with S1 and S3 are negligible at best.

>>95988727
Weird how you demand specifics but are only happy to produce broad strokes yourself.

>>95988632
>Tomb of Horrors
Holy fuck you're not just stupid, you're disingenuous

>>95989034
You're a dumb astroturfing piece of shit that cries about based Gary (pbuh) every thread

>>95988632
Artifact use charts appeared in Gamma World and S3 and then disappeared, because as you observed the novelty soon wears off. But I later learned that they are Markov chains and you can represent a Markov chain with a transition matrix where the i,j-th entry represents the chance of advancing to state j when you are in state i. If T is the transition matrix, and T^n is the matrix multiplied by itself n times, then if you take the limit of T^n as n -> infinity, you will get a transition matrix where the the i,j-th entry is the chance of ending up in the final state j starting at i, assuming you keep rolling until you get to a final state. The i,j-th entry will be zero if there is a final state reachable from i and j is not a final state. This is of some practical significance if you want to resolve your artifact use chart with a single roll. Gary didn't teach me all of this exactly, but he planted the seed.

>>95987576
>this guy hasn't even run S1 Tomb of Horrors once with all 20 pregens in play at the same time.
Shigyy Diggy Doooo

>>95987604
fellow online dm here
>should I create a map and just turn exploring fog off to simplify the process online
Absolutely. If I am pressed for time, I simply google "fantasy battle map [insert theme]" and copy it 1:1. If I have only a little time, I do the same but photoshop the map for a bit.
Especially helpful for small lairs in the wilderness and random buildings in towns.
>(combat) a mix of both?
I recommend it. Player and monster tokens for rough positioning (who stands besides who, distances etc.) but no slavish adherence to grids. Scale on the map is accurate though, mostly 1 inch wide, then I go from there during play.

>>95989790
Kinda like thanking the man who shot you for inspiring you to look into medicine.

>95989851
>Gary Gygax shot and killed shitters who were disruptive at his table back in the day.
... ??? Uh, based?!

>>95989851
Stop trolling the thread, you stupid fuck

>>95988031
It's alright. It's his personal amalgam of Holmes and B/X and 1e, I guess for people who don't want to make their own homebrew or those who want a retroclone with aesthetics that harken back to AD&D. I thought the nod to the cyclops in Krull was an interesting nostalgic addition to the races, but that might not resonate with younger people.

Thoooough, the one thing that really bugs me is how messy the cover design is. It looks like he or whoever did the graphics/layout accidentally cut the logo in Photoshop and never corrected it. Also, the typography is poorly rasterized and jaggy, instead of razor sharp vectors. The Easley art isn't as high res as it could be, either. Disappointing, considering how much he is charging for POD.

>>95988632
I thought the furry snakes are a Fritz Lieber homage?

anyone have an example of two maps, one thats vague and just shows the general area of land marks, and one thats much more detailed and shows most locations of note?

I always liked the idea of a party starting off with a general sense of an area, but actually filling it out as the go along and gather info. I could see cartography being the overall goal for a party, one that you dont see very much and would focus adventure on travel.

>>95990995
West Marches.

Has anybody got any idea why the DMG Iron Flask magic item has got no listed XP and gp value?

>>95990995
Isle of dread has one with just the coast hexes filled in, since that is what you'd know from looping around it in a boat

how the FUCK do you call diagonal, off grid, shit for the maapper? and WORSE how do you call caverns? i look around and theres all these suuper talented map makers making GM resources that look neat but like... i look at dyson logos maps and say "man that looks cool but idk how to call that." im trying to run Skerples Tomb of the Serpent King and o feel like im floundering completely. (their progress: they have met the cobra golem, basilisk, and xiximanter, but the sacrifice area and the ledge is still out of they purview) the rest of the Tomb map is pretty straightforward, but so many rooms pop out halfway between things .. i just dont know how to make that clear and unambiguous to my mapper.

>>95992216
>i just dont know how to make that clear and unambiguous to my mapper.
That's the neat part, you don't. "The map is not the territory" can be taken literally in this case. There are some situations where a dwarf or spell may help, and a compass is essential. But as you go deeper or into more dangerous places the map is going to be less and less of a direct help.
You describe things like
>DM: You're heading out the door to the north? The passageway immediately slants to the right, at an angle
>Party caller after discussing: We go that way yea. Bruno is taking point tapping with the ten foot pole for traps as usual.
>Ten, twenty, thirty feet. Bruno's pole hits air. A pit is in front of you, it extends to the full width of the walls. To your left, adjacent to the pit there's a door.
>Bruno: How deep is it? I look over the side.
>Only about 5 feet, it looks dug out rather than being part of the architecture. The stone and masonry around the edges is broken.

Shit like that. OD&D has an example of play with such descriptions.

>>95992216
TotSK is probably the most overrated module around.

You describe diagonal corridors and off-grid shit just like you describe orthogonal corridors and on-grid shit, not sure what the issue is supposed to be. Sections that are difficult to map are meant to be a challenge, it's not your problem if they don't map well.

Caverns, you describe approximately, using words like "about" or "roughly" and qualitative adjectives like "a bit", "slightly", or "a lot".
>The cavern tunnel is ABOUT 120' long. Throughout its whole length, it turns SLIGHTLY / HARD to the left.

In all cases, remember never to use objective cardinal directions when describing maps but only relative directions like left, right, and ahead, because characters have no way of knowing what direction they're actually facing, and there's some fuckeries like teleporters that turn them around without them realising.

>>95992490
>characters have no way of knowing what direction they're actually facing
There are ways to do this but they require deliberate action and the formation of good, regimented habits.

Remember much of this derives from wargaming, and those influences mean that your table should try to get more in the mindset akin to an ARMA squad or Barotrauma crew when in hostile areas. It could save you from having to save.

>>95992490
>>95992461
thank you for the advice. I want to be clearer and unambiguous because its a situation where we are both bad at this. im bad at describing, theyre bad at catching. i dont want them necessarily to be able to make perfect blueprints of the dungeon, but i also dont want to turn them around cause in trying to memtally prepare for the whole room i mix up left and roght, or east and west. (these two i REALLY fucking struggle with.)

i have the patience for myself, but i dont know how fickle my group is and how much patience they have.

>>95992589
>or east and west. (these two i REALLY fucking struggle with.)
On YOUR map you should have a compass rose. And should have some way of tracking the party's position. You can do this with a small item with a clear direction to it. One way is to have a steel sheet under your map and use a small magnet with dot or line painted (use your mini paints or a paint pen) to indicate direction, then you can move this about and its less likely to get dropped or messed up.

>>95991044
>>95991800
thanks! forgot about isle of dread.

>>95992730
>You can do this with a small item...
Literally just make a light mark with your pencil and erase it when the party moves. Absolutely do not need to make it more complicated than that.

>>95993116
Risky. Depends on your grid size. If your map is also pencil'd then this could be an issue. If your eraser decides to shit the bed on you then congrats you have ruined the paper.

Using a bead or magnet or something works wonderfully and you can keep it with your dice.

>>95991774
If I had to venture a guess, it would be because if it is empty, then you have to capture something to put it in there, and letting it out will make it hostile again. But if there is something in there, you get XP and treasure from the genie living inside or whatever

>>95992216
Literally just use Cardinal and ordinal directions. As for caves? Describe it as you would if you were physically there. Tell them that the cave walls open up into a large chamber, far past their torchlight, then ask them if they want to walk into the center, or stick towards the edges of the cave, then as they move in describe what they continue to see, and if there's anything interesting, be sure to give it a once over

>>95993251
There's many cases in the DMG in which items have different listed values based on their sub-types. E.g. the Figurines of Wondrous Power are worth 100 XP / 1,000 gp per HD. So it could have two values listed based on the content.

tourist here
scarlet heroes is basically adapted 1st edition right?
2nd edition is "basically interchangeable" with 1st
so with a bit of spit and elbow grease i can freely use the million splats in scarlet heroes without a headache

does this hold up?

>>95993968
>scarlet heroes is basically adapted 1st edition right?
No, not even close.

>2nd edition is "basically interchangeable" with 1st
Nope. The n00b guide has a discussion of why it isn't interchangeable at all: >>95955566

This, however:
>so with a bit of spit and elbow grease i can freely use the million splats in scarlet heroes without a headache
is true: With a bit of spit and elbow grease you can do anything. Doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to do it, though.

>>95987949
Either run T1-4 or some low adventure and then A1-4 before going into the Giant series. The individual A series modules are generally good with A3 being the weakest. It's much too small and boring to be a city and suffers from being a tournament module where the others do not. Avoid the A1-4 super module as it is pure railroady trash.

How am I doing on these pics for the OP? Some feedback would useful.

is jaquaquing or whatever an actual technique to make the dungeons better or is it nusr bullshit?

>>95994113
That n00b guide is pretty bad.
>>95958745

>>95994723
Its real. The info is derived from observations of non-shit modules and is excellent to follow for avoiding quantum ogre railroad bullshit.

>>95994723
Jaquaying a dungeon means to design it in such a way that it uses some of the techniques of a particular designer from TSR. Equivalent advice can be found on the blog The Alexandrian, and sometimes called Xandering a dungeon. Basically, don't make the dungeon linear, add multiple pathways through the dungeon, and do other things like that which increase the relevance of player decisions.

It's not bullshit of any sort. It's good foundational dungeon design, and most if not all of the best dungeons ever designed employ the techniques, even if it only got named more recently.

>>95993968
Scarlet heroes is based on B/X (Basic D&D, a simplified version of OD&D, plus Expert D&D, because complicating RPGs is a apparently inevitability).

"1st edition" is weird, because it goes-
OD&D (which split off into Basic D&D [which then became B/X, and then BECMI)
AD&D 1e
And then AD&D 2e
3e, 3.5, 4e, 4e Essentials, 5e, and 5e 2024.

AD&D 2e and 1e are very similar, with a lot of material being entirely interchangeable between them.

>so with a bit of spit and elbow grease i can freely use the million splats in scarlet heroes without a headache
It's probably not going to be 1:1, but I think a lot of stuff will mesh together with some adjustments/conversions. I've never played SH so I can't say for certain though.

>>95993968
>scarlet heroes is basically adapted 1st edition right?

No: it's its own game entirely, designed to let you play old-schoolish with just one player.

>2nd edition is "basically interchangeable" with 1st

It may look like that with a surface glance, especially if you come from later editions, but the changes in mechanics and tone are extremely significant If you're aiming to run an old-school game, it will fight you every step of the way. Use an actual old-school edition; that's why the OP emphasises the first decade.

No idea about Scarlet Heroes sourcebooks: never gone over them.

>>95994888
>If you're aiming to run an old-school game, it will fight you every step of the way
That's a flat out lie, especially because there's more than one way to run an old-school game, and there's far from anything resembling a concensus on what that is. The worst thing is that there is a minority going about trying to convince people that a TRVE OSR game is one that simply rejects every change 2e made and only because 2e made it, in a very deliberate and obviously butthurt fashion that involves compounding levels of embarrassing mental gymnastics.

1e and 2e are incredibly similar, and if you're looking for a high-stakes dungeon crawling game, you can run either according to your taste and not worry whether some absolute losers try to tell you you're not actually playing an OSR game.

>>95995039
>there is a minority going about trying to convince people that a TRVE OSR game
its also a minority shilling 2e. You can tell its like 1-2 guys given how its only talked about in spurts.

>>95995039
I think proficiencies changer the nature of it pretty signifigantly. but to be fair, later BECMI stuff was already going down that path.

>>95994888
>the changes in mechanics and tone are extremely significant
Yup this is correct. See >>95974533
The tone shift is strong, but it takes actual reading to really grasp it.

The important thing is that while you CAN mod it, it's less of a case of
>Replace the doors because they're starting to rot
and more
>everything was painted with lead paint and its under 3 layers of non-lead paint but the lead paint is starting to peel away because it was applied improperly decades ago, so the entire house has to be re-drywall'd
As in, it's so pervasive and embedded into everything that a "houserule document" would basically be rewriting the game.

Which, you could do that. I'm sure there's a market for a "what if TSR didn't cave to the fundies or kick Gary out, and he revised 1e into 2e instead of Zeb?" It's just a ton of work.

>>95995066
I haven't seen anyone shilling 2e. The most I've seen is people acknowledging that it's OSR, occasionally referencing a 2e setting/adventure, and just generally acting fucking normal.
There's a lot of OSR games, so people only occasionally bringing up 2e is pretty normal. You see 2e discussed here a lot more often than games like C&C for instance.

Meanwhile, the 2e-haters...

>>95995081
It changes the nature, but not to the point where we need to bring up the True Scotsman Fallacy. Remember that even AD&D 1e isn't neccesary "True OSR", with even Gygax preferring not just OD&D, but 3-pamphlet OD&D. If were going to pretend there's a hard line, you can use a lot of the Appeals to Authority and Appeals to Tradition that are frequently employed against 2e against 1e itself.

>>95995039
~~it's just a minority~~ is perhaps my favorite of your many lies and distortions, alongside ~~golly, remember that totally real magical period when the general loved 2e and everyone thought it was OSR?~~

This general has always considered 2e to be off-topic, just like the original OSR as a whole did. It's true that there have always been people ignorant of the history of the OSR (or who just didn't care, like yourself) who have tried to force it in anyways. This is why the OP was changed to (more) specifically disallow 2e as far back as 2019--a full six years ago, in case the same people who are confused by the concept of a decade are getting lost there--but as you can see, this wasn't a sudden change even way back then: it was just clarifying a long-standing position for dullards who didn't know how to research the movement they wanted to hijack.

So while there's people trying to pretend that considering 2e as not OSR and thus off-topic is a recent change--or a minority position, or whatever lie they're working on this week--and treating posts to the contrary as "trolling", they're full of shit.

>>95994723
It's more about making the dungeons appeal to game theorists rather than making the dungeon appeal to players or DMs.

>>95995304
There's plenty of people discussing 2e in the general over the years without your K&KA-style shitposting attacking them. To the point where there's so much evidence that it's actually weird that you think a handful of posts over the span of decade is some sort of impenetrable wall. You really put a lot of effort into crafting your lie, you know that?

Hell, you realize that all of those posts are in response to people talking about 2e right? It's like you think showing pictures of cockroaches is showing proof that there's no food for them to eat. If 2e was so hated, why would people continue to discuss it here despite all your best efforts to get them to stop?

Here. Try this out. If your position is not such a minority, and so many people hate it so much here, just ignore it when the people who don't mind it discuss it here. If there's so few, they'll only get a few replies, and that's the end of their discussion. And, if more than a few people want to discuss 2e, then it looks like you're just even more wrong and all your effort is a desperate attempt to terraform this general.

>>95995190
>people acknowledging that it's OSR
It isn't, though.

>>95995364
>just a handful of posts, but also somehow a lot of effort to assemble

Lol, pick one

I knew you'd try this other defense. The counter is obvious. Tons of those posts (deliberately limited to before the OP change; there were hundreds more) don't just say "screw you 2e fan I hate it for no reason", but over and over articulate what you've done your best to pretend isn't true: that 2e is not considered part of the OSR because it isn't old school. It's a constant series of explanations as much as it is yelling at trolls and the clueless to go away.

>>95995364
>There's plenty of people discussing 2e in the general over the years
95% of the posts about 2e for the last few years are from exactly one poster. One who has a very recognisable posting style, particularly when ACKS is mentioned, to the point that he's made a name for himself on the whole board.

>just ignore it
Nope.

>>95995409
Your mistake is assuming he'd read the screenshots you've put together. He's not here to discuss in good faith.

>>95995452
We all know that, but it's nice to have actual proof. It was a fun lazy afternoon reading through Past /osrg and/tg in general (a bunch of the posts are from other threads), nice trip down memory lane, with TRUEAD&D, Greg, and many other old faces.

>>95995406
Aside from it being TSR-era D&D, it's also a system derived from other TSR-era D&D AND it has plenty of compatible content.
It's also the 2nd most popular OSR discussed on Dragonsfoot, only behind 1e and even ahead of OD&D. Far from being banned from that forum or being relegated to some sort of containment board, it's given the same position as the other official D&Ds.
There's plenty of massive 2e dungeon crawl adventures, tons of other aforementioned compatible content including new items/races/monsters, and it's arguably (like everything is) more alike to 1e than many other OSR systems discussed here without any issues.

I'm essentially convinced at this point that it's not even about the actual systems, but as >>95995109 alluded to, a deeply weird butthurt about TSR kicking Gary out after he spent too much time being addicted to coke in Hollywood and failing to get his D&D movie made.

The Gygax worship really seems tied to the 2e-hater posts, which is actually kind of funny because Gary didn't even really like AD&D (preferring OD&D), and even famously got upset on the Dragonsfoot forums when people kept asking about it because WotC held the rights to it, and was much more open to discussing OD&D (despite WotC also holding its rights).

>>95995311
all i think and read about is game theory. to be desu, i am more into game philosophy than any other aspect of games. all i think about is design, play is only a way for me to test my experimental designs and confirm whether my ideas lead to fun. i analyzed a couple of dungeons today by making diagrams. namely Tomb of the Serpent King and Hole in the Oak. HitO seems too loopy at the end, but TotSK seems too secret blocked. im gonna analyze a few more dungeons before i decide my thoughts but i wanna do a write up about how to formally analyze a dungeons layout and use the space itself to define the style of decoration and DMing that will end up being the best. so far it seems like my claims gonna be "loopy implies goofy" and "linear implies three act play"

>>95995409
I mean, it's both. Not even fifty posts over a decade isn't really all that much, but you spent a considerable amount of effort finding them and assembling them. It's more effort than anyone who disagrees with you is going to put into it, which I think is largely what you're depending on.
You're deeply invested in this, to a point well beyond mere obsession. Your post is evidence of that.

>that 2e is not considered part of the OSR because it isn't old school.
But it is old school. It's more old school than a lot of OSR systems, and more importantly "old school" doesn't have any sort of strict definition, especially not one that's universally accepted. The best we have is incredibly broad definitions, and you really need to just let go and accept that. 2e is an OSR game. You might not consider it one, and that's fine, as long as you respect other people's opinions and allow them to use a definition that not just they are comfortable with, but the vast majority of the OSR community is comfortable with.

>>95995495
I dont give a fuck about gary. 2e is just different. I like the BEC part of BECMI, and that was explicitly made so that gary could have his pet ad&d alone.

>>95995561
>different
Yeah. It's different. But being different doesn't make it not OSR.
Have you looked at the OSR landscape? It's got lots of very "different" systems. Even the first OSR games HAD to be different in order to avoid WotC's lawyers.

At its core, I think the OSR community has developed several different goals, not all of which are universally shared among everyone in the OSR community. Originally, the OSR emerged in the wake of 3e's release, and it was just trying to get new material printed in a time when it seemed like WotC was closing the vaults on the older games and would also send lawyers at anyone caught trying to distribute the pre-3e D&D editions. But, the goals have dramatically changed since the early 2000's, in no small part because not only is PDF sharing far easier, but WotC not only released digital versions but physical versions of the older editions.

Of these new goals, one is preserving the games out of a sense of history. Knowing where RPGs started from, what the games were like and how they evolved, all is information worth keeping alive.
Another is playing the games because there's elements that are genuinely fun but have fallen out of fashion in most modern games, and the goal is to have the most fun while playing RPGs. What these elements are differs from person to person, but the goal is mostly about being inspired by older editions of D&D, and not necessarily replicating them with perfect accuracy.

If you subscribe to either of these goals, there shouldn't be any discomfort over seeing 2e discussion. The first actually understands 2e's role and is curious about how it's genuinely different, and not just how some trolls imagine it is the death of the game. The second is willing to entertain the idea that maybe the changes 2e brought might align with their own personal tastes. I welcome both of these sorts, even if their conclusion is "meh, not for me."

AS&SH is a bit too weird and complex for me (despite having backed the original release) but I love how it oozes flavor.
In particular, when rolling a random encounter with a lich in the wilderness, there is a high chance it will simply ignore PCs as it trudges along, unless they directly mess with it. It's such a powerful, scary thing that it does not even register living mortals as worth its time.

I think that's a lesson we can all learn from.

What are some other interesting ways you've seen for handling "OP" wilderness encounters - ie ones you can't actually outrun - without it being a slower, more painful "rocks fall, everyone dies" situation?

>repeating the same bullshit non-arguments for the nth time to general exasperation
You do realize the only reason you're even here is because your mod co-conspirator going apoplectic and deleting half the thread the second anyone even responds to you with real arguments, right?
Haven't you noticed yet that no one would even remotely tolerate you if this general wasn't actively curated in a hostile fashion against it's staed purpose.
Do a flip into oncoming traffic you humongous piece of shit.

>>95995710
well if you are just talking about taste, everything is a spectrum and 1e bleeds into 2e which bleeds into 3e and so on.

something being different makes it distinct. if OSR just means "Old game" we would all be talking about traveller and star wars d6.

>> 95995884
>and so on
this has to be ragebait man. it has to be...

>>95995884
>we would all be talking about traveller and star wars d6.
We probably should, especially in the context of being contemporaries. When it comes to questions of the History of RPGs/D&D, it's really impossible to get a proper understanding of D&D without seeing what it's "neighbors" were doing.

But, there's also much more gray area games like Tunnel&Trolls, a game that was basically made to be D&D but playable entirely with d6's and does allow for dungeon crawl play, even though it's considerably looser than OD&D. I've seen various opinions on whether it's an "OSR" game, and a good part of me believes that the main reason there's any real doubt is because T&T is just not all that popular, incredibly dated, and mostly only interesting to those curious about RPG history. It's interesting, because T&T is an early and direct descendant of OD&D, predating even Basic, and while forced to make copyright dodging concessions and choosing to dramatically simplify the game, there's still a considerable amount of what could be argued to be "core" to what is essentially "old school".

It's worth discussing, alongside many other games not universally considered indisputably OSR. We don't really need to play the slippery slope game of "If you start discussing T&T here, that means this thread is gonna become the Star Wars d6 general!". Even if that threat was looming on the horizon, if someone thinks they want to try some sort of old school D&D-inspired adventure but using the Star Wars d6 rules, I'm actually curious about how it'd turn out, much moreso than I feel the need to challenge their interpretation of what OSR means.

>>95996025
>we probably should
There's no "we" here.
Go make your own general you nasty troll asshole.

>>95996025
Old os also relatove, so it's high time we brought 3.pf into the discussion. In a few more years, 4e will be considered old school too. Can't Wait.
SQUEEEE!

>>95996025
This is not and never has been a thread about the "History of RPGs".
Not even the reddit /r/OSR dumbasses pretend that's the actual definition so you've somehow managed to go above and beyond even redditors in how retarded you are.

>>95995769
>I think that's a lesson we can all learn from.
It kind of reminds me of C.S. Lewis's Last Battle, where the Dark God Tash learns about an imposter and travels from a distant land into Narnia.

The main character, Tirian, just sort of sees him walking, and Lewis makes it clear that it's a vision of pure horror that terrifies Tirian to his core. Tash isn't doing anything particularly horrifying, just making his way to the tent the imposter is staying in, but it's one of the scariest sequences in the entire Chronicles of Narnia.

it's actually kind of funny in hindsight, because gods walking somewhere is practically unheard of, and Tash walking hundreds of miles just to fuck someone up almost makes it seem like he wants to leave no doubt about how mad he is.

>>95995304
>This general has always considered 2e to be off-topic, just like the original OSR as a whole did
If this general did just as the original OSR did then this general never did.

>It's true that there have always been people ignorant of the history of the OSR
Self-referential ignorance of the history or OSR or baldfaced lie?

>>95995066
>You can tell its like 1-2 guys given how its only talked about in spurts.
It comes in spurts because posts are only needed to refute trolls posting ignorant lies like above.

>>95995190
>I haven't seen anything because I've been deleting all the posts

>>95994113
>>95994804
>>95994888
hey thanks for the quick input and clarification, ill read over the posted guide a few times to get a better grasp of the differences

the main reason im asking is due to me having modern brainrot and addiction to character options (but since SH is a solo-game i think you can forgive my tendencies)

2e has a shitton of supplements for player options, that some anons already alluded to, so i thought this place was a good one to ask about the general feeling of the games

1e DMG Appendixes drew me into asking, mostly since solo-play is heavily reliant on procedural play laong with random tables, which are heavily present and of great quality

i already "knew" SH was a B/X sprout, but didn't quite "get" how deep the differences ran, so ill read through that branch of books first before trying my hand at jury-rigging 1e/2e

its also a good starting point to meet, learn, test and ultimately practice OSR principles, which is something i realized my players want, but dont know exist

sorry for sparking a system turf war by the way, i am just a retarded tourist trying to learn

>>95994667
Sorry that I have no nice way put this but since you've asked for feedback, they're very boring and show nearly zero effort on your part.

The Eggleton one with the crystal ball is nearly unrecognisable as osrg even with fatter text. The one with the round colonade temple is very uninteresting as a picture. The Azure Bonds painting by Caldwell is boring as a painting, and the painting and the book and the vidya come from a long time after the magic "first decade" that excites some people. The pic in the post I'm replying to, another by Caldwell but from 1989 and after the release of AD&D 2e, isn't great and you've done nothing to make it worthwhile. It actually looks like, if you put in any effort, that you used it all up in looking for two of Caldwell's worst D&D paintings.

OP's picture uses the iconic image from 1e's better-illustrated covered DMG and mashes it up with the typeface used on the little brown books of original D&D. It didn't take a lot of either but the guy who did it put some thought and effort into it and it relates to two periods of old school stuff at the same time.

You've typed /OSRG/ in a plain font over some uninteresting images.

>its the 2e "debate" again
You guys seriously never talk about anything else.

>>95996874
Yp ill read over the posted guide a few times to get a better grasp of the differences
You really shouldn't. That's not a real guide, it's just weird propaganda.

Thoughts on advanced labyrinth lord?

>>95980948
this is almost entirely worthless, but i did make it. its meant to be a sort of vague fantasy european time, just south of england, but i didnt care to make it totally accurate (the solstices technically happen on the 20thish of june/dec so it fucks it up a bit)
twilight is meant to be during the start/end of night on the chart, so day means the sun is up. a time autist would break it down into more detail, but scotland is still under nautical twilight at midnight in june for example, New York has 1 hour for n twilight, 1h30m full, about 40m nt, 1h full twilight at the equator etc. Maybe 2 hours (in 3 40 min segments) for south/mid euro twilight is reasonable
the squares should obviously relate to 10 minute turns, and you could theoretically print these out and use a d10 as a marker for where you are in the day and just push it along if you wanted to

>>95998595
>advanced labyrinth lord
It's a hybrid of B/X and the PHB (the real one from 1978 by Gygax, not the dogshit knock-off), so in this regard it's comparable to OSE-Advanced, except it's a bit closer to the PHB with respect to it.

However, since it doesn't port much if anything from the DMG (the real one from 1979 by Gygax, not the dogshit knock-off), it's missing the best parts of AD&D. So it's fine as long as you understand that it's not AD&D, just B/X with more character options, and that the DMG is still required reading if you want to run successful long-term campaigns.

>>95955566
I got curious so I just went ahead and read the noob guide. It's actually pretty good, thanks Anon.

>>95998684
>t. the guy who wrote it

>>95998595
To me it hits that sweet spot between B/X and AD&D in a better way than OSE Advanced does. Just B/X with races, AD&D alignment, extra classes, more spells and going all the way up to lvl 20. I honestly prefer it to actual AD&D.

I think I've read around here that Dragonslayer is pretty much Advanced Labyrinth Lord but with better edition, so maybe it's something you could be interested in as well.

>>95996963
How about this one

Are there any patreons out there worth a damn?

>>95999347
If you like the content someone makes then it makes sense to support them via telling them what you like and why, increasing their reach, or directly via money so they can keep making such things. That last one is really all patreon is.

If you just have money burning a hole in your pocket or have regrets from some you already paid into, then you're not using it properly.

>>95996963
I will give you the text thing as I am still learning how to use this MS paint clone for Linux. As for the pictures if I thought they were boring I would not used them and I like them. For the orb pic maybe get your eyes looked at. I do not follow the first decade bullshit so that matters little here. So one good point and lots of that just your opinion man.

>>95995039
What he said is completely true for the context of this thread, if you don't like it, feel free to make another thread where you are more on topic

>>95995209
That has nothing to do with this thread, the games that we approve are very specifically listed, and we have stuck with it for years. Get with the fucking program already
>>95995311
Nogames crybitch

>>95995710
OSR =/= /osrg/, you ignorant buffoon

>>95996025
>we don't need gatekeeping!
" a common tactic is to make the website significantly less interesting for the user base, by flooding it with content that appears to be normal, but is in fact detrimental

>>95996874
Literally just play BX with a friend or two, stop doing this weird " how do I get into osr?" hand wringing

>>95998534
Incredible, did you mean to samefag the exact same post?

The anon saying "just play BX with a friend" actually gives me a think.

What are the best ways to run A/D&D with sub-3 people? Hirelings? Multiple PCs per person? I remember reading that Kuntz used to do solo play utilizing them sometimes, what are the actual logistics of it? For 1player, it just acting moreso as the "caller" for his whole little squad of multiple dudes, or am I missing something?
How would this change for a duo? Does a trio work any differently or is it just the same as standard 4-man with a little less capability?

>>95999983
I am the one who said it, and for some bizarre reason the moderation decided to delete my post.

Regardless of number of players if you are in advanced, they should already be having hirelings and more than one PC, I think you are coming out this from a completely distorted and broken viewpoint

>>95999983
It's not rocket science, Anon.

A player can run as many PCs, henchmen/retainers, and hirelings as he's capable of. It's a staple of first decade D&D, and how you do it is independent of how many players are at the table: You can run a table with eight players in which each runs three or four characters.

The logistics is that whatever the player does for one character, he also does it for two or more.

>>96000060
>they should already be having hirelings
At level 1?
>and more than one PC
Never heard of this being all that common. Do you have some resources that talk about this in more detail?

>>96000127
>You can run a table with eight players in which each runs three or four characters
That sounds like a nightmare unless you use the caller rules strictly, which seemed(?) to have been an early convention that was gradually phased out by B/X and AD&D.
>The logistics is that whatever the player does for one character, he also does it for two or more.
So if someone is climbing a ladder, he also has to have all his characters climb it? Do they all get affected by a trap because they're all doing the same thing? I have never heard of this before, it makes some sense to me if one is running an early-style OD&D megadungeon where the layout is a bit simpler, but I can't really imagine it for the more complicated or "lived in" lairs or structures.

Not saying any of this is wrong but
>I think you are coming out this from a completely distorted and broken viewpoint
might just be me missing some assumed context.

New thread: >>96000308

I'm making a hex map using the AD&D DMG and there's something I want clarified:
Appendix B (pg. 173) has the inhabitation table, which says on a d100 roll of 1-16 there's some type of settlement, which include castles, and from 17-100 the hex is uninhabited. But then in Appendix C (pg. 182), it says there's a 1:20 chance if an encounter is rolled in an uninhabited hex then a fortress will be discovered. The language implies that fortresses, strongholds, and castles are all the same thing. Am I getting this right? In a big enough hex crawl it seems castles/fortresses/strongholds would far outnumber villages, towns, and cities.

>>96000365
>In a big enough hex crawl it seems castles/fortresses/strongholds would far outnumber villages, towns, and cities.
Civilization is few and far between in AD&D.

>>96000255
>Never heard of this being all that common. Do you have some resources that talk about this in more detail?
Updating an infographics for you. Will take a few minutes. Will post it in the new thread.

>>96000377
Doesn't really seem that way if a little less than 25% of hexes have some form of settlement, not including human lairs like for bandits or berserkers

>>96000407
There's greater than a 1-in-4 chance any given hex has a settlement on it. Appendix B says 1 space = 1 mile. Traveling for four days at 25 miles per day will mean the party moves through about two dozen settlements. Not very sparse at all.

>>96000477
Meant for >>96000382

What things do you need to keep in mind when using the MM 1&2 for a B/X campaign?

>>96002482
>What things do you need to keep in mind when using the MM 1&2 for a B/X campaign?
1. AD&D doesn't have Morale scores, you'll have to make up your own.
2. Know what AD&D treasure letters correspond to what B/X treasure letters. Picrel.

AC is not a concern because the base AC of 10 for unarmoured characters was introduced in the 1978 PHB, the 1977 MM still used an unarmoured AC of 9. Not sure about the MM2 because I don't use it, it's of very mixed quality. Do look into the FF: It's not as good as the MM but it's definitely better than the MM2.

Is Lamentations of the Flame Princess osr?

>>96003244
Of course. Whether or not you think it's good is another matter.