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 โ 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:>>95955556>Thread QuestionWhat's a unexpectedly creative, or utterly idiotic, usage for a (magic) item you have witnessed?
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
>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.
>TQ
The classic "rip a hole in a bag, jam it over something's head and then use mending to decapitate it" trick
keep
md5: 6241fc5d6f8e4fedb4882909ea5305de
๐
>>96000308 (OP)Reposting from last thread:
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.
>>96000378https://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2012/08/ad-apocalypse-and-hereafter.html
Exerpt:
> Civilization: A Thin Red Line>For starters you get smacked over the head with how desperate life must be even inside the few โinhabitedโ zones of the implied world. For you see with every encounter rolled in such areas, there is a full 25% chance that the random encounter table should be utterly ignored and a patrol encountered instead.>And by patrol we are not talking about a small group of muddling watch or a handful of tax collectors/wardens, we are talking armed-to-the-teeth, recon in force. Such patrols are always lead by a fairly formidable leader, a fighter or ranger of a whopping 6-8th level, who has a lieutenant of 4-5th level and a sergeant of 2-3rd level (and this doesn't add in the 40% chance of a 6-7th level cleric and a 60% chance of a 5-8th level magic user). Even the enlisted men are tough, three to four alone being 1st level veterans sprinkled among a further 13-24 men-at-arms. All patrol fighters with levels have plate armor, mounts, and an arsenal of weapons. Even the grunts are humping chain (and scale at the worst).>The sheer frequency of meeting such heavily-powered up bandsโhell even a mid-level party would find the standard issue patrol of normal men a tough go--inside the settled environs sends a strong message that this is a world right on the knife's edge.>Not only is civilization an obsessively-patrolled armed camp, it is also damn sparse. The post goes into more than that and he has several blog posts about it and greyhawk in particular as well
>>96000402I'm asking less about the implied world and more about the bizarre hex stocking method where hexes are first determined to be inhabited or uninhabited and then uninhabited hexes are again checked to see whether they have something inhabiting them. Curious what the motive is behind that, when it seems obvious a single roll would be more intuitive.
My guess is, since the "see if an uninhabited hex has a castle" roll is only done when a random encounter is checked, it's meant to model the idea that some strongholds are essentially "off the grid" and there's no way to know about them other than venturing into their hex, but why not just let the DM determine that?
>>96000333This is false.
The description is the /osrg/, NOT the OSR.
In THIS THREAD the most vocal weirdos insist on an arbitrary cutoff.
In Real Life all BECMI and all AD&D 1e is considered OSR.
Word to the wise.
>>96000378Why aren't you just assigning the terrain and fortresses/villages?
the random tables are merely suggestions for when you haven't already made a map and need one last minute/at the table.
my PCs are planning some assassinations on important figures within a city and I have no idea how to plan for it
how the hell do I prep this and then also run it
>>96000255>>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?The two most important references in which this is discussed in the context of first decade D&D are PHB page 7 and DMG pages 37-38. I don't remember it ever being said explicitly in OD&D, but in all likelihood the reason is that they assumed it would be obvious, since they were writing for wargamers and the presumption that you can only control one unit simply hadn't emerged yet.
I've put big purple asterisks to mark the passages in which multiple characters per player are mentioned, since you asked explicitly, but all the quotes are a MUST READ if you want to begin to wrap your ahead around how old school D&D was meant to be played originally.
>>96000464Two reasons:
1. because making one at the table would grind the game to a halt and having a spare map on-hand is always useful
2. The DMG generation tools are fun to experiment with.
>>96000457This general has had the "first decade" specification for many years now. It's just the local culture of the general, I wouldn't make a huge deal out of it.
>>960004921- is the opposite od answering my actual question
2- if it is an experiment just decide what you want it to mean.
Once more, for clarity
Why are you using tables instead of actually being creative, especially when you have the time to be creative?
>>96000477What the fuck
Have we been wrong about the supposed sparseness of the AD&D world this whole time
>>96000499>repeating what I said almost exactly, yet still missing the actual pointyup,i its the /osrg/
>>96000457The /osrg/ is not defined by the vocal minority of shitposters who don't know what OSR actually is and contradict the definition used by everyone else.
>>96000508Bro lmao relax. You don't have to answer if you don't like my question. A lot of people here actually enjoy discussing the AD&D DMG
>>96000450They are separate appendices. The strongholds and castles are effectively encounter sites and can range from being places of shitty shelter (or possible future strongholds) to monsters, to "social encounters", either of the human type enemies (bandits/etc) or the fortresses of name-level NPCs.
>>96000333Based. Thanks for posting it, Anon. The general just isn't the same without it.
>>96000565>t. the guy who wrote it and posted it
>>96000499The local culture of the general has happily discussed games outside the first decade without much of an issue in the past. It's only ever been a very small minority that tried to force some kind of stricter definition on the rest of us.
>>96000517>mistaking suggested tables for how all campaigns must be designedlol
>>96000540/osrg/fag is loose again
>>96000547This makes sense to me. Upon closer reading it looks like castles and other settlements in "inhabited" spaces are meant to have patrols, whereas castles in "uninhabited" spaces do not. That seems to be the main difference between castles generated in Appendix B vs. castles/fortresses/strongholds generated in Appendix C
>>96000544You seem unaware of how discussions actually work.
I asked you a question.
That is not an attempt to answer a question.
IAre you going to actually answer my question?
>>96000608Correct, "inhabited" zones are (from what I can tell, and the hill cantons blogposts) areas within actual civilization, with trade routes and such. Beyond that is true wilderness.
Note that you can still have monster encounters in inhabited areas, they just have different tables.
>>96000568Nope.
Very odd comment coming from the one poster who's spammed half a dozen flamebait posts already.
>>96000592>Have we been wrong about the supposed sparseness of the AD&D world [AS IMPLIED BY THE APPENDICIES, WHICH PEOPLE HAVE COMMONLY USED TO ESTABLISH A BASELINE UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPLIED AD&D SETTING, EXEMPLIFIED BY THE BLOG POST CITED HERE >>96000402] this whole timeIs that better?
>>96000611NAYRT but asking for clarity on something in the DMG is a pretty common thing people do here
>>96000508NTA
You are encountering what people call 'chart cult'.
There are two main branches of the chart cult:
1) the majority are just Holy Rollers; they take it as a tool that replaces creativity, originality, and innovation. Rather than spend 30 minutes mapping a dungeon by thinking and drawing they spend 4 hours rolling on the DMG charts, trying to figure out how to reconcile the random clusterfuck of hallways, and then think they saved time.
2) is less common but worse, by far, these are the Fundamentalists. they are so focused on the cahrts that if a retroclone exactly the same in every other respect to AD&D had a slightly different treasure placement in the random dungeon generator they declare the entire ruleset fatally flawed and useless because it ruins the XP of the game. They don;t just waste time rolling, they insist that the only vaid rules, and thus valid SETTINGS, are ones that adhere exactly to the charts in the [insert their favorite TSR game form the 70's/80/s]
They can't answer a question about WHY because it is just how they live their life and do their gaming.
This has been Samefagging: the Thread so far
>>96000634Funnily enough Gygax actually says "uninhabited areas are not all wilderness" in the lead up to discussing fortresses in "uninhabited" spaces but I get where you're coming from.
>>96000508>Why are you using tables instead of actually being creativeObviously because I'm not creative. Retarded question
>>96000649No, not really.
First off, the Hill cantons blog has a long discussion of the frequencies of settlements and patrols in the
>rather excellentseries of posts you partially reference. You're mainly missing the fact that the passage is 'a space is a mile OR MORE'
>emphasis addedand confusing inhabited ares versus uninhabited areas.
I am pointin gout that the language often used, as in
>>96000517> the supposed sparseness of the AD&D worldis odd because if you look at Gary's stuff Greyhawk doesn't confirm to those frequencies, nor did Blackmoor, etc.
Do the appendices in the DMG have a broad pattern?
Of course.
But there is no "the AD&D world" is my point.
Campaigns will be different. the suggested charts for emergencies don't mean anything next to that
>>96000656I never said anything about asking for clairty about the DMG, did I?
As a matter of fact, I have also answered with clarifications!
I asked a specific question about anon's worldbuilding process and haven't gotten an answer.
Why is this seemingly so hard for multiple people to understand?
>>96000378>Am I getting this right?Perhaps, let me clarify an important point:
* In inhabited regions you use the inhabitation table from Appendix B and the 1-in-4 chance of patrols, but not the additional 1-in-20 chance for strongholds.
* In uninhabited regions you don't use the habitation table (hence the "uninhabited" part) nor the 1-in-4 chance for patrols, but you do have the 1-in-20 chance for a stronghold.
You NEVER use both the habitation table and the 1-in-20 chance for strongholds in the same region.
>In a big enough hex crawl it seems castles/fortresses/strongholds would far outnumber villages, towns, and cities.In uninhabited regions this is true by definition, since there's no villages, towns, and cities there in the first place.
In inhabited regions this is false because you only get a castle on a roll of 12-14, whereas rolls of 1-11 generate settlements.
>>96000708I think the thing you're missing is that yes, obviously there's no defined "AD&D world," but by looking at the generators in the DMG an image of a setting begins to form. This implied setting is what Kutalik discusses in his
>rather excellentseries of posts
>>96000707Fair enough.
Thanks
>>96000736>repeating what I said almost exactly without adding anything as if it meant somethingA bit of a pattern here.
>>96000729Makes sense. At first I was confused why castles could occupy inhabited and uninhabited hexes (ie why have the inhabited/uninhabited distinction and not just use a single roll) but I realized as stated here
>>96000608 that it seems the big difference is whether there are patrols or not. A different way to think about this is "inhabited" and "uninhabited" really means "patrolled" and "not patrolled"
>>96000662>They can't answer a question about WHYBecause the world that the tables (not "charts") create has a particular flavor to it in the sort of world it constructs, and this is both rather interesting and very different from a lot of more-recent worlds + the ways people build worlds. It's going for a particular type of experience that is rather hard to find outside of these tables. And because they ARE tables, they are non-consumable, compared to how prewritten modules are.
In regards to time, they don't really take all that long once you have and understanding of procedure. And if you still think it does take too long, you can preroll a lot at the start because you know the process and then compare each roll in order to its corresponding tables (adding in sub-rolls as needed). You can even automate some of this using some simple command line programming. Years ago my buddy made one for determining human encounters by type and number once, I don't have it anymore though. Heck with phones you can even do this during your lunch break, using an app to roll, consulting a PDF, and writing things down for later.
The creativity really comes into play from making sense of the random rolls. It's like prompts from creative writing classes back when you were in school, except about shit you (presumably) care more about.
>>96000477>Appendix B says 1 space = 1 mile.Not really. It says "1 mile or larger", and it only says it in the context of random terrain determination. You can use the random terrain determination table at different scales because terrain is, to an extent, a scale-independent fractal, but you can't use the habitation table as-is at all scales, since you will get completely different population densities depending on the size of the hex.
At a scale of 5 miles per hex, the habitation table gives you a population density of about 20 people per square mile, while at a scale of one mile per hex the population density would be about 500 people per square mile. You have to pick a scale.
>>96000752...so what would follow would be for you to realize that Kutalik and others miss the fact that the baseline hex size Gygax lays out is 1 space = 1 mile, meaning the implied world is much less sparse than he thinks. Sorry, I thought that was obvious
>but Gygax says "1 mile or larger!"He also says the tables are suggestions; the point is to follow these suggestions to their natural conclusion and see what world is created.
>>96000333>>96000343lmao. OP hoped to sneak in a thread without the n00b guide, got sniped by a regular in less than four minutes, and has proceeded to throw a tantrum in a dozen samefag posts already. Amazeballs.
>>96000736>>96000794What the fuck's a kutalik.
>>96000769>It's going for a particular type of experience that is rather hard to find outside of these tables.There it is.
I am the guy that asked the original question, not the chart cult guy.
IMO it is amazingly easy to make a world that looks like the DMG assumed world, without tons of pre-rolling
>BTW, pre-WHAT, exactly?or computer programming.
Just create a map with a well-patrolled inhabited area and a custom random encounter table and then place some ruins and castles in the uninhabited areas with other custom random encounter tables.
This is a long Sunday afternoon and will be all yours.
>>96000794you made a mistake.
In an inhabited area IF there is a random encounter THEN there is a 25% chance of a patrol..
In an uninhabited area IF there is a random encounter THEN there is a 5% chance of a ruin/castle.
that is not '1 in 4 one mile hexes has a castle'.
At all.
Not even close.
>>96000833He's a blogger that analyzed the DMG encounters and such years back
>>96000845You can do that but its rather hard to keep consistent without some understanding of the "baseline". Both in 1979 when this shit was new (and most people had robin hood, buck rogers, king arthur, and a midsummer night's dream, maybe tolkein and dune if they were especially nerdy) or in the 21st century where 90% of fantasy is videogames, YA fiction and WotC/Paizo derivatives. Not to mention that sometimes getting creatively "stuck" happens (AKA "writer's/artist's block"), which randomization can assist with.
In any case, the tables are indicated as optional and you can use them in any portion or percentage of your map as you like. Or not at all.
>>96000517>Have we been wrong about the supposed sparseness of the AD&D world this whole timeNope, you don't understand the rules.
Let's say you are traveling through Uninhabited Wilderness, Plains, and on horseback doing 24 miles a day. That's three checks of 10% ech, or roughly 27% likely you have an encounter.
That encounter is 5% likely to be a castle of some sort.
So about a 1.4% chance of there being a castle visible once THE ENTIRE DAY.
If you are in an inhabited area you have about a 15% chance of n encounter and 25% of them will be with a patrol. So all day you have about a 3.75% chance of a patrol, not a village or something.
>>96000935>pure navel gazing for no other purposeAh, sure.
>>96000822I'm not the OP, and I think your "guide" is pretty awful and far from being representative of either /osrg/ or OSR. If you wanted to pretend to write a guide, try spending more than a tenth of it actually guiding new people.
>>96000483This is an excellent explanation but does not really answer the scenario I was confused over. Or well, it half does. The 0e quote says "four to fifty players" for a whole campaign (not session), and indicates groups of less than 3 doing things, but I was more wondering how to handle those smaller groups on a session basis.
As an aside this sounds like Gary had a shitton of free time if he was running sessions multiple days a week as opposed to 1/week or biweekly. And reminds me a bit of how MUDs work, with a persistent "campaign world" that runs regardless of any individual players. I suppose they got it from someplace after all.
>>96000794Official D&D material of the time has varying scales with up to 24 mile hexes for their maps
>>96000998>this sounds like Gary had a shitton of free timeIt's a Boomer / Gen X thing. We used to have a shitton of free time in the pre-internet age, play a lot, frequently, for very long sessions, with no distractions. I miss those days.
>>96001014>Official D&D material of the time has varying scales with up to 24 mile hexes for their mapsUp to 30 miles actually. E.g. Darlene's Greyhawk.
>>96000483As a rog i can tell you - '77 - '84 every group I knew
>more than 15 in multiple states and two countriesinsisted everyone have multiple characters per player.
>>96000998>I was more wondering how to handle those smaller groups on a session basisThat part is implicit in henchmen. They have many uses: Take care of things back home while you are away in-session, carry out missions in downtime, but by far the most common one is to take them into the dungeon with you. Look up the maximum number of henchmen by charisma ability score, and that tells you how many characters a player was assumed to be able to run at the same time, with almost full control, barring the occasional loyalty check.
>>96000878Read a little closer. 16 out of 100 spaces are inhabited. In a 100-mile stretch, there are 16 settlements, including but not limited to castles. In each uninhabited area, there is a 5% chance per encounter that a stronghold is encountered. Remember that an encounter can be checked in a space more than once if the party passes through it on multiple occasions over the course of their adventures. I think the point you're attempting to convey is better articulated by
>>96000957, who has a stronger understanding of both the topic at hand and the AD&D rules, but still misses the fact that strongholds may be checked for multiple times in uninhabited hexes, inhabited hexes by their nature have a settlement (not just a patrol), and that human groups such as dervishes may occupy lairs as well as settlements (strongholds). All that's just to say that AD&D's sparseness is overblown.
>>96001014>>96001026Good point, which leads one to wonder why a 1-mile space would ever be recommended in the first place when it seems for the most part to have never been used in official material outside of confined adventure locales.
>>95999983i think while you can have multiple characters per player, you should still always abide by the rule of only being allowed to bring one of your characters per outing, otherwise you completely negate the point of henchmen
>>96001083Once again this answers a different question.
The rules for henchmen are pretty explicit in that they require payment, and there is a whole procedure for talent scouting.
Obviously I could just ignore this, but let's assume I don't and that I only have 1 or 2 players, whose characters plain don't have the money for henchmen yet. Is it just ill-advised to play with too few people, or what?
>>96001121> Remember that an encounter can be checked in a space more than once if the party passes through it on multiple occasions over the course of their adventures. RAW i believe you are 100% correct, but i would go back to the spirit of
>If a wilderness expedition moves into an area where no detailed map has been prepared in advance, the random terrain determination system below can be utilized with relative ease for a 1 space = 1 mile, or larger, scale. In using it, however, common sense must prevail. and conjecture that the point of the random system is for the areas the DM hasnt got round to mapping themselves yet, and so while rules as written if you leave a village with the 6 surrounding hexes as empty grasslands, and march round in endlessly for days, RAW, a caslte will eventually appear as if by magic. thats the logical extension of that way of running things, so i think the saner rule is that the 1 in 20 chance for an encounter to be in a fortress ought only be rolled the first time the hex is discovered
as written i think you are right, but i cant think that ritual summoning of castles to protect your villages instead of paying for them to be constructed was intended gameplay
>>96001026>>96001131On page 47 of the DMG he suggests using a world map hex scale of 20-40mi/hex and suggests for smaller scale maps dividing them into hexes of either 5mi across or 5mi for each face (with a little diagram).
>>96001121>but still misses the fact that strongholds may be checked for multiple times in uninhabited hexesHe didn't. You missed that he said that you check 3x each day for plains, and each check as a 10% chance of an encounter. This info is also on page 47, it's not in the appendices, and it divides between "relatively dense", "moderate to sparse/patrolled" and "uninhabited/wilderness". He also says that
>Note: In areas where you have detailed the monster population, a random determination should not be necessary, as this information should be recorded by you.
>>96001336i havent responded to you yet, but i want to point out that if your characters cant "afford" henchmen then technically they cant afford to be adventurers themselves. the upkeep rules for henchmen are actually identical to the rules for player character upkeep, the only problem is groups ignoring that rule and therefore thinking henchmen are artificially worse
for comparison:
3 fighter PCs + 3 henchmen fighter PCs (all lvl 1 for the sake of argument) require (100gp x 3) + (100gp x 3) = 600gp per month upkeep
6 fighter PCs require (100gp x 6) = 600gp per month upkeep
so really there ought not be any difference in the amount of treasure/difficulty etc you give between the two theoretical groups
as above, the problem is people not using the player upkeep rule to begin with, and if you reduce or remove it you should be doing so with the understanding that whatever figure is used for one, must be used for the other so that there is no discrepency between the two
just my take, if you want to think on it
>>96001121>In a 100-mile stretch, there are 16 settlementsNo. It's already been explained to you that if you make one inhabitation check per square mile, you get a population density of 500 people per square mile. That's five times as much as the highest population density in antiquity and/or the middle ages. That's retarded.
>strongholds may be checked for multiple times in uninhabited hexesBy your logic, there's an infinite number of strongholds per hex, since there is no upper limit to the number of checks per hex that you can make. The more you travel through a hex, the more strongholds appear. That's also retarded.
>>96001349>if you leave a village with the 6 surrounding hexes as empty grasslands, and march round in endlessly for days, RAW, a caslte will eventually appear as if by magic.>>96001416>The more you travel through a hex, the more strongholds appear. That's also retarded.To some degree there could be "not seen" ones that you simply hadn't noticed while travelling through it before. Even a 1mi hex is quite a lot of space to totally go through with a fine toothed comb on foot. It only really doesn't make sense for totally flat areas where you can see a lone tree sticking out of the ground from miles away.
Could also rule it as fresh construction, but that's a bit more difficult since such things take years without magical assistance.
>>96001403On page 35 it outlines the cost and chances of getting henchman, and the example used has around 1000gp spent to get a 63% effectiveness, that can only be done once per month. Then there's 2-8 days for them to actually apply for the job, and they require an initial payment of 100gp for a 25% chance of accepting the job +10% per extra 100gp up to 55% for 400gp.
And then, THEN the PCs have to offer room, food, and clothing as gratis for either 5% bonus or to take a 25% penalty.
Then the PC's reaction adjustment applies, followed by the final roll to see if the prospective henchman actually takes the job.
>>960011211) as others pointed out, you are still getting the math wrong
2) the same guy wrote both posts you referenced
3) you are putting rolls over DMing
>>96001430> Even a 1mi hex is quite a lot of space to totally go through with a fine toothed comb on footGO
OUTSIDE
>>95995304Exceptional post. Have saved the image and repostan for futurity, thanks Anon!
>>95995543>But it is old school.Nope. Never has been. 2E is, as you've been told many times for the last 6-8 years, the antithesis of 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.Wrong on every point on every level.
>The best we have is incredibly broad definitions, and you really need to just let go and accept that.Lol no.
>2e is an OSR game. LOL no!
>a definition that not just they are comfortable with, but the vast majority of the OSR community is comfortable with.Lies again. As Anon 's post illustrates very clearly, you're the only person anywhere outside the awful subreddit trying to push this idea, it's a /tg/ meme and what's more, your own personal forced meme that literally novbody else agrees with. 2E is irrevocably not OSR, and does not belong in this general.
>>95996025>we should probably just destroy all basis for this general and everyone agrees with me, amirite guise???Pathetic.
>>96000998>As an aside this sounds like Gary had a shitton of free timeHe was literally like an inch from being unemployed. He was working as a part time cobbler, literally fixing people's shoes for eating money whenever someone happened to need the work done. He spent the rest of his time gaming and his wife was assmad about it. This probably has something to do with why he was desperate to monetize the fuck out of D&D, and it's definitely why he couldn't afford to buy Don Kaye's share of TSR, pic very related.
>>96001501thats just upfront hiring costs, ongoing its the same. you have to pay for room, food, and clothing for your PCs too obviously.
you can do it for a lot cheaper too, lets take a small city with 20,000 humans; it has 200 levelled characters in it and 20 prospective henchmen
seeing as we are on a budget as low level characters, lets not use all the expensive extra options: we only post notices in pubic and spend 50gp and roll 1d4 and get, lets say 2 for 20% effectiveness. We make no other efforts, so only 20% (4) of the prospectives take notice and come to us for employment. The number of days we roll (2d4) we roll a 4 (purely for the easy example) meaning one prospective arrives each day for the next four days during which we must hire them or let them go.
We decide to offer only the basic 100gp hiring bonus to any who accept (base 25%), along with the basic quartering (+5%), with a basic fair share (+0%), we simply try and convince them theres no other work adding our charisma reaction modifer, lets say a modest 14 charisma for (+10%), so we have a 40% chance each of them will accept in order. I used an online dice roller and got (20,49,92,75) so the first accepted and we have a hireling for only 150gp upfront spending (plus a little extra for giving them some chainmail or whatever). If we had offered them 200gp hiring bonus we would have gotten the second one too but then it would have been 450gp to hire them. It may be that the time spent waiting another month for another go will cost more than that, but there you go.
Higher level characters will definitely want to pay the 300gp for the Agent as more prospectives mean better chances in aggregate.
I hope that we arent just speaking pass each other, without getting each others point however.
>>96001416>that's retardedI agree, but if you actually READ THE BOOK you will see Gygax /explicitly/ mentions 1 space = 1 mile and then provides showing a 16% per SPACE of a settlement of some kind appearing. Retarded or not, it is what was written.
>By your logicYou seem to assume that pointing out details of the DMG that some people often miss is in actually advocating for those rules to be actually used, which no one is doing. Take a chill pill
>>960015301. What math? The DMG says 1 space = 1 mile, also says each space has a 16% chance of a settlement, also says the other 84% of spaces have a chance per encounter check to have a castle, stronghold, or fortress. No one has disputed that.
2. Don't care
3. You fail to understand that all this started by discussing the suggested DMG overworld generation tools. Obviously no one is advocating for using them over "DMing.". I understand it can be exciting to jump into a conversation mid-way through but I recommend you read the earlier posts for full context.
>>96001666as an addition if we had 18 charisma (+35%), with those rolls, we would have been able to hire 3 of them too, for only 350gp. bargain.
>>96001762>The DMG says 1 space = 1 mileNAYRT but at this point you're just trolling. Or a hopeless sperg.
>>96000586>>96000586>The local culture of the general has happily discussed games outside the first decade without much of an issue in the past.Literal lie.
>It's only ever been a very small minority that tried to force some kind of stricter definition on the rest of us.It's the entire thread vs. only one of you. Fuck off already.
>>96000990>meanwhile, the actual noob from last thread found it helpful and instructive
>>96001762ive argued against you, but im sorry that certain people are not very polite about it, especially when you arn't writing anything strictly untrue
>>96001644Sounds like a lot of people I know including myself
>>96001666>thats just upfront hiring costsYes which is relatively unaffordable for fresh PCs, and which still avoids the question. Sure, after a few adventures they may get some henchmen with some luck, but I am questioning how to handle things before that point. Hirelings "would" be an option but it clearly states that you need to give them equipment yourself.
>>96001818>the n00b is unaware that it's 90% butthurt and incorrect propagandaIt's really gross targeting new people under the idea that they can be indoctrinated before they know any better.
>>96001786Appendix B:
>the system below can be utilized with relative ease for a 1 space = 1 mile, or larger, scale(page 173)
The prevailing assumption of the implied AD&D setting, exemplified by posts such as the one referenced here
>>96000402, is that the setting the DMG overworld creation tools generate is one where civilization is very sparse.
This whole discussion began with pointing out that assuming the stated scale of these same tools (1 space = 1 mile), the population of such a world would not be very sparse at all.
And then a bunch of people who would fail the breakfast test somehow took issue with it.
>>96001820Appreciate it brotha. I enjoy the debate
>>96001859>a bunch of people who would fail the breakfast testTo be fair none of them also noticed that the posts asking about time-tracking also had a joke of an example of an ogre that was insistent on harassing a village of scholars who were studying true giants.
>>96001859Right: troll or sperg, call it.
"1 mile or larger but common sense must prevail" *is not the same* as "the stated scale of these tools is 1 space = 1 mile and that can be applied globally". The fact that you're incapable of understanding the distinction between these phrases implies that you are either lying for bait or a simultaneously overly-literal and hyperfixating neuroatypical individual. Even the slightest application of common sense would allow you to realize that *while* the tools can be applied on a scale *as small as* (but not smaller than) 1 mile, that is not the standard assumed space which can be broadly generalized to an entire setting. Instead OD&D and AD&D essentially assume a 5-mile hex as a baseline.
>>96001841>Yes which is relatively unaffordable for fresh PCsI see what you mean, genuinely fresh lvl1 PCs basically shouldnt think about it, but after a first haul its easily doable (but still a big choice about whether they actually want to spend their money on it yet).
The point i was making however was that in the long run, its really the same, but i guess i wasnt tracking the whole conversation
>but it clearly states that you need to give them equipment yourself.Brigandine/Studded Leather (15gp) + Small wooden shield (1gp) + Short sword & Scabbard (8gp) + 2x Javelins (1gp) = 25gp for some basic historic light infantry skirmisher back ups. Im thinking back to playing Rome Total War and i could see these guys as one of the spanish or scillilian mercenary groups. Obviously you can give them better gear after a delve or two but they are basically great as back rank supporters.
>and which still avoids the questionim not sure which question i was meant to be answering at that point, sorry. i think i was just spouting my own opinion to butt in
>>96001968It's still good info, hence why I didn't simply dismiss it. And 25gp (26 including the soldier himself) is quite a bit of money at the start, it adds up and many characters might only have 100gp or less to begin with, and with only 1 or 2 players you will end up with less total starting gold.
>im not sure which question i was meant to be answering at that point, sorry.Mainly about how to run parties that consist of a small number of players (1-2, maybe up to 3) and thus PCs. Assuming each isn't running multiple PCs concurrently, since all examples so far have been shown of multiple asynchronous PCs, or utilizing hirelings. The 1:1 time tracking passages from the DMG do indicate a pair of players going on an adventure, so there is some assumed support for it...
>>96002002ah, well its slightly cheating, but i think you might allow each player one initial hireling that was assumed to have been hired before the campaign started essentially for free by DM charity. The starting gold is just a suggestion, but as long as you tell them that all future henchmen have to be paid for as normal i dont think it will ruin the campaign.
if you are doing something unusual use an unusual rule
>>96002002>Assuming each isn't running multiple PCs concurrentlyI finally found the small section on running multiple characters for a single player on page 111 of the DMG. Unfortunately it's very light on specific advice, but it DOES say that with a small number of players, multiple characters per player "is likely."
>>96001708>Gygax /explicitly/ mentions 1 space = 1 mileOR MORE
>>96001762>The DMG says 1 space = 1 mileOR MORE
>>96001859>the stated scale of these same tools (1 space = 1 mile)OR MORE
>>96002100It also says that the different PCs belonging to the same player should not be associates.
>>96001708>>96001762> 16% per SPACEYou fucked up.
It isnโt 16%.
Read it again
Also
>IF a map is not read, this CAN be used >COMMON SENSE MUST PREVAILyou are confusing the emergency backup for the uncreative with rules.
This is like saying
>GUYS! My spare tire is really small! Does this mean tires are MEANT to be small?
>>96002227*not ready, sorry
>>96001958>>96002184>>96002227Would you be hungry if you hadnโt eaten breakfast or lunch today?
>>96002263HE FUCKED UP THE HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
The formula is
>how would you feel if you hadnโt eaten breakfast this morning?retard.
And - YOU GOT THE MATH WRONG.
Look it up
>>96002263>posts an image of the question>canโt copy it>trying to insult other people>has no response to their pointsHow would you feel if a girl had ever held your hand?
Does anyone know where I could find a collection of Alarums and Excursions PDFs? I've been looking into a lot of the Californian D&D culture from the 70s to the very early 80s and want to read some of these early articles to see D&D be interpreted by some of the earliest players without direct access to the game's creators.
Hopefully I've not missed it in the archive. It's my understanding that Lee Gold isn't even selling PDFs any more now that her eyesight is too poor to keep the zine going, so, unless some forum users lied about that, I'm not sure you can even get these things legally at this point.
>>96002369the PDFs, that is. Obviously people can still buy old physical copies
>>96002369>Does anyone know where I could find a collection of Alarums and Excursions PDFs?I presume you mean picrel?
>>96002100>>96002192>Explain to your players that you don't object to them having multiple characters if they are willing to play each as a separate and distinct individual, and that should be sufficient advice to any player capable of handling two or more characters:
>>96002282Actually anon the question is:
>how would you feel if you hadnโt had breakfast or lunch yesterday.
>>96002558Aw man, yeah. I thought it'd be in the O-S-R trove.
>>96002710>also gets it wrongItโs in writing, you goofs
>>96002906Reading is difficult.
>>96002558Much appreciated by the way. It sucks those are all there are, but beggars can't be choosers.
I still don't understand how you're supposed to get into domain play.
My only real point of reference for it, is the Vikings TV show. You can mock its historicity, but the storyline feels like how an OSR game would transition to domain play.
>main character has a farm and land he probably bought himself
>has a few servants and stuff
>gets into conflict with local earl
>challenges him to duel
>wins
>becomes earl
>later becomes king
>does a ton of conquering and raiding
But in OSR it seems like you hit 9th level and... what? You have enough prestige that you are granted wilderness land to settle? Given a royal title? Just straight up buy one? What if no one knows about you because you've been delving random dungeons for 2 or 3 years and not talked a lot about your wealth? Which might be prudent since you wouldn't want to attract thieves.
And then you get your domain and it grows a bit, you are a baron, and you decide to, what, attack another baron to claim his land? Wouldn't the duke or count or whatever, gather the other barons and come put the smackdown on you? You'd have to do a lot of politicking I would think. I am thinking of ACKS here, mainly.
I just see all these guys talking about how the system can handle armies of 100,000 men fighting, and all I can think is, does anyone actually get to that point organically, or do they just throw together some contrived shit to make it work so they can skip to that part?
>>96003257>granted wilderness landyou take it, because you are powerful enough to do so and no one else was, or else they would have done so already
>attack another baron to claim his land? Wouldn't the duke or count or whateveryou would be attacking goblin/orc wastelands and clearing them out, but sure evil aligned characters might go to war with other humans.
i think some people have this other idea about playing in some kind of fantasy france/germany with a few of the forests here and there with magic creatures in them, but really the original d&d is an american thirteen colonies, with a hard barrier, the borderlands, beyond which no one knows but here be dragons
>>96003257Thinking of ACKS kills braincells, best avoid.
>>96001644I would say the heart attack that killed Don was the villain, but yeah.
>>96003312what?
>>96003295True I guess so.
So you just claim wilderness land through strength of arms entirely?
>>96000482>Draw dungeon>Place npcs>Have pcs run throughWoaaaw
>>960032571:1 time solves this. You just do the domain stuff in between sessions.
>>96003389>So you just claim wilderness land through strength of arms entirely?Yeah you either gather peasants to clear out a wild youve staked or you and the party get to work yourselves. You hire some competent leveled-NPCs to hold the camp down while you and the party go do more big shit like kill a dragon. Domain becomes your new gold sink
mw
md5: c80245503fa17cc8fd6c95d5924ec618
๐
>>96000769>blossom_knightFlaming Targe. This shield glitters and scintillates in sunlight. When an opponent first makes an attack against its bearer they must make a saving throw versus Petrification/Polymorph or lose the attack by being dazzled blind for 1d4+1 rounds.
Dent-De-Lance. When struck by this lance the target is enveloped by a cloud of pollen. They suffer no damage but are incapacitated for 2d6 rounds with intense sneezing and itching in the eyes, nose, and throat; a save versus Petrification/Polymorph will reduce the duration by half.
I'm not sure about the XP and GP values for these. 500/2500?
>>95983511>Used chainmail terrain selection rules and wilderness wander monsters table...Neat. Throw in some weird-o terrain like from Mike's World and we're really cooking.
Thread was kill right before I hit post.
>>96002634>AD&D doesn't have Morale scores, you'll have to make up your own.Wrong. "Compute them using the book" is not the same as "the books do not have them".
Pic related.
>>96000365>Am I getting this right? In a big enough hex crawl it seems castles/fortresses/strongholds would far outnumber villages, towns, and cities.When you live in a world where there is a not insignificant percentage chance each month that a wandering band of 30-300 orcs shows up near you, a castle is the only settlement which makes sense, imo.
You want to prospect the Black Hills of the Dakota Centaurs and run&gun in the West Marches, not play house in upstate Greyhawk, don't you?
>>95999983Don't be a pussy. Run the game for your pals.
If they are long-term campaign material, they will figure out how to play proficiently and effectively in the campaign millieu you create. Make sure to present the options clearly at least once or twice for each.
And if your friends are not ready and willing to do a long-term campaign, why do you play AD&D in the first place?
>>96003468>1:1 timeBased.
>>96003312Oh, no! Fishfag is sad again!
>>96003861>"Compute them using the book" is not the same as "the books do not have them".That's missing the point for the sake of pedantry. The question was about using the monster manuals with B/X, and "the DMG tells you to make morale checks using a formula based on HD/HP" is different from "each monster has its own individual morale score based on its ecology and behaviour".
>>96000662Rolling a dungeon using tables doesnt take hours if you can read.
>>96004399>each monster has its own individual morale score based on its ecology and behaviourB/X says that? Could you point me to the relevant pages? I'm an AD&Dfag who got into the hobby using Labyrinth Lord, so my B/X specific knowledge is limited, sorry.
Pic related is what I found with ctrl+f
Besides, you can still backport AD&D's percent morale base to B/X's 2d6 morale base:
E.g. Troll
B/X morale: 10 (8 in specific circumstances)
AD&D morale: base 50 + 25 from HD + 6 from extra plusses = 81%
If you apply 81% to the probabilities of a 2d6 roll for minimum results, you get that 81% AD&D most closely correlates with 9 or less (83%) in B/X.
>>96002902>>96003034I can't post direct links for the usual reasons, but the screenshot ought to be enough for you to locate it.
>>96004585>B/X says that? Could you point me to the relevant pages?NTA. Just pick up B/X and have a look at the monsters. Each one has its own individual stat line called "Morale". Picrel.
>>96004585Repost because retarded
>B/X says that? Could you point me to the relevant pages?NTA. Just pick up B/X and have a look at the monsters. Each one has its own individual stat line called "Morale". Picrel.
>>96004589You're good; I got the files right after you posted the screenshot. I forgot about the trove till then.
Honestly, these zines are too messy for me to just dive on in. I should've figured, I guess. Super neat ideas buried in mucho texto. Very cool, very 70s-fan-product.
Wonder why fighting capability didnt make it into later iterations on 1e.
>>96002192What Gygax is talking about there is e.g. preventing the player from just giving all his PCs' magic items and other treasure to one character and overpowering it, not that the same player can't have more than one PC along on a given expedition.
>>96002263Troll it is!
>>96004639The thing to remember is that A&E is less like Dragon Magazine and more like a paper /tg/.
>>96002369>It's my understanding that Lee Gold isn't even selling PDFs any more now that her eyesight is too poor to keep the zine goingThis is correct; a real tard call honestly, but she's clearly an old school fan who wasn't ever exactly comfortable with the digital era (e.g., she sold PDF back issues at the prices you'd expect for individual physical back issues of a zine, rather than just plating the entire archive on a thumbdrive or some shit and selling that for like $40). It seems like (and I have all this third-hand, so don't put too much confidence in it) some others are trying to talk her into making the entire archive digitally available now that A&E is "complete", but that there are concerns about copyright violations doing that.
Also, 2e isn't OSR.
>>96003861I really was looking at 1e as it has the most complete DM advice. But both B's are better.
B/X on page B21 :
>Retainers are often used to strengthen a party which is attempting an extremely dangerous adventure. It is reccomended that the DM NOT allow beginning players to hire retainers. New players tend to use retainers as a crutch, letting them take all the risks. If a dungeon is very difficult, the DM should let players have more than one character apiece BEFORE using retainers, at least until players are more experienced.Mentzer B page D20:
>Multiple Characters>You should NOT allow beginning players to play more than one character at the same time. It can be hard enough to play the role of ONE character; two or more can be very confusing. However, when the players are more experienced, you may consider this as an optional system.>If you have two towns in your fantasy game world, you may allow each player to have a character in each town. This can be more interesting, and allows the players to try different classes.>Retainers>If there are 3 or more players, no retainers should be needed. However if only 1 or 2 players are available, many dungeons may be too difficult for their chararacters alone, and you may allow them to find and hire retainers.>This will only be necessary if there are very few players AND if the player characters are not powerful enough to do well on their own. Fighter characters can usually do well alone, as can clerics, dwarves, elves and halflings.>First and foremost - if you want the character to take one or two retainers, go ahead and do it. Don't worry about the retainer reactions, pay rates, or other details. Assume that a retainer (or more if you wish) has been found, hired for a price (just tell the player the amount), and is ready to go. Make up a retainer sheet, and start the game.+P62:
>[...]the DM always plays the part of any retainers hired. [...] In a game with only one or two players, retainers are often used.
>>96005624>But both B's are better.On this specific topic* I meant, character limit fucked me.
>>96005624As long as you're running the usual boring single-party campaign with the same group of regulars, the difference between running multiple PCs vs running a PC and henchmen/retainers at the same time is going to be a non-issue.
The distinction becomes extremely important once you start implementing one or more of the advanced first decade D&D mechanics of 1:1 time, downtime, adversarial play, an open or at least semi-open table, and/or a long-term campaign to high levels. If that's what you're doing, allowing multiple PCs working together basically defeats the whole point of henchmen, and it becomes unfair. And you're NOT going to find advice for that style of play in the Holmes/BX/BECMI/RC line of editions. Nor in anything written directly by someone who wasn't Gygax or Arneson. Your only reference books for that are going to be OD&D, the PHB, and the DMG.
>>96005091>A&E is less like Dragon Magazine and more like a paper /tg/There are some striking parallels. Picrel is from A&E issue 14, if you catch my drift.
>>96006716Are you telling me a magic-user smoked this fish ?
Are there rules for this ?
>>96006839Ce n'est pas dit explicitement mais je crois que c'est ce qu'il faut entendre, pรฉdรฉfranรงais.
>>96006839But does wizard smoked fish increase its value?
>>96006977It depends on whether you're trying to sell it to Swedes.
>>96006989>Clearing out a dungeon with SurstrรถmmingThe party is later offered a place working under the forces of Chaos by a devil, because 'I can't believe you did that you sick fuckers'
>>96006641>If that's what you're doing, allowing multiple PCs working together basically defeats the whole point of henchmen, and it becomes unfair.Huh. I suppose this is one area where Mentzer cleaves closer to Gary.
I also checked the RC just now. It's a bit lighter on it, lacking the "free" (handwaved) starting option for a small group.
>Retainers are never characters run by players; retainers are always NPCs run by the DM. The DM may prefer that PCs not hire retainers in his campaign. This decision is especially common when there are plenty of PCs to accomplish the campaign's adventures, or when the player characters are strong enough to handle the adventure's dangers. In games with only a few players or with weak and inexperienced characters, the DM usually permits the PCs to hire retainers.BUT page 100/101 does have a whole "balancing encounters" section, which gives rough guidelines using "total party level" compared to the HD of a group of monsters, with adjustments for each. Might be viable for ensuring a small party isn't punished needlessly.
>HolmesForgot to check that one. Holmes only mentions (and this is all on page 8):
>NUMBERS OF CHARACTERS>Most Dungeon Masters allow a player only one (or perhaps two characters) at a time. If a character is killed, then for the next game the player rolls a new character.Nothing much else, the rest is about just hiring NPCs or enslaving monsters.
This is a tangent, but while looking the above I found this, also page 8, the section for
>NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS>Subdued monsters will obey for a time without need to check their reactions, and such monsters are salable.And the immediate prior paragraph states...
>Note, however, that the term "monster" includes men found in the dungeons, so in this way some high-level characters can, arbitrarily, be brought into a character's service, charisma allowing or through a charm spell.Really makes you think, doesn't it?
Cont.
>>96007736And by
>Might be viable for ensuring a small party isn't punished needlessly.I do not mean on-the-fly bethesda fuckery to match them, but rather cutting monsters overall with some internal blanket rules to be roughly "half" difficulty, such as capping their HP total potentials to where anything rolled above half = half (and obviously things with additional powers would still be exponentially harder).
The "special bonus award" on page 85 of the DMG also gives me an idea. For new players some kind of "insurance policy" might also be in order... a "free" restoration to life once per month, that levies a debt to be paid after, if their body can be returned to the temple. And increasing the monthly gold piece cost, with the option to (with a termination fee) drop the policy later if they should so wish. A bit like a light version of Cyberpunk's Trauma Team + the debt of Cruelty Squad... The benefit is the "raise now, pay later". The monthly fee is to account for absconders.
Gives low level players a reason to recover their allies' bodies too.
>>96007736> "balancing encounters" section, which gives rough guidelines using "total party level" compared to the HD of a group of monstersFor Christ's sake, don't do that Hickmanfaggotry. It's not the DM's responsibility to balance encounters to the party, just create a world with its own internal rules for gradients of difficulty, and it's up to the players to figure out where to go and what they can or can't take on.
>"free" restoration to life once per monthFuck off with that bullshit too.
>>96003257>I still don't understand how you're supposed to get into domain play.>I am thinking of ACKS here, mainly. You can obtain a stronghold with territory, or the class equivalent, by clearing it up, conquering it or receiving it by a ruler even before level 9, but you can't attract followers or peasants to move there. So, it'll be only your group and your followers.
Only by level 9 you start attracting people to your domain.
>does anyone actually get to that point organically, or do they just throw together some contrived shit to make it work so they can skip to that part?I'll tell you when I get there, see you in a year or two.
>>96008361You can attract peasants you just don't get an automatic chunk of them at the beginning until you're level 9. You can still invest in your domain or attract them via adventuring.
>>96008361The interesting thing about ACKS though is that you can actually reach Level 9 through rulership.
Since you gain XP for GP over a certain amount, if you do conquer a realm or manage to convince a small township to come under your command? Then if you can ride out those bumpy first few months of being technically too weak to rule then you'll level up to an appropriate level based on how much you're earning.
Which means that the fluff and mechanics line up nicely, either you've proven yourself a competent leader and so people flock to you, or people are flocking to you because they've heard you're a competent leader.
>>96008379This as well.
>>96008313I specified in the 2nd post - due to character limits - that I would NOT be doing that "balancing encounters to the party" thing* but rather altering the internal rules of the world to allow for a single/duo player party to not get absolutely and unfairly thrashed with little chance of experiencing OSR as supposed to be. The games appear built for a minimum of 4 players but in basically every book I peeked in, it stresses that more player experience makes it easier and adds some elements of "balancing new players and experienced ones so they get full enjoyment" or such. I do not have a big table but there's a hope the interested handful enjoy it and invite others. Capping on-die HD rolls behind the scenes seems like a good dial.
>Fuck off with that bullshit too.It's only a spitball idea, since it's "free" in that it's basically a loan. You don't need to pay for it ahead of time, and it's actually more expensive than it otherwise would be. Entering into debt means you need more gold, without some contrived negotiation at the first death when panic sets in. This is motivation for recovering bodies and acquiring enough GP (and thus xp) to eventually drop the policy because you are both more experienced, and thus should die less, and have become a rich bastard who can just pay it out of pocket if something goes wrong. It's also within the domain of a temple of of Zilchus (or similar god, if not using Greyhawk), which could result in an interesting "fuck you guys in particular you thieving bastards" type of relationship between the religion and the PCs. Possibly the inverse and appreciation for wheeling and dealing as it's very uh... "relatable" to adventurers.
At least that's my thinking on it.
* - RC even lists it as optional and stresses that it's not necessary, almost discouraging you from using it and with all kinds of caveats to imply it's not that simple to do so anyway. It's not like 3e-and-later's CR crap, it's more of a very rough guideline.
Is there anything significantly different about monster power or lethality between B/X and OD&D?
The main thing I am trying to figure out is why in B/X and onward, basic D&D doesn't allow fighters multiple attacks against 1hd monsters. Is it really just for simplification's sake? If so, that's a massive downgrade for fighters.
>>96008914Quantity. In B/X the number for goblins, kobolds, bandits and orcs were reduced from
40-400 (g/k), 30-300(b) and 30-300(o)
to
6-60, 3-30, and 10-60 respectively
>>96008914Not sure why the change in basic.
I did some quick googling and found this comment from Macris about the thought process behind ACKS fighterโs methods from 2016 (the blog discussing the history of fighters multi attacks)
>When designing ACKS, I went through all of these systems (save 5E, unpublished at that time), plus one system you didnโt mention โ Dave Arnesonโs โchop while you dropโ rule, which allowed for fighters to continue attacking as long as they were dropping foes. I discovered Arnesonโs rule on the Dragonsfoot Forums. We playtested all these systems, and kept coming back to the chop-while-you-drop rule, combined with a level-based damage bonus, as the best choice for the game. We found the โone attack per level against 1HD or lessโ rule very frustrating in play because of the sharp differential it created between 1-1 HD and 1 HD monsters. A 14th level fighter was a god against koboldsโฆand no better than a low-level fighter against orcs.Blog post in question: https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/a-history-of-the-fighters-extra-attacks-versus-low-level-monsters/
>>96009005Come to think of it, having cleaves means that Vorpal swords are actually worth the bullshit to get hold of them in ACKS. Doubly so with the 'Crit at a certain number over their AC rather than a nat-20' optional rule.
>You cleave through the dragonrider, hewing downwards through his entire body and drive your blade ever onwards into the beasts great throatIs actually a legit possibility.
Does anyone happen to know how fighters worked in regards to multiple attacks in Holmes basic? Did it carry over the rule from 1e, or was it the first to drop multiple attacks?
>>96009005This is similar to my own thought process. I'm starting to want to give fighters AND ONLY FIGHTERS extra attacks in B/X, specifically because of how hard they were nerfed from OD&D, while the monsters remain essentially unchanged.
God these threads are so peaceful and civilized when you know who is off squatting on some other thread.
While he's away I'd just like to say I appreciate you all and the fact we can have civilized conversations when he isn't around.
And I don't mean just about that one system that makes him stroke out, I just mean in general.
You lads are alright.
>>96004585It always bugged me that it got the math wrong or made an inexplicable exception to the procedure ("A score of 2 means that the monster will not fight")
>>96009310Having not checked personally, could this mechanic have to do with the types of monsters scoring morale at 2? Surely there canโt be too many hugging pacifists in the monster list
>>96009140The only indicator in a quick skim through I could find was referring to AD&D for 4th level stuff, because Holmes only goes to 3rd.
Funnily enough what I noticed is that Fighting Men in Holmes have the biggest potential of any class for their Prime Requisite being high, since they can tank both their Int AND Wis to boost it. So you can literally do the "while you were learning magic, I studied The Blade" shit.
Also everyone's attack table in Holmes is the same. Fighters just get all armor and all weapons and the most HP.
The Gauntlets of Ogre Power also imply that having 18 strength allows you to "grasp and crush things with great ease, just as if he were an ogre (18 strength)" (p38)
Strength above 15 in the sample dungeon (unless wearing metal armor) allows you to resist being swept away.
They don't really get anything else.
>>96009152Word.
I'm working on a city guide for my home game, and I was wondering what people felt was the best city adventuring advice they've seen. As usual, there's a lot of stuff out there, but so much of it seems to be either pointlessly naturalistic (the baker is named Tim Donkey-ears, and he has 2 hp, and his sister is named Selma, and they live in a hut on blah blah blah), or so gonzo as to be only usable for that city (a lot of modern OSR stuff). I'm looking for links to solid write-ups and other advice on actual city adventuring. Your own experiences are welcome as well.
>>96009350City state of the invincible overlord
Yoon-suin yellow city hijinks
DCC (not OSR) Lankhmar book
Vornheim
Magical Industrial Revolutionโs Endon
All have insights to glean Iโd say, canโt think of any blog posts consolidating such advice at the moment
>>96009152We might even be able to discuss 2e with him gone.
Wait, we were able to discuss it all we wanted anyway lol.
>>96009426I rarely have anything to say about 2e that doesn't apply to 1e.
...it's nice that you can ressurect elves I guess?
>>96009448The lore reason that elves can't be raised is actually punishment from Corellon for wanting to have defined sexes. Lolth started it with the drow so they're extra cursed but because the other elves also decided to become male or female Corellon punished them by making them always be reincarnated instead of going to Corellon's heaven so even thought they have one gender in one life they're still gonna end up being both male and female in all their lifes combined.
>>96009515I'm gonna need a citation on this. I know Correllon can be either sex, both, or neither, but I've never heard anything like this about the elves.
>>96009515The reason elves can't be resurrected is actually fuck elves.________________________________________
>>96009577I'm trying to find it but the weird thing is that i'm finding some sources in the 90's that repeat the story but at the same time that doesn't make any sense for that to be where the story started because by then elves could be raised from the dead so that's a straight up contradiction. the best I can guess is that maybe it was mentioned in the Artifact of Evil book that gygax wrote because its supposed to feature the drow and explain their history but im not excited to try tracking down a pdf or text of that because its not a rule book.
>>96009515I kinda low-key hate the Greyhawk pantheon.
>>96010057How? There's almost nothing to them. Even Corellon is a late addition and has almost no lore, because almost all the deities are human deities and even they only get a tiny bit of lore.
>>96010116Not that anon, but I hate the Greyhawk pantheon because of its connection to the Lovecraft mythos. Completely unnecessary shit like Dalt being Vatun's brother. Vatun is essentially Odin, while Dalt is essentially a Lovecraftian god in disguise. Utterly inane shit.
>>96001644>doesn't know that Perren is the real villain of DnDNewfag grifter. Further more, I had sex with your mother.
>>96000483Not to discount your whole argument but the 1:20 is the DM to player ratio not the Dm to player character ratio. Remember this was in the days of people war gaming 3 or more nights a week. Some of your players are dedicated and want to play as often as you are both at the club, say once a week or more, and others may only sit in once month or less. Very manageable to the dedicated hobbyist.
>>96010276Eh, fair.
It still kind of amazes me that Gygax didn't get sued to oblivion sometimes.
>>96010394>Not to discount your whole argument but the 1:20 is the DM to player ratio not the Dm to player character ratio.Sure, but I never claimed otherwise.
>>96009350Rather than going to anything anyone else has designed I'd personally go back to the foundations.
Go read Fafhrd & The Grey Mouser.
Walk the streets of Lankhmar, the City of the Black Toga and Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.
Soak that shit in and then come back and write a hook for your city, same as you'd have a hook for a dungeon.
Doesn't have to be Gonzo, but does have to be unique enough that it's memorable.
>>96010742Life moved a LOT slower before the internet, anon. The people who would have an interest in suing Gygax for whatever infringement had surely never heard of him before he exited TSR and he was phased into the FOUNDING FATHERS role
>>96009350>I'm looking for links to solid write-ups and other advice on actual city adventuring.Behold the words of D&D's prophet Earnest Gary Gygax (play be upon him):
>>96012472He faced legal action for including Hobbits and Ents in the first D&D printing, and that's because the Tolkien estate actually had the money for lawyers. I'm betting a lot of other writers/designers wanted to sue Gygax, but just couldn't afford it.
>>96012489Forgot pic.
I shall generate 10 NPC adventuring parties as penance.
>>96012489You're really never gonna stop with that cocksucking, are you?
>>96012502No, for it gives guaranteed replies and ensures that the name Gygax stays on everyone's lips.
Thank you for your contribution.
>>96012502NTA. Gygax is by far the best RPG designer who's ever lived: Proof is what happened to the AD&D line as soon as he left TSR: Cook, Greenwood, Grubb, Hickman, and Ward had a literal masterpiece in their hands and managed to turn it into utter shit.
>>96012566>I will make sure my lips are stained with shitGross. You should keep that to yourself though.
>96012618
What has our good prophet Earnest Gary Gygax done to you personally to deserve such scorn?
>>96012638You make posts that make me wonder if the planet you live on simply was never exposed to the concept of "irony."
>>96012652Not enough splatbooks, no XP for having fun, surviving, learning the rules of the game, playing along with the railroad, and community thespianism.
>>96012809>no XP for having funGygax actually ran games where he would bend/break rules as rewards for "Good play", ie. playing in the way he wanted them to play. We're talking about XP awards and even special perks like leveling without training if he felt the "quality of play was high", and even advised other DMs to do the same.
Far from arguing DMs should be impartial and not just hand out free things to players, he ran games with the mindset that he could and should confer rewards according to criteria that was largely "If this pleases me," which essentially amounted in his case to rewarding sycophantic behavior.
>>96012863That's kind of sloppy design but naturally you should reward play based on what you want the game to be like: What the game rewards is what it's about.
>>96012863>We're talking about XP awardsYou're making shit up as you always do. He's talking about allowing to advance without training, that has nothing to do with giving XP awards. Of course you don't understand the difference because you're a 2etard, but that's never kept you from expressing your opinion on anything, has it?
>>96012863>>96012989Not sure if samefagging or if it's actually two tourists who don't understand the difference between XP and training.
>>96012989With that logic, there's no reason to complain about a game giving XP for having fun, and instead that should be the highest consideration. For why play games if having fun is not what they're about?
Actually, the more I mule it over in my head, while this was originally just to poke fun at
>>96012809, the idea of rewarding players on a "How much fun did you have" criteria may actually warrant consideration.
Up until a guy walks in with an 8-ball and announces he plans on gaining five levels that night.
>>96012502Somebody get this hot head out of here!
>>96010394>Newfag grifter>Anon posted an ancient, local meme
>>96012606That's also why all the games he worked on after TSR are so beloved. Cyborg Commander, Dangerous and Lejendary Journeys, truly games that showcase his genius.
>>96012502>seething this hard at citations from the DMGWhat's wrong, fag? Feel threatened by 1E? Prefer an edition with a worse DMG? LMAO that's all of them
>>96012495>Zelazny was aware of these similarities [in Castle Amber to his works], and on March 15, 1982 he wrote a letter saying he "...satisfied myself that there is nothing actionable there. Ditto on TSR's D&D game, Amber Castle (sic)."Based Zelazny. His work is also cited in one of the Basic inspired reading appendices I'm pretty sure.
>>96012606>>96013329The idea of the lone creative genius sparking something into existence is actually a myth, which is why it's often a strawman used to try to beat some disliked figure down. Every masterful creative had a vast support network that he leveraged to help focus his creativity. Michelangelo had apprentices and connections. Lucas had his film crew and writing assistants and concept artists. Gygax had his fellow designers, home game players, artists like Sutherland, and the rest of the shifting TSR staff over the years. Lovecraft was in constant contact with other authors like C.A.Smith and also tutored various people on writing over the years. Tolkein and Herbert also had their friends and associates. All also had family to bounce things off of (at various points.)
So pointing out that someone's work became garbage when they were suddenly left without the reliable people they could count on for various brainstorming and other tasks (so they could do the heavy lifting or focused part), is just pointing out the obvious.
Iโm thinking of performing the ultimate blasphemy against OSR and the grognards by implementing a maneuver system for fighters and thieves to a lesser extent.
>>96013056Fun is non-quantifiable and a failure state. Plus much of the fun comes from working toward objectives.
>>96013056>a guy walks in with an 8-ball and announces he plans on gaining five levels that night.SIGNS POINT TO NO
>>96013414The thing is, actually great people actually do great things because of traits like having high intelligence.
Michelangelo had apprentices, sure, but he was also genuinely a prolific genius who understood concepts of form, color, anatomy, geometry, and even just the practical aspects of his craft to a level far beyond most of his contemporaries. He worked with talented people, but even just from his personal sketches anyone could see he was a once-in-a-generation artist.
Gygax was not a very smart person. Even saying he had average intelligence may be flattery. He struggled in school, struggled with his jobs, and even in game design his primary success was taking Jeff Perren's rules, adding some more, and then positioning himself as Chainmail's creator. His solo projects at the time, games based on Alexander the Great and Dunkirk, did not sell particularly well, and even contributed to the publisher going out of business.
But, believing him to be Chainmail's creator, Dave Arneson approached him, and essentially handed him the goose that lays golden eggs.
This isn't to say Gary didn't do anything, and far from it. He took a big risk self-publishing D&D, though that's in part thanks to Avalon Hill not having much faith in Gygax thanks to the lukewarm reception and sales from his revised edition of AtG. Gygax's major talent, if we can call it one, was really just shameless copying/stealing in a time when games were allowed to do so. Even Chainmail had Perren copy extensively from Siege of Bodenburg, and the gaming hobby was basically a warm petri dish of people freely playing around with ideas.
>>96013892Gygax's "talent" of euphemistically being "open to other people's ideas" was important. With no intelligence of his own, he relied extensively on the D&D community to build and shape the game for him. Rather than him attracting people, the D&D brand attracted some impressive talent over the years, and even in its earliest years it was heavily shaped not by Gygax but the players at the GenCons acting as unpaid/uncredited playtesters/designers, which is in part why D&D got a heavy load of Tolkien influences despite Gary being quite the grumbler about them.
D&D was a game where it may have been great DESPITE Gygax, rather than because of him. Even B/X serves as an interesting "What if?", in the sense of "What if someone who was actually intelligent held the reigns to the most popular RPG brand?" Holmes and Moldvay were some fairly intelligent people, particularly Holmes, and it's interesting comparing Basic D&D with what OD&D was becoming.
Gygax's work was garbage outside of D&D because he just didn't have much talent for himself. When he left TSR, he actually left with a group of TSR employees, and they were the ones responsible for Cyborg Commander and Dangerous Journeys, two genuinely awful RPGs that sold and reviewed poorly. While there's any number of excuses for why they were bad, none of them applied to Gygax's next attempt with Lejendary Journeys, which may have learned some lessons from DJ, but not enough for it to actually be any good.
D&D's power has always existed in a space beyond any individual person, group, or even company. It's so powerful, that even someone like Gygax gained power by attaching himself to it. When the D&D name was taken from him, he had plenty of opportunity to prove that he really was the reason D&D was good in the first place, that he was a genius and he was the one that attracted top talent and all that, and instead proved, judging by DJ and LJ, that he may have actually been responsible for the worst parts of D&D.
Lying is allowed:
>>96012863>>96012989Pointing out the lies is verboten:
>>96013019>>96013031
Indeed. Lying is allowed:
>>96012863>>96012989Pointing out the lies is forbidden:
>>96013019>>96013031
>>96012863>which essentially amounted in his case to rewarding sycophantic behavior.<citation needed>
>>96014024https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY
>>96014001Are they doing this bullshit on this general only, or in others as well? Because as it stands it's only a matter of time before some lunatic picks one name at random off the published list and stabs him in the eye.
>>96013892>>96013900I've always found this sort of sad revisionism hilarious. I mean, there's plenty of real critiques you could make about Gygax, but no matter the important person under discussion, there's always someone ready to say, "hold on to your hats: I'm about to blow your mind with a truth bomb. You see, despite all the evidence to the contrary, everything you know is wrong." And it's always just the most tedious "what are you going to believe: me or your lying eyes" type nonsense.
Here we have a guy who wants us to ignore that Gygax wrote most of the actual text of OD&D (adapting 20 pages of misc notes from Arneson), and the vast bulk of the text for the real AD&D, and many of the most classic old-school adventures single-handedly. After a bombardment of statements completely lacking proof (e.g. "it was heavily shaped not by Gygax but the players at the GenCons"), the big piece of evidence countering reality is that ... Gygax also produced duffers after he left TSR. This of course is like claiming that the existence of In Through The Out Door is proof that Led Zeppelin actually had all their great albums written and performed by someone else, or that Twain had a ghost writer for Tom, but it only takes weak sophistry to fool someone already holding the axe he's looking to grind. It's all so obviously sloppy and bitter that you have to ask if the writer is even fooling themselves, let alone expecting to fool others.
The only real question here is, is this just the small-minded contrarianism of the little man who hates that creativity exists in the world, or is it fueled by a need to tear down Gygax to promote some other, shitty D&D edition or other game?
>>96014059They turn up in every thread where OSR is mentioned to howl and hoot about how everyone hates OSR and OSR players are all untermensch.
Particularly if ACKS is mentioned.
>Off topic
Janny, it's entirely on topic to say 'There are people on this board who talk mad shit about /osrg/ and ACKS in particular'
It's right on fucking topic in fact, it couldn't be more on topic if I tried.
I'm not trying to start a fight or stir shit, I'm describing what I see as the current standing of things.
>>96014076>(adapting 20 pages of misc notes from Arneson),Which formed the core of the game and the million-dollar-concept. You're kinda saying that the syrup in a soda is less important than the water because there's much more water.
>and many of the most classic old-school adventures single-handedly.Not any of the good ones though. Most of the "classic gygax adventures" are only called classics because they have "Gygax" on them. If people ever did blind adventure runs without knowing the authors, I doubt any Gygax adventure would review particularly highly.
>Gygax also produced duffers after he left TSR. Not mere duffers. Complete stinkers, and stinkers that somehow managed to carry over parts of older editions that no one liked and probably only ever made it to print because Gary refused to listen to reason. DJ is a game I genuinely recommend everyone look at in order to appreciate the elegance that exists in Basic. It's almost like an inverse of Basic in many ways.
It's actually sort of funny. Gygax just added rules on top of what Perren wrote, and then did the same with Arneson's notes. And, he just kept adding more and more rules, with the expressed goal that he wanted a comprehensive game with rules sufficient enough for competitive play. With this expanded juggernaut eventually evolving into AD&D, he completely lost sight of the original core of the game. That's what DJ feels like, with it being an incredibly rules-dense monstrosity that fails on basically every level a game can fail. But, Gary continued his design philosophy trajectory, thanks in part to being bombarded with negative reviews, with LJ being much simpler (but still awkward and complex) than DJ, and eventually, in his dying days, admitting that his favorite game to run was the simplest form of OD&D, before he began to over-complicate it with additional rules.
It's like he spent his life running away from that core that Arneson gave him, only to return to it in the end.
>>96013801Not that 8ball, retard
>>96014201Arneson didn't run games anything like od&d you massive fucking fraud.
>>96014059lmao that'd be hilarious
>>96014096only a matter of time then
>>96014201>Which formed the core of the game and the million-dollar-concept. You're kinda saying that the syrup in a soda is less important than the water because there's much more water. There's no game if it isn't created, isn't written up, isn't put into a usable form. And that's gliding over any contributions Gygax made to the work on top of that. Or is your next sad dodge that he actually created nothing there and every last rules concept is Arneson? I'm sure you have proof for any such claims (who am I kidding?) And then there's all the OD&D supplements on top. And then the AD&D work, which you also dodged other than some weak hint that it wasn't the original game in some unnamed way. Your dishonesty is quite striking.
>Not any of the good ones though. Most of the "classic gygax adventures" are only called classics because they have "Gygax" on them. If people ever did blind adventure runs without knowing the authors, I doubt any Gygax adventure would review particularly highly.World's biggest citation needed. Just typing contrarianism isn't actual proof, you realise.
>Not mere duffers. Complete stinkers, Again, which doesn't invalidate previous work--specifically, the work we actually discuss here. Your argument is irrelevant. That a creative can make bad work later in their career in no way takes away from earlier successes. This isn't rocket surgery here, Einstein.
>>96014197The leak has shown that the 4chan ban interface has two reasons for a ban: A public one which you see, and a private one that only they can see. Meaning the reason that they give you is just a joke to piss you off. Ignore it.
>>96014235 Call me paranoid, but I'd be concerned if I were them. When I've moderated communities I've always played nice because there's lots of crazies around. They're playing with fire. But then again they're probably losers with nothing to lose if they've ended up doing this for an (unpaid) job, so they're not afraid of getting stabbed in the eye, or they get doxxed, or SWATted if they're in the USA, or any other kind of insane retaliation that nutjobs are capable of.
>>96014287>The leak has shown that the 4chan ban interface has two reasons for a ban: A public one which you see, and a private one that only they can see. Meaning the reason that they give you is just a joke to piss you off. Ignore it.Oh, I know, but replying directly to his inane faggotry lets him know I'm still around and his bans don't work.
Which pisses him off something terrible from what I can tell given how he starts having a tantrum whenever his petty spoonful of power is defied.
>Another banStill headbutting away at that are we Janny?
>jannyfag in other thread whining about people who refuse narrativist hickman shit, who play white male parties (apparently a /pol/ proxy in his mind) with resource management and inadvertently outs himself as not playing any of the editions he bitches about because he thinks death is a big deal and doesn't realize resurrection magic is commonplace>>96009077 if you want a good laugh.
>>96014323>>96014394>All White Male Human Parties in HARDCORE games that are nothing but counting down the amount of torches they have until they dieSo 2etard = fishfag IS an actual transsexual. I thought it was just a joke.
>That absolute lunatic post
So Janny.
Are you going to go over to that thread and ban him for shitting up the board with /pol/ or not?
Because it looks to me like he's shitting up the board with /pol/ caused entirely by his brainworms and retardation.
>Muh fucking wh*te men
Man, my setting doesn't even have white men.
I really don't know what his malfunction is.
>Janny is now outright ignoring his gloryhole buddy shitting up the board while banning people that point it out to him
I sincerely and wholeheartedly hope you get raped by an entire pack of wild dogs.
>>96014286>There's no game if it isn't created, isn't written up, isn't put into a usable formGygax wasn't specifically necessary for that though. In a different timeline, Arneson could have approached someone else, some other game designer perhaps, who may or may not have done a considerably better job. Even Arneson's idea wasn't some unique, mystical concept that only could have occurred to him, but something developing in proto-forms elsewhere in the hobby and arguably having existed long before even war games in the form of various parlor games.
> And that's gliding over any contributions Gygax made to the work on top of that. Mostly because we don't know for certain and there's a lot, and I mean a lot, of contradictory stories, particularly with the "Gygaxian" camp trying to "defame" the "Arnesian" camp. I feel it's a little odd to treat the "Gygaxian" side as the pure truth, especially because I've seen some of that camp try to reduce Dave to some sort of diaper-wearing trogolodyte who wrote by smearing feces on a wall, requiring St. Gygax to interpret the illegible scrawl into divine teachings.
I also didn't glide over the fact that Gygax liked adding rules on top of other people's work. I'm pretty sure there's a whole paragraph on that in that post.
Also, please calm down, Mr. Gygax. I assuming you're one of his sons, hopefully not the dead one. Your dad not being particularly smart and on the whole a mediocre game designer that either stole or was gifted his best ideas is far from the worst things that could be said about him if we were actually trying to be mean, and all without having to say anything that wasn't common knowledge.
Do we really want to go to him being a terrible writer, a terrible businessman/partner, generally a terrible person, and judging by you, a terrible father? Or do we just want to try and remain civil and keep the discussion on him being incredibly flawed as a game designer?
>>96014394>>96014417>>96014487>>96014517So it turns out it's some kind of activism to him. This autogynephiliac pedophile thinks he's fighting Trump by trolling /osrg/. Fucking bananas. And I say this as an anti-Trump leftist.
>Janny deleted his post
Was that so hard? Why are you so god damn proud that you can't take someone pointing shit out to you without taking it personally and having a huffy over it?
I want this board to be better.
You, presumably, want this board to be better.
Have you considered working with everyone instead of being this shadowy figure that keeps getting calling a faggot because no one knows what you're up to or why you're acting the way you act?
>>96013892>I AM MAD>MAD ABOUT GYGAXlmao, actual 1980s church-mom leftovers
>>96014076>or is it fueled by a need to tear down Gygax to promote some other, shitty D&D edition or other game?You know it, buddy! This is our old friend trying for a new gap to wedge his off-topic content into the general. His (incorrect) idea is that if he can just tear down Gygax and get us to agree that everything great and Gygaxian sucks (good luck, lmao) then the general will become open to considering un- or anti-old-school design and turn into /todd/, except magically with any activity whatsoever somehow.
Some gaps in that plan, to say the least.
>Can't even accept an olive branch
I hope the hot pockets are worth it, because your soul ain't worth a dime.
>>96000308 (OP)What are people's opinions on the BECMI gazetters? If there is a good respective adventure in the location, I absolutely love them, like Keramikos and Nights dark terror, or Glantree and Castle Amber.
They do a lot to expand and really give you a sense of a place that the adventure then gives you a great example of. However, a lot of the other gazetters are not as great, as there isnt that good of a respective locational adventure. I overall like Mystara better then greyhaw imo because of them.
>>96014580HA HA HA that tardface he's making on the right, incredible, classic
Right up there with that one of the guy who looks like a neanderthal in a wig gesticulating at some poor woman
>>96014527>In a different timeline, Arneson could have approached someone else, some other game designer perhaps, who may or may not have done a considerably better job.Well gee, let me just take my stolen Klingon Bird of Prey around the sun to go get some fucking whales and prove your mirror-universe hypothetical there, chief.
lmao, why let something as tiresome as actual reality get in the way, when I can posit my own universe with hookers and blackjack and a version of Arneson who could actually finish an index with multiple years of work who then hooked up with a noble, dashing good game designer instead of Snidely Gygax.
>>96014729Desuistically they are shit, except maybe Karameikos and the Shadow Elves (but that's just because I like them better than drow). I like the art desu but a large majority of the content just isn't gameable and some of the worst cancer of the BECMI era originates in those books, skill proficiencies notably.
Ierendi has to be the worst one.
>3 day ban
No amount of seething over me and other people forcing you to close the futa porn for 30 seconds to do your fucking job is going to make us stop.
You want us to stop cutting into your gooning time, try trading posts with whoever looks after one of the porn boards, maybe they'll be more agreeable to /tg/ than your hard headed fuckwittery?
>>96014794>desuisticlyI like that word
There is one thing that Gary inarguably designed himself that was part of the LBB version of D&D, and every version since: The alternate combat system. Even 3.x, 4e, and 5e have kept it, only flipping the scale to ascendng AC.
Gygax had his faults. They are many and well documented. Being overly focused on them makes ones analysis of his work just as untrustworthy as pretending they don't exist.
>>96014729>I overall like Mystara better then greyhaw imo because of them.Have you ever actually played in either? Or do you just read them?
>Some gaps in that plan, to say the least.Yeah, the kind of gap that self-lubricates with colon mucus, grows hair on the inside, and you have to spend a lifetime dilating or it seals back up.
>it is once again necessary to have a whole parallel thread for reading on one of the archives in order to post or follow conversations sensibly
gj janny, sensational, top notch, peak, your pussy will probably open and make you a real woman any day now, just like it did for CWC
>>96003257Well, in ACKS you don't automatically get a grant of land. It just says that when you build a castle/sanctum/temple/hideout, you get a bunch of followers. But practically, you either:
>settle wilderness>conquer existing>granted existingBut it's not explicitly level-gated. You CAN be put in charge of a domain before you hit level 9 and in fact it's not a terrible way to safely level low-level characters, if you're willing to take the domain morale hit. You can also recruit armies and build stuff before or after level 9, and so long as your lord is okay with it, you can do whatever. Really it's just that you get the best ROI at level 9 (especially for classes that aren't fighter, because clerics/crusaders enjoy a 50% cost/time reduction).
>>96014933I'm curious: I know ACKS as a game engine is supposed to support this economic and war wider game, but does it have any modules built expressly for that game line and meant to showcase how the designer imagines this would play out at the table? I'd actually like to see what this might look like as gameable material (or even if it is such).
>>96014787Here's the question.
What does Gygax do without Arneson?
And what does Arneson do without Gygax?
Gygax probably would have just kept trying to make board/war games for a few more years, likely without any major success, and then found some other job. Even with all the luck in the world, he's heavily reliant on Arneson coming to specifically him with his ideas.
Arneson would have sought someone else to pitch his idea to, and with luck brought a version of an RPG to market or just to a fanzine. It becoming a cultural phenomenon is unlikely, though arguably possible. More likely though is some other proto-RPG would have become the dominant game and then Reagan and Thatcher would have a son together named Damien who would end the world. I guess we're lucky Arneson and Gygax got together.
>>96014982IIRC it does; I think at least the initial AX series of modules is less of a sequence and more pieces of a campaign environment including adventure sites and one is framework for domain play in the region with mass battles etc. I think Prince reviewed the series and you can probably get a good rundown there, he's usually solid on the specifics.
>>96014982The designer has actually done an entire full campaign of the game on youtube.
Grey brotherhood I think it's called?
>>96015042I honestly don't know: I'm not much of a fan of counterfactuals when attempting to perform real historical analysis, and I never knew either man.
If I had to guess--and that's all it would be--Gygax would never have made it big, because the kernel of D&D is a once in a generation idea that I don't think he would have come up with all on his own, and Arneson never would have made it big because he had little interest not just codification of rules but writing in general and the odds of him stumbling on someone with the weird mix of skills that Gygax had that would see the potential, be able to shape it into something marketable, and have the drive to do so and then successfully expand on it on top was low.
I don't however accept as a given that Arneson would ever have felt that his idea was something that needed to be codified in the first place, let alone then gone out to find someone to do the job, let alone found someone who could do it well, let alone someone who could then get it published and distributed. I feel strongly like you're doing a lot of handwaving at that point.
>>96015060I found it
>Macris reveals the map>No dedicated mapper>No dedicated callerGarbage
>>96015281Hey, no problem. ACKS is a cool game, not everybody's thing but great for its niche.
>>96015060Yep.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheArbiterOfWorlds/videos
I haven't watched the campaign, but his theory videos are pretty good. For instance, his video about alignment is worth watching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v_eJrPS59I
It might be the only take on alignment I've come across that's well-reasoned and makes sense.
>>96015277Arneson is the one who approached Gygax and even demonstrated his game to him with the intention to try and get it published. If Gygax had simply said "No," maybe that would have been the end of things with Arneson just giving up, or maybe Arneson would have gone to a different designer, but either way Arneson wasn't some princess locked up in a tower waiting for someone to rescue him and receive his idea as treasure.
Gygax saw potential in the idea because Arneson showed it to him. He didn't just randomly discover Arneson in a pit or something, languishing with no drive or initiative.
>>96015348>If Gygax had simply said "No," maybe that would have been the end of thingsI wish he had said No so that we wouldn't have shitty FOE people and 5e babies
It's fascinating to watch how many threads are mysteriously down one fuckheaded retard whenever fishfag gets banned.
>>95992043>>96008468>>95986824Three I can just casually pick out without looking for them.
>>96015637He infests fucking Dungeon World as well?
>>96015656Any thread where anyone mentions ACKS calls to him like someone sent up a flare.
He infests everything, I'm 99% sure he just sits on the archive all day refreshing it to check for signs of ACKStivity or people posting anything that's constructive in here.
>>96015637>whenever fishfag gets bannedHe never gets banned, he's just on a break.
> >>95986824Interesting how on the Dungeon World general there's a dozen posts discussing Fishfag, while on /osrg/ all posts with the mere mention of the word "Fishfag" gets deleted and the person who said it IP-banned.
/osrg/ literally has special secret rules that don't apply to the rest of /tg/.
>>96015637>Lol no. OSR doesn't really like ACKS because ACKS breaks the first basic concept behind the OSR: Rulings over Rules.>We just have a bunch of ACKS shills on this board because they've been banned from discussing the game everywhere else because their discord shilled too hard and the guiy who made the game is a lawyer who keeps sending messages to moderators hinting that he's gonna sue them if they keep allowing people to say bad things about him and the game.God that cheeky fucker really does try it on everywhere and anywhere, doesn't he?
>>96015328That is a fucking good video.
>>96015686>He never gets banned, he's just on a break.Alright.
Banished to Gay Baby Jail then.
Still, as someone he's screamed at before and writer of the infamous fishtale. And I'm not, I might add, the one that posted it in that thread, it's nice to see other people getting the same treatment from him as he calls everyone the same person and claims we're all shills for Big ACKS(wound) or some shit.
For a while there I was worried that I was being as much of a pain in the ass in these threads as him.
But no, he causes this bullshit wherever he goes and is the single through line in all this bullshit wherever he turns up.
>>96015294>Macris reveals the map>No dedicated mapperI'm afraid that's the destiny of every D&D-adjacent game played with a VTT.
>>96015777>That is a fucking good video.I even rewatched it and took notes, I think his takes on the two-axis alignment are perfect. But sadly he's also right that it's too complex to explain to most players.
>Fishfag gets kicked
>Janny suddenly goes really fucking quiet
Is-
Is it over?
>>96015637>That smuckling 'I should play the lottery' after someone pegged his entire personality in a single postGod he's so arrogant. It's wild.
>>96015782>For a while there I was worried that I was being as much of a pain in the ass in these threads as him.>But no, he causes this bullshit wherever he goes and is the single through line in all this bullshit wherever he turns up.Yeah, no, this is a guy who's insane enough that he's also been trying to force 2e in this thread for at minimum *seven years*. There is absolutely no way that even a normally obnoxious troll can achieve parity with that kind of deranged autism, let alone just liking a fun niche system. You can disregard anyone bawwing at you over it.
>>96015833Let's find out.
>>96015790Skill issue. my vtt games uses fog, mapper, and caller
Based thread. FUCK fishfag with a rusty file.
>>96015042>Here's the question.>What does Gygax do without Arneson?>And what does Arneson do without Gygax?This isn't really a line that works, because no man is an island. That doesn't detract from the actual work done to combine things. It's been a common trend to elevate the "ideas guys" parts of things and minimize the actual guy who put things into a format + refined it.
Despite the TSR internal shitflinging and it going back and forth with Arneson, he DID get royalties for the non-Advanced line, and that sold a crapton of product. He also had several other publications (including the FFC) and taught at Full Sail later on. I heard secondhand that he was actually a crap teacher and his classes were fairly unremarkable to the kind of people who were there to learn how to make videogames, but that's just anecdotal, nobody is perfect.
Both of them near the end of their lives got to narrate a dungeon in DDO as well. More people probably played the Gygax-narrated one, but the Arneson-narrated one was higher level. Both were awkwardly reading from a script but I have to say that Arneson had a better narrator voice.
I don't think there's really any point in "picking sides" over two men who are already long dead, and whose personal feuding petered out decades beforehand.
>grr I hate this guy so much I cant stop thinking about him! I cant help but talk about that guy all the time grrr what a fag
>>96016283t.
crying_soyjak_wearing_smug_mask.jpg
>>96016260Gygax doing his best to cut Dave out is kind of ridiculous.
Sure, Gary put the work in, but he also put a ton of work into trying to patent the concept, sue his competitors, and trying to figure out any way to stop having to pay Arneson royalties (first with Basic, then again with AD&D). The amount of effort and money he spent losing these cases just to try to maximize the profits from an idea that wasn't even really his, all while also doing his best to create a cult of personality around himself, doesn't really leave me seeing him as a motivated but unsung hero.
Arneson is also basically a blobby midwestern guy who you can hardly call a heroic figure, but so far the scummiest thing I've found him doing is just sucking the royalty-teat for decades while putting in what can be charitably called the absolute minimum effort. And, I can't find much of Dave acting to try and stifle and control the budding RPG market, while there's dozens of court cases with Gygax's name all over them. If Gygax had his way, he might have fucked RPGs forverer by locking them in with TSR, which would have been extra ironic if he also was ousted in this hypothetical timeline.
That's too much character and timeline talk though. As a designer, I think I need to lump Dave in with Gary: kind of boring, maybe a bit sloppier ("looser" if we want to be kind), and there's a lot of shit I just can't take seriously. Like him constantly trying to make The Fetch happen.
>>96000483This made me realize how well a lot of OSR principles and mechanics - 1:1 time, "campaign" being the setting, not the "storyline", and group initiative in particular - map to PBP games.
>>96015328>>96015777It seems like a good video but his mic quality is so bad I have to adjust my audio to either turn the bass all the way down or all the way up.
To the thread: If you make videos or play online using voice/video, please look into at least a cheap XLR mic and USB audio interface, it's just polite to your audience (or friends) and reduces the mental effort needed to understand you.
I treat the alignment axes as a dual system of opposing cosmic energies, which can mix into the ninefold system. They are some of the building blocks of the universe.
The gods act as filters of this energy, not its source. Through its opposing natures, they are influenced by it and play a grand proxy conflict on the material world via their adherents.
There are three situations where this balance is updated:
>When the gods escalate the conflict.
This is when gods fight directly, and gods can die. Champions and seconds-in-command can ascend to godhood as rewards or need of further allies. Those remaining at the end of such a gods' war typically end in a truce, and "reset" the material by paving a new layer of land over the old. The remnants of these wars: battlefields where divine blood was shed, tombs of gods erected by their former-followers to memorialize their bones or armaments, lost civilizations. All can be found if one goes deep enough to ventue between the "cracks" in the haphazard layers of stone that divide the current world from old ones.
(1/2)
7
md5: 23fd0d4df6d6312dff12780bf8dea352
๐
>>96016737>When the "reality rot" becomes unmanageable for those on the material planeThis has a name that I won't mention in case my players peek in this place. It is beings without form, it is form without substance. Foolish cultists worship it, thinking it's a way to usurp the gods and free mortals from the influence of the alignments. This is totally false, it's of no threat to the gods in actuality, but it does disrupt their "game" on the material if it spreads too far. Undead Shadows, spheres of annihilation, and similar "paradoxes of identifiable nonexistence" are examples of "reality rot". These have no alignment, they register as true neutral. If it becomes too much of an issue, the gods once again pave over the old. There is a fair number of pockets of this rot deep beneath the earth, like painted-over mold.
>When mortals obtain the realization that killing gods is possible, and obtain the means to do soA god can kill a god. A weapon created by a god to kill gods, can still kill gods even once its creator abandons it or is slain. Numerous artifacts over forgotten ages have been found - made by either long-forgotten divine hands or mortals who somehow figured out the secrets of the universe - that hint at the fact that a divine being is still a BEING, and more, as stated earlier, of a gatekeeper, filter, quartermaster of the cosmic energies, not their source. Some gods' wars were caused not by escallation of conflict among the gods themselves, but by uppity mortals disrupting the divine order and having to fight for their places among the pantheon. Or die trying.
(2/2)
Pic unrelated (Or is it? It's unrelated, I just thought it was 80s enough to be inspiration for a useful bizarre magical object for someone's game.)
Just going to leave this here since that Dungeon World thread seems to have some sort of protective spell on it that makes it invisible to Big Janny;
>>96017758
>>96000308 (OP)Can you make .pdfs the op image on /qst/? i think i have devised a little game for generating a dungeon....
>>96013634>a maneuver system for fighters and thieves to a lesser extent.You want combats to last an hour and a half instead of 15 minutes? Nobody cares as it will not affect anyone's home-game but your own.
As with any other announcements of intending to shoot yourself in the foot (or equivalent):
Livestream it, anon.
>>96013892>believing him to be Chainmail's creatorChainmail was a cooperative project among the LGTSA (Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association) at around 1970. While Perren was a member so was Gygax.
You will excuse Arneson (a non-member) for (correctly) assuming Gygax to be an important member of the LGTSA as the group regularly met in Gygax' basement at around the time in question. You will also excuse Perren to focus on his own hobbyshop business (self-employed) instead of taking on a whole second job of becoming a (self-employed) book and magazine publisher.
tl;dr lionizing Perren as some schmuck who got duped out of a million dollar idea by Gygax completely ignores the reality of 1970 Lake Geneva.
>>96000308 (OP)Is it the best OSR game?
How common should high level clerics and magic users be for the party to encounter? In particular thinking of NPCs that can cast Raise Dead or identify magic items. How much should those services cost in B/X?
>>96018070P.S. another follow up question: how do you handle a MU leveling up? How expensive is it for him to learn new spells and is he allowed to have more spells in his book than he could cast by his level's spell slots? (Because the rules say no to the latter)
>>96018017>Is it the best OSR game?No. LOTFP fucked up a couple of things, chiefly AC and THAC0, so I personally wouldn't use it. The best OSR game is AD&D, of course and by far. The real one by Gygax, of course.
The only non-TSR game that I find myself referencing is ACKS for the things that AD&D skipped or fucked up. For example magic item prices, how to determine the level of new spells, procedures for attaining lichdom or divine ascension, costs and how-tos for building constructs, and many other examples.
>>96018070Like with 95% of the difficulties, problems, or omissions you will encounter in B/X, the answer is in the DMG, which is why it's required reading.
>>96018089>How expensive is it for him to learn new spellsBy B/X rules he gets new spells for free when he levels up.
>is he allowed to have more spells in his book than he could cast by his level's spell slots? (Because the rules say no to the latter)When I play B/X, I do use that rule. It's very elegant. I wouldn't mess with it, part of the balance in B/X lies in eliminating both the fighter's multiple attacks and the MU's spell choice, which keeps characters in check with respect to monsters.
>>96018102>Like with 95% of the difficulties, problems, or omissions you will encounter in B/X, the answer is in the DMG, which is why it's required reading.Fair point. To encounter was a bad term perhaps, since I specifically thought about settlements if that didn't sound like that. I love the appendices but it will still take me a while to digest the whole dmg.
>When I play B/X, I do use that rule. It's very elegant. I wouldn't mess with it, part of the balance in B/X lies in eliminating both the fighter's multiple attacks and the MU's spell choice, which keeps characters in check with respect to monsters.Thanks for clearing that up properly, I might've handed out a few too many spells (at random) and failed to mention to him earlier that he needs Read Magic to cast arcane scrolls. For his two level ups I let him choose but also pay, oh well
>>96018150>it will still take me a while to digest the whole dmg.Looking up the cost of spell services is easy*, you don't need to read the whole book cover-to-cover for that.
(*) Or at least it should be easy were it not for the fact that the content is never where you expect it to be.
https://files.catbox.moe/kd6klu.pdf
This is a game I hacked together rolling some dice with my sibling. The inspiration is that I wanted to write a dungeon and spend time with them and play a game. The goal is to competitively carve out some territory and gather a hoard. Please suggest rules clarifications, balances, glaring issues, and feature creep or simplification. If thereโs a specific dungeon geometry that you canโt make with this game, suggest a feature that could make it.
>>96018166Very true. I've found the respective Cleric spell costs but not for a Magic User and specifically identify. Haven't touched the phb yet but from what I've gathered in the dmg identify is a 1st level spell, right? So I guess I wasn't too far off letting high level NPCs identify for around 100gp and 1d12 days.
>>96014794>isnt gameableYes, thats why I said I liked the ones that had some adventure book somewhere else, it allows for some nice connective tissue.
>>96014866Ive played nights dark terror and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The Karameikos gazetteer just made it better.
I read through some of the world of greyhawk book, but it didnt captivate me as much. Again I think because the indivigual adventures arent as connected to the setting. whick isnt a bad thing necissarily.
>>96018242For the love of God, stop saying "semiperimeter".
Where are the faction cards?
Was the dungeon on the cover built using these rules? If it was, do you have tables for the semiperimeter of heptagonal rooms? Or are you and your brother savants?
Brainstorming:
Needs rules for multifloor 3d structures. Crevasses with rope bridges, trapdoors, slanted passages, and so on.
Also needs rules for traps. For one action, you can place three trap markers. Only one is a true trap, though (write it down secretly). Bonus points if different traps have different effects.
Add room features. Altars, statues, fountains, pools, thrones, ...
Make different actual dungeon-digging factions (humans, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, kobolds, purple worms) with asymmetrical powers: greater/smaller digging costs, reproduction rates in barracks, material caps.
Create abstract rules for conflict between units, allowing them to conquer rooms instead of building them.
>>96018516>I've found the respective Cleric spell costs but not for a Magic User and specifically identifyI've done a regression and the prices are very roughly
>A ร casterLevel^2,where A is about 50 and casterLevel is the minimum level A character needs to be to cast that spell. So character level 5 for a 3rd level Fireball.
This is far from a precise rule clearly, since listed prices can be much higher or lower than predicted... but at least it's a rough ballpark.
>>96018516>>96019110>where A is about 50 and casterLevel is the minimum level a character needs to be to cast that spellSorry for the extra capitalised A
t. phonefag
>>96018102>No. LOTFP fucked up a couple of things, chiefly AC and THAC0To his credit, Raggi acknowledges the differences in AC and strictly lists things in his modules with "as chain" and such, rather than direct numbers.
And also THAC0 is not a thing in BECMI-and-earlier. This is just a small correction of terminology though, you probably know why.
For people unaware: in these, they use attack tables/matrices, not formulae. (the 1e DMG even lists these all on a lovely 2-page spread for usability purposes).
>>96017862Hey scumbag, if your combats are lasting long like that, it's a player skill issue, not a game issue.
>>96013634Don't get discouraged, give it a try and see if it works out. Acks has a similar system you could crib notes from
>>96019163>THAC0 is not a thing in BECMI-and-earlierDon't talk about things you know nothing about.
Forgot picrel, as per habit
>>96019163>THAC0 is not a thing in BECMI-and-earlierDon't talk about things you know nothing about.
>>96019068idk a better way to say it than semi perim. im open to rephrasing.
>where are the faction cardsunborn yet. i think for them to be balanced it needs to be playtedted, so i might make abstract factions to test them for the next ver.
>was the dungeon on the coverno. i used a donjon generator.
traps and secret doors exist to prevent your opponenets from placing their Guys in your rooms. if they tunnel into you they get free access, and if theyre using them, you cant. i will add a clarification.
for non rectangular rooms, block out the rectangle according, then draw whatever shape you want that fills it. i say this for the initial setup but not elsewhere, i will add a clarification.
for crevasses and underground rivers, i think these should be sealed rooms, and give you an immediate reward (10 Henchmen) or something. i will mock them up as sealed rooms in the next version.
for room decoration, perhaps you make the key of a room when its not your turn, and theme it according to your faction. then every time you roll doubles in tunneling you can add a creature/omen to the wandering monsters room. this will make the finished game dungeon closer to 'ready for dnd play' and make your turn downtime less droll.
for factions having asym powers and caps, i fear too much complexity here. would that make more interesting to play? those powers could be detailed as caveats to the basic procedure of play.
to "conquer" a room instead of building it, simpy use an enemys room that you can access. between turns your guys are in a room. your opponents cant use the rooms your guys are in. i wanted to make the player interaction slightly abstract and strategic. its built around blocking off access to have the most action economy. i think perhaps in addition to the "no redundant corridors" i will say that you cant 'move through' an occupied room to get an unoccupied one on the other side as well as you can only 'move through' your own traps and secret doors.
>>96019110>>96019116Much appreciated, anon
>>96018017Despite everything, yes. It's incredible solid and it does what it wants to do.
Over time I've really come around the LOTFP-way of things. My games are mostly historical now too.
Just moved into a new place and it's large enough that I now have a game room (Featuring a table, some chairs, some bookshelves, and a mini-fridge.) But I'm in dire need of cool-ass wall art. Anyone know of any places I can get cool posters or maps?
>>96019813I'd look at Etsy and some artists you like personal stores.
Depending on the quality and size of the latter you can get them fairly cheap eg a poster might be like $15 for a Keith Parkinson while a print is $60 and a giclee print is $200.
Maps I would guess you'd have to get printed yourself though.
>>96018646Why was the second post I responded to here deleted?
I swear jannies watch this thread like a hawk. I remember saying something mildly disparaging, not even outright anti, 2e and got a warning a few days ago.
>>96020338>watch this threadThey're not just watching it, they're trying to topic-shift it and take it over. They take every possible opportunity to punish, intimidate, and discourage regular active posters. Which is why:
>I remember saying something mildly disparaging, not even outright anti, 2e and got a warning a few days ago.Posts that disparage AD&D are allowed, but posts that criticise "AD&D" 2e are deleted.
It's even allowed to lie about AD&D, and if you point out the lie, you'll have your message deleted and get banned:
>>96013977
Does Michael Curtis (Stonehell) post anywhere these days?
>>96019813find a local print place, get a nice copy of a campaign map from your own game printed
>>96016260>he DID get royalties for the non-Advanced lineHe got royalties for AD&D too, the whole thing about Gygax making AD&D to cut Arneson out is a myth (he did try, but as a side effect, it wasn't the purpose) and when they went to court over it, Arneson won his case and got royalties for AD&D.
>>96019813>Anyone know of any places I can get cool posters or maps?https://www.frazettamuseum.com/collections
You'll particularly want "Fine Art Prints", "Gallery Series", and "Gaming".
>>96019738And the community is pretty good. I found a media studies high school teacher who runs games for his students (first through D&D, then through LotFP). I can't think of a more comfy past time than an old grognard easing you into his LotFP setting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm4qtiqkq7k
Looking for people who played/ran Khosura to share their experiences and give a story from their campaign. I'm looking to run this using Hyperborea because the setting that comes with Hyperborea is a bit too much to start with and Khosura seems more accessible.
>>96018516>I've found the respective Cleric spell costs but not for a Magic User and specifically identify.Unearthed Arcana
>>96020649NTA but this is good shit for mancave. Thanks anon.
Anyone got some resources or ideas how to tweak Appendix A to generate a Wizard Tower?
>>96025855Only lil tool I've found is picrel
>>96025604My pleasure Anon, we're all bros here, except 2efag.
>>96022867I think (hardcover) Khosura might be a bit too new for extensive play reports, and unfortunately the really good, old Fomalhaut play report by Premier on Dragonsfoot starts after they'd already left Khosura (which is where the campaign began IIRC). I haven't gotten around to running it yet myself, for example. I can say it's a great book though.
>>96000308 (OP)Encounter I made for scarlet Heros, but should also work for any osr game. Just add more thugs as needed.
The red piece in the center is Imrie the Eyeless, a cleric being interrogated by a cult to learn of what she knows of the local ruins and dungeons. the red piece at the bottom is the party. the drawn circles are pillars, the stuff between them are curtains. Mechanically, the encounter focuses around being slowed. the dandy has a throwing knife that slows you and the curtains make you move at half movement if you don't spend an action to slash through them. the golem only moves 10 feet (though maybe it should be 15 to be the same as a slowed player.
>>96012652>Earnest Gary GygaxIronic Gary Gygaxโs evil twin
Any anons used Print On Demand before and share any insight on how long the process took you? Ordered about two weeks ago and printer has receipt of order but no further update - I know the website says 4-7 weeks, but I am curious if this is accurate or is it faster?
Going out of town mid month and I'd have to arrange for someone to get my books if they are delivered while I am away!
>>96028728Who are you ordering with? Lulu never took me more than two weeks t bh
>>96026337man I'd love this but just d20 at least
>>96028728Yeah, what POD service specifically are you using?
>>96028738>>96029103DriveThroughRPG unfortunately, I wanted the 1e DMG in print and I couldn't find it locally
>>96029125Fair, fair, but in that case I have no idea and can't help, sorry.
It's probably the best POD book on Drivethru though, so you've got that going for you.
Has anyone ran mythic bastion land? Considering running a longer campaign on the system but worried that it would need monumental prep for it to work
>>96030093>Monumental prepNigga read the book. It gives you everything you need. It encourages inspiration with all the prompts and tables it gives you.
>>96018017That's not BFRPG.
>>96030093Just reading their own pitch about it being rules lite makes me hear "expect to do all the legwork to make it work past 1-3 sessions" but ymmv obviously.
>>96018017LotFP Is too easy. I prefer other games where there's an actual challenge to succeeding.
>>96022867Haven't prepped it yet but i've sort of settled on starting my my new AD&D 1E campaign with Khosura and either Castle Xyntillan or Gunderholfen + some smaller adventure locales strewn about to give both the option of regular sandbox adventuring or going into a megadungeon.
>>96032710Gunderholfen is nowhere near the level of Xyntillan and Khosura.
>>96030093Its just ItO with extra shit piled on top to sell coffee table books. Nothing in it is made for long term play, that was never the point of an ultralight. It was a thought-experiment that turned out to sell well to people with minimal thoughts so he's been running with that for years at this point.
>>96032830I've heard positive play reports of both so i'm just going to decide what appeals to me more.
What is the final goal in an RPG for a player?
Is it truly just wish-fulfillment in the end, jerking each other off playing out each our own power fantasies? Building a stronghold as a fighter, becoming a leader, a king in the imagination land. What then? Is it enough?
The journey there must be the thing. The adventure must be the goal in itself. It feels real at the moment. In the end it's all just in my head.
>>96032932>What then? That's what Spelljammer is for.
>>96032932>What is the final goalWho cares, it's a game.
Just roll up new characters if the old ones get boring.
>>96032932The goal is to play the role of a character for a while. That's it. There are many different types of enjoyment you can get out of that, but ultimately that's what you're doing.
>>96026337>>96028744It was at least enough of an inspiration to scratch a little ~105ft high tower which the players might spot from some hexes away when they encounter an elevation in the jungle or send someone dexterous to climb up the trees.
>>96033053Still not sure if I should fill it like a dungeon or let it be a less dangerous place.
>>96032932https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos
>>96032843>>96030489>>96030093Mythic Bastionland is unintentionally the greatest fascist game. It's about knightly self-sacrifice for a higher cause.
Hard principles. Selflessness. Military discipline. It's a great game.
>>96033425I can already play a Paladin if I want to. The rest just sounds like boring handwavey narrativist stuff and looking at the people in his testimonial section just makes me think that's what it's about.
>whoa Mullen starts selling prints all of a sudden
>Continental US only
I am genuinely buttflustered
>>96033518>I can already play a Paladin if I want to.Yes but that is your individual character. The rest of the party will just be cutthroats pulling the paladin down. In Mythic Bastionland, everyone in the party is an oathbound Knight looking for glory. There's camraderie and friendship.
It's narrativist and "fiction first" and definitely not OSR but there's something special about it. Knighthood is a traditional story that speaks to every man on a deeper psychological level.
>>96033543>Continental US onlyGod dammit! Count me among the assflapped.
>>96033425A lot of fantasy has fascist overtones, so that's saying something.
>>96032932>What is the final goal in an RPG for a player?If we're talking true endgame?
Generational play with previous characters having made their impact on the world.
The real dream isn't power, money or bitches.
It's
>Faenor PvP'd Morgoth and rendered his asshole asunder a thousand generations ago and the world has never been the same.>Dave, who played Faenor in the last campaign: Fuckin' A.
>>96033815Aside from the obvious, the obvious being Techamel, to which settings do you refer to?
>>96033425You sound like an insufferably woke lib, equating discipline and sacrifice to one of history's greatest embarassment of a political movement
>>96033425>Hard principles. Selflessness. Military discipline>Fascistlmao
Is it possible to deal 0 damage or is there a floor of 1?
aight, big thanks to the anons for pointing me in the right direction
after getting mauled by gaygax's cocaine writing very enlightening and providing much needed context for the mechanics even if pretentious sounding OSRIC has just polished what i read into a coherent whole while letting me look up important shit lightning fast
now its just a matter of rereading the DMG to get a better grasp of the intended running play
thanks for helping me on this ADND trip
>>96037268Honestly, I'm curious how bad this is going to turn out at this point.
There's a lot of ways to do AD&D, and the advice you seem to be running on is of a very particular kind. It's not even something actively malicious, it's just the sort of thing where it's very easy to lose sight of why you decided to try playing AD&D in the first place.
As long as you know why and remember why, you probably can't be steered too wrong. I hope. Maybe the direction you're going is actually where you and your group want to go. Won't know until you actually play, which is the shame of it all.
>>96036958I cant remember the rules but in my games I always floor it to 1.
>>96037340what if after everything he's just a shit DM?
>>96036958I would allow for zero damage, especially in instances of succesfull saving throws halving a damage roll of 1, or an attack by a character with very low strength. Negative damage is a no, though.
>when your strength is so low that the dagger blow performs impromptu surgery and recovers 2 hp.
>>96037419Following the advice he's running on would only make it half his fault.
>>96033543>>96033594If you people are interested, I would be willing to middleman shipping to you. I trust /osrg/ to not be malicious.
You pay the shipping, obviously.
>>96037340honestly i just started learning because i wanted to get some supplements for Scarlet Heroes for a solo game
turns out i got sucked into a rabbit hole and just started to pore over ADND in general and i took a liking to it, though i will run it solo before deploying to my group
obligatory blogpost following
ive sentenced my group to 5e since it was a cool system i have a good deal of mastery in because ive been running it for years
im burnt out from the system, it brings out the worst powergamers i know, heavy roleplaying even when they reject WoD, build choice paralysis and endless combat of 3h+ for simple encounters (player bottlenecks), all while the players dont WANT to have a common thread
ive already made the shift to single adventuring day sessions, with a singular dungeon and loot gathering and it went over well until they start with CHARISMAFAGGOTRY (also my fault for indulging them) overactive planning to move through the dungeon (shit you not 30min deliberation on how to move through a room with 3 orcs)
im a shit DM, i admit, i can't tardwrangle my group and i hope exposure to a familiarly unfamiliar system will purge the collective braincell and lead to a better experience
it wont, but at least ill DM something that isnt 5e after fucking years
>>96037487Thanks for the offer but I never dare to buy directly from the US without seeing the shipping charges upfront 'cause depending on the company you can get assraped with triple or more the cost of the product in my country.
I once wanted to order Aces & Eights but Kenzer's only option charges nearly a hundred bucks in shipping for a single book.
Should I get the tomes or the box sets?
>>96037652If you're a new DM I'd recommend running Basic and just adding AD&D rules into the mix gradually, as you get more comfortable. Could also be something fun for your group e.g. "unlocking" Druids as a character class after being inducted into the mysteries of their cult.
>>96037652>overactive planning to move through the dungeon (shit you not 30min deliberation on how to move through a room with 3 orcs)That's what wandering monster checks and time tracking is for. Use a turn/day tracker if you haven't already and make them check off torches and daily for rations.
Another strategy i've heard of people using to complement their time tracking that they and their players said works great is that they have a glass on the table the players can see where they either drop a die in it each Turn that passes or roll the die when you would otherwise add one. Once 6 turns pass they replace torches and all the dies in it are rolled regardless.
Any 1s rolled mean something bad happens, resulting in rolling on a d100 prepped list of dungeon obstructions/complications.
Makes it a constant visual reminder to worry about and makes time passing very obvious to the players and a real overt cost to their actions. I intend to try this out myself next time I run in-person.
The idea is apparently based on this blogpost: is based on this blogpost: https://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/ but i'd take some of it with a grain of salt, personally i'm not big on wandering monsters only resulting in weak minimal encounters for instance.
>>96037818ill run ADND for solo and Basic for the group at first, definitely
i kind of dig the race-as-a-class idea
you mean the normal Basic, not the BECMI one right?
>overactive planning to move through the dungeon (shit you not 30min deliberation on how to move through a room with 3 orcs)
That's what wandering monster checks and time tracking is for. Use a turn/day tracker if you haven't already and make them check off torches and daily for rations.
Another strategy i've heard of people using to complement (not replace) their time tracking is they have a glass on the table the players can see where they drop a d6 in it each Turn that passes or roll the die when you would otherwise add one if they've incurred a roll like by making a bunch of noise. Once 6 turns pass they replace torches and all the dies in it are rolled regardless.
Any 1s rolled mean something bad happens, resulting in rolling on a d100 prepped list of dungeon obstructions/complications making it a constant visual reminder to worry about and makes time passing very obvious to the players.
I intend to try this out myself next time I run in-person to see if I like it or if I should just stick to traditional time tracking with wandering monster rolls out in the open.
>>96037917>and Basic for the group at first, definitelyI don't know your players, but if they can handle 5e without handholding, you will only bore them. Basic is for kids or Beers&Pretzels gatherings.
AD&D is no more complicated than 5e, the formatting of the text is just shit.
t. 1e DM
Good adventure to run to my wife, her brother and his wife, none of which has ever played a roleplaying game in their life but all of which insist I show them "how to play D&D" by Saturday?
>>96038812I like Ruins of Adventure.
The stats are for 2e, it takes place in the FR setting and it was published 1988, so it's not OSR. But it is a decent introduction to D&D imo. The "Quests" given by the town council provide a nice source of dungeons to train problem solving skills of new players.
You can always run it in an OSR style, if you want.
>>96038812Assuming AD&D 1E which is what I would use:
B1 In Search of the Unknown is still one of the greats for intro games but beef up the treasure because it's miserly on that front.
A good rough estimate I read somewhere is 3x the amount a party of six fighters need to all level up, but have a good chunk of it hidden and assume that a party that doesn't do above and beyond will only find about 1/3rd of it. For a first game i'd probably sprinkle extra around to get them to 2nd level both for the excitement and because I find that more fun to run.
If you feel the map is too much then use one of the alternate maps off DF or Dyson but that's really down to taste.
Throw in a nearby village with downtime options either with trainers or without if you want a reason to travel elsewhere.
Maybe even T1 Hommlet with the Moathouse if you're up for that or the B2 with Keep and then throw a bunch of rumours at them and let them decide from there to take on other dungeons or/and travel around if they want to keep going in a proper sandbox campaign.
Obviously only use as many of the rules as you feel comfortable running fast-paced with no downtime or rule lookups and i'd make it clear upfront that taking their time in the dungeon is a risk on it's own and that they're after treasure not 'clearing' a place out.
>>96038812Assuming AD&D 1E which is what I would use:
B1 In Search of the Unknown is still one of the greats for intro games but beef up the treasure because it's miserly on that front.
A good rough estimate I read somewhere is 3x the amount a party of six fighters need to all level up, but have a good chunk of it hidden and assume that a party that doesn't do above and beyond will only find about 1/3rd of it. For a first game i'd probably sprinkle extra around to get them to 2nd level both for the excitement and because I find that more fun to run.
If you feel the map is too much then use one of the alternate maps off DF or Dyson but that's really down to taste.
Throw in a nearby village with downtime options either with trainers or without if you want a reason to travel elsewhere.
If they want to keep going then maybe even B2 with Keep or T1 Hommlet with the Moathouse and then throw a bunch of rumours at them and let them decide from there to take on other dungeons or/and travel around if they want to keep going in a proper sandbox campaign.
Obviously only use as many of the rules as you feel comfortable running fast-paced with no downtime or rule lookups.
>>96039576Will three characters be able to survive In Search of the Unknown?
>>96039600It was made for a party of 3-6 level 1-3 characters in Basic which are more squishy than 1E.
Maybe throw them a hireling if you feel uncertain.
Good recent post by Simulacrum:
>https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-ad-experience-point-system.html
The errata are nice to have but what I particularly like is the care and thought which it shows went into AD&D.
>>96000998What are MUDs?
t. zoomer
>>96038812None. Never, ever play with your wife. Nothing good will come out of it. Playing with your brother in law is even worse.
>>96039763Multi-User Dungeon. Think of it like a text-based MMO.
Attack matrix or pure THAC0?
Magic-users starting with 1 spell or based on INT? Spell list limited to memorizable per day or space in spellbook?
Weapon damage or 1d6 unless special case?
>>96037652>3h+ for simple encountersOne of my (AD&D) players joined a coworker's 5E game. In the last session, they had one combat consisting of a handful of goblins and a spellcaster. The combat took more than three hours!
My player told them that combat can and should be resolved much faster than that and none of them believed him.
I've invited his coworker to play AD&D with us. He's gonna shit his pants when he sees that we can clear a room full of monsters in fifteen minutes or less.
>>96039900Attack matrix, with THAC0 written down for quick reference.
Magic user starting with one spell slot per day, and number of spells known based on intelligence. One being "Read Magic", one being chosen by the player and the others being randomly selected. Player rolls for chance to know spell.
Weapon damage varies by weapon type.
The one thing I'm having trouble with implementing is weapon type vs AC. With my players, running it RAW would likely be sticky. So far, all weapon types have do to differentiate themselves is in utility (axes bashing doors etc.) or in the a unity to deal full damage to certain types of enemies that would otherwise be resistant (skeletons etc.)
>>96039951>Attack matrix, with THAC0 written down for quick reference.These are different tho, THAC0 alone gives different probabilities than attack matrix.
>>96039900>Attack matrix or pure THAC0?Sure
>Magic-users starting with 1 spell or based on INT? 1 spell to start
>Spell list limited to memorizable per day or space in spellbook?Spellbook
>Weapon damage or 1d6 unless special case?Weapon damage
>>96039959I should specify that I mean "when applicable". For characters that need a 20 to hit AC1, for instance, I don't reference THAC0.
>>96038425>the formatting of the text is just shit.The 2e books are kind of amazing in just how much they improved the formatting.
>>96039900>Attack matrix or pure THAC0?Attack bonus + descending AC + target-20 or target-21.
>Magic-users starting with 1 spell or based on INT?One spell per day. We're not playing superheroes, PCs start as worthless shits.
>Spell list limited to memorizable per day or space in spellbook?Huh?
>Weapon damage or 1d6 unless special case?No, variable damage ร la B/X or AD&D.
>>96039959>THAC0 alone gives different probabilities than attack matrix.Not necessarily. If you rule that a natural 20 reads as a 25, they're the same in AD&D.
>>96040647The art ruins the mood completely, I'd much rather deal with the AD&D formatting than having to look at that pastel comic book crap. And don't get me started on the actual content of 2e.
>>96032932You don't even play games, why are you posting here
>>96037477Even with negative strength, a dagger attack should still do a minimum of one damage. If you hit, you did damage, end of story.
>>96040647>>96038425I've never really understood the complaints about formatting or vocab in 1e....
>>96040696That's fair. I would rule a successful saving throws against what would otherwise be a single point of damage from a trap or what have you as zero damage, though.
>>96039867What are you on about?
The best group I was ever in was 3 married couples and two engaged couples and my wife has been playing RPGs with me for decades - and its been great
>>96037937Everything else in this post after mentioning torch tracking is absolutely terrible
>>96039867Why do depressed demoralization posters like you insist on trying to ruin other people's enjoyable experiences?
Have you ever considered that other, more well-adjusted people aren't hostile to having a good time?
>>96039900The attack matrix is just a simplification.
Go with thaco, but make natural 20 count as 25.
Magic users start with four spells, one offensive, one defensive, one utility, and read magic, as per the DMG.
Weapon damage always, including speed Factor on tide initiative.
>>96040647Those books are as bad as the edition they comprise.
Gary's writing is literally a filter that 90% of people are too stupid to parse.
>>96040670>pastel comic book crapKek. 2e got a lot wrong, but the art wasn't part of it.
>>96040724I wouldn't, personally.
>>96040799Gary's writing was the filter that kept his fiction from getting published until he got famous for helping invent a new type of game.
>>96040799Gary was a terrible writer.
His Gord books are like wet white bread. He also had a shit ton of difficulty communicating even simple ideas, which is kind of a death knell for rule books.
>>96040670>The art ruins the mood completelyIt's super hit or miss, but when it hits, man, it's out of the park.
>>96040912I agree with you about his writing. I posted
>>96040872after all.
His difficulty with expressing ideas is probably a side effect of him being well above average intelligence. I think he was also somewhat autistic, probably Aspeger's.
>>96040974I'd say the opposite. He had below average intelligence, which is why he struggled in school and work. Less "he was a genius communicating beyond our level" and more "He read a lot of works by much better authors but lacked the mental capacity to emulate his heroes."
>>96041016We know you would. You take every opportunity to only find fault with the man.
Lots of very smart people struggle in school. Lots of just below midwits do exceptionally well in school.
>>96041042ADDENDUM: You add being smart to being autistic, and you basically have the perfect recipe for doing poorly in school while excelling in areas you enjoy.
>fearless
without fear
>perilous
with great peril
the french are so devious
>>96041042School and work. Take away D&D, and Gygax didn't have much success, even in the game design field, and especially outside of it.
Gygax was very much a midwit at best, sort of the biggest fish in a small midwestern pond. Not a complete idiot (and smarter than guys like Mentzer), but completely mogged by people like Holmes.
>>96040872>>96040912No one is talking about his fiction. Try to stay on topic.
>>96041016Damn struggled in school? That must mean he's retarded.
Did you know that Einstein's teachers also said that he was retarded and wouldn't amount to being an academic?
>>96041127As is common knowledge, the same things that make school difficult for people with some forms of autism make work difficult for them as well.
>fishI'm surprised you could post that word without raging.
>>96041142Einstein actually performed pretty well in school, particularly in Math, and astounded his private tutors. He did fail to meet the standards to enter the first university he applied to, but that's because he applied when he was only sixteen. He did get into a four-year program at seventeen though.
>>96041016>>96041127oh, it's the general's favourite troll again
>Take away D&D,2efags other greatest hits include "if you ignore Catch-22, Heller never had much success" and "if you ignore the fact that the guy was guilty, it's like a goddamn witch hunt."
>>96041367I'm honestly concerned about why he posts here. He never has anything constructive or interesting to say, just trying to sling mud while simultaneously topic shifting
>>96041367Heller had great success beyond Catch-22. While Catch-22 is his most famous and successful work, his subsequent projects are also all very highly regarded. He did more than enough to prove that even without Catch-22, he would be considered a literary great. He wouldn't be as highly regarded without it, but still able to stand on his own feet, and
Take away D&D from Gygax, a game that he co-developed with the original idea coming from Arneson, and it would be quite a different story. We actually got to see what he would make without the power of that brand name, before and after. Before, his big success was adding rules on top of Perren's Chainmail, with his other game projects being fairly mediocre. After D&D, Gygax's games were VERY poorly regarded.
>>96041453>If he hadn't have been successful, then he would have been unsuccessful! Alternatively:
>Ray Kroc? He was a failed mixer machine salesman, take away mcdonald's, and he wouldn't have had anything!
>>96041464You really don't seem inclined to even be close to arguing in good faith. Do you want to try again and prove yourself to be capable of seeing the actual point that's being made?
>>96041503My reply was quite appropriate and comparable to what you said.
I'm sorry that you don't like the community here, but we don't really like you either.
>>96041431He posts here because he's the kind of guy who turns a snickers upside down so he can feel the veins against his tongue while he eats it.
If you know what I mean.
>>96041514>NoThen don't get upset about Gygax being called a midwit when all evidence point to him just being the luckiest midwit in the midwest.
>>96041538What part of rebutting you involved me being upset? Learn to handle a critical conversation like a big boy.
>>96041607The you-not-actually-rebutting-anything part.
You had a chance to reply to this
>>96041453without just being upset and deliberately missing the point, but you seem more happy just continuing to be upset and wrong.
You might still have a chance. Go on. Actually address the point that was being made.
Ha ha, who are we kidding, you wouldn't need to be constantly trying to divert the argument if you thought you could actually address it.
>>96041637Criticism of your flawed argument is directly a rebuttal.
You want to cry about bad faith, but you clearly would rather make a point, than discuss one.
Lads, can we just ignore him for one thread?
We all know he's a little shit.
But can't we just leave him to stew for a few days?
>>96041637You're replying to a different anon: after all, the vast majority of this general despises you, so it's to be expected that others will take the time to throw tomatoes at your terrible posts.
Heller never had a major success after Catch-22, so I have no idea what you're talking about there other than your usual "nuh uh" strategy. His later books were well reviewed, in the polite way that follow-ons from an author who has released non-disastrous major works gets, but he was always being pestered with never having written anything as good ever again. and no one gives a shit about any of them today. This isn't exactly a secret history.
As for your D&D charge, it was refuted last thread, but here we go again: a) this general is about old-school D&D, so the idea that he never had a major success after old-school D&D is completely irrelevant and even laughable, which is why everyone mocks you for it (you always start with the premise "if you ignore D&D" without ever stating why we would in a thousand years do so), and b) you claim that Arneson did anything that matters on OD&D, without showing a shred of proof and always passing over all the work Gygax did on it because "well, we really don't know" (you only "really don't know" when it's Gygax involved; otherwise you're always sure in a convenient lack-of-evidence way), plus all the supplements to OD&D and the management of TSR during its rise to fame and the creation of AD&D. All those things are just glided over: Lucky Duck Gygax just stole every one of them, I guess.
You standard MO is chop everything out of the picture that's inconvenient, make huge claims without the slightest evidence, and the run away when confronted with questions, until the next thread, when you're back all over again with the same pile of sophistry.
You're the shittiest troll this general has ever had, and I remember Greg: it's a testament to the utter failure of 4chan's moderation system that you weren't permabanned years ago.
>>96041663Let me explain why you're deliberately missing the point then, by isolating the point for you. It wasn't particularly hidden.
Remove Catch-22, and Heller is still a great writer. His other books (and plays) are evidence of that.
Remove D&D, a game that originated from a style of play developed by Arneson, and Gygax is a bad writer and a mediocre designer. His writing and other games are evidence of that.
Gygax did do some smart things, notably rushing D&D out because while it was in development other groups/fanzines were also circulating rumors about bringing similar games to market, and D&D being the first gave it a huge first-mover advantage that can be credited for a considerable portion of its early (and later) success. But, as a writer/designer, it's hard to find evidence of him having even average intelligence, let alone high intelligence.
While you can try to point at Einstein as an example of a genius who did poorly in school (when he actually started high school when he was only 8), the much more common trend is people who do poorly in school having low intelligence and struggling in their careers, as Gygax also did, both in the Game Design sphere and outside of it. Gygax's major stroke of luck was being gifted Arneson's idea, and his one bit of genius was rushing it out before it was ready just to get ahead of the competition. Outside of that, there's a lot of almost Crowley-esque sycophantic exaggeration of his abilities as a designer/writer, but the end results of his non-D&D projects (and many of his D&D projects) showcase a man not particularly intelligent and without a clear understanding of even the game he helped create.
Even he would end up disagreeing with many of his own ideas, and admitting he didn't really know what he was thinking at the time he made certain rules, and generally regretting the direction that AD&D went in comparison to OD&D. Gygax spent decades figuring out something Holmes did in less than three years.
>Magic users start with four spells, one offensive, one defensive, one utility, and read magic, as per the DMG
Heh? I've never read that in the DMG. Where is that from?
>>96041729>in the polite way that follow-ons from an author who has released non-disastrous major works getsA flat out lie.
Something Happened and Good as Gold are both incredibly well-regarded, and while his later books seemed to slowly decline in quality, they're still more than good enough to show that he was a great writer. While none are as highly regarded as Catch-22, to be fair to the man, very few books are.
>This isn't exactly a secret history.Like Einstein being a poor student, right? You have a weird way of accepting bullshit easily, which explains why your entire world-view is askew. It's just bullshit you want to believe on top of more bullshit.
>this general is about old-school D&DSo it's important to actually understand it, and the people who created it, rather than trying to deify them.
>passing over all the work Gygax did on itA lot of the work he did on it was bad. Even by Gygax's own admission. When the man you're trying to deify as perfect is the first to admit that he made mistakes, where exactly does that leave you?
Gygax being a midwit is not a purely terrible thing. Midwits are by definition average, and he had just enough intelligence to read books even if he didn't have enough to really write them. That basically forced Gygax to rely on better and more imaginative writers for most of his ideas, and that turned out to be a good thing for the game. Imagine D&D if it didn't have Vance, Howard, Zelazny, or Anderson prominently in its DNA.
I couldn't find a game finder thread so hopefully I'm allowed to post this here. My bad if not.
I'm gonna host a 1E AD&D game this saturday on roll20, message me there if you wanna join.
I'm new to DMing ad&d so there might be a bit of page flipping for rules but it should be a fun time.
https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/425913/adandd-hommlet-plus-stonehell-open-table
Looking through the Old School Essentials Rules Tome's bestiary I see a misprint on the very first monster. The Acolyte, described as a 1st level cleric, has an AC of 2[17]....the same as a Black Dragon. A Medium, described as a 1st level magic user, has an AC of 9[10] which sounds right, and is probably what the Acolyte is meant to have.
>>96042308Ye of Little Faith, trust thy not in the Armor of God?
>>96042054Classic Gary, writing a literal bible-tome of rules, and then throwing it out the window whenever they come up.
>>96042308>The Acolyte, described as a 1st level clericAnd why is it described as such?
>the same as a Black DragonSo what?
>A Medium, described as a 1st level magic userAnd why is it described as such?
>has an AC of 9[10] which sounds rightIt "sounds" right? Based on what?
>is probably what the Acolyte is meant to haveWhy?
>>96042325>>96042448You're right. I apologize.
>>96042308>>96042308I assume the Acolyte is dressed in Plate and Shield
>>96042440So heโs just like your standard OSR gamer?
>>96040647And then 3e somehow messed up a lot again, it's wild
>>96037652You could look into some Fastplays. Ready characters, sometimes simplified, short simple adventures, good for an afternoon with folks without much experience.
Has anyone ITT ever ran a 'city' campaign? How did it go, and how did you rule it? I've always wanted to some arabian nights style city crawl, but always found the rules surrounding cities to be somewhat lacking.
>>96043009I ran one in a gridded city split up into blocks, and the group kind of got to a point where they really wanted to leave the city but they also knew that most of the stuff was in that city. The ability to fuck around and make enemies and then just peace out and travel to a new city is important to some groups, particularly those that like to fuck around.
What's the consensus on attacking a victim of Hold Person in B/X? Instant kill? Auto-hit and max weapon damage?
>>96043271My ruling is autohit max damage in melee, while ranged attack against paralyzed foe is unarmored AC+3 penalty(as though the foe had the lowest possible dex score to simulate a stationary target.). Ranged attack rolls dmg die as normal.
Out of combat or duress I just let paralyzed creatured be coup de gras'd to save time.
>>96040647>The 2e books are kind of cancerFTFY
>>96043418Why not go all the way to +4 penalty per the max suggested range of -4 to +4 for circumstance bonus or penalty modifications
>>96043553yeah... yeah I guess that would make more sense wouldn't it.
>>96042051Behold the immense power and variety our prophet E. Gary Gygax granted to first level magic users. Basiclets cannot even hope to compete.
>>96044815Wtf... I thought Gary hated wizards?
>>96044875Try casting your Time Stop now, nerd.
>>96044815What version of the DMG is that from?
>>96045339The regular version? There's only one version of the DMG.
Potion of Healing and Cure Light Wounds can either heal HP or cure paralysis. Does the latter include petrification by Basilisks and Medusas? If not, how would that be treated?
>>96048501>Does the latter include petrificationno, of course not. why would you think it does???
stone to flesh
>>96042308a first level cleric can wear plate + shield, DUH
>>96048618Thanks, I'm still new and my players encountered a Basilisk today who petrified some of their mercenaries so the question came up.
B/X newfag here again, what's a good guideline for adventuring gear, jewelry and gem weight? I feel like it's getting a little bit out of hand just tracking the weight of coins, armor and weapons. My players like to take a whole camp's worth of storage with them into dungeons.
lmao
112 deleted posts in this thread, exactly 150 in the last one, almost all troll posts left up, good show
>>96051422This is the system I use: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/3967/roleplaying-games/encumbrance-by-stone-odd