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PeterWeller posted:Me too. I have a copy of it already, but I'd totally pick up a premium reprint because I love it so drat much. I did so with the 2E reprints. My copy has the character sheet blank in the back filled in with pen.  It's not even a good or fun character!
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Jul 4, 2013 23:40
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That's pretty poo poo. On the other hand, a BECMI character sheet has, what, like eight stats you need to fill in.
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Jul 5, 2013 05:40
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Speaking of which, the Rules Cyclopedia is again available for download as a PDF.
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Jul 5, 2013 06:40
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And thus we come full circle.
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Jul 5, 2013 06:42
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Ryuujin posted:Warforged almost seems like it could take the monk slot. EDIT: just added the Barbarian to the TAAC additional classes. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 10:31
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Payndz posted:Monks were always a weird class to me; I'm British, and as such have a very clear idea of what a monk is, so when I first encountered them in the 1e PHB I couldn't understand why Friar Tuck was able to kick so much rear end.
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Jul 5, 2013 10:53
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I think the monk just got included because it sounded cool and people wanted to re-create Kung Fu like they saw on TV from not too many years before. The thing about the earliest D&D, at least according to people like Old Geezer, is that it was basically a mish-mash. Lots of pulp influence, a lot of genres mixed together (at least a few old modules involve crashed spaceships), and so forth. People made stuff up because they wanted to throw it in the game. OG mentions that at one point people also played undead characters, and their undead type changed as they leveled/gained HD, so if you wanted to be a vampire you started out as a skeleton and then upgraded to zombie/ghoul/whatever and on till you got there. I think the fact that pulp fantasy, especially sword & sorcery, liked to play up exotic stuff might have also made the monk more appealing as a drop-in.
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Jul 5, 2013 11:12
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Monks fit perfectly into d&d.
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Jul 5, 2013 11:35
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When I was about 11, I ran a BECMI campaign where all the magic items were technology from a crashed spacefleet thousands of years ago and all the magic, special abilities, and intelligent humanoids were mutations from the radiation from the crashes. It didn't make a great deal of sense, but it sure was awesome for a group of late primary school age kids. It was basically just D&D, but "a magic sword that hits stuff better and glows is a lightsabre" and "if this conan the barbarian looking world has lightsabres it probably has laser guns and mutants too" was so obvious to an 11 year old that it all just kind of fell into place without any outside influence. The best part about being an 11 year old gamer in that era of D&D was that I had the two pamphlet-sized books from my red box, some dice, and that was all. For various reasons (mostly to do with the nearest game store being 30+ minutes drive away), there was nobody to say "you kids are playing that game wrong" or "play this version instead". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 14:20
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Gasperkun posted:I think the monk just got included because it sounded cool and people wanted to re-create Kung Fu like they saw on TV from not too many years before. The problem with monks is that they're unarmed, unarmoured fighters in a game where the attack and defense scaling are almost totally based on equipment.
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Jul 7, 2013 15:08
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Halloween Jack posted:I believe the for-real story about why the monk was included was that somebody thought "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas was really funny. I thought the monk happened because one of the original players was really into this weird novel series that was basically "American James Bond who is also an ancient Kung-Fu Master". Apparently a lot of the monk powers and their names are straight from that series. I'd disagree about attack scaling specifically, but you're right in that the monk is a class that doesn't use loot in a game that has a big focus on loot. Of course, what ends up happening is the monk does use loot; one of my buddies played a monk in a long running FR campaign and ended up using a magic spear for a while because it was more effective than flurrying.
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Jul 7, 2013 22:35
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Remo Williams, The Destroyer? You may be right about that. My experience with monks in 3e is that they end up being Matrix characters, seeing how they need cloaks, gloves, boots, and goggles to get by.
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Jul 7, 2013 23:03
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Halloween Jack posted:Remo Williams, The Destroyer? You may be right about that. Yeah, I think that's right. I never thought about 3E monks that way. You may have brought be back around on them. 
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Jul 7, 2013 23:07
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Okay, hopefully I can now stop bloody thinking about this for a while as I present: TAAC Alpha 3! Ten extra classes, an assortment of rule tweaks, and various new things. Let me know if it's any cop.
Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Jul 8, 2013 |
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Jul 8, 2013 15:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Remo Williams, The Destroyer? You may be right about that. I could see this, definitely. I was always a fan of the Remo Williams movie, because it was campy but entertaining. But I haven't been able to track down copies of physical books. Payndz posted:Okay, hopefully I can now stop bloody thinking about this for a while as I present: TAAC Alpha 3! Ten extra classes, an assortment of rule tweaks, and various new things. Let me know if it's any cop. It's even 666k in size! You are birthing the Omen of retroclones here. Will check this out since I have a soft spot for Basic ever since I discovered Stars Without Number and ACKS.
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Jul 9, 2013 02:11
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Did someone mention old-school D&D having a ton of sci-fi elements? Like rules for playing an elf from a sci-fi civilization that relies wholly upon robots to maintain their glass and steel skycrapers and flying cars, and who start the game with what amounts to a laser pistol?
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Jul 9, 2013 04:13
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You realize we'll need more. 
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Jul 9, 2013 04:36
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Let's be honest, nobody would want to be enemies with a group of elves that treat dueling with flamethrower frisbees as a casual pastime.
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Jul 9, 2013 06:08
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Is there a reason why demi-human classes in BECMI only go up to level ~10 while the human classes go up to 36? I never understood that disparity. I finally completed my collection of all BECMI TSR published material save for one module (Dymrak's Dread) and those dumb solo modules. It feels like the Cyclopedia came a few years too early. There's lot of new classes from the GAZ series around the same time that were left out. You're missing out on 3 separate versions of the shaman class! 
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Jul 9, 2013 18:16
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Cocks Cable posted:Is there a reason why demi-human classes in BECMI only go up to level ~10 while the human classes go up to 36? I never understood that disparity. Demi-humans are better than humans so capping the level is "game balance."
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Jul 9, 2013 18:19
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homullus posted:Demi-humans are better than humans so capping the level is "game balance." No idea why halflings are capped at L8, though. Other than someone at TSR going "Eh, gently caress those little bastards."
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Jul 9, 2013 18:26
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homullus posted:Demi-humans are better than humans so capping the level is "game balance." But the Elf is the only overtly overpowered demihuman. Dwarves and halflings are just fighters with different window dressing. That doesn't make sense. What's even more funny if that they seemed to realize their mistake in capping their levels like that and then added the part where demihumans continue to get some improvements with additional XP (but not levels!). I guess that's the problem with their incremental rules release. They made the decision in Expert to cap but then felt the need to support them in C and M. Hilarious. Some of the GAZ are interesting. Rockhome has a dwarf cleric option. Thyatis has an "Elf" class for humans (capped at 10). Darokin has a merchant sub-class that you can tack on to anyone. Thar has demihuman classes for orcs, goblins, and such (various levels caps). Glantri has sort of a specialist mage add-on for
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Jul 9, 2013 18:53
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Cocks Cable posted:
Okay, I'm writing more about elves, but since you brought that up: Yeah, throughout BECMI, TSR expanded classes until you could play an absolutely absurd amount of stuff. Dwarf-Clerics were in Rockhome, elf-clerics showed up in Mystara dragon magazine. Elves who are built with the Gnoll shaman class show up in Champions of Mystara, along with Gnolls who are built using the Elf class! Eventually they started experimenting in having races just be reskinned humans - Lupin and Rakasta are these, but Half-Orcs are mentioned this way in Republic of Darokin. Shamelessly cribbed from Piazza, a list of all the BECMI / RC classes! Agathokles posted:Base Classes
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Jul 9, 2013 19:02
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Cocks Cable posted:But the Elf is the only overtly overpowered demihuman. Dwarves and halflings are just fighters with different window dressing. That doesn't make sense.
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Jul 9, 2013 19:05
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Just to emphasize the fact that BECMI / RC is gettin' mad weird with classes and races and that the Tolkien Four aren't the end-all, be-all of classes, here is a picture of one of the playable classes from the Creature Crucible up there. Who doesn't want to play a kopru? Let's see what Kopru have to think of the rest of mystara! A Kopru posted:
Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 9, 2013 |
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Jul 9, 2013 19:06
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I've been thinking about it since I asked about an Immortals set reprint... has anyone ever done much with the Immortals set? Everything seemed really really cool., but the amount of bookkeeping required to maintain and level your character always turned me off of actually using the rules. I imagine that it's the one part of the BECMI rules that doesn't see much play in retroclones, right?
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Jul 9, 2013 19:45
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JohnnyCanuck posted:I've been thinking about it since I asked about an Immortals set reprint... has anyone ever done much with the Immortals set? Everything seemed really really cool., but the amount of bookkeeping required to maintain and level your character always turned me off of actually using the rules.
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Jul 9, 2013 19:51
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Halloween Jack posted:I believe it's included in Dark Dungeons, but excluded from TSR's own Rules Cyclopedia. Isn't that mainly because the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set was released alongside the RC and Black Box?
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Jul 9, 2013 20:41
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RC has rules for achieving Immortal status. But nothing after that. The original Immortal set was released prior RC and Wrath of the Immortals boxed set. So they could have included those rules in the RC, but they just didn't (probably because its so different and they had plans for the WoI boxset in the works).
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Jul 9, 2013 20:53
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Cocks Cable posted:RC has rules for achieving Immortal status. But nothing after that. Aw, so they left out the bit where if you become Immortal, reincarnate as a mortal, then attain Immortality AGAIN, you have won Dungeons and Dragons?
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Jul 9, 2013 20:55
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Cocks Cable posted:But the Elf is the only overtly overpowered demihuman. Dwarves and halflings are just fighters with different window dressing. That doesn't make sense. They start with much better saves, mainly. It's short-term survivability (plus some special abilities) versus long term advancement gains. The "Attack Rank" stuff they added on is wonky as heck but it sort of works. However, there's an optional "extended" XP table for dwarves, halflings and elves on page 266 of the Cyclopedia if you want to just let them level up to 36 as per other characters. They still need way more XP to do it but they can.
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Jul 9, 2013 20:56
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Parkreiner posted:Aw, so they left out the bit where if you become Immortal, reincarnate as a mortal, then attain Immortality AGAIN, you have won Dungeons and Dragons? Wasn't there ONE Immortal who was rumoured to have done it THREE times??!? God, I gotta see if I can find those gold books!
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Jul 9, 2013 21:04
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Cocks Cable posted:RC has rules for achieving Immortal status. But nothing after that. Yeah, I know all that. HJ's post seemed to imply that the immortals stuff was too complex to be included in the RC, but to me it seemed like a marketing decision because the range was going to be Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia and Wrath of the Immortals Box.
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Jul 9, 2013 21:54
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, I know all that. HJ's post seemed to imply that the immortals stuff was too complex to be included in the RC, but to me it seemed like a marketing decision because the range was going to be Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia and Wrath of the Immortals Box.
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Jul 9, 2013 22:08
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, I haven't a clue. If you'd asked me to guess, I'd say pagecount restrictions or because they weren't offering supporting material for that level of play. Right on. I didn't mean to imply that you were talking out your rear end or anything. I was really just giving my guess as to why they're not in there.
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Jul 9, 2013 22:41
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Payndz posted:When I was re-reading B/X to make TAAC, that really jumped out at me. It's basically "You want to play an elf so you can wear armour and use swords, and cast spells? Have fun taking twice as long as anyone else to level up and never being able to access high-level spells, you greedy rear end in a top hat!" On the topic of taking twice as long to level, Elves are still really overpowered. The 4k XP track is really just a -1 Level Adjustment in a system where baseline XP is 2k and level XP requirements are exponential. If I could play a fighter who got a wizard's spellcasting abilities in 3e for just a -1 LA I would do it in a heartbeat.
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Jul 9, 2013 23:13
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I've always hated the idea of races as classes, since I started playing with AD&D 2E. When I run basic D&D, i've decided to remove the whole 'special snowflake' factor of demihumans and just rename the classes to Sorcerer (Elf), Gladiator (Dwarf) and Burglar (Halfling). Any race can be any class, but there are no mechanical benefits or detriments to it, so your character's race is simply window dressing.
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Jul 11, 2013 15:01
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I like the idea behind racial classes but the way BECMI/RC implements them is kinda wonky which is why one of many things that won me over about ACKS was how they implemented Racial Classes and their oh so wonderful class building system, which reminds me I need to get back to my project of converting the Orcs of Thar & Creature Crucible races to ACKS(and halflings[which is complicated by the fact that I intend to make at least 2 classes for each race to match the amount of classes Dwarves & Elves get in the core rulebook for ACKS])
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Jul 12, 2013 21:51
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One of the better resources for old school sandbox gaming is a blogger/author http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/ His outlook on "sandbox gaming" and building/running/managing a camping world is pretty interesting. Full disclosure, he's a friend of mine and I periodically show up at his table.
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Jul 18, 2013 17:03
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So, last weekend I was at Ropecon, the largest elfgame-related convention in Finland, and this guy was testing out his new old-school D&D plug-in called Lohikäärmeliitto (literally "Dragon Alliance"). I summarily ignored it because I was busy playing Monsterhearts and running an off-the-cuff game of World of Dungeons for a small bunch of people, but today I ran into it again on a Finnish gaming forum and decided to give it a skim. And I loved it. It's not a fully self-contained game (at least not yet, but the author apparently has plans to make it so), but it has some neat ideas and the game actually states that it is easily compatible with Basic D&D and its numerous clones, and thus these concepts could be easily plugged into almost any Basic D&D retroclone. It's written in a very irreverent style and I would very much like to run this thing with either Labyrinth Lord or TAAC. Unfortunately, as the game is in Finnish sharing the .pdf wouldn't make much sense here, so I'll just give you a brief explanation of what the game adds to B/X. First of all, the game actually ascribes each of Basic's seven classes a narrative role. The game's author stated that the game could be seen as the heroes retelling their exploits in older age, and thus the game gives each of the characters a number of clear tropes to embody within the narrative. Also, there can only be one member of each class. The game also gives the classes a hierarchy, which basically states their status within the group. These are in order:
The group hierarchy actually leads into an interesting mini-game by which characters are made in the game. First of all, everyone rolls their abilities, 3d6 in order. Players can keep rolling again and again until they are satisfied with their abilities, but there are no backsies (i.e. if you decide to discard an array you can't go back to it). However, when the penultimate player stops rolling, the last player only has fifteen minutes to stop rolling, and at the end they of that time they must use the array they have at the moment. Then it's time to pick classes, in the following order:
I'm not sure I'd use the above system in a serious game, but it could be fun in a beer and pretzels dungeoncrawler. Each class also has a Prime Requisite (this is where the game departs slightly from standard B/X: there are only five abilities (Charisma is notably absent), the Elf has Dexterity as their only prime, the Dwarf has Constitution, and the Halfling has Dexterity as well. After abilities have been rolled and classes have been split among the group everyone does a switcharoo with their prime and their highest rolled ability. So, if your Fighter only had an 8 in Strength and their highest roll, 16, in Intelligence, you switch those around to get Strength 16 and Intelligence 8. The game also introduces aggro into the game. This might sound weird, but it actually enforces the game's aforementioned narrative roles effectively. All monsters focus on the Fighter first, because that's where there's the most glory to be gained, but if there's too big of a crowd around the Fighter they might attack someone else. Aggro is a simple flowchart where a monster attacks the characters in the following order of preference:
There's a certain narrative reasoning for this order of preference: first of all, even though the Dwarf is a formidable warrior, they're still small and monsters don't take them seriously, so they'll only attack the Dwarf if they can't engage with the Fighter and the Dwarf was the only character to hit them last round. Similarly, the Halfling is just a pest, so no one attacks them unless there's a better target in sight. The game also gives a similar order for traps and other hazards, so that if a trap or a hazard catches a number of characters you will know whom it strikes first. Surprise surprise, the Dwarf as the comic relief gets hit first. The rest of the game is full of tongue-in-cheek mechanics for the different classes that would easily plug into B/X or any clone thereof, but as I said in the opening the game is still sadly incomplete and lacks, among other things, a spell list. Still, I know what I will be running the next time I want a B/X-based dungeoncrawler. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 18:13
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