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I'm not a huge fan of the ACKS AC system, but there are two ways where it works really well. If you're playing ACKS online you can just input /roll 1d20-[your attack save] and it tells you your AC outright, and if you're playing on a tabletop just use the little chart that tracks what you need to roll to hit the various ACs. I don't remember if the official ACKS character sheets have that chart or not, but since ACs pretty much stay in the 0-10 range just having a little cheat sheet is honestly way easier than even the roll + bonus method that later games use.
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Nov 9, 2013 18:21
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I think the reason why ACKS did AC as it did, which I had in my original post but edited out at some point, is because they were trying to unify d20 rolls. Basically, doing it the way they did makes it so that you always need to roll high. For example, a number of things you would expect an adventurer to do that would require a roll, a PC can do by rolling 18 or higher on a d20 (thanks to the adventuring proficiency). This is similar I think with thief skills at first level. 18+ equals out to a 15% chance, which is pretty close to 1 in 6 (which is 16.67%), so I think this is why some of these abilities are like that. It took me a bit of figuring from a few months back, when I was trying to put together an old school style hack of things - I was using the ACKS class creation system as a general guideline - for playing in something inspired by Shingeki no Kyoujin (Attack on Titan). I later thought something more tactically combat-focused might work better, but I haven't gotten much farther with it. I was thinking it would be something vaguely like OD&D because it would have three main classes - basically a fighter, mage, and something cleric-y in the sense that it could do a mix of the other two but probably closer to a ranger in theme - and then I decided to add in a different set of classes, because I wanted more or less to let people have some options for covering other "pillars" instead of the typical methods. I have a bunch of pages with various notes and figures in relation to this (as well as a B/X style setting/7 classes kinda thing, though I vacillated about race-as-class and splitting race and class) but didn't finish them. I think they predate the project I posted in the workshop/finish games thread. Maybe I should consider them viable projects too. Problem is all of these ideas seem to necessitate a new magic system, since I am not entirely thrilled about D&D spells, the reasons dependent on what edition you are talking about.
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Nov 10, 2013 01:16
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ZakS, from what I can tell, suffers very much from "Smartest man in the room" syndrome - he's a guy who's generally smarter than those around him and knows it. And so has got used to being right. (See also pretty much any Internet Libertarian ever). And like most people what he has is a mix of the smart, the creative, the unconsidered, and the head so far up his own rear end that he can perform colonoscopies himself. This is normal - but many smart people get kicked out of the last two by listening to people who disagree with them and understanding where they are coming from. ZakS ... is used to being the smartest guy in the room to the point where it's almost ingrained into him. This means that when he's talking about something he likes, understands, and is good at he's well worth listening to. Anything that disagrees with his preconceptions or that he doesn't understand he dismisses out of hand rather than bothers understanding it, meaning he isn't worth bothering with here. Vornheim is entirely full of things he loves and understands, and is the distillation of everything that he does that's awesome. And the blog posts he does on things that he likes are pretty awesome. When he leaves that territory and starts talking about anything that does not completely agree with his preconceptions he sucks - and his message board posts almost inevitably end up in arguments which means he's posting about things he dismisses rather than understands. And it's entirely possible to get a selective memory from his blog. If you go through it saying "This is something he loves. Read it. This is something he's not understood. Skip or skim." you're going to remember the good stuff and have skipped or skimmed (and so forget) the bad. On a tangent, this was one of the good things about Ron Edwards (who also was incredibly cantankerous on message boards). He was quite happy to go through lists of fantasy heartbreakers picking out the awesome in them.
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Nov 10, 2013 02:10
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He's usually in a room full of people who thought getting Motley Crue tattoos was a great idea. Edit: But Vornheim is a great example of fantasy for fantasy's sake instead of worldbuilding, which frankly dominates the market because it is marketable. I'm inclined to counter those who call it mediocre, but frankly I haven't actually used its random charts and such at my own table. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 19:20
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He's also not that smart and Vornheim is okay at best and I'm not sure why we're still talking about him after the discussion moved over to the chat thread and we're supposed to be focusing on actual D&D products.
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Nov 10, 2013 19:23
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Zak believes he is the smartest guy in the room and his knee jerk condemnation of any evidence to the contrary is a mechanism designed to let him keep believing that.
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Nov 10, 2013 20:08
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Alright, that's a time out.
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Nov 10, 2013 20:29
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Let me clarify a thing. No OSR Politics. I could go off on ACKS' creators for misusing their journalistic position at the Escapist to sell their retroclone and make competitors look bad. I could quote Zak S. I quote write a goddamn thesis on why Raggi is the toxin this hobby must excise from its body. But, importantly, I do none of those things here because then we'd never discuss cool games. Even with the above, I'm okay with people discussing the actual games (Except, notably, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Carcosa, because they are self-derailing subjects: you can't mention them without derailing a general thread. go make a thread specific to those if you want to  ) and in fact that is what I want to encourage. If a derail threatens, go to the chat thread or whine on IRC (SYNirc's #badwrongfun, where I'm an admin and will spew vitriol all I like!) like the rest of us.But in here, we're going to be cool people about games. Please. Let's do that. Now, let's have at it.
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Nov 10, 2013 21:07
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Ahh, sorry dude. I forgot what thread I was in.
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Nov 10, 2013 21:15
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BECMI (and specifically Mystara) was actually the first game to introduce me to the concept of reskinning races. That sounds pretty funny, because honestly, BECMI seems like it didn't have reskinning in mind at all. Every racial variation had it's own class. If you want an Elf Cleric, you take the Elf Cleric class. That's mechanical differentiation, and we have loads of it. The class list got pretty large and eventually there were Elf variations on pretty much every human class (Including Shaman!). BECMI actually implemented the idea, though. Two of the Mystara Gazetteers introduced new races but not new classes: Elves of Alfheim introduced Half-Elves, and Republic of Darokin had Half-Orcs. The instructions for playing them were basically to write down "Half-Orc/Elf" on your character sheet and make a human. This blew my mind as a kid - Of course you could just write down whatever and play it as a human! Of course! That let's you play some really cool stuff without having to worry about being unfair to other players, because humans are already fair! No having to worry about level limits, no having to worry about special abilities - I could play a half-orc and my friend can be a human and we're in perfect parity! But Mystara didn't stop reskinning there. What about races that were the equivalent of humans in their area? The Rakasta and Lupin in Red Steel were cat-people and wolf-people, respectively, but they basically had human culture. How were some of the earliest ways to play a Rakasta or Lupin in Mystara? You write down "Rakasta" or "Lupin" and make a human. Basically, Mystara taught me early on: If you just want to play a thing and don't give a crap about abilities, write it down and make whatever best represents it. This pretty much determined how I ran 2nd edition games: Me and my friends would scour the monster manual for cool races and then just choose a normal race to play them. One of the earliest D&D games I remember was playing a Jermelaine - not the Complete Book of Humanoids version, which I thought would be unfair to people, but as a gnome.
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Nov 10, 2013 21:28
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So, does anyone know if someone's tried making good playable monsters for pre-3E Retroclones? I know that there's some out there for Labyrinth Lord by Barrel Rider Games (most notably monster classes for the Dragon and Dark Elf), but I can't speak to their quality because I don't own them and I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the LL ruleset.
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Nov 10, 2013 22:29
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Libertad! posted:So, does anyone know if someone's tried making good playable monsters for pre-3E Retroclones? We've made a few custom monster classes, but I think only the Lizard Man is on the wiki. Custom classes are relatively easy in B/X, since the expectations of the system are so simple and relatively obvious, so I'd say you can probably just eyeball them on the fly if you're comfortable with the system. Otherwise, you can always try the ACKS class creation system in the player book.
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Nov 11, 2013 00:02
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Was there a class-building thing in BECMI or B/x? I think I remember one, but gently caress if I can find it. e: Mormon Star Wars nailed it though. Pick the existing class/race that's closest in your mind to what you want to be, and write "Dog-Headed-Ratman Battleshaman of the Broken Nose Tribe (elf)" on your sheet, and wield a "Splinterwood War Club of Doom (sword)". VVVV Yeah, that too. Reskin "infravision" as "can see via smell". Trade "finds secret doors sorta like a thief should probably be able to" for "sneaks exactly like a thief". Done. Awesome. Still, just putting whatever race and playing as a human <class> isn't going to hurt anything at all. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 01:32
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AlphaDog posted:e: Mormon Star Wars nailed it though. Pick the existing class/race that's closest in your mind to what you want to be, and write "Dog-Headed-Ratman Battleshaman of the Broken Nose Tribe (elf)" on your sheet, and wield a "Splinterwood War Club of Doom (sword)". I really like giving each character one Special Ability that can basically just be whatever within a certain power level. It makes it real easy to make mechanically unique characters without needing a lot of extra work--your Halfling Cleric is just a cleric with the special ability 'has a few of the Halfling traits', and your DHRBotBNT is just an elf with a special ability that trades in the elven secret-door-finding abilities for a super-enhanced sense of smell and the ability to sneak like a thief.
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Nov 11, 2013 01:48
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AlphaDog posted:Was there a class-building thing in BECMI or B/x? I think I remember one, but gently caress if I can find it.
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Nov 11, 2013 02:12
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If I were to run a BECMI game, character race would just be window dressing, and the Elf/Dwarf/Halfling classes would become Bard/Gladiator/Burglar instead.
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Nov 11, 2013 04:47
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AlphaDog posted:Was there a class-building thing in BECMI or B/x? I think I remember one, but gently caress if I can find it.
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Nov 12, 2013 14:06
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If you could find a copy of the PDF archive they put out in 1999, you'd be set. Not sure how much one would go for on Amazon or eBay these days though.
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Nov 12, 2013 15:35
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Pirating is illegal and immoral, but a search for "dragon 109" will bring up some.... stuff. Maybe you could get that archive CD on eBay?
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Nov 12, 2013 18:13
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I have no idea if it's similar to the Dragon article, but I found this custom class building guide: http://www.pandius.com/custclas.html
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Nov 12, 2013 19:05
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The dragon article is a lot more detailed (I have the CDs, go me  ), but it's along the same lines.
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Nov 12, 2013 19:16
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Have you guys seen that Wizards is reprinting OD&D? I'm not sure who would buy it at $150 since it doesn't come with Chainmail or Wilderness Adventures so you're missing a lot of the context of the rules and Swords and Wizardry is probably a more playable idea these days anyway.
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Nov 12, 2013 21:27
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Unless they want to do a serious revision of the text to actually include omitted rules, yeah, I don't see it being worth it. Not even as a collector. You can get the original game in near-mint for that price, for reference, and that copy might actually have some value and actual collectability factor to it.
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Nov 12, 2013 21:33
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SavageMessiah posted:Have you guys seen that Wizards is reprinting OD&D? I'm not sure who would buy it at $150 since it doesn't come with Chainmail or Wilderness Adventures so you're missing a lot of the context of the rules and Swords and Wizardry is probably a more playable idea these days anyway. Is it still listed at $150? I had read somewhere that they were going to reduce the price some, like maybe slice $20-30 off of it. Even at that price, I think the thing is really only useful to a collector. If you were not alive or not playing when those prints originally came out, I think there are other ways to get close enough rules to that edition without having to pay so much. But if you have to have that edition specifically, I guess you're the type who will pay regardless.
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Nov 13, 2013 03:20
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I wish that WoTC would collect entire 2e AD&D settings' worth of supplements and sell them in giant megapacks. It'd be nice to be able to buy every Spelljammer, Dark Sun or Dragonlance supplement in one shot.
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Nov 13, 2013 14:08
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If that were possible - well, it's possible but unlikely - it wouldn't happen for a while. Even with the increased rate of release for PDFs in terms of making them available on DTRPG, there is still a large number of items in the catalog. As such, they must have some rationale for when they release what they do, but I expect it is not conducive to releasing things in giant bundles because they probably only release parts of such hypothetical bundles at a time.
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Nov 14, 2013 02:19
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They've put out a couple of bundles so far, but only for smaller-scale completed lines like the B-series of modules. If drivethru's other sites are any indication, I'd only expect to see bundles for small product lines like Al-Qadim and not for significantly larger ones like Ravenloft.
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Nov 15, 2013 03:10
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I don't mean PDF, I meant physical copies. Giant hardcover collections. 
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Nov 15, 2013 16:13
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Silhouette posted:I don't mean PDF, I meant physical copies. Giant hardcover collections. I think you'd have more luck buying PDF bundles and then running them through a POD fulfiller. Apparently Lulu doesn't care if you set up PDFs of commercial stuff to print through them as long as you keep them private to your account.
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Nov 16, 2013 06:09
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Would someone, who knows their BECMI and AD&D better than me, explain how the classes changed in 3rd Ed?
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Nov 16, 2013 19:19
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Kemper Boyd posted:Would someone, who knows their BECMI and AD&D better than me, explain how the classes changed in 3rd Ed? The major changes to how classes work in practice have at least as much to do with the changes to the base systems as they do to changes to specific class mechanics:
In general, casters increased in both power and versatility to a degree that non-casters didn't come close to matching. For instance, a druid wildshaped into a bear is at least as physically powerful as the average same-level fighter, and can cast spells in their wildshape form if they took the Natural Spell feat (and even without that feat, they could still buff themselves with spells prior to changing shape). It was obvious almost as soon as the game was released that it was designed and playested operating on the assumptions of BECMI/AD&D (fighters tanking on the front lines, casters blasting away from the rear with direct-damage spells), and bends or breaks when characters and monsters are designed around the particular mechanical foibles that were specific to 3e.
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Nov 17, 2013 05:05
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This should be relevant to all you Mystara fans: Bruce Heard, one of the guys heavily involved with the Mystara Gazetteers, is working on a setting of his own after failing to negotiate with WotC about doing something new with Mystara. He's going to Kickstart this thing, but at the moment he's got this preliminary survey for the Kickstarter going on. Link: http://bruce-heard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/Calidar.html It sounds like a setting I'd play in. It's got airships.
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Nov 21, 2013 16:18
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Ratpick posted:This should be relevant to all you Mystara fans: Bruce Heard, one of the guys heavily involved with the Mystara Gazetteers, is working on a setting of his own after failing to negotiate with WotC about doing something new with Mystara. He's going to Kickstart this thing, but at the moment he's got this preliminary survey for the Kickstarter going on. Link: http://bruce-heard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/Calidar.html I have fond and whimsical memories of Mystara from the old capcom arcade games, but I never got to play a tabletop rpg in that setting. From what I've heard, it reminds me of record of Lodoss War (even though RoLW is based on the Japanese Swordworld RPG). Though not technically a retroclone, I might see about running Mystara using the Dungeon World rules. Ooh...the wheels are turning... World of Calidar seems like an interesting setting...I especially like the descriptions of elvish, dwarven and human vessels and I would love to see some concept art for them. I'll probably kick into this, though it will have a hard time unseating Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies as my favorite airship heavy setting.
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Nov 21, 2013 18:51
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Gizmoduck_5000 posted:I have fond and whimsical memories of Mystara from the old capcom arcade games, but I never got to play a tabletop rpg in that setting. From what I've heard, it reminds me of record of Lodoss War (even though RoLW is based on the Japanese Swordworld RPG). Funny thing that comes up every once in a while in these threads is that Record of Lodoss War is actually based on a replay (think novelization of an RPG campaign that are strangely popular in Japan) of a Basic D&D campaign that a bunch of Japanese dudes played in the eighties. It became so popular that the guys actually approached TSR about doing a Lodoss supplement for D&D, but because TSR was really paranoid about their IP they turned the offer down, so the guys ditched the idea and just made their own RPG. That's why Record of Lodoss War has so many D&D'isms: the main character, Parn, is a Fighter who later becomes a Paladin, Deedlit is an Elf (that is, a character with the class Elf) and the rest of the cast can be easily traced to the classes of Basic D&D. So the similarities between Lodoss and Mystara are not a coincidence.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:35
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Speaking of which, while Bruce Heard may not have successfully gotten rights to do Mystara things (curses), he's off doing his own notMystara thing now! As far as I know he's aiming for systemless, but it's all going to be in the style of the old Basic D&D Gazeteers, so watch that space I guess.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:55
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Full circle in 4 posts. Not bad.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:57
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What, you actually expect me to read this thread? 
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Nov 21, 2013 20:59
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Ratpick posted:Funny thing that comes up every once in a while in these threads is that Record of Lodoss War is actually based on a replay (think novelization of an RPG campaign that are strangely popular in Japan) of a Basic D&D campaign that a bunch of Japanese dudes played in the eighties. It became so popular that the guys actually approached TSR about doing a Lodoss supplement for D&D, but because TSR was really paranoid about their IP they turned the offer down, so the guys ditched the idea and just made their own RPG. I was right about something! On the internet! *strut*
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Nov 22, 2013 18:11
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Rulebook Heavily, would you add Fantastic Heroes & Witchery to the OP? It's a pretty cool little all-editions-D&D knock-off, with the added benefit of having classes for planetary adventure, a la John Carter of Mars. I'm making my way through it right now, and it looks like good fun. The author describes it thusly: "This is the game we all know, in a version borrowing from all editions, from "classic" to "3e." As such you already know the rules, nothing to relearn. You've got ascending attack bonuses (called BtH) and AC, but using the old descending AC is still possible. You've got all the spells found in 1e with UA, and many more for a total of 666 spells. There is a lot of classes, old and new. There is a fundamental difference with regard to priests though: all spellcasters are considered mages, with those using former cleric spells being wise-men/women, and those using former druid spells being forestals. Then, priests classes don't necessarily get supernatural powers, and when they do (i.e. friar class), they pray for immediate divine help rather than preparing and casting spells. This is the only main difference. Other than that, FH&W is 430 pages of simple rules and many options. The book is a combination of player's manual and GM's manual, but does not include monsters and magic items. However, you may use those from Osric or Castles & Crusades just as easily." 666 spells - that's pretty 
VacuumJockey fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 14:28
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Done!
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Dec 30, 2013 22:34
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