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Payndz posted:Ha, mine's on there! Even if they got the name wrong. Time to leverage this into elf fame and elf fortune, put some sweet open source art in there and do a bit of layout. The joke is that elves aren't real
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Apr 5, 2014 22:58
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Payndz posted:Ha, mine's on there! Even if they got the name wrong. I'm curious, which one is yours?
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Apr 5, 2014 23:03
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This is his. It's pretty neatly thought out in terms of unifying the game mechanics.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:11
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Ranting and daydreaming about online gaming ahead I'm in one of my "old school" moods that I get into every couple of months. This is usually marked by re-reading this thread, reading a lot of terrible blogs, and gazing in awe upon the surplus of D&D rewrites that have flooded the internet. I don't have nostalgic D&D experiences that predate the release of 3rd edition, so a lot of this stuff is academic to me. Kind of rough when most of the material online is philosophizing about game experience based purely on nostalgia. But there was an old-school D&D game I played a few years ago that somehow stuck in my mind. In another forum I frequented, a sort of persistent pick-up game had been started using some OD&D rehash (I think it was Swords and Wizardry). Anyone was free to DM, and characters could be used in various DM's games interchangably. To me, the basic dungeon crawling experience combined with the persistant shared setting was magical. The main DM in particular handled this deftly, encouraging us to track and share details of our exploits with other adventurers (in a central thread). Basically, I guess, it was Westmarches. I only played a couple times before the lack of interested players shut the thing down, but it was great. The standout moment to me was when a member of my party recklessly charged a couple of ghouls, shouting all the while. The other party member hissed warnings about this behavior. Sure enough, we were flanked and murdered. As the last party member fell, he swore to never join the reckless players in another delve. On the surface, this was a negative experience. One player deviated from how another player expected the party to behave. The other player was so angry he developed a grudge against the first. But to me, it was just another part of the world exerting itself. When you play D&D, you learn about the setting; the traps, the monsters, the various intricacies of the DM's machinations. Why not, then, would knowing about the strengths and foibles of the other adventurers also be a component of that experience? I'm playing with the idea of starting a similar thing and recruiting out of The Game Room. I've been sketching out the details of a frontier exploration game; It would start out as a small camp on an unexplored continent, and as various achievements and milestones are marked, the continent would slowly become fleshed out and the camp would thrive and grow. For my part, I'd probably have one "not-quite-mega" dungeon that would be my main DMing ground, with some lairs in and about the area for extra fun. Right now I'm thinking about the kind of logistics issues that could trip things up and make it unfun for players before everything really gets sorted early on. One thing that came to mind was mapping. In the campaign I had described earlier, we just played in IRC and operated on the DM's descriptions. Certainly we were free to map things as we went, but as far as I know there was no way for us to share anything as we played. I liked this approach because it was light... get four people together, join a channel, and play. But reading about these kinds of games, it's pretty clear that mapping is a core component of the experience. Certainly the DM could map things out in Roll20 and reveal the map over the course of play, but this adds significantly to prep and removes a component of the exploration experience from the hands of the players. The other issue that comes to mind is backtracking. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect players to need to make their way out of the dungeon when the session is coming to a close, but in online games people sort of leave when they have to, and that's not always planned for. Especially in pickup games. I thought about just letting people automatically leave the dungeon when it's time to wrap up, but again I think that loses some of the romanticism and danger of the dungeon crawling. Every room entered should be a room that eventually needs to be exited, and who knows what might have changed since the last time you crossed the doorway. One possibility that comes to mind is maybe making "quests" to rescue adventurers whose players had to leave before they could exit the dungeon. This idea appeals to me personally because it lends more to the persistance of the setting, but for the players in question it might simply represent a chore getting in the way of the business of playing the game. I'm sad I never had time to participate in OtspIII's ACKs game. It seems like I could have learned a lot from that. 100 degrees Calcium fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Apr 17, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 20:14
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Evil Sagan posted:But reading about these kinds of games, it's pretty clear that mapping is a core component of the experience. Certainly the DM could map things out in Roll20 and reveal the map over the course of play, but this adds significantly to prep and removes a component of the exploration experience from the hands of the players. I'm running Michael Curtis' Stonehell megadungeon on Roll20 using a mostly DCCRPG system (It's kind of a mess, but I'm a filthy DCC-lover). We have a weekly 2-hour session that ends on the dot, generally no matter what is happening, because Roll20 is good about saving the state of the game. One of my players is also good about recording events in chat that aren't obvious from the state of the board. With regards to mapping, I'm actually pretty happy with my hacky solution: 1.Snapshot a specific map from the Stonehell PDF. 2.Create a .PNG of the map (and make sure the image ratio is square). 3.Upload the .PNG to the GM info layer in a page of my campaign in Roll20 and use the Align to Grid tool to make it match the in-system grid: https://wiki.roll20.net/Aligning_Maps. 4.Use the Roll20 map drawing tools to quickly trace out very rough player-visible outlines of rooms, visible doors, and obvious objects over the very spoily map image that only I can see, then cover the whole thing with fog of war. 5.Reveal the map as players explore, and encourage them to write annotations and more details on the map based on my descriptions and their observations, while I have an easy visual-underlay reference to the secret doors, traps, and other notations not meant for player eyes. For a single map image, I've gotten steps 1-4 down to <10 minutes. It works pretty well so far for my purposes, and my players seem happy with it. Man Dancer fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Apr 17, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 21:02
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Well that doesn't sound too bad, actually. It could be that the process of the player manually drawing a map as they go is a bit overrated anyway. In my mind, I'm starting to just see it ending in pain as communication skills fail to translate into accurate drawings. Thanks for the breakdown.
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Apr 17, 2014 22:20
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Evil Sagan posted:Well that doesn't sound too bad, actually. It could be that the process of the player manually drawing a map as they go is a bit overrated anyway. In my mind, I'm starting to just see it ending in pain as communication skills fail to translate into accurate drawings. Yeah, verbally describing a room's layout is actually not that good at making it visible in the player's minds. When I run now I usually just have a whiteboard nearby (I have a small portable one, and whenever I play at school I just steal one of the mobile ones) and write out a really rough diagram of how things are, then erase it when the players decide to leave the dungeon and ask them what path they want to take. Asking them to visualize it just based on words feels like it's just too dick a move, since misunderstandings that would never happen IC are going to be inevitable. This is a nice balance, since my rough drawings are usually fairly misleading as to dimensions (not by my choice--I try to draw them accurately, but I just eyeball the hell out of them and put zero effort into counting squares or whatever). The players can always put more effort in if they want to use the map to find possible secret door locations, or they can just jot down what I do and have something pretty well-working. I think Torchbearer's method is also interesting, and would probably be up for it with a group that wasn't interested in mapping. Just write a list of the rooms you've been in, in order, and when you leave you can just retrace your path using that. You get very little conception of the layout of the dungeon, but some people just aren't into that. Man Dancer posted:3.Upload the .PNG to the GM info layer in a page of my campaign in Roll20 and use the Align to Grid tool to make it match the in-system grid: https://wiki.roll20.net/Aligning_Maps. This is close to what I did, but a lot better (I didn't do GM Info layer). I also drew little diagrams of the rooms out of place in the map and had the players be the ones to try to get the dimensions/placement right, but that's probably something I could either take or leave next time I run online. I will note that Roll20 does not work great for huge maps. I was running a megadungeon with ~80 rooms a level, and my players were fantastic graffiti artists, so we very quickly ended up with a map with so much info on it that we hit crippling performance issues pretty frequently. The maps were lovely (I can post some of them if people are interested), but be aware that things can get slow quick.
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Apr 18, 2014 07:17
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OtspIII posted:(I can post some of them if people are interested), Sure. That sounds like it would be interesting.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:15
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DalaranJ posted:Sure. That sounds like it would be interesting. Alright, these maps are all pretty big (I think 800x500 feet), so it's actually pretty hard to show both the overall flow of the maps and the little notes that get scribbled everywhere, so hopefully a mix of zoom-outs and close-ups will get the gist across. The Wiki Surface Level: The Overview  Detail of the Surface Level: The Starter Area  Detail of the Surface Level: A Much Harder Area  Level One: The Overview  Level One: By The Illusion Monster / Teleport Trap  Level Two: The Overview  That One Time They Got In An Elevator To Way Deep And Bad Things Happened  And finally, for reference, a side-by side of what their map of the first area they explored actually looked like versus how they mapped it:   These are all making me super nostalgic! I basically have no free time to run stuff like this while I'm in grad school, but I do really miss it and definitely hope to get a campaign using the dungeon running again when I have more free time. Actually, I've been using the dungeon a bit recently. Some of my classmates TA 'Games 101', which has a recitation where students are supposed to play the games getting talked about in class, so I've been running the dungeon for a bunch of undergrads when D&D week rolls around. They've generally never played a tabletop RPG in their life before, so the whole experience gets pretty fun and weird.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:27
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Dang, that's downright inspiring. It looks like it was a lot of fun.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:31
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Hey, I thought I remembered one of youse guys posting the website for your Basic games, including profiles of characters and artifacts and a religion based around a guy who got turned to stone. Did I dream that?
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Apr 21, 2014 12:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Hey, I thought I remembered one of youse guys posting the website for your Basic games, including profiles of characters and artifacts and a religion based around a guy who got turned to stone. Did I dream that? That might have been me again. I haven't been able to make it too often to this game this semester, but I'll be back to it over the summer. It's an open game, so if anybody's ever visiting NYC for a week or whatever I absolutely invite you to drop by for a session!
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Apr 21, 2014 16:22
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Yesss, thank you.
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Apr 21, 2014 16:26
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I concur. gently caress bees. Oh, say, does anyone have any opinion of the old module Caverns of Thracia? I saw it on rpgnow recently and I was wondering if it was any good.
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Apr 22, 2014 00:56
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It is considered a classic - check out what Jamie Mal had to say about it: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/12/retrospective-caverns-of-thracia.html I like it a lot too, but it's the kind of module that needs to be read very carefully before you run it. Wouldn't hurt to take notes too. :0
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Apr 25, 2014 11:02
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DalaranJ posted:Oh, say, does anyone have any opinion of the old module Caverns of Thracia? I saw it on rpgnow recently and I was wondering if it was any good. It's considered probably the best old school dungeon crawl and with good reason.
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Apr 25, 2014 13:56
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VacuumJockey posted:It is considered a classic - check out what Jamie Mal had to say about it: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/12/retrospective-caverns-of-thracia.html Mike Mearls, of all people, on that page posted:You're on to something about the lack of exploration in modern adventure design. I've seen several comments to that effect regarding the current crop of 4e adventures, and it's a trend I'd like to reversed. I guess they did do the Undermountain thing at the very end.
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Apr 25, 2014 14:19
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So the wallchat in 5e-streams was not due to Mearls being a bad DM, but an effort to reverse adverse trends identified in modern play-pretend design?
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Apr 25, 2014 14:37
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VacuumJockey posted:It is considered a classic - check out what Jamie Mal had to say about it: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/12/retrospective-caverns-of-thracia.html Okay. I've been having a bit of a mental block generating my own dungeon, so here's the deal. 1. I'll get Caverns of Thracia. 2. Parse it through my thick head and write some stuff down. 3. Come back here to ask questions. 4. When (if) I run it, trip report. homullus posted:I guess they did do the Undermountain thing at the very end. I seem to remember some circa 2010 4ed modules with incredibly, uninspired skill challenges of the form 'Get your asses from the city to the dungeon'. My guess is that this is the result of freelancer requirements that looked like this: 1. Every adventure must contain at least one skill challenge. 2. Every adventure should contain at least one challenge that is about 'exploration'. What could possibly go wrong? 
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Apr 26, 2014 00:46
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DalaranJ posted:I seem to remember some circa 2010 4ed modules with incredibly, uninspired skill challenges of the form 'Get your asses from the city to the dungeon'.
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Apr 26, 2014 02:40
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WotC freelancer requirements were basically exactly that back when I was apping for a position. There was also a minimum number of feats per X size article requirement, hence the ridiculous bloat. The rules were much the same for all of third edition, but I don't know how it was in AD&D times.
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Apr 26, 2014 02:44
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Okay, so I've read through the Caverns of Thracia module. It took quite awhile to wrap my head around some of the connections to the sublevels. The only question I have right now is on the lich. It doesn't appear to have a phylactery of any kind, does that mean that it cam just be destroyed by reducing it to 0 HP? (I guess that would explain why it runs away from conflict by default.) In addition, here's a little glimpse of a sideproject one of my board game obsessed friends put me up to:  It's a ten times scale version of the tiles from the 1979 game "death maze". Well at this stage it's only about a quarter of the tiles, but it will probably fill up a table so I'm not sure there's any point in making more before testing them out.
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Apr 30, 2014 03:40
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After 2 games as a PC in Dungeon Crawler Classics, I was so inspired I GM a game for the first time ever (as in I've never GMed before period). The amount of flexibility and focus on fun and imagination made it a blast. GMing stuff like Pathfinder always seemed intimidating to a relative newbie like me. Mark down mine as another recommendation to try DCC if you haven't.
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May 13, 2014 04:00
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Goodman Games has a pretty awesome Kickstarter going right now for DCC. its basically an entire campaign with hand out puzzles, level 0-5 scenarios, and lots of other cool extras. You can get all the cool poo poo at the $30 tier. Not bad when something similar from Pathfinder costs 4 times as much. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1409961192/dungeon-crawl-classics-the-chained-coffin?ref=banner
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May 17, 2014 17:33
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Trip Report: Caverns of Thracia Alright, Caverns of Thracia run in TAAC with 6 level 2 party members, what happened? I slapped on a front end that involved a small elven hippy commune as the base camp and the discovery of Thracia by a Dwarven ruin excavation crew. They didn't really care about since it wasn't dwarvern. One of my players suggested that they said, "Oh, you call that 'civilization'? Come back in a couple thousand years." The first foray: They made their way to the ruin during which they randomly encountered a party of tribesman cultists performing a ritual to the dark god. The halfling was able to sneak up and take notes before the party went the long way around. They spent about 40 minutes exploring the surface during which time the halfling nearly fell down the hole above the sacrifice chamber. They encountered both the tribesman who they easily routed (killing half and causing the others to flee) upon discovering the secondary entrance to the ruins and a bunch of beastmen led by dog brother who got stuck in the swamp mud as they party fled. They went down the secondary staircase to the tribesman's sacred area where they spotted the guard blowing his warning whistle in the distance. They also were forewarned of the giant bats and were able to take them down without stepping foot on the bridge thanks to a mighty cleave from the fighter. Then they took way too long coming up with a strategy to cross the bridge(s) having previously heard the rumor that the bridges were unsafe. On the (unfortunately incorrect) assumption that the guard had only warned people to the north they crossed along to the east towards the south staircase down to level 2. In the chapel above the stairs they were ambushed by four fighting tribesmen all wearing plate. This quickly turned into a very bad situation as the halfling went down immediately in a failed attempt to alight the curtains with his torch, the party was forced to hold the line with three members in front and two in the rear. The TAAC version of 'sleep' is actually balanced so it did not end the encounter for them. Then the cleric fell, followed by the dwarf at which point the party broke away and fled back across the rope bridge, cutting it down to prevent chase, and then retreating to the safety of the outpost. The second foray: I let them replace their missing number with identical new members. Player: "Hey, you should come explore these ruins with us. Last time we went half of us were murdered and we didn't find any treasure!" Me as new PCs: "That's sounds like a great idea!" This is a running gag now since killing half the party and forcing them to flee with now treasure is exactly what happened last time I had run a retro-module as well. The party decided that they weren't interested in more ambushes so they went down the main entrance this time. First heading to the left where dwarven senses informed them that there was an chamber on the opposite side of the wall if they wanted to dig for a couple days. (Although in retrospect I wouldn't have told them this if I ran again since if someone actually cut through that wall the main entrance to the ruin would be swarmed by 400 angry skeletons. I wonder what the beastmen would have done about that? Possibly just completely abandoning the surface for a couple years.) They then headed to the right taking the unusual tactic of dousing their light and having the dwarf lead them with infravision. They were pretty wary of being ambushed again, I think. The dwarf noticed the wall inscription, but not the spear trap, although the spear trap malfunctioned so they still don't know that it's there. Their unusual approach did sort of allow them to get the drop on the gnolls in the guardpost. Against gnoll HP sleep was more effective allowing them to easily drive the gnolls off and claim the guardpost. They then returned to the mysterious inscription which not even the wizard was capable of reading, and of course, entered the door, to their dooms. In the chapel of Thanatos, the halfling smashed the bodies to dust using sling stones (the party had intended to use a pole for this purpose but neglected to bring one, it worked out to their advantage). Then the halfling bonked the wraith who was not prepared to fight 6 healthy party members and he fled the room through the secret door minus 5 of his HP. This was where I made a crucial miscalculation and switched from rounds back to turns, and later turns back to rounds without thinking about it. Everyone in the party had failed their poison save except the dwarf so in their exploration turn they all collapsed asleep causing the wraith to return to the room and finish off the dwarf before any one else could recover. TPK. Well, I think when we go back to the module I'll run the room again sticking to rounds, because running the instructions word for word will cause them to collapse one by one giving the remaining party members a chance to find the source or at least hide before the wraith returns. Payndz, I'll try to write up some feedback for TAAC and PM you. It's basically all positive except for "too much like AD&D" which can't really be helped. My opinion of the module, Pros: The dungeon is beautifully designed with respect to layout. I love the hidden sublevels. It definitely all works together and work s with the system it was intended for. I like that they include rules for things like drowning so you don't have to make up your own ruling for these. Each room gives you the things you need to run that room which is great. How awake are those bats, what is this magic marble a key to? All that stuff is there where you need it. The single column layout really works for this type of module. Cons: I honestly have no idea how a first level party would get anywhere in this dungeon beyond leaning on a broken version of the Sleep spell like a crutch. Encounters against 6 .5 HD creatures, bring it on! Encounters against 4 level 2 Fighting Men in plate, um, well, are they clearly visible before the encounter starts? Because that's an encounter to avoid. Oh, they basically have a 100% chance of surprise in close quarters, yeah, that's not going to work. The other major issue is that the main intelligent factions obvious first reaction is "Intruders, kill them." There isn't any question about this, a different faction is trying to ambush you at each of the main entrances, this is followed up by more encounters where they're main goal is clearly to keep people out. You can top that with the fact that the party probably can't even speak the language one of the faction understands. Basically tl;dr, dungeon and module layout good, encounters bad. Edit: Holy poo poo, that's a wall of text.
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May 17, 2014 20:00
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TAAC lives!  I'm really happy that you had a blast and everything works. (Although that's more down to Moldvay and Cook than me; all I did was adapt the maths to a unified system and add a few spells. Did anyone use Swole's Mighty Blow, BTW?)
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May 17, 2014 20:16
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Payndz posted:TAAC lives! With only one wizard he opted to take spells that he deemed more practical. Although apparently he didn't know that the most practical spell in Caverns of Thracia is comprehend languages. They were amused by the name though. Edit: Ah, you don't have platinum, I'll write up a feedback post in the thread then. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 21:28 on May 17, 2014 |
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May 17, 2014 20:59
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Speaking of TAAC, the links to the game have become disabled for some reason.
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May 18, 2014 01:21
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New link for TAAC is here! I just checked, and Dropbox has disabled older links to PDFs because of some potential security flaw. Nice of them to tell me.
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May 18, 2014 09:22
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Thanks, I was just rereading the whole thread on Friday and wanted to ask you. Then the power went out. Edit: Hey, you might want to contact the guy at http://taxidermicowlbear.weebly.com/dd-retroclones.html with a fresh link. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:12 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 18, 2014 14:26
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Done; thanks for the reminder!
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May 18, 2014 18:58
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So part of this weekend was my GMing sharpen the saw time, and I was trying to come up with some critique for TAAC based on my player feedback when I was hit by a mental ton of bricks. My players ran 6 characters, one of every class except elf, which is part of the reason the kept getting into spots. Fog is the 'sleep' spell of TAAC. Only it is superior to sleep in two key ways. 1. The wizard doesn't get it. I'm pretty sure this is self explanatory, but I'll do so anyway. The wizard still gets to control people's minds, the wizard still gets to set everything on fire with a wave of his hands, but the wizard no longer gets the piece of the pie that says "Oh, poo poo, we need this encounter to be over right now!" 2. It doesn't defeat the encounter. The party can't destroy the enemy with this spell and then just take their stuff (and the XP) with no challenge. They still get the important part, which is that they can escape the encounter (or sneak the thief up behind the biggest guy, if they'd prefer). You heard it here first, Fog owns, replace Sleep with Fog in every retroclone.  Actual critique of TAAC: So, I think the negative feedback I got basically boiled down to the fact that I didn't commit enough resources to streamlining character creation and the last retroclone I ran was a hack of S&W. So, basically my players had to be walked through each of the classes one by one and it took about 40 minutes to make them all up. As I mentioned before this is not a negative, so much as a, "Hey, 1st edition is more complicated then 0th edition." On the positive side, the main feedback was about how they liked the flavor abilities of the fighter. Technically, battle cry never worked in combat (out of 4 attempts), but both and the players liked that it was there. Cleave is a great streamlining of a classic ability and the way it compounds with the fighter's critical is very flavorful. As I mentioned before I liked the rebalanced version of sleep and one of the players actually verbalized that whittling down enemies before using it can make it more effective when they had that epiphany. If I didn't like roll under, I wouldn't be using TAAC, so nothing really to say about that. And we didn't really get a chance to exercise any of the thief abilities yet. If I get a chance I wat to put together a short dungeon for a 1st level party for TAAC and post it up here.
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May 19, 2014 01:04
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Kick historical questions, how many editions of D&D had Tolkien material in them before the estate of JRR had them removed?
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May 23, 2014 19:04
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I had an idea for my next retroclone (based on TAAC, which itself was based on B/X, so it's starting to mutate in some fairly extreme ways), but I don't know how the probabilities work out compared to what they're based on, so wondered if anyone with a better grasp of numbers could help. Basically, it's a variation of Next's Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic, with the intention of getting rid of +/- modifiers on d20 rolls entirely. A D&D +1 or +2 modifier becomes Best Of Two (ie, Advantage) with a d20 roll, with -1 or -2 being Worst Of Two (Disadvantage). +3 or above is Best Of Three d20 rolls, and -3 or lower is Worst Of Three. A +2 sword would still keep the +2 for damage for simplicity, but when attacking the player rolls twice and uses the best result. (TAAC is roll-under, but that doesn't matter here; "best" can apply to lowest as well as highest.) If, for example, every "attack at -1" penalty (or whatever) became a Wo2 d20 roll to hit, would it throw the results wildly out of whack compared to how it would have played out in B/X, or is it likely to even out over time? And is Best/Worst Of Three far too big a swing?
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May 24, 2014 23:22
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So wait, if I want to get into BECMI should I seek out the individual BECMI books, or is the Rules Cyclopedia the way to go?
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May 24, 2014 23:54
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The average result on a d20 is 10.5, whereas on a Bo2 it's 13.82, so it's more like a +3 or +4 in traditional D&D. Bo3 is a 15.49, which is basically a flat +5. Of course, it's not really equivalent; the effective bonus of a Bo2 or Bo3 will entirely depend on the target numbers you're giving. Let's take the ol' D&D mainstay target of 65%. That's rolling an 8+ on a d20, a 13+ on a Bo2, and a 15+ on a Bo3 - so the equivalent bonus gets more dramatic as your chances go up (and frankly, most of the time in D&D you'll have more than a half chance of success). So unless you want to redo whole swathes of math, Bo2/3 are too big of a difference.
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May 24, 2014 23:59
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Payndz posted:I had an idea for my next retroclone (based on TAAC, which itself was based on B/X, so it's starting to mutate in some fairly extreme ways), but I don't know how the probabilities work out compared to what they're based on, so wondered if anyone with a better grasp of numbers could help. These will be your probability charts for that system. The first number in the parenthesis is the average expected result. While not the best interpretation, I general view an advantage as a +3 or +4 bonus and bo3 around +5.
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May 25, 2014 00:02
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SALT CURES HAM posted:So wait, if I want to get into BECMI should I seek out the individual BECMI books, or is the Rules Cyclopedia the way to go? RC is just so much easier to use.
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May 25, 2014 00:02
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SALT CURES HAM posted:So wait, if I want to get into BECMI should I seek out the individual BECMI books, or is the Rules Cyclopedia the way to go? You'll have a much easier time finding the RC, and as Humbug Scoolbus said it's vastly easier to use. The big deal with the boxes is that each one brings a new set of rules to focus on as well as the new level bracket: Basic is a meat grinder, Expert introduces overland travel and PC strongholds, Companion PCs as rulers, warlords and badasses on the list field and in the squared circle, and Master aims you down a collection of truly epic paths to Immortality. Original box Immortals is just loving weird. The box system isn't a bad learning aid if you need structure, but if you've got any experience with gaming then the Cyclopedia's a much better bet.
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May 25, 2014 00:36
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There is also Dark Dungeons (a fairly precise retroclone of the RC) and Darker Dungeons. Darker Dungeons, if I remember right, uses ascending attack and AC, tries to unify resolution mechanics for stuff like thief skills and ability checks, and also "cleans up" some instances where the RC included conflicting versions of the same rule, because the rules had evolved from book to book in the BECMI set. The author of Dark/er Dungeons goes into helpful detail on his changes here.
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May 25, 2014 02:31
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