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If you start from the assumption that the main goal of the DM is to be a fair adjudicator, then it's not too hard to make the jump that the best way to do that is to overburden them with rules transmitted perfectly from the mind of Gary himself.gradenko_2000 posted:I've often entertained the idea of Internet West Marches: "I'm going to open up a roll20 room at this day and at this time. Anyone who shows up gets to play. We start at Dungeon Level 1. At the end of the session, save your character sheet and bring them whenever you're next available. Good luck" I'd love to. If you do, please mention it here. I'd think that a primary danger of doing it that way would be you might get a lot of single person sessions which won't work very well with most OSR rule-sets.
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Jan 2, 2016 21:00
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DalaranJ posted:I'd love to. If you do, please mention it here. I'd think that a primary danger of doing it that way would be you might get a lot of single person sessions which won't work very well with most OSR rule-sets. It does sound pretty good. You'd need a way of scaling what you'd prepared by level and number of players anyway, so how hard would it be to incorporate ideas from Scarlet Heroes that you could "switch on" if there's just one player?
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Jan 2, 2016 22:13
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Colored me interested and I'd down for dungeon crawling in Scarlet Heroes.
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Jan 2, 2016 22:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:Formalizing everything into having a rule so that (ideally) anyone can DM is a cool and good idea. I'd go so far as to say that it's why 3rd Edition's attempt at simulationism is important even if the execution is flawed - it makes it easier to run Organized Play events and makes it easier for someone jump into the whole DMing if they don't have to pull numbers out of their rear end so much. I've been real tempted to bring back my weekly Roll20 game now that I'm done with grad school. I'd love to get a "every week we meet at this time, anybody can offer to host a dungeon, and the players vote on which dungeon their characters to go to for that week" repeating internet-game going, if that's something you'd be at all interested in being a part of.
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Jan 2, 2016 23:57
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OtspIII posted:I've been real tempted to bring back my weekly Roll20 game now that I'm done with grad school. I'd love to get a "every week we meet at this time, anybody can offer to host a dungeon, and the players vote on which dungeon their characters to go to for that week" repeating internet-game going, if that's something you'd be at all interested in being a part of. Depends on the day of the week, but I could be down for that as well.
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Jan 3, 2016 00:03
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AlphaDog posted:More like a large group of people who all play D&D on and off, so depending on what night of the week and who's available it might be one of several different people running the adventure
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Jan 3, 2016 00:53
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I thought it might help setting this up if we had somewhere more focused place to chat in. So, I registered #OSR on the synirc server.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:16
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FRINGE posted:Oh sure, we did that occasionally, I had just had the impression (for many years) that when they say "organized play" (etc) they mean events where you might not know the people to begin with. The closest I've come to a personal experience with that sort of thing (ie, not just my group of friends rotating DMs) is a uni games club where your sheets and stuff got packed away in the club's locker at the end of each night. RPGA stuff and some tournament events apparently had some kind of record keeping system that was supposed to help keep everything straight. I've got no idea how it actually worked, but from hearing others talking about it you could probably have cheated by replenishing your arrows or whatever, but probably not by changing a stat or adding a vorpal sword. Again, no actual personal experience of this, going off what I heard way back in the day. I used to (probably still would) really dislike gaming with strangers.
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Jan 3, 2016 04:24
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Gaming with strangers at Wednesday night Encounters events is eventually how I put together my entire weekend gaming group in Seattle. 5E caused the talent pool at that same FLGs to wither until it's now almost nothing but kids now. I don't know how the bigger shops like Card Kingdom are doing. For me it's a chance to meet new people and not get bored playing the same game with the same people all the time. As far as this is organized play stuff, I've never really been into the idea. The game is better when the ground rules are set by the people in the room.
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Jan 3, 2016 10:26
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I decided to run with the ideas we've been throwing around and put this up. Is it a good idea? Who knows, but, if you're interested, it might work out.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:48
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I'm not entirely sure where to ask about this, but for the D&D gamers around here, whats your opinion on that Fantasy Grounds program that Wizards released?
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Jan 4, 2016 13:46
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Its expensive and clunky compared to Roll20. It's less useful for non-D&D or Pathfinder games.
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Jan 4, 2016 15:49
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A few days ago Kevin Crawford posted this on G+ in regards to GodBound.quote:It looks like the group's broken 1,000 members, so I suppose I ought to reward the attention with a little note on Godbound progress. As much as I wish he'd break out of the retroclone design space, I'm really looking forward to this.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:33
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Godbound looks like it's going to be good. Really looking forward to that one. Does anyone know who came up with to-hit 20 (Roll + Attacker + Enemy's AC >= 20)? Like in Darker Dungeons and Scarlet Heroes' combat?
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Jan 5, 2016 10:12
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The earliest reference I can find for it is: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-best-combat-algorithm.html from July 2009 There's a PDF by Daniel Collins dated Jan 2010 ( http://www.superdan.net/gaming/oed/target20/Target20.pdf ) that more closely ties and formalizes it to OSR mechanics outside of simply describing the mathematical technique. I think those two would be it, or at least as far as the specific named mechanic of Target20 is concerned. It's possible people have been informally using it in their individual gaming tables. Darker Dungeons was published in 2010, as was Stars Without Number as Kevin Crawford's first game, and so on and so forth for the later OSR games, so that matches the timeline.
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Jan 5, 2016 10:33
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Would someone who is more knowledgeable in such things mind walking me through the different versions of Gamma World leading up to the 7th Edition, as well as any notable retroclones? I feel like an OD&D or B/X version of Gamma World's setting and wacky-but-super-functional character creation would be aces if it was executed as well as it was in 7th Ed.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:33
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Mutant Future is a B/X version of Gamma World by the same people who made Labyrinth Lord. There's a fancy version with good art, but the no-frills version is still free. I picked up Other Dust after being impressed with the F&F writeup. It doesn't disappoint.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:42
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4E question: I've made a minotaur earthstrength warden and, almost by accident, a lot of my powers knock enemies prone. I could have sworn there was a feat that did *something* to proned enemies, but I can't find it? Anyone have ideas if I'm remembering something that actually exists? Otherwise, I might need advice in turning this into more of a charge based guy.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:26
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Headsman's Axe tacks 5 damage onto prone enemies.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:Would someone who is more knowledgeable in such things mind walking me through the different versions of Gamma World leading up to the 7th Edition, as well as any notable retroclones? 2nd edition is considered the classic edition by many. It basically “rationalizes” the game by introducing percentile attribute checks for a lot of things; most things in the game will use either a percentile check or a specialized table. The game has multiple attack matrices (physical combat, mental combat, poison, radiation…) and lots of d100 tables for mutations, equipment, encounters, etc. It also introduced a leveling mechanic, but increased level is purely about reputation and NPC reactions. 3rd edition’s biggest change was jumping on the bandwagon of having a master Action Table that handled all types of task resolution. It was colour-coded (just like Chill!) so you could get a bunch of results from combat and using powers. It also loved the kind of selective “realism” that was popular in games from that era. So, your health is still measured in HP, but that action table will give you results for infections, bruising, and a dozen other kinds of damage types and status effects you can hit someone with. After 3rd edition, the game was essentially built around compatibility with whatever was the current version of D&D at that time. The 4th edition had a race/class/level setup, used THAC, and was essentially AD&D: Gamma World. The emphasis on sandbox hexmapping was noticeably absent. The 5th edition was based on Alternity, the 6th on D20, and the 7th was a simpler, fast-playing version of 4e. I don’t know much about them. The thing about Gamma World is that it has a legacy of being both serious and silly. It’s notorious for a lot of randomly-rolled poo poo, which can be funny but which can also kill your rear end. To some extent, this comes through in the art. The first edition is known for Erol Otus covers and deliberately silly stuff like rabbit-men carrying guns. By the time the 2nd edition came out, the art got a huge jump in overall quality (better than most D&D books of the period IME). Mad Max and late 70s ideas of science-fantasy seemed to have an influence, so there was more emphasis on leather fetish bikers and guys wearing sci-fi armor and firing laser guns while riding alien beasts. But there was still some funny stuff like a bear dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte. The 3rd edition art is much the same but with almost no lightheartedness at all, and the 4th edition art actually leans toward being a little grim.
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Jan 7, 2016 23:31
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Soonmot posted:4E question:
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Jan 7, 2016 23:44
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Thanks, moving it over there!
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Jan 8, 2016 01:42
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I'm finally living the dream and my group wants me to run compendium basic D&D! I'm about 25 years rusty, but I can certainly catch up before we start. Are there any must-play adventures I should track down? I was thinking about dragging everyone from B1 to B12, but that's a hefty commitment (that will certainly fizzle) and we might just have more fun in custom adventures. I want these dudes to share the same stupid-kid fun experience I did, but I'm dreading the thing where nobody cares about your nostalgia. On the one hand, it's like trying to get a millennial to unironically watch Beastmaster. On the other, I kinda want to put on a DM Snuggie and bid a table of friends to "journey with me to the mythical realm of 1982..."
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Jan 8, 2016 05:52
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Halloween Jack posted:<words> Thanks for this! I was already familiar with (and quite liked) Other Dust, but I think I'll track down Mutant Future now.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:59
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X1 and CM2 are both really good. X1 is like the B2 for expert.
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Jan 8, 2016 08:32
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Babylon Astronaut posted:X1 and CM2 are both really good. X1 is like the B2 for expert. X1's Isle Of Dread, yeah? It's a great module.
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Jan 8, 2016 12:19
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Hey I've got that one, it's got a rad dinosaur on the cover!
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Jan 8, 2016 13:49
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Halloween Jack posted:3rd edition’s biggest change was jumping on the bandwagon of having a master Action Table that handled all types of task resolution. It was colour-coded (just like Chill!) so you could get a bunch of results from combat and using powers. It also loved the kind of selective “realism” that was popular in games from that era. So, your health is still measured in HP, but that action table will give you results for infections, bruising, and a dozen other kinds of damage types and status effects you can hit someone with. If you're familiar with TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG from the same period, GW basically reused the color chart from MSH. The systems themselves aren't really cross-compatible, but using the chart in actual play works more or less the same in both games.
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Jan 8, 2016 18:38
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Hey thread. I just became aware of Kevin Crawford's Black Streams: Solo Heroes, which is basically his adaptation of his solo play rules from Scarlet Heroes to Labyrinth Lord and also free. I've been itching to run old-school D&D for a while now, but due to the fact that most of my players work day jobs and I'm already running a Strike! game for them I just don't have the time to run two separate games for them. So, running a solo game for one of them who also happens to be blissfully unemployed at the moment seems like the right approach. Now, reading the rules from Solo Heroes it all seems pretty straightforward, but it's a bit odd that even though it's supposedly Labyrinth Lord compatible it doesn't discuss fray dice for the demihuman races (Dwarf, Elf and Halfling). So, I'm going to need your help in assessing this: I feel that since the Dwarf is basically a Fighter but with some Dwarven abilities on top they might be justified in having a d8 as their fray die, but Elf and Halfling have got me stumped: on one hand, both classes are effectively Fighter-type classes (although the Elf is more of a Fighter/Magic-User, really), but on the other hand their mix of lower hit die coupled with many non-Fightery abilities could be read as them being non-strictly-martial classes and thus having a fray die of d6. Thoughts? Also, speaking of fray dice and damage dice in general, I'm also a bit confused by how the Thief's backstab is supposed to work with these rules: do I double the damage roll (i.e. if the Thief rolled a 5 on their damage die that would be read as a 10, converting to 4 points of damage) or the actual damage value (in the above situation, the damage die of 5 would deal 1 point of damage, which when doubled would result in 2 points of damage)? I kind of prefer the former, because not only does it ensure that the Thief will always deal at least some damage (because a result of 1 on the damage die will be read as a 2, thus dealing at least 1 point of damage) it also will prevent weirdness like the Thief somehow getting a 10+ on their damage roll and thus dealing 8 points of damage, which feels a bit much. I'd welcome the thoughts of anyone who has experience with running Solo Heroes, or better yet Scarlet Heroes itself. -------------------------------------- On a completely different note, I recently started thinking about the idea of character creation as play, and started thinking about how cool it would be if there was a character creation method which was basically like playing a little CYOA with some randomness injected in (which I blogged about on fuckyeahdnd already) and I already started working on such a system for Dwarven characters. The assumption is that the system is heavily similar to Beyond the Wall's (so only three classes, Warrior, Rogue, Mage) and that through the choices made and random chance you go through your character's life and training, picking up class features as you go, with even a possibility that your character "drops out" of class training and ends up finishing training as another class (the example I thought up was a Mage picking up Cantrips at the onset of their training and then failing Wizard Finals or something and actually ending up a Rogue/Mage with no spells beyond Cantrips). The problem is, this poo poo is actually hard. I'm having trouble with figuring out just how much freedom of choice there should be in the system (I'm kind of thinking that your character's base abilities before their training should be mostly random and based on random life events), how many branching paths I want (the more paths there are the more work for me) and just to what extent do I want to differentiate between stuff like two Dwarf Warriors one of whom happens to be Noble and the other being just a simple Clansdwarf. I'd appreciate any input on this as well.
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Jan 11, 2016 11:18
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As far as Scarlet Heroes is concerned, for Sneak Attacks, you roll for damage, THEN you triple it, THEN you convert the result to "this is how many hit dice worth of dudes I killed" I'd definitely let Dwarves use the same Fray Die size as Fighters, but I'd step it down to d6 for Elves because they're also spellcasters. Rereading Halflings, it looks like they're not "thieves" in LL, so that probably makes them eligible for a Fighter fray die. An alternative would be if the Halfling character mostly uses ranged weapons, then crib from Scarlet Heroes' Magic-User Fray die special ability: the Halfling rolls a d6 Fray Die, but can always do so, representing their ability to sling rocks or shoot bows at targets without needing to be in melee range. This also matches the Halfling's normal LL bonus to ranged attack rolls.
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Jan 11, 2016 11:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:As far as Scarlet Heroes is concerned, for Sneak Attacks, you roll for damage, THEN you triple it, THEN you convert the result to "this is how many hit dice worth of dudes I killed" gradenko_2000 posted:I'd definitely let Dwarves use the same Fray Die size as Fighters, but I'd step it down to d6 for Elves because they're also spellcasters. This is a really good idea: I love the image of the Halfling just having rocks on hand that they can throw at their enemies. More than makes up for their lower hit die. Thanks!
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Jan 11, 2016 11:48
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I'm assuming you've looked at Traveler's career path character creation system already, since it's basically the blueprint for that. If not, you probably should, to see how they handle it. One of the big differences would be that a lot of the rewards from Traveler are in different levels of skills, which in your DnD-type game probably aren't very significant. Though you could possibly do stat modifications in place of skills. And inheritance type stuff is always fun--like, you get a deed to a building in a distant town, or an old horse, or a cool weapon, or a spaceship, or something. That helps set up hooks for future adventure as well. Not sure this is exactly what you want, but I wrote up something very random for a group of DCC heroes to do in lieu of a funnel--there's a question prompt and then the players need to pick one of their characters who answers the prompt, with there being variable results from that: http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Questions_and_Consequences You can view source to see all the different results.
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Jan 11, 2016 13:27
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Yeah, I've had Traveler recommended to me like crazy since I first blogged about this, and gradenko_2000 just did a F&F of the character creation and it sort of looks like what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll take a look. Speaking of Traveler character creation, since I can't afford to buy a new RPG book just for this project, I know for a fact that Kevin Crawford has made a variant lifepath character creation system for Stars Without Number (and it's free), does anyone have enough familiarity with that to say if it's in any way similar to Traveler's?
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Jan 11, 2016 17:11
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Has anyone here played much Tunels and Trolls? I grabbed a copy on a whim a couple of weeks ago hoping to try out some of the solo adventures, but the math seems a bit wonky. The very first fight lasted so long I had to just cheat and declare myself winner to see the rest of the story. Essentially the dice averaged out to neither side doing any damage ( after i subtracted my armor) for so long that it just got really frustrating. Is this common?
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Jan 12, 2016 03:45
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WaywardWoodwose posted:Has anyone here played much Tunels and Trolls? I grabbed a copy on a whim a couple of weeks ago hoping to try out some of the solo adventures, but the math seems a bit wonky. The very first fight lasted so long I had to just cheat and declare myself winner to see the rest of the story. Essentially the dice averaged out to neither side doing any damage ( after i subtracted my armor) for so long that it just got really frustrating. Is this common? I remember combat being quite quick - certainly no longer than Basic D&D. That said, it's probably been around 20 years since I've played T&T and I have no idea which edition it was. I was thinking of picking up a PDF to look through again, so I'd be interested to hear more about this issue too.
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Jan 12, 2016 05:28
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WaywardWoodwose posted:Has anyone here played much Tunels and Trolls? I grabbed a copy on a whim a couple of weeks ago hoping to try out some of the solo adventures, but the math seems a bit wonky. The very first fight lasted so long I had to just cheat and declare myself winner to see the rest of the story. Essentially the dice averaged out to neither side doing any damage ( after i subtracted my armor) for so long that it just got really frustrating. Is this common? I've not played it myself, so take all of the below with a grain of salt. From a math/design perspective T&T's combat system does create a situation where if the combatants are roughly evenly matched, then it's going to take a long time for combat to resolve, and then as soon as one side goes on a hot streak and inflicts some nice hits, then the losing side enters a "death spiral" where it becomes progressively harder and harder to claw back a victory from while also causing them to lose at an accelerating rate. I think the point here is that the players are supposed to use their skills and their spells and their ingenuity to create situations where the monsters have already slid down the death spiral as the main combat begins. That is, a single cast of the level 1 spell Oh-Go-Away will immediately drive off all monsters with a Monster Rating less than the sum of the caster's IQ+Luck+Charisma. Or a cast of Vorpal Blade to double the attack die rolls of everyone in the group using swords and daggers for one turn. This is also why magic and missile fire is evaluated first before regular melee combat. EDIT: On the GM-side of things, you're also expected to come up with random monster groups, and varying MRs combined with varying Number Appearing stats would cause some fights to be "well it's three goblins versus five players", which is overwhelmingly favored for the players, but then maybe you also get "three ogres versus five players" where the players have a much higher MR margin to overcome and thus needs to get creative with the rest of their equipment and abilities before engaging. The highly abstracted nature of combat and movement, combined with the potentially apocalyptic results of a losing battle (you die and die horribly) would also seem to allow for a more realistic bent to combat. That is, if the players start to slide on that slow death spiral, they know it's coming, but it's not going to come for another 3 to 4 rounds yet. They withdraw. This concept is a lot more difficult to execute in D&D even when you get over the psychological/cultural mentality of every fight must be to the death. I do know that the 7th edition introduced the concept of Spite Damage*, wherein each side takes 1 point of armor-ignoring damage for every natural 6 rolled by the other side's attack roll in order to address the issue of combats where both sides are rolling 2d6+9 and any success is mitigated by armor and so it takes forever for the death spiral to happen. * Spite in this case meaning damage you take "in spite of everything you do to try and prevent it" gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 05:46
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Certain spells like Take that you fiend and ranged weapons (provided you make the dex save) do damage directly to MR even if you lose the face-off, too, at least in 5th ed.
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Jan 12, 2016 06:00
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Is this where I am supposed to talk about 4th ed now?
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Jan 12, 2016 06:07
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Herr Tog posted:Is this where I am supposed to talk about 4th ed now? You could, but the 4e thread is still active enough.
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Jan 12, 2016 06:12
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Well, I thought the thread name change was pretty funny, anyway.
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Jan 12, 2016 06:39
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