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thefakenews posted:That's poor wording on my part. He asked about increasing the point buy privately, but I think he intended everyone get the increase. During the 5E game he talked about how he liked his characters to be "OP", so I assume he just wants to play a game with more powerful characters. I'm used to running 4E with standard point buy but I don't really mind so long as it doesn't make more work for me. I'm pretty sure red box is the first set of the collection that comprises the rules cyclopedia.
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Feb 6, 2016 00:21
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thefakenews posted:A different question. A couple of years ago I managed to pick up a copy of the Rules Cyclopedia for $10, and recently a friend gave me his copy of his Mentzer Red Box. If I used both of them at the table, are there any substantial differences as far as the rules, for the level range contained in the Red Box? It's generally a good idea to have/use the Weapon Mastery rules from the RC if you're going for a long-term campaign, but Basic rules say nothing about that. Otherwise they're practically identical for the level range.
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Feb 6, 2016 01:09
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FRINGE posted:Not relevant to this, but another old memory to share about "a thing that exists": That sounds weird. AD&D lists the Giant's damage (so, Storm Giants are listed as doing 7-42), and then it says something like "they favor huge swords", which always implied to me that their huge swords do 7-42 damage. the 2nd ed way sounds like it might have used that article as a basis though - Giants have their damage listed in the format of "XdY, or by weapon (AdB+x)", then there's a part in the "combat" section that says what the weapon is. Storm Giants: 1-10 or by weapon (3-30 + 12), then "They employ gigantic two-handed swords in battle. A storm giant’s oversized weapons do triple normal (man-sized) damage to all opponents, plus the giant‘s strength bonus. Thus, a storm giant’s two-handed sword does 3-30 (3d10) +12 points of damage"
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Feb 6, 2016 01:16
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I found it! It was Dragon Magazine #109: You're supposed to look for the weapon's normal damage in the left-hand column, and then match it with the columns to the right for the size of the creature. So if a Storm Giant is wielding a (Storm Giant-sized) Bec de Corbin, which normally does 1d8 damage, it'd instead deal 3d10 damage in their hands. And another flat bonus of +12 from table 2. There's even also rules for how to compute what happens when you, the human-sized character, pick up and try to use that Bec de Corbin after slaying the Storm Giant: it would be a 21-foot long weapon (3.5x longer than the original) and would weigh 4300 coin-equivalents (43x heavier than the original). It would still be a 3d10 weapon, but it would use your own Strength bonus and not the +12, and you'd have a -10 penalty for trying to use a wrong-sized weapon. The mental image of a Fighter charging into battle with a 21 foot, 430 pound polearm is amusing, to say the least.
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Feb 6, 2016 02:02
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AlphaDog posted:That sounds weird. Found it via google. That issue also introduced the half-satyr and half-dryad for all your forest-whoring needs. Also the long lost specialists article on dwarven beards. (Im not joking for anyone young relative to Dragon Magazine.) "Worth its Weight in Gold: A Dwarfs Beard is More than Hair".  (It also has one of the early-ish articles on building custom classes for players.)
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Feb 6, 2016 02:02
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GRADENKO! 
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Feb 6, 2016 02:03
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FRINGE posted:GRADENKO!  They wrote all sorts of poo poo in these old Dragon Magazine articles. While trying to track this down I found something detailing the use of smoke and poison gas in dungeons, complete with math on how to compute for diffusion. And another one that detailed the Thieves' Cant.
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Feb 6, 2016 02:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:
The fireball article was the first "whoa this magic poo poo has some danger to it" dnd moment for my young mind.  Ah Ecologies. All those thing no one ever thought they wanted to know and then loved afterwards. 
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Feb 6, 2016 02:25
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FRINGE posted:Yeah the old 2e era hallmarked by "Ecology of..." had a lot of interesting stuff, even if it didnt get used much. When it did come up it (whatever the special topic was) could make a session amazing though. I never used them as anything other than collections of ideas to plunder, but I loving loved those articles. They often ended up too spergy rather than creative for me, but they were almost universally interesting.
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Feb 6, 2016 03:19
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FRINGE posted:The only noteworthy thing that ever came of it (for us) was when one of the huge fighters realized he was big and strong enough to use an ogre sized weapon with no (or almost no? been a long time) to-hit penalty. The annarchive is a godsend if you're looking for Dragon or Dungeon pre-4e back issues
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Feb 6, 2016 17:06
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thefakenews posted:Edit: apparently he believes he needs 5 out of 6 scores to be high to make an effective Paladin. oh well tell him that that's not how 4e works and 4e generally has characters being more "OP" than any other edition of D&D
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Feb 6, 2016 17:13
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The annarchive is a godsend if you're looking for Dragon or Dungeon pre-4e back issues
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Feb 6, 2016 18:27
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Peter Regan of gaming material online store Squarehex, and writer/publisher of Oubliette, a Old School 'Zine, has set up another kickstarter - this time alongside David Black, of black!, an RPG blog of musings and such. It's for The Black Hack, a OSR RPG based on ye olde Ninteen Seventy-Ecks Popular Fantasy RPG©. Anyway, what does this product offer in a rapidly crowding market of Old School systems? Well, we haven't been told much yet, other than it's built for speed and sits within 20 pages of a5 paper, but here's the character sheet:  So, built into this system we can see there's already a simplified encumbrance system, of which we can see more of an older, WIP version on his blog to give us some insight, and abstract recording of consumables. A quick glance through Black's blog may shed some light of other ideas he has for his OSR hack. I'm personally not sure what to think of the possible inclusion of fifth-edition style "disadvantage", although it may work better in a system like 0E where the target numbers don't quite spiral up like they do in 3E+. Oddly enough, Regan himself will be kickstarting a more traditional retro-clone called FOSSIL, or Fantasy Old School System Index Lite, later this year because everyone and their mum is doing that right now.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:45
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Is anyone retrocloning 4e? I'm just curious.
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Feb 9, 2016 00:17
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NutritiousSnack posted:Is anyone retrocloning 4e? I'm just curious. There's actually an entire thread dedicated to this purpose: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3654793
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Feb 9, 2016 00:46
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NutritiousSnack posted:Is anyone retrocloning 4e? I'm just curious. Technically, that would be illegal due to the difference in licensing. However, WOTC can't very well sue someone for saying their character classes have 'powers'. In addition to the above thread, I would also recommend Strike!
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Feb 9, 2016 04:10
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So old-school treasure tables use letter codes from A to Z, right? Is there a sort of pattern to the general quality or quantity of any given treasure class, given the letter code? Is A always the best?
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Feb 9, 2016 04:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:So old-school treasure tables use letter codes from A to Z, right? Is there a sort of pattern to the general quality or quantity of any given treasure class, given the letter code? Is A always the best? In 2nd ed, each lettered entry is Z% chance of XdY things in each category (cp, sp, gp etc then gems, art, and magic) and if there's a pattern I can't figure it out. The table is divided into lair treasures (A-J, I think) and individual treasures (everything else), with lair treasures being generally better than individual, but there's no clear progression of A > B or anything.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:06
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It depends on what you want. H is generally pretty good if you just want a massive horde of...cash and jewelry and gems, U and V generally gave you a lot of non potion or scroll magic items with a fair percent chance. I don't think A was that impressive actually. And yeah, no real pattern.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:07
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H was specifically dragon treasure. They mostly all had themes. A-O are lairs and P-V are held treasure. L is a stash of gems. N and O are like wizard stashes of scrolls or potions. Unguarded treasure was its own table that scales with dungeon level.
Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 06:54
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DalaranJ posted:Technically, that would be illegal due to the difference in licensing. However, WOTC can't very well sue someone for saying their character classes have 'powers'. Strike is very good, and after my second computer death and rebirth prevented me from running Exalted, I feel like running a Gundam game using it...but it's not crunchy enough for me to think it can scratch my DnD 4E itch.
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Feb 9, 2016 07:12
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OD&D Supplement 2: Blackmoor is now available on DTRPG/DMsguild Any specific thoughts/opinions on this work? Appelcline's history makes it sound like a hot mess. On a somewhat related note, how are Monks in TSR-era D&D? I'm rather familiar with how much they've been generally shat on by 3.5 and Pathfinder, but not their earlier incarnations.
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Feb 9, 2016 15:35
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You know how druids have that dumb MORTAL KOMBAT thing for every level about 11 or so? for Monks, that starts at like 7th or 8th (OA toned this down considerably, with making it one per -monastery-, not in the entire world, so around that level you could go found your own school with blackjack and ninjas instead.) They got d4 Hit dice, (Though 2 HD at first level, so they could survive -two- rounds with a house cat as opposed to the wizard's one) They got no bonus to AC from Dex, (But started with an AC that improved per level, and with OA, could use the AC of their martial art if it's better.) no bonus to hit or damage from good strength (But got increasing open hand damage, and a scaling level bonus to damage with weapons.) and a lot of the same weird grab-bag of limited powers as the 3E monk. Basically the 3E monk tricked people into thinking it was good by not being as awful as the earlier version.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:OD&D Supplement 2: Blackmoor is now available on DTRPG/DMsguild Blackmoor has Monks and Assassins, a hit location system. underwater rules, and monsters, and The Temple of The Frog adventure which gives a good glimpse into Dave Arneson's dungeon design philosophy.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:17
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So apparently Godbound is up to the 1.0 Rules complete beta now and is about a month out from the kickstarter.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:13
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Nice. Could certainly be interesting.
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Feb 9, 2016 23:20
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Does anyone have experience running Tunnels & Trolls in a normal GM-players arrangement? I'm interested in running a oneshot, but I'm wondering if there's enough "interactivity" for players given the combat system.
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Feb 14, 2016 04:27
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The main thing you want to do with GM'd T&T is leverage the hell out of calling for saving throws. It's basically the Defy Danger/4E Page 42 of its day. Like there's a specific example in one of the books of using it for stuff like "I wanna dive between the giant's legs and try to cut his hamstrings, and getting asked to make a dex save, with a note that it could be used to deal full damage regardless of whether his side wins the roll-off. (This is basically how archery works. Make a save, get to deal bow damage to the enemy even if they get a higher result. ) Let people come up with plans, call for saves, give boosts so they actually interact with combat more than "Everyone pools their total damage together and compares it to the monsters."
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Feb 14, 2016 05:04
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Thank you! I think I'll do that! EDIT: I had a follow-up question. As far as I understand it: * Any damage taken by PCs in combat goes straight to CON * When CON reaches 0, the PC is unconscious and will slowly lose CON per round that they're unattended to * When CON reaches -10, the PC is dead * CON does not naturally regenerate within the same adventure - you have to resort of other means of healing, such as Poor Baby. (other attributes will regenerate at the rate of 1 per 10-minute rest, such as STR drained by casting spells) It's armor that trips me up: I know that, for example, Plate Mail adds 10 "hits", such that any damage a PC takes first goes to that instead of CON, but is it: * 10 hits per round of combat? * 10 hits per "encounter"? * 10 hits, period, for the entire adventure/set of armor? gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 05:29
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Depends - if you want an XCOM feel to the way armour works, just take it as per encounter. If you want it to be relatively realistic, make it per round. If you want your PCs to die on a regular basis, make it per adventure. T&T is one of those systems where (it seems, at least) a lot is left up to the GM's discretion.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:01
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I believe it'd be 10 per exchange of blows/round (Or 20 if you're a warrior, or 11 if a warrior-wizard.) The example of play in my copy assumes per-round, too.
unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 07:03
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Thank you for all the advice! In other news, I posted about The Black Hack in the kickstarter thread: gradenko_2000 posted:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730454032/the-black-hack And as of the latest update, the creator has finally given a preview of the game's core mechanics: * The core mechanic is roll a d20 under your attribute to do anything/everything * Given that it's based on OD&D, stat generation is probably going to be 3d6-in-order * Roll-under-attribute is still how you attack, the difference is that if the monster is higher-level than you (as in more Hit Dice), then your roll is harder. If you're level 3 and you're attacking a level 5 monster/monster with 5 HD, and you have 18 STR, you need to roll lower than a 16 instead, since the monster is 2 levels higher than you. * Monsters don't roll to attack. Instead, players roll to avoid getting hit. * Engagement ranges are abstracted, similar to 13th Age * Initiative is still roll-under-attribute, and I like how this is described: if you pass your roll-under-DEX check, you go before all of the monsters. If you fail your roll-under-DEX check, you go after all of the monsters. People in either before-monster or after-monster group can decide between themselves in which individual order they want to act * Since "to-hit" is done via roll-under checks, armor is instead used to absorb damage. * Saving throws are also roll-under checks. * Spellcasting also involves roll-under checks: You have a number of spell slots equal to your character's level. When you cast a spell, make a roll-under-WIS or INT check. If you fail, the spell goes off at the cost of one spell slot. If you succeed, the spell goes off and your spell slot is still usable. * Limited-use items, presumably things like ammo, has something called a Usage Die mechanic: whenever you use a limited-use item, roll a d20. If it comes up a 1 or 2, the Usage Die becomes a d12. Every time you roll the Usage Die and it comes up a 1 or 2, the die size becomes smaller and smaller until it's a d4 and then the item is completely consumed on the next 1 or 2 result. * The Advantage/Disadvantage concept is mentioned: at the DM's discretion, the player will roll two d20s and take the better result, although in this case lower is better. The initiative and Usage Die mechanics sound eminently poachable.
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Feb 14, 2016 17:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:And as of the latest update, the creator has finally given a preview of the game's core mechanics: I really like a lot of what I'm seeing from this so far. I'm probably going to run a Roll20 game once it comes out, to give it a personal test drive. It just feels like something that will run quick/fun and has a lot of the mechanics that I like (roll under, armor as DR, etc.).
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Feb 14, 2016 18:27
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Byers2142 posted:I really like a lot of what I'm seeing from this so far. I'm probably going to run a Roll20 game once it comes out, to give it a personal test drive. It just feels like something that will run quick/fun and has a lot of the mechanics that I like (roll under, armor as DR, etc.). This is pretty much exactly what I was trying to do Wil an all roll-under version of Beyond the Wall. Very nice.
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Feb 14, 2016 18:34
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I'm playing DCC right now. It's...okay, I guess?
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Feb 14, 2016 20:38
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm playing DCC right now. It comes down to what you want out of an OSR experience. What do you like about OSR games? gradenko_2000 posted:Thank you for all the advice! This actually sounds a lot like the type of OSR game I'd like to play.
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Feb 14, 2016 20:42
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Has the Black Hack author showed off any of the art? Hard to back a retroclone without good art
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Feb 14, 2016 20:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm playing DCC right now. DCC is fantasy loving Vietnam, the game. If you like that, it's serviceable, but you really need to like that experience.
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Feb 14, 2016 20:53
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Byers2142 posted:DCC is fantasy loving Vietnam, the game. If you like that, it's serviceable, but you really need to like that experience. It's two games. Low level, especially the funnel is where most of the FFV stuff happens. Above that it's goofy bongwizards 'n robots action.
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Feb 14, 2016 21:02
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Covok posted:It comes down to what you want out of an OSR experience. What do you like about OSR games? You know, but now that you ask I really have no idea what I want out of an OSR game. I mean, I started playing in the era that they're trying to emulate, but this stuff wasn't how we played back then and I still prefer modern mechanics.
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Feb 14, 2016 21:22
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