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I just started listening to Rob's Basement and the literal first attack roll of the game kills a PC. Which is really just not a good way to sell the system imo. Level 0 stuff is fun in theory, but I think cutting it out and going straight to level 1 is good. Or maybe doing a level 0 adventure prequel/whatever with disposable PCs to learn the system or get introduced to the setting.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:22
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Serf posted:I just started listening to Rob's Basement and the literal first attack roll of the game kills a PC. Which is really just not a good way to sell the system imo. Level 0 stuff is fun in theory, but I think cutting it out and going straight to level 1 is good. Or maybe doing a level 0 adventure prequel/whatever with disposable PCs to learn the system or get introduced to the setting. Lol I remember that but I forgot it was literally the first attack. People say they want gritty dangerous combat, but if you put even five minutes of thought into a character, they shouldn't get iced in the first session.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:34
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I treat the level 0 stuff as being there to appease OSR idiots, and just start everyone at level 1.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:36
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Pharmaskittle posted:Lol I remember that but I forgot it was literally the first attack. People say they want gritty dangerous combat, but if you put even five minutes of thought into a character, they shouldn't get iced in the first session. In theory rolling up another level 0 character takes less than three minutes. Which I'm sure appeals to OSR type people, but its a bit at odds with how most people I know play games.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:36
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both times i've played a level 0 my char was the first target of an attack, both times by zombies, and managed to survive the first time was a pretty good character development moment too, convinced me to make that char a priest of father death
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Mar 22, 2018 15:37
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I kinda want to design a bunch of level 0-appropriate monsters that apply some of the "soft move/hard move" philosophy from PbtA. Like, instead of a zombie that just bites you for 1d6+1 damage or whatever, a zombie that has a 0-damage grab attack, then a special bite attack that it can only use against grabbed characters. Stuff to give level 0 characters a little more time to react to danger and save their asses.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:59
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Level 1 and 2 is as weak as I'd really go with PCs for the aforementioned fragility of level 0. Levels 2-4 feel like they hit an awesome spot of "you have the capacity to fight back but a few bad moves can wreck you," which I think is ideal for a more grounded and intense setting. Level 0 appropriate enemies should take cues from DnD 4e minions: fixed damage on a successful attack, and only a single hitpoint (or 5 at the most). Other than that, moves which are telegraphed or require setups and triggers would work to give disempowered PCs the ability to plan and mitigate their own weaknesses.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:14
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When I do my upcoming game I'm thinking I'm just gonna use lv0 as a build up of suspense/mystery until the end of the session where if they encounter enemies they will be overwhelmingly outnumbered and hope they are smart enough to run and then face a single enemy that they can try taking on. Which hopefully is the catalyst that has them teaming up for future adventures storywise.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:49
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I dunno, I like level 0 games. After Serf ran a bunch of lvl 0 one-shots on Discord and introduced me to it, I ran a few of my own for my RL group. I was using the pre-made adventures, some of which are a wee bit overtuned (to the tune of TPK on the first encounter), but they had fun. From these one-shots, plus the beginning of the proper campaign I started earlier this year, the players' general though processess could be summed up as "this world is a gently caress; we're the underdogs so unless we're careful and clever we'll die like dogs." Levelling up felt more like getting more tools to be careful/clever than flipping the script, but then at the end of the previous adventure (lvl 5) they finally met a proper demon. After the first round, when it had aptly demonstrated all its abilities, their reaction was "this is bullshit, we gotta run or we're all gonna die." They managed to get some breathing room, heal and prepare, and when they rejoined battle 2 of the players did 60 damage to the 80 Health demon. They were amazed and ecstatic, and the same dude who said the previous quote just looked at the other players and said "Are... are we the bullshit?" I don't think they would've had quite that reaction if we had skipped the first couple levels.
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Mar 22, 2018 19:13
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Yeah it's very much a by-group thing. Some people want a Dark Souls thing where they struggle for every scrap of survival and then can feel amazing when they're demonstrably more powerful than before, and some people would like to not have their noses ground into the stone before they can accomplish stuff. Not really a situation where one is better, just that by default the system supports a "die until you don't die" style.
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Mar 22, 2018 20:48
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Secretly, stopped being willing to kill my players around level 5. The whole game is based on them Now! I'm not making new plots damnit, liiive! Edit: to expand on this, I don't need to kill my players now because they have goals and friends and family I can take from them. Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to you irl, and it's not the worst thing you can do to a well established PC. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 22:11
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It's more interesting to drive the PCs insane or corrupt them than to just outright kill them. But I won't pull punches.
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Mar 22, 2018 23:20
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Jack B Nimble posted:Secretly, stopped being willing to kill my players around level 5. The whole game is based on them Now! I'm not making new plots damnit, liiive! Yeah, the secret reason GMs pull punches that they don't say outloud is "I already planned too much poo poo based around your character, like hell I'm doing all that work again."
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Mar 23, 2018 05:09
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Level 0 games are fun, but it's kind of a gimmick session everyone has to be into upfront. Like puzzle-heavy dungeons. And the best implementation of the gimmick is found in Dungeon Crawl Classics: everyone rolls four entirely random characters (no stat swaps, no takebacks, no nothing) and whomever survives the fantasy vietnam session becomes an actual character. It's particularly fun when the players start strategizing around putting their least desirable characters on door-opening, chest-touching duty and so on.
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Mar 23, 2018 10:43
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I'm slowly working on a 0 level adventure where the PCs work their way through an area, hopefully getting more horrified with everything they find on the way, including some already dead creatures, then eventually an actual demon or devil that tries to convince them to let him go. If they do, he goes to town on the creatures that imprisoned him, the same ones the PCs have seen, then vanishes to reappear at some later date and harass the party. Only one smallish fight near the end, might only bring people to near death, depending on how lethal everyone wants to play.
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Mar 23, 2018 11:51
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What does OSR stand for?
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Mar 23, 2018 12:23
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Tias posted:What does OSR stand for? Depends on who you ask, but I go with Old School Rules. Just aping older editions of D&D and poo poo.
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Mar 23, 2018 12:28
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Tias posted:What does OSR stand for? Old School Renaissance/Revival, which started out as a movement to ditch D&D-style simulationist design in favour of going back to more rules-light dungeon-crawling in the vein of OD&D or Basic, but pretty much immediately got co-opted by Gamergate/Neo-Nazi types into a movement about how if you don't like chainmail bikinis or baby rape you're the real bigots, games that aren't AD&D are cultural Marxism looking to destroy RPGs, and not murdering two PCs per fight is directly responsible for the decline of Western civilisation. (There are of course people who associate with the OSR because they're AD&D grogs who don't know about the lovely people, without necessarily being lovely themselves, and that's who I was referring to rather than the first group, but the movement as a whole is tainted by association.  )
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 13:21
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Nah man, the OSR has a ton of chill folks in it nowadays who are genuinely interested in designing rad games and who aren't awful. Kevin Crawford, the Goodman Games folks, the guy who does Dark Dungeons, etc. Most like old games and just want to play simple D&D. You'll have the regressives, but hell, there's plenty of them in D&D and Pathfinder circles, too. But Raggi isn't representative.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:53
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Lemon-Lime posted:Old School Renaissance/Revival, which started out as a movement to ditch D&D-style simulationist design in favour of going back to more rules-light dungeon-crawling in the vein of OD&D or Basic, but pretty much immediately got co-opted by Gamergate/Neo-Nazi types into a movement about how if you don't like chainmail bikinis or baby rape you're the real bigots, games that aren't AD&D are cultural Marxism looking to destroy RPGs, and not murdering two PCs per fight is directly responsible for the decline of Western civilisation.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:10
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I have been to a *lot* of Klan meetings (420 chapter blaze it) and no one there has ever been playing OD&D - they're all pathfinder snobs.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:11
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Yeah, whenever some goon went grogmining on Stormfront for grogs.txt, it was invariably some dude's d20/3.5/PF hacks.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:23
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Hell, just the other day I was in a Blades in the Dark discussion when one guy brought up how great the Confederacy was and how SJWs are ruining games, so... There is, imo, an overrepresentation of those voices in OSR stuff because those particular people are incredibly loud and annoying. Stuff like Beyond the Wall and Kevin Crawford's entire oeuvre are pretty cool. I've even seen SotDL pitched as an OSR game, even though its really not.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:32
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Lol I love baggage this place has. You see, neo-nazis play dnd like *this*. Us upstanding citizens play sleek modern systems. *drowns baby in urine* Yeah, that's exactly the point I was making and not the fact that Pundit/Trollman/ZakS/Raggi all claim to be part of the OSR. Thanks for your valued input. Serf posted:I've even seen SotDL pitched as an OSR game, even though its really not. It's D&D-but-streamlined in a way that's sort of oldschool (it measures ranges in yards instead of squares and doesn't have power blocks or keywords), it has a setting where PCs aren't presented as important heroes from the get-go, and it has the level 0 stuff so everyone can remember how great it was to get one-shot by pretty much anything. It definitely has oldschool elements, not that all of them are automatically bad. e; there's some decent stuff that ended up coming out of the OSR design-wise (Beyond the Wall and Red Tide have some neat ideas, and I count SotDL as something that's inspired by oldschool design) but as a ~movement~ it's pretty poisoned by the fact that its most vocal proponents when it started out were the tabletop equivalent of Gamergate, and they haven't gone anywhere. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 16:42
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yeah i'm teasing you because there's approximately a 0% chance that someone asking "What does OSR stand for?" wants to hear about 5-year old SA drama regarding internet rpg personalities
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Mar 23, 2018 16:43
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Also the image of neo-nazis getting serious at their nazi meetup over which edition of D&D to play is funny to me. Most chapters prefer Powered by the Rapture-based systems.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:45
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Lemon-Lime posted:Yeah, that's exactly the point I was making and not the fact that Pundit/Trollman/ZakS/Raggi all claim to be part of the OSR.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:55
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OSR is a mixed bag, but I like it more than the PbtA stuff where every character is very similar mechanically and your RPG goal is, I dunno, reliving high school.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:22
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dwarf74 posted:No, it really looks like you're saying that the entire OSR oeuvre should get tossed out because those are the OSR and how it's all tainted by association with those dudes. Which is a rather hot take! Most of the OSR ~oeuvre~ should get tossed out because Crawford and Goodman Games are the 10% of it that consists of a handful of people designing games with some neat ideas but which are let down by the fact that they're tied to garbage 80s game design, and the other 90% consists of reprinting AD&D rules with one or two changes. The fact that it was co-opted by Gamergate in its infancy just doesn't help its legitimacy as a ~design movement~. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 17:30
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SunAndSpring posted:OSR is a mixed bag, but I like it more than the PbtA stuff where every character is very similar mechanically and your RPG goal is, I dunno, reliving high school. PBTA is a mixed bag, but I like it more than the OSR stuff where every character is very similar mechanically and your RPG goal is, I dunno, dungeon crawling.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:32
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We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white wizards. - Gandalf
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Mar 23, 2018 17:34
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white wizards. Gandalf died after the mines of Moria, which is how he came back as an Imperial Wizard instead of a Grand Wizard. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 17:37
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white wizards. if you find the idea of fantasy nerds who are also massive racists this funny then I have great news for you
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Mar 23, 2018 17:37
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A black man is elected president of gondar while the two competing KKK wizards squabble over whether orcs should roll for stats.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:46
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Serf posted:PBTA is a mixed bag, but I like it more than the OSR stuff where every character is very similar mechanically and your RPG goal is, I dunno, dungeon crawling. Dungeon crawling good, high school bad.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:57
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SunAndSpring posted:Dungeon crawling good, high school bad. Good thing both sorts of game can do all kinds of things then.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:58
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I'm not sure how you can look at a Gunlugger and a Maestro d' and conclude those two characters are similar.
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Mar 23, 2018 18:10
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Serf posted:Good thing both sorts of game can do all kinds of things then. If someone willingly plays a high schooler they must be destroyed for the good of gaming, inshallah.
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Mar 23, 2018 18:11
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SunAndSpring posted:If someone willingly plays a high schooler they must be destroyed for the good of gaming, inshallah. I am definitely down for all anime to be wiped from the face of elfgaming. Co-signed.
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Mar 23, 2018 18:13
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Serf posted:I am definitely down for all anime to be wiped from the face of elfgaming. Co-signed. As someone who is presently rewatching Record of Lodoss War, I have to take umbrage with this proposal.
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Mar 23, 2018 18:22
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