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The other thing is that Keep, like most old-school modules, assumed that there were 6-9 players in the party (plus potentially more with retainers), not 3-5, which means you had a small army at your back if things went south (which wasn't a given, per above).
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Jan 31, 2021 02:24
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aldantefax posted:nowhere does it say "these kobolds are out to kill people in the area trespassing and will take no prisoners". There are even actually rules for taking hostages and ransoming the PCs back to the Keep! It does feel as if it's sort of expected to follow a 'the players poke their nose in, trigger way too much heat, run away/mostly die/get captured/etc, regroup, formulate a plan, come back with some bullshit and turn the tides' pattern. It's one of the modules that the most just Does Not Work if you run it as a sort of series of modern tactical combat encounters that I've seen.
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Jan 31, 2021 04:33
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I just am just kind of baffled because I see this in the 5e thread too. "Random encounters" = "pointless, possibly unwinnable fights" is just being really literal minded and narrow in thinking when I've never treated or seen random encounters treated at such in any table I've been at since the 90s.
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Jan 31, 2021 04:48
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While I agree that a DM shouldn't be killing players outright with ambushes and that BX discourages this, it's incredibly obtuse to miss how what Payndz describes could happen from someone in the 80s reading the book in good faith. Reaction rolls in B/X are described on B24 as being used when the DM is unsure about how the monster would react. Based on that:quote:KOBOLD LAIR: There is a 2 in 6 chance that as the group Not only does this specifically tell the DM to have the kobolds attack, keep in mind that on average most players are going to be within 1 round of death from this ambush given the average character in the game is going to have 3-4 HP at this point, with Fighters more likely to have 4-5. And this is a pretty well-laid trap: if the surviving characters decide to do what may seem like the smart thing and retreat to the cover of the tunnel (remember, the kobolds are attacking from the trees outside), there's a decent chance their front line is going to fall into that pit which of course also does enough damage to instakill most first level characters. So not only is there a pretty good chance of losing a number of party members within the very first round of this ambush, there's another very good chance that more will die when they retreat to figure out what to do next (a pretty reasonable action to take). I'm not saying this is bad design or anything, but to flip the gently caress out like that because someone died to this is silly, and to accuse them of not reading the book is rather ironic.
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Jan 31, 2021 05:05
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Ah ha! Okay. I was flipping through and missed that. I think then that's a valid criticism of reading the instructive material literally. You don't necessarily need to have them roll as strike to kill, even though that is the assumption. If you are a new DM then take the leap that attack = strike to kill, at least implied by the mechanics (since you die when you hit 0 HP, I don't think B/X has a concept of going to negatives) then there are some things that can be done. That said, I'm wondering because there is a much more modern assumption that dying is bad, even if you just created a character in 5 minutes. I think that most of the stories told anecdotally from my print copy of In Search of the Unknown have to do with neophyte DMs being hard on their players accidentally, but they still continued playing. However, that is a very roundabout way of saying that "sometimes characters will end up in very unfair situations; however, as a DM you have to make a judgement call on how unfair you're going to make it", with the other things that directly contradict what's going on. Replenishing party members at the very beginning though has some interesting meta-things: - Players learn that there is some unfairness to the game - Perhaps the survivors do get out or the kobolds will use them as an example and gloat to the nearest settlement about how they have captured foolhardy and naive adventurers, which also means this now enters into "common knowledge" when previously it was not - The characters that die can be replaced if the survivors are taken prisoner, perhaps even with carbon copies of them (or they are knocked out mercifully and taken prisoner with the rest of the group) Dying at that extremely low level did not really feel like a punishment, and if it causes a negative experience because dying is unfun to see the result (maybe it's a form of bullying the players?), then it is an extension of losing being unfun. This perception would also describe in greater detail why game design trended towards more explicitly saying that it is hard for player characters to die in more modern editions to the part that characters are very difficult to kill at first level to nearly impossible to kill at high level. Anyway, if dying is unfun and a product of bad design, new OSR games and retroclones should do away with it, right? But, since nearly all of them feature death, sometimes quick and meaningless...But perhaps it is better said that having an encounter that would smoke a party of adventurers on even odds with tactical advantage is mostly unfun to a larger group of people? Also thinking more on this, the pedigree of players which originally designed and played D&D were used to death as being part and parcel of a larger game - that is, tactical miniatures war games. So, losing a character is not a big deal because they lose characters constantly in massive engagements at scale. Rather, it is more interesting to know how that character met their untimely fate and laugh it off and use that as part of the instructive loop. Whether or not that learning through dying is toxic behavior is up for debate. After all, it was a direct inspiration for the "Souls" video games, which made replacing your character more or less instantaneous, and that puts lopsided encounters and unfair things in front of the player constantly. Perhaps that could be used to re-contextualize the old game texts?
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Jan 31, 2021 06:21
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A lot of things you say in that post are true and fair points/questions, but you're preaching to the choir. Really I think you should probably just apologize to the person you quoted for insulting their intelligence and reading ability when all they said was that people died to DMs running that encounter more or less as written. Also, while KotB totally contemplates players being take hostage or perhaps parleying into a prisoner situation rather than being killed, personally I think it's a leap to think that a newbie DM running KotB is going to read kobolds attacking with arrows from the trees as shooting to pin their shoes to the ground or something. The way attacks work is defined in the book prior to that and doesn't discuss making attacks for reasons other than to kill (surrender scenarios are mentioned in the book and are invariably enemies dropping their weapons and actively surrendering, not being knocked out). A DM thinking those kobolds are shooting to kill is absolutely doing the most straightforward and reasonable reading of that text.
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Jan 31, 2021 06:49
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Yeah, I will call a "my bad" for coming in a bit hot there. Sorry, fellow poster! I suppose I am just thinking about how the divergence in thought took place then if the default was murdering the players in that encounter. I do agree that here on SA, people that would normally be perusing the OSR thread have well-formed opinions and a large host of experience.
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Jan 31, 2021 06:57
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aldantefax posted:If you are a new DM then take the leap that attack = strike to kill, It's not a leap, taken literally the only creature that can be dealt nonlethal damage is a dragon. aldantefax posted:Anyway, if dying is unfun and a product of bad design, new OSR games and retroclones should do away with it, right? This is impossible because the bounds of what is considered a retroclone are generally agreed upon to adhere to the Old School Manifesto which as one of it's tenets expects character death. By contrast, two heartbeakers which I am poaching the approaches to death in my current designs, Torchbearer and Strike!, mostly eschew death within combat.
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Jan 31, 2021 06:58
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To change tracks, I am thinking about systems which use non-standard ways of conflict resolution or task checks. Rather than using a d20 + stuff vs. roll high / low or 2d6, etc. I’m wondering if there are other systems which take the OSR conceptual model and add layers on top of that including the lethality, such as using cards to reflect conflict resolution instead? Or, is the dice throw too core for OSR core systems? I picked up a few DCC books over the course of the past year and while they do not explicitly have anything that changes task resolution around too much they do add “accessories”. Chained Coffin’s print version includes a goofy puzzle wheel that can be used in a variety of ways as a tactile supplement.
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Jan 31, 2021 07:55
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aldantefax posted:I’m wondering if there are other systems which take the OSR conceptual model and add layers on top of that including the lethality, such as using cards to reflect conflict resolution instead? Or, is the dice throw too core for OSR core systems? It's more the ends than the means, I would say, though I would also say that a lot of people don't really understand the ends and so can miss / lose stuff when switching to an alternate resolution system of some sort. I'd ask what you find the matter with the existing method(s), and what you hope to accomplish with an alternate. My immediate concern would be the possibility of welding on cruft to what is at heart a very simple system, which in some ways is a virtue of its own. Certainly though, AD&D is much more complex than Basic, but still preserves the same core, so as a general rule I would think there's room for added complexity (the "rules-light" mantra of OSR play, like so many other bits about it, only makes sense when considering its origins, which is specifically contrasting itself against then-current 3rd ed D&D; AD&D is by no means rules-light, taken on its own terms).
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Jan 31, 2021 08:09
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Since I am a believer of “the mechanics inform the narrative” and vice versa, I would want something like a hand of cards to represent tangible things in the game world. This could be conceptual like someone having some kind of pool of reserve and so using a card means they draw closer to their inevitable fate (or events remove cards from their reserve like a particularly nasty blow), but perhaps also to leverage mundane items and externalize them from a character sheet. Aside from Meikyuu Kingdom and actual board games like Mage Knight I don’t think I’ve seen yet an OSR system which synthesizes or re-interprets the core ruleset into another source other than the standard character sheet where you record all attributes and then your dice that you use against your character sheet. If I’m thinking in greater detail about this to design it, I would represent things traditionally on a character sheet as something more malleable and easier to gain/lose. Maybe it doesn’t need to be focused on task resolution and reinterpreting it from a single throw, just having peripheral types of things that reinforce the system components which fuel a given OSR game engine, that I know of, anyway. But perhaps someone out there considers a game like Everway as OSR?
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Jan 31, 2021 08:21
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No offence taken, y'all.  For me, the early 80s introductory experience of D&D as a young teen was: One person who owned the rules and B2, had read them, and absorbed maybe a third of what they said; One or two people who really wanted to get into the game but only had the DM's fragmentary descriptions of how to play it to go on (I was one of these); Another couple of people who were vaguely interested but had no intention of taking it seriously; At least one who thought it was a stupid waste of time but was only doing it because all their friends were. So with that mindset, all encounters are fights to the death because the DM doesn't know any better, and won't let anyone else read the module to check how it's meant to be played because that would be "cheating". (Ironically, the first time I DM'd after buying the rules myself, two of the players - one of them the original DM - kept leaving the table because they had a copy of the same module and were sneaking looks at what was coming next.) In B2, I don't think we ever even visited the titular Keep, but went straight to the caves. And then, 2 in 6 chance of...
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Jan 31, 2021 09:09
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DalaranJ posted:This is impossible because the bounds of what is considered a retroclone are generally agreed upon to adhere to the Old School Manifesto
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Jan 31, 2021 19:34
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I'm assuming he's referring to Finch's Quick Primer, but while it was extremely influential and is still widely spread around, it's hardly gospel.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:11
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mellonbread posted:Do you have a copy of this manifesto that we've all allegedly read and agreed to? Google turns up an unrelated martial arts manual. Hmm, I thought there was a more recent version in google drive that was being community updated but I can't find it. I suppose I must be thinking of this document? https://www.lulu.com/content/3019374 e: Ah, it's here: https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html Again, can't be as influential as I thought if no one knew what it was. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 03:01
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Principia Apocrypha is a pretty good summation of modern attitudes toward the OSR I think. However I am way too online to know how many people even know of its existence.
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Feb 1, 2021 03:37
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Yeah they're more guidelines than hard rules
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Feb 1, 2021 03:53
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Maybe it's a good opportunity to refresh the OP as well as grind out some cool links? I can't say I'm familiar with either but a quick search in-thread does mention Principia Apocrypha via DalaranJ about it being PbtA + OSR aesthetic.
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Feb 1, 2021 04:24
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In any case though, PC-death-is-okay is pretty widely accepted. If you asked everyone to vote on aspects of OSR play, it would probably be in the vast majority of ballots, IMO. Though I'm in a game now where PC death is impossible. PCs just get auto-revived at the start of each session/time jump. We can still fail missions, and it's still rules-light-high-sim, so maybe it's not 100% OSR but it's still pretty far away from modern D&D. vvvvvv yes dear we're all well aware of such things Sax Solo fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 04:44
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Sax Solo posted:In any case though, PC-death-is-okay is pretty widely accepted. If you asked everyone to vote on aspects of OSR play, it would probably be in the vast majority of ballots, IMO. There's a whole universe of role-playing games that are far away from modern D&D. It's not just OSR, however that's defined.
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Feb 1, 2021 04:48
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Honestly, I think the world of OSR and retromutants benefits from different and weird takes. My interest is usually in randomly/procedurally generated content that surprises the GM as well as the players, sandbox/crawl levels of openness, and being able to grab and go with interesting player ideas or potential encounters. While just about every game that I've run in the milieu has had death on the table, I probably wouldn't hesitate to remove it if I decided to run Skycrawl or something for a group that doesn't find it compelling, and "death happens a lot but these are still the same characters in some fashion" actually sounds like a fun way to engage with a megadungeon, horrible death crawl, or other deadly space.
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Feb 1, 2021 05:39
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Sax Solo posted:Though I'm in a game now where PC death is impossible. PCs just get auto-revived at the start of each session/time jump. We can still fail missions, and it's still rules-light-high-sim, so maybe it's not 100% OSR but it's still pretty far away from modern D&D. Oh, well, I’d love to hear more about this since I’m designing a similar system. How does this part of the game work, and what do you feel are the strengths/weaknesses of such a system? What do you think is important to making a game that removes the threat of death to work?
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Feb 1, 2021 18:18
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Nickoten posted:Principia Apocrypha is a pretty good summation of modern attitudes toward the OSR I think. However I am way too online to know how many people even know of its existence. are you telling me the world is not six billion gretchlings all aching for arnold's lamb piss
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Feb 1, 2021 18:42
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Arivia posted:are you telling me the world is not six billion gretchlings all aching for arnold's lamb piss Reading this cost me some SAN points, but to that matter, does any OSR or retroclone feature insanity mechanics like Call of Cthulhu etc. does?
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Feb 1, 2021 19:05
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Arivia posted:are you telling me the world is not six billion gretchlings all aching for arnold's lamb piss no just us I think
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Feb 1, 2021 19:25
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Nickoten posted:no just us I think dammit i have so many wonders to share with these magic dice
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Feb 1, 2021 19:33
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aldantefax posted:Reading this cost me some SAN points, but to that matter, does any OSR or retroclone feature insanity mechanics like Call of Cthulhu etc. does? I could be wrong but I wanna say Shadow of the Demon Lord does?
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Feb 1, 2021 21:47
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aldantefax posted:Reading this cost me some SAN points, but to that matter, does any OSR or retroclone feature insanity mechanics like Call of Cthulhu etc. does? Don't know if you'd consider it OSR/retroclone but Warhammer Fantasy has fear/sanity mechanics that are similar (probably due to also being a percentile system like CoC).
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Feb 1, 2021 22:29
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The Goblin Punch guy wrote some
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Feb 1, 2021 22:44
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aldantefax posted:Reading this cost me some SAN points, but to that matter, does any OSR or retroclone feature insanity mechanics like Call of Cthulhu etc. does? Silent Legions, of course. Best Left Buried makes it a basic part of the system with your "Grip" being your mental hit points, which you can spend to fuel magic or amazing effort. One of the few games where it isn't another rule tacked on to make the game even less forgiving. Crypts & Things does it using your Wisdom as the Sanity stat. Fantastic Heroes & Witchery is very similar. Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque has a subsystem for Horror & Madness that is a little more intricate, with modifiers based on your circumstances. Still, the ultimate result is rolling on a table to see what kind of mental illness you get. Veins of the Earth has results for hunger and insanity that are better developed than that, though they still seem a bit fussy to deal with if you're managing other dungeoneering logistics. It encourages thinking of "The Rapture" as a psychic predator stalking you in the dark.
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Feb 1, 2021 22:48
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DalaranJ posted:Oh, well, I’d love to hear more about this since I’m designing a similar system. How does this part of the game work, and what do you feel are the strengths/weaknesses of such a system? What do you think is important to making a game that removes the threat of death to work? The setup is: we are summon-able consultants/troubleshooters for an usurped queen. She can summon us once per year, for four hours at a time, to help her with some situation. She wants to prove she's the rightful queen, and it just so happens the way to do this is to solve a bunch of puzzle tombs of the ancients. But it's other emergencies too: we've broken her out of prison, helped her pull off a heist, etc.. So we are usually starting sessions in media res of something she's up to. After four hours of game (and loosely RL) time, we port out one by one, get a couple skill points to spend mysteriously in the void somehow, and pop in the next situation. We are only able to take along equipment we hold in our hands. Tricks to carry more haven't worked. The popping in and out one by one is a nice detail of the setup, which allows for spotlighting. Especially at the very beginning, it allows a pretty tight interaction loop between the DM and one player to establish the scene quickly, instead of dumping out the whole box of cats at once. If we die, we come back fine in the next port fully intact. The cost is we don't take anything through in our hands. And though we're immortal, our queen is not, and we're not sure what happens if she dies. So there's a strong "do it for her" aspect, but we also want to just beat the challenges. The (somewhat loosey-goosey but still real) time limit is crucial in motivating things. We don't have forever to gently caress around. We also know the DM would definitely let the whole campaign end in failure if we hosed up too much. (There's more to the setup, like: we are unstuck in time and jumping between this queen and her granddaughter randomly, plus one unexplained jump to an unknown place. We were not told any of this setup when we made characters; we just popped into existence one by one in the first adventure to rescue a woman who didn't speak any language we knew. We don't know if we have original bodies somewhere else or we're clones or what.) For years this DM ran a lethal, equipment-heavy, sandboxy campaign, and so it's been nice to experience the total opposite on those axes. So far we haven't really missed larger scale planning and self-direction, and it's been about 16 missions over 20 sessions. Though I suspect one player does miss the sandbox atmosphere where he could sow chaos and gently caress things up and forge his own destiny. I think the DM enjoys focusing on a little adventure design and shoving it in our faces instead of hoping we come across it and choose to engage with it. Also, because our characters don't have much equipment or time, the focus can be narrower still. We can't go to the town and buy some gunpowder. But the price is that the adventure design has to be pretty tight. Usually there's a central puzzle to be solved. His puzzle designs are very good, and they're real puzzles, not like this crud. You could probably replace the puzzle with some other kind of gamey action conflict pretty easily. But he's also said that the intro and dressing of the missions is actually the hardest part, and the "what the gently caress is going on, what am i supposed to do, how am i going to do it" progression is my favorite part personally.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:27
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SlimGoodbody posted:I could be wrong but I wanna say Shadow of the Demon Lord does? It does, yeah. And being frightened is a common debuff in SotDL too (though it's not the "take you out of the fight" effect it is in D&D).
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Feb 1, 2021 23:59
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tell me i made a good decision spending $200 on dungeon crawl classics dice and assorted books having never played the system before. i want to start a campaign for a 3 person group this weekend and it seems like everything i've wanted in a ttrpg i bought the lankhmar boxed set and plan to run that looking through it i am so stoked on the art. i hope running the character funnel is as fun as i'm anticipating jarofpiss fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 03:36
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jarofpiss posted:tell me i made a good decision spending $200 on dungeon crawl classics dice and assorted books having never played the system before. i want to start a campaign for a 3 person group this weekend and it seems like everything i've wanted in a ttrpg its the best fantasy rpg. you made a good choice
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Feb 2, 2021 03:46
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I'm in basically the same boat, after buying a bunch of the PDFs from the DCC Humble Bundle and deciding I wanted a real book and some dice. I didn't spend quite that much but pretty close to it after international shipping. Running a big level 0 funnel looks like a lot of fun but I'm a little worried about how it'd work out online vs. playing in person, when everyone has so many characters.
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Feb 2, 2021 03:47
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If people are having trouble with it just treat their pack of dudes as one person with however many attacks and let them assign the hits they take to whichever mook they want. It lets them protect their favorites to an extent which is nice.
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Feb 2, 2021 03:54
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alg posted:its the best fantasy rpg. you made a good choice flipping through the rulebook and looking at the art had me hyped like i'm a kid opening heroquest lol Johnny Landmine posted:I'm in basically the same boat, after buying a bunch of the PDFs from the DCC Humble Bundle and deciding I wanted a real book and some dice. I didn't spend quite that much but pretty close to it after international shipping. Running a big level 0 funnel looks like a lot of fun but I'm a little worried about how it'd work out online vs. playing in person, when everyone has so many characters. yeah i got my copy of the rulebook in yesterday and started looking through it then just got too excited and ordered all the dice and an extra softcover copy for the players. my lankhmar set should be delivered tomorrow so i'll start prepping for the lvl 0 game this saturday. i found a few lvl 0 character generators on the goodman website so i'm hoping we can jump right in. the system seems pretty intuitive so far and i'm coming from only having run icrpg and 5e. gonna have to spend some time with it this week if i'm gonna run a game this saturday though
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Feb 2, 2021 03:56
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jarofpiss posted:tell me i made a good decision spending $200 on dungeon crawl classics dice and assorted books having never played the system before. i want to start a campaign for a 3 person group this weekend and it seems like everything i've wanted in a ttrpg Sure
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Feb 2, 2021 04:03
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If you had $200 to spend on RPGs it's honestly hard to think of too many more enjoyable ways to spend it. It's a good system! Don't get hung up on the funnels - that's not a model for campaign play, just a fun way to get started.
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Feb 2, 2021 05:53
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jarofpiss posted:tell me i made a good decision spending $200 on dungeon crawl classics dice and assorted books having never played the system before. i want to start a campaign for a 3 person group this weekend and it seems like everything i've wanted in a ttrpg You just made the best decision. I've been stuck on a remote island for a little over a year due to Covid and last year I managed to keep a core group of players together for weekly games for 4 months straight with a DCC campaign. We started with Accursed Heart of the World Ender and then continued on into most of the Chained Coffin campaign. I was really unsure about multiple characters per player, but now I'm totally sold on it. Softens the blow when a character dies (happens a lot) and leads to some creative problem solving.
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Feb 2, 2021 06:01
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