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I only just came to understand the luck effect in the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, etc, all using modified 2e). it sounds sort of similar: if you've got a +1 luck effect, then all of your outgoing damage rolls ignore a 1. so if you're using a mace, your damage is 2-6. meanwhile, all of the incoming damage ignores the highest pip, so if you get hit by by a mace you take 1-5. the luck spell only lasts 2 rounds so I usually don't use it, but in Icewind Dale there's a scimitar that grants +2 luck for every roll, so eg an outgoing 10th-level fireball would do 30-60 damage and an incoming 10th-level fireball would do 10-40 damage. it's implemented as a plus with a ceiling or a minus with a floor, so in the first fireball, each die would roll a 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, or 6. the second fireball's dice would each roll 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, or 4.
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Jul 11, 2022 17:09
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Rutibex posted:I love my big phone book RPG supplements. Check out the best monster manual: I never thought of that book as being particularly thick, but I guess it really is.
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Jul 11, 2022 18:54
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I picked up a copy of Ultraviolet Grasslands. It's beautiful and thematic, but I'm not sure I have any idea how I'd run it. That's the same problem I have with Troika and Mork Borg.
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Jul 11, 2022 19:47
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PeterWeller posted:I never thought of that book as being particularly thick, but I guess it really is. 2e had a weird format where the monsters were released as loose pages to be put into a binder. So when TSR abandoned this dumb concept they had a huge amount of monster material they crammed into a compiled 2e monster book. I love the formatting of this book. Because it was originally loose pages every monster takes up exactly 1 page, front and back. It's extremely dense, I would say it's the best monster manual that you can get for D&D. The Beholder section alone is something they turned into an entire book for 3.5e.
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Jul 11, 2022 23:21
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Rutibex posted:2e had a weird format where the monsters were released as loose pages to be put into a binder. So when TSR abandoned this dumb concept they had a huge amount of monster material they crammed into a compiled 2e monster book. I love the formatting of this book. Because it was originally loose pages every monster takes up exactly 1 page, front and back. It's extremely dense, I would say it's the best monster manual that you can get for D&D. The Beholder section alone is something they turned into an entire book for 3.5e. "too many books that are great: the Monstrous Manual*, the Poetics of Space *2nd Edition" I distinctly remember a junior high sick day where I laid on the couch and read that book for hours. It was my first MM and it really was excellent.
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Jul 12, 2022 00:15
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Beerdeer posted:I picked up a copy of Ultraviolet Grasslands. It's beautiful and thematic, but I'm not sure I have any idea how I'd run it. That's the same problem I have with Troika and Mork Borg. Yeah, it's weird. The core loop of travel is pretty well defined, but they really don't give you much more for how to handle how any given encounter/location you visit plays out than a seed of an idea that they then tell you to flesh out on your own. It's a frustration I have with a lot of popular OSR stuff--they do the fun part of prepping a game (come up with a cool idea), but don't help with the hard part (figuring out how it actually works in practice). I think some people have started calling this gently caress You Design I wonder if the current OSR preoccupation with Proceduralism is a backlash against this sort of design.
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Jul 12, 2022 02:07
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I feel like Mork Borg is actually pretty good about telling you how to run it if you go by the text alone, it's just hard to find any of it while you're trying to look up rules. The introductory adventure is as clearly laid out and explained as the rest of the book is obscure, and (at least for me) worked as a pretty decent GM guide for how the game runs in general. I wonder if the new less-flashy edition of the rulebook they just made available will help with this (understandable) criticism, but the ship has probably already sailed. Troika, though, yeah. Kind of a nightmare and it doesn't help that the sample adventure, like much of the rest of the book, is laid out in unformatted paragraphs and the included "map" is less than useless if you're trying to figure out where things are.
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Jul 12, 2022 02:22
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I've been browsing the 1e DMG and it seems like a player could weaponize the class specific manuals pretty easily--as written, for example, a magic user who so much as scans a few letters of the Manual of Puissant Skill at Arms gets stunned for 1d6 turns and loses 10,000 to 60,000 experience points. I'm sure the idea was to gently caress over the players who unreasonably opened the random book they found, but it feels like a crafty player could flash it in front of an opposing magic user's face to stun and level drain them.
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Jul 12, 2022 13:55
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LOL, it's like what happens when grognards try to understand marking and damage on a miss.
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Jul 12, 2022 14:12
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Rutibex posted:2e had a weird format where the monsters were released as loose pages to be put into a binder. So when TSR abandoned this dumb concept they had a huge amount of monster material they crammed into a compiled 2e monster book. I love the formatting of this book. Because it was originally loose pages every monster takes up exactly 1 page, front and back. It's extremely dense, I would say it's the best monster manual that you can get for D&D. The Beholder section alone is something they turned into an entire book for 3.5e. Oh dude, I know. I was very happy when they released that book because putting those little stick-on rings around the holes in the MC sheets so they wouldn't tear and fall out of the binder was tedious. I don't think the loose sheet MCs were a dumb concept. The idea behind them was sound--you could compile all your monsters into one alphabetical collection and pull the specific sheets you would need for a session and tuck them into a folder. In theory it was an elegant way for DMs to manage their monster collections. In practice, it was a bit of a pain and a bunch of partially torn pages.
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Jul 12, 2022 17:16
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A Strange Aeon posted:I've been browsing the 1e DMG and it seems like a player could weaponize the class specific manuals pretty easily--as written, for example, a magic user who so much as scans a few letters of the Manual of Puissant Skill at Arms gets stunned for 1d6 turns and loses 10,000 to 60,000 experience points.  This is why the Mirror of Opposition went from a cheap cursed item in 1e to an expensive major Artifact in 3e
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Jul 12, 2022 18:23
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Halloween Jack posted:I've also been thinking about special effects for weapons and other things like skills in LotFP and its derivatives. A flaming sword sets people on fire 2/6, etc. I did something like that in an Into the Odd hack I was messing with a year or so ago - certain magic weapons had weird effects that triggered when certain numbers were rolled on their damage dice, and monsters also had certain special abilities depending on the specific monster when certain numbers were rolled on their attacks (like a giant frog that attacks for 1d8, but will swallow a human sized character whole on a roll of 1 or 2 and then try to flee to digest in peace). I kind of went against the ItO spirit by letting players roll saves to avoid certain abilities as long as their character still had HP, but if they suffered Critical Damage from the attack the monsters special effect would always trigger with no save allowed.
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Jul 13, 2022 03:38
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PeterWeller posted:I don't think the loose sheet MCs were a dumb concept. The idea behind them was sound--you could compile all your monsters into one alphabetical collection and pull the specific sheets you would need for a session and tuck them into a folder. they hosed this as well by printing double-sided pages. so like you'd have gnoll on one side and goblin in the other, and then when they released the goa (giant) and on the back of that is I don't know a loving hellhound well I can tell you that doesn't line up with the alphabet I know and love. but the actual real problem was the constant tearing, mitigated only slightly by the donut stickers.
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Jul 13, 2022 04:17
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My girlfriend finally wanted to try out an RPG since some of her fellow grad school students are doing it too. After like 2+ hours of pretty grueling D&D character creation where apparently all of her other players have paragraphs and paragraphs of ~secret character backstory~, she texted me something along the lines of “hey doesn’t that DCC game you like have just like simple villagers to start or something?” So yes. Maybe some day I’ll be living the dream of having a significant other that is into OSR RPGs…
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Jul 13, 2022 07:02
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Different strokes for different folks, and I know some folks actually like coming up with extensive backstories, but I wish the idea that my character's story is what happens in the game had occurred to me way earlier, before I ever played anything "old school." I don't think I've ever played with a DM or fellow players that actually cared about or interacted with a particular PC's pre-game backstory beyond a sentence or two
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Jul 13, 2022 07:33
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I say turn the backstory into a mechanic! Give players a number of generic "backstory points" which they can spend during the game to get advantage on any rolls. But they have to come up with a story about their past to justify it, like a Blades in the Dark flashback.
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Jul 13, 2022 07:49
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Johnny Landmine posted:Different strokes for different folks, and I know some folks actually like coming up with extensive backstories, but I wish the idea that my character's story is what happens in the game had occurred to me way earlier, before I ever played anything "old school." I don't think I've ever played with a DM or fellow players that actually cared about or interacted with a particular PC's pre-game backstory beyond a sentence or two running a funnel is fun as gently caress, i did it while very drunk, freestyling all the weird dice with d12s and d6s. My guys lost about half of their peasants, got to the boat by the underground ocean and burnt it, which they decided meant they had vanquished the evil, and went home.
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Jul 13, 2022 08:28
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The problem with monster binders is that every monster has to be on two pages or you lose sorting, but also those two pages can't be a spread, you have to flip back and forth. This is unreasonably annoying to me, like the universe refusing to allow a platonic decahedron.
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Jul 13, 2022 10:32
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The problem with monster binders is that every monster has to be on two pages or you lose sorting, but also those two pages can't be a spread, you have to flip back and forth.
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Jul 13, 2022 13:17
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Bob Quixote posted:I did something like that in an Into the Odd hack I was messing with a year or so ago - certain magic weapons had weird effects that triggered when certain numbers were rolled on their damage dice, and monsters also had certain special abilities depending on the specific monster when certain numbers were rolled on their attacks (like a giant frog that attacks for 1d8, but will swallow a human sized character whole on a roll of 1 or 2 and then try to flee to digest in peace).
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Jul 13, 2022 14:56
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Halloween Jack posted:I like this a lot. I don't have to roll an extra die, and you can set things up so that e.g. you get a special effect as compensation for rolling low on damage. Yeah, can you share more examples? I like that idea as an alternative to standard magic weapons, wouldn't mind seeing what you came up with.
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Jul 13, 2022 15:09
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If you’re using Bastionland ‘enhanced’ is done by adding a advantage die, I’d probably make the special effect occur on doubles in this case.
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Jul 13, 2022 16:24
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Empty Sandwich posted:they hosed this as well by printing double-sided pages. so like you'd have gnoll on one side and goblin in the other, and then when they released the goa (giant) and on the back of that is I don't know a loving hellhound well I can tell you that doesn't line up with the alphabet I know and love. Yes, that was incredibly annoying as well.
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Jul 13, 2022 17:35
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The 2e binders were okay in that they had 2 main volumes that fit together fine, and all the other additions were meant to go into separate divided sections.
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Jul 13, 2022 18:01
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A Strange Aeon posted:Yeah, can you share more examples? I like that idea as an alternative to standard magic weapons, wouldn't mind seeing what you came up with. I don't have a ton of examples on hand since I haven't messed with it for a long while, but the monster special abilities were all pretty basic stuff and I used a similar thing for the way spells were treated (ex: Ice Blast - 1d10 damage, and on a roll of 1 or 2 the target must save or be encased in ice and lose their next action). Most of the special attack powers were things like a giant scorpion/spider that would trigger a save vs poison on a low roll, or saving against being set on fire by a dragon and taking burn damage unless you spent your next action trying to extinguish yourself, etc. I shamelessly stole a bunch of neat mechanics for that hack - I imported in something like the Mighty Deeds into the ItO combat by making it so that every attack a player made which didnt kill/incapacitate the target would allow the attacker to add on a special effect that the target had to save against like a Disarm, Trip, Stun, etc.
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Jul 14, 2022 02:12
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OtspIII posted:It's a frustration I have with a lot of popular OSR stuff--they do the fun part of prepping a game (come up with a cool idea), but don't help with the hard part (figuring out how it actually works in practice). I think some people have started calling this gently caress You Design What I really want from OSR stuff is rules structure that incorporates stuff like mapping, logistics, overland travel, and domain management while being more abstract and easy to deal with than tracking rations and torches and individual squares on graph paper.
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Jul 14, 2022 16:58
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Are AD&D monster manual entries reasonably well calibrated to use against B/X characters? I was thinking recently that a lot of monsters that I consider to be 'iconic' and see use in my games don't exist in the core rules for OSE so I'm winging it (mimics use rust monster stat lines but have different abilities, etc)
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Jul 14, 2022 17:47
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aldantefax posted:Are AD&D monster manual entries reasonably well calibrated to use against B/X characters? I was thinking recently that a lot of monsters that I consider to be 'iconic' and see use in my games don't exist in the core rules for OSE so I'm winging it (mimics use rust monster stat lines but have different abilities, etc) 
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Jul 14, 2022 18:46
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aldantefax posted:Are AD&D monster manual entries reasonably well calibrated to use against B/X characters? I was thinking recently that a lot of monsters that I consider to be 'iconic' and see use in my games don't exist in the core rules for OSE so I'm winging it (mimics use rust monster stat lines but have different abilities, etc) Could just grab a copy of the OSE Advanced Fantasy: Monsters book, that will probably cover most of your needs
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Jul 15, 2022 21:31
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drrockso20 posted:Could just grab a copy of the OSE Advanced Fantasy: Monsters book, that will probably cover most of your needs I have the box set coming from the latest KS so I am going to consider most of my needs covered, then. I do have a bit of nostalgia from when AD&D monster manuals were offered as three hole punched pages because they assumed you'd just have a massive binder full of monsters that you added to over time. I kind of want to make a monster rolodex thing like that in the future, but will likely have a time trying to collect those entries - either the originals, or digitals and printing with proper margins.
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Jul 15, 2022 21:52
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Beerdeer posted:I picked up a copy of Ultraviolet Grasslands. It's beautiful and thematic, but I'm not sure I have any idea how I'd run it. That's the same problem I have with Troika and Mork Borg.
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Jul 15, 2022 22:11
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mellonbread posted:Pick up the quick start version of the book. It's laser focused on "what is this game about and how do I run this" and doesn't bury that information in a setting gazetteer. Wow, that is actually really helpful. Cheers!
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Jul 15, 2022 22:42
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Rutibex posted:I say turn the backstory into a mechanic! Give players a number of generic "backstory points" which they can spend during the game to get advantage on any rolls. But they have to come up with a story about their past to justify it, like a Blades in the Dark flashback. Dark Souls (the official Japanese one SNE put out a few years ago not the recent lovely recent one from Steamforged) and Nechronica are mostly combat games but both have an abstract system of something like that where some things from your past get forgotten or remembered at points and that can make different things easier or harder for you in the moment. If my group makes elaborate backstories we play a bit after the session 0 character creation to work the backstories into how the party comes together. So there's always a few hanging threads the whole party already knows about you can use to have their past be relevant way later on. Verisimilidude posted:I critically failed a test to not slip on oil and the dm made me take 1d6 points of damage, rolling enough to kill me outright. We were 30 minutes into a 4 hour game and he wouldn't let me roll a new character to join back in. A Strange Aeon posted:So you got to hang out and play the monsters at least, right? Or was it literally 'thanks for playing'?? Verisimilidude posted:the second one. I even asked if I could jump back in since we use that random character generator online, but nope I know these posts aren't too recent but I'm still mad that a DM did this like what in the gently caress. Especially in MÖRK BORG, like there's a small table for "how does your newly rolled character manage to suddenly appear in this adventure next to the other characters?" Like it's a game  enough to let your fully formed new character explode out of a random nearby corpse why would they not do this.
Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 01:54
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Halloween Jack posted:That makes a lot of sense to me. As much as I love "gonzo" fantasy, I don't have much trouble coming up with gonzo ideas on my own. At least, by this point, I have all the random tables I'll ever need to spur weird ideas that don't immediately come to me. What's your process? I literally don't do the mapping for my players, and the way we do it is: "You head down the corridor. The walls here are weathered and notched. Random detritus suggests some small fights here and there. Five feet. Ten Feet. Fifteen feet. Stop. You stand at a crossroads. The corridors move onto the east, west and continue to the north." Then I use the sand timer to let them discuss what to do. If they figure it out before it runs out, they continue on, if not, it's a ten minute sand timer. There's also some excellent torch and ration trackers. Most of this is half/second box ticking and sand timer flipping. So uh, yeah, what's the issue for you?
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Jul 19, 2022 06:02
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:What's your process? I literally don't do the mapping for my players, and the way we do it is: 10 minute sand timer to discuss which direction to go at a crossroads?? You must have the world's most indecisive group. I'd make the timer a minute at most and then roll for random encounters when the time runs out. Incorporating a sand timer is a great idea, though--just the other day I used a 30 second timer to give some pressure on the group solving riddles, so they didn't have unlimited time and needed to think and provide an answer pretty quickly.
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Jul 19, 2022 11:19
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A Strange Aeon posted:10 minute sand timer to discuss which direction to go at a crossroads?? You must have the world's most indecisive group. I'd make the timer a minute at most and then roll for random encounters when the time runs out. They used to be extremely indecisive, yes. We have three players whose entire experience of TTRPGs is through me, and two that have been "playing" DnD since 3.5 came out but they are basically normie-tier "Wow, a book of dungeon maps! This is worth sixty dollars because I can't possibly imagine how to draw my own!" consumers. Their whole idea of roleplaying in DnD is not really there. The first one just makes paladins and is extremely passive, and the other one tries to "outsmart" the game and myself all the time, obsessively looking for ways to create synergizing combos (in Dungeon Crawl Classics, lol). While he can be quite annoying, he is also the only one that's gone buck-loving wild into the more obscure DCCRPG mechanics like sword-crafting and such so I guess I can forgive them. And yes I'm back on the DCC train. Thank you Stefan Poag for the new cover variant.
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Jul 19, 2022 19:42
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Bob Quixote posted:The talk of exploding dice made me wonder if anyone had ever tried a setup where the dice only explode if you roll a '1' on them, and whether that would produce higher or lower numbers overall? I used it in a board game homebrew once. It's the same average as crit-on-max. I think crit-on-1 is probably better in most D&D situations (especially OSR D&D) because of overkill. If you're rolling 1d8 damage and fighting monsters with 1-7 hit points, then crit-on-8 isn't doing poo poo for you, whereas crit-on-1 is. Halloween Jack posted:I've been thinking about this for awhile now: what if critical hits happen when you roll the highest number on your damage die, instead of 20 on a d20? I know a DM who does this. He claims it's fun and fine. It avoids the bummer of rolling a crit then rolling bad damage. It also adds memorable moments like that time someone did 30 points of damage with a dagger. It also pleases people who are annoyed that if you need to roll a 19+ to-hit then 50% of your hits will be critical. Not sure what he does if, like, a kick does D3 damage - is it really going to crit 33% of the time? And does it really make sense that a sick 1D10 damage weapon crits less damage than a lowly dagger?
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Jul 20, 2022 01:02
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Bob Quixote posted:The talk of exploding dice made me wonder if anyone had ever tried a setup where the dice only explode if you roll a '1' on them, and whether that would produce higher or lower numbers overall?
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Jul 20, 2022 02:50
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[quote="TheDiceMustRoll"post="524950703"] And yes I'm back on the DCC train. Thank you Stefan Poag for the new cover variant. [/quote] It's a good train! I've been buying and reading through a bunch of modules while listening to the Spellburn podcast and getting hyped like it's 2013 again.
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Jul 20, 2022 03:57
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A Strange Aeon posted:It's a good train! I've been buying and reading through a bunch of modules while listening to the Spellburn podcast and getting hyped like it's 2013 again. I own basically every single DCC RPG module and I've run around 200~ or so sessions of it. I've run about 23 road crew games and I can name about 7 people who play DCC without me, because of me right now. I got tired of the game because I got tired of all the flipping through the book but the most recent printing threw all the pertinent tables onto the back so that helps IMMENSELY. And having a break made me miss it again. Ran a Road Crew game for the DCC day crew.
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Jul 20, 2022 04:12
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