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So I know that I've talked before in this thread about my insanely hardcore grognard friend who plays D&D with a bunch of dudes in their 40s and 50s who run it pure Fantasy Vietnam style. Well he just told me some amazing facts that I'm going to drop here because HOLY poo poo THIS GAME: They are playing Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition. The campaign is 4 years old. He is 3rd level. The DM only runs modules, EXACTLY as written. One player is the DM's Favorite, he constantly switches characters and plays homebrew classes that are completely unbalanced. Everyone is constantly passing the DM notes during the game like some drat Mean Girls clique. Not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES the party has awoken to find some/all of their equipment stolen and a character missing. They have been robbed. The player then rolls up a new character and tells the other players "you can't be mad at me, I was playing my character, anyway please meet this new guy". The DM's Favorite as done this twice. I mean it's like Toxic Game greatest hits, man. This dude is the most hardcore acolyte of D&D I know and he's like "I hate this, it's a huge waste of time and I'm so angry at all the other players." DM is a Simulationist and liberterian, btw. Goddamn! Bad management results in bad outcomes.
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May 26, 2017 17:49
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 16:23 |
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if he's a libertarian why even have a DM? 
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May 26, 2017 17:57
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Fantasy Vietnam sounds pretty rad if you're playing as the Vietnamese
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May 26, 2017 18:06
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Holy poo poo. I want your friend to post here with detailed stories from that campaign for my own personal entertainment
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May 26, 2017 18:14
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Ominous Jazz posted:Fantasy Vietnam sounds pretty rad if you're playing as the Vietnamese The second book in the Wicked series (the one that got made into the musical Wicked) is about Elphaba's son, and he ends up joining the military and they get involved in a really obvious Vietnam-esque situation with a primitive tribal people. quote:After living on the streets of the Emerald City for a time, Liir manages to enlist in the Home Guard. After a number of years in the service, his and three other companies (known as the "Seventh Spear"), led by Commander Cherrystone, are deployed to Qhoyre in Quadling Country, ostensibly to find those responsible for the kidnapping of the Viceroy and his wife and to maintain order, but imperatively to show some strength against the Quadlings for their lack of interest in the disappearance of the Viceroy. Their quietism and general deferential nature, however, prevent the Seventh Spear from needing to display any force. Over time, the unit comes to absorb the laid-back nature of the inhabitants, and the authorities in Emerald City become critical about their laxness, ordering them to get back on mission immediately. To adopt an appearance of keeping the Quadlings in line, and in desperation, Commander Cherrystone provokes the village of Bengda into refusing to pay an exorbitant fine and orders Liir to lead a secret operation to burn the village. In the operation, many of the villagers including women and children are burned to death or drowned, and Liir, having witnessed this, deserts. Liir learns later that the Quadlings attacked and killed most of the Seventh Spear, and that dragons were then sent to punish the Quadlings.
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May 26, 2017 18:16
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:So I know that I've talked before in this thread about my insanely hardcore grognard friend who plays D&D with a bunch of dudes in their 40s and 50s who run it pure Fantasy Vietnam style. Get this man an account so he can post over in the experiences thread. They are dying to hear this sort of stuff.
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May 26, 2017 18:17
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Harrow posted:Holy poo poo. I want your friend to post here with detailed stories from that campaign for my own personal entertainment The one he just told me was that they were teleported into the lowest level of a deadly dungeon and had to fight their way out, only for the DM's Favorite to trigger a trap that sent them back to the lowest level of the dungeon again with all new monsters. This just happened like 2 weeks ago. Fuckin' LOL it's hysterical. The DM's Favorite constantly does mechanically stupid poo poo in-game and puts the party's feet to the fire and when my friend rages out about it (he's an EXTREMELY intense dude) the guy says "playing your character mechanically correctly is metagaming" aahahahahahah it's literally Gamer Hell, when he was telling me this poo poo I honestly started sweating because it took me back to lovely high school and college games with incredibly dysfunctional idiots. This DM's Favorite guy is in his 50s btw, there's literally no excuse to behave like this other than he's an rear end in a top hat. Edit: I don't want to get him an account here because he's the kind of guy who gets extremely Red and Nude online. He's a very passionate, intense guy who is kind of "out there" and I honestly think this forum would shred him.
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May 26, 2017 18:19
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:So I know that I've talked before in this thread about my insanely hardcore grognard friend who plays D&D with a bunch of dudes in their 40s and 50s who run it pure Fantasy Vietnam style. Also yes buy him an account so we can hear his stories and/or shred him, both are good fun.
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May 26, 2017 18:52
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Yawgmoth posted:Also yes buy him an account so we can hear his stories and/or shred him, both are good fun. I'm not going to let strangers mess with a guy who I consider a friend and who I know is 90% likely to get upset about it and take it personally. No. Also yes I told him I would have deleted that group about 25 times. He kept saying "well wait until you hear about this!" and laughing about it because he knew it was going to wind me up. I think I felt him feel a little better when I referred to the DM's Favorite as "not even aggressive enough to be an rear end in a top hat, he's rear end in a top hat-adjacent. He's the worst sort of anal polyp." Edit: I'm thinking of talking with him about this campaign and doing a Dispatches from the Frontier style writing on it. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:02 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 18:58
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Edit: I'm thinking of talking with him about this campaign and doing a Dispatches from the Frontier style writing on it. Please do, oh man. Over in the cat piss thread we're all starving for more stories of total disaster campaigns. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Edit: I don't want to get him an account here because he's the kind of guy who gets extremely Red and Nude online. He's a very passionate, intense guy who is kind of "out there" and I honestly think this forum would shred him. Great, now I'm gonna picture him as Alex Jones.
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May 26, 2017 19:04
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Harrow posted:Great, now I'm gonna picture him as Alex Jones. That's not too far off the mark in some ways, actually. Except he's not a moral monster who rails against the GLOBALISTS. You might want to use the post history function to check out my posts about this guy in this thread, he's a real hoot. It's like stepping back in time 30 years whenever I play with him. Extremely dysfunctional gaming imo. Spoiler warning: these series of posts seems to be building to an insane clusterfuck but ultimately goes nowhere. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=11551#post439096334
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May 26, 2017 19:21
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Edit: I'm thinking of talking with him about this campaign and doing a Dispatches from the Frontier style writing on it. Please please please please please.
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May 26, 2017 19:31
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:That's not too far off the mark in some ways, actually. Except he's not a moral monster who rails against the GLOBALISTS. Haha, that's the same guy? I remember those posts! Holy poo poo what a mess, and really, a boring 4+ hour morass is about all that was ever going to turn out to be.
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May 26, 2017 21:23
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The thing is, 2e run right and using modules isn't that bad. You have to adjust a little but 2e is weird and fun and when I played I think we got to level 5 or so? We got enough experience for the wizard to get Polymorph Other and my Necromancer-Rogue to get magic jar and started dropping Skill Trap nukes and turning friendly cities into armies of dragons. It was rad as hell. (The downsides of Polymorph Other aren't as bad or scary if you are inhabiting a different body.)
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May 27, 2017 13:21
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I played in a game with an old school 2nd ed GM for several years, a couple games in parallel actually, they were all long running, I always enjoyed it. And yeah, poly other and magic jar was basically a body-snatchers not-undead-liche scenario in the best way. Also teleporting was actually dangerous and wonderful because of that.
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May 27, 2017 13:40
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Bad Munki posted:Also teleporting was actually dangerous and wonderful because of that. 
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May 27, 2017 14:46
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I like it. In a similar vein, I've often considered implementing a uni-plane-containing-all-planes teleport system, with...consequences. Not sure how best to describe it, but imagine there still being a delay to teleport, at least from the point of view of the teleportee. The delay is too minimal to notice, unless you're crossing impossibly large distances. Think of a sort of reverse-relativity time-delay. So teleporting around the prime material or whatever you want to call it, that's harmless, no problems there, those distances are all so short. But the other planes, they're out there, but in a theoretical distance->∞ sort of way. Nobody tries to teleport to those places, it just isn't done, but nobody really talks about why exactly, it's just known that you don't do that, nobody comes back from that. It turns out that teleporting to an extra-planar place will work, but since the distances are effectively infinite, there are consequences, like insanity or worse. Think The Jaunt as applied to inter-planer teleportation. It raises some fun possibilities. Researcher popped himself out to infinity, his union wants to know what happened and, if possible, a rescue op. Party wizard thought he was teleporting the party safely to a known target, turns out that target was off-world and half the party went mad on the way (this also has the fun of making teleporting to non-fixed locations inherently more risky!) Etc. tl;dr: I really like The Jaunt and think it could be very well applied to make Teleport and similar spells more Exciting™ Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 15:09 on May 27, 2017 |
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May 27, 2017 15:07
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It all depends on your setting. 2e was were Dark Sun and Ravenloft and Planescape were all established settings. Things in that setting will gently caress you up. Full stop. The game was somewhat simulationist but it's mechanics informed it's flavor, and it was all about a points of light world full of hazards and weird magic. It's a system I really like, and it's a shame that evolved into 3.5 and Pathfinder IMO.
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May 27, 2017 15:33
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You guys are letting nostalgia get the better of you, AD&D 2E is probably the single worst edition of D&D ever made, mechanically speaking. (Maybe AD&D 1E is worse, I'm not that familiar.) Everything good about it is independent of the mechanics.
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May 27, 2017 15:44
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I liked 4e's solution to the teleport problem. Short range (in combat) teleports were fine and a bunch of different classes got them, but anything more than like a hundred feet you needed to sit down, do a lengthy-ish ritual, and then you could only go to a point you already knew about that was set up to receive travellers. It cut down on a lot of problems with teleport magic. Also, as someone with fairly recent experience with 2e, it's not the worst edition. It was a little handwavey and disorganized and some of the rules (like weapon speed) were absolute garbage, but at least it wasn't as bad as 3.5/PF, where you can either play a caster or be shut out of encounters from level 1. You also didn't have trap options in character progression and playing a Bard doesn't require you to level 4 other classes first. Spell resistance properly scales with level so Wizards can't just solve all problems because they picked the right feats. I could go on.
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May 27, 2017 17:49
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You guys are letting nostalgia get the better of you, AD&D 2E is probably the single worst edition of D&D ever made, mechanically speaking. (Maybe AD&D 1E is worse, I'm not that familiar.) Everything good about it is independent of the mechanics. I didn't play 2e until 2-3 years ago and I'm gonna say that it was more balanced and interesting then the 3.x series by a longshot. Both because of the post above me, but also because it's mechanical focus was on Danger as opposed to power. Enemies were dangerous, and you had to work around them in fiction. In 3.x, you can do that to a lesser extent, but enemies are usually powerful and you have to dump damage on them from your build. my platonic ideal of D&D is one with 2e's weirder spells and workarounds, but 4e's combat. Which I guess is kinda a more brutal ritual system and having skills work differently (both 2e NWPs and 4e Skills were generally binary choices vs skill ranks, which are the worst.)
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May 27, 2017 17:53
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2e going back to 3d6 in order was a huge step back, all things considered, though the readability was a lot better than 1e while retaining most of the distinctive inter-class balance.
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May 27, 2017 18:00
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Is there a Fate or PBTAish system that is good for a sort of Wild West/Deadlands game? I was going to just throw something together with FAE but would rather not reinvent the wheel.
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May 27, 2017 18:09
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Is there a Fate or PBTAish system that is good for a sort of Wild West/Deadlands game? I was going to just throw something together with FAE but would rather not reinvent the wheel. There's Blood on the Trail a Fate Core World of Adventure about the Wild West plus Vampires.
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May 27, 2017 18:13
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My dirty secret is that I don't actually care that much about balance as long as the strongest tier of options are interesting to play and have a fair amount of variety amongst themselves. In this case I was thinking more about usability / administrability, though. 2E doesn't even attempt to make an encounter budgeting system. It has loot tables interspersed with cursed items. It uses descending AC. Random overworld encounters are a default assumption and are also tuned to easily be party-wiping via bad luck, RAW. It has a whole host of core rules that are mind-boggling stupid, like 3d6 in order, racial level caps, and proficiencies being optional, which, while they're easy enough to houserule or mandate, require you to go through and understand each of them before deciding if you're going to use them or not. Every single ability score scales differently, many of them requiring table lookups, especially if you exceed the normal human range. The dual and multi-classing rules are a giant headache. The game is littered with little subsystems whose rules are scattered between books and are a pain to adjudicate, like flight classes A through D or underwater combat.
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May 27, 2017 18:15
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basically as a player i can sort of understand the ambivalence but as a DM you couldn't pay me to run 2E
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May 27, 2017 18:27
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Kwyndig posted:I liked 4e's solution to the teleport problem. Short range (in combat) teleports were fine and a bunch of different classes got them, but anything more than like a hundred feet you needed to sit down, do a lengthy-ish ritual, and then you could only go to a point you already knew about that was set up to receive travellers. It cut down on a lot of problems with teleport magic. To prevent brute-forcing, I made sure to state the rune sequences for portals were not only very long, but also written in the old mathematical language of magic comprised of 16 runes, known as Hex-Decimal.
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May 27, 2017 20:39
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My Lovely Horse posted:I used that portal ritual as the core for an entire Heroic campaign once. The party stumbled into having to beat the bad guys to four segments of a stone tablet that were hidden across the world. The tablet itself was completely ordinary and nonmagical, but it held the sequence of runes that would direct your portal to the private hideout of a powerful wizard where he'd hidden the secret to power beyond belief.
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May 27, 2017 21:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:basically as a player i can sort of understand the ambivalence but as a DM you couldn't pay me to run 2E A whole lot of this. As a player, I rather enjoyed 2nd ed. It was harsh, but also fully allowed insane builds if you wanted to do that. It was fun to try to break the game, and succeed at doing so, and then get hosed up anyhow. Teaches you not to get attached to things like, uhh, your character. The specifics of the system, the way AC and hits and damage and skills and poo poo worked was largely incidental to me. But as was said, god I'd never want to DM it. I was glad to have a classic grognard to run that game. And he was good at it, so maybe that's a large part of why I wasn't so offended by the system itself. It meant at least half the specifics I could just flat out ignore, and just consume the juicy bits. Oh how I miss my throwing-dagger specialist. That one's schtick was a large canvas covered in sheaths with throwing daggers. The cleric would rip open a hole to wherever, the fighter would throw the blanket open on her way through, and just kneel in the middle of it, unloading daggers at the baddies like a god damned 18/00 strength Gatling gun with something like 10 attacks per round? I don't remember exactly. It was way gimmicky and a whole pile of fun, no regrets.
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May 27, 2017 22:08
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Is there a Fate or PBTAish system that is good for a sort of Wild West/Deadlands game? I was going to just throw something together with FAE but would rather not reinvent the wheel. Apocalypse World could just do Deadlands straight out of the box. Driver is the only playbook that needs a deep revamp - even Quarantine is easily just renamed to Carpetbagger.
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May 27, 2017 22:40
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2nd edition AD&D fans, would any one of you want to spend 4 years playing at 3rd level or below? Because that is what has happened to my friend.
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May 28, 2017 00:06
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:2nd edition AD&D fans, would any one of you want to spend 4 years playing at 3rd level or below? Because that is what has happened to my friend. I've done that, not recommended, no.
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May 28, 2017 00:11
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No, that game group sounds awful. But the wrong group makes even Strike! or Cortex+ unfun so...
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May 28, 2017 01:10
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:2nd edition AD&D fans, would any one of you want to spend 4 years playing at 3rd level or below? Because that is what has happened to my friend. Does that GM just not give out xp? Is he giving it out like it's a GURPS game instead of D&D? Are they dying every session and the GM is making them come back as 1st level every time? "4 years playing at 3rd level or below" just boggles my goddamn mind. I mean, I know on SA most of the GMs are of the "we level when I think it's appropriate" camp but gently caress sticking around a game like that for longer than 4 sessions. Not gaming is better than bad gaming.
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May 28, 2017 01:35
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Some GMs only give out experience for monster kills, it wouldn't be outside the realm of shithead possibility to extend that policy so it's individual kills. If you're constantly being overshadowed by other players to the point where you don't score kills...
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May 28, 2017 02:02
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:2nd edition AD&D fans, would any one of you want to spend 4 years playing at 3rd level or below? Because that is what has happened to my friend. Hell no, but I think the same holds true for pretty much any system that has advancement. In my case, the games I was playing we were all 8-13 depending on the age of the character and the phase of the campaign.
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May 28, 2017 02:23
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:2nd edition AD&D fans, would any one of you want to spend 4 years playing at 3rd level or below? Because that is what has happened to my friend. Kwyndig posted:I've done that, not recommended, no. I honestly don't know how that's even possible. What, do they play once or twice a year? Even then, that would be bizarrely slow progression.
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May 28, 2017 03:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:2e going back to 3d6 in order was a huge step back, all things considered, though the readability was a lot better than 1e while retaining most of the distinctive inter-class balance. 2e also presented six different methods of assigning stats, and (IIRC) flat-out said "pick the one you like and will have fun playing;" 3d6-in-order was simply presented as "Option One." This insistence that 2e somehow mandated 3d6-in-order is kinda silly.
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May 28, 2017 03:09
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8one6 posted:I mean, I know on SA most of the GMs are of the "we level when I think it's appropriate" camp but gently caress sticking around a game like that for longer than 4 sessions. Not gaming is better than bad gaming. I mean the whole reason people use milestone leveling in the first place is because it's supposed to be faster than bean-counted XP. (which, I'll also throw out is another of those things that was pretty janky with 2e, in that the XP distribution system abandoned "XP-for-treasure", and then instead had this XP-for-class-related-activities thing that was probably really difficult to track in real-time, and if you ended up just doing XP from monster kills, your progression would be super-slow) DivineCoffeeBinge posted:2e also presented six different methods of assigning stats, and (IIRC) flat-out said "pick the one you like and will have fun playing;" 3d6-in-order was simply presented as "Option One." This insistence that 2e somehow mandated 3d6-in-order is kinda silly. They didn't mandate it, no, but Option 1 was set aside as distinct, since the rest were filed under Alternative Dice-Rolling Methods, and they were characterized as optional, and had to be approved by the DM. It was a change of tone from 4d6-drop-lowest being presented as Method 1 in AD&D 1e, and Gygax describing how 3d6-in-order would cause "an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one [character] due to quirks of the dice".
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May 28, 2017 03:18
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 16:23 |
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It was a change in tone, sure, but honestly in the... the far too many years I played 2e games of various stripes, with friends, classmates, or FLGS customers, those games used 3d6-in-order precisely zero times, so it's always jarring to me when 2e is brought up as the embodiment of Why Ability Scores Suck, as though no one reading the books had the capacity to read the rules and say "actually that sounds like it would suck, I'm gonna use one of these other methods that they have thoughtfully presented instead so that I'm not playing a character who sucks." Like literally everyone I played 2e with had that capacity. Even the FLGS grognard who literally got his start playing Chainmail used "4d6, drop the lowest, any order, also if any of your scores are nine or less reroll it because you're supposed to be God-damned heroes;" I guess it never occurred to me that that might not have been the norm.
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May 28, 2017 03:27
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