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 Drivethru/rpgnow is now selling B/X D&D and older modulesWhat is Older D&D? Any older edition or version of Dungeons and Dragons! Officially, there are now six editions of the game (the first one is edition zero). In the more traditional sense of editions, they're probably around twelve to fourteen total. Every time the game updates, a portion of the community decides that the new poo poo is poo poo and sticks with the old poo poo. What do we discuss? The old poo poo. Also, the peculiar phenomenon known as Retroclones. Retroclones? Although D&D is a set of interrelated copyrights and trademarks, the mechanics of the game can't be copyrighted. Combined with the open source d20 SRD causing a boom (and subsequent bust) in the gaming market, this gave creators license to copy the bits they like from the various older editions, maybe add in something newfangled, and publish the result as their own totally original do not steal game. In practice, it just means that fans of older and alternate versions of D&D can continue to buy products related to their favorite version of the game. What are the editions of D&D? Glad you asked! "OD&D" / Original D&D / Old D&D / Brown Box / White Box /Little Brown Books(LBB)  Like an aged emperor slumping in his throne, this version has accumulated titles as the years have gone by. This is the very first one, the thing that started it all. Co-written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, with input from their gaming groups, this game was essentially a modification of the Chainmail wargame ruleset designed so that instead of commanding a bunch of units you'd be commanding a single one. The idea of characters coming together to make a story didn't make it big yet, and the ruleset is largely incomplete. Notable supplements include Blackmoor, the oldest supported setting for D&D. From here, the publication of D&D immediately becomes more complicated. Gygax wrote is own game, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and Arneson's legacy continued in the "Basic" Dungeons and Dragons. The most common story is that Gygax did this to get out of paying Arneson royalties, particularly after TSR had been sucked dry by the Blume family, but that's best left for discussion later. Basic D&D /BECMI / Rules Cyclopedia    This game went trough a TON of revisions over the years. The original intent was for this game to be an "introduction" to Advanced D&D, hence Basic. The line diverged away from AD&D pretty much immediately, and eventually accumulated its own line of supplements (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master and Immortals sets) and its own Setting (Mystara, a continuation of sorts of the original Blackmoor, and currently unsupported in an official capacity). This culminated in 1991 with the release of the Rules Cyclopedia, which gathered together the varying sets, made some revisions and signalled the last hoorah for Basic as a separate entitity. Up until then, two separate games called "Dungeons and Dragons" were being released simultaneously by the same company, and you betcha there were petty snipes and edition wars. Basic may be the best selling version of D&D ever produced. Naturally, it and its legacy is completely ignored by modern D&D. :V Advanced Dungeons and Dragons / First Edition / 1e  This is the definite Gygax Edition, purple Jack Vance-based prose and all. A far cry from the sparse OD&D, AD&D was jam-packed with all sorts of rules, corner cases and crazy additional detail, like a few pages dedicated entirely to the minute differences of various polearms, jokey cantrips (like one that created a little fire with the magic word Zip-Po), completely inexplicable poo poo (the original Modrons, and Druids who get to go to the Seventh Dimension which is not detailed anywhere in the game), dense two-column formatting still reproduced by lovely game editors today and one of the most famous supplements ever produced, Unearthed Arcana. Most D&D-based jokes come from this edition, and in many ways this is the gold standard by which most D&D is judged, the origin of a lot of the game's so-called "legacy". That's not bad considering that what most people actually remember playing these days is either Basic or AD&D second edition! Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition / Black Books ("2.5")   This edition was published shortly after Gygax was released from TSR, and thus is the first D&D to ever be called a betrayal of his legacy. Second edition (actually like the fifth or so version of D&D at this point) excised things like Demons, Devils and Angels from the game based on the whole satanism thing, and also cut a great many things out of the game. What it gave us instead was an explosion of variant D&D settings to play in. Beyond just the old Greyhawk standby, we now had staples like Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, Al Qadim, Maztica and even licensed settings like Diablo. Yes, as in the computer game. Really. The supplement sucked. The "Black Books" version was distinguished by the black borders on its cover and the "This is not AD&D third edition!" essay at the front, released at a time when fans were nicknaming the company "T$R" because it had a bad online strategy and was totally just about the money and not the TRUE GAMERS (  ). It's also been called 2.5.This edition was also the final gasp of TSR as a company, and the common theory is that the multitude of settings divided the customer base to the point where only a fraction of D&D customers were buying supplements for any given setting. It didn't help that some of those supplements were stuff like The Ecology of the Thri-Kreen, but were printed as if they were player's handbooks and expected to sell as such. D&D Third Edition / 3.0 / 3.5   Yes, this counts as old now. It's almost been one and a half decade since it came out. You're old. This version of the game was called "Dungeons and Dragons", but it still called itself "Third Edition", signalling that this was both a new direction and a continuation of the AD&D line (and a nail in the coffin of the poor Basic line). It significantly modified the core mechanics of the game in an attempt to unify the various mechanics under one easily remembered hat: Roll a d20, add modifier, beat a Difficulty Class. In practice this tended to be a little hairier. In any case, this game was also most famous for being released as Open Source! Intended as a way for smaller companies to produce specific low-selling supplements like Ecology of the Thri-Kreen, what actually happened was that people took the Open Source game engine and created entire competing game systems out of it. This resulted in the "d20 Boom", an explosion of d20 and d20-compatible product, and the subsequent bust of the market as it got clogged with... well, mountains of crap. Let's not beat around the bush. The golden nuggets survived, and the rest went under. And as a special note: This was the first really big one to be released in the age of the internet, which means a slew of internet warriors ready to defend or attack it at any opportunity. This will not happen in this thread. I am zero tolerance towards that, or towards the same towards any other edition. Start an edition war thread if you feel a twist in your electronic knickers over an elfgame. As fourth edition is still technically being published, it doesn't belong here (yet). You 4vengers can look forward to being old like the rest of us  Retroclones Here's a list of Retroclones, which you can also totally discuss in this thread and add to. Thanks to Squizzle for helping with this list. Retro-clones of original and Basic: Swords & Wizardry; Labyrinth Lord; Dark Dungeons; Microlite74; Basic Fantasy;Wizards, Warriors, & Wyrms; Original Edition Delta; Long Live the Magic Users and Fighting Men!, Adventurer Conqueror King, and a clone-clone Crypts & Things adapted from Swords and Wizardry. Retro-clones of AD&D 1st and 2nd editions: OSRIC; Myth & Magic; Hackmaster prior to its newest edition; For Gold & Glory 3E family variants and forked continuations: Pathfinder; Trailblazer, a detailed examination of the 3E/3.5 rules with toolkit suggestions on how to improve them; Fantasy Craft, a robust a rebalanced fork of the 3E/3.5 rules (with lots of levels and dials to tweak genre emulation) from the publishers of Spycraft Close Enough to D&D There are several games that are mechanically and stylistically close enough to D&D that I'm comfortable inviting them into the party. These include, but are not limited to: Hackmaster and Hackmaster Basic; Castles & Crusades, heralded by many of its fans as a spiritual successor to AD&D; Spellcraft & Swordplay, of which I know almost nothing; Red Box Hack, associated with the popular (but largely unsupported) Old School Hack; Warrior, Rogue, & Mage, a system using the archetypal D&D trio as attributes instead of classes; Epées & Sorcellerie, a French-language adaptation but not proper clone of original D&D, from what I can tell; ZeFRS, a retro-clone of TSR's Conan the Barbarian game; Siege Perilous, an adaptation and expansion of Swords & Wizardry for the setting of Ultima; Dangers and Dweomers; and Under the Moons of Zoon are both by the same author, but quite different: the former is yet another Basic hack, and the latter is a swords & planet game; Kalevala is an Italian fantasy game based on the trappings of Finnish legend; Big Brown Book, a retro-clone of sorts based on D&D's roots in the wargame Chainmail; Adventures Dark & Deep, trying to create a speculative Gygax-headed AD&D2E; Encounters Critical, a "What if?" game whose question seems to be "What if the designers of Encounters Critical had been able to publish a game in 1979?"; Tirikelu, a system built for Empire of the Petal Throne; Legends of the Ancient World, a retro-clone of The Fantasy Trip; Dragons at Dawn, inspired by Dave Arneson, the D&D creator who wasn't Gary Gygax; Elegia, a mash-up of NES fantasy and old-school tabletop RPG fantasy; Mazes & Minotaurs, an Ancient Greece/Ancient D&D mash-up; Microlite20, a "rulings not rules"-style d20 streamline; Wayfarers, a classless/level-less dungeon fantasy game in the spirit of older D&D; Dungeon Squad, with ultra-light rules and three-second character generation; Searchers of the Unknown, a one-page system that I don't know much about; Mutant Future, combining classic D&D playstyle with a futuristic post-apocalypse; Forward to Adventure, influenced by Tunnels & Trolls Retro Phaze, a standard fantasy RPG influenced by 8-bit CRPGs in tone and aesthetic Blood & Treasure, stealing bits from pretty much everything before 4e Fantastic Heroes & Witchery a pretty cool little all-editions-D&D knock-off, with the added benefit of having classes for planetary adventure, a la John Carter of Mars. Dungeon Crawl Classics: Dungeon Crawl Classics Lightning Lord posted:Dungeon Crawl Classics is not quite a retroclone, and it's not quite a totally new game. It's more about attempting to capture the essence of "Appendix N adventure" through a combination of mechanics both familiar and new than slavishly recreating any particular edition of D&D. It also does that job through art, tone and atmosphere. obeyasia posted:Here's my copy for DCC: Dungeon Crawl Classics has won itself some fans, and not without reason. If nostalgia is about a time that didn't exist, DCC is sort of an exaggarated Fantasy loving Vietnam take on dungeon fantasy tropes in the same vein. At least initially. Feel free to ask about it! NOPE: Nope. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Carcosa No OSR Politics. I could go off on ACKS' creators for misusing their journalistic position at the Escapist to sell their retroclone and make competitors look bad. I could quote Zak S. I quote write a goddamn thesis on why Raggi is the toxin this hobby must excise from its body. But, importantly, I do none of those things here because then we'd never discuss cool games. No Edition Wars. I already said this but hey whatever. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2012 17:34
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homullus posted:I realize you may both know and not care, but your three images of D&D Basic aren't in chronological order -- the Erol Otus cover (3rd pictured) was the earlier revision of the original. If I let myself care too much about the Basic covers the entire post would be nothing but minor variations on them  What do you mean you can't discuss hexcrawls Whitemage, discuss yourself some hexcrawls. Hell, do a big informative post on them or something. And on reading it I guess Retro Phaze counts as close enough, so adding it to the OP.
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Jul 10, 2012 23:59
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I'd add ACKS to the OP, but it's written by Greg Tito and Greg Tito is an rear end in a top hat. A conundrum indeed. Convince us some more! Comrade Koba, I misremembered the actual thing! I do remember it being called 2.5 before 3e came out thanks largely to my old AD&D campaign notes, but OP is modified to reflect reality.
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Jul 19, 2012 13:58
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VacuumJockey posted:Rulebook Heavily, may I suggest that Crypts & Things be added to the OP? It's a swords and sorceryfied S&W clone, a pretty decent one too. Clones of clones.  ACKS and this added to the OP under Basic clones. Gotta love them Basic clones. I'll eventually be adding to that list, I suspect.
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Jul 20, 2012 00:24
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What happened was system mastery. And really, it was inevitable. Once players learn about dangers like yellow mold, they'll know to check for it next time and all the times after that, no matter how much they and their GMs might bitch about metagame knowledge. Eventually, they'll be trained for all the regular tricks and traps, so more measures must be taken. It's escalation, pure and simple. Every time you die in the D&D roguelike game, you learn a bit more until eventually the measures and countermeasures are layered so thick it becomes a parody of itself, with the actual goal of playing long since forgotten. And if it seems overly competitive, remember that AD&D was originally intended to be played competitively at tournaments. Of course, that wasn't the only direction the game headed. AD&D revised has a lot of emphasis on story over deathtrap dungeons. Basic had all kinds of strange and wonderful experimentation going on. D&D never was just one game. But it's quite understandable how this particular playstyle might have evolved into that. A lot of this also boils down to the dual effect of there never being one unifying direction of D&D and TSR being spectacularly bad at listening to its customers and how they were actually playing, but that's another discussion entirely.
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Jul 20, 2012 16:36
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Carcosa has mechanics for ritualistically raping and murdering little girls (available to players no less), Lamentations of the Flame Princess is similarly stupid in its "grindhouse edition" artwork and both are published (and one is written by) by James Edward Raggi IV, who among other things denounces creativity as a worthy endeavor and calls you a moral coward if you happen to think that ritualistically murdering and raping little girls in your game is kind of lovely. And that's basically all I want of him in this thread.
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Aug 15, 2012 21:04
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Yeah, I don't actually want to discourage people from discussing DCC (even if my personal reaction to it is "ahahahaha"). Just be prepared to live with some jibes about d7s and unironic character sixpacks.
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Aug 17, 2012 13:57
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Here's a really interesting tool for tracking things like the time it takes for a torch to burn, when you need to rest and when to check for wandering monsters. Looks handy to me, anyway.
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Sep 17, 2012 19:44
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What I like about the circular one is that you could easily use it to track spell/buff time visually. If a spell lasts 5 turns, just place a marker five turns down the circle and done. It really has potential as a multi-purpose game tool.
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Sep 17, 2012 22:39
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I've added the Drivethru storefront to the OP with sirens and whistles. If you want my recommendation that aren't the usual three everyone always talks about, I'd buy B10 Night's Dark Terrors, as it has very good guidelines and rules on how to run a party through the wilderness, and I particularly enjoy B4 The Lost City. To celebrate this thing, Dagon and I spent some time yesterday making this for running your B/X games. Ringing endorsements: quote:Clever little device with icons for keeping track of your Basic Era turns. quote:<WinsonPaine> hahah RulebookHeavily this owns e: Also! Here's something I'm hoping I can get people on board for. Fatal & Friends is a great thread, but it's very bulky, and if people start reviewing D&D stuff in there it might both get lost and drown out other, more obscure things. D&D is hardly obscure in this hobby, too. So I'm opening this thread for people who want to review older D&D products in whole or in part in the F&F style. I may do some soon-ish myself, but now that some of the products are out and available for purchase and easily acquired by everyone, a review or two will go down even better. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Jan 25, 2013 |
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Jan 25, 2013 17:22
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There's also a rule in Chainmail that states that a Superhero (10th level Fighting Man) will outright kill a dragon with an arrow shot one out of every six times, iirc. The "weak peasant fighter jock who sucks" meme is very much a late addition to the game, as is the idea that fighter types will never be supernaturally good at anything. The real underdogs of older editions are thieves.
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Mar 5, 2013 15:31
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To be honest, I wish more retroclones would be braver with being not-quite-D&D. In the pre-90's publishing era, a lot of the games that came out were essentially a variety of D&D-except-different, and the retroclone movement could totally still do that and carve interesting niches out for itself here and there without lashing itself so completely to D&D as THE old-school gaming style.
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Apr 9, 2013 09:45
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I know, right? It's one of the game's core rules, probably one of its most important ones, and so many people simply skip past it or even houserule it out. It's one of my favorite rules of Basic period because a player really gets a sense of a high ability score being better than a low one just by looking at the sheet when it's time to roll. Mostly people I've asked don't like it because it's roll under in a system where most other rolls are roll over, but it follows the model for all other skill rolls in the system (thief rolls are like that too) so whatever.
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Apr 23, 2013 17:46
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How is your Attack VS AC math working out? I remember starting work on a unified system like this once but I got distracted years ago.
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May 8, 2013 21:16
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Maybe instead of basic combat maneuvers, you can tie maneuvers to weapons. So axes have Cleave, spears have Set Spear (versus charging and incoming foes), Maces have Smash (which in RC rules is a big penalty to attack in exchange for adding your strength score to damage) and so on. Then warriors can just carry a bunch and switch as required, and maybe later learn them permanently so they end up using Smash and Cleave with any weapon they want. It's more exciting than "1-6 damage" at least in terms of weapon stats.
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May 9, 2013 04:47
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The mystic is an odd case. The 3e monk is a direct port of the Mystic (which is a direct translation of an earlier Monk), but the glut of weird unfocused abilities that makes it weak in 3e makes it strong in RC. It never needs to stay still to get all of its attacks, and that alone makes it mobile death when it gets to the right level. Everything else, though, that's the problem. The problem with the mystic is low AC for a veeeery long time, low HP and low damage output. You can't wear armor and you're specifically forbidden all magic items that increase your AC, and your hand-to-hand damage starts at d4 and doesn't even go past d6 until you're at level 5. Basically, unless you are using Weapon Mastery rules and take an AC boosting weapon, you're going to be hit as often as a wizard - but you're expected to be closer to the front - and your damage will stink. You can use thief abilities, but you get them even slower than the thief already does because you need more experience to level. And to top everything else off, your fist never gain attack or damage bonuses as you level, just "effective" ones for damaging some enemies. Basically, your solutions are to specialize in Staff (with weapon mastery) and rely on thrown weapons, which are the only ranged weapon the mystic gets multiple attacks with. (Or master torches and use them to defend and to throw for extra hilarity.) If you're running a Mystic, don't forget the Striking/Wrestling maneuvers which are a huge equalizer for an unarmored Mystic against anyone wearing any kind of protection.
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May 10, 2013 06:04
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Speaking from experience, it's probably not a bad idea to run with the training rules as written. Let them spend the slots, but only benefit once they pass the training course. This isn't so much a punishment mechanic as it is a pacing one so that they don't get all the benefits too fast and suddenly you have a dude with a torch who is deflecting four blows with one hand and then lighting everything in the room on fire with the other at level five. Unless you want that. I mean, why not.
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May 27, 2013 01:19
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I would disagree completely actually. That means that the fighter/halfling/dwarf's main class feature is tied up in the plot/randomness and not dispensed when their level would normally give them access to. If you wanted to balance it by having spell casters jump through ridiculous hoops to use their main class feature, then I guess you could have a balanced low powered mother may I game. Magic Users do have to jump through hoops to get spells as written, though. It's how DMs can control access to some of the more abusive things if they care to, but the free lunch stops at level 4. It's only polite to give them at least one gimme for each spell level they have, of course, but that's what there on the page. The thing about Weapon Mastery is that it was introduced in a supplement for high-level characters, and the rules are designed essentially with those characters in mind. It is effectively expected that your character won't be a grand master anything until quite a while has passed. So it's not "jump through ridiculous hoops", it's "run at the levels it was intended to be run at".
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May 27, 2013 02:34
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quote:Swole’s Mighty Blow I love it. I'll have something more substantive to say later.
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May 29, 2013 20:35
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Now I have something more substantive! This is like a cleaned-up, more unified version of the way I love to run Basic the most: roll-under the number on your character sheet to succeed. It's very intuitive aside from the one obvious bit (I describe one being the best number as "you're number one!" but the pop chart is good) and the charts at the end to convert existing monsters are great. Basically, I'd say that you're on a very good track, and I don't find any mechanical problems with it. You could easily clean it up with art and do a pay-if-you-want version. I'll see if I can do a playtest of it sometime.
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May 30, 2013 20:38
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You could even make some pre-written suggested packages of items that cost X amounts of gold and let people pick from those.
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Jun 1, 2013 21:37
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Just gonna post this here, both for the thread and so I can find it easily later: http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard What interests me most about this series of posts (and what I hadn't gathered before) is how the mapping thing seems to be a core aspect, to the point where a player who was so good that he never needed to refer to a map was the one who essentially tore the game a new one and finished Castle Greyhawk solo. I'd heard of Rob Kuntz' skill before but I'd never thought that it was attributable in such a large part to the mapping aspect of the game! There's also the aspect of not just making the map, but of having to rely on it: There is no "we get out of the dungeon" moment, you have to actually crawl in and then have enough resources to crawl back out. And it's that final bit in particular that's a revelation to me. It makes the reason for the map click in my brain, and makes the really complex multi-level maps of later dungeons make sense to me. The game never transmitted that element of relying on the map to the audience, or at least not nearly this well. I've run the "we get out of the dungeon" bit as a series of wandering monster checks, but not as a desperate race where the mapping is put to the test. Of course, the drawback of it is that there's one designated mapper. So much of the important bit of gameplay lies in one player's hands in that model.
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Jun 10, 2013 22:39
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh, I had a question about that specifically: What do you do when a party member dies in a pit trap and you need to quickly introduce new characters, via promoting hirelings to PC status or otherwise? The funnel made DCC seem to me like another retrogame that worships old D&D tropes without understanding why they existed. The new character is introduced as a prisoner being held by the monsters in the next room.  Another option is the "ascended hireling", if the game is at the point where the party has a bunch of NPCs in a caravan outside the dungeon or even along for the ride. Really, they played pretty fast and loose with it.
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Jun 11, 2013 19:47
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And in even more great older D&D related news, the Rules Cyclopedia just got released on PDF. It's been out of print for a very long time, so this is quite welcome. Since the thread is stickied right now, I think this one deserves an explanation (which is also in the OP). The RC is the collected version of Basic D&D, as opposed to Advanced D&D. It has materials from most of the boxed sets (what is referred to as BECMI - note that this is distinct from B/X), some clarifications, and in one volume has all the rules you need to run a campaign from dungeon crawling to wilderness exploring to rulership to war. It lacks the rules for advancing on to full Immortality, but you can't have everything - it's remarkable enough that this book does all that while also being a monster manual and a DM's guide. A hell of an editing job by one Aaron Allston. I own this one in print, but I think it's more than worthy of consideration even today. And, oh yes, TAAC was based on it.
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Jul 2, 2013 19:04
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Evil Sagan posted:That's pretty exciting. I've heard lots of good things about BECMI. Now I can check it out for myself. Any of the B series is good to start with (they're all aimed at levels 1-3 or so). B3 Palace of the Silver Princess is fairly unique as D&D adventures go in feel, and provides a fairly heroic goal from the getgo. B4 The Lost City is one of my personal favorites, and involves a more "weird fantasy" style game with lost underground civilizations, corruption and rival factions, but it's not "complete": parts of it are deliberately left up to the DM to fill on their own. B5 Horror on the Hill is classic, a more Keep on the Borderlands-style excursion from a town into a monster-infested network of caverns and some hilariously out of place NPCs. B6 The Veiled Society takes place in Karameikos, making it one of the first adventures to have a specific setting (Mystara), and breaks up the dungeon gameplay with social intrigue and criminal conspiracy, the first module to do so. It also comes with some keen fold-up houses. Then there's B7 Rahasia, the debut of Tracy and Laura Hickman of Dragonlance fame, but I haven't read or run through that at all. I hear it's pretty good. I'd avoid B1 In Search of the Unknown, which is mostly empty and teaches you "lessons" like how some combats will just TPK a party by letting the party run into TPKs, and B2 Keep on the Borderlands is much more rules-heavy than most Basic adventures, an artifact of it having been written by Gygax for AD&D. It is a classic module, though, so go for it for name recognition if you like. Some of the later B-series products are also good but they move away from being introductory-level adventures.
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Jul 2, 2013 20:56
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Oh yeah, B10 is a great introduction to wilderness travel, though for that I'd actually recommend starting a bit higher level and playing X1 The Isle of Dread. Jungle Island! Remote tribes to befriend! Dinosaurs! It's the first Hexcrawl adventure ever released. Starting at a higher level in Basic is a bit unusual in that you usually want to pick an XP total rather than state "everyone starts at level 3". Some classes level faster and all that. Other than that detail, it's good to go.
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Jul 3, 2013 16:12
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Wow, Rules Cyclopedia made it to hottest item on Drivethru. I like where this is going. It's also such a relief to finally be able to talk about it and then be able to point at a place where you can buy it and read! This D&D Classics stuff may be a niche business but it's a good deal. On the topic of adventures, has anyone read the CM series of adventures (Test of the Warlords, Sabre River etc)? I realized I've never actually read or played any of them, or even heard people talking about them much at all.
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Jul 4, 2013 11:20
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Winson_Paine posted:You know what? gently caress it, I have tried running it in GURPS, BECMI, and one notably disasterous 4E run. Can I even app after what happened last time?
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Jul 4, 2013 19:30
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You realize we'll need more. 
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Jul 9, 2013 04:36
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Cocks Cable posted:But the Elf is the only overtly overpowered demihuman. Dwarves and halflings are just fighters with different window dressing. That doesn't make sense. They start with much better saves, mainly. It's short-term survivability (plus some special abilities) versus long term advancement gains. The "Attack Rank" stuff they added on is wonky as heck but it sort of works. However, there's an optional "extended" XP table for dwarves, halflings and elves on page 266 of the Cyclopedia if you want to just let them level up to 36 as per other characters. They still need way more XP to do it but they can.
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Jul 9, 2013 20:56
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Rulebook Heavily posted:NOPE: Feel free to start a different thread I won't feel compelled to mess up because people dragged LotFP into it, though. Yes, he's a big name OSR-wise, but there's a reason he was featured on the frontpage.
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Oct 26, 2013 08:19
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Mirthless posted:How were Zak Smith's blog posts incoherent? Also, what makes him a douchebag, other than preferring old-school D&D? He didn't actively engage in edition wars, smear new school products, or poo poo on the way people play D&D in his blog. In fact, he was panned heavily by the grognard community because he used modern game mechanics in his video-blogged game. Is it opposite day? Clearly it's opposite day. Although I'm okay with OSR discussion I think it's better to leave the personal stuff out, which is basically the other big reason I refuse LotFP discussion. For a long time the OSR has been of a bit of battle of personalities but that's far enough removed from the games that I feel okay with leaving it to IRC or the chat thread.
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Nov 7, 2013 18:47
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OtspIII posted:Yeah, I don't think there's a blogger I've seen who delivers as many mind-blowing posts about roleplaying as Zak does. He does have a bit of a difficult personality (he's a dangerous mix of methodical, creative, idealistic, Weird, and hyperopinionated), and plenty of his posts seem like the types of things that are meant to be almost more inside jokes than anything else, but I really don't get the hate for him here. Okay, really now. If you want the skinny on Zak S, ask in the month's chat thread. I even invite PeterWeller to repost his thing there for all to see. If you don't want the skinny on Zak, don't post stuff like this. (The short version is that he's a really, really awful person who does really, really awful things.)
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Nov 8, 2013 02:58
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Yes. What people shouldn't do is "Why is he so hated here guys??", because that's not discussion of his works and does not invite it.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:01
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Alright, that's a time out.
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Nov 10, 2013 20:29
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Let me clarify a thing. No OSR Politics. I could go off on ACKS' creators for misusing their journalistic position at the Escapist to sell their retroclone and make competitors look bad. I could quote Zak S. I quote write a goddamn thesis on why Raggi is the toxin this hobby must excise from its body. But, importantly, I do none of those things here because then we'd never discuss cool games. Even with the above, I'm okay with people discussing the actual games (Except, notably, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Carcosa, because they are self-derailing subjects: you can't mention them without derailing a general thread. go make a thread specific to those if you want to  ) and in fact that is what I want to encourage. If a derail threatens, go to the chat thread or whine on IRC (SYNirc's #badwrongfun, where I'm an admin and will spew vitriol all I like!) like the rest of us.But in here, we're going to be cool people about games. Please. Let's do that. Now, let's have at it.
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Nov 10, 2013 21:07
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Unless they want to do a serious revision of the text to actually include omitted rules, yeah, I don't see it being worth it. Not even as a collector. You can get the original game in near-mint for that price, for reference, and that copy might actually have some value and actual collectability factor to it.
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Nov 12, 2013 21:33
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Speaking of which, while Bruce Heard may not have successfully gotten rights to do Mystara things (curses), he's off doing his own notMystara thing now! As far as I know he's aiming for systemless, but it's all going to be in the style of the old Basic D&D Gazeteers, so watch that space I guess.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:55
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What, you actually expect me to read this thread?
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Nov 21, 2013 20:59
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:11 |
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Done!
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Dec 30, 2013 22:34
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