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That hexcrawl concept sounds super freaking cool. I can't wait until I get my copies of the AD&D books so I can try to run a Westmarches deal on IRC.
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Jul 11, 2012 17:40
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That's pretty grognardy, but it still doesn't trigger my gag reflex like Monte Cook's forward in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. Everything seems tame in comparison.
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Aug 16, 2012 22:25
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So I'm preparing to run my first 1st Edition AD&D game in a two-session romp at the second half of the month. I'm still going through the amazing Dungeon Master's Guide, but I had some questions that I don't think I'll find the answers to within. Namely I'm concerned about balance. I'd like to have up to five players, but at the moment I only have three in my roster and there is a decent chance only two will ultimately be able to make it. The Pathfinder Core Rulebook and (I think) the 4th Edition D&D Dungeon Master's Guide cover the issue of encounter balance for parties of varying sizes and types. However, it looks like the closest consideration 1E makes in expressing notions of balance is the array of encounters spelled out in the random monster selection rules, and even then I'm kind of skeptical that it really considers notions of "fairness," as much as that may matter in a game like this. So I guess what I'm rambling about and asking is how I can be sure to make some suitably challenging encounters for two or three players. If it helps, I'm definitely aiming for a dungeon crawl sort of scenario, but since it's not an extended campaign I'll be aiming to give them some sort of short-term quest. Progression and exploration are not likely to be big motivators in the short term. EDIT: I forgot to mention that this will be the first 1E game for any of us. I don't know if that's relevant. I don't know what's relevant at all in this drat game. 100 degrees Calcium fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Oct 7, 2012 |
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Oct 7, 2012 19:52
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Good to know. I better review the rules on hirelings and henchmen and stress their availability. I only breezed through that part, so I assumed those were guys you hired when you started getting some surplus cash.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:09
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That's pretty exciting. I've heard lots of good things about BECMI. Now I can check it out for myself. Can anyone recommend some good adventures to go with it?
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Jul 2, 2013 19:58
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Thanks for the recommendations, guys. There's a lot of cool stuff out there I had never heard of before. Getting pretty eager to give this a shot.
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Jul 3, 2013 16:15
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OH gently caress YES! I am so apping for that!
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Jul 4, 2013 18:22
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And thus we come full circle.
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Jul 5, 2013 06:42
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I really like this because it coincides with my vision of what a D&D party looks like (according to the books and movies I've consumed), but doesn't match my actual experience with D&D. I feel like I'd have a hard time selling this to a group of players, but I'd really enjoy it.
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Aug 1, 2013 19:18
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I've always been tempted by 2e. I was able to "justify" running 1e as a sort of hardcore "back to the beginning" trip, but the truth is my first exposure to D&D was Baldur's Gate. And that means 2e. Every fantasy RPG I've run or played has been a failed attempt to recreate the experience of playing BG in a social tabletop context. However, I suspect that playing or running actual 2nd Edition AD&D is a fair bit different from playing Baldur's Gate.
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Oct 23, 2013 17:11
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PeterWeller posted:The DM will get mad if you try to rest after every fight and send waves of random monsters to gently caress with you. Wait a minute, that's just like BG. Wow, that's astoundingly spot on. drat, why did I like Baldur's Gate again?
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Oct 23, 2013 18:27
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I always assumed Final Fantasy was based on AD&D, but I know RC was a pretty big influence in Japanese fantasy stuff like Record of Lodoss War. I wonder if there's a source on what inspired the original Final Fantasy. It feels very D&D to me, at least, so I'm kind of assuming there's something going on there.
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Oct 24, 2013 19:27
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When I was preparing to run The Temple of Elemental Evil (never happened, sadly, but perhaps someday) I got the impression at some point that the adventure assumed something like 8 - 10 players in a party. I can't really remember why, but was this an accurate assessment? Is this normal for AD&D adventures? What about Basix/Expert etc?
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Nov 1, 2013 01:24
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I gotta gush and this seems like the likely place. So I was just at the local gaming store to play some Ghostbusters RPG for Halloween. During a break, I was going through their used stuff and found the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the Monsters of Faerun monster supplement. This isn't the exciting part. Buying the books caused the owner to remark "oh you like old D&D stuff." He then took me in the back and mentioned something about a 1981 TSR game catalogue. Not exactly a big deal in my mind, but I figured it would be a fun relic to take. What I didn't expect was that this was on top of... well, these. Not exactly a comprehensive collection, and the quality is spotty in some of them, but almost all the modules are titles I've had an eye on. I'm also particularly excited about grabbing one of the original Deities & Demigods prints. So, which module should I run first?  EDIT: And sorry about the quality. I'm using a camera phone and I don't know poo poo about photography so I didn't really try hard. I figured anyone who would remotely give a poo poo will comprehend what they're seeing.
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Nov 1, 2013 07:48
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Yeah, I'm still trying to decide what to do about the Deities and Demigods thing. None of these books are in especially rad shape, but that one in particular is probably in the best shape out of everything in the pile. My room is sort of an amalgam of loosely organized piles right now, but with this collection now in my hands I've decided to get a bookshelf. Gotta take care of my poo poo.
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Nov 3, 2013 06:50
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Full circle in 4 posts. Not bad.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:57
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Ranting and daydreaming about online gaming ahead I'm in one of my "old school" moods that I get into every couple of months. This is usually marked by re-reading this thread, reading a lot of terrible blogs, and gazing in awe upon the surplus of D&D rewrites that have flooded the internet. I don't have nostalgic D&D experiences that predate the release of 3rd edition, so a lot of this stuff is academic to me. Kind of rough when most of the material online is philosophizing about game experience based purely on nostalgia. But there was an old-school D&D game I played a few years ago that somehow stuck in my mind. In another forum I frequented, a sort of persistent pick-up game had been started using some OD&D rehash (I think it was Swords and Wizardry). Anyone was free to DM, and characters could be used in various DM's games interchangably. To me, the basic dungeon crawling experience combined with the persistant shared setting was magical. The main DM in particular handled this deftly, encouraging us to track and share details of our exploits with other adventurers (in a central thread). Basically, I guess, it was Westmarches. I only played a couple times before the lack of interested players shut the thing down, but it was great. The standout moment to me was when a member of my party recklessly charged a couple of ghouls, shouting all the while. The other party member hissed warnings about this behavior. Sure enough, we were flanked and murdered. As the last party member fell, he swore to never join the reckless players in another delve. On the surface, this was a negative experience. One player deviated from how another player expected the party to behave. The other player was so angry he developed a grudge against the first. But to me, it was just another part of the world exerting itself. When you play D&D, you learn about the setting; the traps, the monsters, the various intricacies of the DM's machinations. Why not, then, would knowing about the strengths and foibles of the other adventurers also be a component of that experience? I'm playing with the idea of starting a similar thing and recruiting out of The Game Room. I've been sketching out the details of a frontier exploration game; It would start out as a small camp on an unexplored continent, and as various achievements and milestones are marked, the continent would slowly become fleshed out and the camp would thrive and grow. For my part, I'd probably have one "not-quite-mega" dungeon that would be my main DMing ground, with some lairs in and about the area for extra fun. Right now I'm thinking about the kind of logistics issues that could trip things up and make it unfun for players before everything really gets sorted early on. One thing that came to mind was mapping. In the campaign I had described earlier, we just played in IRC and operated on the DM's descriptions. Certainly we were free to map things as we went, but as far as I know there was no way for us to share anything as we played. I liked this approach because it was light... get four people together, join a channel, and play. But reading about these kinds of games, it's pretty clear that mapping is a core component of the experience. Certainly the DM could map things out in Roll20 and reveal the map over the course of play, but this adds significantly to prep and removes a component of the exploration experience from the hands of the players. The other issue that comes to mind is backtracking. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect players to need to make their way out of the dungeon when the session is coming to a close, but in online games people sort of leave when they have to, and that's not always planned for. Especially in pickup games. I thought about just letting people automatically leave the dungeon when it's time to wrap up, but again I think that loses some of the romanticism and danger of the dungeon crawling. Every room entered should be a room that eventually needs to be exited, and who knows what might have changed since the last time you crossed the doorway. One possibility that comes to mind is maybe making "quests" to rescue adventurers whose players had to leave before they could exit the dungeon. This idea appeals to me personally because it lends more to the persistance of the setting, but for the players in question it might simply represent a chore getting in the way of the business of playing the game. I'm sad I never had time to participate in OtspIII's ACKs game. It seems like I could have learned a lot from that. 100 degrees Calcium fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Apr 17, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 20:14
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Well that doesn't sound too bad, actually. It could be that the process of the player manually drawing a map as they go is a bit overrated anyway. In my mind, I'm starting to just see it ending in pain as communication skills fail to translate into accurate drawings. Thanks for the breakdown.
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Apr 17, 2014 22:20
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Dang, that's downright inspiring. It looks like it was a lot of fun.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:31
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Libertad! posted:Never said it was, I just felt like pointing that out. We don't truck with your "facts" around these parts. 
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Jun 20, 2014 21:28
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The way ACKS angles at being an adventurer simulator kind of gets me going. It seems like a viable way to effectively create your own Record of Lodoss War. Though I'm sure that has more to do with the fact that ACKS is derived from the same game as RoLW. It's Dungeons and Dragons all the way down.
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Jul 30, 2014 23:10
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Arivia posted:I kind of want to grab this and run it as the lead in to Pathfinder's Skulls and Shackles adventure path. Do it.
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Jul 16, 2015 17:47
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