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RC or Dark Dungeons for BECMI. I'd go with BECMI, because that makes fewer things concrete (for instance, dark dungeons says that weapons are based on class, while RC doesn't actually specify that when using the weapon proficiency rules...)
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May 25, 2014 02:46
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Now here's a question for those of you who are fans of ACKS - how would you hypothetically handle a player who was playing a mage, and wanted their character to learn how to use a weapon that isn't on their weapon list. The way I'd be tempted to do it would be that they'd have to find a trainer in game. The trainer would have to have both the Manual of Arms and the Weapon Focus proficiencies (similar to the requirements for training archers and the like), with the latter being in the type of weapon the mage wants to learn how to use. Then, after training for however long, the mage in question would be allowed to take the Martial Training proficiency (similar to that available for clerics) for the type of weapon they've been learning to use. Alternatively, I might let them train for one to three months, depending on the weapon, and then just be proficient in that one weapon, but not the others of its kind. I only ask, because saying that somebody can never learn to use a given weapon seems overly restrictive. That's why my personal interpretation of the BECMI weapon proficiencies is that while a mage can only be proficient in two weapons at level 1, they can be any two weapons.
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Jun 18, 2014 01:10
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On the one hand, I can see what you mean with limiting their weapon damage; after all, it's the fighter's job to be good at fighting, and it's the thief's job to either shank stuff in the back or lob arrows from a safe distance - and of course to disarm traps and pick locks. The priest's job is a combination of providing backup to the fighter if needed and healing people after the fight. But what's the wizard's job - particularly at low level? It certainly isn't anything combat related, because with only one spell per day, and only the shittiest of weapons as a backup, they're basically completely loving useless in a fight until about fifth level.
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Jun 18, 2014 05:17
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I think the real problem is that at early levels, a mage has neither. Letting them use a light crossbow, at least, means that they can actually do something useful in a fight, rather than just hurl bad language at the foe. I mean, it's not like their weapon use is in any danger of outstripping any of the other classes, and by the time their magic becomes powerful enough to do so, they'll have probably stopped using weapons anyway.
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Jun 18, 2014 19:14
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Evil Mastermind posted:I just found out about this, which is coming out for SWN and Fate Core. Could be interesting - I'll have to keep an eye out for that.
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Jun 21, 2014 02:18
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Stars Without Number is pretty awesome. I actually wouldn't mind seeing a fantasy port for it, because I reckon the mix between old school D&D and old school Traveller works quite well. Yes, I know there's Spears of the Dawn (which is loving awesome), but I meant something closer to how Stars Without Number works, only in a fantasy setting. Probably wouldn't be too hard; you just need to work out what tech levels different weapons and armour would be, redo the weapons skills, and remove the skills that don't make sense (possibly adding a few from Spears of the Dawn if they make sense). The classes work as is, though the backgrounds and training packages will need updating to reflect changes in skills. Port in money and prices from Basic D&D, and you're probably all set.
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Jul 31, 2014 15:13
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I do like how the answer is basically "Yeah, you should probably retire that character - at least for a while".
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Aug 14, 2014 19:57
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To be fair, BECMI already had proficiencies (both weapon and non-weapon) as an optional rule. It did it somewhat differently, and in the case of the latter didn't limit it by class, but yeah.
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Aug 21, 2014 15:45
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Personally, I still reckon letting the wizard use a crossbow also works - when your one spell per day is gone, you can still contribute to the fight, and it does make sense. But then, I'm also in favour of allowing any character to learn how to use any weapon in play, so take that for what it's worth.
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Sep 3, 2014 16:54
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That too - Spears of the Dawn is a very interesting alternative. It's like a cross between the best bits of old school D&D combined with a few bits of old school Traveller. On the topic of keeping track of ammo, I think it depends on the kind of campaign you're running. If you're running a heroic campaign with the intention of telling an awesome story, then keeping track of ammo is probably going to detract from that. If you're running a campaign about a group of guys who found this really deep cave network that they could conceivably spend a week or longer exploring, then I think that all resources should be tracked.
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Sep 4, 2014 11:08
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I'd definitely agree with Darker dungeons for how skills work, though as Arivia said, you'll have a very hard time finding an old school game with tons of options (not counting Kits from AD&D 2nd Ed, where you have loads of options but you pick them at character creation). If you feel brave enough to use an entirely different setting from the norm, Spears of the Dawn might be worth your time - it combines the best bits of old school D&D with the best bits of old school Traveller, and the setting is Fantasy Africa, based off of African myths and legends. Spells go up to level 5, with the ability to transform someone into an animal, the ability to make their own shadow attack them and the ability to put them into a waking coma among the most powerful. There's a pretty good write up of it on the current FATAL and Friends thread.
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Sep 20, 2014 15:34
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Incidentally, for those of you (probably two or three at most but if more yay!) who speak Welsh, there's apparently someone working on a translation for OSRIC in that language (last I heard was a forum post in April on the dragonfoot forum, but they could be working on it somewhere else). Just thought there might be some interest from someone.
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Oct 4, 2014 18:00
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Honestly, I'd suggest going with your gut, remembering that if it feels a little too powerful, it's probably about right.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:34
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Thing is, the Paladin isn't a bad class; it's just an easy class to play badly (though it does in part depend on the GM, as some GMs will make you fall for the pettiest of reasons). When you consider how high the stat requirements are to play one, and how they're required to be basically decent people (as opposed to murderhobos), the additional power they get in exchange seems about right.
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Nov 22, 2014 22:02
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CountingWizard posted:I'm firmly in the camp of believing that magic users shouldn't have at will spells. Combat isn't the solution to everything, and giving them unlimited combat ability changes the group dynamic. Of course they try to avoid combat - once combat starts, there's nothing for them to do but throw harsh language.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:22
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Honestly, I really hate that idea. NPCs may lie to the players all the time. The GM shouldn't - and if that means a PC goes down, the PC goes down. Adventuring is dangerous, and they aren't heroes until they earn it. If they've already earned it, they shouldn't be level 1...
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Dec 24, 2014 04:30
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Honestly, my biggest problem with DCC is the way it treats armour - I mean, balance I can understand, but having worn chain and knowing people who've worn considerably heavier armour, I can honestly say that armour in general no where near as cumbersome as DCC would make it look...
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Feb 13, 2015 03:05
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I just came across the Red Tide Campaign Sourcebook on Drivethru, and I'm seriously considering picking it up. It's published by the company as Stars Without Number and Spears of the Dawn, and it's essentially the sandbox mechanics from those games ported over to Labyrinth Lord, as well as a random dungeon generator with worked example, new classes and races, and some other interesting looking stuff.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:01
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drrockso20 posted:Red Tide is an interesting setting, although personally it doesn't feel very appropriate for use with most OSR systems, feels more like it would work better with Runequest or some other BRP variant Seeing as I rather like Runequest, that would certainly not be a problem. Just as soon as I have money, I'll have to pick this up.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:21
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Grimpond posted:I've expressed in interest to my friend in trying to DM some games. He gave me something called the 2e Fighter's Challenge. I've never played 2e, but from some of the stat blocks and other stuff mentioned in the adventure, it seems pretty different from the editions I know (Pathfinder, 4e, and 5e). He told me the other day he's already working on developing his stronghold, which is, if I'm reading this 2e book right, a base for his followers? There's not actually a lot of information on them. Strongholds are primarily a place for followers to show up (which he rolls on a table to see which he gets). It's pretty much a keep or a fortified manor house with a couple of villages and some farmland nearby that also belong to the lord of the manor. A player can, over time, receive money from taxes from the lands surrounding it, and it's another possible place for role playing to happen. That really is about it. If the adventure doesn't have any scenes that specifically involve the stronghold, then it might be worth starting play there and having the PC travel to wherever the adventure takes place; beyond that, you can pretty much just ignore it. It'd be more important in a campaign. But yeah, 2nd edition is somewhat different from later editions. It's not really that much harder to run; it's just less consistent and occasionally badly worded. To take thac0 as an example, the rulebook talks about subtracting from the character's thac0 to work out the to hit number. It seems more complicated than it really is. An easier way to think of it might be to just say "an attack roll is a d20 + stat modifier + target's AC" - then, the to hit number is always the attacker's thac0.
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May 10, 2015 06:19
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I've played it, and it works quite well. Fighting is dangerous and is to be avoided unless you have a big advantage; definitely make goals (that's where xp comes from) and make sure to have a ranged weapon skill. Even warriors can die in one hit from a firearm (though their class ability makes it a little more subtle). If running it, I'd definitely advise running it as written, as a sandbox, because that is honestly how it works best (not to mention the GM turn provides an amazing amount of material for the players to interact with, and is fun in its own right). There's also an random sector generator somewhere on the internet too; I forget the url, but it's only a google away.
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May 28, 2015 02:49
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JonBolds posted:Silent Legions is an Old school style horror game made by the same dude who makes Stars Without Number / Scarlet Heroes / Other Dust. It has a call of cthulhu-esque 'madness' sanity system. I'd be seriously tempted to cross this with Spears of the Dawn (another game by the same guy; set in fantasy Africa).
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May 29, 2015 19:32
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FRINGE posted:At a certain level thats a pretty good way to handle things. Making special classes for everything gets pretty weird and leads to a lot of dead ends. That's one of the things I like about Kevin Crawford's stuff - because he integrates the skill system from old school Traveller and because it's designed around sandbox play, it's quite easy to play just about any concept you want out of just three or four classes. To use being a thief as an example, in Spears of the Dawn, you have a Warrior, a Bard stand-in, a Wizard stand-in and a Cleric stand-in - if you want to be a thief, just take a couple of useful skills at character creation and start stealing poo poo. Meanwhile, in BECMI or earlier editions, one could just as easily remove the thief class and just treat pretty much all of the skills as either ability checks or "Tell me how you do it and I'll tell you if it works".
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Jun 1, 2015 02:31
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Worth the asking price by itself.
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Jul 9, 2015 19:26
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Stars Without Number takes old school D&D and mashes it with old school Traveller's skill system. If you like BECMI D&D, you'll probably like this too. The best bits by far are the sector generation rules and the GM turn rules. While they're absolutely optional and the game works perfectly well without them, they make running a living, breathing sector of space for the players to explore far simpler for the GM. They are also quite simple to extract and use with whatever system you prefer to run, if you wish (though it would be somewhat less trivial to adapt them for a different setting).
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Jul 11, 2015 14:23
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It's also the only time I've ever seen Vancian magic done in a way that makes sense both in fiction and in gameplay. Some spells are rituals, and can be cast as often as you wish; others must be prepared. You can have as many spells prepared as you wish, but if you go over the limits based on level you have to make a skill roll (with penalties based on how far beyond your limits you've gone) every time you cast until you're back within your limits, and if you fail, all of your prepared spells go off at once with you as the target. Given that pretty much all of the prepared spells are combat spells, that means you're almost certainly about to die. But, if your magic skill is sufficiently high, it might be worth taking a risk on one or two extra spells.
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Jul 14, 2015 21:10
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Lightning Lord posted:Or houserule it away, or make the trainers NPCs that they owe favors to or something. A lot of people will just house rule it away. I personally like it - the idea that you go and find a trainer to improve your skills makes a lot of sense, while self training is time consuming and expensive (and may be practically impossible, depending on the skill and the character's level in it). Skill training can also be offered as a reward in and of itself (if the players didn't have the skill points spare, I would allow them to spend them in advance of levelling up if I offered a skill increase as a reward).
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Jul 28, 2015 19:37
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Simian_Prime posted:Agreed - Thankfully SWN forgoes training time. I feel the same way about long healing times. Is there some purpose to these time sinks besides wanking over verisimilitude? It just means that you can't instantly heal mid adventure by having a night's kip or instantly learn a skill mid adventure when you never expressed an interest in learning it prior to that. Pretty much every system with heal times allows those times to be shortened by spending time in the care of a decent medic (and most also have a means of bypassing said heal times entirely) - and a period of down time spent on recovering after taking a severe beating or on improving the party's skills needn't break the flow of a campaign.
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Jul 29, 2015 19:58
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drrockso20 posted:I've had amazingly bad luck trying to get a game off the ground in the past(between 2008 and 2013 I tried about 20 times with at least 8 different systems to run a game and none of them got past character creation), although I'm hoping to try and get something off the ground before the end of the year(currently looking to be either ACKS or DCC, but there's a couple of other candidates as well) I feel your pain there. As for your comment regarding bad DMs, while bad DMs can be a problem, they're a system agnostic one. A bad DM can make any game feel terrible, just as a good DM can make any game (so long as it isn't utterly broken) fun to play - I would argue that a really good DM might even be able to make FATAL playable (though I don't see why they'd want to). Some DMs are dicks, and they will be dicks regardless of the system. To take a game like Stars Without Number as an example, a good DM will take a look at healing times, and realise that if the party have a competent medic, the time taken to travel from one system to another will generally be enough to heal most if not all of the damage that's been taken, but a good night's kip won't be enough for someone to go from nearly dead from a nasty gunshot wound to perfect health. It gives violence a short term consequence, and gives the party a reason to search for non-violent solutions to problems - or at least, solutions where they aren't on the receiving end of any violence. Occasionally, a good DM might actually work an adventure around things like training times or healing times - while you're training, a plot hook happens, or while you're healing up in hospital, you see a plot hook. Or, these might be given a session of down time to deal with. A session spent mostly taking care of down time stuff can be entertaining in its own right - particularly if it comes after a particularly intense session, as it gives the party a chance to catch their breaths and it means that more intense sessions later on will be more enjoyable.
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Jul 30, 2015 02:24
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ExiledTinkerer posted:It has long struck me as the damnedest shame at both Glorantha and Tekumel missed the limelight that D&D got in terms of the breadth of having people get in on the lot of it and mess around in full the world over---though Glorantha is at least faring far better in terms of that giant/amazing "Guide to" book and the King of Dragon Pass / forthcoming Six Ages on the computer game front versus that one new Tekumel edition KS that made it awhile back. They each have such jam-packed settings and have been hard at it for decades now. The problem that Glorantha has is that it's almost utterly impenetrable for people who are new to the setting. It's different, and it's probably a blast to play in, but because I've never played any games in that setting, I don't feel like I understand it near well enough to run any games in it. I'd much rather run a game in a simpler setting from which I can easily expand.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:03
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Tulpa posted:Glorantha is honestly not that complex and I think people might be thrown off by all the cosmology and myth stuff that glorantha fans like to talk about. the basic setting if you're sticking with Orlanthi cultures is basically iron age celts in fantasy land, fighting creatures of chaos. Most people know some magic, so there aren't dedicated D&D wizards and most spells hew towards the practical (bless crops, warriors casting swordsharp on their weapons, etc) This is all you really need to go on to start with and the more unique elements can be introduced gradually (bring duck people in immediately because death cultist duck warriors are the best) In which case, the setting sorely needs summarising, because the stuff I read always gave me the idea that I was expected to actually learn all that poo poo before even thinking about running a game. If the common conception of Glorantha is that it's ridiculously hard to get into for new players and GMs, then frankly that's the fault of the people writing books for the setting. Maybe there's some better books now for introducing new players and GMs to Glorantha, but I was introduced to it via Mongoose's Glorantha: The Second Age. This book starts from the very first page about myth and cosmology; it describes each culture in first person, starting with myths, then history, then daily life and finally why one might go adventuring, when frankly the opposite from an out of character perspective would be a much better choice. When giving advice on how to play a given culture, it gives such advice as (for playing an elf): "Have your character detour to forests. Once there, it lingers, listening to the song of Seyotel. Require sustained prompting from other Adventurers before you move or pay attention to pressing matters at hand."; "Bring a few dried leaves to the game session in a plastic bag; occasionally take them out and rustle them." and "Talk so quietly others must strain to listen.". Honestly, I'd prefer to see a collection of shorter books that each focus on a different culture; something akin to Runequest Vikings (also from Mongoose), which starts off with an introduction to the setting (in this case, the part of Glorantha that the culture inhabits), a detailed outsider's view of the culture, including the way they view other cultures, advice for creating characters from that culture, religious beliefs (including a few important myths), a section on commonly used magic, including descriptions of any spells not included in the core rules and a bestiary containing the most likely creatures to be found in the bit of Glorantha that that book is focussing on. Maybe there'd be a little bit about heroquesting, but only as it pertains to that one culture. Then, a separate book just about the cosmology, more detailed information about heroquesting, the importance of myth and how all of the religions are correct; all of it, completely separate from the stuff that would allow a newcomer to the setting to actually start getting used to the setting. It might be a little more expensive than having a single book for the entire setting, but it'd certainly do a better job of introducing people to it.
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Aug 5, 2015 03:02
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Besides stopping at 6th level, I'd be tempted to merge Fighter and Rogue as a sort of "Non-Magical Adventurer" class (inspired by Spears of the Dawn). Basically, the Fighter would get all of the Fighter/Rogue skill list and the Bard's skill points. They wouldn't get sneak attack, but instead unaware enemies would be considered helpless for the purposes of a coup de grace, regardless of who does it (nicked from Star Wars d20 Revised). They wouldn't be as good at skill-monkeying as the (at this point defunct) Rogue, but they'd certainly be acceptable - and given a 6th level cap, the Wizard wouldn't be able to outdo them at everything yet.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:43
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You can put the map into the GM layer, so that you can see it but the players can't, and then have them draw the map directly onto the screen - that's how Adam Koebel's been handling it in his twitch series, at least.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:07
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Dark Dungeons is basically the same thing, except with a better layout.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:24
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I actually had a book with two solo adventures for Tunnels and Trolls. No idea where it is now...
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Jan 15, 2016 16:12
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Does anyone know of any retroclones of 1e RuneQuest? I'm largely asking out of curiosity, because as I understand it, RuneQuest was written in part as a response to what the authors felt was wrong with D&D, and it came out in 1978; around the same time as Moldvay Basic and AD&D 1st edition - so it'd be interesting to see how the rulesets compare. Also, on an entirely different note, a while back I mentioned Red Tide, and somebody said that it was a good setting that would work better in RuneQuest. I was wondering if anyone had any idea how one would model the Scions, since they're basically elves without magic, but with very weird abilities (largely because of the whole "Race == Class" thing that Labyrinth Lord gets from old school D&D). Other than simply removing them, of course...
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Jan 24, 2016 00:18
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Interesting - I wonder when it'll actually be available for people to buy in one form or another for people who missed the kickstarter (since people have already received PDFs of it)...
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Jan 24, 2016 00:35
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Nice. Could certainly be interesting.
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Feb 9, 2016 23:20
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Depends - if you want an XCOM feel to the way armour works, just take it as per encounter. If you want it to be relatively realistic, make it per round. If you want your PCs to die on a regular basis, make it per adventure. T&T is one of those systems where (it seems, at least) a lot is left up to the GM's discretion.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:01
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Hmm... Something like that for an oceanic setting would be pretty useful for a campaign about pirates. Anyone know if there is one, or would I need to come up with something myself?
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Feb 27, 2016 15:16
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