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Hypnobeard posted:I'm working on a 1e game, with the intent of running TAGDQ, but I'm not particularly interested in running bare 1e. I've come up with some house rules, and I'd like some other eyes to look them over and point out unexpected things that I'm missing. I'm writing my own retroclone with the same basic idea (mediocrity is annoying), and looking at this I don't think you've really touched on what makes characters mediocre at low levels. The real culprits are ultra-low HP (a cat is a genuine threat; though max HP helps here it doesn't mitigate it entirely) and the difficulty to hit anything (an 18/00 Str fighter with double weapon specialization--the creme de la 1st-level creme--is hitting a lowly AC 7 kobold opponent only 65% of the time, or an AC 6 Goblin 60%; most other characters, including all non-rangers/fighters, are never getting it that good). A single 5% bonus to XP is going to be effectively meaningless and just result in more math for you to perform at the end of every session. At the same time, a single-class human with a high Prime Req stat (which is the next thing to automatic thanks to your ability score method) getting +20% XP might encourage a certain one-dimensionality to your party.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:01
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SavageMessiah posted:AS&SH? http://www.hyperborea.tv/
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Oct 31, 2017 01:08
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Adventurer Conqueror King is B/X with more classes, and a skill system (typical of its kind, so with all the benefits and annoyances such a thing brings). Its main selling point is a focus on the D&D "endgame", the idea of progressing past the looting stage to command of armies and the like. As part of that, it has a big economic focus, and this manifests itself all over the place. For example, the book removes or alter spells that woul break a medieval economy or radically transform the world in ways fantasy games tend to overlook (e.g. permanent light, low-level and permanent animate dead, readily accessible raise dead). There's a lot of stuff about spell research and its costs, and how the characters can invest money, and how goods or specialists are available, and how the PCs interact with all this. Then there's further books that add mass combat rules, again because the game is interested in the big time, but in a "realistic" (i.e. non-gonzo) fashion. If all that interests you, I'd recommend it. If not, there's better plain-jane B/X clones out there, and a lot of clones that emulate a genre or some other ruleset or what have you rather than focusing on the endgame.
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Oct 31, 2017 22:28
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I'm pretty much in the same boat. The guy seems like scum from what I've been told, but I'm not losing sleep over the fact that I probably bought him a machiatto through royalties; he doesn't rant about SJWs in his books that I've noticed, so they're their own thing. I'm not throwing out Chinatown because Polanski's a pedo creep either.
Xotl fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Oct 31, 2017 |
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Oct 31, 2017 23:25
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alg posted:Dude put art of Vox Day slaughtering "SJWs" in one of his books lol What? In which one?
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Oct 31, 2017 23:26
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Serf posted:have you ever considered that giving them money is okay because they happen to keep it on the down-low? surely financing their ability to keep spewing hateful nazi poo poo so long as it never enters their books is cool and good. If it's not entering his books, how are you financing his ability to put it in them in the first place? Anyone can blather on twitter for free. How is he spending his money to promote Nazism?
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Oct 31, 2017 23:40
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I can't tell if this is a serious post.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:48
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An Echo Resounding is pretty cool. It goes about domain management from a completely different angle than ACKS, and there's advantages and disadvantages to both. For those of you not allergic to RPGsite links, I've found a neat thread where Crawford and Macris discuss at length the underlying basis of their systems and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. It's a fun look at game design and starting premises. http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?21979-Domain-Management-in-ACK-vs-An-Echo-Resounding Does anyone have anything good to say about Nightmares Underneath?
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Nov 1, 2017 20:54
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Banana Man posted:also related giant badger entry snippet: I assume it's based on the plotline in the comic where the owner of the game company promised that he'd let his nephew write some monster entries, and they all read like that because the kid was 10 or so. How many of those did they put in that book? One entry would be funny, but a pile of them would be insufferable.
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Jan 25, 2018 21:07
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God I love DCC. And that is one badass cover. I hope they get Harley Stroh to do some of the modules as well: I've never seen a guy churn out such consistently high quality material.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:27
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To add to the others, I really feel it's important to repeat what gradenko said about mechanical simplicity. This is a major selling point for many, but I can't emphasize enough that even if you're tired of the LFQW stuff of 3rd ed, you're getting way, way less to play with overall. There's no feat structure, and very few special abilities and combat options overall until higher levels of the game (an extra attack for fighers at level 12 as an optional rule, for example). Weapon Mastery is the main crunch outlet for melee characters, which can start early on though it isn't detailed until the Master rules; while it's a bit fiddly and complicated ruleset many love it, and it's something that has no real parallel in any other D&D edition. So if you have a group of players spoiled by 3.5/PF choice (even if a lot of those choices are non-choices) you may have a lot of guys getting bored by the lack of system mastery. A lot of retroclones attempt to solve this to various degrees, although it's also often championed as a feature rather than a bug. As for the thief, pretty much everyone on the planet will give them D6 HP, and even Frank Mentzer says he screwed up with their skills progression and to just use the one found in Moldvay/Cook. Caveats aside, I love B/X. But it is a very different mindset. Impermanent posted:Thanks for all the advice on BECMI. I guess my follow-up question is: why would it be a good idea to play BECMI instead of something like Torchbearer or DCC or any of the other retroclones? What does it have going for it that other editions and retroclones don't have? Overall simplicity. Access to oceans of support material, including some of the best D&D material ever written thanks to the OSR movement. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 18:13
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's weird how weapon mastery was kind of forgotten by history. I don't think I've ever seen a retroclone that did something along those lines. I think everyone agrees that it's neat, but also a trade-off between complexity vs. results. I think if you're making a retroclone you probably feel that there's better ways to make fighters good than to require a pile of humongous tables and a lot of per-weapon effects (I know I did when making mine). Plus the system can really bog play down when you've got guys getting into deflection wars.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:23
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It can be fun as all hell, and I agree that it looks far worse than it actually plays.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:35
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I like the idea of being defeated by a Victorian Englishman's opinion on the bi-metallic question (that's a level 3 opponent!). Is there any interest here in discussing people's homebrews? Like about 9/10ths of all OSR players i have one of my own, and I like going over other peoples', but I don't think the game workshop thread here is really interested in old-school mechanics and ideas.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:53
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Evil Mastermind posted:One idea I've had for an updated weapon mastery system is to kind of mix it with a PbtA-style tag system, and let players create their own weapons. Then each weapon type/modifier has its own bonuses. I'd be pretty interested in seeing this done up.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:54
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Okay. I wanted to see how far I could strip the base class structure of D&D down, and then add "modules" on top of that to build as many D&D character types as possible right out of the gate. So there's just the warrior and the mage. It uses feats, but only in that it was recognizable terminology: they're basically the things that let you turn your warrior or mage into a ranger mage or paladin or what have you, rather than giving you the ability to trip people or gain +2 HP. You can be a battlemage, or a warrior with a bit of casting. Thieving is available to anyone who feels like devoting resources to it. For warriors, you get to pick one of four fighting styles: free bonuses that point towards the sort of fighter you see the character as being (e.g. naked barbarian rushing through foes? Whirlwind. Legolas? Sniper.) This lets you build fighter archetypes without needing yet more classes. I also fully embrace the idea that HP are an abstraction. As such, the fighter just simply gets more damage as they climb levels. People get better at enduring/fighting on as they climb in levels (more HP), but a higher-level fighter gets better at cleaving through those abstracted defences. As for mages, I've broken all the spells up into the classic 8 schools that first appeared in 2nd edition. You get two to start. You can pick two more to start, or the ability to specialize, or the ability to actually fight in combat. The net result is that the closer you are to the classic robed useless-in-combat wizard, the more arcane ability you have. It also means that every mage is going to be different, because at best each mage only starts with access to half the spells in the game. I've strictly segregated the spell list so that each school has exactly three spells per level, so no one school is obviously better than the others: you'll need to think about what you want to do instead of just taking Evocation, Transmutation, and Conjuration and calling it a day (the no-brainer schools in most editions). The other major thing is recognizing that most old-school modules assume you have a party of 6-10 players (go ahead, check their intros or covers). I think a lot of the reputation OSR play has for lethality is based in this, because 8-10 player games are nowhere near as common nowadays. So I've deliberated upped the abilities/HP etc of characters based on the assumption that people will only have 4-5 players in their games. Makes it much more feasible/realistic for the sort of playgroups you'll actually have at your table. It's still bloody lethal though compared to 3rd ed and forward, but if you don't accept that you wouldn't be reading this thread. There's lots of little things I'm pretty happy with, but the above is the key stuff. Xotl fucked around with this message at 06:52 on May 28, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 22:06
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gtrmp posted:Assuming that both options are on the table, is there really any reason to go with the Rules Cyclopedia over the Dark Dungeons retroclone? https://rpggeek.com/thread/926652/differences-between-rules-cyclopedia-and-dark-dung That's the differences between the two. If you like them, go for it. I think the layout on DD is worse that the Cyclopedia, thanks to the ultra-small spacing between columns (and the RC was already not the most simple book to navigate).
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Mar 16, 2018 06:36
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Dagon posted:I have one, and yeah its not the greatest scan, but its not terrible. The problem is they just updated the scan again two or three days ago, and apparently the update is worse than the original. They've added hyperlinks, and the cost on getting a POD copy dropped significantly, but the scan quality is noticeably blurrier.
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Mar 16, 2018 19:10
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Impermanent posted:Thanks for the torrent of useful information and tips over the past few pages - it's really been excellent and is hyping me up for this game! I have one more question - how would you recommend balancing encounters / published resources for an adventuring party of 2 or 3 players? That's a very small party. Almost nothing published is really going to support that: the standard assumed size for these games is 6-10 players. I assume you're writing your own adventures? If not, you'll need to dial down the majority of the encounters in any module you use. You may want to use the Retainer/Hireling rules in order to bulk up the party, if you don't mind the extra NPC baggage. Balancing is another issue, in that OSR gaming generally rejects the idea of balance as seen in modern games. While modules from those days (and their modern OSR counterparts) don't ignore the concept entirely (e.g. you won't find a lich in a second-level module), parties can easily stumble into something that will slaughter them if they are so foolish to treat every encounter as a combat encounter--especially in wildnerness encounters thanks to wandering monster tables--and the idea is that the Reaction Table (i.e. talking) and general party cleverness (or just plain the willingness to run) gets them out of the situation. Also, there's no Challenge/Encounter Rating-type system for these old rules. Remember that XP comes from getting money in these games, not from killing monsters (yes, you do get XP from combats, but it's quite small compared to the amounts from treasure, doubly so compared to later editions).
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Mar 16, 2018 19:31
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Pham Nuwen posted:There's a new game store within walking distance of my house, and they apparently do game nights Tuesday and Thursday of every week. If I wanted to try running a one-off OSR thing there, what would you guys recommend? RC with pre-rolled characters? Beyond The Wall's character generation is pretty neat, but I've only got the PDFs and wouldn't want to share watermarked PDFs with randos. I wouldn't recommend the RC because it's only a one-shot. It's going to be harder claiming that this is a slimmed-down, quick and dirty system if you're slinging a fatass tome with you for one game, and 75% of the stuff in it won't be relevant anyways, unless you're starting at higher level. I'd recommend just bringing the Basic book if you have a copy. That also has the bonus of the nostalgia factor: that screaming red will instantly bring back memories for a lot of people, perhaps making it easier to draw people to the table. Pre-rolled characters: if you want to ensure they have certain attribute scores or class mixes, sure. Otherwise it's not a big deal, since it only takes five minutes to roll up a B/X character anyways.
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Mar 16, 2018 20:37
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I'm afraid not: no POD option is available yet (though I assume one would be coming, since they're working on POD in general), so ebay is your only bet that I'm aware of.
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Mar 16, 2018 21:05
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A Strange Aeon posted:What's the deal with Hot Springs Island? Just a solid product? Essentially, yeah. A system-neutral hexcrawl through a tropical island that once served as an Elven kingdom before they hosed around too much. Now it's full of competing factions looting the hell out of the elven ruins and the island's natural resources. Good art, lots of opportunity for adventure. Definitely an OSR highlight.
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May 27, 2018 23:24
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Would anyone mind if I started a new thread? We're over a hundred pages now, plus the current OP is six years old, with the OP banned and obviously not coming back. I'd like to update the clones list, add some good blogs, and so on. I have an OP, but wanted to check with the thread first.
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May 28, 2018 00:55
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Of course: no problem.
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May 28, 2018 01:29
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Had the TOB list but not the other. Thanks!
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May 28, 2018 02:27
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New thread! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3858338 (Sorry, DalaranJ: your thread title was too long). Xotl fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 22:17
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Jul 17, 2018 22:02
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