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I just noticed that the Grognardia blog has been going again (for the last 18 months or so). gonna do some reading.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:55
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Johnny Landmine posted:The folks behind Mörk Borg should include "Made the Grognardia guy start blogging again" in their list of awards and accolades. well poo poo, as if I didn't already love that game
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Feb 24, 2022 02:52
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"In all, I included the details because of insistance of some avid palyers that were in touch with me, regretted listening to them, for the RPG is not suited to combat simulation... As I noted above, we never used the weapons vs. armor type adjustments. – Gary Gygax, ENWorld Q&A, 7th September, 2005" every time this mealy-mouthed fucker even came close to admitting a mistake he blamed it on someone else
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May 20, 2022 15:48
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Rutibex posted:Some editions of D&D do this with skeletons, making them have damage reduction to piercing or slashing damage but not bludgeoning. I always felt that this was misguided: piercing should do basically nothing, blunt maybe some, but edged weapons are how to get through a bone. more to the point, I think we completely ignored this rule in every game I've played.
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May 20, 2022 15:57
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Deptfordx posted:I feel like bare bone, no flesh to cushion the impact, blunt should be as effective as slashing. Siivola posted:Cutting through bone is pretty hard once it's dried out. You can try it for yourself the next time you have chicken wings or ribs. if like a dry cow femur needed to be broken with no regard to whether or not it shatters or cleaves, would it be better to use a sledgehammer or a maul? (genuine question. I can tell you that squirrels are efficient at getting through it.)
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May 20, 2022 16:52
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Siivola posted:Uhhh I have no idea tbh. I'd probably pick the splitting maul to get the smaller face, but with something that heavy I suspect it's a moot point. same, but I'm working off the analogue of chopping down a small tree (so an axe rather than a maul, but still) Rutibex posted:Hitting an animated skeleton would be different than a pile of dry bones on the ground. The skeleton would move when hit, and would presumably be a bit more springy from the evil magic that animates it than just dry bones. ah, further vindication. 
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May 20, 2022 19:12
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I can't remember if I've impugned him in this thread or just other ones but that motherfucker would not admit a misstep under any circumstances like any time that a normal person would have said " I'm sorry that I did that, " EGG, Jr said "I'm sorry that nebulous unnamed persons talked me into publishing that"
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Jun 27, 2022 02:01
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Rutibex posted:The DM is always right exactly my point Gary was so wrong so often
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Jun 27, 2022 02:14
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a buddy of mine made paper polyhedral dice. I've still got them around here somewhere. they didn't roll true but it was still pretty impressive. he's a physicist and a statistician these days.
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Jun 27, 2022 14:17
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some other middle-school kid described to my longtime gaming buddy and me an RPG where you roll to see how much your hair and fingernails grow bc that affects the game. he was talking about Rolemaster, which the aforementioned friend ended up GMing for us later, and while that kid wasn't right, he wasn't wrong. every time I go down my steep back steps I think about the fact that if I were a RM PC I'd have approximately a 3% chance of dying on those stairs every time I use them.
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Jun 29, 2022 22:27
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sebmojo posted:
I only have 2 hitponts you loving philistine I think we actually played more RM than D&D. the guy who ran it for us is an accountant these days, which just makes sense. I thought I was only slightly exaggerating the math, but I'm glad I was off by a couple orders of magnitude. we did have the occasional mishap on something that in retrospect shouldn't have been a roll. the one that sticks with me isn't one of those but a critical fumble where I was so impressed with the smooth moves of a stationary golem that hadn't been activated that I was sidelined for two rounds.
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Jun 30, 2022 21:42
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rolemaster owns actually
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CPA Hell posted:I used a lot of random encounters too and that led to stuff like level 2 characters having to negotiate with or evade things like dragons. I’m not anti encounter balance. But it is fun to have NPCs and monsters that the characters just can’t defeat in combat sometimes and seeing what can be done with it. we gave the dragon all our magical poo poo and he let us go.  (you're right, it was vividly memorable... I hadn't read up on RM dragons and didn't realize that we were already as good as dead once we realized he was there.)one thing I hosed around with when I attempted to make a system a million years ago was pairing different types of dice, but I had an incredibly rudementary sense of statistics in those days.
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Jul 1, 2022 18:16
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A Strange Aeon posted:The bell curve damage can be used interestingly--there's a DCC magic sword I read in one of the Gongfarmer Almanacs or Crawl that does 2d6 damage, but when you roll doubles something happens on a table with 6 different effects based on two 1s, two 2s, etc. I feel like a lot could be done with a template like that to make a magic weapon really unique. you get to roll again each time, but if you roll doubles 3 times in a row, you have to go to jail...
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Jul 2, 2022 02:21
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I only just came to understand the luck effect in the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, etc, all using modified 2e). it sounds sort of similar: if you've got a +1 luck effect, then all of your outgoing damage rolls ignore a 1. so if you're using a mace, your damage is 2-6. meanwhile, all of the incoming damage ignores the highest pip, so if you get hit by by a mace you take 1-5. the luck spell only lasts 2 rounds so I usually don't use it, but in Icewind Dale there's a scimitar that grants +2 luck for every roll, so eg an outgoing 10th-level fireball would do 30-60 damage and an incoming 10th-level fireball would do 10-40 damage. it's implemented as a plus with a ceiling or a minus with a floor, so in the first fireball, each die would roll a 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, or 6. the second fireball's dice would each roll 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, or 4.
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Jul 11, 2022 17:09
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PeterWeller posted:I don't think the loose sheet MCs were a dumb concept. The idea behind them was sound--you could compile all your monsters into one alphabetical collection and pull the specific sheets you would need for a session and tuck them into a folder. they hosed this as well by printing double-sided pages. so like you'd have gnoll on one side and goblin in the other, and then when they released the goa (giant) and on the back of that is I don't know a loving hellhound well I can tell you that doesn't line up with the alphabet I know and love. but the actual real problem was the constant tearing, mitigated only slightly by the donut stickers.
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Jul 13, 2022 04:17
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finally finished reading every post in this thread I've been playing in a Worlds without Number campaign and holy poo poo do I love the system. GM is running us through the 1e U series (we finished The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh) among some other unrelated stuff.
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Dec 5, 2023 01:14
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A Strange Aeon posted:Last Christmas I got a bunch of his stuff, including the WWN book. It read really well, but I've never heard anyone using the actual system. It has a bit more going on than a typical osr game while keeping the spirit, and that guy's tables and world gen stuff are second to none. I think my GM just picked up CwN. what I like about it is what I've seen echoed elsewhere... it's got a lot of depth for something so light. here's a very breezy writeup from memory. stats: straight 3d6 down the page, replace one score with a 14. (or you can arrange the pregen stats however you'd like, which works out mechanically similarly). 18 gets you a +2, 14-17 is +1, 8-13 is no bonus, and so on down. skills: rolled on a 2d6 plus skill pip plus ability modifier. you get some skills for free from backgrounds, class abilities, foci. point buy -- 3 points per character level. skills start at unskilled, so you've got to spend one point to get a 0. further pips are the pip number plus 1 (so to get to 1 pip in a skill, you spend 2 points; to get a 2, you spend 3). skills are sharply limited so that you can't get 3 pips until character level 6. combat skills (punch, shoot, stab) and magic skill (magic) are cordoned off so that they're harder to get unless you've got the appropriate class. background: profession prior to adventuring. you can get a standard thing or rolls on 2 small tables to get results (ability increases, skills). class abilities: just what they sound like. wizards can cast spells (though not many... my wizard is level 6 now and can only cast 3 spells per day out of 7 prepared up to spell level 3 (spells are incredibly powerful, though)). fighters get one where they add half their level to damage rolls. they can also turn one hit per day into a miss and vice versa. experts are the thief class and I can't remember what they do other than they get an extra skill point per level. adventurer is the catchall for combinations of the above (so a cleric would be a mage/fighter with a healer spell list, eg). foci: weird or cool abilities. they have 2 levels and are all over the map. assassin makes you good at doing that. there's one that gives you a familiar. there's one that makes you really good at shooting. there's one that makes you good at crafting. there's one that means you don't need armor. demihuman stuff would take one of these, but we've all only played humans so far. combat: extremely deadly. weapons do something called shock damage, which is damage the opponent takes even on a miss (if their AC is sufficiently low -- each weapon has an amount and AC listed). a shield negates the first instance per round. so stabbing an unarmored guy with a longsword would do 3 points of damage guaranteed. (I think. I'm too lazy to look this one up.) shock damage is also the minimum damage a weapon will do. there are some extra rules but it's all pretty straightforward. ascending AC so rolls are straightforward. some sort of character death rule based on negative hit points... I can't remember the options here, but they include ignoring negative hp if the character would have been destroyed by the damage. magic: spells are extremely powerful and all have long names that are difficult to remember. example: a first-level spell causes destruction of plant material in a 10' cube per level. it's called "decree of ligneous dissolution." the spell names are the main complaint I've seen about WwN. this was all from memory and I don't have a handle on everything but I'm really enjoying the game.
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Dec 11, 2023 02:44
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SlimGoodbody posted:I had to check out when they started getting pedantic about the term "mechanics" as opposed to "mechanisms, because you see blah blah blah." I went and looked it up just to make sure -- mechanics in a sense that works for this usage dates back to the 1640s. somebody could make an abstruse point about not using mechanic as a noun in this context, in the same way that you wouldn't talk about one physic in a physics, but it's completely different from that example in that game mechanics can be discrete and also it's critical to remember that nobody should give a poo poo
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Dec 12, 2023 18:34
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people who prefer rules over rulings are the same as cops, landlords, toddlers, phrenologists
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Dec 12, 2023 20:43
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A Strange Aeon posted:Really appreciate the summary; I think of those books primarily as GM tools first so it's neat to hear about the actual game attached to the evocative tables. I really, really like it as a player, and it works well with this GM's style. the random tables work really well for improvised adventures, even when they don't work well. two recent examples: we got a lead on a magic halberd, so the GM rolled up the weapon and then rolled up the location. it ended up being a halberd of human slaying, and was locked in a temple where a loving named demon lord (from the Monster Manual 2) had been bound by a religious sect. we did not go after the halberd. in another session, we got sent on a quest to an abandoned fort that had been taken over by orc equivalents. we aced every roll that evening, so we got there with no trouble. arrived at the gate to find 4 very friendly orcs, and when the GM rolled a d100 to see how many there were total, he rolled a 4. the total population of the fort then showed us their sea cucumber farm. absolutely nothing happened but we all loved the adventure. Worlds without Number works really well for that group... it's deadly but not unfair, and the quick scaling means that we're level 5 or 6 and are absolute demigods who also almost got TPKed by an enemy fireball. meanwhile we're running through* the 1e modules I mentioned last time. edit: proceeding through with extreme loving care
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Dec 12, 2023 21:01
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while I'm raving about OSR games, we also played one session of the Stygian Library as part of our main campaign and it absolutely kicked rear end. we popped up in a room that'd been sealed for decades, opened it to find some friendly visiting scholars, then a non-magical non-poisoned tearoom, a weird little guardian who tried to kill us for making free with the +1 hurlants we found as fist-sized bees flew back and forth making dripping black honey in their monstrous hive in the room where gravity was weird, and a series of glass tubes with ghosts inside (into which we put an angry spirit in a bottle we'd bought weeks earlier). oh... and a room full of the talking skulls of various experts that sort of made up an unliving encyclopedia. along the way we discovered the location of a magic item (the halberd I mentioned above) and a couple other useful tidbits. I didn't run it, but as I understand the mechanics, the players figure out what they want they characters to learn while they're there. the GM sets a difficulty that represents how many rooms in you have to go and also how many levels down you have to go. rooms are randomly generated on a d20 (?) with a modifier based on how far in you are (??) and you can't go back the way you came (or rather it's changed (this part might not be true)). again, in the hands of the right GM it's really good poo poo. somewhat gonzo, very funhouse. we also do lots of non-random adventures, but the random ones have all been great. e: oh poo poo! the author made a generator: https://stygian.hallsofrust.com/ Empty Sandwich fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Dec 13, 2023 |
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Dec 13, 2023 03:01
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Lumbermouth posted:Oh hey the people that made sure I didn't make anything more for Troika. I know we're drifting off topic, but were Troika folks involved or what's up?
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Dec 13, 2023 15:43
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nessin posted:Is there an a game system out there that I can use to quickly make characters for and play out a short D&D based adventure, like something out of one page dungeons to original D&D modules, that does anything to make non-magic users as interesting to play as magic users? So far the only answer I've been able to find to that question is to either just eliminate magic entirely or convert it all to item effects (like scrolls) as loot for anyone to use. I just read a blog that suggested the following: on a hit, a melee attack can have a specified effect instead of damage, if the victim allows it. the examples were vaguely like the following: the PC rolls to hit and says he's going to grab and restrain the NPC instead of damaging him. the NPC has plenty of hit points, so he refuses (and so takes the damage instead). after a couple rounds, he's in danger of getting killed, so he accepts being taken prisoner on the next hit (and so does not take damage, but is restrained). I'll see if I can find the post. it struck me as really smart, but I haven't tried it out. e: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/ Empty Sandwich fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Dec 13, 2023 |
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Dec 13, 2023 22:31
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same e: lol e2: Worlds without Number does either 3d6 down the line & replace your choice with a 14 or an array that's pretty similar to that
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Jan 2, 2024 22:49
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wrt classes: I can't remember which OSR game it is that we rolled characters for but it was straight 3d6 and we picked classes based on what stats we got. pretty hard grog. but three of us have been playing together since we were 12 or so and one just started and didn't like the idea of starting a character with basically no input. we abandoned that ruleset right away and stuck with WwN e: Old School Essentials Empty Sandwich fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 00:43
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our way of handling that in 2e was "life points," sort of another layer of hit points. I think everybody got 10+CON mod. if a character went below 0 hp, they were unconscious and damage was subtracted from life points. instead of level drain, powerful undead would do damage directly to life points. not exactly an OSR solution, though
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Jan 3, 2024 16:36
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I never played enough 3.5 to remember but I did just remember Kask doing a Q&A on some forum years ago and raging against negative hit points as something that would have pissed Gary off bc it is so antithetical to the very idea of D&D and then someone quoted the part of the 1e DMG that covers that as an optional rule and as with everything else in that thread that didn't jibe with what he said he simply never mentioned it again. lol.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:47
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he gives the impression of being something of an edgy case himself
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Jan 3, 2024 16:53
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there are a bunch of different minigames for ability checks in different Basic and 1e modules. the only one I can think of offhand requires a total of 40 points of STR to do something (close a valve?)
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Jan 4, 2024 15:41
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Halloween Jack posted:That's an oft-ignored part of it, lots of old modules have ad-hoc rules for testing ability scores to get past some obstacle. Nickoten posted:Goddamn, why have I never done this? I love this. there are bunches of them but I'm completely blanking on any others (partly because that one makes a lot of sense to me). I'll see if my DM remembers any
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Jan 4, 2024 20:55
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semi-serious answer: the Infinity Engine games thread e: I've learned a whole bunch about 2e RAW by playing Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. there was even a relatively recent update to correct some of the things that hadn't lined up with the rules for 20 years or some poo poo and now do Empty Sandwich fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 19:43
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Kickstarter backer copies of the new printing of Worlds without Number are shipped out. he's got some extra copies here: https://sine-nomine-publishing.myshopify.com/products/worlds-without-number-offset-print
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Jan 9, 2024 15:04
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Drone posted:Oh man this is tempting but I know in my heart of hearts that I will never actually run it. same except I'm not even sure I'd read it
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Jan 17, 2024 15:36
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A Strange Aeon posted:What if when you die you end up in Arden Vul? Reading and studying the mega dungeon now might give you a big advantage in the afterlife. I'm a reform undermountarian
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Jan 17, 2024 17:11
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Ongeons Sand Ragons
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Jan 25, 2024 17:35
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sasha_d3ath posted:Onerous Sand Rangoons live crabs Jack B Nimble posted:Has anyone ever seen a system where it costs, say, one minute per GP to buy an item? gotta go to the DMV; gotta do closing paperwork (interesting idea)
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Jan 25, 2024 20:42
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/arts/jennell-jaquays-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU0.VLFY.CdovUFTK6b3t&bgrp=c&smid=url-share NYT obit for a TSR artist and designer whose name I didn't recognize but I know some of the art gift article so it's got a bunch of cruft
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Feb 2, 2024 23:11
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I like that as another possible solution to 3d6-down-the-line problems
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Feb 3, 2024 19:23
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I'm getting mixed up between various RPG threads but someone somewhere posted this excellent talk by Josh Sawyer / rope kid where he does a deep dive on stats it's nominally about Pillars of Eternity but he focuses enough on D&D that you don't even have to know PoE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvyrEhAMUPo
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Feb 3, 2024 20:22
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EGG, Jr needs a heart transplant. if I understand his last post correctly his care team has reversed course and decided it's too dangerous to give him a pacemaker and told him he might have a year left he's apparently booking games so now's the time to go hang with him or go to one of the Lake Geneva conventions
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Feb 11, 2024 14:13
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