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I like Dying Earth fantasy--hell, for the past decade plus I pretty much only run fantasy Dying Earth style. Are there some good OSR products written in that style, with a "sci-fi and magic are indistinguishable" and/or adding high-tech gear to a fantasy setting? In theory, it's as easy as mixing Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future. In practice, it's hard to balance a game, or a campaign, without drowning the players in lightsabers and rayguns as soon as they get a few levels.
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May 31, 2018 15:06
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The Dying Earth RPG is wonderful (as is the Gaean Reach RPG), but they're pretty far off from D&D in terms of rules and campaign style. I mean, you can certainly base adventures on exploring ruins full of monsters to find miraculous loot, and it would be weird if you couldn't, but ah, you know what I mean.
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May 31, 2018 18:08
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Megazver posted:Dying Earth RPG has a lot of material (like gazeteers) that you could probably repurpose for a different system, Goodman Games is working on a DCC Dying Earth and I'd say that a lot of DCC and Hydra Collective's Marlinko material is heavily Vance-inspired. FMguru posted:The Robin Laws-authored core book is full of advice about not giving two shits about drawing a map, going with the flow, not worrying too much about conforming with the specifics of Vance's text, and having monsters be collections of rumored abilities that the GM decides the truth of when they're encountered. The supplements (largely not written by Laws) are full of gridded and indexed maps drawn from careful textual analysis, detailed monster descriptions, and adventures that tie in very specifically to the Vance stories. That said, I'm not planning to write a homebrew specifically for playing the Dying Earth in BECMI, or anything like that. I'm entranced with the Dying Earth as a subgenre of fantasy, and my own homebrew is picking up a lot of influence from sources as disparate as Clark Ashton Smith and old Japanese console RPGs.
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May 31, 2018 18:26
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Xotl posted:Only to a degree. We're talking about how the game used to be played (allowing for outliers), and that's objective. andrew smash posted:Has anybody seen or played the dcc book Black Sun Deathcrawl? I flipped through the pdf, and christ it’s over the top bleak. I have no idea how it would actually be functional on the table, but there are some compelling bits in there. Saguaro PI posted:This was the only bit I thought was any good, honestly. I agree with the idea that it seems like at best a one shot thing. Honestly not sure if the sheer bathos of that one mutation where you're constantly drinking your own urine which is also your brain is intentional. I agree with you that there are only 2 or 3 bits that I really want to poach for my own game, especially Oblitus Omega. Aside from that, the only thing I really admire about it is how gamist it is--a lot of my inspiration for old-school play actually comes from early console RPGs, and BSD eschews concerns for food, water, gravity, and death in order to play out its theme. In that sense it reminds me of all the bleak horror games inspired by Earthbound, like the Lisa series. (If I was playstyle policing, I'd say that a game that's this railroady and that totally dispenses with logistical concerns isn't very old-school.) andrew smash posted:If you're just worried about balance, i played in a science fantasy game once where most technological artifacts were nonfunctional or had degraded functionality in some way fluffwise and were just treated the same way as scrolls or wands. Anything with sustainable function needed to be constantly babied by the dedicated artifex class the GM cooked up and were more or less equivalent to spells. He just gated access to power levels at roughly the same rate as magical items and spells and it worked ok. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah I'm assuming you want them to feel fantastic, but being overrun with ray guns and laser swords sounds a lot like being overrun with bows and metal swords. You could have them be fundamentally fragile or something if you wanted the party to constantly switch them around. (Limited ammo or a failure chance each round they are used might do it.) I would probably just let the party have and use them because they're cool. I think I just want to avoid the incongruity you often find in CPRPGs, where you're in a primitive land, but just over the hill is an empire where every combatant is armed to the teeth, prompting the question of why they haven't conquered the surrounding lands yet. Or when you find a village on the other side of a vast wilderness, and despite having a small population surrounded by danger on all sides, they somehow have the base for advanced technology. I'm not a stickler for realism or *~Gygaxian Naturalism~* but that is a little hard to swallow. I think all I really need to do is avoid making encounters with high-level well-armed humanoids a thing as the PCs level up.
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Jun 6, 2018 17:48
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I'm confused as to why S&W and LL both have expansions/editions that turn them into AD&D1e. Was there, like, a contest or something? Is OSRIC just too dry?
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Jun 7, 2018 18:44
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Saguaro PI posted:In a way I think BSD is the logical conclusion of a certain fixation that a portion of the OSR has with adventuring being pointless as a quick and in my opinion kind of lazy route to establishing they're not making games about world-shaping heroics.
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Jun 7, 2018 21:37
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I think I need to give DCC another shot. I became aware of it during a time when the toxic aspects of the OSR community were really getting on my nerves, and the nostalgia marketing just rubbed me the wrong way. If it's the Stoner Metal RPG then I'm obliged.
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Jun 8, 2018 15:33
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I like logistics, but I hate tracking them in real units and then needing to relate those units to game mechanics. In other words, give me turns and encumbrance points instead of tracking minutes and hours and pounds of weight.
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Jun 9, 2018 21:37
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I think that's basically the default; I mean, how many people studiously played AD&D by the book?
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Jun 13, 2018 01:14
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I don't actually want to use the AD&D combat rules, but there's a fair bit of tactics (or at least strategy) in there. 3e and especially 4e and games it inspired made the combat more tactical--I'd even argue that rather than being a departure, 4e hearkens back to Chainmail. But has anyone done an OSR game or supplement that takes the tactical elements of AD&D1e and tries to streamline them? I was very interested in what Malcolm Sheppard had to say about how it worked out when his group played 1e strictly by the book. (The relevant blog posts are lost.)
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Jun 13, 2018 15:14
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Aniodia posted:One of the best campaigns I'd ever played in, running about 5ish years IRL and about 8 or 9 in game, started out as by-the-book 1st Edition, with weapon speeds, weapon-vs-AC, the whole nine. I think it was about 6 or 7 months in that we started to move away from the weapon-vs-AC stuff, and it got to the point where we only really looked at weapon speeds when trying to disrupt enemy spellcasting. Stuff like that just naturally fell by the wayside as we got more powerful and those mechanics didn't really add anything to combat anymore. Pollyanna posted:So why did later versions iterate on the AD&D rules and go for more Chainmail-like gaming instead? There also wasn't much incentive for the designers to take on that challenge. Zeb Cook's AD&D2e design team had a mission to make a game that was more simplified and accessible, and the trend was already towards more story and less strategy and logistics. (In fact, losing these combat rules were some of the most significant changes to 2e; as a game it wasn't very different from 1e. The difference between them is more about style and feel, as exemplified in the new campaign settings and modules, than in the core rules.) I guess the innovations from Basic, like Weapon Mastery, were left by the wayside probably because almost everything in Basic was left by the wayside. Although Cook wrote several Basic modules, my impression is that the TSR staff didn't have much regard for the Basic line.
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Jun 13, 2018 17:42
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Pollyanna posted:I was under the impression that BX/BECMI was less complicated and more streamlined than AD&D, hence “basic”. Did I get that backwards? But Basic has its own innovations. Fighters can become Paladins at high level--or even Avengers, a Chaotic paladin unique to Basic. There's also a ton of racial classes introduced through various supplements.
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Jun 13, 2018 19:01
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Literally my first exposure to D&D was played AD&D:Pool of Radiance for NES, which had an engine based exactly on the AD&D rules. It had a longer-than-usual manual, but it couldn't include everything. Intuiting AD&D rules from experience was wild. (Looking back, it's why I used to get into edition war arguments with people who claimed "AD&D is the most accessible game because the player doesn't even need to know the rules!) Figuring out the movement cost of diagonal movement, ambush, weapon initiative, and firing rates was a long and confusing process. I never did figure out the exact math behind why darts were the best ranged weapon. I had to read it in an actual AD&D rulebook years later and go "ohhh."
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Jun 14, 2018 03:15
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It's OSR in that it uses the same rules framework as Crawford's other games, and it's explicitly designed for hexcrawls. Practically speaking, the power level of the characters precludes most logistical concerns, if that matters to you, and more crucially, you cannot just send a Godbound party off to White Plume Mountain if you want White Plume Mountain to remain standing.
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Jun 22, 2018 18:38
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:It doesn't. Not really. Sorry. I like his work, it's basically just an ADnD with more domain management. I like those rules and I like his modules. Dunno what you want from me....
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Jun 28, 2018 01:34
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Ah, there it is. You want to imagine some conspiracy is oppressing you. You're a dupe, of course, so someone convinced you that you were fighting the power by giving them money. The horrifying truth is much, much worse: you're a dullard with nothing interesting to say, and no one cares.
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Jun 28, 2018 02:13
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WiiFitForWindows8 posted:Well, instead of escalating this further pointlessly until the entire thread is ruined, look man, enough with the insults. I'll be the first to admit that it was rude to do the thing about tripling my donation, but after 4+ years of people telling me "no dont buy don't buy for political" it's gotten a little tiresome. I've had (internet)friends cut off communication with me because I bought things made by Zak S. Like, he's a douche, I would never follow him on any social media, and I wouldn't be able to sit down and drink a beer with him. He's aggressive and rude, and his obvious name-searching due to him appearing on any blog post that criticizes his work(where he criticizes the criticism) is enough to make me think I wouldn't like the dude. But his poo poo is good poo poo. Again, the horrible truth is that nobody is attacking you, because nobody cares very much. You can buy what you want and justify it to yourself however you like. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism; I justify buying from Wal-Mart and Amazon all the time. But I don't get my feelings hurt and loudly whine about it on the Internet, like you're doing. No one cares what you're "receptive to," it's not anyone's job to coddle your hurt feelings, and no one cares. Nickoten posted:Because Lamentations of the Flame Princess isn't really about being an adventurer. It's about getting enough money to be CEO of an adventuring company so you can throw your hirelings into death traps to save your character. The early game meat grinder is there to simulate all the lives you could have lived as a dirty, less cunning poor with bad genetics. I think that making a big to-do about Weird Fantasy in the D&D milieu is a bit redundant because the superficial elements are already baked in. There are scholarly works about weird fiction that you can read when you want to, but the trappings are familiar--ancient ruined cities, vast subterranean realms, necromancy, monsters that don't correspond to legend, etc. These aren't so common in the Tolkienesque or Arthurian fantasy that more often finds its way into films and television. (Though there are exceptions, notice that the Conan films don't draw on stories like "The Slithering Shadow" or "The God in the Bowl.") But in gaming fantasy, subterannean temples to Lovecraftian gods haunted by ghouls, giant vermin, and slimy blobs are box-standard. I believe Raggi has claimed that Clark Ashton Smith et al. were working with the written word, and according to the standards of the time, and that his stuff is what their work "would" look like if illustrated. But while Smith wrote about sexual perversions including necrophilia with varying degrees of frankness, I really doubt he would've wanted one of his stories accompanied by an illustration of somebody loving a corpse. The amount of violence and sex, and how graphically it's depicted, is just neither here nor there. The more notorious LotFP stuff looks more like a preoccupation with death metal culture (and, to be real, building on the "D&D with Pornstars" brand) with some crossover with the heavy metal culture that had some crossover with D&D in the 70s and 80s. Really making D&D more Weird would entail more blurring of genre lines between fantasy, horror, and sci-fi to tell macabre stories through roleplaying, favouring atmosphere over worldbuilding, and having that play into every aspect of the game, not just stocking a dungeon with a bunch of bizarre encounters. There's more to being Weird than just a bunch of weird stuff. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 19:17
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Elephant Parade posted:I agree with pretty much all of this; LotFP is distasteful, plain and simple. Which is too bad: I agree with some of the greater principles behind it, like the importance of custom monsters (though I don't think all of an adventure's monsters should be custom, necessarily) and how magical and interesting things should happen even at low levels. Though I've never run it (or anything
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Jun 28, 2018 19:42
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), I think Broodmother's Skyfortress is an example of LotFP done right—lots of stuff is weird, but it's coherent, and the environment doesn't screw players over for the grave sin of being curious. Oh, and from what I remember there's no sex.
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Numenera's take on Dying Earth fantasy is...underwhelming, to put it kindly. Compare these two:Numenera posted:Calaval had only one last trick in his bag. The rest of its contents were mundane supplies, tools, and equipment. But he had saved one minor bit of numenera for just this moment. He pulled a wire mesh belt from the bag and affixed it around his waist. A metal device on the side of the belt had some simple controls. Jack Vance posted:“The dead man's companions at the counter started to their feet, but halted as Voynod with great aplomb turned to face them. "Take care, you dunghill cocks! Notice the fate of your fellow! He died by the power of my magic blade, which is of inexorable metal and cuts rock and steel like butter. Behold!" And Voynod struck out at a pillar. The blade, striking an iron bracket, broke into a dozen pieces. Voynod stood non-plussed, but the bravo's companions surged forward. quote:Cugel managed to bring forth the tube he had secured from Voynod and expelled blue concentrate at the villagers. Aghast, they toppled to the ground and Cugel was able to extricate himself from the net. Drawing his sword, he leapt forward to cut Garstang free, but now the villagers rallied. Cugel once more employed his tube, and the villagers fled in dismal agony. Monte Cook can't not do that sort of thing, on account of being Monte Cook. In Numenera he's repeatedly guilty of explaining things too much, and classifying them too much--even the title is just the word for "all kinds of magic loot," and he uses radiation as a catch-all explanation! (I can't think of any weird fantasy writer that needed to come up with some midichlorian particle to provide a quasi-realistic explanation for all their fantastical creations.) Another point: Smith, Wolfe, and Vance, to name a few, all had their own style of employing neologisms, and none of them handled them as clumsily as Cook. He tends to invent words that are then over-explained, or redundant in the first place, like calling a gun a "slugspitter." Numenera posted:On the other hand, characters in Numenera don’t refer to weapons as “guns” or vehicles as “cars.” The technology in the Ninth World is too advanced and too alien for such terminology to have endured. Using 21st-century terms for weapons and vehicles is as inappropriate as using medieval terms. He cites Wolfe as an influence, and Wolfe was assiduous about not coining a new word if there was some real (if archaic) word that applied. Guns and steeds are described as guns and steeds, even though it's made clear that he's not talking about modern pistols and horses. A rhinoceros-like animal is called a baluchither; the empire is administered by exultants and chiliarchs. Elephant Parade posted:
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 21:33
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I remember reading the preview; it was very bad. IIRC it's very much a "stripped down 3e" mechanical base, and the setting is your typical homebrew in the vein of the Forgotten Realms, but in a mythical Scandinavia, with lots of racism if you read between the lines--one of the primary enemies is savage dark-skinned foreigners. (Another way of looking at it is that it's Middle-Earth distilled down to just the stuff that would please a black metal racist.)
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 11:40
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When you die on a podcast? You die for real.
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Jul 28, 2018 04:02
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Warriors of the Red Planet fails my "Is the fighter even a little bit interesting?" test. I understand that that won't matter to many people ITT. Under the Moons of Zoon is worth a look. Sword-and-planet is one of those things where I'm not convinced it needs whole new games devoted to it. It requires very little homebrewing to inject rayguns or whatever into old-school D&D. (Especially with Mutant Future just sitting there, freely available and compatible with B/X). It's more a matter of worldbuilding and style, and calls for more modules like Peril on the Purple Planet rather than new games. I think too many people in the OSR have a good idea for a module or supplement, but publish it in the form of a corebook because that makes them a "game designer." al-azad posted:What settings do you think are underrepresented in OSR and OSR-likes? Old-school gaming is necessarily hostile to the sort of moral, heroic fantasy that Dragonlance came to represent, but I'm surprised nobody has published a game or a mega-module that leans hard into that kind of early medieval feudalism. I could liken it to Pendragon, but aren't the settings of Greyhawk and Mystara largely assumed to function this way, divided into many petty kingdoms?
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Jul 30, 2018 17:02
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Yeah, I haven't read the entire Gazetteer series, but the ones that I'm most familiar with are Karameikos, Glantri, Thar, Northern Reaches, and the not-Iroquois one I remember how to spell...none of them continent-spanning empires.
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Jul 31, 2018 03:54
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https://twitter.com/River_Niles/status/1024614949065318400
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Aug 2, 2018 14:50
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Jesus loving Christ.
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Aug 10, 2018 16:10
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Elephant Parade posted:jesus christ this guy's writing is awful. also,
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Aug 15, 2018 14:47
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Dark Dungeons is just a rationalized BECMI and the name pretty much tells you what you're getting into.
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Sep 6, 2018 22:06
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sebmojo posted:My hot take is that the worst is ad&d apart from the incredible magic item list. So many half thought out rules and special exceptions.
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Sep 7, 2018 16:27
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It was a triumph insofar as it took what was originally a supplement for Chainmail, with the expectation that it would appeal to experienced wargamers, and recast it as a standalone game that could be picked up and (possibly) understood by someone who'd never painted an itty-bitty Napoleon.
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Sep 7, 2018 17:19
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There was a great deal of chauvinism within TSR in favour of AD&D, which is for cool smart hardcores, and against Basic, the dumbed-down mass-market version for casual babies.
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Sep 7, 2018 17:34
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Rob Kuntz posted:With the advent and adoption of the concept of pre-made adventures the whole back-end “support” mechanism took upon a new meaning and form and one, by comparison, that flew in the face of TSR’s original vision for its role-playing game. Whereas there was at that point a solid corps of DMs creating their games from the ground up and doing so with great gusto, TSR succumbed to an opposite path of doing the “creating” for them with such adventures. He seems nice. Kuntz is just one guy, of course. Gygax had an interest in AD&D as a product line that would standardize play for personal, idealistic reasons as well as for the purposes of tournament play. AD&D was his baby, the vast majority of his output was for AD&D, and he was concerned about it being abandoned in favour of a simpler game in the form of Basic. To be fair, TSR viewed Basic as "for kids" because it was. AD&D was marketed to college-age players, while Holmes pitched Basic to TSR with the explicit idea of an edition that would teach you how to play within the text.
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Sep 7, 2018 18:08
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If your game is going to have a skill system, calling them "nonweapon proficiencies" in Anno Domini nineteen-eighty-nine should make you die of shame. NWPs and BECMI's Skills were interesting in that most were skills as they exist in other games, but some were unique abilities, the precursor to 3e's feats.
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Sep 7, 2018 21:48
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Payndz posted:It's things like that which just make me imagine Gygax always DMing with a colossal smug, poo poo-eating grin and the words gently caress YOU written on a Post-It stuck to the back of his DM's screen. It's the same GM-as-adversary hidden behind "realism" that John Wick has made a career out of.
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Sep 8, 2018 03:00
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al-azad posted:Arneson would later release The First Fantasy Campaign which I feel has influenced — whether directly or through its legacy — a lot of modern OSR writers in that it’s a ton of charts and tables with a DIY attitude towards actual narrative.
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Sep 11, 2018 20:59
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remusclaw posted:World builder was one of a collection of books that were written by Gary in name only as far as I can tell. I had them all at one point. Nation Builder was the one that actually had advice about building game worlds and was ok in that aspect, World Builder was for some reason or another just a book full of tables.
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Sep 12, 2018 13:49
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Have you ever worked a management job in your entire life? If you humiliate someone publicly, they double down. Always. Secondly, your response implies you've got it 100% confirmed this person was doing this thing to be as much of an rear end in a top hat as possible to the girl. You don't know. Talking to the guy in private about it later can quickly resolve the issue. Your next job, as a good DM/Host is to find out if it's a Can't Or Won't thing. If it's a Can't thing, as in, he doesn't understand his behavior is inappropriate because he sits around all day on 4chan or his previous group was full hardcore edgelords, then you can fix that. If it's a Won't issue, as in "Yeah gently caress the snowflakes I don't change for NOBODY" then you can show them the door.
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Sep 12, 2018 16:26
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An evil mattress is a boss in Silent Hill 2, and someone even made a movie about it, so it doesn't seem so strange to me. Edit: VVV I can't believe I forgot that. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Sep 19, 2018 |
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Sep 19, 2018 15:37
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I like the "combat machine" rule for fighters so much that I expand it so say that fighters can attack any number of monsters in their turn as long as their total HD don't exceed the fighter's level.
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Oct 15, 2018 14:41
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dreadmojo posted:It benefits from a really good mcguffin though, I put the Sword of Kas in the Place which worked out brilliantly.
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Nov 18, 2018 19:42
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I used to play Alphaman, a roguelike that was basically just Gamma World, but it had a really silly plot where the final boss was the Grinch.
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Dec 6, 2018 04:10
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