/osrg/ OSR General - Fresh Paint Edition

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Maps. Dwarves Deep, FR11. The Shadow Rift.

>>49780326
Argentine

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Maztica

> TroveGuy is back and here's his trove:

Let me know if there's anything that needs added that I've missed.

>>49780897
>aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWdhLm56LyNGITd4ZEdVRGFSIURBSGplbC0wN0VxX19LZEpBSFBnWHc=

Okay, figuring out this code was actually really fun.

New school story gaming things or new school unified save throws and the like?

Our group has had a lot of fun with Beyond The Wall's town and world mapping as group games, and integrated character generation. I basically use apocalypse world's fronts to have threats in the world doing things, and moves/complications for when players fail a dice roll or otherwise fuck up. I've also taken to asking a lot of questions of the players to fill in the world.

I'm interested in the Black Hack's armour and resource dice, but haven't had a chance to try them.

Just found this. Pars Fortuna. Didn't see it in the archive.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vn5t9w9k1og6i3w/PARS%20FORTUNA%20Rules-Basic_Copyright_JohnStater.pdf?dl=0

>>49782453
Just finished checking it.

The only thing missing is The Cold Ruins of Lastlife. It's in Dungeon World -> Adventures. Otherwise everything is 100% sync.

but please note d30 Sandbox Compendium in "Adventure prep and inspiration" which is watermarked. I'll clean it soon

>>49782718
Yeah, I should've been clearer: the question is about new school story gaming things, but whatever modern rule hacks you people use is cool too.

>>49783059
Well, it is free at creator's site, so I didn't think of adding it.

>>49783208
> Just finished checking it.
...How do you even begin to comb through all that crap that quickly? Fucking impressive.

> The only thing missing is The Cold Ruins of Lastlife.
Added.

> d30 Sandbox Compendium
Removed.

> I'll clean it soon
Let me know when.

>>49783059
Added.

>>49783275
Well, I did adjust everything to match your organization of material. After that I just compared folders and wherever file count didn't match, I checked it folder by folder. Small folders make it easier since you can just do it visually.

There's like a super small inconsistency because I deleted two out of three (identical) copies of Philotomy's Musings in OD&D folder and moved it out of the folders to see instantly (since it’s considered an important insight). Then I renamed the files in Third Party folder because I was interested in OD&D and some of the names weren’t helpful so I checked them manually.
It’s pretty much the only thing changed in the whole TSR segment.

Also I guess after the whole reorganizing thing I remember every file like it's my child.

If any major contribution pops up, would be nice if you could keep it in the Inbox for a few days, it's an easy way for me to keep backup trove 100% synched.

>>49783536
> If any major contribution pops up, would be nice if you could keep it in the Inbox for a few days, it's an easy way for me to keep backup trove 100% synched.
Sure thing. I'll just make it a habit of throwing everything in inbox from now on and cleaning it out once a week or something.

Does anyone use bards from the Strategic Review in their B/X (and related clone) games? I think I'd like to allow them in my LotFP games but I'm not sure how I'd like to handle the charm and lore abilities (I guess I'd Zak's notes on the Alice class). The biggest issue I see is the experience progression. They only need 1,000 xp to get to level 2.

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>>49782685
>>49780897
>aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWdhLm56LyNGITd4ZEdVRGFSIURBSGplbC0wN0VxX19LZEpBSFBnWHc=
Does someone mind explaining this? I have no idea what I am looking at.

>>49784050
I use this one for my LotFP bards.
http://swordandscoundrel.blogspot.com/2016/07/simple-bards-for-lamentations-of-flame.html

>>49784050
Literally looked it up right now and here's my take on it.

Saving Throws as Specialist (or Cleric as in original one, whatever), XP progression as Cleric. Gets Charm and Lore skills which progress like Elf's Search skill.
I don't care much for fiddly mechanics like creatures substracting 5% from Bard's chance to charm for every HD above three etc. Just penalize it for -1 or -2 if it's fitting.

LotFP minimalistic approach to classes makes it really easy to adapt anything using them as a baseline.

>>49784339
Look up previous thread.

>>49784465
Thanks!

>>49784339

It's a code, you have to be a 1337 h4x0r to crack it, anon.

>>49783536
>If any major contribution pops up

Speaking of contributions, here's one, fresh off of IRC.
http://www115.zippyshare.com/v/yOmHimYf/file.html

>>49783275
Done cleaning it.

>>49784755
Sweet Christmas! Thanks. A lot of is already in the trove, but I'll add whatever's new right now.

>>49785070

Yeah, I try to pick up stuff that I know is not in the trove, but it can be hard to be sure sometimes.

>>49784339
The clue is
b@
$e64

Alright, everything new is in my Inbox folder.

Once TroveSenpai ports it, backup trove will be inaccessible for some time. Got to do some stuff with my PC.

>>49788152
inbox synchronized

>>49780897
I'm going to DM a Stars Without Number session on Wednesday, October 19th at 7:30pm Eastern (UTC−4:00). The moment I'm posting this would actually be about 10 minutes after showtime. The session will be 3-4 hours long. We will use Discord for voice and Roll20 for character sheets, etc. You can contact me via a private message on Discord (tipsta#3617) if you're interested and I'll share for more information.
Hook: You are part of a small team tasked with investigating an abandoned research facility to retrieve data stolen by an alien crew occupying the derelict structure.

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>>49784050
bards in my game are a random level 0 occupation. Rolling one nets you a lute (or similar musical instrument) and a dagger.

This is the only correct way to use bards aside from not using them at all.

>>49790047
I did the take on SR bard in the post above but I wholeheartedly agree.

>>49790047
I usually like Zaks stuff but I never understood this argument. He's critiquing a specific aesthetic rather than whether the class is interesting or not. If he doesn't like hippie hair, then remove hippie hair from the bard. Also, who sees the bard as a hippie-haired lute playing puffy shirt-wearing etc character anyway?

>>49790253
In the last.. oh.. fifteen years of playing D&D with various groups, I'd argue 90% of the bards I've seen people played were some form of swashbuckling minstrel. The remaining ones tended to be some kind of gimmick. I've never really been impressed by the niche the class seems to fill. I don't think Zak S argues the point very well necessarily, but they've never quite done it for me either.

>>49784339
>>49787784
Once you figure this out, you will feel like such a badass.

>>49790253

Zak's hate of bards comes across as half serious and more of an extended running gag a lot of the time.

>>49790253
That's the problem: the specific aesthetic. It's the most popular one too. Other variations get pretty wishy-washy, and when the class isn't archetypical, why fiddle with it?

I've had one player when I started DMing and she was very good at being a scruffy impoverished noble ministrel, but she also found the whole concept silly. Especially music-based mechanics. Packing bard into an occupation or a skill for the thief / rogue / specialist is really the best approach, I feel.

>>49790613
No I feel like that hint and google just resulted in the entire experience being an inconvenience.

Since everyone thinks D&D rules are better the earlier they are, surely the groupthink must then be that the absolute abortion of 1E AD&D bard is the best version ever, right? While the 2E version that makes sense and is actually a class rather than 4 different classes "dualed" together is inferior?

>>49792035
It's in the appendix for a reason.

>>49790607
But I like swashbuckling minstrels with floppy Rembrandt hats and think they're a great adventuring/treasure hunting archetype.
Somebody in the party's got to be able to spout lines of incredulous BS about the lost MacGuffin of the Great Precursor Race, after all.

I think cutting the mechanical class is a fine argument, but I think the staying power of the bard class - specifically the 2e style bard class - is that it's a fast-advancing class on the thief track that tends to get arcane spellcasting, sort of an arcane counterpart to the cleric, and in that sense it fills a niche.

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>>49792035
I'd say most retroclones that have a bard tend to actually use 2e's class. ACKS for example has the 1e skald as the aesthetic, but the mechanics definitely draw more from 2e's bard.

>>49792094
So are all the calculated experience point values for monsters. Are you claiming that you would be a better arbiter of calculated XP totals than Gygax Himsefl? Simply because they're appended?

>>49792384
Nah, I'm saying it's located nowhere near chargen (to be fair a lot of shit isn't, but this is pretty far away). Makes me think even the greater gary knew it wasn't worth going where people would see it.

>>49790253
I think the idea is if you remove all the uniquely bard stuff - which coincidentally sucks - you aren't playing a bard anymore. You're playing a jester or a pirate or a fighter/thief.

RPGPundit thinks XP for gold is a poor mechanic for pseudo-historical settings like his Dark Albion which i want to use. Do you agree? I do handwave XP in some of my groups but i prefer using rules for more player agency.

So as someone who loves the idea of osr, but haven't made the plunge what would be a good game in the trove to try and push on my group?

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>>49793797
Strongly agree with that opinion. D&D rulesets, gold-for-XP, and dungeoncrawls are all tightly intertwined in a feedback loop:
-You spend or wager resources (spells, HP) for gold
-the gold gets you XP that you greater resources to make bigger or riskier wagers.

If you take out one of those pillars then the loop breaks down. What's more, D&D character abilities are designed to be of very specific usefulness in dangerous deathtrap dungeons and will often bypass many of the traditional "gating methods" used for a more low-key campaign (the Magic User "Fly" spell is a good example of this - it's of very, very specific use in an underground dungeon environment, but very powerful when traveling on the surface).

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Some guy covered Freebooters on the Frontier character creation, which includes heritage / alignment missing from custom character sheets avaliable in the trove.

docs google com/spreadsheets/d/1s4gBweEH05wdprQTbiw-Pg4HnF0IbGQ4lHDm4PU8cYo/edit#gid=2079545690

>>49790928
The class is pretty archetypical though, it's just that it's based on a lot of different types of "bards". I guess a lot of people see some kind of Allen-A-Dale when they think of a bard, but I imagine someone like Egill Skallagrímsson.

>>49792967
But what if I'd like to play a character who has poems and an instrument, but also is street smart, has a devil-may-care attitude, and has a seagoing puffy shirt?

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>>49792035
> Since everyone thinks D&D rules are better the earlier they are
Which is exactly why this board is dominated by people playing and discussing white box OD&D.

>>49790928
> Especially music-based mechanics.
This is what makes it irredeemably stupid to me.

I get what they are going for. They want someone who is a little bit of a thief, little bit of a fighter.. has picked up some magic along the way. This is actually why the 1e bard idea, though terribly clunky in execution, is actually pretty cool.

But then they add .. magical..music? eh? uh. No thanks. It's such a silly specific archetype and one that I just don't like.

I would much, much rather take the stuff about the bard I actually like (jack-of-all-trades who learns a little bit of fighting, little bit of magic, and becomes a ne'er-do-well) and just make that the thief-equivalent of the game, since the thief's normal shtick of "roll to solve trap" is kinda meh.

>>49792157
You're welcome to like floppy-hatted minstrels. It's not badwrongfun. I'm just not a fan. "Magical music swashbuckler man-whore with knowledge of everything" is such a specific archetype that it doesn't fit in the kinds of campaigns I want to run or worlds I want to create.

>>49795893
then you'd be playing a bard.
And they suck.
But if that is what you want to play, then go ahead...

...and play something that sucks.

>>49795893
> Egill Skallagrímsson.
I wouldn't really mind the bard if the shtick was "I'm a cunning warrior who has a lot of charisma and lore." Homeric bard is pretty great.

The problem is that it's got a dab of Orpheus in there, so mechanically the big thing is "I make perform rolls for magic effects" to use 3e-speak. Music Magic is a complete turn off for me.

>>49796130
>I'm a cunning warrior who has a lot of charisma and lore.
I'll admit, I'm not the most D&D-savvy person, but I thought that this is how bards usually are like? The most I've seen from the supposed "music magic" is stuff like charm person just to make the "poet" part of the class have some mechanical meaning.

>>49795893
>I imagine someone like Egill Skallagrímsson.
I guess I don't get this? No offense, but Egil in the sagas is a great warrior who happens to also be able to write poems well, he doesn't get magical powers from them and he definitely isn't what D&D would call restricted in terms of combat ability.

It seems like you'd just have to be imagining the Bard as a Fighting-Man with a hobby for this to work out.

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>>49796193
Sadly, music shtick quickly took the front seat.

2e introduces bard that can influence reactions of enemies and inspire allies with music, also countering song-based effects while picking up spells and thief skills.

3e version is a continuation of this approach, cementing the archetype that >>49796030 so accurately described.

4e goes for more of a skald feel I think but that just means powers are more shouty-shouty and wordy-wordy along with the singy-songiness.

5e does the ministrel bard again and emphasises the music aspect a lot, just read the corebook.

>>49796193
In 2e:
"The music, poetry, and stories of the bard" -- Grant mechanical bonuses if the bard spends 3 rounds singing/chanting/whatever beforehand. They can also "counter the effects of songs and poetry used as magical attacks" by counter-singing.

Every edition thereafter has made this work. Bard is a class that is a little bit of everything but only has the one unique feature -- magic music. Every iteration of the game since has tried to make that one unique feature a bigger portion of the class.

>>49796292
Actually, Egil could apparently use rune magic, but I get that that's not what you mean. Unless I'm remembering wrong, Egil was one of the skalds who would read his poems to kings, and inspire people with his poetic skill? That's always what I thought "bard magic" was like.

>>49796294
I can't comment on 3e and up (and those aren't that important for OSR anyway) but I can't really see that much of a problem with 2e. Yeah it can very easily look cheesy when done wrong, but I do like the idea of inspiring allies or manipulating enemy reactions. If the music part gets changed to pure charismatic stuff like being able to trip up the opponent with quick wit (insult sword fighting) or inspiring people with poetry, then I don't really see the problem.

>>49796317
In that case I think the later editions definitely has gone too far with that part of the bard, but I don't see the class as unsalvageable, it just needs some tweaking.

>>49795982
Well, LBB-only OD&D is one of the three best editions, along with B/X and MM3 pre-E 4e.

>>49796354
>pure charismatic stuff like being able to trip up the opponent with quick wit (insult sword fighting) or inspiring people with poetry

Still sounds cheesy and dumb to me. Not as cheesy and dumb as literally playing the instrument during the fight, but nonetheless.

To me it's something very specific that is best determined by player creativity. People often try to intimidate or annoy the enemy during the fight, I don't see the reason for making a class out of it. If you compared a lizardman to bullywig and got them fucking enraged and losing their shit, props to you. What bard does? He just "insults" and debuffs the enemy. Or "inspires" and buffs the ally. Yawn. Make a spell for it and be done with it, we don't the guy standing in the back reciting poetry "supporting" the party.

Mechanics like this are really better reserved for modern editions.

The baggage of aesthetics makes the word "bard" itself unsalvageable, which Zak was also right about. First thing I would do if I cared about bard would be changing the name. Pillars of Eternity has chanters, for example. I can basically leave every but once it's "chanting" and not witty-nitty crap, I can almost get behind the idea.

>>49796556
>I can basically leave every

Don't know what the fuck I've been smoking, it's meant to be "I can basically take it or leave it"

>>49796556
This is actually a big thing for me. I'd rather see a high-charisma thief or fighter doing that kind of stuff than have a bard class dedicated to being charismatic and witty.

>>49796556
I understand that one might not want charisma skills in their game since it removes player creativity, and I get that. Nevertheless I do think some players would find it fun to be able to have their character come up with insults themselves, sometimes that kind of quick thinking doesn't come easy for players. But yeah, I would probably do what you wrote myself if it wasn't for my group wanting more crunch to their classes.

Anyway, the charisma skills is only one part of the bard anyway, which people seems to be hooked on. I still feel like the swashbuckling lore-knowing stuff is (should be) more prominent.

And I do agree that changing the name of the class might be a good idea for some. I am myself thinking of just changing it to "skald". That still doesn't change the mechanics of the class though.

>>49796556
>Pillars of Eternity has chanters, for example. I can basically leave every but once it's "chanting" and not witty-nitty crap, I can almost get behind the idea.

The Chanter lore and mechanics sucked hardcore though.

>>49796784
I didn't play it much, but the word itself sounds good to me.

>>49796707
> Anyway, the charisma skills is only one part of the bard anyway, which people seems to be hooked on. I still feel like the swashbuckling lore-knowing stuff is (should be) more prominent.
The rub is, the charisma thing is the only real wheelhouse the Bard has to itself. Fighters are going to be better at buckling swashes because.. you know. Fighter. By raw archetype, wizards should know as much or more lore as the bard, but they kind of get shafted somewhere along the line when that came to mechanics.

>>49796931
>Fighters are going to be better at buckling swashes because.. you know. Fighter.

Swordplay is only really one part of swashbuckling. Heck, it's the part that the most iconic swashbuckling actor about, errol flynn, was pretty damn shit at.

Shutting down backup trove for 2-3 days. Cheers.

>>49792035
My initial question was about the Strategic Review bard, which is quite different than the 1e version.

I sort of see Zak's point (which does seem to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek) but I was mostly looking for some ideas one what to do if I have a player that wants to play one at some point.

>>49796944
> Swordplay is only really one part of swashbuckling
The word swashbuckler was literally used to designate someone as a boisterous fighting man. Swash+buckler, that little shield that was worn on the hip.

But sure. What non-swordplay part of swashbuckling that bards should be inherently better at than fighters?

What's the difference between Black Streams and Scarlet Heroes?

>>49797316
Black Streams offers barebones system for running games with one player. Scarlet Heroes comes with the setting, character generation, DM tools and options for solo play. The method of reading damage dice itself is identical.

>>49795893

I always pictured the Bard as Taliesin, the old Irish bard who made all the old college-educated bards look like fools, and prophesied the death of that one King, and supposedly hung out with King Arthur and Bran the Blessed according to various myths, and who probably died IRL fighting the Angles when they invaded.
Guy was pretty clearly a real-life PC, who became more so when he got written into various myths and legends later on.

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I currently use a Medical skill in LotFP that is essentially:

>roll your skill or under & heal the amount rolled in HP. Requires a medkit.

So if you have a 4-in-6 skill and roll a 3, you heal 3HP. If you fail the roll, there is no negative effects; you just use up your precious medkit. This allows for a max of 6HP to ever be restored. This is great for low-level characters, and to stabilize those who are dying at -2 etc. For higher level characters, it's a bit weak tho...and I can't decide if that is a good thing or not.

Should I modify it to be [Skill Roll] + [PC Level] = HP Healed?

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For D&D B/X, how do you handle fights with a lot of enemies? I'm just starting out with the system and while checking out a module there's a possible fight against 40 farmers, but rolling 40 times for their attacks seems like a hassle.

What do you guys do in these situations?

>>49798189

An idea: make it half (or one third) the die roll, applied per hit die of the recipient. So 1-3 for a first level character, 2-6 for a second, 10-30 for a 10th level character. Regardless of level, you heal the same ratio.

>>49798189
I see the logical conclusion of doing that being that the specialist gets 6-6 in medical as soon as possible, making sure that a heal almost always happens. At this point the skill is about as good as a cure light wounds but where you buy medkits rather than rest for spells.

If that's what you want, then I say add it, but if you're including health potions in the game then they will get somewhat nerfed because of the time and resources needed to make them.

>>49798216
You can do a mass roll with an app or a computer program, but that might not be something you wanna do.

Maybe you can have some farmers back off, Bruce Lee mook style? It sort of makes sense that not all farmers want to gang up on one guy from the fear of getting hurt themselves.

You could also make them into one entity and raise the entities hitpoints and damage. Not the best solution but it's something.

>>49798350
Oh, I like your idea of treating them as one entity rather than rolling separately. I'll think that if that battle gets to happen, I may solve it in a more organic manner than just be rolling dice like crazy, plus these guys have low morale so I can play it out.

Thanks, anon-kun

>>49798290
yeah but relying on healing potions is kinda lame anyway. So I don't see that as a downside.

>>49798549
Yeah but now they'll rely on medkits instead.

>>49798216
how the hell are 40 people getting close enough to attack one dude?

>>49798290
>>49798549
>>49798603

The immediate trade off I see here is a factor of time. One action to drink a potion, but treating an injury with a skill could be a number of minutes or hours equal to the amount of HP recovered.

>>49798664
From my experience players rarely heal themselves during battle anyway, so I don't know how significant that difference is. But if you want healing to take a longer time, I would suggest having it take a turn like most other skills.

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>>49798645
Yeah I guess that would be pretty tricky.

>>49793976
Use Lamentations of the Flame Princess and start with one of their modules.

>>49798216
>>49798350
>>49798645

Don't forget that you'll be making morale checks, those farmers are likely to run away once they see their buddies without heads.

>>49799092
I'm not the one who originally asked, but if this is the case then how would one go about doing morale checks for 40 farmers up to three times in one battle?

>>49799147
Just do one and call it a day.

>>49799147
If the players are fighting a dozen goblins, I don't roll a 2d6 morale check for each goblin. I just make one check for the group.

>>49799188
>>49799192
So all of them run away if they fail the check? That seems a bit too powerful to me. Maybe if half of them run away or something, I could buy that.

>>49798216
If 40 people can get at the party to attack, somebody's doing something that's either seriously wrong or right.

But look at it this way. At commoner THAC0, the farmers will miss an unarmored person half the time. So figure that half of them miss outright. For the remaining half, roll d10s, with "0" indicating zero rather than 10. If the d10 value is less than or equal to the target's AC, the attack hits. Otherwise, it misses.

So, for example...

RAW: THAC0 20 vs. AC of 5 = hit on 15 or over = 30% chance to hit.

Quick and dirty way: Half miss. Remaining half hit on 5 or under on d10 (with 0 as zero). That's a 60% chance to hit for the guys rolling the dice, but since half automatically miss, that's halved to 30%.

And you can delegate the responsibility to the players if you trust them, having each roll a handful of times against themselves to see if they're hit. In a party of 4 people, that's 5 rolls on each, assuming that all 40 people are in a position to strike at them (which seems highly unlikely).

>>49799217
Then do two checks! This isn't rocket science and your players aren't going to know or care that you are accurately deploying the rules to the full letter of the law. It's a game, do what it takes to make it fun.

>>49799272
Yeah I understand that, I'm just saying that the threat of 40 pissed of farmers is kind of lowered if a low roll makes them all run away at the same time.

>>49798189
This is a terrible system. You succeed more and heal more as your skill gets high? You don't need things to compound like that. It makes it stupid to put a point or two into healing, because they aren't worth much.

The way skills normally work:
skill 2 is 2x as good as skill 1
skill 3 is 3x as good as skill 1
skill 4 is 4x as good as skill 1
skill 5 is 5x as good as skill 1
skill 6 is 5.83x as good as skill 1

The way this method for healing works:
skill 2 is 3x as good as skill 1
skill 3 is 6x as good as skill 1
skill 4 is 10x as good as skill 1
skill 5 is 15x as good as skill 1
skill 6 is 20x as good as skill 1

>>49799217
You could do it by quarters. If they fail by 1 point, 1/4 of them run. If they fail by 2 points, 1/2 of them run. If they fail by 3 points, 3/4 of them run. If they fail by 4 or more, they all run.

Since this cuts down on the number fleeing, you might want to compensate by doing something like taking the worse 2 of 3 dice for them. Or just give them a -1 or -2 to their roll.

>>49798189
On a successful heal roll, the person is healed an amount equaling 1d4 + 1/10 of their maximum hit points (round down).

>>49799217
> So all of them run away if they fail the check?
It's not exactly unheard of. I wouldn't bother making the check at all until a certain number of casualties have been taken, and then once people start running.. it triggers a rout. It's something you see again and again throughout history. Once people on your side start running, people start panicking and everyone runs. It's how the majority of field battles end.

>>49796294
I can tell you've never played 5e.
Although the class picture of a bard has a lute, instruments are only an option as a magical focus - you're free to use normal shit like wands, staves or a component pouch.
The two subclasses don't have anything to do with music either - there's "wandering collector of lore" and "valiant warrior".

>>49799545
Yes but is it fun in-game? The DM seems to have wanted the encounter as a big and challenging battle, so wouldn't that be ruined if there's a high chance they all run away?

>>49799696
Is rolling 40 morale checks or 40 attacks each round fun? Even with mass rolling via a computer that's going to be a fair amount of down time as the DM checks out the results. Furthermore, how many groups want to spend a good chunk of their session killing farmers?

>>49799696
I usually test for morale at 50% of enemies and then 25%. If they make the second check, they fight to the death. I do that regardless of the size of the enemy force.

By the time it even comes up, they've killed half the bad guys -- that's a good time for the bad guys to consider running, both from a narrative perspective and a gameplay perspective.

> he DM seems to have wanted the encounter as a big and challenging battle, so wouldn't that be ruined if there's a high chance they all run away?
If the primary thing that is supposed to make it challenging is the number of opponents, they -still- need to kill 20 farmers before the farmers first check to rout. After killing the first 20, killing the second 20 down to the last man doesn't seem as though it would make it more challenging or interesting. At least not to me, I guess. If you want to up the challenge there are other ways to do it than adding more dudes.

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>>49799906
>how many groups want to spend a good chunk of their session killing farmers?

I'm going to try to read an issue of dragon magazine each day for the next.. uh. However long it takes. 250 days, I guess.

What is interesting is that in the first issue (June, 76) we're already talking about attribute-based general resolution mechanics. A particular gem:
"Everyone should have the chance, for instance, of picking a lock — but since only thieves are specialists, then all others should have only their dexterity as the percent chance of success."

>>49799217
>So all of them run away if they fail the check?

Generally that's what happens, historically. Once a part of the army starts to break and run, you have to be pretty dumb to stick around now that you're even MORE outnumbered than when you were already losing a moment ago.
Battles hit a tipping point, and then it's super run away time.

>>49800180
273 days fool. It only becomes non-canon after #273, when The Edition That Shall Not Be Named takes over, sealing True AD&D in the past forever. Plus Dragon Magazine Annual 1 through 4 inclusive, and The Strategic Review 1 through 7.

>>49799906
But the original question anon had was how to make a 40 farmer battle without rolling 40 times per round, implying that he was design his session with the fight in mind.

>>49799924
I think your system sounds good. I assumed the people arguing for a single morale check would do it after first blood/death.

>>49800313
250 is what I see in the trove. If there are more valid issues, someone needs to find pdfs to submit.

>>49800180
Whoa, interesting. It's interesting that they were pushing percentage rather than a roll under attribute score save. In B/X the thief gets screwed under those rules if they have a Dex of 16 or higher. I'd still be inclined to use the thief's abilities as a backup after a save was failed.

>>49799933
lol

>>49800358
It's not hard to see how Runequest happened.

>>49800368
Does Runequest just suck? It doesn't seem to get a lot of love here, although Call of Cthulhu is generally well-liked. Is it just too clunky for dungeon-crawling?

>>49800180
I think I'll join you in doing that, I really need to brush up on my OD&D and AD&D knowledge.

>>49800459
here being.. this thread? If so, i suspect it's just because we're focused on OSR D&D. If here is "tg in general," I dunno. It's not a bad system, I just never have a reason to play it. There always seems to be a game that's a better fit for anything I'd want to do with it.

>>49800459
>Does Runequest just suck?
From many perspectives, yes. This is going from memory here, but Runequest started out as a bunch of houserules passed around SCA circles in California, meant to make OD&D more realistic (but, in fact it ends up being """"realistic"""" because it turns out the SCA guys back then had no fucking clue), but in the process they broke the play cycle and incentive structures built into OD&D, making it an aimless game, difficult to run well. So in that sense it's a bad game, one of the first of many, many new-school games that lack mechanical support for any play style at all.

Then again, since that's the standard format of a new-school game, I guess you could say it's not bad at all, just typical. After all, tons of people love that type of game.

Personally, though, the more I play and examine classic D&D, the more most games look like some sort of third-order clones of OD&D whose creators don't even understand what they're failing to imitate.

>>49800346
I submit to no one, least of all some incomplete Trove that thinks there are only 250 Dragon issues.

>>49798603
wait, using Medicine uses up a medkit? That's dumb. Medicine should be balanced by 'if you fail the roll, things get worse, not better'. Otherwise it's just a different flavour of healpotion, and there's not much point.

>>49800896
Likely there are 250 in the trove because that was what was on the dragon cd that circulated years ago and wound up leaked on the internet.

>>49800922
I've been ignoring the medkit and just assumed that using it took a full turn. You want to sit there for an hour patching people up? uh. good luck.

>>49800922
Hey, I'm just commenting on anons system. You should take it to him. >>49798189

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>>49800974
>not seeking out every issue ever and every PDF of every TSR-printed piece of material ever made back in 2003 on dial-up using DC++

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>>49800922
- Using a medkit takes a full Turn (10 min) as opposed to an instant healing potion.
- It uses up a medkit because you are using salves, bandages, sewing thread etc contained within. These are not never ending items.
- Failing a skill roll and causing damage in general seems stupid to me. A failed roll represents the inability to properly address the damage, not some retards butterfingers slicing open an aorta.
- Healing Potions should be rare. They are in my game.

>>49801222
You're using LotFP rules, right? In that system a magic user and cleric working together can make their own potions. Have you removed that rule?

>>49799192
>>49799147
You could roll a single check, and if it fails, have some number of them to flee (2d6, or maybe a percentage based on their morale score). If their morale is 10, then 50% flee on a failed check.

You'd see a handful fight to the death. No reason to think there aren't a few lions among the sheep. Most would withdraw (and start setting up an ambush).

It gets close to the result you'd get with rolling individual checks, but stays simple enough to be done at the table without software.

>>49801300
Nope. But we only have a MU in the party, regardless.

>>49780897
>TroveGuy is back and here's his trove:
>aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWdhLm56LyNGITd4ZEdVRGFSIURBSGplbC0wN0VxX19LZEpBSFBnWHc=

Sorry, stupid question: how does one use this? Thanks--

>>49796130
What's wrong with magical music? Music and performing arts throughout history have had associations with sacred ritual and invocations.

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>>49799696
>The DM seems to have wanted the encounter as a big and challenging battle

Part of the implicit attitude in OSR rulesets is that battles are not "fun" - they're dangerous things that you have very little control over and are best avoided. How the heck would a battle vs. 40 peasants even be a fun time, anyway?

Later games attempt to make battles more interesting and more of a primary activity, but "fun" things in OSR games are more the long term choices made in play and seeing the effects of those consequences.

Also, making morale this important means it's a very significant factor in some battles. 40 skeletons are much deadlier than 40 orcs despite sharing the same stat-line - the latter can be broken and induced to flee, while the former will always press the attack with suicidal disregard for safety.

>>49801945
IMO it just comes down to the bard not really having a unique niche. Especially in an OSR game, it'd be just as easy to play a MU and fluff his spells as enchanting music (or an elf if you want to be a passable fighter, too).

And let's be honest, a lot of people who have played RPGs for years have seen how the class draws in some of the most annoying players, who use it as an excuse to be fucking intolerable at the table. For me it was my friend who was already an attention hungry theaterfag and insisted on singing Monty Python songs in character.

>>49801906
>>49787784

>>49787784
>>49802031
I'm playing along for now because I figured it out and I don't want the trove to go away... but does anyone think this will really stop a takedown?

Perhaps one of you trovebros should post your info in the clear, and see if it gets hit again?

>>49802018
Maybe the PCs are level 10, that would make killing farmers pretty easy. Anyway, people have pretty different views on what OSR is and I definitely think some people want their battles to be fun.

And yes I agree that morale should be used to make certain encounters deadlier than others, but I'm assuming that anon wanted to have a battle happen.

Man, I don't even know why I keep arguing for his case. If you think anons (assumed) playstyle is bad, take it up with him.

>>49802071
I think the troveguys are just checking to see how far the dudes will go to try and take down the trove, but they've already removed the pdfs that were the reason for the takedown anyway so I dunno.

>>49802031

Yeah, I saw that clue. I'm still in total darkness, though =(

I need a good 1st level dungeon delve that isn't Tower of the Stargazer.

>>49802108
I'm not sure if anyone noticed but the backup trove was out in the open since the last thread: >>49705079

Of course, now it's temporarily down: >>49797208

Once I sort out my PC issues, I'll make the backup trove open again. It should be okay. No compromising material, of course, d30 guy is really persistent.

>>49802153
yEah, it defiNitely Can seem tOugh but it's Doable If you thiNk it throuGh.

>>49802257
Tomb of the Iron God is my go-to.

>>49802308
It's definitely a very solid adventure and is my first choice for the module I'm going to use. I was just wondering if anybody had other suggestions. Stargazer gets recommended quite a bit but I'm really not too fond of it.

>>49780897
LOL KISS

>>49802303

I finally got it. Thanks! :)

>>49800459
RuneQuest made a lot of weird decisions when it came to leveling up your character, this put A LOT of people off.

So, what're some thoughts on the trait-motivated advancement of the new (Dungeon World, FATE, Reign, etc) vs the loot-motivated advancement of the OSR?

>>49803422
It depends on what you want to incentivize. If you want a classic explore-the-dungeon game, gold as xp works perfectly.

If you want to use OSR for something else, then a more character-motivation based advancement works fine. I'm getting a decent amount of mileage out of SWN's "Goals." If I were going to play 2e as a "high adventure" game, I'd make it into something based off of character-goals and play it like Burning Wheel.

>>49799366
Not the guy you're replying to, but how are you getting those numbers? Because they don't make any sense.

>>49803548
I recently skimmed through SWN but I don't remember anything about goals. Are those rules in the core book?

>>49803422
my thoughts are that 'what you give XP for' (and also fate points, willpower or whatever) is basically what the game /wants/ players to be doing. It doesn't need to be treasure, but whatever you give XP for becomes the game's goal.

Take, for example, Wolf-Packs and Winter Snow. In this game, you get some XP for killing things. However, the things you kill need to be threatening, and you get no XP for killing people: instantly, this rewards hunting monsters. On top of this, the AMOUNT of XP you get depends on how much use you get from the corpse; it directly scales from the number of meals-worth of food and bodyparts used for crafting you get from the corpse. The more inventive players are with finding uses for different bits of animals, the more XP they get. And thus, rather than being about 'combat', the game becomes about hunting big game. Furthermore, you get little or no XP for killing stuff that can't be made useful, so combat for the sake of it is subtly discouraged. Even a small tweak to the xp system there (allowing XP for killing people, or scaling XP by monster strength) would produce a very different play experience, as what the game rewards is changed.

I ran my players through a home brewd dungeon. They liked the flavor of it, and liked the puzzles and traps. Primarily, however, they liked combat.

They were also completely uninterested in treasure of any kind. They kind of like the idea of their characters going insane.

Would the Caves of Chaos be a good tactical combat fest for them? Basically just encounters and sneak missions.

They kind of liked exploring, but mostly they want varied combat.

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>>49803548
>>49803954
They're real. As someone who DMs it I actually find the rules very frustrating. I feel like Dumbledore tossing xp out willy nilly.

Screenshot is from page 64 of the Stars Without Number Core Rulebook, and there's more (still vague) information about XP directed to the GM on page 131 of the Stars Without Number Core Rulebook.

>>49804998
I would say definitely no. The dungeoneering in Keep of the Borderlands is the weakest part of the module.

>>49801300
That could still be a costly process that requires specific and rare ingredients, though.

>>49805077
Oh, okay. Maybe I'll just a nice little packed encounter fest. I'm not sure I'd like it that much personally, but they havent really felt the suspense of too many empty rooms and resource checks. So I'll see if I can make it mostly encounters with some breaks in between.

I know I asked this last thread, but I still need a bit more help. Are there any good resources on varying wilderness encounters beyond just standard combat? I want the wilderness to be dangerous, yes, but not just combat, if the players want combat they'll probably look in dungeons.

>>49805182
Maybe find some nice mini game of food and navigation? Perhaps some system of risk reward, where the players balance spending time finding the right track and spending time finding more food. Every now and then there's til combat. But there's also the resource management in between?

>>49805182
i think you got the best answer you could hope for in the last thread (relinked below). it has some pretty good examples and even better shows you pretty well how to make your own in the same style. if youre idea starved youll be able to find 100 reddit posts or blog posts with long lists of random hurdles and road bumps. my go to is throwing some quirky npc in front of the party.
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/have-nicer-trip.html

one a list you could find thats by the same author
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.co.nz/2016/03/1d135-osr-style-challenges.html

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>>49805182
Elfmaids & Octopi is another good site for lots of encounter lists.

Something that really helps I find is going further and specifying a starting situation/scenario - this is what "% in lair" rollls and what reaction rolls help with. For example, if you roll "Giant Spiders", an encounter could easily have 4 different permutations:

-high reaction, in lair - party finds webbed up people in the webs that the Giant Spiders are occupied with feeding on (representing their lack of interest in the party)
-low reaction, in lair - Giant Spider ambush with web traps laid for the PCs.
-high reaction, not in lair - PCs discover giant spiders rebuilding their nest after something damaged it
-low reaction, not in lair - group of predatory spiders like tarantulas, for example

You may want to consider modifying some of these rolls for your own ends. For example, you may prefer to roll on a "motivations" table instead, or alternately just pre-roll these and populate your table directly with entire setpieces.

The other important thing is that "interesting" wilderness encounters can work better as "keyed" or specifically triggered encounters that are always there rather than a random list. One mistake I've made it the past was put too much interesting stuff in the random list - where it should be the other ways around. Most systems I see specify a 1 in 6 chance of random encounters which means it's possible to have an absolutely uneventful period of travel.

The way random stuff gets interesting is by how it intersects with the already keyed content on the map - by nature they can't really be interesting on your own. Make your wilderness more interesting with keyed content that plays well with the sort of encounters you put in your table, even if that keyed content is as simple as an interesting terrain feature. Spiders in a rocky canyon is a different encounter from spiders in a wooded forest clearing with an altar (and probably represent different kinds of spiders).

>>49805255
Any suggestions?

>>49803800
Normally skills are a pass/fail sort of thing and increasing your skill doesn't increase the effects of your success. So if you have a 3 skill, you succeed 3 times more often than if you have a 1 skill. Thus it's three times as good to have a 3 skill as it is to have a 1 skill.

But under this heal system, the higher your skill, the greater, on average, the effects of your success when you do succeed. So a guy with a 1 skill heals 1 hit point 1/6 of the time. So it's worth 1/6. The guy with a heal skill of 3? He heals an average of 2 hit points (the average of 1, 2, and 3 = 2) 3/6 the time. So that's worth 2 * 1/2 = 1. Comparing those two values, 1 is obviously 6 times as great as 1/6, therefore a skill of 3 is worth 6 times what a skill of 1 is worth.

So basically, what I'm saying is that a guy with a skill of 3 heals 6 times as many hit points as a guy with a skill of 1. (The weird value for a skill of 6 comes from the fact that if a guy with a skill of 6 rolls a "6", he doesn't automatically succeed--he must roll again, and if he gets a 6 on that second roll, he fails.)

>>49806674
Or to maybe give a bit of a simpler way of looking at things: 1 skill gives you 1 point of healing on your d6 roll (you roll 1, you heal 1). 3 skill gives you 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

>>49805255
>>49805825
LotFP's foraging rules would cover that.
You basically make an x-in-6 bushcraft check to hunt for food. modified by various terrain/weather/equipment conditions. Slows daily movement down by 1d4x25% and hunters expend 1d10 ammunition. Failing the check wastes the entire day, no food is gained and no movement is made.

If I have xp for gold, should I still be splitting xp over the number of characters in the party?

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>>49802257
This one's short but I really like it. Easy to expand, put another level in, add some bandits camped around it who kidnapped a village vip who escaped into the prison, etc. Has a bunch of built in world building.

>>49807589
Worth it just for the phrase "Scabrous Yokels".

>>49791952
I feel the same way

>>49799924
There's definitely a case for basic-style first blood morale checks - check at first kill, then at something like 25%. It gives you a nice shock effect.

>>49794110
Well, what is with the X part of B/X? You are meant to do outside adventures.
The problem is that in a good setting there are a lot more exciting things to do besides hunting for treasure. Like e.g. fighting a war. Or preventing a war.
The PCs will be shoehorned into the treasure hunting role since it's the sure way to get more XP. When i add hand-waved XP for more shit than the problem is that money=XP is still the only non DM-fiat mechanic.
Yes DM-fiat is part of OSR but imo the core mechanics shouldn't rely on it.

>>49802153
>>49802303
>>49802565
It's also fairly trivial to solve with a one line command if you have a Linux system.

>>49806674
doesn't foraging for food using Bushcraft work that way in LotFP too?

So, apparently I don't know how to clean files properly so uploading various watermarked contributions might take more time until folks on 7chan can clean them for me.

Meanwhile, coughed up Perdition.

anon to/oBgMYq

Could someone interpret what the below means?

AC -5; MV 15; THAC0 -10; #AT 5/2.
MR 80%.
Saves PPDM 2, RSW 5, PP 4, BW 4, Sp 6.

That would be awesome.

>>49810247

Armor Class -5
Move 15
To hit Armor Class 0 -10
Number of attacks 5/2 (not sure how to read that one)

Magic resistance 80%

Saves:

Poison, Paralyse, Death Magic 2
Rodes, Staves, Wands 5
Petrification, Polymorph
Breath Weapon 4
Spell 6

>>49810247
>>49810287

5/2 means you get 5 attacks total every other round. Meaning you get 2 attacks on the first round, then 3 attacks on the second, then 2 on the third, etc.

AD&D, was weird.

>>49810300
Right. I did play Baldur's Gate, which is where my rough knowledge of AD&D mostly comes from.

>>49794110
I do XP for silver, but it can come from any source. So the PCs can be a guild of thieves and do urban stuff without trouble. They can be a band of mercenaries and live off the plunders of war. They can be dungeon explorers and steal treasure from dangerous monsters, or even businessmen with irregular but huge hauls.

I don't think XP for gold is that big of an issue, really.

>>49793976
Seconding >>49798924
And I heavily suggest you try Tower of the Stargazer. I have introduced about a dozen people who never played D&D in their lives (not all at once) with this, and it gave them the good habits pretty fast. Incidentally, they had a ton of fun.

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How do you handle grappling and wrestling in your osr games? Specifically interested in BX/LL

>>49798216
I don't see how ANY PC would want to stay in such a fight, but assuming they have no means of escape and parley is also out of the question, well...they're dead. Sure, I can roll about 5 attacks on each PC every round until they manage to stop the fight or get out of the situation (morale won't break in a 40 vs 8 situation, if these peasants are angry enough, they're not gonna stop until the PCs are dead or captured), but even a high level PC won't survive that very long, so I don't really see the point.

Which module is that by the way?

>>49810339
Depends on the situation. I usually do something like D20+Strength Score (not mod) in opposition and then describe stuff, but there's no real "go-to" rule for that in my game.

>>49810339
oil.

>>49810339
LotFP has grappling rules that are serviceable. There's also that table in the 2nd edition PHB.

>>49810331
Don't be so literal anon. Gold in this case just means wealth. So wether it's silver any other form of wealth, it's still the same thing and the source of XP. The feedback loop the anon you're replying to mentions still works in your case. I think you need to contrast it to XP for quests or story awards or XP for sessions or whatever is popular these days for it not to be an issue, otherwise it certainly is a big issue since it's the very engine that runs an old school dungeon crawl.

>>49810240
You're a peach, CUTT.

>>49805182
Get a copy of Outdoor Survival and use that for overland travel. Your players will be too worried about dehydrating/starving to death to worry about monster encounters

>>49810339
I usually do a roll equal/under STR.
If the opponent has no STR stat, I arbitrarily roll 3d6 and invent one.

What module would you run that would last for maybe 4-5 hours, had an engaging plot and would be a great into to tabletop gaming?

Not Stargazer; it's already been ran at my table.

>>49807306

It's up to you and your table. It's fair to just split the XP from what they brought back, but it can also be fun for them to be able to apportion it how they want. That way if they want to powerlevel one of their guys they can agree to give him all the gold/XP, or whatever.

Why does the Dragon CD Archive refuse to allow me to view the Creature Catalog 1 in Dragon #89? It is not contained in the PDF nor in the Missing Inserts.

Only links online are people on Dragonsfoot boasting about how much they enjoy sharing it with one another but not with me...10+ years ago.

>>49810339
Lamentations Wrestling rules are pretty good, I also quite like 5e's grappling rules and definition.

Someone posted a pdf of interesting random encounters a few threads ago and I'm wondering if there are any more. It included such things as a nightmare-causing sand castle, a forest witch, a bestial naked man biting the nape of a wolf, etc. Anyone have anything? I'll just upload it with this post, I guess.

>>49816801
I kept getting a connection error when trying to post it from my phone so ignore that last bit.

What are the best megadungeons around? Possibly ones I can run straight out of the box with minimal prep work

Does Scarlet Heroes work well for a small party without losing the feeling of dungeoneering beneath the earth with the goal of dragging out treasure?

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>>49816801
>>49816813
Yeah, those were made by a local anon, and they made several others. Attached is their "Village Encounters." I also have "Tainted Demon Waters" and "Sewer Encounters" by the same person, however there may be more because they were posted back in winter or spring and I didn't lurk as much then.

>>49816899
Barrowmaze (Labyrinth Lord) or Maze of the Blue Medusa (Lamentations, big but not mega). I've heard good reviews of Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls (labyrinth Lord) but haven't read it.

>>49812583
Trouble in Hochen

>>49817192

For 1 or 2 players, yeah. It feels kind of like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Conan and friend.

>>49816899
>Dwimmermount, ran 10+ sessions
absolutely massive, traditional 'floors=difficulty', a lot of potential secrets and metaplot hidden away, cool mechanics with hypermagical megafuel. Suffers from being unfocused due to size, random encounter tables being very uninteresting, difficulty in really playing factions off against each other due to only really meeting 1/2 per couple of floors, high number of 'generic demihumans'

> Barrowmaze, read only
Interesting design to dungeon, due to having ~20 entrances. Mostly is lots of undead? I didn't notice any really cool metaplot/big secrets to uncover.

>Maze of the Blue Medusa - played 3 sessions
Loads of interaction, loads of playing individuals off against each other, no solid factions to keyed areas, very good random encounters/tables, excellently laid out. Amount of interaction prompted might be offputting, perhaps too much chatting for some groups. Weird for weirdness sake. Combat perhaps undertuned?

>>49817440
Thank you friend.

So because of this general, my gm decided to run the lost city.

It's been pretty fun. We all died to beetles in the first session. Since then, we smoked out some bees, looted cannabis man and the dredds storehouse, charmed cannabis-man so we could get hirelings off him, cleaned out floor 1. We used a giant exploding firework to kill a bunch of stirges, got a bunch of fairies to hang out with us, tamed a giant weasel which is now the elfs mount and looted the nerds storehouse. We're trying to get cannabis-man and the xenas to team up for a joint attack on the nerds. They have magic items to loot. I can feel it.

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>>49814192
I have finally found it.

File: Tainted_Demon_Waters_Encounters.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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>>49817440
>>49817947

Here's Tainted Demon Waters encounters, if the anon who made these is still around you're cool.

>>49809333
If the game isn't "about" hunting for treasure then I think maybe OSR rules aren't necessarily the best fit. They're tightly focused ones but I would be hard pressed to say they're always the best rules.

There are definitely some that attempt to address the domain mechanic like ACKS and certain houserules like "spend gold=XP" (which means any task can be rewarding so long as there's a purse in it or the chance to carouse).

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>>49817440
>>49817947
>>49818673
Sewer Encounters

>>49780897
>rhysmakesthings.com/gm_friend - simple hexcrawl builder by anon
Do you have an email?

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Most OSR computer games out there?

- Darkest Dungeon
- Dragon's Dogma

File: Within a Dark Forest OSR Encounters.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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>>49819407

File: Derelict Science Fiction Encounters.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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>>49819446

Why do you think people seem to prefer 3.5/PF over all else in the D&D world?

>>49819408
In the abstract I think that the Dark Souls games are share some of the OSR ideas. Monsters will definitely kill you even if you're high level, rewards careful play, a tiny hint of threat before a blow you can't recover from, predictable and understandable behaviors. Playing both will result with players who experience certain areas or fights or whatever pretty differently even though it's the same game.

>>49819537
I think 5e is pretty quickly taking that title, However my guess it's a matter of time. D&D 3e, 3.5. and Pathfinder were sold for about total of 13 years in an age of internet, where the games before it really weren't. I would also attribute much of it to a sort of marketing snowball. They have the most money to market the games to sell more games to market more...

>>49803422
It's all just a matter of taste as long as you're having fun.

Gold for XP is a subjective measure of success. This is a great strength of the system. Basing XP rewards on "good roleplaying" or whatever requires by it's nature a bit of "guess what the GM is thinking".

One thing I'd like to try is giving each player something like 100XP per level that they must award to another player at the end of the session--they would do so anonymously, via the GM, and can divide it in any proportions they like (including rewarding it to all players equally).

>>49805182
Check out Wolfpacks and Winter Snow. It's a retroclone set in a fantasy paleolithic, and it's got fantastic rules for making wilderness survival into an interesting part of the game (rather than just knocking off a few more GP for warm clothes and extra provisions).

Also, there's a LotFP module called "Weird New World" with great ideas.

>>49809333
Plenty of preindustrial murder hobos went to war exclusively for loot... what does it matter if you're looting it from an ancient tomb, or from an active enemy temple?

Reward them XP for whatever prize they can take from the city (and woe to the captain who doesn't share the loot out with his troops!).

Ditto for ransoming nobles, or extorting tribute from a neighboring city.

The problem (or the beauty, depending on perspective) of assigning XP is that it's a way to tell players "This is what I want you guys to do. Do this thing and you will be rewarded."

XP for gold tells the players "I want you guys to crawl in dungeons and hunt for ancient treasure to bring back to civilization".

XP for monster killing tells the players "I want you guys to find the most dangerous monsters out there and slay them to prove your worth".

XP for participation tells the players "I want you guys to sit there in a corner and play on your cellphone for the entire session. You don't need to do anything, you'll be rewarded regardless of what your character actually does".

XP for roleplaying tells the players... what, exactly? "Roleplaying" is vague, so it'd depend from DM to DM.

And so on and so on.

I think that deciding "how XP is earned in my campaign" is possibly the most important decision a DM can make (and he needs to communicate it VERY clearly to the players).

There's really no "good" or "wrong" thing to do as long as you KNOW what you're doing. That said, the most OSR thing to do is, clearly, XP for gold first of all, and monsters for a distant second.

I know DMs who also give XP for exploration in hexcrawls, defined as finding a particular hex with a point of interest that is keyed to a XP reward. A good way to push players to wandering around the hex grid and mapping it.

Is there a mass battle system that is less a mini-wargame exercise and more a way to determine what happens to PCs involved in it? I'm thinking of something like L5R, where the rolls to determine how the battle actually goes are simplistic contested skill rolls but PCs instead choose where on the battle line they stand (way in the back, on the vanguard, that sort of thing) and accrue damage and glory each round, with the possibility of facing enemy heroes in combat or rolling heroic opportunities to shoot at the enemy general, save a friend from death and so on.

>>49820470
Check out Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic.

Basically various actions help you gain "victory points". Whether that's the thief going behind enemy lines to capture an important general, or the magic user completing a ritual to put a curse on the enemy army. It's pretty light, and could be ported to an OSR game without much fuss.

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>>49820467

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>>49819408
Etrian Odyssey - can't get more OSR than making your own dungeon maps. By extension Wizardry and other dungeon crawlers, and possibly the Gold Box games. Classic SMT could also fit into the weird fantasy angle as well.

Honestly I feel most RPGs pre-1996ish would be easy sources of inspiration, as RPGs were almost always synonymous with dungeon crawls of some stripe or another.

Fallout and Baldur's Gate on PC along with Final Fantasy VI/VII on console really shifted the video game RPG landscape towards more character focused stories as opposed to murderhobo crawls.

>>49819537
Being free helped a lot. 3.x sold with the OGL and were one of the few truly free options in the early days of the net. What's more the OGL fueled a lot of third-party publishing which created a very large ecosystem to draw supplemental material from.

The online SRD was absolutely massive - it's common nowadays to have free trial .pdfs for downloadr but the infrastructure for that just didn't exist for small publishers back in the day and most RPGs literally did not have any free versions. The model back in the day was to let it sit on a store shelf for customers to take a look at. What's more, the release of the SRD coincided with the rise of formal RPG forums - you could now not only discuss the game, but discuss the game with links to the online rulebook - far less clunky.

Whether it was a "good thing" for the industry is debateable but I'd absolutely say it's a reason for 3.x's enduring popularity.

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Is this any good?
And does any one have a copy to share?

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/148348/Class-Compendium

>>49819408
Final Fantasy 1, Wizardry 1, Darkest Dogma, let's go through my Steam library... Arx Fatalis, Avernum/Exile, Crusader Kings 2 (at higher levels), Demons' Souls (not on Steam unfortunately) & Dark Souls 1, Deadnaut & Duskers despite both being solidly SF, Hand of Fate is a single-player card game with combat sequences but it has a wonderful DM sitting across the table dealing you hazards, Icewind Dale 1 despite being AD&D, King of Dragon Pass for higher-level play and general feel, Thief 1 & 2.

Some of these are single-character, not party, but they still feel right to me even if the setting is wrong.

>>49822056
SMT is definitely relevant to the OSR, even if it's not OSR. You can even talk to and recruit the monsters.

>>49822908
You can find most of those (or at least a lot of those) in the trove, Labyrinth Lord -> Classes. I don't remember anything I would use, but that's partially because if I need new classes I usually design them anyway.

Best magic mishaps tables?

>>49807306
I think most rules say that XP should be evenly split among all party members no matter what the actual treasure distribution ends up being.

>>49819408
Pretty much all 80s dungeon crawling CRPGs.

>>49821034
I don't really buy the line about how fiddly XP book-keeping supposedly is.

I'm running a B/X - LL game and all I literally have to do is keep a piece of paper and a pencil next to me (which I already do because, you know, while DMing you generally take notes for yourself, right?).

Players find treasure? Write down how many GP they found.
Players defeat/survive encounter? Write down how many HD of creatures that was.

At the end of session, use the "monster of # HD gives # XP" table (Page 49 on Labyrinth Lord, for example).

Add together all the numbers.

Add any bonuses depending on what you usually do (XP for surviving non-combat encounters, accomplishing objectives, exploring locations, etc, whatever)

This doesn't slow you down during the session and takes literally one minute at the end of the session.

I mean, I'm not saying that DCC's method is bad and wrong. Never tried it, but I'm sure it works fine. Just saying that "you're an adult with a job and a family so you can't be expected to do basic math for 60 seconds at the end of a gaming session" sounds REALLY retarded to me. If you're so busy that one minute at the end of a gaming session to compute XP totals is the end of the world, should you be really gaming at all?

>>49824735
I'm pretty sure the real reason DCC has that system is because they want to focus on the players getting into deadly and weird situations rather than getting gold. In the modules there isn't much gold around most of the time, but there are many "situations" that the PCs have to get through. So they made the system to reward surviving those situations.

Does anyone have Ten Buried Blades for Godbound?

>>49819408
Legend of Grimrock 1 & 2

Any advise for running basic D&D, I recently acquired the rules cyclopedia and was thinking of using it to run a hex crawl campaign after our group finishes the 5e campaign that we are currently in the middle of. Any advise on how I should run it and what I should expect?

>>49825993
Do as much prep as you can. If you're planning on a hex crawl, there's tons of resources (maps, encounters, etc) in the trove. I also like Hexmancer, which is a set of procedural hex generation rules that can be used on the fly.

As for the game itself, there's not a ton of rules so expect a lot of talk and decision making. The reaction and morale rules are your friend so make sure you're familiar with them.

Find the B/X headgear table and have your players roll on that.

>>49825689
If I wanted Dancing in Dungeons, I'd play Crypt of the Necrodancer.

I love what Grimrock is doing, I just don't like the gameplay style. Never did.

Actually, everyone should play Crypt of the Necrodancer.

>>49825993
Good choice. RC is great, it hooks you up with all the rules and even glimpses of the setting + treasure generation and stuff.

Obviously first off comes the standard OSR deal: lethality is high, combat is bad for players, creative approach to challenges and getting treasure is where it's at. The reaction and morale rules are your bread and butter.

Also beware that it's a vastly different game mechanically and people have to learn a few new concepts, like stats that don't affect nearly as much things, weird saving throw categories and race-as-class, but overall there isn't a lot of player facing rules.

The way I'd approach it: pick a place on the map you like, make it their homebase, make a dungeon and some interesting spots around it. After a few sessions develop other things. Don't strive for completeness from the start, hexcrawls are best developed organically in play. Take inspiration from what happened, improvise, then flesh out the details.

Treasure generation tables, wandering monster tables, surround yourself with all that good stuff. Pick your favorites.

I guess that's it. Also there's no unified resolution mechanic and that's part of the challenge / charm for you, the DM, to work it out. Also thief fucking sucks if you interpret his abilities as something mundane. Hide in shadows should be literally hiding in nothing but shadows. Anyone can hide behind something. Stuff like that.

>>49825993
If you're planning to make any use at all of dungeons, familiarize yourself with the light/time/wandering monster interaction for dungeon exploration. They're insanely important rules for the dungeon dynamic to work properly and easy for a newbie to overlook. I keep wishing there were a good introduction/summary of this, but I think the existing OSR primers all drop the ball on it? Maybe Anon can correct me.

>>49826180
>The reaction and morale rules are your friend so make sure you're familiar with them.
This. This so much.

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I just found something largely irrelevant but cool.

This is the pic from the first monster manual.

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>>49827113
and this is from Stars Without Number

>>49824735

DCC's early modules were written for 3e, before they shifted over to their own in-house system. So maybe they're talking about 3e's XP calculation system?

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>>49827130

>>49827113
>>49827130
>>49827432

>dickassthief face through out the ages

>>49819408
A lot of roguelikes follow a similar philosophy, at least the traditional sorts like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Anyone know any good alternative rules for how armor works?

>>49819408
Rather unknown, but probably the best example of one: Wizardly Online.
Shame the servers are dead.

>>49780897
>>49789517
Still looking for players, bumping with traditional format.

>GM or player?
GM
>Timezone/times available
Wednesday, October 19th at 7:30pm Eastern (UTC−4:00)
>Voice or Text?
Discord voice chat, Roll20 for rolling, etc.
>System/setting
Stars Without Number, in the /osrg/ discord server.
>Contact info
tipsta#3617 on Discord
>Additional info
This will be a one shot. Hook: You are part of a small team tasked with investigating an abandoned research facility to retrieve data stolen by an alien crew occupying the derelict structure.

>>49819537
SRD + OGL + internet becoming mainstream + new players who's only frame of reference was 3.x refusing to move on + the general failure and lack of appeal of 4e + Paizo's snowballing market presence and continued support for a broken system

Surprisingly though 5e is steadily pushing 3.x/PF out of it's spot as top dog.

>>49827130
Speaking of SWN, I'm looking for a good Sci-Fi OSR game. How is it?

>>49829641
Forsake your false editions and embrace True AD&D. Make True AD&D take the top spot, that for which it is destined.

>>49829728
>AD&D

Might as well just play Pathfinder.

>>49829709
It's good. I mean, it's not CT, but it's an excellent game and even if you don't use the gameplay mechanics the GM tools are worth reading it (and buying all the supplements).

>>49829769
How will that force Wizards of the Coast to resurrect Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, hire all former staff from TSR, and eradicate all false editions in favor of new material for True AD&D?

>>49829769
Please don't feed the trolls.

>>49829769
If you're going to play something from the AD&D line of development, skip 3e/PF and play the well-designed one.

Gamma World 7e.

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>>49828606
Armor as damage reduction?

>>49830126
AC as DR is trash tho. It makes even less sense than % to hit reduction

>>49830126
Armour as AC, unarmoured = AC 9. fite me

>>49830138
I think it works better from a couple of perspectives. First, armor as to-hit reduction makes things all or nothing, which is silly. Either a blow glances harmlessly off your armor or it is completely unaffected. Depending on how it's done, armor as damage reduction may result in some blows glancing harmlessly off your armor (when damage is reduced to 0), but it also lessens the number of severe wounds you take in comparison to lesser ones, which just makes sense.

More importantly, the way armor as DR breaks up the dice rolls is more straightforward and logical.
1) Did I hit my target?
2) If I hit, how hard/effectively did I hit?

That makes much more sense than:
1) Did I hit my target hard/effectively enough to inflict damage?
2) If I hit hard/effective enough to inflict damage, how hard/effective did I hit within that range?

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>>49825993
I would give you the advice I got, and just run a dungeon for starters. If you want to still have some wilderness and travel time, how about making it a "corridor" between your town and the dungeon with wilderness in between?

You still get to do some outdoor survival stuff, roll for lost food or getting lost (not getting out of the hex, perhaps) and wilderness encounters, but get to focus on making more with less.

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>>49830169
There are math reasons to make people harder to hit than AC 9. In order to prevent DR from running damage into the ground (and having too large an effect on low-damage weapons), you need to increase the size of the damage dice. But you've now made attacks more powerful, and in order to compensate for that, you need to make folks harder to hit.

If you were just to make unarmored people have AC 9 (with everybody else having AC 7 *and* DR), you're obviously changing the balance of the game around. In terms of balance, it's the equivalent of leaving armor the way it is in the RAW, with leather giving you an AC of 7, but changing the AC for unarmored to 11.

Also, from a game play perspective, having AC 7 as a base is a bit better, because otherwise you're making the vast majority of people significantly easier to hit (most people, after all, wear some form of armor).

>>49830267
From a versimilitude perspective, consider small weapons like daggers. In their actual usage against armored foes, they relied on the precision of hitting the less-protected location, with the end result being a stab just like that of an unarmored foe.

Same deal for ranged weapons. Let alone that against many weapons, armor operates in a binary fashion (does your longsword scrape harmlessly across the breastplate or do you hit a vital area?) which traditional AC represents better.

Armor-as-DR might make more sense for crushing weapons, but that's lack of granularity I can handle to keep a variety of weapons viable.

>>49830441
You could just have certain weapon possess Armour Piercing, or have things like sneak attacks ignore DR.

>>49830441
How would you handle something like full plate?

Putting the LotFP skill system in DCC and giving specialists/thieves +4 skills per level to account for change in leveling: good idea or bad? I know it clashes with the d20 DC system but it's just so much easier to grok and it's way more flexible.

>>49830441
>From a versimilitude perspective, consider small weapons like daggers. In their actual usage against armored foes, they relied on the precision of hitting the less-protected location, with the end result being a stab just like that of an unarmored foe.
But the area may well still be protected, just significantly *less* protected. And even if it isn't, the the very fact that you have to aim for a smaller area and may have to do it from a less than ideal angle is likely to reduce the effectiveness of your strike, even though you aren't penetrating armor.

And most strikes against a guy in a hauberk are probably still going to hit his armor. Sure, you'll be striking at vulnerable and unarmored areas, but he's going to be protecting those and it's not like you'd give up a sword blow across the arm as useless. If you have the opportunity to hit with a solid blow, it's probably not going to feel good, armor or no.

Anyway, one interesting mechanic is to say that a maximum roll on your damage die means that you bypass armor. This advantages things like daggers more (since DR is a greater portion of their damage output) and can represent their greater agility when it comes to exploiting a chink in somebody's armor. It doesn't change the overall math of a battle very much, but it might feel more real.

>>49830647
That's the point. Against a variety of weapons, plate armor is an all or nothing deal reliant on one's ability to target weakpoints. Armor as DR, by and large, doesn't make sense before you get into meatpoints discussions.

>>49831128
>If you have the opportunity to hit with a solid blow, it's probably not going to feel good, armor or no.

A perspective that makes more sense with the RAW that hitpoints are not just physical injuries

What's the best OSR system for a nobledark/noblebright campaign, assuming a group who has never played an OSR system before and is more used to Pathfinder and 5e?

>>49831295
I'm not quite sure about the terms, but I think Beyond the Wall is kind of noblebright, and DCC is kind of nobledark.

>>49831295
Any system? I'm not sure what system support do you need.

Ah, the everlasting discussion of AC. The inherent problem is in two levels of abstraction: AC is an abstract measure of armor, dodges and parrying blows, HP is an abstract measure of stamina, luck and health, yada yada. So any differentiation in combat is built on these two pillars of abstraction which is why it always feels weird.

If I abstractly hit the guy and the guy is abstractly hurt, why those weapons deal different damage? It's not damage per se now, it's more like a threat level of the weapon. But any weapon can be lethal under the right circumstances, which is when you're going 0 hp or negative or whatever. That last hit brought you down no matter what and now anything can kill you no matter what.

AC as DR still operates on HP level of abstraction, so it doesn’t directly translates into the hit. Then the plate armor, daggers and ranged attacks issue. So you rationalize it again and:

>most strikes against a guy in a hauberk are probably still going to hit his armor.

Then HP grows with each level, making things more complicated. Then it gets harder when you’re introducing some form of called shots and who didn’t? Figuring out where the monster’s weak spot is and hitting it is rad. But it’s still abstract. With all the narration in the world, it can be hard to establish clear cause and effect.

The ball of rationalization thread keeps unravelling, but the exit out of this labyrinth remains to be seen.

Next time I'm introducing someone to the game, I'm probably going all White Box. Bring out those d6s. Best out of two for heavy weapons, worst out of two for daggers except backstabs and crits. Also Flesh / Grit separation. Crits and clever called shots go to Flesh.

Or maybe not, because after this incoherent rant my mind returns to the good old weird AC / HP and not giving a fuck anymore.

>>49831295
>group who has never played an OSR system before and is more used to Pathfinder and 5e?

ACKS is one of my go-to recommendation here, being essentially B/X with a bunch of houserules packed in. It has a large diversity of character classes that definitely can help out with groups more accustomed to larger build options, and provides strong clarifications to many areas that B/X leaves blank and open to interpretation.

It also does a better job laying out and explaining the tiers of B/X play and dungeon crawl and hex crawl procedures.

I also recommend Swords & Wizardry for similar reasons of solid explanation of play logic. Both of these rulesets are still not perfect - like many retroclones there are still gaps in the rules which need to be filled and some areas which you may want to work with, but I find them far more useable out of the box.

>>49832166
At this point the only reason I use different damage for different weapons is just because my players (and me, to be honest) like rolling different types of dice. I don't even rationalize it, it's all based on primal "small = fast and weak, big = slow and strong" feelings without a regard for realism.

>>49832497
Exactly. That's what I always ended up with.

>>49830709
I honestly wouldn't change DCCs thief. Next to LotFP, it's the best one.

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Apparently Toril has a surface area of 177 million square miles* vs. Earth's 197 million square miles. The CD-ROM Atlas could be filling in space that isn't there.

*SJR4 Practical Planetology, pg. 40

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I've been trying to make a white box Half Elf race/class, but I'm having trouble making it unique. Any help?

>>49834247
Well, elves are fighter/magic-users. What about a more fighter/magic-user/thief sort of vibe? Kind of like a bard only without the bardiness. Lighter armor, less direct offensive power, more jack of all trades.

>>49834532
Ah, I'm really liking the thief/fighter idea. They're rejected by society so they resort to fending for themselves in any way they can.
Any more ideas?

>>49834566
>Any more ideas?
Not really. White Box is pretty brass tacks, so there's not a lot of elbow room. You don't want to get too fancy, and anything I come up with ends up being idiosyncratic. I do kind of like the idea of a half elf being a magic version of a thief. Like, he's a fighter/magic-user in lighter armor, and his thieving comes from casting thieving spells. But then you have to create a bunch of spells, and you're significantly expanding the game.

>>49834733
>thieving comes from thieving spells
You are a fucking genius. Godspeed

>>49834776
You could use the Complete Warlock thief stuff to give you ideas.

>>49834819
I googled this to no avail. Link?

>>49835153
Warlock is a game that started out as a set of D&D houserules at I think Caltech, but quickly bloated into a whole big thing of its own. It should be in the Trove somewhere, I think.

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>>49835153

The Complete Warlock is a weird old D&D clone from the 70s, it's in the Trove. Its thief has a huge list of powers that can be bought and activated sort of like an at-will version of the mage's spells. It's massive, and has some neat stuff, and some dumb stuff, and some pretty funny stuff, too.

>>49835314
>Its thief has a huge list of powers that can be bought and activated sort of like an at-will version of the mage's spells.
What's notable about this is that it's probably the original Thief skill mechanic -- the guy (also in California) who invented the Thief called Gygax and told him about it in broad strokes, and Gygax took that and adapted it to the Greyhawk Thief, but the Caltech guys probably got their version via direct transmission from the inventor, so it's likely to be a better representation of how his original Thief worked. It's still hugely expanded in terms of variety and amount of content, though, much like everything in Complete Warlock.

>>49835411
>>49835314
Wow, alrighty then
You're the best

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>>49835831
Here's all the thief power stuff from Complete Warlock.

>>49829773
Does it support the sort of gritty grimy space dungeon crawl that I'm looking for, or is it more of a space opera theme?

>>49836256
i think it can do both, leans towards big space stuff. you can find out yourself if you join >>49829596

>>49837586
Alas, I have other things planned that night. Why not search on roll20, there's a decent number of OSR players there.

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Been recreating Darkest Dungeon adventurers as lv.1 LotFP classes, without straying too far from the actual character creation or rules-as-written.

>>49832166
>If I abstractly hit the guy and the guy is abstractly hurt, why those weapons deal different damage?
They don't. Just don't use the optional rule of variable damage.

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>>49837831

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>>49837847

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>>49837857

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>>49837871
That's all for now.

>>49830384
>If you were just to make unarmored people have AC 9 (with everybody else having AC 7 *and* DR), you're obviously changing the balance of the game around. In terms of balance, it's the equivalent of leaving armor the way it is in the RAW, with leather giving you an AC of 7, but changing the AC for unarmored to 11.
No, you don't get it. Unarmoured was AC 9 originally. Making it AC 10 and adding in new types of armour to fill all the numbers out was a change made after OD&D.

>>49836256
Not only does it support gritty grimy space dungeon crawls, you can easily and satisfyingly refluff a D&D dungeon into an abandoned space station full of weird alien monsters and malfunctioning security bots, and it's mechanically close enough to be easily playable.

>>49838164
Actually, I just misread the post I was responding to. I thought it said "Armour as DR, unarmoured = AC 9", which would've made everybody easier to hit under the DR system in >>49830126.

>>49838164
In case anyone doesn't know it, the original table was:

9: No armour, no shield.
8: Shield.
7: Leather.
6: Leather & shield.
5: Chain.
4: Chain & shield.
3: Plate.
2: Plate & shield.

Then they expanded it a bit and added new armour types to fill in the gaps, but I like the original. Makes shields seem more important, and doesn't involve inventing bullshit armour types. Like, seriously, the fuck, studded leather? Yeah, there are other types than those basics, but you should just use the closest. There's no need to fill out a list just because it's there.

>>49838411
>inventing bullshit armour types. Like, seriously, the fuck, studded leather?

leather armor in general, even without studs, was made up for D&D.

>>49838444
True, kind of, and the less said about chain mail and plate mail the better.

At the time, armour was kind of a mess. From a Playing at the World blog post on the subject:

>In this early article, written three years before Dungeons & Dragons, we can pick out many familiar keywords. Referring to armor prior to the medieval period, Gygax says it "might be padded, leather, scale armor, ring mail, or chain mail," quite a procession in a single phrase. He notes that in the era of the Norman Conquest, the legs of a fighting man might be protected by "studded leather." Later he cites "banded mail" and "splinted armor," though with the caveat that "none of the authorities can agree as to just what the Hell banded mail was."

There's a reason at least some scholarship comes from re-enactors trying to figure out how shit actually worked, but depending on what sources you could get back in the 70s you could come away with very odd views on things.

A comment from Mike Mornard mentions that they were actually testing some stuff:

>Thanks, Chirine! Yeah, it was crazy for a while... like figuring out that "cuir boulli" could NOT have been soaked in wax, as that made it EASIER to cut...

>(Rawhide soaked in salt water turned out to be the best answer... a 1/2 inch thick piece of that will stop a broadhead arrow from a 75 lb bow at 15 yards)

So yeah, SCA stuff. Historical misconceptions were everywhere, including in scholarly works, because a lot of it was based on previous material and source texts that didn't explain what everyone knew or was just mistaken or misinterpreted.

http://playingattheworld.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/the-legacy-of-gygaxs-armor.html

>>49838488
F'instance, further comment:

>Jon, if you had asked me I could have told you that Gary used Ashdown and Stone for his sources almost totally. "Banded" and "Studded" mail have Ashdown's fingerprints all over it, and Stone is where Gary got the glaive-guisarme-bardiche-spetum-canopener polearms from. Just like CHAINMAIL draws almost 100% on Oman.

>Honestly, I never even knew it was a question. CHAINMAIL and D&D ** obviously ** derive their armor descriptions from Ashdown, who pretty much yanked them out of his ass.

I will never not use glaive-glaive-guisarmes and the like though, that's required for my D&D immersion. IIRC someone wrote a warbear class that, at a certain level, gets to create its own unique polearm - that's what I consider D&D. Armoured bears with unique custom polearms.

File: war bear.jpg (94KB, 450x665px) Image search: [Google]

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>>49838526
And googling "osr bear polearm" gives me the source:

http://hillcantons.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/the-war-bear-yet-another-bx-or-ll-class.html

>At level 6, the War Bear can invent and name a polearm of his own design at a cost of 500 gold suns and two weeks of intense concentration, such a weapon will be +2 to hit and damage only in his own paws and can even strike those creatures only harmable by magic weapons.

>>49838526
>glaive-glaive-guisarmes
Incidentally, a polearm that cannot be rolled on the random polearm generator.

https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/random-thursday-polearm-generator-revised/

You can get a double glaive-guisarme, though.

>>49838596
>fork-fork with fork and fork
yer forked now, mate

>>49838526
>glaive-glaive-guisarmes
Glaive-guisarme-bill-glaives are far superior to glaive-glaive-guisarmes, though I'm personally fond of the footman's fauchard-crowbill-guisarme-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive, not to mention its obscure relative, the glaive (though there's little concrete evidence something that fantastical ever actually existed).

>>49839150
In my fantasy D&D world, polearms are tacticool as fuck. Everyone who wants to be an ~~operator~~ has one painstakingly crafted with modular attachments and a tactical black stealth coating, even the town guards.

then the pcs roll up with a rusty shortsword and a knife tied to a stick, and actually get the job done

and blow the reward on a polearm

>>49837831
I was going to do this myself at some point.
Thanks for saving me the trouble!

>>49819407
Sure:
[email protected]

I'll add it to the bottom of the website so you know it's me.

hey OSRG I posted a thread yesterday but figured I'd throw the question out again. Im looking for a fairly crunchy and lethal game with a low to middling power level for the players to go dungeon delving in.

>>49840608
Check out Dungeon Crawl Classics.

>>49840751
So peering at a review of this and says it uses D7s?

>>49840777
One of its gimmicks is using all the weird dice. Yeah, I know.

>>49840608
>fairly crunchy and lethal game with a low to middling power level for the players to go dungeon delving in.
Low: B/X
Middling: ACKS

>>49840777
Yeah don't use it if you're not into using weird dice. Honestly though they're not used that much and can be rolled on a computer or phone.

So what are some really good modules to introduce a group of 5e players to osr. We will be using the rules cyclopedia.

>>49840608
Hackmaster's crunch is fascinating but it's probably too much for most people. It accepts AD&D idiosyncrasies, bolts on various interesting stuff and somehow makes it all work. I would advise to least check it out.

DCC is a great choice, and there's always The Crawler’s Companion, if you don't want to bother with the odd dice.

I'll also mention Perdition, which has pretty terrific crunch but comes with the setting of Hell that conquered the whatever world you're adventuring in. There's no info dump but there races, classes, social rules and whatnot are all about presenting this setting. Honestly it's great, but the classic divide of crunch and fluff doesn't work here, since crunch is directly tied to fluff. So not the best choice if you need something generic.

Does anyone have the pdf with a great list of fair DnD ability arrays?

File: random but fair attributes.png (136KB, 1240x1116px) Image search: [Google]

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>>49841264
This?

>>49840926

DCC is crunchier than B/X and ACKS.

Speaking of DCC how would you handle Luck when converting DCC modules to other OSR rules? There are surprisingly many Luck checks.

>>49841542
Just make them into wis-based saves, I guess.

>>49841542
The domain stuff in ACKS is crazy crunchy and detailed.

>>49841354
Yes, thanks a bunch!

>>49841644
And badly-designed. The maths is fucked-up and there are a ton of inconsistencies, plus it's functionally useless after a certain size of domain because it expects you to calc all the lower domains and doesn't give you any abstraction tools.

Apparently they're going to redo it, but...

>>49841194
Keep on the Borderlands is always a choice. It benefits from fleshing it out. You can also run a similar OSR module, BL1-2 The Ruined Hamlet / Terror in the Gloaming. It's free at drivethrurpg right now.

Tomb of the Iron God for S&W is also a great introductory module that teaches you all the ropes of dungeoneering. Lacks homebase.

>>49841903
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Maybe someone who enjoys fiddling with spreadsheets might enjoy it but it's not fun in a gaming context.

What do you think is the best Whitebox clone and why?

>>49840608
>a fairly crunchy and lethal game with a low to middling power level
This is just AD&D 1E at sub-name levels, really. Much more crunch than Basic, still lethal, but power level isn't as low as B/X either.

I'm running an OD&D (LBB with lots of house rules) game and discovered Wonders & Wickedness by Necropraxis recently. It's now how I do Magic-Users (I already did the casting a number of spells based on level, but this is much more in-depth and feels even more vancian). So my game has the usual demihumans, Fighting-Men, Magic-Users (Vancian), but I'm not sure what to do with Clerics. There are various cults and religions in my setting, but the Gods aren't actually very present, so it's already established that clerics are rare, and when they're here, they can played as prophets or paladins, usually, more than simply priestly-types.

Question is : since removing Cleric might be too much, what alternatives are there? I'm not looking for *another* class to replace it, but for a new take on the original concept. If it helps, the game is set in Post-Apocalyptic NotAsia (Red Tide).

>>49842094
LotFP is the best LBB+Greyhawk clone.
I'm very fond of Torches & Swords for pure LBB.
S&W Whitebox is a heavy contender, obviously.
Épées & Sorcelleries is pretty cool too.
And Full Metal Plate is probably the best *clone*, as in, it doesn't bring anything new to the table contrary to the other games I mentioned, but it sums up the LBBs quite well. It's also illegal, but, well, I don't have much respect left for WotC.

>>49837885
Those are awesome. Please make the others too when you have time/feel like it. Makes me want to go back to LotFP.

>>49837831
These are all really cool

>>49839382
A bill hook is aces for messing with likely traps.

>>49842042
Nah - it's when you actually try to use it that it all falls apart. It's good idle reading, I guess, and some parts work, and it's a starting point for building a better (working) system...

I hope they do, one day.

Until then, An Echo, Resounding isn't the same style of domain management at all, but it's good.

>>49842379
Remove religion entirely, just have them as undead-hunters.

File: Random But Fair Attributes (Radom Arrays for Old School D&D).png (228KB, 1684x1971px) Image search: [Google]

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>>49841354
Newer version that covers how to do racial adjustments.

>>49842379
>when they're here, they can played as prophets or paladins, usually, more than simply priestly-types

Default cleric is sorta that, he's a warrior of faith, never just a priest. If anything, Red Tide benefits from priesty approach (shamans, although Shou witches are already there and they're magic-users). In any case, removing the class and molding his spell list into a magic-user specialty for example is okay imho.

File: Strongholds and Domains - A Revised Approach.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

1B, 486x500px

>>49841903
>Apparently they're going to redo it, but...

Have you seen this?

>>49842410
>Torches & Swords

Is that in the Trove? I don't see it.

>>49843789
It's free.

>>49843659
I use Wonder & Wickedness fo Magic-Users, including Shou Witches. So putting the cleric spells in the MU's list doesn't work for me.

Since the Cleric is Judeo-Christian in apparel, I'll allow Clerics of the Maker. Other cults have regular priests, or magic-users that also do priestly stuff.

>>49843734
It looks sufficiently "fixed" that I just know I'll have to spend ten hours trying to make it work. Hopefully it is decent now?

I'll give it a shot next weekend perhaps.