/osrg/

Continuing from last thread, because a kind knowledgable anon was being very helpful:

I want to play basic D&D. I'm torn between using Basic Fantasy RPG or Labyrinth Lord.

BFRPG
+Ascending AC
+Books are cheap as all fuck
-Seeing a little more 3.5 than I think I would like to
-Not sure how well it interacts with other established OSR games or modules

LL
+Rules are much more how I remember them
+Feels like I could just swap out the Basic Rulebook with this and nobody would probably be the wiser
-Descending AC
-Books are not cheap and not on a seller I'm familiar with


Not sure yet how I feel about separate race/class and if that's what I want. Do I want to introduce new players to that weirdness, or should I let them customize?

Reuploading from last thread.

TL;DR, got confused over the basic Chainmail rules so I decided to condense it into a more simpler version.

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

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>>50183971
Not sure why it didn't upload the PDF.

>Get so caught up in homebrewing goofy shit that you forget about one of your favorite things in old school games.

Wizards copying scrolls into their spellbook is the raddest shit but none of the classes I've made use a spellbook, and scrolls are unique spells that no one has on their lists and anybody can use them. Did I fuck up?

>>50183883
I didn't participate in last thread's discussion, but to add a third element there:

What do you think of Dark Dungeons (and maybe it's spin-off Darker Dungeons)?

>>50184021
>Wizards copying scrolls into their spellbook is the raddest shit

so copying walls of text and goofy images from piece of paper A to piece of paper B is rad now?

ok

>>50184330
It was an interesting way for wizards to get more spells in the middle of a dungeon and I liked it.

>>50184315
I've only looked at BFRPG, LL, and LotFP so far. I'm willing to listen to the sales pitch though.

>>50184353
oh, i see, i thought the process itself was the peak of radness, my bad

well, being the trinket-heavy DM that i am, i would probably have some actual scrolls on me and would require the wizard to actually copy them.

so far people have been enjoying these meta bits :)

for example, every time the wizard tries to access the magic of an item (to copy, transfer or debuff it), the has to solve a Rubik's Cube. the difficulty depends on the magical item. it can be a 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 or that fucking megaminx.

i usually lend real-life puzzles to actions that don't have immediate necessity though. he can take the rubik's cube home, for example, and when he solves it, he can access the item's whole manascript, and decide what the fuck to do.

also try to give the players physical things (like an actual scroll), they love that shit. also they become treasures to remember past adventures.

Good program or website for creating hex maps?

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>>50184513
>Good program or website for creating hex maps?
pic related is pretty good, don't you think?

although no joke, that's the one i use. just active the snap feature and star dropping pics

>>50184513

Print out hex sheet, use pencil and paper. It's the best method I've found.

>>50184513
well yeah, there's also this route this anon posted(>>50184600), but if you're going to do this, i recommend printing out a large piece on a plotter from your local print shop.

choose vinyl and you'll get a reusable mapgrid

>>50183883
PERSONAL OPINION TIME

I don't know BFRPG well but I love LL and:

1) I don't think descending AC is such a bad thing to have. You just need to fill in the attack matrix.

2) You CAN swap LL for Basic and no one will know. I've run a lot of Basic modules with LL and everything worked perfectly

Books ARE kinda expensive but the pdfs are free (i printed them out and had them bound).

I'd say, If your players are NEW TO RPGS AND D&D start with race-as-class for their first character, and when/if they die inform them that they "unlocked" races and classes as per LL Advanced Companion.

>>50184501
>also try to give the players physical things (like an actual scroll), they love that shit. also they become treasures to remember past adventures.

Feelies are AMAZING. Letters, treasure maps, even just handing players cards with pictures of their magic items make the entire experience SO MUCH MORE immersive.

>>50184671
the whole "the contact stuffed a piece of paper in your pocket and just blended into the crowd" becomes so much better when you take a piece of colored paper (yellow, because fantasy) and write the info.

also there are TONS of props at a costume shop near my house.
because of this, one of the guys has a minotaur's horn with him, and he also has a petrified medusa's snake (snake toy painted grey).

even though we think larping is really cheesy, we enjoy doing these. i dunno, it feels alright.

>>50184716
I used to do LARPing (still do sometimes), and some of my players did/do too.

It's INCREDIBLY cheesy, but it also means that we have a lot of little props hanging around and the skills to make them. Writing in stylish calligraphy, making little contraptions, or even just handing your players a small glass vial half-wrapped in leather cord and filled with strawberry syrup telling them it's dragon's blood (a thing that happened in my game).

That shit sticks in the mind, man. Way cool.

>>50184849
i suppose. no wonder lots of cosplayers/larpers get stylist jobs for movies and such, it builds technique.

question though:
did he drink it? the dragon blood?

>>50183883
Both are fine. I would probably use LL with a few house rules just because it's more well known.

>>50184929
In-game it was terrifyingly acid (black dragon!), so no, he didn't. It was basically a magical component he decided to hang on to for the future. He plans on using it someday to make a magic item of some sort.

I can tell that he wants to drink it sometimes, just because he KNOWS it's strawberry syrup and when he unstoppers the flask the smell is delicious and tempting.

I've secretly decided that if he really drinks it eventually, he'll have to save vs. poison.
On a failure he dies. On a success he starts to mutate. Small horns, some scales, low-damage acid breath.

Then, we'll see if he decides to hunt for another black dragon in the hope of drinking more of his delicious strawberry syrup.

>>50184654
The only thing that really stops me from diving head first into LL is descending AC (Its a dealbreaker. LL is only on the block because it has almost everything else right) and the fact the free pdf has no art, which would be fine if it wasn't for these awkward huge blank spots that always manage to catch me off guard.

>>50184993
And yet on the otherhand, BFRPG gives me pause cause I see things in it that I know are straight up 3.5, like hardness rules, and wrestling, and it creates a natural aversion in me that I should probably just grow-up and get over.

>>50184315
It's a Rules Cyclopedia retroclone that cleans up some stuff and also includes a more liberal rewrite of the Wrath of the Immortals rules and general cosmology, on account of one of those being kind of shit and the other one being proprietary and thus not something you can get away with sticking in your retroclone.

It's still got all the issues the Rules Cyclopedia has, though, except amplified a bit because it's not just the BECM monsters lumped indiscriminately into a huge chapter - it's the WotI ones as well.

If you can get your hands on BECMI it's the better product, but that's easier said than done and Dark Dungeons is literally free (although you can pay for POD).

Can't say much about Darker Dungeons since I'm not that familiar with it, though.

IIRC the author posted a big list of changes between the RC and DD somewhere, so maybe look around for that?

>>50185039
It's not that hard to convert the descending LL AC to a ascending AC with base armor of 10 (or 9 or w/e), and a BAB according to class/lvl/ or hd

>>50185057
Well thanks!

I bought the Rules Cyclopedia book a while ago (thanks to ProJared, i must admit). It's beat up, but i suppose i'll read it instead of DD.

>>50185137
Yeah, I know, I just get hung up on the slightest things.

Okay, then I have one last question that will be the deciding factor overall.

Has anyone run a regular D&D module using BFRPG, and if you did, how well did it convert? Any small fiddly things? Any weird number hang ups that you had to fix pre-play?

>>50185213
If you don't might asking, why have you disregarded LotFP? It seems like the best fit.

>>50185258
Oh, I love LotFP. I game with a bunch of wimps, I legit don't think they're 'metal' enough to enjoy the weird horrors involved with the game or its modules.

>>50185275
Why not use LotFP as your game, but other modules that your players would enjoy though? I play LotFP, but I am not a big weird fantasy dude; you can disregard tone, the rules are still a fantastic modern B/X.

>>50185275
The rules aren't weird at all if you exclude the summon spell and use the no-art document. Even the 17th century stuff is in the appendix.

I printed the no-art PDF and play the game with 11 year old kids.

>>50185388
>>50185381
My attitude has usually been "Why fix up something to look like something else already on the market?" Basic Fantasy and LL look like they'll fit what I need without risking the weirdness and the one or two things I don't like from LotFP (like only fighters get better at fighting)

Besides, that plan would work insofar that the players are casuals without the internet. I have had this conversation before
>"Hey, Anon, did you know that one of the authors on this rulebook triggered someone online?"
>Oh boy, politics!

Alternatively, please save me from this hell on earth.

>>50185421
I get where you are coming from, I also sometimes have difficulties with the whole "DIY D&D" aspect of the OSR (I just like finished product ok!). But remember that B/X style D&D really isn't that hard to manage from the player side: you got yer class, level, stats, saves, (spells), HP, AC, XP, and inventory; you don't need to explicitly know what rule-book (or combination of books) you are using to make a character, as long as the DMs game logic is consistent. What I'm trying to say is; don't be scared to "make it your own". It will still be D&D, as long as you still operate within the B/X adventuring framework.

>>50185421
>risking the weirdness
You better not risk the weirdness!

I could stomach to play with SJWs, but that's me.

>>50185472
>I could "not" stomach to play with SJWs, but that's me.

(oh boy)

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>>50183883
Reposting two posts from last thread, since the thread died when I was in the middle of stuff.

>Thief skills start off higher (though still terrible) in BF, but they cross over around 7th level, after which LL skills are higher (LL's peak at 14th level, where they're all pretty much 99%, while BF's don't peak until 20th level, when they run the gamut from 73%, 83%, 88%, 93%, 95% and 99%). I'd say LL wins if you take all the levels into account, but since you're more likely to play at low levels, it's a bit closer to a toss-up. Still, thief skills are screwy all around, as even in BF, if you attempt something at 1st level, you may have a 1 in 4 chance to succeed.

>Of course, it's been said that thief skills should be treated as saving throws in case you otherwise fail at your task, but this begs the question of what the primary determiner is. Ability checks are an okay fallback but not a very good primary method of resolution because a person who rolls high scores has such a huge advantage. Resolving things purely through description can be good (saying exactly where you poke and prod for the trap with your wooden pole, for instance), but I'm not sure that the thief percentages work very well with that (it seems like they should be more static and not going from terrible to virtually automatic, where it's almost a waste of time to describe what you're doing, since a roll will carry you through 99% of the time), and resolution purely through description only really works for things like traps and not, for instance, stealth or climbing.

>But maybe you want to institute a primary 2-in-6 chance roll for everybody, with the thief skills being a saving throw on top of that. The pic shows the percentages you get if you combine these into a single roll (using Moldvay Basic's thief skill percentages as the basis).

>But I've strayed a bit from the topic at hand...

>>50184654
>You just need to fill in the attack matrix.
Or just have a DM that knows the first to-hit row by heart. Then the players just tell the DM what their roll + attack bonus was. No looking at matrices needed.

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>>50185495
Pic is alternate thief skill system tying into what we were talking about last post.

>Anyway, continuing on with LL vs. BF...

>LL gives clerics spells at 1st level (BF, like Basic, itself, does not) and is more generous when giving clerics spells per day. I'd say the point goes to BF here. Clerics gain levels quickly, can wear any armor, and are decent in combat, so they probably don't need a boost in the department of magic.

>In terms of spells per day, the magic-user progressions in the two systems are much closer to the same. The only really significant difference is that, like Moldvay Basic, BF caps things at 6th level spells, while LL has 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells (it also has 7th level spells for clerics, while BF stops at 6th, and Moldvay Basic at 5th). I don't think high level magic-users need more levels of crazy-powerful shit, so this is a definite point in favor of BF, but you're pretty unlikely to have characters that are higher than 12th level, so it really doesn't matter much in the end.

And on to new stuff in the next post...

>>50185529
BF keeps armor simple, with just leather, chain and plate (improving AC by 2 points with each step). Meanwhile LL throws in most of the AD&D armors (scale male, splint male, banded mail, and studded leather) and has a less regular progression (leather only improves your AC by 1 point, for instance). Clear winner: BF.

BF uses ascending AC while LL uses descending AC. The former is a bit more intuitive, but there's no big difference, and it's easy enough to convert from one system to the other, so I won't award any points on this.

BF lays out its weapons better, and generally reduces the clutter of LL's list a bit (which is closer to AD&D's). However, I would welcome BF's inclusion of flails and picks (though not necessarily breaking them into the light and heavy varieties, like LL does). So I give BF a slight edge here, but not a full point.

BF divides race and class, but while I personally like the simplicity of racial classes, this mostly comes down to preference. I will say that the human's +10% bonus to XP isn't really sufficient to make up for the bonuses other races get, but at least it's a step in the right direction from AD&D, which gives humans squat. And the demihumans racial classes are overpowered in Basic D&D too, especially elves.

>>50183640
Previous thread was >>50142219 for those who are going through archives.

Speaking of BFRPG can anyone tell me what's the main rules changes between 2nd and 3rd edition?

>>50185576
I dug around for that info. Apparently he fixed some typos and added a monster or two. If you bought the 2e book, there's no point in buying the 3e book, but if you're using PDF, there's no reason to not upgrade.

I think I might email the guy later today about keeping a changelog since so many people have edition ptsd

>>50185541
>>50185529
>>50185495
This, and a quick google search telling me that BFRPG is "highly compatible" (though I wish they would go into specifics), I think I'm going to go with BFRPG for now, and if it irks me enough, try LL later on.

Thanks guys.

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>>50185541
Pic is descending/ascending AC conversion, since we were talking about that last post.

As far as spell lists go, the systems mostly have the same number of spells at each level (8 for clerics, and 12 for magic-users starting off and 10-12 at high levels), so no big difference there. Both systems lay out all the spells in alphabetically order, instead of sorting by class and level. I hate this, but they both do it, so there's no net gain here. Overall, the spells seem to be at about the same level of simplicity/complexity, so no advantage there either.

BF has saving throws increase more often, but in single-digit increments instead of using gaining 2 points at a time. They start out roughly the same, but BF falls a bit behind both LL and Basic D&D at higher levels. Magic-users and clerics ultimately end up with better saves at the high levels in LL than in Basic D&D, while the other classes are about the same. Overall, I give the nod to LL for having better saves at high levels, when casters are most powerful and need a limiting factors. The smoother, more regular progression that BF has is probably a bit superior for PCs, but might be a bit more obnoxious for GMs running monsters.

Speaking of monsters, the layout and level of detail of the monster sections are relatively similar, with BF sometimes going into a bit greater detail on the humanoids, I think (though both systems are fairly short and to the point). BF's monster section is probably 50% longer than LL's, but LL fits a bit more into the same amount of space, and according to a quick-and-dirty count I just did, the two contain very roughly the same number of monsters (I think BF has about 10% more entries). I don't see much of an advantage in either system here.

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>>50185784
Since we were discussing saving throws last post, I will say that I'm rather fond of Swords & Wizardry's single category saves, which cut out some clutter, and ditch the clumsy, ad hoc saving throw categories of old school D&D. The progression is a bit fast though, and you end up with significantly better saves as you advance in level if you directly port it.

And finally, neither game has any significant boundary to using misc. old D&D modules and material. I will give LL a point for having the Advanced Edition Companion, which gives you AD&D-level options but with a more streamlined core system, since it's directly compatible with the core LL rules, making porting stuff over even easier, and giving you a fluid way of expanding/shifting your game if ever you want to (you can even have race-as-class characters in the same party with race and class characters).

>>50185878
Yeah, the single saving throw mechanic rocks.

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>>50185878
Single category saving throws with numbers that are more in line with with B/X's numbers (change the bonus categories around as desired).

Are there some good winter wilderness modules or Referee aids I could use to throw some life into the frozen wilderness?

Would there be interest in a traveller clone redesigned to be aimed at fantasy?

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>>50186657
Have you SEEN the reactions to the Wanderer mockup?

You'd need to do it right, though, and that's a hard job. Also IIRC there's some roman-era traveller clone out there you might be able to crib stuff from?

>>50186657

There's one called Adventurer, can be found on Doc Grognard's blog.

Are there any good versions of Gnomes for race as class? Also a decent witch class?

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>>50186526
There's Weird New World for LotFP. I'm not a huge fan of that one, but it might be worth a look for ideas.

Otherwise maybe take a look at Inuit mythology or Siberian people like the Chukchi or Koryaks.
Highlights include:
Meteoric iron weapons and armour
Snow goggles, harpoons, scrimshaw
Dog sleds, kayaks, reindeer, muskox, walrus
Fumaroles, Aurora Borealis, glaciers
Lots of giants, child-stealing hags, shadow people, dog monsters and the occasional mischievous dwarf.

In terms of environmental hazards, consider snowstorms, avalanches, frostbite, thin ice, mirages, ice bridges
If you're talking about your normal campaign setting during the winter then ignore most of this, I guess.

Are there any retroclones that have an ascending AC lower than 10 (or a descending AC higher than 10)? I'm starting to feel like it should be easier to get hit in these games.

>>50184513
Adobe Illustrator

>>50184513
Anon made this, link to it was in the Webtools Pastebin. http://rhysmakesthings.com/gm_friend

>>50187991
You could always just improve everybody's to-hit/attack bonus by 2 points or something.

For Basic-based games with ascending AC (like Basic Fantasy), "unarmored" is normally 11 (to mirror 9 AC), and 10 is a more natural number. Sure, that's only an extra point in the attacker's favor, but each bit helps. Like...

Unarmored 10
Leather 12
Chain 14
Plate 16

I personally like the idea of fate / talent / hero / etc. points of limited power that can be spent to give you a little boost in combat, like letting you hit if you miss your target number by 1. This gives you a deplete-able resource that can pull you through when you need it. But it's not exactly the typical way of going about things in OSR.

Castles & Crusades uses a base AC of 10, but then that's hardly surprising given that it uses the unified d20 mechanic of new school D&D as its engine. And, of course, while it's an OSR game, it's not exactly a retroclone.

>>50187991
Honestly? Play 5e and just ban feats. The feeling is pretty close.

>>50189709
That seems pretty extreme when you could just nudge armor class up/down by a couple of points and be done with it.

>>50189982
Yeah, but if you lower the AC to make it easier, things die way faster, you have to balance that back out.

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>>50187999
>Adobe Illustrator

Correct answer is Inkscape.

Search check.
Yay or Nay?

I vote nay. If the group takes a turn to search something (or hear something) they should succeed. Something like the snake door handle in Tower of the Stargazer is just there of course, no search reveals it as trap.

>>50193124
What about situations where it's not clear whether something might be there. Combing a desolate beach for debris, like a stick or rock with a specific shape for instance? (I'm writing up a scenario right now where this might actually matter).

>>50193124

I say nay.

Listen Noise, as a thief skill, is still acceptable because highly situational (if there are loud noises, they hear them. that skill is only for very muffled, distant or weak noises).

The x-in-6 secret door search is tested when the players are in a room but did not describe themselves searching for secret doors. If they search in the correct way (knock on walls, try pushing loose bricks, try pulling torch sconces, etc) the door is automatically found.

Hidden treasures (concealed under rubble, etc) are automatically found if the party spends a turn searching.
Secret treasures (secret compartment in chest, sewn inside couch, etc) are NOT automatically found if the party spends a turn searching. They have to do something connected to the secret ("I check the chest for a false bottom", "I inspect the couch", etc.) If they do, they automatically find the secret.

A special case is invisible items. In that case it's appropriate to have a random chance of stumbling into them, depending on their size and time spent wandering around the general area. This is less of a search check and more of a pure luck roll.

>>50193342
If there is only a single appropriately-shaped rock on a miles-long beach, it'll take a HELL of a long time.
If there's several appropriately-shaped rocks, just eyeball the chances and say something like "every turn spent searching for an appropriately-shaped rock, each character has a 1-in-6 chance to find one if the party spreads out. If they stay together, they obviously don't cover as much area: roll only once per turn for the entire party"

This gives them a choice: if they split up they'll find it faster, but they'll be more vulnerable to wandering monsters and the like.

Time searching already takes resources. Wandering monsters, food, light resources and NPCs that do something in the meantime.

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>>50183640
I suppose its rather late for a thread question, but here goes -

Would you/have you run a game for an all thief party? What kind of challenges, foes and heists might such a party encounter aside from dungeoneering?

Alternately

Do you run games featuring intrigue, plotting and other 'social adventures'? Do they ever feature as much as (or more than) dungeon-running?

>>50192251
You communists and your bad UI´s

Mutant Future any good? Or is it just "lets add guns to LL and call it a day"?

>>50195245
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_thang.htm

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_nuth.htm

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm

Dunsany is a good place to look if you want stories about thieves getting in over their heads.

>>50195245
>Would you/have you run a game for an all thief party? What kind of challenges, foes and heists might such a party encounter aside from dungeoneering?
It would be an interesting thing to run, but I'm not sure that dungeoneering would be where it would shine the best - perhaps something more fitting to an all-Thief game would be more, I dunno, having the players run around in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord and see what heists they could pull off?

It does sound interesting, at least.

Fuck, now I really want to see someone run through the city-state with the intent of getting as much money from the populace as is possible.

Also fun: consider how you could run any module with a detailed city or town with such a group. Imagine a group of players trying to pull off a caper in the Keep on the Borderlands - that would be some real Oceans Eleven shit.

Basically, ignore most of the fantasy literature and movies out there and just go marathon a bunch of heist movies. Oceans Eleven, The Italian Job, whatever you can get your hands on.

>>50195555
I haven't run it yet, and never ran Gamma World back in the day but it seems like it would be a blast. To a certain extent it is LL + guns but the mutation tables are pretty great and it handles most of what I remember being in the GW rulebook (I had the one that was most like ad&d 2 ed) although heavily streamlined. Definitely worht taking a look at. It's in the trove.

Have you ever made your own monster? What was it like?

>>50197879
You talk like a butthurt stupid child trying to be funny.

Back to OSR.
Can someone educate me on the "SA-crowd"? Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall? And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion? I read some YDIS and I'm kinda freaked how they get 1000s of comments there. Must be some form of troll bots, right?

>>50198579
All communities have their own circlejerks and bandwagons that can't be explained.

>>50198579
yeah Something Awful has a dedicated OSR thread, don't recall seeing much hate for any of those guys though, or at least the kind of hate you're talking about

>>50198537
Just made a fish man troglodyte. 1 HD, breathes underwater, lives in small tribes close to underground lakes.

I use OD&D so I can come up with new monsters in 5 seconds if I need to.

>>50198579
>Can someone educate me on the "SA-crowd"? Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall? And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion? I read some YDIS and I'm kinda freaked how they get 1000s of comments there. Must be some form of troll bots, right?
Remember, each /osrg/ probably gets a couple hundred posts - 350 for autosage.

If you have six /osrg/ threads, that's 2100 posts.

Now imagine that you're in a forum where the topics can stay open indefinitely rather than having an imageboard's more impermanent nature.

Racking up thousands of posts ain't that hard, man. Especially when people don't read the fucking thread (on account of it being a mile long), and so you get a lot of repeat discussion and questions and whatnot.

I don't have any experience with SA's OSR community in particular, though. If you're wondering because of the Fatal & Friends posts that were linked last thread, that's just because it's one big fuckhuge thread where people post readthroughs/reviews of awful and/or obscure games. That poster in particular just happened to dislike Raggi's style.

Fatal & Friends is one hell of a thread, though, and I'm pretty glad that that archive exists so I can read some of that shit when the paywall's up. I probably would never have heard of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist otherwise, to be honest, and that's one of the most interesting games I've read so I owe them for that.

>>50193124
If they declare a search check and where, then yay.

If a thief walks near something noticeable, I make a secret roll based off of their skill. I rule that anyone can search without a thief, but a thief has a chance of just casually noticing something is wrong/up.

>>50198687
>If you have six /osrg/ threads, that's 2100 posts.
Yeah, I made that calculation after posting. I was just comparing to most other blogs which get perhaps a dozen comments in good times.

>>50198748
The big difference there is that most blogs have one content creator and then people commenting on the content, while threads have multiple content creators and thus higher output speed.

I mean, imagine a post with a dozen responses in /osrg/. That's kind of a lot, and not something you'd see all the time.

Also, of course, by having just one megathread (/quarantine, whatever) you concentrate all those dozens of comments into one big pool. If a blog gets a dozen comments in good times, how many comments has it gotten over the hundreds of posts during its entire lifetime?

Also, of course, shitposting and short posts drive up the numbers as well. (Although SA actually has mods that do stuff, I'm not really clear on the rules and on how much they actually do since, you know, fuck paying them :10bux: when I can get just as good discussion in other communities that I'm already familiar with rather than being a newbie and outsider.)

>>50198896
Hey, I was referring to
yourdungeonissuck.wordpress.com
which is a blog of sort. I'm not paying for SA to look at their threads.

One guy involved in the mentioned site has a blog which has pretty funny reviews:
https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com

>>50198579

>Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall?

Yes.

>And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion?

The three have been involved in harassing a bunch of people when arguments broke out about games. Zak gets whiny about SA's opinion of table top games like their FATAL & Friends thread, Raggi has a history of being a creep and SA doesn't like him for it (the "Flame Princess" is based on a girl he had a crush on and stalked a little, and then there's all those pictures of her dying in various ways, sooo...) and Pundit's a libertarian jack-ass with dumb opinions.

I haven't looked too much into it. Zak doesn't seem as bad as they make him out to be, he supports LGBT-etc. I checked Pundit's blog and, yeah, he has dumb opinions.

>>50199259
>The three have been involved in harassing a bunch of people when arguments broke out about games.
It was the other way around though. SA convinced themselves that they were harassers after Zak and Pundit got to do "consulting" on 5ed, and then they started a mass harassment campaign against them. Perhaps Zak said some nasty things like calling them the drama club, but he never called for harassment.

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Gonna start working on a Thief-only OSR.

- Skill system is skin to LotFPs Specialist.
- Saves are modern D&D categories. All start at 16 and each level, including 1, players have 3 points to freely distribute to lower them.
- Wis replaced with a luck ability. Will prolly use the idea of Luck Burning ala DCC.
- Avoid Death is rolling your modifier or under on a d6. And that's if you're lucky enough to HAVE a Luck modifier.

>>50199804
Neat idea! Don't know why the "avoid surprise" thing is needed though, won't it always be 2-in-6 anyway? Also how will the "read scroll" skill work?

>>50195598
>http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_nuth.htm
>http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm
These are seriously two of the best things I have ever read in my entire life.

(I mean, I didn't just encounter them now, it was a long time ago. I'm just mentioning it so Anon won't overlook them.)

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>>50199868
Sorry I deleted the last one.

The reason it's shown is that there might be things that modify surprise, whether it be Arcane or maybe racial. I'm not sure yet.

The magic will only be scroll based. The idea is that even a Nightblade isn't a dedicated practitioner of the arcane. They're a thief first and foremost, so the reading of scrolls will be skill based. ie) You only have a CHANCE to read off that Magic Missile spell.

Instead of actual classes, I was thinking about doing optional Vocations, like so.

>>50199745
Yeah, this. Zak didn't fucking harass anybody, that's all bullshit and lies. They just got pissy because he got the plum they wanted.

(It turns out that being highly creative AND a portal figure in a desirable demographic is better than being humorless and easily offended; who knew?)

What advice do you have for someone who wants to break into the OSR scene as a content producer?

>>50200731
Not a producer myself, but I notice that people want free ideas and tools. Once you've done that for a while, you can write a book with some more ideas and tools (that are worth paying for) and some nice art. Layout is important too. Bonus points if you come up with something nobody else has tried before that is really neat.

>>50200731
Decent art.
Good layout.
Find a niche.
Clear and concise writing.
Network with other people.
Don't be a moody grognard cunt.

>>50199259
>Raggi has a history of being a creep and SA doesn't like him for it (the "Flame Princess" is based on a girl he had a crush on and stalked a little, and then there's all those pictures of her dying in various ways, sooo...)

...Well ok that kind of IS creepy. Puts a lot of the violent/sexual content of LotFP in a whole new perspective.

How well would a megadungeon work if I tried to eliminate a lot of the hallways and try to make it more focused and split into smaller thematically different segments while still trying to retain a lot of choices, shortcuts, secrets, and whatnot?
Or better put, keep the levels on multiple levels, if that makes sense? Much more verticality on separate layers. I'm trying to accomplish this by drawing the map isometrically.
Downside is it'll lose a lot of the typical stuffed feeling megadungeons tend to have. Where you map out a level and basically every spot is taken up. I'll miss that.

>>50201695
It is a bit creepy, but I think it's forgivable. I'll try to tell the story in a more neutral perspective (I'm sure that I've read about this from the same place as the other anon: Raggi himself):

>20-ish years ago, Raggi is a 20-year old edgelord who like metal
>starts checking out the internet, finds website some finnish girl set up
>she has red hair,wears renaissance clothing and likes metal, he is inspired and probably crushes on her
>when he makes a metal fanzine, he decides to call it "lamentations of the flame princess", because of these things
>at some point he also reached out to the girl, but she never responded to his email so he stopped trying immediately
>after some time the flame princess zine gets kinda big in metal circles, Raggi gets to interview artists
>when interviewing some band or another, the singer asks Raggi why he named the magazine the way he did, and he responds with honesty
>after some time the redhead chick apparently also meets the singer, and the singer blurts out something like "oh, you're that girl that the guy based his magazine on!"
>assuming that Raggi is a stalker, she gets scared
>sends him a message to never contact her again
>he never does

Since this comes from Raggi himself, I can't say whether he's truthful or tries to hide how creepy he was, but from his story I can forgive the behavior. It's edgy and nerdy but it's mostly a misunderstanding, but it was also 20 years ago and he's gotten married since then. On his blog he seems to think that what he did was pretty stupid as well.

>>50201695
>Puts a lot of the violent/sexual content of LotFP in a whole new perspective.

I seriously doubt it has anything to do with that.

I'm looking for something with mercantile and domain rules ala ACKS or the Sine-Nomine stuff.

Is there anything better or are those my choices?

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This is the secret power of sage hat

>>50202022
Sounds like a worthwhile idea. Try it with a smaller project first and see how it pans out.

>>50200426
Dunsany is an incredible writer; it's no wonder that Lovecraft tried so hard to imitate him.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/fotd/fotd52.htm

So what's a better OSR setting-

High fantasy adventures with a quirky cosmology

OR

Urban fantasy set in alternate dimension with aleins

>>50204627
It's the dungeons that matter. Setting can be anything.

>>50199259
>>50199745

Pundit catches flak from SA because he had a very non-PC outlook on people playing modern-day TTRPGs, such that if you play anything past 2nd edition, or if you thought that characters shouldn't die ever, you were a baby DM and a whiny player who cared too much about feelings and not enough about a good challenge. This was before 5e, but I have little to doubt he hasn't changed his mind.

Zak got on the wrong side of SA during an argument about the gender-bender belt, and SA never really let go of that.

Raggi is just too metal, and the majority of SA are liberal, and they just really don't have a good grasp on that shit. To point, anecdotal evidence, but one of my very feelsy, left-wing friends told me that you're not supposed to hit people in a mosh pit, and that metal shows generate a positive, helpful atmosphere. Vehemently insisted I was wrong and that I "hadn't been to a metal show" when I told her about how ACTUAL mosh pits went down.

>>50204720
>To point, anecdotal evidence, but one of my very feelsy, left-wing friends told me that you're not supposed to hit people in a mosh pit
You aren't. Or at least, you weren't, like, 25 years ago. I've been to shows where people were throwing elbows and punching people and shit, and those people were fuckwads and ruined the experience. In a good crowd, moshers can be downright helpful, grabbing you and pulling you to your feet when you go down. If your experience is different, maybe you're listening to the wrong bands / music. Or maybe things are different in your geographical region, or the particular clubs you frequent. Or maybe shit has changed in the quarter century since I used to go to metal shows.

>>50204818
Nah, you're not fully wrong, but that's not a mosh pit. A mosh pit is where you go to just fight and hit each other. A lot of my friends who were into the metal scene liked to go just to do that shit, and they had a blast.

What you're talking about is called "Hardcore Dancing", where they throw fists and shit, but aren't supposed to hit. Most people into metal that I know, both online and in other states, will outright call out hardcore dancers for being pussies in their eyes.

>>50204832
>Nah, you're not fully wrong, but that's not a mosh pit.
That's what everybody called 'em back in the day.

>What you're talking about is called "Hardcore Dancing", where they throw fists and shit, but aren't supposed to hit.
Hmm. Maybe we're talking about two different things here. I guess it depends on what you mean by "hit people". I'm talking about slamming into people, which I guess is hitting them in the sense that you're making contact with them, but not punching and kicking them. Shouldering and shoving, sure, but not shit that's specifically intended to inflict damage. But I'm not talking about throwing fists and just not making contact or something.

>A mosh pit is where you go to just fight and hit each other. A lot of my friends who were into the metal scene liked to go just to do that shit, and they had a blast.
The only time I encountered anything close to that was when I got dragged to something that was a bit more in the direction of punk and there were skinheads at the show. Fuck punk and double fuck skinheads.

>>50204893
Man, maybe you were going to shows before the mosh really started. My friends would come back from shows all the time, cut the fuck up from getting punched, kicked, none of this shoulder to shoulder shit.

>>50204702

Then which one lends itself to better dungeons, smartass?

>>50204627
both sound good, would need to know more before making a decision though

>>50204627
>>50205124
Designing for an OSR setting is about some very specific types and arrangements of content; what you're describing here are some very superficial surface elements.

I'm assuming you're trying to run a "classic" dungeon-crawl game, using a gold-for-xp ruleset that implies the presence of dangerous dungeons where it's located in.

Your campaign structure should ideally have methods for the PCs to quickly and easily to reach a dungeon or two at level 1. A good rule of thumb is that the journey to get to the dungeon should not be more dangerous/draining than the dungeon itself; the wilderness encounters in B/X imply that players shouldn't even dare venture out into the wilds until at least level 3 (if not level 5).

Another aspect I think is important is having methods in your campaign to research or learn about dungeons before-hand - some way that PCs can gather information second-hand and from a variety of sources (fellow adventurers, ancient records, wise sages, etc.).

There's nothing wrong with games where you're blindly groping around in the dark, but completely blind choices aren't that much better than a railroad.

This tends to require dungeons that either have legends attached or that have been frequented before by others.

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>>50205231
>Your campaign structure should ideally have methods for the PCs to quickly and easily to reach a dungeon or two at level 1.

Hey, cars work pretty well for this.

>>50205263
Sure, cars can work, assuming you don't have nomadic biker gangs who prey on low-level adventurers. Regardless of the skin you put on it, the idea is that the "trip" shouldn't be too draining, especially for low level dungeons. Dungeoncrawls are all about attrition, and if the party arrives at the gates half-dead and needing to turn back things can be very anti-climactic.

On the other hand these guidelines aren't set in stone. Perhaps you might have a dungeon or two where the central gimmick is the fact that it's located in a forsaken barren or in some other logistically difficult area.

Keep in mind that in most systems, characters that have just started fresh have very little in the way of resources - often after buying armour, B/X characters might not be able to afford more than a week of food, for example - making it likely that characters will starve before a big score if you've placed the starter dungeon more than a week away.

>>50205316
It's also important to note that since most D&D clones are very "swingy" at low levels it's quite possible that a number of excursions might be necessary before the party really learns the layout of the place and actually gets out with any gold. Resting to regain HP will also take a toll on party finances as more supplies get eaten.

If the PCs need to travel a day or more to return to town to rest/rearm, this imposes an additional GP toll every day in food and other basic costs, meaning that a consistently unsuccessful expedition might also eventually run out of gold for basic supplies and eventually go insolvent. This also means that poisons, diseases, or other non-standard wounds that need swift medical attention are also likely a death sentence.

Grim and perhaps entirely too realistic, but it's something to keep in mind when laying out starter dungeons. A lot of these concerns are why dungeons set "inside" a town are popular - an abandoned cave/mine on the outskirts, the city sewers, a magic portal, etc. are so often used precisely because they are more logistically forgiving.

>>50205316
>>50205369

You seem to know what you're talking about, so I'll just tell you my intention for the most part.

Basically I'm making a setting where the entire setting is fit into one pretty big city. It's got a decent size but can be very sparse, decayed, or wild at places. Ruins exist in the setting, as well as 'mini-dungeons' in things like the closed laundrymat or the basement that is a lot bigger then first thought and so on. Monsters exist here too.

However low level characters will rely on public transportation or just walking to get to most areas they want to explore, and may need to pay tolls or appease the various gangs. The biker gang thing you mentioned is a good example, I want them to be a thing and also a threat but they aren't killing people on sight bandits. Remember this is a mostly functioning city- people just exercise their version of the second amendment really hard.

Anyway, later game characters may be able to afford cars and other forms of transport or useful utilities for the city, but I intend getting there to be a minor challenge in and of itself. Appeasing gangs, getting permission or sneaking into places, etc. Due to the urban nature perhaps the dungeons could be scaled back or made a little easier in return for the added challenge of getting there and back?

>>50205417
Nothing in this is specifically "OSR". I'm not saying your setting is bad or anything but what makes a game OSR is its mechanics.

Is the city itself a huge megadungeon or are the urban areas basically what wilderness is in hexcrawls? Is the city a pointcrawl? How are you going to mechanically handle moving around the city? What are the main areas of exploration where you will be using the bread and butter dungeon exploration mechanics (mapping, time & resource management, treasure hunting etc.)?

>>50205860
>but what makes a game OSR is its mechanics.

Well yeah, that's why I'm posting about it and working on it.

>Is the city itself a huge megadungeon or are the urban areas basically what wilderness is in hexcrawls?
No- like I said I wanted it to be less dangerous so people actually feel like it's a real city. Though there are some challenges, as I described above, they are more based on political factors then martial ones.

>Is the city a pointcrawl?
Yes actually, I've been interested in pointcrawls but I don't know much about them.

>How are you going to mechanically handle moving around the city?
This is what I'm trying to hammer out, but as of right now I think I'll doing something like roll on a city encounter check every block or two moved. Go by bus, subway, car or canal and reduce it to one per trip.

>What are the main areas of exploration where you will be using the bread and butter dungeon exploration mechanics (mapping, time & resource management, treasure hunting etc.)?

Within the actual urban dungeons is the plan. Within the old ruined buildings, the service tunnels, etc.

>>50204720
That's what I thought.

Offtopic: The mosh fighting, like real fighting is only true for some subgenres, like death core. It became a trend in the states in small clubs, yes, but many of those clubs don't do *core shows anymore precisely because of kicking and punching. On most metal concerts I was here in Europe you would collectively get thrown out/knocked out if you started kicking people in the pit. So you're kinda right and your friend is kinda right too.

How much actual role-playing is there in your games, /osrg/?

What are the actual crunch differences between AD&D 1e and 2e?

How do I make my adventure fun for my group? Player 1 is amazing at knowing what to do in a situation, but is bored by stats, and hates having to choose race/class/abilities. Player 2 is the opposite, with an amazing character sheet, but has no idea how to handle game situations and just freezes. Player 3 hates character design and math, and has caused TPK with her decisions, she's a murderhobo from the MMO world.

I want to reward any clever situational play by all of them, and I want to help Player 3 to not get smoked without making the game so easy that Player 1's character work becomes meaningless. But I don't know what to do. /gdg/ seems dead, so I came here.

>>50207219
Half-orc, assassin, and monk are no longer core.
Thief-acrobat and Cavalier are kits, not classes.
Bard is no longer a bonkers prestige class.
Illusionist uses the wizard spell list as opposed to its own special one.
Druid now has 20 levels as opposed to 14.
The weapon vs. AC table got turned into the three weapon types (S, P, B).
There aren't any helmet rules (1e's ones were fucking brutal, though).
Psionics aren't core in 2e.
Thief skills are point-buy.
XP for gold is an optional rule in 2e.

There are presumably more, especially when you start looking at all the supplementary shit for 2e.

>>50207312
>The weapon vs. AC table got turned into the three weapon types (S, P, B).
Note that this is IIRC one of the things that got shoved into the supplements.

Also, on a related note, 2E entirely redid and simplified initiative.

Oh, and the Paladin is easier to qualify for, the default attribute generation is 3d6-down-the-line, and... I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure there's a bunch more differences.

Did 2E have 1E's disease rules?

>>50207439
>the Paladin is easier to qualify for
Only very slightly, because you don't need a 9 in INT.

No disease rules in the 2e DMG, but I bet they're also in a supplement somewhere.

2e didn't simplify initiative, it added a whole bunch of modifiers.

What supplement had the WvAC table? I had a look in C&T, but that just has specific bonuses/penalties in weapon descriptions, rather than a table.

>>50207561
>What supplement had the WvAC table?
Maybe check one of the Complete books? The Complete Fighter's Handbook, perhaps?

>>50207291
All of that is achieved by running, say B/X D&D, as it is written. That being said player 2 needs to learn how to play the game without staring at his sheet because the character mechanics are pretty minimalistic in basic D&D. There are no 'character builds'.

>>50207561
>Only very slightly, because you don't need a 9 in INT.
You also don't need to have 6+ in stats in general, which is a rule in 1E. Having 5- in Strength means you can only be a Magic-User, for instance.

The Paladin went from 0.1% to 0.13%, although if you go with 4d6-drop-lowest as the 1E DMG recommends then the Paladin is 24.19%. Just a smidgen easier to qualify for.

There's also the UA Paladin, which well, requires this:
>Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 15, Con 15, Cha 17
With 3d6-down-the-line that's 2ppm, and with 4d6-drop-lowest it's still 0.89%. It's the hardest class to qualify for in TSR D&D, I think?

>>50207714
God damn, I love how AD&D RAW is so drug-fucking insane. Did anyone ever play it like it was written? Even Gygax himself or the rest of the TSR crew?

So in my game, the PCs have stumbled upon a couple of magic items and weapons, but they never use them, supposedly for fear of getting cursed or something. It's ridiculous because they have a bunch of stuff that, even if it isn't always amazing, could still be valuable to use for solving problems when dungeon crawling. How do I make them try this stuff out without having to resort to them "going to the local wizardman to get it inspected etc"?

>>50208370
The evil OD&D answer is "make non-cursed scrolls disappear after a while to force them to read maybe-cursed scrolls".

Really, that just seems to be the system working as intended? Even if it's not cursed items, there's a bunch of stuff that you probably want identified in some fashion before using it - that potion might be a potion of poison that's going to kill you dead, sure, but it might also be a potion of red dragon control... that you decided to use while nowhere near a red dragon.

The traditional way of identifying potions, then, became by color, smell and taste - with the danger then being that potions of poison look like other potions, meaning that you skip the "wasting a potion" problem and go back to the old "risking a cursed item" problem.

Which, well, is the system working as intended. Cursed items make people either save the item until it can be identified by a wizard (not always an option, depending on the edition - take a look at AD&D's Identify spell someday, or OD&D's) or have to always take risks whenever they're faced with a magic item.
And, well, risk management is central to the game in a way that transcends the logistics and combat - is it worth taking the treasure when it'll slow you down? Is it worth throwing rations at the pursuing beasts - do you need to save it for worse beasts later, or just save it for food? Should you head back home to safety now, or is it worth pressing on one more room?
Hell, even the question of "how many torches should we bring into the dungeon" is huge. And even if you decide "fuck it, we'll just Continual Light up a flashlight", what do you do when you run into a Beholder and its anti-magic eye? (Or a single Dispell Magic, for that matter?)

Risk management is central to D&D, although in your case the players seem somewhat paranoid about the whole thing - have they had many bad experiences with cursed items in the past?

>>50204921
>Man, maybe you were going to shows before the mosh really started.
It may, indeed, have changed considerably in the intervening years, but the Stormtroopers of Death released their debut album in 1985, which contained the song Milano Mosh (named after their singer, Billy Milano) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbE1QxeTvN0

It was two years later that Anthrax released Caught in a Mosh -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q5FEmFCFyQ

These bear witness to the fact that moshing was well-established in the metal scene by the mid '80s. By the time I started going to concerts in '87, it was entrenched enough that I never considered that moshing might not have always accompanied thrash metal shows (and Kill 'Em All was released in '83). And it wasn't until like 5 years later, in the early '90s, that my concert attendance tapered off.

Anyway, I actually broke a bone at Megadeth concert, so I think shit was plenty hardcore back then. Okay, so it was a fractured tailbone and I got it when I was crowd surfing, and the fuckers tossed me into a hole in the crowd, and I came down hard on my ass on the cement floor, but I still think it counts.

>>50208370
You should maybe teach them not to be so attached to their characters. Let each of them control two player characters and maybe that will make them try out stuff more.

>>50208531
They've probably had some bad experience with something at some point, but in those cases it was more "gotcha" traps than items that they tried to use and backfired. In some cases they've seen the items being used by the enemies beforehand, and yet they still don't use it. The do understand the risk management stuff with rations and torches and stuff though, but I think they've understood that after failing to bring enough a couple of times.

I guess in the end I'm just frustrated that my players don't seem to put that much thought into what they do when they crawl, and usually when I try to raise the difficulty to force them to think harder, they run a way from the dungeon and possibly get upset at me. I also dread that when the inevitable TPK shows up, that they will be pissed off to know that they were carrying around a bunch of magic stuff that they could have used the whole time.

I guess I'll just have them meet a wizard who can inspect the stuff.

Oh, and I confess that I never thought of thinking of potions in terms of all of their different qualities, which is pretty obviously a good way to do it if I want the players to start being able to identify stuff through exploration and skill. It hasn't really come in my games though, but nevertheless I'll make sure to fix that.

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S&W: Advanced Player's Handbook guy here.

Ever since I uploaded my very early version of the book months ago, I've been hard at work on a second edition. It's almost done now.

Has anyone tried the first version I made? What are some things you like/disliked? What do you want to see in a Sword and Wizardry players handbook?

>>50208370
Maybe you put them up against shit that requires those items to defeat? Like monsters with immunities to mundane weapons and shit.

Followup Mutant Future question. Using minted gold coins in the post apocalypse seems sort of...weird. What would be a reasonable replacement for coins as currency? Yes, I considered bottlecaps. What about instituting a system based on bartering/trade?

>>50208725
>Oh, and I confess that I never thought of thinking of potions in terms of all of their different qualities, which is pretty obviously a good way to do it if I want the players to start being able to identify stuff through exploration and skill. It hasn't really come in my games though, but nevertheless I'll make sure to fix that.
The 1E DMG has a neat little appendix on the topic - Appendix K: Describing Mangical Substances, page 221-222. Just a bunch of adjectives to get the mind flowing, honestly, but enough to make you aware of how many options there are.

If you also want some ideas for what the ingredients are for stuff, Appendix J: Herbs, Spices, and Medicinal Vegetables on the immediately preceding pages is pretty neat, as is the Reputed Magical Properties of Gems section on page 26-27.
For example, let's dissect the example recipe for Protection from Petrification scroll ink, as given on p.117:
>1 oz. giant squid sepia
This is a standard scroll ink ingredient. Note that you'll probably need to fight the beasty.
>1 basilisk eye
>3 cockatrice feathers
>1 scruple of venom from a medusa‘s snakes
Three standard petrifying monsters. Hair from the dog that bit you, etc.
>1 large peridot, powdered
"Wards off enchantments", a.k.a. Chrysolite "Wards off spells", as a green gem represents "Venus - reproduction- sight - resurrection"
>1 medium topaz, powdered
"Wards off evil spells", as yellow gem "Secrecy- homeopathy- jaundice"
>2 drams holy water
Nothing noteworthy beyond the obvious.
>6 pumpkin seeds
"virility, organ tonic"

So, basically, it's got a bunch of gems and pumpkin seeds representing warding off spells and healing, with the monster ingredients being related to the thing being warded off.

>>50209119
Also, BTW, the full example recipe is pretty great:
>Harvest the pumpkin in the dark of the moon and dry the seeds over a slow fire of sandalwood and horse dung. Select three perfect ones and grind them into a coarse meal, husks and all. Boil the basilisk eye and cockatrice feathers for exactly5 minutes in a saline solution, drain, and place in a jar. Add the medusa’s snake venom and gem powders. Allow to stand for 24 hours, stirring occasionally. Pour off liquid into bottle, add sepia and holy ,water, mixing contents with a silver rod, stirring widdershins. Makes ink sufficient for one scroll.

>>50205417
The setting as you've described it is perfectly fine for a an open-world style sandbox, for the most part - although one thing to think about is that if the city is large and mostly functioning, where is the law enforcement?

In terms of difficulty fine-tuning - a lot of that will come from the specific rules and mechanics you are using. Scaling back the dungeon or making it easier will only help if players are willing to even try to go down in the first place after having resources reduced from a wilderness excursion.

You need to think about the player perspective. If I'm about to delve into an unknown dungeon, I am very averse to going in with anything less than 100% resources. The reason wilderness mechanics tend to be abbreviated is because the action is focused on the dungeon. If you want the game to primarily be about exploring the city or dealing with the gangs you may want to consider a different XP mechanic.

I wish there was something akin to the ADnD DMG, but re-compiled as a proper pdf

>>50209614
...So, what, the WotC reprint PDFs?

>>50207312
You left out that specialist wizards now exist in eight different varieties, which isn't in 1E as far as I can recall. (I won't swear to it, though, with all the odd shit there is in the DMG and Unearthed Arcana.)

>>50209959
Well, there's also the bit where specialist wizards are really just standard wizards with some minor changes whereas the Illusionist is basically to the Wizard as the Druid was to the Cleric. Lots of unique spells and shit.

So, well, I guess that's covered by the
>Illusionist uses the wizard spell list as opposed to its own special one.
bullet point?

It's definitely worth pointing out, though.

>>50208979

You might check out the d20 Modern supplement d20 Apocalypse. There was a barter system that used the "Trade Unit" (TU) to adjudicate value. Food and drinkable water were more valuable than they would otherwise be.

It's something of a flawed system, I think, and d20 Modern as a whole was garbage - but it might provide some inspiration.

>>50209814
They're just scans, aren't they?

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Sampler of the progress I'm making on my thief-oriented OSR.

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>>50210832
And the character sheet i'm working on.

Summon monster in DCC. How does it work? Does controlling them require you to use the entire round concentrating on it? Can you use it multiple times to create a horde? How?

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>>50210484
>d20 Modern as a whole was garbage

It was. Everything except the art, which had fantastic production values.

What are some good, smaller-scale sandboxes for new players?

>>50211471
Keep on the Borderlands?

>>50211515
Locations:
>The Keep
>The Caves
Hey, I love the Keep, but without much work, it's kind of barren exploration-wise.

>>50211543
Also, the entire little wilderness area with the bandits, lizard men, and mad hermit.

It's a sandbox, albeit a pretty small one.

>>50211471

LotFP's free Better Than Any Man module could count. It's bigger than Keep on the Borderlands, but still more of an open few-session adventure than a whole campaign worth of material.

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>>50211471
Just using the OD&D wilderness rules and the Outdoor Survival map would probably work fairly well for you.
Pic related: Hexographer clone of the map.

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>>50211879
And, in addition: the brilliant PDF on the OD&D implied setting, beloved by many anons. Pretty sure it's in the Trove already, but what the hell.

>>50211471

this>>50211848
World of the Lost (also LOTFP but not free but Trove)

Isle of Dread is a classic too

>>50208731
mind reposting the first version?

>>50211978

Also there's an official 5e conversion of Isle of Dread floating around. It was part of the alpha playtest, and has some wilderness rules that didn't make it into the final game IIRC

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>>50211980
sure

>>50211897
While that series of blog posts were neat as hell and incredibly inspiring, I feel like making one of the deserts into Barsoom is a bad idea: after all,
>OTHER WORLDS:
>There should be no "natural laws" which are certain. Space could be passable because it is filled with breathable air. On the other hand the stars could be tiny lights only a few hundred miles away. Some areas of land could be gates into other worlds, dimensions, times, or whatever. Mars is given in these rules, but some other fantastic world or setting could be equally as possible. This function is up to the referee, and what he wishes to do with it is necessarily limited by his other campaign work. However, this factor can be gradually added, so that no sudden burden will be placed upon the referee.

Note also that The Strategic Review #1, published a bit before Greyhawk, has this in the Solo Dungeon Adventures article:
>**enchanted lake leads any who manage to cross it to another dimension (if special map is available, otherwise treat as lake with monsters) -- lake will have from 2-5 monsters

Also, of course, the cursed scrolls in Monsters & Treasure:
>8 Transportation to another planet

Having Mars be on the same map is rather more boring than being actually transported to Mars, in my opinion!

(I've got similar opinions about just making one of the swamps into Dinosaur Land rather than having them all be in a hidden Valley that Time Forgot or, well, a Jules Verne-esque Underdark-equivalent. And, obviously, similar opinions about the ice age mountains and fey forests. Sticking them into a map just because they "need" to be there feels a bit... off. Make 'em special.)

Also, by the by, if anyone is confused about the dinosaur-filled swamps then that's all because of an old outdated theory that dinosaurs needed the water to keep themselves upright. If you've seen old drawings of T.Rex walking upright in a dumb-looking way then you've got roughly the right time period.

>>50210832
this is really cool. Like, *really* cool. I'm watching this with interest.
Might want to clarify Backstab so that 1 dot of it multiplies by x2, 2 dots multiplies by x3 and so on.

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>>50212704
Thank ya. I got a long ways to go. Hoping to keep it simple, at around 30 pages.

Here's a slightly updated version.

>>50210832
>>50212875
Both of these pieces of feedback are really minor and stupid, but I might as well give 'em anyway:
I. The R in "March" on the cover is too "skritchy" IMO, it makes it hard to see right away what letter it is. I'd suggest cleaning up the streaks over the horizontal part so it can't be confused with an i.

II. I'm not totally fond of how forgoing a vocation makes your character exactly as good as using one. I get why you did it that way but if the vocation system is to have any justification it needs to either be mandatory or have some advantage over rolling your own, however minor.

>>50213058
Actually, I've got one more. It's even more minor! I'd call it "Cleverness" instead of "Intelligence" if I were you, partly as a homage to Cugel the Clever, partly because I think guys like Mr. Nuth and the Grey Mouser would also pride themselves on being "clever", rather than "intelligent".

>>50213058
All feedback is good to me, amigo.

The vocations are basically "Quickstarts" as I saw it; 12 simple little pregens for people who are unsure of how to build the thief they want.

Foregoing them is for people who know what they want, who want a Vocation even *MORE* niched ("I want a 5-in-6 climb skill immediately"), or who want to try an unconventional build.

>>50213124
I was gonna call it "Wits" initially. I like your idea too!

>>50213164
Here's something you might like for inspiration -- it's long as fuck, but good. The section "a gang of thieves" is particularly relevant. http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/men-and-books/6/

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I think making *everyone* be able to get a backstab modifier (x2 at 1 pip) is the way to go. That way I can just change Sneak's to-hit bonus to +4. Feels more...thiefy.

Any advice on running Caves of Thracia?
Any ideas on what to modify and change to eliminate some flaws?

>>50213885
Well, a previous anon (or maybe it was you?) mentioned the dearth of treasure in the dungeon for its size, and some anons suggested guidelines to him for how to pluck it up and bring it in line with the typical Basic expectations. That seems like good advice in general.

>>50207312
Even though it doesn't say it, does AC 10 for unarmored head and AC 1 for armored head imply that it's modified by Dexterity (seems it should be)? Speaking of 1E helmet rules here. Doesn't say what happens when a head gets hit either.

>>50212000
I know, it was one of the first things I ran

>>50210688
Maybe, but they've got proper digital text and things. You can't really tell.

>>50213941
Any chance of remembering the Thread this happened on because it'd be very helpful.

>>50217897
I don't remember the thread number, but the gist of it is that Thracia expects that you give out 100 XP per monster hit die, so there's relatively little treasure.

>>50217897

Searching the archives for "caverns of thracia treasure" turned it up:
http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/49915259/#49949360

>>50217915
Well, you SAY that - but it's also using Greyhawk's variable damage and d8 hit dice and, well, a bunch of monsters from later OD&D like the Piercer (from The Strategic Review).

And Greyhawk was the one that introduced the "proper" XP calculation.

I dunno, I'll make an excel sheet to check just how much treasure it actually has and then come back with it.

>>50217817
I just checked them out, and you're right. It's really well done, I'm surprised. Thanks for pointing it out.

Does a proper scan of Holmes Basic exist?

>>50184513
Hexographer

>>50213941
No, it was me. I'm "re-writing" Thracia adding a lot more treasure to balance it for B/X progression. Will share when/if complete.

>>50221318
Also:

>>49949535
>I always liked the megadungeon rule that each level should contain 3-4 times the treasure required for a party of the same character level as the dungeon level to reach the following level.
>So for instance level 1 should have 30-40k gp of treasure, level 2 should contain between 60k and 80k, and so on.

This is my guideline, sounds good enough?

>>50221318
I'm planning on running it in a week. Can I ask you to how much you boosted the first floor's treasure?

>>50221368
I honestly don't know where you got that rule from - IIRC when Delta mathed out OD&D dungeons he found that if you had fifty rooms per level a four-person party would level up once after clearing out each dungeon level?
Also, most of that experience comes from a single set of jewelry because oh boy those things are expensive. And a proper OD&D group would not level up anywhere near as fast as that, since they would be much larger and also megadungeons aren't something that you can ever "clear" and tend to restock with monsters and treasure.

Caverns of Thracia, meanwhile, has nowhere near fifty rooms per level - it's more like half that.

>>50221487
>I honestly don't know where you got that rule from

...I linked the post I got that from...?
>>49949535
It's here:
http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/49915259/#49949535

>>50221318
Remember that the party can sell any Thracian artifacts they find for 2d100 gp to that one collector if they've heard of them!

That intact head of Athena's statue, or those 25gp skull pendants? Yeah, now you're making more money.

>>50221525
It's a big "if" to rely on. I'd consider it as a bonus rather than "money that is actually in the dungeon"

>>50221487
>I honestly don't know where you got that rule from
It's not a rule from a rulebook or extrapolated from a random stocking table, it's a convention based on the idea that in a megadungeon, a party should be able to level up from the treasure of each level, and proceed to the next down in due course -- that is, on dungeon level 1, a group of characters who are also level 1 should be able to reach level 2, so that they can deal with the challenges of dungeon level 2, and so on. For that to work, levels should have sufficient treasure that characters ideally don't need to find every scrap of it and don't need to explore the entire level -- mortality, potential second groups and so on will all take their toll, just as plain missing hidden stuff will.

That said, if you extrapolate dungeon level treasure from the BECMI/RC random stocking and random treasure tables it ends up as some hilarious quantity of wealth IIRC.

>>50221368
>This is my guideline, sounds good enough?
Yeah, I think so. It's a rule of thumb based on practical gameplay and progression conciderations, which to my mind is better than being purist toward either the module or any given set of random tables (which are only meant to help if your imagination feels stuck while designing the dungeon, anyway).

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I have a really weird question that's also a longshot.

Have you guys seen any dungeons in an adventure module that looks like pic related? It doesn't have to be the exact same, but having some likeness could help me out.

>>50222330
That's some circular-ass map design. What's that from? Looks pretty modern.

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>>50222483
It's the Rolex Leaning Center, it's too circular for my taste, but I have to shoehorn certain ideas and compare it to dungeon design.

>>50186793
> Have you SEEN the reactions to the Wanderer mockup?

There is "World Apart" book: http://www.lulu.com/shop/joseph-browning/worlds-apart/paperback/product-20714918.html

Apparently, it already exists.

Speaking of Caves of Thracia - any other module that carries over such a strong sense of history through its design itself? I'm really interested in trying more of similar.

>>50223193
Jaquay's other modules, perhaps? Dark Tower, Night of the Walking Wet/Realm of the Slime God, etc.

Is there a good middleground between modern rules-heavy versions of D&D and OSR games? I really want to try some old school style gaming, but my playgroup likes to have many different classes and such.

>>50223432
>Night of the Walking Wet
Speaking of which, here's some reformattings some dude made before his blog shut down (they were a bitch and a half to find):

>A4 AD&D-style
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxGA_BYDlr7JZERVOXNlS2JqTVk/edit?usp=sharing
>A5 OD&D-style
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxGA_BYDlr7Jb3owb3Y2cDVSb0k/edit?usp=sharing
>Cover (includes the wilderness map, for some reason)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxGA_BYDlr7Jb2lqZzQ5clExdjA/edit?usp=sharing

It's a hell of a lot easier to read than the version in the Dungeoneer compendium, at least!

>>50223559

Basic has a ton:

http://pandius.com/becmicls.html

>>50223559
5e? 2e with kits?

>>50202145
Keep in mind that Raggi, like the Pundit, is putting forth an image. He ENJOYS being a figure of controversy. (As one person put it, he has this great ability to feed on internet hate and turn it into surprisingly professional production values.)

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>>50223559
Take a look at AD&D some day - ten distinct classes in the core book, more of dubious balance in the supplements and Dragon Magazine. Also, Elf is not a class! Just remember to use 4d6-drop-lowest-and-arrange so you actually have a chance at decent stats and qualifying for shit, though, and don't bother with the Bard or Psionics because the 1E version of both leave a lot to be desired.

You're not necessarily correct in assuming that modern D&D is the rules-heavy one, though. Basic is, well, basic, but AD&D can get pretty involved at times.

Have a twenty-page cheat-sheet to initiative.

>>50223849
>>50223756
>>50223681
Thanks!

>>50223849
I'll take
>Things that never happened until the guy who wrote this tried to force a meme.
for 200.

>>50223559
ACKS is often tossed around as well, to add on to the previous recommendations. If you include the Player's Companion classes you can easily have over 22+ classes and it even has rules to build your own.

>>50224019
...I'm not entirely sure what you're referencing there, to be honest!

ADDICT's just some dude's fairly well-sourced and detailed explanation of 1E's sometimes-confusing and intricate initiative system (that's also often misunderstood on account of being, well, confusing and intricate - how Speed Factor relates to your initiative roll being the big one, I guess).

Unless you're referring to something else like the idea of not using the Bard (it's ridiculously overpowered, seriously - IIRC it ends up with twice the hit points of a Fighter?) or Psionics (I'm the guy who shills OD&D psionics in these threads now and again, but AD&D screwed the pooch on that one 'cause Gary didn't give a shit about the subsystem).

Or if you're talking about the idea of AD&D being more rules-heavy than modern D&D in which case, well, there's a reason people like saying that you don't play 1E RAW with all the rules. There's a ton of separate and somewhat complex subsystems you can play with if you want, from the disease rules to unarmed combat tables to humanoid troop racism to morale to, well, initiative. Remember that having half the speed factor of your opponent (or five less, in any case) gives you an extra attack, and having ten less gives you two!

AD&D is neat as hell, but I honestly have a hard time seeing someone actually managing to enforce all the RAW.

Unless you're talking about 2E, in which case things are a bit simpler and not in High Gygaxian and I just realized that I should've written that in my original post. Whoops.

Anybody have Towers of Khral or thoughts regarding it?

>>50223849
Not the anon who asked and it's a bit unrelated, but did OSRIC fix things like psionics and the bard class? Or is it the same?

>>50224885
Castles & Crusades has a bard who doesn't use vancian magic. I'm really not a fan of bards and am not familiar enough with it to evaluate it, but I really like the approach for rangers and paladins.

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Looking for some more feedback on my strictly Thief Class system i've been at work on. Thanks!

>>50207291
Player 1 is looking for an Adventure game. He wants to solve puzzles, and hates when the rules get in the way of logic narrative. He probably hates the situation of "I sneak up behind the orc and hit his head with a bottle to knock him out" being met with "Well, you failed your sneak roll" or "you miss his AC even though he wasn't moving" or "You hit, but you didn't do enough damage to him, so he turns around and stabs you". Little things like that probably irk him. For that, play a little more to the narrative, allow players to "cutscene kill" opponents they have a dagger to the throat, or taken on by complete surprise, etc.

The second player seems like a straight forward combat fiend. You should create tough battle situations for him, maybe even specifically designed around just him and the others as support. Allow player 1 to use him as a narrative tool for "solving" encounters.

Player 3 seems like a lost cause. The best way of improving things with her is to just have everyone hold her to higher standards, but in my experience, girls don't really like this too much. Try to introduce more story elements for her to negotiate with and talk with. Barring that, you should honestly replace her, or set up encounters as though she wasn't there at all.

>>50224182
Thanks. ACKS looks really nice, especially the option to add army-scale combat.

>>50207291
I don't know how OSR it really is, but you could give them magic items / blessings to compensate for their deficiencies. Player 3 can come come back to life or regenerate. She's no more powerful, but the repercussions of her thoughtless aggression are but temporary, and there's no need to adjust the power level of the monsters. (But there is still the danger of her falling into the enemy's hands and them either damaging her body beyond return, or maybe claiming the amulet or whatever that is the source of her magic).

Player 1? Man, you're in an OSR thread. How difficult can making a character really be? Play something based on Basic. Roll attributes. Pick one of the 7 classes. And that's it. Maybe you provide adventurer packs for the various classes for folks who don't want to pick their equipment piece by piece. Either that or you premake a few different characters and have him pick one. He can, of course customize them as desired, or start over from scratch, but he has something he can use if and when he doesn't want to go through the trouble.

Maybe Player 2 has a magical confidante of some sort. A talking amulet, familiar, pixie companion, or the consciousness of his sister inside his head for some reason or other. This confidante can guide the PC, yelling things like: "stop that ogre on the right; he's trying to flank us!" or "if we let them get to the gate, we're in big trouble!"

>>50226997
Oh, and maybe Player 1 has a magic item that facilitates promising tasks. In other words, if P1's character attempts something that will probably be successful according to the stats, then there's no need to roll (or only a 20 fails or something). That way, a clever plan can't be foiled by bad luck. You can play around with how certain something has to be to qualify, and can reduce the certainty if it still seems too powerful (like, the better of 2 rolls instead of automatic), and you could maybe offset it by having things on the other end (when the odds are stacked against him) get the worse of 2 rolls or something. Shit like saving throws would not be affect. This would not be reflexive stuff but only active attempts to do things.

>>50208370
Simple answer? Remove cursed items.

A cursed item is meant to instill caution onto the player. To make them stop and think "Well it's magic. Is it worth the risk right now to try it out?" However, this is instead putting fear into them, and isn't really helping out your game as you are unintentionally grinding it to a halt.

Change all of the cursed items they have (secretly of course) into regular magic items, and then inform them "Hey, look guys, I don't have any cursed items, and I want you to be using the toys that I gave you. Let me identify them all for you right now." and then tell them all what they do, or even let them see your notes for a bit.

If they've seen you use cursed items before, then you need to have a talk with them. Say "hey guys, I know I've run cursed items in the past, but it seems to be giving you trepidation from using your cool gear. How about this, how about no more cursed items?", and then follow the steps above, transforming their cursed items into magic items, and telling the party what they are and what they do.

The main problem here isn't just that they're scared of their characters, its that they don't seem to have a good player-DM trust relationship in general, which is an OoC problem that needs to be resolved OoC. You need to let them see that you're a trustworthy DM before you can really start laying down curses, or they're just going to see it as a mean DM, as opposed to a cruel and bitter game world.

Alternatively: Create a cheap resource used for removing curses that isn't common, but is pretty easy to find and build up on, and make sure its easily identifiable, such as all scrolls with a blue seal on it have been purified and sanctioned Remove Curse scrolls that are impossible to forge or fool.

>>50204720
You aren't supposed to actually punch and kick people in a pit unless you're at Core faggot show for teenagers with faggot Scene kid hair.
Although the earliest forms of punk moshing did involve alotta Accidental face kicking

>>50228863
>Accidental face kicking

don't remind me, the other day I almost suplexed a bystander when I was tying my shoes

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>>50204921
You are an underage retard who probably thinks Emmure and Whitechapel are cool, stop talking about offtopic shit. No, you NEVER punch or kick in a pit its like american football. Shut the fuck up or talk about D&D

>>50229000
>>50204921
>>50208688
>>50204893
>>50204832
Related question: what metal bands do you listen to when playing an OSR game? What seems most appropriate?

>>50230548
Kvelertak

>>50230548
Power Metal or Bust.

>>50230548
For my part, Black Sabbath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-LIuujqnIo seems appropriate for trying to recapture the roots of D&D, given the time period, but I'm a bit more partial to early Metallica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sASN1TDO0A8 or classic Maiden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71TJitXU8Z0 both of which are era-appropriate for Basic D&D.

does anyone have the DCC X-Crawl pdfs? I can't find it in the trove

>>50230548
Fantasy OSR demands black metal or dungeon synth. Post-apoc OSR and doom metal go excellently together, sludge as well. And for sci-fi, I go with stoner.

>>50230548
I don't play music because I can't make out what people are saying and the constant background noise distracts me. IDK, a hearing problem or something.

>>50231275
>doom metal
This guy gets it.

>>50230548
I played a lot of progrock and stoner metal when I ran LotFP, but now I run DCC and play 70s rock and hard rock. This is mostly because my players aren't much into doom metal and similar.

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>>50229000
Here's a Codex I made for Zak's Demogorgon coven generator.

Blaspherit
Fallen Oath of Black Doom
Codex of the Thirteenth Coven
Chapter 1. Temple Cult (Beaked)
Chapter 2. Fallen Oath of Black Doom (Breathes Fire)
Chapter 3. Six Days of Desecration (Bulging Eyes)
Chapter 4. Werewolf of the Black Abyss (Crown of Flesh)
Chapter 5. Goat Command Desolation (Chaos Spawn)
Chapter 6. Weltering in Semen and Blood (Chaos Spawn)
Chapter 7. Gods of Goldenwood and Pagan Fire (Invisibilty)

Spells:
1. ?? (4)
2. ?? (4)
3. ?? (6)
4. ?? (4)
5. ?? (5)
6. ?? (3)
7. ?? (5)

>>50230548
I'm going to second the votes for doom metal. It's got this oppressive, heavy, grinding feel which is basically perfect imho. Horror soundtracks and some off the weirder bits of triphop also work quite well.

>>50230548
Sabbath, Hawkwind, Sleep, High on Fire, Darkthrone, stuff on Silver Key Records

>>50232770
I've been meaning to play Coil's Hellraiser soundtrack and Alessandro Cortini would probably be great.

>>50198579
>Zak
Gets into constant shitflinging, easy to see why people dislike him. Some people probably think he's an SJW after that stunt with the Escapist

>Pundit
He's a cunt from what I remember

>>50232948
>Some people probably think he's an SJW after that stunt with the Escapist
What happened?

>>50233572
Escapist hired a guy who was critical to trans people, so Zak and his friends decided to leave the site and take their show with them.

>>50233595
It's certainly his prerogative, but REE-ing about "fucking frat boys" or whatever makes it seem like a gigantic temper tantrum

In 2e what are the best priest domains with all the expansion or most of them

So, if I'm just interested in exploring some of history of RPGs and getting some exposure to how the hobby may have looked & played once upon a time, what are the differences between Labyrinth Lord and actually going and playing a copy of Basic D&D? LL even seems to claim to be backwards compatible with Basic D&D modules, which is cool and weird and not the sort of language I'm used to seeing outside of video game consoles. But if it's so similar in the first place, what advantages does it offer? I don't know anything about either of these games, so I'm just interested in the reasons why somebody still playing Basic D&D today would opt for LL today.

>>50236738
It's not really hard to be backwards-compatible with old TSR modules, really - hell, most OD&D/Basic/AD&D modules work with any of the other systems without major issues.

The main advantage Labyrinth Lord and similar retroclones offered was that you could actually buy them, but that's become a bit less relevant now that Wizards have put up the old PDFs again - now it's mostly just that they're cleaned up with more modern formatting and such, IIRC.

Also I'm pretty sure that LL has some differences beyond just the legal obfuscations (i.e. changing XP charts)? Hell if I know what they are, though. I've always been more interested in the actual Old School systems than the OSR, personally.

Any advice on making dungeons scary?

>>50236738
Somebody already playing Basic probably has zero reasons to switch to a clone. Hell, in my opinion B/X is a better and a cleaner product overall than any clone.

In my opinion, nowadays the strength of OSR isn't so much in the clones because the original material is pretty easy to obtain digitally now that everything is re-released. The best stuff that's coming from the OSR movement right now is games like Stars Without Number and other games that aren't straight up clones but are inspired by the originals.

If I want to play the original game I will choose the original game. If I want something a little different then there are numerous modern variants to choose from.

>>50237415
Have them be unpredictable. If they're hard to map, complex, and have many branching paths? Your party will have some bits that they're familiar with, but a lot is going to be unknown.

Secondly, force them into the unknown. One-way doors that block them off from the known bits of their map until they can loop their way back through the fog of war, unnoticeable teleporters that move the party without them noticing until their map starts to overlap, slanting passages that bring them down a level without them noticing until the map starts to overlap... really, just grab a copy of OD&D Volume II: The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures and take a glance at all the mapping tricks suggested and think about what exactly they mean.

Also, well, I find this paragraph from the same section pretty interesting:
>Tricks and Traps: Besides those already indicated on the sample level, there are a number of other easily added tricks and traps. The fear of "death", its risk each time, is one of the most stimulating parts of the game. It therefore behooves the campaign referee to include as many mystifying and dangerous areas as is consistent with a reasonable chance for survival (remembering that the monster population already threatens this survival). For example; there is no question that a player's character could easily be killed by falling into a pit thirty feet deep or into a shallow pit filled with poisoned spikes, and this is quite undesirable in most instances. Here are a few simple items which can be included[...]

Killing the characters is easy. Ridiculously so. So don't do it - make it dangerous, but make it survivable. Make dying the result of bad choices rather than purely bad luck - if a character is trapped within a trap door and doesn't search the walls for secret doors and therefore dies of dehydration, that's on them, but if the pit was instead filled with insta-kill poison then they died through no fault of their own - the fault lies with the DM.

>>50237415
>>50237636
Now, you don't have to go with the whole "fear of the unknown" gambling-with-your-life thing. You could also go with the more atmospheric horror stuff, where you simply describe the situations in an unnerving or terrifying way. You'll need to be one hell of an orator to make this work properly, though. If you're interested in this route, maybe check to see if there's any good books out there on how to make horror books/movies work? Remember that you can't go with the visual spooks, at least, and need to rely on descriptions and the immersion of the players.
This also only works if the players WANT to be spooked - an uncooperative player will make it a farce.

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>>50236738
Labyrinth Lord consolidates both of B/X's books into one, and extends the game to explicitly cover through 20th level rather than just 14th. Having things in one book is nice, but B/X's books are short enough (64 pages apiece) that you quickly learn where everything is, and having two different books to deal with isn't actually that much of a detriment. Still, edge to LL here. As far as going through 20th level goes, I don't think it makes a lick of difference. You're very unlucky to get that high, and the game starts to break down a bit well before that (in particular, casters have a ridiculous number of very powerful spells).

Labyrinth Lord expands the number of weapons and types of armor (and changes up the AC progression of armor a bit). Overall, I consider this a net loss as B/X's simplicity is in its favor, and I don't really miss having heavy and light picks in B/X (besides, it's easy enough to throw in new weapons as all you have to do is assign a damage die according to what sort of weapon you think it's equivalent to). I mean, it's no big deal, but it's extra shit to sift through. Also, leather armor only protecting you by one point seems wonky to me.

Labyrinth Lord smooths out the cleric spell progression, so you don't have that weird jump that B/X inherited from OD&D where you gain access to 3 new spell levels over the course of gaining only 2 levels. Of course, BECMI also smoothed out the progression, and it's easy enough just to use its cleric spell progression table (or just to reference the magic-user table at 1 level lower). Labyrinth Lord also starts clerics out with a spell at 1st level, which Basic D&D does not. Given the low XP requirements for clerics and the fact that they're pretty competent in battle, that seems unnecessary to me. They should be a step behind magic-users in spell acquisition.

>>50236738
>>50237840
Saving throws are pretty similar in both games, though magic-users and clerics do ultimately end up with better saves at the high levels in Labyrinth Lord than in Basic (though this is in relation to BECMI, as it only occurs in levels higher than that which B/X explicitly covers, and the comparison gets a bit tricky, because at the top levels of B/X, cleric and magic-user saves are better than they are in BECMI). The other classes are about the same.

Labyrinth Lord has spell levels up through 9th for magic-users and 7th for clerics (instead of 6th and 5th, respectively). This is mostly to cover the additional character levels that Labyrinth Lord has, though B/X does hit the spell level ceiling a bit before its maximum character level of 14 (BECMI, of course, has the full range of spells, like Labyrinth Lord). Honestly though, it's going to be rare that you have a character of high enough level for any of this to apply, and high level casters are plenty powerful without needing several levels of spells past 6th and 5th. So I think this may actually be a point in B/X's favor as that's fewer spells to clutter the book. Labyrinth Lord lays out all its spells together in alphabetical order, which I fucking hate, while B/X arranges them by class and level.

B/X has to-hit go up less frequently, but by 2 points at a time, while Labyrinth Lord does it more frequently, but by a single point. I like the smoothness of Labyrinth Lord's progression, though the rate of progression is less regular, which I dislike.

In the end, I think the justification for Labyrinth Lord's existence is that it's a version of B/X that is currently sold and which can have modules and such made for it.

>>50238166
Keep in mind it was made before B/X has gotten reprints.

>>50238226
Yeah. And when B/X is freely available, that does rather detract from its raison d'etre. But B/X is only available in PDF, right? If that's the case, then folks wanting a physical copy still have a reason to go for Labyrinth Lord.

>>50222802
Interesting, doing a quick search I see that the PDF used to be PWYW but now it's $5 on OBS. Also kind of disappointed it's not in the digest-sized format of the classic Traveller books.

Is it just me or is the DCC Cleric a bit overpowered? He almost never loses spells, and he can keep on asking his god for help.

>>50238226

OTOH, you can't publish stuff "for B/X" without a license.

>>50239687
He still needs to roll well to do spells, and once he rolls his first 1 it's a downhill slope that can leave him unable to do anything for days. In the game I run the cleric was doing really well at first, but almost died and had to be saved by the rest of the party when he rolled a 1 and had to immediately pray for a couple of rounds. He still has negative modifiers from when we left off.

>>50239927
What was the exact situation? The results explicitly state you need to pray after the danger is over.

>>50241478
You are right, I supposed I must have made the wrong ruling in the heat of the moment, or maybe the fight was about to end anyway. Either way that was only one of the disapprovals he got during that battle, and after that he had a lot of trouble healing everyone up.

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Does this look like a pretty good classless game set in an urban fantasy world?

I sadly haven't got the psychic powers written out yet, but I'd like to know if this is a good base.

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opinions or input on this thief job generator for my osr project?

>>50242420

I actually really like it.

How would you rate the binding/printing of the various OSR games on the market? I'm specifically interested in ACKS and its supplements.

How would you mechanically run an action movie paced chase scene in an OSR framework?

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>>50244749
Not sure. Seems like one important thing would be varying movement so that things aren't predictable and monsters of the same speed don't automatically maintain the same distance between them.

>>50244749
something along the lines of; each round represents an obstacle or chance to gain/lose ground. Those things can increase or decrease distance between the parties. Distance of 0 = chaser catches chasee. Distance of 4+ = chasee escapes

Which OSR game has the best DM screen?
I need this little bit of info before taking my hiatus from 5e and going back into OSR games.

anyone have the tables of lvl population? i was something like for every 100000 people 10 where lvl 1 or something like that

>>50250180
You're thinking about ACKS, I think. Don't have the PDF, but it should be in the trove.

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Posting Brave the Labyrinth #4 and #5 so that they can be added to the trove.

>>50253192
file dropper com/ btl005bravethelabyrinth-issue5pdf10246653

This issue is just a smidge over the filesize limit

>>50249951
I'm sorta tempted to answer "none". OSR authors don't really seem to be into DM screens, and it seems to be either an afterthought or a very limited item for the few times that it gets made.

>>50253671
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's because DM screens aren't really available for print-on-demand, which means that all the more indie guys get cut off - unless they sell PDFs that the buyers themselves print out and tape to a screen, I suppose.

I suspect that DM screens are one of those things that only really make sense selling if you're going to sell a fuckton of them, and generally individual OSR are too niche for that. Economy of scale and whatnot - those need to be custom printed, probably, which means that you want to make 'em in bulk, but you also don't want to make more than you can sell. And I don't know how many OSR publishers could expect to sell, say, a thousand DM screens.

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I am rewriting some rules of the game retro phaze, i see that the human haves the ability to reroll once per session any check, is luck really a perk of the human? or should i add another ability for him to use

I really can't see any large problem with abolishing "race as class" in games like LL and LotFP and just giving someone who wants to play an Elf or whatever a small stat bonus/penalty and some Darkvision.

>>50256422
Yeah, it's not that much of a problem. Could be a good idea to adjust xp needed for each level though.

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>>50256422

There isn't, it's a staple of the OSR genre and I'm sure you'll get lots of people to disagree with you here.

Truthfully race as class is USUALLY pretty stupid because the classes already take care of that, and anything as intelligent as a human with a society would be like that. Race as class seems to imply that dwarves don't have any mages, clerics and thieves, and that elves don't have thieves or clerics. It's kind of stupid.

However I do support race as class for things like dragons or mules or something similar; something properly imhuman that can't even use tools or weapons would count. Racial bonuses like stats are good enough. It's one of those sacred cows which is simply not necessary for the experience and is something you can cut out if you don't like it.

>>50256550

For some inexplicable reason, I imagined the Castle Men as the gear people from Rick & Morty.

>Know, O prince, that in the time between the crumbling of the basaltic acropoli and the age of the children of the Buttress
>there was an age undreamed of, when shining citadels lay spread across the world like tumbled jewels beneath a sky riven by heavy moons
>the castle men, striding the earth with their stony feet, unchallenged in might or stature, treading their foes into the dust and darkness
>know O prince, 'twas an Age of Adventure!

>>50256550

I can generally take it or leave it, but ACKS, is really the only system that's done race as class in a way that justifies it's existence. The racial classes actually feel unique and not just like gimped versions of another class.

Is there a B/X compatible version of the kenku?

>>50258563
DCC and Pars Fortuna also make it work rather well, helps that in the latter by default there's no normal humans, so it's only the Racial Classes

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>>50259374

I just ran Death Frost Doom for my players.

Zeke's camp, the Cabin and 4 rooms into the crypt. One died, one is blind and the rest officially hate OSR.

So basically I see all these awesome, great roleplaying blogs and I think they are all really cool.

Now I don't have as much experience as a lot of people, but I'd really like to make my own roleplaying blog. Think it could work?

>>50260224

What? You told them what to expect, right? You didn't just spring a horror module on a bunch of unsuspecting dudes and expect them to not mind when their characters started dying?

>>50260286
Oh most definitely did. They still don't quite grasp that OSR = "you will probably die."

Most want to just be Legolas-esque superheroes.

Oh well. Only gaming group I got, and they aren't even gamers.

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>>50260313

Welp, nothing to be done about that then, I guess.

>>50260313
it's less "you will probably die" and more "you will probably die if you don't play smart", so you should be more clear about that(also while many people would say this is heresy, nothing wrong with occasionally fudging a roll in the PC's favor)

>>50260490
To be fair, you cannot 'play smart' in DFD.

>>50260737

I dunno, some folks seem to do alright.

>>50260752
As much as I enjoy it and recommend it, good lord, everything in it fucks you up.

>>50260737
My girlfriend played pretty smart solo.
She didn't fuck with most of the shit that was a trap because it seemed like an obvious trap to her. The only mistake she made was a cursed amulet or dagger (I don't remember) she took.
She saw all the horror movie trope stuff and nope'd her way past it.
She even lived through it (deal with the devil).

And this was her first time ever rp'ing.

I've run a couple of veteran groups through it though and they tend to treat it like a traditional dungeon. So they get fucked up.

I kinda like that, actually. Experience working against you.

>>50253815
There's that customisable thing DTRPG do. The plastic one with pockets.

>>50260737
which kinda makes it a terrible adventure for a first time group, Deep Carbon Observatory would probably be a better choice in my opinion

>>50260883
How did you run her through it? More than one PC or did you adjust to module?

Does anyone have the pdfs of Sunken city from purple sorcerer games?

>>50260490
More like "you will die if you interact with any element of this adventure".

I still have no idea why DFD gets so much praise.

>>50260313
Even OD&D-era Gygax is on record saying that actively trying to fuck your party over like that is terrible DMing. I think it's unfair to say that people mad with DFD "want to be legolas-esque superheroes". That's one hell of a strawman: "you either enjoy to die horribly and meaninglessly or you want to play superheroes".
They might have been middle-of-the-road players who could've been won over to the OSR movement if you didn't run something as assholish as DFD to them.

>>50260737
Pretty much this. The best way to "play smart" in DFD is a player going "Wait wait, I know this adventure. This is Death Frost Doom. We have nothing to gain from this and we're very likely to die, so let's just ignore this and return to town."

>>50260883
So you mean "it's a bad D&D module and that's why it's good"?
...Huh. That's not a way I've ever thought about it. I guess DFD has value as a "here's what not to do" example.

>>50261100
As I recall I ran it by the book (original. Not remake).
She played as a solo lvl1 fighter.

I may have lowered the HP of the whistling plant thing, but no other changes that I can remember.

>>50261689
DFD, the White Dwarf module it's based on, and Tomb of Horrors are all very good for springing on players who are falling into a rut, but not much use outside of that.

>>50261689
> So you mean "it's a bad D&D module and that's why it's good"?

That is not what I mean. I mean it is good because it shakes up the expectations of veterans and rewards intelligent play over game mastery.

It is an excellent beginner module because it encourages experimentation, thoughtfulness and due care. It won't establish a bad habit of standard murderhobo procedure like a B1/B2 style module might.

And when the players tpk, fuck everything up and unleash a horde of the undead on the campaign world, you've just set up some awesome plot for their new characters to be subject to.

>>50260182
Thanks. I was actually hoping for a monster version but this is great too.

>>50261738
>It is an excellent beginner module because it encourages experimentation, thoughtfulness and due care. It won't establish a bad habit of standard murderhobo procedure like a B1/B2 style module might.

Experimentation in DFD is going to get you killed. I mean, there's literally a writing that, if you read it, it makes you try and kill yourself.

How does that encourage experimentation? That DISCOURAGES experimentation. That fosters a feeling of "every thing I try to do ends up harming or killing me", which leads to the conclusion of "I should do nothing, experimentation is bad and will get me killed".

Besides, what part of B2 (can't talk for B1, haven't run it) "establishes murderhobo procedures"? What do you even MEAN by "murderhobo procedures" anyway?

"Killing monsters"? First of all, if you properly use the reaction roll, about half of your encounters won't even be hostile. And, B2 is set up so that, if you play smart, you can leverage each faction in the dungeon against each other. There are a lot of hints for this (the goblins paying the ogre, etc) that can spark the idea into the players.

Furthermore, the monsters are explicitly interested into capturing adventurers and ransoming them, meaning that it's MORE forgiving to experiment than normal because even if you're knocked out or forced to surrender your comrades can either rescue you or pay for your release.

Does the "hobo" part of "murderhobo" mean that the PCs are assumed to not have a place to live in?

...Like the Keep on the Borderlands? That place which explicitly has an inn with rooms, and also private housing? The place where the party, once they've scored some success, can enter the Castellan's court and become power players in the local politics?

Please, explain to us how B2 "establishes a bad habit of standard murderhobo procedure", and what "standard murderhobo procedure" is, because I don't understand.

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>>50250180
1st Edition D&D

1 in 100 have "the spark" allowing them to attain levels and roll 3d6 for stats giving 3-18
All others are permanently 0-Leveled possessing only racial base HP* and rolling 3d6, but treating all 1s as 3s and all 6s as 4s, thus giving a range of 6-15 at extremes

* Human
Sedentary Females 1-3HP, Combat Level -3, Sedentary Male, 1-4HP CL -2, Active Females 1-4HP CL -1, Active Male 2-5HP CL 0, Laboring Females 2-5HP CL 0, Laboring Males 2-7HP CL 0

Level distribution for the segments of the population permitted levels are such that there are half as many of each level than the last, so if you have 100 level 1s, then there are 50 Level 2s, 25 3s etc.

Clerics 20% (3.3333% are Druids, 16.666% pure clerics)
Fighters 44% (4.4% ranger, 4.4% paladin, 35.2% pure fighters)
Magic-Users 20% (3.3333% Illusionist, 16.6666% pure Magic Users
Thieves 15% (2.5% Assassin, 12.5% """"""pure""""" thieve)
Monks 1%

Home-brew classes should be slotted in to their sub-type, so a sorcerer if you include it would take another 3.3333% from the pure magic user, bards a 2.5% from the thief and so forth)

This is the official rule although how ever you calculate this is up to you, I have personally found that first calculating the number of "leveled" characters permitted, so 1million people means 10,000 leveled characters.

>>50263853

Half this is the number of Level 1 characters, then half this number for each extra level, when you get to fractions, take it in turns of rounding down then up (rounding down is overuled to round up if this would make it even) until the total is the full number. Never allow more than one tier to have a single individual, if you reach one without hitting the cap add the additional values to the first value that involved rounding.(As in example 4 in jpg)

With the lower levels with lots of numbers just assume the distribution of classes are equal to the percentiles of distribution of the classes as given in the book (and earlier in the post) but when you get to the individual small values roll percentiles to see what kind of characters the most powerful people in the land are, then choose the society based on this.

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>>50262731
Well here's the original Kenku for 1e. In my head, they've always been lightweight thieves and vagabonds, so I dunno if they really deserve d8 as a HD or spells. Anyways...

I use LotFP, so if I converted this, it'd look like:

Armor: 16(5)
Move: 180’
HD: 2-5(d8)
Morale 9
Attack: Weapon Damage or Claw+Bite Attack (d4+d6)
- 3HD: get one lv-1 spell.
- 4HD: get two lv-1 spells.
- 5HD: get two lv-1 spells and one lv-2 spell.
+1 Sleight of Hand per HD
+1 Stealth per HD

>>50264111
Awesome, this is great. I guess they are basically just 8 HD thieves, start getting magic user levels at level 3.

>>50263263
I can't speak of DFD but in Tower of the Stargazer pretty much everything that can kill you is by stupid experimentation. Even the telescope thing becomes a non issue if you sit down with the books before playing around with magical shit you don't know anything about.
The deadly wine gets criticized sometimes, I don't agree. The guy is a sadistic psychopath, which you'll find out at the least by reading the journal in the apprentice room. If I was him I'd keep deadly wine around.
I think the module is really great and those things are not random at all.

>>50264510
>The guy is a sadistic psychopath, which you'll find out at the least by reading the journal in the apprentice room. If I was him I'd keep deadly wine around.

More probably IMO, someone may have gifted him a bottle of poisoned wine, hoping the evil old bastard would drink it and die.

Anyone have a guideline of making skirmish maps on Hexographer?

>>50261725
Hey, you take that back. The Lichway is alright.

But yes, they are all very much not introductory adventures and, in fact, The Lichway is the only one of the three that I'd even attempt to use as an introduction to OSR stuff - both DFD and ToH are pretty atypical deserted trapfests, and not very representative of anything other than their own little subgenre of deserted trapfests.

At least Tomb of Horrors has an excuse for it in it being a tournament module (and also a way to up the ante vs. Rob Kuntz, who turned the tables by beating it in a single go).

The Lichway is pretty neat, though, and doesn't have any problems with "ending the campaign" or whatever - the undead don't swarm the countryside, after all, but seem alright with staying in their ancestral crypt. Also, there's like a tenth of DFD's numbers.

It's also actually got a bunch of NPCs to interact with and something like five separate factions to play off of. Maybe more like six or seven depending on player interactions with the lizardmen and whether or not you count the undead as one or more of an environmental hazard. There's a fuckton of them, anyway, and even then the big bad is a frickin' third-level magic-user. It's not exactly a deathtrap, especially since the entire dungeon is one big loop so chances are that if you follow the soft design cues you'll end up escaping the undead without issues... and if you ignore the open passageway to the Dronesong and go through some doors backwards in the loop, or boat through the river entrance, chances are that you'll end up knowing about the Sussurus beforehand and have a magic item that lets you beat it nonlethally and loot the hoard.

Which OSR titles will offer me the best chance of finding real world games?? I don't have a group and will be looking through online resources for games. Which OSR games/systems are most popular for real world games? Thanks in advance!

>>50265504
Probably AD&D 1E or D&D B/X

>>50265504
Yeah, what >>50265685 said. D&D has brand recognition, and chances are that people have actually HEARD of AD&D or Basic even if they know nothing about it. Dungeon Crawl Classics or Lamentations of the Flame Princess or, hell, Labyrinth Lord? That stuff's niche as fuck in comparison to the juggernauts.

Especially if, like, you go Mentzer Red Box in the Keep on the Borderlands. Play up the nostalgia/retro factor while using the most accessible/famous iteration of the system.

You still won't get as many offers as if you'd offered a more modern popular system like 5E or Pathfinder, but you'll probably have a better chance of a game than with something that will have people googling up the system and judge you for some shitty stuff the author did.

Also, of course, if you already have a group of friends chances are that you could just offer to DM whatever system you want and they'd at least consider it. The main problem, then, is coordinating schedules and making sure that everyone's onboard with the system expectations re: lethality, character power, GP=XP or whatever.

>>50256422
If memory serves, LotFP's rulebook basically says that Raggi doesn't use races other than humans, but he included them in the rulebook for those that want it. The game works fine without them.

>>50266304
So basically the Gygax excuse, then?

>>50266349
I mean raggi runs in like, 30 years war, so that's probably why he doesn't use them

Is Godbound considered OSR?

>>50266349
Yeah, it basically is. I wouldn't call it an excuse in a pejorative sense as it's a a necessary part of fantasy game design. If you're making a system (not a setting) that's designed to be a vehicle for fantasy games, it only makes sense to include races that your clientele would want to play.

Considering that in the older games, modifying base classes simply wasn't something that is present in the system, race as class is only logical. So for Gygax and Raggi, bonus races as extra classes that are included in the system only as support for potential buyers makes plenty of sense even if it seems hypocritical.

Adding racial bonuses and extra features for a specific race isn't in keeping with the standard game mechanics of either system, but it also makes the most sense.

>>50266609
It considers itself OSR, and I'm pretty sure it is usually considered OSR by people. It's really on the edge of it though.

>>50266609
Sure, I guess? I'm pretty sure it's marketed as OSR, and since it's one of them B/X clones it's certainly OSR-compatible, and those two points are usually enough.

It plays differently, but so does high-level BECMI. Not everyone plays OSR games in the Torchbearer way.

>>50266648
The extra classes were a Moldvay/Cook simplification for Basic, since OD&D races pre-Greyhawk were basically de facto race-as-class.

When Gygax added a race, it was to AD&D and just meant giving a bunch of bonuses and penalties and then saying what their level limits were. AFAIK the new races he made post-PHB were kind of busted - UA's Drow and whatnot - but he certainly wasn't the big race-as-class proponent.

I mean, fuck. That paragraph in OD&D about how players could play a dragon if they wanted to, but would need to start as a young one? The first print version had it as them wanting to play a Balrog, and the player who wanted to play a Balrog (and did!) was Mike Mornard.

>>50266349
The demi-humans are pretty strong in LotfP. At higher levels you might complain there is not much going on for Dwarfs & Halflings but their advantage in saving throws (both) and hit points (Dwarf) is just crazy. Nothing can kill those little bastards.

>>50265504
Moldvay Basic (B/X) is the foundation for more retroclones than any other edition. Basic Fantasy is based on it. Labyrinth Lord is based on it. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is based on it. ACKS is based on it. Hell, Mentzer Basic is based on it; the two systems are fundamentally the same, only Mentzer adds additional material in the later, higher-level sets that expand the game past 14th level (which the Rules Cyclopedia then incorporates). Swords & Wizardry Core is based on OD&D's little brown books + the Greyhawk supplement, the same thing that Moldvay Basic is based on. Given how short* and easy to learn Moldvay Basic is, and how much it underlies other games, it seems like the obvious thing to learn. Even if you don't end up playing it, if it's some other edition of Basic, or a Basic retroclone, you can just build on your knowledge of Moldvay Basic and ask what's changed rather than having to learn a new game from the ground up.

*Moldvay Basic is a grand total of 128 pages split between 2 books (64 pages for the Basic Set and another 64 for the Expert Set), compared to something like 450 pages split between 9 books for Mentzer Basic (almost 200 pages split between 3 books for the Basic and Expert Sets, with most of the additional length coming from redundancies due to bad format and sample walk-through), 300 pages for the Rules Cyclopedia, and 500 pages for AD&D's core books (PHB, DMG and MM).

So is it really bad to just not give any bonus to players who roll really poor stats and starting stuff? Not even a little more starting gold or something to compensate?

I know the point of OSR is not 'balanced' but it still seems a little unfair.

>>50268205
Depends on the system. Mentzer recommends rerolling if the stats are way too shit, IIRC, while something like OD&D has it not matter much at all on account of stats not really mattering that much.

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>>50268205
If you're worried about balance, consider an alternative system for stat generation that gives you more even results.

>>50268205

If somebody rolls a real dog of a character, I let them roll a new guy, but only after they give the first one a name -- 'cause he lives in town now.

>>50268205
I think it's fine to do a reroll if the stats are absolutely awful. >>50268327 is a very fun idea too.

>>50268178

Thank you, this is quite helpful.

Give me a list of X in 6 chance skills for thieves but for a modern fantasy game world. I'm at a loss.

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>https://www.docdroid.net/GtTDks6/trm-sample.pdf.html

Looking for some more feedback/advice/input/suggestion on my OSR in progress.

What is missing that's important? What would you want to see addressed?

we need a new thread

>>50269092
Extreme Parkour
Hacking
RFID-swipe pickpocketing
Stealth
Jury-Rigging
Cell Phone Usage

>>50269499
Made it.

NEW THREAD

>>50269712
>>50269712
>>50269712

>>50269718

Good job, anon!