/osr/

I like this. Pretty spoopy.

Regular university, or magic university?

Great suggestion today boiz

furs and leathers. Warmth is most important, and that means multiple layers of reindeer fur. Keeping the damp out is also useful, so that means waxing the out layer.
But in my setting 'non-combatant' basically means 'children and invalids'. If you're an adult, you hunt.
The Things They Made should be there. For example:
>repair and janitorial drones
> helpful medical bots
that are almost indistinguishable from
>horrible torture bots
>golem law enforcement, that think the PCs are tresspassing.
>shambling results of forbidden experiments
>Entertainment puppets with their weird arts
>artificial slaves

Mostly regular university with strange magical investigations into uncovering and translating ancient texts. Like if the renaissance fascination with ancient greek and roman stuff also had things man was not meant to know.

Is there a distinction between "regular universities" and "magic universities?"
Old-timey universities had pretty heterogeneous curricula.

>Great suggestion today boiz
Dirty fucking tables boiz
>Real fucking dirty
Dirty like Dave
>Dave Arneson
With the Dave Arnes-guns *pow* *pow*
>Guy didn't look like it, but he was fucking stacked bro
Stacked in 10' cubes bro
>Stacked like bonuses to hit bro
Stacked like....

>that are almost indistinguishable from
I think that concept's been done to death, desu. It's a little trite these days.

In my setting, yes. Wizards can't study theology in any serious capacity.

It's very good.

>trite
Does this actually happen? I get people who are into osr as a scene, dm and read a lot more stuff than we play can get blown out on things, but do players call things 'cliché' or whatever at the table? I see a lot of discussion about cliché' things and trope on Veeky Forums but I can't tell if its just complaining. I might just have lucked out in having mostly noob players. If one of them got it together enough to gm, I'd by mostly exited to play... at all really.

>Wizards can't study theology in any serious capacity.
That... seems pretty at odds with the original idea of a university.
Not wholly juxtaposed, but enough that I'd imagine wizards having guilds instead.

Correct.

See, it started off that wizards could totally study theology.

Then angels started showing up.

This made a lot of people very unhappy, but it also made a lot of people very dead.

Now, they can still go to University, but they get their own semi-affiliated buildings and they aren't allowed to muck around with scripture.

Moving from B/X to 2e and I want to be clear on how spells work

>A wizard tries to learn a new spell, either from a book, other wizard, or research
>he has a chance to fail based on ability scores
>if he succeeds, the spell is copied into his spell book
>specialists can't learn spells from the opposition schools
>then as he pleases based on spell slots, he memorizes spells
>casting spells works similarly to B/X except some cost materials
>if a wizard loses his spell book, when he starts a new one he needs to reacquire spells
>your skin can be used as a spell book

Your spells known limits are by Intelligence, instead of matching how many spells you can memorize.
Spells known are also a separate concept from your spellbooks, which can really screw you if you need to replace a book.
You gain a new spell each level up, from assumed downtime research. You don't roll chance to learn on it.
You can learn a spell from a scroll by spending half the cost of inventing a new spell.
Your spells aren't automatically last each round. The "Casting Time" entry on every spell is an initiative penalty.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate classless OSR?

Alright, so I contacted this guy Kevin a few days ago, from an Ad on our FLGS, and he's aiming to play a 1E AD&D Adventure he's been working on.

My experience with RPGs have been 5e, GURPS, FFG Star Wars, Cyberpunk 2020, Savage Worlds, RuneQuest 6e, and a couple other minor games.

What am I in for, what should I expect, and most important, which is the least "problematic" class in 1E, or the one that every party usually wants in a classic Dungeon Crawl.

>paly
Good luck.

>which is the least "problematic" class in 1E,
Fighter.
>or the one that every party usually wants in a classic Dungeon Crawl.
Thief or Cleric.

>except some cost materials
Some materials are a pain to acquire or transport.

Just going by that ad, I feel like Kevin is in his late 40s at least.

I hope you have a good time palying with Kevin!

As a general rule of thumb, I'd stay away from anybody hooking.

Why does that ampersand look like a beggar?

The magic item creation is neat, but feels overly bookkeepy.
Does it have anything else going for it besides awful aesthetics?

Thanks. So spells known are separate, that means you can have spells in your book that you don't know and can't cast. If you lose the book, you can only transcribe the ones you know. Is that right?

I like that aspect.

>that means you can have spells in your book that you don't know and can't cast.
That's absolutely a thing that you're allowed to do.
>If you lose the book, you can only transcribe the ones you know.
If you haven't filled all your spells known and you pass your chance to learn, you can add new spells.
But for the most part, yes. You will need to find copies* of the exact spells you lost.
*unlike in Bx, where you can freely rewrite any of your spells without access to your book

There are a few other differences between the spellbooks, come to think of it.

Bx Magic-Users implicitly have one spellbook, which they take everywhere.
It costs nothing to add a spell, but 1000gp per spell level to replace a missing book.

AD&D Mages often have many 100 page spellbooks. Spells occupy level+1d6-1 pages.
Each page costs 50gp tp fill, and the book can't leave down.
You can also pay 100gp per page to fill transportable 50 page books.

For comparison, 15gp buys you 1 day's Iron Rations in Bx amd 10gp buy's you a week's in AD&D.

What do you think about increasing the fighter's critical threat range as he levels up? Too overpowered?

Thanks, that's very helpful. My party really likes using magic so I need to be clear beforehand.

Too arbitrary?
Whatever floats your boat.
I don't even use crits.

I like crits. Gives the players something to look forward to when they attack, and something to dread when a monster does.

How much of a crossover is there between people who enjoy storygames and OSR? Apocalypse World honestly seems like a decent system to do OSR-style shenanigans in if you cut out the faggotry.

I thought that is what dungeon world was about?

You could always make your own hack. I've also tried my own hand at it, but people didn't seem to like it very much on this board.

I would avoid playing wizards and thieves. But I think you will have a good time

There's already a 1-in-8 chance that my d8 weapon does 8 damage.
I don't see the need to add a 7-in-(8*(20+AC-THAC0)) chance to that.

Torchbearer sees far less play than OSRIC, and nobody plays OSRIC.

>Apocalypse World honestly seems like a decent system to do OSR-style shenanigans

It's called Dungeon World, and it's shit.

It's fun and it adds just a bit more danger and uncertainty to both sides without being totally unbalancing. I think there's very much something to be said about simulating the random lucky shot.

I'm already doing that with the d8.

>if you cut out the faggotry.

Dungeon World is a trash version of Apocalypse World.

>It's shit.
AW is not DW. DW is shit.

Torchbearer isn't even an RPG. It's basically a boardgame sans board.

So I was going to work on some new material today but I realized I had this half finished one from like months ago and I decided to finish it up.

Magic War-Torn city encounters. To whoever requested it; sorry for the long delay.

It depends on your tolerance for narrative hijinks but I think it works pretty well if you emphasize that kind of play.

The optimal strategy for an AW derived game is to describe your PC acting in such a way that they would plausibly attain their goal, but that doesn't trigger a Move (and cause you to roll dice, which can cause you to fail), because then the GM will just give you the thing you want in all likelihood. So in a way those games emphasize player knowledge of real life things, creativity, and persuasion skills (which can make a nice break from testing systems knowledge so much). For example, you don't have a lot of real life knowledge of climbing, but you theorize using a rope to climb a cliff is better than not using one, so now when you roll Defy Danger the sorts of consequences that the GM is logically allowed to inflict on you if you fail are dramatically less bad for you because the rope would prevent you from plummeting to your death. Then if you had a lot of experience with mountaineering and free climbing it's possible you could use that knowledge to specifically describe a procedure that would entail so little risk the GM and the other players decide you're not even doing anything risky anymore and you don't have to roll at all and just succeed. By emphasizing the social rather than the systemic aspect I think it is sort of like Mafia or Werewolf is to board games.

That procedure is very similar to the OSR method of "say something smart your PC does and the GM interprets it based on how likely it seems to succeed" in most ways that matter I think. Two big sticking points for some people is that AW-derived games have very strong suggestions for how you should best be interpreting player actions in terms of their success/failure/consequences via the GM Move system, and that some of the game mechanics are heavily abstracted (like ammo or gear). I don't mind the former and chopping off the latter is easy enough, so I think it works ok.

>Buying his time for a more respectable
position
You buy time from things, you bide time for things.
Biding time is waiting. Buying time is delaying.

Unless I'm badly misreading the rest of the entry, Cat-scartach demon is trying to /become/ significant rather than trying to avoid it.

>faggotry

The main game I run is a mashup of apocalypse world and b/x. I push moves pretty hard, use 1HD:2harm as a rough measure, do stuff with more procedural generation and make lists with tables so I'm not always asking players everything, I cut out Hx and use a bastardized ask/answer xp system, probably a bunch of other hackjob stuff. Seems to work fine.

The dark ages game they were going to make but fucked up and made AW 2nd ed has a lot of cool stuff going on to loot. Beyond The Wall is obviously taking direct cues from AW. Dungeon world is mostly shit, I like how they do adventuring equipment and other parts of inventory though. It also lead to Perilous Wilds/Freebooters on the Frontier, both of which have excellent material for pbta and osr. World of Dungeons is pretty neat as well. PbtA also lead to The Quiet Year and The Deep Forest, both of which are amazing content and world generators. The Deep Forest especially for D&D.

I come to /osr/ for tables, maps, links to books and material to steal.

eeee.... I don't like badwrongfuning people, but that's really far from how anyone I have played, would play, or would want to play a pbta game and seems like an odd reading. If you're concerned with optimization strategies for player success you're focusing on the wrong things. Also the mc can make failing a roll as dangerous as the circumstances require, the question is not 'how can I make this seemingly benign so I don't have to roll?' its 'how can this be interesting, and if its not, don't roll'. If the mc has notes or ideas regarding other events that can interfere with the group in question climbing a cliff and they can make it interesting, they can inflict. Its not about trying to immobilize your mc's imagination by providing so much seemingly authoritative information that they can't fuck with you, its about making compelling events by elaborating on each other's ideas.

>do stuff with more procedural generation and make lists with tables so I'm not always asking players everything

That bit functions better as advice than a game rule anyway. It makes exploration-based gameplay almost impossible because players are making shit up instead of discovering it.

I'm not sure I see much of a difference between making shit up and discovering it. I'm not too worried about simulating pioneering free agency though, the collaborative aspects are more interesting to us. When hex crawling I roll on tables as appropriate, and ask players for more input and ideas.

It's obviously not the INTENDED way to play, I won't dispute that. But in spite of the advice to play the game as a hippie story circle this way works just fine and me and a dozen other people found it fun for like 70 or 80 sessions I think.

It really depends on which principles you emphasize. For example, if you emphasize "ask questions, use the answers" to a high degree then you basically wind up with GMless storygaming. Similarly, if you emphasize "make AW seem real" and "say what honesty demands" then you naturally arrive at the fiction-manipulation gameplay among challenge-oriented players who want to describe and interact with the scenario so that what the truth demands is them succeeding.

What an incredibly specific grievance. I have fixed it now though, for future installments.

If you don't mind the distinction more power to you, but to me it's like the difference between reading a story (discovering) and writing a story (making shit up). Like I want to learn what's in the chest I just opened not create it. If I wanted to put contents in chests I'd be the GM you know?

It seemed like an honest mistake, rather than a typo.
>grievance
I wasn't thinking badly of you, I was thinking less of you.

My correction was with pure intentions!

I'm not really sure how making the game about elaboration on risk management isn't a story circle jerk? Like, ymmv so go for it, and we're getting into very different group dynamics at this point. The dozen or so people thing is neat, did you have a decent amount of player turnover and/or big games?

I get that. When I want to read a story I read a story, when I'm hanging out telling stories with my friends I'm interested in what we can come up with together. Its one of rpg's greatest appeals to me, that you can do live collaborative story-telling with rng and prompts.

Sorry about both of those posts, I think I came off more like a jerk than I wanted to. Its actually interesting to learn about what things in playing games people like.

>AW is not DW. DW is shit.

And that's why I said Dungeon World and not Apocalypse World.

AW isn't faggoty if it dovetails with the narrative heavy, cinematic style that one might be looking for in a game. There are several PbtA games based off it like Monster of the Week that are great because they know the specific tone of game that the system is tailored for. Dungeon World fails both as an oldschool dungeoncrawler and a newschool narrative storygame.

>Sorry about both of those posts, I think I came off more like a jerk than I wanted to. Its actually interesting to learn about what things in playing games people like.

Not a problem. What people find fun is highly idiosyncratic, often to the point of wondering how anyone could find one of their pastimes enjoyable at all. Most people I know would think painting miniature plastic army men is incomprehensible unless you're an action figure manufacturer.

> I'm not really sure how making the game about elaboration on risk management isn't a story circle jerk?

What do you mean by "story circle jerk"? I'm not sure what you consider to be one so I'm not sure I can explain further.

> The dozen or so people thing is neat, did you have a decent amount of player turnover and/or big games?

It was a shot at a West Marches-y thing, but it was hard to advertise for something that emulated modern D&D's priorities (realism, discovery, challenge) using the AW engine, which for good reason tends to attract more storygamer types. Typically about 1 in 8 applicants ended up playing long term, 1 in 8 played a couple times, I threw out the applications of 4 in 8 because they were bad, and 2 in 8 decided against playing for whatever reason despite a good application.

> learning means not being active

I agree with your priorities in terms of player agency, but I don't think these two are mutually exclusive. For example, you can display a lot of that sort of thing in a mystery oriented game, but it kind of blows apart the whole idea of solving a mystery if the players get to write it as you go.

I should clarify, by "players writing the mystery as they go" I mean the parts of the mystery that traditionally if you knew them you would have the solution to the mystery and it would stop being interesting except in a dramatic irony sense.

I'm not sure what you meant by the intentions of the game being a hippy circle jerk? Or I think I do, in that its a dialogue call response kind of way? I think its probably only going to be a preference as to what sort of story masturbating we prefer really. I find the idea of everyone sitting around trying to elaborate on rock climbing so as to avoid rolling dice to be a really unintuitive way to have fun and it was confused by what constituted a circle jerk I think. How did that end up working in practice? How much/what sort of descriptions of things did people come up, or what made them more compelling than others? Did rolls come up much? It sounds neat, just very different than how our group plays. I think it makes sense also given a rotating cycle of players, as there's less regular contact and time to build rapport for rffing on each other's ideas.

That does seem tricky to filter for. It almost sounds like you used the moves in an osr mentality of rolling dice is a failure state, as a way to incentivize free-form in a weird way.

Yeah, mystery games as how they relate to 'finding' or discovering is a neat space. I haven't had a chance to play many investigation oriented games though. CoC didn't really do it for me, but I hear mixed things on Gumshoe and have only read the rules. I think some of the revealing of the mystery is key in how it appears and feels to be discovery and gming that would be a delicate matter.

I get what you mean. I think mysteries would be difficult with my group given how much we collude and try to link things up thematically. They'd be more like police procedurals/noirs where everyone knows the form and the acts, we're just sorting out how the formula comes together this time.

>I'm not sure what you meant by the intentions of the game being a hippy circle jerk?

Oh, I was just exaggerating the idea that the GM and players' roles strongly overlap and that the game frowns upon "winning" except insofar as "winning" is collaboratively 'writing' a good story with some mildly asymmetric authorship roles.

I meant to draw the distinction between being diagetically clever (doing smart things on behalf of your character and finding fun in their success) vs. being a clever author (doing smart things on behalf of what an audience would find entertaining, even if it means bad things for your character).

> I find the idea of everyone sitting around trying to elaborate on rock climbing so as to avoid rolling dice to be a really unintuitive way to have fun

Rock-climbing is just one example to be fair. In the general case it's the same kind of fun you can have when you consider "how do we beat these orcs using only a bag of marbles" or "how can I use my spear most to my advantage in this combat," only instead of thinking in terms of the rules for marbles or spears you are thinking about how they would best be employed in real life (or the nearest equivalent, for stuff like magic), or at least thinking up an idea that will convince the other players of your success.

> How did that end up working in practice?

It taught me one thing that I still use, at least, which is that you should make the default consequences explicit, and then state how those consequences are modified by players' ideas so they can make informed choices. So, like, if a player wants to climb a cliff you could say "well you could do it free hand but you'd risk falling to your death," and then when they say they'd use a rope to help you could say "OK well now you might hurt yourself but you won't fall to your death." It's a great way to feed players info so they can make informed choices without having to make a wild guess about what your ruling will be. (1/2)

I think you could use Apocalypse World to tell a story that has similar aspects to an OSR game, but Apocalypse World is driven, as written, by Player + Player interactions, not Player + World. It's also highly non-simulationist.

I do like it though, and other story games like Fate, etc. They wouldn't be my first choice for an OSR game by a mile.

Wait... you minmaxed Apocalypse World to avoid losing?

Why?

Wait, are you Skerples? The desu threw me off.
You would be new enough to not know the word filters.

(2/2)
> How much/what sort of descriptions of things did people come up, or what made them more compelling than others?

A very common variety of this was finding ways to just deal damage in combat without having to expose yourself to danger. Stuff like luring monsters into an ambush and dropping things on top of them, or sneaking up on them while they're asleep, abusing the range of your spear or so on. Commonly there was a sort of hierarchy where you'd get things that relied on character skill like "I attack" (usually triggered a Move, not advantageous) versus somewhat obvious but specific descriptions like "I stay at range to use my spear" (usually triggered a Move, but made consequences for failure less severe) versus no-roll ideas (e.g. specific investigative actions like looking under a couch instead of doing the "tell me what's cool in this room" Move).

It's really not remarkably different in practice than all the "OSR players being clever" stories you've probably heard, except I think it supports it a little better in some ways b/c of the GM Move and Move trigger gameplay loop whereas b/x is just like "you got it GM go make some rulings about stuff that isn't in the rules I believe in you."

> Did rolls come up much?

Most games are mostly made of stuff you don't roll for I think, but that's just how TTRPGs work. I'd say we rolled about as many dice as any other game that doesn't roll wargame tier dice buckets. Most of the player skill came in minimizing consequences for rolls instead of circumventing them entirely b/c that's easier.

> It almost sounds like you used the moves in an osr mentality of rolling dice is a failure state, as a way to incentivize free-form in a weird way.

That's exactly it, really.

> I get what you mean. I think mysteries would be difficult with my group

Cool, yeah, that's what I was getting at re: the difference.

Or old and lazy enough to forget about them.

>suggesting oldfaggotry
You fool no one.

You also haven't posted your paper:

I get it. Interesting. I think finding ways to encourage detail rich descriptions is worth thinking about. Not how I'd even think to do so, but it also sounds like you were running a very different game.

Explicit consequences are key for sure. I think one of the pitfalls of giving so much potential authorship to players can be a lack of distinction between characters and players, and losing sight of keeping their narration/ideas/responses from becoming too outlandish.

I tend to run fronts pretty aggressively at the players so they have a bit more world to be against together.

I think he's onto something with the optimization. Or its at least worth thinking about.

I can't make my fucking PCs leave this fucking castle alone. They've spent 130k gold on it so far and they keep trying to turn DCC into ACKS and won't even play ACKS. I actually reduced the entire thing to ruins with a massive giant attack and they were like "Oh man this must have something really valuable in the catacombs if a giant army wanted it." And rebuilt it. Dragons blow up towers and they have them rebuilt. They've been doing this so long they're on their third set of PCs, with around 19 level 10 pcs that just sort of wander the fuck around being walking demigods. I have this entire world built and all they want to do is hang out in this castle and "investigate the mysteries." I made the fucking mistake of having one of them, after 10 sessions of digging into the god damn ground, actually find a hidden chamber with a shitty +1 sword and now they've got armies of craftsmen in there, tunneling, holing out and making a small subterranean city. Had them bump into a dwarven thaig or whatever and get invaded, ruining all of their progress. Fuck it, we got lots of gold let's build it all again but this time with more shit. I can't fucking handle this anymore. My players. Will not. Leave. This castle.

Don't respond to this, it was already posted last thread. There's no reason to dozens of posts. This general already moves too fast.

Yeah, there we go. I tend to use moves as prompts for activity, so when/if someone says 'I attack' I'd ask 'how?' and they'd give me detail and we figure out if it actually needs a roll or triggers anything. After a while everyone just gives details automatically, and if the details are significantly in the player's favour I probably don't ask for a move. I think we're talking about a similar enough thing, we just think about it really differently. Brains are weird.

>b/x is just like you got it GM go make some rulings about stuff that isn't in the rules I believe in you
Charmingly accurate.

that was cool, thanks.

That's going in the next OP.

>You fool no one.
Don't make me go through the archives again, sonny boy...

>You also haven't posted your paper:
Now that guy, that guy is not me. I've been having a nap for the past 4 hours. Anyway, my eras are the breakdown of the Roman Republic, the 100 Years War, and some scattered bits around the Thirty Years War.

Anons what are some things I can do to give my fighter PCs more customization beyond Weapon spec and mastery in 2e D&D?

>in 2e
You picked 2e, and you need to ask? Kits.

>I think he's onto something with the optimization. Or its at least worth thinking about.

It's definitely worth thinking about. But it's like looking at a guy who made a beautiful secret prison workshop to produce bone china. Impressive, in a way. Worth examining and cracking down on. But, as you cart the miniature furnaces away and carefully bag the tiny, tiny pots of glaze, you have to ask "why". Why not meth?

Don't you fucking dare.

Yes. And my DM doesn't allow kits at the table so that's out atm.

He allows Skills and Powers, Combat and Tactics, and things of that nature, but as far as I can tell it still only gives Fighters flat bonuses to hit better and the like and Im looking for more to do than charge forward and attack.

...

Are there any weapons besides spears that do special things?
Maybe use one of those. Or fluff your dude in an odd way.
Or talk to your referee out of game, and ask him for help.

>Don't you fucking dare.
Race you!

>Race you!

Mostly we have to crack down on how much you suck your own dick in public and think its clever.

Mostly My DM is a great person, but he's constantly on a kick to try and make the game his own from the ground up. right now he uses 2e rules as a base line to build characters and lets players go from there, he's changed the way wizards work, the way clerics work, and the way rogues work to make them have their own unique thing that other classes just cant do, but fighters still don't have a thing, and the other person helping him build this damn thing besides myself doesn't think that warriors deserve any special thing to do besides swing their weapon, since they have the most hit points the highest saves, and they can blat the other classes without anything else....which Is mostly just the other person's bias, but I'm trying to come up with something for the fighters to have besides just swinging away all the time. and Im looking for any sort of help I can find.

And how exactly do you intend to do that? Rudeness? Or posting OC until I there's no room for my stuff in the threads due to an avalanche of much higher quality content?

Please don't do that. It's my one weakness.

Also, I still find minmaxing Apoc World confusing. Brilliant, well thought out, and apparently masterfully executed, but confusing.

Not to defend Skerples, but I reckon you would have hated Diogenes.

And if you ask him to, he'll brew something for fighters.

>Why?
Lots of reasons. For one, I enjoy that sort of thing. For two, I think the game supports it surprisingly well and somewhat uniquely if you read the principles a certain way (favoring fiction-first and disfavoring player-as-author).

Knowing and applying the rules in AW doesn't really give you any kind of advantage when it comes to "winning," but being able to persuade the other players that you deserve to win by giving effective descriptions is highly incentivized. This makes the skills being tested in AW more like Diplomacy or The Resistance (political/social deduction games) instead of traditional board games where knowing and applying the rules is what matters most.

Considering RPGs aren't really about winners and losers but that I still think it's fun to solve problems in an RPG context, I think it makes a unique sort of sense that you are solving problems via a social dynamic instead of through systems mastery.

(OSR games usually also solve problems via the same social dynamic that relies on convincing the GM your idea is clever instead of rolling dice at a problem, but they have a lot fewer guidelines for how to make that fun and fair than AW does.)

Thirdly, and this is incidental, I needed a system that could provide challenge, discovery, and simulation gameplay but that was as rules light as possible for running West Marches (because prep is a pain but you have to do it given the campaign archetype). Basically my choices came down to "try this unusual way of playing AW-like games or use labyrinth lord" and I decided to try something new. It was pretty fun but a lot of the advice on how the game is supposed to work is phrased as rules so it was hard to cut wheat from chaff initially when it came to, like, players design the world for you kind of stuff.

This sounds like more of a problem to workshop with your DM in a sit-down setting. Without the full context, changed rules, GM style, campaign type, existinc PCs, etc. it's tricky to make suggestions. Now you could post all the changes he made... but that would take ages and wouldn't get you much help anyway.

I made fighters "unique" in 2 ways:
1. They get Camp Followers and have early access to the whole hireling economy
2. They are Best at Fighting. Wizards get burst damage, sure, but Fighters are very, very, very good at hitting stuff until it dies.

Thanks for the background. That's sensible and very thorough.

To explain a bit further. Wizards(Arcane Spellcasters) operate on a mana point system which I think he grabbed from spells and magic, and can create their own custom spells from a chart that the DM has created (which I don't have access to atm or I'd post for further explanation)

Conduits (Divine or Other Source Spellcasters) cast spells with Favor Points and gain bonus spells from their provider and may spend favor points to cast spells beyond their current level.

Rogues gain % dice scores which besides gaining rogue scores, they can place a % score onto any non weapon proficiency they have to gain a % chance of success before rolling on the skill itself.

And warriors have....Nothing but their Arm, armor, health, and how many times they can swing their weapon currently.

skerpls is about as much a cynic as your third asshole

You're also weak to criticism. If you're going to high horse about oc, get some new gifs.

Sorry I missed this but it's relevant to my point -
>It's also highly non-simulationist.

It sort of is and it sort of isn't. It has lots of non-diagetic highly abstracted bullshit in it that is clearly constructed to serve narrative convenience, but the game is extremely insistent on putting the fiction first and only ever "saying what honesty demands" (e.g. only doing things that make sense).

For example, in spite of Dungeon World being a kludgey hack of a game I think I can run the most realistic combat this side of Riddle of Steel or GURPS using it precisely because I'm a member of a HEMA club and I can use all that crap I know about real sword fighting to influence how the game proceeds. Knowing melee combat minutiae lets me assign highly realistic consequences to various combat ideas, and that's encouraged and supported by the rules to a very large extent.

The game is at its least simulationist, I think, when you don't have anyone at the table who really knows about the thing going on in the current scene. Then things move along at the behest of narrative convenience. But when you have an expert on that thing it actually becomes quite satisfying from a simulation perspective (bar one or two annoyances).

>If you're going to high horse about oc, get some new gifs.
Now that's remarkably petty.

>skerpls is about as much a cynic as your third asshole
Eeeh... I'd go check out the non-OSR "Stories, Hard Science Fiction, and Moloch" post. Might be worth a read.

'Course, it's mostly autofellatio, so your mileage may vary.

I can see that. What I meant is that the game has "starving to death" occur as a matter of narrative, not as a matter of running out of food, if that makes sense. It's not a criticism.

>, but the game is extremely insistent on putting the fiction first and only ever "saying what honesty demands" (e.g. only doing things that make sense).
And if you do that, almost any system works for your game of choice. It's a good guideline in general.

Should spell books look like Illuminated Manuscripts?

Here's my explanation user

Hell no. Pages are written in ear wax and scorch marks, and maybe have a few post-it notes.

>I think one of the pitfalls of giving so much potential authorship to players can be a lack of distinction between characters and players
I agree for sure. I've come to embrace the idea that you shouldn't put somebody in charge of their own opposition because the conflict of interest is usually too hard to resist. Like, sometimes it's great, but often I find it kind of sucks because they won't punch themselves hard enough to be interesting.

> I think we're talking about a similar enough thing, we just think about it really differently.
Yeah, your procedure and mine sound basically the same, it's just that in my case I find a lot of enjoyment in pursuing making the details significantly in my favor (or having players that try to do the same).

I'm not curmudgeonly about the kinds of consequences I use when players roll 6-s either - if three or four things are similarly likely to happen I'll always go for the one that makes for the most entertainment even if it seems very marginally less likely. Probably we agree about that I would guess.

> What I meant is that the game has "starving to death" occur as a matter of narrative, not as a matter of running out of food, if that makes sense.
Would you explain it a bit more? I think I see what you're getting at but I don't want to put words in your mouth.

> And if you do that, almost any system works for your game of choice.
I can't really phrase my response here very well, but one thing to think about is that the game usually isn't "wrong" in the sense of being unknowingly unrealistic (unlike some games that pretend to simulate, like D&D 3.5) so you don't need to rip out a bunch of rules, while simultaneously it embeds simulation in its core gameplay loop to offer more guidance than just "go make up a story that makes sense I'll wait here." I dunno if that makes sense, but anyway I think the game cares more about realism than it appears.

O shit I forgot to quote this guy. Last two quotes are you.

>Would you explain it a bit more? I think I see what you're getting at but I don't want to put words in your mouth.

No problem.

Apoc. World says "You need food. If you don't get food, you die, because that's how the real world works. Sometimes, the world is fucked, and you run out of food, and here are rules for the world being fucked up."

Some OSR games go "You have 10 rations and you eat 2 rations per day. If you have no rations, you lose 2 HP per day until you die." or something like that.

Apoc World assumes you and your players know about starving to death and how that works. If a player brings in an article from a journal that states that they can live for an extra few days by eating the bark of the sycamore tree, then that gets added to the game's fiction. Rather than building a system to simulate reality, Apoc World relies on reality to provide details to the story. It's a handy method, desu. Works for all games though once you get the hang of it.

Whereas simulationist games try to emulate reality using mechanics. You could be a chemosynthetic alien from the planet Gorblax and still understand the core idea of "humans need food or they die" from the simplified starvation rules for OSR games I listed. Does that make it good? Eh. It makes it quick. I don't need to give two shits about the reality of the situation - someone else did the legwork for me.

>I think the game cares more about realism than it appears.
It does have very good tools to drive non-narrative storyelling, that's for sure. Stories that break from narrative tropes are really, really tricky, but Apoc World, despite character generation being tropey as hell in the core game, is,at its core, a great game for realism. Tricky as hell to run though.

For most hyper-realistic games these days, I'd just use Fate, and roll dice about once a session.

FUCK YOU YOU SUBHUMAN IF I HAD PLAYERS WHO LIKED A DUNGEON HALF AS MUCH AS THEY DID REEEEEEE

Don't take the bait, user.

That's also going in the next OP.