OSR General - Nobody wants to make the thread edition

I don't know if anyone gives a shit, but I basically did a 180 on my opinions of the OSR.

geekspeaker.com/youre-probably-playing-dd-wrong-13/

Someone suggested a couple of threads back changing CON to modify the min/max roll on a HD rather than a flat bonus/penalty.

I was thinking of doing that, but wizardswould have d6, thieves/clerics get d8, fighters d10.

Would average out to something like 40hp at lvl 10. Fighters rolling max every level would have a cool 100hp

You could always slow spell progressions and so forth, making each level a smaller deal overall. I do agree that 20th level in regular D&D tends to be a bit absurd.

So I want to make an OSR game but I want to run some ideas by you all:
>Mana points, not vancian casting
>Use BECMI's weapon mastery and AD&D's proficiency systems
>5e's Advantage/Disadvantage system
>Ascending AC
>4 base classes but Specializations attained at level 5 for humans, demi-humans have three classes (a "pure" class similar to what a human can choose and two classes that are basically hybrid classes)
>Levels go up to 30, Immortality optional rules for higher play

Thoughts?

>Mana points, not vancian casting
Good luck is all I can say to that, people including Gygax have tried and failed for 45 years.

>Use BECMI's weapon mastery and AD&D's proficiency systems
Stick to just one. I'd go with BECMI mastery, but that needs revising as well -- you can't have anything focus on specific weapon types since in practice that just restricts the fighters' and the referee's options.

>5e's Advantage/Disadvantage system
Good plan (for those who like it).

>Ascending AC
Good plan, pretty much a shoe-in.

>4 base classes but Specializations attained at level 5 for humans, demi-humans have three classes (a "pure" class similar to what a human can choose and two classes that are basically hybrid classes)
Bad plan. Too many classes.

>Levels go up to 30, Immortality optional rules for higher play
Bad plan. If anything cap out normal levels at Expert limits, then have the immortality option follow on that. If you do both you'll just overstretch the regular levels AND keep the Immortal element entirely out of players' reach in practice.

>and failed
How?

What are you making at the moment /tg? I'm working on a little dungeon involving constructs made out of wool for my new players

This is just my take on things, and you're likely to get very different responses from different people.

>Mana points, not vancian casting
I'm not a fan of mana points. It's really hard to balance being able to freely cast whatever spell, and keeping track of a bunch of points is annoying. I agree that vancian casting isn't perfect, but I think a better solution is to try to patch it up rather than ditch it. But then I'm not sure what exactly your reason is for going with something different.

>Use BECMI's weapon mastery and AD&D's proficiency systems
I've never been a fan of proficiencies. They needlessly junk up the game and limit people's options. Some form of specialization / mastery is okay for me, mostly as a way that somebody can legitimize his character always using a particular type of weapon, even when he finds a magic weapon of a different type that would otherwise give him a bigger bonus. But I like it as one of a number of different options you can choose from, so that you don't end up limiting everybody's weapons, even when that isn't specifically what they want to do.

>5e's Advantage/Disadvantage system
I've long been a fan of "better of two" or "worse of two", though it does rather limit your options to only have one big step in either direction if you don't include the possibility of smaller situation modifiers of some sort.

>4 base classes but Specializations attained at level 5 for humans, demi-humans have three classes (a "pure" class similar to what a human can choose and two classes that are basically hybrid classes)
Can't really comment without seeing the mechanics, but I'm not opposed to it in theory.

>Levels go up to 30, Immortality optional rules for higher play
That's about 20 levels higher than I usually want to go, but your mileage may vary.

Oh, I forgot:
>Ascending AC
Sure. A lot of retroclones use it, and it is more intuitive.

The balance never works quite right, and normally not even close to right -- especially without adding a bunch of fiddly rules and limitations on top. One of the common fail states is the wizard just optimizing damage/point or DPS/point and downconverting himself to a laser gun without considering whether it's really a tactical advantage.

Personally if I wanted out of Vancian I'd move to some form of check based system, despite that effectively adding a magic skill to the game. The one downside of this is that to be balanced with the Vancian first level caster with his single spell, the check caster has to be likely to fail any given spellcasting roll and thus, likely to fail to cast at the very moment he most needed it. It's a serious enough flaw to kill it, for me, but then I never saw anything much wrong with Vancian casting anyway except that it seems to rub some people the wrong way as somehow unrealistic(!).

Check casting does give you a lot of room for tacking on extensions easily, though, like letting ritual castings lower the casting difficulty of certain classes of spell ("ritual fireball" is just stupid); ditto material components; improvised casting; and so on. Mana points, on the other hand, just gives you plenty of room for mathspergs to crash your magic system with no survivors.

i thought DCC did a good job or morphing Vancian Magic into something more interesting.

And yet one of the most common criticisms of DCC both here and elsewhere is the fiddle level of DCC magic.

Seriously, Vancian casting's one of those Churchillian-democracy things.

Looking for feedback on my nearly complete system please.

Also gotta ask; Anyone look at this and feel interested for a game? I might be recruiting~

It's one thing to swing a sword at somebody and miss, because at least you feel like you're doing something there. You can describe the strike, and how the guy bats it out of the way with his shield before lunging forward to deliver his own blow. There's action involved--cinematics.

But when you try to cast and spell and fail? There's really nothing interesting about that. It's pretty much like your turn just got skipped, and that sucks. So I'm no fan of spell checks. (Graduated levels of success I'm okay with though. If you want to have a lesser effect if you fail a check or if your enemy makes one out of two saving throws or something, I could be down with that. You just have to make sure spells don't become a complicated mess).

>But when you try to cast and spell and fail? There's really nothing interesting about that.
Nah, you can make that interesting; spell failure chances, for instance -- you try to fram at the jim jam but get fripped in the krotz instead.

A worse problem is that *unless* you penalize or limit it somehow you're encouraging the caster to try to use magic as much as possible.

This is basically what OD&D did.

I've been experimenting with hacking it together with chainmail's combat. The results have been really interesting.

Any Original and Advanced DnD scholars around? I forget how things went.

Advanced DnD was essentially Gygax doing his best to put all the Little Brown Books into a decently understandable 3 book set, right? I hear that Holmes Basic was also a kind of update to the ODnD rules, meanwhile Moldvay and Mentzer copies of Basic were more of a rewrite.

Are the only real differences between Moldvay and Mentzer sets formatting and art?

My understanding is that OD&D and AD&D play very similarly after you start adding all of the Dragon material nad expansions in.

AD&D was an attempt to put all that information in one place and make it all more or less compatible. There was also at this point a move towards the idea of "Standardized play" with an eye towards allowing people to move from table to table without issue. This was about the time D&D "tournaments" and things became popular.

Holmes basic was not intended to be a stand-alone game. It was explicitly a product meant to up-sell you to AD&D.. or at the very least, serve as a simplified starter-kit for AD&D.

It took off well enough, though, that Moldvay Basic became a thing a few years later. This was when the game legitimately splits in half. Moldvay changes a lot more and is a complete stand-alone system.

Mentzer comes along later with BECMI as a new edition. I can't recall why they changed it, but I figure some kind of royalties were involved somewhere (it seems to be a theme with TSR employees). BECMI expands the range of stuff in the game and extends the character levels from 1-14 to 1-36. I think it introduces some variant classes as well, adds in some new high-level options and some other stuff.

The Mentzer and Moldvay are very similar, but not strictly compatible. Mentzer makes a bunch of small changes, though one of the more annoying ones is that some class features have been stretched to fill the 36 levels. A level 10 Moldvay thief has better percentile skills than a level 20 Mentzer thief, if I recall.

Don't forget, Basic, BX, BECMI etc were also kept around so Arneson would not reclaim the rights on it as per an out-of-court agreement.

How do you do a DnD "tournament"? Survive an OSR dungeon faster than everyone else?

Also, thanks for the recap.

I really like your saving throw system

>How do you do a DnD "tournament"? Survive
Haha, no. The classic way the tournament dungeons were built is, you play until you're (most likely) dead or the time for your playing slot runs out, then the DM sums up the value of the treasure you got and that's your score.

This is among the reasons that Tomb of Horrors is such a shitfest death trap (although there were also other reasons, specifically Gary wanting to challenge Rob Kuntz (it failed, according to legend Rob soloed the module and cleared it out)). You're not supposed to live, just get as far in as possible.

You have multiple tables all running the same module (or sections of a module). Everything you do to complete a task (clear out a room, defeat a puzzle, overcome an obstacle) is worth points, so you want to be smart and complete as many challenges as possible without dying to accrue as many points as possible. At the end of the time limit, the referees add up the points and whichever table has the most (and are still "alive") wins.

Almost all of this is good, but:
>Holmes Basic was not intended to be a stand-alone game. It was explicitly a product meant to up-sell you to AD&D... or at the very least, serve as a simplified starter-kit for AD&D.
Not exactly. It was written as an introductory set for *OD&D*, which was and still is a notorious pedagogical disaster zone. AD&D was conceived of in the run-up to publication, and Gary went through Holmes Basic quite late in the process and edited it notably imperfectly to refer to AD&D instead, since that's where they were putting their chips at the time.

Oh, and the difference between Moldvay and Mentzer appears to have just been A) that they made a fuckload of money and could afford artists like Elmore, so they revamped the box set that was their face toward the new consumers, and B) the consumers were increasingly kids and not college/middle-aged wargamers, so they wanted a Basic set that could really teach a kid to play who didn't know any D&D players himself. (Middle-aged players now tend to hate the disposition of Mentzer Basic, but it appears to have done the job it was built for, because TSR sold literal millions of those bastards. Best selling RPG product of all time, IIRC.)

What's the most underrated module you've come across? I wanna see something new.

Sounds like the DMs have a lot of power over who gets what treasure and how much.

At many of these tournaments Rob and Gary were literally the entire pool of referees. So at least everybody got dealt the same fair type of arbitrary judgment.

Underrated? Most people seem to not be too keen on X6 "Quagmire!"

Hey guys im going to be running The God That Crawls because it seems like something different. Rather than convert it to a newer/more mainstream system I was just going to use LotFP, but I have zero experience with old-school/retro-clone systems. I have two questions.

1. Should I just use LotFP or is there something better that will be simple and easy enough for my players and me to pick up and run?

2. Are there any changes I should make to the adventure itself? Id like to run it as close to by the book as possible but I will be taking out the whole "leave the character sheet in a envelope" thing since its a one-off.

1. Yeah, just use LotFP, it's a nice, tight, clean system that the module's already built for.

2. Nah, just run it as is, and you should be fine.

Sounds good, what are the party's chances of survival? They are fairly competent on most fronts, but they have never been the best at managing inventory or time.

TGTC is a pretty nasty one. If they keep a cool head they'll probably be okay, but if they panic I'd say they're monster food. Time management will likely be the death of them, because once they're down there, the thing starts hunting them.

Sounds great then. I like watching PCs die, but I don't like killing them off in normal campaigns. That's why I run one-off adventures like this. My players know I don't hold back on these and so when they succeed they feel great, when they fail I get a sadistic kick out of it.

The hook I have set up is that a minor noble in England discovers information about the Catholics and the caverns filled with relics. When he tries to petition his lords to take the place he is always dismissed or given bullshit reasons as to why they can't do it. He has grown fed up with being told no and sends one of his knights on a secret mission to retrieve what he can without harming the Catholics.

I'm even going to give the knight a suit of plate armor and everyone else extra gold to buy equipment because I think its funny.

...

One thing that The God That Crawls desperately wants to teach the GM is that wandering monsters are important, so the absolutely most important thing about the modules I'd say is to have a good grasp on the simplified tracking mechanics. The complex one is pretty useless unless you can really grasp exactly how the monster would move when the players do.

Chiming in on this.
I'm handling it with a check, but also added the option of forced casting which makes you forget the spell , but it successfully goes off. Find it to balance it out quite a bit.

Hey guys:
Have any of you taken a look at this? I just stumbled across it like 30 minutes ago.

I understand it has newschool gamey mechanics, but is supposed to be compatible with OSR creatures and adventures.

Has anybody here tried it out/looked at it?

What did you think?

I like wandering monsters anyway, i just hand place them instead of rolling. Ive never been a big fan of randomness on the part of the Gm.

I own the 1980 version of the game. It's quite fun and can be seen as a board game intro to D&D. Some simple mechanics and archetypal features are in there and you'll recognize lots of the monsters.

Does anyone have the White Star pdf? There's some stuff in the trove, but not the actual rules.

>I don't remember, does Donjon handle mapping challenges? Diagonal passages, door labyrinths, teleporter hallways, sloping passages, shifting walls, one-way doors etc.

Like I said in the old thread, "most" of the hard bits of inspiration are already done for you on donjon. Anything you don't like, you can add, subtract, or re-map as you please.

>Because there's a lot more to good dungeon map design than just having a bunch of interconnected rooms and hallways.

Thanks for the preachy lecture, but I was trying to do user a favor to save them some time.

>You might want nonlinearity with meaningful choices and entire chunks hidden behind secret doors, for instance

Which are included as toggle options in donjon. Too bad you felt the need to pre-judge it before actually exploring the generator.

Dunno if you're the same guy that asked about God That Crawls, but the likelihood of the monster appearing is raised through player action, like making noises. Dunno how you could have that be fixed rather than random.

>Mana points, not vancian casting

Sure, no problem. However, you're going to have to find a reliable mana system that the player's can't exploit. This is one of the reasons why 1st Edition Shadowrun was broken.

>Use BECMI's weapon mastery and AD&D's proficiency systems

Nice!

>5e's Advantage/Disadvantage system

Never heard of it. lol.

>Ascending AC

NO problem!

>4 base classes but Specializations attained at level 5 for humans, demi-humans have three classes (a "pure" class similar to what a human can choose and two classes that are basically hybrid classes)

Not criticizing, but what's your reasoning behind this?

>Levels go up to 30, Immortality optional rules for higher play

Tim Kask will laugh at you, but okay.

I am. I just pay attention to what players are doing and when I feel like they need a kick or just something to surprise them I have a monster wander in.

So like if they are spending a lot of time fiddling around in a room I might just say that a curious monster (maybe a few bored goblins thinking there is something to eat) walks in so that the party can fight it off and be reminded that they are not alone.

If they are making an absurd amount of noise or are in a particularly dangerous place then I throw in something bigger that poses a serious threat.

It just give me more power to determine what is happening in the world rather than rolling on a chart and helps smooth out gameplay instead of having a string of too easy or difficult fights.

If you can find them, there are old modules with tournament rules in the back, like A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade. They will specify the goals the PCs are supposed to reach. I played an RPGA tournament back in 1989. I was a gnome fighter and got bonus points for making the best of it.

Some of these are just flat-out not fun. I remember one where you wake up on an island a-la "Naked and Afraid," and you have to survive your way through the module starting with absolutely nothing.

That pic is gold.

Castle Amber. No one seems to mention it, but my players loved it. The dragon encounter is so unexpected that I'm not spoiling anything.

So the richest corpse wins?

I've sort of considered a hybrid of check casting and The Black Hack's usage die for spell slots, myself. When you cast a spell it will still go off if the check is failed but you lose a spell slot in the process.

Wait, people in the last thread complained that there is no search function in mega. There is. On the left hand side, just above the folder list, the red bar, there you can enter a search string.
Alternatively the TroveGuy could make a file list with megals ( megatools.megous.com/man/megals.html ) I tried to do it with the remote filesystem option, but I can't seem to get it work.

That sounds like a fine and organic way to do it. I'd beware however the risk of becomming to formulaic.

Yea, I just play it by feel. No one ever says anything about it so i figure that means Im doing it right.

Okay, nvm. I imported the trove to my account and made a list. And then put it into a PDF so I could post it here.

Does anyone know if the pdfs bought from dndclassics are the same quality as the ones in the trove?
I want to print out Moldvay/Cook B/X in the best quality.

Why the shit does the knight here have some kind of sci-fi Raygun? I've not read much R.E. Howard yet, but ...

fuckyeahosr.tumblr.com/

lotfp666.tumblr.com/

for more LotFP centered visuals.

Is there a PDF of Spire of Iron and Crystal around?
I'm pretty sure that image is a homage.

Has anyone run Maze of the Blue Medusa yet? Any good?

Should a single daily ration *really* fill up an entire encumbrance slot in LotFP?

That sounds konda weird. Shouldn't that be just like a skin of water and some dried meat and bread?

5 rations fill up a slot.

Anyone here have tips on running a gridless/"theather of the mind" B/X game? I'm mainly talking about combat since it's the handling of traps, exploration, and such is pretty self explanatory.

What are the quintessential OSR rules for character-changing diseases such as vampirism and lycantrophy? Or is that not a thing in OSR?

Oh, it's a thing in OSR. We wouldn't have the Cleric today if Dave Fant's character, Baron Fant hadn't been turned into Sir Fang, the vampire.

The classic AD&D/Basic solution is "you are now an evil NPC under the DM's control", but there's been quite a few alternate PC options over the years - from early Dragon articles to BECMI's Night Howlers sourcebook to just plain old homebrew.

I'm not sure that I can think of any "quintessential" rules for PCs getting character-changing diseases and actually getting to continue playing, though - they tend to be somewhat overpowering, or get so many drawbacks to just not be worth it.

Well, in the stories he makes reference to other fantasy and sci-fi mythos', for example, he makes refrence to Cthullu and the Old Gods from H. P. Lovecraft's writings, (I think they were friends IRL). I don't think it is too much of a stretch for there to be Anchient Aliens or something like that.

>cantrips
kys my man

I mostly need rules for it in the case it comes up. Are all of the "official" rules based on a specific mechanical skeleton or are they radically different?

Has anyone ever tried adapting any of RM's Arms & Claw Law into their games.
I got a bit of a kick out of the AD&D conversion chart in the book.
I'm not a huge fan of rolemaster and it's many MANY charts but I do like it's OB/parry system. Also I'm a bit curious if it's conversion rule actually work.

how many times a character must eat a day?

Once in most systems.

Well yes. Ancient Aliums. I could get behind that, because of all the Lovecraftian vibe that's in some stories. But 80's-style spess rayguns? Didn't expect that.

Well yes. Ancient Aliums. I could get behind that, because of all the Lovecraftian vibe that's in some stories. But 80's-style spess rayguns? Didn't expect that.
But maybe I've not read the stories, that contain some sci-fiy stuff. Like I said, I've yet to read all of them.

That's badass, dude!

Depends on the system in question, I guess - I kind of get the feeling that this is something that a lot of OSR monster manual-esque products would want to change.

Let's get some examples from the Rules Cyclopia, though:
>Lycanthropy: Lycanthropy is a disease. Any human character who loses more than half of his hit points in battle with a lycanthrope becomes a lycanthrope of the same type in 2d12 days. The disease kills demihumans. The victim begins to show signs of the disease in half that time. The condition can be cured only by a cleric of 11th level or greater, who will do so for a suitable price or service. Any character who becomes a full lycanthrope will become an NPC, to be run by the DM only.
Lycanthropes come in a lot of different types, and have class levels and stuff in their human form but a fixed stat-block in their animal form.

As for vampires, well, that's just your standard Wight/Shadow undead-leadership dealio.
>Any character slain by a vampire will return from death in three days, as a vampire under the control of the slayer.
They also have a fairly fixed stat-block without class levels, although there's a bit of variance in hit points and any spellcasting they might have - they're one of the only RC monsters that can actually be a full spellcaster, although it's "at the DM's discretion". Most just get access to the highly nerfed Shaman/Wokan monster spellcaster lists.
They don't really retain any of their former class levels or anything, and even a first-level MU becomes a full 7HD Vampire.

Yeah, like I said: this is something that I can definitely see individual OSR authors altering.

If any other class that isnt a thief wants to: hide, move silently, climb a wall , listen and that shit how do you manage "lol you cant"

>listen
Literally a standard check that the Thief just gets a bonus to. For reference, it's 1d6 for everyone, 2d6 for demihumans, and then the Thief skill varies between 1-in-6 to 6-in-6 and something like 15%-100% depending on the level and edition.

Other than that, though, Climb is for climbing actual sheer walls, Hide in Shadows lets you actually hide in shadows, etc.

i am using basic fantasy, checks for thief are in %, so for other classes doing that stuff it should be 1 in 1d6?

Pls guys :(

There's probably a section in the rules somewhere detailing listen checks - I don't know jack shit about BF, but check the index or glossary or something. Maybe just CTRL+F. I don't want to give you false advice when I don't know the system.

Wait, it's not in the Trove? I uploaded a bunch of White Star stuff for TroveGuy a while back, and I'm pretty sure that was in the second bunch. Hang on, let me see what's what.

oh okay
>sendspace.com/file/13cgxp

Thanks user!

Found when I posted it back in June, but the link's dead. Uploading some White Star fills for the Trove now.

That's great: thanks!

White Star fills:

White Star (dewm).pdf
White Star - (W1) Peril at the Pod Auction.pdf
White Star - (W2) Twelve Easy Parsecs.pdf
White Star - Colonial Civil War.pdf
White Star - Relics of the Akashics.pdf

uploadmb.com/dw.php?id=1470430173

Alright. Thanks for the information user!

Awesome :D

Those Thief % skills should be used like a saving throw in most cases (if they fail a normal check, they roll the % skill as a safety net). However, Climb Walls isn't, since it's meant for climbing sheer walls that would be unclimbable otherwise, and Hide in Shadows is almost supernatural.

nope, but I'm definitely planning on getting it eventually, cause it looks gorgeous;

satyr.press/