A friend wants to GM "Lamentation of the Flame Princess" on Roll20. What should I expect...

A friend wants to GM "Lamentation of the Flame Princess" on Roll20. What should I expect ? and do any of you have some past experience with the game ?

You should expect it to be tough, a lot of the official material will murder the party very easily, and some of them end in a way that almost guarantees at least one party member will croak. You should also anticipate it including a lot of grisly material, and possibly sexual too (zigzagging the line between erotic and horrific in some instances), so if you don't like those things, you should check with your GM. Characters scale up in small amounts - fighters are the only ones to get attack bonuses that scale, for instance. If you want something challenging and merciless, it will meet your needs.

Generic OSR with a strange tendency for murderporn in its art.

This

As someone who ran it for almost half a year, I can tell you that the book and modules are full of questionable design decisions, all of which shills will defend.

What sort of design decisions?

Reposting from last time I talked about this

>Fiddly character creation. The book includes a rule that allows you to reroll a character if your ability score sum is -1 or lower, but in that case why not just include a mechanic to improve below average characters (add a D4 to an ability score of your choice or something) rather than having people reroll again and again
>HP bloat means high level characters will basically always win in a straight fight, even if it's totally inappropriate for them to do so (IE a level 9 wizard will beat a level 2 fighter in hand to hand combat due to having more HP, even if he never casts any spells).
>Modules often include self important screeds by the game's designer about how amazing and clever he is for 'breaking the rules' or defying peoples' expectations

There are also things I think other OSR games do better
>Base AC is 12 instead of 11 or 10, making combat take a tiny bit longer for no real benefit
>No unified saving throw mechanic
>Death mechanics are the usual 'die at -10' rather than something more interesting like Into the Odd's critical damage system or Goblin Punch's dismemberment table
>Base HD for monsters, weapon damage, etc is a D8 instead of a D6, making combat much more 'swingy' for no real benefit

Supposedly there's a new version in the works that really shakes things up, but all of the changes I've heard of are dramatically worse

So now "shills" means "people who still like a thing even after I said I don't," huh? Man, that linguistic shift is amazing to see in action.

It's a simple well-designed role-playing game with a somewhat unfortunate tendency towards player killing

If you into old school role-playing with merciless adventures of yesterday with out having to use THAC0 or the usual oddball rules. You really can't go wrong.

I'll go ahead and play "shill" for you. Because Raggi has money to pay people to pump his tires online; that's totally a thing. You have no idea how much coke and whores LotFP gets for me. Buried in Colombian snow and pussy over here.

>Rerolling characters at creation
Considering how long it takes to roll six times, I'm terribly sorry for the tragedies you've suffered as the result of rolling poorly and having to pick up all those little pieces of plastic to drop them back onto the table again. You poor thing.

>lvl9 wizard vs. lvl2 fighter
Level 9 characters of any persuasion tend to be highly competent. Non-problem.

>Masturbatory screeds
You're 100% correct there. I give zero fucks how clever and iconoclastic an author thinks his is.

>Stuff other OSR games do "better"
That's your opinion, man. Any decision made on any of these points would be questionable. How much damage should x do, etc have been debated for literally decades with no end in sight.

B/x clone with some modern trappings & novel rules, a horror focus, and a tendency for graphic content. Not for the squeamish or SJWs.

Imo one the better OSR retro clones. It has an idea of what it wants to be and goes for it. Feels like it's more than another grognard's homerules for sale.

>Level 9 characters of any persuasion tend to be highly competent. Non-problem.

Bullshit. If a level 9 wizard wins against a fighter it should be because he casts spells, not because he's just able to absorb more damage. HP bloat is pure unadulterated cancer.

I'm playing in a LotFP campaign, mainly using published adventures.

All the adventures we've played so far have been filled with schmuck bait and you feel like you're only one bad roll from death or something worse. Several times we've decided to cut our losses and quit while we're ahead (usually by a very small margin) rather than push our luck, and just hearing the GM's post-game commentary on what we missed has usually rewarded that strategy.

I'd imagine the adventures are pretty fun to read or run, and probably play for a certain type of player or mindset. I'm mainly in it because our GM deserves some fun, and I'm hoping the That Guy will get his sweet comeuppance before I get mine, but ~7 sessions in and it's wearing thin.

got a copy of said tables from Into the Odd's or Goblin Punch? You've piqued my curiosity

I want to run a game with decent flitlock weapons. Which allegedly lamentations of the flame princess has.

How they stack up? Would be nice to have black powders weapons balanced for once, rather than being either massively under or over powered.

There' a free rules pdf, why not out yourself

>All the adventures we've played so far have been filled with schmuck bait and you feel like you're only one bad roll from death or something worse.

Sounds like a lot of OSR

If HP bloat is a problem, why are you playing *any* OSR. Play Classic Fantasy or something with fixed HP.

There's a difference between health increasing, and health increasing by too much.

Just to throw out some hypothetical math (linear for simplicity), but if attack damage is increasing by 5/level, and health is increasing by 20/level, you've got health bloat. It's crossed a point where it's no longer making your character more durable, but outright stupidly durable such that combat takes longer for no good reason.

I'm embarrassed. I fucked my math up.

I hope you take my point however. If health is increasing too much, high-level combat is just a slugging match.

Let's think this out a little and see where we end up. Taking 2nd level Fighter typically statted & equipped versus 9th level Wizard typically statted & equipped (I'm not assuming either of these characters are suffering from the cancer that is charop).

Fighter has 2d8 HP (average 14 after constitution bonus), maille and shield for AC 17, and a medium weapon that does 1d8 damage. His Constitution and Strength ability scores probably give him a +1 bonus on hit points and melee attacks.

Wizard has 9d4 hit points (average 23), no armor for AC 12, and a medium melee weapon that deals 1d8 damage with a +1 attack bonus.

The Fighter hits AC 12 on a roll of 9 or better (60% of the time), for 1d8+1 damage (5.5 on average). He'll deal about 3.3 damage per round on average against the Wizard. He can expect to deal enough damage to knock the scrawny bastard out in about seven rounds.

The Wizard hits AC 17 on a roll of 16 (25%
of the time) for 1d8 damage (4.5 on average). He'll deal about 1.125 damage to the Fighter on average. He can expect to take the big lunk out in 12-13 rounds.

Typical 9th level Wizard may be well advised to avail himself of his spell list when going toe-to-toe against typical 2nd level Fighter. In practice either character may have different ability scores than assumed here, and dice are fickle and swingy, but a level 9 Wizard probably isn't a great example of HP bloat being problematic.

It's pretty good! They're powerful, but limited. It's difficult to fire them more than once per encounter, they're likely to misfire if they get wet, and the noise can trigger a wandering monster check (or alert the whole area that somethings afoot).

>stupidly durable
By 9th level, you might have to soak a couple hits from dragon breath, dude. If you're wasting your time beating up bandits, you'll probably never scratch together the treasure to level up to 10th.

And by most interpretations, 9th level is like being the Michael Phelps of adventurers... there might not be more than a handful of people in the world who can roll with you. If you can't come up with an explanation why a wily mage who's been in dozens or hundreds of deadly fights might be able to even the odds with the village tough guy, your imagination is broken.

I mean, it's cool if you don't like the game, but I doubt there's a class and level game out there that doesn't have this "problem", and B/X is the least bloaty of the D&D editions.

And if the fighter has plate armor, the odds are even more in his favor!

The system itself is a pretty tight OSR in the vein of B/X or maybe LL, but the modules are the main sticking point.

Many of them have critical flaws and some are straight up bad, but there are some real gems in there. If your friend is an inexperienced GM who just grabs things from the LotFP catalogue I wouldn't get my hopes up, but if hes well informed and capable there are some truly stand-out adventures to be had. I honestly would rank some LotFP adventures, especially the 3rd-party/collab ones from Zak S and Patrick Stewart, to be the best adventures I have ever run or played.

Also all the anons arguing over HP bloat are missing the point (well kinda). LotFPs relative simplicity to more modern RPGs (and some other OSR titles, although not many) makes it a cakewalk to mod. There is a metric asstonne of hacks, homerules and tweaks out there for it. Goblin Punch and 10' Foot Polemic come to mind, although you can just DIY it.

Also also HP is often used as"Not Getting Hit Points", simulating dodges, close scrapes and the like. The 9th level wizard dosen't eat the sword to the face, he swooshes around in spooky clouds, leaving mirror images or messing with the attackers perception.

Also also also how the hell did you get to 9th level without dying or retiring. You usually either get mulched at 2nd or retreat to your gawdy manse at 6th.

It's a lot like COC Dark Ages

I might be that GM T*d or Mog?. In all honesty the rules themselves are just D&D B/X rules with a few enhancements such as ascending AC. Dungeon crawling without too much cruft. Depending on whether or not your GM is actually running the weird Europe setting and the official modules, or just running a standard D&D campaign your campaign can be out of the ordinary. I would actually ask your GM what they are doing, how long the campaign is, to get a better idea of what you are in for. Approach it with an open mind and it can be tons of fun. I personally am a huge fan of the era rather than the typical 14th-15th century psuedo-European settings that people are accustomed to.

And? Experience does not suddenly grant ridiculous durability. A kid just beat Michael Phelps because he's fucking old. And if somebody shoots a level 20 character or a level 1 character in the head with a crossbow, both of them should instantly die without armor.

T here, sup GM bro. Just trying to get a broad view of the system from Veeky Forums.

I'll agree to being put in whatever state a system uses to put someone incapacitated and at death's door, but I know a woman who survived shooting herself in the head with a Colt and used to know a guy who had survived a knife in his trachea. The latter was an Inuit and he ran afoul of some wolves a few years later.

I like the idea of that for hp that it's more like "fate points" which are a mix of things from being tough as nails, dodging out of blows that they only scrape you, to using magic to survive somehow.

That's because that woman shot herself with a .45 ACP, which is pretty slow for a bullet and both 9mm and .45 ACP can actually bounce off your skull without any harm. Shooting herself with a .44 however would lead to a very big hole in the ceiling.

Yeah this works better, although it's still not perfect. By all means Richard Lionheart was a level 9 chevalier, but he ended up getting killed by a random kid with a crossbow shot to the shoulder.

>LotFPs relative simplicity to more modern RPGs (and some other OSR titles, although not many) makes it a cakewalk to mod. There is a metric asstonne of hacks, homerules and tweaks out there for it. Goblin Punch and 10' Foot Polemic come to mind, although you can just DIY it.

This is true of any game. A flaw you can fix is still a flaw.

It did go into her brain. There's a scar under her jaw and a scar on her scalp from the same bullet.

OSR especially is just a set of homerules that you pick and choose from. That is one advantage that OSR has over others. If I wanted to add in unified saves or races that aren't classes, I can just use an existing system. If I chose most other fantasy systems, I wouldn't be given as many options when it comes to premade professionally published fixes.

Maybe Richard got 2 nat 20s with a confirm?