/osrg/

The writer of WPWS comes here, so try a summoning sigil.

a king's tomb at the bottom of an ancient and still used sewer/catacomb, said dragon is a Wyrm(ACKS definition, so purple and it's breath weapon is a cloud of fetid gas), is wingless(but has limited magical flight), and considers itself a Necromancer, although it creates Undead in a unique manner; by imbuing it's tiny parasitic offspring with Necromantic energy, said offspring can fuse with the corpses they by instinct nest inside, creating unique hybrids of dragon and undead(most commonly resulting in dragon headed Ghouls, although other forms are possible, as any vertebrate corpse or corpses can be used to form a dragon/undead hybrid)

if the Wyrm isn't stopped by the party it'll eventually direct it's "children" to swarm the city it's lair is under, which will grow it's army to a size big enough to become a threat to the entire region

Try it out yourself. If your party likes it, roll with it. If not, then drop it or choose something else.

>Dragons - intelligent or animalistic?
i like intelligent as it can be of any disposition
from chaotic evil to lawful good
i have one that is recurring in campanes that is somewhere in the lawful/neutral/good range and has a horde of knowledge --books in a library in one part and in another part necromancy to keep the spirit of great minds around to preserve their knowledge even after death
this dragon can also shapeshift into human form and regularly shows up as a helpful NPC
his price for helping is usually some new form of knowledge like a map or a book or even a story or for characters simply to help spread and preserve a form of knowledge, like to tell the land about how the king became king by killing the last king and lying about it

So did people really use 3d6 in order very much? The AD&D 1e sourcebooks seem to suggest that everyone had moved past it already in favor of more forgiving systems, but the 2e sourcebooks have a whole tirade in defense of 3d6-in-order. Was this piece of apologetics something that wasn't really followed in practice? It seems like it'd be a lot easier to run 3d6-in-order under the old rules where every ability score between 8 and 15 is effectively the same.

Pretty sure Castles and Crusades fits in here. What do people thing about the Class and a Half optional rules?

A lot of people assigned as wanted even in OD&D, but the idea later took hold that "true D&D" was 3d6 in order. Even Gygax had praise for it at some points, but some of his suggestions for fixing them in 1e were crazy, like rolling for 3d6 12 times FOR EACH ABILITY and picking the best of the sets, or rolling 3d6 in order and taking the set and setting it aside and rolling again for a total of twelve 6 attribute sets and choosing the best set of the 12. To his credit, his first suggestion is the standard 4d6 drop lowest die method.

B/X is arguably more unforgiving with 3d6 in order compared to AD&D or OD&D - in the latter, you just get +1 for a high score. In AD&D, statistics are really complex and granular, but it does mean there is a difference between rolling 13 and rolling 14, even if it is small. On the flip side 3d6 "works" better in those games mainly because you don't get much for a high score.

In B/X there's vast breakpoints and the bonuses are big (+2 or +3 to damage is pretty impressive with d8 monster hp) and apply across everything, so you more keenly feel the difference between high and low stats.

I really like the idea, but C&C multi-classing rules are only slightly less broken than AD&D's, with multi-class characters significantly overpowered until name level, at which point multi-class characters start falling far behind. Although it doesn't really address your class-and-a-half question, you might want to look into something like this for regular multi-classing, with the fine-tuning rules that increase attribute checks.

>49297220

Doesn't specifically have to be Thri-Kreen.

Animalistic all the way for me. I mean I like stand-offs with Hobbits and dragons as much as the next guy, but I want my dragon to hoard treasure because they're shiny and just be a force of nature in an of itself.

meant to link to

I disagree. With AD&D in particular, you are punished even more severely, since high ability scores have commensurately higher bonuses. An 18/00 has +3 to attack and +6 to damage. 18 Dex provides a +2 to initiative, +2 to ranged attack rolls, and -4 AC adjustment. Spell levels known are also tied to having higher Intelligence (in 2e anyway, if you don't have an 18, you'll never cast 9th level spells).

In B/X, you only get the +3 if you rolled an 18, and you can arguably survive without having any high ability scores at all, because most of your class dependent abilities do not rely on them.

Which is for the better.

Well I have to go to bed so I can't stay and chat about these things, but I have two questions wise ones.

Is the Labyrinth Lord "How to Hexcrawl" pdf any good?

How can i get players to be more like old mythology? I want players to react "Oh shit! Goblins are REAL?" Rather than "Oh, just a handful of goblins? OK." Has that ship sailed?

I personally do it for my characters because I think it's fun figuring out what kind of character you're getting from the stats. I let my players do 4d6 drop 1 then assign.
I've also experimented with just removing stats entirely which works pretty well for O/B/X since none of the math really requires good stat bonuses or any at all. I might include it as an option in more games I run.

>Is the Labyrinth Lord "How to Hexcrawl" pdf any good?

Is that in the Trove? I don't think I've seen that before.

Definitely good points. Still, I think a more stringent table that's still granular could work grafted onto B/X - for strength, for example, you could give +1/+0 hit/damage, then +1/+1, then +2/+1, etc. as you go up the scale so individual scores mean more.

>I want players to react "Oh shit! Goblins are REAL?"

I think it's hard to get this without making up your own critters and dropping rumours about whether they exist or not. The contextual setting matters a lot too. If players are told upfront that they're playing a fantasy setting for example, why would it be strange that they would encounter fantastical creatures?

That being said, I think chasing this is a waste of time and energy, at least in OSR rulesets (story-games like FATE encourage this sort of meta-role play better with Aspects and the like). One of the strengths of OSR play is that existential dread (and other emotions) comes as part of the play mechanics, rather that invoked and collectively reinforced by some storytelling procedure.

When an Ogre steps into a room of level 1s because their torch has sizzled out because they took too long, the fear isn't "oh shit, Ogres are real!" - it's "Oh shit, a 4+1 HD monster that deals 1d10 damage, and we're fighting it in the dark!!". Knowledge of the mechanics tell player characters that someone could die here.

Obviously, nothing in the game is "real" at all, but the emotion triggered by game mechanics has a different effect than what you suggest, because everyone has collectively agreed to play by a set of common game mechanics and no one person is prompting them "the ogre's scary, act scared!"

(cont'd)

The problem with the idea "goblins are real, but not thought to be real within the context of the setting" is twofold:
-Firstly, a person needs to think through several convoluted layers here. A player understands that
A) goblins do not exist in the reality outside the game this setting,
B) in the setting, goblins do exist
C) most people in the setting don't believe they exist, and
D) Your character probably should react differently than you do, because your character believes in C and is now confronted with B.

By the time you've thought through any instinctive terror is long gone because you've had to analyze your character's reaction from a meta perspective, so the emotion is acted or invoked rather than instinctively felt.

Secondly, these premises are an imposition on the fiction by one specific individual - the GM - rather than an emergent outcome resulting from the interplay of the dice following collectively agreed-upon mechanics (like how a 4+1HD monster dealing d10 damage can splatter a level 1 adventurer in one turn). So this is another thing that contributes to the lack of fear.

It's precisely this sort of dissonance between calm player rationality and "realistic" character emotions that story-games like FATE try to bridge - games in these traditions tend to hand out points or incentives to reinforce playing like how the character would actually act, which then lets the always-rational player select actions that are more in line with the character's "realistic" priorities.

So as a long roundabout answer, one thing you could try is alloying your rules with some ideas from story-games. The thing about OSR games is that they generally do not provide a separation between "player morale" and "character morale". That is to say, if you want the characters to break and run from an encounter, you throw something that actually strikes fear into the players from a tactical perspective (like the afore-mentioned HD4+1 Ogre).

tl;dr get ideas from FATE and create incentives to make up for tactically less-optimum decisions (like fleeing in fear from an easy encounter)

By using something that is not goblins, you loser.

What i use is a species called Critterlings, basicly a mix of all gentile goblins you can think of plus some impish shit, there is great variability in them. From spikesin back and finger to feathers and scales, poison saliva and blood to high regen.
Over all they look like Overlord's brown/green minions but bulkier.

Are there class-based armour restrictions in LotFP? I can't remember off the top of my head.

Nope.

I'm getting a bit confused about DCC's ability scores
What should one roll for ranger-type abilities? Tracking, pathfinding, looking out for ambushes, etc?
It sounds like either intelligence or luck, maybe?

I suppose if a character has a ranger background he rolls a d20 and if he doesn't he rolls a d10. It's a bit boring but I suppose that DCC is mostly based on having the PCs start at the entrance of the dungeon rather than moving around the wilderness. Maybe you can import a system from another game?

Is there something going on with Mega.nz? I want to test DCC for a oneshot event, but when I open the link nothing loads.

That's all fine, but what should the modifier used be?
D10 rolls still should require a modifier bonus there. Which one would apply?

Int is the most applicable. I'd apply Luck if the party is seriously lost.

Looking for ambushes is best done the way best traps are done, by actually exploring the environment and finding clues.

I'd say INT just because I feel INT needs more stuff to do in DCC if you're not a wizard or thief.

The closest thing to armour/weapon restrictions I can think of is the need for a number of hands free and encumbrance cap on spell casting for magic-users and elves (plus the fact that no specialist is going to sneak up on someone in plate armour. But hey, maybe they're not a bog-standard fantasy thief.)

>Double barrelled at the breach
>Single barrel at the muzzle
This picture honest to god triggers me

Non-Euclidean geometry, dude.

But that's not what non-euclidian geomentry means, user

I've never heard of flesh/grit, but it sounds interesting. What does it add/change?

Terrifying vistas of reality, bro.

Anyone can recommend me an evocative, exciting, inspiring and memorable npc generation system/table?

Your imagination!

...

Basically you have two pools of HP instead of one.

One, called "flesh" represents physical wounds. Usually it takes longer to heal, and if they're gone, you die.

The second, called "grit" basically represents your ability to dodge and soak attacks--that arrow just nicked your shoulder instead of going into your eyeball. That goblin's sword just dented your armor instead of spilling your guts on the floor.

Grit usually heals much faster, and is subtracted first. Once it is gone, damage goes straight to flesh.

What gives a game an Appendix N feel?
I'm reading through DCC and some of the tales and it's just not clicking for me.
I fail to miss the connection

So it's LITERALLY Wounds and Vitality, huh?

Monsters are more unique. Think the "the alabaster-skinned mockery of a man, its mouth full of blood-red fangs" instead of "a ghoul"

Magic is dangerous. Magicians are always dangerous and terrifying, even if they're theoretically "good guys". The Demon in The Mirror by Offut has a great example of this.

Heroes are much more pragmatic. For example, if the maidens must be rescued in 60 seconds or they turn into terrible monsters under the wizard's control, an Appendix N-style character is just as likely to try to kill the maidens and foil the plan that way instead of trading blows with the wizard.

>So it's LITERALLY Wounds and Vitality, huh?

Yeah, it's Last Gasp Grimoire's implementation of that hoary old houserule.
Wolfpacks and Winter Snow has another variation that's worth reading.

So, I have found pretty interesting monsters in various 2e books.

Does anyone have a guide to converting them into the ACKs monsterblock?

I live

>Is it worth the extra effort?
totally. All those arguments about what HP actually /mean/ are rendered moot by it. Plus it allows even high level PCs to be threatened by ambushes and stuff, so you don't lose the tension of low-level play.

Yeah, and it also eliminates that weird thing that used to bug me about 2e's natural healing rules, where your low level guy gets better in a week, while it takes two months for the high level guy to heal all the grievous injuries to their "fighting spirit."

>Ow! My spirit!

Slow thread is slow...

generals are cancerous anyway

Okay, so here's a thing I've been thinking about. I played a lot of Inquisitor when it was out, and I really liked the 'no points-values, no character gen rules' thing it had going on. The rulebook explained what the various stats were and what different values represented. A bunch of sample weapons and abilities were given, and a bunch of example characters. BUT, character gen was entirely 'pick a concept, and then come up with stats that match the concept'. No limitations, players were expected to self-police to come up with what they considered reasonable.
What do people think about including this in an OSR-based game? Rather than locking characters into specific classes, give a framework for the rules and some example characters, and let them come up with their own starting adventurers.

Okay, but how does this interface with saving throws? Encumbrance? Surprise? The magic item generation system? Hit points? Spells?

Could a player decide they have a good attack bonus, excellent saving throws, unlimited magic, and start the game with cloaks and boots of elven kind because he's playing an elf lord looking for his favorite amulet that he dropped in a crevasse long, long ago before humans got uppity and started speaking like they're people?

...

>Okay, but how does this interface with saving throws? Encumbrance? Surprise? The magic item generation system? Hit points? Spells?
You choose what value your saving throws to be, what your strength score (and so encumbrance) is, how many HP you have, and everything else. If you want magic, you'd pick how you want to cast spells (like a cleric, like an MU or spontaneously) and how many you know/can memorize.

>Could a player decide they have a good attack bonus, excellent saving throws, unlimited magic, and start the game with cloaks and boots of elven kind because he's playing an elf lord looking for his favorite amulet that he dropped in a crevasse long, long ago before humans got uppity and started speaking like they're people?
Other than 'unlimited magic' (that's not how Vancian spells work), sure. 'Elf lord looking for lost artifacts' is a fun concept. I've found from playing Inquisitor that most players, given the freedom to create any character, tend to produce pretty reasonable characters. Since being OP is really, really easy (just set all your stats to max and take loads of abilities), there's no challenge to it, and it just makes you look like an asshole. Instead, players tend to build characters that are /interesting/, with strengths and flaws and quirks, because that's how the game becomes /fun/. Once you give players total freedom, I've found only assholes make uber-strong death machines. So, the solution is simple; don't play with assholes.

>don't play with assholes

Agreed.

>inquisitor

I may have to check it out. it could make for an interesting diversion.

>rules bits

While I was using hyperbole for what (I hope) was comedic effect, I am curious how you'd deal with bolting vancian casting onto just any character concept. Would it work like the "Everyone is an Adventurer rules" or would you just get to decide you can cast spells of a certain level? How do you do mechanical advancement?

>Would it work like the "Everyone is an Adventurer rules" or would you just get to decide you can cast spells of a certain level?
So, suppose you're making a wizard. You might decide to give them a first level spell-slot and a second level spell-slot, and let them have two first-level spells and a second-level spell in their spellbook. Or whatever you want.
>How do you do mechanical advancement?
'advancement' is a slight misnomer for how I see this working. Did you get your hand eaten by a giant snake? Staple an 'only has one hand' rule onto the character. Ate a fresh dragon's heart after you fought it? Maybe get some bonus HP and the ability to breath fire once per day. Survived a gruelling journey through the swamps? Improve your saves vs poison. Bitten by a vampire? Now you're infected; you take penalties in sunlight or in front of holy symbols, but can heal by drinking fresh blood.
Basically, advancement works much more like finding magic items/new spells; it's in discrete packages based on particular deeds, rather than getting a level (and a bunch of stuff packaged together as part of that level) at given intervals.

You base it off their occupation and backstory. If they have a good reason to know those things, they use a d20 over a DC. If not, they use a d10.

For instance, someone who used to be a hunter would be skilled at tracking while an alchemist wouldn't. A blacksmith could skillfully repair a weapon while a shepherd couldn't. Unless they had some relevant backstory of course (I was a pig-farmer who was Shanghaid and became a decent sailor and navigator.)

>I want players to react "Oh shit! Goblins are REAL?"
This isn't really old mythology, this is more like '80s fantasy that cribbed ideas off Narnia. In old mythology, shit goes down roughly like "oh fuck me, it's those shitass sirens, stuff broccoli in your ears and lash me to the mast" or "Centaurs? AGAIN?! I hate centaurs, especially when I'm naked except for my cloak which is ALL THE TIME"

That being said yes, that ship's probably sailed; it's generally extremely hard to make players genuinely react that way.

What adventure module is the easiest to run for a newbie GM and player? I'll be running it for my girlfriend using Godbound if it matters.

Uh, did you mean Scarlet Heroes? Because running traditional D&D modules with Godbound is going to take a some conversion work, as I understand it, as well as just boil down to the Godbound character plowing right the fuck through everything.

Well, she likes powerful protagonists and I do too, so Godbound's a good fit for both of us. I'm not really concerned with her blowing through the module. Conversion's pretty simple too. Il'l turn a few of the monsters into mobs and change the strongest one there to be a proper challenge.

But if the problem is that newbie GMs like me need to learn run things straight from the book first, then I'm cool with it. She'll just spend her first session as a Scarlet Heroes pc then.

>Since being OP is really, really easy (just set all your stats to max and take loads of abilities), there's no challenge to it, and it just makes you look like an asshole.
This assumes that everybody's on the same page and contemplative enough about the repercussions of bad balance and so forth that they end up in roughly the same place. In my experience, that's a *huge* assumption. Let me give you a "for instance" here.

One of the guys in my group is the biggest pussy in the world. He's a cool guy, but he he doesn't much care for adversity in any form. This is true to such an extent that when he GMs a game, he makes the PCs so powerful that there is a tendency for some of the players to stop increasing them through experience because they're already past the point they need to be at anyway.

One time, we got framed for a crime and thrown in jail awaiting trial. And when I say "thrown in jail", I mean "consented to go to jail so as to try to clear our names, because we could have effortlessly brushed aside the guards". As things preceded, it became clear that the fix was in and that we'd have to escape. This was no problem because between our super-powered characters, we had no shortage of ways of accomplishing this on our own. But while we were discussing how to go about things, one of the guards came up and said he knew that we were being framed and could maybe arrange for some way to help us escape. He had barely finished when somebody we knew arrived at the window of the cell and offered to get some people together and bust us out.

I shudder to think what his character would look like if he were allowed to set things to whatever he wanted, and I'm fairly sure it would interfere with my enjoyment of the campaign (I'm a tough but realistic warrior, and he's powered by our yellow sun's affect on his Kryptonian physiology... which tends to ruin most dungeon crawls).

Now, that is an extreme example, and the guy is probably not in your target demographic for this sort of thing, but it does point out the problem of players with different expectations from the game. In almost any group, I'm the "serious business; no fun allowed" guy. It's not that I want things to be super-realistic or anything (since real life really isn't that conducive to fun), but I want them to be less ridiculously unrealistic than everybody else. And with everybody deciding for themselves how powerful to make their characters, I feel like there would be a natural tendency to end up with the Justice League. And like with humor, where things can only be as serious as the silliest character,* a campaign can really only be as gritty and down to earth as the most powerful character allows.

*It only takes one Jar Jar Binks to ruin the gravity of any scene. Take The Godfather and throw in Jar Jar and what do you end up with? What about Macbeth? Or Schindler's List?

Scarlet Heroes is a good baseline. When I ran a game for my friend, fighter pretty much played out like Geralt.

...

Do you keep your core four races stereotypical (halflings in shires, elves in their hidden forests, dwarves in their keeps, humans being the everyman) or do you mix it up? Maybe the elves are barely civilized? Halflings are the ones who had the ancient empire? Dwarves are more akin to goblins than to the other races?

Animalistic.
Last time i checked, Dragons were in the MONSTER manual

So are a lot of civilized and/or intelligent races too, like the Illithid, the various races, centaur, faun, liches, etc. Are they all feral too?

They are now. I don't imagine feral liches come up all that often, but now I want to try it.

depends on the setting more than anything

>monsters are unable to be intelligent
That's rude.

Well, I just ran Curse of Strahd and there is an insane lich who has gone so far down the rabbit hole they forgot their name, their spells, their purpose, everything other than "YOU NO TOUCH BOOK IT MINE" so it is possible maybe.

Sad bump.

Why is Mr. Gosling so sad?

What I liked the most in dragons from that edition, was that no matter what their color/metal or their alignment was, the most important was them being Dragons. They're all primarily solitary creatures, territorial, greedy and vindictive. All of that to a various degree, of course and overlaid by their personality

Would the Driver be into OSR?

Does he have any other expressions?

Yeah I hate the Great Gang of Good Dragons too.

I made a character sheet for adventurer, conqueror, king (or any other D&D game).
Is this worthy to be added to the trove? The original character sheet is a bit "artsy" for my tastes and not very neatly arranged

Used it, but discarded it because it was too cumbersome while running many henchmen and monsters.
I have resorted to having to make a save when you take more damage than your hit die + CON or you take an injury from a table. Makes combat dangerous and you have less shit to track.

In your guys opinion what's the best edition of Gamma World (for an OSR aficionado)? I've only looked at 2e which seems pretty strong.

Look's pretty good user!

I wouldn't give grit to level-0 hirelings, as I'd assume they're not skilled combatants yet.

Well of course it does. I was asking about "in your games (which are most likely homebrew settings), do you present the core races differently than they typically are in OSR and/or generic D&D systems and settings."

2e is pretty much the definitive classic version. It's essentially an expanded, tweaked 1e. 3e has some really cool ideas, and I totally dig what it was going for, but it's too rule-heavy, it was prematurely released due to deadlines and thus is littered with errors and has entire sections missing (that are added in the errata), and it's dependent on a color-coded table that you roll against for success (which I don't mind, but you might). I would love to have seen a tidied up, properly edited version of 3e, but as it is, it's a fixer-upper.

4e is sort of like if you took 2e and tried to force it to be more like 2nd edition AD&D, which seems silly to me, because the game was already similar to D&D and what differences it had were because they fit better with its setting. Having classes and explicit levels is unnecessary.

5e is Alternity and I'm not familiar with that. 6e is d20 Modern, and fuck a whole bunch of that shit. I did rather like the tone of the stuff I read, but the actual mechanics caused me too much pain for me to continue through it. 7e is built on 4e D&D and is apparently good for a zany pick-up game, something I could well believe but which I have little interest in.

So all things considered, 2e is a pretty good choice.

I'd think if you were to use it you would save it for PCs only, rather than monsters and henchmen. Or alternately give henchmen and monsters a flat Flesh/Vitality stat (something like 1 point per HD).

If you're just running 5 PCs at the start it's not much, but like said by the time you get to mid-levels in OSR play you're usually running 5 PCs, 5 henchmen, maybe another 5 assorted hirelings, and then running into wilderness encounters of 1d6x2d4 Orcs... things scale up fast.

yeah, but as soon as you have a bunch of level 1 fighters and enemy monsters with 2 HD or so it becomes annoying as fuck. So far the rule with "massive damage" meaning a potential injury was very efficient in play and still hat interesting results during combat. I usually allow for a parry if you skip your next action to halve incoming damage (the more damage the harder the parry, you can sacrifice your weapon for +3 to parry and your shield for +6 to parry).

Maybe so, but I usually track wounds with hash marks ( |||| for 4) and it's easy to make horizontal ones for wounds to flesh. And generally for monsters/npcs I just set their flesh to the last hit die. So 6 flesh for a d6-based character.
(I make exceptions for unusually large critters, since my you-just-got-seriously-wounded system is based on doing half the flesh value in one attack, but big things like that are uncommon)

Yeah, its just not for me. Having massive damage and then a die roll determine if you just got nicked in the guts feels just much more natural to me. And in that tactical, whole dungeon spanning battle of 20 goblins and 2 goblin leaders versus 6 adventurers and 4 henchmen I noticed that flesh and bleeding out every turn, etc. would just have slowed it down too much. And huge damage -> die roll -> see if gobbo/hero just got gutted feels faster and more elegant.

Thinking of running an OSR game but I'm not sure what to run. My party has only ever played (in D&D terms) 3.5 and 5 (me and one other also tried 4e as well) so I'm not sure which game would be best to "ease them in" as it were.

Suggestions? I was looking at DCC, BFRPG and Darker Dungeons but I want some other ideas or more info on those three please.

DCC and BFRPG seem like good choices. BFRPG is good if you want race-and-class and a more general ruleset, and DCC is good if you want a very fun and gonzo system and can handle tables and funky dice.

People say DCC is the closest to 3.5 mostly because the way it handles stat blocks and crunch. BFRPG is more pick up and play. DCC is my favorite at the moment.

True, the funky dice are probably going to be the reason me and my party back away, at least until I can get a set of them.

I think we're going to go with BFRPG and add some supplements to it to give my party some more options as well.