/osrg/ OSR General - Expensive Hat Edition

I'm dming Bride of the black manse at my halloween party. It's a 4 hour module with a lot of praise. I read it and it's awesome.

Death Frost Doom might be a little tight for one session, especially if the characters are as carefull as they're supposed to be.

God that Crawls is awesome and doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves.

I personally get little joy from finishing a module. In fact, the few times I rounded up a module because we were through all the material it was kind of an anticlimax. Maybe it's just my DM-ing, but we had way more fun figuring out our way through some underground lair and being surprised with all the twist and turns that came along with it. I guess it's a classic example of how the journey is enjoyed more than the destination. If you feel this might be the case for your group as well, try out Keep on the Borderlands: it's a dungeon crawl sandbox with lost of stuff to work with. There's not a real ending to it, just many sessions with worthwhile exploration.

Does a book/pdf collection of puzzles for dungeons exist? The way that Grimtooth is a collection of traps?

Introducing a guy to tabletop. He's excited. All he knows of RPGs is from computer gaming.

Do I use LotFP or DCC as an intro?

>do I invite him into airbrushed wizard van, or creepy rape van?

Always go with the airbrushed wizard van.

Gotta agree.

LotFP is easier to learn. I'd go with that.

The airbrushed wizard van is DCC, but you could also just go with B/X, that's good too. Less silliness. It's still an airbrushed wizard van, but it's one that's been around a few decades and treated well, but worked hard. The wizard is unironically wearing 80s hair because it was painted in the 80s, not because "that's what an airbrushed wizard van should look like."

Speaking of DCC, anyone got a copy of Tower of the Black Pearl #79.5?

Bumparoni

Maps.

Dark Sun boxed set, The Ivory Triangle

What's your consideration on determining whether to roll a saving throw or some ability check? I tend to use ability checks for active player actions and saving throw for passive ones. Does anyone else do this differently?

I'm not too fond of rolling for ability checks in general, to be honest! Roll-under-stat has a tendency to make raw stats extremely important, way more important than IMO something static that's randomly generated at character generation should be. They're also, well, static - you can't really have an easy or hard check without fucking everything up due to the swinginess of stats. (Seriously, roll-under-stat makes stats literally twice as important as they were in 3E. Except even more so, since there's no skill bonuses and the DCs are static.)
Attribute bonuses are better but, well, runs into the whole issue of "rollplaying" where you leave stuff to the dice rather than relying on player expertise.

So it's a question of challenging the player vs. challenging the character, really, and I'm more in the former camp.

As for saving throws, that's just giving them an out from bad stuff if they fucked up. Ain't exactly something complicated, although things start to get a bit hairy once you have really specific categories and try to shoe-horn other stuff into them. I think some BECMI thing had you roll vs. paralyzation to avoid being disarmed? And there's the old classic of saving vs. (turn to) Stone to avoid a cave-in, of course, or rolling vs. Wand for various dodging stuff.

docdroid.net/FrxCKOl/ruinations.pdf.html

Can I get some feedback on my homebrew Ruinations?

No. Just no.

Saving throws scale with experience, and ability checks do not. I usually differentiate between both on the basis of "does the character's past experience matter more in this situation, or does his raw ability matter more?"

For a trap it's often the former - more experienced adventurers gain better saving throws and better HP, representing their improved ability at resisting or avoiding things that would outright kill a less experienced character.

For a lot of reasons I also tend to prefer using rolls that depend on experience scaling stats, because the bonuses for raw talent are already built into most relevant areas already (charisma for reaction rolls, attack bonus for strength, etc.).

Rolling directly on your raw attributes I feel is generally very rare, mostly for situations where experience doesn't apply at all.

So do people ever run one shots from here for people interested in OSR but don't have an OSR group?

There was an osrg roll20 thing that ran a couple times recently. I missed the second one, but it's pretty fun.

>Cutting someone's neck with a butter knife
She doesn't fuck around

Name change?

Yeah. The other was a little too meh.

bump

I wanna run a post apocalyptic game and I'm realizing OD&D may not be the system for it, my players wouldn't want to use retainers and I'm not a big fan of them either, and I don't like all the races like halflings and all that that make it feel Tolkien and all that stuff, what do I do? Start making a homebrew? the problem is I really like the way OD&D plays and handles dungeon crawling and other games don't really do that.

Should I check out Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha? Or something like White Hack that I can fit to my needs?

Man, trying to play a post-apoc game with od&d and don't even bothering to change the name of the classes is really low effort.

The races aren't really necessary - just have everyone be human by default. (Note also that hobbits are explicitly optional in OD&D - they suck ass, but are included 'just in case anyone wants to play one'.)

Once those are removed, you've mostly excised the Tolkien elements as-is.

Of course, now the question is "what kind of post-apocalyptic setting are you after?"

Do you want something Fallout-esque, where it's all ordinary humans and sci-fi tech? Mad Max, where it's just ordinary humans in a desolated wasteland? Zombie movies, where the world itself is pretty much intact except civilization has fallen apart? Dying Earth, where you've got fantasy stuff but everything is irrevocably fucked forever and you've passed the golden age into a great decline?

The last one is basically what you get if you run OD&D by-the-book, by the way - probably because that style of Black Death-esque setting is great for adventuring in. Note the mass amounts of bandits, the negligent-at-best castle rulers, and the extremely dangerous encounter rates. Oh, and the buried ancient magical ruins and treasures.

Hell, you might notice how a lot of official settings are post-apocalyptic in some way or another - there's a ton of ancient hypermagical Rome-esque empires that have crumbled and left behind ruins and treasure for the Visigoths to loot.

Also, OD&D really requires retainers and it's not like post-apoc stuff isn't often about having a band of survivors, either. Retainers (or henchmen in OD&D, IIRC? The specific term gets swapped a lot in various editions) are backup characters, a force multiplier that makes it so you can actually fight above your weight class, a big group which makes each individual person safer since it's more unlikely that everyone dies to a medusa or that (with Chainmail/AD&D-esque random combat targeting) someone gets focus-fired, and also have the glorious distinction of letting you carry more loot and thus both give an overall experience boost.

It can be a post-apoc fantasy game, user.

Take a look at Sine Nomine's Other Dust, it's a post-apoc rendition of basic D&D (with added rules for skills, mutations, starvation and radiation poisoning, equipment degradation, repair & construction, and related stuff). Feels pretty close to Gamma World and Fallout.

Maybe it's too crunchy for you, but it can be mined for ideas. It also gives strong support for sandbox play style.

I thoroughly enjoy your game. I made my own personal changes to guns but everything else is very nice. I like that some gear is a bonus to saves and so forth.

See

Play Gamma World, nigga. 1st edition is basically that, man. Even if you don't like that particular setting, it's a fuck ton easier to homebrew into something post-apocalyptic.

Has anyone come up with a way to incorporate the chainmail man-to-man table into OD&D properly? I get that it's a holdover from Arneson first describing his games to Gygax, and from what I've read Gary devised the alternative d20 system to use for his own campaign.

I love the way the table means that there's a purpose to using different weapons against certain armour types, seeing as by the book with all weapons doing d6 damage there's no reason to pick a two-handed sword over a dagger (obviously the GM can make their own judgements such as reach and space required and whatnot, but there's nothing written down).

I like the idea of playing OD&D with just d6s (would have to do something about saving throws too but that's easy enough to swap out), but I can't grasp how you'd use the chainmail man-to-man table when you factor in levels of combatants, or fighting vs. creatures that don't actually wear a type of armour.

What were your gun changes, out of curiosity? I'm always looking for ways to improve it.

What's the best one ?

>I like the idea of playing OD&D with just d6s (would have to do something about saving throws too but that's easy enough to swap out),
You would only need to generalize the "save vs. fireball/lightning bolt": for example, a hero needs 9+ on 2d6 to avoid being killed by a fireball. Also, think of the morale roll as a save. vs fear.

>but I can't grasp how you'd use the chainmail man-to-man table when you factor in levels of combatants,
The most straightforward way is to use hit dice as hit points. Heroes have 4 HD, so you need to hit them 4 times to kill them. So a 4-HD hero and a 1-HD soldier equipped with the same weapon and armor would have the same chance to hit each other, but the soldier would be killed by the first hit.

Also, creatures with high HD could cause multiple HD od damage on sufficiently-low HD oponents (Empire of the Petal Throne does this; a 4-HD character causes 2d6 of damage - thus 2 HD - on opponents of up to 1 HD, to be spread out on a cleave-like attack).

>or fighting vs. creatures that don't actually wear a type of armour.
You could use approximations based on the creature skin; e.g. a dragon would be plate, a troll could be chain or plate, an ogre would be leather or chain. Large creatures could be considered +Shield to account for larger reach.

Or you could add columns to the table based on creature categories (dragon, giant humanoids, giant insects, incorporeal undead, and so on).

Magical weapons could give +1 to the 2d6 attack roll, and/or increase the number of HD of damage. A dragon-slaying spear could function as an ordinary spear except against dragons, treating them as "no armor" and causing 1 additional HD of damage.

>I like the idea of playing OD&D with just d6s
I'm in the middle of making a houserule pdf for this. It will be only for combat at least for now. Saving throws are easy to do with 3d6.

>but I can't grasp how you'd use the chainmail man-to-man table when you factor in levels of combatants, or fighting vs. creatures that don't actually wear a type of armour.
It's much easier to just scrap the man-to-man from Chainmail. It's way too clunky and has too many anomalies to be workable.

In my model melee combat is simultaneous and each creature rolls a number of d6s equal to their HD or fighting capability during a round of melee. Once the dice are on the table, "tactical" decisions can be made. E.g. if you're wielding a sword you can choose to spend any die showing 5 or 6 to parry an incoming hit. As you get more levels and more dice you have more options at your disposal. Different weapons have varying chances to parry and riposte. Some weapons have special effects that can be triggered with dice showing 6.

My goal is to have two systems both using the same armor classifications, one for man-to-man and skirmish and one for mass combat.

Remember that you're mapping a linear probability distribution onto a bell curved one.

For instance rolling 2d6 isn't the same as 1d12, since you're adding the sum of the two d6's giving you more likelihood of certain combinations than others.

Yeah, the probability distribution of 3d6 more closely resembles that of a d8 or a d10 than a d20.

Oh, cool. It's still possible, you just get really whacky translations. Leveling up and changing your chance to succeed with a roll gets weird with 3d6, since you're moving on a bell curve. As long as you have the same probability it should still give the expected results, however.

Yeah, that's a given. The saving throw table needs some modifications to work with 3d6.

While an exact comparison depends on where you are on the 3d6 bell curve, generally speaking, a +1 bonus on a 3d6 roll is worth about a +2 bonus on a d20.

Still, I really like the idea of using more d6. Feels more elegant somehow.

From what I've been able to tell, it wasn't ever really meant to be used in OD&D - Arneson used it in the beginning, I think, but somewhat quickly (and repeatedly?) went over to other systems. Lots of experimenting behind the curtain.

The bits of the playtest document that were publicized make it look like the "intended" use of Man-To-Man in OD&D was just, well, using the weapon class and initiative rules with the Alternate Combat System table.

Now, if you actually want to use the Man-To-Man table with levels mattering there's an easy solution to that - Fighting Capability. A Curate fights as three men with +1 on one of the rolls, for instance. Monsters fight as a number of men equal to their hit dice, as written in volume two - also, just to round things out, IIRC monsters that appear in the hundreds are supposed to be non-fantastic.

The problem, then, comes with Fantastic Combat - fighting the stuff that doesn't have armor, like dragons or balrogs or ents. Here's where the Fantastic Combat Table comes in, with its associated rules. Unfortunately it's pretty fiddly and requires you to make new lines for any new monsters you want to add (or even the non-chainmail LBB monsters!), but that's what you get when you abandon the ACS' more generic armor class system.

You also need to adjudicate on whether or not non-Heroes can even fight on the FCT, of course.

Chainmail is great inspiration but using it straight up as written is asking for trouble and frustration.

The initiative system seems perfectly usable, at least, as well as the general rules for terrain and mass combat in general.

It's just a little bit funky when you try to use man-to-man in its entirety with OD&D and end up with one guy making ten attacks and then the second guy making forty. You can really see why AD&D made multiple attacks get split up over the round - a guy with three attacks attacking before everyone else, on their initiative, and after everyone else, for instance.

Also, funnily enough, you kind of need Chainmail for some small important details - Wizards having to stand still and not be meleed in order to cast spells, for instance.

Mass combat in Chainmail is indeed surprisingly well designed and quick to use. It's pretty much the only one of the three combat systems that are worth porting over as is.

I think TSR made a big mistake when the d20 ACS was made the default for man-to-man combat. It completely misses the opportunity to use HD as number of attacks.

Eh, it's based off of Man-to-Man since that actually gives you some time between attacks by splitting it up into rounds - if you just use the mass combat rules, fights suddenly get much deadlier for the players as they often can't run away once caught in melee. That's alright in a wargame, as is the one-hit-kill thing, but it's not necessarily something you want for an RPG.

The entire ACS system is kind of modeled after the Fantasy Combat subsystem, really.

I've been tinkering with the way chainmail combat works in relation to OD&D. I've found that using the mass combat system is actually amazing even on a 1:1 scale to quickly handle hirelings, mercenaries, and others skirmishing in the background of the fight. I've run massive company-level fights that way, with the PCs leading a couple dozen mercenaries into a cultist lair and that sort of thing. It lets you handle fights in a way that would be impractical rolling out with the traditional combat system. Also, letting people throw handfuls of d6s as their attacks and mopping up buckets of goons drives home the "heroic" aspect of higher level play very well.

Man to Man is amazing as well, because it overcomes the chief issue I've had in higher-level D&D play for me. Two name-level fighters throwing down should be an epic clash of wills. A furious exchange, rather than a slow widdling down of respective HP. The Man-to-Man thing lets you throw a bunch of attacks based on your combat ability, which makes the whole thing seem much faster and more deadly.

Not chainmail RAW, but it wouldn't be hard to then declare that you could divide up that pool of Man-to-Man dice into attack and defense, if you wanted more nuanced play.

The only thing I find completely borked and unusable is the Fantasy Combat Table.

>Not chainmail RAW, but it wouldn't be hard to then declare that you could divide up that pool of Man-to-Man dice into attack and defense, if you wanted more nuanced play.
...So something like the existing man-to-man parry mechanics?

i.e.
>If your weapon is 2+ longer than the opponent's, you can't parry.
>If your weapon is +1 longer to -3 shorter, you can give up your attack to give 'em a -2 to-hit penalty.
>If your weapon is -4 to -7 shorter, you can either get the first attack OR parry for -2 - if you parry and their roll equals the original hit number, your weapon breaks, but if your parry is successful you get a counterattack. You also get two attacks period.
>If your weapon is -8 shorter, you get the first blow and can parry with -1 and the breakage rule. Parrying does not use up an attack, I don't think. You also get three attacks per round.

The advantage of longer weapons being that you'll hit first on the turn entering combat (pikes, spears and lances always winning on charges) and generally have a better hit chance - since this is a one-hit-kills system, this works alright.

I imagine that it'll need readjusting for use in D&D, since hit points change everything.

Man-to-man's parry rules are ridiculous. For example you can't parry attacks from a dagger with a spear.

It would be damn hard for a dagger wielder to make successful attacks while being at the receiving end of a long spear.

>>If your weapon is 2+ longer than the opponent's, you can't parry.
Depending on how much difference this actually is, it seems incredibly .. well. Not unrealistic so much as false.

I can take a spear and parry a sword. I can take a staff and parry a dagger. The only things that really couldn't parry are either weapons that are so long they aren't meant for individual combat (pikes, mounted lances) or when you're in a situation where your weapon is so much lighter than the opponents it can't get the leverage (a dagger can parry thrusts from all manner of one-handed swords and daggers just fine. It will be significnatly more difficult to deflect a zweihander being swung at you).

Just a reminder that the open table game today is starting now. Message Stagehand on Discord or Roll20 for an invite.

Can I get a rec for a decent post-apocalyptic 'dungeon' crawl? One that isn't ASE.

Just refluff some of the fantasy ones.
Like, turn The Tower Of The Stargazer into, um... The Silver Well Of The Mole Man!
And instead of being kept alive by magic, he's stuck in a Mr. House-style capsule.

S3 Expedition to The Barrier Peaks?

Is this in response to my question earlier? this is exactly what I'm looking for

If you're then I recommend this guy right here using either Labyrinth Lord as intended (for fantasy post-apoc) or Mutant Future (for gonzo post-apoc)

I've run it myself with my LotFP/Mutant Future homebrew Ruinations and we had a kickass time, all in all.

Labyrinth Lord was intended for fantasy post-apoc games?
Where has that been stated? I'm just genuinely curious.

he means the module is intended to be run with Labyrinth Lord

what he said.

ASE takes the standard fantasy classes and puts a post-apoc twist on them, via the module. It's pretty rad and sating my gonzo love until MCC is released.

Opinions on DESU?

S'alright. It does some neat stuff, but it goes a bit too far off the reservation for me to enjoy it as a proper OSR game. Might be fun for one-shots though

It's pretty popular, SENPAI.

LotFP

Seeing as this thread was pointed out to me when I was asking about Empire of the Petal Throne, I was wondering if anyone here knew where to find scans of books for it.

I'm not too fancy. Just some extra damage here and there. D8 is now 2d4 and so on. Some do exploding damage. I'm a simple man.

Thanks to everyone who made it out this time - was good fun!

Anyone interested in 'Crawling Under a Broken Moon' for DCC, I finally have the collected issues 1-16, Character Sheet, and the High Calibre Hijinx issue.

>Basement Nintendo 64

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Holy shit, those falling rules really are insane. I should really get to reading AD&D.

I haven't played it, only read it but it looks really cool.
As said it might work best when you don't need or want to bother with a more crunchy system.

It's actually in Unearthed Arcana, which is a collection of alternate rulings and houserules.

Most of Unearthed Arcana is simply Gary Gygax's Official Rules Additions from Dragon Magazine, collected and loosely organized.

They are Official Rules, but only if one runs them from Gygax's articles in themselves, with no extraneous Kim Mohan editorializing. This means that the cavalier and barbarian are not classes, since they are Experimental.

>Heroes have 4 HD, so you need to hit them 4 times to kill them.
Keep in mind that they need to sustain four *simultaneous* hits in a turn to be killed in mass combat/man-to-man; unlike most of the monsters they don't have a pool of hits that gets depleted, just a fixed threshold. Heroes and superheroes are stupidly resilient in Chainmail.

Personally, I wouldn't translate this to "four hits in one round" in D&D, since the turns in Chainmail most closely correspond to D&D's exploration turns and not the combat rounds; instead perhaps a regeneration of one hit/d6 HP per ten rounds for each level would be the best solution. (E.g. a level 5 Fighting-Man regenerates 5 hits / 10 rounds or one every other round; a 3rd-level Fighting Man 3/10, and so forth.)

In the Trove, under TSR -> OD&D -> Modules.

thanks

Do you guys run with 0 hp = dead?

The revised falling rules are more clearly laid out in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, which also limits falling damage to 20d6 (10d6 if falling over a waterfall, which I think might be meant to mean into water), just like the DMG, so the picture in is wrong where it says 43d6 and 53d6.

0 hp = fatally wounded

Succumbs to death after 30 minutes at 0 hp without healing or aid. Players can choose to recover 1 hp at any time by giving their character a permanent injury. I've a chart of some examples I use, but for the most part I let my players decide the injury and the penalty, which I then vet. This is a sort of last-ditch effort to keep your character alive and playable when the party isn't going to be able to get them to safety or heal them in time.

I tossed a bunch of EPT stuff in it's own folder as well. It was, at one point, it's own game. It is currently in both _inbox and under 06_Other Oldschool

general OSR babby

thinking of trying out first edition. any tips before I dive in? recommended modules?

My tip: play B/X instead because it's actually a coherent set of rules ready to be used as is.

Don't listen to this loser, , anything with race-as-class isn't worth playing.

My advice would be to play 2e with the XP for gold optional rules on (and without story and individual XP bonuses), and any other rules you feel like forward-porting from 1e (such as the weapon-vs-AC table). Also remember that 1e supplements are essentially fully compatible with 2e, barring a few minor changes.

>anything with race-as-class isn't worth playing

Them's fighting words, boy!

Look, even TSR gave it up as a bad idea.

so 1e has nothing going for it?

Thanks a lot user!

1e's weapon-vs-AC table gives you a much more detailed view of how each weapon fares against each AC (when 1E was first released there was only one way of getting to each AC, UA screwed with that by introducing new armour types), compared to 2e's three weapon damage categories (Slashing, Piercing, and Blunt). Notably, using that table actually gives you a reason to use a 2H sword, which are otherwise hugely overshadowed by all other swords.

The reason to use 2e over 1e is that 2e is more clearly laid out and edited. Gygax tried to imitate Jack Vance when he was writing 1e, so it's a bit harder to parse in some places.

The best way to run AD&D is to use 2e as a base (for ease of reference), and drop in bits from 1e that you like (such as the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides). Almost nobody runs any TSR edition exactly as written, they drop rules in from all over the place.

If you're coming in from newer editions, it might be easier to think of there only being three TSR editions (OD&D, AD&D, and BD&D), and the gradations inside them as more similar to the differences between 3.0 and 3.X than those between, say, 3.X and 4. Even then, it's easier to move material between the TSR editions than it is to move it between the WotC editions.

It has some things going for it. The problem with it is that it's a convoluted mess. It's written by Gygax after all and it's widely known that he simply couldn't write coherent rules. It's not a good game if used RAW.

Whereas B/X for example is very clearly laid out and easy to follow. Basic D&D is also much more abstract in nature than the simulationist AD&D.

If you want to have detailed (and broken in many cases) but convoluted combat rules and other rules aimed at simulationist gamers then go ahead and choose AD&D. Otherwise Basic does everything better in terms of smooth gameplay.

>when 1E was first released there was only one way of getting to each AC
But that's not true.