/osrg/

So what is the advantage of taking say a Longsword versus a Mace or any other medium-sized weapon?

Magic item tables, I'd guess.

In most combat situations, nothing.

Very nice! Anyone with a Mega account needs to add this to the trove.

>Rifle makes as much damage as a fist in combat.
Sorry, but that is horseshit.

How to do procedurally generated exploration games? What tools do you use?

>>Rifle makes as much damage as a fist in combat.
>Sorry, but that is horseshit.
1. Combat is abstract.
2. Successful attack rolls and therefore loss of hit points doesn't necessarily mean actually sustaining wounds from weapons. See 1.
3. There are no rifles in my D&D.
4. When you do get a decisive wound, it doesn't matter whether it's caused by a mace, a sword or a rifle; you're going to die any way.

Take a look at this: fightingfantasist.blogspot.fi/2010/01/od-weapon-damage.html

But conversely, the disadvantage for NOT using a longsword goes away.

I don't mind that knowing that combat in D&D is highly abstract. Characters and monsters prepared to fight are expected to have "appropriate" weaponry.

It doesn't however prevent me from creating ad hoc roleplaying situations where the weapon at hand does have significance.

1. I know
2. I know. If I want to play a simulation I wouldn't play D&D. Variable weapon damage is just a minor complication.
3. In others there are. What about a trebuchet or an arbalest? They also don't exist?
4. A wound isn't necessarily a deadly wound.
(I take a look at that blog.)

How do you handle the fact that some weapons are just straight better than others?

>4. A wound isn't necessarily a deadly wound.
Yeah but when you do get just a small scratch it makes no difference what type of weapon created that small scratch. It is what it is.

I like to keep things simple and stick more to the narrative and descriptive side of combat. It is a choice of play style for sure and certainly not the only one but in my experience D&D is especially suitable for such abstractions.

Are they? And if I absolutely must have a situation where a combatant is at a disadvantage because of a poor weapon I'd rather give him a penalty to hit, not damage.

I'm still salty that the official ref screen that came out of the campaign for the hardback ref book will only ever be availible to backers; I hadn't found out about LotFP yet at the time of the campaign and the ref screen looks sick.

Personally I kind of like class-based damage, where it's not about the tool so much as the man who wields it. Where the Fighter can kill you just as good with a dagger as with a longsword once he gets up in your face.
Works better in Dungeon World with its range-based combat than D&D though

>Are they?
Consider the mace and the morningstar.

I had a look at that blog and he just says
1. hp=abstract
2. damage=abstract
3. only last hit is a deadly wound
4. therefore it doesn't matter how much damage a weapon does.

That's wrong. Even if you assume most damage is just tiring the character or pressing his luck. Fighting against a man with a two handed sword will test your luck a fucking lot more than fighting a child with a wooden paddle.

>Fighting against a man with a two handed sword will test your luck a fucking lot more than fighting a child with a wooden paddle.
Sure, but this situation is absurd to begin with.

>Fighting against a man with a two handed sword will test your luck a fucking lot more than fighting a child with a wooden paddle.

But fighting Miyamoto Musashi when he's armed with a wooden sword is liable to end with your ass getting spanked and your sword shattered.

>Consider the mace and the morningstar.
For the purpose of playing a game about exploring dank dungeons and recovering mysterious treasure, I consider a mace and a morningstar to be the the exact same things.

Disgusting.

Not if you put an equal skilled man against him with a real weapon.

That's the thing, Miyamoto was dueling against other Samurai, and because he was a massive dick, he used a wooden sword and used it to slap the other samurai's swords until they broke. (All that folding lets the crappy Nippon steel take a great edge, but it also make it brittle when bent sideways)
(Also good luck finding a swordsman as good as old Musashi the Sword-slayer).

Dammit, forgot pic related.

I'm thinking about making an OSR explicitly based on thieves. Dungeon crawling, breaking and entering theft, conjobs.

Does that interest anyone else at all?

yeah

yes

>Demon lover enraged.

The Ready Ref Sheets, for all their occasional nonsense, are a pretty important OD&D supplement. Certainly better than some of the published supplements.

He did approach that encounter like a PC, though. Katanas and paddles both doing d6 doesn't save you when your opponent shows up late enough that you're getting sloppy, blinds you with the sun, whacks you with a solid lump of wood, and has timed it well enough that he can run back to his boat and get away with the aid of the tide.

I wish Castles and Crusades had decent fan-made content. I love the support that Labyrinth Lord and other old school clones get, but aside from the Crusaders' Companion there doesn't seem to be much out there.

I wonder the same, because all of the stuff I see available for it seems to take ages at the table.

user, you shouldn't talk while you have food in your mouth.

To answer your question, Retro Phaze goes out of its way to specifically mention that anything you do offensively in combat, regardless of what you say, is just you trying to inflict harm on the enemy, and should be resolved with the standard to-hit/damage rolls, which makes the combat much less narrative like 0D&D or Basic, but strangely enough seems to make combat go much, MUCH faster than normal. So in my opinion, it balances it out, especially because you're going to be having a lot of combat.

The only non video game element involved is the fact that it pays attention to the range of your weapons. This creates an oddity where EVERYONE has range weapons out at the start of combat, and there's relatively low incentive to close the gap.

Ammo is resolved in an interesting way, yet I don't believe that its unique. Whenever you buy ammo, you have [FULL AMMO] for whatever weapon of choice you have. If you ever fire a shot, as soon as the encounter is resolved, regardless of how many you shot or didn't shoot, your ammo goes down one level.

So it goes
[FULL AMMO]
[ENOUGH AMMO]
[SOME AMMO]
[ALMOST EMPTY]

When you hit Almost Empty, you always have ammo, UNTIL you roll a Crit-fail to attack with a shot, and THAT'S when you discover you're out of ammo. However, Ammo, in all of its states, only takes up one item slot, so you could actually buy three sets of [FULL AMMO] and whittle that down as you go.

The original idea behind uniform weapon tables is that the DMs know what the difference between a Longsword and a Mace are, and would affect how combat was handled even if not mechanically. So if someone tried to use a longsword against something with scales, the DM could be like "Nah, you can't even get through that shell. The attack is ineffective".

Most people nowadays, I feel, would have a conniption if that happened though.

If you consider yourself OK at designing traps and/or rooms, I'd appreciate it if you submitted one to this google form:
>docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2RWB8ZkcDaMYdHl-A-6S0bEHBU_1rNFrMHnUha69QvCeSzQ/viewform
I'll make sure to share the complete collection later if it actually gets enough submissions, but I made sure that you can see the results either way in case that doesn't work out.
I think. This is the first time I've used Google Forms, so I'm not sure if I got everything right.

I figure that I might try running one of those OD&D Solo Dungeons here some day, see how far Veeky Forums can get. That might be entertaining.
Maybe this weekend or something, I dunno. I'll have to make sure to make some magic-users in advance, since those are always a pain in the ass as random monsters.

What are the most innovative OSR?

Please bear with me here: I had a group, long ago. We fell apart, I got bitter, but now we're meeting once a week again for board games (non-rpg). I would like to ease them back into RPG's because it seems GMing is a drug I can't quit.

Thing is, we only have about 3-4 hours once every couple of weeks, and they're all, despite my best efforts, casuals.

I'd like to try and run something tight, focused, something in the style of what I imagine was used in D&D tournaments in olden days: with set goals or perhaps some sort of scoring at the end. This wouldn't diverge too much from what they already recognize from board games.

I'm comfortable with Swords and Wizardry, I know the players would be able to handle it, but it seems this is a system that emulates D&D before the advent of tournaments.

What are some good adventures that fit my bill? If there's nothing like this for S&W, is there a list of known and reliable one-shot adventures that I could use for inspiration? Perhaps a list of popular adventures used at gaming cons? I don't want to go plume mountain on them from the start.

DCC.

Use DCCs tournament funnels.

Black Hack, Into the Odd. Bits of Beyond the Wall are pretty newfangled. Wolfpacks and Winter Snow does some interesting stuff, too.

I am reading about DCC now. Looks good, hope I'll be able to use it and not just put into the dusty collection of pdfs I have.

For your pleasure I removed the name-fagging in the LotFP screen and optimized the ridiculous image size.

Not that guy, but the classic way of differentiating weapons is to use the Chainmail Weapon vs. Armor table. It basically makes a sword better at hitting a lightly armored or unarmored enemy, while a mace gets through heavy armor better.

>How to do procedurally generated exploration games?
Use the procedure to generate content before the game starts, not at the table unless the PCs walk off the edge of what was pregenerated.

>all of the stuff I see available for it seems to take ages at the table.
See above, but also consider making an app or something to generate with on the fly.

I'd say Wolfpacks for the simple reason that it shows an actual understanding of the mechanics and incentives of OSR D&D and manages to put forth *new equivalent incentive structures* for a game about different things than classic D&D is about. That's miles beyond what anybody writing their own games BITD managed to do, and few games since. To me, that's a big deal.

(Most people just complain and bitch about various rules without understanding at all why they're there or how they work within the system, and then change the rules they don't like assuming that the game will magically still work after you altered crucial bits to make it "more realistic").

The full version of the rules - including the AD&D adaptation, I suppose - also has other interesting little differentiations, like longer weapons striking first on charges and significantly shorter weapons getting multiple attacks.

The Chainmail spear sucks ass, though, to the degree that there's even an article in The Strategic Review #1 where Gygax responds to complaints about it. The weapons vs. AC tables in their d20 form also went through three separate not-entirely-identical evolutions in Supplement I: Greyhawk, Swords & Spells, and the AD&D Player's Handbook. Stuff got buffed and nerfed over time.

(Interesting note about Chainmail-to-D&D conversions: goblin light sensitivity in Chainmail is -1 to a 1d6 roll, meaning that they can't hit anyone with decent armor at all, but got turned into a -1 on 1d20 in OD&D, and then later -30% (i.e. -6) in Swords & Spells before getting swapped back to -1 in the Monster Manual.

I imagine the people in charge of updating OD&D monsters weren't the same ones writing S&S, who presumably noticed the Chainmail-to-OD&D problem?)

Is Fire on the Velvet Horizon in the trove?

This guy knows what he's talking about.

>The Chainmail spear sucks ass, though
Yep, agreed. It's a serious flaw, but the table in general, and as a concept, is a pretty solid alternative to variable weapon damage since it's a highly defensible claim that all wounds from weapons exist on a roughly equal scale of grievousness.

>Interesting note about Chainmail-to-D&D conversions
The same's true of a bunch of other Chainmail conversions -- including the weapon vs. armor modifiers themselves, I believe. They were bizarrely sloppily done given that Gygax himself must've been at least aware of the probability work in Chainmail, as co-author.

You've perfectly summed up everything wrong with people who attempt to replace Vancian magic.

Point/Mana based systems don't work in games designed for them let alone trying to retrofit it into D&D.

I think a lot of it might have been intentional? Even stuff like OD&D having +1 to +3 swords, while Chainmail has the exact same range suggested.

I remember a quote about how Gygax got a bit peeved at some players who were using a 1d12 to resolve morale/reactions/whatever rather than 2d6, since it fucked up all the probabilities - I can't imagine that Gygax was unaware of how things got changed when moving from the 2d6 man-to-man system to the 1d20 alternate combat system (not to mention the 1d6 dicepool mass combat!)

Which is why the weapons vs. AC chart in Greyhawk is so bizarre - it just assumes that 8 is +0, IIRC, and just goes +-1 for every +-1 on the 2d6 chart. It's a straight port, no frills attached.

I guess it might be more balanced or something? I dunno. I think Gygax might have just been pressured into including it by player demand, and did a half-assed conversion to appease them? Kind of like the OD&D Halfling, in a way.

Oh, spell points work perfectly fine in some versions of D&D - 3E's Psionics is a wonderful implementation.

It just turns out that it takes a lot of effort to make a good spell point system, and most people who are interested in doing so either don't put in the effort (e.g. 21 first-level spells at first level, or alternatively two fifth-level spells at first level, or alternatively one ninth-level spell at first level) or realize that for all the effort they're putting in they might as well go fix the rest of the things that bug them about the system and WHOOPS you've got a new RPG that's trying to compete with D&D.

Seriously, you want one very simple relatively balanced variant on spell points?
>You have one spell point per level
>Casting a spell costs one spell point per spell level
Bada-bing-bada-boom, you've got a not-overpowered spell point system. The main problem here is that it's a lot weaker than vancian casting, and the Venn diagram with spell point designers doesn't overlap much.

Hey, can someone tell me how missile combat works in 2e for magic items? Like if I have a +2 bow I know thats +2 to thaco and damage, what does using magic arrows do with that?

>D&D - 3E's Psionics is a wonderful implementation.

I wouldn't know, like 99% of the population my DM's wouldn't let Psionics at the table because of how unbalanced they were or something... wait.

>The main problem here is that it's a lot weaker than vancian casting
Is it? I'm not sure if the increased flexibility doesn't make up for the lower number of theoretically castable spells.

Also wondering this

>Seriously, you want one very simple relatively balanced variant on spell points?
>>You have one spell point per level
>>Casting a spell costs one spell point per spell level

How would you govern spell point regeneration? X amount of points per hour? 8 hours rest and they're all back?

Which book describes 3e's take on psionics?

>How would you govern spell point regeneration?
I'm not him, but I'd use the same thing as for Vancian casting: spell points refresh only between adventures. You can't get any back by taking a break, so there's no point in obstructing the adventure to get your wind back. You just have to be judicious with the resources at your disposal at the start of the expedition.

For 3E: the Psionic's Handbook. For 3.5: the Expanded Psionic's Handbook, I think the name was.

If you want the awful take on it that clung too close to 2E's take on it, 3.0's Psionics Handbook.

If you want the one that's actually worth giving a shit about, 3.5's Expanded Psionics Handbook.

Beyond the misunderstandings about the scary system they aren't used to, a lot of anti-psionic attitudes stem from the AD&D psionics which were... sketchy at best, I suppose? They never really worked all that well, IMO.

Whatever method you use for magic-users. Slow regain is a pain in the ass to track.

Then limit the number of spells known, I guess? Honestly, that variant I gave is probably horribly underpowered - when you get access to a new spell level you're shooting off one spell per day and then you're dry. You've got a fuckton of first-level spells, but you really quickly run out of juice if you ever try to use higher-level ones.

A good implementation takes effort and, well, that one didn't take effort.

>Beyond the misunderstandings about the scary system they aren't used to
Oh, also, there's the whole fluff issue where some people are of the opinion that psionics are too sci-fi to fit in their D&D setting.

I don't agree, but that's their opinions and they're allowed to have them.

Seriously, though, the best thing 3E psionics did? They torched Psionic Combat and just made it into an alternative casting thing. Old psionics is too caught up in being two or more separate systems all competing over the same resources, all because the editing process for Eldritch Wizardry was a nightmare and its psionics were literally cobbled together from two separate systems.

>A good implementation takes effort and, well, that one didn't take effort.
Actually, what I meant to suggest with my post was that your implementation was one of the better ones I've ever seen, effort or no effort. Plus, even if it ended up being underpowered that would be the best place to start from since you could just sparingly hand out more points until shit felt right -- no player will ever bitch and moan about getting more points, but taking them away will rankle even with most good players, so starting out with lowballing them is the best strategy.

>so starting out with lowballing them is the best strategy.
That's probably a good idea with homebrewing in general, really - better that people complain that your shit is too weak than that they complain that it's overpowered. One's going to get banned and looked at negatively in the future, and one's going to maybe get reconsidered if there's a patch.

You aren't going to hit the sweet spot with your first try, so you should probably work your way towards it from the shallow end of the pool

Come to think of it, wouldn't a spell point system where you get quite few points naturally be a very good one for using magic items and such? You could have a whole class of implements offering extra spell points if you have access to them between adventures, or if you carry them with you, wear them and so on, even regular stuff like wands would become that much more valuable. Magic drugs which give extra spell points at the risk of addiction, using ritual paraphernalia and even sacrifices to get extra points... if spell points were scarce the temptation would always be there, which I think is an interesting idea.

Thats a nice way of managing ammo, any tip before running it?

Maybe every x levels a magic-user gains y amount of points. I'm not sure how that would work over longer periods of time.

I feel like it's been done before, although I don't know how well.

It's certainly something you could work with, but I feel like you'd need to rejigger things and create your own classes/spells/magic items etc.

So, you know, you run into the old "if I'm going to put this much effort into it, why not [X]?" problem, where X can be anything from endless development creep to creating an all-new fantasy heartbreaker to just giving up on the project due to the required effort involved.

Especially since, well, that's a lot of effort for something that might not end up worth it - just for starters, going that far off the beaten path is already dividing your potential audience into teeny-tiny bits.

I'm sure that we can all think of some highly innovative and unusual game that we would never play since it's TOO innovative and unusual.

You probably don't want to stick too hard to a formula, to be honest - perhaps it's better to just move around the numbers on a spreadsheet and see how many possible spells you'd get? I dunno.

Sounds interesting, Did B/X itself have some good tables for this? Or a 3rd party supplement?

Your opinion is shit, it's the same as everyone else's manufactured false opinion even as you proclaim the superiority of false editions.

True AD&D psionics are best. False edition psionics are false and inform nothing.

Is the guy who was working on converting the d6 mass Chainmail combat battle system to DnD still here?

>True AD&D - False edition
Get lost already you idiot.

How the fuck can AD&D psionics be the best when AD&D psionics is a bastardized, watered-down, unbalanced version of Eldritch Wizardry's psionics that somehow managed the nigh-impossible feat of being harder to keep track of than fuckin' Eldritch Wizardry's god-awful editing?

Since you're a bit of a troll, I'll also take the chance to make a trollish point about you crowing about "false editions" when you're talking about Advanced goddamn Dungeon and Dragons, the game that Gary Gygax Most Definitely made all on his lonesome with no prior help or inspiration, no sirree, these rules are 100% pure Gygax in origin.
Seriously, "True" D&D? Yeah, fuck that shit. Piss on Arneson's grave while you're at it, you've already unzipped.

Also, man, there's like five different variants on AD&D psionics, none of which are identical. I think it's five, anyway - 1E, Psionicist article, Complete Psionicist's Handbook, Dark Sun, Skills & Powers, and The Illithiad? Did I miss any noteworthy variants?
Fuck, I don't think the later ones even use the psionic combat matrix. Didn't they also give up random power selection at some point, and waffle around a bit more on the psionic combat vs. non-psionics bit? I don't even know, man. AD&D psionics is such a fucking mess.

ACKS is a pretty good extension of B/X and has something for every traditional fantasy campaign. DCC does a lot on the micro class end and has a very interesting replacement for Vancian magic. I agree with all the people saying Wolfpacks as well; sums up much of the reasoning.

>So, you know, you run into the old "if I'm going to put this much effort into it, why not [X]?" problem
I agree that there's a risk, but I've also seen a fuckton of alternative magic classes and systems for old-school D&D; I feel like Last Gasp alone must've created three or four, and the Carcosa system's infamous of course.

I think there's space for making all new shit there and still recognizably be D&D, although I do agree that very few of the systems will have many fans. For most of the really out-there ideas it would also be a Herculean task to keep things balanced against the standard casting classes for purposes of fitting published modules and so on, no doubt.

>you're a bit of a troll
Bro, True AD&D is a full troll; calm down, don't let him get to you and don't take the bait.

He's actually kinda funny as long as you don't make the mistake of taking him seriously.

Yeah, sorry.

It just really pushes my buttons, y'know? OD&D's psionics were fascinating when I first read them, if confusing, so I went to see how AD&D handled it. AD&D did a pretty good job with converting most of the OD&D material, you know? How much worse could it be?

Good God, how much worse could it be?

All the fun little bits I liked about OD&D's psionics? Gone. The only thing really remaining in something close to its original form is the psionic combat, but it's burdened by the ridiculous "one attack every segment" rule and also has a bunch of small annoying tweaks like making it easier to brain-fry non-psionics (moving the required Psionic Attack Strength from 120 to 100) and, well, randomizing which psionic attack/defense modes you end up with.

The OD&D ones scale with the number of powers you know, see, so if you're a newbie you can only Psionic Blast while a master could use Psychic Crush to kill people outright (not to mention defend themselves and all their buddies with Tower of Iron Will).
AD&D? Nope, you know a random number of them at character generation and IIRC never get any more. Choose whichever ones you want, I guess.

And then the powers! Good god, the powers! OD&D's pretty neat in how it divides things up so that each class has its own little list of available things, so the kung-fu monk "mind over body" shit goes to the Fighter rather than the Magic-User. AD&D? Nah bro, let's just put it all in one big pool and see what happens.
Similarly, that little note about how, when you as a DM are making the random tables, you should make it so that they're more likely to get stuff that's related to powers they already have? Nope, one big pool.

And all those neat little flavorfull class-specific drawbacks to psionic power are gone, of course - the magic-user doesn't lose spells, etc.

Man, I get that Gygax didn't like the system and only included it because of peer pressure, but why did he have to fuck it up so thoroughly?

I'm really sorry for you.

The focus avoiding combat and making out alive with loot prods at my OSR heartstrings. I'd say go for it user.

Here's some more thief art to inspire ya

Arneson is a piece of shit and so is anyone who defends him, like YOU you fucking piece of shit. Fuck his shit. I bet you piss all over cancer patients while they struggle for breath like he did for Gygax? Claim false authorship to something you had NOTHING to do with? His whole fucking existence is based around Gygax allowing him to share credit.

HURR I ROLL 3d4 FOR ABILITIES, I INVENTED D&D. FUCK YOU. 3.0 and 3.5 are FALSE EDITIONS deal with it you fucking cuck.

Here's where it ends. Anyone who plays anything other than True TSR Editions is a fucking cuck. Suck nigger bull dick, fluff 'em up for Arneson cuckbois.

This is a natural fit, since arguably D&D is all about thieves in the first place -- magic-using thieves, fighting thieves, and (controversially) thieving thieves. Conan is a thief; Faf and Mouser are thieves; anyone who goes below to steal the treasure of the orcs is a thief. You'd just be sharpening the focus a bit; it makes sense. It would probably make for a good resource for less strongly-focused games, too.

This bait is way too aggressive to really emulate True AD&D well. I give it 0/8, and may God have mercy on your soul.

People do conveniently ignore all the bad stuff Arneson did though.

>all the bad stuff Arneson did
What stuff exactly would that be? By all accounts he seems to have been a decent dude who was fond of games and less fond of self-promotion, prone to favoritism when DM-ing but a great creative worldbuilder.

If you have some secret villainy to reveal, let's hear it.

This. Arneson is like August Derleth, running his whole campaign off in Minnesota while the Real Men were dancing with the shoggoths in Wisconsin.

"Hey Gary, I play a game kind of like yours but it's totally different!" Writing letters and not actually playing in the same campaigns or even the same state. "Oh cool Dave, you're a big boy now, let me just use none of your ideas ever."

"Gary you made it big with your game, can I have credit too please I wrote you letters". "Sure OK I'm nice." "HAHAHAHA YOU FAGGOT, I INVENTED THE GAME, HAVE FUN DYING OF CANCER HAHAHAHA"

What are some good exploration-based DCC modules? I feel most of them are rather linear.

Has anyone read Castle Zagyg? Why the fuck has nobody scanned it for the rest of the world? Do they hate it so much?

they're all like that, they're mainly designed as one-shot tournament style modules, just find a non DCC adventure and run it with DCC

I haven't read it yet but you might like Peril on the Purple Planet.

Uh, are you actually clear on who Dave Arneson is? You've got the order completely reversed. It was Arneson who first started using Chainmail for his Braunstein campaign set in "The Duchy of Blackmoor" - he ran a demo game of Blackmoor for Gygax which convinced him that this could be a new game by itself.

Gygax was huge, no doubt - Arneson was using Chainmail, after all, but the whole idea of playing Chainmail with players representing individuals, with a referee to arbitrate between them, was entirely Arneson's to start.

Retroactively changed his story multiple times to minimize the perceived influence Gygax had on blackmoor*. While working at TSR multiple employees complained he worked on personal projects including a fanzine on company time and contributed little-to-nothing to the company. Ironically stole credit from Megarry.

* which was literally a unreadable unplayable mess until Tim Kask got his hands on it and rewrote the ENTIRE thing.

Innovations particular to Arneson's Blackmoor games also included Clerics, the Turn Undead ability (which from comments seem to have functioned less like an "auto-rout" ability originally but instead was more of a "barrier" to Undead, as per the Hammer Horror TV show the Cleric is pretty clearly stolen from). Blackmoor also featured thieves, but apparently the rules in Blackmoor may have been different (the rules Gygax published for OD&D's Thief class were instead taken from a different source).

Castle Blackmoor was essentially the very first dungeon, and Gygax was inspired by it to create Castle Greyhawk a few months later.