/osrg/ OSR General - Can't Stop The Rock Edition

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>Previous thread:
Monks, yes/no/why?

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51027523
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51029322
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51034350
revolution21days.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/why-d-has-lots-of-rules-for-combat.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>Monks, yes/no/why?
Yes, I like having a lot of classes, and Monks are in the RC

No, I don't like dealing with explicitly Shaolinist class. Not because of "muh medieval fantasy hurr durr" because I run anything but medieval fantasy, it just doesn't work for me aesthetically.

>Monks, yes/no/why?
While I have nothing against them personally, generally no, mostly because they don't fit well into my campaign setting. Wouldn't say no if a player wanted to play one, but I'd have to think how to fit them in. Honestly though, my players tend to file monks under weeaboo and so show no real interest in them.

Thanks, but that's only being sold in watermarked PDF too. I want a printed copy.

Monks? Sure, why not? I guess I'd try to make them a Fighter/Cleric hybrid, not unlike the classic "Elf" class being a Fighter/Magic User hybrid.

Limit them to unarmed combat, staves, clubs, and one other weapon of their choice.

Anyhow, I have to admit that the only reason I'd add them in is my own love of the concept.

>Monks, yes/no/why?
Yeah, I like 'em. Like , I use the RC, so it's the Mystic, and it's actually not terrible balance-wise. (At least not on low-to-mid)

The main issue I have with them is actually that their unarmed damage ends up being better than swords and spears, which isn't really appropriate to the source material -- I figure the solution is to give them RC Weapon Mastery with either one or all the classic wuxia weapons (sword, sabre so sword again, spear, maybe bolas or something to represent meteor hammers), but I've never worked out something I'm totally satisfied with there. Anyway the open-hand superiority thing is just really typical of 1980s kung fu flicks available in the US, specifically, so it feels dated and off to me (when I was kid it was all about Crouching Tiger, Hero and that).

In any case, although my setting is basically not!medieval Germany I like it when crazy shit invades in small doses, like rayguns, snail-men of the Yellow City and hashish-eater assassins sent by the Old Man of the Mountain to fuck shit up. So kung-fu mystics from faraway !China are fine by me. They probably came lured by the impossible wealth and magical artifacts of Castle Dangerous anyway, in my setting it's unique, like Golconda. Other places in the setting have magic swords too, but not megadungeons.

>Monks, yes/no/why?
why not?
If they're in the book, I don't see a reason to remove them.

There's a lot of things in a lot of books. Do you include everything there is to include in your games?

I think I missed the "overpowered rock" meme. Could someone spoonfeed it to me or post a screencap?

Someone was saying an unlimited-use 1 damage cantrip was a bad idea because it could trivialize immobile monsters. Then other people said rocks could do the same thing. Then he argued that that was dumb. It kept going like this for awhile.

I don't remove them.

Uh, I don't mean my way is the right way or the only way, but if it's in a book somewhere related to the current game I'm playing (like, BECMI or ACKS) then I assume everything in those books is fair game for me or my players.

I don't play super broken games like AD&D 2e so I don't have to worry about crazy splats.

lol no that wasn't it.
The cantrip thing may have started it but it sure wasn't the reason for the image.
the reason the overpowered rock became a joke was due to the longass argument about how big a rock would need to be to cause 1 damage (with some crazy dude insisting that it would have to be fist-sized).

Lead to someone posting the katana pasta with fist-sized rock.

That's it. I'm sick of all this "fist-sized rock" bullshit that's going on in the /osrg/ right now. Rocks deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

I should know what I'm talking about. I myself found a genuine rock in my garden and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even crush slabs of solid steel with my rock.

God spent years working on a single rock and crushed it up to a million times to produce the finest pieces of soil known to mankind.

rocks are thrice as strong as sling bullets and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a sling bullets can penetrate, a rock can penetrate better. I'm pretty sure a rock could easily blow through a knight wearing full plate with a simple throw by a peasant.

Ever wonder why medieval knights never bothered killing all the serfs? That's right, they were too scared to fight the commoners and their rocks of destruction. Even in World War II, soldiers targeted the men with the rocks first because their killing power was feared and respected.

So what am I saying? Rocks are simply the best projectile that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in rocks. Here is the stat block I propose for rocks:

1d12 Damage
Speed * (always goes first)
+2 to hit and damage
Counts as magical


Now that seems a lot more representative of the power of rocks in real life, don't you think?

tl;dr = rocks need to do more damage in B/X, see my new stat block.

Ah yes, rocks. The great equalizer.

I just can't believe people actually care that much about how big a rock should be to do damage.
Who gives a shit if it's one inch or one foot.

This post about how an unlimited-use cantrip that did 1 hp of damage would destroy the game started things off: archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51027523

Basically, it was saying that if a monster was immobile, trapped in a pit, or (obviously considerably) slower than you, you could just cantrip it to death, ruining resource management and so forth. From there, it was pointed out that you could just throw rocks at it, which lead to an argument about rock availability and damage. That, in turn, lead to the rock-version of the katana meme: archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51029322

>That's it. I'm sick of all this "fist-sized rock" bullshit that's going on in the /osrg/ right now. rocks deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

And from there, things just got sillier (a wand of "sling bullets" that just gave you attacks as if you were using a sling was totally broken because, unlike a sling, you could use it if you were trapped in a closet with your enemy). archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51012685/#51034350

And then we just sort of branched out from there.

Troll Gods Issue #2 is still starving for content. You have something, anything send it our way!

This is wonderful

...

You know what's been the scary part? I just explained this meme to my friend who's my best player too and he's like "yeah, damage dealing cantrips are pure BS". The discussion just started but I'm fucking scared right now.

I get not liking it stylistically, and maybe thinking it sets a bad precedent, but the doomsday predictions regarding the mechanical power of 1 hit point of damage have been seriously overblown.

just drop the conversation right now
He will fucking bash your head in with a rock

>thinking it sets a bad precedent
This would be my only concern if it had an attack roll, tbqh. Plinking for 1 HP damage isn't a big deal, but it sets up a bad expectation.

Autohit might be okay too but I'm significantly warier of the mechanical effects of unavoidable at-will damage, even if it's minimally low.

He just did. Although we kinda agreed that it's only useful in very specific situations. I wonder why nobody brought up that wandering monsters, time-sensitive goals and the possibility of escape assuming you trapped somebody are still a thing. I mean if you have the time to jolt somebody constantly consequence-free, surely you also have the time to fry them in the lamp oil or something.

Guaranteed damage to armor class 2 monsters without using a spell slot is bullshit no matter how you look at it.

Granted, but you can add a rule it only damages targets on X class or worse.

That being said, a To Hit bonus would be far better than am Auto-Hit.

All that was brought up, it didn't dissuade the guy from continuing to call it overpowered 3.pf cancer.

You have to look at average damage, though, where the cantrip still doesn't outperform regular weapons. 1 damage per round autohit can't keep up with a d10 even when the d10 misses 8 times out of 10.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK MY ONE WEAKNESS

Would you be interested in some NPCs?

Let's look at a normal/long sword being swung at a THAC0 of 19 vs. a guy in platemail with an AC of 3. You'll have a 25% chance to hit for 4.5 damage, leading to 1.125 damage per round, which is marginally better than the cantrip. But once your THAC0 improves, or you add in a strength bonus, or you get a magic sword, or you get some sort of situational bonus for flanking, etc., you pull away. What you're really looking at here is a situation that renders starting characters relatively ineffective (if the monster you're striking at has 4 hit dice and 14 hit points, it would take you 12 to 13 rounds, on average, to take it down on your own, which is a bit ridiculous). It's not so much a case of the cantrip being overpowered but of the encounter being outside the range that starting characters are meant to deal with. And there in that niche case, yes, the cantrip really shines and becomes almost as effective as a fighter (assuming the fighter doesn't have a strength bonus and isn't using a two-handed sword, etc.). But then a starting fighter's main claim to fame is his durability; it's really only as he levels up that he begins to really pull away from the other classes in terms of offensive power. Mind you, I understand people not wanting there to be a cantrip you can plink away with over and over, as it changes the feel of the game, if nothing else, but I still don't think it's game breaking.

It's one of those counter-intuitive things that sounds like it should be game-breaking, but when you look at it in detail, it's not.

>Monks, yes/no/why?
Depends on the setting really.

Rocks are the best /osr/ meme

Is the user from the other thread here, where I asked if he has a group open? My discord is soniciscool3

Sorry for the autism name, man. It was so I could remember since my Skype I made in high school is the same thing

Hey, it's Veeky Forums, we've all got the autism here.

>Sorry for the autism name, man.
>soniciscool3
This post gave me a spontaneous chuckle.

Witch name combination for the 4 head classes do you guys prefer?

Warrior / Fighter / Fighting-Man
Rogue / Thief / Specialist
Cleric / Mystic / Child Molester
Mage / Wizard / Magic-User

Fighter/Thief/Mage/Cleric.

>Monks, yes/no/why?
Meh?
Nobody's wanted to play one yet, but if they did I'd set up a Zak-style random class for them Start out with Minor Weapons and high HP. On the level up table, give them rolls for penetrating AC, better saves, attack bonus, points in Climb and some kind of ascetic abilities that let them ignore starvation or dehydration for a few extra days. I'll poke at it a bit in my head and post something later if I can come up with a reasonable table.

1) Magic-user for the class, but used interchangeably with "Mage"/"Magi"/"Magus" and "Witch" in-game.
"Wizard" is a technical term for someone who's got magical powers, but doesn't adhere to the traditional Vancian system. Whether that's because of an Item of Power, Elfin blood, possession, or other crazy shit.

2) Specialist.
I like having "thief" be an in-game job, not an entire class. I also like having the option to let characters make Rangers, assassins, occult dabblers, ship captains, and seige engineers without needing a separate class for each.

3) Cleric, although that's just a convention. I'd probably call them Zealots or Templars if people gave a shit.

4) Fighter/Slaughterer. Gets the point across. I occasionally use "warrior" because I played too much FFXI.

...which is also why
5) I call Fighter/Magic-users "Red Mages".

What's a good progression system for Fighters?

Currently I was thinking of doing something similar to LotFP where Fighters just get +1 to hit each level, but also get a 'free move' ability depending on their attack roll, as in a free combat move on their turn that lets them knock enemies around, attempt to trip or disarm, through sand in their eyes, etc.

At level 1 it would be on a roll of 20 or 19. Level 2 it would be 18, Level 3 is 17 and up, etc. This in addition to the +1 to hit.

Any thoughts on this? I was trying to keep things simple but keep Fighters from being too boring.

>What's a good progression system for Fighters?
More hit dice and attack bonuses.

No moves for Fighters. That's not OSR. Find another goddamn game if you want special anime builds. The Fighter already has the bigger hit die and access to all weapons and armor, and that's really all OD&D needed to make it awesome. All that stupid shit you want to pile up on it is covered within a truly oldschool combat round of one minute.

>All that stupid shit you want to pile up on it is covered within a truly oldschool combat round of one minute.
I agree with this. Many of these newschool homebrews forget that D&D combat is abstract as fuck.

I like "fighting man". It's funny to me. Also I'm gonna be a heretic and say I like "rogue" over specialist and thief.

>Fighting Man
>Magic User
>Rogue
>Cleric


I think sonic is cool too

Jump off a bridge.

Warrior
Specialist
Cleric
Mage

>Fighter
>Rogue
>Zealot
>Sorcerer

If you use anything else, you're doing it wrong.

Sure.

We've all been there, man.

>Dub Dub Trip
Welp, I guess I was right

Listen man, if your name is just something edgy or dumb like 'shadowslayer' then it's fine to keep your old highschool name into adulthood.

But when that's your name? 'sonic anything number?' You need to fucking change it.

Are you seriously reacting like this over one user who wants to play an old-school system in an old-school way, in the old-school general?

Fighter, Specialist, Mage. Well technically I'd use Magic-User, but it doesn't sound catchy in my language. Also I'm thinking about dropping Clerics as a religious militant class and refluffing them as
Red Mages!

That's fine. If I used something like this I would still use Mighty Deeds but stunting on various natural numbers is okay, kinda like 13th Age.

Although I just kind of wing maneuvers on the fly and everyone's happy, so I don't know why you guys keep coming up with this. Then again anything can get stale.

Wrong. Edgelord names induce cringe exponentially as the time passes, 'sonic' doesn't.

SwordGuy
DickAssThief
RootyTootyPoint'N'Shooty
BustinMakesMeHealGood

Most people here don't want OSR play. They're like those Penny Arcade shitheads that fellate 4E but sometimes drop into a heavily modified Swords & Wizardry where you can't actually die or lose or do anything other than magical tea party bullshit just to "do things like in the olden days." Any user that actually gives a fuck about how the game was meant to be played all along has to tell these fuckers off every chance they get.

We have a winner!

>T-That's not OSR! Only my definition of OSR is correct!

Wrong.

Men & Magic is OSR
White and Black Hacks are OSR
LotFP is OSR
Into the Odd is OSR
My game is OSR, your game is OSR

OSR is;
>Resource management, high risk dungeon crawling
>Player skill > Character skill
>Rulings before Rules

OSR is not
>A ruleset
>Race-As-Class
>Sacred Cows

Arguing over what is and isn't 'old school' is fucking sad, can we just go back to sweet homebrew tables and shit?

>OSR is not
>Race-As-Class
B-But this is better than race-and-class, everyone should do this

I honestly don't have a problem with people playing their own way, but it's getting a bit annoying that every general has people coming in asking about "trip/disarm rules" and such, as if it's an assumed part of osr games and osr play. At least understand that many anons here don't play like that, so people being critical against it shouldn't be surprising.

Player wants to trip or disarm. What's the rule? That's what people are discussing. Why is it a problem for people to discuss this?

I'm the user with the posssible game I'll contact you a bit later today. I gotta go run about. We'll talk.

It's a problem when no progress has been made for several threads. Either make a rule suggestion in a pdf or something and ask people for feedback, or maybe come to the conclusion that adding such rules to an osr ruleset is very hard and maybe not worth the effort anyway when they can just play a more combat-focused system.

>so people being critical against it shouldn't be surprising.
There's a difference between "I'd advise against something like that, as it undermines old school play" and "Find another goddamn game if you want some special anime builds."

There's also a difference between "I understand that it's not typical OSR, but I'd still like to try it" and "Jump off a bridge".

Murderhobo
Sneaky-Breeker
God's Bitch
Arcane Schizophrenic

>Monks, yes/no/why?
yes, although I've yet to really find an OSR Monk class that does what I want with the archetype(but then what I want to emulate is stuff like Fist of The North Star or the first two arcs of Jojo)

Fighter
Thief
Cleric
Magic-User

it's more because that guy said it like an asshole

you're right about OSR having a vague and highly encompassing definition, but I don't think yours is quite right either, honestly the only sensible definition is as such;

a game or book is OSR if it fits into one or both of the following definitions:

1. was published by TSR

2. is broadly compatible with any TSR edition and most other products that are also labled OSR

any other definition is doomed to cause arguments

Balancing disarming is a tricky prospect. What percentage of an enemy's hit points is disarming them worth? If you can freely draw a new weapon without penalty (and actually have another weapon of comparable power), it obviously isn't worth much. If drawing a new weapon takes your turn, then it's not very powerful since you have to use up your turn to *maybe* lose them theirs (if you're ganging up on a single enemy or they don't have another comparable weapon, it may still be worth it).

The worst thing you can do is make disarming generally more powerful than just attacking, because it leads to ridiculous combats where everybody focuses on disarming. Ideally, disarming should pretty much equal all the time (good luck with that), or should be a bit weaker on average, but have certain circumstances where it shines.

One idea is that you need to set up special maneuvers. Like, the enemy has to be vulnerable in some way or they're significantly weaker (on average) than just attacking. Maybe if an enemy misses you by a decent amount, they become "vulnerable". Or maybe you have some sort of expendable resource that you can use to perform special maneuvers. Maybe you earn them in various ways during combat (missing by a single point, making a kill, an enemy rolling a 1 to hit you, etc.) or just start with a couple (if you don't want people to blow them all immediately, maybe they have a chance out of 6 of working equal to whatever combat round you're in, so the longer you save them, the more effective they become). Etc.

But of course, you run the risk of things becoming overly crunchy. If this is the only bit of crunch you add, I think things would still function pretty well, but if you do shit like this all over the place, pretty soon your game is going to start feeling like Pathfinder or something.

In your personal opinion, how much murderhoboing is too much murderhoboing in OSR?

I wasn't involved in that exchange, but the "jump off a bridge" person was responding to the other person being snotty. If somebody is snotty with you, being snotty back becomes somewhat more justifiable.

Interesting. But also formulaic.

Here's my definition of the OSR (and feel free to argue, arguing about philosophy is what we pedants do).

• Willingness to hack. Everything.
No Sacred Cows is part of this, but far from the only one.

• "Referee" before "Master". It's not about making things go your way, it's about running a world. Subtly different from "rulings not rules", but part of the same ethos.

• Elegance and verisimlitude before "realism". Rules need to be clean, elegant, and playable, or no-one's going to use them.
I call this the three-by-five card test; if you can't explain it to a reasonable person on one, then you need to look real hard at where you can pare it down. It needs to feel reasonable, even if it's not technically correct, or the players won't go for it. This doesn't apply to tables, just to the rules that adjucate them

• Trust the dice more than the paper.
Fuck your story, don't fudge dice. If you really wanted it to happen you shouldn't have rolled first.

• Resource management.
Well, duh.
What kind of resources change as the characters level up, but they're always handling some manner of resource, and something's always in short supply. By the time you're not worried about torches, you >are< worried about payroll and your social capital.

• Risk. Real risk, of losing things you like.

• Player skill can be patched - but not replaced - with character skills. (AKA "skills as saving throws").
Sometimes, you don't need to roll the dice to know that something works. Sometimes even the smartest player runs up against something they didn't plan for.

• Trust the players.
Occasionally they'll have better, funnier, or otherwise more tone-appropriate ideas about what's going on than the module, or you. Don't be afraid to roll with it. Literally, if you have to - you can always roll a die to see if they're right.

Ultimately the OSR is about building a structure you can hang a tense mind game on.

>THAC0
>numeric AC
>d8 longsword damage
>using the Alternate Combat System, ever

Tb h your math and explanation and everything is great, but it totally misses the mark as you've committed one of the classic blunders.

I think the two snotty comments are on very different levels. One of them at least tried to make a point, the other just urged him to kill himself.

The problem is I've been TRYING to make these rules but every time I post in the thread I get shitters 'muh not osr' trolls who just waste everyone's time and energy.

It's a significant issue in a game. Unless you want to argue that 'all combat actions besides attacks should be given a ruling all the time every time' I think it deserves its own rule.

>tfw no more Dragon Half OVAs

One act of snottiness was unprovoked. That's the difference I see.

You should find the True AD&D guy and argue with him. Somewhere else.

Well, clearly you're also getting replies saying that it looks good. Have you playtested these rules? What are your findings? Do you have any problems with the rule yourself? Something you specifically need help with?
Just posting this over and over here doesn't seem to help much.

True, but while the first one went from a 0 to a 10, the second went from a 10 to a 50.

...you're against female Clerics?

Does anyone know if there's an OSR Game with rules for tanks? Thanks in advance.

Another major part of my gaming ethos is a simple proposition:

The world stills exists without the player characters.

They can alter it. But things don't hang in midair waiting to drop as soon as the PCs arrive. Trees fall, because the damned world hears it even if there's not a character sheet sitting next to it. TSR and JG had a lot of problems getting that, and I don't blame people for following their lead. But for me it's part and parcel of making the players feel like they're involved in a world and not in a play.

It also makes >time< a resource, which is part of what Gary was getting at in his little rant in the 1eDMG. Sure, you track it so you know when torches burn out. But if you leave the prisoners sentenced to death in the jail, eventually they need to get their damnfool heads cut off or it voids the "risk" element of the OSR. Being able to depend on the princess sitting, endlessly on the cusp of ravishment, until the murderhobos show up on the EHP's doorstep is poisonous to the tension that's a core element of OSR games.

How about a simple HD+Str/Dex mod vs eachother ? As a static number.

What about when someone fumbles, an adjacent enemy can perform a free maneuver. If they hit their armor class it works.
On your turn you can choose to do a maneuver instead of attack and on a crit, you succeed. You can also extend your crit range to make it more likely, but you must equally extend your fumble range. Extending crit range to 16-20 also extends fumble range to 1-5. Of course if you fumble then the enemy can try to make a maneuver.
I basically just combined an idea I had with a rule I've never used I saw on a blog.

The Bustin in BustinMakesMeHealGood is in reference to people's faces.

>Balancing disarming is a tricky prospect.
Totally agree. I've thought about this a lot, and what I've concluded is that the best way is to use the dragon subdual rules (no, hear me out). If you attack to disarm a guy (cleanly and not as part of stabbing him in the guts), declare this and do subdual instead of killing damage, that percentile roll, the whole thing. If the enemy fails the percentile roll, his weapon flies out of his hand(s) and he realizes he's been soundly trounced, thus surrenders, like the disarmed bad guy in an Errol Flynn movie.

Has anyone used 5e Backgrounds in OSR systems yet?

There's Tractics, which Gygax name-dropped in the DMG and he worked on a little. it's a tank wargame.

Nigga. Are you serious right now.

That's an ATTACK. I'm not talking about Attacks. I'm talking about non-attacking combat moves. How is this not clear to you?

Fighter is fighting kobolds along with his Cleric buddy. The Fighter has a sword and realizes the kobolds have a magical enchantment that makes them immune to cutting weapons, so he kicks the kobold towards his Cleric buddy who smashes the kobold's face in.

Was that an attack? No, it wasn't an attack. It was a set up, an extra move. When the party is faced with dangerous monsters and some party members, especially the thieves and MUs, are weaker at combat they need other ways to be useful in a fight. Throw sand in his eyes, try to trip him or hook his shield to lower his AC.

These are not attacks and they are a integral part of dynamic combat. That's the ruleset I'm trying to pin down, but apparently it's not 'OSR' enough. I'm sorry I guess two faggots hitting each other with swords over and over again without moving is 'real OSR', oh yeah? Fuck you.

>including 2E in the definition will not cause arguments
Mufugguuuuuuuuuh come onnnnnnnnn

>These are not attacks and they are a integral part of dynamic combat. That's the ruleset I'm trying to pin down, but apparently it's not 'OSR' enough. I'm sorry I guess two faggots hitting each other with swords over and over again without moving is 'real OSR', oh yeah? Fuck you.
I think the problem is, the amount of things you can do in a combat other then "attack" is so varied that it is almost impossible to create a rule that works for every single situation.

>muh assassins and devils ;_;

Reminder that Gygax himself stated in Dragon that he was going to either stick assassins in an optional DMG section or remove them, just like psionics.

And at least 2e fixed the daemon/demon retardation.

Yeah i was trying to give advice and help you but it seems like you don't want advice, shitpost somewhere else.

>but apparently it's not 'OSR' enough. I'm sorry I guess two faggots hitting each other with swords over and over again without moving is 'real OSR', oh yeah?
Honestly, this seems like more of a problem with your home game than with the system.
One, you can have a bunch of stuff going on around the battle that the players can interact with. If you place a battle in an empty void, then yeah it becomes kind of boring.
Two, you seem to have forgotten morale rules, but a lot of people do I guess.
Three, oldschool d&d really isn't as much about fighting as it is about dungeon crawling and avoiding danger, so having fights shouldn't be the main point anyway.

>Three, oldschool d&d really isn't as much about fighting as it is about dungeon crawling and avoiding danger, so having fights shouldn't be the main point anyway.
Frankly, since combat isn't the main point, I've been thinking it should not take more than one roll per party per encounter to solve. Some Apocalypse World style "roll high and you kill the bads without losing resources, roll low and you get to pick between losing a PC, running the fuck away or missing treasure" single die roll. And yet most OSR stuff still revolves around combat, rules-wise.

I used occupations and such, but not in the 5e way, like with the personality traits tables. They're fine to roll on to get some inspiration without fully investing into the full fledged character.

>user suggested opposed check
>That's an ATTACK. I'm not talking about Attacks.

You need to pin your autism down.

Why not give every class a linear bonus but then let them 'trade it in' for in universe special effects of abilities?

ie; Fighter can 'trade in' his normal to-hit bonuses for training with the old man on the mountain, who eventually teaches him (after a quest) how to become immune to cold damage.

This could be a better alternative to 'builds' and similar things, since people tend not to like those.

> I've been thinking it should not take more than one roll per party per encounter to solve.
Seems like way too much abstraction to me but if that's what you want.
>And yet most OSR stuff still revolves around combat, rules-wise.
That's probably because combat is a lot more difficult to arbitrate then role-playing or puzzle-solving.

revolution21days.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/why-d-has-lots-of-rules-for-combat.html

>in reference to people's faces.

I assumed it was in reference to dealing with the undead.

Because the old man in the mountain might not exist at all, and the player should not get to force setting elements for mechanical bonuses.

Yeah undead people's faces.