/osrg/ OSR General - Endless Labyrinth Edition

bandolier of crossbows!
just shoot one and throw it away, jonh woo style

But that would be way overpowered. No dm should allow that

that's it
rocks fall
everyone dies

Off to a good start.

Remove thieves because they aren't how gygax fucking wanted dnd to work.

Thieves make the game way to anime. Magic needs to be a powerful force, but we can't have things so extreme that an unarmered human with no magical powers can defeat a troll or survive a fireball, even if they make their saving throw. My house rules are the only way to play, if you play anything else you need to go back to pathfinder general and stop shitting up my personal board.

oh, and gay people? TOTALLY faggots. Tolkien said so.

This bingo thing is dumb. It's basically an excuse for funposting, and a lot of its entries aren't even very good.

>basically an excuse for funposting

And here to prove it is

Hey, here's a thought:

Play bingo privately, then attach your *winning* board to an otherwise constructive post.

I don't even know what raggi IS.

I agree with you. The time to post the bingo is AFTER we've filled it, or come close.

I think bingo user is just proud of his new creation. I'd be proud to.

Note to bingo user: next thread, post that after people have mentioned things in it. Much better that way, it discourages this crap

Well he's right. Gay people are faggots.

They've TWO (2) ill-gotten (You)s now, and I bet you didn't even report them.

Now tell me about Elves?

But what if he changes the board before posting it? Its terrible game design to let people just cheat at bingo like that.

This isn't the type of bingo gygax envisioned at ALL

To get the thread back on track: Opinions on drow?

The way I play 'em they're mostly 2nd level fighters with bonus magic abilities and items.

So +3-5 to hit, super intelligent and tricky, but only 2d6 hitpoints. They go down in essentially two hits, though their +5 chain makes that hard to accomplish for low levels.

Elves are amazing to add flavor to a world, but I dont' let players play them. If you make them characters, you get humans-with-pointy-ears disease.

>drow
my opinion is

one kind of elf should be enough for everyone

What about normal elves that live under ground?

c 3rd to 5th level Elves

I like Shadow Elves better than Drow.

that's a dwarf

So if I post my homebrew could I get good feedback?

Maybe, maybe not. But you'll get feedback.

aw what the fuck is that gif

just do it

a very old classic Veeky Forums meme packed in a newer Veeky Forums meme

Guys, I have an idea. Not meming here. An OSR style Doctor Who game, mainly in the fashion of the classic show rather than the modern show.

Why? Because of a few factors:

1) Classic Doctor Who could be lethal - our heroes rarely die but the people they meet die all the time to demonstrate the threat of the monsters and villains.

OSR games are low HP games. This makes PCs quite mortal and it frequently promotes thinking around violent solutions. Very Doctor Who in my opinion.

2) The Doctor is extremely skilled and capable in ways that are hard to make work in games with skills. OSR is not based around skills but rather player skill and GM rulings.

3) Rulings > Rules allows flexibility to tell nearly any story as desired as per Doctor Who.

4) Similarly, OSR can be realistic or gonzo. This is suitable for everything from pure historicals to adventures on alien worlds.

Am I onto something here?

If Goblins are asshole children does that make Hobgoblins asshole teenagers?

>Opinions on drow?
Demon summoning elfs that live in the underworld?

Awesome.

I'm not sure that classes and levels--at least with respect to ramping hit points--really work very well. Barring something meta like Fate, it seems like a stripped down, attribute-based system without the combat focus of the D&D crunch might work pretty well though. So sort of D&D with no classes, and just the attribute scores and improvise... or something like Barbarians of Lemuria, actually. Just add on the necessary careers and go with simple 2d6 rolls.

So now that we've decided that thieves and clerics are unneeded clutter, why don't we take the next step? It's time we all started playing properly in classless systems like Gygax intended.

Any character token generator? i am thinking on using the ones from rpg maker but they dont have dwarves or halflings

It's very easy to houserule.

>have just one class: man
>wearing armor of any kind prevents spellcasting

There.

By gracious arrangement with the author of AD&D™, these monsters of The Dragon's Bestiary are to be considered Official Rules Additions on the same level as those within the Monster Manual.

makes sense;

mushroompress.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/goblins-as-nasty-maggotmonsters.html

But who are the asshole grown-ups?
Inb4 humans

hu-
damnit
bugbears?

Ogres and giants
Duh

Not sure really. There isn't a monster equivalent of taking advantage of your children to feed your vices while simultaneously teaching them that same behaviour through verbal and physical abuse. Get dad another beer or he'll beat you doesn't lend well to a monster trait.

Not Bugbears since they're not very gobliny . It needs to be like a Goblin King or Queen. Ogres maybe?

progresses through each of the Monstrous Humanoids, with it varying for individuals depending on various factors, so you might get weedy little Kobolds(that nonetheless have deadly cunning), or a titanic Hill Giant, or maybe even some Lizardmen if things get weird enough for said group of Goblins

basically most non-undead or extra-planar monsters you encounter are in fact Goblins, just warped and altered by their upbringings(sometimes intentionally so, like with Wargs)

Rate my Race as Class monsters from a mysterious city in the wastes.

Stormers are horrific killing machines, created by some alchemic and spiritual means in a mysterious city in the wastes. This city is known only for its brutal decay and production of cheap goods in its slave factories. Stormers can serve as elite Operatives, journeying far beyond the wastes as part of a mission with others, or just to record their travels for a hungry home audience. Stomers is expected to name themselves, as part of its training; usually choosing an adjective which is thought by general consensus to be interesting, otherwise they are known by the three digit number tattooed on their arm. A consequence of this is there are only a thousand Stormers at any one time, with only a hundred chosen for Operative status, due to their superior intellect. Management is unhappy with the current breed as they display less health and intelligence than estimates expected and have marked them as Export-Only, if a superior breed could be grown.
However Stormers are child-like in their curiosity and eagerly obtain hobby skills from those they encounter, in an attempt to differentiate themselves. Stormer are often gluttons, and will eat anything else if offered food other than their pork rations.
They suffer a -2 penalty to reaction rolls due to their hideous skinned-horse face, it is also speculated they are part troll, as they regenerate 1 hp every 4 turns, unless exposed to acid or fire. However the process that is used to create them is a foul twisting of magic and science and so Stormers cannot use any form of magic weapons or benefit from any magic. They are so large, it costs twice as much to fit armour for them and the Halfling bonus against large creatures applies.
Saves as Elf
Level 1 ------------- 0
Level 2 -------- 2775
Level 3 -------- 5550
Level 4 ------ 11100
Level 5 ----- 22200
Level 6 ----- 44400
Level 7 ----- 88800
Level 8 ---- 138750

These will only be encounter as enemies in my campaign.

They have d10 HD

Under that idea, what's a good name for the class?

Boogey men?

Goblinoids?

Gublinches?

banderlogs?

Fay folk?

Long fingered dwellers in holes?

Relevant
deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/06/game-mission-statement.html

How do you make a sci-fi OSR game?

The fighter has a laser sword.
The ranger has a raygun.
The wizard is psionic.
And your go murdering and looting in spaceships, moon bases and ancient alien tombs.

Relevant how? What in the thread is it a response to?

Combat mini-maxing, goback to pathfinder

Fighter specializing in rayguns and fighting sense
No ranger, but there is a pilot/tech guy who can reverse engineer and break into derelict network systems.
Wizard is psionic.
And you go murdering and looting in spaceships, moon bases and ancient alien tombs while hitting on neon colored alien babes in between.

I'd honestly rather not have psychics at all.

Maybe keep the classes like Thug, Smuggler, and Technician to round it out.

Magic by any other name.

Still, nanomachies are a common alternative.

I need a name and to iron out this homebrew, though the classes are starting to shape up well enough.

>Do you think mega dungeons are good?
Hell yeah. Gonna be running a one-shot later today where the setting is loosely based on the megastructure from Blame! Here's hoping the group enjoys it, they're not usually into OSR games.

Your shields need a significant buff to make them worthwhile if you have 2-handers that good.

How gonzo do you like your OSR?

so, are you going to incorporate the fact it all takes place in the subconsciousness of a single person?

How would you do it?

+2 AC? Reduce all damage taken by -2 while holding the shield (minimum of 1)?

It probably won't get too metaphysical unless my group wants to keep going with it.

I guess I fucked up my wording.

Originally I was going to have it so if you used a 2 hander you didn't get to add your Dexterity modifier to your AC, and a shield just gives a flat bonus of +1, the idea being that if you are a weak caster or thief you'd probably want to hide behind a shield anyway and not use a two hander, but I like the idea of even characters like Wizards being allowed to use 2 handers just because.

>I like the idea of even characters like Wizards being allowed to use 2 handers just because
Just ask Elric of Melniboné.

I bet you only got to D&D through the beat 'em up, you secondary.

WELCOME TO THE D&D WORLD

Thief best girl

Elric's one of the reasons the D&D Elf is a Fighter/Mage, though.

>Do you think mega dungeons are good?
I think they're neat in theory, but I've never had occasion to run one.

I feel like you'd need some Dark Souls-tier level design to make one worth playing through, 'cause a generic dungeon crawl stretched out over several floor would just be awful.

I wish, they didn't have D&D games that cool in 1981. I mean, there was that Intellivision game, but nobody had an Intellivision.

I might be biased because I hate Dr. Who, but no. God no. A system like FATE is much more suitable for what you're looking for than trying to kludge together some sort of OSR Frankengame.

Bogles.

Play Stars Without Number if you want something "realistic". Starships and Spacemen + Mutant Future if you want something wilder.

I've been putting together a setting for my OSR game. Something focused on the things I want to DM a game on. I've settled on the idea of a large empire that fell to a civil war and left behind a fuckton of feuding factions, chaos and general unplesantness. That seems like a pretty good starting point for a sandbox.

Additionally, the idea is that when the empire still ruled, it pacified its lands well and drove all kinds of monstrous things away from its lands. Outside of its borders, into deep woods, under the ground, wherever. Point is, there's no empire any more, and everyone's too busy bashing each other over the head to get their shit together and actually deal with it. So a lot of bad stuff has crept in and is settling back at its leisure, which just adds to the chaos. As people keep bashing heads and adding to the corpse piles, the world around them is getting worse and worse.

Now, I've been thinking I should probably come up with some representative type of monster for all that. I don't want it to just be generic goblins and shit. It needs to be something more evocative and punchier. Ghouls (and stuff like that) might be good, since they'd be literally gnawing on humanity at that point. Unburied battlefields full of corpse-eaters, growing bolder and greedier, preying on travellers and villagers, seems like some pretty evocative imagery.

Suggestions?

BoL Hack perhaps?

Skeletons. But not just boney mooks with rusty weapons, go full hog with the imagery of the skeleton and death. Skeleton riders on skeleton horses, blaring Aztec death-whistles. Skeleton guards mounting permanent guard over checkpoints and watchposts lost to time and history. Step out of the towns and villages that remain, and before long you hear the awful crack of broken bone under your soles. Everything looks bleached and worn, everyone looks haggard and thin - like skin straining to fully stretch over the skeleton under it.

Draugr maybe?

I like to add in gonzo details in most dungeons I do, but it has mostly only confused my players so I keep it at a minimum for the most part.

Mystara's shadow elves are a bit more interesting than the drow of Greyhawk/The Forgotten Realms, yeah.

>I feel like you'd need some Dark Souls-tier level design to make one worth playing through, 'cause a generic dungeon crawl stretched out over several floor would just be awful.
IMHO the main thing to make it tick is having it be unclearable and running multiple groups through it.

DaS1-tier level design is a good idea, though. Never have just one entrance and just one staircase to the next level.

Undead. Assuming your basic man is 1 hd, and a trained fighter might have chainmail (ac 5) and 1-3 hd, these are plenty terrifying.

Skeleton: Undead. Damage, 1d6, ac 7, hd 1/2 (1-2: 1 hp, 3-4: 2 hp, 5-6: 3 hp)
Anything killed by a skeleton and left on its own becomes a zombie. Skeletons are just zombies whose flesh has rotted away.

Zombie. Hd 1 (1d6 hp) damage 1d6 ac 8.
Anything bitten by a zombie becomes a zombie unless cured. Villagers commonly kill their wounded to prevent the spread. Can only be killed by destroying the head, but that's not too difficult 1v1

Ghoul Hd 3, ac 5, damage 1d6. Bite as zombie, but also save or be paralyzed for 1d6 rounds. That's probably enough time for them to eat you.

Ghasts hd 5. Ac 5, Attacks like ghouls. Ghasts have an unholy stenche, so anyone within 20 feet of them must save versus spell or be overcome by uncontrollable retching and be -2 to hit for 1 day. Ghasts are difficult to distinguish from ghouls by sight

>Bipedal animal-people, astoundingly
fertile. Lineage of species, sometimes chimeric

Why don't you name it furry oc central

>promotions?

honestly I'd probably ripoff either Destiny or Mass Effect, because those games' setups works pretty well for Sci-Fi OSR shenanigans(heck Dead Space, Lost Planet, and The Deadly Tower of Monsters are also possibilities to take influence from)

it varies depending on what system and setting I'm using, but there's often at least some gonzo in the setting somewhere

I'm fond of the term Grendel-Kin when putting the monstrous humanoids under a blanket term(something in reference to Typhon, Echinda, Tiamat, or other mythological progenitors of monsters are also possible ones)

>I feel like you'd need some Dark Souls-tier level design to make one worth playing through
that's what I've thought of doing if I ever made one(well my tastes lean towards more towards Bloodborne, but same general concept)

Bloodborne is too

Bloody

For me

Mega dungeons are how the game started. So if you want to be really "Old School", then mega dungeons are the way to go.

Now that being the case, I like how ACKs has them and the reason they exist. To harvest monsters. Think of them as an interactive zoo/farm. Adventurers are just the way you harvest, or the vermin coming in to take away your crop.

Would I like to play in one? Sure. I've played all sorts of video games for this purpose, since computers tend to do it better.

Would I run one? Doubtful. I like story that is a little more deep then kill shit, take their cash, get drunk,laid and healed, rinse, repeat.

>I like story that is a little more deep then kill shit, take their cash, get drunk,laid and healed, rinse, repeat.
Are you unironically implying megadungeons cannot provide that?

They can. But they are an inferior medium for such stories. I much prefer other settings for deeper stories. They have so much more to offer.

>computers tend to do it better.

You don't belong here

>But they are an inferior medium for such stories.

[citation needed]

Anything you can do with a city and overmap can be done with a mega-dungeon environment. Hell, that image upthread is going to require hexcrawling to explore some of those bigger levels, and at that point the only real difference between adventuring in that and the region above ground is that your sky is made of earth.

A computer doesn't give a shit about "plot." A computer is going to kill characters if they are misplayed without the slightest thought for story or balance. A computer can easily generate dungeons and monsters and run them seamlessly without flip-flopping, and can have characters running through them in a fraction of a time it would take generating them by hand for tabletop.

If all you want of OSR is plotless megadungeons, there's no reason to waste time and braincells on tabletop. There's a million roguelikes for that.

You don't know how OSR playstyle is like, you don't know what a megadungeon is like, and you clearly don't care enough to find out trough the millions and millions of blogs that tell you how megadungeons are played and how the OSR playstyle is like

so I'll say again, you don't belong here.

All what those "million blogs" you're parroting mindlessly say can be reduced to "you must play the way we imagine some nerds in the '70s did" For that matter, you have never played a megadungeon beyond a game or two that went nowhere, though you'll claim you're in a ten-year old campaign with twenty-odd players that come and go to raid the dungeon and have finely developed player skill that allows you to thrive and enjoy the megadungeons because of it.

To that, I say congratulations on your functional MMO guild.

why are you even here?
You clearly think the osr movement is bogus.

And you clearly haven't read a single one of the osr blogs.

>computers tend to do it better.
Unless you're talking about, like, NetHack? Nah, you don't have anywhere near the same freedom in CRPGs as you have in pen & paper.

Also, well, why the fuck would you play a story-based RPG campaign rather than playing a story-intensive videogame or reading a book?

Interactivity and freedom from rails. The same reason that even a hack & slash dungeoncrawl has a different feel on the tabletop than on a computer.

Also, well, if your megadungeon doesn't have factions and NPC interactions then quite frankly it's a shit megadungeon.

Honestly, it kind of surprises me that there aren't more RPGs out there that don't require you to kill enemies to progress? Is it just because that was easier to program in the old days and then later 2E also did away with nonlethal progression, or what?
Honestly, I wish more games would have morale and reaction checks. And GP=XP, I guess, but it's not as integral to the whole "all NPCs attack on sight and fight to the death" problem some games have.

Include some sort of intro or preface. In that paragraph sell your game. What separates it from the 100 other OSR games? Compare on contrast. What is the goal your rules can reach that no other game in the world can do as well than this one?

Drop the semicolon, make Stats a table.
Perhaps rename Rouge to Assassin.

The race options do nothing but give a peak into an intended tone or setting, which is cool if you want to lean in that direction. As currently written they it seems unnecessary, you could do something more inclusive with a line like, "describe your character's appearance".

Saving Throws should be moved to a later section it has nothing to do with character creation as presented. What does "base saving throw number?" Starting difficulty? you forgot a period at the end of this sentence. The third paragraph is a mess off commas and seems to be missing the word "add", because it doesn't tell you want to do with half your attribute.

Under combat, might want to replace "strike" with a less melee biased verb. I tend to use the word for a number when talking in amounts, and digits only when talking about math. This makes the document easier to reference later. The verbs under Combat Maneuvers change tense.

You may want to move your armor rules in front of the Attacking rules, or include a not in the attacking rules that wearing armor makes a target harder to hit. I would limit armor to left leg, left arm, torso, right leg, right arm, head, but that's not necessary I suppose.

Drop the "and so on" in Weapon Damage. This is a rule book not a conversation with your friend. Break Hidden Weapons into two sentences. Simple, quick duel wielding rules, this is a plus. rework the last sentence in Heavy weapons.

cont.

You swap between "Hit Die" and "Health Die" in the very first explanation of them, stick to one. I don't know anything about math or curves or odds so I can't give you any input on the max health advancement. You don't mentioned some assumed information like HP max and current HP. You don't mentioned what happens when you you hit 0 HP, which is very important.

The section under Saves for Fighter advancement is strangely worded. "Odd levels +1 to..." There's an implied "When you reach an..." but when you read it out loud as it it sounds pretty bad.
"Superiority" gives the fight +2 Range, what is range? It's never mentioned before this point. "Once per adventure" is too loose a measurement. Try limiting it to once a day, week, etc. Parry again uses Range, an unexplained mechanic. Sometimes you write "Fighting Style" with a capitol F and S, sometimes you do not. The second sentence describing Fighting Styles is redundant.
Tossing the Fighting Styles into a table and giving them names can be a place to inject some flavor (Savage, Quick, etc). I don't really have any idea what you're talking about in regards to Fighting Styles needing specific weapons, so you might want to elaborate on that point.

Under Rogue you give a bonus to sneak attacks, but don't explain what qualifies as a sneak attack. that should probably go in the combat section. There's another style inconsistency when you ou italicize Rogue Skills, but not Fighting Style. Making rolling Rogue Skills a more complete sentence, "When you attempt a Rouge Skill you roll 1d20, if the result is equal to or less than your Rouge Skill points you were successful." Some games make moving without being noticed and other similar roles secret and the DM rolls them. If this is the case in your game you should mention it. You offer a complete list of Rouge Skills, but before that you mention it's up to the DM I would advise doing both. Either make it a set list, or open for interpretation.

cont.

>You clearly think the osr movement is bogus.
Well, he's not really wrong. Reading the blogs they pretend that everyone was running Conanesque low-fantasy tales of cunning when in reality people were running high fantasy hackfests against Norse gods (that's why Gods, Demigods, and Heroes exists).

So much is either manufactured or cherry-picked that the OSR is actually pretty laughable as a historical source.

Magician looks WIP, but as with the other two classes I would restructuring the Saving Throw bonuses into more complete sentences. If you don't want them to be complete sentences, you could make them bullet points. even still I would reword them.

Overall I can't say this home brew is very interesting. I've seen a lot like it before. It doesn't offer any rules for how to level up (or how to get experience if that's a system in the game at all.) If it's meant for quick play going all the way to level 10 seems useless. It doesn't touch on money or equipment in other than mentioned a few items, which is fine you can write a paragraph along the lines of "You start out with proper adventure gear" if you wanted to handle it that way but it should be mentioned in some capacity.

Hope I offered some help.

If you think so why are you here on /osrg/?

To point out the fallacies of the OSR and steal those sweet random charts those Anons post.

Yes, people ran all sorts of stuff in the early days, but most OSR blogs aren't interested in all sorts of stuff; they're interested in the specific kind of stuff that didn't survive into the 90s, which was only a subset of what people were running back then.

Also, mixing a little truth in with your retardation is standard trolling procedure. And while that part of his post is semi-defensible, the rest of it is full-on aggressive stupidity, whether real or simulated. It's best to ignore him and his dumb shit.