Old School Renaissance General - /osrg/

This again

1. Actually the broken ribs of a massive skeleton. They jut out of the earth bleached by the sun. Over centuries, they have been carved upon by various _________.

2. The, quite literal, dead and rotting body of God.

3. The field itself is trying to send people a message. Perhaps a warning of some kind.

>You also have to come up with a new edition name
>that's a lot of pressure
Unlike the filename, the edition doesn't have to be clever.
>and a thread question
That goes in the first reply, not the OP.
The next thread is GUARANTEED to copy that by mistake.
youtube.com/watch?v=OGp9P6QvMjY
>or else you're a fag.
As a Veeky Forums user, you area dag either way.
ESPECIALLY if you try to be OP.

>What's the deal with those ancient stone pillars?
1. Ribcage of an (un)dead giant. Sometimes he tries to move.
2. Boners of petrified giants. A cult of fetishists gathers around them.
3. Shell casings that fell from a God's gun. The great gunsmith lives nearby.
4. Pistons in an ancient machinery. If cleaned, oiled, and powered, they can launch people into space.
5. Yard sale of a pillar god. He keeps best ones under the counter.
6. A bunch of nuclear missiles. They are useless due to age, but the local techomancer warlord doesn't know that.

How do you actually impart a specific kind of feeling to your locales and inspire your players to really see what what it is you want them to see? tl;dr, what makes your dungeons not boring?

What is the one, singular thing above all that can make a game go from OSR to not?

Like, if you took B/X and added ONE thing to make it no longer OSR in spirit, what is that?

Is there more to that comic?

Thieves. jk Player-facing mechanics, specifically fronloaded in chargen, e.g. significant class customizability

>What's the deal with those ancient stone pillars?
They hold up the sky.
They're taller at the top than at the bottom (a la. Bugarup University).
The used to be part of a palace. A historian (sage) could tell you were to dig to find the dungeon underneath.
The're an elaborate calendar.
Obelisks that fell (and broke) during transportation.
Carven on every stone: "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I too have known."
A foreign Magic-User commissioned them, "to fix the fēngshuǐ."
>What lurks in the huge meteor crater beyond the hills?
An antlion.
A lightning breathing lion made of steel.
A regular lion.
A rust monster, guarding a stainless steel cooking knife.
A personable blue midget with 7 arms and 7 "wands of death."
30-300 Orcs.
A foreign Magic-User commissioned, "to fix the fēngshuǐ."
>What's the truth behind the geoglyph south of town?
A demon has spent years inciting parts of the ground to erode, inch by inch.
Drunk wizard's apprentices put them there as a joke.
It's a note dropped by a Cloud Giant princess, imprisoned against her will.
If you dig beneath, lo and behold! A dungeon!
They don't think the universe be like it is but it do.
A psionic ant colony is trying to parlay with the birds.
A foreign Magic-User commissioned them, "to fix the fēngshuǐ."

>Who is the lord of this land?
>The shapeshifting monsters looks like ___
>What are the rooms at the inn like?

Editing, storytelling and shared fun

Does the LotFP Specialist count as significant class customizability?

>there are people who are literally angry that BotW is trying to capture in full 3D what wandering around in the lonely world and dungeons of the first Zelda game felt like.

Fucking wiz... I mean, fucking magic-users.

>Is there more to that comic?
It's a fan comic for Zelda (the NES one?)
• adambrycethomas.deviantart.com/gallery/43473918/TLoZ-Comic

Speaking of Zelda, here's some concept art for the early games (mostly Zelda 2?)

>nerds angry about video games

Color me shocked. This is why I'm more into tabletop now, to get away from that stupid, entitled, venomous culture of "gamers."

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No, I don't think it's much more choice then when you let first level MU's choosing their starting spells. It'd be a different story if each of the 8 or so classes had similar progressive choices available, and it'd be even worse if you had race-and-class. The measure is chargen time, all the multiple layers of choice exponentially extend player options leading to a build style of play.

Alternatively, I would've said replacing Gold for XP with Combat for XP as the primary source of XP.

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Give descriptions that make the place feel lived in and realistic, even if its some technically impossible super crystal fortress.
Give discriptions of the smell of the place, what the players themselves sound like with their voice echoing off the walls, even mundane things like discribing how tacky the decorations look.

Take my picture, for example. Imagine discribing to your party's fighter what its like to descend those stairs and see what's on the lower floor. Word it in a way that would effect them personally (if they're the cautious type, draw attention to the tentacles they see slip back into a recess in the wall; if they're hot blooded, point out that they can run ahead and test what the monster in the wall might do based on how it retracted).

>when you let first level MU's choosing their starting spells.
You should probably be dicing for those?

Retro LoZ, especially the old art by Katsuya Terada is a huge inspiration for me when it comes to worldbuilding. it's a goldmine of ideas. I really like what this guy did with the first game:

nathanandersonart.tumblr.com/post/149845044314/the-legend-of-zelda-redux-enemies-in-high-school#149845044314

Can one balance the two then? Maintain the spirit of OSR while offering customization? And I'm not talking about PF shit. I'm talking about having a Fighter who is actually a decent pick-pocket or a Cleric who is a wiz at bushcraft?

>to really see what what it is you want them to see?
Poor lighting usually helps.
The less they can see at once, the more you can get away with telling them.
And the more likely they are to search around why asking about what they see.
>tl;dr, what makes your dungeons not boring?
Reward paying attention to the dungeon.
• The PCs realize two goblin tribes live on opposite ends of the dungeon, then pit them against each other
• The PCs can make reasonable judgements about what they'll find next based on what their current room was built for (old kitchen ⇒ old storage room, etc.)
• The PCs find a secret door left open, when they come back it's closed

>What is the one, singular thing above all that can make a game go from OSR to not?
honestly I can't really think of any one thing that would, it takes a bunch of things at once to do so, but then I find any attempts to define OSR beyond the very simple ones stated last thread in & to be utterly meaningless wastes of time that generally only exist to start arguments

>Player-facing mechanics, specifically fronloaded in chargen, e.g. significant class customizability
honestly I completely disagree with this, especially since most of the time when I've seen people be against "Player Facing Mechanics" what they really mean is that they're against the players' having any significant input in play or indeed mechanics in general(not to mention their ideal character systems tend to result in completely flat and boring characters, especially in the hands of your average player who literally can't roleplay their way out of a plastic bag)

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>dat wizzrobe
That's EXACTLY the vibe I'm trying to get for the Wizard King in one of my dungeons; just this force that exists with the sprawling bricked dungeons of a forgotten age.

We really aught to stick that definition in the OP...

Question: Is it wrong to backwards engineer roguelikes into OSR?

I'm absolutely enamored by the idea of dungeons that are unfair solely because Players are literally fresh out of the village and diving into an unknown tomb of monsters and magic, surviving literally only because they actively pay attention to what's going on and not just trying to slaughter wave after wave of baddies and believing that the next treasure chest will be the answer to their problems.

Naw, you go for it, m80. Also dang, I am so down for all the art in the thread tonight.

Moldvay monster

Not at all! Rogue and its closer ilk were proper OSR.

What's the most/best OSR roguelike? I've only ever played nethack

Nah. Sounds fun.

There's really something to be said about western fantasy re-interpreted through the eyes of non-westerners and then brought back over.

>"The knight who lives in the labyrinths.
> He has lots of attacking power.
> He repels Link's attacks from the front with his shield."
> -The Legend of Zelda Manual
Are these guys adventurers who never came back up?

Especially fitting since FF is literally a massive Japanese copyright infringing D&D ripoff. And it's great.

Play some DCC.

>What's the most OSR roguelike?
Angband?
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is pretty good.
Sane for Tales of Maj'Eyal.
>I've only ever played nethack
You. Have. Got. To try the original Rogue.

Roguelikes are literally just OSR games, though.

If you're playing OSR games the way they're meant to be played (that is, old school dungeon crawling), then you're playing a tabletop roguelike.

Remember, rogue was literally an attempt to translate D&D into a computer game. Back then, in the days of 1E AD&D, games were much more about dungeon raiding and surviving against the odds than epic storytelling and the likes.

We stole Kimba the White Lion from them. It all evens out.

Creativity and tactics belong in roleplay, not in their character sheet. Munchkinism is binary.

OSR game with oldschool JRPG fantasy style art fucking when.

>Creativity and tactics belong in roleplay.
>not in the character sheet
And yet you probably still do roll-under-ability to check shit, don't you?

You're gonna have to face it; the majority of players, even in the OSR, balance the two. OSR leans towards RP side, PF shit leans towards relying on stats and the sheet, the rest of us meet in the middle.

>Creativity and tactics belong in roleplay, not in their character sheet. Munchkinism is binary.
honestly I've long come to believe as little as possible should be left to roleplaying in an RPG, 99% of all people whether player or DM are absolutely abysmal at it and shouldn't even bother with attempting to do anything involving it

What I mean by roleplaying is just the part where you declare actions besides dice rolls, not, like, trying to be an actor or something. Good roleplay, imo, is realistically occupying your PC's perspective, using the tools available to follow through on their motivations. I don't think players have much trouble with that. The trouble with role-play comes when players have to fake their motivations to match their PC's. Both PC's and players want the gold, so it works perfectly but when you have some dumb backstory about saving the princess, you have to force yourself to act it out, which is why mechanically arbitrary XP handouts are a thing.

And when you have shit like a skill for lockpicking or spot checking or ability/feat bonuses, it stops players from using their creativity to solve problems by controlling actors in a situation in favor of pressing a button to activate abilities or discussing tactics in a situation based solely on the mechanical buffs on their character sheet.

>What's the truth behind the geoglyph south of town?
It's a clue to help the party decipher the ancient map. The glyph reads, "north."
It was put into the ground ages ago, before the most recent flipping of the magnetic poles.

Let's say we want to switch the magic users and clerics for the romantic notion of the division between High and Low magicians. What should be the capabilities of each?

>Actual play
Top good, Ruinations Guy!

>that pic
"So, how long until the baby's due?"

It depends on the game. If I'm running a fairly straight medieval fantasy campaign, everything will stick more or less to that setting (even if the far east is Yoon-Suin, or the Red and Pleasant Land exists in a parallel dimension). If I'm running something more gonzo, though, it seems to me like there's no good reason for something to be its own dungeon if it doesn't have its own style -- in that case it can just be part of a previous dungeon.

Post more art!
Show me your ideal level 1 OSR character!

>You're gonna have to face it; the majority of players, even in the OSR, balance the two. OSR leans towards RP side, PF shit leans towards relying on stats and the sheet, the rest of us meet in the middle.

Quoted for truth.

I'll be honest, that kind of art gets me more pumped for old school style games way more than a lot of other fantasy art out there.

I'm new to these games and wanna know:

If a monster is worth 50 XP upon defeating, is that 50 given to each player or divided?

Could you guys explain to me what the problem is with percentage-based thief skills? Not the thief skills themselves, but rather the system. Many retroclones change it around but I'm still not so sure about what was wrong with the original.

The small increments meant the Thief took way too long to start becoming useful.

The Thief in BECMI for example is pretty much the objectively worst class.

Nothing is wrong with d% systems. The numbers were just laughably low.

It's be like having a fighter who starts with a 15% chance to hit someone.

I'd say it depends on how fast you want your players to level up as a group. If you want everyone to be equally strong, then give them all the 50 XP individually, but if you want it to be a "You've got to pull your weight; throwing a pebble to get the cave spider's attention isn't the same as wrapping your boots in its webbing so you could walk on its web to stab it" sorta thing, divide it based on what they did.

The problem with the second one is that it opens up OoC conflict. Say you have a party of three: a human, dwarf, and drow. You run into a giant spider, but the drow does nothing to fight it. Instead, they know how to move and speak to it to have it ignore them and the drow moves past its lair, while the human and dwarf kill it. You can logically split the XP given from the ENCOUNTER to everyone (the drow tested a method to avoid conflict and it worked, while the dwarf and human engaged in conflict and won), but the human and dwarf's player might argue otherwise.

Japanese '80s fantasy art owns.

It's ya boi

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What?

By the rules, you always divide XP among the party. A 50 XP monster would grant a party of 5 PCs 10 XP each.

I've never heard of anyone complaining about party members who aren't useful in combat getting XP, and I've never played with a group that didn't divide XP either.

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Would you say that the numbers are better in Basic Fantasy RPG, or is that still too low?

I have. I've had arguments where the group's hotblooded fighting man insisted that he's logically learning more from stabbing goblins than the illusionist was basically just using the same spell over and over to dazzle them, and deserve a lion's share of the XP.

To me, OSR just means compatibility with old editions. I don't believe there's any real ideological root shared by everyone--just a desire to fuck around with the old games and use interesting material from the TSR days and modern writers.

So throwing out a core mechanic of the system would make it "not OSR" to me.
>throwing out d20 rolls or substantially changing the scale of damage and HP (or changing those subsystems so much that they can't relate to earlier material)
>switching to dice pools or some other mechanic

Even dropping core attributes doesn't substantially change the game, as Into the Odd demonstrates.

Not because it's bad design or because I hate... but literally because I can't be bothered to go through dozens of statblocks to update shit.

>I don't believe there's any real ideological root shared by everyone

You'd be wrong. The OSR movement is both about mechanics AND ideologies.

All retro-clones are OSR, but not all OSR games are retro-clones. You could have a game that is mechanically distinct enough from D&D, like say, Torchbearer, be present in many OSR discussions because it has the spirit of OSR down to its core.

Better, but still kinda shitty. There is a supplement for racial advantages/disadvantages that can tweak things a bit.

I suggest one layer of customization, if any.

>cleric/mu choose spells
>specialist chooses skills
>fighter chooses weapon and armor
Or have them roll randomly for all that shit.

If you really dislike giving the specialist too many choices at chargen, just give him a package with the traditional thief skills, or let him choose from packages like "ranger", "thief" etc.

Whether it does or doesn't fit some ideal of OSR purity is irrelevant, as long as the guy can muddle through Keep on the Borderlands.

Of course everyone has to choose weapons and armor, but the fighter is the one with the most options, and is most often on the front line. And hell, you could even roll weapons randomly.

Neat, thanks!

>shared by everyone
>shared by everyone
>shared by everyone

Fair point about torchbearerer, since it clearly is inspired by the old school dungeon crawl, but because it aims to broadly reinterpret the themes of old school D&D with wholly different mechanics, it's still set apart.

>Of course everyone has to choose weapons and armor, but the fighter is the one with the most options
This is something I see posted now and again but what does this really mean? Unless you're using Chainmail or AD&D variable weapon vs armor tables, there's no real reason for fighters not to wear the heaviest armor they can afford and the strongest weapon they can wield (or second strongest, in case they prefer to go sword and board) OSR systems aren't crunchy enough to differentiate the exact effect of a long sword striking mail as opposed to a flanged mace, and yet the fighter's ability to use all weapons and armor tends to be compared to the variety of spells magic-users or clerics get.

>but because it aims to broadly reinterpret the themes of old school D&D with wholly different mechanics

Exactly, that's my point. If there is such a thing as an old-school D&D "spirit" or "feel", which Torchbearer clearly evokes, that means OSR can't be purely a mechanical definition, and has an overall ideological drive.

>the Thief took way too long to start becoming useful
the only things thieves can do that other players can't are pick locks and pick pockets (and climb without the aid of tools).
Pick locks has no limits on retries*(except wandering monsters), better is just faster.
Pick pockets just isn't that useful, but it's still retriable in some contexts.
And for everytjong else can be do 'the normal way' and the thief ability simultaneously, which is strictly better than non-thieves.

*Also true of 'climb' (at small (safe) heights) and 'remove simple traps.'

I keep thinking if it'd be possible to take something like Riddle of Steel's battle system, simplify it, and graft it onto DnD

If with CHAINMAIL man-to-man it's not that much of a choice.
You'll carry 3-4 wrapons, and switch to whatever's most appropriate.

Some retroclones, like DCC and LotFP, add in mechanical differences in the weapons.

Roleplaying is a skill, and it can improve with practice. But give a player a crutch and it will help them in the here-and-now, but it might also teach them to lean on it permanently, and hinder them from learning to do without it.

Which is why players are so bad at describing their attack maneuvers. Without the to-hit roll in which they rely, they would be forced to actually consider how their attacks are made.

Try
Brogue
Tales of Maj'Eyal
Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM)
Caves of Qud

nice!

mystara.thorf.co.uk/jrc.php
They're from the Japanese Rules Cyclopedia.

>divide it based on what they did.

IMO, you should never, ever do this. It damages your appearance of impartiality, and sooner or later results in hard feelings between players, like they feel like Dave didn't pull his weight in the last fight and should have gotten less experience, while Dave feels he was too badly hurt to risk getting in there and the other PCs had it, and they're all mad at each other, and some of them think you really gave him that much XP because you're playing favorites, etc. etc.
Split it evenly among them, every time -- the party is the basic unit, not the individual characters. Reinforce that at every opportunity.

Encumbrance and roleplaying are the major things I can think of.

Sometimes it plays as petty DM niggling, but it's a legitimate tactical problem that most people get nervous around someone in full battle gear.

I don't mean to belabor a small point, but Torchbearer is just one guy's idea of what old school D&D "feels like". I disagree with the notion that he's distilled the essential qualities. It's just another take on a fantasy game (and I can't use my old books with it). If Torchbearer is OSR, then so is GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.

Point at the rules, and tell him he's part of a team. If he wants to have a bigger share of XP, he can go as a party of one sometime.

Hey, /osrg/, I did a little thing. inb4 feats
ywgahn-shaag.tumblr.com/post/156765204543/but-what-if-we-like-mix-dd-with-apocalypse
Or you can just look at picrelated.

It's terribly unfortunate you feel that way. If it weren't for the roleplaying and open ended creativity, I'd have never bothered with D&D, and all the best experiences I have in traditional games came from people getting invested in the situations and characters we were depicting. I've never seen a ches player try to take revenge on the queen for taking his favorite pawn.

I suppose if I were you I'd just play fantasy themed war games instead.

Are you using pbta moves and binary pass/fail?
The mechanics of Mighty Deed seem like a weird thing instead of pick from a list of results.

Being more specific about what reloading faster means would help.

He Who Fights Monsters could be uses based on the HD of the monster defeated rather than level of the player. Makes it a resource that depletes and seems more proportional? Eating the heart of an ogre for its strength 4hd ie 4 times before it runs out vs the eyes of an orc with only 1hd giving you dark vision once.

Reposting in hopes that someone can share a DDL to pic related since the Trove got scrubbed.

>Are you using pbta moves and binary pass/fail?

It looks like he's using straight D&D mechanics, but overlaying these "moves" on top. That Mighty Deed thing is basically what I do to import the thing from DCC.

>The mechanics of Mighty Deed seem like a weird thing instead of pick from a list of results.
I was thinking about that, yeah, don't really remember why I chose to do it differently.
>Being more specific about what reloading faster means would help.
I've seen a few different ways to handle that, so I didn't specify. Halving the times seems to be the most straightforward way, though.
>He Who Fights Monsters could be uses based on the HD of the monster defeated rather than level of the player. Makes it a resource that depletes and seems more proportional? Eating the heart of an ogre for its strength 4hd ie 4 times before it runs out vs the eyes of an orc with only 1hd giving you dark vision once.
That's... much more interesting way to do this, huh. Gives more reasons to hunt down bit tough baddies, like dragons or demons. Neat.