OSR - Butthurt Avoidance Thread

Skill systems and storygames make me the angriest.

Here's one designed around thief skills. It's simpler than it looks, and you could drop the strength/weakness categories if you wanted to make things easy. The weak skill column can work for classes with lesser skill progressions (think assassins, which have access to thief skills in AD&D, but lag levels behind) if you have need of that.

>Which of these makes you the most butthurt:
Probably AD&D. It's too gygaxian to use at the table, has a bunch of pointless rules, and spawned 2e which spawned 3e.
Still, it's pretty fun to read.

This actually does help. I'm really taking the essentials of these systems and homebrewing it into something that works for me.

I'm worldbuilding and I'd like to be able to plugin whatever race/class/mechanic that applies to my story.

Thieves.
c

....How many spells do I start with in my spellbook in AD&D? Have read the wizard section fifteen fucking times and can't find it.

Also how do you guys feel about a generic / modern OSR system? I'm thinking of making one for an upcoming zombie apocalypse game I plan to run. Like rolling 3d6 straight down for stats, having it be very lethal and based on what characters choose to do.

>Which of these makes you the most butthurt:
>AD&D
I'm apathetic towards it.

>DCC
It's a good system that does what it says on the box.

>Thieves
I prefer LotFP's Specialist better, but Thieves in general are perfectly fine.

>Skill Systems
Depends on the implementation, but generally nothing wrong with skills.

>Engrossing Storylines
That depends entirely on the DM.

DMG p.39

You know read magic + one offense, defense, misc spell, randomly generated of course.

I misread that and thought you meant a barebones Skill System. I vote BFRPG.

As with half the char-gen rules, it's in the DMG.

For 2e, that's 3d4 spells or their INT (whichever is lower).
One spell must be [Read Magic] and one spell must be [Detect Magic]
The DM rolls for the other spells, but behind the screen.
(so you might 'luck' into spells if you ask the DM)

Not sure about AD&D, proper (own 2e physically; phoneposter, can't look at my AD&D .PDFs at the moment).
But it'll be in the DMG, I'm sure of that.

How could I add layers of success to checks? Something like powered by the apocalypse games where 7-9 is a partial success and 10+ is a complete success?

Oh yeah, I misread it that way too.

I think you answered your own question.
I usually give a level of success scaling with how they rolled relative to the check

Using what dice system and how often do you want the two levels to happen relative to each other?

You could take the associated stat mod and use that amount less than the target number as a partial success. So needing an 18 to hit, but having a str mod of +2 means 16 and 17 are partials.

That's just off the top of my head. Might not come up enough.

Oh yeah, that's right, they use HD (rather than Strength, notably) as a proxy for how hard a guy is to grapple down! I like that; it's clever use of existing stats, and it makes sense to use the advancement in martial ability as the key trait.

I'm doing a non-class based OSR game inspired by into the Odd and other modern fantasy with some light sci-fi elements as well.

I come to you, OSR thread, to tell me what kind of powers I should give my psychic players. These psychic powers are essentially something you have to 'sacrifice' other things for at the start of the game, similar to playing a weak class like Wizard for access to magic, in this game it works similarly but with psychic powers. Also you only get one psychic power, but they tend to be kind of broad.

Basically I want your best ideas for a mix of supernatural, magic, and psychic things put together to just make powers that would work well for a urban hexcrawl style game.

Remember, this game has flying cars but everyone uses shitty guns made of scrap metal. Enemies the players encounter will be bandits with rapid fire machinegun or close range rifle executioner hidden pistols and other nonsense, along with supernatural monsters and mad science experiments. So keep that in mind.

If they only get 1 power I'd take a look at what other games term psychic disciplines/schools of magic and have each of those be the outline of what the power does. Easiest would be to take the psionic powers from stars without number and rather than getting different powers have them basically all available at a cost of entry that otherwise disables the character and/or has higher risk/just does damage to use that is scaled for the power of effect.

I honestly wanted a mix of magic/psychic abilties here, but I'll take a look. I've been meaning to read SWN anyway.

Gander this

should probably be broad categories of Psychic abilities, like Telekinesis, Pyrokinesis and so on, at least if you're going to go with just one power(probably better off just refluffing the regular spell system as psychic powers though, would be much easier to make a functional balanced system doing so, even if it's less "creative")

[Phatasmal Force] is about how broad powers should be, if they are limited to one.
But if I were doing classes OSR, I would limit players to scrolls.

>- AD&D
>- DCC
>- Thieves
>- Skill Systems
>- Engrossing Storylines

the answer is yes

New player here.
I understand that in OSR style dungeon crawling using Basic D&D you're supposed to avoid combat right.

But how exactly you do that?
For exanple. I'm playing B2 keep on the borderlands. I'm a fighter, others are cleric, mage, and thief. We got 2 more henchmen fighters. I'm walking in one of the caves. Thief scouts ahead and see 6 kobolds guarding the next corridor. On the other one, is a room with a bunch of rats. Fuck rats, we're not going that way.

So how do I avoid the kobolds? I can't see anything else to do except maybe try to get a surprise attack, but with a thac0 of 20 on everyone I know we don't even have a 50% chance to hit those fuckers. 6 kobolds, that's an equal numbers fight, I don't want to take those odds.

But I don't really see how one goes about "avoiding fights" in OSR when most of the game you're meant to go into the vietnam-like mazes full of monsters.

Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart. Time to start thinking like you only have duct tape.

Lure the kobolds away.

Bribe them.

Chat with them.

Charm them.

Flood the cave.

Put them to sleep.

Feed them poisoned meet.

Stampede some cattle into the dungeon.

Dress up like a sexy lady kobold, obtain husbands.

Dress up like a dragon, obtain a cult.

Lure the rats towards the kobolds. Lure the owlbear from outside towards the rats.

>No Thac0 in B/X
>Use your environment and wits
>Lay some food out in a trail leading from the rat room to the kobolds and watch shit go down.

>PS I meant I don't use thac0 in my B/X games. derp.

Find allies in the keep. Play the monsters off each other. But one way or another you have to clear the caves.

thac0 works just the same as the b/x hit tables

Hmm, so basically just try to avoid rolling dice as much as possible.
I'm not sure I'm creative enough for this

I really wish I could see some people playing old school D&D somewhere or read a report so I could get see a few examples of play that aren't made up.

btw how would I flood the cave? I can see how to do everything else but flooding the caves of chaos looks really impractical.

>I really wish I could see some people playing old school D&D somewhere or read a report so I could get see a few examples of play that aren't made up.

Son, your google-fu is weak sauce.

You can find Actual Play threads on a lot of forums. You can find podcasts and video recordings. You just need to look.

Flood the cave by diverting a stream, or filling a bag of holding* with water, or find a friendly cloud elemental, or an incontinent dragon, or cast a portal under a lake.

*or larger equivalent

>DCC is a pretty big departure from 'conventional' OSR (while still being closer than AD&D).

I'd say it's absolutely further than AD&D. I can use Basic adventures and monsters in AD&D with no trouble, and vice versa, but have you seen the DCC stat blocks?

>Giant Water Warrior: Init -2; Atk large axe +5 melee (1d8+2);
>AC 18; HD 3d10; hp 20; MV 30’; Act 2d20; SV Fort +5, Ref +2, Will +2; AL N.

Some of that's usable, but some of that's got to be reworked to go to Basic, or invented if you want to bring something from Basic to DCC.

I'm a fan of skills exactly for people like you. My players have about a thimble of creativity between them if not given mechanics to work with. Run DCC and they're utterly lost on improvisation. Use a system with a "Tinkering" "Speechcraft" or "Athletics" skill and suddenly everyone has a grip on what they wanna do. I can't explain it, but it works.

Therefore, my solution is: Use Lamentations of the Flame Princess and its simple d6 skill system. Ignore the horror bits if needed. Add whatever extra skills you see fit to the character sheet (Arcana, Speechcraft, Medicine, etc). Stress beforehand that combat at low levels is risky as hell.

So which critical hit system do you like the best:

-Crits do max damage
-Crits do double damage
-Crits let you roll damage twice and add the results (i.e. exploding dice)

inb4 someone gets all huffy and calls critical hits badwrongfun

>-Crits do max damage
This one.

Critical hits, but only for my character, who has 18 charisma.

I prefer "Crits do double damage, or regular damage and let you perform a free maneuver (shove, trip, grapple, etc.)"

>-Crits do max damage
D&D 4e had it right with this one

Add level to damage.

I want to add AEDU system to OSR games, is this not a good idea?

This one.

I folded to-hit and on-hit into one roll (attacks deal 2d6-AC* damage, +1d6 per extra 'attack'), so there's fundamentally no difference between a max roll and max damage
*man-to-man AC, -1 across the board (because M2M has you 'hit' if your roll equals AC)

At-Will and Encounter are somewhat at odds with the resource management subtheme, but refreshing spells at the cost of a few Wandering Monster rolls would fit right in.

>"I ignore the pile of gold, and warn the party to IGNORE it under pain of death."
>Why?
>"It's a pile of gold in a deep cave. That doesn't just fall from the sky, it was placed there, likely by a dragon or some other form of hoarder."
>Would you character know that?
>"Bitch I'm a guy who spent two years in fifth grade because I got my hand stuck in a radiator and my character is a third level ranger in his thirties, I leave the fucking gold alone."
>Then he gets salty because he didn't get to use the mimic boss he spent so long creating.

Shit like this is why I prefer OSR. It weeds out these kinds of DMs.

not necessarily, just gotta make sure the At-Will spells and abilities aren't too strong(to a lesser extent that applies to the Encounter ones as well)

like for example something like Fireball works fine as a Encounter ability, something like Charm Monster or Sleep should be a daily ability though

>At-Will and Encounter are somewhat at odds with the resource management subtheme
Most at-will powers are not that better than normal attacks, just different or act like a class feature:

>Sure strike
+2 to hit, but no strength modifier to damage

>Reaping strike
half strength modifier as damage on a miss, full mod if using two-handed weapon

I also dislike Encounter powers, I think something like the way they made psionics (no encounter powers but have "Power Points" to augment at-will powers) better, just changing "Power Point" to Stamina for Fighters and Rogues.

I dunno what I would do with casters, maybe something more like 13th Age or similar to Beyond the Wall: number of spells equal to your level.

There is also Essentials 4e, I have to look at that yet.

>not that better than normal attacks, just different
If the Magic-User wants to refluff his crossbow into a shit wand, I truly don't mind.

>There is also Essentials 4e, I have to look at that yet.
Never looked at that one, but I've heard bad things.

>If the Magic-User wants to refluff his crossbow into a shit wand, I truly don't mind.
The problem is I think spellcasters are better with the vancian system, so at-will power can be a problem, as they use the caster int instead of the usual dex that crossbow requires

Do you think something like this is too much?

What happened to the Terrors & Wonders user? Are you alright? Did you give up this project?

Looking for your favorite one-shots or 2 to 3 session adventures.

Running an episodic game and plan on running a lot of these.

I think it's silly to add damage for STR, let alone DEX or INT.

>But in an edition with really, REALLY good 1st level spells... [Read Magic] is your most underwhelming choice.

For a new character in a new party, but if you die and roll a new m-u, especially if you're starting over at 1st level and the rest have levelled up a bit, it's an excellent way to punch above your weight.

got this idea from the last thread. Let's make a shared Hexcrawl map/setting.

Add a hex, expand the map, or add detail to other hexes already made.

first hex is a mountainous region.

Added another mountain.

>If the Magic-User wants to refluff his crossbow into a shit wand, I truly don't mind.
while I don't mind refluffing, I feel it's better for the system to actually support low level semi-unlimited spell flinging

in 4E's context they're fine, for an OSR context I'd drop the damage for all of those to either 1d4 or 1d3+1(and probably drop the bonus damage from modifiers)

honestly I'd just make Read Magic an at-will cantrip that all MU's get, but maybe make it harder to succeed in exchange

...the whole map is going to be mountain.

If you die and start over at Lv.1, most of your party's scrolls have been identified.
You might have a few unidentified, but they probably aren't worth giving up [Sleep] or [Charm Person]

I can't seem to find Hackmaster 4E in the treasure trove. Can anyone point me to where I can get Hackmaster 4E pdfs?

No, to cast the spell off the scroll you personally have to cast read magic on it.

This just got me thinking, has anyone done a setting that is nearly all mountains, where plains are almost unheard of? Like an opposite seaworld.

Obviously PCs are Yak herders.

It'd be interesting but I think I would prefer a mixed environment (Dark Sun being about my only exception). Maybe a region that is almost all mountains though, like Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet or something. Deep cut river valleys but most people live in thinly populated villages save the Dwarves who have been nearly wiped clean as well from near constant attacks from monsterfolks.

Did somebody say... mountains, cliffs, and rivers everywhere?

I think it would be better to just use Hexographer and make a completely random map then let fellow fa/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls adds icons and such to it. Far faster in my opinion and could lead to some really odd yet interesting things.

How do I make a neighborhood-crawl for a modern fantasy game?

think silent hill, except less perpetually spooky

I guess you'd have to consider how movement works. that's always at the core of hexcrawls. And the hexcrawl map is usually an overworld, and unrelated to the map used for combat.

I guess you should make a few roads in a combat grid map and give each building a floorplan they can fight in. thenjust expand for the size you need.

or you could just follow the standard hexcrawl map style but each 6 mile hex is a patch of 'city-types' like residential, industrial, public parks.

I'd keep two or three dozen 'template' floor plans handy. Maybe switch a room or two in them now and then.
Not that unrealistic, since any given area tends to fall back on the same few architects.

Plus unique setpieces for special stuff, etc.

In under a dozen words, describe either your custom setting or the one that your DM runs.

Ancient Sumerians, miasma theory of medicine and snake-people.

Pioneering of the New Fantasy continent by a Hudson bay company rip-off.

Expeditions from Lankhmar-Morpork to the mideval mid-west. Dungeons ≡ Allegorical Bullshit

Too many. You need UNDER a dozen.

Hex crawls, Dungeon delves.

Eh, if he just dropped all the articles he'd be fine.

>Pioneering of New Fantasy continent by Hudson bay company rip-off

I still lurk. I haven't really given up but I also haven't worked on it lately. I'm not really okay but I'm doing better.

Changelog:
>Added Agility (Dexterity) back in, change named because I am semantics autismo
>Adding turning rules
>ditched the 3.5 action economy for a weirder system
>Started on 3.PF conversion notes

And I think I accidentally skipped a version?

Otherworldly city, aliens fight with trash guns and psychic powers.

I'm about to start a dark soulsy game ran with B/X, btb. I'm not familiar with the system and its lethality.
What would make a good boss fight for 1st level dudes, with random equipment? Maybe a 3th level elf + a couple of 1st level elves?
How would you stat the bomb-throwing giant in the top of Sen's Fortress? (so it's very hard but can go down with a party of 3-4 smart players)

>"Bitch I'm a guy who spent two years in fifth grade because I got my hand stuck in a radiator and my character is a third level ranger in his thirties, I leave the fucking gold alone."
kek

Hill Giant with bombs for throwing instead of rocks?

Shit, where do I go, dungeons everywhere. Fuck ghouls.

My players filled the cave entrance up with anything flammable they could find and smoked the kobolds and rats out. Picked them off as they scrambled over each other to escape.

and, as others have said, the rats to the kobolds or vice versa is always an option. As is making allies with another group, or otherwise manipulating one group into warring on the other.

Of course, out-of-the-box thinking only works if your DM has an imagination gland that wasn't shriveled up by 3.5/PF and 4e.

Can 3-4 poorly equipped murderhobos survive a 8+1HD thing that hurls area-of-effect bombs?
They can't be Charmed or put to Sleep, either...

He said "very hard".

Princess of Mars meets The Little Mermaid. Underwater Dark Sun.

All the OSR shit I buy, layered on top of each other.

Red and Pleasant Land but me designing the dungeons, so it's shit.

donjon.bin.sh + labyrinth (1986)

Hello /osr/, 5e tourist here. I'm curious about how do you go about 'boss' encounters. Do you have them? Do you roll reaction rolls for them and all that?

What would make a good boss for a first session? I'm interested in trying LL, if that matters.

Post-Apocalyptic. 300 years after. A lush, overgrown Pacific Northwest with subtle elements of gonzo and the strange.

Post-Apocalyptic, 300 years after the fall. A lush, overgrown Pacific Northwest with subtle elements of gonzo and the strange.

I might be wrong, but- is Dungeon Meshi plain, pure, rules as written B/X D&D?
Including reaction rolls and dwarves finding traps like champs.

There are definitely enemies of groups that are stronger than others, if that's what you mean. That's been a thing since OD&D. Every goblin and orc camp has a chieftain, every evil cult has an evil high priest. They roll for reaction too, but might also have higher morale.

I can't tell you what would make a good boss encounter, because even though there are strong enemies, an old-school dungeon crawl should rarely make it so the PCs have to fight something. You can place a treasure room just beyond them, but there should also be a bunch of smaller treasure in the dungeon and the players should be able to feel like they can be done and leave the dungeon with the loot they've found without having to take a big risk and fight the big boss.