/osrg/ OSR General — Origins

>Arneson or Gygax?
Gygax for sure... Arneson was a complete dick

>Arneson was a complete dick
both were dicks

>ACKS is the best retroclone, play ACKS!

I think ACKS is great and all, but there are other things worth salvaging in other retroclones.

Why not run B/X or maybe AD&D as the base, while picking up other things you like from the retroclones like a nice buffet table of books?

I'm starting a short campaign, the plan is:
>PCs finish intro dungeon (quasqueton)
>whenever they sleep in a dungeon, or when the game is slowing down, or in general whenever I like, they dream with a horrible place (tomb of horrors) in a forgotten place under a total eclipse
>they can explore it with the current items they have (so, jammies if they are resting in a city)
>dying in the dream (or waking suddenly) = restless night, no recovery
>items spent, lost of broken in the dream are gone out of it.
>they can't wake up while inside the tomb
>they start the dream at the entrance, not entering ends the dream and they get full rest (in short, it's optional)
>soon they find & enter death frost doom (or another dungeon with 'you were destined to be here!' and 'PCs trigger apocalypse!' - which they do)
>doing so causes eclypse
>campaign end in tomb of horrors, PCs around 4-6th level

Good idea? They are new players, so they know *nothing* about ToH.
yes, it could be any other dungeon, but ToH relies on player skill and meta spoilers...which they'll learn 'safely' but at the expense of game resources

Sounds fun and a neat way to let people figure out high fatality dungeon crawling. How are you going to do XP? Also what are you going to do if some characters don't go in the dreamscape?

Looking for a one shot, simple plot and dungeon, that I'll run at a convention

Just make your own if it's going to be a short, simple dungeon.

>t. Macris

I like the idea of tomb of horrors with respawns. The worst part about it is making 15 new characters before you finish

>XP
It's a dream - they are getting info on a super-highly lethal dungeon relatively for free -- the one that ends the campaign no less. No XP.
Anyway I don't think you can get XP there being a puny low level bloke - and treasure can't be brought from the dream anyway.
>split party
They are missing out? They get a full rest, and the ones that go in have less meat to chunk into traps. Or they stand guard, and wake the others if there's trouble.
The game is fairly meta (you can tell right?) so they will be cheering/booing like bitches, I don't think they will get bored at all.

B1 In Search of the Unknown is great, but you'll have to stock it beforehand and use a simplified map - both things can be found already made for you on dragonsfoot.org
Whatever you run it, try to skip sloooowwwly crawling in boring, empty corridors. Not fun, and takes lots of irl time.

Nah, they play with their characters, except they don't really die.
And if I change my mind, I can always click character.totalpartykill.ca/basic/ & GO GO GO.

>Arneson or Gygax?
Nnnngiiieeeehhhh I'll say Arneson just because I really like how Blackmoor was set up, as a wargame/dungeoneering mix thing, and because there's a sort of cheerful whimsy in FFC and other bits that's really appealing. "Baron Jenkins", "the Great Svenny", Baron Fant becoming Sir Fang the vampire, it just refuses to take itself seriously in a really pleasing way, none of this MUH IMMERSION faggotry.

I'd say it's pretty unquestionable that Gygax wrote most if not all the rules we know, though, and there are more than enough reports of Arneson being a favoritist to make it hard to respect that side of his refereeing as well. Probably if I were less of an LBBfag I'd be more inclined to say Gygax.

>at least 5th level city guards and all that
That kind of stuff shows up as early as the City-State, and there it seems based on pretty much what Bledsaw considered necessary to keep mid-high level guys in order in supplemented OD&D (or AD&D). Strictly by the book, though, town guards and watchmen should be non-leveled men at arms, who roll to hit as Normal Men; even a level 1 Fighting-Man is superior to them (hence the name of Veteran). It's also worth noting that even a level 9 Fighter can get in deep shit against a squad of the town watch in old-school D&D; you don't have *that* many HP.

>But in order for that to be true, there'd need to be a whole lot of high-level characters running around: at least 5th level city guards and all that. And that shit sounds like what you get in Pathfinder and 4e.
But there are plenty of higher-level characters, friend. In your generic bandit band of 30-300 bandits, there'll be levelled fighting men: up to ten 4th level, up to six 5th or 6th level, up to three 8th or 9th level, and on top of that possibly an 8th level cleric and a 10th or 11th level magic-user. Every single one of them has a chance of magic items - even the basic 4th level guy has a 20% chance of magic armour, 20% chance of a magic shield, and 20% chance of a magic weapon.

A bare minimum bandit group has 30 bandits lead by a 4th level fighting man with decent odds of a magic item.

The average town guardsman might not be that experienced, but there are definitely people out and about with levels.

+1 ACKS. My favourite along with OD&D.

What makes ACKS so great? What's it got that the other retroclones, or vanilla B/X, don't have?

The name/title for 1st level fighters is "veteran."
Even in armies, most NPCs are 0th level.

NPCs through 3rd level aren't an oddity, but even 2nd level NPCs are uncommon.

>Where's the fine line?
Someone posted a /REALLY GOOD/ rule-of-thumb recently.
I'll see if I can find it for you.

And bear in mind, anyone at 9th level is famous (or at least well-known).
It's "name level" because your name has spread across the land.

>shilling LOTFP
>even ironically
*tips fedora*

>I'd be curious to hear your explanation to how half-orcs, of all things, are a mary sue race.
muh tortured family life
muh evil heritage
muh marginalization
muh misunderstood by society
muh heart of gold

Half-orcs paved the way for tiefling, non-evil drow, and half-dragon/half-fiend/half-celestial half-ogre PCs

I've always kinda assumed that level 1-3 are nothing special but beyond that you start to become special. At level 10 you're basically a celebrity, and at level 20 you're a living legend or quest-giver that people will seek out.

>muh tortured family life
>muh evil heritage
>muh marginalization
>muh misunderstood by society
>muh heart of gold
>Half-orcs paved the way for tiefling, non-evil drow, and half-dragon/half-fiend/half-celestial half-ogre PCs

None of that makes them Mary Sues. They're only Mary Sues once the entire world loves them inexplicably and they succeed in everything they do.

>I'll see if I can find it for you.
OK. Well... I cannot.

The just was "use a region's budget (or loose change?) to approximate the xp of high level NPCs have accumulated."
It makes the concession that the it only finds lower bounds (the best in town might be the best in the province, the best in the country might be the best on the continent, etc.) but it's quick, and it's easy, and it works.

>Thread topic: Arneson or Gygax?
Arneson had better ideas, but wrote too little about what he meant.
Gygax was mostly chaff, and wrote too much about what he meant.

Arneson's work is the tattered remains of some gossamer majesty.
It's disgusting just to look at, [insert Tolkien quote about the world diminishing].
Gygax's work is at least food for thought.

>I'll see if I can find it for you.
OK. Well... I cannot.

The jist was "use a region's budget (or loose change?) to approximate the xp of high level NPCs have accumulated."
It makes the concession that the it only finds lower bounds (the best in town might be the best in the province, the best in the country might be the best on the continent, etc.) but it's quick, and it's easy, and it works.

>Thread topic: Arneson or Gygax?
Arneson had better ideas, but wrote too little about what he meant.
Gygax was mostly chaff, and wrote too much about what he meant.

Arneson's work is the tattered remains of some gossamer majesty.
It's disgusting just to look at, [insert Tolkien quote about the world diminishing].
Gygax's work is at least food for thought.

Fuck you, LotFP is great.

>wrote too much about what he meant
More like "he wrote on essay on what was obvious in two sentences and wrote two sentences on what was opaque without an essay"

In OD&D there are a fair number of high level characters running around by default. High level fighters will ride out of their castle and demand a joust, high level wizard step out of their towers to cast Geas on you and send you off on an errand to repay your trespassing, and high level clerics can demand tithes or send you on a holy quest.

Don't respond to bait.

>and at level 20 you're a living legend or quest-giver that people will seek out.
Going to have to disagree with you here.

At level 12, you're great enough that after a few centuries of oral tradition you'll be mistaken for a demigod.
At level 15, you've probably had several cults form independently of each other during your lifetime.

>it just refuses to take itself seriously in a really pleasing way, none of this MUH IMMERSION faggotry.
The first PC M-U, "the Wizard of the Wood," cast (threw) spells by casting (throwing) basketball-sized "superberries."
He also bred dragons during downtime.

Agreed (and not the guy you were replying to), but this one anti-Raggi baiter's become annoyingly active in the general lately, and talking as though his garbage were the thread's consensus beliefs or some shit. It's not strange that people can't resist telling him to go fuck himself now and then.

>No XP.
You want them to go there, you should use xp to encourage good behavior.
>and treasure can't be brought from the dream anyway.
So give xp for anything they take to the edge.
Note what they've done that with. On futures passes, replace it with whisky azure illusions of the treasure (so they don't double up on easy pickings).
>I don't think they will get bored at all.
It's fine as long as they contribute to the decision making, I guess.

>The first PC M-U, "the Wizard of the Wood,"
The Wizard Gaylord, natch. (Played by Pete Gaylord. Still funny)
>cast (threw) spells by casting (throwing) basketball-sized "superberries."
I know. (Not just throwing either, there's a quote of Arneson saying that he won't reveal the mechanics of the Superberries because the players have far from discovered them all yet, but that they can be mashed, dried, brewed into wine, etcetera.) I also know they only happened because Arneson's HO-scale orange trees were losing their oranges, and due to the minis being smaller scale the oranges ended up being relatively the size of pumpkins.

I get that people get annoyed, but the faster people stop responding to him, the faster he'll stop.

$0.01 has been deposited to your drivethrurpg account.

>high level wizard step out of their towers to cast Geas on you
By-the-book, they only do that if you step into their towers.

Ignoring him hasn't stopped him shitting up the threads with his hot opinions yet. Ignoring's fine, but it's better to report and hide.

if you ignored him I wouldn't have to deal with you inane prattle.

>that pic
I lost it

>WAAAAAAAH STOP TALKING BAD ABOUT MY HIPSTER GAME THIS IS MY SAFESPACE REEEEEEE

Eat shit. If I can call OD&D shit, call Gygax an asshat, and call 1e a pile of hot garbage then I can badmouth your favorite avant-garde shitbrew. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.

I don't know, if I were to just brought up that any of those things were objectively terrible, without any provocation to do so, and kept going over many threads in a row, I'd imagine people to be justifiably annoyed by it as well.

Hey /osrg/, I had an idea for a different way to handle attacks and damage in D&D and I'm just curious what you think of it. Replace the attack roll with a to-hit roll, and then add a to-wound roll. What I was thinking was something like an expanded version of 40k's to hit and to wound table, using a d20 for to-hit and d10 for to-wound. Skill (level) bonuses would be towards to-hit, while strength and weapon variables would be modifiers to-wound. Damage would be a d3 with modifiers roll on a scale of 1-6, where 1 is a minor wound, 2 is a concern but not fight ending, 3 is a big deal but you could probably tough it out, 4 is fight ending and possibly lethal, 5 is defenitely fight ending and likely lethal, and 6 is immediate death. To me this seems to help resolve some of the oddities of full plate making you harder to hit but not reducing damage at all and so on. Any thoughts?

>I'd imagine people to be justifiably annoyed by it as well.
And? Veeky Forums isn't your hugbox. The fact there is more than one person complaining about LOTFP (for example, I wasn't the guy complaining about Raggi's lack of ecology) shows that this isn't the work of a lone shitposter but the opinion of a plurality. And at least I have the decency to sage when I shit on LOTFP.

>Veeky Forums isn't your hugbox.

No, but it doesn't warrant you just coming here to fling shit, over and over again, for no fucking reason. Like you're the only one here that's somehow enlightened enough to see how terrible something is, and you just can't shut up telling the rest of us about it.

Veeky Forums is not a hugbox, but you, my friend, are shit.

>And at least I have the decency to sage when I shit on LOTFP.

You know saging does nothing, right?

>adding pointless extra rolls
>making HD and therefore levels even more worthless
>making thieves and wizards even easier to kill

I think you should just play WHFRP instead.

>tumblr filename
>impact text
>STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT WHAT I LIKE

whoa . . . so this is . . . the brain power . . . of loftp drones . . . not bad . . .

Tell me what you like and I will proceed to tell you it's objectively terrible every time you say a bad thing about LotFP.

>sage
Nobody uses the Front Page, because the Catalog is a thing that exists.
Nobody sets the Catalog to "Bump Order," because "Last Reply" helps catch the dying breath if auto-sage threads.

I love B/X. Have fun shitposting, brainlet.

Tomboys, reverse traps, DFC, bondage, lolis, and some /d/ stuff I won't post anonymously.

Oh, cute, you like the untested unpolished beta version of a potentially good game.

I don't even know why you'd rather have that than something that's actually fixed it up. You must have brain damage.

Do you guys know any saving throw systems that aren't classic "death ray", 3e F/R/W, 5e ability score base, or S&W single number?

It doesn't reduce damage because rolls to hit, ac and damage are abstractions of a chunk of time in melee rather than a single attack.

I like some of the harm clock stuff that's happening with your damage scale though. How would you apply it to things that aren't humanoid, and how does leveling make you tougher? Would that still be a thing?

I can't think of a single TSR edition they wasn't either polished or tested.
...maybe the shovelware modules and some of the latter 2e stuff.

>call 3.PF shit
>3.PFcucks flip out and say you just hate it because it's popular and tell you to stop shitting on their game

>call LotFP shit
>LotFPcucks flip out and say you just hate it because it's popular and tell you to stop shitting on their game

Such a suspicious symmetry really gets my synapses sizzling.

>call AD&D shit
>AD&Dfags say, it "works if you play my shitty homebrew and /pretend/ it's AD&D"

I don't much care for either system, I just still wonder why you'd bother coming here to just shovel shit in our way.

Nobody asked for it, we're just trying to talk about stuff.

At least tell us what's so terrible about LotFP and how would you change the OP post. What other ruleset would you put up on the paragraph in question, to "clarify and expand upon the principles of old school gaming"?

Why are you trying to engage with a blatant shitposter like he's not cranked the trolling up to 11?

>Nobody asked for it, we're just trying to talk about stuff.
How about you stop responding to bait and talk about stuff then? The thread has been nothing other than this shitflinging so far. Several questions and topics have been ignored because of your pointless bullshit bickering. Just ignore him.

If he refuses to answer the question, then I will know he has nothing to add to any topic and will ignore him accordingly.

If he does answer it, then the discussion will be over anyway and we can continue.

How 2 write a Lamentations of the Fire Princess module
>1. steal a concept from European module that dumb Americans have never heard of. if you can't then pick uh a house, farm, or tower
>2. set the adventure in Europe c.1700 except with magic and elves because I'm subverting medieval fantasy aren't I 2clever4you
>3. make one of the encounters be with a penis or vagina monster OR make the treasure rare luxury dildoes
>4. include an area where the party gets hopelessly lost, a trap automatically hits them without chance of detection or save, or any other suitable railroad
>5. throw in encounters at random with no regards for ecology and interactions
>6. include some random inconspicuous item that deletes all magic/flips the world upside-down/kills all elves
>7. include lots of art of women getting injured and/or killed in gruesome ways
>8. collect dosh

LOFTP and ACKS don't clarify shit, they make shit up. They're glorified houserules. It's like saying that a fanfic explains the plotholes of a movie.

I'm noticing a trend here, I think it goes-

>shitposting and trolling storm
>calm
>new, naive people come and see how nice is usually this thread
>niceness increases
>somebody flames, new kids are baited, shit escalates in seconds
>repeat

why not ignore this shit? honest question.

I like you better when we create gameable content, /osrg/

>I like you better when we create gameable content, /osrg/

We were supposed to make a granny dungeon. Can we go back to that?

>spoiler
I agree, and we had something interesting going in the beginning of last thread. Maybe I should compile and see of anons here want to keep working on it.

Can someone collect what we have so far? Need to eat something, bbl with fresh ideas

/osrg/ content is mostly a thing people make on their own and bring here. Sometimes you can get ideas here. Making the op question about a random table or content oriented instead of opinions helps too.

Post overpowered stone rock /osrg/ has gotten different, but here has always been a holding pen for people who will eventually learn enough and get it together enough to make a blog/game, and people who will complain about that blog/game.

I'll do it. Give me a minute.

Greetings, newfriend!

well? Who IS Veeky Forums?

Dungeon premise: a small hut wherein a kindly old grandmother lives, turns out to be surprisingly spacy with enough room for all manner of weird creatures to live in the walls, the basements, the cupboards, and the attics. They have alliances and rivalries and feuds, but no one touches the grandmother because she's the only one that brings in the groceries.
The grandmother has no idea any of them exist, and refuses to believe it.

This is because it is the failing trans-dimensional travel pod of a long dead alien, if you enter through the front door it is a normal hut, but if one enters through a hidden portal from the cellar, then it will seem as if you have shrunk down to an inch high, and the grandmother has become monolithic. This bizarre effect allows you to access the rest of the pod, which stretches on for miles (or a couple of feet for the grandmother)

>grandma is half-ogress but nice one
>however her house applies with a parallel dimension where her house is 100x times larger
>the monsters in the walls, the basements, the cupboards, and the attics all seem to be miniature versions
>1' monster in dimension = 5" in normal reality
>PCs get shrunk
>they must survive and find a way back to normal reality

but where them goblins at??
Clearly the goblins live in the walls. They've been shrunk too.
There should definitely be rats. And goblins. What else?
Ravens right outside the window. When the dimensional fuckery is going on, they too can be massive and dangerous.

1/2

A miserable pile of shitposts! But enough meta-discussion, have at you!

Mason jars of preserved homunculi, labled after the strange fruits they were reduced and extracted from. The jars can be opened and the creatures inside given commands that they follows with malevolent literal mindedness.
>Urchin Custard, a wet dripping thing that giggles and sticks.
>Skull Candy, a grinning face with tiny legs, agreeing with you sweetly.
>Peach, Plum, Pear, three fey with insectoid features and bad manners.
>Black Meat, a twisted wretch with needy hands eager to strangle.
>Memory Jelly, the quivering mass of opaque forms that remains familiar but wrong.
>Humour Pickle, eyeballs that bounce and roll as a mass of judgemental stares.
I imagine them in the darker recesses of the pantry, pressing against their glass. Like they really want out. The local factions know about them, but have already learned not to use them. Players probably aren't as wise, or are more clever in their instructions than a bunch of goblins living under a stove armoured in pots and pans.

>giant ravens (pteradon stats)
>giant mice (dire wolf stats)
>granny is vaguely aware of her "little helpers" and loves soiled plates on a special table
>the shrunk creatures gather any food from here
That's all we got so far. What next? Got any ideas of what should be in that dungeon? How about making a map of that implied dollhouse? More info on factions? Where can you go in the house?

Read The Keep on the Borderlands. Almost every area has some character with class levels and +1 or +2 gear. There's no reason NPCs haven't killed monsters and amassed treasure too, it's just that you don't start out as a superhero by virtue of being a PC.

>however her house applies with a parallel dimension where her house is 100x times larger

Man, I wrote this part and re-reading it sounds retarded. What I went to say was.
>granny's house occupies the same point in space (but necessarily time) as a parallel dimensionlet
>this dimensionlet contains an exact copy of granny's house but at a greatly increased scale
>inhabitants of the dimension can't be perceived by people in granny's house but they can see people and things in granny's house
>very small creatures (rats, birds, and bugs) can perceive the dimension's inhabitant and prey on them

>and leaves soiled plates on a special table
If there's a slight time difference between the house and the dimension then maybe from the perspective of the inhabitants there's a "great feast" every other day. The inhabitants scale the winding tunnels carved within the table's legs to stake a claim to a specific plate, cup or utensil if they're unlucky.

>What I went to say was.
What you meant to say is worse.
Maybe the granny is a giant. She never leaves the house, but her quarter-giant grandchildren bring her food.
There are rumors in the village that the granny is a giant, but the village only sees her "normal sized" from windows or the door frame.

>What you meant to say is worse.
t-thanks

What's the best way to get a feel for Mystara? The gazeteers seem intimidating. Is there some sort of overview mini-gazeteer?

My initial thought is something like levelling gives you "wounds" to use at your discretion. Fighters get 1/level, MUs 1/2levels, etc. Each wound reduces damage by one level, but they are applied after damage is calculated. So you could save them to reduce level a 4 wound to a level 2 or 3 and keep fighting. I'm making this all up on the fly though. For larger creatures I'd probably just apply a penalty to the damage roll to represent the difficulty of landing a fight-ensing blow on a giant using a man sized sword.

>Is there some sort of overview mini-gazeteer?
Yes, actually: one of the Rules Cyclopedia's appendices is an overview of the Known World.

(One of the reasons I consider it the best D&D edition -- it may not have perfect rules, but it's just so damn *complete*.)

Mystara is actually pretty bad honestly. It's a patchwork world with about as much consistency as Golarion. At least the Hollow World has the excuse of "Immortals did it" to explain the artificial feeling of it.

youtube.com/watch?v=79DijItQXMM

Yeah, that makes sense. I was imagining a really awkward circular overlay with fractions for size, but its probably easiest to just include size as armour/damage reduction.

Using wounds as free hits works, but might again just be simpler to add them to the 1-6 range. Or even just call it a hitdice to keep terminology familiar. Hrm. You could do something like each HD you have when you level is an actual d6 that you spin down when you get hurt. Like a level 3 fighter has 3hd so 3d6 that need to get damaged through. Probably have to crunch numbers for a bit at this point.

For clarity's sake, when i was thinking of damage I was picturing it as its own thing. Each damage level would have specific penalties if you kept fighting with that wound. I was aiming for something that had the potential to end the fight in one hit, or end up as a slugfest of gradually accumulating wounds. I do like the idea of hit dice adding extra wound tracks somehow. I'm not exactly sure how to implement it, but i like the thought that a 5 hd hero could survive a killing blow with his heroic resolve. I think handing out 1 HD per level might be too much though. I'd still like a high level of lethality.

To further clarify my own point, having a level one wound and recieving another level one wound wouldn't push you up to a level two wound, you'd just have two level one wounds, and the penalties would stack.

This right here.

The farmer boy in the village gets a +2 to hit when using simple weapons and 3d6 HD when on his own plot of land due to his spiritual connection to it and strong body, not because of any leveled abstraction or dungeon crawling experience.

Neat. Gets weird though. What happens if you get 6 level 1 wounds? Would armour be able to totally reduce a hit's damage? Also how long are your combat rounds?

Sorry so many questions. Its just similar but different than a thing I've been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Basically simplifying damage and hitpoints to 'how often you can get hit with a sword' but still trying to make going up in levels give you some added survivability.

How much do you guys like non-medieval style OSR?

Stuff like Into the Odd or Stars without Number? I'm a big fan of the modern fantasy gonzo stuff myself.

Having six level one wounds is a bad time. You'd have stacking penalties for all wounds, so at that point you'd be in pretty rough shape. Not "about to die" kind of rough, more like "about to collapse/be useless in a fight." The inspiration for this is the way song of swords handles wounds, which is very all or nothing. SoS tracks pain, bleed, and stun from each wound. I was just thinking a -1 penalty to hit per level of wound, stacking between wounds.

How fleshed out are your NPCs?

Mine: name & rank & why PCs care (quest, shop, enemy?), level, looks (armor+arms and how they are concealed?).
Important or recurring NPCs get a couple of lines with a story and a goal.

I'm terrible I know, maybe I just need some good motivation tables or soemthing, I just can't get arsed. I'd rather think about monsters and traps.

Questions help. I'm at the stage where i have the idea in mind but it hasn't fully formed into coherent rules. It's like a big glob of intent at this point.

Do you have arcade-inspired adventures?

I remember a pacman one-page-dungeon, but I can't seem to find it (there's LOTS ffs).
And I remember reading about a 'pinball wizard' dungeon, with bouncers, rolling boulders and the lot.

p o s t ' e m

I'm doing a scifantasy thing right now. SWoN has a lot of tables I like. Into The Odd looks fun, but haven't had a chance to play it. The tables for starting gear seem useful regardless of system.

I'm late to the boat on this video, but its gonzo af.
youtube.com/watch?v=3JJsq0GbpPg

I'll take a look at Song Of Swords, thanks. I'm into flash/grit from Wolfpacks & The Winter Snow as an all or nothing damage resolution method. I have to check with my players too, because I like the idea of more streamlined damage, but they're probably like rolling dice and I need to have some of that too.