/osrg/ OSR General

>and treacherous
Have they learned about passing you notes yet?

Nope. To teach them the Sin of Metagaming and the Power of In Character Action, I'm trying to ensure that any "secrets" are open ones, and then gently chiding them for not remembering that their characters don't know stuff they know as players.

We'll get there though. Got to get the fundamentals down.

I'm changing the lower bound of my () prediction to the 18th.
They won't even be in the dungeon for most of the next session, it seems.

Sorry man. :( I do my best, but like I said, it only inconveniences you guys, not me.

Luckily, Session 4 is done (I know, I'm slow), so once I post that we'll be all caught up, and the PCs will be exploring the dungeon again no later than the 15th of May.

No need to be sorry*. We would have to be pretty entitled shits to feels upset with you.
We're experiencing despondence, not disappointment.

*You actually don't need to feel sorry under /any/ circumstance.
As the adage goes, "I don't care if you're sorry, I do care if you do it again."
Purely a tangent and not at all a complaint. To reiterate: You are doing fine, keep at it.

Oh good, I'm glad you feel that way. I'll just delete my draft of the Animist Wizard post. It was going to be lousy anyway. Why bother, right?
That's sarcasm, by the way.
I don't have a draft.

Where do level 1 Magic-Users pick up their trade? How learned are they?

Elementalists and Orthodox Wizards go to Wizard College.

They spend the rest of their lives paying off Wizard Student Loans, which are nondischargable, extremely expensive, and very inconvenient.

Most of the other Wizard schools get trained in a master-apprentice style. Some people just get spare spells embedded in their brains and have to seek special training to get them to leave. At that point, they're 'natural" wizards.

Level 1 wizards have some book-learning, but little practical knowledge. Their grasp of theory depends on their school. Animists and Elementalists are immensely practical. Illusionists are all theory and weird science.

Considering the fact that you can always just roll up a new one when the last one died, I just imagine level 1 magic-ursers being the equivalent of some script kiddie.

They have to be reasonably common, some village idiot who managed to spend enough time over a weird tome to get the spell to enter their head.

In the meantime here's a compilation of both dungeon levels that've been posted so far in a summarized PDF format. Repost from old thread

This format looks really neat. Are you using a generator or do you have a process written down? I know this has been asked ~3 threads ago but at the time I didn't think I'd have a need for it I now have a need for it

Thanks. It's word, two column format. I use the Modlvay b/x font Souvenir-Light and stole the writing style from Stonehell (very minimal language, listing rather than prose). The font I think is part of what does it, so try it out!

Also the maps are made with this:
campaignwiki.org/gridmapper.svg

so a couple threads ago an user had an idea for a setting that sounded pretty neat to me; , a lot of the stuff it needs is covered in some form or another by existing OSR content, but one element could possibly use some attention, the idea calls for Mecha to be a prominent and PC accessible component of the setting & rules, so how would you go about handling them, especially with the following caveats;

1. no referencing to the existing Mecha/Power Armor rules present in Stars Without Number, Godbound, or Colonial Troopers*

2. needs to be usable from level 1, and be a viable/practical choice at that**

3. unlike rule 1 I'm not restricting pre-existing firearms rules, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel there if you don't want to(personally I'd suggest Fantastic Heroes & Witchery's rules on this matter)

4. this is more optional but it'd be interesting to see a character's class have some sort of tangible effect on their mech

5. basic assumption(albeit not set in stone) is that most mecha range between 9 feet tall at the short end, and somewhere between 25 & 30 feet tall at the largest, with most hovering between 12 and 15 feet or so

*nothing against these rules for the most part, I just want to see what /osrg/ can come up with

**interpret this as you will(like perhaps at level 1 most characters can't afford to own one fully, and are instead renting/leasing one from the local nobility, so the unit is lower spec and you can't do much customizing compared to one you'd properly own once you get some levels and money under your belt)

Drizzt first showed up as early as 1st edition AD&D. It's all a matter of how you fluff it.

Neat! Also found a typo:
>Attacks patterns (Use on per round):
>on

I just don't get it. You want a game that has the qualities of high lethality, quick character creation, focus on mostly avoiding fights and instead sneaking around and grabbing what you can get. At the same time you want a game where the players are in nigh-indistructible, highly customizable and loud battlemachines. I have a really hard time picturing this.

Oh, yeah thanks. I also realized that this landscape stuff will be very difficult to print as a booklet because apparently the pdf reader I use doesn't support splitting a landscape page into two portraits to reorder.

I changed it to full A4s and just made the font a little bigger, so I can print it as A5 booklets and test play.

>You want a game that has the qualities of high lethality, quick character creation, focus on mostly avoiding fights and instead sneaking around and grabbing what you can get.
eh of those qualities, only the quick character creation is one I actually like at all in relation to the OSR, I've given my reasons for my interest in the OSR framework in previous threads multiple times so I'm not going to repeat myself at the moment about it

>At the same time you want a game where the players are in nigh-indistructible, highly customizable and loud battlemachines. I have a really hard time picturing this.
eh I'm not picturing them as being all that durable, like sure a regular person on the ground isn't likely to be able to do much to a mech if they don't have the right weaponry and/or magic, but when fighting monsters or other Mecha they'd only be slightly more durable than a regular person(and that mostly because a mech can usually still somewhat function even after losing a limb or two), and I still find the OSR movement's general fear of customization to be ridiculous

overall I'm thinking less Gurren Lagaan and more Mobile Suit Gundam 08th MS team in regards to how the mecha would function(well that and the series in the pic in my previous post Panzer World Galient, and the one in this pic, Aura Battler Dunbine)

Is /osrg/ the only place you're writing about this? I'd feel like you'd get much more help in threads that talk about rules-lite and science fiction. The fact that you kind of don't want this game to be OSR in many ways kind of makes it hard to help you.

What;s this Lamentations of the Duck princess thing I heard about last thread?

the thing is I love OSR rules(with some tweaking), but I hate most of the OSR philosophy as it just doesn't align very well with what I find fun about RPG's(part of that might be because a lot of it leans towards Roleplaying and I'll freely admit I have almost no skill at all for that, nor does pretty much anyone I've ever played with)

also outside of the OSR I generally hate most rules-lite systems I've encountered, as most of them are incredibly bland and boring, especially in regards to combat(which is one of my favorite parts about RPG's)

How "gonzo" do you guys tend to go with your worlds? I've notice a pretty close correlation between OSR design and "weird fantasy" settings.

have you tried adobe editor?
you might be able to torrent an old one.
are you sure you wouldn't be better off adding an image into microsoft word or libre office?

I'm also curious about this.

>are you sure you wouldn't be better off adding an image into microsoft word or libre office?

What do you mean? I'm using word 2016 for the editing.

>Honestly, the whole OSR is a sham. There's all this "roots of the hobby" and "RPG history" bullshit bandied when it's really just people reacting against 3.PF/4e. Not to mention the "oldschool" definition is a load of bullshit. The Fantasy Trip had point-buy attributes in 1977 but this isn't considered "REAL oldschool" by D&Ddrones because T$R didn't publish it. Yet somehow BECMI from 1983 is "REAL oldschool" because of the holy imprimatur of T$R, Inc. Then there are the dozens of "new" OSR games that are just lazy copypastes of B/X with houserules but which the OSR hivemind heralds as though the solution to the problem of how to REALLY play D&D. And that's not even touching the endless bitching about rule X or Y while refusing to look outside of D&D/retroclones for possible solution.

>inb4 someone uses that retarded "but the OSR started because people wanted to re-examine D&D" That shit was over 10 years ago, there's nothing left to re-examine, the "philosophers" of the OSR beat every dead horse they could find. Nor should the origins of a movement prohibit its evolution. Instead we get shit like OD&D IN SPACE! OD&D WITH CAPES! B/X WITH HORROR! B/X BUT WITH A MODERN SETTING! B/X BUT IN INDIA! because fanboys can't bear to leave their little D&D pond.

Nice meme, but have you considered; any and all D&D divorced from the design philosophy of its hex-crawl sandbox roots is shit

This but unironically

>It's roots are in wargames, not tacked on, shilled shit like Wilderness Survival. Warhammer in its later editions is more true to the roots of the hobby than some namby-pamby "oh I'm scared of the dark like a bitch" cave exploration like Veins of the Earth or 'lets all look a graph paper ad masturbate to horny elves shit' you people spew out in different (((setting))) colors.

Nice meme but have you considered: if you're not playing D&D as a hexcrawl you are actually, literally playing the game wrong and should probably play a system actually built for whatever you're trying to turn D&D into.

Seconding this

This but unironically.

Who are you quoting?

I tacked another part onto the pasta to reflect more recent publications.

I think adding the ((())) was a bit too far, didn't keep the timelessness of it.

hey guys, I wrote some text for a really trick dungeon entrance that rewards players for paying attention.

Maybe you could make a map of it?

Question, not necessarily only to
What does MI mean at the end of the monster statblock?

On that note, is stonehell in the trove? I can't find it.

hey guys, I wrote some text for a really tricky dungeon entrance that develops reading comprehension and rewards players for paying attention.

Maybe you could make a map of it?

slight correction, sorry.

He wasn't a snowflake back then, though.

Then what defines snowflake?

He stood out like a sore thumb when compared to all the other generic dwarf fighters and human wizards, he had actual personality, a plotline, and perhaps most importantly in OSR context, plot armor. He wasn't even that well written, even back then.

What do all the modern Pathfinder Mary Sues have that he does not?

Him not being the main character in the early novels helps a bunch. That and not having the eight million feats of world-saving he accumulates by the latter ones.

Fair enough.

So to snowflake an OSR character, all you'd need to do would be to keep him alive for several dungeons that actually have some world-threatening evil in them? His friends die but he survives, becoming more a main character than the replacement characters of the other players, and developing both an in-universe reputation and a whole bunch of angst over all his dead companions?

It'd be more difficult than in later editions, I suppose, due to the more personal scope and higher lethality, but I can't see how you couldn't manage that. I mean the OSR game I'm currently running has characters with developed and distinct personalities, and it's actually drawing dangerously close to plot, so it could end up going this way if only one of them survives.

I've got nothing. It's obviously towards the crunchy end, but it's not any of the more involved retroclones I can think of. It is familiar-looking though. Wait... it's not in the D&D family, is it? I don't think it's GURPS, so I'm gonna go with RuneQuest. Boy, you're screwed in terms of weapon selection if you end up with a below-average DEX and STR. If they're both 8s, that limits you to rocks and elf bows, which are presumably less than ubiquitous.

Drizzt's negative reputation is also due to the waves of knockoff characters he spawned.

It could end up that way, but as long as you can keep the spotlight roughly evenly shared among the characters it shouldn't be that much of a problem.

Compare the Icewind Dale trilogy to The Legacy. In the Trilogy, there's roughly equal screen-time-sharing between all the members of the group, while in The Legacy, it's very obviously Drizzt whom the plot revolves around. The drow invasion is largely caused by his sister trying to capture him, and all the stuff Entreri pulls in the novel is aimed at getting to him as well. The only real plot thread that doesn't involve him much is the wedding of Wulfgar and Cattie-Brie.

Alright lads,

How would you build OSR-ish classes for insects? I have been toying around with a game based on nine insectoid classes, however conventional OSR stats seem to break down when comparing, say, a stag beetle and woodlouse.

It's definitely RQ. 2e, I believe, though not the scan I've got.

Runequest, and the only thing I recognized it from is that Chaosium always used the big D in their dice notation.

>vintage meme edition

I don't do gonzo per se but I do prefer slightly weird. Dragon has a trove of weird monsters like Cobra Dragons and Web-Spectres.

Pretty sure it's Morale.

>Morale: Rocksteady
I see what you did there

dammit! think I got it this time.

One Last Time

Ah, thanks, user.

>waves of knockoff characters
Yeah we're sure being inundated by all these dual scimitar weilding good aligned characters of a traditionally evil aligned society! That also have dark skin! I've been fighting through the NY times bestseller lists to just find anything not related to all these waves!

>user seriously believes Drizzt did not inspire a bunch of copycat characters
Salvatore pls.

Well, where are they? Is there an albino drow elf somewhere that's super evil and dual wielding scimmies?
Isn't drizzt a sort of knock on Elric, anyway?

>Isn't drizzt a sort of knock on Elric, anyway?

Outside of coming from a society of ancient, powerful, feared, and decadent race, not really.

>I don't see this thing
>therefore it has never existed
Salvatore
pls

god damn you are contrary and annoying

I don't disagree with you or anything, but don't just be a contrarian, don't just insult your opponent: that doesn't make for a good debate and will never win you anything.

Instead, how about you name a few examples of Drizzt knock-offs. I'd like to hear of them as well.

>I've notice a pretty close correlation between OSR design and "weird fantasy" settings.
I'd still make the case that Fantasy and Sci-Fi are the same genre, but the distinction hadn't been made when OSR content was originally in print.

Debating people like you is pointless. I can feel you sucking the life out me. Your sucking the life out of this thread. You're making everyone else miserable. We should just hog tie you and sell you to hillbillies who live in the swamp.

I'm not even that guy.

I'd just like to hear of some Drizzt-clones. Naming a couple can't be that tiring, can it?

>Naming a couple can't be that tiring, can it?
Stick your dick in a toaster oven.

Yeah please list an example. I'm sorry but I just didn't see these waves user was speaking of, honestly.
Love, Veeky Forums

Maybe take it in a Gamma World direction. Many HD at 1st level, and no extras.
But instead of CON = HD, just start each class with some # of HD.

Police Academy 1 and 2 weren't that good, but surely Police Academy 7 will be worthwhile!

Not, like, literary characters or anything, but peoples' RPG characters. Drizzt's the ur-good drow, and what I've heard seems to indicate that Drizzt clones were a relatively common character concept when he was at his most popular (about the turn of the century).

If you can't even bother trying to debate seriously, why answer at all? Why insult? All it does is make your opponent think they're in the right, since you can't even form a coherent response to them. And also it makes you look like a dickbag.

There are no benefits in responding this way, only drawbacks.

aggh! stop feeding him you idiot!

Back! Back troll! Yah!

Honestly, this is the most annoying post in the thread.

NO U

Now that! I did see that, being an avid nwn player. Not the same thing exactly but ok we'll take it.

I guess that means I win then. My job here is done.

Oh please!
How could you not know that was what he was talking about?
You were obviously playing dumb!

>Not the same thing exactly
That is exactly what I meant when I first said it. I was actually kind of confused when the NY Times bestseller list was brought up.

...

Now I just wonder if there's a term for a 'twist' like a Drow being Good becoming so cliched that the original, 'cliched' version of it is now more interesting than the twist.

>NY Times bestseller list was brought up.
thats because hes TRRROOOOOLLLING YOOOOOOUUUUU

DO NOT RESPOND TO TROLLS

>that top tier [top? bottom? best]
>not including the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guide from 1e

You need to calm down. The rest of us have.

No I brought up the NY times bestseller lists because drizzt and crew regularly make the top ten when a new book drops. Ya know, along with all the other fantasy books about an angsty dark elf being all good and doing awesome ranger shit. Yeah all ZERO of them.

Calm down nigger, we already cleared up this misunderstanding.

Probably because NY Times bestseller list doesn't care for cheap knock-offs.

>NY times bestseller
You know the only reason people get on that list is because they bought a record number of books from the printers, right?
They are just stuck with a million unsold copies of their own books. Its a nice little statement about demagoguery that took me a while to learn.

So where are these waves of drizzt knockoffs? No where! What a spurious argument! Making a PC knockoff barely counts. There's been as many Bruenor knockoffs, maybe more, if we're counting pc knockoffs.

Okay, to be honest that may be a rumor. But its one I personally tend to believe. If you want to fact check it be my guest.

>No one buys Stephen King books
>No one buys G. R. R. Martin's books
Please stop posting.