Best D&D Fix

Fantasy Craft is the best 3e heartbreaker on the market. The best "D&D" fix is to revert to Moldvay B/X and expand from there as you choose.

OSR is really nice these days.

OSR is pretty overrated. It's not as bad as 3.5, but for the most part it'll be the casters doing the heavy lifting at later levels, and fighters can be summed up as "a blob of hitpoints with an attack that quickly loses its utility."

Whats the best adnd 2e ? Spelljammer?

Weren't hirelings and mandatory titles/strongholds a thing that set fighters apart at later levels?

Sounds like D&D and all of its cousins.

yeah, but that's how Pathfinder works, too.

Fantasycraft is good because everything just works, as advertised, and the game gives out all of the relevant information for modifying or fixing problems that come up in game.

This doesn't *sound* like a huge deal, but in the realm of tabletop games and especially compared to Pathfinder, it's massive. 3.pf's biggest problems came into things like Monks being an entire trap class right in the core book that was straight-out weaker than the rest, right next to spellcasting classes and classes like Druid/Cleric/etc. that gave experienced players far more power than others.

It also gets rid of feat bloats - Every single feat in that book is good for some character, as opposed to the dozens of +2 to a skill or +3 HP feats that are just there to make Power Attack look even better in comparison.

It's not amazing. It's just a highly competent system that's fun and easy to make your characters in without having to have a lot of system mastery. In addition, since it knew it'd have limited releases, it included the rules for crafting monsters, worlds, and good ways to modify the campaign to your liking, from high-power high-fantasy to low-fantasy sci-fi or whatever. The downside is that it doesn't have all those splats, so the GM has a lot of work in creating almost literally everything from monsters up.

>objective observation on a vast subjective topic which varies drastically from group to group and even to player to player.
hahahahahahaha, well meme'd.

PLANESCAPE, motherfucker.

Weapon specialization was what made Fighters great.

Everyone gets that kind of shit, and that doesn't really make much of a difference when you get to the nitty gritty of actually adventuring in my experience.

>b-but they do it too!

4th edition doesn't, Fantasy Craft supposedly doesn't, hell even 3.5 and 5e put some effort into giving fighters some options (Tome of Battle, and the Battlemaster respectively).

>crying about someone voicing their opinion in an opinion thread

Touchy much?

It seems like OSR has a very specific playstyle in mind, that isn't what everyone wants out of notD&D. Maybe that's just the OSR thread here, though.

>Everyone gets that kind of shit, and that doesn't really make much of a difference when you get to the nitty gritty of actually adventuring in my experience.

I dunno. Being a higher level fighter with a well equipped band of men-at-arms would be a boon to any adventuring party. More meat for the grinder at any rate.

Google "Ivory Tower Game Design"

5e's terrible because of the schizophrenic game design, the lack of understanding of the fundamental system that the designs had when releasing the core books has led to them making major design changes mid-run which is absurd.

4th Edition is a wargame.

Fantasy Craft does alright. Better than 3.5e for damn sure.

5e is leagues better than B/X, which is shit mostly because only two classes get useful options.

It's possible. Godbound is considered OSR, however, and it's kind of an exalted-like.
Stars Without Number is also built in the same framework.

Kevin Crawford is pretty cool.

You don't even have an argument. Your 'point' cannot exist, except in a bizarro world where you are the only person who can make up the rules.

>Battlemaster
That was an effort to take away options from the Fighter after the playtest.

Because "class options" wasn't a design concept in B/X and immediate derivatives. Instead of needing to be told your character can do something, if it made sense, your character just did it.

5e talks about this at length, in fact. I like that. I don't like how their adventures are dumbed down. I don't like that one of their core classes was literally revised part way through their run. I'm not going to put any additional money towards the game myself, but don't let me detract you from doing so.

>You don't even have an argument.

See OSR fans are some of the touchiest on Veeky Forums. Capable of handling no criticism of their choice games.

>this meme

Playtest fighter sucked dick.

Class options weren't a thing, unless you were a cleric, elf, or wizard.

Imma not seeing as many anime tits as were promised by OP.

"OSR" isn't a system. It's more like a category of systems, or even a genre of them. Not all of them play the same.

Mundane characters can go "off the rails" and perform unscripted actions of their own volition based on the rulings of the judge and the group. If there's a possibility of failure or success, it's usually determined by an attribute check or a saving throw.

So the utility of a mundane character is pretty much only limited based on how little of an imagination you have. In your case; since it seems like you can't properly dress yourself in the morning, you're likely extremely correct.

>OSR isn't a system

Indeed, it's included some genuinely innovative titles such as Retrophaze, which almost never get discussed here and here it's basically shorthand for "B/X, Labyrinth Lord, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess" in which my criticism applies.

>Mundane characters can go "off the rails" and perform unscripted actions of their own volition based on the rulings of the judge and the group. If there's a possibility of failure or success, it's usually determined by an attribute check or a saving throw.

"Mother, may I contribute to the encounter meaningfully?" Kek.

The ability to contribute to encounters meaningfully is always at the judge's discretion.

Are you just moaning about the idea of having magic users in your fantasy land?

If that's the case, remove the caster—remove the problem! Or don't, because it would only ever really be a problem if you were playing 3e or part of a group the latter of which I don't foresee ever happening.

Depends on what you're after. FantasyCraft is hands down the best for gritty/medium power games while Legend is far better for any power level above that.

>Start thread asking about D&D fixes that aren't official D&D editions.
>OSR fags just can't resist shilling B/X.

Kek.

>The ability to contribute to encounters meaningfully is always at the judge's discretion.

Only in shitty systems, in other games that GM has to go out of their way to ensure that someone can't contribute.

>Are you just moaning about the idea of having magic users in your fantasy land?

No. I'm pointing out that these OSR titles include clear-cut mechanical options for casters to contribute to the adventure, but force the blob of hitpoints with a shitty attack to rely on freeform bullshit.

Ironically BECMI actually DID give martials access to tons of special effects through the weapon mastery table. Far more than 3.5 did until late into its lifespan, that's for sure.

It's just that OSR players don't use that kind of thing.

You can play as a motherfucking dragon for starters.

>A Game Master, meaning Master of the Game, the book-wielding tyrant of weekend imagination sessions has to go out of their way to do anything
HAH.

HAHAHA.

HA.

I can't imagine how you manage to maintain your own willing suspension of belief when you talk to yourself. The judge facilitates the entire world, ya goofus.

But anyway, Moldvay was replaced soon by Mentzer, with BECMI, which made it rather unofficial, but it does work out of the box with relatively few problems so long as you can play with humans instead of autistic trogmen.

Labyrinth Lord is also very much a "Fix D&D" system that makes a relatively easily-readable AD&D. Plus it's free, so...

>to rely on freeform bullshit.
That's called 'roleplaying' and it's the most fun.

Trailblazer.

drivethrurpg.com/m/product/64009

I literally cannot shill hard enough for this.

>freeform bullshit.
so like, a roleplaying game?

>but for the most part it'll be the casters doing the heavy lifting at later levels
Stick a number on "later levels"

>fighters can be summed up as "a blob of hitpoints with an attack that quickly loses its utility."
The point of OSR is that it breaks down the artificial walls that the over-mechanicalization of later editions built up to box-in characters. It's a mindset, not a ruleset, and your whole post is an example of not understanding the mindset.

I like fantasy craft, but two things really annoy me:
/scene /adventure abilities, because scenes and adventures can last too long or not long enough and reputation/contacts/pretty much all character traits that can give them NPC relationships, because I hate putting those as mechanics when they'd depend on roleplay. It's hard to work against that when some classes do get contacts, renown or reputation as part of what they do as well.
Anyone ever tried ways to alter these mechanics?

THICCER

If you want ludonarrarive consistency, Earthdawn.

If you want OSR simplicity, Barbarians of Lemuria/Shadow of the Edgelord.

If you want OSR simplicity with storygame faggotry, White Hack/Beyond the Wall/World of Dungeons.

If you want complexity, ACKS with the retro-stupid taken out (remaking the classes with everyone on the same XP chart).

If you want to stay 1pp d20, M&M3e.

If you really like 4e, Strike.

If you really liked optimized 3.X, Tome with errata.

People see a bunch of dials and widgets that they then can mindcaulk into working. Like GURPS, but without the amazing supplements.

Please do not post picture of my wife without her permission.

3.p. Neither wholly one nor the other, with bits cherry picked from each. For extra fun add d20 slayers.

Level five or so.

Go play Risus.

>The point of OSR is that it breaks down the artificial walls that the over-mechanicalization of later editions built up to box-in characters.

Except if you play a spellcaster. Then you get actual options.

>For extra fun add d20 slayers.
Please don't. It is a pretty terrible book.

So is this the sweet anime tiddies thread?

it's actually pretty decent, but there is no reason not to modify the rules to fit better with your own personal blend of 3.p(not everyone agrees on how much or what to take from each component, but noone is likely to argue that 4th is better. Unless they actually like FATAL).

While I like the fatigue based casting system, the book does an awful job at reflecting the Slayers fluff, and it misses out on a lot of the best spells from the series. As a Slayers book it fails, but as something you crib a few mechanics from it can work out.

it does a far better job than most of the books that turn anime into rpgs.

Compared to? Fluffwise a lot of things are just wrong. The class system is retarded and doesn't fit the context at all. The art is just made out of recycled screenshots from the show. They didn't even bother to put in a setting map or anything legitimately useful. The spell list is lacking, and things like Necro Vood or Rubty Eye Blade simply aren't mentioned. The only thing that I can give it points for is not just using vancian magic.

What's good about Trailblazer?

In my opinion Legend was pretty good. A few tracks weren't as strong, but the amount of customization you could do with what was there was pretty awesome. It's one of the few games where a Dragon Barbarian, a Wheel Skeleton Knight, and a Robot Wizard are all perfectly acceptable characters that you can run at level 1. Oh, and the whole thing is free.

ruleofcool.com/

compared to pretty much every other BESM product. Yes, it is far from what it should be, but it is better than it could have been.

>compared to pretty much every other BESM product
That is quite a low bar, so I will have to concede there.

I dunno, BESM second was an OK generic RPG.

>for the most part it'll be the casters doing the heavy lifting at later levels
It really depends on the edition and what you mean by "later levels". It can be tricky to stay alive until high levels, but the game does have some issues once you get there. If you play within the 1-10 level range, casters shouldn't get too out of hand, especially if you're playing something like B/X as opposed to 2e. In B/X, there are no specialty wizards, so magic-users have fewer spells. You can only learn a number of spells equal to the number you can cast per day at each level. And instead of having 45 first level spells to choose from, there are only 12 (and the book pretty much leaves it up to the DM whether to assign the spells or not). All of this makes a difference.

A 10th level magic-user in B/X has spells per day of 3/3/3/3/2. That's 14 spells, which is certainly nothing to scoff at, but not all of them are going to be hugely powerful or even applicable a lot of the time. So, sure, you have read magic, ventriloquism and sleep, but none of those are going to be game changers at high levels. So you figure that maybe 1/3 of your spells are going to be of limited use, which leaves you with 9 more essential spells to dole out over the course of a high-level adventure.

I think that the core tri-stat system for 2E was good. The d20 version was just a cash in, so not so much there.

E6 Gestalt

Fight me

Why Gestalt?

It's fun.

Also, it helps and it is kind of hard to fuck up a Gestalt character with Max level 6. If you chose the 2 "weakest" classes of the game and use Gestalt, you get a decent melee character doing really fun shit (Monk//Fighter). If you choose the most "broken" classes of the game and use the level 6 cap, you get a really subdued CoDzilla that won't overpower your party since everybody is pretty close to you in either Melee or Spellcasting abilities

Oh, what a scathing condemnation. Come up with an actual insult - if you can manage to find the option, of course.

The thing there is having fewer spells to work with means a higher incentive for the MU player, if they come from a 21st Century D&D background, to hold everyone up and take a rest so they aren't completely useless after blowing their wad. Without multiclass rules, there's not a fallback fighting man core (unless they run Cleric, if that's an option), so that weighs heavier towards the incentive to take a 15 minute workday.

Stopping that, as with stopping MUs from getting powerful spells, is mostly Ref fiat. Instead of the player choosing spells, the Ref or the dice do. Instead of the player dictating the pace of the game, the Ref (or the dice rolled by the Ref, for random encounters) does. Instead of having clear cut abilities that do specific things, several B/X hacks leave it to NWP alikes or stat checks that need to be haggled over for use, which ultimately is Ref fiat.

OSR games are good at stopping caster abuses in the same way free-form games are; because potential (ab)uses of abilities comes down to Mother May I. There's nothing innately wrong with that, but it's honestly something the Ref can do in any game or system.

To me, the selling point of OSR is quick character generation and having prompts for lulls in a session (random encounters, etiquette/reaction tables, the random generators one finds in Sine Nomine products).

A level 5 MU memorized up to 2/2/1 spells.
They can only memorize these in town.

They have to trek several days to the dungeon, delve it, then trek back on 2/2/1 spells.
Their spells known are random, but also limited to 2/2/1.

They have 12.5hp (avg.) and can survive 3 attacks (avg.), dying on the 4th.

If they want to cast during a fight, everyone gets to act before them.
If they get hit, the spell is wasted. Period.

As far as fighters go, let's compare a 3rd level fighter striking at a 3 HD monster to a 10th level fighter striking at a 10 HD monster. We'll be generous and give the 3rd level fighter a +1 sword and the 10th level fighter a +3 sword, and figure they both have a +1 strength bonus. An AC of 6 looks about right for a 3 HD monster, and an AC of 4 for a 10 HD monster.

Now, the low-level fighter has a 50% chance to hit the 3 HD monster and inflict an average of 6.5 damage. That's 3.25 damage per round, which should kill the monster in 4,15 rounds.

The high-level fighter, with his more powerful sword and improved THAC0, has an 85% chance to hit the 10 HD monster and inflict an average of 8.5 damage. That's 7.225 damage per round, which should kill the monster in 6.23 rounds. That's almost exactly 150% the time the 3rd level fighter takes to kill his monster. So while his hitting power has gone down, it hasn't diminished as much as you might think.

Sure, and the blob of hitpoints will stand in for the attack. But the spells they get offer more concrete mechanical options to contribute to the game than any other class gets, and they still get all the freeform bullshit the blob gets.

A 50% increase in time required to do your job is MASSIVE, especially since in my experience a fight that lasts more than three rounds will typically start losing the attention of players in systems without actual tactical options.

Exactly, it may not be what I want it to be, but it is better than I feared it could be when I first checked it out.

>spells
>concrete
At the risk of arguing your side, I hereby denounce you for talking about shit you don't know about.
MUs get to do freeform bullshit with their spells, too.

Not him, but did you even look at the picture he posted? It's not the massive spell list they get on newer editions, nor do they get as many spell slots to use them, on top of most likely being the frailest members of a party. A 5e wizard at the same would have 4/3/2 spells + 4 cantrips + ritual casting and 20 hp at the same level and depending on race and archetype choice, possibly be able to use armor and real weapons

>Stopping that, as with stopping MUs from getting powerful spells, is mostly Ref fiat.
Well, the whole game is largely built around that, which makes it less of a problem that you need it to make something work well. If you have a system which doesn't promote DM fiat, but needs it to fix an issue in one area, that's a problem.

>a higher incentive for the MU player, if they come from a 21st Century D&D background, to hold everyone up and take a rest so they aren't completely useless after blowing their wad.
You can only do it once per day, you have to have a completely uninterrupted night's sleep along with an hour of study, and there aren't any tricky spells to give you magical shelter while in the dungeon. So in most circumstances, it's really not feasible.

I'm not saying it's a perfect system, but seeing as OSR stresses resource management, it's less problematic that spells are also a resource that needs to be managed.

Spells *could be* random, but all the book says is that the DM decides how they're allocated. Also, it doesn't say you can only memorize spells in town, the parameters just make it really difficult to do in a dungeon. As far as casting during combat goes, spells go after missile attacks and before melee in B/X, and there really isn't an apparatus for interrupting spells in the rules. It sounds like you're playing a hodge-podge of OSR rules, like pretty much everybody else does. Honestly, the core rules of the editions are similar enough that it's hard to remember which variants a particular one uses.

And a 5e fighter would also have feats and archetypes to give them some options. No one claimed it was perfect, just that they get more options than OSR fighters, which are exactly blobs of hitpoints with shitty attacks; their function could be run as a script.

>You can only do it once per day, you have to have a completely uninterrupted night's sleep along with an hour of study, and there aren't any tricky spells to give you magical shelter while in the dungeon. So in most circumstances, it's really not feasible.

On top of that, 3.5 casters eventually got reserve feats, 4e casters have encounter and at-wills, and 5e casters have cantrips, which means they have things to do after they've blown their wads.

e6 is the shit for post-AD&D play. I have been wondering how well it'd apply to 5e.

also tits for the tit thread

>a fight that lasts more than three rounds will typically start losing the attention of players in systems without actual tactical options.
Unless there's no cinematic description or improvisation involved (in which case even 2 rounds would be boring), the people you play with are attention deficit. I mean, I don't entirely disagree that high-level fighters could stand to dish out a bit more damage (and they do in AD&D, but getting an extra attack every other round at that level), but let's not exaggerate the issue.

Weapon feats in 5e are basically mandatory for martials to work as intended, so counting them is dishonest as you most likely need to pay 2 feats as make-me-not-suck tax. Unless your DM allows vhumans of course but vhumans are a pretty lazy fix to make humans not suck. The only archetype at that level which gets meaningful choices is battlemaster.

I mean, for someone complaining about needing DM permission to do stuff, it's also a common rule in those older editions that the DM also picked out your spells for you and decided which ones you found.

They typically provide combat options and some degree of tactical depth. I wasn't referring to them as character creation options. OSR fighters could be fixed with a combat system that had more depth than Shining Force.

>are attention deficit

Yeah, god forbid people having different tastes than you not be considered a sign of neurological abnormality.

Cinematic description can only carry 1d20+1d8+2 repeated ad infinitum so far, and it's not very far at all.

OSR combat is a fucking chore.

So? They'll still have more meaningful input in an adventure than the fighter, which as has been said before, could be run as a script.

The mother may I options are simply the worst, since they tend to either boil down to "here's the end of the encounter" or "why did you even try?"

4 hours rest (NOT sleep) + 15 minutes per spell level in AD&D.
AD&D also gives MUs "travelling spellbooks," if they spend enough dosh.

I played all editions of D&D. The earlier editions are not more balanced, fair, or even really that much simpler. The biggest difference is that the DM has to handle exponentially more, so they (knowingly or not) have more options to smooth things over without anyone knowing.

About Spellcasters in earlier editions: geometrically expanding power has always been an issue. It was bad enough to where people wrote in letters to Gygax, who responded with something along the lines of "Why are you letting your Magic Users get past fifth level?".

Finally, Fantasy Craft is probably the most balanced 3.x derivative. 4e is the most balanced edition of D&D, though that's not saying much. Your options for D&D depend on what you think D&D ought to be doing. If you're about dangerous and gritty D&D, use GURPS Dungeon Fantasy instead. If you're all about mythological, high adventure epics, run D&D in Mutants and Masterminds or your favorite Superhero System of your choice.

It's a role-playing game, and I think you're missing out if you play it like a wargame. Bad OSR combat, with a GM who doesn't improvise and let you improvise, is dreadfully boring. Good OSR combat, however, is a completely different story.

>[Mwahahahaha intensifies]

And how does that differ from improvising in any other edition?

Combat is the most time consuming and mechanically intensive part of the game. It should be fucking interesting.

>good OSR combat

Doesn't fucking exist.

No rules for the cool thing you want to do is better than boring rules for the cool thing you want to do, I guess?

It doesn't, except by mindset. A game with a menu of options inevitable leads to people choosing options from the menu, and seldom going off-script, to mix metaphors. Also, there's not a lot to get in your way when it comes to OSR; a simple game makes for a much better platform for improvisation than a heavy tangle of rules.

But my point wasn't that improvisation magically made OSR different from later editions. My point was simply that cinematics and improvisation will get you plenty far without needing stratified combat techniques and whatnot. The argument was that OSR is dull if it goes past 3 rounds, and I was disagreeing with that necessarily being the case.

>It was bad enough to where people wrote in letters to Gygax, who responded with something along the lines of "Why are you letting your Magic Users get past fifth level?".
So 75% of the game was actively designed never to be used, and if you actually got that far you're playing it wrong?

Except you may as well just play freeform then.

Thank fucking Christ. Someone else who doesn't think that just because old school D&D existed before people like Touhoufag that it's somehow balanced.

>The earlier editions are not more balanced, fair, or even really that much simpler.
B/X sure as shit is. Simpler, that is. More balanced and fair? Eh. Depends on what you're talking about.

>Also, there's not a lot to get in your way when it comes to OSR; a simple game makes for a much better platform for improvisation than a heavy tangle of rules.

4e did pretty well there, with a lot of GM guide stuff to help get improvised stuff that was actually useful (Rather than it being a step down from using powers)

I have, it was fun too.

Yeah sort of.
Most of the spell list was only there for scrolls.

In OD&D, MUs had stats up to level 16. Those stats were for NPCs.
There was an entire level of spells MUs got at level 12.
The MU xp table only went to level 11.

Also of note
youtube.com/watch?v=7UjXi1HKjms

>You can play as a motherfucking dragon for starters.

No one cares. And that's not a selling point, unless you're a special snowflake faggot. Stop using edgy language to shill for a dead game that no one wants to play.