/osrg/ — Old School Renaissance General: OP for Ants Edition

I love neoweird, but I'm an artsy wanker. Trying to tone it down, hint don't show, keep the strangeness distinctive instead of just going full bore into it. Its hard, but I think probably better for the new campaign.

This is cool. I think I'd just use the minor items part though.

I don't know. You could get clerics from both European missionaries and native Americans, and wizards from the latter. Fighters and thieves would of course be all over the place.

I'll have to read this some more, but I really like the feel you're going for. The specific mechanics feel a little too '+1 treadmill' for my tastes, but I could easilly switch out '+1 dex' or whatever for a bonus more to my taste.

Basic Red's Doublecrossroads is something like that. I like the classes in that system, feels very D&D while being flavorful and unique.

basicredrpg.blogspot.com/p/xxr.html

I like this, but it feels like the start of an idea.

You might want to make it more closely tied to some major OSR resources (money, time, and XP).

>Neo-weird, y/n?
n
It's gotten old

>>Neo-weird, y/n?
>n
>It's gotten old
ironic, really, considering how the idea is built on novelty.

>Deep South reskin of Ravenloft
That instantly brings to mind Deliverance and Hills Have Eyes, and is therefore hilarious.

Got a link?

How should I add professions like cooking and blacksmithing into BFRPG?

>Got a link?
Sorry, no. It was just a bit of PDF that was posted here once. I don't think the author intended to go anywhere with it. It was great though. Voodoo, crazy mists, alligators, etc.

>Veeky Forums
>Ever not being retarded and chugging the bait

Background skills. Either brought up at chargen (a blacksmith's son fighter obviously knows about blacksmithing), or - like pic related - announced when appropriate.

Thanks faggot

>cooking
Occultesque has some rules for cooking here: occultesque.com/2017/07/eating-good-in-dungeonhood.html

And then there's of course Monster Menual.

I'm considering a modified version of NWPs, myself. Though for cooking only if you're making food that tastes good. It ain't hard not to burn water for awful stew.

Yeah, but it's not really a skill thing driven by the characters, so I didn't post it. It's more of an addition to the setting.

If you wanted to run a character who was /all about cooking/, it'd be good though.

But he'd probably be some kind of weirdo.

>he'd probably be some kind of weirdo.
Aren't all PCs?

Fair point.

I was more just thinking like, the group would have somebody like Brock from Pokemon, who would make them some tasty shit on the road.

You should check out Ryuutama then. It's got all kinds of cool rules for that sort of stuff. You might want to steal their Condition system and bolt it onto yours.

Honestly, you can probably just manage it by means of roleplay. He says he's the cook - fine, so he can cook stuff, while the rest of the party will probably fail at it if they ever try. No need to go into any more detail.

Thanks

How smart are trolls? Would it make sense for a troll to go after a lightly armoured opponent first, or would they just charge the closest one?

There was a TSR game back in the day called Boot Hill. I never checked it out because I've never been into Westerns, so I don't know how similar or dissimilar to D&D it is, but I think it was already old by the time I played Holmes Basic in the early 80s, which might point to it being closer rather than further from D&D.

Trolls are ridiculously varied, probably even within settings.

But even then, only the most bloodthirsty animals couldn't think at least a little. Most trolls certainly can.

Yeah I was just speaking generally, but thanks.

Wasn't there a b/x sort of pdf or google doc a few threads ago that made it really simple and obvious, I don't think it had the spells added yet though.

I really like that system, does anybody have a link or know what I'm talking about?

I didn't open it, but do you mean the grayharped b/x?

Hold on, I think that doesn't exist. I got confused from some shitpost

I've only ran 1 troll encounter, but they seemed cunning but not smart to me, so I they had a plan but were bad at changing it based on what they players were up to. Simple but effective ambush, bad at figuring out the player's tricks.

>Medieval Christians believed Muslims were pagan idolaters who worshiped gods named Termagant, Baphomet, Mahound and Apollyon.

I need to integrate this into my game somehow.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Christian_views_on_Muhammad
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termagant
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahound

What I do is let my players make up ludicrous lies about Foreign Parts.

I then take those lies and back-form the truth from them. Sometimes they aren't lies at all. Sometimes they are utter fables. But Afanasy Nikitin wrote only the truth of what he saw, and his account is still pretty ludicrous.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasy_Nikitin

I found it. It was actually from a blog, so I'm just a dumbass, not from the thread.

What does b/x actually stand for anyway?

Bag of Xylophones

...

Boron / Xenon

These guys.

Bx stands for [B]asic Rules (by Tom Moldvay) and E[x]pert Rules (by David "Zeb" Cook).

Say what you want about the gender stats discussion but at least we I got us fucking posting and not on page 6. Here's a free bump before I hit the hay

AD&D had max and min attributes as prerequisites for race, class, and gender.
It /did not/ have attribute modifiers by race. class, or gender.

You can look into Black Powder, Black Magic. It's a Dungeon Crawl Classics setting/zine that's western themed and replaces/offers human variants of the dwarf, halfling and rogue.

I think you mean True AD&D (tm)

But this is broadly how I run it. Character age, social class and gender tend to be influenced by the stats I roll. There's probably a good essay in how to mine information from the six stats rolled and what they mean for the character you've created.

>a TSR game back in the day called Boot Hill

Boot Hill is kinda shit desu. The 1st edition is anyway. It's pure Gygax so it's more of a war game than an rpg. I think the later editions improved but I never tried them.

Look at Go Fer Yer Gun. It's in the trove.

I've noticed LotFP assumes you have a monster's stat scores. Is there any bestiary for it available or do you just wing it with normal B/X monsters?

So last thread I spitballed an idea about a total narrative and aimed/called shot combat system. Using only a d20 to attack with and lowering the amount of dice to use. I'd like to work on the mechanics a bit.

While this game system is still going to have rolls and random chance, I want it so players can do whatever they want with as few rules as possible. I also want the idea of finishing off a foe with a killing move as to not be a natural progression of losing HP, but an intentional move done with risk vs reward.

>d20 + modifier is attack rolls
>Roll strength when smashing stuff, dexterity if seeking cracks in armor, Int if using magic to burn things to a crisp, etc.
>Monster Hit points are added to AC for finishing/killing blows
>If attacks are not intended finishing blows, like stabbing a beast in the arms or legs, knocking them around, etc. Only roll vs AC
>Weapons deal 1 damage per their size, plus class bonuses, plus location damage bonus, round the relevant stat to the nearest 5 and divide by 5 (20 in strength when smashing, deals +4 damage) all these bonuses let you take out large chunks of HP at once
>As fight goes on, creatures with lower health will be able to finish off. Make it so once they drop below a maximum for their HD they lose some AC and/or to hit bonuses and damage to fluff them becoming weaker

How does this sound for a good start?

Two questions regarding magic since I didn't get much from last thread: What's the deal with spellcasting in ACKs? Is it like sorcerers in Pathfinder where you don't prepare spells?
And I don't want to use the elemental based spells (fireball, earth's teeth, etc.) given in ACKs for my battle mage class. I'm thinking of adding the Force Spells from D&D as their main bread and butter. Thoughts?

Trolls fight as three Armored Foot when battling normal men, and literally can't be killed by them (due to the regeneration, presumably). So probably they'd just wade right in and fuck shit up; there's no particular reason for them to go for fleshy targets first, and in fact, since they're indestructible it's probably smarter to use them to tie up heavily armored foes.

Anyone have an idea of what I should write about or make a table about?

1d30 table of 1d30 tables.

1d20 magical vegetables and their 1d20 weird growth requirements.

How long does it take to heal a broken limb, and would it have any long-term consequences? Are there any resources available for this sort of things?

You drink a healing potion.

If you're out of healing potions, you'll have to hobble your way back to town with your buddies and then get one there.

Once you drink the healing potion, your leg goes ZIP and straightens out. The long term consequences is that you had to spend money on a healing potion.

>limbs
>broken
>D&D
First you should tell us what houserule you're using.

Depends on how cleanly the bone was broken and whether or not the flesh around it was impacted.

It was more of just winging it rather than using any houserule: a powerful monster rolled a crit with near-maximum damage and I decided it broke the fighter's arm. I'll admit I didn't think it entirely through, but mostly anywhere I see hit points tend to be just superficial damage rather than genuine wounds, and healing spells and potions therefore wouldn't be enough to fix deeper damage.

Why are you playing with crits?

3 weeks sound reasonable.

It's quite easy to add extra flavor and effects on really high and low rolls in the fly, and it can add a proportionally fair amount of tension, grit, and occasional hilarity.

I don't have tables for them or anything.

More OC

I don't think you should bring in too much about either called shots or wounds. Regular attacks are already explicitly trying to cause both: there's no need to make it any more complicated.

>sticks-to-snakes
I mean this is from the bible though so it's not like it's that weird or anything.

Yeah but the Bible is weird as hell on its own.

"Neo-weird" is a lot less weird when a bunch of people start trying to do it all at once. I have nothing against ditching tolkien-fantasy for the "weird fantasy" stuff but the trend as it started to appear in OSR products the past couple years got old really fast for me.

Why do people think "don't do thing I don't like" is good criticism? It's not really helping anyone develop their esoteric homebrew system at any rate.

Needlessly complicating things that are meant to be simple is a valid criticism well beyond "I don't like thing!".

Because it eventually just becomes completely meaningless foreign objects flashing in front of you. The "Tolkien" Fantasy images are archetypes that communicate various things to people and have meaning because of a shared cultural heritage, but weird items have no such connection and to saturate it too much is just overwhelming and frustrating for anybody.

The originals did it best, you go from the real, familiar world (familiar as in our actual world or familiar fantasy) and then you get to weird stuff deep down. It needs to have the exploration and discovery, familiar to unfamiliar, if there is ever going to be any meaningful effect.

If you want to be a real contrarian like me, go for the generic high fantasy approach from video games and anime and such.

So magic item shops everywhere, generic elves and orcs but you can add in others, leveling up is an understood mechanic in universe, etc.

Yeah but these days that shit's pretty overdone as well.

What's next, each player character is actually a real world person transported into the magical land of adventure?

>Yeah but these days that shit's pretty overdone as well.

Not in tabletop fantasy it isn't. Tabletop fantasy is either classic D&D style fantasy, muh grit and grime, or neo weird. Very rarely do you get that kind of style.

It takes 6-10 weeks to heal a simple fracture in an arm or leg to the point you can use the limb, but it'll be weak for a considerable time after that.

>he doesn't know about Forgotten Realms
I truly envy you.

Forgotten Realms started out as pretty good actually. It was just slightly gritty, decently high magic without going full retard with it, and even had a bit of really weird shit spicing it up. Then 2e dropped the ball.

Yeah, I agree the original box set isn't bad at all. But it went full retard really fast.

It's designed with the intention that every monster be a unique hellmess instead of goblins, orcs and whatnot. Most of the modules have specific monsters in them. There's a few bestiaries for it with interesting random tables to make weird shit with in the trove. It also works fine with a regular monster manual, just remember LotFP has a better base AC for unarmoured humans.

Yeah I recommend the Esoteric Creature Generator pretty highly. It's led to some off the wall shit like an elder god trapped in a hive consciousness in a baker's dozen cat-sized sparrows immune to normal weapons.

Interesting. I'd streamline it a bit and have the finishing move damage increase by class level instead of
>round the relevant stat to the nearest 5 and divide by 5

Keeping it a risky move where its always potentially dangerous seems key. Maybe give the monster a bonus against someone if they miss too.

Could go with an option if you roll max damage to represent a well positioned attack, basically asking if they want to roll double or nothing.

Unusual keys & locks.
Magical writing materials.
Common ornamentation on weapons & armour. (the folk charm table last thread got me thinking about how humans tend to love scrawling, doodling, carving and otherwise busying up their stuff)

Just look up how long it takes irl? There's your resource, webmd.

Made me think of Waterworld.

Honestly, crits that cause complications like broken bones are much better that crits that just do extra damage, which make a nonsense out of the damage roll. If you want to use critical hits, it's definitely preferable to use a table with things like getting stunned, knocked prone or unconscious, disabling a limb and so on. It even allows you to make Cure Light Wounds and Cure Serious Wounds more mechanically distinct -- permit only the latter to mend broken bones and similar injuries.

I think is going for how to let players do more heroic violence against monsters rather than crits against players like is doing.

Re: monsters its basically mechanizing an increased risk/reward system for dealing damage to monsters. I tend to just do that based on asking players how they're attacking, what their plan is, etc. But its interesting to see how other people would do that. Also for new gms its probably useful for them to learn how to build a thing, then realize they can wing it more than they have been. Another easy way to incorporate it would be to have sliding attack/damage bonuses to decreasing your ac like some systems do.

There are a lot of dismemberment and horrific bad damage times tables/houserules floating around. Crits against players is a thing I do very simply. If an attack would drop the character to zero, they can take a crippling injury instead, drop to 1hp, roll a random stat and drop it by d6. I sort out what the injury is by what's attacking and what stat got rolled. They can only have 1 at a time, they're still in a bad way, makes life more complicated (and tend to die anyway) and gives me more to riff on later. Magical healing isn't just laying around to mend bones and undo brain damage either. Its a bit gamey, but that's fine.

I like the HP+AC defending against killing blows thing because it really uses HP the way it was intended - lots of flynning and then eventually one good shot gets through.

>But he'd probably be some kind of weirdo.

Perfect.

What's the weird bit about your current player character?

I don't play special snowflakes. What about you?

I don't play """characters""". My P"C"s are the abstract, featureless recollection of the components in my character sheet stuffed into a vaguely human-shaped husk, as God (Gygax) intended.

sounds boring i play a char called sasuke and hes a fox person

>magic item shops everywhere
okay
>generic elves and orcs
okay
>leveling up is an understood mechanic in universe
please no, isekai has already infected enough shit

as usual, autists of Veeky Forums prove themselves incapable of any thought more complex or varied than the two absolute extremes