/osr/ - Old School Renaissance

Basic Fantasy RPG is what I use. It has ascending AC so it'd probably be a smooth conversion for you.

BFRPG is good, check out Dungeon Crawl Classics as well. Maybe check out Adventurer Conqueror King.

I'm currently making a roleplaying game where, to sum up the lore as quick as possible, you go into fallout shelter vaults to drink alcohol that mutates you and makes you stronger. The idea being that once the whole party is drunk, you could just wake back up out of the dungeon.

However my issue is how to work on this if people drink the first thing they find; should there be a mechanic where that player is basically just drunk and stupid for the remainder of the dungeon after they get their new super power? Should they wait until they all get some booze, or should the party have to actually roleplay leaving the dungeon instead of doing the whole 'black out drunk and return home' thing I think works well?

Just play 5e and give experience points for treasure recovered/spent. Once you add that mechanic, and tell the players that they don't get experience from fighting and should try to get in and get out, the OSR feeling is achieved. 5e and B/X are practically the exact same game once you do that.

>What OSR syste-
ACKS, it's the best clone, I dare say it's better than the original game

Hi, guys - posted this in the last thread but I want to ask again in this one.
I'm looking for thoughts on Torchbearer. Do any of you have strong opinions on it? I have been getting into dungeon synth music recently and I'm looking for something that's grimy in that same way.

Basically, I'm looking for something that doesn't put trying to trick the rules front and center. Focus on exploration. Looking to make a choice between Torchbearer and Moldvay Basic or BFRPG

Are there any favorite homerules you guys use for ACKs?

We used DCC spell system in my last ACKs game.

>Are there any favorite homerules you guys use for ACKs?
No, the game is already perfect

>DCC spell system
How does that work?

How do you determine how much things should cost when players buy their starting equipment?

Most rulebooks have a prices section don't they?

I'm making my own. Which is why I'm asking.

What are some good design principles?

I suppose if you don't want to just use the same prices as everyone else, you could do research on the real prices of things in medieval times.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/currency-in-osr-games.html

I'm a big fan of 1gp = 10sp = 100cp, and 1cp = $1 modern American dollar = 1 denier

medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

And it works within 1 order of magnitude, so it's pretty good. It's very handy for estimating totals.

I'm not really sure what you are asking. We use the DCC spell system in lieu of the ACKS spell system.

This pricelist is also useful. web.archive.org/web/20110419191117/http://www.maisonstclaire.org/resources/pricelist/pricelist.html

I think he's asking how DCC spells work generally.

Why BFRPG instead of Labyrinth Lord?

>races as classes
>descending AC
no thanks

Is there any particular reason you felt the need to shill your own blog, again, with something not relevant to what was asked?

Stop.

LL is technically a good system but Proctor borked it by stretching level advancement to 20 and organizing info badly.

>with something not relevant to what was asked?
>I'm making my own. Which is why I'm asking.
>What are some good design principles?

It's... literally about the design principles of a price list?

I guess I felt the need to post it because it could either answer user's question, or provide some useful lists and context for designing a price list. I forgot that we're supposed to bicker and snipe at each other on Veeky Forums, not try to be helpful. My bad.

Not the guy you're replying to, but why not post a blog that is actually well put-together and helpful then?

Yeah dude what the fuck? He aanswered your question...

Normally I hate that fucking prick and his endless shilling. But in this case the article is actually okay and relevant to what was asked

What types of adventures do you guys generally run at your tables? Do you just do all dungeon crawl, all the time? Do you do quests and more modern type stories? Political intrigue? Sandbox? Tell me.

Because he doesn't get ad money from a blog thats well put together

hehehe

>but why not post a blog that is actually well put-together and helpful then?
>Normally I hate that fucking prick and his endless shilling.

The constant bitching about Skerples is 100x more annoying than Skerples has ever been.

> borked it by stretching level advancement to 20 and organizing info badly.
Well, BFRPG also goes up to level 20 too, and the table of contents looks similar to the LL table of contents.

hey skerples what's up?

LL uses a horrible AC system stolen from a naval wargame and uses an outdated race system as well.

>outdated

If you think OSR is "outdated" in general then you really don't understand it at all. OSR just works. Most of it, anyway. Things like descending AC and race-as-class are just outdated though, and the argument of
>b-but D&D did it
isn't actually an argument at all.

How is race-as-class as "outdated" as descending AC?

When did I say they were equally outdated?

>plays 30-year old games and clones of 30-year old games
>complains about stuff being outdated
What did he mean by this?

...

BFRPG is easier to obtain copies of, cheaper, and the whole thing is free. It also makes a separation of race & class and uses ascending AC. There are still some negatives you should be aware of before jumping in though.

First, BFRPG is laid out like absolute shit. It lists the character building within the first two chapters, then the spells smack dab in the middle of the book organized in a questionable manner, and then it gets to adventuring and most of the rules you'd actually WANT to flip to in the middle of a session if you need it. It requires you to bookmark it somehow, digital or physical.

For some reason, the guy who made it made the 1 GP = 1 XP rule optional and presented in the back of the book. I have no clue why anyone would ever play without this rule and why he would do that in a game where the only people who are playing are either oldfags who are savvy or completely new players. I did the math once, and in order for a fighter to get to level 2 without that rule, it would require him to kill 400 orcs. Attempting such a feat is not recommended.

Finally, if you go BFRPG, just keep in mind that the website has the extra classes listed out as separate supplements. If someone wants to play as a paladin or half-orc, you're gonna have to send them there and possibly print out those sheets so you can spot check rules.

Other than that though, BFRPG is fantastic for a first timer, but as you play more, I fully recommend moving up to OSRIC or outright AD&D 2e.

Terrible argument. The entire point of a retroclone is so you can copy the good shit about the old days and then update it with advances in game design. There's no good justification to keep sacred cows in place when you can always just pick up the actual old rulebooks and just play those instead. Why bother cloning?

This is precisely what I meant. No reason to bog down the future of OSR with stupid shit like descending AC.
Race-as-class is more of a preferential thing that I dislike, but I still call it outdated because it feels outdated to me.

What exactly do you not like about race as class? I really like it because I prefer to run Humanocentric games and demi-humans being as different from a fighter or rogue as a wizard is is something I really like.

I, too, much prefer mostly human games. But I feel that race-as-class needlessly limits character creation. I see your point that it is a way to keep humans more common than other races, but I think it's the wrong way to go about it.

So race as class limits people from playing Elf-Wzards or Elf-Clerics?

Or Elf-Fighters. I understand that the race-classes are versatile but it isn't the same. Like I said, it's just a preferential thing. I just dislike it as a mechanic. But I can see why somebody would like it, moreso now that you explained why you do.
captcha: tits aruba

So do you common have demi-human and non-human cities in your games? Because if you have multiple racial settlements/ multi-racial settlements I can see how codifying large portions of NPC's encountered into a single class could be disenchanting to players. In my games the rarity of elven enclaves is higher than dragons so for that reason I would want hoops to exist for the players to hop through if they wanted to play as one. I also think a big difference is the aesthetic/thematic elements of games, if other races are just star-trek shaded people with prosthetic then why not just simply have the human? How do you balance "uniqueness" of races to their "alienness"? or do you just ignore that as a Referee? not that there's anything wrong with that at all

I'm not going to pretend I'm super fluent in game design. I like how BFRPG handles it.

>The entire point of a retroclone is so you can copy the good shit about the old days and then update it with advances in game design.
No, the entire point of a retroclone is CLONE a RETRO game. If you want to add newschool stuff to that you're making a homebrew (or rather, shitbrew) and not a retroclone.

As the others have said, Race as Class limits your options, but I think the more important aspect here is it forces your narrative. Dwarves and halflings do not know magic. It's simply not an option to them. Therefore, there are now Dwarven clerics, no halfling mages, or even halfling thieves. Those are the purview of the humans only.

It's not even like in AD&D 1e where Race and Class were separated but limited. Dwarfs can't be clerics? Well fuck you, in my world they can. I have the rules Dwarfs, I have the rules for clerics, I'm just going to ignore this rule. You can't do that in LL or original basic, because there's nothing defining what makes a dwarf a dwarf as opposed to a fighter, or an elf and elf without being a magic user and fighter together.

>Dwarves and halflings do not know magic. It's simply not an option to them.
This is only true for PCs, however. OSR games insist on building NPCs as the GM deems fit without paying attention to chargen rules.

>No, the entire point of a retroclone is CLONE a RETRO game
Then your point is both retarded and without merit. Simply pick up the original Moldvey Dungeons & Dragons which is not only available quite freely on the internet, but even moralfags can purchase them from the current license holder themselves in pdf form. There's literally no point in considering this mind-numbing retarded statement any further.

Why even bother replying to trolls? This is pretty obviously 5e guy, asshurt that his bait earlier in the thread didn't get any (you)s.

It's hard to create a fun world and game for players when the narrative is not backed up by the mechanics or vice versa. Players become disquieted when they see an option that isn't available to them without any logic or reason, and it simply becomes unfair to the player. It's just basic game design 101.

>2e
A perfect post, and then you had to fuck it up on the very last word.

I love how nobody in these threads even bothers defending descending AC, yet most OSR games have it just because
>muh D&D
Wait a minute... No, I don't love that, I fucking hate it.

The narrative is already at odds with the mechanics in OSR stuff. PCs will find NPCs with class levels that don't have a dungeoneering history, but PCs can only progress by going into dungeons and looting them.

How does Swords & Wizardry compare?

Pretty sure I've seen earnest defenses of descending AC here.

I honestly never have in the 2 months or so I've been in these threads.

>OSR
>GP=XP
>PCs will find NPCs with class levels that don't have a dungeoneering history, but PCs can only progress by going into dungeons and looting them.
What did he mean by this?

It was farther back than that but I'm sure. It was something revolving around how each number in descending AC meant a specific armor combination and how "elegant" that was, but I can't remember the exact wording.

God that sounds fucking retarded

I used to think that it was terrible, but I've recently started a campaign using it and it's honestly not as bad as I thought it would be. Goes about as quick in my experience as ascending, surprisingly enough. Maybe even quicker.

>3e and 5e kiddies trying to change the OSR
If that one guy spamming The Fantasy Trip couldn't do it, what chance do (You) have?

Defend descending AC. I fuckin dare you

> Defend descending AC
Sure, but first explain why Gonnerman used descending AC in Iron Falcon after he had already written BFRPG.

>sets a hard limit on AC instead of the infinitely scaling retardation of ascending AC
>in practice it's barely more complicated than ascending AC and BAB
>it's the standard used in almost all TSR D&D and OSR materials, making conversions to ascending AC pointless arithmetic
>it was good enough for 25 years of the franchise and all of TSR D&D
You ascending AC cucks are just 3.pf kiddies to lazy to learn a "new" mechanic. I bet you use feats too.

Going off the naval wargame point from last thread, descending does make sense. If, barring magic, plate+shield is the best defended you can be, it's perfectly reasonable to call that "First class armour," AKA AC 1. AC 2, therefore, is second class armour, and AC 3 third class and so on. It tells you, at a glance, without knowing that an unarmoured man is AC whatever, just how well defended your character or a monster is.

>If other races are just star-trek shaded people with prosthetic then why not just simply have the human?

Why is this opinion copied and pasted everywhere on Veeky Forums? You seem to have some baggage that humans are somehow inherently superior to use in a setting then nonhumans.

What's wrong with having nonhumans, Star Trek like or otherwise? I like having different fantasy races to make the setting more fantastical feeling, but I don't like giving them powers or abilities too strange so they don't bypass normal human weaknesses. I can't use intelligent undead, avian fliers, golems, or anything like that. So all my races are roughly near human, with near human abilities.

I know at the end there you added 'not that there's anything wrong with that' but that doesn't make you immune to criticism. Mostly I'm complaining about other, more outspoken people who mirror your opinion however.

I'd say that it's because /osr/ is full of nerds like the rest of Veeky Forums, and they want to stand out just like the rest. Since "traditional" fantasy is generic pseudomedieval realms where wandering parties of snowflake heroes are all over, everyone wants to do their own special thing - in /osr/'s case in particular, it's "gritty" fantasy where snowflake heroes are heavily discouraged, and non-humans are snowflakey by default.

>>sets a hard limit on AC instead of the infinitely scaling retardation of ascending AC
no because descending AC can just go to the negatives
>>in practice it's barely more complicated than ascending AC and BAB
not an argument. you're literally claiming it's "not that shitty, just a little bit"
>>it's the standard used in almost all TSR D&D and OSR materials, making conversions to ascending AC pointless arithmetic
so basically
>MUH D&D DID IT
>>it was good enough for 25 years of the franchise and all of TSR D&D
again,
>MUH D&D DID IT

Swords & Wizardry

Not him, but in the context of the OSR keeping mechanics similar has an actual tangible benefit in ease of conversion from TSR materials. The sacred cow meme doesn't really apply if you're using stuff made for the systems where the "sacred cows" were introduced

I was gonna call you retarded, but I think the other user did it for me. There's also the problem with your story though. I have yet to see a single NPC in ANY adventure that has class levels and specifically ever says "has no dungeoneering history". I mean, seriously. List one. List an NPC from an official OSR adventure pre-3e that has class levels but specifically says they've never been inside a single dungeon. What adventure, what NPC and what page?

I not only remember, I've been in those arguments before. They basically surmount to nostalgia and stigma over the name "Class" as in "Class 8 Armor".

The only somewhat decent argument I've ever seen for descending AC is that because it relies on a chart, you just look at the chart and you quickly know what number on the d20 to roll above whereas ascending tends to encourage you to add it up every roll, but I find that to be a bit of a player problem as opposed to system.

Guys...

>descending AC
>not a full-square attack grid w sub-modifier table

>I know! I'll just call it bait so I don't have to come up with an argument! Sheesh, that was close!

>>more fantastic feeling
I am genuinely confused by what you mean by this. Do you mean fantastic as in high fantasy like Final Fantasy or as in reinforcing a sense of wonderment that is other worldly? If it's the first case then I see nothing wrong with random races instead of humans.
>>humans are somehow inherently superior to use in a setting then nonhumans
I 100% do. The more encounters you have with the weird, the less weird the next thing is. In my experience as a Referee memorability is all about contrast. If there is a dragon on every mountain then it doesn't matter that it has 12 Hit Dice and breathes flame, it becomes a generic beast and loses it's "magic". Encountering magical creatures exists outside of ecology and logic. They are rare, and seeing one itself is a significant thing. The majority of encounters should then have a sense of normalcy and involve figures that wouldn't shatter one's world view (Humans and Animals). I think that "final fantasy" high fantasy settings cannot be fantastic because they are so polluted by weird stuff that it dilutes the weird. But that's just my opinion and I'm not gonna tell you that you're having bad wrong fun at your table.

Okay, Tork from HHQ1 Fighter's Challenge (what I had under my nightstand at hand) is a level 2 Fighter that is explicitly described as just the local village bully that sells fish for a living and just gets in a lot of bar brawls. Page 3 in my Spanish-translated copy, if you need it.

>2E isn't true OSR
Let me preempt your goalpost moving by saying that no official D&D edition is OSR in the first place. They weren't trying to retroclone anything. they just were.

>no because descending AC can just go to the negatives
-10 is a hard limit.

>you're literally claiming it's "not that shitty, just a little bit"
Ascending AC: Roll 1d20, add or subtract fiddly stuff, check if exceed a number.
Descending AC: Roll 1d20, add or subtract fiddly stuff, check if exceed a number.

>MUH D&D DID IT
Yes, and? You're playing rip-offs of D&D and using material designed for use with D&D. Are you also going to complain if the next Terminator has time travel and robots?

>Ascending AC: Roll 1d20, add or subtract fiddly stuff, check if exceed a number.
>Descending AC: Roll 1d20, add or subtract fiddly stuff, check if exceed a number.
You're leaving out a step or two, don't you think?
>Yes, and? You're playing rip-offs of D&D and using material designed for use with D&D. Are you also going to complain if the next Terminator has time travel and robots?
Why not improve something instead of sticking with outdated mechanics?

I already did.

Anyway, since this is bait I won't be responding any more. I have enough of these pictures to get us into autosage, and I'd really rather this thread have something productive in it before that happens.

Go ahead and bump then. I'm the OP.

>What's wrong with having nonhumans,
As someone who has grown a distaste for non-human characters, or at the very least non core-4 races, I'll field this question relative specifically to why I don't like players playing as non-humans.

They just don't emote very well as that race. Ultimately, it just becomes a stat they picked up at char-gen for the perks of it. This was especially bad in 5e when I was doing Adventuer's League for them before hoping onto the OSR train. But even in my private 5e games, I found that there was a very toxic mental condition that races were only played specifically for their bonuses, even though they denied this up and down.

Point: I was trying to start up a home 5e campaign with some people in my FLGS way back, and I was slowly growing irritable with the power builds I was seeing. People kept telling me "feats are great for character customization", but every single time, people would pick the same exact 5 feats that basically put them 4 or 5 levels ahead in terms of power development and leave the rest to the wayside.

Having this experience, I told the group "Make what you want, but NO feats. Chapter 6 is going to remain optional and off the table" to which a sperg who was on board with me every step of the way suddenly and violently turned on me and INSISTED that no feats make the humans "Unviable" and there was now no reason, despite gaining a +6 total stat growth normally, to not just play another race entirely, and would eventually wind up dropping out despite any questioning of "why not just play a human and not worry about power gaming"? Which would just send him into a tizzy.

Gary Gygax was way ahead of his time when he wrote that people just want to be monster races for the power, not because they see compelling stories in them.

But what line states that he's never stepped foot into a dungeon? You missed that part.

>-10 is a hard limit.
30 is a hard limit.

Wow. You sure are retarded.

>Why not improve something instead of sticking with outdated mechanics?
Not him, again, but why fix something that isn't broken? Why should we immediately accept your subjective opinions as fact as to what is "outdated" and how you can "improve" it? Even more so since you go back and forth between pointing out that they're almost the same, except for when you pointlessly talk around about how descending AC is supposed to be so glaringly inferior and mystifying

>Why should we immediately accept your subjective opinions
It's not subjective. Descending AC is needlessly more complicated

This is just rehashed ROLLPLAYERS arguments from the '90s. For all that the "serious roleplayers" of the decade decried D&D, they took on similar attitudes to the old fogeys, including the passive aggressive ways to limit character choices. Rather than just setting hard nos on what PCs can be, they give out gimped choices and then go
>Gary Gygax was way ahead of his time when he wrote that people just want to be monster races for the power, not because they see compelling stories in them.
like it's any excuse. (Plus, it's weird to see people quoting Gygax in defense of 'compelling stories' given the hate in OSR circles for anything resembling story making.)
I've never had any trouble either playing humans or finding people willing to play as them, even without restrictions on what non-humans can be or do. If your players don't want to play humans without mechanical bonuses, consider that maybe you made them boring as shit.