/osrg/ OSR General

The Yellow City seems like the natural hub.

>Are you still the user that got butthurt that not everyone adhered to their way of abstracting attack rolls?
No. I'm actually the guy he was reacting against.

Speaking of AD&D 2e, what optional rules (weapon proficiencies, non weapon proficiencies, level limits for demi-humans, Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers...) do you use in your games?

WPs
NWPs
Psionics and wild talents
Kits are case-by-case

BtW used to be my main retroclone, then I switched to DCC. The latter has a lot of drawbacks - weird dice, takes a lot of time to add new spells - but my god if it's not the most brilliant reimagining of DnD I've ever seen.

Ever since, if I'm playing a DnD derivative that's not DCC, I am likely to still hack it to use DCC stats. Three mental stats was always one too many for DnD - one is always a dump stat - and the luck stat is surprisingly useful.

This includes BtW.

>and the luck stat is surprisingly useful
What does it do?

Metastat for preventing fumbles, stopping gaining corruption if your a wizard, thief and halfling stuff, et cetera

>"Three mental stats was always one too many for DnD - one is always a dump stat"

>using point-buy

>allowing players to assign rolled scores

>this kills the WTC

>tfw you know enough Chinese to know those characters individually but then you look it up and it means something completely different

Okay - three mental ability scores in DnD derivatives means that one is always near-useless, and all of them usually suffer. Better?

There's a reason why OSR maintains stat rolling but rolling down the line is literally a meme that only persists because it's an "old school rule" with no mind towards the effect it has on the system.

You gain literally nothing from not letting a players build towards the character they want to play. "Sorry you didn't roll the right stats for a good fighting man, you're a thief now" is not intuitive design.

>he says this while playing a system that dumped the most useful OSR mental stat (Charisma) and kept the most useless OSR mental stat (Intelligence)

I don't play it any more (OD&D is my game for deadly dungeon crawling & fief managing, DCC for higher-powered anything else resembling D&D) but I used to use a short list of NWPs from core and skills & powers, the most basic kind of weapon mastery, demihuman level limits and kits.
In retrospect i'd probably drop:
kits or at least only allow custom kits that follow some semblance of fluff coherence and power balancing. (some were utter shit with heavy rp demerits, others munchkin garbage at no loss, others just boring af)
multiclassing rules (they can use the dual-classing system if they want to munchkin) and if so demihuman level limits since there's no point to them after that point.

>Implying PC is not going to die and the player will have to roll again 5 minutes later

>OSR
>"""""""build""""""
>>>/5e/
>>>/pfg/
>>>/gitp/

It also functions as a sort of hero-point system, where you can spend luck to improve your rolls with the side-effect of becoming less lucky in general (and only thieves/halflings regenerate luck).

It's also a good stat for situations where your characters rolls about something that is more the result of external circumstances that their own mental and physical traits - like is the house we're breaking into empty or full of angry mercenaries armed to the teeth, do I find the thing I'm looking for in the market or do I have to keep looking, did I win the lottery...

No. Charisma is arguably the most powerful stat, since it can potentially allow you to avoid combat entirely AND gain an ally with one roll.

You fucking idiot, reading comprehension
not "build" as in "character build", "build" as in the actual act of constructing a character

stop letting words trigger your autism

I agree. One thing I've done before is to just reduce them to a single mental stat, which is more or less intelligence and wisdom combined.

DCC did not remove Charisma. If anything it removed Wisdom. Personality is more Charisma than it is Wisdom. If anything, the one thing wisdom actually did for non-clerics (senses) is more of an intelligence thing there.

I far prefer (semi-) random allocation of stats than random generation of stats. Randomness in allocation means that you get more interesting arrangements. Randomness in generation just means that some people end up with shittier characters than others.

>arranging scores to minimize downsides while maximizing downsides (or "min-max" as role-playing game aficionados call it) isn't part-and-parcel of WOTC-style character builds

>he doesn't know that in TSR D&D Wisdom added a bonus on saving throws vs spells
>his only frame of reference for what ability scores do is 3e

>minimize downsides while maximizing downsides
wat

If you're playing a mega-dungeon type campaign, you can see how it works in conjunction with race and class stat requirements.

No one gets to choose if they can be an elf or an assassin. You have to get lucky.
That one in a million chance to roll up a paladin is a nice consolation prize if your pc just got gibbed by a random fire beetle.

>Things are bad because they exist in WOTC game
You sound like the kind of person who still thinks "race as class" was an intuitive idea

Is it kosher to do "roll down the line," but allow players to swap a single roll with another?

Fun fact, a "mega-dungeon" is really what they meant when they said "Dungeon" back in the day.
Anything else was just a "tomb" or a "ruin" or similar stuff.
This is out of the mouth of Mike Mornard who played in most of the old campaigns.

I approve of this. It's one of the ways I've allowed limited choice in stat allocation.

I know people do this, but I'm not a huge fan of it in OSR.

It's more of a "compromise" between no arrangement and full arrangement.

It just works.

>intuitive
You keep using this buzzword. OSR isn't about being intuitive, if it were then it wouldn't be centered around systems with dozens of clunky subsystems that only makes sense when evaluated from a mechanical perspective with the aid of retrospective analysis of the creators' home games.

Anybody got an issue of Wormskin lying around? I really want to see what it's about without shelling out my shekels.

You sound like the kind of person who still thinks "race as class" was a good idea

>good idea
You keep using this buzzword...

Why do you keep trying to bait with race-as-class and race-and class arguments?

There's a copy of the first issue floating around, but I don't really want to post it because it still has someone's name watermarked on there.

Can I post a throwaway email and have you send it there?

[email protected] I'll just drop it and let you what you will.

Race-as-class was a rather obvious way to streamline the game. Originally, race and class were technically divided, but each demi-human only had access to a single class. Also, in B/X there are 7 classes, 3 of which are demihuman, which is about the right number for a human-centric campaign world. For a game with substantially more classes (like AD&D), I'd probably want more demihuman class options as well, if I were to do race-as-class.

Scarlet Heroes. I run games for only one person. Plus it has a kick-ass bestiary.

anyone play pic related?

as others have noted ACKS would be my top choice

I see no problem with it if you're not doing a DCC Funnel style game

Race As Class isn't a bad idea in and of itself, but how it was implemented was admittedly kinda half-baked in the TSR era, how ACKS does it is great though

>drivethrurpg.com/product/223013/RPGPundit-Presents-1-DungeonChef
>Skerp, had you heard about this?

Nope. Haven't had a look at it either. Is it any good?
I tried posting in the thread about it
But that thread went to hell in a handbasket.

It's not like it's the most original idea in the world. Nethack is 30 years old.

Last thread I was wondering if there was a way to waylay or speed up stats in character creation, as having a bunch of 10s and 11s seemed kind of boring. Better to just focus on what makes the character special.

The talent idea; characters just roll a d6 and get bonuses to the rolls relevant to that stat, then roll again and get negatives to the second roll, meaning that they just have a positive and a minus. Easy and fast. But then the question is, if every character just has that and a class, could or should there be any other method to make them feel different?

I like the idea of making players roll for a race in race and class games.

I haven't actually run it, but I made the observation that it wasn't so much a complete system (alghough it could be used as one), but rather a base from which to build your own game.

>I like the idea of making players roll for a race in race and class games.
I'd at least let folks roll twice and take the result they prefer. It would suck to end up with a halfling if you hate halflings.

>speed up stats
...Is it actually a long and difficult process for you to roll a few dice and add them up?

I don't know about speeding them up, but having separate scores and modifiers does seem a bit superfluous.

Just one positive and one negative roll? I'd probably go with 3 and 2, or at least 2 and 1 if I were trying to keep things simple.

I was gonna just boil it down to the character's most important traits, but a little granularity like that is good. I'll make it 3 and 2, makes sense to me.

Which of the old DMGs and equivalents are the best?

I'm talking mostly about teaching you how to run the game, interesting insights into adventure creation, world building etc.

Why is it the best?

I mostly play the newer retro-clones but I want to hear advice from the sages. I also recently purchased the newest version of How to Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck for some more modern takes on adventure construction.

The problem with the old books is they just sort of assume that you're playing the "normal" way. There's lots of hints as to what that means if you take the time for a careful reading, but very little of it is overt. As such, while you can learn how to run a good OSR game through there, it's going to take a lot of work and you're often better off just finding some good blogs that have already done the detective work for you.

Most of the classic "how to run a game" books or chapters came from non-D&D game lines (Aaron Allston, the same guy who edited the Rules Cyclopedia, wrote one of the seminal examples for Champions called Strike Force, for example). At the same time, a lot of good advice is pretty universal, even if some of it focuses on story more than most OSRites are comfortable with.

Do you prefer linear, well-developed, descriptive adventure modules, or do you think adventure modules where most of the content is randomly generated or drawn from player additions are better?

I'm mostly looking at pdf related for the latter. Do you have any better examples of the concept?

Irrespective of the quality you perceive of the adventure itself, do you think one makes a better product than the other?

AD&D 1e DMG

I wrote up my ultralight. It's pretty rough, but I think I got everything important down.

Shilling a small writeup on illithids / mindflayers and some weird items.

occultesque.com/2017/10/the-garden-of-mirrors-illithids-and.html

This.

>You gain literally nothing from not letting a players build towards the character they want to play. "Sorry you didn't roll the right stats for a good fighting man, you're a thief now" is not intuitive design.
You obviously come with a 3.PF/5e bias and try to shoehorn that philosophy in to old school D&D without considering how things could be played differently. You have a fetish for bonuses and mechanical power. That design is also very intuitive -- you are what you roll and that's it.

This video talks about people like you: youtube.com/watch?v=pBmEFgd_4ho

>Citing Noah Antwiler as an authority

Counter Monkey is a lot of fun to listen to, user, but your assumptions are nonsense. "You are what you roll" would be a totally viable basis for a game that didn't have classes with prerequisites, but when you're making the way the player interacts mechanically with the system be tied to a random generator, without any room for intervention (lest you inspire the wrath of Veeky Forums anons and other purists) you're not making a reliably good game.

>you're not making a reliably good game.
So how exactly having randomly allocated attributes prevents the game from being good? You say things but you provide no arguments.

That video of Counter Monkey is pretty spot on when it comes to character building babbies moaning about 3d6 in order. 3d6 in order is very fast, easy and simple. It's not supposed to be balanced. 3rd edition tried to be balanced.

The game is not reliably good because if you roll in a way that forces you to play in a way that doesn't appeal to you, the game sucks for you specifically.

Meanwhile if you let people curate their options, you get a game that more reliably caters to their preferences. Is it a bad thing to appeal to the people actually playing? Don't you think your argument is leaning too hard on community cred, when that's not nearly as important now that play has moved away from FLGSs?

Not him, but third edition tried like a thousand things. Balance wasn't one of them, which was a fourth edition design goal in reaction to third's utter lack of balance.

In any case, "shit game did this thing" isn't by itself proof that a given thing is in fact shit, unless you're suggesting we also toss fighters, Vancian magic, and the Strength stat.

What is OSR and why should I care?

>If you had to pick a single published system, which would you choose?

Castles and Crusades and frankly I'm not even sure why.

It has a Knight class and that to me is badass enough to justify it's existence.

We play TSR era DnD and it's clones, read way too much into the implications of it's text and try to develop our games into different directions than Wizards developed DnD as it is now.

No one can agree on exact definitions but that's my experience.

Also we tend to have better modules than Wizards or Paizo.

I'm interested

Old School Renaissance. Old school (pre-WotC) editions of D&D and the various clones and derivations based on them. It's basically your dad's D&D. It's historically interesting because, well, essentially all role-playing games that exist can trace their lineage back to it. But mostly, it's just a different approach to D&D that was a bit more organic and improvisational.

Compared to most modern games it's more rules light (sort of: the rules it does have tend to be janky compared to modern games, but it has less of them as a whole). It's also more mechanically improvized, less heroic, and less about plot as the end-all, be-all of a RPG. Resource and time management and similar things that modern games tossed as being tedious often feature.

You should care if this sounds appealing to you.

To be fair, there's a lot of shared space with systems with narrative goals, like Beyond the Wall and its coming-of-age story agenda

to be completely honest, as much as I like Beyond the Wall as a system I have a lot of trouble actually considering anything with the equivalent of fate points you spend not to die a game that's really that dedicated to feeling "old school."

It's a good system, mind you, but it's on the very, very fringe of OSR design philosophy in effect. Nobody ever seems to mention the fate points you spend to not die when they're trying to sell BTW, which is surprising because it stood out as really egregious when I picked the book up.

anything new you have read/buy/play?

Just ordered The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia in hardcover. I grabbed the pdf as well and am looking forward to digging in. Haven't seen any major reviews yet.

While I agree that the fate/luck/fortune points (i don't remember the name) are there and are definitely not Old School, a lot of OSR works specifically by adding subsystems like it. I don't think it's weird that someone would add a survival mechanic like that to a game where your characters are not actually meant to die. It's OSR but focusing on different things.

Kind of like how you can have a roguelike that lets you respawn if you die but still has the rest of the roguelike structure to support being called roguelike (like randomly generated, deadly, cursed items, etc). BtW pushes it pretty far, but it wins my support via charm.

You shouldn't, now go away.

It's pretty much "what if we crossed over Barrowmaze and Caverns of Chaos, but had it set in some badlands."

Swords & Wizardry Complete. It's got all the relevant rules from OD&D and its supplements, but better organized.

The only thing I don't like is that is uses a single saving throw, but it also includes optional rules to fix that.

What's the best stat to modifier table and why is it
3-4 = -2
5-8 = -1
9-12 = 0
13-16 = +1
17-18 = +2
???

Labyrinth Lord, if I can include the AEC along with it.

It's basically a modded lighter version of the current D&D 5e rules set.

I fucking love randomly generated/player inspired/procedurally generated adventures. My GMing tends to be very improv-heavy anyway, so a module that's a series of prompts and tables rather than rigidly defined is going to work better for me; I remember a detail I rolled up and contextualized better than one that's written in the book.

Basically, rolling it makes you *think* as you run.

Scenic Dunnesmouth does this rather well. Also look up the Corpathium stuff from Last Gasp Grimoire.

it's nice.
I'd make it a two-page thingy and go into a bit more detail with how you expect magic to work.
also you mention saves and don't define what they are.
I'd be interested to see an updated version, though, I really like how attributes are handled.

But that's wrong, though. The best table is
3-8 (25.93%) = -1
9-12 (48.14%) = 0
13-18 (25.93%) = +1

...I just really like OD&D, alright?

"Approx." below means "really really close to, like, REALLY close."

16-18 (+ approx. 2 standard deviations) = +2
13-15 (+ approx. 1 SD) = +1
9-12 (approx. 50% of distribution) = 0
6-8 (- approx. 1 SD) = -1
3-5 (- approx. 2 SD) = -2

Lifted from Delta's blog, which see for actual numbers and knowledgeable discussion.

>15. Grimtongue's Tongue
>13. Gloves of Simple Tasks
Good stuff, thanks for posting.

Anyone here run DnD from the LBBs?

I've considered starting a campaign using Greyharp.

I'm thinking on replacing the thief (mostly a sack of skills that others can do too) straight for a ninja (blend in shadows, climbing walls, reading scrolls, etc; but on a more exagerated level). While I like it, Is hard for me to imagine it working inside a dungeon. IDK, what do you think?

Seems fine. The scrolls and such gives it a more academic bent so it's a bit more useful outside of 'Physical traps here' dungeons.