/osrg/ – Old School Renaissance General: Philotomy Tribute Edition

ASE is the next thing I'm going to run. The more gonzo, the better.

maze rats is clunky shit, In the Into the Odd folder at the trove you can also find Sellswords that is similar but less diluted, also maze rats magic looks tedious

Looks like a D20 game.

>What's your favorite thing about LBB OD&D?
All d6 hit dice, which means that the hit point boost from a high constitution is proportional across the classes (at 29%), rather than increasing hit points by 40% if you're a magic-user and only 22%* if you're a fighter in later editions

*Assuming d8 hit dice like in Basic. For d10 like in AD&D, the increase is a mere 18%.

Why is thief so shit? It should have the same hit dice as the cleric imo

Yeah, that's definitely a good point. A slight note, though:

>For d10 like in AD&D, the increase is a mere 18%.
AD&D also tried to "fix" this to some extent by having Constitution scale better for the Fighter classes - while 15 CON is +1 to everyone and thus +40% to M-Us and +18% to Fighters, 18 CON is +2 to non-fighters (so +80%) and +4 to fighters (+72%).

It still falls behind, though, and only applies to CON 17-18 - which, given AD&D's Method I, might be a bit lower priority than going for the sharp scaling in 17-18 Charisma or Dexterity or, well, trying your luck at Exceptional Strength.

So yeah, OD&D's method definitely has its advantages.

Thieves being hard-hitting glass cannons has been a thing forever, user. It's why they wear leather while the Cleric is going around in full plate acting like a crusader.

It's a weird variant magic-user.

>Thieves being hard-hitting glass cannons has been a thing forever
They don't hit hard tho

If they flank and you're using Chainmail rules they hold their own.

>Sell Sword

Looks nice, thanks for posting!

Aren't fighters OP? You can disarm with every attack(?). Meanwhile, thieves get two extra skills (i.e. +1 on climb and command rolls...) I would just make combat maneuvers available to everyone and give fighters +1 to hit or something. Or steal the fighter class from GLOG (mm, notches...).

Add a simple Death&Dismemberment table (I'm working on a d6 one) and more detailed price list (i like LotFP) and this should be gold. It's a little awkward to play without saves, but I guess I could make the main mechanic work for that as well.

Will try!

OD&D Thieves get 4x damage at name level (+1x per four levels), and can wield magic swords. Also, backstabs get +4 to hit.
(This all got into AD&D, by the way - "The damage done per hit is twice normal for the weapon used per four experience levels of the thief...". B/X really fucked Thieves over.)

Compare and contrast with the Fighter, who doesn't get multiple attacks and is doing just the base damage of his weapon plus an exclusive strength bonus - which is, at most, +4 to hit and +6 damage. Give each one a magic sword, and they're hitting for 4d8 (22) vs. 1d8+6 (10.5).

However, the Thief has a lot less hit points and a lot less armor. That's the trade-off.

How does backstab works in OD&D? It seems very hard to get it, and it will only work once a fight

Why all the hate for the Rules Cyclopedia?

The main issue with thieves is thief skills being dick. But in B/X, thieves can use any weapon, and while they don't have the same attack progression as fighters, they have low XP requirements, and so have good offensive power. Given their shitty armor, I still think you could afford to bump them up to cleric hit points, but those tables there are a direct conversion, and thieves in B/X share d4 hit dice with magic-users.

What hate for RC? I personally think it moves too far in the direction of AD&D and so would rather stick with B/X, but I don't actively dislike it.

PCs should stop leveling after name level

...

>By striking silently from behind the thief gains two advantages...

How exactly this triggers is a bit ambigious, to say the least - is it enough to strike from behind using the standard flanking rules, or do you also need to roll to Move Silently?

Either way, though, 4d8 damage is one hell of a starter and probably doesn't need to work much more than once per fight. Even just the double damage of the 1st-4th-level Thief is easily killing low-HD enemies and probably forcing the higher-HD ones to roll for morale.

Because Allston fucked up BECMI in various subtle and infuriating ways when compiling it, and while it works decently as a reference document it's pretty lousy to actually learn the game from - BECMI is much superior in that aspect.

Also, the way it just throws everything together doesn't work. The very first monster is the Actaeon, who you might remember from the level 25+ Master Rules.
It's presented in a way that makes you think that "hey, maybe this thing is perfect for my Expert-level party to face", when that's not really the case.
Seriously, it has a 9.5/9.5/9 attack routine, 5-in-6 surprise rate, is invisible, has a 10' polymorphing cube THAT STILL POLYMORPHS ON A SUCCESSFUL SAVE, can summon 1d6 treants... yeah, it's meant to be challenging to higher-level parties.

Not to mention the way it just removes the Immortal rules entirely (including artifacts from the Master set!), and when they were reintroduced in Wrath of the Immortals they were... bad.

It's also straight-up missing some of the rules for tournaments.

>minmaxing
>OSR
What did he mean by this? Even 2e is very hard to minmax.

>What's your favorite thing about LBB OD&D?
3-point alignment.
I also like how gold dragons are the only good dragons.

What are some good creatures to encounter at the base/foothills of a volcano?

"Similar but less diluted" it reads nearly identical lol

Volcano cultists.
Some sort of furnace-golem powered by a fragment of stolen magma.
Nesting phoenix.
Crazy wizard obsessed with furnace-golems; either he's the creator or he's trying to capture and dissect one.
Fire elementals trying to retrieve stolen magma fragments.

It's not hated. Despite its issues, the reason it goes for such a high price nowadays is because a lot of people want one.

>Even 2e is very hard to minmax.
Lol, 2e is full of broken shit, it's just there was no internet back in the day

It's a surprise attack for someone taken completely unaware.

>What did he mean by this? Even 2e is very hard to minmax.

What are dart fighters for $200?

>What did he mean by this? Even 2e is very hard to minmax.
D A R T S P E C I A L I Z A T I O N

Also, of course, Skills & Powers. Used by Clerics, obviously.

And probably something from The Complete Book of Elves. Or maybe someone goes and grabs half-dragons from Council of Wyrms - I think I remember hearing that they were pretty good on account of being balanced against other PCs being literal dragons?

Darts aren't that good, you can't carry a lot of them

Yeah, I mean I guess the core isn't that bad beyond standard multiclassing but the splats and setting books have a ton of stuff.
There's the Kits that give you free magic items or allows your elven magic user to use swords/armour or gives free weapon mastery and extra attacks, the races that get free table-rolled powers, the monster classes with free high-tier magic, the point buy systems for building character classes without flaws that can be broken in three choices, the FR spells that are simply much stronger variants of real ones, all of the weapon mastery specializations that stack damage bonuses upon damage bonuses for the fighter classes.
All off the top of my head and haven't cracked open a core 2E book in a couple of years now.

Salamanders. Efreeti. Dwarves and/or Duergar. Those weird lava-raptors from the Fiend Folio and whatever they were ridden by.

Oh, and Lava Children of course. They'll make your players go MAD.

>le dart meme
As somebody pointed out awhile back, it's not really that effective in practice due to how initiative works (as well as firing into melee). It's mostly an armchair construction, as soon as a polearm specialist advances into melee you'll regret sinking all those points into dart.

Darts aren't a big deal. Fighters with high strength & dex with dual weapon specializations and grand mastery shit is more broken.
Complete Book of Elves is just garbage, the kits in it are broken the Mage and Archer ones but almost all demihuman kits fall under that.
But Skills & Powers, Combat & Tactics, Demihuman kits (looking at you Dwarf Priest/Fighters) and The Complete Book of Humanoids (worst one by far) are all guilty.

...

>effective in practice due to how initiative works
How does initiative affects darts?

I emphasize that optimization is something that they do during play, not during character creation.

Real talk: what are actually good weapons to specialize in 2e? It seems nothing can beat the good old longsword, specially if weapon style specialization is allowed

Who cares. CharOp shit belongs to 3E and later.

Pretty sure practically everyone does initiative differently?

Discussing which weapons are worth using and which aren't is something that's applicable to pretty much all of AD&D, though.

Especially 1E. Those Weapon vs. AC adjustments change a lot in what's good and what isn't.

In running games in an OSR style how do you stop pixel bitching as it were?

Players will literally just use a ten foot pole or whatever and prod every inch of the floor with sticks/ poles etc, wall, ceiling methodically , every door will have a battery of tests performed on it.

It's hard to tell them not to as well some of that shit is trapped but shit does it slow down walking down a cooridor. I could just say some areas are safe but then it would be really obvious when they're not.

>Those Weapon vs. AC adjustments
Does anyone use that?

Have the quest force them to keep up a quick pace. If they check every door, they'll all be killed when... the elder god is summoned, the dragon wakes up, the princess is sacrificed, the dungeon seals itself shut/explodes/fills with poisonous gas.

They change a lot and I generally prefer to use them.

They're easy enough to use if you do your work in advance and write down a small hit matrix for your specific weapons.

(Also, since they only apply to guys with armor they aren't nearly as big of a pain as you might think. No wondering what that AC-2 Dragon counts as, for instance.)

That's all well and good, but having a time limit for everything seems equally contrived

Players like customizable characters. Suck it up.

That's unironically what wandering monster checks are for.
The slower the more frequent wandering monster checks and make it clear to the player's that's what's happening.
Should light a fire under their ass assuming the xp for monsters are small time compared to the treasure.

I don't run anything more customizable than DCC for D&D stuff so I really don't have to.

Anyway if they're after customizationfaggotry we'll just roll with GURPS instead.

This is literally what wandering monsters, limited torchlight etc. exists for. Every turn you spend prodding a 10' square is a turn closer to you needing to light a new torch, a turn closer to a wandering monster showing up (and they're not worth fighting - they give a pittance of XP when compared to treasure!), and so on.

This doesn't apply to the Tomb of Horrors, obviously, but that place has another restriction: the tournament timer.

I guess i like that the spell list is reduced to just titles and that. I find them easy to use.

It wouldn't be hard time limit all the time. You just have to condition your players that if they go slowly they will die. Its not hard to imagine dungeon dwellers, given enough time by a dawdling group of adventurers, wouldn't rally together to organise an overwhelming attack on the party. Its not like the hobgoblins weren't aware that the party had spent 45 minutes in a single corridor.

I don't use those charts (far too much to pay attention to) but I do use something like pic related.

Time limits help, but the fundamental problem here is that players need information to make decisions. You can "decide" to go left or right at the non-descript T-junction, but this isn't a real decision because the player has no idea what might result from going left versus going right. To engage in actual play the players need information to let them make educated guesses about the results of their actions.

Coincidentally, the players get no information about the game world AT ALL except what the GM tells them. Therefore, the solution is to give the players information without forcing them to pixel bitch it from your cold, dead hands.

Here is an example. A non-descript hallway has a concealed pit trap in the middle of it. The players, believing this hallway given its description to be identical to every other hallway, proceed merrily down the hall and fall into the pit trap they could not have reasonably conjectured existed. They have just learned that you will not give them an indication a trap exists unless they take action forcing you to give that information up. So now they will spend half the session slapping every flagstone with a 10 foot pole to FORCE YOU to tell them about the traps.

However, using incomplete information to make educated guesses is a fun part of the game, so you do not want to simply give the information away. The middle road between pixel bitching and giving it away is to code the information: "You see a skeleton riddled in darts curled up in the corner next to some thumb-sized holes in the wall." This is plenty of information to succeed in deducing there is a dart trap, but success is not guaranteed - it does still need a small leap of conjecture.

Therefore, the solution to pixel bitching is to stop forcing players to pixel bitch so much. Give them more information - coded as a puzzle if you absolutely cannot stand the thought of giving it away for free.

Those numbers...don't seem right. Sure, maces are better at hitting people in armor, but making them have a better than normal chance...you lost me there.

"Better than normal" when it comes to those systems basically just means that they negate some of the armor. That +1, for instance, means that rather than plate it's more like they're wearing chain+shield.

The best example of this is in the OD&D/AD&D one, where some weapons give +1 vs. the even "shield" ACs - basically, it means that a flail completely ignores a shield.

Although I'm not to fond of the numbers in . They're kind of tiny and inconsequential.

First, Can't really do that in an OSR game. Second, I only ever play with one player so that's never balancing and niche protection are not that important in a normal game. Third, the player doesn't minmax anyway.

>They're kind of tiny and inconsequential.
You make them bigger and you start getting inversions in what armors are better. If you get -1 vs. chain mail and +1 vs. plate mail and that makes them equivalent. Make that -2 and +2 and plate mail and chain mail have completely swapped places. That's screwy enough, but now make that unarmored and leather...

Let's look at maces:
Unarmored AC 9 at -1 penalty to hit = AC 8
Leather AC 7 at -1 penalty to hit = AC 6
Chain mail AC 5 at +1 bonus to hit = AC 6
Plate mail AC 3 at +1 bonus to hit = AC 4

I'm trying to wrap my head around totally descriptive combat. You don't roll attack and deal damage, you just declare how your swiping your sword, at what body part, and roll attack. How can we gamify this so it doesn't just develop into instant kills and pointlessly long boss battles?

>tfw some guy posted new reprints of the original LBBS
>want them badly
>can't find out how to have them made

It's making me sad. I almost bought that deluxe white box shit from WotC but I'm glad I didn't, but I really want the LBBs in a new version of their original form.

Is there a version of ADnD1e that isn't written in tiny fucking text and formatted like complete shit?

I feel like writing something. Someone ask for random tables.

Just use the 2e books user

Why is this ghost hanging around?

Rumours from Foreign Parts

Secret weapons of the Underground Lunatic Races

Layout is pretty much the big issue of the original TSR products.
OSRIC is basically meant to be 1E OGL-ed and has a much better layout, but there are minor differences to be found so YMMV.

Unusual methods dungeon dwellers use to dispose of their garbage

1d8 Weapons for Underground Lunatics

1. Buzzsaw Launcher. Something like an oversized crossbow crossbred with a miniaturized sideways trebuchet. Saw is made out of something absurdly springy so it keeps bounding around in an enclosed space like a dismemberment-happy pinball. The blade is usually rendered unusable, sadly.

2. Gas Mask. Heavy, face-enclosing helmet with a secret reserve of poisonous dust. Grip the tube with your teeth, twist to unseal the reserve, and blow into the enemy's face. Potentially useful in a close grapple. IMPORTANT: DO NOT INHALE.

3. Absurdly Spiky Armor. Just charge directly at the enemy flailing wildly and screaming.

4. Drill Hammer. Magic mechanism in head powers a trio of chewing drill-bits. Nominally doubles as a digging tool but the geometry of the handle is really useless as anything other than a weapon.

5. Flame-bellow. A primitive wheelbarrow-mounted flamethrower, powered by a manual pump. Actually kind of mediocre as a direct damage-dealer, but great for replacing all the air in a cave with unbreathable smoke quickly, killing everyone inside. A favored weapon of suicide cultists.

6. Spring-pike. Long polearm with a telescoping metal pole with a spring inside. Fold it up for transport through tight caves, then surprise the first enemy you see with a long-range, spring-powered stab. Distance it springs out to can be set by a dial on the butt, maximum 16' and folds down to 4'.

7. Hideous noisemaker. Like nails on a chalkboard at 150 db. Save to do anything other than stagger around with your hands clamped over your ears. Races with echolocation don't get a save and also take 1 damage. Lasts one minute before the spring winds down.

8. Rust Monster onna stick. Self-explanatory.

>tiny fucking text
Just get some glasses nerd

Are you saying that you make an attack roll but not a damage roll? Or would you still make a damage roll? Because if it's the latter, that's the normal way of doing combat, as far as I'm concerned. They player describes how he's attacking and the GM may throw in some modifiers or something, and then the dice do their business. If there's a disarm attempt or something, that might necessitate an additional check or something to see if it goes off, but otherwise, you're going by the normal (situation-modified) dice rolls. Just because you say you're trying to cut somebody's head off doesn't mean you succeed. You only succeed if you roll enough damage. Otherwise, you gash their neck, or cut more deeply into their shoulder, or whatever. A decapitation is going to be tricky, and that's a vital area that your opponent is going to protect well, so for something like that, I might give a -4 penalty to hit, but +2 damage.

1d8 Dungeon Detritus Disposals

1. Bottomless Pit.

2. Giant, all-consuming blob at bottom of dungeon. Thankfully lazy and satisfied with the steady flow of random garbage it receives, but if this keeps up it'll eventually fill up the entire dungeon. Then it'll go hunting.

3. Double-magic Bag of Holding and Portable Hole. Sticking them into each other causes giant implosion as normal, but after 1d4 hours both of the objects reappear.

4. Nothing. Certain corridors are starting to become almost impassible due to accumulated filth. Spontaneous spawnings of Filth Goblins are becoming an increasing problem. Everyone knows this can't go on, but nobody wants to be the one to actually fix it because that's a lot of work.

5. Laser Room. Immense mirror-lined tower concentrates sunlight into single room, used to vaporize trash. Trickier inhabitants will try to convince adventurers of vast wealth hidden in the Laser Room.

6. Traded away to tiny fey who place value on ridiculous things. Receive steady supply of tiny magical items in return.

7. Magic portal to middle of magical forest. Just dump it right in there. Moronic monsters have no idea that the constant druid attacks and their dumping trash in a magic forest are connected.

8. It just vanishes. Nobody is quite sure how. Hobgoblins are going to increasingly absurd and paranoid lengths to catch the perpetrators in the act.

im too lazy to go through the links to check the formatting
rpg.rem.uz/
but check this site

Has anyone actually compiled GLOG into a PDF without tossing their own houserules into the mix?

How feasible is reconstruction of ruined stonework like pic related? I think the PCs would be interested in renovating something with a lot of time and money but I don't know if it would even be possible without tearing down everything short of the foundation

But user, that's the whole point of the GLOG. The only things that are "official" are the core rules and Guts, everything else, you have to house rule to make it compatible with the official stuff.

1d8 God Dammit Why is This Ghost Here

1. A villager owes him money, and he won't pass over until the debt is repaid. To him, directly. The impossibility of sending physical goods to the afterlife is apparently lost on him.

2. Perving on women. Apparently a hideous creep when he was alive, too. Won't pass over until he contrives a way to lose his virginity (lol no) or someone just takes a magic dagger to his face.

3. Died in major disaster that led to his village being abandoned. Wants to know if his family made it out alive, but incapable of moving beyond the bounds of the former walls of his ruined house. Will not leave until someone goes out, finds out his family's fate, and brings word back. No supernatural ability to detect lies, but cunning and suspicious.

4. Top half of dead soldier, cut clean in half in old battle. Looking for the ghost of his legs so he can be whole.

5. Ghost of murderer attempting to find ghost of victim so he can kill him twice. The victim did not leave a ghost.

6. Staggering idiot completely fails to understand fact of own death, continues to try to perform everyday tasks while failing miserably. Completely impervious to all attempts to convince him of the fact of his demise.

7. Ghost of necromancer. Completely intended for this to happen, he insists. Just a part of his grand master plan. His lies are totally unconvincing.

8. Ghost of loyal dog, haunting former owner. Owner is perfectly fine with this state of affairs.

No damage rolls, or as few as possible. Purely descriptive. You kill the monster when you attack its neck/heart/head and actually succeed your attack. Preferably, this would be hard to actually pull off unless if you had a very high Fighter level compared to the monster or powerful weapon without a few blows to weaken it first.

WANNA GO UNDERWATER AND SEE THE HORRORS OF THE UNDERWATER VORE HELL THAT IS THE ABYSSAL PLAIN!

melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/10/watery-depths-and-watery-deaths-coastal.html

Share some good fuckin art.

...no?

...

That guy probably printed them off Lulu but won't share his buying links. I'm mad too.

I mean, obviously no.

But I'd like to read about it.

Not canon unless they contain rules for the pyromancer class and its unique spells (canon, part of OD&D)

Best OSR to reference to insert a Mutant class into my BFRPG game?

Not bad, but seems a bit too easy. I was researching this exact topic myself a while back and managed to make myself so scared of deep underwater that I may never touch diving gear if I don't have to. This is borderline encouraging of underwater exploration.

One day. When real life calms down.

Fairly feasible. Getting dressed stone is always the major expense. I made rules for turning dungeons into castles: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/09/osr-building-castles.html
And I tested it on the ruins of the Moathouse from the Temple of Elemental evil, which is pretty much exactly the scenario you're describing: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/09/osr-castle-of-elemental-evil.html

>1d8 God Dammit Why is This Ghost Here
Hehehe.

Personally it's my tome of choice when DMing B/X. But maybe I' not well initiated enough to see what flaws it has. Could someone explain why it's bad, or at the very least why they don't like it?

Hmm. Sounds interesting. Consider studying diceless systems for inspiration. Those tend to focus on resource management instead of dice, so everything is always under player control.

anyone here play stars without number?, how well does it run for an OSR scifi game?

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