/osrg/ – Old School Renaissance General

On my opinion: repairs, building, healing, specialized tracking, etc are things that can be solved by finding NPCs to do it. They're also a source of good plot hooks.

Adding a background to each PC in addition to their class can work, yeah, but in practice there are only so few backgrounds that can actually help on an adventure (tinker, doctor, hunter, arguably noble and school teacher) while most others can only give sparce flavor (merchant, mercenary, beggar, slave, labourer, glassmaker, etc)

AD&D then detaches these bits from each other completely - weapons have separate stats for Length, Space Required, and Speed Factor.

Length mostly matters for charges: in a charge, the longer weapon strikes first. Don't charge a set spear, the system has built-in counter mechanics. This is a special exception for initiative rules.

Space Required is, well, how much space you need on either side. If your front line has spears, you can fit five dudes in a 10ft corridor - if your front line has bill-guisarmes, only two. Halberds are lonely in the front and take up the entire corridor with their swings, while the zweihander needs to be kept in its sheath until you reach a more open space.

Speed Factor is how fast your weapon is - the lower the better, generally. If you tie on initiative, the faster weapon strikes first - if you tie and one weapon is twice as fast, they get an extra attack. If they're faster by ten (very rare), they get two extra attacks on a tie. Speed Factor is only relevant after the first round of melee, though.

Speed Factor also decides whether or not you get to hit a caster before they cast their spell, which you do by comparing initiative plus Speed Factor/casting time. Faster weapons are better at this.

And that's all I remember that's relevant about that stuff.

Somebody post that purple robe cleric wizard guy from a couple months ago. He was the best character. Lots of development.

What are some good, short/medium length dungeons that are stand alone but not randomly generated that I could flesh out a Westmarches style campaign with?

politics

B2 Keep on the Borderlands and B4 The Lost City.

Although these might have a bit too much civilization (or ruined civilization) for a West Marches game.

Well almost any that aren't megadungeons should do the trick. (although Westmarches is basically megadungeon play more spread out between hexcrawling and lairs/ruins)
G1-G3 Giants series, Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, The Darkness Beneath from "Fight On!" magazine, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, Tegel Manor. Caverns of Thracia, Tower of the Stargazer, Tomb of the Iron God, Castle Amber, Ironwood Gorge,
The Spire of Iron & Crystal, When a Star Falls, B4 the Lost City, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, Keep on the Borderlands, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Expedition to Barrier Peaks, N3 Destiny of Kings etc etc.

Really the only advice I have is that when you see something that you think is stupid (often the climax of one of the above modules in my experience) amend it with how you think it should go instead.

>although Westmarches is basically megadungeon play more spread out between hexcrawling and lairs/ruins
I said this once and I recall being called a retard. Good to see I'm not crazy after all.

Yep, I found it. Awesome, thanks for the breakdown.

As I think a lot of people have properly pointed out here over the years, a lot of what makes skills bad is conceptual rather than mechanical. That is, it all looks fine on the surface and works for a given value of "works", but has knock-on effects which are often bad that the system doesn't talk about. So building a system that takes those effects in account mechanically and also specifically talks about how they're expected to work is best (if you're going to use them at all).

Basically, a lot of OSR stuff is about mindset even over and above the rules, and you need to not take that mindset for granted if you want it all to come together. If you're fighting against the prevailing rules/gameplay trends, you need to really come out and hit readers over the head with how you're trying to steer them differently. So in the write-up I use I talk about what everyone can do, how and why social skills are forbidden, and how there's no guarantee that any given skill will ever see play: it's fluff to round out your character that may help you out once in a while, but not the centrepoint of play. Players don't seem to mind once they know the score.

Sounds like you're doing something wrong.

G1 is probably the best of the best – it's effectively a hill giant's lair, so you can just put it on any suitable hill.

>I said this once and I recall being called a retard.
Did you say it on Veeky Forums? I wouldn't take that too much to heart. For instance, I'd be disappointed if nobody called me a retard for writing this post.

I let players state a previous occupation (that makes sense, no child blacksmiths, no declaring you're a sage as per the NPC sage rules) exactly once. They invariably do this the first time anything comes up and then kick themselves for it for the rest of that character's lifespan, which I enjoy.

For the rest they'll have to hire NPCs.

You're not a retard user.
You're a special person!

What is the most dangerous thing you or your players have survived?

Euphemisms, euphemisms!

Peter Purplestripe?

Greyhawk thieves are loosely based on Warlock thieves, which were MUs with a different spell list.

Yeah him. His powers were only matched by his constantly evolving wardrobe.

It's so each weapon and each armor total to +/-0
9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2013/08/rant-i-hate-game-balance.html

I've been out for a while. Did Laughterstinkeye ever get off his armchair and figure out how he wanted his MUs to work?

Can you say more about the "mindset" you're talking about? Sorry, I'm new to the OSR but curious about its advantages/differences to standard RPGs

These threads have so much talk about rules but so little about settings and adventures. An adventure module is more important than the minutiae of rules.

The central resolution mechanic is referee fiat.
The referee is neutral, he's not out to get you. You live and die by your own stupidity.
The rules cover running away. Sometimes enemies are much stronger or much weaker than you.
Player conflicts (spotlight sharing complaints, etc.) are dealt with by out of game discussion. You're adults, act like it.
The rules are tailored to handle dungeon delving, and only dungeon delving, extremely well.

No worries. Before you had skills, you'd a) have to describe what you were doing if you wanted to, well, do something; and b) tend to avoid things you figured were outside your grasp ("my guy has no idea about alchemy"). For the latter, that's why specialists existed in old games: they did the things players might be interested in, but that it didn't make sense for random fighter or cleric to know about.

Skills then come along, allowing players to tackle b) ("of course I know about alchemy: it says so right here on my sheet"). This gives more options, and moves things from NPCs to players, which is generally good.

However, people then grow the skill system to encompass everything that could conceivably be called a skill. It's a logical growth, and mechanically it seems fine. But this has two really bad follow-on effects.

1) Players no longer feel the need to describe what they're doing, because the skill allows a shortcut. So, instead of "I approach the guard with a friendly expression on my face. I sympathize with him about the cold and the job, and then slip him a few silver and ask if he'll let us pass", you get, "I roll my Bribery skill". This tendency is so powerful that even with skill systems often having a caveat of "this shouldn't take the place of roleplaying or logic", you still have people just shortcutting to rolls, because people are naturally lazy. Social skills (persuasion, diplomacy, etc) are the worst for this, because they gut roleplaying. Is he lying? I don't have to decide anymore: the roll tells me. Is it a good speech? The dice say yes.

2) All encompassing skill lists start removing options from players instead of granting them. In a skillless system, it can be safely assumed an adventurer can ride a horse or start a fire. With skills? If you didn't take the firestarting skill, now you can't do a basic thing. Feats create similar problem for fighters. E.g. "you can't trip someone: you don't have the right feat."

>The rules are tailored to handle dungeon delving, and only dungeon delving, extremely well.
Not really. Wilderness adventuring was covered in the very first edition of D&D.

>and only dungeon delving
Eeeh not really.
A lot of the specific rules pertain to dungeon delving but there was always city play, wilderness adventures and more going on. Most of that just doesn't need specific rules.
The original D&D way of handling say "bluffing" is that you, the player, try to bluff them with your words and the DM responds accordingly. (rather than messy-ass dialogue systems meant to turn the roleplaying into something ridiculous)

And that's just for skills (since it's what the post you quoted was mostly covering). There's lots more, which I see another user has covered well. It all adds up to a very different style of gampley, both from the GMs and the players. Both have to be onboard with the mindset in order for an OSR game to really work. If the GM isn't, you get plot-heavy games. If the players aren't, the game tends to collapse as they feel rudderless and lacking in options they're used to, not realizing they have all sorts of other options now to compensate.

good beginning modules to run ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS through (and im low on DM experience desu)

considering ad&d 2, swords and sorcery, and DCC as the engines. i'm sure I could port any adventure if I tried hard enough.

So when deciding what characters can and can't do or deciding whether that thing is successful, is that just a fiat or is dice rolled?

Like this example for bluffing. Say the character bluffs. The GM decides by fiat whether it succeeds? He rolls some dice (and maybe modifies it based on what was said)? Something else?

Same thing for the feats example
Also, I'm actually not the same guy that posted about the skills.

U&WA hexcrawling was screwy even by LBB standards.
Doing one thing well does not preclude you from other things.
You can make it work decently, but only decently.

If something clearly will or won't work, the referee says so.

The rules cover things you're guranteed to do (listening at doors, etc) but not all of them.
If an action has no rules but may or may not work, the referee makes a ruling on the spot.

If it comes up often, the referee adds a houserule.
I'm not 100% sure when it got removed (might have been as early as AD&D), but "add houserules" was an actual rule at first.

I believe most good referees would handle it like this:

If the referee considers the fictional positioning that the player is suggesting strong enough for the bluff to work then no rolling is required. If there's potential for failure or interesting complications then it's better to use dice.

Old school play is all about player ingenuity and skill, not so much about character skill.

>So when deciding what characters can and can't do or deciding whether that thing is successful, is that just a fiat or is dice rolled?

Depends on the situation. Some of the situations are covered by hard mechanics, and they're arbitrated in the normal way. It's just that they're less common, and also less all-encompassing. There's a rule for rolling to find food while moving in the wilderness for example, but it doesn't try to list a dozen modifiers for what might help. If you can think of something that might help, explain how you're doing it, and if the GM agrees you might get a bonus. There's more mechanical improv (including whether to use mechanics for a given situation at all).

>Like this example for bluffing. Say the character bluffs. The GM decides by fiat whether it succeeds? He rolls some dice (and maybe modifies it based on what was said)? Something else?

Up to the GM. There's no hard and fast rule. Some GMs make everything about the dice, just applying modifiers for your actions. I prefer skipping rolls if I have sufficient information on-hand.

With something like a random guard, I'd probably roll on the Reaction Table to get a quick idea of the guy's base personality, and then take the player's stated actions into account from there. With more important people, I probably know ahead of time how they're generally going to react. But the players' actions almost always matter, and can shift things. Give them agency. The main point is that the players just can't override the situation because they have a skill that says they autowin any social engagement (known in 3rd ed play as the Diplomancer). This isn't adversarial, it's forcing players to play.

I like charisma skills only because I would prefer the game to revolve around character-skill rather than player-skill. That said, just as a player must announce his intent to attack and describe the manner of attack, so too must he give a general description of what lies he wishes to tell, what words he’ll use to persuade the guard to fuck off, so on and so forth, before making his skill roll. The randomness of the roll doesn’t just determine how well the character speaks but also helps to cover the NPC’s reaction. I dislike fiat in general, wherever it can be avoided I willl try to do so. But I will still reward players who actually role play. A rousing speech will still grant automatic success, a convincing lie or bribe will automatically convince an NPC. Charisma rolls, in general, are primarily for situations where I don’t know how the NPC will react.

B1 is intended to teach new DMs.
B2 is intended to teach new players.
X1 is a good gateway to hexcrawling.

>DCC
Sailors of the Starless Sea.
>AD&D 2E, Swords & Sorcery
B1 In Search of the Unknown, Tower of the Stargazer, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

>I would prefer the game to revolve around character-skill rather than player-skill.
I'm sorry, but old school style is not for you then. There's no getting around the fact that emphasizing player skill is one of the fundamental pillars of old school D&D.

>I like charisma skills
The role in roleplay doesn't refer to dice.

>and describe the manner of attack
When a combat round is an abstracted minute's worth of clashing back and forth, that tends not to matter so much.
>I dislike fiat in general,
Ba-da-bing back-da->for situations where I don’t know how the NPC will react
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting

Inb4 skerples

Didn't he mellow out?

Do you guys have any advice for making games run faster? I believe that I am well prepared and generally don't grind the game to a halt to check notes or anything, but my players can't come to a consensus over the smallest things and sessions are taking forever. The last one only had the players cover four rooms.

h a v e
t h e m
u s e
a
c a l l e r

Go grab an egg timer and when it runs out say a monster shows up.

These both actually sound like good ideas. Random encounters corresponding to real time is nice, but a caller sounds like a great idea especially for my merry band of retards. Thanks anons.

Here's the rundown:
Discussion can occur, but the caller has final say.
Players can veto actions that single out their character.
Players pick a new caller if they tried to disregard consensus.

Arneson did that. He'd say the monster was attracted by the sound of the argument.

>Arneson did that. He'd say the monster was attracted by the sound of the argument
Gary did it, too. I forget if it was actually in the AD&D DMG but I know he had posts on ENWorld talking about just rolling for random monsters if the players were being boring for too long.

I think that was maybe in the sample dungeon?

In any case, B1 has the same note in the player handout at the back. "Don't argue, it'll bring monsters. Also, don't hurt the feelings of other mmkay"

I just do that by fiat whenever I think the players are taking too long to make a decision. Time doesn't stop while the characters argue.

>2e
There's Pundering Poppof from Dragon Magazine. Other than that there the old 1e modules (B1, B2)

>DCC
I like In The Wake of The Zorkul

Yes!

Was always mellow. Am just quite busy at the moment.

I wrote this for absolute beginners. It's got design notes, lessons, and goblins. And art. And it's free. coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-megapost.html

And this post might help too: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-introduction-for-new-players.html

I'm a revolutionary. They're a support class now. I dare say I cracked the secret of how to make magic work for OSR.

themansegaming.blogspot.com/2017/08/sages-sage-magic-system.html

>So in the write-up I use I talk about . . .

Care to share?
Thanks.

>came on at the same time
holy shit.
are you each other?
do you argue with yourself to get over bad ideas?
or is it like, pretend arguments with other people you can't work past
is he not allowed on your sidebar out of shame

At a glance, this looks more well designed than the standard spell caster but I just can never glom to anything that does away with specific spells.
I like my goofy and oddly specific spells. Especially when the players only get them by trade or stealing them off the dead bodies of wizards.

Scrolls, m'boy!

Sure. It's for my own homebrew, so you'd have to decide yourself how to resolve a skill check and when you get new skills. Most of it is about beating the reader over the head that hey, skills don't work here like you're used to, because I'm assuming an audience that is used to modern play.

I've been DMing D&D 5e for 2 years now. Many of my players love the game and look forward to playing every week.

However, more than half of them look despaired whenever they level up because of the sheer amount of rules to take into account. Also, 3/4 of my prep time is spent recopying monster stats.

We've been interested in the OSR for about a year now. I've mostly converted 1e modules as I'm more interested in D&D's history than in whatever WotC's putting out. 5e is the first rpg I've ever played btw.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to is which OSR system should we get? My LGS has the OD&D and AD&D 1e reprints and LotFP. I just want something that doesn't take three decades to prepare.

Start with Bx.

If you want to learn OD&D, learn Holmes first.

If you want to learn AD&D, The Challenges Game System first.

Start with Bx.

B/X and its clones (Labyrinth Lord et all) are the simplest, but really any OSR game is going to be far simpler in the way of character options compared to 5th or 3rd that when a guy goes up a level it's all going to feel amazingly quick, and all the monster stats are going to seem dead easy (2-3 lines).

...

Thanks friendos. I'll tell my group about these. It's going to be less expensive than the $200 OD&D wood box for sure. (We were gonna split the price, but still).

I've already discussed these issues with my group. They've gone through all of TToEE so dungeon delving isn't much of a problem.

Ayy. Ayy. Ayyyyy.
There's a pastebin in the OP labelled Trove.
There's a mega in the pastebin full of rad bananas.
Rad bananas you can illegally download.

I'm not saying, "don't pay the owners" not that they didn't just buy it themselves
but I am saying, "you're clearly not set on this: try before you buy"

This is what running games has taught me. The rules are almost irrelevant (unless they are shitting things up). Dungeon design is way more important than this other 3.5-tier trash discussion.

None of us play except some of the bloggers, this is Veeky Forums

Oh, I know about the Trove. Where do you think I got TToEE ;)

Coo.

I don't know about other people, but...

There's nothing about a setting that means it has to be explicitly OSR. There's another thread for settings --- /wbg/. And honestly most OSR settings are lackluster in my opinion. For me in particular, my current game is completely randomly generated on the fly.

I rarely use modules, and only then if there's some purpose to using the module rather than making my own (ex. when I will be introducing a new group, I might use TotSK). I've so far been randomly generating dungeons as well.

Meanwhile, all of us use some sort of rule, I would expect. At least one or two.

Anybody got a favorite magic fountain?

...

What do you guys think of this as a psion/monk replacement? The idea is a magic support class with spiky martial utility.

Mystic

HD: As wizard
Proficiencies: As thief
Saving throws: As fighter

A mystic chooses 2 from the list of mystic powers at 1st level. They gain an extra ability every even level afterward.

Aura Sight: See auras of living things automatically. Mind roll for other auras.
Telekenisis: 5lbs within 40ft. Move 5ft/round. Mind rather than str/dex for rolls with the object)
Mental Projection(choose sight or sound) 20ft /turn, 5ft if solid object. Roll mind to go through objects (+1 per 5ft). On failure, projection ends. Roll 1d12+turns in projection after projecting. 1 damage for every point rolled over mind.
Psychic vision: Roll 1d6 when first touching an object. On 1-2 have a vision from its history.
Tranquility: Advantage saves vs mental effects.
Breatharian: Need half water, food as long as an hour of sunlight that day. Age half as quickly.
Telepathy: 40ft. Only hear thoughts for you.
Thought Probe: After eye contact over 1 minute, target makes mind save. On failure, you can hear surface thoughts if they’re in front of you. Can only attempt once a day.
Sparkle Eyes: +1 reaction roll if eye contact.
Stun: Gain 2 chi/day. 1 chi to stun 1 round and knock back 5ft on a successful attack.
Slow Fall: + 2 chi/day. 1 chi to halve fall damage.
Qi Kung: +2 chi/day. 1 chi to heal 1d6 damage.
Qi Attack: +2 chi/day. +1 attack per chi spent.

Just use eldritch wizardry without psionic combat.

Content you made yourself is still a campaign/adventure module.

How much reward do you give characters for accomplishing tasks for NPCs? Like if an NPC hires the party to clear out some dungeon or whatnot, what's a good metric for determining how much treasure they should get? (And what standard does that value use?) My party just finished a session where they received a reward for bringing back someone or another, but my player was surprised at how much they got for the reward. So I think I might have given the party too much. On the other hand, even the characters who have survived since the start are only 1/3 of the way to level 2 after 4 sessions, so...

A small cut of what they find, plus whatever they can smuggle.

"Made myself" is pushing it. It's randomly generated, sometimes at the table during play.

Then that's what your campaign is. Discussing about your methods of randomly generating adventure content is much more interesting than arguing about attribute modifiers or whatever.

Can anyone tell me about True AD&D™?

Weak bait.

I don't think so? I barely have enough time+effort to make my own stuff decent. I can't keep up with theManse and do MSpaint art.

>do you argue with yourself to get over bad ideas?
Well, yes, but I don't write it down.
Why not?
> Anybody got a favorite magic fountain?
YES I FUCKING DO: youtube.com/watch?v=vbhJ9c-pFoI

Anyone have that exorcist class some blog was peddling a few days ago?

What fonts do you use?

Hehehe.
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/09/osr-class-exorcist.html

There's links to the 3 varieties of the class (Bell, Book, Sword) in this article.

If you're not famililiar with GLOG classes, you gain a Template (A,B,C,D) each time you level, to a max of 4 templates (at level 4), and you gain them in order.

So you could have level 4 character who is
Thief A, B, C, D
Fighter A, Thief A, Monk A, B
Fighter A, B, C Monk D
etc.

>GLOG

>Fighter A, B, C Monk D
Should be Fighter A, B, C Monk A

Ain't even bothered. Just impressed at how fast you are.

dude, why do you hate the glog? I'd rather play B/X, but you don't see me posting "le garbage fire" meme every time it's mentioned.

Correct. Sorry! Am a bit tired.