/osrg/ Old School Renaissance General

Here there be children wearing fake neckbeards.

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>Thread Question
How much competition is there between players in your group?

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Did the bouncer get ten to life at least?

He got an award. He should have, anyway

I just looked it up, surprisingly it wasn't just a case of a rich asshole talking shit and getting hit.

The tl;dr of it is that the kid got into an argument with some drunk Greek asshole who happened to be a bouncer, tried to walk away, the Greek wouldn't let him, he said to the Greek that he'd (the Greek) work for him (the Brit) one day, and then the Greek chimped out even harder and murdered him. Then one of the two women who were with the Greek asshole said that the kid "deserved that," then they fled the scene.

It turns out the Greek was the bad guy in this case.

>murdered
Manslaughter, not murder.
The dude banged his head when he fell, then received no medical attention (his drunk friends called the wrong number).

It seems like you committed one of the classic blunders here. Let me try to help salvage things: what's Seren Ironhand?

The one module Moldvay published for his lawsuit waiting to happen system.

It's basically keep on the borderlands, but you're on a river instead of in a valley.
Also the caves have wackier shit in them and you're hunting river pirates.

First for replacing your magic users with Sages.

You are seventh.


Eighth for replacing your pictures with ekphrasis.

>dindu

I think you mean
>dyndou tipota

>he said to the Greek that he'd (the Greek)
The bouncer was British, too.

>

Sounds cool, although that's a staggeringly ugly cover. You should find it and upload it!

Is that an one punch man reference?

lots of races, several classes for each race(like 2-4 for most, but more than that for Humans)

if /osrg/ did another collaborative project an Americana meets D&D Fantasy setting would be a fun one to do, heck some adventures would probably transfer over to such a setting with surprisingly minimal conversion(Deep Carbon Observatory comes to mind for example)

>an Americana meets D&D Fantasy setting
Isn't this literally what Weird Adventures is?

Confirmed

But moving past the classic blunder, would you consider Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to be OSR?

>Isn't this literally what Weird Adventures is?
not exactly, sure that setting is in a fantasy version of the US(and even more specifically a New York City expy) but not quite what i had in mind, I was thinking something with an even more old fashioned vibe, think more Over The Garden Wall or the indie comic Hillbilly for what I have in mind, or even the Oz books to an extent

TLDR: while Weird Adventures technically qualifies, it's leaning more towards Pulp/Noir fiction than what I was thinking, this would be a touch more Fairy/Tall Tales in overall tone

>would you consider Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to be OSR?
No because it's not part of the Revival and also isn't compatible with old D&D. That being said, though, it's the most old-school-style game besides D&D itself; it's the second best game to run the high-lethality, high-player-skill dungeoncrawl in. The crucial difference is the power curve; in WHFRP you stay at a point corresponding to low-mid-level in D&D forever. If you like that shit it's pure gold, though. I'd recommend the first edition over the second, although that's not a popular opinion.

Oh, I get it, I think. You want hobo expeditions into the caverns of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, Uncle Remus, O Brother Where Art Thou? and stuff like that.

>See bouncer working at a dingy club
>He looks a bit down
>You're privileged, want to give something back
>Tell him that you'll give him a better job in the future
>Get punched to death

Wasn't aware 'Trabucatti' was a typical Briton name.

Does anybody have suggestions of monsters a party of six could fight that would be fun for AD&D 1st edition?

...

I'm wondering if I should rule that all magic users need to roll to hit with their offensive spells. I was reading Conan and I liked the bit in the Scarlet Citadel where he dodged the magic and cut off the wizard's head (the wizard lived, because fucking wizards).

Lloyd isn't an English surname either, dingus.

Sadly that helpful jingle didn't help them as they were in Greece at the time.

Why would they not? (excluding AOE stuff, which is easier to say "fuck everything in that vicinity", and targeting the environment)

More english than the obviously italian/spanish Trabucatti.

Andersen isn't a Swedish surname either, but it's more Swedish than Kbuti.

You should adopt DCCs magic system.

>Why would they not?
I mean, I agree that it's a fine idea, but it's literally the opposite of what's in the rulebook, so that seems like a stupid question.

Some would say that for a good OSR game, the adventure is more important than the mechanics. In other words, you can run a game with the right "feel" in any reasonably-OSR system, as long as the scenario, the challenges you present to your players, etc. are flavorful enough. So...

What would you say is the best module to convey the flavor of OSR? Purely in your opinion, what adventure captures the style of game that you enjoy most? If you had to run one thing to show me what your version of OSR play is like, what would it be?

Isn't this simulated by making a save?
Also I think magic missile is the only single target damage spell in b/x, and the whole point of it is that it doesn't miss.

Barrowmaze for more traditional.
ASE for gonzo.

Looks like Mentzer's career is rolling a save vs. poison right now. It's not looking good either.

I wouldn't be surprised if some people made fake pics like that just to destroy a man's work. Anyway I don't really care whether that's real or not. His setting seems pretty generic and uninspired. This whole thing surrounding Mentzer is just one huge social porn circlejerk that shouldn't even exist in a sane world.

>This whole thing surrounding Mentzer is just one huge social porn circlejerk that shouldn't even exist in a sane world.

Yeah, but we live on the Internet nowadays, where your self-worth is determined by the amount of (You)s-per-post or (Y)pp. What does it matter that you're spending all your free time carefully cultivating an appeal-to-authority argument?

theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/

This article does a good job explaining why people are willing to spend their time broadcasting literally-nothing exchanges.

>This whole thing surrounding Mentzer is just one huge social porn circlejerk that shouldn't even exist in a sane world.

Don't pretend like Mentzer didn't encourage this type of behaviour, he has always been extremely liberal and had a tendency towards famewhoring.

So I've rolled up my dungeon and it has a bunch of traps in it, but how exactly do traps work?

Do I I just free form "well an arrow just shot you through the face you're dead", or would arrows/spears do weapon damage, or is there some other way I'm missing?

The general pattern is
Wait, that's a trap? -> I'll just pretend it's not -> Actually, I don't mind

If there is no examples of traps just make something up.
Pit trap - 10ft wide and 1d4*10ft deep, anything larger then a halfling walking over it triggers it on a 1-2 on a d6.
Arrow trap - Pressure plate in the middle of a tiled hallway. If stepped on it activates on a 1-3 on a d6. An arrow will shoot down the corridor at human chest height. It attacks like a 1d6 level fighter and does 1d8 damage.

Just think of how a dungeon builder would install a trap. What kind of trap would it be? How would it work? Then figure out some mechanics for it and be prepared the adjudicate the hell out of it once the players start screwing around.

What happened with Frank Mentzer?

A woman is calling him a creep. Somehow being a creep is a big deal nowadays.

I wouldn't "roll" traps - players should be reliably able to second-guess their location from context and enviromental clues.

Some people criticized his work and he was quite edgy with his responses as usual. Then some people latched on to that and started criticizing the way he responded. Then it has evolved into a proper internet shitflinging circlejerk where some people don't even know what's happening but want to ride the bandwagon.

Oh yeah, and now it's apparently an SJW issue too. Because what isn't nowadays?

He said a girl was pretty but he was too old and married, and then the girl got upset at being hit on by an old guy, and then some MGTOWs got upset because she got upset.

Fucking SAVAGE user

Hard laffs were had

Dude fucked up. Kid was from Harrow, he was probably fast tracked to the 1%.

The most hilarious thing he fucking chose to flirt with Jessica Price, a person so extreme in her views she was a liability for Paizo.

>and then some MGTOWs got upset because she got upset.
More like they're pissing gas onto the fire and laughing about watching SJW's tear themselves apart.

I remember this, british guy states to another british guy in Greece "You'll work for me one day" and gets one punched for it.

Two morons out of daily life so I don't see the problem. This stuff happens in the uk daily in terms of nightclub and bar fights.

Wrong, both were british and it was manslaughter. The Richard Eveleigh case was used as a precedent if I'm correct.

I rolled 3 floors of a dungeon using appendix a, this is the first time I've ever done it, hence the questions

Top kek

>This whole thing surrounding Mentzer is just one huge social porn circlejerk that shouldn't even exist in a sane world.
>Yeah, but we live on the Internet nowadays
Eh, I can sympathize with you guys' sentiments, but if Mentzer had pulled the equivalent of this kinda shit in Victorian Britain (angry shitloss at his gentlemen's club, probably) he would still have become a pariah. This isn't new. Hell, even rubbernecking isn't new.

It's mostly being annoyed with the Internet's ability to work up a large section of the population into a noisy fervor, which gets in the way of actual productivity and eats up our free time waiting for it to die down before we can get back to business.

It's pretty much up to you, honestly.

Having an arrow trap auto-kill feels a little extreme for my personal tastes, but there's technically nothing wrong with it.

I think automatic damage is more common (the arrow flies out of the wall and strikes you for 1d6; the floor opens up and you plummet into the pit for Xd6) which at least has the chance of not being instantly lethal.

Otherwise, you should consider allowing a saving throw of some kind. Poison traps insta-kill, for example, but not without a save.

Just do whatever makes sense to you & fits the feel of the game you're going for.

Personally, I don't like it when traps feel like "gotchas" or simple time/hp taxes. I like them to challenge the players' ability to creatively circumvent obstacles and to think quickly on their feet.

So with an arrow trap, here are two ways I might handle it:

1.) Straight up tell them, "there are several small holes in the stonework of the hallway." They get to be aware of the obstacle, but have to respond to it with incomplete information—what comes out of the holes? What triggers it? etc. This tests their ability to intelligently approach / circumvent an unknown threat.

2.) When they step through the hallway, tell them, "you hear several clicks as your foot depresses a plate in the floor—what do you do?" Don't tell them what's coming, just let them describe how their character reacts in that moment (and don't give them a lot of time to think about it!). If they were cautious before entering the hallway and asked you about the walls, they'll know the holes are there and can make an educated guess that jumping in a certain direction or raising their shield or whatever might save them. If not, they just have to guess blindly. Then you adjudicate it however makes sense to you: if their stated action wouldn't help them at all, they take the damage automatically. If their stated action might save them, either call for a save or have them avoid it automatically.

Open the Monstrous Compendium to any page. Or jab your finger at 4 random spots in a dictionary, then make up stats.

>1.) Straight up tell them, "there are several small holes in the stonework of the hallway." They get to be aware of the obstacle, but have to respond to it with incomplete information—what comes out of the holes? What triggers it? etc. This tests their ability to intelligently approach / circumvent an unknown threat.

Thanks for your help user, that actually helps me out a lot.

That's actually what I was planning. As long as they tell me they're cautious and are looking at the walls/floors, I'll give them clues like that.

I didn't think about the second way though, I actually quite like it. We're new players to OSR and I feel like that'll give them a chance to get used to the way traps work without it feeling too punishing.

If you don't feel comfortable winging trap descriptions, write LOTS of details about the trap. Like 4 sentences, maybe even 5. Or draw yourself some diagrams.
The effect of the trap doesn't matter so much (it's usually save/no save for damage/death/room change), but the mechanism and signs of the trap dictate how players will interact with it.

No problem. For the longest time I almost NEVER used traps in my adventures because I saw them as un-fun taxes (the players either waste time over-examining everything or eat the unavoidable HP loss; neither makes for interesting gameplay).

Presenting them this way, as another vector of player agency in navigating the dungeon environment, helped me come around to actually appreciating their place in the game.

>tfw you avoid setting off a trap on your way into the dungeon and manage to set it off behind you into the horde of goblins chasing you as you're fleeing your way back out of the dungeon

>tfw player regularly kick open doors that they know for a fact are rigged with traps
>somehow manage to survive impalings, rocks on head, poison, bludgeonings, and worse
My players are cursed with impatience, blessed with good fortune

>Encounters/enemies/traps designed to be hard the players somehow bullshit through.
>Things you didn't even expect to be a problem or even remotely lethal somehow massacres the entire party.
Every fucking time

And then the players get mad at you for not conveying that they could die from the thing well enough.

Hi friends,

Trying to recall a scenario but I don't remember where it was from. Could be LoTFP, but was probably something from Goblin Punch.

Basically inside of a dungeon is a group of crypts / tombs for very powerful vampires? gods of death? arranged like a little neighborhood. The PCs are tempted / roped in to the gods' plans, some of which involve their neighbors.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I don't think I imagined it, so I'll post again if I figure out what it was.

The newer version of DFF? With the greater repugnance?

>LoTFP
Why do people keep capitalizing The t in LotFP?

Yeah, it sounds like Death Frost Doom.

death frost Doom, I can spell, don't worry
Because people don't know what it stands for?

I'm starting a grimy punk band that just sings about d&d and fantasy. No reason the metalheads should have it all.

Gimme some ideas for good lyric content.

Wasn't this the chick that Paizo fired because she was too easily triggered, even for them?

What´s the best suplement for randomly create a hexcrawl map?

Thanks - I'll have to dig it up. I remembered it when reading the "singing plant" version of DFD, which only has one vampire guy. He sparked my memory, but I guess I didn't realize there was another version so I thought it was from something else. I was a little confused because I also remembered the melting chain skulls which didn't show up in the DFD I found at all!

Same reason I capitalize it in LoTR!

Anons, I have come to a personal conclusion:

I hate traps.

I really do. This is as much a post to put my own thoughts in order as anything else, so apologies if it's a bit meandering.

A dungeon trap is a kind of security system that prevents unauthorized intrusion. In our modern world, security systems usually take the form of alarms of various types: when an unwanted intruder enters the protected location, the alarm goes off and alerts the inhabitants, the police or both. Simple enough. Now, the thing here is that the alarm is meant to ward against unauthorized intrusion, which is why houses with commercial alarm systems usually sport a big PROTECTED BY SO AND SO SECURITY COMPANY, 24/7 sign to deter burglars. It's the same principle as cameras in grocery stores and bodegas (along with the cute SMILE, WE'RE TAPING YOU stickers): the security system is revealed so that would-be thieves think of it twice, in theory.

But "unauthorized" is the key word. If it's only a matter of access, then the location could simply be walled off or hell, even demolished if it's not necessary to keep it around. But people live and work in these places, so the counterpart to security preventing unauthorized intrusion is that they must allow authorized access. In home systems, this can be as simple as a code that the owner has to punch in a terminal after entering the house, with the system giving them some time to identify themselves before going off. In places like banks, this can take the form of keycards, two-man systems, etcetera.

Which leads us back to the dungeon trap. They, frankly, don't make sense. Rather than simply alerting dungeon denizens, they tend to come in lethal forms, which are accepted as part of OSR's risky gameplay. But this comes at a cost of verisimilitude. If you fuck up when entering your alarm code at home, the worst that will happen is the alarm going off and a call from the security company (after all, false positives make up most of alarm activity) but if you trigger a dungeon trap, you might as well die - which is a desirable if brutal result for unwanted intruders, but completely undesirable for local inhabitants. A couple of your orc guards get a little tipsy and wander down a hallway, forgetting to avoid the one floor tile that makes a giant boulder fall on them. Sure, as an evil mastermind you don't particularly care about the lives of your minions, but the trap still has to be reset: you still have to get people to recover the boulder blocking the way, force it back into its hiding space above the hallway, and set the mechanism back into 'armed' mode. And are you sure the guards are going to remember to avoid that particular floor tile in the future? Are you sure you will?

Ah, but what if the place is a ruin? No locals to get themselves killed by accident. But that's the thing - the place is a ruin, and expecting mechanical traps to work perfectly years, decades or centuries in the future also strains belief. PCs are as likely to find rusty gears that do nothing and false floors that have already given way to reveal the spiky pits under, and who is to say the PCs are the first would-be tomb raiders of the place, anyway? They might just find the remains of previous adventurers that fell to traps that were not reset.

Where, then, to find classical dungeon traps in a way that makes sense? The only possibility that comes to mind is a place built as if meant to be inhabited but in practice sealed off. The Egyptian pyramid of pulp stories comes to mind: hallways, treasure rooms and more, but no one is ever meant to set foot on them after the last brick is set. There's also the dungeons that keep dangerous creatures inside (like the Minotaur's labyrinth) but what if said creatures run afoul of the traps? Then the PCs might just find rotten corpses rather than treasure, but if the creatures can overcome the traps, why build them in the first place?

Of course, there's always "it's magic, lol" as a justification. But one can justify a lot of things like that.

...That's why traps have specific triggers. If you walk over the right floor tiles, the trap doesn't trigger. If you open the door slowly for the first few inches, then it doesn't trigger. If you avoid the shafts of light, then no trap.

>Ah, but what if the place is a ruin? No locals to get themselves killed by accident. But that's the thing - the place is a ruin, and expecting mechanical traps to work perfectly years, decades or centuries in the future also strains belief.

Counterpoint: Indiana Jones was awesome

Wandering Monster table aside, that poster is Appendix A; *not* the Dungeon Robber rules

There's also the old chestnut:

>kobolds are basically "dungeon elementals"; they live in the walls and reset all the traps when they need to

>In our modern world, security systems usually take the form of alarms of various types
Probably because booby-trapping your house is illegal in most places. If the police need to break into your house you can't have them setting off deadly tripwires.
>Rather than simply alerting dungeon denizens,
If someone falling down a pit or being pummeled by rocks doesn't alert you, then I don't know what will. It's not like they have loudspeakers and red warning lights in all the rooms.
>And are you sure the guards are going to remember to avoid that particular floor tile in the future? Are you sure you will?
If you've been living in a place for years and you can't even remember where the hand full of traps that you put are, you've got bigger problems.

Reminder that the word cobalt comes from the word kobold.

That's how you end with the Resident Evil situation where cops have to collect several games and solve astrology-based puzzles just to go to the station chief's office.

Random thought: How would Death Frost Doom do as a Funnel for Dungeon Crawl Classics? In the vein of "You won't spend the night on the mountain you bitch" and have a bunch of teenagers there because of a dare or whatever?

It works but I think one of the things about DFD is the fact that the players decide to go there even though they are warned that they shouldn't. So a funnel or one-off doesn't give the chance to walk away since the module is the session. Seeing the PCs die because of the choice they made is much better than just sending them into the funnel without a chance to leave. Also I think that the whole thing is much more evil, meaner and sweeter if the PCs are higher level and actually have something to lose, it makes all the curses terrifying.

There's a military saying, along the lines of: 'obstacles (land mines, barbed wire, moats) not backed by fire are nuisances.' A lone pit trap, as you say, might not make sense; a pit trap in front of a barricade manned by kobolds with crossbows and polearms is a serious challenge. Making the traps part of an active defense by intelligent opposition opens up a lot of gameplay opportunities, I think. For example, if players encounter a trap they know is likely to be command-operated by a hidden watcher, then bypassing the trap requires finding and somehow neutralizing, deceiving, or negotiating with the trap operator. Use of traps can make a weak enemy force much more formidable on the defense, while PCs that manage to seize control of a 'master control room' for a dungeon can wreak havoc among its denizens in turn. Lots of possibilities.

Seconded.

>'obstacles (land mines, barbed wire, moats) not backed by fire are nuisances.' A lone pit trap, as you say, might not make sense; a pit trap in front of a barricade manned by kobolds with crossbows and polearms is a serious challenge.
Look at Forbidden Caverns of Archaia for examples of this.
The entrance to almost every cave is a killzone carefully crafted by the inhabitants that live there.

I made a thing for you guys this week. Hope ya like it.

In my experience, it seems like a lot of OSR people have neutral-to-positive feelings about 4E. Why is that the case when a lot of 3.5 people feeling quite negatively about it?

This is because, I believe, "OSR people" is a misnomer. There's lots of people that like OSR stuff and also like other games, including 4E. On the other hand, people that are mostly 3.x fans tend to stick to d20-based games, with much less branching out.

4e does its job, 3.5e doesn’t

This
I can respect it for what it tried to do. Also, we were let down by 3.5e, so 4e wasn't too much lower of a step.

This is a really good suggestion. Reminds me of Legend of the Five Rings, where the Kaiu Wall is a great example of the good guys running the dungeon and setting the traps. There's even a plot seed where the PCs have to provide cover for a team of engineers resetting the traps in a level, IIRC.

4e is actually a reboot of their miniatures game. It openly says,
>my scope is to do these things, and only these things well.

Where as 3e expects you to expect it to work for everything.
Surprise surprise, 3e doesn't work well for anything.

Neat
Probably because 4e is only good at being a tactical combat rpg.
3e players want a game that does everything okay, instead of a game that does one thing really good.

I mostly notice that people here see 4e as a different game and therefore don't really have a problem with it. 3e however expanded on 2e in a lot of ways that ruined the continuation of the classic game.

3/3.5 was a big fuck you to AD&D, and 4e was a big fuck you to 3.5

>>

A passage over a firey pit.
Trick is that the fire is too hot (hot enough to melt any metal lowered into it, also makes it hard to cross the passage) messing with it collapses the passage into the pit.The flaw is that there isn't any smoke from the fire. Is that any good?