/osrg/ Old School Renaissance General

Having a dedicated skillmonkey discourages people from attempting skills because they aren't the Skills Guy™.

It's why a lot of people in these threads argue that the Thief adds nothing interesting to the game.

>If a DM ever says "you cannot attempt that" because it is not a listed skill, that is a bad DM, not a bad mechanic.
The issue is less with "that's not a skill, you can't do that" and more with "you don't have that skill, you can't do that".

Basically, adding skill systems counter-intuitively makes characters less competent: where before there might be an assumed omnicompetency, now there's very clear Things You Cannot Do.

If you create a Find Traps skill and give it to Thieves, you're implying that non-Thieves cannot Find Traps. They do not have the skill, after all, and if they could do it anyhow then why does the Thief get the skill?

Having a dedicated fighter discourages people from attempting combat because they aren't the Fighting Guy™.

Having a dedicated wizard discourages people from attempting magic because they aren't the Magical Guy™.

If you create spells and give them to the Magic User class, you're implying that non-Magic Users cannot cast spells.

I'm not seeing the problem here.

Me neither, so let the thieves have their skills and yes, don't let others step on their toes.

It's asinine to give niche protection to Fighters and Magic-Users and then complain that everyone should be able to do Thieving skills.

Those are both right, but "fighting" and "magic" are smaller and more specific niches than "skills", which can potentially encompass almost everything that isn't fighting or magic.

Besides, most systems don't have provisions for non-MU characters to attempt using magic besides magic items, and fighting is traditionally a sort of punishment in OSR

Asked before, but how anime are your games, /osrg/?

youtube.com/watch?v=kOTHNoODYmY

>and fighting is traditionally a sort of punishment in OSR
Tangential, but this is really kind of fucked for fighters: the thing they excel at is something no party wants to happen in the first place in orthodox play. If fighters are doing their thing, things have gone wrong.

If the argument is that thieves aren't interesting and should be removed, "yeah but what about thieves" is completely nonsensical. "Skills" can be something characters are implied to be able to do and not their special class power

>which can potentially encompass almost everything that isn't fighting or magic.

...but the Thief has specific, niche skills and not some broad brush-stoke of abilities. It's literally 7 things that they happen to excel at.

Thieves aren't really a Skills Guy.™
They're a Stealth Guy™.

I was not talking about thief skills, I was talking about the idea of a skill system in general, which was brought up earlier in the thread. I could easily make a similar argument for thieves, though. Having skills for climbing, stealth etc. and locking them to the thief implies that only the thief can do those things competently. It leads to things like the "Conan is a thief/thief multiclass" argument

Honestly it's just another part of resource management.
Fights aren't "always" a bad option.

>implies

Therein is the problem. A lack of understanding from DMs or Players that this isn't the case.

But if that was untrue, what is even the point of having a thief class? Following the thing with Conan, if thieves didn't exist he'd fit squarely as a high level fighter. It's a choice between having "your niche is killing shit" and "your niche is being sneaky" or allowing the same character (and perhaps all other characters, with their respective niches) to both kill shit AND be sneaky

If a first level thief only has a 10% chance to hide, what does a fighter get? 1%?

>thing they excel at is something no party wants to happen in the first place in orthodox play. If fighters are doing their thing, things have gone wrong
Could you stop with this revisionism?

Or you can have multi-classing and you not have that problem at all. As much as we love the B/X 4-niche human classes, they don't need to be the do-all, end-all.

>Hide in shadows

"Anybody can hide. Hiding is an all or nothing thing. Either you're hidden or you're in view. Thieves, however, have a chance to hide in SHADOWS. A thief generally prefers to hide rather than to hide in shadows. It's nice to have a chance to hide in shadows when you need it, though. Halflings have a similar ability, having a 2 in 6 chance of hiding in shadows. They also have a 90% chance of hiding in woods or underbrush. (p.B10) Note that to hide in shadows, the thief cannot be moving, silently or otherwise. Hide in shadows & move silently are mutually exclusive. There is no double jeopardy."

>web.fisher.cx/robert/rpg/dnd/thief.html

I mean, that didn't answer my question, but thanks anyway I guess.

Multiclassing isn't that good a solution either for this problem, because removing thieves works under the premise that all characters should be able to competently do what is otherwise offloaded into the thief. In a system without thieves, your fighter can sneak around, climb, pick locks etc. as well as anyone else. If you use multiclassing, you're trading off your main's class prowess in their niche in order to be able to do that stuff, and not even do it that well

Yes it did. Anyone can attempt to hide in the right environment.

The thief has a borderline supernatural ability to blend into shadows, not just 'hide'.

CLASS: USEFULNESS
Fighting man: useful
Magic-user: useful
Cleric: useful
Thief: ?

But what is the chance? Is it the same as thief skills? Does it change by levels? I need more then "You can do it".

That's definitely true, but it's also not necessarily something you would have assumed to be possible to begin with. If you come in with fresh eyes and the only class is the Fighter, you're going to assume that magic is just something that players don't really get access to (in true Lord of the Rings style).

Everything you include as Something A Player Can Do is Something Another Player Cannot.
If nobody has any languages listed, for instance, the assumption may very well be that everyone speaks Fantasy English like in all those fantasy movies. If one player speaks Common and Elvish and another speaks Common and Orc, you can probably assume that the former cannot speak with orcs and the latter cannot speak to elves. (If all elves spoke Common, after all, why is Elvish a language?)

Let's say that we have two classes, the Bobby and the Robby. The Bobby is in the core book, and has no abilities of interest to this hypothetical. The Robby is in the first splatbook, and has the explicit ability to hold up people.
In a core-only game before the supplement was released, the Bobby could presumably have held up a guy. The moment the supplement was released, though, the Bobby was retconned to no longer be able to do that.

That's the "Air-Breathing Mermaid" - 1st Edition Mermaids the Swimming has no verbiage on whether or not they can or cannot breath air, but 2nd Edition MtS introduces the ability "Air-Breathing Mermaid: your mermaid can breathe air". Creating a new option removed an earlier implicit option.

For a more concrete example, you know how the Thief is the only class that can stab someone in the back? And the Ranger the only class that can track someone? And the Barbarian the only class that can conduct first aid, imitate bird calls, or build snares? And how presumably only Cavaliers can be knights?
When you carve out a niche for a new class, maybe consider what you're carving it out of.

>Multiclassing isn't that good a solution either for this problem, because removing Magic-Users works under the premise that all characters should be able to competently do what is otherwise offloaded into the Magic-User. In a system without Magic-Users, your fighter can read scrolls, cast spells, create potions etc. as well as anyone else.

If you change Thief to anything else, you would vehemently disagree and justify their class being the only one who should be able to do what they do. The ONLY Thief skills that are class specific are Lockpicking and icking Pockets which MAKES SEEEEEEEENSE.

What is revisionist about it? Fighting drains resources for no gain other than immediate survival. XP does not come from killing monsters in OSR but from gold taken from dungeons. You simply never want to fight unless forced to, and as rightfully points out fighting is a form of punishment in OSR.

I see that argument as equally as valid as mine, as long as your objective is explicitly to remove Magic-Users (and presumably clerics)

You're working under the assumption that thieves are an essential part of the game, whereas the mentality behind removing thieves is that they're superfluous and should be removed (thus not directly putting those points up to discussion, but implying "how do I go about this" or "what are the benefits in doing this")

>But what is the chance? Is it the same as thief skills? Does it change by levels? I need more then "You can do it".

For a style of gameplay that relies less on rolling dice and more on roleplaying, are you telling me that you don't understand that it's reliant on the player describing his actions to the DM?

Careful, this is what leads to '90s style "I don't need to be a rollplayer, I can just TELL YOU how my edgelord kills your chumps because I studied the blade." Rolls matter.

All that this is saying is that you're talking past each other and will never come to agree. Can we not retread the thief arguments again?

If that's the case, why do thieves have to roll?

damn 50 minutes went by super fast.

didn't expect this to be so entertaining with it's pretty "down to the bones" storytelling.
I guess my games right now have almost no 80's anime vibes right now. as my player's characters go stronger there might be some more hotblooded action

because 'hiding' and 'hide in shadows' are vastly different things.

>The ONLY Thief skills that are class specific are Lockpicking and icking Pockets which MAKES SEEEEEEEENSE.
Moldvay Basic, B10:
>THIEVES
>They are the only characters who can open locks and find traps without using magic to do so. Due to these abilities, a thief is often found in a normal group of adventurers.

Although do note that this was probably an editor forcing their interpretation into this - they missed this text on B22:
>Any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one in the correct area.
Please note that the thief only gets better than 1/6th at level 3+, being 10%/15% at level 1-2.

Also, by the way, Pick Pockets is a later addition - originally it was just a function of Moving with Silence.

If the only way to explain thief skills is by them being "supernatural" then I don't want them.

Anybody can search for traps. Dwarfs have a 2 in 6 chance. Everyone else has a 1 in 6 chance. (p.B22)

youtube.com/watch?v=zO-QyFeyTbw

I'll accept this.

Did you miss the spoiler?

>Fighting drains resources for no gain other than immediate survival. XP does not come from killing monsters in OSR but from gold taken from dungeons.
You are just as bad as 3.5 players saying "muh optimal way". Fighting is fun and iconic, and was a big part of most modules from TSR, it's not about optimization of leveling up

It being fun is not the same as it being rewarding from a purely game design standpoint

And there are a lot of times where it's unavoidable, saying it is a "failure state" is a modern misconception spread by hipster bloggers

>a real thing people have in real life
If I wanted a game about real life people doing real things I would go outside.

I think you missed the point.

Unavoidable does not equal wanted. Of course fighting happens, that's why most of the hard OSR rules involve combat and don't leave it to theater of the mind, soft DM-may-I approaches. But gold-as-XP does mean that you want to avoid fighting as much as possible, as whatever you gain from it (pocket lint from orc guards and whatnot) is ancillary to a dungeon's true reward, which a party should be putting most of their effort in getting.

What do you think of this review /osrg/?

youtube.com/watch?v=tpqiJIGtkJw

I personally agree with it

What exactly does a wizard do after his one spell is cast?

Same thing he was doing before his one spell was cast.
What exactly does a fighter do when he's not fighting?

Probably the same thing everybody else is doing, exploring the dungeon.

I watched it and wrote down his points so you don't have to:
>3d6 stats and rolling hit dice is bad because unbalance
>Having a big group of characters is bad because then there's no adventure and everything is too easy
>Things are lethal but actually it's all luck-based so it's bad
>Playing more than one character is bad because then you don't feel like a hero
>They didn't get into a fight for the first hour of the game and that's bad
>Thieves are bad because the chance to succeed at skills are low
>Forcing doors has a higher chance of succeeding that lockpicking and that's bad
>You can't specialize when it comes to fighting, and that's bad
>Fighting has a lot of missing and that's boring and bad
>The dungeon was boring because nothing interesting was in it
>Map-making was tedious and boring
>Torch mechanics are boring because people bring a bunch anyway
>MUs have one spell and that's not fun because they don't have any other strengths beyond that
>Checking for traps in every room is bad because that makes the PCs appear paranoid rather than heroic
>They didn't find anything cool and that was bad
>"There's no reward for... It's just random luck for your stats and it's tedium in the exploration and your goal is to get money."
>His biggest gripe with the game seems to be that they went into the dungeon with 15 characters rather than 5
>Keeping track of things is bad
>They only got 157 experience each for 4 hours of crawling, which is bad because it takes too long to level
>Amazing exploration and encounters is apparently not possible because the game is about "slaying monsters and getting loot"

Honestly it seems like he had a shit DM and a shit group. Almost all of his gripes are about how the DM set up the dungeon and how the rest of the players responded to it. He doesn't really have much to say about the game and seems to have fundamentally misunderstood it based on his experience.

But what are your responses to things like forcing doors being more likely than lockpicking, or bringing in 16 characters, or taking a ridiculously long time to level up

There are videos of his experience with LL and Barrowmaze if you want to see whether it was a shit DM or not, I haven't watched them though.

NAYRT
>But what are your responses to things like forcing doors being more likely than lockpicking,
Lockpicking does not attract wandering monsters. Force the door if it fails.
>or bringing in 16 characters,
Use 16 characters and appoint a caller if you have 16 players.
Use 5 characters, probably appoint a caller , and be careful or buy hirelings if you have 5 players.
>or taking a ridiculously long time to level up
They were playing slow.

Not him but it makes logical sense that breaking down a door is easier then picking a lock, it's also much less stealthy.

How does one play fast? and which way is better? because it seems ridiculous to have 20+ sessions before leveling up to level 2

Gave it a watch.

"I really want to play a hero with other heroes, doing heroic things. I don't want to play treasure-hunting murderhobos. It doesn't interest me."

That sums it up.

Fights should be a matter of luck, and life or death. Going an hour without fights isn't a bad thing. Neither is rolling to bash open doors or pick locks. Someone (maybe Jeff Rients?) said that once you're rolling dice, you've already lost. Not everyone's opinion, but you should be aiming to avoid rolling dice (which always have a chance of failure) if you can help it.

15 characters was a mistake. The moment he talked about one player playing three characters and talking among them awkwardly, I realized I'd seen the playthrough.

He says mapping was fun but also tedious and took up the entire game. Early Barrowmaze has a lot of square and rectangular rooms, but it's better than diving straight into caves and other awkward shapes.

As for the speed of levelling up, that's completely controlled by the players. His rogue could hit level 2 pretty quickly if they were willing to push the risk-reward factor and grab more loot. They were playing a pretty open megadungeon so it's not like the DM wasn't giving them enough treasure to collect or monsters to fight (Barrowmaze has plenty of both).

I think the main problems are: it wasn't the kind of game he wanted or was used to; the DM gave the players too many PCs instead of hirelings; and they played a megadungeon as a one-shot. If they had played this every week for months or even years, and THEN he'd done a review, I think his opinion would be very different.

>Until we say otherwise, we search each room by doing _______
Also appoint a caller. Shit is magic, my dude.

What's a good module for started DMs of OSR? I know everyone and their mother says B2, but I've also heard not to use it many times

>Set rules up with Swords and Wizardry Complete, and houseruling in some changes to ease players' transition from 5e
>Pretty proud of it and the players, while cautious of change, get excited
>Xanathar's Guide to Everything comes out, now I am going to be the bad guy for not wanting to run 5e anymore
please end my suffering, these people are dear friends of mine but I think they're gonna resent me for putting my foot down.

Tower of the Stargazer or Tomb of the Iron God.

I will never understand the hype for XGtE, it's literally just a reprint of shit they post for free on their website except you have to pay for it now.
And most of it isn't even that interesting.

Tell them to run their own game if they want to play 5e. Otherwise, they playing S&W. It's not like Xanathars really added anything of substance, it's mostly just very slightly changed stuff from UA, and a large part of the book is DM options.

B1 gets a lot of flak for requiring more prep, but it's pedagogical. You won't learn the ropes setting it up, but you will get experience tying a few. B1 also gives better advice than B2.

>But what are your responses to things like forcing doors being more likely than lockpicking
You can do both on the same door, making it more likely to get past it.

>or bringing in 16 characters, or taking a ridiculously long time to level up
This is hilarious because having less character makes leveling faster, so the solution was right there in front of him. Other than that, the DM could have just added more treasure.

Are there better scans of these old modules anywhere? Maybe with the original fonts instead of horrible OCR?

And what system should I use, I don't really get the difference between the basics and experts, or the labyrinth lords and swords and wizardrys and OSRICs and Lamentations and all that

Lorraine Williams is mai waifu

I wrote one for new DMs and new players. It might help a bit. coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-megapost.html

I don't hate them. I just use skills that are closer to Fate aspects. No trapfinding, no social skills. Stealth is a separate stat for everyone.

It seems to work. If you have the "Sailor" skill (because you were a sailor) you could use it to:
-automatically tie knots in a rope or row a boat
-roll for contacts in a port (roll determining quality of contacts)
-lend a bonus to other sailors
-roll to pilot a ship single-handed or some other ludicrous feat
-sense changes in the weather
etc.

I like how DCC handles that with the 'Former Occupation" thing.

taxidermicowlbear.weebly.com/dd-retroclones.html

Despite what people will tell you, it doesn't really matter what system you use if you know what you're doing. I'd recommend straight up B/X (Moldvay and Cook's version of Basic Dungeons and Dragons from 1981). If that's too old for you then you can check out Labyrinth Lord which is basically the same with minor changes, and if that's not unique enough you can check out things like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and ACKS and such which have more houserules implemented and kind of go with their own style.

My vote goes for B/X (although you won't need the X half yet). If you're running Tower of the Stargazer v2, read 'sp' as 'gp' and understand that Armor Class goes up from 12 instead of down from 9. Tomb of the Iron God can be run as-is.

There's a 12.5 MB copy in the trove with marginally better ocr.

May you live in interesting times.

Basic and Expert go together. They're what most people use. Labyrinth Lord is a straight clone of Basic/Expert. OSRIC is a clone of AD&D mostly made to publish new materials for AD&D. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is B/X with a simplified encumbrance system, ascending AC, no weapon restrictions, rules for guns and early modern armor, comparatively buffed fighters, simplified and buffed d6 thief skills, dumb changes to the spell lists among other B/X houserules. S&W is OD&D

If you want Ascending AC but aren't interested in the other shit from LotFP, there's also B/X to be considered

How do you feel about resurrection of player characters, /osrg/?

I know a lot of modern OSR games, especially the more grimdark grit ones, really shy away from the concept. However in many oldschool games higher level characters, especially clerics, would revive each other constantly or with their vast saved up fortunes get revived by NPC healers.

Why are people today shying away from this "easy rez" concept?

>Labyrinth Lord is a straight clone of Basic/Expert.

For newbies I'd like to add that B/X has better writing and LL adds some minor changes. Go with the originals if you can.

Same goes for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and even games like Stars Without Number: they're not "basically just B/X". They add a lot of house rules and incompatibilities, and personally I think that's a bad thing. Your mileage may vary.

I don't think it's "people today", I think it's just an influential part of the OSR that enjoy having their games be highly lethal and therefore remove some of the more forgiving sides of the system like resurrection.

For me, in my current campaign world I'd like players to play new characters if they die, but if they want their old character back then they can travel to a bigger city to get them resurrected. This will often cause them to have to deal with a lot of things and end up a bit sidetracked, so it's only a thing they would want to do if they feel that's it's really important for them.

No but you missed the mention of dwarves.

I don't see a big issue with it. The king has reigned for 500 years, not all of them consecutive.

Could this be fixed if you change Find or Remove Traps to Find AND Remove Traps?

Has anyone here actually run Deep Carbon Observatory? Is it as great as everyone says it is?

I personally like DCC's method of "Quest for it".
If you want some powerful magic to remove a curse or bring back your friend you need to go on an adventure to find it.

I've read it, it's great. Right up there with Maze of the Blue Medusa and Veins of the Earth.

I haven't, but from reading it what impresses me most is the "here's what happens on each day" rival adventure party stuff.
It's almost certainly not _all_ going to come up, but it looks handy.

Dann shame he couldn't afford a real map.

HEY!! Veins of the Earth is good.

>Hey has anyone actually run this?
>I haven't but it's great anyway

Sums up this general, 90% never played true old school D&D

I think use of the word "Detect" would serve us better than the word "Find" (that is, they have a chance to simply know by sheer intuition that a trap is present without searching for it; and then must search for it manually). Thieves should maybe get a bonus to removing traps, but it shouldn't be an exclusive skill. Same with picking locks, honestly. The only skills that should be class abilities are Move Silently (which means literal silence) and Hide in Shadows (which is, as mentioned, a supernatural ability different from simply hiding).

I'd rather just reflavor them as Scouts and give them general anti-ambush and anti-trap abilities. Scouts keep you out of the mess, Fighters pull you back out of the mess, and Wizards make the mess disappear entirely. Clerics can do a bit of all three, to varying degrees.