/osrg/ - Old School Revival General

Fair cop.

I'm mostly fine with the colors I chose. Could probably use less yellow on the "Jungle Hills" but I'm feeling the laziness that comes with having completed something.

not sure OP understands phrase "beating a dead horse"

If you pirated stuff and then regretted not buying it, what's stopping you from buying it now, exactly?

It went out of print?

No, but I regret Kickstarting MCC instead of the Umerican Survival Guide.

Been loving the fuck out of the Dungeon Dozen pdf. Anyone else used this thing?

Maybe not, but Raggi deserves to be beaten anyway tee bee aytch

>unrelated anime OPs
>meme shitpost OPs
Ah, so we're in the death spiral now. 'Twas fun lads.

There are no spirals. It's cyclical.

pandius.com/

>18, 200+ page PDF detailing the world of Mystara
>New classes/class variants
>So much shit

See you all never again.

MSPaint user... do yourself a favour and just download Paint.NET. It’s the same thing but with layers.

If I like what I pirate I buy it in deadtree.

Paint.net is trash.

I layout whole pdfs in ms paint and I don't see the problem.

Which game does firearms best? Why?

For that to be the case there'd have to be a cycle. So far it's gone from small comfy threads, to big popular threads, to rampant shitposting. If it then returns to the small comfy threads which it will not then you might be able to call it cyclical.

I think, like maybe, house ruling firearms into the system you are currently playing is best.

You know, instead of contributing to the shitposting spiral, you could try to make the most of our "last few threads" instead of fatalistically whining about it.
Or wait until after it dies for real to start up the small comfy threads again

My firearms are best, obv
I really need to update my blog but the muse is on vacation

What are some simple rules for hexcrawls? I mean less domain management and more the "wilderness travel" aspect. Something easy to use but with a little more meat than the OD&D rules

...

>2 silver for a bullet
Good god, man, that's 'spensive.

Thanks user, I'll tweak this as needed

You... do realize that what I've been doing this entire time, right? I appreciate the flattery thinking I could produce transparency with such a limited toolset from skill alone, but no. It's always been paint.net.

Hey everyone, I'm working up a magic system that uses magical words. Any ideas for it? Basically I'm thinking spells should have some kind of word combinations- like you could imagine "Force" and "Projection" meaning creating some kind of blast of force. Or "Barrier" and "Fire" to produce a wall of flame, or a shield of flame around a person.

I'm not exactly sure what the limits should be yet. For starters, how many spells should be able to be cast per day? Is there some kind of limit to speech, or does it drain energy to do so? I would imagine speaking a basic word, like "Fire" by itself could just conjure some fire without form or shape, which makes sense as a basic spell, or perhaps could only manipulate fire in noncomplicated ways and it ways it already behaves. So simply speaking the word for water could make it flow in a different direction, but not up, and you couldn't make it not get you wet when you walk into it.

Please do not suggest the magic words post from the Papers & Pencils blog. That system only applies to spell research and itsn't exactly what I'm after.

Download World of the Lost for LotFP from the trove and look at it's section on hexcrawling rules.

It's been
>Please do not suggest the magic words post from the Papers & Pencils blog.
Oh.

I don't think you can do it much differently without having hugely limited effects.

You don't even need an alpha channel for that though? You just need a color picker macro and some patience.

>Which game does firearms best? Why?
To be honest, I've never really been fond of the typical approaches to firearms: they generally invent all sorts of weird little subsystems while otherwise having, say, a crossbow be mostly the same as a greatsword. If you're going to introduce granularity, go whole hog on it, don't half-ass it.

So my personal opinion is that they're pretty much just crossbows. Move around ranges a bit perhaps, adjust reload times if necessary, change the damage die to whatever you want.
I'm an LBB guy, so for the most part that means 1d6 damage. Maybe I'll nick the Arquebus ranges from Chainmail since I'd need to grab ranges from there anyhow, but I honestly don't see the point of all the "oh, it ignores armor and kills on hit and on a failed attack the gun explodes in your face and looks like a peeled banana" rules people like heaping onto them.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j-EyBNZozE

Here's a magical trick that worked in the Windows XP version of MSPaint but may or may not work now: make the primary color the color that you want to replace, the secondary color the color that you want to replace it with, select the eraser tool, and right click on the image.
IIRC that's how it used to work, anyhow. I haven't done any work in MSP in years.

Not what I'm referring to.

In he's using transparency to blend 2 colors, but the end result isn't actually transparent.
I'm saying he could rig something up fairly easily that would take 2 RBG values and fraction then spit out an RBG value.

Wait wait wait. It might just be
R = λ * R_1 + (1-λ) * R_2
G = λ * G_1 + (1-λ) * G_2
B = λ * B_1 + (1-λ) * B_2
which you don't even need a macro for. You can do that by hand.

ok so if I'm a newschool fag (which i am) whose only ever played 3.5 and 5e and i want to try the old school stuff, whats the best game option to play just starting out?

I want to say it's an American thing. Guns are the be all, end all of personal combat, so when they are introduced to a game that doesn't normally have them they can't behave just like other weapons, they have to have special rules and effects to set them apart - and yeah, the same people writing these intricate firearm rules think nothing of letting the same rules handle bows, crossbows and thrown weapons, for instance. Note that you can go the extreme other way, though - in WFRP1E there was literally no reason at all to ever use a firearm, since you needed advanced skills for them and they were slow and dangerous to use without having a reason to use them over any other ranged option in the game.

>Which game does firearms best? Why?
overall I think I like Fantastic Heroes & Witchery's the best, although ones in The Nighmares Underneath and Pars Fortuna work well also(albeit are much simpler in nature)

Moldvay B/X, or any compatible retroclone.

>inb4 Basic Fantasy shilling

So question: what defines something as "old school" to you?

a game about the adventure more than its about the characters individually

a game where combat is not safe and victory is not guaranteed

a game where the rules dont try to cover every possible action

a game with very little in the way of character customization or narrative elements

Thoughts on this save system?

Basic Fantasy gets recced because it's B/X with ascending AC and races, which makes it attractive to newcomers

This guy's got the right idea Though I would point out that "what is old school" is a much broader question than "what is OSR" -- the latter is anything mechanically compatible with TSR D&D.
Traveller is old school as fuck, but it's not OSR.

Something can be old school and not be OSR, and vice versa. Railroady Dragonlance adventures are eady to run in any OSR system, but they're not very old school, even though they're old, if you catch my drift.

It would make more immediate sense if you changed the format to show the saves from worst to best or best to worst. Other than that, I would say that many saves don't have an obvious stat which should affect them and the bonus will rarely be significant, so maybe remove that.

>it's B/X with ascending AC and races
So it's just b/x but better?
Ascending AC is objectively more intuitive and there is no actual reason to use descending from a game design standpoint. descending is more aesthetically pleasing though.
And race as class is just boring honestly. Only works for LOTR games.

Maybe so. I just feel like it's one of the most bland of retroclones, and can't see why it gets pushed so often here. I guess "basic bitches" is the right term.

>many saves don't have an obvious stat which should affect them and the bonus will rarely be significant, so maybe remove that.
Alright. That was my maim sticking point. I know bx doesnt modify saving throws but it just feels wrong to roll an 18 for dex yet be no better at dodging dragons breath.

Start wiyh Basic: either Holmes, Moldvay or Mentzer (check the trove to see which one has better explanation in your opinion)

Then go to Expert set or AD&D

There are some clones if you're interested, like Other cool clones are Lamentations of the Flame Princess (get the no art version), Adventurer Conqueror King System and Beyond the Wall

Try this.

LotFP is also bland without it's modules. Same with LL, B/X, S&W etc. AAC is arguably better and race/class division offers myriad more options for players without getting into stupid territory. Plus the bajillion supplements created by the community are, for the most part, quality. The print option is $5 and everything they have ever released is free.

>descending is more aesthetically pleasing though.
No it isn't

Race as class doesn't fit LotR. Gimli is no more of a warrior than everyone else that's not a hobbit in the Fellowship and if anything Legolas would be a fighter/thief or ranger

Its not more or less bland than moldvay d&d or Labyrinth Lord. And its only like 5 bucks for a book on amazon. Its a great deal for someone new instead of telling them to hunt down a copy of moldvay d&d from the 80s on ebay or labyrinth lord for 30 bucks.

So... you're claiming that "old school" is more of a PLAY STYLE than necessarily a mechanical construction?

My players are pissed off at me for putting a cap on female strength. What should I do?

>AAC
What's this?

Kill yourself?

That's a good place to start.

Ascending Armor Class. 11 is unarmed, 18 is platemail, (or whatever) etc.

Probably remove the cap. It's bound to offend people and only really matters on the niche case that someone rolls high Str and wants to play a female character, cutting into people's fun for petty "realism"

Talk to the ranch-girl bartender who used to sling me drinks back in Arizona and then tell me that is still a valid rule.

Unarmored should be 10

read:
>(or whatever)

Suck it up and listen to them if you’re the odd man out. It’s one thing to have fluff implications from gender, it’s another to screw over players who wanted to have female characters. Alternatively, put a cap on male Wisdom.
good on you for going with the cap instead of the -4 str meme

BFRPG has an unarmored AC of 11.

Shit clone desu

Not him but I would say that youre right to an extent. But only to an extent because there are just hard coded limits to running a game like 3e or 4e with the above stated guidelines.

The characters are extremely customizable and take so long to create that it would be very unfun for them to die.

Combat in those game is just baseline not that dangerous. You can make it more dangerous of course, but you'll be "breaking RAW" as your players might tell you.

And I shouldnt even have to saw that the rules are fiddly as fuck and definitely try to cover everything they can.

With this is mind, yes "old school" is more of a playstyle and way of thinking than any hard coded mechanics, but temper it with the knowledge that some of these philosophies stemmed from the hard mechanics and not the other way around.

Do men have a cap on strength as well by chance?

I mean that literally it's impossible for humans to achieve a certain limit of strength if you wanna be all "muh realism" about it.

Like if you want the female cap to be lower I guess that's one thing but saying women need a cap and men don't that men can literally become superhuman while women need to be in the pen is... well it's telling of a few things.

For OSR it is. Probably just a nostalgia thing then.

Alright then I'm out of ways to defend it. I agree with you, btw. Although, ranger in d&d has never been like Aragorn or legolas, with the spellcasting and all. Actually I've always hated ranger mechanics in 1e and 2e even though I prefer them to the dual- wielding animal- companion spell- casting snowflakes of the post 3e era.

Ehh I'd say that at least low-level 4e is easy enough to make characters for.

At least comparable to 2e.

>The characters are extremely customizable and take so long to create that it would be very unfun for them to die.
At least we're no longer in the '90s with its systems that combined complex chargen with high-lethality, "realistic" combat. Looking at you, L5R.

I'd remove it and just pretend strength is a measure of finesse and control instead of raw power. Or that she's really strong but still wiry. For my own characters and npcs I'll never make a female with more than 14 strength in any d&d edition but I don't like to restrict others. Not to mention a female character played by a female player, a fighter is a good place to start especially if she is a novice.

One option, if you're up for nicking subsystems from other systems, is the Syntactic Magic from GURPS Thaumatology.

To make things brief:
You have a number of verbs that describe what your spell does.
>Suggested ones are Communicate, Control, Create, Heal, Move, Protect, Sense, Strengthen, Transform, Weaken/Destroy.
You have a number of nouns that describe what your spell affects.
>Suggested ones are Air, Animal, Body, Earth, Fire, Food, Image, Light, Magic, Mind, Plant, Sound, Spirit, Water.
Verbs and nouns have defined costs - time and energy, in GURPS' case, although given the long rounds and different system of D&D that should probably be changed.
Spells combine all relevant words, using either the lowest or greatest cost and time amongst the verbs and nouns - GURPS uses lowest as default since each additional verb is -1 to a skill check, but suggests using the greatest if you want to keep things simple.
Effects are generally good for 1d6 of damage or healing or +-1ish to stats (10 points in (dis)advantages, in GURPS terms), against a single man-sized target, for a set duration (one minute in GURPS). AoEs, healing and damage multiply energy cost, additional targets are (roughly) a set +1/per.

Beyond that it's entirely freeform, though: Create Water as an AoE can make it rain, Move Body could let you fly, Create Move Fire Body could be a fireball, etc. etc. You might want to introduce a skill check of some sort to put some limits on it, I dunno.

I'll leave the question of how applicable this is as an OSR system to you, but at least it's something to look at. The GURPS general links their trove in a PDF in the OP.

>The characters are extremely customizable and take so long to create that it would be very unfun for them to die.
Lol
>giving a fuck about unfun
>not turning your PF campaign super hardcore and not giving a fuck about CR at all anymore.
>not hoping at least 1 or 2 characters die before the campaign ends, both for the cheap jolt of drama it's provide, and to lube them up for thhe huge osr cock you intend to stick in them once you are done with the campaign and can finally CHUCK PF in the bin where it belongs.

>what defines something as "old school"
In the broadest sense, lack of a unified mechanic and the presence of subsystems.

Did you give women characters the option to roll exceptional Charisma as detailed in The Dragon? If not, you're doing it wrong.

Ah, here it should be.

Don't do that. It breaks immersion with nothing productive coming from it.

>LotFP is also bland without it's modules.

Not really, I can see what its selling points are clearly, between the specialist and the encumbrance rules and the 17th century stuff and the nice firearms rules. Then you tack on excellent modules on top, and it's got legs.

Labyrinth Lord is fairly bland at its core, it's true, since it's just B/X with a few small changes. The AEC is excellent, though, and lets you easily slot in the bits of AD&D you want. Outside the core it has also built up something of a brand identity with high quality modules and supplements like An Echo Resounding, Fever Dreaming Marlinko, or Misty Isles of the Eld.

BFRPG gives me nothing I can't just houserule on my own, apart from race-and-class. And I've already got Labyrinth Lord's AEC for that, if I cared, which I don't. Its modules are crap, though.

By bland, I mean "doesn't give me any compelling reasons to buy it when I have B/X." Labyrinth Lord's AEC is better at what BFRPG does IMO, LotFP has actual improvements to the core rules.
The only good reason I see to buy BFRPG is that it's cheap, and that's not enough for me.

>Although, ranger in d&d has never been like Aragorn or legolas, with the spellcasting and all.
The Ranger is almost literally just Aragorn with the serial numbers filed off and given one hell of a wank. It doesn't fit all that well with the actual unwanked Aragorn, but then neither does Len Patt's fireball-slinging Gandalf.
The spellcasting mostly has to do with Aragorn's athelas-related stuff, I suspect. In any case, note how the OD&D ranger is explicitly allowed to use crystal balls!

>not hoping at least 1 or 2 characters die before the campaign ends
That's a pretty lenient campaign, even by PF standards.

Honestly? It's mostly up to design-related stuff. It's less refined, the editing isn't as tight, the art may or may not be ass.

It's something that sticks out pretty hard related to other stuff: you can immediately tell what period an RPG is from by looking at the design of a single page.
Like, does it have interior color? Well, I guess it's probably from the 90s onwards.

There's definitely mechanical stuff to it as well, though. There's a certain lack of focus in the mechanics, an uncertainty of what exactly they're going for. Things may be left unexplained because the author thought them obvious.

Basically, there's the old school of game design and then there's a number of newer schools of game design. The oldest school is the one popular around here - roughly '74 to mid-'80s. It's very scattershot, though, since everyone was new and pretty much making things up as they went along.
Another very obvious (and now mostly dead) school you can identify is the one prevalent in the '90s, mostly defined by metaplots. Metaplots and truckloads of setting supplements and, as that one user said, complicated chargen combined with lethal combat.
Since the naughties you're started to see actual focused games come up as well, and ones with strong universal mechanics - those are clear signs of the current school of game design.

Not taking a side in the argument, but you're overlooking a paradigm shift.

Before Clerics, Fighting Man was the 'everybody' class. Normal Men weren't 0th level Fighting Men, but that's a good way to think of them. Gimli and Frodo are Fighting Men simply by not being Magic-Users.

Also player skill over character skill in as many cases as possible. Enough of "but my character would know what to do cause he got 18 int".

the simplicity and neutralness of the system is kind of a virtue. Either you want super-focussed thematic games, or something middle-of-the-road as a baseline to homebrew from.

Not put a cap on female strength. You roll 3d6 in order for your stats, and then pick class/species/gender/culture based off that. If somebody who rolled strength 18 wanted to be playing as a frail 75-year old or a teenage girl, that's probably a problem, but I see no issue with 18 strength on a scary amazon bitch. (As a player, I do tend to enjoy playing scary amazon bitches).

Just about everybody has thought of it (me included). Go read Ars Magicka and use their system.

HAH

If I'm gonna use FRW I may as well just have it be bonuses vs a DC. I like the characters knowing what they have to roll for a save so that way when they fail it's not "my fault" as the DM, if that makes sense.

I'm just worried when I present this system to my 3.pf group they're gonna start poking holes in it "why don't my attributes help my saves, like user that makes no sense." Makes me consider straight attribute checks (like d20 + mod) for saves, and just add half your level. But again the same issue as 5e has where It and Cha saves come up very rarely.

>Not to mention a female character played by a female player, a fighter is a good place to start especially if she is a novice.
You can roll as high as 18/50 as a fighter before you lose the option of playing a female. For humans that is. Half-orcs might allow 18/75? I don't have the table on hand.

>animal- companion snowflakes of
Not sure about 1e, but their followers table has monster entries in 2e.

>That's a pretty lenient campaign, even by PF standards.
Uh...not in my experience. Although every 3.pf player I've met makes super effective characters. Unless I literally tailor encounters to defeat them and change the course of the campaign. That said I have had 2 and a half characters die in my campaign so far, but only because of staggeringy stupid decisions like throwing fireworks into an orc camp then trying to lose the pursuing orcs by hiding inside a sarcophagus in a temple that had a wraith inside. Or going alone to visit a person of interest in a murder without telling the rest of the party where he was going, then getting killed when she turned out to be a succubus. Or, while invisibr amd scouting, shooting a 10 foot tall demon in the mouth while he was eating (I had mercy because it was more fun for the character to be humbled by being paralyzed by blasphemy, than outright killed). And what pisses me off about the first one is that the guy shouldn't even have died, he had such insane buffs to fortitude from some bullshit trait that if I hadn't forgotten you get fortitude saves against wraith attacks he would have lived, although the pcs had no magic weapons at that point so they would have been hard pressed to rescue him and defeat the wraith.

2e came after Drizzt existed, if I recall. I like dual wielding and I like Drizzt but I hate how animal companions have become such a thing for them. I also hate ranger followers in general, rangers imo are one of the few classes that I think should rove alone. I have very strong feelings about my favorite class though.

>Not sure about 1e, but their followers table has monster entries in 2e.
It's a thing even in OD&D - 1E toned it down a bit, in fact. IIRC they replaced the Gold Dragon with a Bronze or something similar?

For those running hexcrawls, how do you guys go about stocking your hexes? What do you lean on the most?

I made a custom deck of cards

1/4 or 1/8 have civilization features.
1/3 of those that don't have landmarks.
1/3 of those that don't have landmarks have lairs.
1/3 of those that don't have lairs have dungeons.

3/6 of lairs are nonhumanoid, 2/6 are bestial, and 1/6 are humanoid. This is typically whatever's around.

In theory, I've changed to creating regions with separate encounter lists. In practice, my hexcrawling game that I was running was using per-hex terrain generation, and also hasn't had a session since. I've been running a megadungeon instead.

If you find a road, I use a slightly off-the-cuff-modified version of Lungfungus' road generation method.

That covers me in most cases.

That said, if you want interesting things to stick in your hexcrawls, Telecanter has several blogposts about it. I've yet to use any myself, though, even if I think they are really neat ideas.

It's not a spiral. It's a ring viewed in 1 dimension. You going to do something about it?
I like it.
Seconded. The mechanics /help/, but they don't /define/.

I mean that there is a particular play style that can be called "old school," which can be found in various old systems and some new ones. It maps only imperfectly onto the OSR thread, since not everyone is here for that old school play, and you can ahieve that same style elsewhere, while this thread is generally more focused on OSR rules and compatible materials. Also the GLOG.

Still, OSR rules are arguably the most well suited to that old school style of play of any system out there, so putting the two together is like chocolate and peanut butter.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2018/02/osr-inner-workings-of-creation.html

This is more worldbuilding stuff, but the discussion of scale and the Sauna Line might be useful (or at least interesting) for anyone curious about deep caves and geology.