So I think I've come to understand something Veeky Forums. About D&D and how all of it's rules interconnect...

More like unfair. You don't survive using skills, only by chance.

That's a pretty dumb comment, would you like to rephrase before people make fun of you?

>skills are just things on your character sheet that you use to solve problems with dice

Scrub. I bet you're the sort of player who whines about rust monsters being unfair

Meanwhile, a recent /osrg/ poster's players, when confronted with a rust monster, caught it in a sack and carried it upstairs, and used it to open a portcullis that had thwarted them on a previous floor of the dungeon.
Now those guys have some skill.

>D&D
>Literally only the first bullet applies to 4e
Really activates those almonds

He's talking about real D&D, not Wizards of the Coast and their "authentic" D&D substitutes.

It's less horror and more "dungeon crawler". All of those elements make staying in a dungeon longer then necessary dangerous, and make the primary focus of the game around dungeon crawling.

People on this board unnecessarily hate every edition of D&D and think it's all shit, but the rules as they were used for dungeon crawling are extremely solid and fit the game's themes and gameplay very well.

I can't believe it's not D&D!

>Meanwhile, a recent /osrg/ poster's players, when confronted with a rust monster, caught it in a sack and carried it upstairs, and used it to open a portcullis that had thwarted them on a previous floor of the dungeon.
Now those guys have some skill.
This is the kind of thing that makes me, a FATE-loving narrative-y kind of guy, highly interested in the OSR scene.

Fucking this Forever.
Dnd is good for dungeon crawling
Dnd is bad for fantasy super heroes on epic save the world adventure.

It occurs to me that there’s one big difference between D&D dungeon crawls and survival horror: in survival horror, the characters are propelled by external circumstances— most often something trapping them in a dangerous place—whereas characters often choose to enter dungeons. D&D characters are typically less desperate than survival horror characters and have a broader scope for making decisions about the circumstances they find themselves in.

>Dungeons and Dragons is a survival horror game in a fantasy setting.
>survival horror

Definitely more of the former, less of the latter. Horror only occurs when everyone at the table is willing to play it up. When death is expected and accepted to some degree, then it's a lot less terrifying.

As for the survival, that's the point. You're tombraiders looking for treasure, not witchers hired to murder monsters. Combat is dangerous unless you know exactly what you're doing, and it is rarely worth it when you have half a dozen ways of mitigating or avoiding it entirely.

Unfortunately this was all turned upside down on it's head when later editions removed the gold = xp rules.

Where do you find a sack big enough to fit a rust monster, that it can't just chew through?

I haven't found a system that gels with super fantasy save the world adventures more than 4e.

OD&D is Fantasy Vietnam.
AD&D is Fantasy Indiana Jones.
3.x is Fantasy Superheroes.
4e is Fantasy Die Hard.
I'm not sure about 5e yet, but I'd say it's Fantasy Goonies.

osr is all about skill without using mechanics. If you're rolling dice, it's because something bad happened.
It's a different playstyle to (say) fate, in that it's not about making a story, it's about exploring the setting. OSR games are /highly/ exploration focussed, with the PCs mostly as pieces to explore with.

OP is largely correct until you hit 3e. After that, DnD becomes an incoherant mess (with a brief foray into being a well-made tactical skirmish game in 4th). But up until ADnD 2, it's pretty good for survival horror, and some modern clones (LotFP, for example) play it up even more.

>Where do you find a sack big enough to fit a rust monster, that it can't just chew through?

Oh, they didn't have one big enough with them, he said their wizard used a spell to shrink it.

But you don't need a really huge one, they're not quite man-sized according to TSR era descriptions. And any canvas sack will do, they don't chew through cloth and stuff.

Oh hey, that was me. The guys are all 40 to 50 and have years of what youd call OSR gaming experience, but we arent all 'grogs' either. We play all sorts of shit but 1e AD&D is our main go to game.

>rust monster
I was DM and the party was rolling through a megadungeon, and were about 6th level on avg. They came across a portcullis that was resistant to the wizards knock spell, and the theif used his only vial of lock acid on the lock and it didnt work.
They moved on, had some battles and the wizard had a scroll of polymorph other (they wanted to add it to their spellbook later, so it was saved).
Cut to a couple levels down, they come across a pissed off hungry rust monster. The wizard had an AH HA! moment and whipped out his scroll. He rolled his penalty to cast tue spell above his ability (it was a 20% or so chance of failure) and polymorphed it into the size of a rat. They then trapped it in a canvas sack and marched up the 2 levels to the portcullis.
Exposing only the things head, and wearing heavy leather gloves, they used that fucker as an AD&D cutting torch and dropped the portcullis like a bad habit.

>how Rusty became a semi sentient party member mascot beloved by all is a much longer story

I grew up on AD&D 2e and it was nothing like survival horror. Exploration, yes, ingenuity too, but there was never the feeling that a wrong step could end your life.
Now, this could be in part due to how we played, but there was nothing in the rules to reinforce the supposed brutality. Even before the paradigm shift to d20, D&D accommodated different playstyles, and the recent re-readings of the OSR don't always map the experience of those who were there. There was a very good blog post on this from a guy called Lizard, but I can't track it down right now.

2e was when the official stuff started to shift away from the original playstyle, which is why you see some folks on the /osrg/ argue that 2e is not OSR. (It is, there are only a few significant mechanical differences from 1e, it's just not entirely geared towards the OSR play style, which is different.)

The shift was in large part market driven, though -- lots of people really wanted to use D&D to play this other sort of story-focused game, even if it was not particularly suited to it.

4E encounter balance it's a disaster get out of here

>4E encounter balance it's a disaster

It is. Since all you faggots ever cry about is balance, im sure youre all shit players with shit dms.

>The game is bad because I say so
>If you don't agree you're bad too

wew lad

>i cant refute what user said
>ill pull a snarky greentext outta my ass, thatll show him!
Wew fag

It has a serious HP scaling problem, even with the MV fix.

You... you never even made a point that could be refuted. You just said that it sucks with no reason why. So, what are you trying to prove?

The secret to OSR games is that you don't need clunky, intrusive mechanics to adjudicate every little thing. If you want to try something like bribing a monster, or solving a puzzle, you just...try it. It's a lot more loose and naturalistic way of playing than having to roll and cross reference giant lists of skills and statblocks of crunchy games, or having to parse the contrived "mother-may-I" rules of a lot of narrativist games. The big caveat is that it relies a lot more on the skill and creativity of the players and GM to make things interesting since there's less of a safety-net to fall back on.

So, you think that the OSR way is *less* "mother-may-I" than, say, I roll to decide who narrates the outcome of my attempt, like many storygames do?
Look, I'm all for old school games. I am an old gamer, in fact. But this attitude does not help anybody.

That he can collect (You)s?

I think it's badly phrased, but I see the point user is making.
A lot of storygames have quite tight rules over things like narrative control, introducing plot elements, and so on. I've seen a lot of games where the flow of 'counters' (fate points or whatever) around the table to determine who gets to decide what happens is where the real meat of the gameplay is.
OSR gameplay boils it down to
>player states actions and intent
>GM responds with outcome
as the basic engine of play, with mechanics only being brought in to adjudicate where common sense judgements become hard for the GM - combat, for example.
Since the fundamental cycle of play is so stripped back - there's no player-facing mechanics around scene framing or introducing plot complications or when you 'get to do stuff' - going from an OSR playstyle to a heavilly narrativist one can absolutely feel like your input is being restricted and funnelled. And, because you don't get the tools to shape things outside of your PCs actions, you'll probably feel equally restricted going from a storygame set of assumptions to OSR.

I know all this, and you explained it clearly, but my point is this:
OSR (or at least, this interpretation of OSR) literally relies on GM's judgment and common sense - it is literally "mother may I". Which is a perfectly valid playstyle, but also leaves room to a lot of dickery, and it's not like the history of the hobby isn't filled with egregious anecdotes of dickery. Treating it as if it was some sort of gospel or gaming redpill is irksome.

oh yeah, absolutely. Playing OSR with a GM who's a dickhead is absolute hell. On the other hand, run /properly/ it works really well.
To misquote dostoyevsky: good games are all equally good, bad games are all uniquely horrid.

I'd counter that trying to remove "mother may I" in order to prevent DM dickery is a futile pursuit. Evil DMs can not be made into good ones by the rules, not even if it totally says in the book they have to do X Y and Z, seriously for real you guys!
These sort of rules can tie a good DM's hands and yet they barely slow down the nasty ones. It's a false solution.

The only real solution is not to play with DMs if they're dicks, or at least to talk to them about what they did, if they're your otherwise good friends.

Have you ever actually played a "storygame" (for lack of a better term)?
They don't magically make a good GM out of a bad one, but the dynamic of narrative control can be really different. Heck, some of them don't even have a GM.

nayrt, but yes, yes I have.
In this instance, Ten Candles, which is about as narrativistic as it's possible to get.
It was shit, and the reason it was shit was because the host was shit. Sure, narrative control was distributed differently, but that just gave the game different avenues for him to ruin the game through his dickery.
That Guy will be That Guy regardless of system.

Yes, I love storygames. I'm just saying that the notion (especially popular in the 90s) that it's desirable (and possible) to completely rid a game of "mother may I" is wrongheaded. At some point, the DM needs to be able to weigh in, or why even have him there? Just make a GM-free system like Fiasco, and accept the limitations that puts on things.

>it is literally "mother may I"
Bruh, user just didn't realize that "mother may I" is the Forgeite terminology for the exact OSR play style, that's all.

>Treating it as if it was some sort of gospel or gaming redpill is irksome.
Here's the real gaming redpill: women are whores but seriously: you can't stop a bad DM with rules.

honestly the forge has a few good insights but they're buried in a huge pile of pseudo-accademic jargon they made up so they'd look serious, and then topped up with a massive bias towards certain playstyles. This is why the terminology for narrativist stuff sounds so much more dignified than for other stuff; the forgies /liked/ narrative play, and didn't bother disguising how they looked down on the rest.
But, you know, some of their stuff ('system matters' for example) is good.

>Open chest full of snakes
>sorcerer casts fireball on the party

"System matters" is hardly an insight, user, let alone a forgist insight

I dunno, user, have you met the average play group?

>Let's play a cyber-western! We'll use D&D, because that's what we know!

D&D is already an elf-western, though.

In what way is OD&D Fantasy Vietnam? I skipped right to AD&D

It was an old joke on some forums, but basically you're a bunch of underequipped grunts in hostile territory, with underground tunnels filled with traps and enemies behind every corner. A crude metaphor but it is fitting.

In first two editions very yes, and dungeon crawls still work best that way, but later editions only really have that because of design choices that grandfathered in, with a few exceptions like 5e's bounded accuracy being made as a response to 4e's not threatening at all 1hp mooks.

Is that a joke? In 3.5, 4, and 5 there are all kinds of redundants and copies with minor tweaks.

>there was never the feeling that a wrong step could end your life.
Is that a joke?

Not really. Though that is a popular meme lately.

His DM probably used optional rules to mitigate the lethality, and probably didn't make use of traps and stuff because it's "unfair."

It really shows that you are two kids who only heard about AD&D from the OSR general.
Not everything in 2e was Tomb of Horrors, lads. We were playing fucking heroic fantasy, and even if every single character I've seen at our table died an horrible death, it was never "survival horror".
Stop believing all the memes you are fed.

Only if your gunslingers are spellslingers, their staff focus being shaped like a rifle / wand carried in a holster

There are dozens of compendium entries dedicated solely to causing bullshit deaths.

...

I started playing Basic in '81, and nobody I knew played like that until around '87 or so, therefore you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about! QED!

>my anecdotes can beat up your anecdotes!

We enter the room ahead
>a black disk drops from the ceiling, swallows your buddies head, and behind chewing it off
I stab it!
>you stab your friend
I cast at it!
>it channels the spell into your friend
Well then how do we beat it?
>just start guessing. Hopefully you'll hit it before it finishes eating his head

After the session, discussing with the DM, the rogue now beheaded "WHO THE HELL STOPS TO POUR BRANDY ON A MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIGHT?! IN WHAT CONTEXT DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE AS A SENSIBLE TACTIC TO TRY?!"

Oh hey, it's a monster that only appeared in one tournament module once!

I'll chalk this one up to bad writing instead of bad design. The creator didn't set out to make a monster vulnerable to brandy. A player tried it out and the referee rolled with it. If someone gave you a creative suggestion, you should have rolled with it too.

Did you mean Monster Manual II 1983?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf-in-sheep's-clothing

What weapon is redundant in 5e?

Name one module besides S3 that uses it.

Spear and trident.
Longsword and battleaxe
Glaive and halberd
War Pick and Morningstar are objectively worse Rapier since finesse is optional
Warhammer is an objectively better flail because versatile

I'm pretty sure there are at least two more I'm missing but those are the ones I found on a cursory glance.

Who says it needs to be in a module? That's like saying an M15 card isn't real because it wasn't part of a story block.

I did and that's a dumb analogy. Modules were their main product.

Right. Not the PHB, DMG, and MM or anything like that.

Systems are like consoles, sold only because they must be.
WotC's main product is supplements. TSR's was modules.

And paizos is adventure paths

Also, they don't "must be" they give out the basic rules for free as SRD.

>I think of Erik Mona staring at a keyboard and thinking "What the fuck do I say about A Song of Silver that I haven't said about the last ninety-nine adventures?"
>I think of a customer going "Well, I could quit, but that'd mean admitting I was wrong about subscribing to the last hundred Adventure Paths, but fuck that. Someday I'll get to run them all, once the Singularity comes!"

>Basic
>Same thing as AD&D 2e

Okay

>Spear and trident.
>Longsword and battleaxe
>Glaive and halberd
>War Pick and Morningstar are objectively worse
>Warhammer is an objectively better flail because versatile
Correct
>Rapier since finesse is optional
And you’ve confirmed yourself as a fucking moron. You were doing good until then.

>Nitpicking this hard to defend your pet game

You 5e kids should really have learned something from the edition wars.

>4E encounter balance it's a disaster
Well, there was this point which is the one he was referring to. The point that you claim he didn't say so you could refute it.

Idiot.

God, elf westerns are terrible. Just fucking awful.

Every single one of them has these long, lingering shots of desert. No characters, just desert. It’s probably great if you’re an elf and nature occupies half your brain, but to anyone else it’s dull as hell.

And then there’s the set design. Elves don’t quite grasp the “hardscrabble frontier town” idea and they definitely hate the aesthetic, so every town in every elf western looks like it was painstakingly assembled by skilled artisans who were told to construct something with “rustic charm.” You’ll have a scene where someone’s getting hanged, and the gallows is covered in intricate floral carvings or something. You’ll get a shot of a bar which is supposed to be full of macho types and it’ll look like the inside of a prestigious library. It’s that bad.

Probably the most head-breakingly stupid part, though, is the way the plots are usually driven by something that happened a century ago even though the frontier ISN’T THAT FUCKING OLD. It makes no goddamn sense.

I’ve only scratched the surface, here. Just... just avoid elf westerns. They don’t get the idea. They think they do, but they don’t.

The burden of proof is on him tho?

Is this going to be about the "muh broken math" meme?

"4e encounter balance is a disaster" is not a point, since it doesn't bring anything to sustain that statement.

That said, it's still wrong. If "encounter balance" refers to how you build encounters, the 4e system is absolutely wonderful: it's a matter of simple level equivalencies (rougly, 1 PC = 1 equal-level standard monster) and, due to how the math works, the GM has a very good estimate of what to expect; plus, the XP are calculated in a way that there is a certain amount of encounters expected over one level, so that gives the GM also an idea about how to pace them.

If the complaint was about the monster math meme, it's enough to sit down and take a look at the numbers to see how well they work. Monster stats scale linearly, PC stats do too but in a slightly bumpier way. A gap is created between the two, but it barely goes over 1 single point of difference up until epc tier - and that's assuming very average characters, so the gap can easilly be filled with a very slight amount of optimization (getting 18 or 20 in the main stat instead of 16, getting two specific feats) and decent party teamwork. The math has been reviesd, but numbers at hand, the revision touched exclusively monster average damage and the HPs of solo monsters, all the other calculations stayed the same. A tribe of number-crunching minmaxers did not do the game any favor, by crying "broken" over every minimal difference, but the game. just. works.

But 5e isn’t my pet game, I quit it and started playing OSR. Anyone who claims rapier is redundant still doesn’t know the first fucking thing about 5e and clearly hasn’t read the PHB.

If the guy got 5 out of 6 right, and was wrong about the rapier, his point still stands though.

What else would I do on Veeky Forums than nitpick? I’m still not the user he was responding to and I have no desire to defend 5e, but I still wouldn’t listen to someone’s far-reaching claims about D&D who doesn’t even have a grasp of the editons he does talk about. I mean rapier is THE least redundant weapon in the game, bar ranged weapons perhaps.

>With this in mind I think it's transparently obvious what this game is... Dungeons and Dragons is a survival horror game in a fantasy setting.
I think next to no groups play it this way, but it certainly would've been a cool campaign to do it that way? :3 Lots of focus (and penalties) on resources and supplies; food, water, medicine (if you don't have an endless supply of cure poison/disease spells) etc...

You DM fucked up
>its attack methed causes the victim to suffer whatever other spell effects the executioner's hood sutains
Meaning that it's not immune to spells by transferring the effects, it's just the victim is also damaged by the spells.
So yeah, a fireball would have worked. Your DM needs better reading comprehension.

>capped

So it's less a case of "D&D is survival horror" and more a case of "GM is a dick".

"DM can't read" ≠ "DM is a dick"

Do you know what B/X is