Welcome to /osrg/, the Old School Renaissance General! Here we discuss editions of Dungeons and Dragons from the TSR era, as well as retro-clones of those editions and other games and material compatible with them.
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Topic for Discussion:
How long have you been playing or running OSR? How has your play style or DMing style changed over the years?
Give me your spiciest new magic system ideas.
We don't force stories into our games. Things happen in the world. Each character has a personality and a point of view. The PCs and the GM act scenes out.
I don't understand the new concept of "roleplaying" people use, they aren't playing a role, they're emoting. I've seen newcomers think "roleplaying" consists of describing every single action with a paragraph of text.
Players cast using their HP, but there's also martial casting so a fighting man can use hp to jump farther and hit harder. A thief can cast to raise his lockpicking chance.
I'm running Basic Fantasy RPG for a couple of people soon because of the very fast char creation rules. How valid / flavorful would be a houserule to give early magic users the following, self-crafted item: a wand of force which is (and I don't know which one):
>a regular attack you have to aim and which deals 1d4 dmg
>a spell that always hits akin to magic missile but which deals 1d3
The reasoning here is that early game wizards throwing knives and slings kinda lacks flavor to me, but I don't know if such an item would be against the spirit of the OSR, esp. since by design it would have infinite charges and not encumber the mage.
It's a treacherous meme that has somehow crept into the hobby to mislead newcomers into creating shitty 'quirky' snowflake characters thar "need" to have intrincate, "original" one page long backstories.
This same poisonous thought leads to DMs thinking that every single location, NPC or encounter needs to have super complex motives, plots, descriptions, or backstories.
It's all false. The reason every single RPG enthusiast comes to the table is not for the story. The interaction between the different elements in the world and how it changes over time in unexpected ways because of them is what is interesting.
it's okay, i guess, you're just replacing knives and slings with something with a more magical flavor without it having any real consequence on gameplay, balance etc.
>a spell that always hits akin to magic missile but which deals 1d2
This may be of use to you.