/osrg/ - old school rant general

well my thought is that Intelligence is the brute force approach to convincing someone. This Is Objective Reality I Am Right.

Wisdom is dex, because it's more slippery. a string of smaller, more easily grasped arguments to bring them in line with your way of thinking.

I use Charisma as essentially an indicator of composure and willpower. a guy with high charisma isn't about to be lead around by the nose by any prick, and a guy with low charisma can be convinced to do just about anything. Hence, it's your HP.

>How many cults does it take to overcrowd a mega dungeon?
Only one if they have enough members.

>ctrl+f face
>Phrase not found

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean

It's a fancy bit of chink culture that boils down to "hazy social currency"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

He noticed no mentions of face in your Three Kingdoms rules, and since it's a pretty important concept in that setting, he disapproves of the lack thereof.

Eh, seems more like a campaign level resource, like gold for hiring troops or purchasing supplies, than something you find in a heated debate (which the rules are supposed to cover)

Face matters in any social encounter, but petty bullshit is where face matters most

What do you guys use to format fancy PDFs?

I'm pretty new to this and using Libre Office with low success, I just want to do some sections in normal one column and other in two column style.

But do I want to be explaining a complex socio-political concept of a foreign land to my players, or do I want to be able to hand them easily understood rules and get playing?

I'm partly basing this on the debate minigame in ROTK X by koei, and I don't think face cropped up at all.

LibreOffice if I'm feeling lazy about it. Good luck with different sections like that though. I normally try to avoid that. You could always splice pdfs together though.

LaTeX if I want to get fancy. Which I usually don't.

...

It's a pretty ground-level concept and you're the guy who wants to run the setting. Run the setting or don't, but don't ostensibly run it.

Face = Honor, boom we're done now get to pursuing Lu Bu.

Looking this up it's looking like it's basically reputation/Honor. make that a modifier to AC or damage from the higher party against the lower.

No joke, Powerpoint or its equivalents. Text boxes, custom page sizes, easy image editing.

latex is unironically cancer

How did we trick our academics into doing their own layouts?

Which?

...

I'd have gone in a more 'literally a financial instrument' route and just made it be g.p. values worth of money you can bribe people with by acting submissive. Maybe with a small bonus to rolls against people with much less face than you.

that was my first instinct, but from how his complaint was it not being in a system designed to handle semi-formal debates and argumentation

How do I slowly transform my 5e game into an OSR game

1. Use a different rulebook.
2. Convert their characters the best you can.

All done!

You don't. You stop running 5E, break out your OSR system, and say "Okay, we're playing this now" at your players. It's your show.

Talk to your players like reasonable adults, then start a new game entirely because 5E's character-driven model of play doesn't mesh well with OSR's earned-reward system of play?
Whatever's easiest. It's just numbers.
We told them it was easy and that admitting defeat would be like admitting they couldn't use a mouse.
A bit, but practice helps. Just focus on your principles. When you get panicked, you forget the rules but you remember the intent. Focus on the intent and you'll do fine.

You can actually do a lot with just plain old MS Word. Cerainly any basic thing like you've just listed.

5e isn't as difficult as some other systems to make OSR-esque. Stuff like feats and multiclassing are technically only optional rules that you could do without (and if Mearls is to be trusted, apparently a lot of players do), and there's an official variant for gutting the skill system into something absurdly simple. From that point on just DM with the mindset of relying upon player intelligence and dungeon crawling.

Obviously it'd be ideal to actually use an OSR system but I'm assuming that's not an option. It's probably best to try weaning your players into it anyway.

>if Mearls is to be trusted

kek

Mearls is a fuck but I could see it being true if only because of how many new players 5e brought into the fold.

I still think the "build a character" style of play is very difficult to port into OSR terms.

Like, just take a look at Warlock. It's a class that's almost entirely "stuff I should be earning by fucking about in a dungeon and cutting deals with eldrich powers", but instead, it's just "level up and your Patron gives you +1d6 damage woo."

And all Warlocks, despite being unique eldritch creatures in the fluff, are mechanically the same, and you do certain "builds" to make the best ones, and god forbid you should meddle with the balance of them.

Now... how do you port that mentality into OSR?

>Talk to your players like reasonable adults

I'm not an adult though

Microsoft Word 2010

>Now... how do you port that mentality into OSR?
Glogposting?

MS Word has tons of functions to make fancy handouts. Even columns are an easy one button thing to set up. You can also do text boxes, text wrapping around images, shading, textures. It's all there.

Nah. The GLOG might have weird character templates, so it /looks/ character driven, but most of the cool stuff that happens comes up during play, not because of class features.
Speaking of, it's been a while. Maybe I'll take a break from hexes to write up a few underground classes, like the Cannibal Gourmet and the Magic-Eater.

maybe take a Fire Emblem approach to Glog? basic classes that promote into advanced classes with another 4 templates to take?

Oh it's certainly difficult and I wouldn't describe my suggestions as pure OSR, but if user can't get his group to switch tabletops then I don't think its' a bad alternative. Sometimes you gotta meet your group halfway on things.

>2e is a good game

Explain the dart proficiency fighter

>"build a character" style...ported into OSR

Barf. The WoW character build mentality is what drove me away from 3.+ whatever.

What's your problem with it?

Fortune cookie proclaiming death (in bed, by wraith ambush, tonight) on its eater. The lucky numbers will double the session's haul if used at roulette.

I've got 1 built that way (the Surly Gnome class) and I think the underground classes will be limited template classes (so you need to take at least 1 other class). To be a Cannibal Gourmet you need to have at least 1 template in another class, for example.

Any other underground class ideas?

Oh for sure, but sometimes your group isn't making informed choices. Given the choice between pizza and pho, people who don't know what pho is will choose pizza even if they're tired of pizza.
It was a rhetorical question. Please don't actually try.

What about templates you can start with that end before D?

It's a meme that only works well at the table if your DM allows a specific set of optional rules and splats.

Yeah, that's an option too. Cave Urchin might be one of those.

optional rules yes, but splats? I mean yeah, it becomes BETTER with splats, but it's still real fuckin broken in the base game

Nah. You're lucky to get one round of darts off before your targets close with you and then you've wasted all those slots. It's only notably powerful in very narrow and specific circumstances.

Plus, you look like this. youtube.com/watch?v=9SJnSmQCxkg

...

To give an example, for each page here there's three columns, six tables (with custom colours), three embedded centre images, a background image, a chapter-wide header, and inserted page numbers. All with Word. And I wouldn't even say any of this is particularly advanced; it's more a matter of knowing where the commands are. You don't need crazy software to do nice stuff.

Word 2010 supremacy 4 life. I really hate that they removed so much of the context menu stuff in later versions, since I used all those.

Boring.

I made a really fun little ruleset about creating monsterous hybrids and crossbreeds. Hope you enjoy it.

I thought into the odd was good, then I listened to the GG no RE actual play of Deep Carbon Observatory

You know that party that's supposed to be hunting you the entire module and is supposed to be one of the largest threats? While in the first flooded town, one of the character used a bone magnet (does exactly what you think it does) to just pull them off from in the distance, and force hold them while the party shot him dead, him being well out of melee reach, and too slow to pull out his bow

He then continued to force push anything that had any bones into the distance, nullifying all pretense of combat being deadly

How is this supposed to be fun?

You can hit your allies in melee with darts

So does the ref just bash the two things' statblocks together and tweak numbers until it looks reasonable?

Of course dude.

Gentlemen, I give you ... the Owlbear!

Cool.

Every time I wanna run an old school dungeon in 5e I think of wizzes spamming Fire Blot and Mage Hand and then I stop.

lomion.de/cmm/humakara.php
lomion.de/cmm/darkstal.php

Pirate Luchador (AC; HD 1+1; MV 12; #AT 1 (at +2); D 1-6; SA Wall of Fog at will; SD 3 dice Fireball on death; Save T1; Ml 12; AL C)
1 plus 25 lucha fans (fight as Normal Man, Ml 20, can see through Pirate Luchador's fog) or 2 plus 30-180 lucha fans.

I don't know where I was going with this, but wherever it is I know I didn't get there. The moral of the story is avoid Random buttons.

>I think of wizzes spamming Fire Blot and Mage Hand and then I stop

???

Why does that stop you?

A: People usually don't abuse them and

B: They're limited enough they can't really do anything of use

What OSR games are good for small groups (around 3~ people)

Most of them I'd say.

All of them

The easiest way to make 5e osr-ish is to make resources actually matter, ie, cut out cantrips (and probably the warlock class as a whole 'cause they die without cantrips). Then shift the rests so you don't get all your resources back after a rest.

Although people disparage it, Beyond the Wall is actually compatible and works pretty well for small groups.
Alternatively, if you don't care about compatibility and besides, most stuff converts easily /into/ the GLoG, you could try the GLoG. It's not exactly high powered, but my players have consistently survived situations with 1-3 hp that slaughtered my LL group when I ran it for them.

With the caveat that the original rules were meant to have much larger groups of players.

That's a spicy layout.

Deep delver/Cavern Guide: a class for a character who's already been down in the dark too long. Think Gollum crossed with ranger abilities.

I'm not aware of any that hit that particular spot. Scarlet Heroes goes for one player; most OSR games are shooting at 6-10, whether deliberately or inadvertantly through emulating their base games.

Exemplars and Eidolons could do 3 without going into Godbound lalala territory.

Sometimes you grogs are so stupid.

>Like, just take a look at Warlock. It's a class that's almost entirely "stuff I should be earning by fucking about in a dungeon and cutting deals with eldrich powers", but instead, it's just "level up and your Patron gives you +1d6 damage woo."
This is literally no different from a fucking cleric, yet one of those is sacrosanct and the other is UH YOU SHOULD BE DUNGEON CRAWLING FOR THIS.

>The easiest way to make 5e osr-ish

That's a start, but you also need to deal with death saves, strip out backgrounds (Outlander turns any wilderness trip into a pleasant picnic for one), fold in some kind of xp for gold, and probably do a lot more if you want anything approaching a real OSR experience rather than just a "dude, OSR" experience.

Scarlet Heroes/Black Streams does two players just fine. Three would be getting pretty OP, though, but you could select modules that were a bit overleveled for them and that would help mitigate that.

I don't like or use clerics either, for the same reasons, so neener neeener neener.
I'm leery about doing a Cave Ranger class because I want cave expertise to become a thing you get from exploring and learning, not a thing you get as a class feature. A sort of player skill, in a way. Cave experts are just players from any class who have spent enough time roving around the Veins.

As the other guy pointed out, Clerics are hardly sacrosanct, and the blandness of them is one reason they're unpopular, so arguing "you should let the warlock in because the cleric is bland, too" is dumb.
I notice you ignored the rest of his post, where he made much stronger points.

Why do you guys hate fun so much?

Beyond the Wall

Because a lot of stuff that's fun for you, we don't actually find fun. Thus, we hate it and are convinced that you can't have fun with it.

I happen to love fun.

I don't know where you get that impression. I certainly don't behave the same way I do on Veeky Forums in real life.

I don't hate fun, I like fun

That's why I play _5e_

>5e
>fun

While I agree (I'd sooner play 3.x over 5E) I see you using VGCats images again and I'll dock you points, user.

5e is pretty fun.

>I'd sooner play 3.x

Depends on whether the RP or the mechanical/combat aspects are what you enjoy.

Goes to show my dislike of 5E, user.

How you gonna stop me, user? You can play 3e all you want, that's only hurting you.

Fun killed my family.

I won't, but fate has a way of taking care of anons like you.
(-10 points.)

>I don't know where you get that impression.

The fact that people get very very angry when you play certain games, or when you play a very certain popular fantasy adventure game the wrong way

Do your worst, ya pansy!