/osrg/ - Old School Renaissance General

Weapon Speeds. More advice depends on whether you're running 1e or 2e

Start with B/X, pull the bits you like off of AD&D, it's a lot easier than trying to prune that beast.

>Weapon Speeds

Dude, don't troll the guy.

1e
What's wrong with weapon speeds?

Eh, I don't recall WOTCobolds having the balls to become dragonslayers.

I meant to say "don't use weapon speeds"

>Start with B/X, pull the bits you like off of AD&D
GYG

Someone here haves that pdf where everything is a roll under mechanic?

Starting with B/X and cribbing shit from other systems is the only way to play OSR

>GYG

AX would approve -- he usually ran 3LBBs with a few houserules later in life, rather than all that supplementary shit that he piled together to create AD&D.

B/X is kinda like a readable OD&D w/o supplements.

Here's a close approximation of character building and combat. Learn this and learn dungeon traversal.
Then play. Whenever you make a ruling (during a lull after, not on the spot) check the book for a rule.

Attached: Challenges Game System.jpg (1808x5834, 2.2M)

Don't use UA
Be aware that if use psionics then people can die before initiative is rolled
Don't use RAW Alignment Languages

You mean TAAC?

Gygax made Cyborg Commando, his opinions don't matter

False OSR Enthusiasm is not welcome here.

Attached: TAAC.pdf (PDF, 669K)

You talked to your scale-fetishist player first right? I agree that there is nothing there, but if you are pulling lore and characterization out of your ass then you might as well pull it out of a collective ass.

I was inspired by that user's plight but I am not he.

>Gygax made Cyborg Commando, his opinions don't matter

He coauthored Cyborg Commando, he didn't try to run it.

>False OSR Enthusiasm is not welcome here.

B/X is as OSR you can get, you figgy puddyng.

>B/X is as OSR you can get
Yes but is it "the only way to play OSR" as says? I say thee nay.

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>15 pages and all it says is "they're gooks"

Yeah, that guy am go too far.

Anyone have any interesting encounters for an abandoned mine?

A crazy family or group of people that have taken refuge there. Or maybe a decent level mage that has taken other past adventurers under his control, that will occasionally send patrols throughout the mine to look for more subjects. Maybe on his person you'll find a Wand of Charming, or some scrolls. He might also hoard some treasure he got from said adventurers.

Refugees. Or an MU with charmed adventurers. He has a Wand of Poon Raiding. The adventurers might have stuff.

Mage sounds pretty good actually. I reckon I will put in a friendly adventurer who has been running from the mage and his minions for a few days

traumatized baby metal elementals who want to know why their families have been taken away

It's a mine mine. Mimes are mining out mimes. The whole thing is solid, but you can pantomime in. Talking is fatal.

What do you enjoy more about OSR than other games?

It is closer to the fiction than games with more fiddly shit. Less worrying about rules and tactical battlemap nonsense and more focus on what is happening in the game world.

Gold = XP makes a really nice feedback loop which emphasises creativity and avoiding combat.

Class specialisation. I hate how in modern D&D all classes are balanced around combat strength. I want my thieves to be good at thieving, my fighters to be good at fighting, my clerics to be good at healing and buffing, and my wizards to die before they hit level 2.

I run duets and play solo games. Tha KS to Scarlet Heroes that shit is piss fucking easy and I'm drowning in content. It spoiled me rotten so I'm not really willing to do the effort to make other games single PC compatible.

>You're the one who brought it up in the /osr/ thread.
Lies and slander. That topic started from

I know ACKS is famous for its economy and domain rules but has anyone tried their class building rules? It seems detailed and consistent. Also ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook is liberated now.

The ACKS forums have a number of homebrewed classes which seem thematically and mechanically in line with professional material.

Seems the rules do their job quite well

Also Heroic Fantasy Berserker is 11/10

Modular rules = easy to hack with less worry of knock-on effects.

44 years of D&D + strong on-going DIY tradition = great fripping wodges of old and new material to use and be prodded by.

Simply-described starting characters becoming interesting through play in the group = more fun (subjectively, of course.)

Fuck off Dice.

so, bois, what hexsize is best?
6 miles or 12 miles?

yoo how long does a torch or pint of oil in a lantern last? I'm asking for lotfp/BX d&d

found it, nvm

>Don't worry, 4e totally lacks fluff for them too. They're uh... clannish and... um, loyal... and a billion years a go they went to war with the tieflings who also have no fluff

You could be an OSR lover and also not be retarded about new stuff, you know? In other words: read a book, nigga.

- Simple but complete rules for encounters and wilderness and reaction of monsters.
- Everybody and their mothers have its own houserules, so you get less complains for not running RAW.
- It does scratch that itch of just having a bunch of characters pack their stuff and go explore the world.
- Making content for it is fun (save some exceptions like making classes) because you can just eyeball it and who doesn't enjoy drawing interior maps with pen and paper.

It also has its own annoyances, but you know, every system does.

/osrg/!

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How often do you all use a map/tokens? Ever?

I should say: for combat specifically

How does everyone like there thiefs backstab damage? Multiplier, d6 bonus or something else?

less getting caught up in "MA CHARACTER" bullshit and instead everyone be's a team player. I never have to worry about one player attacking the big scary monster the party wants to try diplomacy with and I don't have to worry about a player tripping mine while trying to do shit because their character hates my character.

my group is over internet so every session.

I've recently moved towards utilizing the Kingdom Death showdown board to represent the combat area in my hexcrawl.

So technically every session, but not in a normal/vanilla way.

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How big is the OSR? To quantify; how many buy and play TSR D&D and retroclones of the same? Surely we can gauge this through pdf sales, OSR Con attendance and OSR online community numbers?

Largest OSR Centric Cons:
GaryCon X (2018): 2373
GaryCon IX (2017): 1716
Gamehole Con (2017) >3000
North Texas RPG Con (2017): >400

Largest OSR Google+ Communites:
Google+ OSR Community: 5002 members

Google+ AD&D: 2296

B/X and Labrynith Lord approx 1000 ea.

Not clear on how to gauge rpgnow/drivethrurpg numbers. There are many OSR Platinum sellers.

Maps never, but I do use tokens (actually I use chess pieces and glass stones) to display formation and units that are in melee.

Do you have to know about the OSR to be in the OSR? I imagine a lot of people just play AD&D to this day without caring about internet communities. I also imagine a lot of people buy/pirate books and maybe lurk communities but mostly keep to themselves, so the OSR could be bigger than assumed. What about communities in other countries and other languages? And of course, people might buy OSR products without actually playing them, and does that count as being in the OSR?

>Surely we can gauge this through OSR Con attendance and OSR online community numbers
We can't, a lot of people at Gary Con are older people who don't do online communities and most of them haven't actively played a campaign in a long time.

>pdf sales
The RPG community is renowned for pirating literally everything and never purchasing anything.

There was a good talk by a bunch of industry insiders that pretty much spelled doom: 5000 sales is considering a significant success, 0.9 player replacement loss, everybody is underpaid and overworked, this is all made worse because players lie about what they want.

I agree but we have to gauge on some metric. Con attendance is probably a poor one since it is expensive and requires time and money. The median demographoc at GaryCon is probably late 40s white male.

Anecdotal: I met a father and his friend (approx age 60) and one of the men’s sons (25) at GenCon 50 who had never been to any con ever but were rabid AD&D fans from the late 1970s onward in a continually running home brewed campaign world.

I’ve lived in 3 different cities and all 3 AD&D groups I’ve joined were older original fans running home brewed campaign settings they had played with the same people in for years.

>most of them haven't actively played a campaign in a long time.

While I agree many aren’t active in online communities I disagree with the later. These are rabid rpg fans.

>The median demographoc at GaryCon is probably late 40s white male

This is why we are ultimately doomed m8

Trips, the mark of the beast! Plenty of younger players of OSR games under thirty. Look at Legend of the Flame Princess.

Has anyone playes WEGS Oldskool? Is it any good? I'm interested in picking it up, I like the concept

It’s not appropriate for this thread as it is not pre-WotC D&D, a retro clone, or a related systems.

Doesn’t sound like any of the above:
WEGS is the Wickedly Errant Game System. Four dice alone fuel its battle frenzy (2d6 and 2d10), and these dice catapult the players’ actions to the highest of highs or plunge them to the lowest of lows. Like the casino game craps, WEGS is all about dramatic swings of luck and unfettered speed-of-play. This little system moves!

It uses poker chips for gawds sake! Not OSR even if it calls itself Old Skool.

If you can find the total downloads for OSRIC directly from their website, and divide that by two, I'd like to imagine that that would give an okay estimation of the least amount of people possible in the OSR.

>There was a good talk by a bunch of industry insiders that pretty much spelled doom: 5000 sales is considering a significant success, 0.9 player replacement loss, everybody is underpaid and overworked, this is all made worse because players lie about what they want.

That sounds like a very interesting talk. Do you have a link? I'm especially interested in what they meant by 'players lie about what they want'. It's a common criticism of RPG players that everyone asks for 'something new and different' but only want what they know when it comes down to it. Seeing some actual figures to back this up would be fun.

I know Ravenloft has its gothic horror influences, but is there an OSR setting for if I want to run something heavily influenced by Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.?

Basically gothic horror with a proto-scifi bent.

LotFP probably would fit? At least the modules I've looked at seem to have a horror bent to them. They also seem to like 15th-17th century Europe which works for that.

>heavily influenced by Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Lamordia is literally Frankenstein: The Theme Park and Nova Vassa is literally Mr Hyde: The Theme Park so I'm not sure what you're asking.

Poorly written schlock with dick monsters is neither gothic horror nor proto-scifi

>What do you enjoy more about OSR than other games?
AD&D is a profound experience. On the surface, it is a well built dungeon crawl simulator. But there is something else at work. The entire game is one, giant puzzle. Everything is just out of conceptual reach. The rulebooks themselves are dungeons to explore, treasures hidden here and there. The game and its approach to the dungeon crawl isn’t about story, or world building, or any of the concepts that have grown around D&D over the years. The game dwells at the edge of perception, its lack of definition is its defining trait. Within that ethereal space, the game comes to life. The experience unfolds in a dream-like state, everything in doubt until it unfolds, and even then often leaving little meaning to those who did not experience it firsthand. I could tell you about the time that I played a fighter of middling ability, that my group was ambushed by orcs, that we defeated an evil priest and his trogolodytes, and even overcame an ogre (the half-orc fighter of the group was killed by that last threat), but that doesn’t really capture it. I could say we went to a strange place of twisting corridors, where danger and death lurked around every corner, where battering down a door to find an empty room brought a mix of relief and disappointment. That still doesn’t do it justice. It’s like trying to explain why it’s fun to be terrified by a well done horror movie. There is definitely an alchemy to making an AD&D dungeon crawl work. Going into it looking for a clear understanding, with an eye toward disassembling it, is the surest way to spoil it, yet that doesn’t stop you from thinking about it, and wondering why it is that counting off squares and sketching a map is so satisfying.

>dick monsters
Which one has them?

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shit nigga play ACKS fuck da bitches

Give me one good reason to play OSRIC over AD&D

Why would I play the inferior clone?

Transylvanian Adventures but it's DCC

OSRIC is an exact clone, isn't it? So that if you're playing OSRIC you're playing AD&D? I thought the point was just that it was better-organized.

So you use OSRIC to consult for rules for ease-of-use.

>it's DCC
Ackshually, a lot of reviews complained that it was too different from regular DCC (False DCC?) and should have been it's own thing.

Wait... FDCC GYG?

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There is already one on DrivethruRPGs

If you already have the AD&D books and you're fine with the Gygaxian prose, then there's no reason.

>everybody is underpaid and overworked

Other than WOTCs small staff (who I can’t see making much more than $50k USD per year) I can’t imagine it is a realistic goal to make a good living off solely rpg products. It’s a recipe for failure.

Wizards staff are notoriously underpaid senpai, they're paid 35-40% below the market average.

There's a market average? I mean, Wizards are pretty much the market when it comes to RPGs.

5ish

I usually take a minute to do a quick sketch of the area if its even a bit complicated, not really to scale but it seems to help. Gives me a second to think about it too. I ask if it makes sense, if it doesn't I either fix it or get the player to fix it. So far so good.

It's WEGScellent

Superior version of AD&D

Ghastly Affair bills itself as what you want. I only breezed through it, wasn't relevant to my interests.

LotFP module tone is all over the place. Forgive Us, England Upturned and The God That Crawls, maybe Scenic Dunsmouth can work for gothic horror, Towers Two, Broodmother Sky Fortress, Bad Myrmidon, less so.

How is it a version of AD&D other than thematically? This thread isn’t for your game m8.

Who in thier right mind thinks they are going to make money writing elf game books? I’ve been in this hobby for 20 years it’s not a secret that you do it as a fun hobby not a means to make a living. I have a writing credit in a published product. I got 5 copies and a check for $140.

I was paid .05. cents per word by a major publisher (not Wizards) with no rights to retain my work.

What would you say is a good OSR system to get into for someone who's used to playing DW and 5e?

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ACKS has class templates, a domain system, and a forum

Does anyone else finds that Open Doors checks slows down the pacing of the game? I still roll for Wandering Monsters every door, but I've stopped making them roll to actually open it (except in unique scenarios like the rusted portcullis in Stonehell, etc).

ACKS + Stonehell

Chaosium?

I only realized why Open Doors was a thing recently. Mornard said that in Greyhawk, when a door wouldn't open on the first try, they would skip it as any monsters inside wouldn't be surprised.
This would leave large sections randomly unexplored for future parties. Not really a thing if you don't run multiple groups in the same megadungeon.

That's hilariously videogamey, like waking up Doom monsters.

5 miles for back compatibility. Same reason we use THAC0.

I did. I was an absolute fool on the past and my collection stretched as far as Player's Handbook Races: Dragonborn. Didn't buy 4e modules though; maybe they tucked lore in them? If you know something then you're welcome to share.

>Basically gothic horror with a proto-scifi bent.
The meth had nothing do do with Jekyll's transformation. The moral of that story is that if you act like a jackass you turn into a jackass.

It's ugly, clunky, unintuitive.
Not being facetious - I like that, because it encourages homebrewing like nothing else. If I wanted a game that Just Worked I could get anything else. There's plenty of games that do lethality, low power, grittiness and other OSR descriptors out there, and frankly do it better from the get-go. But I've found nothing encourages writing your own rules and settings like OSR stuff.

Been in the mood for some reading. Anyone have some good D&D type fluff books to read? Similar to the "Races of the Dragon" book that was posted earlier. Except actually good?

I'm a shitter not a splitter