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Post by cadriel on Dec 21, 2012 8:11:42 GMT -6
So Thieves, unless I am missing it, aren't given an explanation of their attack rolls under the alternate combat system, though they do have Chainmail "fighting capability". Was this explained anywhere later? Do people just use the matrix from AD&D? LIkewise the blackmoor assassin and monk don't have the chainmail stats, but they arent given anything else either. As a cleric subclass, presumably the monk fights as a cleric? How do you guys handle them? Greyhawk explains thieves in the alternate combat system under that section: Treat Thieves as Clerics for purposes of advance in steps — four levels/group (1-4, 5-8, 9-12, etc.). With regard to saving throws treat Thieves as Magic-Users. Per Blackmoor, monks are clerics and assassins are thieves - as subclasses they should follow the same logic, just as paladins are for all intents and purposes fighters. So all of them use the cleric progression in the Alternate Combat System, and the thief or cleric progression as appropriate using fighting ranks.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 18, 2012 10:17:08 GMT -6
Once you start to look at D&D as primarily a "character build" game - which was heavily promoted in the 3.x years because it sells supplements - then character levels with no built-in bonuses take away from the fun, since they add nothing to your character build.
If you look at it as a dungeon/wilderness exploration game, none of this matters. A smoother progression is something that a referee can do, or not, without really changing much.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 18, 2012 9:53:20 GMT -6
I've been meaning to ask: why exactly is it called AFS? I don't see any explanation in any of the blog posts or threads here or elsewhere. Note: All pre-orders will be shipped today! The more recent batch of orders I have recieved will ship Wednesday or Thursday. Hi cadriel. To answer your question: I had originally started this magazine in collaboration with another friend in Houston. We both had an interest in history, war history and political history as well as old school gaming. The original concept for the zine was for it to be old school gaming content and also feature a few articles on events in history. AFS stands for Anti-fascist gaming society. ie. we had an article on the death and hanging of Mussolini, the Spanish civil war and the fascist falange etc. (Nothing to do with current politics). We ended up bagging the idea but the name stuck. The magazine has shifted to it's current focus on old school gaming and pulp literature which seems to fit better Fun story - have an exalt for shipping the preorders!
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Post by cadriel on Dec 18, 2012 6:20:59 GMT -6
I've been meaning to ask: why exactly is it called AFS? I don't see any explanation in any of the blog posts or threads here or elsewhere.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 10, 2012 7:59:31 GMT -6
Awesome. Preorder sent.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 9, 2012 6:16:05 GMT -6
Unless you are using Greyhawk or AD&D stat modifiers, I don't see why you would mess with 3d6 in order. Once you are in GH or AD&D territory, low-stat characters are just pathetic compared to their high-stat counterparts. The lack of stat inflation is a part of why I like LBB OD&D. Not sure how you can get "unplayable" characters in that.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 24, 2012 7:04:21 GMT -6
There's an IMDB page for this film here: www.imdb.com/title/tt1337098/But if John Carter was an overpriced yet wonderful flick, all signs point to Carson Napier being a Z-grade low budget affair fit only for mockery on "bad movie night."
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Post by cadriel on Aug 23, 2012 6:49:04 GMT -6
There’s a really fascinating chapter on Glorfindel in The Peoples of Middle-earth, pp. 377-91. It’s actually one of the last things that Tolkien ever wrote. The one thing I will point out is that it’s not quite true that Tolkien never re-used names — for example, “ Galdor is a name of…a more simple and usual form and might be repeated” (p. 387) —, but that Glorfindel is “so striking a name” that “repetition…though possible, would not be credible” (p. 380). There's a Denethor in the published Silmarillion who is an elf in the First Age, so Tolkien clearly reused names every now and then. As for the discrepancies, the Silmarillion was a moving target for Tolkien's entire life, he never actually settled on anything final, just a succession of revisions according to his latest ideas. Lord of the Rings in this sense was an inconvenience, in that it set a lot of details relatively firmly. It's possible that Glorfindel's death at one point in the revisions was meant to be changed at another; Christopher Tolkien had to stitch the published Silmarillion together from a melange of stories written over more than a half-century.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 17, 2012 14:59:34 GMT -6
For some reason this makes me think that you could do a really interesting blend of non-Gygaxian early D&D by taking the Ready Ref Sheets, adding in material from the First Fantasy Campaign and the first Arduin Grimoire, and seeing where it goes from there. You'd have some elements of magic from FFC and Arduin, and the very different XP charts from Arduin, and a lot of random table elements from RRS. Certainly quite a different thing from the "pure" RRS model.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 16, 2012 19:43:52 GMT -6
I have to side with Jon on the question of Arneson's input into OD&D. Trying to derive authorship from purely hypothetical working drafts is an exercise in speculation and tells us nothing about the origin of the game. There is a great deal of bias and side-taking in this, as the attribution of the game's origins are a live and hotly contested question.
The criterion Jon set forth for Playing at the World was broadly correct: don't rely on reminisces or anything published after 1980, and take anything after 1976 with a grain of salt. Anything else is just going to wind up being tendentious.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 13, 2012 12:04:57 GMT -6
This article begs to differ: www.toplessrobot.com/2009/04/the_10_most_shameful_rpg_dice.phpAside from which, would you actually want a bell curve from 1-100? The whole point of percentages is that you skip all the bell curve stuff. Anywho. What I want are 12-sided dice that are marked 1-4 with each number repeated three times. It'd eliminate the need to "roll" another dCaltrop.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 13, 2012 7:13:39 GMT -6
In the first couple of years, from what I've seen, T&T was pretty much seen as the cheaper, rules-lite equivalent to D&D. It only cost a few dollars, where D&D was $10, which in today's money would be at least $40. The differences didn't matter too much, since people made of the games what they wanted anyway, and T&T had the added advantage that you only needed six-sided dice. It was seen as being better than just pirating D&D as many people at the time were doing.
Of course these games were entirely new and totally different - there wasn't much of a baseline yet, and people felt free to express their ideas as basically "D&D but different." This changed rapidly as roleplaying went from a sideline in wargaming to its own thing, of course. The big shift was around the change from OD&D to AD&D, as I've seen it, with the three hardcovers cementing TSR's role as the dominant voice.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 8, 2012 8:03:01 GMT -6
I think I see the advantage in a slim published volume of not mentioning the classic monsters (as opposed to one's own campaign) I also like the format and think it is perfectly sensible to do without art but the price is surprisingly high for essentially 8 A4 pages plus map. G1 was eight pages and cost $4.50 in 1978, which is around $15 now. Despite a lack of art, it's actually a bargain, relatively speaking.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 7, 2012 13:19:08 GMT -6
The Caves of Chaos are fairly packed with monsters, relative to what a classic dungeon was supposed to be. I think the tables in Moldvay Basic give about the right distribution of rooms - you should wind up with more rooms without monsters than in any of the published modules. Players should have the chance to avoid combat both in dungeon design and in encounter reaction, as described above. If the PCs can get away with some loot without having to fight, you should be able to have at least a cleric or thief hit level 2 without too much problem.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 24, 2012 19:45:16 GMT -6
Opinions in taste can be very personal, of course, so I wouldn't argue with those who like what they like, but.... Greyhawk, Wilderlands and even my beloved Blackmoor are fairly generic and sophomoric efforts as far as creative and intriguing settings go. Even some of the pulp fiction worlds such as that of Howard or John Norman are more creative and original. Red Tide however takes the classic D&D fantasy trope to a whole other level. Excepting EPT, which hardly counts as a TSR product anyway, TSR never produced anything in the same league as Red Tide. But TSR in its early years was the kind of organization that could put out an EPT - they both had the support and the philosophy that put it forward, as much as it was clearly a parallel to the D&D game to which so much of TSR was now staked. I hardly think it's fair to judge TSR by taking out of consideration one of their pioneering products. What I'd ask about Red Tide is how gameworthy it is. A lot of settings are very detailed but not conducive to actual games; the detailed settings that TSR put out in its later years, for instance, sometimes seemed to be better read than played. Meanwhile the Wilderlands may not seem like a "sophisticated" setting but it is almost nothing but pure game-ready detail. I'd argue that this is more relevant to a game than how mature the setting is seen to be.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 24, 2012 18:13:38 GMT -6
What exactly has the OSR done? Red Tide. I don't have Red Tide. What's special enough about it that it beats out any comparable work by TSR? It bills itself as a "campaign sourcebook and sandbox toolkit," which doesn't sound like an awful thing, but what about it beats any comparable product put out by TSR?
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Post by cadriel on Jul 24, 2012 14:35:46 GMT -6
What exactly has the OSR done? Red Tide. That's one campaign setting, how does it really stack up next to Greyhawk, Blackmoor (Supplement II and DA1-3) or the Known World? Not to mention the Judges Guild stuff, including the Wilderlands and all their sandbox-building material (Ready Ref Sheets, Castles / Villages / Temples / Islands).
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Post by cadriel on Jul 20, 2012 8:58:01 GMT -6
geoffrey:
I think we just differ on taste. Particularly with Raggi's material, I haven't really liked any of it since the Random Esoteric Creature Generator.
I haven't read Isle of the Unknown and Vornheim, but I would rather run in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy than in Carcosa. Nothing personal of course. And I'd rather run OD&D than any of the many permutations of Swords & Wizardry or the other clones. And if I had to pick a module off my shelf for a D&D game tonight, I'd certainly pick a TSR module long before an OSR module. So for me the OSR really hasn't offered enough.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 20, 2012 7:02:44 GMT -6
What exactly has the OSR done? Fight On! has produced some ok work, and as an active but minor contributor I don't want to diminish a project that I really enjoy, but we're only on the brink of 14 issues, and the quality is mixed just as in the early issues of The Dragon.
Probably my favorite OSR work is the Dungeon Alphabet, but as much as I like it I'd take the 1e DMG any day. I like Labyrinth Lord but if I wanted to play that style of D&D I would do it with Holmes and one of the expansions. I like Stonehell and Barrowmaze but since I'm not going to run somebody else's dungeon, I'd rather steal ideas from my collection of old TSR modules. I've liked a few of the "Advanced Adventures" modules and a couple others scattered here and there but the production quality and the quality control are lower than in the TSR modules. I dislike the majority of the clones and I'm honestly tired of new games that are basically D&D with a few things tweaked.
At the end of the day for me it's core rules, and OD&D is straight up better than any of the clones. I can make my own dungeons, I can make my own wilderness maps. The clones are all inferior imitations with other people's house rules. Some (like ACKS) might be OK supplements but I do not see them as games that I'd ever play.
So what exactly are people so psyched about that they're calling OSR better than TSR? I mean specific products, not just an approach or philosophical reasons.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 19, 2012 13:07:12 GMT -6
It's interesting that the people who've answered on this forum have been weakly pro OSR (5 to 4) while on Dragonsfoot it's overwhelmingly pro TSR (68%). Particularly on this forum, as I feel that running Swords & Wizardry would be several steps downward from 3LBB OD&D.
To me this isn't about the nostalgia factor. I find the AD&D DMG and the Monster & Treasure assortments very useful in dungeon stocking, and to be honest I'd rather have my collection of TSR modules than my stack of OSR modules, even though some of them are decent. And there were hundreds of Dragon magazines, but only 13 FOs....all told I don't think the OSR is going to get there. Which is fine, but I don't think promoting the "OSR > TSR" meme is useful.
Edit to add: While I was typing that, apparently the vote went to 5/5 here.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 19, 2012 8:52:12 GMT -6
I voted TSR. I'd rather run white box OD&D and I wouldn't want to give up the AD&D DMG for any amount of OSR stuff.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 18, 2012 20:50:54 GMT -6
Also relevant to chances of attracting wandering monsters, perhaps (cookfires and all that, which would be more difficult to prepare in most dungeons, being unable to scavenge for firewood and kindling). Yep, very true - of course with the morale impact it's a live question, do you observe a careful "no fires" policy, lower your chance of getting attacked but have unhappy henchmen, or do you start a fire, have some good and cheap food, get everybody happy, but risk an attack?
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Post by cadriel on Jul 18, 2012 20:21:41 GMT -6
Judging by the terminology, standard rations should be food you have to cook - maybe beans, stew, soup, bread, sort of chuck wagon type fare that you heat over the camp fire. This would presumably spoil easily in the atmosphere of the dungeon and not be prepared if you holed up in a dungeon area. Iron rations should be dried meat, hard cheese and hardtack or similar, all stuff that can survive a long period of time and is hopefully in some preservative container. You can eat it without actually having to cook it, which is a big deal, but you're not exactly going to be ravenous over it.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 2, 2012 19:58:52 GMT -6
I had these books when I was a kid - I think it was the first time I ever heard of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. (I later got to know them much better when White Wolf put out its editions of the books.) I never actually convinced anyone to play/read them with me, the idea was kind of daft. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure for two players, and when anything required conflict, each player picked a number and then you cross-referenced it against a table that I think was printed on the back of each book, and you had character sheets and everything.
Not worth the paper they were printed on, from what I remember. I loved Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but doing it as a one-on-one game was just weird.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 26, 2012 20:54:33 GMT -6
I ordered all 4 on Amazon, they're still readily available.
One of the things I think they showcase is how swords & sorcery was changing over the period that D&D came out. It had been relatively a medium of short stories before 1970, but over the next decade it would transition to novels - hence why the representation in these volumes is even a bit more dated than it might otherwise have been.
It's also interesting to me how the novels got longer over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Moorcock's whole Hawkmoon series in 4 volumes was a total of 667 pages, and the 6 Corum novels (collected in two thick books) are 784 pages. The 6-paperback series of Elric books was similarly long. All ten Amber books by Zelazny are in an omnibus totaling 1258 pages. In a modern epic fantasy series, each Eternal Champion saga would be, by pagecount, no more than one single volume. Yet more happened in one volume of Hawkmoon or Elric than two books of the Wheel of Time saga.
I think the story choice itself is interesting, some of it - such as Thieves House and Black God's Kiss - contains thematic material quite appropriate for a D&D campaign. It's amazing how powerfully little reference there is to any fantasy literature (except maybe D&D novels, and that's questionable) there is in the current 3.x/4e/5e stuff. It's a lot more "I want fighters to do x y and z" and a lot less "I want to play the Gray Mouser" (of course, that's the hard thing in the armor-centric combat system of D&D).
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Post by cadriel on Jun 12, 2012 8:51:29 GMT -6
A few years back Lee was kind enough to copy the first twenty issues for me (at some cost for paper, copying and shipping). No idea if she'd do it again.
I imagine the rights issues for the reproduction would be a nightmare, every person retained rights to what they contributed. So hundreds of people would need to sign off and be compensated for their copyrighted work.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 1, 2012 7:35:01 GMT -6
(remembering that in Men & Magic, clerics were required to choose Law or Chaos after 7th level) Just a reminder that in the first few printings of the game Clerics were required to choose Law or Chaos at the start. I've never heard or read any reason for the change. Thanks, I wasn't sure and wound up checking an OCE copy. I think they wanted to be able to continuously revamp the rules, which of course led to myriad discrepancies.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 1, 2012 6:07:15 GMT -6
Druids were originally a monster type in Supplement I: Greyhawk that used a mix of Magic-User and Cleric spells. They were the priests of Neutral religions (remembering that in Men & Magic, clerics were required to choose Law or Chaos after 7th level), and had spells, barbarian followers, and shapechanging abilities.
They became a playable class in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. It's in EW that the whole "fight your way up the druid hierarchy" concept was developed, although druids at this point were 13 levels instead of AD&D's 14 (level 2, Ovate, was not present). This was done in clear analogy to what had been done with Monks in Supplement II: Blackmoor. EW druids had their own distinct spell list, complete with a number of new spells, rather than using a mix like Greyhawk druids.
I suppose the idea was current because of the Men & Magic restriction against neutral clerics. I remember in Alarums & Excursions there was at least one stab at a neutral cleric class before Eldritch Wizardry, which wound up being modeled more or less on the Greyhawk druid. They don't show up in the Strategic Review except in vol 2 issue 1 when they are mentioned in regard to alignment and tied closely to the Bard class.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 31, 2012 12:53:16 GMT -6
d20s generate broad probability bands of 5% per number. The average roll is 10.5. Any system you do based on rolling 1d20 has to be based around that percentage. On 3d6 the average roll also happens to be 10.5. So for an average person a difficulty of 21 will lead to success 50% of the time. Your "easy" threshold will mean 55% chance for an average person, but less for every point below average that they are in a stat.
I think you're going to have trouble being granular if every single point you have in a stat is a 5% chance of success/failure. Have you thought about using stepped bonuses a la B/X, or adding the stat to a percentile chance rather than a d20 roll?
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Post by cadriel on Mar 26, 2012 12:43:50 GMT -6
I get the impression after having read through the First Fantasy Campaign that balrogs were definitely the go-to monster for heavy-duty baddies. It's a shame that the Tolkien estate's lawyers got in the way. Yeah. Although I'm surprised that they didn't do the same thing with Balrogs as they did with Ents and Hobbits - they just had to relabel them. And while wraiths as Nazgûl went away (with slightly odd effects) they were still in D&D. The early issues of A&E that I have are a favor done (at my cost) by Lee Gold, who created the magazine back in the '70s, photocopied from her personal collection. A lot of it is actual play reports and discussion from gamers, with an emphasis on California, but with other parts of the US represented. It was a very different "scene" than the Midwest that we are used to with a focus on Gary, Dave and their respective crowds. Rather like reading a message board done with typewriters, from a certain point of view. The zine is still ongoing after all these many years, believe it or not!
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