|
Post by cadriel on Dec 5, 2022 9:03:00 GMT -6
I think that, overall, original D&D is the best. In no small part that's because OD&D is what you make of it. You can run it with just the original three books and it works fine. You can run it with Greyhawk and it works fine. You can run it with any mash-up of the supplements you like and it's a more flexible base than AD&D, without 2/3rds of the layers of cruft that got added on because people wanted rules for things. You can add in any other material you like.
Holmes is a good basis for an OD&D game; I think if you ran it with that expanded by the OD&D booklets and Greyhawk you'd have a great campaign. I don't really consider it separate, though Holmes fans are free to disagree.
B/X I know is popular in OSR circles but I don't like it as much. It's OD&D but rationalized in a way that turns its light mechanics into their own kind of game. Old School Essentials boiled it down to a very pure form, but in such a way that it's sort of a Procrustean bed. You can have any idea but it has to be fit into the B/X way of doing things. OD&D has the opposite philosophy, you're encouraged to bring your own stuff to it and make the game work with it.
AD&D is its own ecosystem. You have to want to do "high Gygaxian" AD&D. I am not in love with it like I was in high school when I found it like unearthing an old secret (I was in high school in the '90s and found that I liked older AD&D better than the modern version). I understand why people want to do AD&D but that's separate from what I want from D&D.
2e AD&D I got tired of in its own era. There was good material for it but a lot of bad and it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. I couldn't justify running it today.
3e and 3.5e ... I just don't get into it. People have gone on to Pathfinder because Paizo has found the niche who really liked this and they make a good game for that niche. I'm not in the niche and I'm okay with that.
4e I think failed in crucial ways both commercially and culturally. I think it had neat ideas - it really loved creating neat stuff for PC and monster abilities, but it got bogged down in all the stuff it piled onto combat. Some of its better concepts got moved into 13th Age which has its own community and that's cool.
I've run a significant amount of 5e and I think it's okay. I would rather run OD&D but it's fine. It's a mostly happy medium between people who just want a simple game and people who want to do character building. I think 5e will be almost completely replaced by whatever One D&D winds up being. I have a lot of neat material for 5e. At the same time I've run enough of it that I just want something different for a while.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jul 19, 2022 12:11:01 GMT -6
S&W Core is the sort of "middle ground" between Whitebox and Complete. It takes the original booklets, adds in the thief but not the paladin, as well as a simplified version of some of the Greyhawk material (ability score adjustments, spells, monsters, magic items) but leaves out things like percentile Strength or weapon vs armor tables. As a result, Core winds up being something like Holmes with extra levels - though without the Holmes idiosyncrasies.
Swords & Wizardry Light was a version of the game that Erik Tenkar did to reduce the game to a four-page giveaway. I honestly don't care for it. Continual Light expanded it to a pamphlet that you could run as a slightly more robust system. Its biggest issue is that it manages to not be compatible with any other edition of Swords & Wizardry. It's terse but IMO it is in no way an improvement on Whitebox.
The funny thing about different editions is that the exploration rules (listening at doors, surprise checks, etc) had been left out of the first edition of Swords & Wizardry. They were restored in later editions, but S&W Whitebox was based on the first edition - and as such was missing the same rules. White Box FMAG also puts them back in - at least one factor in its corner.
Anyway, I'll be very happy to see new life out of Swords & Wizardry. Even though I will always say it's "inspired by" OD&D rather than a "clone", it's a really nice game and well put together, and it's still generally my preference among OSR games.
|
|
|
Aasimar
Apr 14, 2022 6:57:30 GMT -6
Post by cadriel on Apr 14, 2022 6:57:30 GMT -6
My Greyhawk 5e campaign had an Aasimar paladin, they're functionally not that different to humans except a few "special effects" abilities. They don't have a flying speed, so they're not an issue in that sense (unlike Aarakocra, who I wouldn't allow again as a PC race because they have a high flying speed that messes with a lot of things).
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Apr 4, 2022 8:12:41 GMT -6
I'm curious - what kind of work do you do? My mom was a bench chemist for a number of years, mostly on GCMS and LCMS systems. She worked at environmental labs and later the Food & Drug Administration.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Mar 17, 2022 10:47:15 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Mar 1, 2022 12:04:55 GMT -6
It was probably shelved because, well, Gary Gygax was pushed out of TSR.
Given what was published in the first Unearthed Arcana, I imagine it would've looked like a mix of material that had been published in previous magazines (including Dragon and Imagine) and new material that Gygax cooked up to keep sales going. He had suggested a few different classes for AD&D that were never realized - the Mystic (cleric concerned with prediction and divination), Savant (magic-user specialized in arcane knowledge), Mountebank (thief specialized in illusion and sleight of hand), and Jester (yep). He specifically said no to the anti-paladin, so that wouldn't have been in it. Otherwise I imagine it would be a compendium of spells and magic and maybe some more expanded rules.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Feb 11, 2022 7:14:30 GMT -6
I'll probably watch but I think it's a very expensive bit of fan fiction, and no more impactful than that. I imagine Tolkien wouldn't approve.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jan 28, 2022 14:57:58 GMT -6
My current title is database administrator although it also involves a good bit of software development as well. I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and have worked in software since 2003.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jan 25, 2022 10:12:41 GMT -6
Honestly I think a lot of the stories I'd pick from are in the Appendix N anthology edited by Peter Bebergal. I think it picked the wrong Clark Ashton Smith entry ("The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" is a perfect D&D story), and "The Valor of Cappen Vara" (in de Camp's important anthology Swords and Sorcery) is a better Anderson pick, but it hits a lot of my points.
I do think that adding in Jirel of Joiry is the best thing an Appendix N update can do, and I think "Black God's Kiss" is the best of that cycle by a long shot. The value of "Tower of the Elephant" and "Jewels in the Forest" to the D&D feel is all too obvious. Ramsey Campbell's Ryre often gets overlooked as a dark fantasy pick, so I'd include that and "Satampra Zeiros" if I had to narrow it to five. It's a shame to lose Moorcock and Vance, and I'd probably go with this as a perfect ten:
1. "The Tower of the Elephant", R.E. Howard 2. "Black God's Kiss", C.L. Moore 3. "Jewels in the Forest", Fritz Leiber 4. "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", Clark Ashton Smith 5. "The Pit of Wings," Ramsey Campbell 6. "The Dreaming City", Michael Moorcock 7. "Turjan of Miir", Jack Vance 8. "The Man who Sold Rope to the Gnoles", Margaret St. Clair 9. "The Valor of Cappen Vara", Poul Anderson 10. "The Doom that Came to Sarnath", H.P. Lovecraft
If we're looking at thin novels, I think there are a few overlooked ones that I'd want to sneak in. Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea, Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh, and Jhereg by Steven Brust are a few that might have escaped enough attention.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jan 11, 2022 15:12:44 GMT -6
If you like the "cleanup crew" I found the generator in Dungeon of the Unknown by geoffrey quite useful. It looks at them as rolling hits, possibly normal, possibly with some extra effect. There's a specific rule for sticking to weapons.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Sept 8, 2021 8:28:15 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 27, 2021 13:29:22 GMT -6
The thing about 2e is that it wasn't a game, it was a platform on which other things got built. Good examples of using 2e well exist - for instance, the book Arabian Adventures for Al-Qadim totally redefines how AD&D works in a very flavorful way. Other successful retools included Dark Sun (we played a bunch with the original set), Domains of Dread for Ravenloft, and the historical sourcebooks - the best was probably HR4 A Mighty Fortress.
One of its bigger issues was that things didn't play well together. For instance, the kits in the various Complete books didn't mesh with any of the above settings; neither did the various Player's Option books. And its "vanilla AD&D" implementation left something lacking, and quickly lost focus once you let supplement bloat in. The proficiency / attribute roll-under system was not particularly elegant, and combat could bog down if you started bringing in material from the Fighter's handbook and Combat & Tactics. Some books, like Skills & Powers, were not adequately playtested and made it fairly easy to min/max character generation. Others, like Spells & Magic, offered some refreshing options.
I'd say that 2e had many of the most interesting books in the life of D&D, although this is a result of retrospectively picking out the gems from the duds, and wasn't inspiring as a system. But, there are no holy wars over its initiative system, so at least it has that on 1e.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 4, 2021 13:07:25 GMT -6
EPT probably did not see much editing from TSR. The editing standards of the OD&D booklets and even the supplements - as much as I love them - and the EPT book could not be more different. Simply put, EPT's editing quality is too good to have come from TSR. It is structured, written, and edited like a college textbook. Sections which are muddled or ambiguous in OD&D are clear and easy to understand in EPT. Things which belong together, are placed together. Of course, Prof. Barker had an unfair advantage here! But TSR did not produce a comparably well edited work until many years later, so I would assume the works was mainly done by Prof. Barker on his own. But there are differences between the 1974 Empire of the Petal Throne Manuscript (available in PDF here) and the version that was published by TSR in 1975 (available in PDF here). Unquestionably the organization of the material was Barker's. The question is, who made the changes between the two? Was it Barker himself, or Gygax, or someone else (maybe Brian Blume)? It would make sense if the new version was just an update by Barker of what previously existed; a lot of numbers are tweaked, changes to rules are made, etc. - as one would expect for a game that had been thoroughly playtested.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 3, 2021 7:40:17 GMT -6
Because the Tékumel foundation released it, we know what changed between the 1974 EPT manuscript and the 1975 TSR version. I guess the main questions would be which changes were done by Barker in the interim (as I understand it, the original was based on playtest D&D rules) and which were done by the TSR editor, as well as the identity of such editor. Sadly I don't think anyone checked with Brian Blume before he passed last year, as he was the last person who would've been in a position to know directly.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 2, 2021 8:30:45 GMT -6
The foreword credits Gary Gygax as "Tactical Studies Rules Editor." Empire of the Petal Throne was published after Don Kaye's death by TSR, Inc., and before TSR hired Tim Kask in 1975. Kask's first job was editing the Blackmoor supplement, and his hiring was announced in the Strategic Review after EPT was published. At this time TSR basically had no employees. The Strategic Review was edited by Gary with Brian Blume credited as the Associate Editor. Other than that, there was Donna Kaye's involvement, and Dave Arneson was a partner when the new TSR was founded. So basically those four (Gygax, Arneson, Blume, and Kaye) are the only people at TSR who could have worked on this. It seems that Arneson was on staff for eleven months ending in November 1976, which makes it very unlikely that he was the one who edited EPT. The other person involved with Empire of the Petal Throne was one Bill Hoyt, who is actually credited in the TSR version of EPT ("Presented in Association with Mr. William J. Hoyt, W.A.W. Productions."). It seems that Hoyt's credit on the book was a finder's fee because his company had already optioned the book: playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2015/05/world-at-war-tsr-of-twin-cities.html I believe that Hoyt is still around, so if anybody is able to be asked about this, it would be him. I'd guess it was Gary but I'm not sure. increment notes that Hoyt was credited but Arneson wasn't, on p. 537 of Playing at the World.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jul 24, 2021 10:53:52 GMT -6
By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth I cast: Resurrect Thread! So I was reading an interview with the author of Hillbilly Elegy, apparently he is running for congress. He mentioned that only those with children should be allowed to vote because they have a real stake in the future. This isn't about the merits of that idea, but it did make me wonder what you'd call a political system only parents are allowed to participate in. Parentocracy? What would the greek translation be? Mitrikracy? The words that mean "parent" in Greek include γονεύς (goneus) and γεννήτωρ (gennetor). So you could have goneocracy or gennetocracy - I think the latter would make more sense to the ear of English speakers who know the term "progenitor" or the term "genetics". Both have meanings involving "birth" in a physical sense; γεννήτωρ is from the same root as γεννηθέντα in the Nicene Creed, which is typically translated as "begotten." γονεύς is the same root we get the word "gonads" from.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jun 19, 2021 9:27:43 GMT -6
I'm in a few OSR Facebook groups but compared to how things were in the Google+ days - I am just not invested in today's OSR. It's a great way to put the question. Five years ago I was keeping abreast of all of the ideas in the scene, running games online, and having a good old time. Now it feels stranger and more distant. I still love OD&D and older D&D generally, but I don't think OSR materials contribute much to that any more. Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy was the most recent OSR Kickstarter I backed, and I got the books and they've just sat on my shelf. Obviously well-made and lovingly produced, but if I go back to the old ways I want OD&D my way.
My main group, which will hopefully be in person again before long, plays 5e. I'm happy with that. I'm also putting together a discord for OD&D games, just online since two in-person things would be far too much. Those are the ways my interests fall these days. I don't really feel connected to the current OSR, and I'm okay with that as well. I'm not interested in the new variants to come down the pike and I've never gotten over how ugly the OSR scene got toward the end of the G+ days, so I'd rather just stay with where I am.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 31, 2021 14:03:57 GMT -6
To be honest, I was disappointed with Swords & Wizardry when the first printing of the Core book came out. I had really hoped it would be more of a 1:1 swap that I could stop using OD&D booklets and just run S&W. When it didn't really deliver in that realm - there were just so many small differences - I wanted a more "precise" clone.
Later I wound up running S&W Complete and I found that in practice, I liked it quite a bit. It helped that by the time of Complete a lot of rules had been added back to the rulebook, and it was easier to just start people with that book than worrying about OOP D&D editions. I was also running online at the time. I also came to like things like the unified saving throw and its simplified Greyhawk ability bonuses particularly.
The one thing I still am not happy with is the way S&W does treasure distribution. It's something I don't see discussed enough: OD&D had a fairly simple chart based entirely on the dungeon level (which puts treasure in empty rooms and has monsters without treasure). S&W has a system that creates gold based on the monster XP value. The reason I don't like this is philosophical: I think that GP-for-XP is meant to explicitly decouple monster XP from treasure. If you never have empty rooms that have treasure (perhaps guarded by traps, tricks, magical wards, etc), then the game becomes more linear in its relation of monsters to XP. Someone designing a dungeon based on a copy of Swords & Wizardry is never going to have the same "flow" as a dungeon that uses The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures or Moldvay Basic D&D (both of which I find great for stocking dungeons).
I don't think it's a bad enough flaw to say that I don't like S&W. Like I said, I like it and I think it's a fine game. I just don't recommend it for stocking your dungeon. It'd be neat to do a "Ready Ref" type book that had the original style dungeon stocking rules, analogues of some other rules that S&W didn't include (I'm thinking particularly of its rules for castles), and some charts reminiscent of the old Judges Guild Ready Ref sheets that always grace my OD&D table.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 24, 2021 14:45:19 GMT -6
I actually wanted to check one of my claims above and looked into my copies of S&W. It looks like what I said was basically true of the original S&W - the first version basically had almost no content from The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. But it looks like it's inconsistent across different versions of S&W. S&W WhiteBox follows the first printing - it doesn't even have rules for listening at doors. White Box FMAG adds these back into the rules. So does S&W Core in the 4th printing, which also has rules for mass combat that were missing in prior printings. S&W Complete has all of that as well as aerial and naval combat rules fairly close to those in U&WA.
None of them seem to have an analog for OD&D's rules around castles (either as encounters or construction), or various rules like upkeep, baronies, and so on. And of course, S&W has large-scale changes from book 3 with regard to treasure generation. What's most ironic is that S&W Complete comes closest to covering the same ground as the LBBs, but it also has the most additional stuff from other sources. S&W WhiteBox, on the other hand, has very little from U&WA at all.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 24, 2021 9:05:06 GMT -6
My favorite variation on this theme is actually the take our own geoffrey did in the module Dungeon of the Unknown. The "Goops, Glops, and Globs" section there is a short generator, but it scares the heck out of even veteran players when they see a slime creature of previously unknown colors with unknown immunities and abilities.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 24, 2021 7:20:09 GMT -6
So, I got to watch this. I think Matt handled himself well on the question of the Quick Primer - which made sense in its time but comes off as a bit too punchy today, when some of its ideas are lurking in the official D&D rulebooks.
I'd have pushed back somewhat on Swords & Wizardry being as close to OD&D as Matt says. It's got a lot of the spirit, and in practice you could run a pretty similar game, but there are tons of details that aren't that similar. It basically omits the large majority of volume 3 of OD&D, and reworks things from stat bonuses to saving throws. Delving Deeper is a much more faithful clone. I see it as similar to Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord - one is more of a spiritual cousin, the other an attempt to reproduce directly. This isn't a knock on S&W at all; I think it's a fine game, and one of the better clones overall - in no small part because of these very departures. I just think it needs the caveat that it's got a number of idiosyncrasies relative to OD&D.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 23, 2021 9:02:33 GMT -6
I'd like to know what Matt thinks of the "Quick Primer" he did for the OSR and its impact on gaming since then.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 19, 2021 9:36:04 GMT -6
Television execs thought people (Americans) were too stupid to follow continuous long running storylines. I don't think it was simply the expectation that people were too stupid. After all, the first shows that really had complex, long-running storylines were soap operas, which aren't notorious for being highbrow and intellectual. (In fact, for some time, shows with continuity were called "primetime soaps".) A key factor was probably technological. If you had a TV show before the early 1980s, and someone missed an episode, they were out of luck until the episode happened to be re-run. Continuity starts to grow after the advent first of the VCR and later of the DVR - its popularity is roughly proportional to the ubiquity and ease of recording episodes. There were probably also a lot of scheduling and bureaucratic concerns that made it easier for TV shows to be self-contained. But I really suspect that technology had a lot to do with it.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 19, 2021 9:24:09 GMT -6
Nice! I've thought about doing something like this. It looks like you hard-coded most of it in Javascript. I think I'd probably want to figure out a way to store all the potential values in JSON and interpret that so that it was easier to tweak or fix.
Also - does the dungeon stocking follow Moldvay Basic? It seems to have "Trap" and "Special" results that follow Moldvay's charts instead of U&WA.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on May 10, 2021 9:04:40 GMT -6
I was a fan of LotFP for a long while because it had a big part in taking the OSR beyond crappy dungeons on Lulu that looked like imitations of the old TSR modules. I was one of the few contributors to his short-lived zine, Green Devil Face, and for a long time I made it a priority to get every release for LotFP. Around the time that the Zak S. stuff hit the fan, I decided I couldn't go to bat for James any more, and stopped buying his stuff. It's 2021 and he still hasn't published the hardcover Referee Book that he crowdfunded in 2013 and promised by 2019.
I always figured the shock value of LotFP was largely marketing. I liked that James had high (if idiosyncratic) standards for art, writing, and physical product design, and thought that he did a good job making himself known in a very niche market. I did like that the game itself embraced the "horror" aspect of D&D - although I'd never object to anyone who says it went too far.
I don't follow his releases any more. I've consistently found that the stuff he published by Geoffrey McKinney was the material that made it to my table. It was much easier to pilfer from Carcosa, Isle of the Unknown, and Dungeon of the Unknown than any other LotFP materials, and those are the books I'd recommend to general audiences who aren't into the splatterpunk aspect of the game.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Mar 8, 2021 7:34:52 GMT -6
I've had this idea rumbling about in my head that sort of synthesizes a handful of ideas in OD&D. First: you have the races in Men & Magic, specifically Dwarves and Halflings, that take the Fighting-Man and add certain abilities to it. These take a severe level cap as a disadvantage. Second: you have the Paladin in Greyhawk. This is also a Fighting-Man, but with special abilities and restrictions. It also has a massive Charisma requirement; very few Paladins exist if you roll 3d6 in order. Third: you have the old school idea of tables of Special Abilities proposed by various groups, usually in California, such as those seen in early issues of Alarums & Excursions or the first Arduin Grimoire. Fourth: you have this article full of backgrounds for human characters that Zach at the Zenopus Archives whipped up back when 5e came out. It seems to me that OD&D could work pretty well if this system was extrapolated out further and made into a single "Background" system. I'm specifically thinking it would work well for a game where PCs were all fighting-men or magic-users. Clerics could be abstracted out of the game, and a couple of Backgrounds (one a Monster Hunter that turns undead, the other a Healer) could move its functions into that system. Other "races" could just be different Backgrounds, monster PCs would be a Background that granted a special ability, etc. It adds a level of customization to the character without adding much complexity to the system. I'm also pondering to what degree the California-style special abilities (like bonuses to certain weapons, saves versus certain things, affinity to dragons or elves, etc) would factor into such a system. Anyway, I'm curious what folks think. Have you tinkered with ideas like this? Ideas or examples of other things that fit well?
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Jan 25, 2021 9:37:16 GMT -6
GAZ1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos and GAZ3 The Principality of Glantri are my favorites. The thing to remember about the GAZ series is that they were written by freelancers who were paid by the word, and at the time TSR considered filling out the layout to be more important than, you know, actually having sufficient content; the result of this is that there's quite a bit of filler. If I were to run a Mystara game it would be in one of Karameikos or Glantri, depending on the format I wanted (Glantri would have more magic and intrigue, Karameikos would be a more traditional dungeon / hex crawling game).
Also, if you're running a Mystara based game, be sure to get both versions of the Creature Catalog. There's some overlap but they both have interesting Mystara creatures to fill out the world.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Sept 20, 2020 4:45:42 GMT -6
Goodman's business model has always been about nostalgia and deluxe products for collectors, with actual game usage an afterthought. I stopped buying his products after Into the Borderlands. I love Jaquays and her early work but I have copies and feel no need to get a new hardcover, especially at the steep price they are asking.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 13, 2020 6:24:45 GMT -6
"New comments are not allowed."
That makes me sad - the appeal of Grognardia for me was always in the depth of the comment threads, which is where frequently a lot of the insight would come out, both from James and from the commenters.
But never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, it's good that James is writing again. Dwimmermount was a very difficult project; as a backer, I was deeply disappointed in it, and it clearly happened at a bad time for James and in a way that upset the apple-cart of his blog and caused a lot of harm. In retrospect we (myself included) were too hard on him, even though I remain unsatisfied with the result. I appreciate his blog and I'm happy he feels that he can have a public voice again.
|
|
|
Post by cadriel on Aug 7, 2020 5:51:12 GMT -6
Wasn't there at least one rather lengthy splat book that added a lot of heroic maneuvers and weapon specializations? I may be misremembering. As I said, I never owned a single 2e book. There were a lot of them around back then but I was a monetarily challenged youth. There were at least two. PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook has a list of combat maneuvers and extra specializations, and Player's Option: Combat & Tactics has a list of combat options and a whole new detailed specialization system. C&T had a lot of ideas for a very detailed grid-based combat system and in some ways was closer to 3.x D&D than anything else released in the AD&D years.
|
|