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Post by cadriel on Jul 27, 2020 12:44:44 GMT -6
The 2e DMG makes a lot more sense when you realize that a great deal of the material in it on building worlds and running campaigns was cut. This ultimately made it into DMGR1 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, which is a considerably better book than the 2e DMG itself.
TSR was like that sometimes.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 27, 2020 12:34:31 GMT -6
What do you guys think is the most common use of 2e today? A. Use 2e core rules with non-2e modules/supplements/settings B. Use 2e modules/supplements/settings with non-2e core rules C. Use them together or not at all I just finished a campaign that did a lot of B, using 2e Greyhawk and Planescape materials extensively in 5e, and I would imagine that it's by far the more popular of the two options. But that's simply because - and the ORR Group report confirms this - 5e is the absolute majority of RPGs that are being played at this point in time. It simply makes too much sense for groups to pick up and convert 2e material - whether that's running one of the big boxed campaigns like Night Below, or using one of the 2e signature settings like Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Birthright, or Spelljammer, or mining the mountains of 2e Forgotten Realms material or the reams of other game-worthy stuff that TSR put out in the 1990s. When I say that 2e is a mediocre game I'm talking about the rules. I adore Domains of Dread, and Planescape, and both Dark Sun boxed sets, and Night Below, and Carl Sargent's run on Greyhawk, and the Complete Book of Necromancers, and HR4 A Mighty Fortress, and the Monstrous Compendium Appendices and Annuals, and a number of other 2e books. TSR put out so much material that, even if you figure that 90% of it was crap, the 10% that's left is a substantial amount.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 27, 2020 7:38:03 GMT -6
I don't understand when most people express this sentiment. From my perspective, if 2E was mediocre, then implicitly 1E was mediocre as well because they're the same game - it would be like a Pathfinder player calling D&D 3.5 mediocre. And maybe this doesn't describe your feelings on the editions, but I find that many of the people who call 2E mediocre are die-hard 1E fans. Like tdenmark said - maybe it's because 1e is kind of mediocre too. Although I think that this is made worse by 2e trying to smooth out the weird wrinkles and hiccups that 1e had, which are part of its idiosyncratic charm. It's not a robust or well designed unified system, and tinkering with it and adding extra parts (proficiencies, additional sub-systems) can definitely be a step backward in quality even if the underlying system is similar. Given the choice I'd rather run OD&D than 1e or 2e, and I'd probably want 1e with the extra Gygax-isms over 2e unless it was for a particularly idiosyncratic 2e game.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 26, 2020 19:09:00 GMT -6
I started playing D&D and RPGs during 2e's run, in 1994. I ran a number of campaigns in 2e, using stacks and stacks of books. By high school graduation in 1999 I was a convert to the older ways and 1e, and then tried my hand with some Rules Cyclopedia. I got into other things in college but afterward I wound up gravitating to OD&D and other old school games - I only really started running 5e a couple years ago, and have been running that regularly.
There are ideas that I'd love to run in 2e. I'd love to run a campaign using HR4 A Mighty Fortress to do some Elizabethan era real-world swashbuckling, or using HR3 Celts to run a deep, mythic campaign set in the Ireland of pre-Christian myth. It'd be a lot of fun to bash through some Planescape as well. I played a lot of Dark Sun, and would happily do that again in 2e. But overall, the game got way too bloated and unmanageable with extra stuff. You really have to pick and pare down your materials to get it to run well.
2e was a dream for the monster collector, though. I have no less than eight monster expansion books - four Monstrous Compendium Appendix books, a Dark Sun, two Planescape, and a Mystara monster book - all in addition to the Monstrous Manual. And the MM has tons of art by Tony DiTerlizzi - some of it is simply awe-inspiring. The actual monster entries sometimes have filler but it's amazing that someone managed to write a full page about every single monster in the book.
The thing about 2e was, it was mediocre. You can always do worse - but you can also do better. Very few people mourned for it when it passed, and a lot of people were quite happy to move on to 3e and beyond.
As for the art? 2e's PHB was generally mediocre I agree, but later they had Brom and DiTerlizzi. The "outsider art" kitsch of early TSR AD&D was fun but these guys were on a whole different level.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 11, 2020 13:38:06 GMT -6
In RPG historical terms, 1984 was the year the RPG "bubble" burst and a lot of companies had massive down years (TSR's revenues declined by 30%). It was out of this that the RPG industry re-configured itself into what it became by the 90s, so it actually does make some sense as a cutoff year for the "golden age".
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Post by cadriel on Jul 8, 2020 13:14:49 GMT -6
Castles and Crusades is quintessentially OSR (if you are willing to have 1st edition in that continuum which I am). DCC is OSR too, though I'd say further out to the edge. This is a historical question. Castles & Crusades predates the OSR as a label, and not accidentally. What we can identify as the OSR started as a reaction against C&C - a number of people who didn't care for where Troll Lord Games took the system went off and made OSRIC, and at roughly the same time Chris Gonnerman made Basic Fantasy. That's the ground where most of what we can identify as the OSR came together. A lot of people who came into the OSR early did so after trying C&C and moving on to earlier editions and retro-clones (myself included - I ran C&C before OD&D or Labyrinth Lord). Since then, C&C has had its own ecosystem, and other than Castle Zagyg the products from one haven't really made an impact on the other. Most importantly, C&C has never claimed to be part of the OSR. Dungeon Crawl Classics, on the other hand, just isn't a clone. It has the 3e system at its core but it's tricked out and really weird. I don't think of it as OSR because you can't really mix and match between DCC and OSR materials, whereas compatibility has been a pretty good sign of OSR games. And again, DCC doesn't claim to be OSR, which I think is important. I just ran a 5e campaign that used mostly 2e materials so I can't argue that much with that. On the other hand I think it makes sense, the OSR hit demographics that WotC wanted to sell to and had original ideas about gaming that actually stand up to the test of running games. It's nice that they do things like put tons of charts in the books, though.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 7, 2020 12:52:54 GMT -6
Back when there was a G+ and I was still pretty deep into what we call the OSR, or at least a couple of its manifestations, I would say that the OSR was a marketing label, an artistic movement (actually a couple of them), an approach to play, a community of players (actually several of them), and a way to describe some games. I still think "OSR" is all of those things, at once, and there's no way to focus down into this or that element and capture the whole thing.
For me, it has always stood for Old School Renaissance. That's what the Lulu group that held all the early OSR products was called and that's how I first started referring to it. And to me, "old school" has always had a Dickensian referent - "a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young" (from Bleak House). It has that "grognard" feel to it even from the early years.
The key thing about the OSR is that it clearly describes multiple, overlapping, distinct entities. Something that's true about one facet of the OSR is not necessarily true about another. It's almost always oversimplifying to start a sentence with "The OSR...." This is particularly true as it has gained a temporal modality over the years it's been a thing, and some parts of the OSR have changed a lot, while others have stayed more or less the same.
To actually define it, I'd say the easiest criterion is this: things that say they're in the OSR, probably are. Things from after 2004, that are generally inspired by TSR-era D&D (or other early RPGs) in any of aesthetics, rules, or play style, are possibly OSR. A retro-clone and its compatible products are probably OSR, although there are exceptions. Castles & Crusades isn't OSR even though it's quite similar to a lot of OSR retro-clones. Dungeon Crawl Classics is really close in some respects to the OSR and it's hard to say where it sits; I'd say out, although it seems to want to have it both ways. 5e D&D isn't OSR but the designers certainly looked at it and took notes. But there's no one test you can apply to anything and figure out if it's OSR. So the simplest is to listen to what people and products say.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 23, 2020 5:54:31 GMT -6
This question is going about things all wrong. Gary and Dave didn't set out to "invent a roleplaying game". They were wargamers, who were restless inventers and tinkerers who just had to mix Diplomacy, 1:1 scale skirmish wargaming, LotR, REH, HPL et al., and amateur theatre in a big pot and pour out the resultant gooey mixture. What they created wasn't an RPG but a bloated wargame of hyperbolically Wagnerian proportions. That's exactly why I hypothesized about a game like Pendragon arising along parallel lines with D&D. From reading Playing at the World I really got the vibe of several things that would feed into it: proto-roleplaying happening in Diplomacy, which would fit well with an Arthurian variant; people doing re-enactment like the SCA; and currents within the fantasy literature of the time that would fit in with it. People could be playing a game where each player had an Arthurian knight, based loosely on Le Morte D'Arthur, for months before they put together that it bore fundamental similarities to Dungeons & Dragons.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 21, 2020 9:00:13 GMT -6
The first Dungeons & Dragons book I ever got was an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player's Handbook. I could not make heads or tails of it - the book was a reference manual and not designed to teach 13 year olds how to roleplay. A while later I got what was presented as a board game version of D&D: This boxed set made a lot more sense. It had a set of "Dragon Cards" that familiarized you with all the dice and stats and terminology, and how gameplay worked as you made your way through a solo adventure. I wound up using it to run my very first game of D&D because it had, in one booklet, monsters and treasure and everything I needed. I say my first because, well, after that game, I started running AD&D 2e proper. I had figured it out, kind of, and wanted the "bigger" advanced version of the game. I was sort of a "Monty Haul" DM for a while because I wanted to play with all the magical toys in the DMG. Then I read Dragon Magazine and found out that was frowned upon, and buttoned up and became a much better DM. In its final years, TSR kept tinkering with the formula for introductory Dungeons & Dragons. None of them seemed to take; we would go to Kay-Bee Toy & Hobby, and the board game shelves would be littered with D&D boxed sets that had been remaindered and were selling for only $5. We bought a bunch of starter sets because it was a cheap way to get dice and the one after that came with plastic miniatures. I remember finding the "First Quest" Audio CD quite funny because of the (low) quality of the voice actors. I did, however, find out that the version I started with had an expansion, the Rules Cyclopedia, and got my hands on a copy of that (that one is now falling apart, although I have others in better shape). I loved the Rules Cyclopedia, and ran it for a bit after I finished high school and before 3e came out. I remember a friend having the Cook/Marsh Expert book but we were not particularly impressed. It was much later that I discovered Holmes and Moldvay, and found a lot of respect for both. I've run games that are really fun with each of those sets, as well as the RC. I love Holmes as its own beast, and find the RC as my favorite incarnation of the B/X line, perhaps for slightly nostalgic reasons as well as my conviction that D&D as a complete game in one book is an idea that simply seems right. If I were starting an old school campaign tomorrow the Rules Cyclopedia would probably be my go-to.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 19, 2020 8:28:06 GMT -6
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand - I would have a lot of fun bringing back the Rules Cyclopedia and then creating a D&D that changed things around, like having a non-Vancian spellcasting system and critical hit charts and different attributes and other things that were heretical to Gary's D&D but popular in the '70s game scene. Given my druthers I'd even play using a hex map like the Outdoor Survival one, and put more of a hex-crawling element into the game from the start.
But the big, ambitious goal would be: bring back Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon RPG. This could even start off as Arthurian Diplomacy, and grow into a complex multi-generational feudal saga of knights and chivalry. One advantage is that the "turn" system would make it ideal for play-by-mail games. I think this would encourage some historical elements of how the early RPG scene formed that wound up neglected, while steering it clear of the Tolkienesque fantasy that D&D wound up in. I actually think that D&D would still exist in a world that had a Pendragon-like game, and that it may actually take a little while before people realized that they're the same kind of game. I'd borrow heavily from Stafford's design, although it would start out in a stripped-down form. I think this would introduce a lot of positive things into the RPG industry from the start, and change the fundamental idea of what an RPG could and should be. And I think that it would translate well for electronic play as BBSes and email and the Internet develop, and really flourish there.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 1, 2020 7:25:46 GMT -6
Obituary from the funeral home which would indicate that this is in fact real. There will be a time, months from now and with some distance, to reflect on his role in gaming. For now our community should simply offer condolences to his family and friends.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 5, 2020 7:26:35 GMT -6
This is some great stuff. Thank you. If I may ask, which level of the Warden were these pregens for? I ran the adventure on Level 7, using more or less Orphans of the Sky and Starship as guidelines for how the environment worked. A large chunk of the adventure was run in a RHMDU that I had generated using the tables in the module The House on the Hill, which played out as terrific fun.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 5, 2020 7:00:23 GMT -6
I'll keep this going. On Semper Initiativus Unum, Wayne Rossi compiled his outdoor adventures posts into a PDF including a version of the Outdoor Survival map by James Mishler. This resource has been around for some years, but I don't know of a better interpretation of Gary's envisioned wilderness. It turns out that Gygax' castle and wilderness encounters, from volume 3, describes a gameworld with some very weird transitions. From the Lost World of the dinosaurs to the red sands of Barsoom to aerial jousts astride hippogriffs, Rossi seems to have covered it all. There's a lot of inspiration here.
If you missed it in the post, you can follow this link to Mishler's Adventures in Gaming, where he posted the full size Hexographer map of Outdoor Survival. Thanks! I haven't been active in OSR or older D&D lately (my current game is 5e) so I haven't kept writing for the blog, but I'm glad that people still see it as a useful resource for their OD&D games.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 4, 2020 14:08:07 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Feb 4, 2020 14:03:07 GMT -6
When I've run MA as a one-shot or con game, this is how the human pregens were kitted out.
Human A Weapons: Spear, Longbow Armor: Shield, nonmetallic Gear: 2 berries that add +4 to Mental Resistance for 1 hour
Human B Weapons: Normal Ax, Crossbow Armor: Heavy fur Gear: Gland, when ingested gives total resistance to poison for 10 minutes
Human C Weapons: Dagger, Normal Bow Armor: Skins Gear: Gland, when ingested gives extra 1d6 hit points for 1 day.
Human D Weapons: Spear, Normal Bow Armor: Cured Hide Gear: Sap, when ingested gives telepathy (up to 25' away) for 1 hour
Human E Weapons: Normal Ax, Longbow Armor: Shield, nonmetallic Gear: Horn of the Unicorn, any poison put in it will foam
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Post by cadriel on Jan 31, 2020 8:29:55 GMT -6
I actually had to read A Wizard of Earthsea for 9th grade English class, but I wound up engrossed in it. The plotting is somewhat slow, but that seemed natural for a book we were reading in English class so maybe I was grading on a curve. I loved three things in the book.
First, I absolutely loved the way magic works in Earthsea, and the sequence of Ged's education. The whole idea that magic is about using names to gain power was really cool, and I deeply appreciated that Le Guin gave magic a logic and ethos. It's worth noting that I'd devoured Debra Doyle's Circle of Magic, a young adult series about a young apprentice wizard in a medieval magic school, several years before I read A Wizard of Earthsea and this was like a logical step on from that.
Second, I really enjoyed the island setting of Earthsea. When I read A Wizard of Earthsea, I had read The Lord of the Rings, which has a very stock medieval fantasy setting, and I had read the Dragonlance series, which has a big weird setting that nobody thinks too hard about, and the first few Elric books, of which nobody ever said the Young Kingdoms were the most lovingly drawn fantasy world. So this huge archipelago with all these different islands really appealed to me.
Third, I loved the dragon. It was just such an epic confrontation between a wizard and a dragon, and it felt truly fantastic.
Afterward I went on to read The Tombs of Atuan. I liked how Le Guin had a conflict turn into a friendship, but I also loved that the labyrinth reminded me of a D&D dungeon (this was all read when I was getting deeper into D&D). I know that I read The Farthest Shore but it didn't stick with me like the other two.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 13, 2019 7:12:21 GMT -6
I haven't watched episode 6 yet but I have seen the rest.
So far it's worn its heart on its sleeve. It takes the Western and Samurai influences that Star Wars has always had, and uses them almost as a manifesto. The first episode's climax, for instance, reminded me heavily of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The fourth has bits that are straight up Seven Samurai. There's a lot of the feel of Lone Wolf and Cub in it as well. If that's what you want out of a Star Wars show, then it definitely hits the right notes.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 11, 2019 13:20:23 GMT -6
Well, the Kickstarter's live:
The book is being written for StarSIEGE, with this aside: What's particularly irritating with the Kickstarter's format is that the stretch goals only apply if you spend $150 on the boxed set. That's more than I'm interested in, and I don't see a lot of merit in buying in.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 9, 2019 13:07:08 GMT -6
This is something I was surprised to see. Troll Lord Games is putting out a Kickstarter for the Starship Warden, which claims to be Jim Ward's complete starship: www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/1715/landingI'm a bit surprised to see this, given that Jim published his previous work through Goodman Games. Does anyone know more about this and why it's going through TLG and published for the Siege Engine instead of Metamorphosis Alpha?
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Post by cadriel on Sept 4, 2019 14:16:32 GMT -6
If this were, say, a rather modest gathering of people who were going to spend a weekend in the Twin Cities playing Blackmoor and Braunstein and Napoleonic minis and DGUTS and Empire of the Petal Throne / Tékumel minis and maybe a spot of Dungeon!, then I think it could be a success. I for one would love to do it and would be willing to contribute for it. Trying to make it a full scale convention with booths and other events and such would seem less appealing.
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Post by cadriel on Sept 3, 2019 13:41:42 GMT -6
This is a question that really stumped me for a bit, but I think I've found my way to it.
My pipe dream OD&D would be three books, but big ones.
Book I: The Compendium. This would combine OD&D with most of the choice bits from the first 3 supplements - all the new classes, spells, monsters and magic items, and the rules that don't suck. It would, however, be re-organized and updated with a good chunk of material (particularly combat rules) taken from Empire of the Petal Throne and Chainmail as necessary to flesh them out or clarify things, and maybe a touch of Holmes. All very orthodox TSR material.
Book II: The Grimoire. A compendium of variant material from back in the day. All the good material from the Strategic Review and The Dragon; variants on things like psionics and hit locations that weren't done well in the supplements; all kinds of lifepath tables and critical hit tables and variant races and classes and spells and magic items from the APAzine community and OD&D compatible works like EPT and the Arduin Grimoire. The "riotous diversity" of early OD&D condensed into a single usable volume.
Book III: The Bestiary. Oh, my. A simply gob-smacking listing of creatures. A compendium to put all three volumes of All the World's Monsters to shame. No nook or cranny left un-scoured. If a monster was done five times, then five variations might appear in this book. No restraint in borrowing and stealing.
In principle, you could run a thorough and complete OD&D game with just book I, or the most crazy-go-nuts gonzo variant ever with book II, and for anyone who loves monsters, book III would simply be a delight.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 21, 2019 9:17:15 GMT -6
I read the first 6 books in this series, but it got tiresome after that. My impression was that it started as a sort of self-conscious cross between The Lord of the Rings (dark lord, epic quest, fantasy world, flight from a village, inhuman adversaries) and Dune (female mystics, chosen one linked to desert people who can use the same powers as the female mystics, wheels within wheels plotting) but over time became too laden with cruft to be enjoyable. A TV series can probably shorten most of the narrative problems that I had with the books, so I'm interested to watch it.
Putting Moiraine as the lead is an interesting frame. If they really have thought about the adaptation and do justice to the parts that are really solid adventure writing without getting bogged down, I could see this being a solid series. But I have to admit that the first thing I looked at when I heard Moiraine had been cast was how tall the actress is, and was disappointed that she's so tall.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 22, 2019 6:20:51 GMT -6
In chronological order, these are the movies I rated 10 stars on IMDB:
Nosferatu (1922) Metropolis (1927) The Rules of the Game (1939) Citizen Kane (1941) Casablanca (1942) Sunset Boulevard (1950) Seven Samurai (1954) Breathless (1960) Psycho (1960) Through a Glass Darkly (1961) Winter Light (1963) Band of Outsiders (1964) Dr. Strangelove (1964) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Persona (1966) The Godfather: Part II (1974) Mikey and Nicky (1976) Annie Hall (1977) Star Wars (1977) Dawn of the Dead (1978) The Thing (1982)
Exactly one of those films came out after I was born. This is saying something. Ingmar Bergman is over-represented as a single director, and even in a single period of his work, but oh well.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 8, 2019 15:37:44 GMT -6
I haven't been running OD&D lately; I've been running 5e D&D, both using original material (my current campaign) and pre-written material (the campaign before this one). And I have to say; the attitude of Dave Arneson's True Genius, and of Mike's review of it, and of most of the posts here, are things I just don't agree with, despite having run OD&D and really loving it when I have.
From about September 2017 to December 2018, I ran Tomb of Annihilation, a huge 5e module with a jungle hexcrawl, a ruined city, and a huge dungeon. We had a lot of fun playing through it. It was a challenging and fascinating experience. Nothing about this was fundamentally a different activity from when I've run dungeons that I made up using OD&D as a guideline and Gary Gygax's Greyhawk as an inspiration. That is what I reject, completely, from Rob's thesis and from those who support it.
Absolutely nothing about 5e D&D changes the "you can do anything" nature of an RPG. There is literally no action that a player has wanted to take in my running 5e that is precluded by the rules. The players often did things that surprised me, and I frequently had to make shirt up because they are creative and clever and will do things like blast a mimic off a ledge or turn an adamantine shiv on a pole into a weapon. That is delightful. The only restrictions they faced were specific things in the scenario where the module made exceptions to rules that would have broken the dungeon, like using Stoneshape on the dungeon walls.
People talk about 1974 OD&D like it didn't have rules, and was just a free Kriegsspiel. It wasn't. It had a lot of rules, and arcane ones that it turns out most people didn't use. Back in the day, Tunnels & Trolls was created as a simpler reaction to OD&D. The most popular retro-clone of OD&D, Swords & Wizardry, has almost nothing in common with OD&D (against any other old school D&D) other than the fact that it matches OD&D's lists of spells and magic items and monsters.
I love Dave Arneson's work. I think the man really was a genius. I love 1974 OD&D and Holmes Basic D&D, because they're easy to run and I can make up monsters while I'm writing them down. But in my experience players tend to like 5e because the mechanics support them making meaningful choices about their characters. And I like running 5e just fine.
I mean, look. We have all loved OD&D - some people here for longer I've been alive, some even longer than it's been in print. And it's a great game, it really is. OD&D made me realize things that made me much better as a DM when I went on to other RPGs. But what I don't like is the attitude of running down other games. The audience for 5e D&D is larger than ever, and it's more diverse than ever, and people are playing a game that really is at its heart a true descendant of the game we all love.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 4, 2019 10:36:40 GMT -6
Honest question. WHY is this seemingly so difficult? You take two armies, you put them on the opposite sides of the table, and you fight a battle. I remember a review years and years ago of an RPG called Over the Edge that talked about Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do. Lee tells the person reading his manual to do what comes naturally. The problem is, what comes naturally to a novice in the martial arts is very different from what came naturally to Bruce Lee, who had spent decades mastering Wing Chun. You literally learned the game from the people who wrote it. Any gaps or unclear things were just a matter of explanation and probably seemed like simple common sense. That clearly doesn't translate to people trying to figure the game out themselves from the written rules, which were aimed at an audience that was already doing miniatures wargaming.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 2, 2018 11:03:42 GMT -6
I stopped reading the books after 5 or 6 because it became too much of a soap opera, so I'm reasonably confident it will translate on the small screen.
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Post by cadriel on Sept 17, 2018 7:38:26 GMT -6
Chainmail started with Jeff Perren after he and Gary saw Elastolin 40mm. If you're going to speculate study a bit of the history first. If this is directed at me, I've certainly studied the history. The Lake Geneva rules in some form would have existed without Tolkien, but the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement wouldn't. There was real and specific demand for a Tolkien-ish wargame that this was responding to, and the Fantasy Supplement is specifically what Arneson used in constructing his Blackmoor campaign. Whether Chainmail without a Fantasy Supplement is published in a Tolkien-less world - who knows? Too many variables are different.
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Post by cadriel on Sept 12, 2018 12:33:36 GMT -6
It's a really fascinating question. If there's no Tolkien, I think there is no Dungeons & Dragons, but it's a near thing. So: Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in 1954-55, but it was a relatively obscure book, only available in three hardcover volumes. It wasn't until the 1965 printings in paperback (spurred by the unauthorized Ace editions) that it became massively popular. This caused a fantasy boom, with Ballantine hiring Lin Carter to pick older fantasy novels to reprint. The Tolkien boom happened at the same time as the sword & sorcery revival. L. Sprague de Camp's anthology Swords & Sorcery was published in 1963, and it basically named the genre; Poul Anderson, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, and Clark Ashton Smith were featured. Three years later (1966), Lancer began releasing volumes of Howard's Conan stories edited by de Camp and Carter (who also included their own work and "posthumous collaborations"). As a fascinating side note, de Camp sent a copy of Swords & Sorcery to Tolkien, who wrote his own notes on it. So the S&S revival still should have happened, although it probably would not have the momentum that Tolkien's success gave to all of fantasy literature. We still would have Conan, and the mass market paperbacks of Leiber and Moorcock (who shows up in the second de Camp anthology), but not of Lovecraft or CAS, who are in Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series which wouldn't have happened. The reason I don't think there is a D&D with no Tolkien is that I don't think Chainmail has a Fantasy Supplement without it, and possibly Chainmail itself doesn't happen if Gygax isn't interested in Middle-Earth Diplomacy games. No Chainmail, no Blackmoor - I know it wasn't the primary rules for the whole campaign, but it was a significant piece. More broadly I don't think a fantasy milieu has broad currency without The Lord of the Rings. Gygax didn't accidentally put elves, dwarves, and hobbits fighting goblins, orcs, wraiths and balrogs, into Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons. Without these elements, both games would be missing a lot of the sticking factor that they had. I generally think fantasy would be a much smaller concern. Tolkien looms so large over it and it's hard to see the Howard-influenced wave of the '70s gong as far as it did without people reading Tolkien and looking for the next fantasy novel. And of course the late '70s wave led by The Sword of Shannara and all subsequent fantasy would never have happened.
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Post by cadriel on Sept 7, 2018 7:56:45 GMT -6
I have two OCE white boxes. Sometimes I talk with my mother about her sewing / embroidery machines and think I should just buy myself a woodgrain box.
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Post by cadriel on Sept 3, 2018 18:02:36 GMT -6
Crossposting from my G+:
I read the main novel in the first volume of L. Sprague de Camp’s Viagens Interplanetarias series, The Queen of Zamba. It’s a light, breezy trip from a weird 22nd century down to a planet of people very much like modern humans. de Camp’s hero is a human disguised as an alien, and it’s sort of a rationalized version of Burroughs’s Barsoom works. It is not as good at swashbuckling as Burroughs, but de Camp was a fairly good writer, and his story is interesting. The worldbuilding is noteworthy here as he presents a fleshed out world parallel to our own, given a fairly short novel and the perspective of a human to tell it from.
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