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Post by foster1941 on Mar 21, 2008 9:08:08 GMT -6
Jim Holloway's illustrations of female dwarfs in The Shady Dragon Inn (Classic D&D supplement of pre-rolled characters) all have beards but they less full than the males' beards and usually braided or "styled" in some other manner. That's pretty much always the way I've visualized it.
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 25, 2008 14:49:03 GMT -6
I don't like it when people Necro ephemeral or off-topic threads or when people necro threads without adding anything beyond "anybody have any more thoughts on this?" or "I agree." Other than that, though, on a fairly new and fairly small site such as this I've got no problem with continuing old threads in favor of starting new ones on the same topic, especially since the Site Boss prefers it that way.
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 6, 2008 19:19:15 GMT -6
Because of the shallower numerical power-curve in OD&D than some of the later editions (smaller numbers in general, and fewer and smaller adjustments) mixed-level parties are much more feasible, and are in fact the assumed norm. 3 to 4 levels of difference between characters in the same party is completely unremarkable and in fact that's what the recommended level spreads on the old modules meant -- when they said "for characters level 3-7" they didn't mean an entire party of 3rd level characters or an entire party of 7th level characters, or that the party would start the adventure at 3rd and finish it at 7th, but rather a party in which the lowest level characters were around 3rd and the highest level were around 7th.
1st-2nd level characters do require some special consideration because they're so fragile -- a single hit is often enough to kill them, and something like a fireball or dragon breath will likely do them in even with a successful saving throw -- but even so, if the other players keep this in mind (and some of it can be mitigated by giving the character good magic items -- magic armor, rings of protection, etc.) it shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle, especially because, due to the way the XP tables are set up, low level characters that survive will quickly close the level gap -- a 1st level character joining a party of 7th level characters will, straight XP-wise (i.e. assuming no wastage from acquiring enough XP in a single session that would normally raise him 2+ levels at once and having to burn the excess), hit 7th level himself right about the time the rest of the party hits 8th level (and will remain 1 level behind thereafter, assuming they always adventure together and split the treasure and XP evenly).
Another thing higher-level characters saddled with a newbie companion can/should do to "break in the new guy" is to adventure a bit "beneath their level" for a bit, until their new companion is able to catch up. A party of 3 7th level characters and 1 1st level character shouldn't immediately head for dungeon level 7 and watch their new companion get slaughtered by the dragons, giants, etc. that dwell down there; instead they should spend some time on, say, dungeon level 4 or 5. The same logic that says smaller parties should stick to easier levels says that mixed-level parties should seek out challenges appropriate to their average, rather than their highest, level.
The last thing to consider is that, given the way the game is set up, characters above a certain level shouldn't permanently die all that often -- lawful clerics of 7th+ level can raise dead and wishes (from rings and swords) are fairly common (with bringing back a dead companion being, per the book itself, the quintessential non-greedy, should-be-granted use for a wish). Plus, at those levels, most characters are assumed to have a retinue of retainers, at least a couple of which are likely of fairly substantial level themselves and can be "upgraded" to full PC-status if necessary. So the idea of a 12th level character dying and having to be replaced by a rank 0 XP newbie isn't really something that should come up very often.
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 6, 2008 13:53:47 GMT -6
In theory I strongly support starting all new PCs at 1st level and either the higher-level characters are responsible for helping them along and keeping them alive until they're high enough level to fully contribute, or the low-level characters have side-adventures until they're high enough level to join the main party. However, in practice, where the group only gets together once a month and it's always the same 5 players, that approach probably won't work. In that case, I'd probably bite the bullet and grudgingly allow the new PC to start at 1/2 the XP (which is to say generally 1 level below) the lowest total of any PC in the party, even though I hate doing that (and even hate it as a player -- any character that didn't start at 1st level with 0 XP doesn't feel "real" to me).
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 5, 2008 23:35:31 GMT -6
I can think of a certain recent event that might be inspiring a little more interest in old D&D collectibles. I expect we'll see a price spike across the board for D&D stuff from the 70s and 80s. If you've got a few extras sitting around now's probably a good time to put them on the block. If you're still trying to complete your collection, well, you'd either better be prepared to pay a premium or get to like pdfs
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 5, 2008 1:28:43 GMT -6
One of the guys in my semi-former gaming group (they're still playing, and I'm still on their email list, but I haven't played with them since the last DM-switch and campaign-reset about 6 months ago) suggested getting together sometime soon for a one-shot old-school dungeon-crawl in honor of EGG's memory. I'm trying to convince them to let me run The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth* (probably just the Greater Caverns level) using the OD&D rules. That seems like a wonderfully fitting tribute, running Gary's first published dungeon under his first published ruleset. Alas, at least a couple of the guys in the group are die-hard AD&D only, so they'll probably insist on the AD&D version (module S4) instead, but I'm trying... *note: the info on this site is wrong; the module was published in 1976, not 1978.
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 4, 2008 13:51:49 GMT -6
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 4, 2008 13:35:48 GMT -6
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Post by foster1941 on Mar 4, 2008 11:36:02 GMT -6
The end of an era. Even if this hobby of ours survives into future generations it will never be the same for them as it was for those of us who were lucky enough to know (or at least interact online with) the co-father and public face of the game. It'll be interesting to see what kind of coverage this gets in the mainstream press and what (if any) official reaction WotC will have.
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Post by foster1941 on Feb 14, 2008 14:21:44 GMT -6
That would be the most "purist" way to go about it, but that would cut you off around issue #6, meaning you'd be missing out on a lot of good stuff from the later issues! For instance, issue #17 (which I happen to know pretty well since it's the oldest one I actually have in hardcopy) includes articles on tesseracts in dungeons, vampires, specialist magic-users, expanding the jousting rules from Chainmail for D&D, and a very long story-article by Gary Gygax about combining D&D and Metamorphosis Alpha that is an absolute classic. All of it is either edition-neutral or OD&D-specific, despite the full-page ad for the newly-released AD&D Players Handbook that appears in the back. This ENWorld thread of review/summaries for each issue of The Dragon from #14 up to #27 (an earlier, now lost, thread covered TSR and issues #1-13...) gives a good idea of what was in each issue during this transition period. The biggest breaking-point is probably issue #22, which included a 9-page preview of material from the forthcoming AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (including the combat & saving throw tables). So, to remain OD&D-pure, ending your collection at issue #21 (December 1978) might be the best call...
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Post by foster1941 on Feb 14, 2008 13:23:30 GMT -6
OD&D and AD&D overlapped in The Dragon for a long time (not surprisingly, since it took 2 full years for the complete AD&D set to be released). I believe the last OD&D-specific article appeared somewhere in the late 20s, around issue #27 or 29 or so. As a general rule, I'd say anything up to issue #14 is all OD&D, from there up to about issue #20 is mixed but predominantly OD&D, and after that is mixed but predominantly AD&D.
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Post by foster1941 on Feb 16, 2008 11:37:15 GMT -6
From the index posted upthread it looks like WD made the switch from OD&D to AD&D gradually, but was pretty much all-AD&D by around issue #20 (which means WD actually supported OD&D through 1980, which is about a year longer than The Dragon did). WD started heavily favoring their own games (which at the time included US-based games that they sub-published in the UK such as Paranoia, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and Call of Cthulhu as well as their home-grown Judge Dredd and WFRP, so although it was becoming increasingly a house organ it was still pretty diverse) from about issue #80 on; the last AD&D article apperared in issue #93; from issue #100 the magazine changed its focus, becoming all-GW and much more heavily Warhammer/minis focused and (at least from my perspective) no longer worth reading.
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 16, 2008 0:21:33 GMT -6
Yep. Here's the thread, the map is attached to post #173.
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 15, 2008 22:18:40 GMT -6
Heh, too bad you guys didn't make a full map -- we could compare it to the ENWorld mods' map from GenCon to see if there's any overlap (they entered via the NW corner, you headed in a north and westerly direction...).
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 3, 2008 13:46:34 GMT -6
The Citadel of the Autarch - Gene Wolfe (I think; I read this and The Sword of the Lictor back to back and have trouble remembering which scenes took place in which book; I suppose I could cheat and list the omnibus volume Sword and Citadel...) I've read the first two, but got sidetracked and haven't gotten to the latter books - are they even better than the first half of the series? (And, if we wanted to open yet another can of worms, should this series be more properly considered 'science fiction', rather than 'fantasy'? They struck me as being like the Dune series in that they both take place in a sci-fi universe, but so far into the future that the technology is seriously pushing the edges of Clarke's Law.) I read the first two several years ago and the second two recently so I can't do a true side-by-side comparison, but my vague/gut feeling is that I liked the second two better than the first two (which is saying something, as I liked the first two very much). As for sf vs fantasy, that's not a distinction I'm too strict about. Most/everything in the Book of the New Sun is justified via ultra-advanced science rather than actual magic, but the "feel" of the series is much more fantasy than sf in my mind (whereas Dune feels more sf).
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 3, 2008 11:47:53 GMT -6
Trying to order these by preference would require too much effort, so here's an alphabetical-by-author listing of ten favorites.
The Broken Sword - Poul Anderson The Face in the Frost - John Bellairs The King of Elfland's Daughter - Lord Dunsany The Gates of Creation - Philip Jose Farmer (could just as easily be A Private Cosmos) The Ship of Ishtar - A. Merritt (could just as easily be Dwellers in the Mirage) The Blue Star - Fletcher Pratt Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire J.K. Rowling The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien The Eyes of the Overworld - Jack Vance The Citadel of the Autarch - Gene Wolfe (I think; I read this and The Sword of the Lictor back to back and have trouble remembering which scenes took place in which book; I suppose I could cheat and list the omnibus volume Sword and Citadel...)
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Post by foster1941 on Feb 11, 2008 12:35:15 GMT -6
Supplements II-IV and later printings of Supplement I appear to be in Times Roman (or, again, something similar). From what I understand (never actually seen a copy) early printings of Supplement I were in Futura Lt BT, like the boxed set.
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Post by foster1941 on Feb 11, 2008 12:14:39 GMT -6
All printings of Chainmail and the early printings of the boxed set were in Futura Lt BT (or something similar). The 5th and 6th printings of the box were re-set in Helvetica (or something similar). No idea about the supplements.
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Post by foster1941 on Nov 21, 2007 17:04:16 GMT -6
What do you think about my game so far? I hope I can get feedback from you guys, since I'm quite new to OD&D. I'm very interested in the "OD&D way" which I'm finding fascinating, and I want to learn as much as possible. Any comments are well received. Your introduction was spot-on and it's cool that the players seemed to understand and embrace the vibe you were going for. I look forward to reading about how things turned out once the actual adventuring started
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Post by foster1941 on Nov 21, 2007 14:14:14 GMT -6
Yeah, I noticed that in the pic, and it made me smile. TSR apparently used green as well as orange for the original sheets in 75-76, so you were still old-school-correct
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Post by foster1941 on Nov 21, 2007 13:39:13 GMT -6
Love the group photo. Argentinian gamers look "cooler" than American gamers (or maybe just the Argentinian gamers who chose to play OD&D...) -- that group looks like they could be a rock band. Also, I hope those book covers on your DM screen are facsimiles and that you didn't chop actual OD&D books apart to make that screen!
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Post by foster1941 on Oct 31, 2007 22:36:50 GMT -6
Considering that 3rd level characters, even at full health, are likely only to have ~10 hp (more for fighters, less for mages) and dragons do damage equal to their hp with their breath weapons (save for 1/2, usable 3x a day), any dragon with more than 15 or so hp is pretty much guaranteed to wipe out the party. Assuming you don't want that to happen, I'd say a small sub-adult white dragon (5 HD, 15hp) is probably about the highest you should go. If the party is likely to get the drop on it and avoid its breath weapon you might be able to go as high as a small sub-adult black dragon (6 HD, 18hp) but that would be pushing it and you'd be very likely to end up with several dead characters (unless they can manage to talk their way out of fighting it...). Younger dragons of larger sizes or tougher types could also be used (e.g. small young green dragon: 7 HD, 14hp; small very young red dragon: 9 HD, 9hp), but vol. II says they don't normally have any treasure, and I assume if you're making the party fight a dragon you'll want to at least let them get a little treasure out of it.
Remember also that even if they manage to avoid the breath weapon a dragon is a very tough combat opponent for low-level characters -- AC2 means they'll have a hard time hitting it (17+), whereas 5 or 6 HD means it'll have a pretty easy time hitting them with its bite (12+ to hit AC2).
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Post by foster1941 on Oct 31, 2007 21:39:28 GMT -6
You can find a link to a very good pdf facsimile of the original D&D character sheet in the first post of this thread. You can find a not-quite-as-good (but still good enough IMO) facsimile of the original game reference sheet here. For true retro-appeal, be sure to print them both out on orange paper. Advice for running the game: don't get hung up on the rules (or allow the players to) and keep it as fast-moving as possible. Don't waste a lot of time setting up backstory or establishing a plot, just get the players right into the middle of the action ASAP and don't let up until the session ends. EDIT: Duh! You said cheat sheets or reference sheets -- I read that as character sheets or reference sheets. For OD&D, the only cheatsheet you really need is something with the combat and saving throw tables. If your ruleset has the Reference Sheets one of them already has exactly this. If not, it should still be easy enough to photocopy or cut & paste vol. I p. 19 and vol. I p. 20 onto a single sheet.
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Post by foster1941 on Dec 14, 2007 11:57:25 GMT -6
A point that often comes up when this topic is discussed at ENWorld (usually in relation to C&C there, but the same general principle applies to D&D) is that one of the reasons players who like the skills and feats of d20 like them because it lets their character do "special" things that not everyone else can do, and a general ad-hoc system tends to lose that distinction by applying the same chance of success for everyone (or at least everyone with the same class and comparable stats). It's not just that the player is going to want his character to be able to trip or disarm or be a prodigious knot-tier or have expert knowledge of gemcraft or whatever, he's going to want to be able to do those things as a speciality, to be better at them than the average person (i.e. the other players' characters).
How you choose to address that is up to you (and is a matter of how much you're willing to indulge your players, how much de facto d20 you're willing to allow to slip in through the back door) but it's something to keep in mind, to make sure you at least understand where the players' complaints are likely to be coming from -- it's not just that they want to be able to do stuff beyond the scope of the rules-as-written, they want to be able to do it better than everybody else.
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Post by foster1941 on Jul 18, 2007 16:40:31 GMT -6
Heh, I'm actually glad the price on that is already so high. If it were more "reasonable" (like, say, somewhere in the $500 range) I might actually be tempted to bid on it with the money I've been saving up to get a new car. But at $1,774.98 (reserve not met) with almost 6 days to go that's already so far out of my even theoretical price-range that I'm saved from temptation I've resigned myself to the fact that unless one falls into my lap by some sort of coincidental fluke (a relative finds a copy stored away in an attic or some such) I'm never likely to own an actual woodgrain OD&D set, and I'm okay with that. My 4th printing (which has the white-box and 'new' cover art but still has the original font/layout on the interiors) is good enough for me.
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Post by foster1941 on Dec 1, 2007 11:57:59 GMT -6
I'm definitely enjoying this board at the moment, but I don't expect it to last forever. In my experience, one of two things invariably happens to internet discussion fora (not just rpg ones): either the membership remains at a fairly small level and eventually enough members either run out of things to say or move on to other things that the board stagnates and fades away, or the board continues growing and becomes more impersonal which then leads to an attempt to "build community" through off-topic chatter and in-jokes and such, which leads to cliques, which leads to board-schisms, etc. Perhaps it's possible to have a sufficient critical mass to avoid #1 without falling into the trap of #2, but in ~15 years on the internet I've never seen it happen yet...
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Post by foster1941 on Dec 1, 2007 12:07:21 GMT -6
I had a friend who read Quag Keep back in jr. high and told me it sucked so I've never bothered with it. I have, fairly recently, read the first 3 Witch World novels, and found all of them pleasant and enjoyable enough, so perhaps I'll go back and pick this up some day. Probably not anytime soon, though. The Quag Keep sequel was co-written with (posthumously completed by?) Jean Rabe (possibly familiar to D&D fans as head of the RPGA in the late 80s and author of a lot of really terrible modules and game-based fiction), which is a huge black mark against it in my book, so I doubt I'll ever read it even if I do read and enjoy the first one.
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Post by foster1941 on Jul 11, 2007 12:01:37 GMT -6
There are 3 HalfBrice Books stores in Indianapolis (where my sister lived for several years) and I used to love going to them -- I don't recall buying much/any rpg stuff there but I bought tons of other books. Even after my sister left Indy my mom and I still drove up there (about a 3 hour drive each way from Evansville, where we lived) a couple time mostly just to go to this store.
Sadly, there are no locations in Southern California, and traveling up to the Bay Area or to Phoenix just to go to a used bookstore ain't gonna happen...
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Post by foster1941 on Jul 6, 2007 10:55:19 GMT -6
Big news just spotted by Daniel Proctor (Goblinoid Games): the OCE version of the OD&D rules is now available for purchase on pdf at RPGNow: enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=22428Considering how long we OD&D fans have had to advise people curious about the One True Game to either drop $50+ on ebay or seek out bootlegs, being able to point to a legit source is a huge bonus. Thanks to WotC for (finally!) making this available
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Post by foster1941 on Jul 2, 2007 10:58:54 GMT -6
- Midkemia Press' Cities (or AH Runequest Cities) Oh absolutely! This is one of my all-time favorite game supplements (I've had the RQ version for years, and only recently picked up the original generic (OD&D-compatible) version and it's even better). I'll take 64pp of this book over 1200pp of Yggsburgh any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
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