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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 14, 2015 18:11:43 GMT -6
In later editions, game balance was a big deal and it was baked into the rules. In the older editions, game balance was (as far as it was even a thing) in the hands of the players and DM at the table.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 14, 2015 16:50:28 GMT -6
For my money, you just can't stuff enough owlbears into an adventure.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 12, 2015 20:40:48 GMT -6
I'm not clever enough to be a wargamer. I rp and throw dice and hope I don't die stupidly.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 12, 2015 5:41:27 GMT -6
I'm trying to think back. I have never run or played in a campaign where the complaint was having too much money and not enough to spend it on.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 12, 2015 5:38:03 GMT -6
It depends on how professional you want it to look. I find Word does what I want it to do. It doesn't look slick, but it's readable and useable. Use a 10 point font if possible. Margins don't have to be huge- even the "narrow" setting is fine if you mirror your indents.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 11, 2015 5:41:19 GMT -6
Hmm. Dragonsfoot has open registration. I think it's a little less serious there too.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 10, 2015 21:20:24 GMT -6
It goes slowly, but that's ok. It's not like there's a ton of new source material. ^_^
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 8, 2015 1:22:13 GMT -6
Sorry to necro this up.
I saw the movie last night. Was definitely thinking of the several heroes, fantastic monsters, and armies in terms of mass combat RPG and wargames. The bats seemed to be a morale thing. Scattering (but not routing) units, but I don't think I saw one attack.
The CGI was awesome. The battle was just amazing. The giants (ettin? Stone Giants?) literally served as heavy catapult. Awesome.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 5, 2015 15:55:13 GMT -6
Remember that in OD&D only fighting men can wield swords. Making good magic swords more common than other magical weapons helps to keep them viable versus the other classes longer.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 5, 2015 15:53:08 GMT -6
This is the kind of advance that would keep fighting men in line power wise with magic users, given the several reasonable restrictions we have discussed on the latter. Good stuff.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 2, 2015 21:34:25 GMT -6
Generalizing a little from this example and some other cases I have come across, it seems like many of the earliest authors wrote complicated rules, or at least wrote rather impenetrable rules, and then house ruled to simpler resolutions at the table. Yeah?
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Post by Scott Anderson on Mar 1, 2015 23:01:55 GMT -6
So elves Attack as fantastic combatants but defend as normal ones, even in melee?
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 28, 2015 14:09:28 GMT -6
I'm going to arrange spells in order of duration, in little text boxes on the bottom of each page, each one containing one spell and a half spells. That should bother everyone equally.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 27, 2015 8:05:15 GMT -6
I actually like this rule a lot because it allows heroes and fantastic monsters to dispatch normals in a timely manner.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 25, 2015 23:01:36 GMT -6
There is nothing wrong with an AC 7 thief hitting better than an AC 2 fighting man. What about the AC 7 thief who hits better than the AC 7 fighting man? Well I guess that Fighting Man should have been a Thief!
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 25, 2015 16:36:57 GMT -6
There is nothing wrong with an AC 7 thief hitting better than an AC 2 fighting man.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 24, 2015 3:08:16 GMT -6
The XP bonus from having a good prime requisite is probably more valuable than getting an additional +1 to any other stat in the long run.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 24, 2015 1:42:56 GMT -6
A +-1 on a 1d6 roll is about the same as a +-3 on a d20 roll. (16.67% vs 15%), but the discrepancy between +5% for a 14, say, and +15% for an 18, disappears.
to be honest, all the throws in an RPG are abstractions, so one is just about as good as the other. The key component to any of The rules is verisimilitude, not realism.
But back to the topic at hand: if you're not playing iron man (3d6 in order and like it), it matters very little how you arrive at your numbers. And one way is no better than the other.
I prefer the iron man method. Here in a PBP game I have an LBB hobbit with CON and WIS each of 4, and one hit point. Because that's what the dice told me she was. And thats fun for me. YMMV and all that.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 23, 2015 21:52:45 GMT -6
One of the only ways a thief or fighting man (or dwarf or hobbit) can get considerably better is to gain magic items. Clerics and magic users less so since magic is "exponential" in power.
And yeah, guys did a lot. Throwing in a couple three cool powerful items makes a big difference in the capabilities and the interest in a particular party even if they don't use the items.
In a PBP game right here, the party had lost a previous companion when he picked up a cursed magic sword. When they found the next one, nobody wanted to touch it for some time! Finally someone tried it, and as a reward, he got to keep it. its a flaming sword, so that increases the party's bravado and survivability quite a bit.
The moral of the story is: d**n, use the magic items Gary gave us!
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 23, 2015 21:44:00 GMT -6
For a long time, my draft of Treasure Hunters didn't use ability scores. We don't use them at my home game- only bonuses and penalties. We say, "this guy has inferior strength" or "that guy has exceptional constitution."
In the end I decided to go with the 3-18 range. But you only get +1 for scores above 12 and -1 for scores below 9. Which is okay because almost everything is resolved on 1d6 or 2d6, and more often 1d6.
The point is, if you minimize the mechanical discrepancy between, say, getting a 14 or an 18, people will whine less and just play.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 23, 2015 15:58:34 GMT -6
That is God's honest truth: there's 3d6 in order, and there's everything else.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 23, 2015 6:31:26 GMT -6
Thanks for giving me the opportunity, Vile. It's confusing because there are actually three different games called Treasure Hunters.
Almost a year ago, I wrote up a slim game called Treasure Hunters Précis Edition. It's got a lot of holes in it. But it's based on B/X.
At the moment, I have Treasure Hunters Prolix Edition. It is like OD&D with elements from other versions. What's differet about it is it only uses six sided dice. It also has extensive rules for domain management and mass combat. The players guide is finished and the referee's guide is about half done. Another person has expressed interest in writing up some monsters, and he's looking it over now.
In the mean time, I went back to the Precis Edition, and I'm rewriting it from scratch more or less.
All three are just for fun, although I think I've got something good in the Prolix Edition that some folks might conveivably want to own. To that end, I expect to commission some nice art and have it laid out professionally. I am still looking for some play testers to tear it apart and show me what needs to be fixed or improved.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 22, 2015 22:25:22 GMT -6
so, work on the Referee's Companion is stalled at the moment. On the other hand, I had two copies of the Player's Guide printed at Staples and they look and feel great. It's gratifying, whether they are published or not, that I can hold my own work in my hands and show it to my family &c. So being without a project at the moment, I turned back to the precis edition, to re-write it based on what I've learned in the last nine months. It's really embryonic, but if you're interested, this is what I have so far: drive.google.com/file/d/0B_0ONkhGdLg8cFRTZDlFdTBFc2M/view?usp=sharing
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 21, 2015 0:17:18 GMT -6
I have put monster stat block out to another person for the weekend to see whether they are interested in writing them after seeing them. In the meantime, I started to rewrite my basic D&d version of the game: treasure hunters precis edition.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 19, 2015 21:06:02 GMT -6
Well, the first dungeon masters rolled all the dice in some cases. So why not?
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 19, 2015 21:05:07 GMT -6
The more I think about this, the less I think about the three LBBs as disorganized. They seem pretty well organized IMO. The several rules are laid out in order of importance to the original players. Modern organization has different priorities and the advantage of several decades of experience.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 19, 2015 12:02:15 GMT -6
Michael, how big a deal were intelligent swords in the games of FFC and D&D? Did they come up a lot? What were they like?
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 18, 2015 22:09:45 GMT -6
Mr. Mornard, it's a rule set unto itself but much in the spirit of the LBBs. I would be honored to send it to you so you can tell me what needs improvement.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 18, 2015 14:55:32 GMT -6
Rather than describing the feel, describe it as fact. "You are invincible now." "You have just remembered a huge bank account you didn't know you had. The ring has reminded you!"
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 18, 2015 9:34:32 GMT -6
The specific way it tricks the party would have to be specific to the effect. A phony ring of fire protection wouldnt protect the wearer at all, but the DM would describe how it would have been much worse without it. A ring of invisibility would make the wearer invisible to his friends (but not his enemies).
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