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Post by clownboss on Feb 16, 2024 20:30:10 GMT -6
I got here again to pay my respects to the hobby. It's a monumentous release, and 50 years later it still captures all of our imaginations. I'm also trying to cook something. Hopefully this won't be the last you'll see of me. Happy 50th.
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Post by clownboss on Mar 6, 2022 8:57:44 GMT -6
Howdy, yes, I know @bitfed, too, and we play in a campaign with harlandski , bitfed's a nice fellow.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 1, 2022 18:53:30 GMT -6
I've joined here, this stuff is great.
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Post by clownboss on Jun 24, 2021 18:33:45 GMT -6
I'm 1992, as you do. The first D&D I was exposed to came from WotC.
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Post by clownboss on Apr 18, 2021 16:44:27 GMT -6
Gygax's example of a Chainmail melee from the Great Plains Game Players Newsletter #15 (Feb 1975), newly uncovered by badger2305 , appears to support that when a melee continues, it does so in a melee round in the next turn, rather than continuing in the same turn. Note especially the bolded part. From here: odd74.proboards.com/post/240709/threadJesus, this throws every conception I ever had of CHAINMAIL right through the window.
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Post by clownboss on Apr 14, 2021 20:06:30 GMT -6
How bout this: The more high-level a Mage is, the more powerful the Charm Person spell can be.
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Post by clownboss on Apr 13, 2021 14:39:39 GMT -6
Mages suck, dude. Give them at least something useful they can do.
Anyway, the way I play it: Charm Person by the book makes your targeted enemy think you're their best friend, like it's been heard in many Mike Mornard's stories. Sleep is super effective and requires no saving throw, but the falling creatures are on edge and could wake up at any irritation. You still need to roll an attack roll to attack them(with a +4 advantage) and even a miss would be enough to wake them up.
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Post by clownboss on Apr 11, 2021 16:35:33 GMT -6
I do what Ways said. A Veteran would jump like a Veteran, a Hero would jump like a Hero. Ever wanted to see a Swashbuckler jump like a Swashbuckler? I like it when the class ranks in my games have actual meaning.
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Post by clownboss on Mar 16, 2021 14:10:09 GMT -6
I remember drawing it once many years ago and yep, it looked exactly like that.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 23, 2021 16:33:55 GMT -6
The design for these is so nifty.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 23, 2021 9:29:20 GMT -6
9 seconds to launch the application and click on the "Generate" button, the coding process itself is much longer obviously, hahaha.
I can not really program it to select equipment for me or something so dependent on creative human decisions, but for my purposes when I wanna roll hireable NPCs, it's great stuff. Coding these is a hobby of mine and I translated nearly all of the OD&D rules into Tablesmith. When it's done I'm thinking of sharing them here.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 22, 2021 13:15:14 GMT -6
They're just languages and have their own slang and curses in their vocabulary just like any other language. Common is the language of the Human society. Lawful is a holy language similar to Latin, Chaotic is Black Speech from Mordor. The Netural language I imagine as a cant language similar to Polari, nominally it should be similar to Common, but it's been changed with so many euphemisms and codewords, many of which take from archaic and druidic traditions. Certain monster languages like Orcish and Goblin are branches of Black Speech, but are mutually unintelligible.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 22, 2021 13:07:00 GMT -6
Descent into Hell. A favourite for everything from Dante to Diablo.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 22, 2021 12:53:21 GMT -6
So haste is of the essence, huh? I've coded a table for myself in TableSmith. 9 seconds.
jeez this guy is so squishy
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Post by clownboss on Feb 13, 2021 15:18:05 GMT -6
I have one Greyhawk-like mega-dungeon, plus tons of side-missions in the outside world for when players need to gain extra experience, and for essential storytelling and worldbuilding.
The neat thing about my mega-dungeon is that each level has an underground railway system that leads you to a faraway part of the world outside. If you find a way to activate the train, the megadungeon is a great way to serve as a "hub" for getting to distant places without the need for flying creatures or teleportation spells.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 7, 2021 14:55:24 GMT -6
As a Chaotic person, she has one cardinal rule to follow: She must never, under any circumstances, become a bootlicker.
She's not fighting for the King, for the country, or for God, she fights for herself. She's always in fistfights with cops.
Chaos is, after all, according to Moorcock, the principle of possibility unfettered by rules. Chaos is freedom. The effects of Chaos can be beautiful. Add a little bit of Crowley's Thelema("Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law"), and you can get a perfectly working Chaotic good guy in OD&D.
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Post by clownboss on Feb 7, 2021 14:05:07 GMT -6
I have a Chaotic Cleric in my campaign, and she mostly leans as a Chaotic Good type. She's an Adept now but instead of being an "Evil Adept" we both agreed to rename her into a "Dark Adept". Oddly I don't think the chaotic forms of spells will mean much in terms of her being someone evil, but I think she's gonna grow to be more of an Elric type: Somebody who wants to dismantle Evil and Chaos by using the tools of Chaos.
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Post by clownboss on Jan 29, 2021 9:00:13 GMT -6
Gronan always used to talk about Dwarves smelling out Trolls in the first level of Castle Greyhawk, so that's one more thing I like to include: A keen and encyclopediac sense of smell.
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Post by clownboss on Jan 29, 2021 8:51:39 GMT -6
Protection from Evil: In my campaign, the evil in this spell means "violence towards oneself with the intent to maim", so the spell would give you +1 AC from any source of violence, whether they're evil Goblins, chaotic good merry men who rob from the rich, or a lawful good Patriarch. It also doesn't matter what alignment the spellcaster is. Really, I should call this spell "Protection from Harm."
I like dicebro's definition of "enchanted monster".
Dispel Evil: Neutralises spells made with an evil(or good, for the opposite) intent, such as fixed doors or mind control. I think I've heard somewhere that this dispel is only meant to be temporary though.
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Post by clownboss on Dec 27, 2020 12:22:27 GMT -6
I mean, back in the "old days", there was no such thing as Dungeons & Dragons here in Serbia, where I live. My country was never a market and was cut off from all of the hype that was built in Western countries. The way D&D made itself known and popularised came straight through the Internet, and that's the D&D that I know and that I'm grateful for. I do like leading OD&D games though!
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Post by clownboss on Dec 26, 2020 20:03:55 GMT -6
I love these, thanks. It surprises me that many of these are even questions because I already considered them, but, yeah.
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Post by clownboss on Dec 26, 2020 19:40:30 GMT -6
The D&D boar orcs are my 2nd favorite orc depiction. The orcs in Ralph Bakshi's lotr movie being far and away my favorite and closest to what I imagined when reading Tolkien. A person of culture above. I like all Orcs, it doesn't matter which is which, they always make for a compelling enemy. The ones I was exposed to the most are the greenskins from the Warcraft games(and they in turn came from Warhammer).
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Post by clownboss on Dec 26, 2020 15:42:20 GMT -6
That's me in the avatar. Fuzzy hair. "Revolver-era Beatles" art. Huge eyebags. And a cutie! The name "Clownboss" is my online name everywhere and it stems from a comic character I drew on MS Paint when I was 13. Clownboss was a leader of a clown gang who would work in a circus by day, but by night time would go out in the city for underground criminal activity... and also become bringers of justice in the neighbourhood and protect the weak and innocent. So basically the plot of "Joker", but better.
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Post by clownboss on Dec 21, 2020 16:27:54 GMT -6
I pretty much keep it by the rules. Tampering with forces beyond your comprehension, before you are ready, will destroy you.
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Post by clownboss on Dec 11, 2020 6:50:59 GMT -6
I have to admit, in all my decades of gaming? I don't recall* ever seeing a result of empty room interpreted as completely bare (just walls, floor, door). ETA: don't get me wrong, I've used completely bare rooms for effect (i.e. scare the beans out of players) but not as an interpretation of that rule). Have any of you actually encountered this interpretation? Yes, in high school. Or maybe a year or two after graduation? I was usually the GM, but this time, one of my other friends GMed. And I think it was technically Rolemaster, not D&D. But yeah, the one night he GMed, we explored a couple rooms and did not find a single monster, treasure, trap, piece of furniture, or even junk. Most of the rooms we went through were empty, but a couple had minor features like a crack in a wall or a bump in the floor that we wasted some time on. But we found nothing, and nothing happened that play session. It became a legend among my friends. "The adventure where the most interesting thing we found was a bump in the floor." To this day, I have no idea what he was planning that night. Pffthahahahah, see, that's exactly what I mean. The LBBs never spelt it was important to keep the rooms interesting!!!! That's why it was such a shock to me when I read "Dwarven Glory". Every single room had tons of fascinating things to occupy your attention and time and players could easily run into rooms like these where they'd get so asborbed in them that they would forget they were out to fight monsters and find treasure. In just the first page the "Dwarven Glory" had stuff like a theatre stage, a bed bunk room, a jewerly store, a refreshment stand, a mine, a vault, and a striptease bar. And that's not to say for the other rooms that have a barbeque, a well, a police HQ, a mysterious Ogre playing Chess, kitchen, smithys, libraries, a boutique, an 'incense' room, and so on. It feels like a lot. I just wonder where do people find the inspiration to come up with this kind of variety and originality. It is a lot of very taxing mental labour. And that's why I'm wondering if there were ever supplements that added room furnishings on the fly or sparked some ideas. Other people might attempt to shake things up and put a table with some chairs in their empty rooms to kill the monotony, but trading in "empty rooms" for "rooms with a table in them" is its own kind of unoriginality, too.
How do you do it?
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Post by clownboss on Dec 10, 2020 12:07:35 GMT -6
D'yer ever feel a lil' bit daunted when you gotta come up with a dungeon/room/monsters layout and the rules explicitly say that monsters will inhabit rooms only 33% of the time? And even then the remaining 66% would only have a 1-in-6 chance of there having treasures. The rest of the rooms are just..... empty. Nothing but rock walls and doors.
Now considering the tales of zany things that Gronan said he had encountered and some of the modules of the time(Wee Wariors' Dwarven Glory really loved tackling this), I get the impression these rooms are not meant to be barren, "nothing-but-walls-and-doors" affair but rather that every single room has to have at least something interesting. It can be as little as a dining table or a bedroom, but it seems like every story I hear from the past is that every room had some really interesting diversion in it. Some unusual piece of furniture, or a gadget, or a machine, or books of records, or a pile of useless sawdust, or a zoo, or casual non-threatening characters you can chat with. I'm just wondering if I really need to strike my creative juices for this sort of thing because it seems hard to think of incidental, inconsequential furnishings on the fly and use them to furnish so many darn rooms to pad the time before fighting monsters. It feels like there should have maybe been a supplement for this to ease the labour of thinking, but maybe people back then were much more eager to be creative than me, so I don't know. I try to have at least something interesting in most of them, even if it's a tiny thing. Maybe like a former prison cell with skeleton remains hanging.
How do you handle the problem of so many rooms that are seemingly empty? How much of your rooms are truly empty?
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Post by clownboss on Jun 2, 2020 7:10:01 GMT -6
I used to have story ideas for Black Sabbath and to me it was more rooted in the present of the time, like the Vietnam War and stuff. The story goes that the more evil is being commited, the more humanity is being pushed towards war, death and violence, that Satan gains power and every single soul that died on Earth comes to join his massive undead/demonic army. His agents are the one that incite the war and keep fueling the fire. Then The Wizard appeared from another dimension of Good that combats Satan and he picked a couple of conscientious soldiers with pure hearts to become the "chosen ones", the "agents of good", who will dessert the military and go rogue in order to stop this demonic influence before Satan gains an unstoppable force. The Wizard imbued the chosen ones with amazing agility, strength and resilience and they go to fight monsters or the large-scale human war machine. It's a story that later goes crazy and meta and goes throughout time and space. You'll have the time-traveling Iron Man trying to correct this problem himself and going awry, nuclear apocalypses, alternate dimensions and timelines, and the ultimate goal of the campaign is to break this vicious cycle and prevent The Symptom of the Universe.
I used to have the "Evil Woman" from the cover of the first album and the "blackleaf"(modeled after Sweet Leaf) in my campaigns too, lol, although they were clasically medieval
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Post by clownboss on May 15, 2020 7:53:05 GMT -6
For the most part if I understand, units tend to come in stacks of 5, so anything that numbers in 5, 10, 15, or 20 is standard fare. It's just easier to count. Of course you can deviate from it, but if you have regular units that number less than 5, they start to feel dubious and CHAINMAIL begins to show cracks in its ruleset that it wasn't meant to contend with.
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Post by clownboss on May 15, 2020 7:47:26 GMT -6
I agree, try to start with humans first. I know history is boring but trust me, you need some room to breathe and train, and you might even get to love it.
Try 100 vs 100 point battles first and slowly build up to 300-350.
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Post by clownboss on May 15, 2020 7:32:37 GMT -6
Oil has no future, I'm afraid, and I'm very sorry to see your business fail. But fossil fuels are destroying our planet and environment and I hope this tragic loss serves as an opportunity to rethink where we place our services and manpower to hopefully make a more sustainable future. Renewables have been continuously on a major upswing, which is great, and I hope a deal passes that helps the fossil fuel industry sector re-equip themseves and the workforce for renewable energy development. Let's treat our beautiful world with care.
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