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Post by cadriel on Jul 6, 2014 15:20:30 GMT -6
I don't think it's unreasonable for stats to increase a bit over the course of play, in fact it's kind of assumed in 0d&d. In what way is this "kind of assumed" in OD&D? There are no mechanics for changing ability scores, and there is nothing in the text (as far as I'm aware) that actually backs up the assertion that it's an assumption. You should really back things like up rather than just saying them as if they're obvious facts.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 5, 2014 7:26:07 GMT -6
Because D&D 5e is firmly in the family of retro clones. It is no S&W, L&L, or OSRIC. Rather It more akin to Lotfp or Blood & Treasure or Castles & Crusades. Having played and refereed it I play most similarly to the a Blood & Treasure campaign I am playing and it feel similar to how I referee the Majestic Wilderlands Honest question. I played Castles & Crusades and hated it. I hated the SIEGE Engine and the way the abilities were superficially like older AD&D and basic D&D but not like them in play. If I felt that way about C&C, is there any reason to think that I would like D&D 5e?
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Post by cadriel on Jul 3, 2014 20:14:52 GMT -6
I agree, especially with regard to the incestuous references to TSR’s own literature, which is derivative and weak. I will say I prefer that over the influence of anime and video games. However, it’s funny that they *completely* disregard the entire “back to Appendix N” element of the OSR. Yeah, it's what I think is the biggest weakness of Wizards of the Coast's approach to D&D: they treat it as a brand where the detailed settings and heaps of novels are Really Important. So the influences are D&D novels, which is kind of incestuous; they are creating things that aren't fresh and don't reflect any ideas outside of the D&D "brand." None of which reflects actual play, where the majority of gamers have always thrown all that overboard and played in their own games with material they invent themselves. It's a minority who closely follow the established settings.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 3, 2014 11:57:31 GMT -6
I gave it a quick look. The disclaimer is funny and the d100 Trinket table is my favorite thing in the PDF. The bulk of it isn't my style these days but I probably would've loved it when I was 16 and running 2e AD&D. It seems like it would play similarly to 2e but with some 3e/4e twists.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 24, 2014 13:40:43 GMT -6
I never said I didn't know what Go is. What I'm saying is that Gary spoke of his enjoyment of Shogi often, but I never heard him mention Go. That's fine, I wasn't correcting you. geoffrey said his memory was hazy. I was providing a refresher for his benefit.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 24, 2014 13:34:10 GMT -6
Go (Chinese: wei ch'i) is a game played with black and white stones on a 19x19 grid. Shogi is a Japanese descendant of chaturanga, the Indian game that eventually became chess, played with tiles on a rectangular 9x9 grid. Wei ch'i / Go originated in China, Shogi was developed in Japan. Japan is the center of the Go world, and it is Japanese Go players who are usually the masters of the game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi
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Post by cadriel on Jun 23, 2014 6:38:54 GMT -6
Given that Carcosa was written by our own geoffrey, it figures that B1 In Search of the Unknown would probably be the easiest module to convert. Just throw out all of the monsters and treasures and replace them with Carcosa-appropriate equivalents.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 17, 2014 13:36:27 GMT -6
These are all examples of Gary writing something very different from the way he actually played, because he really believed in winging it. He published rules because you can't sell "winging it." I often wonder if you could have. I mean, Holmes Basic was 48 pages and if you added 16 pages you could fit much – perhaps most – of the material that was dropped from OD&D. Boot Hill was 34 pages, Metamorphosis Alpha 32 pages, Gamma World 56 pages, Tunnels & Trolls 41 pages. OD&D itself was 112 digest-sized pages that would've been 56 if laid out like Holmes. The drive to systematize and clarify everything was driven, in my opinion, by the youth of the players. Wargamers had been mostly college-aged or older and played in large, loose groupings; roleplayers were being recruited around 12 and playing through high school with small cohorts of friends.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 16, 2014 8:31:20 GMT -6
The First Fantasy Campaign from Judges Guild (1977) gives Dave's notes from the original campaign, as well as maps and a very basic key to 10 levels of the Blackmoor dungeon as he ran it in conventions in 1975 and 1976. It's very scattered but it is the prime source for Arneson's own ideas.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 16, 2014 8:27:57 GMT -6
My version has no 550 section. It jumps from 510: Description of Bonus Spells to 600: Experience Levels and Experience = That's the 1975 TSR version or one of its reprints – my own reference copy is a Different Worlds reprint. I am referring to the 1974 "green cover" rules, a typewritten and staple-bound manuscript that Barker circulated before TSR edited and officially printed it. In 2012 this version was made available as a PDF with both a scan of the manuscript and a "clean" copy of the text via optical character recognition (or possibly having been manually re-typed). See here: rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/99646/Empire-of-the-Petal-Throne-Original-Manuscript
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Post by cadriel on Jun 15, 2014 18:55:36 GMT -6
Does this imply that any differences between the original manuscript PDF and the published version of EPT are then TSR/EGG edits? If so, perhaps there may be some D&D rules clarifications to be found? I think it was a lot of changes in organization and wording rather than substantive rules. There was a difference in the damage rules, but I haven't looked too much into this. A side-by-side analysis might reveal some minor points of interest, but I doubt it would reveal much (if at all) about D&D as such.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 15, 2014 8:11:23 GMT -6
Is the EPT manuscript in PDF the same as the booklet from the original boxed set? No, it's actually Barker's original typed manuscript that was submitted to TSR. The PDF contains both an exact scan of the MS, and a "clean" copy that is OCRed from it. There are substantial rewrites that were done to the original, but I'm not sure that anyone has yet done a side-by-side comparison of the two.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 15, 2014 7:30:36 GMT -6
The EPT manuscript says (p. 21, under "550. Further on Combat."): With the two together, it's pretty clear that a 60-second combat round is implied. (We could argue about two "moves" per turn, but Gygax's emendation was making it clear that rounds are one minute and not 30 seconds.) You have the EPT manuscript in PDF, right? It seems silly to discuss nuances in the rules without it.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 15, 2014 7:13:05 GMT -6
That sounds like the initiative system from second edition AD&D to me, and is how I ran for a few years in the '90s (which was high school for me). It works, although to be entirely honest I think the weapon speeds are entirely wrong-headed. In actual combat, someone with a dagger will almost never get the first strike when facing someone with a two-handed sword, because he has to close in the entire length of that sword to strike. I prefer almost the opposite, with weapon length taking priority over imagined speeds. (It doesn't help that D&D and AD&D are entirely wrong on weapon weights; almost no non-ceremonial weapons weigh more than 4 lbs, because of the problems of swinging them over time. Combatants spend more time positioning themselves than swinging weapons.)
Having player characters add weapon speed but monsters not is a disadvantage to the PCs generally. The system works best where everyone is using weapons and/or spells.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 15, 2014 7:02:34 GMT -6
I think that this is the best answer. I don't think that you can pick a book at random from Appendix N, read it, then point to a specific thing in D&D and say "look! There it is!" Appendix N is mostly supposed to be a general inspiration of the spirit of the game. Although if you happened to pick Three Hearts and Three Lions or Lord of the Rings, you'd be finding things at every turn. ;-) I think people who get into "Appendix N" focus like I did at first on Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance and Lovecraft, and a lot of the flavor that's not sword & sorcery / pulp fantasy gets lost. Yeah, but when it came up on my blog it was pointed out that assassin's guilds definitely originated in the Gor works, and probably the specifics of how Blackmoor assassins work.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 14, 2014 21:45:09 GMT -6
There's a danger of over-analysis in Appendix N, because it was really just a list of books Gary liked. You could pretty well argue that John Norman's Gor novels, which Dave Arneson read and informed the Blackmoor campaign, had a pretty significant impact on the way D&D turned out. Some bits were excised, such as having slavery outright in the setting and the Tarns and so forth that we see in First Fantasy Campaign, but there's the Assassin which is definitely Gorean in origin. The point being, Appendix N is not a bibliography so much as a set of books Gary was suggesting to get the referee's fantasy juices flowing.
Given that caveat, Jack of Shadows is widely thought to have influenced the development of thieves in some way. To what extent it's not clear, since the thief is principally an attempt to add Leiber's Gray Mouser to D&D, but at least the "hide in shadows" part of thieves may be related to Zelazny. Amber's concept of multiple worlds probably didn't hurt the implementation of the same in the D&D cosmology, but that is its own complex nut to crack, with lots of roots in myth and spiritualism.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 14, 2014 21:22:38 GMT -6
Because he was a great fantasist. I think his Jack of Shadows is the obvious one to have an impact on D&D, but Appendix N isn't really about "D&D fantasy" as such. (And it's missing some great fantasists; Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore and E.R. Eddison should all be on the list.)
A number of the authors wrote primarily science fiction. Brackett, Brown, Norton, Weinbaum, Williamson - none of them wrote much that we'd call fantasy today. Burroughs and Carter wrote in the "science fantasy" vein that straddles a line between sci-fi and fantasy, as did Merritt. Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey is substantially more Gamma World than D&D as such, as is Saberhagen's work, and Sign of the Labrys is science fiction plus magic that was an inspiration for the dungeon concept.
I've been trying to stress for a while on my blog that D&D is not a "vanilla fantasy" work. It has robots and Martian creatures and such. It's much more open, and a lot weirder, than the reputation it has gotten. Fantasy narrowed in the 80s and 90s, and D&D narrowed along with it.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 13, 2014 8:48:08 GMT -6
That's wonderful, Allan, but how do we buy it? I don't see it in the Black Blade web store.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 12, 2014 18:24:27 GMT -6
Another way you can go is crafting magical items. It's time consuming, but obviously very beneficial.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 12, 2014 18:01:52 GMT -6
There are several ways you can go with this.
One: OD&D is extremely amenable to players buying ships. You can easily become a merchant or pirate leader. Ships are really expensive, and captain and crew have their costs listed. There are whole sections of the rules that are outright neglected for ship to ship combat.
Two: there are several high-ticket retainer types. Sages and assassins are extremely expensive, if PCs want information or dead enemies; spies and alchemists are very expensive, and can net you potions and intelligence. Sages in particular are great for soaking up PC wealth throughout a campaign. Animal trainers are also quite expensive, if a PC decided to have a personal menagerie.
Three: In The First Fantasy Campaign, Dave Arneson talks about how the Blackmoor characters gained experience by indulging their special interests: wine, women, song, wealth, fame, religion/spiritualism, and hobbies. PCs with enough wealth can go on epic benders, find expensive lovers or courtesans, spend lavishly on bards, create great hoards, become a patron of the arts, donate generously to their faith, or spend a fortune on their own special hobby (such as the aforementioned menagerie). All of these are valid ways to sink quite a lot of money. Think about football players or investment bankers, and their lavish expenditures. Civilizations always have ways to let people spend their wealth.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 10, 2014 14:43:40 GMT -6
Playing at the World lists it as having been released at GenCon VII, which was definitely the 1974 con.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 9, 2014 14:48:44 GMT -6
I can get on board with this line of thinking too, until we drag out the “dead-horse-to-beat,” missile weapons. If missile combat is abstract and multiple missiles are launched every round, how do you keep record of your ammunition without house ruling it? You must house rule it to keep it abstract. I've never seen any rule other than Rate of Fire that says how many missile to deduct from my my equipment during any given combat round. So, if my archer fires two arrows in a combat round, I can conclude that he uses two arrows from his quiver. That's two rolls of the D20 in separate phases of the combat round for two individual strikes. There's nothing abstract about that. That's a problem with the 60-second round, not with abstract combat. A 10-second round lets you have missile weapons be single shots, while melee means several attempts at attacks.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 6, 2014 5:23:27 GMT -6
I wrote this a while back about OD&D, but I figure it would do for Delving Deeper as well: Save vs. Death Ray!
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Post by cadriel on Jun 4, 2014 13:48:21 GMT -6
Nice. The descriptors of the tomes really fit well with the feel of the Carcosan rituals. And it reminds me that I was always impressed with the names of the Carcosan rituals, which are very evocative of a particular exotic evil.
On the execution it needs a little cleaning up, mostly the spacing of the phrases. For instance: It'd be better with spaces after the colon and the first comma, and none before the second comma or the period.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 4, 2014 4:47:13 GMT -6
if you created an Appendix N RPG from first principles, it wouldn't look much like the DCC RPG, or like D&D for that matter. Aside from specific references like the King of Elfland (Dunsany), DCC seems mostly to have turned the Tolkien influences down and amplified some non-Tolkien (particularly sword & sorcery) influences: Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Lovecraft. Honestly it doesn't feel Appendix N at all to me, reading more like a mash-up of older D&D, Warhammer Fantasy and Rolemaster.
Appendix N is much more far-reaching. As the recent Chained Coffin Kickstarter pointed out, it involves Manly Wade Wellman's tales of rural Appalachia. It also includes post-apocalyptic fiction (Hiero's Journey, Sign of the Labrys, Changeling Earth, Hawkmoon, nominally Andre Norton's Daybreak - 2250 A.D. as well) that would imply mutations and psionics and witchcraft. There's some planetary romance (Burroughs' Mars and Venus, Brackett and Carter, and on the scientific side, Weinbaum) and some hidden-world science fantasy (Pellucidar, Merritt). Most of the authors listed by name without any specific work recommended primarily wrote science fiction. An Appendix N game would be "gonzo," bursting with sci-fi stuff and mutations and weird magic (even moreso than in DCC) and strange gods and a lot of jokes.
(As a side note, much like E.R. Eddison or C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith is not in Appendix N. Of course he should be on anyone's reading list.)
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Post by cadriel on Jun 3, 2014 16:50:56 GMT -6
My favorite format for a book is a mass market paperback of 200 or fewer pages. That way it can comfortably fit in my pants pocket. I was in a bookstore earlier today, and I wager that there is very little in the science fiction & fantasy section that would fit comfortably in your pants pocket! Most older books are only available in trade paperbacks, and most newer books are well over 300 pages. Why a pants pocket as the measure, out of curiosity? Are you frequently on the go and reading a novel?
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Post by cadriel on Jun 3, 2014 11:42:19 GMT -6
I find that RPG books work well:
0-96 pages saddle stitched 64-244 pages perfect bound softcover 128-600 pages hardcover
If it's over 600 pages, make it two or more books. That's just painful to hold.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 2, 2014 16:30:25 GMT -6
One very old school suggestion is to make up a "background" / "special ability" table - chock full of interesting minor bonuses for humans, from adjustments in combat, to additional ability score points, to starting with a material advantage (hireling or item), to minor special abilities. Maybe even make one per class. This is something that there was a lot of in the early days; you can find an example in the Arduin Grimoire. And then only give a roll to humans. Demihumans only get the stock abilities.
(As a side note, I'm looking over the Arduin list and it's wildly uneven; one roll gives "Born of a normal mother and an efreet father, you are 100% fireproof." while another socks you with "-4 chance of figuring out anything mechanical, -3 intelligence." Most try to balance things - "+1 with all axes, -3 versus all dragon 'breath'" or "Cold and poison competent, -3 versus magical disintegration." It's a bit of a crap shoot.)
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Post by cadriel on Jun 2, 2014 5:31:36 GMT -6
Swords & Wizardry Whitebox transitioned nicely to a perfect-bound 6" x 9" paperback. It's inexpensive (around $10) and contains the whole game. It's probably Delving Deeper's main competition.
I wouldn't want a 3-booklet version. What might be useful is if you could create a one-volume paperback with all three, and then a saddle-stitched booklet with just the first booklet (player rules). The referee could get the full book for themselves, and then give the others to the players. But realistically I'd just run it with everyone using a full volume.
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Post by cadriel on May 31, 2014 16:13:14 GMT -6
The other problem with dual-wielding is that 99% of people are not ambidextrous. You are probably considerably weaker and clumsier with one hand than the other, and your dominant hand is 90% likely to be your right hand. In a fight, the other person is using all of their strength and speed and wits to try and kill you before you can kill them. It's quite hard to advance and get a weapon to a point where you can actually make contact and injure your opponent. Even if you were only wielding one weapon, you should be at least at -2 if not -4 to hit with your off hand.
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