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Post by cadriel on Aug 30, 2015 5:13:56 GMT -6
That's a game you play where your prize is telling a story after the fact. Two separate things. A game objective can only be an objective pre-existing in the game. Like 3 x's or o's in a row or a home run. "Invention" itself cannot be an objective in a game. Gameplay is the act of discovery. Dave Wesely's Braunstein games revealed something totally new in a refereed war game: given an objective and a situation, players can do literally anything they want to do. Some people tried to quantify absolutely everything and anything, but it remains the core point: you can do anything. It seems foolish to then say that, in such a game, you are limited to "an objective pre-existing in the game." D&D is fundamentally different from tic-tac-toe or baseball, in an important and already well described way. I think that goes back around to the original point: the idea behind "no-numbers" play is to let players do anything, unencumbered by figuring out what combination of "moves" or other rules gadgetry will let them do something interesting in the imagined world. The referee in a Braunstein-type game facilitates this by being able to decide how to proceed.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 29, 2015 4:35:05 GMT -6
The map doesn't seem very game-able. It would be difficult to describe to players, and difficult to reproduce on a dry-erase mat. Considering that Gary's maps apparently resembled the Dungeon Geomorphs, I am not sure that "game-able" means what you think it means. It may not be suited to your particular methods of play, but there are other methods. I've never had a dry-erase mat involved when running OD&D. I could describe most of its twists and turns to a player group; hell, if you remember your geometry you can even figure the lengths in corridors at angles. (A 45° diagonal corridor, if each square is 10', is very close to 14' per square.) So northeast of room 77 (near the center), I would say "Ok, the corridor turns 45° east from here, and goes ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a bit over fifty feet - that's four squares - before opening into the southwest corner of a small chamber. The chamber is twenty feet deep, thirty feet wide, and there is a door in the middle of the east wall, two doors in the north wall. In the northwest corner of the west wall there's a ten by ten niche with another door on the west wall but the door doesn't have any kind of handle on it." Or room 79: "You open the secret door. You're on the west wall of a triangular room. The straight lines of the triangle are thirty feet long, on the west and north sides. You're in the middle of the west wall, the north wall has a door on the east and west sides. Now somebody roll a d6." (The d6 is for surprise, of course.) It's not really hard to describe dungeon maps to players, remember that their characters don't have surveying equipment and are just able to make rough judgments. In play that cave-ish area's maps would look blocky. Cave 74 for instance is: "Roughly eighty feet wide and fifty feet deep, a couple niches here and there. You're in the west side, about ten feet down from the north wall. There's an opening across from you in the east wall, and the southeast corner leads off into another passage. It looks like there's a pool about ten feet south of the center of the room. Now somebody roll a d6." But assuming they survive what's in the room, they'll come away with a blocky map of the cave areas close enough that they can figure out the spots where it plugs back in to the nice neat dungeon corridors.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 24, 2015 4:25:04 GMT -6
There are four good volumes of Fafhrd and the Mouser: Swords & Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist and Swords Against Wizardry. (If you are getting the later collected editions, these were reprinted as Ill Met in Lankhmar and Lean Times in Lankhmar.) Swords of Lankhmar isn't terrible, but in the chronology, it's all downhill once they get out of Quarmall. Swords & Ice Magic and The Knight & Knave of Swords are the kind of thing that need only be read for completeness's sake.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 23, 2015 6:26:14 GMT -6
I've been thinking a lot about this, too. One of the things I did without telling my players was to start using the critical hit tables from Arduin. I would just have them roll percentiles, and then roll the damage dice indicated on the Arduin chart, and then describe the damage done. I liked the idea of having a referee-facing-only set of charts, although I'm probably not going to use the versions from Arduin in the future because they are a bit too far-out.
You could, in theory, use this as an opportunity to pull out different rules when you want a monster to be more interesting. For instance, a lot of the charts in the supplements might only be useful in certain situations, such as using Blackmoor hit location tables to see if the players hit a vulnerable spot in the monster's hide, or the Greyhawk weapon versus AC charts when fighting figures in armor. Or you could just be making rulings in combat, freed from the assumption that everything works on a straightforward and objective set of die rolls. If a player describes something that gives them the upper hand, then just give them the upper hand, and vice versa.
Gary Gygax had a quote in his letter to Alarums & Excursions #2:
It's certain, then, that Gary and Dave agreed with Mike/Gronan in his philosophy. The more of the game that the referee keeps behind the screen, the more "monster parameters" can be kept as a challenge for the players. For a wargamer there is no reason that a particular monster couldn't have its own sui generis treatment.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 18, 2015 22:20:48 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Aug 18, 2015 22:05:56 GMT -6
On the serious side, what is the best way to actually get into Free Kriegsspiel? I've found this book that looks like a good start: Verdy's Free Kriegspiel including the Victorian Army's 1896 War GameI found this by poking around on this site: Kriegsspiel NewsWithout having any experience with the genre, it seems like you could run Free Kriegsspiel with a stack of order sheets, three laminated copies of a map, the orders of battle, and maybe some tokens for the umpire's maps (I'm sure you could scrounge those from Avalon Hill games). Beats the hell out of having to paint a ton of miniatures, which has always kept me at a bit of a distance. Sound about right?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 7, 2015 11:40:50 GMT -6
The recent Conan movie was a watchable fantasy flick, but by not living up to its famous character name or its predecessor to the name, it doomed itself. I enjoyed it for its merits and didn't care too much that they pretended this was Conan. Unfortunately not enough people agreed.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 3, 2015 9:31:55 GMT -6
I've also played DCC at conventions, mostly in funnels. I kind of agree with the assertion that it doesn't compare much to OD&D. DCC is an odd duck. At its core, it's a light version of the D20 system (D&D 3e), with some simplifications (race as class, bell curve instead of linear stats) borrowed from B/X D&D. It's bulky mostly by accretion: it adds on critical hits, arcane duels, spellcasting tables, patrons – all kinds of crunchy bits intended to change the flow of the game. The end result talks about "1974" and "Appendix N" a lot, but it's .... well, it's got several things going on. First, aesthetically it's really a cross between early first edition AD&D and old Warhammer Fantasy, taken to eleven with a heavy hand on the "weird" factor. The whole thing about starting off at level 0 and becoming a hero later is fun, but it's much more Warhammer than anything we find in Gygax's Appendix N. And with its predilection for lots of charts atop a straightforward system it has more than a touch of Rolemaster to it. Second, Appendix N tends to make it into DCC in weird ways. DCC is no stripped-down Conan, or high fantasy Tolkien. It tends to steal elements from authors like Dunsany or Moorcock and then adapt them to its aesthetic. Peril on the Purple Planet, a recent sword-and-planet adventure/setting, is to me a great example of this. No way would you ever mistake it for ERB's Mars, but you can tell where the inspiration came from. I guess the best way to explain it is that DCC uses nostalgia to rope gamers in, and then encourages them to go over-the-top and have gonzo fun adventures with it. If OD&D was aimed at wargamers in Minnesota and Wisconsin who literally had nothing to do (outside of school or work) for months on end and tons of time to create and play, DCC is aimed at somewhat older (I'd say over-30) gamers with disposable income* and a chunk of nostalgia for AD&D, but limited time for play and prep. It's very much a "make your gaming time count" type of system, which makes it really good for convention play. When I've played DCC, I had a good time. I tend to think their modules have good writing, art and ideas, but the adventure design of some of them is far more linear than I really like. I thought about trying to put together a DCC megadungeon at one point, but it was just not an aesthetic match. I prefer OD&D at the end of the day, but I also understand why people like DCC. * Joseph Goodman is a hell of a businessman, and has created a dedicated following of gamers.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 28, 2015 4:42:51 GMT -6
This is Jim Ward's latest big project. Epsilon City - the city on level 14 of the Starship Warden - is being released as a hardcover supplement for Metamorphosis Alpha, with material from Jim and several of the DCC designers who chipped in with new material for the deluxe hardcover version.
Along with Epsilon City, the Kickstarter is also offering a 96 page softcover version of the deluxe Metamorphosis Alpha. That's exciting because, as excellent as the big hardcover is, it's physically unwieldy at the table. (Personally I've wound up just using the WardCo reprint I bought off of Lulu when running MA.)
But this is exciting new material! Check out the description and all the excellent stuff that the Kickstarter has to offer!
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Post by cadriel on Jul 27, 2015 8:17:30 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Jul 1, 2015 8:10:52 GMT -6
I think simplistic interpersonal relationships are one of the reasons why SW has a certain appeal: Not kidding - in SW, the quest is usually the focus of a story, not group dynamics, like in, say, Game of Thrones. So, not everyone is a traitor, sex is not a focus of the story, and people are usually working together out of personal sympathies. HArd to say how you emulate this in a game, but IMO one of the key elements of SW. Star Wars has a MacGuffin-driven structure: there is a straightforward object/action goal, an obstacle, and usually a twist or two en route, but it's very much storytelling 101. The original is a particular favorite in screenwriting courses because the plot is blazing obvious and easy to understand. The personal dynamics are generally a side aspect, because it's a very story-forward film. One way to do it in a game is probably to have everyone with 3 'hooks' about their character (Farmboy, Pilot, Son of a Jedi; Rogue, Ship Captain, Heart of Gold; Princess, Capable, Member of the Rebel Alliance and a Spy; Old Jedi, Veteran of the Clone Wars, Local Kook) and sort of roleplay in very broad strokes around those.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 30, 2015 10:16:12 GMT -6
Aliens should be a big differentiator from Firefly, too. Players don't even need to know what the aliens are, you never get detailed racial or cultural stats about them. They don't all speak in Basic and they are often just background dressing but there are plenty of them.
Also, vehicle fights are very important. Firefly doesn't ever do them but you need fights in both spaceships and terrestrial vehicles.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 30, 2015 5:34:41 GMT -6
One thing to keep in mind is that Star Wars planets and moons tend to be extreme environments, Tatooine is a giant desert, Yavin IV and Endor are both covered in jungle, Hoth is a frozen wasteland, Bespin only has humans in the clouds, Dagobah is all swampland. You don't go to a city, you go to a planet that is a giant city (Coruscant). I'd keep that in mind for any settings you use: one biome, taken to the extreme.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 25, 2015 8:46:29 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Apr 25, 2015 8:42:30 GMT -6
Over on RPGnet, @gronanofsimmerya described Chainmail morale for those interested in OD&D (the whole thread is good reading): forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?754152-So-who-wants-to-talk-about-Original-D-amp-D&p=18930499#post18930499On my blog, I followed this up with a slightly simplified rule that maps Chainmail's morale rules to HD: initiativeone.blogspot.com/2015/04/chainmail-and-od-morale.html#comment-formThe main thing here is that low level monsters will make their first morale check after 25% or 33 1/3% losses, and even if they stand, will rout immediately if they lose twice that threshold. Meanwhile, higher HD creatures will stand as long as they make a check at 50% casualties. i think this is a simple variation that can add a lot to the game. It certainly makes goblins and kobolds a different factor; a well equipped level 1 party with henchmen can take on a group of 20 and not necessarily have a TPK.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 2, 2015 19:58:11 GMT -6
It's been years since I read it, but I recall the story acquitting itself well. My feeling is that it's a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, as much as any other. Leiber may have retrofitted it into Nehwon, but I have long felt it was the adventure of his tales that defined Fafhrd and the Mouser, and his worldbuilding outside of Lankhmar was hit and miss at its best anyway. Sure, Quarmall was pretty great, but it's mostly the city of sevenscore thousand smokes that was a character in its own right. So to me it's no less an achievement and part of the series than any non-Lankhmar story of the pair.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 25, 2015 4:53:04 GMT -6
I believe S&W:WB is a clone insomuch as it clones how most folks played rather than the messy, confusing, weird and scattered rules themselves in black and white. Matt even stated years ago, if I remember correctly, that it was about the experience and feel moreso than the often hard-to-pin-down, obfuscated and ambiguous rules of OD&D. S&W may not have the "angry villager rule" or castle construction or specifically prescribed wilderness rules but I fail to see how my table experience would differ if it did or if I used the actual 3LBBs only (as opposed to using S&W:WB only or as I actually do, S&W:WB + Ready Ref Sheets and some home made tables made by various folk for OD&D...all of which I'd use were I playing via the 3LBBs). *shrug* Desiring to imagine that S&W is somehow not a clone seems sort of disingenuous considering the intent and what was happening/happened at the time. (recall for example that at that time OSRIC was not at all the more full-fledged clone it is now). To be brutally honest, if I used the 3LBBs themselves at the table instead of WB the only thing I'd imagine that would change would be that it would take more time (going back and forth between booklets, counting down level titles to see which level number, doing much the same for the 'to hit' table for other classes besides fighting men, flipping back and forth from monster descriptions to stats, etc.,etc,blah,blah,blah...). I'd probably be more forgiving were OD&D as easy to digest, handle and use at the table as, say, Holmes. I really wish the good Dr. would have/could have simply added a small handful of pages for 'Holmes D&D' to actually be a full presentation of OD&D (thus being the published alternative to AD&D and taking the place of the original box/booklets). It's weird. No one ever says that B/X isn't "D&D". Most even accept that it's clearly a clean-up and re-edit of OD&D itself (at least as practiced by and large at the time). When someone comes along and does almost the same exact thing decades later, suddenly it's "not the same". Oh, no! Bonuses to other stats! GASP! Ya mean....like so many folks were very likely already doing in their own games in the mid to late 70s already?!? The horror! They must not have been playing OD&D! Changing things! In a game that demands that the players change things! Insanity! Oh. Well. Okay. Not insanity. Well...just...don't make it, like, a rule or something. Then...THEN it's insanity. Well...except for Holmes and Moldvay. They're okay guys. But not Finch or Proctor. Certainly not 30-some odd years later. No way. They're not Holmes or Moldvay or Gygax or Jim Bob or whoever and it isn't '77 so it just cannot be. Personally, for my own part, even after I read the original booklets (soon after when S&W was first published in '08) and finally digested much closer clones of OD&D I still found I took more old-school-style fun from S&W:WB. I'd think it's much more important and indeed more old-school to actually play than wring my hands for who knows how long over if a tiny handful of words on page x in book A and pages y and z in book B mean this, that or the other thing. I say all of this loving OD&D of course. Otherwise, why would I be here? Oh... that's right. The reason I first joined in the first place: a great place for OD&D info and ideas for my S&W:WB and Holmes games. Whitebox is actually missing major details that S&W Core and Complete have, such as the rule about PCs finding secret doors on a roll of 1 in 1d6. If the only book you ever read was S&W: Whitebox, you would be totally missing the main underworld exploration rules from OD&D volume 3. Personally, I think those are good and simple rules, but the earliest version of S&W that Marv was working from didn't have them, and the revisions of Whitebox didn't add them in. Does this mean that S&W:WB isn't a good game? Not in the least. But those rules shape how dungeon exploration works in OD&D, and unless you port them in from elsewhere, they won't be in a WB game. Back when S&W first came out, I was running OD&D and wanted it to replace my LBBs at the table, but the cumulative effect of its changes meant that I wouldn't be able to do so without changing the game pretty significantly. The single saving throw, the changes to experience rules, the differences in how stats worked, the lack of a bunch of rules I used, were all enough that I wasn't comfortable using the game except when starting fresh several years later. I think that qualifies it for what we agree it is - a game that aims at the same "feel" - but I don't think that is a clone. There's nothing wrong with making changes to the game, but I don't see S&W as being "OD&D" any more than Holmes is, and in play I find it's more like B/X D&D in most of the ways that matter. I enjoy all of those games, but they are different in ways that impact on play, and we don't refer to B/X as OD&D here.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 24, 2015 14:56:23 GMT -6
Bear in mind that building retro-clones was risky, uncharted territory when Matt Finch boldly set out to explore it, so he naturally protected himself legally with lots of deviations while building his retro-clone. As time has passed and no cease and desist letters have come Matt's way (that we know of!), other authors have been emboldened to get even closer to the original rules with their retroclones. I think we must bear this in mind when evaluating the closeness or "cloniness" of S&W. Er? OSRIC (and Basic Fantasy) came out in 2006, Labyrinth Lord in 2007, and the first version of Swords & Wizardry in 2008. It was hardly a daring "uncharted territory"; in fact, it was following several other games that were considerably "closer" to their source games than S&W is to OD&D. If you compared Labyrinth Lord to Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert, it follows them considerably down to the level of chapter organization, and has corresponding rules, spells and ideas for everything B/X presents. S&W didn't do the same for OD&D. LL does change significant things, such as clerics getting a spell at first level, the armor types, a lot of the specific numbers, etc., for the sake of not being a literal copy, but it is a clone. S&W has significant rules sections and concepts that just aren't in OD&D and is missing whole blocks of rules that OD&D had. There is a real difference. If we are being strict with the definition of a clone, then S&W is not a clone. I've run Swords & Wizardry, and I want to be clear that I am not bashing it. I enjoy the game. But it doesn't run like OD&D ever has for me, and I don't think of it as a clone. It's in the "inspired by" category as far as I'm concerned.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 24, 2015 9:30:36 GMT -6
I don't think Swords & Wizardry is a "clone" of OD&D in any strict sense. The current revision of Core is closer, but still a long way from a match for OD&D. S&W has a number of rules that have no analogue in OD&D, and it doesn't have rules for some of the things that OD&D has. Whole sections of volume III of OD&D just don't show up in S&W, and its methods of determining treasure and stocking dungeons are nothing at all like the ones presented in OD&D.
None of that is to say that it's a bad game; it focuses on being a playable game that has a "feel" like OD&D does. But you can't swap it out for OD&D, even with S&W Whitebox. Not that I've ever hesitated to take PCs from one game to another, using OD&D, S&W, B/X and Holmes characters - the only consequence is that specific numbers changed depending on the rule set.
Delving Deeper I think has some interesting ideas, and I want to pilfer its monster section, which has stats for a lot of the monsters that OD&D didn't write up in any detail. But I have no compunction about borrowing monsters from any of the dozens of books I have, or making them up as the occasion presents itself. At the end of the day I wouldn't swap out DD for the LBBs, because it has a different interpretation of the fiddly details than I do.
Iron Falcon I think is an interesting project. I like its to-hit chart, which I've used instead of OD&D's for a session, because it gets a bit more granular. I have no particular intention of playing it but I like that it's there to grab stuff from.
Personally I'd like it if there were just a book that was very very close to OD&D volume 1 for character creation, and didn't worry about the rest. And that would just be so that I could play hangout games of OD&D without people needing the original set.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 21, 2015 5:29:22 GMT -6
For a variety of reasons, a good chunk of my childhood was spent playing games in the Ultima series by Richard Garriott, mostly Ultima IV, V, VI and VII. Ultima grew out of a game called Akalabeth that Garriott, a D&D player in Texas, came up with. Most subsequent RPGs are basically similar to the Ultima series.
Both Akalabeth and the original Ultima game were games with an overworld and a sort of fake-3d dungeon. They actually had some of the resource management elements of D&D, where your character ate food as he roamed about the overworld; in some entries you needed a torch or a Light spell in the dungeons. You played a fighter, wizard, cleric or thief; the class variety would get widest in Ultima III, which had tons of different classes. The first three Ultima games had various demihuman races, mostly recognizable from D&D, that changed your statistics. Ultima IV onward was all human characters.
My favorite, Ultima IV, had a lot of great little subsystems in it that would probably work well in a tabletop game. For instance, magic spells had to be mixed by buying eight reagents (sulfurous ash, garlic, ginseng, black pearl, spider silk, blood moss, and then mandrake and nightshade that you had to find). You then needed to know the spell's formula, so a cure poison spell required garlic and ginseng, while a heal spell used ginseng and spider silk, and fireballs were ash and black pearls. It reminds me of Arneson's spell system in a way, and was one of those resource-management tricks in the game. (In the first game, spells were straight-up purchased.)
The Ultima games were transparently D&D, although from the fourth game onward they had more of an individual identity. Probably the biggest difference was that they only gave you experience for killing monsters, which meant that you had to spend a lot of time fighting to level up. And magic wasn't Vancian at all; Ultima was pretty strict on buying your magic, although it also implemented a "magic point" system in later installments to limit how many spells you could cast between rests. Later computer RPGs mostly got rid of the purchasing aspect, at least for individual uses of a spell.
It's amazing how many people have played games that are basically very similar to D&D over the last three and a half decades, but have all the mechanical stuff done by a computer. Of course, the ones I played when I was a kid were crude in comparison to modern games, and the stories were much less complicated. But what I loved about the Ultima games was that, like good D&D games, they were wide-open sandboxes. Particularly Ultima IV, where you had an ultimate goal (mastering the eight virtues, finding the eight runes, bringing them to the shrines and becoming an Avatar of Virtue, going down into the dungeons to liberate the eight stones, and descending into the Stygian Abyss to find the Codex of Infinite Wisdom) - but how you went about it was up to you, and you had to talk to NPCs and find hints at all the game's puzzles and quirks. Very few games were so beautifully open in their play.
Anyway, yep, it was D&D, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 16, 2015 6:51:00 GMT -6
1. Random Esoteric Creature Generator, by James Raggi. This book encourages a radical take on monsters – create a new one every time it's needed. While I do occasionally appreciate the old classics in terms of creatures, I love coming up with new and weird threats. This book has stood up in those terms and made some excellent ones. 2. Carcosa, by Geoffrey McKinney. Probably the two most infamous things in Carcosa, the sorcery and the dice conventions, aren't quite my thing. The rest of the book I think is a gold mine. I love that it has simple and straightforward rules for everything from Cthulhu Mythos creatures and dinosaurs, to generators for both robots and Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, to space alien technology and weird lotus powder, a neat and tight psionics system, and even a table of mutations. With Carcosa I'm just torn between the original edition, which was a much tighter booklet after the OD&D supplements, and the LotFP version which is an absolutely beautiful artifact with great illustrations and expanded hexcrawl content. 3. Dyson's Delves I and II, by Dyson Logos. I don't run a lot of adventure modules, but I do often find myself using Dyson's maps, both from these two books and newer ones from his blog. Dyson's maps are complex and often have interesting three-dimensional features to them. Rather than draw a dungeon map myself I will take one of Dyson's and put my own creatures and ideas into it. 4. A Red & Pleasant Land, by Zak S. I'm not sure I'd want to run this straight, but it is full of ingenious ideas for adding a distinctly Alice in Wonderland type of "unreason" to D&D. 5. The Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom by Matt Finch. I just love this adventure's structure (it can be run from either "end" of the dungeon) and the kind of B-movie pod people it uses as its main antagonists. I'd slip some of Matt's other work ( Tomb of the Iron God and The Spire of Iron and Crystal) in here as well. Most of these are "early" materials from the OSR. I do like other stuff geoffrey has done, particularly Dungeon of the Unknown, though not as well as Carcosa. I also have to give honorable mentions to some of the attempts at capturing the megadungeon such as Michael Curtis's Stonehell, Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment and James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount. And I'm not sure where to fit Rob Kuntz's recent releases, but The Original Bottle City is a brilliant dungeon from back in the day that is available now.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 16, 2015 4:17:01 GMT -6
So it seems to me that EGG took Dave's notes and developed them into what he termed (in the article above) his "“Original” version of D&D" by around Spring 1973. Meanwhile, Dave was further developing his own rules in a somewhat different direction. So the Dalluhn Manuscript is interesting to us now because it likely represents something pretty close to EGG's "“Original” version of D&D" from 1973. The Dalluhn "manuscript" is most likely a document that either is, or derives from, playtest rules that were distributed in 1973. Now, I haven't read it; aldarron and increment should be able to let us know if there are any significant differences in the combat mechanics, but it's never come up in the online discussions of the document. Whether or not there are differences, I don't think that it's going to shed any light on Chainmail connections in OD&D, because it's already established that nobody was using Chainmail to resolve D&D combat in 1973. The "Chainmail connection" was always over-stated, deliberately, for marketing reasons as Gary wanted to sell more copies of that game.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 15, 2015 6:55:11 GMT -6
Despite this it's clear enough that D&D used the man-to-man rules in the beginning. Multiple discussions with Dave Arneson's players have established that Dave only used the Chainmail man to man rules for the first session or two of Blackmoor before he began tinkering with the combat rules. Dave didn't tell his players the rules, but the evidence suggests that he was changing them as he went along, only settling with his variant of OD&D after the boxed set was published. The "wizard Gaylord" character sheet in Playing at the World has values on it that don't correspond to either Chainmail or OD&D.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 10, 2015 3:33:07 GMT -6
The 4e and 25th anniversary rules are different, but don't worry! For $15 you can get a print-on-demand copy of the original Metamorphosis Alpha rulebook. And the money actually goes to Jim Ward when you buy this version. Also, if you check out WardCo on RPGNow, you can get PDFs both of the original rulebook, and of the adventure "House on the Hill" which contains both an adventure and random generators for using the Round House Modular Dwelling Unit. If you need an interesting MA location in a pinch, House on the Hill is great.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 7, 2015 18:52:02 GMT -6
Aside from the fantasy inspiration, what were the military historical inspirations for Chainmail? Were there any books on medieval tactics, battles, arms and armor that were consulted?
Were there any battles that players would talk about specifically? Like Agincourt or Crecy? And were there specific wars in mind like the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses etc? Was there a "gold standard" conflict that was aimed at in terms of battles or wars?
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Post by cadriel on Mar 5, 2015 15:48:39 GMT -6
I don't have them, although I must admit the covers are kind of tempting. My dad has the old Ballantine editions, whose covers I remember well.
Now, it makes me curious, though. Ace books - at least all the ones I have from the 50s and 60s - were 6.5 inches tall and 4 inches wide, compared to a "normal" mass market paperback which is 7.5 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide, giving them a trademark squatness by comparison. The LotR books look like they have normal proportions, I wonder if that's when Ace made the shift?
It's also important to remember that those paperbacks caused a huge groundswell of fantasy literature. Ballantine had so much demand for more of the same, they had Lin Carter digging up every old book he could find, which of course became the great Adult Fantasy line.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 5, 2015 8:15:56 GMT -6
Keps, my particular issue is that the modules Noble Knight is selling in this range were originally sold for under $20 less than five years ago. Dragons at Dawn was print on demand for $16, and the LotFP stuff had never been nearly as expensive as Barrowmaze. I have nothing against paying for collectables from 40 years ago, but I do chafe at the idea that something put out so recently enters the same category.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 27, 2015 19:54:38 GMT -6
The OD&D FAQ very clearly states the scale of HD for "normal" combat:
"so this is treated as normal (non-fantastic) melee, as is any combat where the score of one side is a base 1 hit die or less" (emphasis mine).
This is in the text of the combat example, but it puts it plain as day that normal combat ends above 1 hit die, not at 4 hit dice. So 1st level clerics and magic-users trigger normal combat, but 1st level fighting-men don't.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 19, 2015 18:26:32 GMT -6
James Mishler shared this fascinating detail on the blog comments:
This makes a lot of sense out of the reference to an old Japanese movie.
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Post by cadriel on Feb 19, 2015 13:54:42 GMT -6
I had recently re-read Greg Svenson's article The First Dungeon Adventure and it reminded me of something interesting: the very first monster that was encountered in Blackmoor was a giant blob, like in the eponymous movie. I have more observations on my blog: Semper Initiativus Unum - The First Dungeon Monster. I'd be interested in thoughts from people who gamed with Dave or people who've studied the early days, on the role played by the classic "Creature Feature" in forming those early games, and the imagination of the period.
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