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Post by cadriel on Nov 23, 2014 16:26:37 GMT -6
My very first Carcosa games used a mix of AD&D and Gamma World (1st edition of both, natch). That sounds about right given its vibe. I used MA as an example because it's re-entering public visibility and I see the non-level-based system as a closer fit for Carcosa. It seems to me like a world where advancement should come through sorcery and technology rather than XP and levels.
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Post by cadriel on Nov 23, 2014 7:50:09 GMT -6
Carcosa would do pretty well with Metamorphosis Alpha, I think. The mutations would blend well and offer an alternate power source, although sorcery would still be available. MA's system starts characters at full capability, which would be a good match for Carcosa's terrors. Stormbringer/BRP would be another natural choice; you could use Call of Cthulhu for the Cthulhu Mythos creatures.
Other sword and planet worlds are natural fits, with Carcosa being easily the worst of the lot.
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Post by cadriel on Nov 21, 2014 10:35:18 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Nov 14, 2014 5:30:46 GMT -6
Different people use different tools. Professional layout uses things like Publisher or InDesign, while amateur layouts can get by with stuff done in Word or some OpenOffice branch. (Basic Fantasy has been done in OO for almost a decade, for instance.)
Are you drawing your maps and illustrations? There are some excellent artists around the OSR, the best way to find them is the Google Plus community OSaRtists. Art, of course, costs money unless you've got someone willing to help you on commission, but you shouldn't count on that. The other option is to go with public-domain art, which a number of OSR projects have done in the past.
For selling, there are two main options right now, Lulu and OneBookshelf (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow). OneBookshelf is better for selling PDFs, and will let you bundle print with PDF, but is less awesome for selling print copies. Lulu on the other hand doesn't let you bundle, but I've found it much better for print-on-demand. So it's worth thinking about whether you want to sell POD through Lulu or PDF through OneBookshelf. PDFs sell more copies than print.
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Post by cadriel on Nov 12, 2014 10:00:23 GMT -6
I run very few of the modules I buy. Most of the time I skim them for interesting tidbits and look at the maps; I read the module in depth if I want to understand its complexities, like Caverns of Thracia, but in general I don't read all the room descriptions on any given module. I am more likely to read more if I can view the map separately from the running text, as I'm trying to follow it spatially rather than sequentially.
Most of the time I'm more interested in modules for the answer to "how did they do X?" rather than thinking "I want to run this."
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Post by cadriel on Nov 9, 2014 7:33:42 GMT -6
I had my second game yesterday, and it was maybe even better than the first. The idea that combat is very serious (lots of unconscious PCs) without being ultra-deadly was reinforced strongly. It was interesting to see that goblins using good strategy (lots of hiding and firing bows) were a much more dangerous threat versus seven PCs than a single ogre. Numbers rule, as they had in OD&D. There was also an interesting contrast between thugs, who have lots of HP and a poor AC, and goblins, who have few HP but good ACs. The thugs were still dangerous after two of the four were taken out, while the goblins go into a death spiral more quickly.
One thing I noticed was that, if the PCs have potions and a cleric, traps are dangerous and resource-draining without being outright kills. I'm looking forward to the next dungeon I have prepped, which plays more with status effects.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 31, 2014 15:09:56 GMT -6
If you're telling stories, I think it would be really great to have some about "the better part of valor" - the stuff you ran the hell away from, or avoided.
To the extent that you are talking about the history, I think some things about the generation gap between younger and older players that grew up would be interesting.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 25, 2014 19:36:00 GMT -6
So, I came up with a micro-setting for 5e D&D and ran my first adventure in it today. On the whole it was a lot of fun.
I ran it very much by the book. The monsters I used were all straight from the Monster Manual, and the PCs used the PHB options, including a ranger and a warlock. Character creation took a while but worked well. Players got into their characters via the background system; I also used it to flesh out some NPCs in the area.
Combat felt very threatening, except when small groups of enemies lost initiative. It wasn't at the speed of OD&D combat (which, with d6 damage and minimalist stats, is extremely quick) but I think the options were worth it. PCs were able to have interesting things to do every turn, and everybody got to contribute.
Advantage/disadvantage didn't come up much, but it worked well when it did. (There was one situation where I rolled an 18 and a 20 to hit with disadvantage - go figure.) the core system has a few ambiguities that required simple rulings; nothing wrong with that. It was hard to fight certain instincts, like going for a d6 when asked about secret doors. But just asking for certain checks was straightforward and easy. Some are great ways to convey info to the players. A few mismatches were funny, like the low Int cleric blowing Religion checks.
One PC died, technically after the end of the session, because he just had to kill the Gas Spore. I loved using it as a monster, it was a really neat enigma and the veteran players didn't metagame it for the newer guys at the table. The 5e Kenku were really neat with their echo-speaking. And I really like how the giant toad worked.
I expected cantrips to be a big issue, but they really weren't bad. Likewise the short rest worked well, allowing the trip to the dungeon to include a good combat without making the dungeon itself unworkable.
The PCs didn't level up. This was unexpected, but I didn't mind; 2-3 adventures at level 1 are fine by me. I am looking forward to the DMG on XP methods.
I'd like to get a bit more of a handle on how to present challenges that encourage non-combat solutions, and generally how to set DCs at a glance.
I'm looking forward to more with this system, and I have a lot of hope for it. It doesn't if to the same niche that OD&D does but it has it's own thing to offer, and I think that is worthwhile.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 10, 2014 14:16:14 GMT -6
I was discussing this thread on my blog, and a commenter asked if I could pass his question along to you.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 9, 2014 9:20:09 GMT -6
So, Geoffrey: will there be new material aside from hexmap details in the follow-up book for Carcosa? Yes, but with two main differences from the first Carcosa book: 1. The overall structure of this book is a list of hex descriptions. Thus much (but not all) of the new stuff is found in the hex descriptions rather than in its own section. 2. In terms of percentages, there are fewer new monsters, new rituals, etc. in this book than in the first. This book is aimed more at the persons who have basically said: "I'm having a hard time picturing what people/monsters/entities actually do in Carcosa. I'm also having trouble picturing just how stuff works in Carcosa, so to speak." The hex descriptions in the published Carcosa are rather terse, inviting the Referee to flesh them out according to his own lights. These hex descriptions in the new book are already fleshed-out to a considerable extent (probably averaging 225 to 250 words per hex), also indicating how the encounter in a given hex interacts (if at all) with the stuff in other hexes. If the first Carcosa book was like 1977's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, this book is more like Necromancer's Wilderlands boxed set. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, of course. I don't have the Necromancer Wilderlands products, just the originals. How would you say it compares to Isle of the Unknown? I'm guessing there won't be as many monsters / statues / NPCs as in that book.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 2, 2014 5:15:28 GMT -6
So, Geoffrey: will there be new material aside from hexmap details in the follow-up book for Carcosa?
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Post by cadriel on Oct 2, 2014 4:18:02 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Sept 29, 2014 9:19:25 GMT -6
I know you put a McDonald's in one of your own dungeon levels. Were there any places in any of the "classic" dungeons that you played in where that kind of thing was done less satirically? Like, the monsters having a bazaar, or gambling, or arena games, or anything like that?
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Post by cadriel on Sept 17, 2014 5:37:18 GMT -6
Gary wrote about religions in Alarums & Excursions back in 1975 (transcript of letter here): Pretty much as gronan describes it.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 29, 2014 8:08:49 GMT -6
We would tell the wizards to get ready; one round, swap places with somebody in the front rank, second round throw spell, third round swap places back. Or if the wizard could get up higher, great. Or a dwarf in the front rank, partial hard cover! We tended to reconnaisance in force. And we would use stuff like tables as barracades, flaming oil pools to cut off paths of attack, wedge ourselves in narrow spots, etc. We tried our hardest to avoid getting flanked, which I think is a wargamer thing. IN most wargames a flanked unit is in deep, deep trouble. And we tended to not try to trap enemies; we wanted the treasure, not blood, and as Sun Tzu says, when the enemy is trapped without retreat that is when they are the most dangerous. Against one large single stupid opponent like a giant lizard or spider we'd surround and try to gang up. Excellent, that really helps just in terms of getting the picture of how your combats went. Were the monster tactics parallel to the ones the players used? Also - you talk about "stupid opponents" - were there differences in how certain monsters were played? Any particularly good examples?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 28, 2014 17:35:29 GMT -6
We never did undermining, no. If barracading stuff were available, sure. We fought as a close order infantry squad. Fireballs weren't that much of a worry because not that many critters have area effect attacks, and in the dungeon ranges are so short that a thrown spear might reach a magic user before he got his spell off (or a light crossbow was also cool!) Anchoring your flanks was absolutely vital; you didn't want bad guys to get to the magic users. But magic users couldn't throw spells from the second rank, so it was an interesting challenge. Also, spears or polearms in the second rank is a great thing. More questions about this? You say it was an "interesting challenge" to get wizards to throw spells; how did you solve it? What I'm trying to picture is ways where having a group of wargamers made combat different from how people who cut their teeth as roleplayers tend to do. Did you have people going ahead for recon or was it essentially "reconnaisance in force"? When you decided to fight, did you take measures other than initial missile fire or spells? Did you ever manage to use the dungeon environment against the monsters, like trapping them in rooms or corridors?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 27, 2014 18:58:15 GMT -6
I'd really like to get a good picture of the kind of tactics you used when fighting in the dungeon. Specifically, do you remember anything about formations, choice of terrain, or variations on siege tactics? That is, were you able to build barricades or traps or undermine rooms, or did it never get that elaborate?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 27, 2014 6:38:24 GMT -6
Did you have any intelligent swords, or see anything interesting from how Gary or Dave ran them for other players? Was it ever a Stormbringer-type situation where the sword had its own will and ideas of what to do?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 22, 2014 7:08:06 GMT -6
So I'm slowly plotting to run Metamorphosis Alpha for a bit in Google+ hangouts. And I have a couple of questions about rules.
I'm not looking for "canonical" rulings here, but just some ideas on how judges run their games and what works best.
First: with disruptor pistols and rifles, do you use the charts on pages 8/9 (based on ranges and 3d6) or the weapon class vs armor class table on page 19? It seems like there are 2 sets of rules for this. Or do both apply in some way?
Second: it seems to me like everything, whether an NPC or a mutation, needs at least scores in Mental Resistance, Dexterity and Constitution. Mental Resistance because the Mental Strength Chart requires it on both axes, Dexterity for order of combat, and Constitution for poison. Am I missing something, or do you assign such scores to NPCs and mutations?
Third: Morale is listed under "Non-Player Characters" but isn't referenced anywhere else. What morale rules do you use? In my D&D games I usually do a 2d6 roll-under morale values, which are set somewhere in the 6-10 range, a la B/X. This would seem to work naturally with the MA rules: given a base morale score of 8, -2 would get a value of 6, while +2 bumps it up to 10.
I'm also interested in any other interpretations or house rules that you guys use as MA judges.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 21, 2014 12:42:04 GMT -6
That was an interesting post, Cadriel. It makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious where you got the information. Well, the changing demographics are a matter of D&D's history; our own @gronanofsimmerya was an eyewitness to the shift in age, but it's clear that by the time the Holmes Basic Set caught on big in 1979 that the audience had skewed dramatically younger. The market research WotC did was discussed publicly by Ryan Dancey, who was head of the RPG division back when they released 3rd edition. It generally holds true for the history of D&D, although I'm sure exact numbers have gone up and down. I would think the "average" campaign length in 1982 and 1983 when TSR was selling over a hundred thousand Basic Sets per month was much shorter, probably only a couple of sessions, because of the massive number who would've stopped playing after one or two sessions. You can dig on Dragonsfoot for exact numbers, but basically the RPG hobby had two boom years, 1982 and 2001, when sales exploded. The majority of gamers come from one of the two great waves in those years. (I'm an outlier, having started in 1994.)
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Post by cadriel on Aug 21, 2014 8:19:57 GMT -6
"The party" comes from sociological realities. D&D went from a game played by big groups of wargamers of college age to a game played by small groups of non-wargamers in their pre-teen and early teen years. When you've got males of that age, that they tend to form small, close-knit affinity groups. The model of a single, unified party playing continuously in a campaign run by a single referee mirrors these groupings pretty precisely.
You could write books about how D&D was played versus how it was written. In 2000, they figured out that campaigns ran for around 16 sessions with groups of 4 players, facts that had been the general trend for decades. (Yes, there were longer-running campaigns; statistically they tend to be outliers.) This meant that most of the D&D experience was of the lower levels played by mostly teenage players. The endgame doesn't even come into sight when you play for 16 sessions.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 20, 2014 18:29:21 GMT -6
Afterward (sic) to Volume 3: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures:
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Post by cadriel on Aug 7, 2014 13:03:17 GMT -6
Did you play much Diplomacy? Jon Peterson's history made a fairly big deal out of Diplomacy variants and postal games as partial predecessors of D&D. Was any of that still going on when you were gaming with Gary and co, and if so, any memorable bits?
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Post by cadriel on Jul 21, 2014 7:43:17 GMT -6
If you can handle the small form factor of an old Asus Eee PC, you can pick one up on eBay for around your price range. They generally had wifi but that's easily disabled. They were big in the heyday of the netbook before tablets caught on. The Eee 700 used a custom Linux distro while the more popular Eee 900 series used a light version of Windows XP. They had USB ports and could probably handle a thumb drive. Download a light word processor then disable the wifi.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 18, 2014 4:16:05 GMT -6
That's interesting. I hadn't thought there might be a desire for that. It's easy enough. As you might have seen, the PDF's are low tech-without locks or indexes. So you could just jam them together yourself with Preview. But perhaps I could offer it as an option. Let me ponder. By the way, do you think it's a significant thing that there are no PDF indexes, or whatever you call them? No one has said anything either way. Good bookmarks in PDFs are really helpful, because you can't use the same kind of sense memory or quick flipping that you can with a paper book to flip to a given page. It's a feature that is easily underrated. Anyway, thanks for considering it.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 17, 2014 20:16:32 GMT -6
Would it be possible for you to make Zylarthen available as a single PDF? I would like to reference it but I read PDFs on my iPad and I really wouldn't want to need to flip through all four booklets as separate PDFs, if there were a single-PDF alternative.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 16, 2014 20:19:26 GMT -6
OD&D uses at least two resolution mechanics: roll high on a d20 (combat matrix, saving throws) and d6 (dungeoneering tasks). Only the d20 roll admits of a modifier - the Dexterity bonus to hit.
I don't care for the d20 system's central conceit, which is that abilities all have basically the same impact (+/- 25%) on anything worth rolling for. Sometimes I want it to be bigger, sometimes I want it to be nonexistent.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 14, 2014 18:39:03 GMT -6
As to characters not improving, remember that a lot of the saves are done on a pretty standard chart: Task Difficulty -- DC Very easy -- 5 Easy -- 10 Medium -- 15 Hard -- 20 Very hard -- 25 Nearly impossible -- 30 As the character improves his stats go up and his proficiency bonus goes up but "medium difficulty" (for example) pretty much stays the same. This means that the characters do improve compared to their environment. The three main saving throw types in 5e are Dexterity, Constitution and Wisdom (mapping to 3e's Reflex, Fortitude and Will). Every spell and save mentioned in Basic uses one of the three. Each character only has saving throw proficiency in one of the three. This means that two of their three save types will improve by 10% or less due to stat increases, and the third will improve by 20% to 30%. This means that even at high levels, a PC is likely to be extremely vulnerable to high level spellcasters, because the save DCs will be going up 20% to 30%, while the PCs only keep pace in 1 of 3 categories. I know that the 5e designers tried very hard to get the game off of its escalation treadmill, and simplify things, but I think that adherence to a unified system is more of a weakness than most game designers see it. Absolute saving throw improvement was a major positive of TSR D&D compared to its WotC competitors, but it doesn't fit the unified system. Neither does a simple system for common tasks like determining surprise, searching for secret doors, etc. The unified system must be used even if it's a bad fit.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 13, 2014 19:05:04 GMT -6
I want to draw some comparisons between OD&D and 5e D&D.
Surprise in OD&D is elegant and simple. You roll a six-sided die for each side. If one side or the other rolls a 1 or a 2, that side is surprised.
Surprise in 5e D&D is tightly integrated into the system, but rather inelegant. It only applies when one side or the other is trying to be stealthy. If they are, then it uses a Dexterity (Stealth) check for each character/creature trying to sneak versus the Wisdom (Perception) passive score of each character/creature on the other side. That means that a d20 roll with Dexterity modifier, and possibly Proficiency bonus, has to be made for each character on the sneaky side, and the Perception passive score has to be calculated as 10 + possible modifiers (Wisdom and maybe Proficiency) for each character on the other side. You need to know, for every character involved, an ability score and whether or not they have a Proficiency bonus for a skill (and if so, what their Proficiency bonus is).
There are several areas where play is like this: where OD&D has a simple game solution, usually "roll a d6," for a given scenario, 5e generally has an application of its d20-based universal mechanic. This allows more flexibility but makes the game significantly more complicated. Particularly it means that monsters and NPCs must have full sets of statistics.
OD&D saving throws improve between 40% and 60% between 1st level and the level when they max out (13th for fighters and clerics, 16th for magic-users). 5e saving throws improve, if the character has Proficiency, 20% from 1st level to 17th. However, this is only nominal for saving throws versus spells, which use the caster's Proficiency bonus to modify the saving throw DC. If the character saving does not have Proficiency, their saving throw likelihood may actually be lower at high levels, if enemy casters level up with the PCs. Likewise any ability modifier increases will likely be offset by the wizard's own increases to his Intelligence. Against on-level casters, this is a treadmill at best.
Using floating saving throw difficulty numbers generally creates this problem, because it eliminates the idea of absolute improvement. OD&D made PCs absolutely more likely to save at higher levels. This is a check on the magic-user's power, since his spells will be evaded or semi-evaded instead of allowing him to reign supreme. WotC broke this pattern back in 3e and it contributed heavily to the so-called "caster dominance."
This isn't to say that I dislike 5e; I've not yet played it and would rather keep an open mind about how it works at the table. But it does do some things that I don't care for as they sit on the page. I'm curious if anybody here has experience with surprise or saves in 5e and can share their opinions on how it actually goes.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 7, 2014 4:20:52 GMT -6
the ring of wishes, djinn, and demon lords from the earliest games were used to raise stats. Magical pools that adjust stats are also used very early in the games history including B1! That's not the kind of stat increases we are talking about, though. There is a difference between having the possibility of stat increases come from exceptional circumstances in game play, and having them automatically occur as a basic part of the system. The way you stated it, it sounded like you were talking about the latter, which is very much how 3e, 4e and 5e do it. You can certainly ask what someone means when they say that a game you spend a lot of time playing, reading and interpreting is totally different from how you've experienced it. The "doesn't assume magic items" sounds like a technicality. It will probably assume a level of magic item use similar to any other edition, it just won't have the checkpoints that 3e and 4e did to say "you're not on-level unless you have x, y and z items." There were campaigns that treated magic items like Halloween candy, and there are good records of this. But they're not the ones we tend to use as inspiration, in no small part because that's not how the guys with their names on the cover of the game played. Not sure how this is an "Amish-like" game, and your last sentence doesn't really make sense.
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