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Showing posts with the label OSR

Ailments for the Poor Fighter

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I discussed the poverty of options for the poor fighter recently. And concluded that extra attacks seems to be the go-to solution for giving the fighter something extra. I think it's a poor solution. For one, I think breaking the action economy is generally undesirable. It makes it the impact of a lot of other bennies exponential, it slows down combat and adds tactical decision-points that mostly don't really add anything to the combat experience, other than the fighter being better than he was. I also think it is a bad fit for the low resolution of the D&D combat round. A round is already 6-60 seconds long (depending on edition) and we are supposed to understand that the attack roll and subsequent damage roll is the sum of a rally of blows exchanged. So how does extra attack fit into this? It seems to me a high-resolution manoeuvre retrofitted into a low-resolution attack sequence. As I see it, extra damage is a mechanic that plays much better into this abstraction. Four E

The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be the victim of who

Streamlined Mechanics aren't all they are made out to be

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I'll tell you what I instinctively disliked the first time I opened the 3e Player's Handbook:  Priest spell levels going all the way up to 9th level.  Now, the reasons for this change seem fairly obvious to my mind. It streamlines spell progression for priests and wizards and makes it easier to gauge power level of a priest vs wizard spell.  But are those actually good  reasons? Is streamlining in and of itself a positive? Perhaps being able to gauge power level is useful, but tangentially so if so. How often do you need to compare a priest spell to a wizard spell and determine how powerful they are compared to each other?  As for streamlining spell progression between wizards and priests - This may seem useful as it makes progression transparently equal (getting rid of different XP tables was another move to ensure everybody progressed at the same pace. An alleged virtue I would question the virtue of), but it belies a point that is central to the argument of this blog post: H

Standing up for D&D's Gen X: 2e (Part 1)

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This is part 1 of 2 about 2nd edition. Part 1 will focus on the rules aspects. Part 2 on the nebulous 'culture' aspect of 2e. Out there in real life, I just about made the cut for an elder millennial. But in terms of DnD generations, I am very much Gen X - The Forgotten Generation.  Sandwiched in between the cantankerous curmudgeons of the B/X and AD&D 1e old schoolers who from their loftily perched blogs, abrasively champion their refined and sophisticated simple gaming ways and dour-weird piss-bag adventure aesthetics (all hail Erol Otus!) and the guileless charoppers of 3e that revelled in posting "build guides" on message boards for prestige classes and tricked out feat chains, considered Wayne Reynolds real cool and thought planning out their Conjurer 3/Incantatrix 10/Fatespinner 4 15 levels in advance to be a fine act of character development Is the un-championed generation X of 2nd edition romantic railroaders and the sad fools who learned their naive D&

Addendum: Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks

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My recent meditations on roll under ability checks and rant against the D20 unified mechanic has generated a bit of commentary and further clarified my own thinking on the matter. This post is an addendum to my  Using Ability Checks in B/X  article, seeking to further explicate why the "Roll Under" ability check truly is the best of ability checks. Earlier today, during my delvings into the blogosphere, I came across this box from  Quarrel & Fable , a Fighting Fantasy spinoff: First thing that struck me was how similar it was to my proposed resolution for Ability Checks . And secondly, it combined those thoughts with my memories of the old Fighting Fantasy  [FF] gamebooks and set my mind spinning into that cross section and how much I always liked the elegant simplicity of the FF mechanic. The best part about doing a post involving Fighting Fantasy is the chance to showcase some of the brilliant art in the gamebooks Now, I've given reasons already in previous posts

How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

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It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides

Ability Score Improvements have been a terrible addition to D&D

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This is going to be one of them rants I fear.  It relates to my previous meditation on the heft of levels across various editions  and my recent contemplation on ability checks in B/X , specifically my desire have the unmodified numbers mean something in and of themselves, rather than something purely to derive other numbers from that do  have mechanical relevance. In a way, this posts is like a concluding remark on the heft of levels in TSR vs WotC D&D. To summarise, if the mechanical relevance of ability scores are almost always somewhere on a scale of -3/+5, why do we bother with rolling 3-18 instead of just using the derived numbers to begin with? Why has that never changed? And why do I have a firm impression that there'd be a great outcry if it were ever changed in a future edition? And it occurred to me that ability scores do have a relevance in the unmodified form, one that has remained across all editions - They are the formative narrative components of the character s

Using Ability Checks in B/X

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One gripe I have always had with D&D ability scores is - what are they for? Regardless of edition, they are only ever used for deriving other numbers. It would be much clearer if it were simply a -3/+3 stat since that is how it actually gets used. And yet, no one wants that. We all love our 3-18 rolls that we end up never using. It annoys me that such a prominent feature of PCs mechanically means so little. The exception of course, is the ability check in TSR D&D, introduced in B/X and which achieved peak infamy with 2e non-weapon proficiencies. The mechanic where you actually get to roll against your ability score. To begin with, let's acknowledge that there are many good old school reasons not to roll for ability checks in B/X: Most things that DMs in later editions require rolls for,  shouldn't require a roll in the first place as long as the players can describe what they are doing properly - And the ability score should be factored in by the DM in those cases an

Stunting for Profit in D&D combat

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A complaint I've something seen concerning combat in TSR-era D&D is that it is too simplistic. You roll to hit and see if you hit or miss, roll damage die and that is it. There is no room for the kind of creativity that players might want to realise from cool action scenes in movies. By contrast, later editions allow cool moves to spice up combat. Feats in 3e allowed stuff like bull rushing, cleave, Disarm, Spring attack etc. In 4e, everyone gets a cool move they can execute. In 5e, feats returned and on top of that we get battlemaster maneuvers that let fighters pull off even more stunts like riposte, parry, feint, trip attack and similar (Rules Cyclopedia is guilty of the same with 9th lvl fighters getting access to special maneuvers). The fatal flaw in this, the older schooler might remonstrate (and I would join that choir) is that the approach to stunts in later editions gates them behind feats and class features. It defines combat in a way that strongly implies that if it&

Forgotten Realms: Old School Redux

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I've reviewed the Forgotten Realms as a setting before.  To sum up the issues with the setting: In its present incarnation it's an unmanageable mess, plain simple. The tabletop equivalent of the Marvel universe - Overburdened with an absolute immensity of 'canon' , loads of 'story line' developments that have no relation to gamers, universe-wide 'crossover events', desperate retcons and a handful of mary sue novel characters blazing a trail of shit through the setting that no one cares about.  WotC have done what they can to salvage the wreckage in 5e. An ill defined event to normalize the wreck that was 4e, move the timeline forward to let the passage of time erase as much of the canon baggage as possible, be intentionally vague about what has actually changed and otherwise just leave the setting the fuck alone, so gamers can walk around without tripping over 'setting lore' at every step. It's ok I guess, as a cardboard background f

Review: Ba5ic

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On reddit, I was alerted to another 05R game, BA5IC, an OSR adaptation in 54 pages that was released in October and is PWYW. I shelled out the recommended 2 bucks and decided to have a look. I will do a basic review and also compare it a bit to Into the Unknown and 5TD. tl;dr - A whiteboxed Epic 6 treatment of 5e that has some good stuff in it, but ends up looking a bit more like the author's heartbreaker than a fullfledged game. Presentation & First Impressions: Clocking in at 54 pages in letter format (23,000 words), this is another candidate that goes even slimmer than whitebox. The layout has generous whitespace on the outside, a bit too much for my liking considering the narrow space between columns and slightly cramped space between paragraphs. It is not so much worse than Into the Unknown in this regard though, but still a noticeable difference coming from 5TD's generous spacing on every page. Still the layout is mostly neat, paragraphs mostly don't