Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to first decade, Gygaxian D&D, its more faithful modern clones, and content created specifically for use with them. Later editions (2e and newer) should be discussed elsewhere.Broadly, OSR games encourage a tonal and mechanical fidelity to Dungeons & Dragons played as intended and taught by its creators from 1974 to 1983 — less emphasis on linear adventures and overarching metaplots and a greater emphasis on player agency.Broadly, OSR games encourage a tonal and mechanical fidelity to Dungeons & Dragons as played in the game's first decade (74-83) — less emphasis on linear adventures and overarching meta-plots and a greater emphasis on player agency.If you are new to the OSR, welcome! Ask us whatever you're curious about: we'll be happy to help you get started. We also have two excellent beginner guides created by Anons with feedback from the thread, feel free to check them out for answers:>n00b DM's Guidehttps://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B>n00b Player's Handbookhttps://pastebin.com/XALkXkV0>Troves, Resources, Blogs, etc:http://pastebin.com/9fzM6128>Need a starter dungeon? Here's a curated collection:https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94994969/#95006768>Previous thread:>>96815749TQ:Do you remember to check for wandering monsters when players enter a room with monsters, thus creating the chance for a double encounter?What’s the most surprising, dramatic, unexpected, or hilarious result you've had from wandering monsters, particularly double encounters?
>>96860188>Has anyone ever turned the hex icons from Expert into a digital tileset? Want to see if I can save myself time before doing it myself.Not quite what you asked, but the colour versions from Atlas of Mystara are not bad are reasonably close.
>>96859270>Doesn't ACKS2 basically just use a bunch of 3.5 esque maneuvers?I don't use them and I'm not a fan, but I've taken a look and they're nowhere as bad as the ones from 3.5e (or 2e, which are even worse).
>>96860469They're actually considerably worse, because they're just sort of hamfisted into a system they don't really belong in. Terrible design all around.
>>96860196Impressive list. Can I get book and page numbers for these two? They're new to me.>OD&D/Chainmail: High-level fighters automatically detect invisible opponents.>OD&D/Chainmail: High-level fighters impose morale checks when they charge.
>>96860477ACKS might be the worst designed system in recent memory.It's also not an OSR game, it's just wearing the skin of one. A skin it bloated up with some godawful systems that suck and suck hard. Like a leather sack full of leeches.It doesn't even follow the most basic concept of "rulings over rules" that is so fundamental to the OSR movement. It's like if someone tried to make an OSR game but his only expreience was playing a butchered version of 3.0.
>>96860513>It doesn't even follow the most basic concept of "rulings over rules" that is so fundamental to the OSR movement.Based if true. I may have to check it out then, since yours is a plebbit-level understanding of what "OSR" means.
>>96860492I won't be able to reply for a few hours, perhaps someone else will dig up the references for you.
>>96860513>rulings over rulesIs a meme spouted by retards and "Ikea assemble-your-own-system" grifters on DTRPG. This is your lamest attack on ACKS "in recent memory," you obsessed faggot
>>96860540>>96860574We’re talking about something Matt Finch laid down as the first pillar of what he believes an OSR game is.And while I don’t agree with everything he’s ever said about the OSR, if even he agrees on that point it really makes you an outside case.The whole OSR movement started as a reaction to the direction D&D was going because of 3rd edition, that’s why it started not long after 3rd Edition’s release (and not in 1984). And, what most people found upsetting was 3rd edition moving pretty hard into being rule heavy.
>>96860591
>>96860597>facts hurt meBecause you are a retard.
>>96860591>We’re talking about something Matt Finch laid down as the first pillar of what he believes an OSR game is.Nobody cares.
>>96860513I remember someone tearing down exactly how badly designed it is.https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/96569835/#96584636It's kind of embarassing that the things people try to sell the game on are what it happens to do the worst. It's a complete and total fuck up of a system.
>>968605913.0 is light compared to ACKS. ACKS took the whole "try to sell games by page count" business and took it to a stupid extreme.It's a bloated mess that is the antithesis of not just OSR, but good design.
>>96860492Both are on pg. 43. Lazy, lazy anon. This is trivial to find.The invisibility detection rule is also referenced in Monsters and Treasure, Pixies entry.>Air sprites as described in CHAINMAIL, Pixies can be made visible, or make themselves visible, but they are naturally invisible to human eyes. Therefore, they are able to attack while remaining generally invisible. They can be seen clearly only when a spell to make them visible is employed, although certain monsters such as Dragons and high-level fighters will be aware of their presence.
>>96860651>https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/96569835/#q96584636That sounds objectively bad.
>>96860737Thanks for digging it up.>The ability to raise morale for friendly droops.This is also an excellent one.
>>96860747It is. It's a pile of untested math designed to look good to people who prefer to dream about running a complex fantasy game instead of actually running one. It's Realms of Atlantasia with better layout and editing.
>>96860759The writing/layout/art look like trash though. How bad is Realms of Atlantasia?
>>96860737>B - The ability to see in normal darkness as if it were light (dwarves, gnomes, elves).Interesting. So infravision for demihuman PCs was actually REMOVED from OD&D, but it was already in Chainmail!
>>96860770Real bad. 545 pages of this.
>>96860783That's pretty bad.They posted the acks mass combat rules and I don't know which I dislike more.
>>96860450Asking if anyone ever turned the terrain symbols on page x61 and X62 of Cook Expert into a digital tile set for programs like worldographer or hextml. I want BW hexes for easy printing
>>96860513It's a real shame gygax died before acks came out. I'm betting he would have skullfucked macris and called him a homo when he nutted on his brain.
>>96860857Gygax spent the last years of his life talking about how D&D sucks and building up lejendary. It's what he actually wanted people to play.
I remember a long time ago someone posted a LaTeX file for classic TSR formatting but I can't find it in the archive. Anyone know where I can find it?
>>96860883It was about how he didn’t like the direction 3rd edition went. Hated “ruleplayers.”One of his last posts on DF was him saying he couldn’t wait to go to a convention and play his favorite game, OD&D.
>>96860856>the terrain symbols on page x61 and X62 of Cook Expert into a digital tile set for programs like worldographer or hextmlThorf has created some high-resolution versions of those.https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/legend-1983-bw.pngDon't mind that the filename says 1983, they seem to be exactly the same.I think I remember him sharing them as individual files for each icon, but I cannot find them anymore. I'll look to see if I can find them, but if you end up having to do it yourself, at least the high resolution image linked above is a good starting point.I absolutely love to see how intensely Fishfag = 2etard is samefagging on this thread, by the way. He's utterly desperate after his own thread failed last time. Gives me some sweet Schadenfreude.
>>96860856>>96860930>https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/legend-1983-bw.pngFuck me, I might as well share it directly.>>96860893>LaTeX file for classic TSR formattingAlso interested.
>>96860513I've seen several worse games.None anyone was trying to sell though. The amateur game market is filled with "games" like ACKS.
>>96860856>>96860930>>96860940IF he's made them available, they should be in one of the many files he shares here:https://www.thorfmaps.com/tools/but the icons would probably be in some kind of adobe illustrator format. Also it might be this alternative set of icons. This is the best I could do. If you find something better, please do share it here.
>>96860857Gygax would say/do anything if someone paid him enough.>>96860883He went from promoting Lejendary Adventures and complaining to how everyone only wanted to talk to him about D&D, to just accepting that Lejendary was a flop and talking more and more about D&D, especially after he buried the hatchet with WotC once they started started treating him like a cartoon character and paying him appearance fees.
>>96860651>the sheer impracticality of the system requires to either set up an excel sheet for EACH AND EVERY location, or cry yourself to sleep when having to roll 33d6 per location, on each and every visit
What setting do you recommend? I quite like Wilderlands of High Fantasy personally.
>>96860477>>96860469Completely wrong and baseless, 2etard=fishfag.How tf does>The maneuvers can be done by anyone, but taking the skill in them mititgates penalties.>Example: Manuevers require you to attack at -4. If you hit, you do damage, and the target gets a save vs paralysis to resist being knocked down/wrestled/disarmed etc.>If you have the repsective skill proficiency, the attack penalty is only -2, and the foe suffers -2 on their save.>Also, certain weapons gain a bonus when using maneuvers.mindbreak you?
>>96861343Dark Sun is a perfect capsule of its time.
>>96860574>>rulings over rulesI approve of this message
>>96860759>Realms of AtlantasiaA true heartbreaker among heartbreakers. /tg/ used to use it as a punching bag but that got sad.>>96860949Amateur market is an oxymoron. You're talking about the blogosphere, a ghastly realm of endless heartbreakers.
>>96861411>the blogosphere, a ghastly realm of endless heartbreakersWhat I'm hearing is "I hate the OSR"
Jesus Christ!All of this could have been 5 simple lines if you throw out everything that isn't needed to bring the point homealso>Goblins = 250 xp per headwat
>>96860737Elves as a class should get split move and fire?
>>96861551I love OSR.Hating bad imitations that just use the same ingredients is just loving wine and hating stale vinegar.
>>96861411>the blogosphereIt's such a retarded meme-opinion to hate the "blogosphere." Everyone who's ever made anything good in the OSR has had a blog, anyone who thinks otherwise has had that opinion downloaded into their head by other anons they couldn't tell were joking
>>96861688Calm down, grandpa. No one said the entirety of blogs are bad.But you're gonna really need to cry a thousand times harder if you want to convince anyone that even 5% of RPG blogs are worth reading; and yours definitely isn't.
>>96861688>Everyone who's ever made anything good in the OSR has had a blog,And everyone who's made complete shit almost certainly has a blog too.
>>96861567Absolutely. It's strongly implied in Men & Magic. Not that it's terribly useful most of the time, but it does allow an Elf to do the peekfire thing Crisis Suits used to do in 40k. Move out of cover, fire an arrow (ideally with a magic bow for that +1 damage), then move back to cover.
>>96861567>Elves as a class should get split move and fire?Elves as a class in B/X, no. Chainmail elves and Monster Manual elves, yes.
>>96860651I thought lynchings were illegal.
>>96861734Blogs are exclusively for baked good recipes, lonely suicide notes, and lunatics screaming into the void.
What are some good /cozy/ settings to run OSR in?Greyhawk?Latter Earth?
>>96861929My vote is >>96861343
>>96861929Undermountain is the coziest megadungeon.Has a cozy tavern right at the entrance, other adventurers leave notes and grafitti, and there's horrifying rape monsters waiting on the lower levels no one talks about because no one's come back from that far.
Haven't looked too closely, but it seems the xp awards for monsters in Labyrinth Lord are greatly increased from what they are in B/X? Giant Gecko is worth 100xp in LL, but a 3+ HD monster should only be worth 50?
>>96862069Sorry nvm, I guess the Gecko has a special ability, that checks out, although the base xp awards are slightly higher in LL
>>96860315Nice one, OP! Judging by how pissy Fishfag is you did a great job on this thread.>>96860737Well referenced, Anon. Besides the table summary, the abilities of Heroes and Superheroes can also be found in the text of Chainmail on page 27 (2e) or 30 (3e). (Obviously, some of these are tied to the mass combat of the wargame, such as the simultaneous hits to kill and the dragonslaying ability, and should not be transferred over.)>>96860930>>96860940>>96860979This is also a really nice reference. I wasn't the anon who asked for it, but good stuff, Anon!
>>96861869Public execution.
>>96862069>>96862097Slightly different is very likely, because the XP tables were, for some reason, one of the things Proctor thought he could be hauled up as an OGL licensebreaker for. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he thought the same about monster XP values. Greatly increased is improbable, as you noticed yourself.
>>96857728>The difference between true and true & interesting is actionability or something of note beyond just the facts.If the information isn't actionable, don't worry about it too much. Sure as fuck don't make it part of regular gameplay procedure like a rumour table.
>>96858189>you can even do IRL handouts with puzzles riddles poems, ciphers etc, and have the players actually solve them.Do you have a few good examples of this? I would like to imitate it.
>>96860783>>96860827The first is just regular bad. Accidental bad. Almost innocent bad.The latter is what happens when someone learned all the wrong lessons and took them to heart.That's also just one page of several, which end up creating a procedure that takes forever to setup, even longer to resolve, and has next to no strategy and was partially designed for autorunning battles between NPCs, which sounds like hell to sit through.And all woefully under or completely untested.
>>96860747He's just listing some of the more basic and obvious issues. The real problems start when you bring other parts of the system into the mix. The trade rules are broken, but it's worse when a naive player decides to try out being a venturer and only slowly learns that thanks to bad math the class's main focus can't turn a profit at larger scales (and with almost any travel involved). Combine bad trade rules with bad domain/geography rules, and bad tax rules, and bad guild rules, and you've got rotten apples in a barrel of rotten apples.
>>96862457>>96860747its worked fine for my table for years.are you just brain deficient or...?
>>96862247>Nice one, OP!Except I'm a retard and included part of last OP again as well.LMAOAlmost there, almost there...
>>96862465>are you just brain deficient or...?He's just fishfag = 2etard = NightLandsFag throwing his usual tantrum about ACKS. Safely ignored as always.
>>96860827How did this pass through an editing process? Did it?
>>96862482Judging from the>(p. XX) appearing three times, I'm pretty sure this is a draft. You're just not very bright, fishfag.Bonus picture: Progression of the historical funding of Autarch Kickstarters. Very clear increasing trend.
>>96862507>Bonus picture: Progression of the historical funding of Autarch Kickstarters. Very clear increasing trend.Oops
>>96862465Bad people can play bad systems. Less a word in favor of the system and more of a word against yourself.>>96862482That's ACKS2. It's the second version, so it would have to have been refined and playtested and all that, right?Except the game is 1500 pages, and the people making it were struggling to just fill up as much space as they could. Macris was even posting about how he was just churning out fluff and taking up space with AI art in order to fill up pages.Even just playtesting a hundred page game could take years to do it properly, and the more systems you add, the more playtesting needs to be done, exponentially. It's no surprise that a game rushed and bloated has broken systems on top of broken systems.
>>96862512>early numbers are low enough to be rounding errors>ACKS2 campaign is a big jump, though most of that money probably went to the shills that got the game banned from reddit boards, and there wasn't even enough money to finish the books with proper art>numbers decline from there, game on the path to extinction especially since they're runnning out of places to advertiseHow sad...
>>96862507I doesn't look like it was ever edited by a human though. It looks like a first draft from Chatgpt.
>>96862546That money came from less than 2,000 people.I think it's obvious why he went with showing the money, because showing the number of backers tells an even funnier story than the one you told, because most of that ACKS 2 spike came from a much smaller percentage of backers spending thousands on the game.
>>96862546Amusing you think he would actually pay his employees. He has a track record of failing to do that.>>96862551ChatGPT would have been less robotic.
>>96862596Seems like a waste of time to me.>>96862384Realms of Atlantasia does have the "complex interacting subsystems that do not do what the author intended" thing going on. E.g. the fumble tables are so punishing that the safest method of combat is to not attack enemies and let them injure themselves to death.ACKS has a few similar subsystem glitches. Complexity that looks good on paper, and tickles the designer's brain, but that cannot be implemented at a real table. AD&D also has that of course, but nobody claims to run AD&D perfectly by the book and only by the book. It's also increasingly indefensible. A good designer should know better than to invent a mass combat procedure that looks like >>96860827 or a trade procedure that both discourages trade and creates an economic doom spiral.
>>96862527This doesn't look fun at all. And it just keeps going.
>>96862632>He has a track record of failing to do thatYou're verging on slander now, you lunatic
>>96862546>there wasn't even enough money to finish the books with proper artA guy was running numbers on the books in the /nsrg/, and it didn't look good for ACKS. Wish I could find it in the archive.
>>96860651That thread is turning out to be full of gold.https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/96569835/#q96584858
>>96862466Jej, I'm a retard too because I didn't even notice despite reading over the OP to check for goofs.>last thread: ACKS was barely mentioned for the first 200+ posts>this thread: already like 50 posts of assmangled samefag seething about ACKSKek, he's so obvious. Pitiful shitposting.
>>96861343The Wilderlands are fucking great. My personal favorite map (for gameplay purposes, not aesthetically) is Sea of Five Winds, closely followed by Barbarian Altanis.
>>96860827>>96862693These are genuinely some of the worst rpg rules I've seen, and I've read through some of the driest legal contracts you can imagine. I'd rather read through four volumes of territorial fishing rights than four more pages of that.
>>96863069>I'd rather read through four volumes of territorial fishing rightsHAVE WE GOT GOOD NEWS FOR YOU!
>>96863069... then stop seething about it? idgi.
>>96862482Bad editors can't make good books.
>>96863076LBBs? Large Black Bass.
>>96863069The entire game is like that. 1.5k pages.
>>96863087THAC0? Trawling, Hauling, And Catching Nothing.
>>96863079>idgiHe's flooding the general in an attempt to kill it. You can safely ignore him, he'll keep failing like he has for the past two years.
>>96862949I had heard people talking about this game a lot here, but actually seeing its rules is a whallop.I think I understand why I never see anyone posting them.
>>96862527>>96862546im sorry that yesgames make you seethe+dilate
>>96862656>A good designerA basic human being should be able to not fuck up that hard, and he's fucking up for a thousand more pages?There should be guidines for designers to prevent things like that from happening. Or even just basic tests or something, like reading the rules out loud and seeing what a group's expressions are at the end.Smiling? Good.Neutral silence? Not good.Coma? You're a criminal.It's one reason I really appreciate a writer/editor like Moldvay. You can get a real sense that he's writing with the experience of having had to actually explain rules to people, and that carries over even to rules just for the DM.
>>96863202so dont play acks?worked fine for us for years, but if youre struggling, plain BX is pretty simple.
>>96863202It's not the rules being badly explained though, they're bad rules badly explained. Them being badly explained is probably the only reason anyone ever got them to work for themselves.
