I played a couple of games like that, never bother on giving names or backstory or even roleplay the characters, treated like a videogame. GM got furious
Unironically the correct way to play old school games. You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash and all the character growth is about how to get even more cash and secure the cash you already earned. A staggeringly high amount of shit will outright kill you, so you best hire mercs for the meat grinder and pay them well enough that mercs will still work with you even though their friend Bob got his skull sucked out his butthole by some kind of writhing nightmare worm working for you two days ago.
>You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash and all the character growth is about how to get even more cash and secure the cash you already earned
Wait, DnD is just sword and sorcery?
>You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash
This is not how oldschool D&D worked narratively or mechanically. This is how OSR pretends that oldschool D&D worked.
>You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash and all the character growth is about how to get even more cash and secure the cash you already earned
Wait, DnD is just sword and sorcery?
>Wait, DnD is just sword and sorcery?
Always has been
D&D is a western about a roaming group of heroes saving towns being menaced by bandits
That wasn’t how I played 2e, it was definitely high fantasy story shit, I prefer OSR B/X play nowadays regardless if it is an innovation or not. Gold for xp really pushes you in that direction, my 2e group didn’t play with that.
I never played with gold for XP either. Don't get me wrong, we still stole everything in a dungeon not nailed down, but we were clearing that dungeon of evil to save the town. The wandering cowboy or ronin usually got paid to be a hero too.
That is exactly how Basic and Expert worked and were very much the bulk of grognards delve into D&D.
B/X was also objectively superior to Gygax D&D because all it took to get players to do a quest was the phrase "There might be loot".
>Well, what did he expect?
I assume he expected him to get invested in the characters and cry or get mad when they died. Anon played an uno reverse on that DM
>Instead of trying to have fun playing a game with my friends, I will instead just act like a pissbaby b***h that doesn't want to engage because I fear the loss of an imaginary character
>fun game design
Nowadays it's called "rogue like" and it's very successful in video-games.
Have you ever played Darkest Dungeon? Your party members feel a lot like old school D&D characters, disposable adventurers being sent into a meat grinder, only the stronger emerge.
first off, the gameplay experience of OD&D is not at all like Rogue despite the superficial similarities. you're talking out your ass from the jump. second, the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite", so called because those kind of games borrow the high level concept of Rogue (ie a large semi-random dungeon that starts you back at the beginning when you die), but soften it considerably for modern audiences by allowing the player to carry over progression from one play to the next.
>the gameplay experience of OD&D is not at all
You don't get to tell me how my experience playing D&D used to be, pal. >the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite",
I now know you must be very young and/or not very smart because you spend you time arguing about the precise meaning and descriptions of cultural terms on the internet.
You also forget you still had 5 other characters as back ups
Holy shit your right. Todays generation loves RNG bullshit muh souls like difficulty but freak out if even a slight challenge is presented to them in a TTRPG game
i dont know about you but i treat my DD characters with respect and try to avoid death and when the ones named after my friends died i was distraught. losing my first leper was a painful lesson i will never forget
In oldschool games, there's no downside to losing a character, moron.
In most roguelikes, (You) are the character and the game ends with your death and restarts.
And losing characters in DD hacks at your investment, as heroes are money sinks.
Think for 5 seconds, moron. You're fighting a ghost with terrible powers, what's your plan?
>ambush it with holy water? >stock up on silver weapons? >set some kind of trap? >what spells and magic items do we have access to? >can we bypass the ghost somehow, do we even need to fight it? >can we put it to rest by other means?
>only a wizard
Each party member is good at tackling different challenges, that's how D&D works. Wizards are a starting option, it's not like it's difficult for the party to have one. Wizards are not the only ones with spells either. Clerics and Druids are going to be casting too.
Lol fireball
Why are you expecting me to respond seriously? Just say “I was only pretending” so you can feel better and move on, remember you are not as intelligent as you think you are, any further responses will be more shit posts.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah fireball is a good option. We're talking about D&D, not some OSR game where you start with D6 broken sticks and 1GP as your gear.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I accept your concession.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>Lol fireball
If you can cast Fireball, you probably have other extremely useful spells.
>looks at sheet >"There's no 'Banish Ghost' spell!"
>ambush an ambush predator >randomly carry around silvered weapons for no reason >set traps against an ambush predator >wizard solves all problems >ignore the monster entirely >treat it as a puzzle set piece
sasuga
9 months ago
Anonymous
>ignore the monster entirely
yes, because the point of old school play was to get the treasure, not to kill every monster. your 5e brainrot is showing.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>yes, because the point of old school play was to get the treasure, not to kill every monster. your 5e brainrot is showing.
I actually played Basic. I prefer literally anything that isn't D&D at this point, though.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>the point of old school play was to get the treasure
it actually is though, old school play literally revolves around getting enough treasure to stay living - that's why you go on adventures, to replenish your wealth
9 months ago
Anonymous
>ambush an ambush predator >set traps against an ambush predator
Yes, humans do this, that's why we're on top of the food chain.
9 months ago
Anonymous
We generally do not. It wasn't until the creation of the firearm that humans stood any real chance against most apex predators. We succeeded largely by not being in the same places other apex predators were. Not avoiding but simply not living in places where apex predators did.
Sounds like a great night of D&D to me
Bet you think you like sandbox games. lol
9 months ago
Anonymous
>It wasn't until the creation of the firearm
Even if you want to ignore that wizards are living artillery, D&D literally has an arquebus in it
9 months ago
Anonymous
Not in my D&D. None of that shit, thanks.
9 months ago
Anonymous
We're all so impressed.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>Hunted around 8 species of large felines that were the apex predator including a subspecies of lion to extinction in europe in times when iron was rare and steel only randomly dug up in the alps and scandinavia >on topic of alps, to be nazi slavs knife hunted wolves in the entire southern forests to extinction before rome even fell
vs >humans didnt stand chance until firearms
Pick one moron.
Your entire argument is shit when humans used to melee whales to death.
Actually this is interesting. Humans probably weren't apex predators. For one, our diet is too varied and for another, we're endurance hunters. Which is how we hunted whales. By harpooning them and hanging on while they tired themselves out, then killed them.
But orcas aside, whales almost never occupy an apex predator role.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Your entire argument is shit when humans used to melee whales to death.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>It wasn't until the creation of the firearm that humans stood any real chance against most apex predators.
Try when we figured out the spear. Also apex predator doesn't mean exactly what you think it means.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>Also apex predator doesn't mean exactly what you think it means.
Hit me with that Wikipedia definition. I'm ready.
9 months ago
Anonymous
An apex predator is any predator that has no natural predators of its own. That doesn't mean it can't suffer from predation, simply that it occupies the highest trophic level within its ecosystem. Basically no one makes it a vital part of their diet. While we typically think of things like wolves, apex predators also include things cormorants, owls, and snakes because it's contextual to habitat. Whether or not humans count is a matter of debate as we're omnivores, we often kill other animals for reasons other than eating them, and, thanks to farming and animal husbandry, we can occupy multiple trophic levels within a food chain.
No bro you dont understand, I cant think of a straregy because there isnt a line in my player sheet saying I got the strategy-thinker feat Bro
How can I figure something out If the DM does not tell me after I roll a D20?
I miss encounters like this. Everything is so safe these days; DMs are afraid to harm their players, let alone kill them. I also haven't seen a proper trap or good puzzle in years, which is a shame.
On the bright side, my current DM really likes going all in on terrain and stuff, so the game always has a pretty neat setting. One time he built a 8 foot long ship with multiple decks for a dungeon.
I love to make macrodungeons in a single, big map. Print them on A3 sheets then tape them together.
Seeing your player's face light up when you unfold the map and discussing where to explroe is such a great feel.
This was literally me back then. I had to eat up ("tank") the ghosts to spare the humies.
Good thing the cleric became so powerful he just turned them.
>shit, a ghost. We better run for it and try to find a way to avoid it, maybe there is an exorcist in town we can hire or some sort of alternative passage to avoid them.
But the system didn't have anything in place to DO that
Sure I could interpret as a DM maybe they roll some sort of skill check for that to gather info on priests and call for an exorcism. But there's several problems with this
1: It takes away player agency to feel like heroes. If they're just guys, why even bother?
2: Maybe they do have some more potentiality than just some guy, but even if they do, the mechanics as they're written don't really give a whole lot of info on how to do that and I'm just winging it
Just admit D&D was always a bad game. You osr boomers and 5e zoomers can't even say any edition was good. It's just bad vs worse
The best part is that there is, there's population demographics for the percentage of people with PC levels, level distribution, and class percentages among npcs so you absolutely can determine how strong the priests will be in settlements of different sizes
>But the system didn't have anything in place to DO that
Wrong. AD&D has very detailed procedures for doing that. >we better run for it
Pursuit and evasion of pursuit, pages 67-69 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Also covered in Basic D&D, because running from fights is a basic concept. >maybe there is an exorcist in town we can hire
Hire a cleric henchman, Dungeon Master's Guide 34-37. Henchmen are also covered in detail in Basic D&D and Original D&D. >or some sort of alternative passage to avoid them.
The AD&D dungeon generator is prone to creating alternate routes, and published modules usually have alternate routes too.
Did boomers actually play this shit as they said they did? I got the impression that a lot of the annoying hardcore shit that they did was exaggerated.
3.5 is quite autistic, I say this as a 3tard.
For the record, 3.5 Ghosts can be of different types and being damaged on at least 2 stats is no joke.
I was also positive it had some aging attack in 3rd but I could mix up with my BECMI memories.
Boomers invented the game and were already adults when playing and it spread through word of mouth often copying Arneson and Gygax so I’d assume so, unless by boomers you mean anyone 40 and up in which case kids who weren’t taught by elders played what they comprehended or wanted.
Yes. 'Tomb of Horrors' literally only existed because Gygax's group complained they wanted something hard again. It had to be revised when they stole the tomb doors and ignored the actual dungeon. Games back then were more like roguelike videogames than the RPGs you know. Stuff like NetHack? The high lethality and deadly challenges were the fun part. Not even necessarily facing them, but successfully avoiding them and getting the treasure.
Getting characters to be busted was big part of old school fun too. Like people often meme about instakilling and level draining bullshit enemies of the 80s Wizardry games, but player could also access gamebreaking abilities.
Ironically the sort of hardcore grudgecore experience that was a blight on the hobby to this very day was a shallow parody of what was coming before, when everything just hit a lot harder and everything could do cool shit. Unlike 5e and it's teddy bear-core or newschool osr which is just suffering porn.
You're the one calling it hardcore. The hobby's always had whiney theater kids in it, but AD&D as intended wasn't written for wasn't written for the type of people who cry when they lose a character. By the time players are facing a ghost they probably have some way to handle it, probably access to de-aging magic at a nearby town, and they wouldn't even get that far without the common sense to run if things turn bad.
Yes. 'Tomb of Horrors' literally only existed because Gygax's group complained they wanted something hard again. It had to be revised when they stole the tomb doors and ignored the actual dungeon. Games back then were more like roguelike videogames than the RPGs you know. Stuff like NetHack? The high lethality and deadly challenges were the fun part. Not even necessarily facing them, but successfully avoiding them and getting the treasure.
The thing about the Tomb of Horrors is it was written as a tournament challenge, people liked it, and it was winnable for the hardcore players.
>By the time players are facing a ghost they probably have some way to handle it
A level 3 cleric has Spiritual weapon. A level 6 cleric is straight immune to ghost aging.
Gygax actually played a little soft with his group, starting them at level 3 with 4d6d1 for stats and giving them bonuses at lower stat caps than the default rules.
>Yeep, the game was so lethal back then, man we played those characters for years!
Its easy to be the toughguy when your competition is redditors who are afraid that someone might cry if they track monster HP. They just let it go to their heads.
If you don’t have any lawcucks in your party and play sandbox style you can just frick off somewhere else without ghosts and wights. It’s literally not your problem.
Then again, ghosts don't even grow in graveyards according to its rarity rating and are solitary creatures.
So you wouldn't meet more than one and you wouldn't meet it outside of some ancient ruin that time has forgotten and that isn't even accessible without setting up a proper expedition to find it. This isn't some low level shit you'd use a couple dozends of to test your new silver dagger or whatever.
>Then again, ghosts don't even grow in graveyards according to its rarity rating and are solitary creatures.
The only person ITT to actually read the screencap. The ghost was a rare boss level creature, not a generic enemy that killed you when you looked at it.
>fun game design
Nowadays it's called "rogue like" and it's very successful in video-games.
Have you ever played Darkest Dungeon? Your party members feel a lot like old school D&D characters, disposable adventurers being sent into a meat grinder, only the stronger emerge.
It takes one button click to generate a new roguelike character, that's part of why they've made hardcore meatgrinder TTRPG obsolete
>It takes one button click to generate a new roguelike character
Old school D&D were very easy and quick to generate also.
What made meatgrinder D&D obsolete was in part the rules bloat of later editions and the special snowflake culture of character creation.
>they've made hardcore meatgrinder TTRPG obsolete
Dungeon Crawl Classics embraces the meatgrinder with the "Level-0 Funnel" which is an absolute blast. Instead of dying and rolling a new character, everyone goes into the dungeon with a Level-0 nobody expecting almost all of them to die, and. the one that survives is the one you play. I'd love to see a videogame take this approach.
I do think discouraging players from getting invested in the characters they're playing by demanding backup characters and designing to kill them all off is strange game design for a roleplaying game.
The point is that you eventually get invested in the one PC that actually manages to survive against all odds. This leads to a more natural attachment than the 30 page backstory does.
Besides, the "super high lethality" is mostly a meme. Yes, 1st level PCs are squishy as frick but once you actually make it out of the early levels death is much more rare. Especially once you gain access to Raise Dead and so on.
Because you come from a different school of thought. To Gary and Rob and Arneson, the very idea that you're playing as a singular man and giving him a class and a name was novel and a significant level of investment. Hell, compared to the wargames these guys made and played, a LBB character is significantly more survivable. Take a look a Chainmail sometime. You know what the difference is between a living infantryman and a dead one? At best rolling a 6 on a d6. With different types of units and more dice in the pool per man (and even extra per stronger units against weaker) that gets even more likely.
There was no presupposition of story, the campaign was literal, the (often military-esque) exploits, victories, defeats of you and your comrades and hirelings and henchman. The story was recounting those exploits.
The way people play the game today would've been unthinkable and alien to them and that culture back in 1974, at least as alien as the old school seems to you today if not more.
>specified marching order >descript rules for reach of ranged weapons, melee, and pole arms >hirelings that support functions like carrying supplies >henchman that provide combat support >the expectation of multiple forays into the dungeon >retreats in the event of crushing defeat >followers and men at arms at higher levels with the expectation of waging large scale conflict >literal wargame combat with phased action resolution, a fantasy setting and expanded veteran progression levels
I dunno what to tell ya man, almost everything mechanical or procedural about the game is either a direct carryover from foundational assumptions of wargames or just ripped entirely from other wargames.
9 months ago
Anonymous
You might get into just a couple fights a session, that’s where there is more rules definition, but it’s not even half of your game time. Even then, you get puzzles like in OP in terms of the encounter
The rest of your time you’re parleying, figuring out a trap that isn’t rolling for a DC but essentially roleplaying how you solve it, mapping the dungeon and figuring out the safest way to approach it for freeform stuff, and managing resources alongside all that
Some sort of ghost possessed the girl and grew her a dick to frick the now female dragon (used to be male, but the ghost turned it into a female, because no homo, and I think when alive fricking dragons was his thing).
>and I think when alive fricking dragons was his thing).
His thing was fricking Every Single Thing, but he's straight, so he created a magic to turn anyone he wants into a woman. It is a really dumb, mildly entertaining manga.
Rosen Garten Saga loosely based the Germanic epic poem Rosengarten zu Worms which is basically crossover fanfiction of the Nibelungenlied and Dietrich von Bern cycle.
Ever wonder where the sword named Balmung originated? That was the name of Siegfried's sword in the Nibelungenlied which was later reused for the Ring of the Nibelung opera.
Dietrich von Bern is pretty much the German equivalent of King Arthur and has a similar amount of crazy adventures.
9 months ago
Anonymous
helpful answer by someone who can correctly answer the question "why should I care about your culture"
My impression of old school dnd games by non-gygax gays was that these super hardcore guys was disliked and dms like ddd was prefered since they just gave everyone cool shit.
Or just get something to reverse aging. Or mind control young orphans to go after it, they can afford to age a few decades. Or run out comically once you realize the place is haunted.
Grease is a level 1 spell and it's already bullshit strong against level 1 threats. By the time you're fighting ghosts you'll have a whole toolbox of spells and magic items.
>only a wizard
Each party member is good at tackling different challenges, that's how D&D works. Wizards are a starting option, it's not like it's difficult for the party to have one. Wizards are not the only ones with spells either. Clerics and Druids are going to be casting too.
>ripping off the fantasy novel feel
There's nothing wrong this and the best DMs I ever had were the ones who were influenced by fantasy novels. A God tier DMs ,which I was only in the group for a few years, was a history professor who also had a sizeable knowledge of European myths
>Was combat in old dnd just more rare? There's so much bullshit stuff lmao.
There was a lot more "punching down" against not so bullshit enemies than there were attempts to "punch upwards" and ACs were over a much narrower span. Various simple enemies without special rules were the most common which made those with special rules all the more engaging to face.
Except if anything that suggests the opposite. A Cleric of 6th level is immune to the aging, and is thus a good choice. Once the ghost manifests, silvered and magic weapons are a good way to attack it.
To attack the ghost with a spell, you also need to be ethereal.
Best candidate is probably just a Dwarf Cleric with a silver mace.
>Best candidate is probably just a Dwarf Cleric with a silver mace.
Clerics and Paladins were pretty hard counters to undead. Mid to high level were not to be messed with if your party lacked one of those classes.
>Clerics and Paladins were pretty hard counters to undead.
I recently ran a published TSR module where the dungeon ends with wight followed by a specter. Cleric turned both of them. Needed an 11 to turn the specter and still turned it. Both went from terrifying to whimpering in the corner as the PCs stabbed them with magic swords.
>Both went from terrifying to whimpering in the corner as the PCs stabbed them with magic swords.
But the prevailing understanding is that turned undead only stay turned if players don't do exactly this. So much so that 2E explicitly codified it: >If the character forces the free-willed undead to come closer than 10 feet (by pressing them into a corner, for example) the turning is broken and the undead attack normally.
You corner a turned undead, they will resume defending themselves.
In our group, we've ruled that as long as the cleric continues to present his holy symbol, the undead will cower if it can't flee, and is helpless while cowering. So standard tactic is back it into a corner and stab it with magic swords.
Our group generally runs on the "if you've neutralized it as a threat, you can kill it without combat" rule of thumb.
That was kind of the entire point of Clerics in 1e and B/X. Healing the party was definitely not the role they filled in those games, they just hated skeletons like you wouldn't believe.
>Both went from terrifying to whimpering in the corner as the PCs stabbed them with magic swords.
But the prevailing understanding is that turned undead only stay turned if players don't do exactly this. So much so that 2E explicitly codified it: >If the character forces the free-willed undead to come closer than 10 feet (by pressing them into a corner, for example) the turning is broken and the undead attack normally.
You corner a turned undead, they will resume defending themselves.
>2e
Nothing WotC ever did to D&D was as fricking wrong as 2e was. If anyone believes otherwise, they are definitely moronic.
It wasn't so much the system itself (though removing gold for xp is a big one), the game itself is mostly fine if slightly bloated. But the culture surrounding the game had clearly shifted, as can be seen in most 2e modules being complete railroads. The success of Dragonlance had a lot to do with this too. The focus became more about heroics and storytelling and the game shifted more and more away from the dungeon.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Given the lack of dungeons or often even tables or stats, you'd think from picking up a splatbook that AD&D2e was LARP.
Might as well not even have dungeons in the title.
D&D is at its ABSOLUTE best when it is a group of dudes clearing out a dungeon for loot, dealing with traps, avoiding fights unless absolutely necessary because MONSTERS ARE SCARY FOR A REASON.
2e was the start of moving away from that, being story oriented, focusing on being heroes instead of adventuring for gains, and other core game design ideas that REALLY started making the game become how it is today.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Second Edition is when D&D succumbed to the lie that D&D is a high fantasy novel simulator, leading to infinite frustration and eventually culminating in Ron Edward's of the Forge observing "this game doesn't do what you think it does!" This lead to both the explosion of indie games ("let's make games that actually do what D&D says it does") and the OSR movement ("if D&D isn't a fantasy novel simulator, what was it supposed to be?").
Before anyone tells me that Edwards had nothing to do with the OSR, that's not what I meant. I mean only that both Edwards and OSR exploded around the same time and came out of the same shift in the zeitgeist.
While i can understand and even respect your hate for the dragonlance anti dungeoncrawl and religiousless religionkowtowing of that eras culture, Turn being broken when cornered is a artifact from 1e (iirc it was based on hit die type or something schizo like that and tucked away separate from the actual turning rules, but there).
No. Cornering does not break in 1e if the undead is cornered UNLESS the one who turned the undead closes the distance breaking the turning effect. Essentially, if the cleric turns the undead and stays where he is, the undead just cower and get moved by the rest of the party as they aren't the source of the turning
1e never really clarified how it affected intelligent creatures differently though just that you could apparently turn lesser devils, demons, fallen paladins, and shit too. Gygax was not good at writing rules.
Except if anything that suggests the opposite. A Cleric of 6th level is immune to the aging, and is thus a good choice. Once the ghost manifests, silvered and magic weapons are a good way to attack it.
To attack the ghost with a spell, you also need to be ethereal.
Best candidate is probably just a Dwarf Cleric with a silver mace.
I know you're meming but 1e wasn't nearly as stingy with magic weapons as 5e is. It was pretty standard for a Fighter to run around with several +1 swords. If not, just run away lol.
>If not, just run away lol.
More groups in general need to realize this. I don't know why there's so many suicidal players nowadays who b***h about unwinnable fights.
>If not, just run away lol.
More groups in general need to realize this. I don't know why there's so many suicidal players nowadays who b***h about unwinnable fights.
Running away was a failure state since old school D&D was closer to a resource management game. By running away not only do you waste resources, you have to contend with replacing them, random encounters, and as per RAW any traps or environmental hazards like traps resetting.
that's because dnd was designed as a wargame you keep sending characters at, like a roguelike, not the modern interpretation where it's a vehicle for your mary sue fantasies
>just as there's a reason it isn't today's dnd
Because WOTC bought out the IP and released a new edition for a quick buck before themselves selling out to Hasbro?
more or less, even though getting to this point was just casualization in general
>just as there's a reason it isn't today's dnd
Because WOTC bought out the IP and released a new edition for a quick buck before themselves selling out to Hasbro?
honestly, it's a very interesting topic to see discussed, for me
>he wants to be a part of the world instead of a driving force
What is with this cucked mentality in older roleplayers?
>I want to live out the fantasy of being a normal knight >I want to live out the fantasy of being a peasant who escapes on a simple adventure >I want to live out the fantasy of being a wizard >Nooo, you can't do this! You need to be yet another demigod saving the universe! There is no other valid roleplaying experience! Please listen to me!
>second, the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite"
Genuinely clueless if you don't understand the difference between roguelike and roguelite.
but he's correct, even if he's being an ass about it
>Frequency: Very Rare
The only problem I see is DM's who choose to ignore this sort of thing. Very rare would imply 1 every 100 sessions, if that, but most DM's would be like "there are ten if them"
There's too much attachment to characters these days.
Back pre-3e you'd lose 10-20% of PCs within your first couple levels. And only the real grizzly neckbeards wrote 30 page backstories.
Yeah, you got attached. But it was nice to allow a character's story to end. The squire avenges his master, the cleric defeats the threat, the thief gets to live a life of gambling and wenches from selling that old magic sword you got off a death knight.
Now every fricking campaign has epic plots, and almost no stakes. Punches get pulled, deuses machina'd, and campaigns peter out because it just becomes boring or tiresome to DM.
I miss those old days. There's been some improvements but the gates shoulda been kept.
homie you're talking about editions where there were actual rules for building castles and setting up your own kingdom and going to war with armies. Players were more driving their own destiny than ever, instead of just following the DMs story as in modern games.
>driving force != becoming a name level lord, building a stronghold, and leading armies by your own hand >driving force == being a pawn in the DMs creative writing projects
I genuinely can't tell if this is parody ir not.
Okay I never knew about that and it sounds cool.
I wish my DM did that with us. He said the party are all Counts now but we still spend most of our time adventuring. We supposedly have lands and men but it just never came up.
>has hyper opinionated take >turns out its just ignorance and having a shitty GM
I want to dunk on ya, but all I have is pity. Even adventuring is better in older D&D when the game is what your players decide to do rather than the DMs lameass amateur fantasy fiction.
Domain-level play was never super popular because it tends toward abstract book-keeping and wargaming-lite. For most players it simply wasn't what they were interested in.
>driving force != becoming a name level lord, building a stronghold, and leading armies by your own hand >driving force == being a pawn in the DMs creative writing projects
I genuinely can't tell if this is parody ir not.
Honestly. So much of the newhomosexualry in the rpg space is due to anime. The need to be in some isekai power fantasy madr to help Japs forget about working 23 hours a day and do something other than sniff used undies and crank their hog.
But American kids got hold of it and it Honestly poisoned the brain. Every experience is a hand hold through a failed writer's super original donut steel setting (that's probably just the plot of the latest Yu Yu Sailor Beserk fantasy).
Boomers were inspired by Adams, Pratchett, Moore, Howard. Zoomers watch 300 hours of Critical Role.
There's major brain rot in the hobby. And the need to be the hero. Theatergays and the like.
There's no pride in surviving to level 10 when every other character did because the DM pulls every punch and hand feeds you every battle because otherwise it's 'not fun'.
Ah yes. The 'everyone's the hero simultaneously and forever' problem of anime such as *checks notes* World of Warcraft.
This has been an ongoing shift in culture everywhere for decades. b***hing about anime on Ganker just singles you out as an outsider and you need to go back to wherever you came from.
9 months ago
Anonymous
No. I just ignore the weebs and have a great time watching them get upset when called out on their terrible media taste.
well, generally, there's two different strains of adventure entirely. It might not have been as popular in the past, but nowadays it's completely normal to run a campaign where death is an absolute rarity because it's simply not combat oriented.
Maybe any other system but DnD and Pathfinder is better suited for it though. DnD and the likes, once you reach higher levels in your class, you basically become an unstoppable monster that far surpasses commoners physically and mentally and can do super karate, run through brick walls, literally catch bullets and throw them back at the same destructive power, or flatten a village with magic.
No. I just ignore the weebs and have a great time watching them get upset when called out on their terrible media taste.
while I wholeheartedly agree that DnD-like anime is fricking cancer, and the people who watch shounen and then make a character based on some anime protagonist are, too, you're being a tad moronic by complaining about anime on an anime website, made by anime fans, always focused and designed for the discussion of anime and topics that anime fans might like (like traditional games).
9 months ago
Anonymous
>but muh animus
Nah. Weebs are a cancer. Two bombs wasn't enough.
>Honestly. So much of the newhomosexualry in the rpg space is due to anime. The need to be in some isekai power fantasy madr to help Japs forget about working 23 hours a day and do something other than sniff used undies and crank their hog.
Literally half of fricking D&D is directly ripped from an isekai power fantasy novel. The only difference is that it wanks American superiority over the natives instead of Japan.
There was a 2e monster book where half the entries are ripped from 80s anime, sometimes not even bothering to change the names.
>Not the later stuff! I mean *real* D&D!
Gary Gygax has confirmed that based monsters like the bulette, carrion crawler, owlbear, purple worm, rust monster and umber hulk on... Ultraman kaiju, the same things which inspired Pokémon.
There was a 2e monster book where half the entries are ripped from 80s anime, sometimes not even bothering to change the names.
>Not the later stuff! I mean *real* D&D!
Gary Gygax has confirmed that based monsters like the bulette, carrion crawler, owlbear, purple worm, rust monster and umber hulk on... Ultraman kaiju, the same things which inspired Pokémon.
Indirectly via a bag of chinese knockoff toys that were being sold in the US as "Dinosaurs"
Danish or Norweigean immigrant IIRC.
[...]
Indirectly via a bag of chinese knockoff toys that were being sold in the US as "Dinosaurs"
Doesn't 3H3L say that orcs and Germans are literally the same thing manifesting differently in different worlds, to the point where killing one weakens the other? Meanwhile on Earth the cosmic forces of good manifest as Americans.
>he wants to be
there's where you failed, you weren't supposed to self-insert into a wargame with a high fatality rate any more than you self-insert as a chess piece
NTA, but I feel like this is swinging too far in the other direction. The very idea of playing singular heroes rather than a division of men demonstrates an interest in inhabiting the character. I mean, we're talking about a game where Gary and Rob Kuntz spent years doing one on one play of Robilar's exploits. The thing that tempers that though is that a Robilar or a Mordenkainen were the product of lots of play and dead characters. Sure they didn't spend reams of paper on every character they made, but the one's that stuck definitely earned their personal investment, to the point where they felt the need to immortalize them.
the assumption was that the characters you're making would die and a common recommendation was to show up to a session with backup characters already rolled
it doesn't raelly, but neither did what you said negate what i said before that
9 months ago
Anonymous
Did I say I intended to negate what you said? I was trying to temper what I saw as a lack of nuance in your post. Yes, compared to modern games, the majority characters were much more like gamepieces. No, that does not mean there was no characterization or investment on the part of the player. Or else we'd not have Tenser or Melf or Robilar or Mordenkainen. But it did take a lot of play to get a character that sticks like that to warrant the investment.
OSE character creation is 3d6 down the line, pick a class that fits what you rolled, fill in the sheet, and done.
It's that way explicitly because character death is pretty common.
>zoomers mad they can't just wombo combo this monster with their 3rd level tiefling warlock using the feats of cum blast, powerful cum blast, and then synergizing some gay mobility feat with 13 ranks in acrobatics to just backflip over the ghost, do an attack of opportunity, and roll 14d88.
>wizard that respawns when he dies >epic mysterious ranger fated to become king >prince of gondor >elf so agile he can walk on snow without leaving footprints >hardened dwarf warrior
If only anime hadn't influenced Tolkien to add freakshit, we could have played RPGs as intended, as nameless human mercenaries who lose half their number defeating a single bandit and then the rest die of dysentery
I feel like when people point to Tolkien as some sort of gotcha for D&D not having some element or another, they really just reveal how poorly read they are in fantasy as a genre.
Was Tolkien AN inspiration for D&D? Sure. Was it THE inspiration? Hell no. Vance alone constitutes like 75% of the assumption, tropes, and conventions D&D uses. The other 20% is Three Hearts and Three Lions. And the last 5% is a slew of Moorwiener and a frickton of other authors.
Instant death mechanics is good to add actual stakes to "boss" encounters and to let your players know that they are in a place they are too weak to be in.
I don't see that in the OSR/TSR modules, it's basically just be a frickhead and find out
You gotta engage with traps and make up some plausible bullshit rather than roll for it
Ex.
27. Bejeweled Bung
In the center of this room is an elongated stone dome, 4Ê
high, resembling a beehive. Plunged into the top of the
dome is a golden spike, with an aquamarine gem
attached.
The beehive is hollow, and filled with poison gas. If the
spike is removed, the gas will be released into the room.
The person who released the gas must save vs. poison or
die. Others in the room have 1 round to immediately
leave, or they too must save vs. poison or die. If
someone successfully saves, but remains in the gas, they
will have to make another save every round they remain
in the poison.
If the door is not shut after the gas is released, it will
spread into room 26 as well. It will take 1d6 days for the
gas to dissipate, due to the lack of ventilation. Leaving
both the door between 26 and 27 and the door between
26 and 31 open will cause the gas to dissipate much
more rapidly, in only 2d6 turns.
The aquamarine may be safely pried off the spike
without causing the gas to be released, should the players
try that.
The golden spike is worth 200 gp, and the aquamarine
an additional 400 gp.
Also based on this, there is no such thing as being underleveled, if you play carefully you can just loot this shit and be on your way. You don't even have to go back to this megadungeon if you don't want to. Completely the opposite of your zoomer level gating - it's more IQ gating.
This isn't bad if players have a way to sus out that its filled with poison gas and make a plan around that. If they have 0 way of determining the results of their actions its kinda shit
I will remind you that this thing called "culture" you speak of is just you being inappropriate proud that people who live in your area in the past were smarter and more creative than you are.
I'm amazed that people think isekai was an animu thing first. "Portal novels" (my D&D group enters a portal and appears in the world) were so prevalent that publishing houses refused to take any new portal novels and limited them to established authors by the time the 90s came around.
Where does the line go? I mean, John Carter is just displaced in location in the same universe, no? Is Predators an isekai? It's effectively the same thing (modern day people transported to an alien planet).
Technically yes, though the predator planet is just a generic jungle so you're not really experiencing the "outsider in a weird new culture" aspect of isekai.
"Different universe" is a modern concept. If a place is outside of your known world, people can't casually travel there, then it's another world.
Even a story about being transported to a land a few hundred miles across the sea could count as isekai if it was told before the invention of boats.
And before that there was the entire "Sword & Planet" genre -- Burrough's Barsoom, Howard's Almuric, Aker's Scorpio, pastiche like Norman's Gor, Carter's Calliso, etc. -- in which a guy (usually an American soldier) is transported by some plot device to an strange world that happens to have a breathable atmosphere and gorgeous alien women with compatible anatomy.
101. Treasure Grinder
This room is almost entirely occupied with a gold-lined
pool of liquid. The shadowed ceiling is 20'
above. The pool is an incredibly powerful acid...
...If the players illuminate the ceiling 20'
above, they see ominous looking cracks outlining
large square sections near the hallway entrance.
The platform across the pool is a pressure
plate, already partially depressed...
When activated, hinged portions of the ceiling near the
hallway entrance swing open, and on each side of the
room massive rotating bronze cylinders (10' long)
covered with two-foot-long blades, and hooks at the ends
of 10' chains, drop down with a massive CLANG (50%
chance of bringing forth a wandering monster to
investigate). The cylinders move forward towards the platform,
spinning the chains out quickly, catching anyone within
their path and drawing them in to the blades. Halfway
across, the cylinders will move in on tracks towards the
center of the room, as their chains retract, and once the
blades are close enough to overlap each other, the meat
grinder will continue moving towards the platform. Once
over the platform, the cylinders will sweep out along the
end of the room in either direction, and then back
towards their original positions near the hallway
entrance. Once returned to their original positions, they
will rise back up into the ceiling.
...As mentioned above, the only thing keeping the acid
contained is the thin layer of beaten gold. If the gold is
scratched away below the surface of the acid, the acid
will begin to eat through the stone behind. As the stone
behind turns to mush, the gold will buckle and form
further cracks, and over a week's time the acid will drain
out. Where the acid eats away the stone, that portion of
the dungeon will turn into an equivalent volume of
caustic mud, with only a thin crust of stone above. Any
player crossing this crust will fall into the mud (players
will take 1d2 damage per round while in the mud)
Chad boomer spends like two minutes making a character from three classes and rolling some dice to determine stats/HP, and then lets them develop in play so enemies can be lethal as frick
VERSUS
Virgin zoomer spends three hours consulting build guides, picking between seventeen different options, and writing up a long backstory for his character so every combat has to be certain victory going through the motions.
>Balls deep in the lair and haven’t fought a single guy >Go ham on the BBEG since you didn’t blow your load on the easy guys w/ successful reaction checks >Beat BBEG into submission, pass morale check and take all his gold in exchange for his life >Figure you got most of the goods and leave immediately, never come back and never fully clear the lair >Level anyway because it’s xp for gold
>spend 1 hour + on every fight >clearing this dungeon level has taken real world weeks >emotionlessly hunt down every last rat in the dungeon for exp >dungeon map is a straight line so at least its easy to find everything >out of spells when you fight the BBEG that you're pretty sure the DM ripped from world of warcraft >gm just ignores his dice and the boss's HP and lets you win out of pity
They already are nerfed, they're moronic. >1000 years only and only a level 2 wizard >meanwhile a human mage has hit level 5 by age 30 >an entire civilization of people who only have kids once every 500 years >their entire population is outnumbered by a small town >fighting in a war losing ten elves is a worse deal than a human lord losing his entire army and takes ten times as long to replace >because of this they have to spend their entire millenia long existence hiding out in remote forests or caves
Yes, and mindflayers can basically 1shot from grapple.
Just houserule the age damage to be concentration based and make it revert when the ghost dies and you make one of the most annoying enemies a fun and interesting mob.
It IS fun game design, as long as you are in the right mindset. The mindset being "lmao my character's life or death doesn't matter worth one SHIT, if he dies I roll a new one in 2 minutes"
It was. See, literally none of that shit matters except the first "on sight" save.
In 1e, you weren't playing a bunch of tiefling, firbolg, and tortle 'adventurers' with flashy anime powers on a grand campaign to stop the cult of Tharizdun from sacrificing the cute Harper Agent by casting Vicious Mockery on her repeatedly to open a portal to the Elemental Plane of Poop, you were a bunch of grungy humans - with the occasional dwarf, elf. or halfling - engaged in the fine art of tomb robbing so you could afford enough money to retire, and you could spend the entire campaign tactically clearing out a single old buried castle of every gold coin you could find.
This often involved clearing out rooms like a S.W.A.T. team headed through a booby-trapped and parasite-infested crack den, 10' poles and pocket mirrors at the ready to fend off treachery. You had a point man for murdering mooks (fighter), a scout and trap-disarming expert (thief), a combat medic/messiah/exorcist (cleric), and the radio guy who everyone had to keep protected but could call in an air strike once in a while when things got too heavy (wizard). Since you couldn't just sleep off a punji stick injury in 8 hours like 5e, establishing forward outposts so you could maintain a controlled area and prevent new monsters from moving in while you spent weeks healing, training, and studying up was essential for forward progress. Similarly, you scouted out new dangers, added them to your maps, and either planned routes around them or built a tactical squad specifically geared to move in and murder the shit out of them.
That ghost? Yeah, your thief scouted ahead, saw it, maybe aged, turned around while it was still down the hall, and hightailed it back to your group with his 12" movement speed. You all either bugged out or called in Father Ghostbuster or a bunch of hirelings armed with mirrors (to bypass the on-sight effect), slingshots, and vials of holy water and ended the thing in one round.
Haha, I am probably the only anon who encountered one of these bad boys "in the wild" so to speak, nigh on 25 years ago.
Most of what people are saying in this thread is wrong by the way. 1st ed was nothing like a roguelike game. People were just as attached to their characters as they are.
The ghost was a high end enemy we took on with a high level party. Because we were a high end party multiple members of the party were able to pursue it into the ethereal realm to directly deal damage, including IIRC an early version of the Monk class from unearthed arcana, who was able to shift into the ethereal realm at will.
I always expect shit takes from "let me tell you how it REALLY was" boomers but you sound right. I'm extremely skeptical of people who seem to think no AD&D group ever got past level 3. You want me to believe that half the monster manual is just stuff you can never face and most TSR modules for characters of levels >4 can never even be played legitimately?
Yes, it's a design choice. Undeads in Ad&d are different from other monsters because they tend to inflict a permanent damage rather than insta-death - you'll rot away, lose a Level, lose 10 years of life... that is their big thing. It isn't like being turned to Stone or Poisoned, you are alive and wish you weren't.
A Ghost is one of the top dogs of the Undead family, way above a wraith or specter - their powers reflect that, they're akin to a Red Dragon or a Balor.
>We don't have even how hard is the save
Saves are rated on a class/level/effect matrix, rather than by difficulty class. Ghost fear is a Spell effect, which for a 1st-Level Fighter is a 19+ save, down to 6+ at 17th and up, while a Wizard would be 12+ at 1st Level and 6+ at 16th.
It was though. You didn't frick with a ghost because it would mess your shit up. Same reason a Death Knight would just wreck your ass - it was meant to unapologetically convey "this thing is dangerous and it will likely kill you" and frick the idea of balance or fairness. Some shit was just more powerful and you either had to avoid it or deal with it. Any asshat suggesting just blindly fighting something clearly better than what the party was equipped to handle deserved getting wrecked. There was nothing wrong with just calling a run quits. The problem is over time people just now equate "old school" with unwinnable counters which is moronic. Yes a tomb of horrors exists but that was literally Gygax trying to challenge professional sperglords.
Compared to these days where having an NPC or monster stronger than the pcs is seen as being a That Guy DM thing, a meme or a form of hate crime/ rape of the player. It's inane for PC's to think they are invincible, it's even worse for DM's to allow it, it's tragic if the system prevents it. It's infuriating now because for some reason games are either power fantasy simulators or gritty autism.
I played a couple of games like that, never bother on giving names or backstory or even roleplay the characters, treated like a videogame. GM got furious
Treating it like a video game is the right way to play
Unironically the correct way to play old school games. You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash and all the character growth is about how to get even more cash and secure the cash you already earned. A staggeringly high amount of shit will outright kill you, so you best hire mercs for the meat grinder and pay them well enough that mercs will still work with you even though their friend Bob got his skull sucked out his butthole by some kind of writhing nightmare worm working for you two days ago.
>You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash and all the character growth is about how to get even more cash and secure the cash you already earned
Wait, DnD is just sword and sorcery?
>Wait, DnD is just sword and sorcery?
Always has been
>You aren't a hero, you just do dangerous shit for cash
This is not how oldschool D&D worked narratively or mechanically. This is how OSR pretends that oldschool D&D worked.
D&D is a western about a roaming group of heroes saving towns being menaced by bandits
That wasn’t how I played 2e, it was definitely high fantasy story shit, I prefer OSR B/X play nowadays regardless if it is an innovation or not. Gold for xp really pushes you in that direction, my 2e group didn’t play with that.
>2e storyshit and no gold for XP
Not big surprise. 2e was the beginning of the end.
I never played with gold for XP either. Don't get me wrong, we still stole everything in a dungeon not nailed down, but we were clearing that dungeon of evil to save the town. The wandering cowboy or ronin usually got paid to be a hero too.
That is exactly how Basic and Expert worked and were very much the bulk of grognards delve into D&D.
B/X was also objectively superior to Gygax D&D because all it took to get players to do a quest was the phrase "There might be loot".
Well, what did he expect? I mean how many PCs can you reasonably lose to cheap tricks before you stop becoming emotionally invested in them?
>Well, what did he expect?
I assume he expected him to get invested in the characters and cry or get mad when they died. Anon played an uno reverse on that DM
>treated like a videogame
Go play a videogame instead then, you're the cancer killing the hobby
>completely ignored
moron
>Instead of trying to have fun playing a game with my friends, I will instead just act like a pissbaby b***h that doesn't want to engage because I fear the loss of an imaginary character
>completely ignored
Haha gay
Based, I love videogames. Don't have any theater kids stinking up my games.
>supernatural beings are actually extremely dangerous instead of just another sack of hit points to beat on
It's hard for a 5e zoomie to comprehend, I'm sure.
Why cant I always win and pretend to be my favorite superhero
That does sound like fun game design
>fun game design
Nowadays it's called "rogue like" and it's very successful in video-games.
Have you ever played Darkest Dungeon? Your party members feel a lot like old school D&D characters, disposable adventurers being sent into a meat grinder, only the stronger emerge.
>only the stronger emerge
Not accurate in this situation at all, it's just pure luck/bullshit from the gm.
Gameplay wise yeah, it's mostly RNG like in any RPG, but within the fantasy of the world those are strong few who survive
first off, the gameplay experience of OD&D is not at all like Rogue despite the superficial similarities. you're talking out your ass from the jump. second, the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite", so called because those kind of games borrow the high level concept of Rogue (ie a large semi-random dungeon that starts you back at the beginning when you die), but soften it considerably for modern audiences by allowing the player to carry over progression from one play to the next.
>the gameplay experience of OD&D is not at all
You don't get to tell me how my experience playing D&D used to be, pal.
>the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite",
I now know you must be very young and/or not very smart because you spend you time arguing about the precise meaning and descriptions of cultural terms on the internet.
>second, the term you're reaching for is "Rogue Lite"
Genuinely clueless if you don't understand the difference between roguelike and roguelite.
You also forget you still had 5 other characters as back ups
Holy shit your right. Todays generation loves RNG bullshit muh souls like difficulty but freak out if even a slight challenge is presented to them in a TTRPG game
>Souls-like
>RNG
Are you one of those people who thinks passing your driver's test is all luck, too?
Learn how to stack the deck, dumbass
This is the best kind, maybe a bit harsh, I'd say 5 years would be more fair
nah, OP is about flavour and roleplay, not the challenge
i dont know about you but i treat my DD characters with respect and try to avoid death and when the ones named after my friends died i was distraught. losing my first leper was a painful lesson i will never forget
In oldschool games, there's no downside to losing a character, moron.
In most roguelikes, (You) are the character and the game ends with your death and restarts.
And losing characters in DD hacks at your investment, as heroes are money sinks.
Also DnD doesn't have moronic sanity checks.
>hmm this enemy is very dangerous
>should I form tactics around it?
>no I will just complain
What tactics? It’s literally “let the wizard win the fight”?
Unfortunately it seems you suffer from 5e brainrot. I'm afraid it's terminal.
Congrats you didn’t answer my question and have only reinforced my view that there is no real tactics involved
Think for 5 seconds, moron. You're fighting a ghost with terrible powers, what's your plan?
>ambush it with holy water?
>stock up on silver weapons?
>set some kind of trap?
>what spells and magic items do we have access to?
>can we bypass the ghost somehow, do we even need to fight it?
>can we put it to rest by other means?
Lol fireball
Why are you expecting me to respond seriously? Just say “I was only pretending” so you can feel better and move on, remember you are not as intelligent as you think you are, any further responses will be more shit posts.
Yeah fireball is a good option. We're talking about D&D, not some OSR game where you start with D6 broken sticks and 1GP as your gear.
I accept your concession.
>Lol fireball
If you can cast Fireball, you probably have other extremely useful spells.
>looks at sheet
>"There's no 'Banish Ghost' spell!"
>ambush an ambush predator
>randomly carry around silvered weapons for no reason
>set traps against an ambush predator
>wizard solves all problems
>ignore the monster entirely
>treat it as a puzzle set piece
sasuga
>ignore the monster entirely
yes, because the point of old school play was to get the treasure, not to kill every monster. your 5e brainrot is showing.
>yes, because the point of old school play was to get the treasure, not to kill every monster. your 5e brainrot is showing.
I actually played Basic. I prefer literally anything that isn't D&D at this point, though.
>the point of old school play was to get the treasure
it actually is though, old school play literally revolves around getting enough treasure to stay living - that's why you go on adventures, to replenish your wealth
>ambush an ambush predator
>set traps against an ambush predator
Yes, humans do this, that's why we're on top of the food chain.
We generally do not. It wasn't until the creation of the firearm that humans stood any real chance against most apex predators. We succeeded largely by not being in the same places other apex predators were. Not avoiding but simply not living in places where apex predators did.
Bet you think you like sandbox games. lol
>It wasn't until the creation of the firearm
Even if you want to ignore that wizards are living artillery, D&D literally has an arquebus in it
Not in my D&D. None of that shit, thanks.
We're all so impressed.
>Hunted around 8 species of large felines that were the apex predator including a subspecies of lion to extinction in europe in times when iron was rare and steel only randomly dug up in the alps and scandinavia
>on topic of alps, to be nazi slavs knife hunted wolves in the entire southern forests to extinction before rome even fell
vs
>humans didnt stand chance until firearms
Pick one moron.
Would you, uh, like to try again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_species_extinct_in_the_Holocene
Actually this is interesting. Humans probably weren't apex predators. For one, our diet is too varied and for another, we're endurance hunters. Which is how we hunted whales. By harpooning them and hanging on while they tired themselves out, then killed them.
But orcas aside, whales almost never occupy an apex predator role.
Your entire argument is shit when humans used to melee whales to death.
>It wasn't until the creation of the firearm that humans stood any real chance against most apex predators.
Try when we figured out the spear. Also apex predator doesn't mean exactly what you think it means.
>Also apex predator doesn't mean exactly what you think it means.
Hit me with that Wikipedia definition. I'm ready.
An apex predator is any predator that has no natural predators of its own. That doesn't mean it can't suffer from predation, simply that it occupies the highest trophic level within its ecosystem. Basically no one makes it a vital part of their diet. While we typically think of things like wolves, apex predators also include things cormorants, owls, and snakes because it's contextual to habitat. Whether or not humans count is a matter of debate as we're omnivores, we often kill other animals for reasons other than eating them, and, thanks to farming and animal husbandry, we can occupy multiple trophic levels within a food chain.
Sounds like a great night of D&D to me
No bro you dont understand, I cant think of a straregy because there isnt a line in my player sheet saying I got the strategy-thinker feat Bro
How can I figure something out If the DM does not tell me after I roll a D20?
I miss encounters like this. Everything is so safe these days; DMs are afraid to harm their players, let alone kill them. I also haven't seen a proper trap or good puzzle in years, which is a shame.
On the bright side, my current DM really likes going all in on terrain and stuff, so the game always has a pretty neat setting. One time he built a 8 foot long ship with multiple decks for a dungeon.
>DMs are afraid to harm their players, let alone kill them.
Well of course. It's only a game, you're talking about battery or murder. Grow up!
>he doesn't take his players into the thunderdome whenever there is a disagreement over the rules
lmaoing@ur life rn
>; DMs are afraid to harm their players, let alone kill them.
NO! NOT BLACK LEAF!
F
Kek
Thanks anon all the negativity on here nowadays makes me forget some of us still have fun
>8' long ship
>multiple decks
WS it just floating ladderways?
No, the model he made for it IRL was 8 feet long. It was made it two halves and the hull had removable sections so you could see inside.
That's neat as frick. Got any pics?
Sorry, no. Used to, but my old phone died and I never transferd the pics to anything.
autism
I hope you mean 80. A lot of canoes are longer than 8 feet.
Encounters were intended to be avoided when possible in those days. You wouldn't understand.
Also I choose to interpret this is as the ghost literally giving you a ghost blowjob until you die of exhaustion.
>ghost blowjob
WOO WOO WOO
Fricking zoomers/genalfalfa don't know what they're missing with a ghost blowjob.
>not posting the actual ghost blowjob in Ghostbusters
I love to make macrodungeons in a single, big map. Print them on A3 sheets then tape them together.
Seeing your player's face light up when you unfold the map and discussing where to explroe is such a great feel.
Imagine how scary encountering a ghost would be tho, if you heard a graveyard was haunted you'd probably avoid it in 1E.
Just play the elf, 40 years is nothing
This was literally me back then. I had to eat up ("tank") the ghosts to spare the humies.
Good thing the cleric became so powerful he just turned them.
>shit, a ghost. We better run for it and try to find a way to avoid it, maybe there is an exorcist in town we can hire or some sort of alternative passage to avoid them.
Read Master of the Game by Gygax himself.
This is the right mentality to play the game under.
But the system didn't have anything in place to DO that
Sure I could interpret as a DM maybe they roll some sort of skill check for that to gather info on priests and call for an exorcism. But there's several problems with this
1: It takes away player agency to feel like heroes. If they're just guys, why even bother?
2: Maybe they do have some more potentiality than just some guy, but even if they do, the mechanics as they're written don't really give a whole lot of info on how to do that and I'm just winging it
Just admit D&D was always a bad game. You osr boomers and 5e zoomers can't even say any edition was good. It's just bad vs worse
You’re just a guy in Traveller too
You don’t know what you want and you have narrow experiences
>But the system didn't have anything in place to DO that
More 5e brainrot
>b-but there's nothing in the rules about what npcs are in the local village!
What the frick is this zoomer take lmao
The best part is that there is, there's population demographics for the percentage of people with PC levels, level distribution, and class percentages among npcs so you absolutely can determine how strong the priests will be in settlements of different sizes
>But the system didn't have anything in place to DO that
Wrong. AD&D has very detailed procedures for doing that.
>we better run for it
Pursuit and evasion of pursuit, pages 67-69 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Also covered in Basic D&D, because running from fights is a basic concept.
>maybe there is an exorcist in town we can hire
Hire a cleric henchman, Dungeon Master's Guide 34-37. Henchmen are also covered in detail in Basic D&D and Original D&D.
>or some sort of alternative passage to avoid them.
The AD&D dungeon generator is prone to creating alternate routes, and published modules usually have alternate routes too.
>undead are supposed to be terrifying
>give them aging and level drain abilities
>players are now literally terrified of them
It's unironically genius game design
>Boomers really thought this is fun game design.
its over
Did boomers actually play this shit as they said they did? I got the impression that a lot of the annoying hardcore shit that they did was exaggerated.
GG played with adults, no one cares what children did
That did not answer my question. Did they actually do this uber-le ebin hardcore shit that they said they did or not?
No, noone but true autist turbo nerds played d&d before 3.5
3.5 is quite autistic, I say this as a 3tard.
For the record, 3.5 Ghosts can be of different types and being damaged on at least 2 stats is no joke.
I was also positive it had some aging attack in 3rd but I could mix up with my BECMI memories.
Boomers invented the game and were already adults when playing and it spread through word of mouth often copying Arneson and Gygax so I’d assume so, unless by boomers you mean anyone 40 and up in which case kids who weren’t taught by elders played what they comprehended or wanted.
30 and up
Phoneposting
Why waste paper and ink on the rules if you never really intended it to be played that way?
Yes. 'Tomb of Horrors' literally only existed because Gygax's group complained they wanted something hard again. It had to be revised when they stole the tomb doors and ignored the actual dungeon. Games back then were more like roguelike videogames than the RPGs you know. Stuff like NetHack? The high lethality and deadly challenges were the fun part. Not even necessarily facing them, but successfully avoiding them and getting the treasure.
Getting characters to be busted was big part of old school fun too. Like people often meme about instakilling and level draining bullshit enemies of the 80s Wizardry games, but player could also access gamebreaking abilities.
Ironically the sort of hardcore grudgecore experience that was a blight on the hobby to this very day was a shallow parody of what was coming before, when everything just hit a lot harder and everything could do cool shit. Unlike 5e and it's teddy bear-core or newschool osr which is just suffering porn.
You're the one calling it hardcore. The hobby's always had whiney theater kids in it, but AD&D as intended wasn't written for wasn't written for the type of people who cry when they lose a character. By the time players are facing a ghost they probably have some way to handle it, probably access to de-aging magic at a nearby town, and they wouldn't even get that far without the common sense to run if things turn bad.
The thing about the Tomb of Horrors is it was written as a tournament challenge, people liked it, and it was winnable for the hardcore players.
Yeah, I'm not denigrating the Tomb of Horrors. It did what it was supposed to do.
>By the time players are facing a ghost they probably have some way to handle it
A level 3 cleric has Spiritual weapon. A level 6 cleric is straight immune to ghost aging.
Gygax actually played a little soft with his group, starting them at level 3 with 4d6d1 for stats and giving them bonuses at lower stat caps than the default rules.
>Yeep, the game was so lethal back then, man we played those characters for years!
Its easy to be the toughguy when your competition is redditors who are afraid that someone might cry if they track monster HP. They just let it go to their heads.
If you don’t have any lawcucks in your party and play sandbox style you can just frick off somewhere else without ghosts and wights. It’s literally not your problem.
I am confident that if the screenshot were of someone praising this encounter, all of the replies here would be calling it unfair.
Then again, ghosts don't even grow in graveyards according to its rarity rating and are solitary creatures.
So you wouldn't meet more than one and you wouldn't meet it outside of some ancient ruin that time has forgotten and that isn't even accessible without setting up a proper expedition to find it. This isn't some low level shit you'd use a couple dozends of to test your new silver dagger or whatever.
>Then again, ghosts don't even grow in graveyards according to its rarity rating and are solitary creatures.
The only person ITT to actually read the screencap. The ghost was a rare boss level creature, not a generic enemy that killed you when you looked at it.
It takes one button click to generate a new roguelike character, that's part of why they've made hardcore meatgrinder TTRPG obsolete
I guess superhero TTRPG is obsolete now that there is a video game that reproduced its rules with co-op
well nobody plays superhero ttrpgs anymore but yes, videogames are part of the reason
marvel stigma is another
>It takes one button click to generate a new roguelike character
Old school D&D were very easy and quick to generate also.
What made meatgrinder D&D obsolete was in part the rules bloat of later editions and the special snowflake culture of character creation.
I mean it is kind of boring to roll yet another fighter over and over again.
Git gud
Poor baby. Want a bottle?
>they've made hardcore meatgrinder TTRPG obsolete
Dungeon Crawl Classics embraces the meatgrinder with the "Level-0 Funnel" which is an absolute blast. Instead of dying and rolling a new character, everyone goes into the dungeon with a Level-0 nobody expecting almost all of them to die, and. the one that survives is the one you play. I'd love to see a videogame take this approach.
You don’t play 4 guys at once but that’s roguelikes, thinking Zorbus
Almost like just venturing out to fight monsters is actually dangerous.
>Session 0
>GM: Ok, this game is going to be oldschool, very deadly, I'm not going to pull punches, so enter at your own peril
Problem solved
You forgot
>everyone roll a backup character
But yea, pretty much this
DnD is community theater
I do think discouraging players from getting invested in the characters they're playing by demanding backup characters and designing to kill them all off is strange game design for a roleplaying game.
The point is that you eventually get invested in the one PC that actually manages to survive against all odds. This leads to a more natural attachment than the 30 page backstory does.
Besides, the "super high lethality" is mostly a meme. Yes, 1st level PCs are squishy as frick but once you actually make it out of the early levels death is much more rare. Especially once you gain access to Raise Dead and so on.
Because you come from a different school of thought. To Gary and Rob and Arneson, the very idea that you're playing as a singular man and giving him a class and a name was novel and a significant level of investment. Hell, compared to the wargames these guys made and played, a LBB character is significantly more survivable. Take a look a Chainmail sometime. You know what the difference is between a living infantryman and a dead one? At best rolling a 6 on a d6. With different types of units and more dice in the pool per man (and even extra per stronger units against weaker) that gets even more likely.
There was no presupposition of story, the campaign was literal, the (often military-esque) exploits, victories, defeats of you and your comrades and hirelings and henchman. The story was recounting those exploits.
The way people play the game today would've been unthinkable and alien to them and that culture back in 1974, at least as alien as the old school seems to you today if not more.
Old school D&D doesn't seem military-esque, it's basically a puzzle
>specified marching order
>descript rules for reach of ranged weapons, melee, and pole arms
>hirelings that support functions like carrying supplies
>henchman that provide combat support
>the expectation of multiple forays into the dungeon
>retreats in the event of crushing defeat
>followers and men at arms at higher levels with the expectation of waging large scale conflict
>literal wargame combat with phased action resolution, a fantasy setting and expanded veteran progression levels
I dunno what to tell ya man, almost everything mechanical or procedural about the game is either a direct carryover from foundational assumptions of wargames or just ripped entirely from other wargames.
You might get into just a couple fights a session, that’s where there is more rules definition, but it’s not even half of your game time. Even then, you get puzzles like in OP in terms of the encounter
The rest of your time you’re parleying, figuring out a trap that isn’t rolling for a DC but essentially roleplaying how you solve it, mapping the dungeon and figuring out the safest way to approach it for freeform stuff, and managing resources alongside all that
>the player rapist ghost
Through proxy.
What am I even looking at here?
troonime shit
Some sort of ghost possessed the girl and grew her a dick to frick the now female dragon (used to be male, but the ghost turned it into a female, because no homo, and I think when alive fricking dragons was his thing).
>and I think when alive fricking dragons was his thing).
His thing was fricking Every Single Thing, but he's straight, so he created a magic to turn anyone he wants into a woman. It is a really dumb, mildly entertaining manga.
>Every Single Thing
Ok. Haven't had time to get into it, just saw a panel which looked like corporeal him balls deep in a big dragon lady.
Ghost, Prince of Netherlands, Alpha Male
A masterpiece of bullshit.
Rosen Garten Saga loosely based the Germanic epic poem Rosengarten zu Worms which is basically crossover fanfiction of the Nibelungenlied and Dietrich von Bern cycle.
Why should I, as an American, give a shit about Niger burger lied and Derrick von Berns bicycle?
Because you don't have any culture of your own?
>Because you don't have any culture of your own?
The absolute pottery of saying this in a thread about D&D.
And D&D is a sickly, wheelchair-bound, inbred amalgamation of European literature and folklore.
Yes, really makes you think.
Ever wonder where the sword named Balmung originated? That was the name of Siegfried's sword in the Nibelungenlied which was later reused for the Ring of the Nibelung opera.
Dietrich von Bern is pretty much the German equivalent of King Arthur and has a similar amount of crazy adventures.
helpful answer by someone who can correctly answer the question "why should I care about your culture"
moron /po/ kneejerk answer
High culture, innit?
S' beautiful, like.
>Shart of the Doodoo Lord
No thanks I don't like scat.
Getting ubermad at that is just a normal reaction, ghosts can't go near salt
My impression of old school dnd games by non-gygax gays was that these super hardcore guys was disliked and dms like ddd was prefered since they just gave everyone cool shit.
That's sick as hell. Imagine the party trying to kill a ghost without seeing it.
>casting fireballs around corners
>leaving traps for the ghost
>blind swordsman dueling the ghost
Or just get something to reverse aging. Or mind control young orphans to go after it, they can afford to age a few decades. Or run out comically once you realize the place is haunted.
Did old school B/X or 1e players play their groups as morally questionable mercenaries? We were only allowed to play as cucks in 2e.
It's ok, they're elf orphans.
Gold-for-XP tends to produce amoral groups.
Just hire some elves.
>hire
I'd rather die than give one penny to an elf.
Alright, then coerce some elves.
Elf hate is the most boring zoomer meme
Elf love is the most cringe boomer meme.
Elf hate is the most quintessential millennial homosexual joke there is
>Or run out comically once you realize the place is haunted.
ZOINKS!
>mind control young orphans to go after it, they can afford to age a few decades
what the frick man
>"I'll have to use the orphans," he said, stuffing them in a sack and ignoring the many non-orphan related options still available.
oh boy
Was combat in old dnd just more rare? There's so much bullshit stuff lmao.
I feel like old dnd would just be slower too since it's just ripping off the fantasy novel feel.
Combat was a central part, but not the main focus like in 5e or modern games. The goal was always to acquire treasure, through fighting or not.
Not sure how you think the game would be slow, you lost me there. Everything moves pretty fast in my experience.
Also you tried to cheat like frick in combat constantly. Not like on the dice, but in-game advantages.
>There's so much bullshit stuff lmao.
The players had a ton of bullshit stuff too.
No they did why lie?
Grease is a level 1 spell and it's already bullshit strong against level 1 threats. By the time you're fighting ghosts you'll have a whole toolbox of spells and magic items.
>spell
>against a ghost
>that only a wizard can use
Amazing
>illiterate third worlder who hasn't played D&D comes online to argue about D&D and call people who have played it liars
Why?
Why race bait?
Yeah...That's a bannable offense, we're on a blue board guys...
>only a wizard
Each party member is good at tackling different challenges, that's how D&D works. Wizards are a starting option, it's not like it's difficult for the party to have one. Wizards are not the only ones with spells either. Clerics and Druids are going to be casting too.
>muh wizard/martial false dichotomy
Also a symptom of 5e brainrot.
>ripping off the fantasy novel feel
There's nothing wrong this and the best DMs I ever had were the ones who were influenced by fantasy novels. A God tier DMs ,which I was only in the group for a few years, was a history professor who also had a sizeable knowledge of European myths
>Was combat in old dnd just more rare? There's so much bullshit stuff lmao.
There was a lot more "punching down" against not so bullshit enemies than there were attempts to "punch upwards" and ACs were over a much narrower span. Various simple enemies without special rules were the most common which made those with special rules all the more engaging to face.
>Best candidate is probably just a Dwarf Cleric with a silver mace.
Clerics and Paladins were pretty hard counters to undead. Mid to high level were not to be messed with if your party lacked one of those classes.
>Clerics and Paladins were pretty hard counters to undead.
I recently ran a published TSR module where the dungeon ends with wight followed by a specter. Cleric turned both of them. Needed an 11 to turn the specter and still turned it. Both went from terrifying to whimpering in the corner as the PCs stabbed them with magic swords.
>Both went from terrifying to whimpering in the corner as the PCs stabbed them with magic swords.
But the prevailing understanding is that turned undead only stay turned if players don't do exactly this. So much so that 2E explicitly codified it:
>If the character forces the free-willed undead to come closer than 10 feet (by pressing them into a corner, for example) the turning is broken and the undead attack normally.
You corner a turned undead, they will resume defending themselves.
In our group, we've ruled that as long as the cleric continues to present his holy symbol, the undead will cower if it can't flee, and is helpless while cowering. So standard tactic is back it into a corner and stab it with magic swords.
Our group generally runs on the "if you've neutralized it as a threat, you can kill it without combat" rule of thumb.
That was kind of the entire point of Clerics in 1e and B/X. Healing the party was definitely not the role they filled in those games, they just hated skeletons like you wouldn't believe.
>2e
Nothing WotC ever did to D&D was as fricking wrong as 2e was. If anyone believes otherwise, they are definitely moronic.
What was the great sin that 2e did? Make gold for xp optional?
It wasn't so much the system itself (though removing gold for xp is a big one), the game itself is mostly fine if slightly bloated. But the culture surrounding the game had clearly shifted, as can be seen in most 2e modules being complete railroads. The success of Dragonlance had a lot to do with this too. The focus became more about heroics and storytelling and the game shifted more and more away from the dungeon.
Given the lack of dungeons or often even tables or stats, you'd think from picking up a splatbook that AD&D2e was LARP.
Might as well not even have dungeons in the title.
D&D is at its ABSOLUTE best when it is a group of dudes clearing out a dungeon for loot, dealing with traps, avoiding fights unless absolutely necessary because MONSTERS ARE SCARY FOR A REASON.
2e was the start of moving away from that, being story oriented, focusing on being heroes instead of adventuring for gains, and other core game design ideas that REALLY started making the game become how it is today.
Second Edition is when D&D succumbed to the lie that D&D is a high fantasy novel simulator, leading to infinite frustration and eventually culminating in Ron Edward's of the Forge observing "this game doesn't do what you think it does!" This lead to both the explosion of indie games ("let's make games that actually do what D&D says it does") and the OSR movement ("if D&D isn't a fantasy novel simulator, what was it supposed to be?").
Before anyone tells me that Edwards had nothing to do with the OSR, that's not what I meant. I mean only that both Edwards and OSR exploded around the same time and came out of the same shift in the zeitgeist.
While i can understand and even respect your hate for the dragonlance anti dungeoncrawl and religiousless religionkowtowing of that eras culture, Turn being broken when cornered is a artifact from 1e (iirc it was based on hit die type or something schizo like that and tucked away separate from the actual turning rules, but there).
No. Cornering does not break in 1e if the undead is cornered UNLESS the one who turned the undead closes the distance breaking the turning effect. Essentially, if the cleric turns the undead and stays where he is, the undead just cower and get moved by the rest of the party as they aren't the source of the turning
1e never really clarified how it affected intelligent creatures differently though just that you could apparently turn lesser devils, demons, fallen paladins, and shit too. Gygax was not good at writing rules.
Yeah, much more fun if the ghost just does 1d6+3 damage and has nothing else special about it, just like every other enemy.
lmao it even says that if a ghost kills you you're dead for good.
Humans BTFO
How quaint.
>only wizards, already the most useful and powerful class, are capable of attacking ghosts
bravo gygax
Except if anything that suggests the opposite. A Cleric of 6th level is immune to the aging, and is thus a good choice. Once the ghost manifests, silvered and magic weapons are a good way to attack it.
To attack the ghost with a spell, you also need to be ethereal.
Best candidate is probably just a Dwarf Cleric with a silver mace.
Wizard is the only one who can attack the ghost if it doesn't manifest
They have to materialize in order to drain you, and then you'd have more options.
Did you even read the image moron?
>saving throw vs. magic
Is that vs. magic wands or vs. spells?
Save vs Spell I believe. Rod/Staff/wand was a hard to pass version of the vs Spell if I remember right.
They were easier to pass.
Damn Human Male Fighterbros..how are we supposed to deal with this? Especially without DM gibbies?
I know you're meming but 1e wasn't nearly as stingy with magic weapons as 5e is. It was pretty standard for a Fighter to run around with several +1 swords. If not, just run away lol.
>If not, just run away lol.
More groups in general need to realize this. I don't know why there's so many suicidal players nowadays who b***h about unwinnable fights.
Running away was a failure state since old school D&D was closer to a resource management game. By running away not only do you waste resources, you have to contend with replacing them, random encounters, and as per RAW any traps or environmental hazards like traps resetting.
Seems easy enough during random wilderness encounters
It's a more interesting mechanic than anything in 5e.
If it was 5e, they would just give it like 300 HP and have the it's attack just be "the GM decides"
Not quite. The ageing rules would be overly wordy and characters would have 9000 ways to nullify it by the time they hit level 3.
>punishes humangays for playing the shortest lived race
Based.
>10hp
Doesn't a level 1 magic missile obliterate this thing?
Hid Dice, champ. That's 10d8hp
that's because dnd was designed as a wargame you keep sending characters at, like a roguelike, not the modern interpretation where it's a vehicle for your mary sue fantasies
Good bait
there's a reason design like that was tolerated in old dnd, just as there's a reason it isn't today's dnd
I said it was good bait you don’t need to keep responding wait or some moron to respond seriously
you communicated your ignorance
more or less, even though getting to this point was just casualization in general
Don’t tell me you’re actually serious, that’s be disappointing
yes, i was, and that gives me a clear lead on you seeing how you haven't made a single assertion yourself 🙂
>:)
Oh thank god I was worried, carry on
pathetic
Lol
haha
Hehehe
>just as there's a reason it isn't today's dnd
Because WOTC bought out the IP and released a new edition for a quick buck before themselves selling out to Hasbro?
Nono he’s saying “BACK IN MY DAY THINGS WERE BETTER” before dying of old age
i said things were different because people expected different things from them, you oversensitive little snowflake
Who the frick actually see these threads and thinks “this isn’t outrage bait”?
honestly, it's a very interesting topic to see discussed, for me
>I want to live out the fantasy of being a normal knight
>I want to live out the fantasy of being a peasant who escapes on a simple adventure
>I want to live out the fantasy of being a wizard
>Nooo, you can't do this! You need to be yet another demigod saving the universe! There is no other valid roleplaying experience! Please listen to me!
but he's correct, even if he's being an ass about it
>cleric dwarf
Is there anything more kino than this class combination?
>Dwarf Cleric
>Elf Ranger
>Human Paladin
The perfect combos.
>Is there anything more kino
Yes, dwarf as its own class.
>Frequency: Very Rare
The only problem I see is DM's who choose to ignore this sort of thing. Very rare would imply 1 every 100 sessions, if that, but most DM's would be like "there are ten if them"
There's too much attachment to characters these days.
Back pre-3e you'd lose 10-20% of PCs within your first couple levels. And only the real grizzly neckbeards wrote 30 page backstories.
Yeah, you got attached. But it was nice to allow a character's story to end. The squire avenges his master, the cleric defeats the threat, the thief gets to live a life of gambling and wenches from selling that old magic sword you got off a death knight.
Now every fricking campaign has epic plots, and almost no stakes. Punches get pulled, deuses machina'd, and campaigns peter out because it just becomes boring or tiresome to DM.
I miss those old days. There's been some improvements but the gates shoulda been kept.
>he wants to be a part of the world instead of a driving force
What is with this cucked mentality in older roleplayers?
homie you're talking about editions where there were actual rules for building castles and setting up your own kingdom and going to war with armies. Players were more driving their own destiny than ever, instead of just following the DMs story as in modern games.
Okay I never knew about that and it sounds cool.
I wish my DM did that with us. He said the party are all Counts now but we still spend most of our time adventuring. We supposedly have lands and men but it just never came up.
You should press him on that. Domain level play is awesome.
>has hyper opinionated take
>turns out its just ignorance and having a shitty GM
I want to dunk on ya, but all I have is pity. Even adventuring is better in older D&D when the game is what your players decide to do rather than the DMs lameass amateur fantasy fiction.
Domain-level play was never super popular because it tends toward abstract book-keeping and wargaming-lite. For most players it simply wasn't what they were interested in.
>driving force != becoming a name level lord, building a stronghold, and leading armies by your own hand
>driving force == being a pawn in the DMs creative writing projects
I genuinely can't tell if this is parody ir not.
It's anime.
Honestly. So much of the newhomosexualry in the rpg space is due to anime. The need to be in some isekai power fantasy madr to help Japs forget about working 23 hours a day and do something other than sniff used undies and crank their hog.
But American kids got hold of it and it Honestly poisoned the brain. Every experience is a hand hold through a failed writer's super original donut steel setting (that's probably just the plot of the latest Yu Yu Sailor Beserk fantasy).
Boomers were inspired by Adams, Pratchett, Moore, Howard. Zoomers watch 300 hours of Critical Role.
Schizo take
It's true.
There's major brain rot in the hobby. And the need to be the hero. Theatergays and the like.
There's no pride in surviving to level 10 when every other character did because the DM pulls every punch and hand feeds you every battle because otherwise it's 'not fun'.
Ah yes. The 'everyone's the hero simultaneously and forever' problem of anime such as *checks notes* World of Warcraft.
This has been an ongoing shift in culture everywhere for decades. b***hing about anime on Ganker just singles you out as an outsider and you need to go back to wherever you came from.
No. I just ignore the weebs and have a great time watching them get upset when called out on their terrible media taste.
this is a problem but it's not because of anime, it's been a growing trend for decades
anime has been around for decades
Anime predates DnD
The popularity of anime in the States doesn't.
Bubblegum Crisis became popular in the States like what, 1990? So I guess technically, yeah.
well, generally, there's two different strains of adventure entirely. It might not have been as popular in the past, but nowadays it's completely normal to run a campaign where death is an absolute rarity because it's simply not combat oriented.
Maybe any other system but DnD and Pathfinder is better suited for it though. DnD and the likes, once you reach higher levels in your class, you basically become an unstoppable monster that far surpasses commoners physically and mentally and can do super karate, run through brick walls, literally catch bullets and throw them back at the same destructive power, or flatten a village with magic.
while I wholeheartedly agree that DnD-like anime is fricking cancer, and the people who watch shounen and then make a character based on some anime protagonist are, too, you're being a tad moronic by complaining about anime on an anime website, made by anime fans, always focused and designed for the discussion of anime and topics that anime fans might like (like traditional games).
>but muh animus
Nah. Weebs are a cancer. Two bombs wasn't enough.
this is like going to a zoo when you hate animals
>Honestly. So much of the newhomosexualry in the rpg space is due to anime. The need to be in some isekai power fantasy madr to help Japs forget about working 23 hours a day and do something other than sniff used undies and crank their hog.
Literally half of fricking D&D is directly ripped from an isekai power fantasy novel. The only difference is that it wanks American superiority over the natives instead of Japan.
When they made a D&D cartoon it was also isekai.
There was a 2e monster book where half the entries are ripped from 80s anime, sometimes not even bothering to change the names.
>Not the later stuff! I mean *real* D&D!
Gary Gygax has confirmed that based monsters like the bulette, carrion crawler, owlbear, purple worm, rust monster and umber hulk on... Ultraman kaiju, the same things which inspired Pokémon.
Danish or Norweigean immigrant IIRC.
Indirectly via a bag of chinese knockoff toys that were being sold in the US as "Dinosaurs"
Doesn't 3H3L say that orcs and Germans are literally the same thing manifesting differently in different worlds, to the point where killing one weakens the other? Meanwhile on Earth the cosmic forces of good manifest as Americans.
I only read/listened to the first bits.
>he wants to be
there's where you failed, you weren't supposed to self-insert into a wargame with a high fatality rate any more than you self-insert as a chess piece
NTA, but I feel like this is swinging too far in the other direction. The very idea of playing singular heroes rather than a division of men demonstrates an interest in inhabiting the character. I mean, we're talking about a game where Gary and Rob Kuntz spent years doing one on one play of Robilar's exploits. The thing that tempers that though is that a Robilar or a Mordenkainen were the product of lots of play and dead characters. Sure they didn't spend reams of paper on every character they made, but the one's that stuck definitely earned their personal investment, to the point where they felt the need to immortalize them.
the assumption was that the characters you're making would die and a common recommendation was to show up to a session with backup characters already rolled
And that negates what I'm saying...how?
it doesn't raelly, but neither did what you said negate what i said before that
Did I say I intended to negate what you said? I was trying to temper what I saw as a lack of nuance in your post. Yes, compared to modern games, the majority characters were much more like gamepieces. No, that does not mean there was no characterization or investment on the part of the player. Or else we'd not have Tenser or Melf or Robilar or Mordenkainen. But it did take a lot of play to get a character that sticks like that to warrant the investment.
People who play OSE complain that it is too lethal and that the DMs should pull their punches
No they don't
People who play OSE is a wide net
No they aren't
OSE character creation is 3d6 down the line, pick a class that fits what you rolled, fill in the sheet, and done.
It's that way explicitly because character death is pretty common.
Beautiful, loving elven wives!
Devotion as strong the day you die as the day you got married!
100s of years(potentially) of fertility!
Enemy poses a unique threat that isn't
> roll to hit
> deal damage
This is such bad game design!!! Matthew Mercer would never allow this!!!
>zoomers mad they can't just wombo combo this monster with their 3rd level tiefling warlock using the feats of cum blast, powerful cum blast, and then synergizing some gay mobility feat with 13 ranks in acrobatics to just backflip over the ghost, do an attack of opportunity, and roll 14d88.
We need W.T. Snacks back. I miss when being a homosexual was a bannable offense.
Who?
>wizard that respawns when he dies
>epic mysterious ranger fated to become king
>prince of gondor
>elf so agile he can walk on snow without leaving footprints
>hardened dwarf warrior
If only anime hadn't influenced Tolkien to add freakshit, we could have played RPGs as intended, as nameless human mercenaries who lose half their number defeating a single bandit and then the rest die of dysentery
I feel like when people point to Tolkien as some sort of gotcha for D&D not having some element or another, they really just reveal how poorly read they are in fantasy as a genre.
Was Tolkien AN inspiration for D&D? Sure. Was it THE inspiration? Hell no. Vance alone constitutes like 75% of the assumption, tropes, and conventions D&D uses. The other 20% is Three Hearts and Three Lions. And the last 5% is a slew of Moorwiener and a frickton of other authors.
People don't realize that the inclusion of all those races was basically pandering to the crowd, not at all how GG played.
Zooms can't conceive playing race-as-class either.
Instant death mechanics is good to add actual stakes to "boss" encounters and to let your players know that they are in a place they are too weak to be in.
I don't see that in the OSR/TSR modules, it's basically just be a frickhead and find out
You gotta engage with traps and make up some plausible bullshit rather than roll for it
Ex.
27. Bejeweled Bung
In the center of this room is an elongated stone dome, 4Ê
high, resembling a beehive. Plunged into the top of the
dome is a golden spike, with an aquamarine gem
attached.
The beehive is hollow, and filled with poison gas. If the
spike is removed, the gas will be released into the room.
The person who released the gas must save vs. poison or
die. Others in the room have 1 round to immediately
leave, or they too must save vs. poison or die. If
someone successfully saves, but remains in the gas, they
will have to make another save every round they remain
in the poison.
If the door is not shut after the gas is released, it will
spread into room 26 as well. It will take 1d6 days for the
gas to dissipate, due to the lack of ventilation. Leaving
both the door between 26 and 27 and the door between
26 and 31 open will cause the gas to dissipate much
more rapidly, in only 2d6 turns.
The aquamarine may be safely pried off the spike
without causing the gas to be released, should the players
try that.
The golden spike is worth 200 gp, and the aquamarine
an additional 400 gp.
Also based on this, there is no such thing as being underleveled, if you play carefully you can just loot this shit and be on your way. You don't even have to go back to this megadungeon if you don't want to. Completely the opposite of your zoomer level gating - it's more IQ gating.
This isn't bad if players have a way to sus out that its filled with poison gas and make a plan around that. If they have 0 way of determining the results of their actions its kinda shit
Hey! I recognize that trap. It's Anomalous Subsurface Environment!
I will remind you that this thing called "culture" you speak of is just you being inappropriate proud that people who live in your area in the past were smarter and more creative than you are.
ntg, but it's kind of hard to be more creative than the entirety of a localized chunk of human history, no?
Esl
I'm amazed that people think isekai was an animu thing first. "Portal novels" (my D&D group enters a portal and appears in the world) were so prevalent that publishing houses refused to take any new portal novels and limited them to established authors by the time the 90s came around.
If anything Japan copied 80s Era Tor Books.
No, they copied Astrid Lindgren's 1973 novel The Brothers Lionheart.
No, the copied Gulliver's Travels
No, they copied Lucian of Samosata's 2nd century novella "A True Story"
Doesn't Alice in Wonderland fit the bill?
also John Carter of Mars.
Where does the line go? I mean, John Carter is just displaced in location in the same universe, no? Is Predators an isekai? It's effectively the same thing (modern day people transported to an alien planet).
>Is Predators an isekai?
Technically yes, though the predator planet is just a generic jungle so you're not really experiencing the "outsider in a weird new culture" aspect of isekai.
"Different universe" is a modern concept. If a place is outside of your known world, people can't casually travel there, then it's another world.
Even a story about being transported to a land a few hundred miles across the sea could count as isekai if it was told before the invention of boats.
Is Encino Man an isekai?
Connecticut Yankee too.
And before that there was the entire "Sword & Planet" genre -- Burrough's Barsoom, Howard's Almuric, Aker's Scorpio, pastiche like Norman's Gor, Carter's Calliso, etc. -- in which a guy (usually an American soldier) is transported by some plot device to an strange world that happens to have a breathable atmosphere and gorgeous alien women with compatible anatomy.
and they did it badly, with an overreliance on the most turgid tropes possible
In AD&D, you need monsters like that to challenge a party that has 10 trillion gold worth of magic items.
Just throw a disenchanter at them bro
101. Treasure Grinder
This room is almost entirely occupied with a gold-lined
pool of liquid. The shadowed ceiling is 20'
above. The pool is an incredibly powerful acid...
...If the players illuminate the ceiling 20'
above, they see ominous looking cracks outlining
large square sections near the hallway entrance.
The platform across the pool is a pressure
plate, already partially depressed...
When activated, hinged portions of the ceiling near the
hallway entrance swing open, and on each side of the
room massive rotating bronze cylinders (10' long)
covered with two-foot-long blades, and hooks at the ends
of 10' chains, drop down with a massive CLANG (50%
chance of bringing forth a wandering monster to
investigate). The cylinders move forward towards the platform,
spinning the chains out quickly, catching anyone within
their path and drawing them in to the blades. Halfway
across, the cylinders will move in on tracks towards the
center of the room, as their chains retract, and once the
blades are close enough to overlap each other, the meat
grinder will continue moving towards the platform. Once
over the platform, the cylinders will sweep out along the
end of the room in either direction, and then back
towards their original positions near the hallway
entrance. Once returned to their original positions, they
will rise back up into the ceiling.
...As mentioned above, the only thing keeping the acid
contained is the thin layer of beaten gold. If the gold is
scratched away below the surface of the acid, the acid
will begin to eat through the stone behind. As the stone
behind turns to mush, the gold will buckle and form
further cracks, and over a week's time the acid will drain
out. Where the acid eats away the stone, that portion of
the dungeon will turn into an equivalent volume of
caustic mud, with only a thin crust of stone above. Any
player crossing this crust will fall into the mud (players
will take 1d2 damage per round while in the mud)
>cleric turns undead
>ghost explodes instantly
Chad boomer spends like two minutes making a character from three classes and rolling some dice to determine stats/HP, and then lets them develop in play so enemies can be lethal as frick
VERSUS
Virgin zoomer spends three hours consulting build guides, picking between seventeen different options, and writing up a long backstory for his character so every combat has to be certain victory going through the motions.
>Balls deep in the lair and haven’t fought a single guy
>Go ham on the BBEG since you didn’t blow your load on the easy guys w/ successful reaction checks
>Beat BBEG into submission, pass morale check and take all his gold in exchange for his life
>Figure you got most of the goods and leave immediately, never come back and never fully clear the lair
>Level anyway because it’s xp for gold
Sounds like a good time, what's the problem exactly?
There was no problem. Not included was possibly useful macgyvering of 10 foot poles and mirrors.
>spend 1 hour + on every fight
>clearing this dungeon level has taken real world weeks
>emotionlessly hunt down every last rat in the dungeon for exp
>dungeon map is a straight line so at least its easy to find everything
>out of spells when you fight the BBEG that you're pretty sure the DM ripped from world of warcraft
>gm just ignores his dice and the boss's HP and lets you win out of pity
The boomer loot and scoot vs the zoomer 100% clear just like muh vidya games
>deals 102–114 Dark damage
>15% chance to inflict Fear for 3s on Crit
Zoomers really thought this is fun game design.
Just play the fighting man and axe that ghost
races with long lifespans need to be nerfed in some way. you don't get to live for fricking 750 years bro.
They already are nerfed, they're moronic.
>1000 years only and only a level 2 wizard
>meanwhile a human mage has hit level 5 by age 30
>an entire civilization of people who only have kids once every 500 years
>their entire population is outnumbered by a small town
>fighting in a war losing ten elves is a worse deal than a human lord losing his entire army and takes ten times as long to replace
>because of this they have to spend their entire millenia long existence hiding out in remote forests or caves
who is making 1000 year old, level 2 characters? sounds like a skill issue to me.
That was the trope of the "old race previously superior to mankind and now in decadence because of (insert reason here) " taken from LotR or Elric.
And Tolkien got it from stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann that were being written by Anglo-Irish people at the time out of colonial guilt/nostalgia.
Is it pedophilia if the child was aged by a ghost?
It's legal to frick the mentally moronic if they're of age, so what's the difference compared to this middle-aged person with the mind of a child?
Just think around it if you're such a legendary hero.
Am I having a stroke or did a third of the thread just get deleted?
Yes, and mindflayers can basically 1shot from grapple.
Just houserule the age damage to be concentration based and make it revert when the ghost dies and you make one of the most annoying enemies a fun and interesting mob.
>Boomers really thought this is fun game design.
It IS fun game design, as long as you are in the right mindset. The mindset being "lmao my character's life or death doesn't matter worth one SHIT, if he dies I roll a new one in 2 minutes"
It was. See, literally none of that shit matters except the first "on sight" save.
In 1e, you weren't playing a bunch of tiefling, firbolg, and tortle 'adventurers' with flashy anime powers on a grand campaign to stop the cult of Tharizdun from sacrificing the cute Harper Agent by casting Vicious Mockery on her repeatedly to open a portal to the Elemental Plane of Poop, you were a bunch of grungy humans - with the occasional dwarf, elf. or halfling - engaged in the fine art of tomb robbing so you could afford enough money to retire, and you could spend the entire campaign tactically clearing out a single old buried castle of every gold coin you could find.
This often involved clearing out rooms like a S.W.A.T. team headed through a booby-trapped and parasite-infested crack den, 10' poles and pocket mirrors at the ready to fend off treachery. You had a point man for murdering mooks (fighter), a scout and trap-disarming expert (thief), a combat medic/messiah/exorcist (cleric), and the radio guy who everyone had to keep protected but could call in an air strike once in a while when things got too heavy (wizard). Since you couldn't just sleep off a punji stick injury in 8 hours like 5e, establishing forward outposts so you could maintain a controlled area and prevent new monsters from moving in while you spent weeks healing, training, and studying up was essential for forward progress. Similarly, you scouted out new dangers, added them to your maps, and either planned routes around them or built a tactical squad specifically geared to move in and murder the shit out of them.
That ghost? Yeah, your thief scouted ahead, saw it, maybe aged, turned around while it was still down the hall, and hightailed it back to your group with his 12" movement speed. You all either bugged out or called in Father Ghostbuster or a bunch of hirelings armed with mirrors (to bypass the on-sight effect), slingshots, and vials of holy water and ended the thing in one round.
Haha, I am probably the only anon who encountered one of these bad boys "in the wild" so to speak, nigh on 25 years ago.
Most of what people are saying in this thread is wrong by the way. 1st ed was nothing like a roguelike game. People were just as attached to their characters as they are.
The ghost was a high end enemy we took on with a high level party. Because we were a high end party multiple members of the party were able to pursue it into the ethereal realm to directly deal damage, including IIRC an early version of the Monk class from unearthed arcana, who was able to shift into the ethereal realm at will.
It was nothing like this guys says.
>my table did it this way, that means everyone did it the same
I played at a lot of conventions. 99% of what people say on /tg/ about "old school" is flat out wrong.
Going on the internet and telling lies.
>oneshot sessions at conventions
>long-term character attachment
yeah that makes perfect sense moron
I always expect shit takes from "let me tell you how it REALLY was" boomers but you sound right. I'm extremely skeptical of people who seem to think no AD&D group ever got past level 3. You want me to believe that half the monster manual is just stuff you can never face and most TSR modules for characters of levels >4 can never even be played legitimately?
Of course there were successful groups, but success wasn't some kind of promised guarantee the way it is in modern dnd
Yes, it's a design choice. Undeads in Ad&d are different from other monsters because they tend to inflict a permanent damage rather than insta-death - you'll rot away, lose a Level, lose 10 years of life... that is their big thing. It isn't like being turned to Stone or Poisoned, you are alive and wish you weren't.
A Ghost is one of the top dogs of the Undead family, way above a wraith or specter - their powers reflect that, they're akin to a Red Dragon or a Balor.
That thing has 10 HD, it's an advanced enemy.
How much crap can have players to deal with it?
We don't have even how hard is the save.
>We don't have even how hard is the save
Saves are rated on a class/level/effect matrix, rather than by difficulty class. Ghost fear is a Spell effect, which for a 1st-Level Fighter is a 19+ save, down to 6+ at 17th and up, while a Wizard would be 12+ at 1st Level and 6+ at 16th.
It was though. You didn't frick with a ghost because it would mess your shit up. Same reason a Death Knight would just wreck your ass - it was meant to unapologetically convey "this thing is dangerous and it will likely kill you" and frick the idea of balance or fairness. Some shit was just more powerful and you either had to avoid it or deal with it. Any asshat suggesting just blindly fighting something clearly better than what the party was equipped to handle deserved getting wrecked. There was nothing wrong with just calling a run quits. The problem is over time people just now equate "old school" with unwinnable counters which is moronic. Yes a tomb of horrors exists but that was literally Gygax trying to challenge professional sperglords.
Compared to these days where having an NPC or monster stronger than the pcs is seen as being a That Guy DM thing, a meme or a form of hate crime/ rape of the player. It's inane for PC's to think they are invincible, it's even worse for DM's to allow it, it's tragic if the system prevents it. It's infuriating now because for some reason games are either power fantasy simulators or gritty autism.