Really bad adventure modules

What do you feel are some of the worst written adventure modules of all time? Do you have one in particular that you really dislike?

I recently read through Adventure I by AEG because I thought it would have at least some good inspiration to steal or maybe a framework for adventures to Noun-swap, but jesus those adventure modules were not even proofread. These little one-shot adventures that come in these books were written to be simple single session events that you could sprinkle in an ongoing campaign, but they are just AWFUL.
>Says it's written for 4 to 8 level 1 through 4 characters. Yet the highest CR in the whole adventure is 2
>Later says that the adventure is actually written for 2nd level adventurers
>First "Read to the player" blurb uses the sentence "Turns him on his back" Three times, explaining that the mysterious man that breaks through the door is slumped on the floor.
>They accidentally reverse the names of two major npcs in the introduction, completely confusing anyone that actually is trying to follow along. The Inn-keeper's wife is named "Kamalda" and the shamaness that you have to fight at the end is also named "Kamalda". (After rereading through it twice, later I found one instance towards the end, where the inn-keeper's wife is referred to as Karna.)
>Puts the random encounter table for the roads surrounding town at the end of the book as opposed to at the beginning, when the players would actually be going to the site of the adventure
This may be one of the worst ones I've ever seen
Does /tg/ know of any worse adventure modules?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    N2 The Forest Oracle

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      This one seems like it would be fun to play because of how bad it is, with the right group it could be hilarious.

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The default, main-book-printed "module" for pic related is fricking abysmal. And not because the premise is bad - it's the shit-tier execution. In fact, it went so far, when Seth was discussing the system itself, he made a follow-up video to explain the difference between "cool story to read" (what the scenario as-printed is) vs. "cool scenario to play"

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Of course forgot to add the image

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Man, I love HEX. I hope to play it someday.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      yeah, in general I would say a lot of rpg material follows this "good to read" instead of "good to play"...I would say the main offender was white wolf, pretty much everything wod is a great read, but the modules are unplayable and even the in rulebooks, you need to rewrite the rules in a clear and logical progression to really understand what is going on

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Dragonlance walked so White Wolf could run

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        How many customers actually play these modules vs how many of them buy them and read them?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          I have wondered this for a very long time - I think very very few people actually have played or DM'd any modules through since AD&D-era. 2e modules sucked in general. Maybe the first 2 WotC modules after d20, and I think alot of people have played/DM'd the 5e module Phandelver. But other these that I think surprisingly few.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Holy shit I played this one and it was one of the worst sessions I've ever played in my life. I've never read it, but it was boring and railroady as hell, but the thing that made it a thousand times worse was that there was this fat, dumpy (Sort've pig-like,) girl that was playing with us, that the GM knew. And he was completely all up in her cooter the entire time. Like, everything that happened he'd give her benefits on and he'd completely ignore the rest of us. We were roleplaying our asses off and he'd give us one action point, but then she'd cross her arms and say, "Well, I'm gonna go sit in my camper!" in-character, and he'd chuckle hysterically and give her tons of adventure tokens and chips. I fricking hated that shit.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      I remember reading this and half-way through realised I'm still in exposition. The scenario proper doesn't start until the zeppelin gets attacked by the pterodactyls, which is past the half-way of the whole thing. Which not only leaves a massive railroad, but also tops it up with having barely anything going in the scenario. You have:
      - encounter with the flying dinos
      - optional encounter with momma dino
      - short talk with bunch of tribals and Amundsen
      - big shot-out with the nazis
      - the end
      Like I get it this is a starter adventure, but it's ridiculously poorly written and has barely anything going despite its own great premise.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Like I get it this is a starter adventure, but it's ridiculously poorly written and has barely anything going despite its own great premise.
        sounds like the perfect homage to the terrible 60s-70s films which must've inspired it, then

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          ... except it's inspired by completely different things, so way to miss the fricking mark

  3. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    This absolute wiener sock of a book.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      This is awful. This may actually take the cake. This shit is bloated as hell and convoluted.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Is there a decent free PDF creator software? I have a bunch of scanned pages from KotDT magazine with an adventure.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Oh, this one is only four pages.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous
          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous
            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous
              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Oh, this one is only four pages.

                It's a railroad adventure for a wierd niche system, but it's far from the worst I've seen. Something of the stuff that 10footpole or PrinceOfNothing reviews are so bad that it's genuinely insulting.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It’s a game based around a notoriously shitty rpg made by an in universe character from Knights of the Dinner Table. It’s inherently meant to be lame and a joke.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        I tend to just print to PDF for small jobs. Simple, works.

        This is awful. This may actually take the cake. This shit is bloated as hell and convoluted.

        It's bloated. Convoluted. Linear. Has fakeouts designed to wipe the party. Has dicky troll physics moments. Has an entire dungeon hidden behind a broken puzzle. Has fricking lame loot. Has at least one intentional softlock moment.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          This is awful. This may actually take the cake. This shit is bloated as hell and convoluted.

          This absolute wiener sock of a book.

          luckily that adventure was remade and improved on recently [including expanding the city of Grissom]

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >Still more linear than Mayan architecture
            >Dungeons still basically ghost trains that kill you, with reverse-Jaquayed maps.
            >Still relies on stupid decisions
            >Inn of Chang still a TPK in a funny hat
            >Siren Woods still stupid as frick
            >Mimir's riddle now more broken as H is drawn with diagonal lines
            >Mountains of Brack still stupidly deadly with multiple softlock points
            >Die rolls, die rolls everywhere.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >page 13
      >fire elemental spells
      >"Summon the Holocaust"
      based

  4. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Seems like a series of filters for brainlet DMs and players to me

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      You know what's really weird is that I read multiple reviews online, and none of them address the mistakes in the book or the bizarre layout. They just say it's bad, and forgettable, but they don't explain why it's bad.

  5. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    How do you like it when the GM is dommed and degraded by the adventure itself?

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      This is bullying the GM.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >"Frick for Satan," an adventure about a wiener-shaped alien and its pheromones

        Also in this adventure, the wiener-shaped alien gets cuckolded by its wife.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          But if the page in the rulebook is torn out, then this rule no longer applies, thereby rendering the stipulations therein null and void, correct?

          What if you just pull up a second copy of the rulebook?

          How does this work with PDFs?

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >Agatha Foxlowe
            >Agatha is 11 years old

            >Grandma broke her, twisted her, hooked her, and hoisted her up in place of the chandelier in the dining room. Her upturned ribs and her destroyed limbs, they all hold candles which burn down and scorch her flesh. Agatha’s screams lets Grandma know that it is time to change the candles.

            >Agatha’s innards hang down out of her body, dangling ever so close to the table where they could rest and Agatha would not feel them pull anymore.

            >Agatha is fully conscious and retains full use of her head. She is in great pain, but the sensory overload these past days has pushed her past agony, past hallucination, and straight through to a grim lucidity. She will beg for help, beg for anyone that can help the pain stop (healing with Cure spells only make her current form the default; a surgeon would have to work on her to get her human-shaped again, but with only a 15 percent chance of Agatha surviving the procedure and never having use of her limbs again).

            This is some spicy writing, with an illustration to accompany it.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              Meanwhile, in Monolith from Beyond Space and Time, there is a colony of pansexual nudists who eat berries, which make it so that even holding hands conceives a child. They then eat these babies, because within the colony, nobody ages anyway.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >If a time paradox does occur with the fish, the campaign world and all connected universes fold in on themselves ending everything. Not only is this game over, but the Referee in question can never run an RPG session again, with any system, because all their possibilities have been canceled.

                Who wants to become unable to GM a session ever again?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You enter the valley, and it turns out to be measured in astronomical units.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                All you need to do to escape Raggi's writing is to flee to a world with no numerical statistics.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I unironically like the plateau. It is cute, and there is a hint to it. The plateau would make for a good space-themed mini-puzzle.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The PCs get automatically infected by a colony of nano-aliens. Whenever the PCs sleep at night, they become invincible and bloodthirsty killing machines, out to murder anyone who is not infected by the nano-aliens. Later, the PCs fight a "guardian" that is essentially just an automatic damage effect that cannot, in turn, be fought against.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The interior of the monolith screws over clerics while hypercharging magic-users, obviously.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In the monolith, all travel is based on thoughts. If you want to find a safe place to rest, you find it. If you want to find the exit, you find it.

                If you want to find a "control room," "headquarters," "bridge," "leader," "master," or something similar, you instead go catatonic and wind up in your own brain. Naturally, this causes problems, but on the bright side, it gives you the opportunity to merge with the multiverse and grant your next generated character a significant bonus. How sweet.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Raggi's Monolith adventure can be escaped from... partially.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >16 SIGNATURES GATHERED

                >Information storage systems around the cosmos will fail. This will start with books, and every other book, but this The Book, magical or mundane, will instantly become incomprehensible gibberish. This will affect all written communication, as even a person writing a note to himself will be unable to read it. If The Book is in a high tech setting, all information stored electronically also immediately fails. All hardware and software fails the instant that The Book is completed.

                >Within 24 hours, mathematics begins to fail. Simple counting is no longer possible; structures begin to collapse as the principles that guided their construction no longer apply. This happens on a biological, even cellular level and so inanimate objects weaken and all living beings begin to fall ill, their every cell turning cancerous. Planets and stars begin to fall out of their orbit ever so slightly. Within another 24 hours even the pain of existence will no longer matter as the last bastion of information storage, memory, fails, and conscious thought and intelligence becomes a thing of the past. Brain activity becomes entirely random and the world dies in a collective, suffocating seizure.

                >Within another period of time that no one will be around to measure, the multiverse unravels and becomes Nothing.

                >In the end there is only The Book.

                At least Raggi lets you destroy the multiverse by gradually piecing together a magical book.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Sacrificing your family for great power seems like a great deal if the character hates their family and is, in turn, hated by their family.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Surprise; the deadliest poison is actually the book itself, so you die, no save. Better luck next time.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                "I Am the Gate" is yet another book that permanently screws the character for reading it, no save.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                "A Hypothesis on the Nature of Reality," is, once again, a book most cursed to read.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Mother Forget Me Not is one heck of a curse.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >If the chariot moves outside of the realm of reason, the character sheets of all those characters still on the chariot must be collected (or printed out if you are not playing face-to-face). Inform the players that these characters are dead. Each character sheet must be placed in a separate, but otherwise-plain envelope clearly marked “PLEASE READ ME.” Inside the envelope with each character sheet must the Referee’s contact information (in whatever method the Ref is most comfortable with strangers using, and must include a postage stamp if a mailing address is given) and a note stating “Possible Reward for Return.” After this game session, but before the next, the Referee must go out in public and leave the envelopes in different places (so they are not found by the same person), in public, where they are likely to be seen. The players are not to know why their character sheets are being stuffed in envelopes.

                >If the Referee is contacted by someone inquiring about the reward, that player of the character whose sheet has been found must agree to pay a reward equal to the local price of one standard McDonald’s Big Mac meal (is there any other universal standard of value throughout the world?) to the finder. If the reward is paid and the physical character sheet (or printout) is indeed returned to the Referee, the character can return to play with an additional 1d4 × 10% experience points. (If the sheet is returned with no reward required, the character receives no additional experience points.) All equipment will be lost, however. (If the person who finds the character sheet commits a crime against the Referee—these are complete strangers we are dealing with here—this is a sign that the player whose sheet was found is no good. Get that person out of your gaming group!)

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >If at any point a character takes exactly 8 points of damage (at once or cumulative, not 7 or less, not 9 or more, but at some point has taken exactly 8 points) while on the chariot, from any source, he dissipates into a whirlwind of sorrow and pain. Any player who laughs at this naturally without prompting can dictate the results of any one die throw in the future (do not reveal this until the chariot stops). If it is the player whose character has disintegrated that laughs, he gets to determine the results of any two die throws in the future (including during new character creation).

                >Any players caught laughing insincerely because they have read the adventure and wish to get the bonus must paint their nose yellow for the rest of the game session. If no yellow substance suitable for this purpose is available, one of that player’s character ability scores, selected at random, will be reduced to 3 until such time as the player completes an entire session with a yellow-painted nose. Note this is a player-facing effect and new characters suffer this fate until the player complies.

                >Any players not laughing at all obviously have no sense of humor; their characters all have one random ability score reduced by half until they wear a dunce cap for an entire session.

                >If the character of a player who suffers one of these last effects has the effect removed (via Dispel Magic, Remove Curse, etc.), it is the Referee who must wear the yellow nose and/or the dunce cap.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Answers to the multiverse's mysteries (since more toads can be imbued with Understanding) in exchange for a "vaguely batrachian appearance"? This one might not be so bad.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The illustration on the next spread is just an example of what goes on here. The Referee should push hard to create a gross, cruel-spirited description of the place. There’s no “sanity mechanic” in LotFP; it is up to the Referee to blur the lines for the players at the table between “I’m your friend presenting this fictional situation” and “I’m getting a little too into this description, is everyone’s skin crawling yet? No? We’ll let me tell them about what’s going on with eyeballs…”

                >Rafael Chandler (of Scorn: The First Book of Pandemonium and Teratic Tome fame) suggests: “Suffering is most intense (to the audience) when the victim is singular and humanized and trying to avoid the pain. So the Referee might start to describe such scenes by noting the actions/words/plight of a single victim before zooming out (so to speak) to address the tableau in its entirety.”

                https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/351756476231974913/546755925269020672/Kitchen.png

                I like the emphasis on entrails here. There is even a toddler.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                "Better Than Any Man" ends in typical Raggi fashion. The PCs are swarmed by thousands of monstrous insect ghosts and a 75 HD insect god.

                All but one of the party is transformed into arthropodal abominations, and the survivor becomes the insect god's servitor in the surface world. That is it. That is how the 180-page adventure ends.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Erasmus is Armor 12, Movement 30’, 1st level Fighter, 8hp, 1 stinger attacking as a 4HD creature doing 1d6 damage, Morale 12. He can also shoot a black ooze from his genitalia (aiming it where he pleases) up to 30’ away. Victims in this area (a 45° arc) must save versus Breath Weapon or take 1d4 points of damage from the acidic nature of the ooze. It can shoot at a single target if it chooses, and if the target fails its save it is subject to the effects of a Web spell that lasts 1d6+4 rounds. This also inflicts 1d4 points of damage per round on the target.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Azathoth can be encountered as part of a random encounter chart, by having the GM pick up a Call of Cthulhu rulebook.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Do OSRgays like it when the campaign they presumably spend hours on ends with a mandatory TPK?
                I don't get the mindset here.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                OSRgays don't like anything.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You can always run away.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Do OSRgays like it when they have to run away like a little b***h instead of having a satisfying conclusion?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The conclusion is doing the smart thing, packing up, and leaving.

                Ever played Spec Ops: The Line?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                oh boy I sure love wasting time encountering something I have no way of dealing with and then wasting time fricking off

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                See

                I have no idea. I'm not familiar with any of these systems. But I assume that once you retreat into the tunnel they won't be able to use their superior numbers to overwhelm you, so you can fight them off while slowly withdrawing. There's probably doors and other obstacles that could delay the bugs, too.
                Also, its probably a huge dungeon with lots of places to explore, so by the time the players find this room, they've probably collected a ton of loot and are ready to leave... they already got what they came for. There's no need to explore every single dungeon and kill everything.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                and now you have hit upon the real issue: none of this is meant to be played, only read while buzzed so the reader can think "man, that's frickin gnarly" and presumably feel superior to whoever their personal gaming boogeyman is (5e kiddies maybe?)

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                oh boy I sure love wasting time encountering something I have no way of dealing with and then wasting time fricking off

                The game is about strategy, planning, and treasure hunting. If there's no challenge and never a need to retreat, the entire point of the game is rendered moot.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                This isn't a fight where you have to use strategy and planning to win, it's just unwinnable.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Again, I'm still not convinced that retreat is possible. The way that whole section is worded, all "whens" and no "ifs" make it seem to me like you're intended to die there, surrounded by thousands of bugs.
                Now to be fair I don't have the pdf to make sure it doesn't mention anything else after that page, but based solely on the information given I think it's pretty clearly meant to be a mandatory TPK

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116452/Better-Than-Any-Man

                The adventure is free.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                OK, now that I've actually read through it, you're not really supposed to go into the bug zone at all. The original post made it seem like it was a mandatory part of the adventure, but if it's like this I actually don't see a big issue (though making the players go through a big ass fricking area with frick all loot just to kill them at the end feels a bit mean spirited.)

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >you're not really supposed to go into the bug zone at all

                >Once the player characters are in this room and there is a bit of quiet, that is, there is no combat, no milizionäre at the door, or anything going on that would make a considerable noise, then certain characters will begin to hear things. The character with the highest Wisdom hears whispers of “Help us…”, “We are trapped…”, and “Come to us…” It is coming from the floor of this room. If that character leaves the room, the character with the next highest Wisdom hears the whispers.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >spooky ghosts tell me they are trapped
                >lol lets go save them
                lemming tier

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >If camping or resting to regain spells within this cavern system, Clerics will be directly contacted by their deity, telling them to “Leave this damned place at once!”
                >Any time a divination or any informative spell (Detects, etc.) is cast by anyone, instead of the normal effect the spell summons 3d6 spirits of humans being devoured by ghostly insects. The spirits will appear for 2d10 rounds, screaming all the while. Every so often, one of the spirits will see through the veil of death and warn the adventurers to run while they still have their souls
                Let's be completely trasparent here yeah?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Mixed messages.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If the party has already been through a dozen Raggi rape dungeons, why would they get fazed by THIS all of a sudden?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >If camping or resting to regain spells within this cavern system, Clerics will be directly contacted by their deity, telling them to “Leave this damned place at once!”
                >Any time a divination or any informative spell (Detects, etc.) is cast by anyone, instead of the normal effect the spell summons 3d6 spirits of humans being devoured by ghostly insects. The spirits will appear for 2d10 rounds, screaming all the while. Every so often, one of the spirits will see through the veil of death and warn the adventurers to run while they still have their souls
                Let's be completely trasparent here yeah?

                If the correct thing to do is to stop playing the adventure, it's a shitty adventure.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Nothing is obligating you to go in. See Spec Ops: The Line.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Oh, you're trolling. Okay then.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Spec Ops: The Line
                Holy shit I don't even disagree with your point but please get better taste in vidya.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Do OSRgays like it when they have to run away like a little b***h instead of having a satisfying conclusion?

                Your problem is that you think you have to kill the demilich in the Tomb of Horrors to beat the Tomb of Horrors. No. You just have to steal its wallet. That's the actual objective.

                Raggi has some actual bad content under his name, but just having unkillable enemies (that can be escaped from or otherwise avoided) is not bad design. One of the most important skills in old school D&D is picking your fights correctly.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The treasure in the bug module everyone's talking about is shit and your party is done for the instant they step in the room.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Prove it.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The treasure in the bug module everyone's talking about is shit and your party is done for the instant they step in the room.
                So don't go there.

                Literally don't fricking go there.

                It's the last room in a dungeon that's so hostile and empty of treasures it's not even an IQ test. It's a test of whether the players want their characters to die or not.

                PS. It's not a "bug module", it's a sideshow dungeon in a larger semi-open-world module about a city under siege. The bug dungeon isn't the main attraction.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You can "experience" it just fine. The intended experience is going a few rooms deep, realizing the place fricking sucks, leaving and possibly finding a way to blow up the entrance to it. Reaching the end is like an optional Bad End.

                >PS. It's not a "bug module", it's a sideshow dungeon in a larger semi-open-world module about a city under siege. The bug dungeon isn't the main attraction.

                How are the players supposed to know that there isn't actually some big treasure at the end?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                jesus fricking christ dude

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                By not being vidya-playing, vibing zoomers with experience in the hobby counted in days.
                I mean why the frick would you even pick Raggi shit in the first place, not to mention as someone new to the hobby, too? But the other anon is correct: the module gives you a very fair warning that you should back the frick up and try to find a way to block the entrance instead.
                It's like you never played Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, just for the sake of memes. And that was all cozy and warm by comparison, because it lured you with this pretense that "what bad could happen, plus we can loot liquid soap and laser guns". Here the first reaction 3 rooms in is "we should bolt, while we still have legs"

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Prove it.

                Here's the thing: if you go and read the module there's absolutely no loot in the domain of the Insect God. There's treasure elsewhere in the adventure but nothing in the dungeon itself. The closest thing are a bunch of obsidian chunks described as "just shiny enough to look valuable, just impure enough to be worthless". It's a textbook example of negadungeon, the party will gain nothing from entering except a horrible death.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Not every dungeon is a wise decision to enter.

                OSR is about picking your battles intelligently.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Not every dungeon is a wise decision to enter.
                How the frick are you supposed to know whether to go in or not just by looking at the entrance? Not every cave or cavern has a sign out front saying "don't fricking come in here" or some wise old sage in town who will list off all 300 people who went in there and never came back out.
                >OSR is about picking your battles intelligently.
                You can't act on a lack of information, just guess.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Once the player characters are in this room and there is a bit of quiet, that is, there is no combat, no milizionäre at the door, or anything going on that would make a considerable noise, then certain characters will begin to hear things. The character with the highest Wisdom hears whispers of “Help us…”, “We are trapped…”, and “Come to us…” It is coming from the floor of this room. If that character leaves the room, the character with the next highest Wisdom hears the whispers.

                If you fall for the oldest trick in the book then it's on you.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Yes, but you had to get to that point. Granted in this specific module the way up to the place is a giant red flag, but that furthers the issue with this design mentality.
                If you're supposed to be smart and avoid places that seem dangerous or that you don't know about then it's kind of impossible to run a game where you do anything other than go to places where you're near-guaranteed to never face life-threatening danger. Being smart and picking your battles taken to it's logical extreme means not doing any real adventuring. There's no point in presenting the player with a Tomb of Horrors or a Lair of the Insect God because an actually smart player walks home to do literally anything else.
                If you're supposed to go into dangerous places and hunt for treasure then you can't fault the players for ending up in scenarios they couldn't predict would be too dangerous to handle, and you can't fault them for being miffed when you blueball them with an impossible challenge. It's sadistic and counterintuitive to tell players to go looking for treasure and meet their efforts with bullshit.
                You can't have it both ways. Being smart and picking battles necessitates avoiding conflict to truly reach the point where one is no longer at fault for dying to shit like this. Going adventuring in search of treasure necessitates that one be motivated to get treasure and such motivation shouldn't be punished with bullshit gotchas.
                This is the inherent problem with OSR design. Everything in the OSR is a double standard. You're supposed to be treasure hunters but also you're a fricking idiot for going to places where there might be treasure. You're supposed to be people in a survival horror world but you're not supposed to do the smart thing and stay the frick home where it's safe. Games are supposed to be fast and rules-light but also there's a bunch of rules for simulationist bullshit. So on and so forth with everything.

                Don't reply to me if you're just going to snipe some quote.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                A veteran OSR player instinctively knows what dungeons are worth getting treasure in and which aren't.

                This is why loot as the SOLE source of XP is important. You're not playing heroes. You're playing vagabonds out for gold.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's not a double standard. It's about knowing which dungeons are safe enough to delve.

                Weighing risk and reward is a very important part of tabletop.

                All you're doing is convincing everyone else watching this argument, like me, that OSRgays have brain damage

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's not a double standard. It's about knowing which dungeons are safe enough to delve.

                Weighing risk and reward is a very important part of tabletop.

                Your response basically boils down to "skill issue", which is fricking moronic. You can't ever actually know whether or not there's treasure in a dungeon before you explore the whole thing. It's literally impossible without some form of clairvoyance.
                Hypothetically speaking, what if there was a frickload of fat loot at the end of the insect god lair? What if you knew for a 100% fact that there was more loot than you could ever want in there? What then? What if this was one of those subversive dungeons where the danger is all illusory but you had no way of knowing before the end?
                Again, this is the problem with OSR. Advertised about making smart decisions when actually it's about your DM signposting to you where the loot is and training yourself to spot the patterns. Touted as being about real danger, as opposed to "pointless" games with no real stakes, but actually every challenge has a neon sign above it telling you if you're supposed to go for it or leave and try something easier. Sold as being realistic and immersive but actually it's video game bullshit all the way through.
                There are no decisions to make, you're just operating on training. Hooks that tell you at their outset if the right choice is to engage.
                There is no real danger. All the bullshit deaths are signposted and you can reroll another goon with zero consequences.
                There is no realism. It's all smoke and mirrors designed to give the illusion of realism to outsiders but which fundamentally operates on game logic.

                Don't bother with him, he's one of the nuschool rpg players who think that every encounter should be beatable, and resents the idea of there being bigger fish out there.

                Frick your fake false dichotomy and choke on my dick. I've already stated my opinion on encounter design and if you weren't lazy or moronic you wouldn't strawman some shit I don't believe. OSR design is counterintuitive and throwing ad homs at detractors doesn't fix it.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Your response basically boils down to "skill issue", which is fricking moronic.
                But it literally is.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I expect a reply at least 1k characters in length

                You seem irrationally mad about OSR. Have you tried playing it with a good DM?

                You seem incapable of addressing my points. Have you tried being smarter?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You seem irrationally mad about OSR. Have you tried playing it with a good DM?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >instinct
                >vs GM-designed scenarios
                So, sanctioned metagaming?
                Between this and the Soi Ops the Line parallels, you guys aren't making OSR any favors.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's not metagaming. It's reading the room.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If only there were some word for using your out of game experiences of storytelling tropes to guide your character's decision making

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >instinct
                >vs GM-designed scenarios
                So, sanctioned metagaming?
                Between this and the Soi Ops the Line parallels, you guys aren't making OSR any favors.

                >So, sanctioned metagaming?
                No. Just common sense.
                You're supposed to think about the situation as if it were real. In real life, would you go into some anus-looking nightmare hole in the ground full of shit that tries to kill you? Or would you weigh the risks and benefits and go elsewhere to find a different place to scavenge?
                Metagaming would be going in under the assumption that "it's a game and the DM would never put a thing in the game that doesn't have a shiny lootbox for me".

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Or would you weigh the risks and benefits and go elsewhere
                "I go find a local miller to apprentice to and live my life out as a bored but mostly happy baker."
                Raggi goes to hard on "Dungeon that only a moron would go into" to the point where genuinely heroic characters just go around murdering anyone who looks like an adventurer.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It may be metagaming to assume there's something great in the bottom of the insect murder death hole, but it's being a shitty GM to include a locale in an adventure that is only designed to waste your time and deplete your resources. Even the most grognardy of OSR or classic games have dungeons as vehicles for collecting items and gold. Having no reward either intrinsic or extrinsic to the dungeon (a baron wanting the inset murder death hole cleared out for example, willing to pay) is actively and intentionally jerking your players around. It's not even Tomb of Horrors tier "everything is designed to frick with you", because at least Tomb of Horrors has items and gold in it.

                The moment you insist on 'realism' or 'making characters act like people' you defeat 90% of module premises, which almost always involve getting mixed up with incredibly dangerous things without assurances of a commiserate payout. People are at your table to play a game, not buy in to a shitty social experiment of how long you can abuse their trust and irritate them until they decide you're not worth having as a friend.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Have you tried actually weighing risk and reward?

                OSR is all about gold as XP for a reason.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If the reward is 0, no amount of risk matters, in which case I reiterate: a location that exists only to deplete resources and waste time is awful. How long should a GM let players delude themselves into thinking there might be something at the bottom of the cave? 20 minutes? An hour? A session? Two sessions? What do you tell them at the end: "Maybe the real treasure was the grueling combat and character deaths we had along the way!"

                If you don't see how that is shit, you have no business running a game. You could have replaced the location entirely with walking in a circle in a forest and rolling on a random encounter table; in fact by accident your players would have been able to get rewards out of that.

                By all means, try it out, get your favorite game group together and put the insect hole on a map. Watch them go check it out-- just because it's on the map-- and smash their faces against it. Then tell them what's at the bottom when they all die or when they get there and tell me what they think of it. I'd be very surprised if they begged you to run it again; in fact I'd be rather surprised if they showed up next time you invited them.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                My OSR group would have a pretty good time and take it in stride.

                Character death is a part of OSR.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If you don't get it I can't understand it for you. Good luck.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In real life, would you enter a ruin in Detroit just because you think there might be treasure in it?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In real life I wouldn't enter a ruin I KNEW had treasure in it, if I believed there was a serious chance I could die getting it.
                That's a worse deal than my day job.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You're not an adventurer. An adventurer's job is to get rich or die trying, by looting dungeons.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If the reward is 0, no amount of risk matters, in which case I reiterate: a location that exists only to deplete resources and waste time is awful. How long should a GM let players delude themselves into thinking there might be something at the bottom of the cave? 20 minutes? An hour? A session? Two sessions? What do you tell them at the end: "Maybe the real treasure was the grueling combat and character deaths we had along the way!"

                If you don't see how that is shit, you have no business running a game. You could have replaced the location entirely with walking in a circle in a forest and rolling on a random encounter table; in fact by accident your players would have been able to get rewards out of that.

                By all means, try it out, get your favorite game group together and put the insect hole on a map. Watch them go check it out-- just because it's on the map-- and smash their faces against it. Then tell them what's at the bottom when they all die or when they get there and tell me what they think of it. I'd be very surprised if they begged you to run it again; in fact I'd be rather surprised if they showed up next time you invited them.

                You only think it's bad because you think there's an implicit agreement that everything in the game world must be there for the players' benefit. That agreement doesn't exist at all tables. In quite a few circles it is instead agreed that some things in the game world can be there purely as hazards to avoid, and part of the game is recognizing such things and dodging them like they're punji pits.

                >How long should a GM let players delude themselves into thinking there might be something at the bottom of the cave? 20 minutes? An hour? A session? Two sessions? What do you tell them at the end: "Maybe the real treasure was the grueling combat and character deaths we had along the way!"
                The area in question is only eight rooms so realistically the players will have either fled or died in less than an hour. And the module doesn't hide the fact that the place is dangerous and useless. In fact if the players attempt to rest there and have a cleric in the party, they will literally get a divine vision of their god commanding them to leave. That's in the module. So it's really just the people who are built in such a way that they _have_ to see the end that get fricked over. The kind of people who in real life do spelunking and die stuck upside down in Nutty Putty Cave because they just had to cram themselves into the furthest corner of the hole for no rational reason.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >You're not playing heroes. You're playing vagabonds out for gold.
                Why is there a paladin class in early D&D then?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                A mistake.

                There's a reason why true OSR has no paladins.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Old School Roleplaying
                >Proceeds to remove a distinct and well liked old school class

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You fricking moron. Paladins were introduced in Greyhawk. Sure, they're not in Basic, but it takes a very specific brand of stupidity to say that OD&D isn't OSR.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You fricking moron. Paladins were introduced in Greyhawk. Sure, they're not in Basic, but it takes a very specific brand of stupidity to say that OD&D isn't OSR.

                Adding on to this, Paladins were also in BECMI, albeit as a sort of “subclass” one can take at level 9.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's not a double standard. It's about knowing which dungeons are safe enough to delve.

                Weighing risk and reward is a very important part of tabletop.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Don't bother with him, he's one of the nuschool rpg players who think that every encounter should be beatable, and resents the idea of there being bigger fish out there.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Here's the thing: if you go and read the module there's absolutely no loot in the domain of the Insect God.
                That precisely, you adorable zoomer, is one of the clues to why you should leave the fricking dungeon. That's a clue. The fact that you can go five rooms, ten rooms deep and not find a single god damn thing of value, only increasingly spooky and bodyhorrory shit and tons and tons of enemies. That is not accidental, that is a clue that the place you're in is a bad place to adventure in, and the only way you might find it anything other than obvious is if you're raised on some Warcraft/Diablo paradigm where every place on the map is one you're supposed to raid regardless of how it looks.

                It's not like the insect god thing is thrown randomly at your unsuspecting level 1 party. It's the very last room in a dungeon whose every single room tells you to frick off. You have more than fair warning (which, to wag my finger at Raggi a bit, he doesn't always remember to provide. But he's blameless here).

                >Not every dungeon is a wise decision to enter.
                How the frick are you supposed to know whether to go in or not just by looking at the entrance? Not every cave or cavern has a sign out front saying "don't fricking come in here" or some wise old sage in town who will list off all 300 people who went in there and never came back out.
                >OSR is about picking your battles intelligently.
                You can't act on a lack of information, just guess.

                Yes, but you had to get to that point. Granted in this specific module the way up to the place is a giant red flag, but that furthers the issue with this design mentality.
                If you're supposed to be smart and avoid places that seem dangerous or that you don't know about then it's kind of impossible to run a game where you do anything other than go to places where you're near-guaranteed to never face life-threatening danger. Being smart and picking your battles taken to it's logical extreme means not doing any real adventuring. There's no point in presenting the player with a Tomb of Horrors or a Lair of the Insect God because an actually smart player walks home to do literally anything else.
                If you're supposed to go into dangerous places and hunt for treasure then you can't fault the players for ending up in scenarios they couldn't predict would be too dangerous to handle, and you can't fault them for being miffed when you blueball them with an impossible challenge. It's sadistic and counterintuitive to tell players to go looking for treasure and meet their efforts with bullshit.
                You can't have it both ways. Being smart and picking battles necessitates avoiding conflict to truly reach the point where one is no longer at fault for dying to shit like this. Going adventuring in search of treasure necessitates that one be motivated to get treasure and such motivation shouldn't be punished with bullshit gotchas.
                This is the inherent problem with OSR design. Everything in the OSR is a double standard. You're supposed to be treasure hunters but also you're a fricking idiot for going to places where there might be treasure. You're supposed to be people in a survival horror world but you're not supposed to do the smart thing and stay the frick home where it's safe. Games are supposed to be fast and rules-light but also there's a bunch of rules for simulationist bullshit. So on and so forth with everything.

                Don't reply to me if you're just going to snipe some quote.

                This is literally a skill issue, and a kind of an entitlement issue too. You think it's impossible to figure out what's beyond your party's abilities but it's actually really easy once you get past the mindset where things are supposed to "scale to your level" and be just a fun theme park ride for the PCs.

                https://i.imgur.com/PekgQuN.jpg

                What do you feel are some of the worst written adventure modules of all time? Do you have one in particular that you really dislike?

                I recently read through Adventure I by AEG because I thought it would have at least some good inspiration to steal or maybe a framework for adventures to Noun-swap, but jesus those adventure modules were not even proofread. These little one-shot adventures that come in these books were written to be simple single session events that you could sprinkle in an ongoing campaign, but they are just AWFUL.
                >Says it's written for 4 to 8 level 1 through 4 characters. Yet the highest CR in the whole adventure is 2
                >Later says that the adventure is actually written for 2nd level adventurers
                >First "Read to the player" blurb uses the sentence "Turns him on his back" Three times, explaining that the mysterious man that breaks through the door is slumped on the floor.
                >They accidentally reverse the names of two major NPCs in the introduction, completely confusing anyone that actually is trying to follow along. The Inn-keeper's wife is named "Kamalda" and the shamaness that you have to fight at the end is also named "Kamalda". (After rereading through it twice, later I found one instance towards the end, where the inn-keeper's wife is referred to as Karna.)
                >Puts the random encounter table for the roads surrounding town at the end of the book as opposed to at the beginning, when the players would actually be going to the site of the adventure
                This may be one of the worst ones I've ever seen
                Does /tg/ know of any worse adventure modules?

                This thread could have been fun, too bad it was sidetracked by one anti-OSR homosexual spamming clearly intentional design choices that he dislikes.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                What the frick is the point in writing so many words about a dungeon you're not supposed to experience?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You can "experience" it just fine. The intended experience is going a few rooms deep, realizing the place fricking sucks, leaving and possibly finding a way to blow up the entrance to it. Reaching the end is like an optional Bad End.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                That sounds like a waste of my evening but OK.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >That sounds like a waste of my evening but OK.
                You're not supposed to spend an "evening" in the bug pit. You're supposed to spend like 20 minutes tops and turn around. There's more than a dozen other locations in the module than this one area you're weirdly fixated on.

                Because if you apply rational logic instead of video game logic the treasure would be in a secured storage area instead of randomly scattered around the place.

                >Because if you apply rational logic instead of video game logic the treasure would be in a secured storage area instead of randomly scattered around the place.

                Opposite of that actually. Only logic where you could possibly expect something good at the end of the awful bug shithole is game logic. If you apply rational logic instead of videogame logic, BUGS DON'T HAVE TREASURE YOU MORON. WHY THE FRICK DID YOU THINK *BUGS* WOULD HAVE *TREASURE*?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The treasure in the bug module everyone's talking about is shit and your party is done for the instant they step in the room.
                So don't go there.

                Literally don't fricking go there.

                It's the last room in a dungeon that's so hostile and empty of treasures it's not even an IQ test. It's a test of whether the players want their characters to die or not.

                PS. It's not a "bug module", it's a sideshow dungeon in a larger semi-open-world module about a city under siege. The bug dungeon isn't the main attraction.

                Then why bother running the dungeon at all if the players are meant to avoid going in?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >PS. It's not a "bug module", it's a sideshow dungeon in a larger semi-open-world module about a city under siege. The bug dungeon isn't the main attraction.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Sorry, missed that part of your post. My bad. I was thinking it was like that other dungeon by Raggi where players die at the end. The one were over 9000 undead get released, making wonder why you even bothered with the place.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I actually played that one with my friends and we looted the place with no issues (staked every suspicious door shut so the zombie apocalypse never got released).

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Because James Edward Raggi IV unironically believes in "DM must torture and humiliate players and not allow them to have any fun with a game".

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >"Guys, you're ten rooms in and haven't found any loot yet. Why are you still exploring this dungeon?"
                >Party keeps going because they want to actually play the game.
                >Get TPK'd.
                >"Well, it's your fault for wanting to go on an adventure!"
                Isn't there some sort of unspoken arrangement between player and GM that there's an actual point to playing? If I get asked to play a game about dungeon delving, I expect there to be a point to dungeon delving. I don't expect to waste my time and effort just for my expectations to get le subverted.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The dungeon has had no loot until that point. Why would you suddenly think that there's loot at the end?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Because if you apply rational logic instead of video game logic the treasure would be in a secured storage area instead of randomly scattered around the place.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If you were indeed applying vidya logic, then the path with most resistance is the path to treasure.
                If you were, say, playing tabletop RPGs instead, especially dungeon crawlers, you would know that not getting any loot so far and having encounters that are tough in bad enviro, you should leave. Because the dungeon is as long successful as you can walk out of it
                But hey, if you did and know those, you wouldn't be shitposting right now

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                NTA, but what a disappointing take. You're talking about dungeon crawling ttrpg like it's a world's greatest block digging video game. Why the frick would you include a pointless stuff in your game? To waste the limited time you have with your bros/sistas at the table on nothing? Cause they're going bare-ass first into whatever you've made for them expecting something fun.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Being this green and new to the hobby, but trying to be smug and sound like a big-brain intellectual
                Black person, have you EVER played a single, actual dungeon crawler session? You know, the type of game where the whole thing ends when you get out and haul the loot back to the civilisation, because you lived the day and can tell the tale.
                That without even bringing up the obvious subject that it's 2023 and at this point anyone being "surprised" by just about anything in Raggie's work is either a total fricking newbie (and I mean literally just picked the hobby) or a fricking moron.
                And I fricking hope you ain't a moron.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                play a game instead of reading shitty blogs child

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >surrounded in enclosed space
                >vastly outnumbered
                >opponents are faster than you
                >module doesn't even consider the possibility of a single player managing to escape
                >JUST RUN AWAY BRO

                The conclusion is doing the smart thing, packing up, and leaving.

                Ever played Spec Ops: The Line?

                >Spec Ops: the Line
                >a completely illogical railroad that loves to pretend you had a saying in what was scripted to happen
                >the only winning move is to stop playing
                Fitting comparison

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In OSR, packing up and leaving once there's no more loot is the smart thing to do.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The lack of proper scouting is on you. The lack of proper tactics and plans in case of a frickup is on you.
                The lack of survival instinct is on you.

                Why do you want to waste time? Nobody gives a shit about what's "smart". I have 4 hours to game every session, why do I want to waste half of it walking back to town and doing nothing of interest? Who the frick thinks that's fun? God I hate OSRBlack folk so much and I'm so tired of their smug anti-fun bullshit

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                How is it a waste of time or "anti-fun"? If you never need to retreat and regroup, you're never in any sort of danger. If there's no danger, there's no point playing the game.
                Really, you've signed up to play an RPG but then you get upset when you're expected to play an RPG.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >How is it a waste of time or "anti-fun"
                It's a waste of time in that I literally have to stop doing whatever we're doing to retreat, lick our wounds, and maybe spend time coming back. I have to spend time arguing with the group to get them to leave and then we have to spend more time either planning how to beat the thing we retreated from or decide what to do next. You're doubling up on decision-making time that you don't have to double up on.
                >If you never need to retreat and regroup, you're never in any sort of danger.
                >If there's no danger, there's no point playing the game
                See, this part is the problem with OSRgays. You think you're style of play is the end all be all.
                "Danger" depends on the game and the style. There should be a way to balance (yes, I know you types shudder at that word) encounters so that players are challenged and risk dying without going so far as to have them hit a brick wall. To use a vidya analogy it's kind of the difference between an optional superboss versus an actually unbeatable boss with infinite HP.
                Also, death isn't the only kind of "danger". Injury, losing items, and social threats are all kinds of danger that don't kill you. If you're going for a deadly style that's a fine threat but it's not the only threat. You guys keep talking about spec ops but conveniently forget there was plenty danger there that wasn't just about the MC dying. Doing harm to other people and the negative mental/social/political consequences of that are a very obvious type of threat that isn't just "if you don't leave right now you die".

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >See, this part is the problem with OSRgays. You think you're style of play is the end all be all.
                On the contrary, you're the one making claims that he's having Badwrongfun and seething, unpromped, about OSR and all OSRgays because you saw some modules being shared SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE THEY ARE BAD.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                God you're such a fricking pedant.
                First of all, obviously those anons are making claims. That's why he's using harsh and direct language to advocate for the play style.
                Second, allow me to reword my argument slightly. Oviously there is no such thing as objective taste. I personally would find it unfun to be in a dungeon and have to backtrack solely because the thing my DM put at the end of the dungeon is way out of my league. I think that would be a waste of my time. I would not personally enjoy playing, designing, or gamemastering that kind of dungeon.
                Thirdly, those anons did start making claims first.

                Do OSRgays like it when the campaign they presumably spend hours on ends with a mandatory TPK?
                I don't get the mindset here.

                asks a question and

                You can always run away.

                responds by making a statement.
                Fourthly, you're a nitpicking c**t and I'd like you to drink bleach.

                Superhero games are a thing. You should switch to one.

                Frick off with this elitist false-dichotomy bullshit. There is no right way to play games, stop pretending you've discovered the right way to play games, and stop insisting that the only alternative to mudcore OSR meatgrinder is an episode of care-bears.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                OSR is meant for hardcore, dedicated players.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                How about you dedicate your mouth to sucking these nuts you fricking fairy

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Anon you don’t get it. OSR is literally perfect, from every mechanic to every adventure. Thus, any issue with it must stem from a personal failing, and any complaint is simply evidence that the speaker is too stupid, entitled, or homosexual to understand the divinely-inspired truth of OSR.

                To see it from any other perspective is to challenge OSR’s perfection, and that makes no sense because OSR is perfect and unchallangable.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >I would not personally enjoy playing, designing, or gamemastering that kind of dungeon.
                The response you list as proof of the evil of OSR is literally just presenting an option without any judgment passed. Literally no one is saying you have to play or run OSR. Get a grip.

                Anon you don’t get it. OSR is literally perfect, from every mechanic to every adventure. Thus, any issue with it must stem from a personal failing, and any complaint is simply evidence that the speaker is too stupid, entitled, or homosexual to understand the divinely-inspired truth of OSR.

                To see it from any other perspective is to challenge OSR’s perfection, and that makes no sense because OSR is perfect and unchallangable.

                Literally what prompts this kind of effete passive-aggressiveness? I don't even play any OSR, you just look ridiculous.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Literally no one is saying you have to play or run OSR
                Hey buddy if you can't fricking read english maybe get the frick off the english speaking website, okay? If you can't read the responses from the osrBlack folk without me mass replying to all of them and explaining word by word the smug elitist stench dripping from them then brush up on your reading comprehension. If you can read smug via text and you're just being a pedant again then suffocate on my wiener, gremlin.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Are people being smug? Mostly I see people telling you to chill out, and you freaking out about how awful OSRgays are. Just don't play OSR stuff if you don't like that style of game, it's not a big deal.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                (you)

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Superhero games are a thing. You should switch to one.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The lack of proper scouting is on you. The lack of proper tactics and plans in case of a frickup is on you.
                The lack of survival instinct is on you.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                So you're admitting that your original suggestion of running away was unfeasible and poorly planned?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >>Spec Ops: the Line
                >>a completely illogical railroad that loves to pretend you had a saying in what was scripted to happen
                >>the only winning move is to stop playing
                Nah, I kept playing because the madness mechanics were kino and genuinely well implemented and got the best ending (welcome to dubai)

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Supposedly, all the old tournament modules (e.g. Tomb of Horrors) were designed around death traps and TPKs so that different groups would play and compare notes like it was a competition or some shit. "You actually fell for the Goblin's Pole?!?! Ha! We beat it and the Succubus' Cushions!!!"

                Because the whole OSR badge is just code for "we like D&D from last century, but can't agree on which D&D, because playing D&D the correct way is serious fricking business for grown ass menchildren!!1!" I mean, frick, we used to call all these wanna-be D&D knock offs "fantasy heartbreakers" for a fricking reason. Namely, they thought they'd done something more meaningful than houseruling how an elvish blowjob uses a d8+2 instead of a d10, and it fricking made everything so better to the point of needing a whole new game. And when they realized nobody gave a shit, it broke their socially isolated and culturally moronic little hearts. But hey, pump out enough crap long enough, and somebody sees the value in a manure-based economy. Hence OSR.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Jesus fricking Christ, when I made this post I didn't expect it to trigger a fricking shitstorm like this. I just wanted more info on the adventure and the design philosophy behind it.
                Sorry for causing such a massive derailment, the thread had potential.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >I just wanted more info on the adventure and the design philosophy behind it.

                Raggi's design philosophy has like two main rules
                >if the players stop being careful to the point of paranoia for one second, murder them and rape their corpses
                >sometimes you'll randomly trigger an event that derails your whole campaign because it's funny to me
                It's certainly not to everyone's taste, but it's the thing he's famous for and it's clearly an intentional style choice, so b***hing about it is just a fruitless waste of time really.

                I'm much more interested in actual design errors rather than "I bought a LotFP module and I don't like LotFP, how could this happen to me?"

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                He really is the Garth Ennis of rpgs.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Not him but that seems like the entire point of LotFP, and it's almost a weird bait and switch. From what I've heard the base ruleset has little if any shocking or edgy content, it's a fairly standard OSR gritty ruleset.

                When you get into the modules is where you get the scat porn and veganal teeth monsters, or his old blogs where he would rant aggressively about his ex-girlfriend.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                If you want the real answer it's this: in osr spheres you generally don't do the whole death trap tpk rocks fall type dungeon. You have a normal campaign comparable to any other game.
                You also have some one off adventures like lotfp or tsr tourney modules that aren't meant to be played as part of your main campaign. They're meant for nights where not all the players can show up and you grab some pregens or do a dream sequence game or whatever and see how far toy can get in a mud core everyone loses scenario
                Also the worst adventure is journey to the rock

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Ok I'm going to play devils advocate here. What stops players from just running away? it doesnt say anything about the monster blocking the exit. and it doesnt read like the author simply forgot.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                You can always run away.

                Can they? The little bug guys have 180' movement, isn't that way fricking higher than what the players would have?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I have no idea. I'm not familiar with any of these systems. But I assume that once you retreat into the tunnel they won't be able to use their superior numbers to overwhelm you, so you can fight them off while slowly withdrawing. There's probably doors and other obstacles that could delay the bugs, too.
                Also, its probably a huge dungeon with lots of places to explore, so by the time the players find this room, they've probably collected a ton of loot and are ready to leave... they already got what they came for. There's no need to explore every single dungeon and kill everything.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Do OSRgays like it when the campaign they presumably spend hours on ends with a mandatory TPK?
                I don't get the mindset here.

                In the exact same adventure, the party's best source of information is a brothel madam who gives out intel in exchange for PCs sexually degrading themselves.

                >Ludmilla has actually become the most knowledgeable person in the area and is the only one who knows what is really going on.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                is 75hd a lot? I've never played any of these games and have no idea what that means.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                In the early editions of D&D an ancient dragon would have 9-12 HD and the mightiest creatures like storm giants and purple worms would have around 15. It's a farcical number that makes the insect god basically unkillable.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous
              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Using this against a player would be a dickbag move but I like the concept.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                At first this kind of seemed like a cool concept, but then they inexplicably went from "they just want to observe" to "lol they make u kill ppl".

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Does the author come to your house and beat you to death if you ever try and run another RPG ever? How do they enforce that?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                No you're just supposed to what it tells you, because the author is power tripping even harder than the kind of GM who'd run this sort of thing

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Through a time paradox, naturally.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                they call the Pinkertons RPG and Collectibles Division

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I suppose this is a good lesson you don't need to do something because an idiot wrote it in a book

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Agatha Foxlowe
                >Agatha is 11 years old

                >Grandma broke her, twisted her, hooked her, and hoisted her up in place of the chandelier in the dining room. Her upturned ribs and her destroyed limbs, they all hold candles which burn down and scorch her flesh. Agatha’s screams lets Grandma know that it is time to change the candles.

                >Agatha’s innards hang down out of her body, dangling ever so close to the table where they could rest and Agatha would not feel them pull anymore.

                >Agatha is fully conscious and retains full use of her head. She is in great pain, but the sensory overload these past days has pushed her past agony, past hallucination, and straight through to a grim lucidity. She will beg for help, beg for anyone that can help the pain stop (healing with Cure spells only make her current form the default; a surgeon would have to work on her to get her human-shaped again, but with only a 15 percent chance of Agatha surviving the procedure and never having use of her limbs again).

                This is some spicy writing, with an illustration to accompany it.

                Based, nice to see some adult content that isn't watered down for normies.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >with an illustration to accompany it.
              I was morbidly curious and had a look. Honestly it gets so edgy that it pushes past grotesque horror and into absurdity for me. I like how Erasmus Foxlowe jizzes spiderwebs kek
              pic related it's a screenshot of the Agatha illustration

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Holy fricking lmao, actually made me laugh out loud. Imagine writing shit like this, and -publishing- it.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Charge your phone.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >with an illustration to accompany it.
              I was morbidly curious and had a look. Honestly it gets so edgy that it pushes past grotesque horror and into absurdity for me. I like how Erasmus Foxlowe jizzes spiderwebs kek
              pic related it's a screenshot of the Agatha illustration

              I see nothing wrong with this

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >healing with Cure spells only make her current form the default
              this is completely moronic, if you get stabbed with a sword healing it doesn't make your guts falling out your new default. christ lotfp is such dogshit

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It does if someone specifically arranged your guts that way.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                your autismo limited approach to these games is dogshit, friendo.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >Multiple fights against oni who are resistant to normal weapons in a row, I don't think the writer actually playtested this shit
              >There's a part where the players have to go to this pleasure island brothel and the ronin guy in charge confisgates all their weapons even though they're nobles/magistrates

              lol, like at least GW stuff can be argued to be satirical. This just sounds like emotionally disturbed 14 year olds trying to one-up each other.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Multiple fights against oni who are resistant to normal weapons in a row, I don't think the writer actually playtested this shit

                Oni requiring Jade to damage is pretty normal. Once the first Oni is confirmed arming up with Jade is one of the first things to do.

                >There's a part where the players have to go to this pleasure island brothel and the ronin guy in charge confisgates all their weapons even though they're nobles/magistrates

                Giving your swords up for "Sword Polishing" is actually pretty normal in setting. The intended solution is to have the honorable characters go in the front door and give up their weapons while the less honorable members sneak in with jade backup weapons.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              And somehow this, wizard tower and monolith modules are still better than this CBT incarnate.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            The book it comes from is quite good tbh.
            It's sort of "you're not fighting a creature, you're fighting a concept"

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      It’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It’s basically like if Garth Ennis made an RPG and wanted to complain about them.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      This is bullying the GM.

      >"Frick for Satan," an adventure about a wiener-shaped alien and its pheromones

      Also in this adventure, the wiener-shaped alien gets cuckolded by its wife.

      >Agatha Foxlowe
      >Agatha is 11 years old

      >Grandma broke her, twisted her, hooked her, and hoisted her up in place of the chandelier in the dining room. Her upturned ribs and her destroyed limbs, they all hold candles which burn down and scorch her flesh. Agatha’s screams lets Grandma know that it is time to change the candles.

      >Agatha’s innards hang down out of her body, dangling ever so close to the table where they could rest and Agatha would not feel them pull anymore.

      >Agatha is fully conscious and retains full use of her head. She is in great pain, but the sensory overload these past days has pushed her past agony, past hallucination, and straight through to a grim lucidity. She will beg for help, beg for anyone that can help the pain stop (healing with Cure spells only make her current form the default; a surgeon would have to work on her to get her human-shaped again, but with only a 15 percent chance of Agatha surviving the procedure and never having use of her limbs again).

      This is some spicy writing, with an illustration to accompany it.

      LotFP is annoyingly bipolar, about half of their stuff is genuinely good and the other half is just unusable shit seemingly on purpose.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      This is bullying the GM.

      >you have to show your players a map and your dice rolls, and then call freddy freaker to get a silly effect
      Woe is me my story path is ruined!

  6. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    This is actual shit

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      well, obviously. it's called "against the giants" while it's clearly written for ants

  7. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    LotFP is cheating.

  8. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Pretty much every D&D adventure written after 1984.

  9. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    You know I hadn't read Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and was kinda meaning to, but I think this tells me most of what I need to know

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      The game itself is a pretty standard b/x clone with decent houserules, but Raggi is an edgy frick and will publish just about anybody who wants to write a module.

      https://i.imgur.com/PekgQuN.jpg

      What do you feel are some of the worst written adventure modules of all time? Do you have one in particular that you really dislike?

      I recently read through Adventure I by AEG because I thought it would have at least some good inspiration to steal or maybe a framework for adventures to Noun-swap, but jesus those adventure modules were not even proofread. These little one-shot adventures that come in these books were written to be simple single session events that you could sprinkle in an ongoing campaign, but they are just AWFUL.
      >Says it's written for 4 to 8 level 1 through 4 characters. Yet the highest CR in the whole adventure is 2
      >Later says that the adventure is actually written for 2nd level adventurers
      >First "Read to the player" blurb uses the sentence "Turns him on his back" Three times, explaining that the mysterious man that breaks through the door is slumped on the floor.
      >They accidentally reverse the names of two major NPCs in the introduction, completely confusing anyone that actually is trying to follow along. The Inn-keeper's wife is named "Kamalda" and the shamaness that you have to fight at the end is also named "Kamalda". (After rereading through it twice, later I found one instance towards the end, where the inn-keeper's wife is referred to as Karna.)
      >Puts the random encounter table for the roads surrounding town at the end of the book as opposed to at the beginning, when the players would actually be going to the site of the adventure
      This may be one of the worst ones I've ever seen
      Does /tg/ know of any worse adventure modules?

      I'm gonna go with the Dragonlance series, the original railroad.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        The description someone gave of "if Garth Ennis wrote an RPG and wanted to complain about them" seems pretty accurate, and that's fairly offputting on it's own, I can't imagine it leads to much decent content. Certainly not things I couldn't find better versions of elsewhere.

  10. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Keep on the shadowfell. I wonder how many people just hate 4e becausw of that abomination

  11. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    There was this OSR module, I don't even remember the name. The backstory was that the island it's set on used to be a colonial domain of the elves and the local governor made Leopold II look like Mother Theresa. The party is delving a ruined elven fort where some bad guys are hiding and are trying to resurrect this guy.
    The very first thing you're met with is the main gate, which creates a "temporal clone" of whoever touches it, which eventually becomes your new character as the original suddenly disintegrates a random number of hours after the touch. Two whole pages to explain all kinds of corner cases and interactions, like what happens if a clone touches the doors or if it dies early; not a single word to explain why the frick an abandoned military fort would have an incredibly elaborate chronomancy-based cloning machine as the front door.
    I remember it as the module that cemented my opinion that a lot of OSRgays seem to think "weird fantasy" means "I don't have to justify any of this random quirky shit".

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      As an OSRgay, that sounds like exactly the kind of bullshit that was left behind for good reason. It would only be more Gygaxian if it stole your gear too.

  12. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    What do people think of the TSR Marvel modules? Been thinking of mining them for ideas but I'm not sure if they're even worth going through in the first place.

  13. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Crypt of lizandred the mad.
    It is bad in a good way though. But if another gnome illusion challenges le to do actual maths on a timer i will make Greyhawk implode.
    Sick cover, though

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Sick cover, though
      No kidding. However bad the module is it's a necessary price to pay for that art. The expressions on the adventurers are exactly perfect. Eye patch did is 100% in "oh frick, oh frick, oh frick" mode

  14. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Oh frick, I got that one for like a dollar and couldn't make head nor tail of it.

    I've heard pic related is pretty awful, as are most WW modules it seems. It was described to me by a player as just hanging around at a bar waiting for NPCs to tell you the plot.

    The second module in the rogue trader campaign series, Citadel of Skulls, was pretty shit. It was all about grabbing a treasure trove, in a game which abstracted out all money. You could make it work but it was a big step down from the first module for that game, the Frozen Reaches.

  15. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I remember that one really infamous Pathfinder adventure that had the players meet the LG goddess of paladins who blasts the party with divine trumpets for like 4d6 damage at Lv2 for incredibly petty and nonsensical reasons. I don’t know how bad the rest of the adventure path is but that part stood out for how blatantly railroady it is, how lethal it was out of nowhere, and how out of characters the established NPCs were written to be.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      I think that's Wrath of the Righteous? I know there's at least a moment where you meet Iomedae and she acts like a moron in that one, I'm not sure if it's the one you're talking about.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Yeah that’s the one.

  16. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >demon dog, a mork bork setting
    >actually decent production values
    >quickstart adventure is literally "roleplay for a bit, beat up random people who insult you (no stats you just do it) then go to a bar where one random monster will burst in)

    I mean, I know it's artpunk but come on.
    New OSR trensetter, DARKBAD managed 4 rooms then a boss for it's sample dungeon

  17. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    everything 5e

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      IDK man, playing Mad Max in the Grey Wastes is fun, but it comes too early and doesn't stay for long. Still, Descent into Avernus is one of the better D&D 5th adventures.

  18. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    L5R has some real shitty ones

  19. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I'm glad to see OSR finally get the hate it deserves

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Why does the OSR deserve hate?

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        because it sux

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Any actual arguments?

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            try reading the thread lazy homosexual

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              Holy shit. I'm asking for YOUR views, not the views expressed by OTHERS. Why do YOU specifically dislike the OSR?

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Because it's degenerated into the worst of the 3.X OGL shovelware glut only with a way more obnoxious and sanctimonious fanbase.

  20. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    pf2's agents of edgewatch
    pf2's fists of the ruby phoenix
    hell, most of pf2's APs besides like abomination vaults

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >agents of edgewatch
      I really wanted that one to be good because of all the seeth Pozzo unintentionally generated by releasing an AP about playing as police officers so soon after the Martyrdom of Saint Floyd. Alas, twas not to be.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        What is bad about it?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          From what I understand, it's incredibly overtuned (all the 2e APs are this way for some reason. Hard is good, but stuff like Edgewatch goes well past hard into the realm of unfair.) I don't have the time to discuss the story rn, since I have to leave for work, but basically everything I've read about it from DMs says that they had to radically nerf everything to avoid a TPK every other session.

  21. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Christ, that was written by the guy doing the new Marvel game too.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Sure, twenty years ago. Give him a chance, man!

  22. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    White Wolf used to be notorious with adventures where NPCs did stuff in order to advance their metaplot as the PCs got to watch helplessly. Any adventure with Samuel Haight or Divis Mal springs to mind still.

    Storm King's Thunder for 5ed had this one bit at the end that was clearly meant to be a big cinematic battle scene. With giants and monsters and what not all duking it out... while PCs were expected to go do something else. Which would've been kind of fine, except the DM was actually expected to run that immense battle because otherwise it'd have just been handwavium that moved the story. So do you rely on handwavium, or let the GM jerk off with dice by themself for an hour each turn? Honorable mention to Decent Into Avernus as well, for giving GMs a section of bonus art rather than stuff that'd actually be useful in a game ("here's an early sketch of shit before they decided to do something different"). Give me a fricking 20 page gazetteer on Hell you dimshits!

    And then there's Cthulhutech: Damnation View, (in)famous for it's super awesome hot rape furries. Before that you have a dull and railroady and dumb adventure. But then you get railroaded by rape furries. You can't resist, and the sex is soooo good. And it'll kill your character if she's a girl. Afterwards you're expected to fight your way to escape, but by this point the adventure has been such an awful exercise in deprotagonization most players will just be going home. There's other bad CTech adventures, but this was the worst of the worst.

    And honorable mention to Wraith The Shoah, because nothing says a fun adventure like getting experience points for adventuring through the Holocaust. Is that pile of gold teeth a cool magic item? What powers will that gas chamber give us? Sure it's a sourcebook rather than an adventure, but point still stands.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >There's other bad CTech adventures
      One hell of an understatement.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Wraith The Shoah
      You said these were bad adventures, anon.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Wraith The Shoah

      >Wraith The Shoah
      You said these were bad adventures, anon.

      Reading this book left me depressed for something like a week- the only thing I remember is that the population of the city I live in is exactly equal to the number of babies that died.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Jeez. I was expecting an adventure where you go back in time to the Holocaust and rally the imprisoned israelites to fight and destroy the Nazi occupiers. That would’ve been metal.

  23. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Not the worst adventure but the adventure that disappointed me the most. I've read many praise for Patrick Stewart's writing and since he was one of the more prominent figures in the OSR community, I had very high hopes when I've started to read his adventure for Forbidden Lands - The Spire of Quetzel. It was released in the adventure anthology with the same name.
    Patrick made a railroad with a Gotcha Frickyou boss in the end while not understanding anything about the system he wrote it for.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Bet the prose was pretty, though

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Not really, no. But I may have no taste. Some god imagery is present though.

        I've only heard bits and pieces about The Forbidden Lands. Could you explain just why this wasn't good?

        - Way too overpowered boss for a very lethal system.
        - Almost no freedom, just a straight line with 1 short fork.
        - Insufficient roleplaying oppotunities.
        - Barely or no foreshadowed gotchas are stupid. Tomb of Horrors at home vibe. Magic items turn out to be cursed during the boss confrontation. Touch the black gem before the boss and your soul will be trapped. Now, I don't mind rarely using tricks like this, but all before/during the boss confrontation in a railroad? Frick that.

        The same anthology has an adventure with a similar world-ending level of power NPC(s) by Chris McDowall (of Bastionland fame), but that one is more of a dungeon with freedom of where to go and quite good amount of roleplaying opportunities. You can find a way to avoid combat and even the encounter difficulty will differ depending on what the party does. Still too much for an average FL party, but would be fun to run it for a retired adventurers, like one last ride.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      I've only heard bits and pieces about The Forbidden Lands. Could you explain just why this wasn't good?

  24. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    With all the edgy shit it really makes the "satanic panic" seem a lot more reasonable.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      LotFP came about 20 years after the Satanic Panic, so no.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        I think he means "The Satanic Panic warned parents that people like this were playing rpgs- and given how fricking old all the creators for this game are, it appears to actually have been true."

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          The Panic is more likely to have caused LotFP than predicted it two decades early.

  25. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    This piece of shit is the epitome of 90s metaplot cancer and railroading.
    The writers wanted this to be a sendoff for the Deadlands - Hell on Earth setting and a bridge into the new Deadlands - Lost Colony; as a result the entire adventure is one long series of unskippable cutscenes where the party plays captive audience as all the important setting NPCs beat each other up and have long dramatic dialogues, intersped with some busywork that exists only so the PCs don't feel like they're doing absolutely nothing. I'm not exaggerating when I say the "read this aloud to your players" boxes take up a full third of the book.
    And of course there's the moronic finale where the only way to power up the spaceship that is the final objective is for the party to murder one of their own, and then face a ridiculously overtuned boss while down one PC.

  26. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    these "retro" rpgs are edgy in all the wrong ways. where are the tattooed evil sorceresses? where are the breasts? it's just "rocks fall you die lmao" every other page.

  27. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >friend invites me over for game using his homebrew system
    >we do it in an OSE dungeon module
    >”there’s a spooky ritual going on and a huge bounty for stopping these people sleepwalking to the mountain”
    >tactically play through the whole thing
    >reach the final room
    >there’s an angel
    >he has access to the entire magic-user spell list
    >he paralyzes all of us for three rounds then goes around casting Death
    OSR is such shit, my god

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Retreating is sometimes the best course.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >walk into room containing our objective
        >angel paralyzes us
        >kills us all before paralysis wears off
        >’JUST RUN BRO’
        Do you have brain damage?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Consider it a deconstruction of the dungeon crawling genre.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            How about we just consider it shit.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >>we do it in an OSE dungeon module
      what module? OSE seems to just stick to the standard sort of dungeons.

  28. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    The general problem is that "refusing the call of adventure" is generally considered one of the absolute worst player traits in any other scenario. If your DM sits you down and tells you your options, refusing to go to a very clearly planned and scripted out location is basically telling them they wasted their time on it and you're not playing ball. Why would you ever prove that behavior right?

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      OSR requires a different mind set.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        NTA, but it doesn't. Even in mapcrawl you need to tell GM your plans and more or less stick to them so that GM has time to prepare the content for you. If GM made a dungeon you've told him you'd go to and you decided to explore uncharted waters in the opposite direction, pissed off GM would have to either stop the session and reschedule the game or generate stuff on the fly. You don't have to play old D&D or its clones to understand that.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          This is why modules (ESPECIALLY hardcore tournament modules) exist.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            Anon, you cannot use a fricking module on the fly. You need at least to read it once. So you need to prepare content either way and if your players refuse to interact with whatever you've prepared, the game is fricked.

            >Being this green and new to the hobby, but trying to be smug and sound like a big-brain intellectual
            Black person, have you EVER played a single, actual dungeon crawler session? You know, the type of game where the whole thing ends when you get out and haul the loot back to the civilisation, because you lived the day and can tell the tale.
            That without even bringing up the obvious subject that it's 2023 and at this point anyone being "surprised" by just about anything in Raggie's work is either a total fricking newbie (and I mean literally just picked the hobby) or a fricking moron.
            And I fricking hope you ain't a moron.

            That's a whole bag of buzzwords straight from OSR blogeddit. Play a game with your friends just once, man. Maybe then you'll stop to spread the tired cliche of going into dungeons just because you're playing loot-obsessed adrenaline junkies. Hint: looting dungeons is a method, not the whole reason.
            Anyway, let's say that you understand what you're talking about and I'm the greenest, the smuggest big-brain intellectual wannabe that does not. You create a nobody, a literal characterless piece of paper that will never be /yourguy/. Your bros/sistas create them too. You get together and your GM gives you a rumor that there is some dungeon. You go there and there is no loot. The point of your game is to take loot from a dungeon, nothing else, just to write a different number with pencil on a paper. GM wasted your time on "ha, gotcha, there is no loot!". You know, next time he should schedule a game and not come at all. That would be 10/10 fun game.
            >it's 2023 and at this point anyone being "surprised" by just about anything in Raggie's work is either a total fricking newbie (and I mean literally just picked the hobby) or a fricking moron.
            Did I miss Appendix /literalwho/ on my way to this board?

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              It's literally the post-game dungeon. Your mission is already done. You've already gotten the loot. Why do you need to go down a spooky hellhole?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Anon, I don't think I ever encountered a concept of a post-game dungeon in TTRPGs before. How is it supposed to work? Post-game we talk a bit, shake hands and say our goodbyes.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Realize that it's a bad idea to go into an underground hellhole just for treasure.

                Pack up, go home.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Anon, I don't think I ever encountered a concept of a post-game dungeon in TTRPGs before. How is it supposed to work?

                NTA but presumably the concept would the same as in a videogame: you get your objective, you beat the module, you have won. The game is already over. Then you may enter the bonus area that's filled with overpowered monsters purely just to mess with it now that you don't really care whether your characters live or die anymore.

                I don't know if I would classify the Realm of the Insect God as that, however:
                >the greater "bug area" so to speak consist of four separate dungeons
                >literally everything you need to do in there is in the first three, as well as all treasure
                >fourth, the one that kills you at the end, is purely optional you never even need to enter it at all

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Yes and no. Obviously, all roleplaying at any level requires some sort of buy-in on the part of the players. You cannot roleplay if one of the parties involved insists on not engaging or doing noting or actively avoiding opportunities for storytelling.

      The major problem with roleplaying in a game setting is that the "game" implies there is a process of engagement, challenge, and reward. Roleplaying is PART of it, but it is not ALL of it, and thus there has to be some suspension of disbelief (buy-in) on the part of the players because while obviously it is baseline logical that people wouldn't just wake up one day and choose to risk dying horribly in combat with monsters or bandits all just to heed the call of adventure, the game presupposes those things are going to happen. So if your goal is to play your character such that they just want to sit in a tavern all day and chat with NPCs, that may be roleplaying but there's no game there and so it begs the question of why you're sitting at a table to play a game, if you have no intention of playing that game.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        I don't think you understand the true spirit of OSR. It's about testing the PLAYERS' skills. Their characters are just avatars.

  29. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    You know, I actually find a lot of the published content that's just out there in the wild pretty insultingly bad, but I do think it's funny how the old dogshit adventures in Dungeon magazine and pamphlets sold for a few bucks in the game shop, are basically the exact same as the fricking slop that is heaped onto sites like DriveThruRPG and shit.

    If you've even bought (though I only pirate) these books, you'll find that for like $15 you get "50 different adventures!" or some shit, and it's always like "Actually we just sent a Twitter DM to some random people in the social media RPG community and paid them a few bucks to come up with some completely nonsense 1-page garbage that you'd be embarrassed to ever run in your campaign".

    There's lots of good module content out there, but there's so, so much fricking bad. At this point you're better off just telling ChatGPT to write you an adventure because it's going to be about the same as anything you're likely to buy on the stores.

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