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  1. Celebrim

    Mapping the Town - What should a Fantasy Town look like?

    I don't use either 1e AD&D or 3e D&D demographics exactly, but I do tend to have the majority of NPCs very much in the gritty tier. However, the 3e RAW demographics, which are just 1e AD&D demographics translated forward, have several problems in my opinion, one of which is they make the PCs...
  2. Celebrim

    Mapping the Town - What should a Fantasy Town look like?

    Well, the following summarizes how I do it, and is fairly generic demographics for my campaign world. A typical human town consists of about 120 wooden homes clustered together along somewhat but not entirely regular dirt streets, each home having a small garden plot of around 1/5th of an acre...
  3. Celebrim

    Mapping the Town - What should a Fantasy Town look like?

    Fantasy towns should look like whatever you like. Walls are realistic if and only if in the recent (past few centuries) past of the town the town has been subject repeatedly to the instability of war. Walls get abandoned if the peace lasts and the town tends to spill out around them or even...
  4. Celebrim

    Homebrew Solo Leveling meets D&D

    Very close to what I imagined except that I imagined the ranks extending up 1 higher level than you, so E Rank was 2-4, and D rank 5-7. However, I have no idea what the exact scale is, I only choose that because I was in my mind highlighting just how useless the weakest possible E rank was for...
  5. Celebrim

    Homebrew Solo Leveling meets D&D

    Without the Chosen One aspect, it's basically just "What if World of Warcraft (or insert your favorite MMORPG) was in the real world?" Which is kind of just D&D where the setting is taking the gamist tropes of an RPG and making them simulationist within the setting, which is something that in...
  6. Celebrim

    Homebrew Solo Leveling meets D&D

    Although it isn't obvious, it appears Solo Leveling is actually a Science Fiction setting, and the magical beasts are just aliens who have been previously conquered by the "mana" givers. I don't think the "gift" of mana to humanity is in fact anything but a trap, as it's the means by which the...
  7. Celebrim

    Looking to commission art...

    Given the prices that pros would charge. Would you consider a starving college student working/studying in graphic design? Her internship work and other professional pieces are probably at the level of detail you are looking for.
  8. Celebrim

    RPG Crowdfunding News – When Society Collapsed, Ballad Hunters, Fomoria, and more

    I'm just about at the point where if a company makes an over-the-top anti-AI statement, I think I'll just boycott them. I can't imagine using AI in its current form unedited for any creative purpose, but on the other hand, some of this comes as performative Luddite crap. I use AI to brainstorm...
  9. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    Note that to a large extent this controversy among the sages has to do with whether you treat Gygax's write up of the assassin as primarily focused on the assassin as NPC (hiring one to perform assassinations and spying) or treat the assassin as PC. While the assassin shows up in the PH, I...
  10. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    While I have always allowed backstab to multiply the bonuses, I'm pretty sure backstab explicitly says somewhere that it only multiplies the damage dice of the weapon.
  11. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    I seem to remember playing that way back in the day and thus basically never getting off a backstab, but the 1e PH book is written in a way that surprise is optional for the backstab, and I think that's more reasonable and so I've also made that explicit in the revision. It would work then more...
  12. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    I ran 3e for like 15 years, and ranged sneak attack is obviously inferior to melee sneak attack because you can always melee sneak attack by flanking, whereas ranged sneak attack requires surprise and to be within 30 feet of the target. One of the subtle jokes of "Order of the Stick" is the...
  13. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Oh, they are absolutely both, and that's true of high level play as well. Assuming they survive the low levels, which like the M-U they probably wouldn't, they turn into something that can either kill what they are facing outright in one round or else are absolutely useless against it. As an...
  14. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    No. In fact, they have nothing really do with each other. I think the requirements of a backstab are basically you are behind the opponent, while the requirements of an assassination are you've achieved surprise. A backstab benefits from surprise but doesn't seem to actually require it...
  15. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Oh, it gets worse. Because it is so broken as written it has to be hard nerfed in secret in the DMG requiring a full half-page of clarification and restrictions on their core mechanic. But to make matters worse, that hard nerf depends on an extremely fiddly comparison with the target's weight...
  16. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Assassin for 1e AD&D

    In the write of the revised thief, thieves can take the Sniper NWP to do it.
  17. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    It doesn't help that its mechanics are terrible. It's everything that is wrong with early D&D design wrapped in a toxic package that is worse than the sum of its parts while carrying a bunch of fluff along with it.
  18. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    It sounds like you'd do well surviving my games. When playing a PC, the thing you should be asking is, "How is this character going to die?" and be mitigating against that. For example, it should cross your head in chargen, "What happens to this character if they fall into deep water?" If...
  19. Celebrim

    AD&D 2E Al-Qadim campaign setting

    I never ran it, but it fits in neatly as a part of the world in my heavily animistic psuedo-European default setting. I love a world haunted by spirits, and the genie are just another variety of species of spirit. In fact, in my setting they are explicitly the rulers of the elemental fairies...
  20. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Creative and surprisingly good considering. I think after playing around with it that you'd have to also have a rule like "Reroll your 1's once." as well, because it generates sub-6 rolls almost as often as 3d6. UPDATE: Yeah, that's actually really sweet if you let a certain number of 1's be...
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