Shadowdark Shadowdark looks so good!

[kenada]

Black cover with a not-beholder on it and a green (maybe textured) cover with a lich on it.

Ah, okay. I want a physical copy of the core rules, but I don’t need a fancy one. I just don’t want POD, which isn’t an option.

 

[darjr]

It’s over 9000!

 

[kenada]

I was 9007. They’re really on the ball. I already got an email to fill out information on BackerKit, which was nicely proactive. The add-ons were also integrated into the pledge screen, which is the first time I’ve seen that. You usually have to add extra to your pledge then pick the things you want when checking out on the fulfillment platform.

 

[overgeeked]

I was 9007. They’re really on the ball. I already got an email to fill out information on BackerKit, which was nicely proactive. The add-ons were also integrated into the pledge screen, which is the first time I’ve seen that. You usually have to add extra to your pledge then pick the things you want when checking out on the fulfillment platform.

Dungeon Denizens has the "select add ons as part of pledging" thing also. First time I’d seen that as well.

 

[kenada]

Dungeon Denizens has the select add ons as part of pledging. First time I’d seen that as well.

The most recent thing I’d backed was Cities Without Number, which closed at the start of March, but Kevin Crawford doesn’t do add-ons or stretch goals. Prior to that was some other stuff last year I don’t recall having the extra UI. I appreciate the feature. It makes getting your pledge right a lot easier when you want add-ons (though at least BackerKit lets you pay later if you mess up or forget).

 

[overgeeked]

The most recent thing I’d backed was Cities Without Number, which closed at the start of March, but Kevin Crawford doesn’t do add-ons or stretch goals. Prior to that was some other stuff last year I don’t recall having the extra UI. I appreciate the feature. It makes getting your pledge right a lot easier when you want add-ons (though at least BackerKit lets you pay later if you mess up or forget).

My last one before Dungeon Denizens was Monty Python. Long list of possible add ons but all handled through backerkit.

Yeah, it's a great feature. I hope it's now standard. So much easier.

 

[deganawida]

Shared the KS with my best friend, who's also my normal DM. He really liked it. Like, really liked it. He even liked that there were fewer classes, and didn't mind race-as-class. He normally plays bards, and has never cared for race-as-class (except in Palladium Fantasy). It might be just what is needed for us to go back to a more old-school style of game.

 

[kenada]

Once one admits some amount of customization (feats, talents, foci, etc), race-as-class doesn’t make much sense. It’s an obvious and easy customization point, especially if you’re trying to appeal to people with experience playing other games that have it.

Also, good on Shadowdark for not having ancestry level limits or class restrictions. Limiting class progression based on race was always a dubious balancing mechanism.

 

[JohnSnow]

I think there's a definitional question about compatible that probably bothers people more who came to the hobby late.

For those of us who played back in the days of the BECMI/Advanced D&D split, we knew that one system had AC start at 9 and go down, whereas the other had AC start at 10 and go down. Similarly, different attributes had different bonuses from one system to the other (BECMI didn't have percentile strength, which was a weird system anyway).

But if we chose to use a BECMI module with AD&D characters, or vice-versa, we just accepted those little differences because they were effectively inconsequential. The Moldvay Basic Rulebook "goblin" having slightly different stats from an AD&D Monster Manual "goblin warrior" didn't matter, because the stat blocks were close enough that they didn't even need to be fudged. You don't need to look up the stats for the goblins your PCs encounter in the Shadowdark rulebook, you can just use the stats exactly as they are written in Keep on the Borderlands, because the mathematical variance is insignificant. We're after playability here, not some platonic ideal of perfectly balanced game design.

Which I think is the major point Whizbang Dustyboots has been trying to make about Shadowdark. To a great degree, it's just as compatible with the monsters from both BECMI/AD&D/C&C and every other OSR game that 90% of the on-the-fly conversion is basically: "Change AC to ascending. Done."

 

[Autumnal]

Very much agreed something that different people feel differently at a gut level is this: no session includes a statistically significant set of rolls. If you’ve got a party of four, and each player makes 20 or so checks for success (setting aside damage and such here), and the GM rolls twice as often as any one of them, that’s a whole 120 rolls. That’s not nothing, but any statistician would tell you to expect something other that strict conformity to the odds. Indeed, too-close conformity might arouse some doubt whether some part of the rolling environment is out of whack.

And lots of us won’t roll that often in a typical session.

This is a big influence on my own “close enough is really the same in practice” attitude. I suspect many others feel. The same thing intuitively, whether or not they can articulate it.

There are games finely enough tuned that a one-point difference can genuinely matter a lot. D&D hasn’t ever been one of them.