Recent content by Retreater

Since I’ve been told I’ve been judging Arcane Library’s Shadowdark adventures unfairly, I’m doing a quick read through of “Fortress of the Burning Brothers,” from Cursed Scroll 2 and sharing my thoughts. There will be spoilers. This is obviously not a review, since I haven’t played it. I’m just...

Also - in the wisdom of that GM - he wanted to "skip to the good parts." This meant avoiding all the faction play on the upper tiers and just putting us in the dungeon, with no support from the factions, no knowledge of what was below, etc. He's a great friend, but he did a bad job with this one.

Yes. And this wasn't one of the convention games. It was being run by a GM who had been a player in my group going back to the AD&D 2E era. He has been running an ongoing Castles & Crusades campaign for about 2.5 years at this point. I don't know why he ran the encounters the way he did -...

Right, I found that OSE didn't match my expectations of old school play, but I was hopeful that another branch of the OSR might. Maybe (if anyone cares) I can explain what my nostalgia was, and maybe that will inform the disconnect I have with Shadowdark and other games. If nothing else, it...

I don't think I fully understood that until my string of bad sessions. I had a nostalgia for how I played old TSR D&D, but that's not what the OSR does. I'm guessing it's more in narrative games like Daggerheart. And honestly, those styles of play couldn't be more different. I have to say I've...

I think if they don't have a solid grounding, that you're going to have the experience I had at the convention. Maybe they watched a lot of YouTube videos and not read the books. But playing the game as written with the assumption of play it entails will lead to many character deaths. I don't...

You're conflating bad design and not being financially successful. I don't deny SD's popularity or financial success. However, I do think it's badly designed - not just for my interests, but in actually achieving the style of game it purports to want. That's because you can't run Shadowdark with...

Seems correct - assuming you get to the +4. My character did not because I didn't get to make my own character. For my preferences, having a failed casting roll result in a fizzled spell is enough punishment instead of taking the spell for the rest of the day. If you want to be hardcore, maybe...

For me, I think the golden era is still going strong. There are many varieties of games. Heck, even I am finding new systems I like. I've got Fabula Ultima tomorrow, Wildsea the day after that. I'm prepping a Daggerheart game to start next month.

The problem is that there's nothing to tell them that they're not following the rules or that they're being bad GMs. Because when you follow the rules as written, everyone dies. It's the soft skills as a player and GM that could make it survivable - and those aren't covered. It's as if there's...

No Luck tokens. I don't have the character sheet on hand, but let's say I had a +2 from Intelligence. I don't recall any advantage on spells from a talent, but I think I might've had +1 on casting checks. So that's +3. DC 11 to cast a 1st level spell and DC 12 to cast a 2nd level spell. So...

We did not have the choice. We were beset by mindless giant insects with no advance warning and couldn't escape if we tried. It was run poorly. But honestly, this "combat as fail state" opinion in the OSR is impractical. People are going to fight. It should be what the core mechanics of the...

A fighter isn't limited to 2 swings of a sword per day. A miss with a martial attack doesn't mean that your character is "spent" for the day. Let me put it this way. I had a 3rd level SD wizard with one attack spell (pregenerated at a convention). I missed with my one attack spell on the 1st...

I agree. Even Gygax didn't stick to the 3d6 in order. It's been a mess since AD&D, and shouldn't be a standard method, because you end up having to mulligan and spend way more time than needed to generate characters (like rolling 15 sets of stats or whatever). I think Dionne's error (IMO) is...

Or worse yet: Chessex's convention specials that actually replace the 1 AND the 20, making them completely useless.