Recent content by the_redbeard

Yeah, that was a good one in the C&C campaign that I ran with Yggsburgh. OMG, I found the pdf I had of it on a google drive from my old laptop. Huzzah!

Thanks. That's great for tracking. But it still leaves the cleric being surprised much less than the Ranger, which in AD&D, "Rangers surprise (q.v.) opponents 50% of the time (d6, score 1 through 3) and are themselves surprised only 161/3% of the time (d6, score 1)". I wasn't even thinking of...

There's a lot to like about C&C. I ran it for several years. A d20 mechanic and simple, stripped down classes. And the trolls do seem like good guys. I remember at one point when they got a printing press, they were discussing allowing DMs to send in their house rules and then the trolls would...

If you have one of "those" dungeon masters: the Stamp of Death https://www.zazzle.com/stamp_of_death-256846415257211662

But to put it in context, MOST US companies spend the time between discovering the union effort and the NLRB election in discrediting the union, harassing pro-union employees (or even creating pretexts to fire them), making unenforceable promises that "we've heard you, we'll do better", or...

Here's a blog post on the history and some variants of 'carousing' mechanics in D&D.

Remember that D&D evolved from a miniature wargame, and some of the first characters were warlords leading armies into battles. How do you get armies? You pay them with gold. Even in the early middle ages, when much of the cash economy of Rome had collapsed, warlords still used wealth to...

So you didn't know what to say and decided to go with vaguely insulting and playing your grognard card? Ability checks against 1 of your 6 scores wasn't a mechanic until Moldvay, several years after AD&D, and skipped by many people who were already playing AD&D (as was the case with myself and...

It's not identical. Ability checks are in the rule book as a DM tool in 5e (not a player tool, btb they are called by the DM) but ability checks do not even exist as a mechanic in 1e. From 3rd edition onward, I've seen players demand to just roll a skill check instead of describing their...

Not AD&D, but there's a really good B/X-ification of 5e called "Into the Unknown". It keeps the chassis of 5e, and : Admittedly, some of those changes (no multi-classing and no trivial spell components) are B/X, not AD&D. But most of the other differences between 5e and AD&D mentioned in this...

A couple of years ago (was it that long? damn) I ran a campaign that limited cantrips. I'm restarting one soon (had a session zero this past week). It lasted 10 session before my work schedule killed it. While there were some players who decided that the campaign was not for them, all of the...

If I'm running a game with a VTT instead of theater of the mind, vision is the feature that makes the additional hassle worthwhile. I think it really changes the game and adds a lot of suspense. Making maps in DungeonDraft and exporting to Foundry has all the lighting and walls fixed, and then...

There is a commercially available B/X-ification of 5e called "Into the Unknown". The author distinguishes between "travel pace" and "exploration pace", which is 1200/ft per 10 minute segment, allowing mapping, passive perception, no penalty on perception vs stealth checks for surprise, etc...

Yeah, he posted that while I was writing. I'd forgotten about that passage. However, I think a) this is a rare occurrence only available to high level characters and b) is the exception that proves the rule. @S'mon's point about the lack of 'DM's Story' holds, though I think I disagree that the...

Interesting. Like you, I was a Realmworks fan. Recognize you from their forums. I wish I liked the Powered by the Apocalypse style of resolution more. Fiction forward yes, plot points, nah. So not Cortex Prime as much as I like your description of their rules platform. Aand I wish I still...