Search results

I guess that means adventures are short then. One adventure is one excursion — leave town, go do stuff in dangerous places, return to town. Every game session begins and ends in Castellan/Kendall* Keep, or Hommlet, or Tanaroa, or Mantua, or the unspecified home-base locations from the G series...

My preferred paradigm is the "living sandbox" milieu. Draw a hex map, fill it with: cool places, interesting people, conflicting factions, dangerous monsters, desirable treasures, a difficult mystery, and loads of clues. Turn the players loose on the world and see what happens. Make sure the...

(You forgot "not applicable, don't use alignment".) I'm not running 5e, but I still checked "not applicable, orcs and drow absent." I hardly ever run "official" settings, so I have no use for "official" Greyhawkian/Realmsian lore. I have a variety of fay-folk and sluagh and orcneas and draugr...

First played on a friend's copy of the black box. First owned an AD&D 2E PHB (revised black-cover edition). Within a year, my personal collection had grown to encompass four more rulebooks: a black-cover 2E DMG, the Complete Ninja's Handbook, a Trampier-cover 1E PHB, and 1E Oriental Adventures.

Age: 37 Year started: 1998 (I played a couple of times before that, but '98 was my freshman year of high school and also when I seriously started gaming) First RPG: The Classic D&D Game (the mid-90s trade-sized reissue of the black box) Formative experiences: Played Classic D&D and AD&D 2E in...

It was good. I can't sit through fifteen minutes of Critical Role without getting bored to tears — watching other people play D&D (or pretend to) isn't engaging — but Vox Machina was fast-paced, funny, and generally delightful.

That's a good option too. In addition to implying breadth of competence (I can easily picture a red mage type being called an "adept"), "adept" has something else going for it in terms of the fantasy literary tradition — in Baum's Oz novels, it's one of five types of studied magic-user on par...

My best villain one-liner was a written note in a treasure chest, combined with a simple trap: the floor of the room was a wall of force concealed by a simple illusion of a stone floor, over a 20' deep spiked pit. Opening the chest in the middle of the room, one simply finds a note therein...

"Dragoon" would be less of a mouthful, and it has a bit of fantasy precedent. Part of the problem, of course, is that we're trying to coin a neologism for a concept that has no deep, resonant name in folklore and mythology. The archetypical (in the campbellian sense) great warrior-hero is often...

We can generalize the concept with terms that don't step on cultural toes. Bodyguard —> guardian —> warden or warder. I like the sound of warder — it suggests both a shield-bearer and an abjurer.

Ranger. Then they'd finally have an identity that couldn't already be handled by "warrior class + outdoorsy background." (And there's a bit of precedent from the BECMI elf-trained "forester" class, which is a pure gish.) (Hard no on any name that uses "sword" or "blade", though. We don't want...

Goombas. Goombas are stompable little maniacs, and they're worth 100 points each. (Then 200, 400, 500, 800... stomp enough of the blighters in a row and you start earning 1UPs!)

That stuff is fun. But it's also the case that the last few decades of modern fantasy have humanized orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogres, and other traditional D&D humanoids to an extraordinary degree. And frankly, I'm okay with that. Elder Scrolls orcs and Warcraft goblins are cool. Shrek is a decent...

Druids are priests, the same as clerics. They 100% serve deities, particularly deities of human cultures. But where clerics serve big, ineffable, cosmic gods of Order or Chaos, druids serve the deities of the Balance between the two forces, deities which tend to be close to the land, in harmony...

Oh, absolutely. I love the Mentzer Set, the '91 ("New Easy-to-Master') black box and '94/'96 Classic set. Grew up on 'em, learned to play from 'em, still use 'em.

The '81 or '83 Basic Set? If it's Tom Moldvay's booklet, the armor table is with the rest of the equipment on page B12. If it's Frank Mentzer's, which is admittedly a much more confusing layout for reference purposes, armor prices are on page 22 and Armor Classes are on page 50 (but with each...

Maybe.

I think my point wasn't clear enough. The long term effect of just about any benefit you can think of is increased DPR for the better weapons. Even if all weapons are made to ostensibly inflict 1d6 damage on a hit, anything you do to increase your chance of hitting with a bigger, better weapon...

☝️

Oh, absolutely. Ben Milton is vocally in the camp that says "OSR" is principles, not mechanics, and he most definitely backs up his position with a robust œuvre of publications.