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My favorite CRPG I've played in a very long time has been Tyranny, just because it asked "ok, what happens when the Dark Lord who craves domination and total power wins." Draw Steel!'s world is doing something similar. In both cases, the calamity is intended to drive play. I think setting...

I'm reminded of opening up the generally solid Neverwinter Campaign Setting and trying to figure out why it starts with like 30k years of history that have 0 bearing on the actual game you're going to play, and doesn't even structure it in a way that helps tie directly to the situation and...

"I think this is teh best dungeon geography ever made" & etc. Clearly many disagree. Their opinion is no less valid. I enjoyed the Iso maps in the 5e Curse of Strahd for trying to give an idea of the sweep and scale, but they were useless to run off of; the standard top down maps were more...

OSE originally, I ran the excellent 5e conversion. Or more generally: "D&D."

I think that WOTC's house style just sucks, frankly? I'm assuming Pathfinder is similar. I think we should be able to expect better.

I think you're maybe not familiar with the newer (by like a general "length of TTRPGs existing" newer) modules that I think many of us are point at when we say "Easy to Run." I'm going to use the excellent Winter's Daughter by Gavin Norman as an example (released 5 or 6 years ago?). It opens...

Oh that's another good note, Iglanced through a few of the better recent OSR modules I have and they all lead with the most active and important thing. If there's a bunch of goblins flinging trash off the edge of the room, that's the first thing you're told in the description. If there's a demon...

That's like a part-time job.

Have you read any of the excellent modules in OSR space? They convey dungeons full of interactivity and factions with succinct text and layout. You’ll probably get some big picture goals up front too that help contextualize the random encounters and such, and said encounters are written to give...

When I look at a really good OSR module it has the following: Something actually interesting going on in each room to paint to the players. Solid use of word choice to succinctly give me a mental image I can vomit forth, and small numbers of interesting things. Eg: "2 Idiot Dragon Hunters...

What besides the DG adventures? I still have a weird hankering to run RHoD sometime for some reason.

I mean I’m thinking of adventures that not only need prep due to bad organization and missing bits, but are also a railroad as written and thus a lot of the work winds up being fixing that. And so why bother, right? The one thing that I acknowledge I just don’t do as well as professional...

The criticism is generally “I thought I was paying for something I could open and run” and it rarely is that in most mainline products (notable exceptions in my experience are dungeon focused play out of some of the OSR/NSR space). If I need to spend hours reworking something or using it as a...

I’m going to discount “setting up the..setting” prep. As far as focused time thinking and sketching ideas : play, at least 1 : 6. Eg, for the current situation in my Tuesday game I spent probably 2 hours off and on wrestling down some formatting i wanted to use and then vomiting out ideas. We...

I liked the slot based encumbrance that Dolmenwood's version of OSE (not sure if it's in base OSE as well?) and HMTW used. Easy enough to grasp, made for interesting tradeoffs in the dungeon, didn't have to do math.

It's kinda fun how when you switch your entire frame of reference for your campaign to modern fantasy stuff, you don't have to worry about "oh should guns do more damage then blah blah." Group figured they had enough clues to put stuff together last night and tried out the Theorize action...

Looking forward to the oncoming threads: "What campaign should I use for a non-D&D focused dungeon," "what D&D should I use for a campaign focused dungeon" and "what focused dungeon should I use for a campaign D&D."

No-ish. Gold extends Dark’s rules for longer form dungeon crawling play and removes the inability to fight “monsters.”

I generally detest multiclassing systems because of stuff like this (and because of how hard actual mastery is); I’d certainly need some strong narrative justification from a random Warrior about why they were suddenly a Druid. However a Seraph has spells unless they went full Valor.

I actually do like some of the systems that make “consumable management” a somewhat abstracted thing, like Load in FITD or similar in Stonetop. Mainly because in those cases it’s something which feeds back into space for interesting moment to moment consequences and play. Or they’re usable as...