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The one I was in that worked used age of sail trappings, right down to the major military powers having "ships of the line". The GM didn't want to introduce gunpower - less because of the worry about cannons and firearms and more about the worry of PC's putting barrels of gunpowder in portable...

D&D is conceptually pegged at Medieval. In practice, Gygaxian D&D is Victorian minus gunpowder. Age of Piracy is actually anachronistic the other way in many cases. It's not really obvious because the medieval era is so far away historically that unless one actually reads primary sources from...

I mean some of this happened but that's not really an accurate description of the mechanism of pirates in the Golden Age of piracy. Those smaller targets generally had to do with the age of criminal pirates post 1730 when pirates couldn't be expected to have safe ports or government backing...

That's a novelist point of view. It's not normally how you write for an RPG. In an RPG the players are invested in the characters but you need to get them invested in and excited about the setting. Of course, the problem Critical Role has is that this is both an RPG and a play with an...

It's an emotional bang, not a dramatic one. It's meaningful to the characters. But as others have noted, this sort of bang works better if you are invested in the man being executed or the characters trying to rescue him. The whole city experiencing a natural disaster, an invasion of...

I think it is probably better for an audience though I think I would probably detest it as a player. I also think from the description he's violating the rule that you start an adventure with a Big Bang, then you lore dump once you have people excited. This is playing out as a slow burn novel...

This and the publication of some Dragon articles about sea faring combined with dissatisfaction at running the PC's across the Sea of Fallen stars in a homebrew adventure to rescue slaves led my college GM to steer the campaign into piracy and naval combat. Of course, we found out after just...

I don't think you have to get as deep in the woods as tracking barrels of fish and depending on the campaign setting you probably don't need to track food and water portions if you can assume stops in ports are pretty frequent the same way you don't track food while the PCs are in town. There...

IIRC correctly, that's because Treasure Island has no actual piracy. It features a mutiny by former pirates against the owner of a merchant vessel who was unwise in hiring his crew. There are only about two dozen crew aboard the schooner, so naturally neither side of the mutiny can have more...

UPDATE: Ooops. Sorry. I thought this was a response to a post about the Skull & Shackles AP. What I wrote isn't actually a response to what you are claiming. So, if you don't have ship to ship combat like people expect when they imagine pirates, and instead you have something more medieval...

We tried to play it. The introductory scenario were you get pressed ganged is awesome and the minigame of being a sailor aboard a terrible ship is a great little minigame that really impresses on you life sucks. I would be more than happy to run the first adventure. But leaving aside some...

So typical pirate movies have ships that correspond to age of sail frigates. They have crews in the range of 240 to 350. So, the moment you start running a game that looks like a pirate movie, you immediately jump from dozens to hundreds. And that's probably going to happen to you as soon as...

I'm not really a professional writer by any stretch, but I do know if I was a former professional writer I'd have enough of an ear to recognize I probably shouldn't be starting off all my posts with that claim. I don't think it means what you think it means. Oh, he's a bandit. Somehow I feel...

In case it wasn't clear, my point is not that everyone should take the trouble to make their stuff publishable - as I said of my own stuff, it's not. My point was that the general lack of standards is creating a culture where no one has a clue what published material should look like or what...

Oh no, I think you "win" - though I question whether that's a prize or a white elephant. I doubt I've used more than 300 published monsters in 40+ years of running games. When I was writing my 3e house rules one of my projects was looking at published spells from the 1e/2e era to see if any of...

Ok, since we are being frank here, let me put in my frank thoughts. I am increasingly finding it a total waste of my time to buy gaming content because of the entirely unprofessional and low standard of slop that I usually find on display when I buy something prewritten. I backed two...

Been there, did that. Should have printed out the t-shirt. I had at one time hand-written notes for redoing many of the games monster entries to bring everything up to the MM2 standard and my own house rules. This included big updates to two things correcting XP entries and...

So in a nutshell, "Yes". Multiclassing in AD&D is not additive with HD. Your HD is the same as your highest class level. You don't acquire more HD by multiclassing, just more abilities. So your assumption about the priest king counting as a 12 HD monster would be correct, though you'd still...

@ilgatto: I think it is a mistake to think that there is one true and correct way to play 1e AD&D. It's best to think of the rulebooks as the somewhat disordered house rules of a very influential DM whose campaign and rules was always evolving based on theory crafting and play experience and...

For the purposes of the weekly game, they handwaved back when we ran out of time. I would guess we only ran about 6-7 sessions in the mega dungeon (I ran like 13 weeks) and so at no point did anyone get more than 5 or 6 rooms from the entrance/exit, so it was never a big deal to suggest...