The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

i recently bought a bunch of 5e stuff and i have like 10 interested players but getting even half of the crew together at the same time is proving impossible ... sigh, adult life

OTM, I know about 20 ppl who would like to play but scheduling is fucking impossible

When I DM there's no goddamn encumbrance and no morale checks and no running out of arrows.

OTMFM

re: scheduling... yeah, see also "band practice" for us olds

it doesn't help that a play session tends to last about 8 hours (because we are adults and so tangential)

The ones I have now are the ones Shakey posted and lord I hate the graphic

I might be persuaded to take these off yr hands...

re: scheduling if I do get this going it will be primarily my family and maybe like one or two other people so that should simplify things

(I def have an in-law who is down for this at family events, so that's good)

When I DM there's no goddamn encumbrance

was always curious if *anyone* played with this, because what a nightmare

bags of holding all around

pack animals

but yeah encumbrance, morale fuck that shit

not so sure about the infinite arrows thing though

Arrows is just cause I'm lazy tbh

I suppose you can just assume everyone picks up all their spent/shot arrows afterwards - problem solved!

i have visited brooklyn strategist and it is almost always filled btw. wish i had that place when i was younger; they're doing the lord's work

I hate that "encumbrance" made it into video game RPGs and shooters. Trying to shoot your way out of an abandoned factory wearing power armor in Fallout 4 only to slow to a crawl because you picked up a fucking screwdriver is some baloney.

Yes, but what about the masochists and the survival modders (possibly the same people)?

make it an option for the survival mode of the game and just remove it from the regular mode

I think the problem with Fallout (with the caveat that I haven't played Fallout 4) is that they both added the baggage of first person shooters and doubled down on the amount of junk/crafting. I'd rather have crafting require fewer, more unique items rather than having to store up a myriad of currency/material substitutes

Let's just say that I have spent more than an hour at a time in Fallout 4 just looking for aluminum and ceramics.

Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas was amazing, on par with the original two and in some ways even better, but I can't bring myself to play either 3 or 4 due to Bethesda's involvement.

This (longish) review sums it up rather nicely: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10267

whoops i confused brooklyn strategist with brooklyn gamelab... different thing!
https://brooklyngamelab.com/

compleat strategist on 33rd st is one of the most pleasant places in new york city imo

I broke down
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNfp4SwU8AAXnDO.jpg:large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNfp4SwU8AAXnDO.jpg:large

After plowing through the mountains of rules I had forgotten I'm beginning to be a little skeptical that my wife and daughter's stated enthusiasm for it will not wane when confronted with just how fucking *long* everything takes

nice, hope it works out

personally i thought the campaign included in the box was really cool, though i wish i knew more about the forgotten realms.

for whatever reason i lasted about two weeks with the rules in the box, then broke down and picked up player and dm guides and monster manual

i still haven't bought any of the adventure books (especially interested in tales from yawning portal and curse of strahd) because we were still working on the starter set campaign when it just kind of petered out (did i mention the campaign is really cool?)

i did pick up voio's guide to monsters, which was great for fleshing out encounters

excited for xanathar's guide to everything, which i hope will get me up to speed on forgotten realms

the books are fucking *expensive* though. sorry independent game shop, i'm headed to amazon.

the adventure does look pretty cool, it just reminded me that "oh yeah this is not a game you pick up, read the rules, and then play for an hour", it's way more involved than that.

I went over the character sheets with my daughter (often stopping to look up stuff I didn't remember) and she seems interested, she v much likes the storytelling aspect of it - but idk about all the rules and dice-rolling and math and shit

keep on the borderlands or gtfo

(not really)

some of my students were asking if i knew what d&d was

they were like "it's a boardgame ... where the board ... is in your mind!"

it was strange

xp there is a company (goodman games) that claimed to be working on a reprint of keep on the borderlands (original art and text) with updated 5e stats

supposedly dec 2017

http://www.phdgames.com/borderlands-goodman-games/

i often don't really trust third-party expansion material but i think the reprint strategy is a good one

i like that they obviously love the cheesy colored-pencils-in-a-high-school-notebook aesthetic of early dungeons and dragons

http://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-role-playing-game-4th-printing-copy/

but some of their other stuff seems like just a ripoff

http://goodman-games.com/5e/

shakey you can cut out all the rules basically and just do cooperative storytelling on the fly. most DMs ime use the rules to help arbitrate results but aren't wedded to every nuance in the book and are even willing to throw results away if they make the game less fun.

we started a campaign last night - i haven't played in years but it seems like a really good group. all young (early 30s) dads. homebrew campaign tho hopefully w/ lots of plane hopping so many we'll make a stop in forgotten realms / ravenloft / etc.

Yeah the rules are there for tactical gygaxians - go arneson, make that shit up.

+ seriously unless you're planning on playing w/ figurines, grid boards and measuring tape you're going to be applying all the rules kinda arbitrarily anyway. also i've never played in a campaign that calculated encumbrance or forced characters to "eat." all that stuff should be immediately done away with in any campaign.

yeah it's called role-playing not roll-playing maaaaaaan

tbh I'm probably just encumbered by teenage experiences playing w aggro nerd guys that just wanted to flout rules so they could have characters that were all 30th Level Wizard Warriors with vorpal swords and unlimited psionic powers and shit

xp

I feel like there oughta be a comfortable middle ground where you just have to roll for attacks and damage and attempting to do various things

i admit i like to min/max a little but i roleplay sincerely and play my character w/ lots of limitations. i just like knowing i have some mechanical nuke in my back pocket if things get dicey.

i actually got more into using the rules than i used to be, possibly because i play more boardgames than i used to, i'm more into math than i used to be and i'm less good at making funny npc voices (our pcs are getting worse at speaking in character too)

i found it was really fun just to sit around a table and roll dice. i was playing w some dudes i used to roleplay with in high school and i remember we used to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make everything *grand storytelling* but last time we played it was like three 2nd level characters trying to kill four goblins in a cave and we had a blast. the sort of back-to-basics roleplaying i hadn't done since i was in grade school.

Despite being into fantasy stuff for a long time, I never knew how table top RPGs worked, never knew anyone who played them (except the figurine versions) and got someone to explain it to me last year.

Hmm

Btw I read this on Sunday - it’s pretty good

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/rise-dungeon-master-gary-gygax-birth-dd/

(I mean I read the whole thing Sunday, not that excerpt)

cool

eyo late great dungeon crawl classics is fun but has a couple of things which acknowledge and require a degree of meta-gaming. also they want you to use zocchi dice. probably not ideal for outis's campaign ~~

there are other OSR ( = 'old school renaissance') -aligned products which have a lot less kipple than playing 5e -- if you want the same feel, and to get rid of a lot of the crud, but you're not comfortable doing it on the fly, you can use whitehack (which is 2e-compatible, though you need to adjust for THAC0) which is basically all the d&d rules you need in like thirty pages. it's pretty understandable by anyone who's played d&d of any vintage before without being such an offputting set of tomes for new players.

dungeon world is even simpler, everything is on d6, but a different paradigm -- it's a little more narrativist, a little less simulationist or gamist. i am tempted to give it a go later this year -- i have a handful of people who might crystalise into a group, most of whom want something like the standard d&d experience, and i want to move sideways from that at least a little.

one might also say a word for the mouse guard rpg, or the (unrelated) rpg-lite board game-ish mice and mystics, but this depends on your tolerance for mice and shit

also i wrote a thing about d&d and rpgs a few months ago which is ... better than most things i have read written about d&d and rpgs (low bar):

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-players-handbook/

i highly recommend shakey does not use a system that includes THAC0

oh, that was poorly phrased -- whitehack doesn't use thac0, but the earlier stuff he posted that he's familiar with does. if you want to use whitehack with earlier material, you need to adjust to whitehack's slightly off-kilter ascending AC system.

i really enjoyed yr essay

ty!

I think i understood 25% of the words in thomp's posts