Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[AnOminous]

- A Bag of Holding

I was generally really generous with these because I got sick of jacking around with encumbrance bullshit and how everyone could carry that ten foot pole that always got used for poking something suspicious.

And how many characters survived?

If I'm remembering B5 correctly it is not insanely difficult and is a good way to loot your opening party up a bit, sort of like The Keep on the Borderlands.

I always went with the more stingy approach.

I only did this once when I overreacted to having run a Monty Haul game that completely went off the rails thanks to throwing in ridiculous artifacts from the original DMG. The players eventually revolted and were basically give us some swag, nigger, wtf is this shit?

My general policy in D&D is your first adventure should get you to level up and everyone should get something cool, not something major, but like a +1 or +2 to something that leans into their character's strength.

After using the prepackaged scenarios for a bit I would just always make a first adventure specifically around the set of characters to give them loot directed at the party composition.

So a paladin might get a cool sword, a cleric might get a batch of potions, a magic user might get a wand so he has a choice other than just casting magic missile at the beginning and then hiding behind the fighter, etc.

 

[demicolon]

The module contains the following loot;

“It’s 106 miles to Baldur's Gate, we got a full pack of wands, half a pack of magic scrolls, it’s dark... and we’re out of healing potions.”

 

[AnOminous]

“It’s 106 miles to Baldur's Gate, we got a full pack of wands, half a pack of magic scrolls, it’s dark... and we’re out of healing potions.”

"We can't stop here. This is Bat Country!"

 

[demicolon]

"We can't stop here. This is Bat Country!"

"How long can we maintain... how long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this lvl 1 Fighter? What will he think then... this same lonely dungeon was the last known home of the Drow family. Would he make that grim connection when my cleric starts screaming about spiders and driders coming at us in the caravan? If so... we'll just have to cut his head off and bury it somewhere."

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

"How long can we maintain... how long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this lvl 1 Fighter? What will he think then... this same lonely dungeon was the last known home of the Drow family. Would he make that grim connection when my cleric starts screaming about spiders and driders coming at us in the caravan? If so... we'll just have to cut his head off and bury it somewhere."

"I blew the horn a few times, hoping to call up a basilisk. Get the buggers moving. They were out there, I knew, in that goddamn swamp--hunkered down, barely breathing, and every one of the stinking little bastards was loaded with deadly poison."

 

[demicolon]

"I blew the horn a few times, hoping to call up a basilisk. Get the buggers moving. They were out there, I knew, in that goddamn swamp--hunkered down, barely breathing, and every one of the stinking little bastards was loaded with deadly poison."

"And what else were they loaded with? Gold and magic items... I must ask my cleric to hide all the good stuff from me, at least until tomorrow."

 

[Judge Dredd]

Sorry I'm late, but-

You make it sound like the OSR philosophy is "Put a nail in front of the players and then get mad when they pull out a hammer." Which is fine with me, since I don't respect OSR philosophy.

OSR philosophy would be more "Put a nail in front of the players, and if they use a hammer, the hammer explodes dealing 8d12 damage." and if you question it, the players are somehow supposed to be more creative than that.

The philosophy is, "Not everything needs to be a d20 roll on a skill list. Using your brain can be fun, too."

The problem is people get too clever for their own good. This is where a lot of smug bullshit meets vague rules wording, so people cast light in someones eyeball to blind them, or use the infamous pocket sand.

Does anyone actually do the legit Solo RPG stuff? Without an LLM? This might be the most autistic hobby I've engaged with.

I've been tempted to run my own adventures, simply so the hours of prep doesn't go to waste when people continuously flake.

I love this scenario already. I'm wondering how it came about.

Sadly, it's not as fun or interesting as you're expecting. Though now I want a literal mall adventure.

As for what the adventure actually was. Some day, I should just spill the beans on my spy campaign and accept lolcow status. But for that adventure, they were actually under cover at evil corps office. They had to get to the CEOs office and steal data from their computer. Evil corp doesn't want attention so they would detain them, and either ban them from the building or hold them until police got there. If they uncover any secrets, then their goal becomes to detain them, get information out of them, and make them disappear.

The main physical threat was rent-a-cops. Balanced by the fact that the PCs in this one shot were pen pushers and trainees instead of elite agents, and had limited equipment.

 

[The Ugly One]

The problem is people get too clever for their own good. This is where a lot of smug bullshit meets vague rules wording, so people cast light in someones eyeball to blind them, or use the infamous pocket sand.

I have a simple rule: Cleverness doesn't turn high-level spells into low level spells. Want to blind somebody? It's a 2nd level spell. Period.

 

[demicolon]

Though now I want a literal mall adventure.

You enter a hall filled with with stalls evenly spaced from each other. Various types of undead, looking hungrily at you but immobile, fill the stalls. A lich, pushing a cart filled to the brim with ghouls all with bored expression on their face, passes you by, saying "Good unmorning, Priests of Bane, how's the terrifying going lately?".

 

[Adamska]

I have a simple rule: Cleverness doesn't turn high-level spells into low level spells. Want to blind somebody? It's a 2nd level spell. Period.

Reminds me when I felt really clever with the idea of using create water to dry drown someone on land. I was so disappointed when the GM did not allow me to do that even though it makes total sense why it shouldn't be able to with being a weak spell like that.

 

[demicolon]

Reminds me when I felt really clever with the idea of using create water to dry drown someone on land.

How about use a Gate scroll to create a portal to the bottom of an ocean, facing the BBG of the module? Industrial water jet cutter at home.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Reminds me when I felt really clever with the idea of using create water to dry drown someone on land. I was so disappointed when the GM did not allow me to do that even though it makes total sense why it shouldn't be able to with being a weak spell like that.

Cast it inside their lungs, or in their brain.

But yes. OSR claims to encourage creativity, but immediately slams into walls like this that the DM has to shut down. In a way, Avatar The Last Air Bender was a blessing, because it means the whole "The human body is 80% water. I use control water to rip it out of his body!" type stuff isn't as clever as it used to be.

 

[VerySpicyOnion]

Still at it. Still experimenting with different systems. Played a bunch of CY_BORG. Looked further into rules-lite systems. Namely 2400 but I think I prefer Freeform Universal's advantage/disadvantage dice pool system.

Does anyone actually do the legit Solo RPG stuff? Without an LLM? This might be the most autistic hobby I've engaged with.

If anyone's interested in my rulebook conversions (Cyberpunk 2020, CY_BORG, 2400, FU) or prompts let me know.

I've played a few back when I didn't have a steady group to play with. The ones I've tried either rely on event tables or an oracle system. The ones with tables are easy but limited, they're like the rumor tables you'd find in most sandbox adventures, but each one is more detailed. Once you play them enough you'll get repeats of the same events though. Oracle games are more open ended but they can be an autistic slog. The most popular oracle game I can think of is Ironsworn. It has rulesets for a fantasy viking age, fantasy age of sail, and sci-fi. It uses lots of oracles to essentially generate writing prompts for the player.

Say you walk into the cabin of a derelict ship and roll your oracle, getting the words "Betrayal" and "Faith." You then use those two words as a writing prompt to decide what happened. Maybe this ship was filled with missionaries from two faiths and a religious conflict doomed the ship, or maybe the captain was assassinated by lovecraftian cultists because he betrayed them somehow. Then you flesh out the situation and characters involved by rolling on even more oracles, each time getting two words or phrases as prompts.

The oracle solo rpgs don't really feel like rpgs. Sure your character has stats and abilities and hp and rules for combat and all that, but they feel more like a sort of creative writing game. If you're not interested in writing a novel's worth of diary entries for your character and the world, you definitely won't have any fun. I've never tried using an LLM to help, but it would take my social life collapsing to give it another attempt.

 

[AnOminous]

The problem is people get too clever for their own good. This is where a lot of smug bullshit meets vague rules wording, so people cast light in someones eyeball to blind them, or use the infamous pocket sand.

I ran games for a while where most of the players were also GMs of their own games, and it was kind of a competitive practice to try to break the game. The general rule we arrived at was if there was a higher level of spell that did what you were trying to do, you couldn't use a lower level spell to do it.

Pocket sand, though? Completely okay. It's something you could do in reality.

 

[The Ugly One]

OSR claims to encourage creativity, but immediately slams into walls like this that the DM has to shut down.

Players trying to rules-lawyer every spell description into Power Word: Kill isn't an OSR thing, it's an "every single edition of D&D" thing. If you think this is some sort of unique OSR problem, I'm starting to doubt that you play D&D at all.

 

[Illumithotty]

You can't summon water into someone's lungs, or create light directly on the surface of their eyeballs, or reduce the area of heat metal so that instead of heating a square foot of metal by twenty degrees you heat their half inch earring so it's as hot as the sun.

Why not? Those spells are all relatively simple, which is why they only take one or two pages of a spellbook to express the wizard autism into useful terms and figures. Getting extra powerful effects requires extra autism for defining target, adjusting the elemental conjunctions, etc etc, which all require additional pages of theory and formula to properly express and more wizard chi so it doesn't collapse in on itself. You can't make a pocket flashlight into a face melting laser no matter how you focus the lens or wiggle the batteries.

 

[Ghostse]

You can't make a pocket flashlight into a face melting laser no matter how you focus the lens or wiggle the batteries.

That's a perfect example I will be stealing.

Cast it inside their lungs, or in their brain.

My rule on something like "I REVERSE CAST LIGHT TO BLIND THEM" is "ok. You have made a cube of darkness. The monster immediately recoils back a step out of the total darkenss, sees you through the dim light, and charges you with a roar"

A mage wouldn't be able to cast "Create water" in a place they can't see, so they can't cast it inside a target's lungs.

How about use a Gate scroll to create a portal to the bottom of an ocean, facing the BBG of the module? Industrial water jet cutter at home.

I have also read Goblin Slayer

 

[LovisXVI]

The stupid attempts to use a spell in a way that is beyond the actual ken of the thing is largely the result of lacking a spell creation system. If you want to do something interesting or neat, you either need to barter with the DM to add the spell or try to wriggle your way into doing it with something else. Rather it is better that you make a spell to do that specific thing after weeks or even months of research and development. Harnmaster has that natively, and it's a big part of why being a mage is fun, because you feel much more like a proper scholar than just a spell dispenser.

 

[Brain Problems]

In the middle of my depraved descent into CoC related obsession I've been reading up on Delta Green and now I'm worried that it too sounds totally up my alley. What are peoples' thoughts on it compared to 1920s CoC? Are there any adventures in particular that you recommend? Read something that said Impossible Landscapes is an incredible TTRPG experience.

The books looking lovely doesn't hurt things either. I know there are a couple of dedicated CoC/DG enthusiasts in here.

 

[LovisXVI]

In the middle of my depraved descent into CoC related obsession I've been reading up on Delta Green and now I'm worried that it too sounds totally up my alley. What are peoples' thoughts on it compared to 1920s CoC? Are there any adventures in particular that you recommend? Read something that said Impossible Landscapes is an incredible TTRPG experience.

The books looking lovely doesn't hurt things either. I know there are a couple of dedicated CoC/DG enthusiasts in here.

I don't care for Delta Green; compared to modern-day CoC, play feels much narrower, and the whole tone is distinctly more dour and not fun. CoC, even at its more hopeless, still has you as an adventurer of some sort, and as a result, the whole thing feels more enjoyable and easier to take as it is. DG always struck me as having taken too much from WoD wrt to the "feeling sad about yourself and the world," but lacking the disconnect that WoD has, it just ends up bringing me down. Anyway, for CoC, I always recommend Missed Dues, an introductory adventure for 7th, which I have run like 5 times. Has great pre-gens and is one of the few adventures that starts out convincingly about the mundane and slow boils the eldritch nightmare before dumping it on the players all at once at the end.