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

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
I absolutely agree with you. The petty autism of the OSR is really making me roll my eyes. Especially Jeffro with his insistance on autistic gatekeeping instead of succinctly explaining what 1:1 Gygaxian rules actually are and how to run them.

Gygax never said 1:1 time. Stop calling it Gygaxian, don't drag the man's name into this autism hole.

Gygax said time needed to be kept rigously as in "You need to know how many days it takes to go from city to city and not fudge time keeping*" this is to make things like spell research and item crafting mater. You need to track the phases of the moon.
He never, ever said anything about this autistic One day game = one real day shit and those/you niggers need to stop trying to authority appeal by misquoting him.

The closest Gygax ever got to saying 1:1 time is in the AD&D DMG when he said "If a player dithers too long deciding what they did on their combat term, tell them they did nothing and move on to the next in intitiative order. They should respond faster next time."

Also DCC has a very solid idea, and rules that work well in theory, but are completely fucked in practice.

* And you are meant to fudge timekeeping, but intentionally. If the players will never get to the temple in time to stop the Orcus summoning ritual, have the gods magically speed their journey. But address it as "Moradin Parts the mountains, and you discover a previously hidden mountain pass that shaves 3 days off your journey." and not "Umm, well, you arrive with 24 hours to stop the ritual and that's just how long it took. What do you do?"


the reason even a pessimistic asshole like me doesn't subscribe to the "everyone's turning into a woke dndtard eventually" theory is because it's simply a perception issue. there will always be people wanting a non-pozzed game with non-shit players (I'd say the majority does), the problem is how to find them. fuck, ever tried to get 5 people to agree which movie to watch?

Less than 10 years ago this shit would have been unthinkable, they'd have been laughed off twitter. Now they have supporters. Continue to not listen to the warnings, stay in the pot and boil.

You are huffing god knows what. The reason you could find players before was because they were playing the same general sort of rules and games. These are the people running games for the new wave of players. The people in these games, talking about colonialism and Orc Lives Matter, and Trans Rights being more important than you playing a game - these are going to be your replacement pool. They are trying to make you the racist grandpa, and nigger you have been warned.

I use Pathfinder 1E.

Do a little modifying, and POOF, fits anything.

That's sort of true with any functional system. The problem with PF1e is the same with D&D3.x, which is caster power ramp. You need to junk pretty much anything other than the corest of the core rules and flush almost anything pre-built.

The only PF1E players I've known are horrible munchkins more interested in breaking the system than playing the game.
 
People who try to say that Pathfinder 1e is more balanced than 3.x is smoking crack. It's just broken in different ways that the people who say that tend to ignore. Ironically the only strong caster that gets nerfed is the weakest of the three bullshit ones, Druid. Wizards actually are even more broken.

I've played both and honestly I can go with either, though 3.x is just what I use more.
 
I use Pathfinder 1E.

Do a little modifying, and POOF, fits anything.

Also sit down with the players on Day Zero, brainstorm over what they'd like to see/try what kind of game they want, then go through the character creation to make sure they fit into the world. Then we make sure each character has 1+Cha Bonus in contacts, and do random rolls for the contacts.

Which is how the PC's have a contact that's a spell component/charm seller with a Thalidomide flipper arm who was once a popular prostitute.
If Pathfinder was released nowadays it'd be considered an OSR retro clone. Because that's what it is. It took 3.5 rules and cleaned them up in a time when people were dissatisfied with 4e. That dissatisfaction with 4E was the catalyst to the retro clone primordial ooze that turned into the OSR through things like OSRIC and older games.

I think there's nothing wrong with the IDEAS of the BrOSR. Whether they are based on existing rules or not. I hate their attitude as much as I hate the OSR's general autism. But I see nothing wrong with taking what works. If I need to clean it up myself for my group's use I will. I don't think I am inherently an ubermench of gaming because of that. It is a WAY of playing tabletop RPGs. Not a doctrine that must be obeyed like the BrOSR think. Lots of players don't want to deal with 1:1 time and the busywork it can create. That's okay. There are multiple different games and ways of playing.

You could take the 1:1 rules. (Whatever you want to call them, I just call them Gygaxian because that's what the BrOSR use and I can't be fucked to find another name. Maybe just call them BrOSR rules. IDK.) and easily apply them to other games. I can imagine the intrigue in multiple Patron players in a VtM game. Or even add a couple high level Mages and Werewolves. I won't lie, as in all of this shit, it's easy to abuse if you have a doormat GM. But every dumb thing a Patron does needs to be okayed by the GM first. And you can just as easily say "No, you can't use your 8 dot Dominate to make one player rape another one. In fact, get the fuck out of my game." Hell the BrOSR right now are doing a Traveller game with 1:1 rules. I can see the big issue being spending huge amounts of real time crossing the stars. But that can be mitigated by their suggestion to use multiple characters as and when they feel like it. However, that is not mentioned in the rules. So they are no longer doing it RAW and thus are the same "gross nerds" they go on about playing DnD wrong.

I am actually in the middle of a 1:1 game starting today. So I can give some first hand knowledge of if this style works or if I need to make modifications. I have two patrons who are feuding over a tomb of the demon they both worship. And a group of 4 who chose without any prompting from myself to raid said tomb today unaware of the macinations of both Patrons. Could be interesting
 
Does anyone else listen to ""actual play"s? i.e recordings of game sessions?
I used to listen to some but the only one I currently listen to is Sounds Like Crowes and even then its only while I mow the lawn so I'm like 3 years behind on it. There are way too many of them now and from what I've experienced they are almost all 0 effort Discord recordings and can't help themselves from politisperging all the time.

I wish I could find some more less garbage ones. I go back and listen to those first 4 or so Penny Arcade ones that were audio only because they are still pretty good, even with Wil Wheaton doing his best to prove he's the worst human being after the first adventure.
 
because they remind people that there is objective evil, and destroying it is not only a moral duty, it's great fun.

Though I GM better with "They smell your blood. They want your flesh. They feel no pity, remorse, or much fear. It's kill or be killed."
 
That's sort of true with any functional system. The problem with PF1e is the same with D&D3.x, which is caster power ramp. You need to junk pretty much anything other than the corest of the core rules and flush almost anything pre-built.

The only PF1E players I've known are horrible munchkins more interested in breaking the system than playing the game.
The best solution I've seen to this problem was when we played an all wizard game and all agreed that we were going to power game and be dicks about magic as hard as we could. The GM responded with the same level of brutality. The end result ended up feeling like an Adult Swim show where we would constantly argue about magic along side various petty problems. The BBEG was always an after thought to us as the largest problems we ended up having to deal with were caused by our constant bullshit. We still talk about the game to this day.
 
Does anyone else listen to ""actual play"s? i.e recordings of game sessions?
There are way too many of them now and from what I've experienced they are almost all 0 effort Discord recordings and can't help themselves from politisperging all the time.
Someday when I have a lot of time to kill, I'd like to try editing a ttrpg podcast to remove the soy. There's loads of them out there that are almost good, but just can't help inserting political/genderspecial crap, and I almost feel like it could be snipped off with minor effort, it could be like a Disney release in China. The tough part would be listening to the soy in order to know what to remove. Maybe someone could make a soy remover AI?
 
You could take the 1:1 rules. (Whatever you want to call them, I just call them Gygaxian because that's what the BrOSR use and I can't be fucked to find another name. Maybe just call them BrOSR rules. IDK.)

Just say 1:1, real-time. etc.

Just because someone says something wrong doesn't mean you need to be wrong in the same way by repeating and feeding their dillusion. They are trying to make their spergpile seem 'authentic' by invoking Gygax.
 
The best solution I've seen to this problem was when we played an all wizard game and all agreed that we were going to power game and be dicks about magic as hard as we could. The GM responded with the same level of brutality. The end result ended up feeling like an Adult Swim show where we would constantly argue about magic along side various petty problems. The BBEG was always an after thought to us as the largest problems we ended up having to deal with were caused by our constant bullshit. We still talk about the game to this day.


Strangely enough, not always the best answer to your particular problem, even if it is the funniest.
 
Fireball.mp4
Strangely enough, not always the best answer to your particular problem, even if it is the funniest.
I think it's something you can only really do with a group of people you know and trust to be cool about it, but that's any game really.

The clip reminded me of the time in that game when the BBEG who called himself "The Dark Lord", which we constantly made fun of him for, did some villain bullshit to force us into breaking into a university and stealing some evil bullshit artifact he wanted. Understanding that we were being forced we boldly announced that we were "under duress" which allowed us to act without guilt or the assumption of consequences. This resulted in rival wizards getting fireballed and sent to the hospital, a separate incident of lighting a building on fire and the death of an authority in magical research who was very angry when she got resurrected. Despite representing ourselves in court we were sentenced to wizard prison, broke out, and fucked off.

We decided to just make our own city out in the middle of nowhere by going and scaring a bunch of orcs into hanging out with us. We built the entire town by abusing wall of stone and stone shape to make them flintstones huts. Fed them by casting stone to flesh on rocks and fabricating the rock meat into cans. Good times.
 
I think it's something you can only really do with a group of people you know and trust to be cool about it, but that's any game really.

The clip reminded me of the time in that game when the BBEG who called himself "The Dark Lord", which we constantly made fun of him for, did some villain bullshit to force us into breaking into a university and stealing some evil bullshit artifact he wanted. Understanding that we were being forced we boldly announced that we were "under duress" which allowed us to act without guilt or the assumption of consequences. This resulted in rival wizards getting fireballed and sent to the hospital, a separate incident of lighting a building on fire and the death of an authority in magical research who was very angry when she got resurrected. Despite representing ourselves in court we were sentenced to wizard prison, broke out, and fucked off.

We decided to just make our own city out in the middle of nowhere by going and scaring a bunch of orcs into hanging out with us. We built the entire town by abusing wall of stone and stone shape to make them flintstones huts. Fed them by casting stone to flesh on rocks and fabricating the rock meat into cans. Good times.
One, this game sounds absolutely hilarious and I would kill for more stories about it.

Two, abusing wall of stone and stone shape to build a town... isn't really abuse. That's what they're designed for. You lay out basic structure with wall of stone and use stone shape to tweak it.
 
I think it's something you can only really do with a group of people you know and trust to be cool about it, but that's any game really.

The clip reminded me of the time in that game when the BBEG who called himself "The Dark Lord", which we constantly made fun of him for, did some villain bullshit to force us into breaking into a university and stealing some evil bullshit artifact he wanted. Understanding that we were being forced we boldly announced that we were "under duress" which allowed us to act without guilt or the assumption of consequences. This resulted in rival wizards getting fireballed and sent to the hospital, a separate incident of lighting a building on fire and the death of an authority in magical research who was very angry when she got resurrected. Despite representing ourselves in court we were sentenced to wizard prison, broke out, and fucked off.

We decided to just make our own city out in the middle of nowhere by going and scaring a bunch of orcs into hanging out with us. We built the entire town by abusing wall of stone and stone shape to make them flintstones huts. Fed them by casting stone to flesh on rocks and fabricating the rock meat into cans. Good times.
Ah, that sounds like good fun. I'm with @Capsaicin Addict , more stories.
 
I finally got a group to play D&D B/X (actually OSE) with. Normally I wouldn’t mention it- god knows I’ve said that on here a million times that this is the time I’m getting a game. But I saw this while prepping module B11, an intro module for 1st level characters.
7FFE48FB-E376-4929-9800-04F346682D36.jpeg


For context, instead of good vs evil, B/X has law vs chaos, which is almost exactly like good vs evil. This leaves me with two questions.
1. I’m not alone in wondering why murdering the always-evil race of degenerate humanoids is a chaotic act, am I?
2. Do people actually enjoy the Orc Baby Dilemma? I’ve never encountered it as a player, so take this with a grain of salt, but it just feels like it would lead to an awkward argument and (worst case scenario) a lot of hard feelings.
 
The best solution I've seen to this problem was when we played an all wizard game and all agreed that we were going to power game and be dicks about magic as hard as we could. The GM responded with the same level of brutality. The end result ended up feeling like an Adult Swim show where we would constantly argue about magic along side various petty problems. The BBEG was always an after thought to us as the largest problems we ended up having to deal with were caused by our constant bullshit. We still talk about the game to this day.

That sounds like a game of Ars Magica, except without 40 year plans to create the ultimate adventuring mage who does not have to leave his lab to solve adventures.
 
One, this game sounds absolutely hilarious and I would kill for more stories about it.

Two, abusing wall of stone and stone shape to build a town... isn't really abuse. That's what they're designed for. You lay out basic structure with wall of stone and use stone shape to tweak it.
Ah, that sounds like good fun. I'm with @Capsaicin Addict , more stories.
Okay okay okay.

So the GM started the game at 3rd level and as three 3rd level wizards and a sorcerer pretending to be one (he had played a wizard in the last game), I had determined that without something to stand in the way we were going to get pasted should things go wrong while we were out and about. As a result I decided to make a necromancer and make my first and only starting magical purchase a robe of bones. This would at least provide us with some fodder I could send out in front to buy the party time to scream and run away if need be. The robe does provide a unique challenge however, that being you don't actually control the undead inside of it. My solution to this was to simply buy a donkey, a cart and a cage. Toss the whatever in the cage and then use my rebuke undead to snag it, then we have something to walk around for us in a pinch.

There are a couple things I should mention about this plan to help you understand my autistic wizardry. First off the rebuke undead power doesn't give a fuck if it comes from a wizard school and still runs off Charisma, this meant my second best stat was allocated to it. Wisdom received the 5 I rolled. It's also good to have a control undead as a backup because non-intelligent undead get no save against it. My extra necromancer spell slot usually had that as backup in case we needed to toss something like the Plague Ogre Zombie out of it. This would be done by being a dick about action economy and having a skeleton throw the patch freeing me up to control it. I later attempted to train a monkey to do this, it ended up just biting several people and destroying my apartment. This was mostly because I had watched some British documentary explaining the horrors of owning a pet monkey a week prior.

This served us fairly well until we could find a suitable replacement. This ended up being a troll skeleton, a scroll of animate dead and begging to use the alternate rules for bloody skeletons. We treated him like another party member and loved him dearly. That is a story for another time though.

Shortly after we were tasked by one of our wizard professors, who had made himself immortal and then decided that he wanted he wanted to kill himself, with tracking down and killing some great serpent in some lake by this elf forest. He needed the poison from it because he thought it was special and would do the job. I think his wizard collage forced protective spells on him without his consent too. By then another player joined us. He was a weird dude in person and upon hearing we were playing a fun wizard game decided to make a dwarf ranger named "Papa Phil" after that duck dynasty guy to bitch and moan about how "you can't solve your problems with magic blah blah blah". This joke works exactly once, and not that well. So off we go to kill this lake serpent.

Fast forward to the climax of the adventure where we sail out on a raft after listening to Papa Phil complain and threaten us with beatings, which we as players largely ignored. As wizards I imagine we internalized and added to our ever growing victim complexes. Sure enough, big giant snake comes swimming toward the raft with this ominous shadow moving toward the party. Being power gaming cunts we wizards all had improved initiative which we used to win initiative and promptly case levitate, leaving Papa Phil alone on the raft. To his credit he tanked fairly well but that serpent was pretty durable, enough to get us down to cantrips and Papa Phil maimed, bleeding and poisoned.

Being 20 feet in the air, well 40 by now just to be safe, affords you certain luxuries. One of which was when you toss your plague zombie out of your robe of bones you don't need to worry about casting control undead on it. It provokes, gets bit, explodes and the GM rules that I get falling object damage. This kills the snake and it sinks to the bottom of the lake. Luckily for us Papa Phil had plenty of it's poison all over him and coursing through his veins. Unluckily for the elves plague zombies carry zombie rot which turns things that get killed by it into another plague zombie. We knew this fact but were too lazy to try to dredge up the serpent, said fuck it and went home.

I mentioned in character that the serpent had to actually fail a fort save for it to turn. The GM rolled a die and started laughing at us without looking at what he rolled at all. Within 3 months the elven forest was a giant undead nightmare which ended up getting firebombed by the several wizard colleges shortly after, ending that particular elven civilization. Though a combination of believing his own lies and general delusion my necromancer convinced himself it was just a coincidence and people asking about him were being necromanceyphobic. Later on Papa Phil died and his player quit the game in a huff. I animated his corpse and declared him a doctor. Dr. Phil would later hold a talk show in our orc town explaining to our orc bros that, "You can always solve your problems with magic". A fine use for magic mouth.

That poison didn't work by the way.
 
For context, instead of good vs evil, B/X has law vs chaos, which is almost exactly like good vs evil. This leaves me with two questions.
1. I’m not alone in wondering why murdering the always-evil race of degenerate humanoids is a chaotic act, am I?
2. Do people actually enjoy the Orc Baby Dilemma? I’ve never encountered it as a player, so take this with a grain of salt, but it just feels like it would lead to an awkward argument and (worst case scenario) a lot of hard feelings.
I think it goes in the same "lawful good" direction where most people couldn't even explain what it means, and just boils down to their own opinion. so basically
1. they're not evil at that point, might be evil later but if it doesn't affect you it's arguable why you should care, plus it takes more intent and motivation to go all out than just leave the room and let them run. so what's that motivation and intent?
2. it's just another form of moral dilemma, and like most "good" dilemmas there are both pro and contra points to it (else it wouldn't be a dilemma in the first place), not to mention how it's weaved into the story and relates to your characters (a dwarf with a hateboner for orcs is gonna have a different opinion than a paladin whose god values life/honor/etc). the only time I could see it turn into hard feelings is if people can't separate fiction from reality and are unable to argue from a position other than their personal one (which given the internet these days or reddit in general seems to be way too common) or it hits too close to home for whatever reason (don't mean MUH TRIGGERS, people having issues with certain content is natural, wokeshit just dialed it up to 11).
there's also nothing wrong with cutting them out completely, not everybody wants to deal with it and just have a lighthearted fantasy romp.
 
Last edited:
That sounds like a game of Ars Magica, except without 40 year plans to create the ultimate adventuring mage who does not have to leave his lab to solve adventures.
Don't get me wrong, there were times we insisted that we wasted weeks playing house in our wizard tower that loomed over orc town. Never really described what was in there, just that we drank frosty margaritas and would planar bind bebiliths in front of shit as a lazy trap. Fun Fact: bebiliths do not have any spell resistance which means you can just shove them in a reverse protection vs evil circle after binding them and just leave em for a while. Someone pops that bubble and the thing gets out and tries to murder them. Doesn't cost a thing and the duration is instantaneous, which means forever.

Good undead material too.
 
Back
Top Bottom