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

[Sinner's Sandwich]

I share discord servers with a couple OSRtubers and interact on X with a couple more. From what I understand, nobody collabs with him anymore precisely because of shit like this.

I didn't know that he was an insane sperg. What a shame.

 

[Gingervitis]

I didn't know that he was an insane sperg. What a shame.

I mean, it’s less that he’s insane and more that even among people critical of WotC, 5e, and The Cult of Woke, he still repels people because he’s constantly talking shit about all three (which is fine), but without adding anything positive to the conversation. He’s a politisperg before he’s a trpgtuber

 

[Ghostse]

I don't understand OSR. If I felt the need to go back to the time before game design, I would just play B/X (which I have done). But aside from that RPGPundit is kind of an obnoxious polisperg who is to blame for many of the bad elements of 5e's design (as he himself will often gloat) so he is on my shitlist for many reasons.

No one understands OSR because it covers so much ground.
DCC (released by Goodman Games who now sucks tranny dick) is a high effort OSR that claims the OSR due to 70s aesthetics and their massive rule tome having typesetting straight from 1970.

OSE is literally just B/X with formatting and some rewording of rules (and supplements that cater to the creator's mushroom fetish)

In between you have Knave, LotFP, and White Hack/Black Hack which are BX/AD&D compatible system extensions. Basically Pathfinder to B/X's 3.5e. Because B/X is so simple, its very easy to rewrite and extend so you see a lot of low-effort.
You also have games like Maze Rats that use different dice.

You also see games that are just Settings; mechanically B/X but offer new classes, tables, etc. Again, given the slimness of the B/X rules its not that hard for your setting document to exceed the size of the OG rules.

There's also a bunch of "OSR Mods" to 5e like Torches in the Dark or even GMG's 5e Classic Modules conversions could be considered OSR.

From my personal observation/perspective, OSR has following (or at least attempts to accomplish these things)

1) Native or near-native compatibility with any D&D 1e/BX module released under TSR. Even if they don't use the exact Five Saves, they either say what they've been renamed or provide a "This save maps to this value" simple conversion. Monsters are tracked with HD.
2) Lower PC survivability; a step away from 3e's "superheroes". not just save-or-die effects. But Even high level characters are vulnerable if overwhelmed and character death is to be expected.
3) "70s aesthetic" - an appeal to nostaligia via art and theme. This is very problematic now, so you see a lot of gooners (Venger Satanis) trying to hide their perversions behind "Its Gonzo 70s Heavy Metal".
4) Combat that is quick, deadly and focuses more on strategy than tactics. Its not about positioning minis and using measuring tape/counting squares to figure out exactly how far you can get, its more "I run to the cluster of rocks over there". I'd probably include "enemies have morale" on there, but I think that'd getting into hair-splitting territory.
5) High degree of randomness, from encounter tables to rolled stats, to random spell effects.
6) Lack of skills/skill points/skill checks. I'm somewhat hesitant to include this one because even B/X rogue has skill THEY'RE CALLED ABILITIES, MOM GAWD and most OSE systems include a list of things that classes are good at even if its very general. but its not to a PF/3e system where you pick skills from a list and assign points. And there's usually no "DC10" checks, its usually percentile. And that leads us to
7) Movement away from "Keywords" and towards "General Terms". Its not OSE without rules lawyers slap fights over ambiguous language. Unlike (especially) 4e and 5e, there isn't a focus on keywords or stacking specific words to clarifiy how armor is classified or what is made of metal.

Castles and Crusades

I don't really considering C&C OSR because its more in the vein of 3e. Same with Basic Fantasy. Though I guess with the march of time....3e is almost old enough to rent a car.

 

[FatR]

Bit of a shower thought. All the complaints about 5e turning DnD into fantasy super heroes are arguably things that started in 3e or even ADnD. Powerful PCs that are difficult to kill. Having a lot of abilities on their sheet to solve problems. A game focused on individual combat instead of relying of hirelings and retainers. Spells and abilities that trivialize dungeon mechanics like fly and dark vision. Characters that reach a point where low level monsters are no longer a threat in 1 on 1 combat. All this kind of stuff was present in PathFinder, and seems to be true in ADnD as well from what I've heard of that game.

DnD was about fantasy superheroes from the beginning. Peak opponents from lower-powered fantasy books, like nazgul from LotR or the troll from Three Hearts and Three Lions served as inspiration for mid-tier DnD monsters. You were expected to slice and dice tyrannosauruses. 12-feet tall giants appeared in squads, often accompanied by their monster pets. There were combat stats for gods. Even gritty low-to-mid-level adventures at times expected you to fight and beat dozens of grunts.

At the same time, DnD also was about crawling dungeons for a few gold coins and day-to-day survival in a very hostile world, where characters dropped dead regularly and were quickly replaced. And it had rather few distinct steps from the latter state to the former. There also were other snags, easily explainable by how raw and unpolished early DnD was, like many spells, even low-level ones, being powerful enough to bypass whole types of plots, and the game not always taking that into account.

For the same reason the game also did not do a good enough job to explain where one playstyle ended and another began. The classic example is followers being granted right about at the level where finding any use for a bunch of low-level mooks, who cannot hurt majority of the things you fight at all, requires some creativity.

Both later editions and copycats of the game, however, tend to abandon this massive ambition of being the ultimate fantasy kitchen sink, and tend to cram the game into one niche or the other, when they have any ambition at all besides "being DnD". 3E was about the last edition which gave the seruous thought to both, and even then, even though it had somewhat reasonable rules for navigating monster-infested caverns with a torch, early and easy availability of healing and utility spells impacted its ability to reproduce low-level adventures.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I don't understand OSR. If I felt the need to go back to the time before game design, I would just play B/X (which I have done). But aside from that RPGPundit is kind of an obnoxious polisperg who is to blame for many of the bad elements of 5e's design (as he himself will often gloat) so he is on my shitlist for many reasons.

OSR has some great ideas on paper, but as Yahtzee said, paper is weak and goes transparent when you get grease on it.

What I like about OSR is some of their dungeon design. Their book layouts and editing is fantastic, which is why I like OSE so much. And old school games have great adventures vs newer games that are railroads beholden to lore. I think it's telling the best Paizo module is a blatant rip off of Barrowmaze. "Here's a set up and a sandbox, go play in it" is a great way to design an adventure. I also like the openness and creative, homegrown spirit of OSR.

However, the problem with OSR is nobody actually plays it, and with good reason. I hate OSRs obsession with meat grinders (more on that later) and instant character death. Be it save or die traps, monsters that do ludacris damage, or simple spell backlash results. That's before the problems of getting people away from 5e in general.

3) "70s aesthetic" - an appeal to nostaligia via art and theme. This is very problematic now, so you see a lot of gooners (Venger Satanis) trying to hide their perversions behind "Its Gonzo 70s Heavy Metal".

This kind of opinion is becoming a problem in video games. You have social justice wokeshit that doesn't offend anyone provided they have no taste, like DnD non-binary prom night, but at the same time things that would've been considered milqutoast back in the day are treated as "degenerate" and "coombrained" by the tradcuck right.

The same people who tell stories about how DnD was the edgy book with the demon on the cover and had a topless medusa, are now running to the fainting couch when a OSR game shows a bit of cleavage.

Both later editions and copycats of the game, however, tend to abandon this massive ambition of being the ultimate fantasy kitchen sink, and tend to cram the game into one niche or the other,

I had no idea DnD did both. It was always a slap fight between mordern "super hero" players (me) and those that demanded the game be a historical simulation (the HEMA guy I've ranted about previous). And while some is done in jest, I always felt there was some social desirability bias going on, since the games people played (super heroes) always clashed with their stated claims of realism.

I think it's a good thing the games split, because it marks a clear delineation between them.

Ironically, despite the HEMA types having a hatred for "degeneracy" and having a love of older games, my experience has been that the simplicity of older games lends itself far better to degeneracy.

 

[Gingervitis]

but at the same time things that would've been considered milqutoast back in the day are treated as "degenerate" and "coombrained" by the tradcuck right.

Maybe it’s because I’m a degenerate coombrain who intentionally follows other degenerate coombrains, but I don’t really notice the lack of cleavage when it comes to OSR. If anything, I see more people begging for characters to wear something that would at least shock a Victorian grandma. Hell, Macris (the guy behind ACKS) made a pretty reasonable argument as to why a woman would be more likely to wear skimpy clothes in a fantasy setting.

https://x.com/archon/status/1791995299281477830?s=46&t=mkKyoS71bbncG8jCUFBAUQ

Fellow #rpg #simulationists, if your fantasy world is realistic, it will inevitably include hot sorceresses dressed in revealing and provocative outfits.

Consider:
1. In countries that offer equal rights to women, some of the women choose to dress revealingly. This has been proven by social science and also by my Instagram account.

1a. When filters and plastic surgery become available, more women choose (or feel forced by peer pressure) to maximize their appearance. That's an empirically verifiable fact (and apparently contributing to a decline in women's mental health, but that's neither here nor there).

2. In countries that oppose equal rights for women, most of the women choose or are forced to dress more modestly. That's also an empirically verifiable fact.

3. In the ancient and medieval world, most civilizations did not offer equal rights to women and accordingly in most civilizations the women were dressed modestly (by our standards). Again, empirically verifiable.

4. One reason women did not have equal rights in the ancient and medieval eras was due to socio-economic and politico-military conditions that were beyond any particular country's ability to change. Such factors included the tragic necessity for strong men to repel violence, lack of birth control, the awful rate of childhood death leading most women to have many children just to keep the population stable, etc. Egalitarianism between the sexes was a luxury that brute survival did not permit in many societies. This is a complex argument but I believe it to be true.

5. In a fantasy world where magic exists, is available to women, and is capable of both increasing the "firepower" available to hypothetical female combatants and of reducing the health risks of women and children, the historical conditions would change to permit more egalitarian social structures.

6. Whenever these conditions changed in the real world to permit more egalitarian social structures, some but not at all countries politically progressed to offer women more equal rights. This is empirically verifiable.

7. Therefore, all else being equal, in our fantasy world, some but not all countries would offer women more equal rights.

8. Therefore, based on 1 (above), in some fantasy countries, some of the liberated women would choose to dress in more revealing ways.

9. In fantasy worlds where magic is capable of evoking damaging spells and treating injury and sickness, it is usually also powerful enough to cast polymorphs and illusions.

10. Since illusions (filters) and polymorphs (plastic surgery) are available, more women will choose to maximize their appearance, especially those with access to them.

The inevitable and logical conclusion is that if your fantasy world is high magic, it is virtually certain to include a population of sexy sorceresses with fabulous clothes, fleek eyebrows, and hot bling.

Over time, being hot and sensually dressed will become a social signal of magical power. The Hyborian documentary Conan the Destroyer demonstrates this well with the outfit of the sorceress-queen.

Finally, if you don't believe me, log in to Black Desert Online and check out how the high-level female avatars are dressed.

In short: When I bring sexy back, it's #simulationist sexy.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I had no idea DnD did both. It was always a slap fight between mordern "super hero" players (me) and those that demanded the game be a historical simulation (the HEMA guy I've ranted about previous). And while some is done in jest, I always felt there was some social desirability bias going on, since the games people played (super heroes) always clashed with their stated claims of realism.

The difference is where you start feeling like a superhero. Even way back in the early, early times of BECMI, it was all in the name: Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters/Immortal. Basic , was levels 1-3, literally introductory material with characters being extremely fragile. Expert was levels 4-14, where the characters started out still very fragile but gradually went up in power. Companion was levels 15-25, Masters was 26-36, and then you had Immortals where your character was basically just short of divine. From what I could tell talking to the greybeards back in the day, you started feeling more sturdy and able to take on more foes directly in 1e at around level 9-10.

Up to that point you were heavily encouraged to resolve encounters without direct combat, or by forcing a large advantage at the start of the fight (that's what the Wizard's area or control spells were for). So even as PCs became "epic" characters, they were raised to be practical, underhanded and sneaky. Even at higher levels some things just killed you outright if you failed a save, which meant the best way to avoid being killed was to not even allow that effect to go off, or to come into the fight with outright immunity to it. So if you were going up against a Lich, you were heavily encouraged to bring an item that gave you outright immunity to shit like Finger of Death and whatnot. And the GM was expected to let you prepare to a certain extent. If you're going up against a powerful foe, it's expected you're experienced enough to know who to talk to and where to go to acquire some level of countermeasure to the enemy in question.

Anyway, with 3e dying became harder (that 10 negative HP buffer between 0 and dead did wonders for giving people time to prop you back up) and magical healing became more prevalent. While in 1e and 2e first edition a character dying (or being in a coma for 10-60 minutes) and the rest of the party dragging them off to be revived was relatively common, by 3e you'd only really see a death sticking if someone took A LOT of damage in a single attack at low health, or if the entire party wiped.

 

[titty skeleton]

Posting in my favorite thread to offer some comedy:

I couldn't help but cackle at the dude on the right's face.

What's the adventure about, you may ask? Well: African Nigga Hogwarts (Nogwarts to the erudite) produces some of the greatest wielders of magic in Golarion, and your one shot party of five are students! Find your lost teacher and solve a wicked mystery that threatens the existence of Nogwarts!

The best part about this is that the PDF is free and includes some pregenerated characters. Inquire within for some goofy character art and potential new KF forum icons.

The editor must have also found the cover art funny because the PDF uses that guy's face as a page header:

Spoiler

Honorary mention goes to whatever this creature is:

Spoiler: Tolkien could never

Thank you Paizo for this bounty of comedy. I'm sure this adventure about being students at African Hogwarts enticed many more blacks to the hobby, especially since it was released for free on Free RPG Day! I hope the thread finds this as funny as I did because discovering the existence of this adventure and that cover art made my day.

 

[Ghostse]

The difference is where you start feeling like a superhero. Even way back in the early, early times of BECMI, it was all in the name: Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters/Immortal. Basic , was levels 1-3, literally introductory material with characters being extremely fragile. Expert was levels 4-14, where the characters started out still very fragile but gradually went up in power. Companion was levels 15-25, Masters was 26-36, and then you had Immortals where your character was basically just short of divine. From what I could tell talking to the greybeards back in the day, you started feeling more sturdy and able to take on more foes directly in 1e at around level 9-10.

Up to that point you were heavily encouraged to resolve encounters without direct combat, or by forcing a large advantage at the start of the fight (that's what the Wizard's area or control spells were for). So even as PCs became "epic" characters, they were raised to be practical, underhanded and sneaky.

The other thing to note is that for all the drama about how brutal and lethal 1e was, unless you just have a killer DM, most of the lethality was to be completely mitigated by player experience and preparation. The lethality was supposed to only be there to encourage players to do said prep - get TPK'd a couple times and your 4th characters come back a little wiser and cautious.

Everyone makes bones about the first challenge of the Tomb of Horrors being a 50/50 death trap, but for a high-level experienced party no one should die. Finding traps is what hirelings are for While there's no way to know which entrance is the one that collapses and kills you, there are ways to try the door without the party being at risk.

This kind of opinion is becoming a problem in video games. You have social justice wokeshit that doesn't offend anyone provided they have no taste, like DnD non-binary prom night, but at the same time things that would've been considered milqutoast back in the day are treated as "degenerate" and "coombrained" by the tradcuck right.

I am not a tradcuck. I'd advise you read up on Venger Satanis before you start white knighting and complaining about the squares ruining your coomies. I call that muthafucka a gooner for a reason.

But that's the exact problem I'm highlighting. Everyone's trying to have a good time with attractive women in fantasy looking attractive, some good ol' ass & titties and why its good to be the king. And then some dude rolls up with some untextured blender models "Yeah, but wouldn't it better if they were all being gang raped by packs of goblins?" or AGPs doing the "I wish that was me" tranny simpfishing shit. Bcause its hard to gate keep out these gooners without just banning anything remotely titillating.

Nogwarts

I lol'ed

 

[LovisXVI]

Posting in my favorite thread to offer some comedy

Pathfinder is the example of an rpg going to shit purely through who they let in the writer's room. We could argue if the problems were there in 1e, but I think it is inarguable that the setting took a wild shift in 2e to a different tone and massive increase in faggotry. Shame really because it has a lot of things I like, like the fuckoff huge demon portal and techno Conan (though both of those got squatted in the move from 1 to 2 so another demerit).

 

[The Ugly One]

However, the problem with OSR is nobody actually plays it, and with good reason. I hate OSRs obsession with meat grinders (more on that later) and instant character death. Be it save or die traps, monsters that do ludacris damage, or simple spell backlash results. That's before the problems of getting people away from 5e in general.

I've been playing Adventurer, Conquerer, King System (ACKS) for a couple years now. It is very good. It's one of only a couple OSR games that's just trying to be a good game rather than primarily a vehicle for the author's weird obsessions. It's got a lot of crunch in it for kingdom management, hiring mercenaries, and local economies, but it actually does matter. A high-rolling party can't walk into a fishing village and buy all the plate armor they want. You really do need to know where major cities are, how to protect your wealth, and so on.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I am not a tradcuck. I'd advise you read up on Venger Satanis before you start white knighting and complaining about the squares ruining your coomies. I call that muthafucka a gooner for a reason.

I know the "magical realm" cliche exists for a reason.

My memory of old RPGs is limited mainly to fighting fantasy books, and I came to old DnD much later. OSR tends to have a lot of pen and ink art in the style of the old games. However, the content is more comedic.


I know which ones I prefer.

I get why. Old DnD was often played by kids, so they attempt to make OSR more kid friendly, and want to push the whole depowered heroes point by showing characters as goofy or doing badly. But as far as I can tell, old DnD was never about that.

The difference is where you start feeling like a superhero. Even way back in the early, early times of BECMI, it was all in the name: Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters/Immortal. Basic , was levels 1-3, literally introductory material with characters being extremely fragile. Expert was levels 4-14, where the characters started out still very fragile but gradually went up in power. Companion was levels 15-25, Masters was 26-36, and then you had Immortals where your character was basically just short of divine. From what I could tell talking to the greybeards back in the day, you started feeling more sturdy and able to take on more foes directly in 1e at around level 9-10.

I had no idea. I'd thought Basic/Expert/Advanced represented rules complexity, not tiers of play. I also had no idea about Companion, Masters, and Immortal tier. This also explains the supposed Gaigax house rule of "start at level 3".

Pathfinder is the example of an rpg going to shit purely through who they let in the writer's room.

One thing I never understood about Paizo is that multi part modules are written by different authors, and it shows. I wanted to run Outlaws of Alkenstar, but I had to take the basic concept and write it because part 2 and 3 go so off the rails in terms of writing it doesn't make any sense. Their wokeshit also ruins great ideas. There was a Starfinder space trucking module that sounded interesting in previews, until one of writers starting going off about class struggle and solidarity.

 

[robobobo]

Yeah their modules are largely dogshit. They're disorganized, inconsistent, make occasionally extremely bad assumptions about what the party is going to do, and have encounters balanced so poorly that a GM often needs to redo them or tweak on the fly.

 

[Ghostse]

I get why. Old DnD was often played by kids, so they attempt to make OSR more kid friendly, and want to push the whole depowered heroes point by showing characters as goofy or doing badly. But as far as I can tell, old DnD was never about that.

You're projecting the "Weird and Gonzo" shit which admitted a lot of OSR creators do onto the whole enterprise. (And Venger does a lot of stupid "gonzo" shit that isn't directly related to cooming as well, so the coomer/gooner and gonzo overlap is pretty high). Its a lot of weedlords (more 70's obessions) going a little too far into the power of their imagination.

Also "old DND was never about that". Are you serious? My Nigga, there was an entire TSR module about exploring a crashed UFO. The OSR gonzo fags are annoying but they aren't pulling that shit out of no where.

 

[AnOminous]

Also "old DND was never about that". Are you serious? My Nigga, there was an entire TSR module about exploring a crashed UFO. The OSR gonzo fags are annoying but they aren't pulling that shit out of no where.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Probably one of the very first things I ran after graduating to AD&D 1e from Basic.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Also "old DND was never about that". Are you serious? My Nigga, there was an entire TSR module about exploring a crashed UFO. The OSR gonzo fags are annoying but they aren't pulling that shit out of no where.

Agreed entirely.

Although there's a greater point at play here: specifically, that trying to say "old DND" was anything is a bit of a fallacy. Resources telling you how to play were very scarce back in the day (and the books themselves didn't help much), and not everybody had the resources or the patience to go looking for discussions online (first on places like Usenet and later on forums). Every GM did their own thing out of necessity, and TSR (and for a while WotC) catered to that by being pretty damn broad with the content they offered. So just like today there was no "one way" to play DND, some groups were dungeoncrawling, hexcrawling Gygaxians, others were doing more plot-driven stories playing out the novel bouncing around the frustrated writer GM's head, some were mudfarmers slaying giant rats with clubs from levels 1 through 20 because a single GP is the equivalent to a peasant's entire lifetime earnings, others were speedrunning killing dragons and being showered with wondrous items by their GMs.

Ironically, for how much smaller the audience at the time was, there was a lot more space to do these things simply because people didn't know better and didn't have people online telling them that. I'd argue a big problem these days comes from both the system becoming too narrow and everybody (publishers and community alike) trying to pretend it can do more than what WotC streamlined it for: a low-stakes power fantasy.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

I've been looking for a group nearby lately and it seems impossible.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

Also "old DND was never about that". Are you serious? My Nigga, there was an entire TSR module about exploring a crashed UFO. The OSR gonzo fags are annoying but they aren't pulling that shit out of no where.

Prehistoric Mystara was a space opera setting that you can go to in a Blackmoor AD&D module. You can also visit an underground city of evil elves and fishmen which is lit by glowing radioactive minerals in the ceiling, explore a volcanic island populated by woodwoses who worship a pig, travel to other dimensions to fight aliens and cave men. It's amazing how much loony OSR shit is just a remake of modules from a time when D&D gaming was supposedly just a warrior swinging a sword at an orc.

 

[LovisXVI]

Mystara

I will take this opportunity to promote Mr. Welch and his quest to introduce Mystara to the current generation, since WotC, may their name be damned, won't. https://www.youtube.com/@Mr_Welch

 

[AnOminous]

It's amazing how much loony OSR shit is just a remake of modules from a time when D&D gaming was supposedly just a warrior swinging a sword at an orc.

I had a mini-campaign that ripped off some Traveler rules for starship combat and did AD&D in space.