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

[Lightning's Heraldry]

It is really funny that for a community that was built upon personal and hacks interpretations of the original core rules of D&D they do this.

Their claim is that "if you want builds then play a different game". But I am not looking for builds, I am looking to let players do things like play old school Fighter / Magic User or Fighter / Thief. I am looking to codify progression past level 10 so that if someone wants to keep playing a character they can and still have something to gain by doing so.

If anyone here also plays Shadowdark and wants to share their houserules I would be happy to swap ideas. Apparently trying to do that with the OSR community would be a waste of time. But personally I genuinely like discussing rules, I like rules in general. I would rather a system include tons of optional rules as opposed to flippantly telling GMs to figure it out. It's always easier to not use a rule or modify a rule than it is to come up with a baseline from nothing, and having a baseline from which to draw also shows the original intent of the author. It shows a level of forward thinking that is appreciable, to me at least. Especially when those rules are well written or simply explained. I can understand not wanting a word salad or some overly complex solution to an otherwise simple problem. I said it in a post about "fiction first" style games some pages back but if I am paying for rules I want to actually get what I paid for.

 

[AnOminous]

Why are they so allergic to real rules in the core ruleset or houserules? These people are so obsessed with "stripped down clean rules" they act like reading a sentence risks giving them brain cancer.

My only real rule as a GM was "quit pissing me off."

 

[Manly_Brony]

Having something to do on a spaceship has always been a weakness for sci fi RPGs. Just look at Star Wars, in most scenes the cast is sitting on their asses while watching Han fly the ship. It's fine for a show, but boring for a game. Most RPGs have some busywork bullshit to give to players, but it tends to have little to zero impact on anything. Especially for more advanced sci fi settings where things like manually aiming weapons is pointless.

Star Wars does have something of a fix though: fighters. For every character flying around in a fighter you have one fewer person needing something to do on the party ship. They added fighter docking clamps as a pretty easy piece of ship equipment to get so you can just latch back onto the bigger ship and rejoin the party when there aren't space hijinks going on.

You actually have a lot of things to do on most transports if you're a passenger. You can seduce someone, brawl, duel, get into drunken shenanigans, discuss future plans, solve a crucial puzzle, read the Necronomicon, train in the Force, look for a nasty or harmless stowaway, whatever. It's the pilots who are left out unless they're in a dogfight, a car chase or are battling the stormy sea. But even they can join a conversation if there's no danger. One of my Top 10 TTRPG experiences was just talking in character with others for an hour and a half on a long bus ride before and during a dust storm in CoC.

 

[Ghostse]

Why are they so allergic to real rules in the core ruleset or houserules? These people are so obsessed with "stripped down clean rules" they act like reading a sentence risks giving them brain cancer. Genuinely word-phobic. I had 3 pages of houserules for AD&D when I used to run it because when I make a call I like to remember how I handled it so I can be consistent in the future. That can't possibly be that strange of a thing to be the case for others who ran older systems.

A lot of OSR-tards are the TTRPG equivalent of "Vibe Coding", except imagine if Elon Musk was like the inventor of vibe coding, an absolute master of it, and like a muslim attempt to twist his words to justify whatever shit they get up to.

I'm going to really give a heavy, massive "it depends".
House rules usually fall into to three categories:
1) Common interpretations of resolution for situations. Criticals do double damage, you have X rounds to stabilize a dying person, Invisibility spells work like this, grappling is just opposed str checks, taking crossbow expert gets you banned from the table, etc. Things that take no more than a sentence or two and don't add rules or mechanism but are just a book of commonlaw for your table.
This is the only good category, and often aren't even written down.
"Type 1" house rules are usually just addressed to new players in play as they come up or maybe in social and abstract manner. I write down some of my house rulings in a shared doc not because I'm expecting players to remember but so I do.

Then there are two bad categories, where the house rules are either so austisticly exacting or are absolutely not thought through at all. Often, as you said, a bunch of world salad trying to lock in a concept or just "vibe gaming" in the vein of Derek Dishaw.
In either case, if I get a book of rule alterations from a GM I'm expected to know before I join a game I'm probably not joining that game, or if there has been wiki entry ported into the game so Aiden can be a special Teifling Pisswizard with his own magical realm.

So while I get poo-pooing on house rules, those guys sound like dicks. Either give constructive criticism or say you wouldn't enjoy a game with those and move on.

Especially when those rules are well written or simply explained. I can understand not wanting a word salad or some overly complex solution to an otherwise simple problem. I said it in a post about "fiction first" style games some pages back but if I am paying for rules I want to actually get what I paid for.

Agreed. And I like thinking about ways to stream line game flow or such and its good to have a group of people to talk to about how attempts at doing X have worked out for them.
I mean I posted my world salad about the attempts to do "card decks instead of random tables" and its good to talk about what I was trying to do, what happened, and get feed back and thoughts on how it might be improved in the future.

If anyone here also plays Shadowdark

sorry I'm not gay.

 

[Lightning's Heraldry]

Common interpretations of resolution for situations. Criticals do double damage, you have X rounds to stabilize a dying person, Invisibility spells work like this, grappling is just opposed str checks,

I think this is really very normal though, right? All my biggest houserule lists have always been more of a FAQ than anything. More often than not I am also put in a position where if I don't write it down I will almost certainly forget too.

I have done extra content styles of rules in the past though. I don't think there is anything wrong with that as long as you understand what it is you are doing. I have seen a lot of homebrew stuff over the years that was just terrible though. I remember during the 3.x era where you would find just horrendously written monstrosities in 3rd party splatbooks or on various website. Giant in the Playground forums was more popular back then. But if you don't read the bad stuff or try to understand why the good stuff is good, you will also never improve at doing it yourself.

Tabletop games don't spring out of the ground, somebody has to write them. Those somebodies had to write the bad stuff before they could write the systems we now love to use at our tables.

Not sure why you are hesitant about Shadowdark though. Nothing inherently tied to culture war or politics in it and as a whole I think it's pretty well written and concise, especially for a more modern style ttrpg.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

subtarded?

Is that the basement below the house of retardation? If so, I'd argue it's under that.

 

[Rapier Ape]

Fellas, I am getting ready to run a Shadowdark campaign (which I expect to be rather short for a campaign)

I am looking to codify progression past level 10

So just don't worry about the problem because its probably not going to become a problem in the 1st place. You're putting the cart before the horse.
Another thing to consider is that there's plenty of talk across all games of how gameplay just flat out breaks down at super high level play.
Im currently running an ancient system and the Skills maximum caps are there because the rest of the rules as far as monster power etc rely on said caps. Which oddly enough cap out at level 10.
If not you get that those high level shenanigans like let's say osr style D&D where the PCs can pretty much rek anything and everything if the Monster Manual after level 7-8. Its saving grace is PC hit point gains are soft capped beyond 9th level.

But this is all just my opinion.
One actual good thing about having characters capped is you pretty much know exactly what they're capable of. This is actually a good learning curve and skill set you'll have to pick up as a DM and thats finding clever ways to challenge said players that DOES NOT revolve around just plunking bigger numbered baddies at the players for them to get bigger numbers as a reward.
I refer to this as false progression.
Its the World of Warcraft model. I actually refer to that also as having Diablo Brain.

Shadowdark is also a new system. New systems get updates. New rules get added that tend to work with the core system in the previous book. Remember Basic and Expert?
Expert specifically had a write up with suggestions that pretty much boiled down to plunk what you want in there. Revert if needed.
Then companion came along with codified options for weapon proficiency (along with higher character level progression) and you could just retroactively add those options to any previous material.
If Shadowdark is a cash grab one and done then you won't see that. If there's larger plans then you will.
As far as multiclassing you have to figure out what you're shooting for. Do you want them sort of balanced like TSR era D&D or super powered 3.5 Gestalt types?

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

there's plenty of talk across all games of how gameplay just flat out breaks down at super high level play.

Aychtually, I think the problem there is that people expect the fundamental gameplay to be the same across all levels. "Go clear out the [tavern basement] of all those [giant rats]" is a formula that doesn't work the same when you're super powered figures of legend as when you were some nerd who knows Color Spray and the weirdo he picked up on the trail who wants to touch people with his Quivering Hand, even if you swap in [the prime material plane] and [neutronium golems.] There should be a progression from "lowly jobber" to "minor notable" to "regional player" to "major force" and so on even towards divinity...

Almost like you should progress from Basic to Expert to Companion to Master to Immortal, or from Adventurer to Conqueror to King.

If only there were systems for that, though...

 

[Lightning's Heraldry]

So just don't worry about the problem because its probably not going to become a problem in the 1st place. You're putting the cart before the horse.

Well I did that with my Stars Without Number game and that ended up running all the way to 10 and we had to figure out if we just wanted to continue with no progression or start a new campaign. We started a new campaign.

Another thing to consider is that there's plenty of talk across all games of how gameplay just flat out breaks down at super high level play.
Im currently running an ancient system and the Skills maximum caps are there because the rest of the rules as far as monster power etc rely on said caps. Which oddly enough cap out at level 10

I don't plan to change any of the cap formulae for the game in question. Something AD&D did with Deities and Demigods was allowing stat growth up to 24. I am more than happy to let stats remain capped at 18/+4 due to the way the system handles DCs. In fact I would like to place hard caps on Talent gains as well. Normally you get a random Talent every other level which is rolled from your class Talent table. This means by level 10 you will have gotten 5 Talents or 6 if human. Talents are things like +2 to a stat relevant to your class, +1 to hit in melee or ranged or +1 to casting checks. I will probably put a hard cap of +5 on any given Talent bonus and have that roll removed from the random roll table. I feel I am getting into the weeds here on system analysis though.

To address your point more clearly; Basically every edition of D&D has traditionally had issues with high level casters specifically. Yes there have been times where things like Dart Fighter abused some odd rule, but mostly at higher level the issue always breaks down to Save or Die spells, immense battlefield control or nested spell casting. Shadowdark fortunately does address this in what I think is a pretty novel way and I don't anticipate running into the same issues with high level play that normally plagues D&D-likes.
Even with that said I have run high level campaigns before and as someone else pointed out you just have to change your approach to how you structure challenges. So the worst case scenario is that I am forced to do what I have done many times before.

Finally I don't think Shadowdark is a cashgrab since they just finished their second kickstarter successfully. But I do anticipate some issues to crop up in the system itself. They have an official character sheet with built in level up function on their website. The problem I take with that is by default it allows progression past 10th level, gaining hit die and every other level a Talent roll like normal. You just don't get more spell slots or other features past 10. I expect HP bloat in players will reach a tipping point around level 7-9 where it becomes very difficult to challenge them without instantly killing them, so I don't want to give them any more hit die past level 10. This is an issue that also occurred in Stars Without Number, where because the game does not have extra attacks and because spells by default do so little damage the game slows down instead of speeding up at higher levels.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Bit of a power level.

It's order system was excellent. You place the order face down next to each detachment and players take turns revealing them so the game isn't one giant mess of their side goes then my side goes. Added a dimension of tactics that their usual crap lacks.

Oh. That explains a lot (powerlevel below). Does it work?

Asking because I looked into Epic Warpath a month or so ago and decided against it due to this mechanic. It sounded too dry and clinical. You basically choose orders in advance. Face down. They are move, shoot, and advance (which is a half move and shoot with no reaction fire).

Having something to do on a spaceship has always been a weakness for sci fi RPGs. Just look at Star Wars, in most scenes the cast is sitting on their asses while watching Han fly the ship. It's fine for a show, but boring for a game. Most RPGs have some busywork bullshit to give to players, but it tends to have little to zero impact on anything. Especially for more advanced sci fi settings where things like manually aiming weapons is pointless.

Star Wars does have something of a fix though: fighters. For every character flying around in a fighter you have one fewer person needing something to do on the party ship. They added fighter docking clamps as a pretty easy piece of ship equipment to get so you can just latch back onto the bigger ship and rejoin the party when there aren't space hijinks going on.

Starfinder, the first one, had decent space fighting rules. It was okay, and people had a lot to do. It was much simpler in practice than the rules made it seem. Though it was still far from ideal.

Why are they so allergic to real rules in the core ruleset or houserules? These people are so obsessed with "stripped down clean rules" they act like reading a sentence risks giving them brain cancer. Genuinely word-phobic. I had 3 pages of houserules for AD&D when I used to run it because when I make a call I like to remember how I handled it so I can be consistent in the future. That can't possibly be that strange of a thing to be the case for others who ran older systems.

It's an over correction to the lengthy lawyer speak of PF2 and 5e. Which was intended to stop rules lawyers but results in long pauses at the table.

OSR keeps repeating this mantra of "rulings over rules", ie. DM should make it up. But at a certain point it just becomes a non-game. Just a book of vague ideas.

 

[AnOminous]

read the Necronomicon

>read the Necronomicon
>pick up the Call Azathoth spell
>lose your mind
>in a fit of insanity actually call Azathoth
>destroy planet
>die

 

[Snekposter]

Real Steel

That was a surprisingly good movie, and I'm mildly disappointed we never got a sequel. Although to be honest it didn't exactly need one since unlike so many other movies it neatly wrapped everything up, so I'm not exactly heartbroken.

Also if you are a rat appreciator-enjoyer-degenerate, then get fuck-fucked since they're too busy-distracted making themselves dead-dead in a riot-revolution.

When are the Skaven ever not busy-distracted murder-killing each other?

 

[Adamska]

When are the Skaven ever not busy-distracted murder-killing each other?

They're in the middle of an active civil war to try and fail to cull Pestilens and at one of their lower points during the Old World era. I think we're right about when Skavenblight is done burning and it reunifies tentatively once more.

So yeah, they're too busy making each other dead-dead to really have big armies-fodder to kill-eat the man-things at the moment.

 

[Ghostse]

It's an over correction to the lengthy lawyer speak of PF2 and 5e. Which was intended to stop rules lawyers but results in long pauses at the table.

The issue is 5e doesn't stop the rules lawyering. It is the worst of both worlds in my opinion. 4e was clinical but until QC started to slip due to grog whinging, it was pretty unambiguous on what could and couldn't happen.

I can't decide it its better or worse than 3.5, where 3.5 has a lot of the same issues but because almost EVERYTHING in 3.5 was ambiguous the GM could just say "no, that's not what that means at this table" and shut down the whole mess. Much harder to do in 5e.

Dunno about PF2e; as mentioned before, I'm not gay.

 

[Overly Serious]

Does it work?

It is excellent. It adds a dimension of tactics that their usual crap lacks.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Basically every edition of D&D has traditionally had issues with high level casters specifically. Yes there have been times where things like Dart Fighter abused some odd rule, but mostly at higher level the issue always breaks down to Save or Die spells, immense battlefield control or nested spell casting.

Very accurate, and I say this as someone who's played a fair number of casters. Even in 1E/2E/BECMI a magic-user could bring a tremendous amount of bullshit to the table at higher levels. 4E sort of pared it back a bit, but 5E couldn't keep pace even with a large number of spells now being concentration-required (meaning you couldn't spam buffs/debuffs).

I've never had a problem with houserules as long as they're specified at the start of the game. If we're sitting down for a session 0 character-building roundtable, I really would like to know if we're using the Elephant in the Room 'modpack' for PF1E as that's the sort of thing that can affect what I play. Don't spring rules changes on players as a gotcha; that's just faggot behavior.

 

[Judge Dredd]

That was a surprisingly good movie, and I'm mildly disappointed we never got a sequel.

There's a twilight zone episode called "Steel" which supposedly based on the same story. I haven't seen Real Steel, but I'm guessing it's different despite the same concept. Robot boxers.

I've never had a problem with houserules as long as they're specified at the start of the game.

My issue with houserules, and especially homebrew systems, is that most people aren't game designers, and each house rule adds a small amount of mental load and potential for rules conflicts.

eg. I remember HEMA guy telling everybody about his house rules he wanted for a game of 5e he wanted to DM. He never put it together as far as I know, but he wanted hit tables to determine where you were hit, what happened when a part hit 0hp, etc. Basically making every hit nightmare of tables. Spells were added, changed, or removed based on what personally pissed him off. Not in a "I'm removing goodberry because I want a gritty survival game" kind of way, but a "I'm removing hold person because my fighter dumped wisdom and I kept getting fucked over by it whenever even a low level caster entered the scene" kind of way.

I also object to trying to house rule 5e into something it's not. Want a modern game? Play Savage Worlds, or Everyday Heroes, or Spycraft, or CoC, or fucking anything other than 5e. Want a grimdark meat grinder set in Dark Souls? OSR is right there. Shadow of the Demon Lord is supposedly Dark Souls like. I'm fairly sure there's a Dark Souls RPG.

 

[Adamska]

To address your point more clearly; Basically every edition of D&D has traditionally had issues with high level casters specifically.

It's not an issue when it's baked into the design IMO. There's a reason there's the term linear fighters, quadratic wizards, and it's been a thing since the 1970s. You sacrifice early game fragility in order to lay down the hurt later on. It was a reward for you not being killed either through good usage of your spells, or your party doing its job. Complaining about this is sort of like complaining about roles in Shadowrun, or the Clans/Tribes/Traditions in the World of Darkness; it's baked in and just play something else.

Shadowdark also isn't as balanced as you think given that it like all other OSR sloppa is based on the same source (5e LARPing as B/X ); all it did was just cut out the back half of levels, and wizards were already busted if you knew what you were doing once you got your hands on 3rd level spells. It just did the cunt move that a lot of bad OSR does by forcing you to eat shit on spell fumble tables and forcing you to constantly make caster checks to even cast spells in a way that isn't intuitive or fun given the fucking DC is 10 + spell level. That's a shit way of solving the problem; it's actually worse than what Venger Satanis did for his own barely-a-system. It also like a lot of OSR slop glazes dick-ass thieves IMO given their backstab is not nerfed.

As for homebrew, I use and cook it up it from time to time as the campaign or setting needs it. In particular I have what I call "early modern set", which is mainly just expanded equipment lists which included more fire-arms and a bit of tweaking to try and make them worth the price given how Pathfinder fucked that up.

Also included things to help speed up artificing in the form of workshops (so that downtime is a bit more paced fairly), more mundane weapon customization options, tools as a magic device since Mechanist from Final Fantasy called and it works for artificing and the era, and some others. I made a point to introduce them as needed, and did so since the world of Barsoom includes high technology as well as supernatural stuff (mainly psionic stuff).

It also was because I have two engineering inclined characters, and this shit helps get them invested.

 

[Bœuf Bourguignon]

Is anybody playing, or better GMing, Symbaroum here? I was a GM through the Copper Crown and after a longer break want to get in again.

But I really don't like the book layouts which results in constantly looking for everything all the time. And then having to think about rebalancing most encounters. For some issues I am to blame myself, since I'm retareded with the number game and authistic with provided information...

But I think the game could really benefit from a proper Update, especially the Core Rulebook.

 

[Lightning's Heraldry]

My issue with houserules, and especially homebrew systems, is that most people aren't game designers

So how do game designers becomes game designers? Where do they start? I agree most houserules are bad, most homebrew systems are even terrible. But if you blanket refuse all of them where do people start? I want more good systems to read so I accept that I will have to occasionally read shitty design as a byproduct.

It's not an issue when it's baked into the design IMO. There's a reason there's the term linear fighters, quadratic wizards

It has also always been dumb as fuck. Grogs will die on the hill that it's okay for wizards to become gods at 7th level because fighters were the better class for the first 3 levels. Like how crazy, Fighter player spent 5 sessions as a slightly stronger party member than you so now it is okay for you to save or die every encounter? Oh sorry you forgot Web and Color Spray are both save or dies in all but name.

Shadowdark also isn't as balanced as you think given that it like all other OSR sloppa

It removes almost all save or dies and the few it keeps you can only cast on low hit dice enemies, it retains only having one big spell up at a time, it nerfs damage spells extremely hard across the board, it never gives casters bonus action or reaction spell casting and it has a spell fumble table. The upside for casters is that spells are only tiers 1-5 and tiers 1-3 fumble tables suck but won't ruin your session.

The greatest strength of spell casters has also been consistency. Vancian magic never asks the question of if you can cast a spell, just how many times. Except for a handful of AD&D spells like teleport and wish most spells never had a real risk to them either. Forcing a player to ask the question of "is this worth the risk of failure" is a good response to casters just nuking every encounter.

You may be right, maybe I get 12 games into this and it surprises me as just a terrible game with terrible balance. It would be a surprise though. I don't think my eye for system balance is that bad.

Also included things to help speed up artificing in the form of workshops

A lot of modern systems seem to be trending towards "carousing" as their downtime action, which I am rather indifferent towards. Honestly downtime is something I think Burning Wheel does exceedingly well. In Burning Wheel wealth is abstracted and you have to check to see if you have to go get a real job sometimes. Having a high skill that is for doing jobs good means your downtime can instead be spent doing something else like training other skills. But you can't do either if you are injured and need time to heal. This means you have to properly manage your time and if you want to progress faster you will end up playing it safer or just generally mitigating risks. Makes the players think about every encounter a little more.