https://boards.4channel.org/tg/thread/79521668#p79533931

>For those anons that do run 1E, why?
I used to run 1e RAW. the mechanics didn’t bother me so much as the player facing content. I love the mechanics of 1e since I love detailed and technical mechanics to really sink my teeth into and burn my brain on. I don’t mind longer, more complicated games with more mechanical depth.

However in playing 1e I had consistent issues with several of its core elements. The Monk and Assassin classes, for example. Every time a player played Monk he either went full weeb or full campy Kung fu movie. Monks are really easy to kill at level 1, so he was also a useless contributor to the party. Every Assassin PC also added more work for me as the DM to handle their “secret mission” shenanigans. Even if the player was good, the PC was an unneeded strain. If I had to spend every game banning Assassins, Monks, Bards, Psionics and other core elements of the game, why wouldn’t I just find a game that had less issues to begin with? 

My preferred game now is 0e. Because OD&D eventually turned into AD&D, it is very malleable and fitting for AD&D-isms to be stapled into it. I can take the mechanics I like about AD&D and fit them into OD&D seamlessly, without posting over the elements that I don’t. I can also use AD&D’s race and class system as a “fix” or “upgrade” for OD&D’s very vague and confusing explanation. 

I also enjoyed 2e. In my opinion 2e fixes all the problems I had with 1e, and provides a more streamlined game on top. It’s not perfect but it’s better than 1e RAW. Unfortunately the community for 2e is not there, unless you like playing with 40 year old+ grognards. 

I don’t play B/X because it is an intentionally simpler game. If I wanted to use the more complex mechanics in B/X, I’d have to house rule it on such a grand scale that it’s better that I should find a different system. For me, a blend of OD&D and AD&D is the game I want to play, but BX is for a simpler experience.

 I’m going to move my dungeon crawls into meatspace. I have sets of dungeon tiles and the Advanced Heroquest rules to help me quickly generate dungeon layouts. I can use my miniature figures as a PC party and monsters. I can use the AD&D rules for movement, combat, timing, etc. I can make character sheets and pull monster stats from the MM. I can do this all to run my own solo dungeon crawls with AD&D

Maybe after a few dungeon crawls I’ll move into hex crawling with this method as well

I bought Mage Knight and still haven’t learned the rules. I realize now because I don’t give a shit about Mage Knight. I just wanted the hex tiles. Hex crawling with hex tiles should be easy for fun and profit. In the event of an encounter, I’ll just move my miniature figures over to a battlemap and use the AD&D outdoor combat rules.

The relationship between OD&D and AD&D

 AD&D is what OD&D was starting to be. When E. Gary Gygax sat down to solidify his open notes of OD&D into the more concrete rule books of AD&D, he spent a lot of time explaining what he actually meant by the rules and pinning them with mechanics. Unfortunately in the process, he included a lot of extra elements that complicated or contradicted the rest of the structure. To really understand the game of OD&D, you must add to it cues from AD&D, or take AD&D and subtract elements from it until you return to a game that's like OD&D.

Most players, on the other hand, want to play the game their way, and rather use OD&D as a springboard for their own Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaign, with the elements they like and rules assumptions that they prefer. And that was the original intent of OD&D all along.

The difference between OD&D and B/X

 When I run D&D, I’m not presenting just a game with mechanics and rules, but an experience. The fundamental part of my game’s experience is that I want players to believe they’re interacting with a real world. A world they can maybe only see in their imaginations, and interact only by talking to me, but a real place nonetheless that follows real rules of a world that are similar to our own

And sometimes something as simple as letting players buy equipment as they go along is enough to shatter that immersion and remind them that “you’re only playing a game. We’re only here for a few hours. Speed it along”

And that’s why I will not sacrifice verisimilitude for convenience, and why I don't play B/X.

Because there are many instances where B/X sacrifices verisimilitude for convenience. Race-as-class, the length of a combat round, movement rates, item weights, etc. 

B/X is the game of convenience. It was literally written for kids to play, and play quickly.  It does not deliver the immersion that I want to provide.

OD&D delivers pure immersion in its rawest form.

OD&D + Greyhawk

 “If you’re going to play with Greyhawk, why not just play AD&D?”

Well, now I have an answer. Players don’t want to play AD&D, because of the stigma. But they’ll play a game that’s mechanically identical to AD&D, so long as it’s still OD&D.

To be fair, there’s a lot I don’t like about AD&D, which I’ve expounded about on my blog. So I guess now I’ll be playing OD&D + Greyhawk, which gives me everything I like about playing AD&D, and none of the stuff I don’t.

I love being an OD&D Dungeon Master.

This is my 200th post!

Screenshots from last night!

 

Setting fire to suspiciously purple fungus growing at one end of the corridor

 

And the miasma cloud they left behind

 

More fire

 

And an example of them stacking against a door to check it. Using Isometric maps with tight dynamic lighting in this way made the players behave like they were actually moving their figures. It was like a game of Pillars of Eternity or Path of Exile or Diablo but there was so much more interaction, imagination, and creative freedom.

 

But the REAL trick of the night was this. The players broke the wall that had seperated these two zones across a chasm. The idea was so crazy that I had to let it work. They then threw a lit torch into the other end to examine the place. What happens next? Do they attempt to jump the void? Who knows.

Playing with darkness and light on these isometric maps has increased the quality of my games 1000 fold

And as a final bonus: CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBE

Total 180

 As a kid in the 90’s, I swore never to play AD&D 2nd edition

Running dungeon crawls in 2e this past week has been the most fun I’ve ever had in gaming

Thing about hex crawls is, as soon as you run into any feature, you have to move to a new map. Even running into a wandering monster means that you must now move to a battle map. A hex crawl isn’t just one map, it’s at least half a dozen maps, to start.

At least the DM should have a map for every new location, if you don’t use battle maps.

 My personal belief is that for the author of AD&D 1e, the game and the setting were inextricably linked. That’s why there’s so much setting specific information in the DMG, and built into the classes. The author was just of a high level enough to know how to genericize it for his readers, so that they could port and customize it to their personal games

In fact that paragraph just gave me an epiphany. The whole reason I switched from playing 1e RAW to 2e was... I didn’t like Gygax’s setting specific stuff in the PHB and DMG and MMs controlling my game

Managing a large party on Roll20

 The maps and tokens are a godsend . Thank Alex Drummond for the Epic Isometric pack, players are too busy fiddling with their tokens to be distracted by things out of game.  Dynamic Lighting is a necessity. Isometric tokens + Dynamic Lightning make players feel like they’re playing a video game, and they will focus on the POV of their character.

To that end, players can interact as their tokens as well. They don’t all need to talk in voice chat, they can text chat their responses. Only the Caller and the DM actually need to use voice at all. The DM for obvious reasons, 90% of mic time would be the DM. While the Caller is organizing players or the DM is describing the world, the players can text their responses. 

Group initiative from O/AD&D is the only way to play. In Movement phase, all players move tokens. They don’t need approval. Just move your token to where you want to be. In the attack phases, everyone just rolls all their own dice, and the DM can pick successes. It’s so simple and fast. 

The end of my 1e campaigns

 The last campaign I ran before this one was a mix of The Village of Hommlet and The Keep on the Borderlands. I replaced the inner town of the Keep with Hommlet, placed the Moathouse in the Environs of the Keep, and scattered the Caves of Chaos all around the map. I then let players enter the Keep as normal, roleplay with the NPCs, grab adventure hooks and rumors, then head out into the map to run into wandering monsters, random encounters, and find the dungeons, the Caves of Chaos and the Moathouse.

This all sounds OSR as fuck, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Build a huge ass sandbox with all these elements and then the players choose what they can do to create an emergent story

But it was exhausting to run and the actual time the players spent crawling through dungeons and fighting monsters was about 1/5th of the whole session

bookended by trips to town, buying selling gear, calculating XP and gold, etc... So much time doing telemetry and accounting and almost none doing dungeons.

My current game has all player services available in a single tavern, and the dungeon is a short jaunt away. So much more time spent doing something and not accounting for it.

Also, in my opinion the Caves of Chaos are just not fun dungeons. The Moathouse isn't fun either, but it feels more like a real place.

AD&D 1e

I think it marks the last time I’ll run 1e RAW

Player Knowledge vs Character Knowledge, an illustrative example

 

The players literally stumbled onto the coffin of Snow White and the bodies of the Seven Dwarves, and started begging for Religion and History checks to identify them.

Did you not watch Disney movies??? The Halfling literally ran through their home, where I described everything in sevens.

It took them 30 minutes, but when they got it, it was with a rolling wave of laughter.

That's a Basilisk that they turned to stone behind them, using polished silver. So they were able to use their player meta-knowledge in that case. but I guess the rest of their imagination was a bridge too far.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a good test of player knowledge.

Generally, when it comes to reading the rules, I prefer For Gold & Glory. I read FG&G constantly, to learn and look up the rules of the game. I use FG&G as a straight replacement for the 2e DMG

When it comes to references at the table, I use the 2e PHB. This is because players have a lot of questions all the time, and I want to use the exact language of the text so as to minimize conflict. I pull the exact charts and tables from there as well, even though they're the same in FG&G.

I look up the 2e DMG once in a while, just to pull charts and tables, and text for rules lawyers

I really, really don't like how the 2e PHB and DMG split the rules in half between them.

Gygaxian they are not

How to DM 5e

 I finally understand how to be a DM for 5e. I must embrace my role as Entertainer, Storyteller, Railroad Engineer, Babysitter, and Live-Action Video Game. 5e players want to be spoonfed their "entertainment". And to get the most out of that relationship, I should focus on playing the game I want to play, the story I want to tell, the plot I want to run. The players can go through it at the pace I decide. And here’s the evil part, they love it. They will ALWAYS ask for more.

Today, I ran a 3 hour session of Lost Mines of Phandelver for a 5e group. Normally, when I run LMOP, I let players explore the town of Phandalin, do a short hex crawl on the Sword Coast map, and present to them options on pursuing the goblins or saving their employer or delivering the cart. This time, I didn't do any of that. Well, I kept the hex crawl. But otherwise I pushed  the players from encounter to encounter, with little choice in where they got to go.  And they loved it. They want another game next week. They "like the group dynamic"
Everything I know about RPGs is a lie. I'm Booboo the Clown.

I managed to fill up the group in under an hour by recruiting from a Discord. The players weren't technically mentally stable, but I think they were pretty average for zoomers. When I play AD&D, its exclusively with 40+ year old men. I have never had an AD&D group where the average age was below 39. This group was mostly college or post college adults. There was an almost 50/50 parity between the sexes. And they had all signed up completely at random.

 I'm setting up my second dungeon for crawling. I'm learning something: Its so easy.
Prepping for 5e is a process. I don't create a location, I create encounters. And those encounters can occur randomly and in weird places spatially, and each encounter is like a mini story with an inciting action, rising tension and dramatic climax.
I'm not doing anything like that in my dungeon. I just place a bunch of shit around that would be funny if it killed the players, and that's it. I can focus on crafting the location into something that's good. And its so fast. If I wasn't using a VTT, I could probably prep this dungeon in an hour before gametime. Including dice rolled encounter tables.

In fact I spent so long prepping TSR modules as well. The ones written by Gygax are all very complicated, even the so-called easy ones like B2, T1 or G1.

It's so freeing to just let go of the story and plot and sandbox and everything, and just be like "This corridor goes down 120 feet..."

Big Boy Pants

 I’m going to put on my Big Boy Pants and write my own encounter tables to stock my dungeon with, just like the homework Zeb Cook assigned in the 2e DMG.

On Thieves

 I don’t let non Thieves attempt to pick a lock or pickpocket. If a Fighter or Cleric were to pick up a lock pick, I would tell them that they fiddle around with it uselessly for their turn. A subtle pickpocket attempt, such as brushing by the coat of the intended victim, will automatically fail. Repeated attempts will alert the victim.

Detect/Disable traps only works on small, mechanical traps such as a poisoned needle hiding under the lock of a jewelry box. Unless the non-Thief specifically mentions looking for it, he cannot find it. The Thief gets a ‘I search for traps’ roll. Detect/Disable traps does not apply to a bear trap concealed under a moss and bush disguise. Anyone can attempt to search that 10’x10’ area and discover the trap, and there are a myriad ways to disable it. A Thief CAN roll to disable it and reset it to its original position.

Move Silently and Hide in Shadows belong not to the Thief, but the DM. Only the DM should know if the attempt is successful. Not every stealth attempt requires both. Other classes that wish to sneak quietly or duck out of sight may do so organically. Only the Thief is assured of undetectability.

This is how I run Thieves and I don’t understand why /osrg/ can’t fucking get over it.

2e drops the ball

 The 2e books have no random encounter tables! This is a cornerstone of OSR play! They have no random stocking tables for dungeon generation either. Random encounter tables by level were a feature of all core rule books going back to the original 3 LBBs. 

The 2e PHB and DMG each devote an entire chapter to Encounters, but those chapters only have guidelines for writing and general advice. The DMG chapter assigns the DM homework to write encounter tables himself, using the guidelines in the book!

Compare that to the massive chapter in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, Encounters and Evasion, which is full of amazing charts and practical procedures for handling this step of the game. And so many tables of wandering monsters. Or the famously good AD&D 1e appendices.

I strongly defend 2e in the OSR space but this is a heavy strike against it. The tragedy is that 2e’s 2d10 method, based on rarity, is a better random generator than 1e’s straight rolls, and 2e’s reaction tables are better than all the other games’. 

Dynamic Lighting

 I have to bite the bullet and buy a Roll 20 subscription, just for the dynamic lighting. The player engagement it results in is amazing, they become so much more immersed. I used to try manually removing fog of war, but that slowed the game down, made more work for me as the DM to shuffle about, and caused players to move passively. Combined with isometric maps and tokens, and it’s almost like they’re playing an isometric cRPG.

It’s sad but the best way to play D&D online is to present it as close to a video game as possible. I very strongly tried to resist this but it’s the sad nature of people sitting in front of a computer not seeing each other.

Theater of the mind is the best and most immersive way to play but it does not translate to online voice and video software. I’ve had too many players play video games on Steam in the background during my sessions.

MOMENT OF SHAME

 Out of all the starting towns I've used, I've come to use Phandalin the most and have started to prefer it best