Ranging Far Afield

It occasionally happens that I become hyperfocused on OSR. My attention zeroes in on D&D and all of its direct descendants. The term is vague enough to encompass anything the person using it should desire. Does it refer to games with a particular progenitor? Uh-huh. Does it refer to a specific play-style? Sometimes. Can it refer to a specific period of time? Sure, why not.

Even in the face of bouts of being hyperfocused, it has never been my aim with this blog to limit myself to any narrow definition of OSR. This post is a direct result of looking beyond where I had previously focused my attentions.

Who remembers this? I can't recall exactly when I became aware of this. It wasn't in the form pictured here. It was an advert for Arms Law as a stand-alone product. It was billed as a drop-in replacement for the combat system of whatever RPG one happened to be playing. In all honesty, at that point in the hobby, it was aimed squarely at D&D. RQ and D&D were the only two with serious crunch and market presence, and RQ already had a crunchy percentile combat system. It promised a combat system that resolved all attacks in melee with no more than two rolls.

It achieved this by having the attack roll also indicate damage. The system's take on armor was quite interesting, and still very solid in its conception. Simply put, heavier armor actually makes you easier to strike, but much harder to critically injure. You'll take more "exhausting" damage as you get knocked around inside the armor, but your squishy bits are more protected.

The second roll (if required) was the critical roll. It was based on the type of damage a weapon caused (slashing, piercing, or krushing), and a letter value based on the severity of the hit. There were separate tables for the damage types.

This isn't really intended to be about Arms Law, despite the amount of time I've spent describing it.

I had a very serious flirtation with Rolemaster, the unification of all the "Laws" into a single system. During my first great break with D&D, I loved RM's supposed realism, its ability to model a wide variety of character concepts, and the "nerd" value of using such a chart and math intensive system. I had some friends that were into it, too, and we played some. Not much, nor regularly, as we lived a few hours apart. Eventually RM fell into my regular ADD rotation and would get some attention every few months. Even that waned once I lost all my old ICE products. I never really worried about replacing the materials due to my preferences moving toward "lighter" systems.

One of the things I always loved about RM was the house setting for it: Kulthea, the Shadow World. There are a number of concepts I still love in this setting. The geography for one. I mean, look at that map. It makes me want to be there. The peoples of the world are often times isolated and cut off from one another by powerful flows of magical energies, as well as forbidding geography. There are world-spanning organizations, such as the Navigators, who have learned to travel using these magical energy currents. There are the Loremasters, dedicated to recovering and recording knowledge from across the breadth of Kulthea.

If you've read much of my ramblings, you know it is a sad fact of my life that I don't have any second-hand stores that make a point of catering to gamers. There is one used book store in Huntsville that is of any real use to me. There are actually a fair number of used book stores, but all save the aforementioned one cater mainly to used romance paperbacks. I sporadically drop into the Booklegger because they do have a very small game section (populated primarily with World of Darkness titles). Hope springs eternal, and I did actually find a softback copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay there.

You can imagine where this is going, and you're (mostly) right. I found a copy of High Adventure Role Playing, HARP, in there for $10. It is the older ICE edition, not the newer one published by the Guild Companion. I don't have a clue what the differences are. I believe the GC edition has a slightly larger page count.

HARP is its own game. It borrows from RM, even to the point of using it as foundation. It is not a "lite" version. I guess in a way it is to RM what Castles & Crusades is to AD&D (HARP is in no way OGL, though). It is a streamlining and re-imagining, not a replacement nor is it some sort of quick-start.

I still haven't read it all the way through. It claims to be complete. It contains stats for over 40 creatures. It contains six individual spell lists for the spell using classes, but there are some spells that appear on more than one list. There is a very serviceable treasure section, including mundane treasures.

Characters are a combination of class/level and skill based. Skills are all-important, and any character has the ability to learn any skill. Class and level govern the development costs of individual skills and when development points are gained, respectively. Thus, it is easier for a fighter to learn weapon skills (lower development point cost) than for him to learn a spell. He can learn the spell, but it will greatly impact his development in his chosen profession.

The skill list isn't particularly burdensome. Skills are divided up into 10 categories, with between 3-9 skills per category. The categories are important as they inform the types of things a given class is naturally predisposed to.

There are nine classes, five have spell lists, and thus use magic in some capacity. The class descriptions are very brief and setting agnostic.

The usual races are present, along with a unique system for mixed-race characters.

Ok, so I didn't intend to go into this kind of depth with this post. I just wanted to ramble about another game from my past and a younger cousin of it I recently found. If anyone wants to know more about the game I'll be glad to share, but for now, I think I'm going to get back to reading.

A New OSR Blog

One of my followers has recently entered the OSR blogging arena. Dienekes has opened The Gygaxian Bag of Holding for business. If his first posts are any indication, it should be one to watch. He plans on featuring Dave Trampier's art on Thursdays, which is nice. He also has a very detailed and well-thought out examination of a certain old-school module posted. Go on by and see which one . . .

Microlite20 RPG Collection

For the Microlite20 fans, this little piece of magnificence dropped today. It is almost 1400 pages of M20 goodness, including the excellent M74 Extended and M20 Purest Essence. This is the first update of the massive M20 Tome in 2 years. Do yourself a favor and give it a look.

The Microlite20 Rpg Collection - 2012 Edition

It Doesn't Get Much More Old School

If ever there was a one-sentence phrase to sum up old school play, this is it:

"My very first D&D character was a fighter. He was paralysed by a ghoul. The party looted me while I was still alive and used my body to wedge the door while they ran away."

This is the sig of one Bochi over on Dragonsfoot. He may use it elsewhere, as well. I just wanted to share it because it cracks me up and it really does have that old school ambiance.

Critical Hits in D&D

This post over at Tenkar's Tavern (excellent and highly recommended, by the way) got me to thinking about critical hits in D&D, any flavor, including clones thereof. As a player, and as a DM who likes to see smiling player faces, I love critical hits. Nothing is quite so exciting as getting your ass handed to you and all of a sudden rolling that beautiful 20 (we always yelled "NATCH!"). You may still get your ass handed to you, but that crit insured that the other guy knew he had been in a fight.

Of course, we handled it differently over the years. There were hit location tables, confirming crits, secondary tables with more abstract things than direct hit locations (Bleeder!), and the ubiquitous double damage. It was the double damage we generally used most often. It was faster, less fiddly, and quite a visceral experience to slap some jackass with 28 points of damage.

The enemy could score crits on the players, too, and there was always the dreaded fumble. This usually was simply fall or drop your weapon. Either way, you basically missed your next turn.

I'm not such a fan of critical hits these days, and I'll tell you why.

• D&D combat models results. It's roots are in a wargame, and a wargame is concerned with who wins, not how. Any sort of critical hit system intrudes on the model.
• Combat is conducted with a d20. It is based on linear probability, which means the stable boy and the war hero will crit 5% of the time. Now, I know that confirming your crit mitigates this, but who wants to fiddle with another roll? And have you ever seen a player in a desperate situation that failed to confirm? It isn't pretty.
• The roll to-hit is simply that, a roll to-hit. The only possible rationale for basing a critical hit from that would be to assume that a high roll (a 20) could indicate a hit to a more vital spot.
• To me, it really should be the damage roll that indicates a crit. I have no system for this because I do not desire one. I am merely speaking hypothetically. Exploding damage dice or something. I just think that it is silly to roll a 20, double the damage, roll like a 2, and end up with a "critical hit" doing maybe 6 points. A damage roll that indicates max damage is more critical than that.

I am an old-schooler when it comes to weapon damage. I love the idea of all weapons doing d6. So, and this is completely off-the-cuff as I type this, I think if  was going to introduce crits, I would just allow an additional d6. Maybe. I don't know. I just know we are trying to model outcomes and introducing subsystems like critical hits into the model engine are doomed to either fail or disrupt the engine.

The D&D Rules Cyclopedia

Any exploration of OD&D inevitably leads me here. As you know by now, I cut my teeth on the LBBs + Supplements, and went from there to AD&D. I never played Moldvay/Cook/Marsh B/X. In fact I've never held a physical copy in my mitts to this very day. The Mentzer BECMI boxes, though, is another story.

I used to buy a lot of D&D stuff, always trying to recapture the wonder of those first adventures, the halcyon days of youth. This was one of those purchases, made during a time when I came to the conclusion that I needed two things in my gaming: 1) Completeness and 2) Simplicity. I had already learned from 2nd Edition that I didn't want a million splatbooks and rules spread across 12,000 pages. (I'm an option whore, so I always want all the class books, race books, whatever).

Anyway, this one book had it all, and it had it all for 36 levels. It also had a charming, almost naive simplicity to it. Before it is said, I know BECMI is not considered as simple as B/X. I'm not prepared to debate that in this post (maybe in the comments), but one thing I think we can all agree on is that BECMI is much simpler that AD&D 1st or 2nd Edition. I even liked the race-as-class, because sometimes I think I tend toward too many house rules and feel a need to return to the source from time to time.

Sad thing is, I never got to play it. My group had become geographically challenged in those days and we only got together once a month or so. It wasn't my turn on the DM carousel, either. Besides all that, I doubt my group at the time would have played with these rules anyway. They were too advanced for that. By advanced, I mean they were into a 1st/2nd edition hybrid, with a cornucopia of house rules, Dragon articles, and whatever whimsy overtook the DM during any given session.

As should be plain over these last few weeks, I am once again tilting at windmills of simplicity. Thus, I arrive once again on the shores of Mystara. Unfortunately, I gave away my copy of the Cyclopedia to the 13 year old son of a (then) friend. He was wanting to learn D&D, it was his birthday, and I could introduce my beloved hobby to him in a single book. Besides, I wasn't playing from it anyway.

Enter:

A retro-clone of the Cyclopedia. I won't go into a review here (I'm not really qualified since I haven't played it), but I will say that this is a very cool game. Especially if, like me, you loved the Cyclopedia, but no longer have access. It is a free download here and come in three versions and two editions. All free. There are POD options, as well, costing no more than print cost plus shipping.

Since it is free, I feel comfortable recommending Dark Dungeons based on my simple read-thru. If you want a complete game, with a little more crunch than some titles, this won't disappoint.

A Question of Experience

I forget what I was doing, but the other day I directly compared the Fighter and Magic-User advancement schemes. We old schoolers were raised on the concept that magic-users start out weak and end up as the most powerful characters in the game. A quick glance at the table I've compiled reveals why this is. In almost every version of D&D, and the clones based on those versions, it requires fewer experience points to reach 9th level for a magic-user. In some cases, substantially less. In the LBBs, AD&D, and S&W Core a magic-user is well on his way to 11th level when the fighter crosses the threshold into 9th.

	9th Level
Source	Fighter	Magic-User
LBB	240,000	100,000
B/X	240,000	300,000
RC	240,000	450,000
AD&D	250,000	135,000
S&W WhiteBox	256,000	320,000
S&W Core	256,000	135,000
S&W Complete	256,000	100,000
BFRP	240,000	300,000
Labyrinth Lord	240,001	310,001
Advanced Edition Companion	240,001	310,001
Castles & Crusades	272,001	340,001
OSRIC	250,000	140,000

I'm unclear on the reasoning for this. The best answer I can come up with is that different designers/writers have different ideas on how magic-users should progress. They were all apparently pretty happy with the fighter's requirements from the beginning.

I simply can not fathom why the requirements for the magic-user were so lax in the LBB. Something to do with hit dice and a lack of armor, maybe? The only direct-damage spells they have in those books are Fireball and Lightning Bolt. Other than those, magic-user spells are utility, buffs, or just "magicky". So, maybe that's it. An OD&D magic-user winning the footrace to 9th level doesn't have nearly the impact it does when spells like Cloukill and Ice Storm are up for grabs. Not to mention that magic-users from those editions are well on their way to 11th level by the time the Fighter drags his sorry ass to 9th. That opens the door to Death Spell and Disintegrate (neither of which are available in the LBBs).

I guess that explains why it was that way in the LBBs, and by extension AD&D and clones based on those. It seems that other editions/clones woke up to the fact that with access to spell levels 7-9, not to mention many additional spells in levels 1-6, and that there are many more direct-damage spells. Magic-Users under those rules are much more potent and their progression to the strata that grants access to the newer spells should be slowed, otherwise they will definitely come to dominate the campaign, as well as the campaign world.

New Link

I've updated the link associated with the OSR logo to the right --->

The new link is an excellent write-up/graphic depiction of what several retroclones are actually cloning. I found it to be a very good intro when I first discovered the OSR, then I lost track of it. Now that I've "found" it, I am happy to share it with my readers. Thanks, Rockjaw, for such a cool, informative break-down.

Also, for the convenience of anyone interested, I have uploaded a copy the Old School Primer by Matt Finch. It's on my GoogleDocs (link at bottom of page). It is freely available, and does a fine job of describing what it means to play "old school". Definitely worth a read, even if you started with the old school games a million years ago, like me. Years of bad habits and games can obscure the essence of what made gaming fun to start with. I found this little document a fine reminder.

Redefining the OSR

Anybody reading this, do yourself a favor: do not think the OSR is all about clones. That's what I did. I convinced myself that the only way to get in touch with my gaming roots was with a clone. The clones are awesome and they do an awesome service to our hobby. They get a lot of positive ink in reviews for their "restatement and clarification" of the old rules. That praise is well-earned, because they do collect, codify, and clarify many things that may have been spread across multiple sources. But never make the mistake of thinking that the clones ARE the OSR. They aren't. Technically, OSR stands for Old School Renaissance (or Rules, depending on whom you ask). For me, from now on, it stands for Original Source Rules.

If you can realize and accept that supplements, no matter how many "Official" labels there are attached to them, are just somebody's house rules, then you can really dig in and find your roots. It doesn't matter what your OSR of choice are, get back to the core, the kernel if you will, of them. Then, from there judge the absolute necessity of any additions or changes in a glaring light. If it meets your criteria, then install it, but do so on your terms. I'm all for the D&D at my table being my D&D, but it should always be D&D. Too many additions, changes, and house rules and it becomes a case of "I like a little D&D with my house rules" instead of the other way 'round.

Irony

Irony can be such a subtle thing. This thought occurred to me whilest reading some forum posts about "What is S&W?". One of the staple answers to such a query always involves house ruling. Back in the days of 0e we house ruled. AD&D tried to do away with that. It was an attempt to cover all the bases. Not to stifle creativity, just to establish a common tongue, as it were. The idea was that if you sat down at 20 different AD&D tables at 20 different conventions, they would all be the same AD&D.

The real death knell for creative thinking in D&D was actually the internet. There have always been plenty of people willing to step up and create new classes, subclasses, systems for this or that, and so on and so forth. Back in the day, you had to wait for the next issue of Dragon to access these folks, and they never directly addressed your needs. You took what was on offer or you didn't. Then came the internet.

Consider this: In 1977 if you wanted a different magic system, you made it yourself. In 2007, you Google it. There are plenty of people who have already done the work. If you don't like one, there're plenty more. Their work is still considered house rules, but not your house. DMs (I prefer the original term, Referee) became lazy. Since the advent of AD&D they had been discouraged from deviating from the written word. Now of the intrepid few that did, many of them just used the work of the other intrepid few.

Then, as irony would have it, the internet came to the rescue. Games like S&W, Labyrinth Lord, and BFRPG sprang up. Not only do they encourage individual referee's to house rule and customize, they require it. And, thanks to the internet, they are in wide distribution among players who share their passion for such gaming on forums and across the blogosphere.

Long live the clones and the intellectual exploration they engender!