Quote from: Tavis;584183If you want an economic system that can be consistently extrapolated to the most basic and concrete elements, you need to be able to control all levels of the pricing and to make necessary changes to the assumptions of the system.

While I agree with you about the need to control the economic system, isn't that exactly what such a hypothetical supplement would include?  Something like:

• New monetary standard
• New price lists (equipment, hirelings, upkeep, training, etc)
• Domain income per season
• Domain expenses per season
• Domain events per season
• Other misc. domain rules
• If necessary to maintain the logic/balance of the system, a formula for calculating XP from treasure.  (If 1xp per 1GP won't work.)

No need for normal combat rules, spells, classes, races, monsters, et cetera in such a hypothetical supplement.

My general dissatisfaction with the standard D&D economic model (which I use, but handwave and try not to think about too much) is one of the main reasons I'd be interested in a domain management supplement, and a pop-in replacement is one of the things I'd expect from it.

EDIT:  I'm not against ACKS as a complete system, by the way.  I'm just thinking a separate plug-in supplement would be cool, too.  (And meet my selfish/personal need better.)

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;584187My general dissatisfaction with the standard D&D economic model (which I use, but handwave and try not to think about too much)

Haven't you read Paul Vernon's economic model from White Dwarf 29 & 30? He went on to show how to develop villages, towns and cities. He is the guy who wrote Starstone and is top drawer.

Quote from: _kent_;584189Haven't you read Paul Vernon's economic model from White Dwarf 29 & 30? He went on to show how to develop villages, towns and cities. He is the guy who wrote Starstone and is top drawer.

No, I haven't, but I'll see if I can dig it up.  Thanks for the tip.  (For no good reason, White Dwarf remains an untapped resource, for me.)

Quote from: thedungeondelver;584129Hey that's cool; re the module - it's been a long long long time so my memory of our exchange is very hazy so apologies for muddying the picture.  No offense intended.

None taken, and it was my fault for being so brief/terse upthread. Time to post was very short, because I was on my way out the office door to my lunch-time AD&D game

Quote from: Guy Fullerton;584192None taken, and it was my fault for being so brief/terse upthread. Time to post was very short, because I was on my way out the office door to my lunch-time AD&D game

I tried the lunch-time AD&D game but my daughter's preschool kept giving me the gimlet eye when I'd don my wizard hat and set up the DM's screen

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;584187While I agree with you about the need to control the economic system, isn't that exactly what such a hypothetical supplement would include?  Something like:

• New monetary standard
• New price lists (equipment, hirelings, upkeep, training, etc)
• Domain income per season
• Domain expenses per season
• Domain events per season
• Other misc. domain rules
• If necessary to maintain the logic/balance of the system, a formula for calculating XP from treasure.  (If 1xp per 1GP won't work.)

No need for normal combat rules, spells, classes, races, monsters, et cetera in such a hypothetical supplement.

My general dissatisfaction with the standard D&D economic model (which I use, but handwave and try not to think about too much) is one of the main reasons I'd be interested in a domain management supplement, and a pop-in replacement is one of the things I'd expect from it.

Yeah, after reading the 'must-see' linked thread, I'm not seeing it, either.

Economics touches a lot of the core D&D framework - if you look at First Fantasy Campaign as a snapshot of the primordial game, it's surprising how much of it is price lists for hiring tarns and donating to temples to gain XP, and how little is devoted to explaining what a tarn is or who these temples worship. At the point where you've pinned down all that stuff it is pretty tempting to say "let's fill in the remaining bits and call it its own thing", especially since a) monsters become economics when you assign treasure types and spells likewise when you consider spell research and b) you can assume that much of your audience is savvy enough to swap out those bits and treat what you are calling a core system as the supplement that fits their needs.

I'm also a believer in the virtues of labeling a genre, as I was saying above. I guess it's cool when Margaret Atwood writes SF without a rocketship on the spine, just like I want to support people who want to take a genre-emulation system like DCCRPG and add ACKS to it as an economic supplement. However this leads to some problems of crossed expectations, like where people want to treat hard-SF elements as metaphor because they don't have the right set of genre assumptions. Sometimes it's easier to use "we're playing ACKS" as shorthand for "if you want to hire a bunch of henchmen to scour the dungeons for you to finance your military campaign to seize the treasury of the vizier next door, that's totally OK."

As a side note, I just picked up DCCRPG to see whether the levels went to 5 like I remembered from the playtest period, or 10 as turns out to be the case. What a beautiful testament to OSR passion that book is! Goodman is the most economically rational RPG publisher I know - whenever I feel like quitting my day job to do this full-time I can count on him to sober me up - so the fact that he thought it was a good idea to pay for AWESOME ILLUSTRATION ON EVERY PAGE is a source of perpetual wonder to me.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;584193I tried the lunch-time AD&D game but my daughter's preschool kept giving me the gimlet eye when I'd don my wizard hat and set up the DM's screen

The campaign that got me and future ACKS co-author Greg Tito together started when I was dropping my son off at preschool and saw that one of the other parents was wearing a drunken beholder T-shirt from the Ram.

Quote from: Tavis;584197At the point where you've pinned down all that stuff it is pretty tempting to say "let's fill in the remaining bits and call it its own thing", especially since you can also assume that much of your audience is savvy enough to swap out those bits and treat what you are calling a core system as the supplement that fits their needs.

I imagine I'm savvy enough; I'm just lazy.  

Wait, wait wait: ACK is cuircular in its logic? How useless is that?

"Let X be € [4,7,88])"
"Here is my superiour economic analyisis: X will be either 4, 7 or 88, depending on circumstances."

What the fuck?

Also very weak argument saying D&D can't be reasonably done. It WAS already done SEVERAL times, without kiddie wheels...Magic Medieval Society: Western Europe...BECMI...AD&D DMG...Greyhawk Wars...Black Shield and lalala
as well as a VERY interesting TOME series on economy postings...probably by Frank Trollman even.

whoa the mind boggles at the weakness of intellectual boldness that seems to underly ACK!!

Still catching up on parts of the thread...

Quote from: estar;584018Although I would talk to the guy and try to get Lost Man's Trail on that list as that similar type of product to what Rob Kuntz wrote.

I *think* you're referring to the Hoard and Horde list here as "that list." If yes, then unfortunately Lost Man's Trail doesn't qualify.

I don't mean to disparage Lost Man's Trail. It's just that the Hoard and Horde list is ultimately for my own, idiosyncratic organizational purposes, and it's fairly narrow in scope. The fact that Lost Man's Trail uses the JG Universal System puts it too far away from the target set of games.

Unfair? Maybe. But it's not about fair

Thankfully the Hoard and Horde list is fully exportable. Anybody can grab the data from it and modify it to their heart's content, and publish a new list via google.

Quote from: RPGPundit;584172I can't disagree with you more, obviously.  The OSR that is all about re-releasing exact duplicates of old games and rehashing the same pre-1979 stuff over and over again forever is the stupid OSR I want nothing to do with; and fortunately, the majority of Old School gamers have figured that out now.  

The OSR that's released Majestic Wilderlands, Stars Without Number, Mutant Future, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, ACKS, AS&SH, DCC and other such things? That's the fucking awesome OSR I want to be a part of. Thank sweet Christ that's what's on the rise now.

RPGPundit

I don't know of an OSR that is all about rehashing and rereleasing the exact same anything.  Are you saying that making new spells, classes, modules, etc., for AD&D using the safe harbor of OSRIC is bad, while making new spells, classes, modules, etc., for AS&SH is great?  Or if Gamma World is cloned with Mutant Future that's to be praised, but B/X is cloned with LL, it isn't?

If you're talking about people who want to play OSRIC rather than people who want to publish new shit using OSRIC - that makes some sense to me.  I remain somewhat perplexed by people who want to play OSRIC in lieu of AD&D.  I can sort of see it based on the price of a new book(s) for AD&D and OSRIC, but even then not completely.  I would rather spend a little more for the original game.

Edit - if you're talking about how "a paladin for labyrinth lord" and supplements like that were published, yeah, I can see that too.  I have no personal use for those, since I don't use clones to game with.

I like many of the games you listed, but then again, many of them exceed the "OD&D with my house rules" threshold in my opinion.  I'm not interested in buying a 300 page book to get your 50 pages of house rules, with the other 250 pages being the game I already own, just rotated 15 degrees off center.

And unless you plan to write stuff for AD&D and would like the convenience of having a hard copy of OSRIC for use in staying within the safe harbor, as opposed to the free PDF, I don't know why anyone would need to buy a copy of it, either.

Quote from: estar;584031First off so we are clear, I use OSR as a shorthand label to refer to people publishing and playing older editions of D&D.  I am pretty sure that Guy is using OSR in the same way.

Another idiosyncratic thing: I try to avoid using the term "OSR" together with the Hoard and Horde list; the inclusion criteria (shown on the doc itself) is more deterministic than "OSR". (Edit: K&KA threads show that I wasn't consistent in that regard, sigh.)

Whatever anybody else wants to call it is cool, though.

QuoteThey opted for a low risk way, Mayfair tried tacking closer to the original rules and got sued for it.

Evidence for that? Google can turn up the primary source legal info regarding the TSR vs. Mayfair situation, and it's ultimately about trademarks, not rules closeness.

Quote from: Jacob Marley;584131Isn't this exactly what James and Tavis are doing?

I was referring to this discussion, not necessarily its subjects. I have heard good things about ACKS from reliable sources, so I suppose it is a good game - I just don't need yet another D&D nowadays (I have my own), not even with domain management rules (I have my own). And Dwimmermount, when it is released, will be a functional colour-within-the-lines megadungeon. So that is one thing.

But the other thing, I am bothered by the way people in the blogosphere are trying to build themselves into brands. And there is an odd, unpleasant feel around Kickstarters, some of whose reward mechanism have the stench of "ultra-rare gold-foil alternate-cover Batman" around them. You know what's good? Towers of Krshal is good. And that's a cheaply produced, dodgy PDF product written in Bad English if there ever was one.

And of course, the third thing is spectators. RPGs are not a spectator sport. It is a participatory hobby. Get in and sit down or get out and don't bother us. There are a lot of spectators, some hurling tomatoes and some daydreaming about what would happen if they were actually actually gaming. Things were better without them too.

I'm not seeing the requirement for ACK to be its own game either in that thread.  That it could be a supplement is evident in that it is acknowledged as able to be used with a minimal amount of work with other systems.  Once we get to "it's tempting to fill in the other parts and make it its own game" then I speculate that's a baser motivation that drives it.

All of that said, it isn't that ACK is a game itself that I find negative, per se.  It sounds like a comprehensive domain management system, and increasing granularity and cohesion to areas of the game(s) that were lightly detailed is a good thing.  But the game/supplement issue is a single aspect of some of the broad conversation points brought up.  I do think publishing new games ties into, and contributes to, the "group apart" aspect of the blogosphere, the groupthink and their self-promotion, at the expense of the original games.  

As an example of how new games could negatively impact traditional games, I'm guessing that the number of topics directly and mainly about D&D at The Mule Abides have significantly declined recently as compared to 2009, while topics about ACK now predominate.  I would guess the same will be true at the Land of NOD blog, with Blood and Treasure.  Why does that leave a faint aftertaste of carpetbaggery as compared to the original intent to expand, invigorate and promote (as opposed to replace) TSR games and others of that era?  It shouldn't matter - it's a game.  But it's also a label.

Quote from: estar;584031My feeling, again no hard data, is that for any given game or distinct market there is only a limited number of gamers who look outside of their chosen game system for supplemental material. (...) It is far more likely a AD&D 1st gamer will try to adapt a d20 adventure than they would a Harn adventure.

Funny. I hardly ever play modules with their intended systems because I am playing with gamers who are also GMs, so they know most of the official stuff for the respective system.

I adapted many many Dungeon Magazine adventures and AD&D modules to Midgard.
I adapted Harn, MERP, Dragon Warriors, Midgard, and The Enemy Within to AD&D.
I adapted RQ adventures to Advanced Fighting Fantasy.
I adapted AFF adventures to Légendes des Contrées Oubliées.
Last weekend I GM'd an old White Dwarf AD&D adventure ("Plague from the Past") with Das Schwarze Auge (1st ed.) (btw, the first time that I ever ran that system!).