Quote from: Phillip;789739They $ue Regularly

Holy shit, this takes me back.

Now there's a blast from the past.

I do not want this to devolve into yet another God damned fucking stupid ass argument over stats.

Stats in OD&D are neither totally irrelevant nor totally dominant.

Deal with it.  There is this little thing called "nuance" you may want to consider.

Now shut the fuck up about it.

Dammit! You kids cut that out! Now you woke up grandpa from his nap again and he hasn't had his first beer today so he is cranky.

It's interesting this thread came up, because I've been thinking lately how incredibly fed up I am with minutiae in RPG's. When I was planning our current campaign, I was going to go Microlite-20, mainly because all my experiences with it had been fun. As a system it just...gets out the way. But....we started talking about systems, me and the other two GMs, and BFRPG came up.  At first, I thought, "HEY! This is GREAT! Even better than what I had in mind."

Until...

...discussion of add-ons...We went from running the game according to the core to running the game with something like 15 supplements figuring in (with some of those supplements having parts we DID keep and some we didn't).

Why does this happen? Players. Players want to have pages and pages of options listed, even though most of them have little bearing on anything they may actually play. It's like they have to have that stuff out there to feel "special," because, evidently, playing your PC memorably isn't as important as designing and mechanizing your PC to make them memorable (well, let's just say significant). And all the while, I keep thinking, "Shoulda stuck with what I first suggested."

It's my fault, really. I let myself get led into the splatbooks and pseudo-options and extra crap some folks just can't seem to play without. I should just said, "No, we're going light, light, light, because I don't want to have rules discussions about damage-type versus etc. I just want to play."

My fault....never again...I DL'ed the d20 SRD for permanent use. I have M20. I have the free core of BFRPG. I own LL and S&W. Those are the games I'm gonna play from here on out. Because everything else just seems like self-aggrandizement. "System mastery" can suck it. I just wanna play.

Thank you, guys ! Now, OG is all grumpy and moody and will not answer my questions ! ^_^

Quote from: estar;789727If you looking for recommendations.


You might want to take a look at Icons sometimes. It skill base and flexible but not detailed obsessed as Champions. Uses a 1d6-1d6 system so it a bell curve similar to Champion. The general mechanics is a die roll plus bonus greater than or equal to a target. The appeal is in the fact that has the same range and high level design of Champions except way less detail. It really easy to come up with rulings on the fly.

I believe this is what the Pundits uses for his Golden Age campaign.

Also you may want to look at Fudge and Fate family of games. Fate focus more on the narrative side of tabletop roleplaying. Fudge is more traditional.

Both are free to download. Both rely a lot of ruling on the fly, both are NOT number heavy. However they do uses the Fudge/Fate dice although they give alternatives to use.

I used them in lieu of GURPS/Hero System it works well with not a lot of fiddling. The downside is that +1 or -1 is a significant bonus in these Systems.

They are also free to download and check out.

Well, that CHAMPIONS game has died long ago, and nobody else wants to run superheroes.  I certainly don't, so I have no reason to look at anything.

I played a one shot of FATE.  It works okay, it was fun.  But I thought the whole "compel" system was rather metagamey, even for me.

But honestly, I'm not looking for any new games.

Quote from: yabaziou;789756Thank you, guys ! Now, OG is all grumpy and moody and will not answer my questions ! ^_^

Oh he will, but now there will be farting and the tonguing of pee-holes.

Quote from: yabaziou;789684Old Geezer, you have played OD&D and (if I have read you correctly) Dungeon World. How do these two games compare to each other (Are they even comparable ?)

Not really compatible, but they play very similarly... that is, "Just tell me what you want to do, I'll tell you what dice to roll."  I could run an OD&D game using DW with very little effort.

Quote from: yabaziou;789684And also (I know that I can have the answer elsewhere but I am interested in your answer) how different is OD&D from basoc D&D/ AD&D 1 ?

It's very different from AD&D 1 in terms of size of rules, but AD&D was used by a lot of people including me as books of supplemental stuff to be added to our D&D games.  The system itself changed only trivially.

I never saw Basic so I can't comment.

Quote from: CRKrueger;789758Oh he will, but now there will be farting and the tonguing of pee-holes.

I don't mind since it is a part of the OG's experience ! ^_^

And thank you, OG, for your answers !

Quote from: The Butcher;789714iPad's giving me shit today so I can't quite cut and paste the relevant passages of Larsdangly's post.

Lars, I disagree with some of the specifics — I adore random character generation, especially with systems like D&D, BRP and Traveller THAT combine randomness and choice; and I think Gygax, Armeson &co. were far better designers than most of my generation of gamers usually gives them credit for.

I'm inclined to agree that Sturgeon's Law is in full effect when it comes to game design, and that some corners of the Internet do cultivate an unhealthy fixation with exegesis of rulesets.

However, I feel the folks writing OSR game's generally do a pretty good job of hacking the TSR D&D chassis into new and interesting games, provided they have something specific in mind.

ACKS does a great job of smoothing out the numbers for a "hardcore simulationist" D&D with an eye towards movers-and-shakers high-level play.

DCC cranks the gonzo up to 11, crunches the power curve, and generally lays out a neat framework for gonzo, flashy, heavy-metal-album-cover D&D.

AS&SH treads some of the same ground as DCC but with a laser-like focus on the horror and Fantasy yards of the Weird Tales trinity (HPL, REH, CAS) and a ruleset that hews much closer to the Gygaxian classics (OD&D and especially AD&D 1e) albeit supplemented with a plethora of new classes and monsters, plus an amazing setting.

SWN is the most flexible SF hack for D&D out there, especially when the supplement line — covering cyberpunk, transhumanism, post-apocalyptic, space fleet battles, interstellar arbitrage trade, you name it — is accounted for.

Hulks & Horrors takes a different route to SF D&D, eschewing flexibility for a built-in setting with plenty of falir, and OD&D/S&W for BX/LL as a base.

I'm 100% positive you can find plentiful counter-examples, but I named these because I feel they feature genuine good design, in that a lot of thought and care went into each of these games to make sure they got to crank out the tabletop action we expect of them, under the aegis of the hobby's lingua franca that is TSR D&D.

TL;DR — I wouldn't dismiss OSR rulesets so readily. I wouldn't discourage anyone from writing one. But yeah, more setting and adventure modules would be nice.

This is where I part ways with the OSR. If all the OSR represents are new and innovative ways to slap D&D character rules onto a different genre, then it is missing the true unique and fun playstyle of old school games - it just shows that the OSR can do nothing more than "D&D in ____________".

Quote from: jeff37923;789763This is where I part ways with the OSR. If all the OSR represents are new and innovative ways to slap D&D character rules onto a different genre, then it is missing the true unique and fun playstyle of old school games - it just shows that the OSR can do nothing more than "D&D in ____________".

For every Stars Without Number, there are like 50 Delving Deepers.

Quote from: jeff37923;789763This is where I part ways with the OSR. If all the OSR represents are new and innovative ways to slap D&D character rules onto a different genre, then it is missing the true unique and fun playstyle of old school games - it just shows that the OSR can do nothing more than "D&D in ____________".

Fair enough. The OSR represents just a fraction of the RPGs I enjoy.

Quote from: Old Geezer;789757Well, that CHAMPIONS game has died long ago, and nobody else wants to run superheroes.

True. Generations of playing murder-hobos makes being heroic problematic for some of my local players. Most fun Superhero experience I've had the last 5 years is with SUPERS! It's exceptionally light and simple, but does the genre --especially "street level" and slightly higher -- pretty well.

Oh, it's not that so much as nobody wants to put in the work.  I loved the Avengers movie, but I'd rather run D&D than a superhero game.  My crew gets superheroes, we just would rather do other things.

I admittedly haven't played many Supers games (BESM, M&M, read-not-played-Marvel Heroic, Brave New World), but of what I have, I genuinely prefer MSH. It's fast, it's entertaining, it's adorably clunky, but it works.