I'm trying to decide which of those two is should pick up. I heard they are very similar. What kind of system would you recommend for a beginner in OSR?
Hi,
I'm planning about building a little home server just to keep some files and run a few docker containers (no need for kubernetes). I won't use any VM.
Looking at things like TrueNAS I can see the advantages but I also think they take out some of the customization options and install more stuff than I'll ever use.
I'm good at Linux (I've been daily driving Arch for years now) and I'm (almost) sure I would be able to set up everything by my self on plain Linux and a terminal. I don't mind spending a couple of days setting up my services and spending some time trying to fix problems that may occur.
To me it looks like that they "abstract away" the interaction with the underlying OS and just click some magic buttons on a web interface.
My question is: in the long run, do these OSes really help with the setup, up-time and maintainability? Are they worth this "abstraction"?
EDIT: Thank you everyone for your answers! I'll give a try to some of the software you recommended :)
At the moment I am running a sandbox adventure for my group based on Old-School Essentials. And I found out that I don't use many of the functions presented in the book. Not that I have to, but I feel more comfortable when I given a small toolkit. I also feel that I acted unfairly when I forgot some rule and the player's character suffered or even died. It's not fair after all. Also, my players don't like some aspects of vanilla system. Do you know any minimalistic system, preferably for a couple of pages, that can be easily combined with OSE? You know, not to redo the character sheets of already created heroes.
If I wanted to level up/advance/increase the difficulty of a given monster in OSE Classic, how could/would I go about doing that?
Thanks
Mechanically speaking, is there any significant difference between the classic version of Old School Essentials versus Basic Fantasy? I enjoy the clean and concise design of OSE, but I’m also on a budget and Basic Fantasy seems mostly similar in terms of rules.
Given Magic Missile has a duration of 1 turn in OSE, how would you rule if a player wishes to pre-cast the spell multiple times prior to a fight?
Would one casting replace the other? Would they both exist? Would any concentration be required to maintain both casts?
Hello,
I want to introduce my group to the wonders of OSR and I am planning on doing so by preparing a tiny campaign for Old School Essentials. I own the OSE Classic Fantasy Rules Tome (great book btw!) and in it there are only rules for rolling ability scores with 3d6 (the way it was back then I guess). But me and my group are really not into rolling stats and I would like to come up some with house rules for a point buy system. So, my thoughts are: With 3d6 I roll an average of 10,5. I have 6 abilities so 6x10,5 is 63 points. But, since no ability could be under 3 if you roll them, I would let the characters start with 3 in every ability and reduce that points from the points they get. So 3x6 is 18, 63-18 is 45. So every player would get 45 points to spend on their abilities. But since the higher numbers would be really rare if you roll, I thought that I may let every point above 16 (or 15 maybe) cost twice the points. So if someone wants to max out their strength with 18, it would cost them 17 points (3 to 16 = 13 points + 16 to 18 4 points). I am not really a math person, so I am interested in your thoughts about my idea and maybe you have some ideas of your own on how to do it.
Oh and another question I would like to sneak in here: We will most certainly play with ascending armor class. I know that in OSE the aac as well as the attack bonus for every monster is stated, but what if I want to use some old adventure and there ist some monster that is not in the OSE Rules Tome? How can I convert the values? I found out, that the for monsters the aac always seems to be 20 - (the ac +1), so a Giant Bat with AC 6 has AAC 13 (20 - (6+1)) and a Dragon with AC -2 has AAC 21 (20 - (-2+1) (<— minus minus gets plus here)), but what about the attack bonuses for monsters?
Thank you in advance for your thoughts, ideas and answers!
EDIT: thanks to everyone who gave some constructive reply and has not been gatekeepy! I think I will talk some ideas through with my group and see if, and how we change the character generation. If we decide to hack it, I have more than enough ideas on how to do it now!
Does anyone know the status of the Old School Essentials module? It's not supported for almost half a year, I think, and with the new Foundry update, some features are no longer working.
Meget kan man sikkert sige om Elvira…. Men hun laver fandeme GOD mad til farfar ❤️ Ingen Gossip i know - just good vibes 🍀
So my players are about to return to town after a fantastic adventure. They have tons of gold, and they will get lots of XP. But, one of them will lose 1k XP because they can't level twice in one session. A rule I agree with. But I feel bad that they have to lose so much XP.
How do you guys do it? Do some of you play with a house rule?
What do you think about Elvira? I’ve recently fallen in love with this name. I think it can be nicknamed Evie too which is cute. But I wanted to hear y’all’s thoughts? Not pregnant or having kids soon, just love names lol.
I know it’s common for some tv show I’ve never heard of. I’m 23 for reference, but it’s a well established name dating back to the fifth century. Meaning “all true, trustworthy”. It was in the top 300 in 1900 and had useage until the 1940, dropping out of the top 1000 in 1981.
I'm planning an OSE campaign for my group sometime in the future after we finish our current Pathfinder campaign. Within the past two years I've discovered and fell in love with the OSR scene. OSE Advanced is what I want to run, but me and my players also love the magic from DCC.
My plan is to throw a small amount of spells right out of the DCC book into my OSE game. I want to tie them in with the magic of a long dead civilization, old magic tended to be a little less predictable.
What are some thoughts on this? Thinking of adding spellburn and luck as well. Halflings and thieves would gain the class skills tied to the stat. I could go on and on adding stuff like crit tables, mighty deeds etc., but at some point I'd be playing DCC.
Edit: I'd also be adding the spell rolls to cast and corruption. Everything tied to casting spells in DCC. Mecurial magic may be the only thing I eliminate.
Hey guys and dolls,
When running my players through a dungeon is it better to draw them a whole map of the dungeon or just the rooms they're having encounters in? I know detailed maps for battle aren't all that necessary in OSR games (especially compared to 5e) but I'm still not sure how much I detail I need to give. I of course will already have a map drawn out with descriptions for personal reference.
In the OSE rule book it says one of the players should be a mapper but is that something usually used? I also will be running the game almost entirely online if that influences any advice.
Hi everyone, I am thinking of merging Old School Essentials with Labyrinth Lord in my next campaign. I really like the idea of character being able to go to 20th level and have options of higher level spells (up to 7th i think). However the numbers don't really match up with these two games. It mostly concerns spell progression but also things like turn undead and maybe other things.
So I am here turning to the hive mind of how to do it. What is the best and most efficient way of doing it?
One way that I am thinking is just having spellcasters follow the LL way of spell progression even if it means they will end up being slightly more powerful than their OSE counterparts.
Do you think this is a plausible way of doing it?
Thanks in advance
By the way I am thinking about advanced versions of both games
I’m the GM of Shudder, AMC Networks’ streaming service for horror, thriller and the supernatural. We’re the streamer that turned Creepshow into a TV series, brought back horror hosts Joe Bob Briggs and Elvira, made great films like V/H/S/94, Host and The Mortuary Collection, and made new seasons of Slasher and Dragula.
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Everyone talks about the specialist and the encumbrance system and the skill system. However are there any other really good BX retroclone rules you put in your OSE game?
Obviously Elvira is a fictional character, at least in so far as it’s a character being played by a performer (the always amazing Cassandra Peterson). But in terms of popular culture representation, it’s arguable that there hasn’t been a greater, for lack of a better term, mascot for our beloved genre than the character and persona of Elvira. Through hosting her own show to guest appearances in character to even having her own movies (which honestly are pretty good, Ngl), Elvira as a character is probably one of, if not the best real world horror characters ever, rivalled probably only by Joe Bob Briggs.
Anyone else agree? Have another character in the real world you think k is better?
I’m somewhat new to OSE and OSR in general, though I have played various incarnations of DnD over the years. At the moment, I have been trying to wrap my head around skill checks in OSE or B/X style games.
After doing some research i’ve found a myriad of rules interpretations and homebrew info about how to handle skill checks, for example Thief skills like Hide in Shadows. This also extends to other classes found in OSE Advanced Fantasy. From what I gather, there are two types of checks for this. A d6 roll that can be either 1 in 6 or 2 in 6, depending on your class or whatever, then there is the percent roll check associated with a class skill.
What I see is that either one or the other would be rolled, so for example, a standard fighter character without armor might try to hide from a wandering monster. Roll a 1 in 6 to succeed. Basically a 16.67% success rate. A thief, on the other hand tries to do the same thing, at 1st level this is 10%. So in effect, everyone but a thief is good at hiding.
I understand that this gets home brewed a ton, but I’m trying to understand the RAW. How should this work? Why would anyone play a thief over a fighter, for example, in a one shot where no one is expected to level? Is there a rule somewhere that covers this or is it left up to the DM, specifically to make a rule?
I'm tinkering with a BECMI-inspired class to give Dwarves a unique flavor in my OSE home campaign setting. The chassis of the idea is the Dwarf-Cleric from GAZ 6. The idea is that Dwarf-Clerics don't "cast spells" like the standard Cleric; instead they focus on the Rune Magic system from GAZ 7 The Northern Reaches. Not a huge change there, just a simple limitation. I have the tools in place to make such a concept playable.
But then I started working on the problem of balance, since XP would not shake out fairly for a Dwarf-Cleric who only casts a small selection of spells from the available pool (RAW). I was reminded of the Building a More Perfect Class article from a while back, and set hopefully to re-reading. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do about the Spellcasting value for XP (see article for the proposed calculation on XP thresholds), since the math was based around what level of spells are available at certain caster levels, not the number of spells available.
So I'm throwing this out to the community: Given that I am essentially taking an existing class and severely cutting down its available spells, with no improvements to its other capabilities, what sort of balance modifications should I be considering? Should I be considering Rune casting as more of a class ability and not true spellcasting?
(As an alternative thought: I did consider making all Cleric spells available through the Runic Magic system via new runes, but then that presents the problem of Bless Rune (1st or 2nd level spell, depending if you are using the Magic Of Mystara fan compilation that adjusts some spell levels). This spell would be used to activate any rune, even if its spell level was very high, and as long as a rune were prepared for every Cleric spell the Dwarf-Cleric would only have to memorize one spell to access them all. And what's more, Inscribe Rune makes the runes permanent, so a little up-front work would possibly be game-breaking later. I'm not too keen on just taking the standard spell slots and explaining it with runes to solve these issues, because that's a substantive change from the way Runic Magic works and takes away some of the fun of this class idea. Maybe someone else has solved this, but I didn't come up with anything.)
EDIT: Hmm, I missed a small entry in the article on my first read: "Inherent Spellcasting" as a Special Ability. Maybe that's the answer...
Update: As was requested, the player in question is my brother in law.
I've got a risk averse 5e player who doesn't want to do much of anything in our group's weekly hexcrawl & I'm wondering what I could or should do able it?
The rest of the players recognize that there's a higher lethality in OSE and have for the most part done well. I asked this player what we could do to increase their enjoyment of the game, and they told me that the game is far too dangerous, or that they need a lot more power (like they're used to in modern games). We use Jeff Rient's carousing rules and this player kind of told me that they'd do the bare minimum to collect treasure, and then head back to the city in order to carouse their way to higher levels. The problem is that this has caused them to kind of nitpick the party's plans, or try to pull everyone away from anything further than twenty minutes outside of the starting town. Frustrations abound, obviously.
So, as I've said previously, I've got a risk averse 5e player who doesn't want to do much of anything in our group's weekly hexcrawl & I'm wondering what I could or should do able it?
OSE seems to get a lot of love, and am curious is it more about nostalgia with a cleaned up organization or is there a set of players who never touched the original system but love OSE? Why do you like it over modern systems such as WWN/Black Hack/ Knaves/ etc?
I am looking at the possibility of merging the Illusionist and Magic User classes and spells into one for my game and wondering how this might impact the long term implications. Has anyone done this and is there a good reason why an Illusionist class should exist separately from a Magic-User?
I recently DMed The Wild Men in Casmir's Mill, written by Coldlight Press. There are spoilers here, so be warned. It was only the second time in my life I DMed an OSR game in my 15 years of experience in RPGs, but it was pretty awesome. The team was an assassin, a thief, a bard, and a ranger. 4000 XP (so lv. 2-3). They were all pretty squeamish, so I told them not to rush into battles.
The first game was very calm. Three players were fugitives from the law, and they found the bard unconscious by the road. The first mystery was what happened. They investigated a bit and followed a trail into the woods. The group was mostly very realistic, very Middle Ages peasants, but the bard was totally in another vibe, befriended a wolf, and tried to keep him as a pet. The town guards and the rest of the party didn't like it much, but he didn't care. After they reached the town, they mostly delivered grain to other villages, heard stories about the wild men in the woods, and were ambushed by them at the end of the adventure, but managed to survive for a few turns.
During the second game, however, things got hot. The bard's player couldn't play, so I let them use him as a meat shield, mostly (it was the last game, anyway). They kept their work as delivery boys and then were captured by the wild men after a very unsuccessful fight in which the bard died. They just kept losing, lol.
There, they discovered that the lord was something like a necromancer and that he stole some bones from the wild men, which is why they were attacking. The assassin disliked the wild men, so he wanted to tell the lord about them, but the others didn't agree. We were playing on Roll20, so I talked with this player via a messaging app and he plotted his way: betray the group.
While the other players were coming up with a plan to rescue the bones and give them to the wild men, the assassin was trying his own thing. The party eventually decided to raid the lord's house when he was out but got distracted along the way and stalked a mysterious lady to some ruins where the cultists were. The assassin managed to convince the lord to gather up his men and attack the wild men's village (I homebrewed a village for them to act as their stronghold).
How does it all end? Very badly. The ranger and the thief went into the dungeon alone to look at what was going on. The thief died when a snake bit him. It was pretty unexpected. Then, the ranger player freaked out, threatened a cultist, and saved the chil
... keep reading on reddit ➡They have to ship to Finland.
The phone should be max 350 euros.
And it needs to have as good specs as android phones with the same price.
Here’s an image capture:
https://i.imgur.com/NWgsxHx.jpg
Thanks in advance?
