I wish I could find a game where I can play a Kensai! *whimper* absolutely favorite 1E class.

QuoteDoes OSR require the 4 man party?

OSR? I don't know. I don't speak for the OSR.

What I do know is that the "4 man party" is not a "thing" when it comes to game and module design, to me. On the contrary, I try to think about different party makeups and possibilities when coming up with adventuring environments. Basing everything around some made-up "average party" is antithetical to how I see the use of a module at a game table, and the campaign in motion. It directly leads to total bullshit like running after some mythical, absolute game balance that doesn't and shouldn't exist in an actual game.

Quote from: Omega;747568O/AD&D itself works darn well for non-standard groups. In fact thats the norm for my experience and F/C/T/MU groups were rare. We often lacked a cleric in the group and sometimes didnt have a straight up fighter either.

Though one of my longest current local AD&D campaigns now had just a pair of fighters, well, a Paladin and a Kensai. With occasional walk ins of a pair of Thieves who didnt last to the 1/3rd mark due to moving.

The only thing I can see as necessary in AD&D|B/X would be healing of some sort.  You could substitute items (potions, etc.), but lack of healing would seem to make things a bit difficult.

(Can't speak to OD&D)

Quote from: Old Geezer;747566The original D&D cleric is a genuine badass.

Or a twinked out min/maxed uberclass with no place in the source material depending on your position

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;747570I wish I could find a game where I can play a Kensai! *whimper* absolutely favorite 1E class.

Just pursuade a DM to run a game where you can play a Kensai. A solo game with one Kensai PC based on Fist Full of Dollars (itself a remake of Yojimbo of course) or High Plains Drifter would be awesome.

The D&D model does have a problem with hit points and healing in games without a cleric. The Cleric is basically the sticking plaster that fixes the HP paradigm.
However, you can easily tweak HPs to include a wound mechanism or a 4e style healing mechanic. Or you can tweak initiative which might work well in a kensai game (at low level a single blow from a kensai is likely to kill most folk so building an ijitsu mechanic based on a wild west fast draw might mean your kensai tends to attack first and so is less likely to to get mired in the tradditional D&D melee combat form).

I don't think I actually ran into the We Have To Have One Of Everything fallacy until I started participating on TBP eleven years ago.

Thinking back, the very first OD&D crew I ran had five players: three stick jocks, two magicians.  "Thief" types have been rare in my campaigns; priests rare indeed.

Just having spent 15 minutes going through my campaign records, there've been 85 long-term PCs -- by which I mean as having played ten or more sessions.  Of that number, 18 were wizards, 28 were heavy fighters, 16 were light fighters (swashbucklers, archers, that sort of thing), 6 were martial artists, 2 were entertainers, and two were seriously unclassifiable JOTs.  Only six were "rogue" type characters -- and half of those were unambiguously assassins -- and only seven were priests, four of them played by a single player who loved the archetype.  Heck, right now my lead group are all wizards, a concept the players wanted to try.

Quote from: robiswrong;747575The only thing I can see as necessary in AD&D|B/X would be healing of some sort.  You could substitute items (potions, etc.), but lack of healing would seem to make things a bit difficult.

Not at all.  It just makes things different.

For many years now, I've been GMing GURPS, a game with an unforgiving combat system.  Even with the game's First Aid skill, low-tech combat's pretty deadly.  The obvious answer is that parties don't swing with the balls-to-the-wall frontal attack paradigm so beloved of some gaming groups.

But that's how my groups swung back in VD&D days too.  They fought when they had a reasonable assurance of victory, and didn't if they figured the cost was more than they were cheerful about paying.  I expect a lot of groups swung that way in those days.

Quote from: robiswrong;747575The only thing I can see as necessary in AD&D|B/X would be healing of some sort.  You could substitute items (potions, etc.), but lack of healing would seem to make things a bit difficult.

(Can't speak to OD&D)

You just have to play more carefully, as if you had a cleric in the group and said cleric was out of healing spells. And at lower levels that was darn fast.

We learned to not rely on spell healing much at all. Potions were often about it out in the adventure and when we ran out or low we started considering a strategic withdrawal to recover if possible. Which was not very often. And healing potions tended to not be all that plentiful unless you bought them, or made them yourself and even that was not very plentiful till later stages.

Quote from: Omega;747598You just have to play more carefully, as if you had a cleric in the group and said cleric was out of healing spells. And at lower levels that was darn fast.

We learned to not rely on spell healing much at all. Potions were often about it out in the adventure and when we ran out or low we started considering a strategic withdrawal to recover if possible. Which was not very often. And healing potions tended to not be all that plentiful unless you bought them, or made them yourself and even that was not very plentiful till later stages.

That is interesting.

I thought that at low level base healing spells were fairly plentiful.

The typical D&D 1st level cleric based on wisdom bonus gets 3 spell slots and depending on how you were playing clerics could either pick the spells as required, swap out slots for spells or had to pick them up front. We always used option 3 pick them up front meaning 1st level clerics have 2 heal light wounds and 1 command spell most of the time.


The D&D combat system at 1st level is very lethal. Unless you modify the initiative or similar a 1st level melee fighter with Chain and shield (AC 4)  will expect to get hit by a 1hd monster once every 3 rounds and hits with about the same frequency. Therefore in any single combat encounter the fighter will basically expect to take 1 blow which will remove 1/3 of their HP and take days of rest to heal. We could extrapolate to suggest 3 such combats will lead to death unless you have magical healing.

In my experience with those odds you either have to ambush your foes, very hard in a dungeon environment where it's their turf and they can see in the dark and you can't, or you migrate towards a 10 minute adventuring day.
It was these considerations that led us to change D&D HPs to a model more like the Vitality / wounds split.

Quote from: jibbajibba;747587Just pursuade a DM to run a game where you can play a Kensai. A solo game with one Kensai PC based on Fist Full of Dollars (itself a remake of Yojimbo of course) or High Plains Drifter would be awesome.

The D&D model does have a problem with hit points and healing in games without a cleric. The Cleric is basically the sticking plaster that fixes the HP paradigm.
However, you can easily tweak HPs to include a wound mechanism or a 4e style healing mechanic. Or you can tweak initiative which might work well in a kensai game (at low level a single blow from a kensai is likely to kill most folk so building an ijitsu mechanic based on a wild west fast draw might mean your kensai tends to attack first and so is less likely to to get mired in the tradditional D&D melee combat form).

That'd be great if I could find someone willing to run 1E!

Quote from: jibbajibba;747582Or a twinked out min/maxed uberclass with no place in the source material depending on how fucking stupid you are.

Fixed your typo.

Quote from: Old Geezer;747615Fixed your typo.

whatever mate.
I just think its a little dim to praise the Cleric class because its so tough but condone the 3.5e era super-ninja-priest-shapeshifter class becuase its too twinked.

Both are just classes written by the designer. Their relative power compared to other classes is merely a result of how well they were written. If they are more powerful than their peers then they are badly written.

The cleric as a foil to the vampire PC is particularly amusing as any DM worth their stones would have said "that vampire PC is fucking stupid" and demoted it to NPC status rather than create a new class to deal with it.

I tend to find that compared to other RPGs, D&D of all stripes discourages solo adventuring. In pre-4e D&D this is mostly because a single failed save can take out the lone PC, and even low level creatures can force saves, such as vs Hold Person, or ghoul paralysis, so a high level PC won't last long against even low level foes. Single-player plus henchmen/retainers/comrades works fine, though.

The PC group in my AD&D/OSRIC Runelords campaign is 3 Fighters & 1 Paladin, level 2 & 1 Ftr 3. This seems to work fine without a Cleric; they have lots of hp, good armour, good offence. Some of them take point, when those get too wounded they cycle round to the back and unwounded Fighters take the lead.
One reason this works is that AD&D has both less healing and less damage than 3e/PF, so it's not suicidal to go into battle at less than full hp. 3e/PF replaces the Fighter's hp tally as a resource with the Cleric's healing ability as the main resource, so my PF group expect not only to go into combat at full hp, but also to have plenty of reserve healing from magic items, like cure light wounds wands.

Quote from: S'mon;747667The PC group in my AD&D/OSRIC Runelords campaign is 3 Fighters & 1 Paladin, level 2 & 1 Ftr 3. This seems to work fine without a Cleric; they have lots of hp, good armour, good offence. Some of them take point, when those get too wounded they cycle round to the back and unwounded Fighters take the lead.
One reason this works is that AD&D has both less healing and less damage than 3e/PF, so it's not suicidal to go into battle at less than full hp. 3e/PF replaces the Fighter's hp tally as a resource with the Cleric's healing ability as the main resource, so my PF group expect not only to go into combat at full hp, but also to have plenty of reserve healing from magic items, like cure light wounds wands.

So in your Runelords game how does the party work day to day?
The real issue we found wasn't on day 1 but on day 3 or 4 when the whole party have taken a couple of hits and were down to the dregs of the HP pile and there was no let up in the action.
I gues the paladin's laying hands is worth 4 HP a day which helps.

The key party for us was - Barb, Thief, Fighter (the barb had uber HP and the fighter was a tough old dwarf) we just found that the party ended up having to avoid everything by the second hald of Day 2.

IIRC the 4-man standard party is a 3E thing - the entire 3E encounter balance and XP system hinges on this. This got even more hardwired into 4E with the advent of roles. But even then, I'm playing 3.5E these days and we have a Fighter, a Druid (me) and a bow-using Ranger, and are having fun. Sure, not having a blasting Wizard makes combat somewhat challenging, but we make do without one.

The way I see it, OSR parties tend to be LARGER than 4 characters, but not necessarily larger than 4 PCs (sometimes even 1-2 PCs). The idea is to take many henchmen along, and as combat in OSR games tend to be simple, running multiple henchmen isn't that difficult.

In ACKS, for example, simply start you character at level 2-3, and give him/her the max number of 1-2 level henchmen, and you'll be able to deal with any adventure.