Quote from: Brad on February 09, 2024, 10:30:33 AM

Quote from: King Tyranno on February 08, 2024, 11:15:12 PM
Sounds ideal for my group. I ran OSE Advanced and it was fine but I think my group wanted more complexity. However $30 is too much for any PDF when Basic Fantasy, C&C, and others offer either free or cheap PDFs. And frankly $80 for a black & white PoD hardcover with DTRPGs usual inconsistant quality is not endearing me towards purchasing this. Hell DCC is only £48 on Amazon. That's about what I'd expect for a hardcover book.

He's a college professor or something, so his idea of pricing books is at the higher end of "outrageous". I'm sure you can pay $80 for the book then sell it back to him for $10 when a new revision is announced, then he'll resell for $75 and say the new rev won't be out until next year sucka.

Not sure what goes into his personal pricing decisions (maybe it's the exchange rate or maybe he's trying to profit though he has said otherwise), but as a college professor I can attest that we have absolutely zero input into book pricing.  That is entirely at the discretion of the publisher. 

And as for the myth that professors are getting rich off selling their own books, that's pretty overblown too.  Unless it's a textbook put out by a trade press, we're seeing very little from sales.  And even some textbooks might just pay out a flat fee once and that's it.  If you're assigning an academic book you're likely making less than $100 a year in royalties.  And now, many universities screw everyone by "renting" used textbooks to students.  We see none of that income and the students are charged pretty much close to cover price for a book they use one semester and have to return to the school bookstore.  They hide this in the "fees" section of student tuition, etc.

Quote from: Brad on February 09, 2024, 10:30:33 AM
He's a college professor or something, so his idea of pricing books is at the higher end of "outrageous". I'm sure you can pay $80 for the book then sell it back to him for $10 when a new revision is announced, then he'll resell for $75 and say the new rev won't be out until next year sucka.

As a college professor, this made me laugh.  And GG does have a rep for gouging his students. At least they get some nice art in their pay-to-pass PDFs. 

Quote from: Persimmon on February 09, 2024, 12:56:07 PM
Not sure what goes into his personal pricing decisions (maybe it's the exchange rate or maybe he's trying to profit though he has said otherwise), but as a college professor I can attest that we have absolutely zero input into book pricing.  That is entirely at the discretion of the publisher. 

And as for the myth that professors are getting rich off selling their own books, that's pretty overblown too.  Unless it's a textbook put out by a trade press, we're seeing very little from sales.  And even some textbooks might just pay out a flat fee once and that's it.  If you're assigning an academic book you're likely making less than $100 a year in royalties.  And now, many universities screw everyone by "renting" used textbooks to students.  We see none of that income and the students are charged pretty much close to cover price for a book they use one semester and have to return to the school bookstore.  They hide this in the "fees" section of student tuition, etc.

Obviously I was making a joke here...I remember when I was getting my masters in philosophy and my thesis chair asked me if I wanted to make some extra money over a summer and do some edits/ revisions to a textbook he was working on (Engineering Ethics). I think I edited a couple chapters, made literally peanuts for the amount of work I put in. He then told me how much money he was making for the work he put in, and also how much the publishers were charging the bookstores, and the bookstore markup. So yeah, professors make fucking nothing for textbooks relative to the end-cost.

But still, dude should know better. $30 for a PDF is ludicrous, IDGAF.

I agree that $30 for a pdf is high, though I've seen worse.  However, this is in line with e-books that are often just a couple bucks less than physical copies, which is also an absolute joke.  The rationale I've seen given is that they're assuming all these people are sharing pdf's or e-copies, hence they're charging more.  That may be true.  I'm so old fashioned I often decline the free pdf that comes with a printed title unless it comes with extras I want like custom character sheets.

Quote from: Persimmon on February 09, 2024, 08:46:33 PM
I agree that $30 for a pdf is high, though I've seen worse.  However, this is in line with e-books that are often just a couple bucks less than physical copies, which is also an absolute joke.  The rationale I've seen given is that they're assuming all these people are sharing pdf's or e-copies, hence they're charging more.  That may be true.  I'm so old fashioned I often decline the free pdf that comes with a printed title unless it comes with extras I want like custom character sheets.

I wonder if the market finds the right price point. For example, say I charge $30 for my PDF and no one is buying, I cut it to $15, and no one is buying. I cut it to $7.50 and the sales start pouring in. (If there are any Econ professors out there, please correct me if I've got this wrong.)

We have a few forum posters who sell PDFs (AMacris, Eric Diaz, Sine Nomine, etc.) How do you guys set your prices? Have you ever re-adjusted? Did it work?

Eagerly awaiting a real review of this...if Greg Gillespie would chime in and maybe send Pundit a copy for review, that'd be great. Perhaps he can offer a South American discount.

Quote from: Brad on February 10, 2024, 06:52:56 PM
Eagerly awaiting a real review of this...if Greg Gillespie would chime in and maybe send Pundit a copy for review, that'd be great. Perhaps he can offer a South American discount.

Here's an early one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXzUvkYJ4cQ

Quote from: Persimmon on February 10, 2024, 08:25:41 PM

Quote from: Brad on February 10, 2024, 06:52:56 PM
Eagerly awaiting a real review of this...if Greg Gillespie would chime in and maybe send Pundit a copy for review, that'd be great. Perhaps he can offer a South American discount.

Here's an early one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXzUvkYJ4cQ

So that's how you pronounce Symbaroum!

BTW, I just realized tonight that Greg had sent me my codes in a brief email exchange we had the other day.  So I'll offer a very preliminary hot take based on scrolling through the pdf a couple times.

Overall, I like it quite a bit.  Pretty much what we expected.  Very evocative art reminiscent of TSR ca. 1980.  Tight, two column layout.  I especially like the custom font he uses for headers. 

You get the following classes: cleric, druid, monk, fighter, ranger, paladin, barbarian, thief, assassin, magic-user, and illusionist.  There are the following races (not ancestries or some other PC term): human, halfling, dwarf, elf, half-elf, half-orc, gnome, and cyclopsman.  As in AD&D there are race & class limits imposed on demi-humans.  Humans advance to unlimited levels in any class.  There is multi-classing, though it's somewhat limited to the core 4 classes.  The various demi-humans all have racial abilities, ability score modifiers, and (usually) saving throw modifiers.  Armor class is descending (but see below).  For character generation of ability scores, you roll 3d6 seven times, discard the lowest result, and arrange to taste.  I rather like this method.  RAW, all PCs start with max HP at 1st level.  Most hit dice are standard AD&D, but interestingly, barbarians get d10 and rangers get d12.  Monks (more on this below) get d8.  Another very cool feature is that for each class the game offers 3 pre-generated equipment packs to choose from.  Other games have done this, and I like it, as it can speed up character creation even further.  Starting height, weight, and age for the various races, properly divided into male & female, are provided. There is a character sheet at the beginning of the book.

Overall, I like the little tweaks he makes to the classes.  For example, fighters (and paladins & rangers at higher levels can cleave): "If a fighter kills a target, s/he immediately receives 1 additional attack per two levels (one at Level 1, two at Level 3, three at Level 5, etc). Cleave applies to both melee and missile attack forms" (p. 24).  Barbarians get totem animals (for flavor, there's no mechanical benefit) and they can extend berserk rage if there are multiple barbarians in one party.  They can also be taunted into going berserk.  The biggest changes are with the monk, which I think should more properly be called a friar (and we'll do so in my campaign).  This is changed to be a Western monk and combines clerical abilities like turning the undead and casting spells with staff fighting, and abilities in lore, scholarship, and assorted holy things.  It's a very powerful class, but difficult to qualify for RAW, needing 12 in STR & INT, and 15 in WIS & DEX.  So, like paladins, in theory there won't be many monks running around in most campaigns.

Overall this section is good, but there are a couple things that REALLY bother me.  First, in the the section with the character classes, he only lists saving throws for first level.  The rest are buried in a chart near the back of the book.  There are other organizational issues as well, like the mechanical stuff towards at the end, even after description of magic items.  This is followed by procedural things about dungeon & wilderness adventuring, discussion of experience points, then various appendices and optional rules.  Also rather strange is that even though the game uses descending armor class, there are no attack matrices/tables.  Instead, there is the mini-chart on the character sheet and all classes get attack bonuses as in ascending AC systems.  Monsters are treated as fighters, but because he favors a slower power curve, it's not a simple hit dice equals attack bonus thing.  You have to know what a fighter's bonus is at that level.  Frankly, an attack table would be easier and we'll just pull out one of my other DM screens when playing.

Spell lists are pretty good; the new ones from Greg's megadungeons are in here, as well as some others we haven't seen before.  I get annoyed at the refusal or inability of most retroclone designers to expand the spell lists.  Paladins and rangers do get spells, which is a negative IMO, but that is in accordance with AD&D.

The monster section is fine; some good minor tweaks to classic monsters here and there, and I think it does a better job than the other similar clones like Labyrinth Lord & OSE Advanced in merging the B/X & AD&D monsters.  Great to see a more powerful sasquatch, must be the Canadian influence.  You get an image for pretty much every entry and the selection is pretty much like the AD&D Monster Manual.  Hilariously, the invisible stalker is literally an empty box.  And no shortage of topless nubile female monsters if that's your thing. I also like the nosferatu style vampire.  More exotic monsters & variants can be found in his Megadungeon Monster Manual.  One quirk is that the various giant sized normal animals are all in the "G" section so that's where you find Giant rats, toads, wolverines, etc., not under the exact species.

The treasure and magic items tables are quite good.  One innovation is the inclusion of magical runestones, with a fairly high chance (15%) of rolling them.  There are sub-tables for jewelry, gems, etc.  The magic items include lots of classics, plus a fair number of cool variants or original items from his mega-dungeons.  As noted above, there are very useful sections on dungeon & wilderness exploration.  He also includes lots of useful tables for randomly generating traps and even whole dungeons, with sub-tables for features, contents, and the like.  The Dungeon Generator Worksheet is fantastic and I'll be using it to help me fill out Dwarrowdeep.  There are similar, but less detailed, tables for hex crawls, and, of course, wandering monster tables.  The appendices include a funny, if at times, sarcastic FAQ on old school gaming, tips on playing for new gamers, carousing rules and table, a few more useful random tables and your certificate of death for PCs. 

All in all, a pretty good product at first glance.

Quote from: Persimmon on February 11, 2024, 12:29:07 AM
BTW, I just realized tonight that Greg had sent me my codes in a brief email exchange we had the other day.  So I'll offer a very preliminary hot take based on scrolling through the pdf a couple times.

Overall, I like it quite a bit.  Pretty much what we expected.  Very evocative art reminiscent of TSR ca. 1980.  Tight, two column layout.  I especially like the custom font he uses for headers. 

You get the following classes: cleric, druid, monk, fighter, ranger, paladin, barbarian, thief, assassin, magic-user, and illusionist.  There are the following races (not ancestries or some other PC term): human, halfling, dwarf, elf, half-elf, half-orc, gnome, and cyclopsman.  As in AD&D there are race & class limits imposed on demi-humans.  Humans advance to unlimited levels in any class.  There is multi-classing, though it's somewhat limited to the core 4 classes.  The various demi-humans all have racial abilities, ability score modifiers, and (usually) saving throw modifiers.  Armor class is descending (but see below).  For character generation of ability scores, you roll 3d6 seven times, discard the lowest result, and arrange to taste.  I rather like this method.  RAW, all PCs start with max HP at 1st level.  Most hit dice are standard AD&D, but interestingly, barbarians get d10 and rangers get d12.  Monks (more on this below) get d8.  Another very cool feature is that for each class the game offers 3 pre-generated equipment packs to choose from.  Other games have done this, and I like it, as it can speed up character creation even further.  Starting height, weight, and age for the various races, properly divided into male & female, are provided. There is a character sheet at the beginning of the book.

Overall, I like the little tweaks he makes to the classes.  For example, fighters (and paladins & rangers at higher levels can cleave): "If a fighter kills a target, s/he immediately receives 1 additional attack per two levels (one at Level 1, two at Level 3, three at Level 5, etc). Cleave applies to both melee and missile attack forms" (p. 24).  Barbarians get totem animals (for flavor, there's no mechanical benefit) and they can extend berserk rage if there are multiple barbarians in one party.  They can also be taunted into going berserk.  The biggest changes are with the monk, which I think should more properly be called a friar (and we'll do so in my campaign).  This is changed to be a Western monk and combines clerical abilities like turning the undead and casting spells with staff fighting, and abilities in lore, scholarship, and assorted holy things.  It's a very powerful class, but difficult to qualify for RAW, needing 12 in STR & INT, and 15 in WIS & DEX.  So, like paladins, in theory there won't be many monks running around in most campaigns.

Overall this section is good, but there are a couple things that REALLY bother me.  First, in the the section with the character classes, he only lists saving throws for first level.  The rest are buried in a chart near the back of the book.  There are other organizational issues as well, like the mechanical stuff towards at the end, even after description of magic items.  This is followed by procedural things about dungeon & wilderness adventuring, discussion of experience points, then various appendices and optional rules.  Also rather strange is that even though the game uses descending armor class, there are no attack matrices/tables.  Instead, there is the mini-chart on the character sheet and all classes get attack bonuses as in ascending AC systems.  Monsters are treated as fighters, but because he favors a slower power curve, it's not a simple hit dice equals attack bonus thing.  You have to know what a fighter's bonus is at that level.  Frankly, an attack table would be easier and we'll just pull out one of my other DM screens when playing.

Spell lists are pretty good; the new ones from Greg's megadungeons are in here, as well as some others we haven't seen before.  I get annoyed at the refusal or inability of most retroclone designers to expand the spell lists.  Paladins and rangers do get spells, which is a negative IMO, but that is in accordance with AD&D.

The monster section is fine; some good minor tweaks to classic monsters here and there, and I think it does a better job than the other similar clones like Labyrinth Lord & OSE Advanced in merging the B/X & AD&D monsters.  Great to see a more powerful sasquatch, must be the Canadian influence.  You get an image for pretty much every entry and the selection is pretty much like the AD&D Monster Manual.  Hilariously, the invisible stalker is literally an empty box.  And no shortage of topless nubile female monsters if that's your thing. I also like the nosferatu style vampire.  More exotic monsters & variants can be found in his Megadungeon Monster Manual.  One quirk is that the various giant sized normal animals are all in the "G" section so that's where you find Giant rats, toads, wolverines, etc., not under the exact species.

The treasure and magic items tables are quite good.  One innovation is the inclusion of magical runestones, with a fairly high chance (15%) of rolling them.  There are sub-tables for jewelry, gems, etc.  The magic items include lots of classics, plus a fair number of cool variants or original items from his mega-dungeons.  As noted above, there are very useful sections on dungeon & wilderness exploration.  He also includes lots of useful tables for randomly generating traps and even whole dungeons, with sub-tables for features, contents, and the like.  The Dungeon Generator Worksheet is fantastic and I'll be using it to help me fill out Dwarrowdeep.  There are similar, but less detailed, tables for hex crawls, and, of course, wandering monster tables.  The appendices include a funny, if at times, sarcastic FAQ on old school gaming, tips on playing for new gamers, carousing rules and table, a few more useful random tables and your certificate of death for PCs. 

All in all, a pretty good product at first glance.

I will have to agree with the positives Persimmon has noted on this review and thumbs up for the brief review.

The interesting thing about multiclassing, from what I have heard from Dr. Gillespie, is that it will allow many level-limited demihuman characters in a sense to explore all four basic classes. Obviously, Dwarves cannot be magic-users or illusionists. But say your dwarf survives up to hitting his level limit in Cleric, and you didn't multi class to begin with? Start taking Fighter levels. And an elf could theoretically eventually be a fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief even if they didn't start out classes as all of them originally.

I'll have to clarify with him at some point whether capping a class out first and then multiclassing into a different class would make you split your xp two ways or just earn as normal.

I'm not a huge fan of the megadungeon GM screens, as they don't contain enough information for me that's generic to the game system vs. specific to the Megadungeons they were created to support. I'd like to see one of those soon, if not just create one myself. And I've got a 3D printer project for a Dragonslayer time wheel I am working up. Other than that, I think just having the one core book will be great and I'm not a fan of digest so I'm good with the traditional size book that contains what I need to get launched. I'm looking to pick up the MMM in physical soonish.

On the PDF pricing? I am not really entirely in agreement with the folks who call it overpriced. A lot of companies start their pdf pricing at $24-29, so $30 isn't as terrible a stretch really. It's steep. But I think I'd as soon support the people like Dr. Gillespie who are making quality stuff I want to use as gripe about how much it costs to do so. If you look at most core Rulebook type products on DTRPG that are less costly ($15-pwyw), they absolutely do not deliver the same level of quality in their products as Dragonslayer RPG. They more often than not look like AI-generated art with weird, poor text layouts.

As to my own negative impressions of the game? Barbarians with rage - absolutely hate that class feature every time it is used in a game. It doesn't turn me off entirely to Dragonslayer RPG, mind you, but I cringe every time a player chooses a rage barbarian. And I do expect one of my players to do that.

I have to agree that keeping the full save tables and attack matrices with the class info would have been better for players, but viewing the class info section I believe what he was going for was a quick introduction into the basics of each class.

More as I read further.

I agree with Dropbear on the rage for barbarians ability.  Never something I liked.  And they still have too many scattered abilities for my taste.  I think a couple situational wilderness abilities based on origin, the ability to fight to -10 HP, extra quickness in non-bulky or no armor as reflected by periodic AC bumps, better saves (which they have in Dragonslayer) and some kind of superstitiously oriented penalty concerning magic and magical items would be sufficient.  I also give them d14 hit dice in my games, but we have pretty lethal crits.

This reminds me that Dragonslayer also has very simple crit and fumble rules.

This is a game book that's way too expensive for being another of a another of a another OSR fantasy D&D retro clone, especially as a B/W book. Unless an OSR game book can do something different enough from WWN, Hyperborea and ACKS most likely I won't consider it unless it's really cost effective to warrant at least looking at.

Quote from: Dropbear on February 11, 2024, 08:28:53 AM

I will have to agree with the positives Persimmon has noted on this review and thumbs up for the brief review.

The interesting thing about multiclassing, from what I have heard from Dr. Gillespie, is that it will allow many level-limited demihuman characters in a sense to explore all four basic classes. Obviously, Dwarves cannot be magic-users or illusionists. But say your dwarf survives up to hitting his level limit in Cleric, and you didn't multi class to begin with? Start taking Fighter levels. And an elf could theoretically eventually be a fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief even if they didn't start out classes as all of them originally.

I'll have to clarify with him at some point whether capping a class out first and then multiclassing into a different class would make you split your xp two ways or just earn as normal.

The one thing about multiclassing XP that may be problematic if the XP was not split for the 2nd and subsequent classes is the rapid level gain.If an elf got to say, 5th level as a fighter before starting the magic user class then going on adventures with a 4th-6th level party. The XP gain on those adventures would be enough to attain 2nd level in no time. I never liked the splitting rules either. Having to split XP two or three ways when only a single class can still advance is pretty brutal. I would have to come up with something else.

Quote from: RebelSky on February 11, 2024, 09:48:52 AM
This is a game book that's way too expensive for being another of a another of a another OSR fantasy D&D retro clone, especially as a B/W book. Unless an OSR game book can do something different enough from WWN, Hyperborea and ACKS most likely I won't consider it unless it's really cost effective to warrant at least looking at.

Two out of the three you mentioned aren't things I'd spend money on anyway. I'm not exactly a Crawford devotee - although I would give SWN props, I don't care much for WWN. ACKS isn't my bag, either. Hyperborea is great though. I just liked the art style used in 2E way better than Diogo Nogueiro's art.

And it's in the art style where I think Dragonslayer is sublime, I really like black & white line art style.

As far as the price? No different than buying hard copies or pdfs of OSE. Cheaper than buying either version, really. If you want to talk price gouging for product, OSE is a bigger culprit of that practice. Better to have one book with everything needed to play loaded in than six books or eight books (or at minimum, two) depending on your desired flavor of OSE.

I'd rather spend the money on Shadowdark than on OSE, ACKS, or WWN. I've already spent the money on Dragonslayer and it's more than worth it.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on February 11, 2024, 10:09:05 AM

Quote from: Dropbear on February 11, 2024, 08:28:53 AM

I will have to agree with the positives Persimmon has noted on this review and thumbs up for the brief review.

The interesting thing about multiclassing, from what I have heard from Dr. Gillespie, is that it will allow many level-limited demihuman characters in a sense to explore all four basic classes. Obviously, Dwarves cannot be magic-users or illusionists. But say your dwarf survives up to hitting his level limit in Cleric, and you didn't multi class to begin with? Start taking Fighter levels. And an elf could theoretically eventually be a fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief even if they didn't start out classes as all of them originally.

I'll have to clarify with him at some point whether capping a class out first and then multiclassing into a different class would make you split your xp two ways or just earn as normal.

The one thing about multiclassing XP that may be problematic if the XP was not split for the 2nd and subsequent classes is the rapid level gain.If an elf got to say, 5th level as a fighter before starting the magic user class then going on adventures with a 4th-6th level party. The XP gain on those adventures would be enough to attain 2nd level in no time. I never liked the splitting rules either. Having to split XP two or three ways when only a single class can still advance is pretty brutal. I would have to come up with something else.

My favorite version of multi-classing is from Castles & Crusades.  You just add both or all three classes required XP together, plus an add-on and advance simultaneously.  Since they don't have racial level limits for classes, it's pretty easy.  At the lower levels you're not too far behind and at higher levels your multiple classes make up for being generally a level or two behind the group.  In my campaign, because I do have racial class restrictions, only demi-humans can multi-class anyhow. 

On the other hand, C&C has this class and a half thing that I hate.