Save Tenser's Transformation for your last spell and get in on the melee!

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 12, 2024, 06:41:23 PM
The only advice I know for Basic D&D wizards is to carry a chainmail shirt in your pack and put it on when the magic is gone. 

You may suck as a swordsman, but not as bad as a dead wizard.

Hah! What a great point.

Quote from: El-V on February 12, 2024, 06:54:02 PM
Save Tenser's Transformation for your last spell and get in on the melee!

Another great option.  I recall in 2e days I had a fighter/wizard who did exactly this.  Used spells to buff, turned on tenser, and away he went in melee.

Quote from: solomani on February 11, 2024, 11:49:45 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 11, 2024, 11:45:38 PM
Out of curiosity, which adventure path are you adapting? I ask because Pathfinder 1 was based on 3.5, and despite all the extra stuff bolted on top of it, 3.5 was still based on the structure of AD&D. Admittedly it's been like 15 years, but my memory of 3.5 is that a lot of the same principles applied to wizards, at least below around 10th level. I would think that even in Pathfinder, a lone wizard is going to get absolutely mulched by a competent party if trapped in a room with them.

Reign of Winter. The Baba Yaga adventure path.  You are right about 3e. However, a big difference is the "get hit, interrupted" rule, which isn't automatic in 3e (get a concentration check).  And the "meta" for 3e was pre-buff out the wazoo before a battle, but there are a lot more spells to buff within 3e than 1e.

Neat. I've read through a couple of the Pathfinder adventure paths (though not that one), and they're quite cool. If I have a beef with them, it's that they don't appear well set up to adapt to the players going off script.

Converting non-OSR modules to OSR games would be an interesting thread of its own. I've been doing a lot of converting modules for my Dolmenwood campaign. Generally finding the biggest challenge to be converting the skill checks, since OSR games often don't have comparable skills to a lot of newer systems, and even when they do, they presume skill checks are made less often, but have a much lower success rate.

Quote from: solomani on February 12, 2024, 05:56:01 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 11, 2024, 11:45:38 PM
Also if you end up finding that the gulf between Pathfinder and OSE is too much design-wise, and you still want to run the adventure path, Pathfinder for Savage Worlds is a decent alternative for a rules-lighter system to run the same adventures.

I looked at the DriveThru entry for this. Am I right in saying it's a rules/mechanics/monster conversion you can use to convert an adventure path, or do they also convert adventure paths directly?  Best I can tell they only converted rise of the runelords and crimson throne directly.

Sort of. Savage Worlds (often abbreviated SWADE) is it's own universal game system with a bunch of settings published, but part of the schtick is that each setting book is usually a full core rulebook in it's own right. So the Pathfinder for Savage Worlds core book is a full game, designed to let you play the Pathfinder classes/races/setting under the Savage Worlds system. It doesn't include a conversion guide, but you can easily find fan-made ones online. And then they've done some official conversions as well.

I'd describe SWADE as a middleweight rules system. Definitely less chunky than Pathfinder, but still more involved than something like OSE. The highlights are that it's a dice-ladder system, so attributes are ranked from d4 to d12, instead of a number and a bonus. Attacks are made against a "parry" stat or a target number based on cover etc. Damage is done on a wounds system based on how far the damage is rolled over the target's "toughness" score (which includes armor). The core system is pretty simple, probably one of the simpler skills-based systems out there,  but there's talents and things to add on top of it that make it a bit more complex.

EDIT: Sorry if I'm telling you things that are obvious to you. You never know what someone else knows.

My recollection from AD&D etc is that much of the strategy both for the players and the DM revolved around protecting the magic-user from interruption so he could nuke the enemy.  I think this produced more interesting tactical play by far than later editions where it was not needed.  So I consider it a feature, not a bug.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 11, 2024, 11:45:38 PM
Converting non-OSR modules to OSR games would be an interesting thread of its own. I've been doing a lot of converting modules for my Dolmenwood campaign. Generally finding the biggest challenge to be converting the skill checks, since OSR games often don't have comparable skills to a lot of newer systems, and even when they do, they presume skill checks are made less often, but have a much lower success rate.

Interesting, I am running a Dolmenwood campaign and my PCs dislike the sandbox, hence me moving it to a more adventure path type game and scrambling to find something as I have nothing prepared.  Regin of winter fits the bill IMO.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 11, 2024, 11:45:38 PM
Sort of. Savage Worlds (often abbreviated SWADE) is it's own universal game system with a bunch of settings published, but part of the schtick is that each setting book is usually a full core rulebook in it's own right. So the Pathfinder for Savage Worlds core book is a full game, designed to let you play the Pathfinder classes/races/setting under the Savage Worlds system. It doesn't include a conversion guide, but you can easily find fan-made ones online. And then they've done some official conversions as well.

Nah, all good, not familiar with it apart from I've heard the name before.

Quote from: Mishihari on February 12, 2024, 09:46:55 PM
My recollection from AD&D etc is that much of the strategy both for the players and the DM revolved around protecting the magic-user from interruption so he could nuke the enemy.  I think this produced more interesting tactical play by far than later editions where it was not needed.  So I consider it a feature, not a bug.

Don't disagree.  I was just caught by surprise.  Happy to go with it.

Quote from: solomani on February 12, 2024, 10:02:14 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 11, 2024, 11:45:38 PM
Converting non-OSR modules to OSR games would be an interesting thread of its own. I've been doing a lot of converting modules for my Dolmenwood campaign. Generally finding the biggest challenge to be converting the skill checks, since OSR games often don't have comparable skills to a lot of newer systems, and even when they do, they presume skill checks are made less often, but have a much lower success rate.

Interesting, I am running a Dolmenwood campaign and my PCs dislike the sandbox, hence me moving it to a more adventure path type game and scrambling to find something as I have nothing prepared.  Regin of winter fits the bill IMO.

What are the odds! What level range are your PCs in? I've been putting together a list of modules I thought I could slot into the Dolmenwood setting. Might be useful to you.

Quote from: RPGer678 on February 12, 2024, 04:38:40 PM
Give the thieves a d8 hit die at levels 1 and 2. Give the magic-users a d8 hit die at level 1 and d6 at level 2. Explain it by saying these are the levels at which they are younger, healthier and rely more on their physique than the craft they're still learning.

My solution for the HP issue is that all PCs get their entire Con score plus regular roll plus Con bonus at 1st level.  It helps a lot then and evens out down the road.  I also use the AD&D hit dice for OSE (so thieves get d6, fighters d10, etc.).  As for the original question, yeah, tactics matter a lot more I'd say, than in later editions of the game.  This applies to players too.  But using allies, traps, environment, etc. can be huge.

Quote from: Persimmon on February 12, 2024, 11:07:45 PM
My solution for the HP issue is that all PCs get their entire Con score plus regular roll plus Con bonus at 1st level.  It helps a lot then and evens out down the road.  I also use the AD&D hit dice for OSE (so thieves get d6, fighters d10, etc.).  As for the original question, yeah, tactics matter a lot more I'd say, than in later editions of the game.  This applies to players too.  But using allies, traps, environment, etc. can be huge.

I give PCs max hp at level 1; I have been doing that since 1982.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 12, 2024, 10:31:31 PM
What are the odds! What level range are your PCs in? I've been putting together a list of modules I thought I could slot into the Dolmenwood setting. Might be useful to you.

So, I started the campaign in September with the preview books.  My game plan was to have many hooks the PCs could pursue. They ended up visiting the Abbey but then retreating once they got to the lower level (from Wormskin), and then they did the Black Wyrm of Brandenburg (set it in Galblight), and now they are in the Incandescent Grotto.  But they don't seem interested in any of the main bad guys - nag lord and the Cold Prince - nor in randomly exploring hexes (though they are great, IMO), and they asked me to go back to the old "campaign arc".  They don't want to be railroaded, but they like the idea that every adventure is part of a larger meta-plot (like Temple of Elemental Evil or Against the Giants).  So will take them off to the far NE of the Imperium/Dolmenwood to Kislev (aka Russia) and run Reign of Winter. 

My PCs range from level 1 to 5 (some deaths have occurred) - I think it goes level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 5 (one of them is the ghost of her dead character - long story!).

This is the first non-5e campaign my group has played (though I've been playing since 1981/82, all my players, bar 1, came into the game via 5e).  I picked Dolemenwood because the classes are a bit closer to 5e with some class abilities.  One of the sticking points for migrating was my players didn't like the super basic classes of BECMI/OSE.  Dolmenwood seems like a good compromise.  So, I will stick with the classes but otherwise use OSE Advanced rules.

A B/X MU with fireball (or even sleep, charm, etc.) is extremely powerful at first; it makes sense he would also be fragile.

Of course, when he runs out of spells...

Quote from: solomani on February 13, 2024, 02:26:16 AM

Quote from: Persimmon on February 12, 2024, 11:07:45 PM
My solution for the HP issue is that all PCs get their entire Con score plus regular roll plus Con bonus at 1st level.  It helps a lot then and evens out down the road.  I also use the AD&D hit dice for OSE (so thieves get d6, fighters d10, etc.).  As for the original question, yeah, tactics matter a lot more I'd say, than in later editions of the game.  This applies to players too.  But using allies, traps, environment, etc. can be huge.

I give PCs max hp at level 1; I have been doing that since 1982.

I wound up giving my Dolmenwood players their Constitution attribute score as HP at level one. Might have been overkill, but they'd never have survived the first adventure without it. Dolmenwood characters are kinda weedy even by OSR standards.

Quote from: solomani on February 13, 2024, 02:26:16 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 12, 2024, 10:31:31 PM
What are the odds! What level range are your PCs in? I've been putting together a list of modules I thought I could slot into the Dolmenwood setting. Might be useful to you.

So, I started the campaign in September with the preview books.  My game plan was to have many hooks the PCs could pursue. They ended up visiting the Abbey but then retreating once they got to the lower level (from Wormskin), and then they did the Black Wyrm of Brandenburg (set it in Galblight), and now they are in the Incandescent Grotto.  But they don't seem interested in any of the main bad guys - nag lord and the Cold Prince - nor in randomly exploring hexes (though they are great, IMO), and they asked me to go back to the old "campaign arc".  They don't want to be railroaded, but they like the idea that every adventure is part of a larger meta-plot (like Temple of Elemental Evil or Against the Giants).  So will take them off to the far NE of the Imperium/Dolmenwood to Kislev (aka Russia) and run Reign of Winter. 

My PCs range from level 1 to 5 (some deaths have occurred) - I think it goes level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 5 (one of them is the ghost of her dead character - long story!).

This is the first non-5e campaign my group has played (though I've been playing since 1981/82, all my players, bar 1, came into the game via 5e).  I picked Dolemenwood because the classes are a bit closer to 5e with some class abilities.  One of the sticking points for migrating was my players didn't like the super basic classes of BECMI/OSE.  Dolmenwood seems like a good compromise.  So, I will stick with the classes but otherwise use OSE Advanced rules.

Gotcha. Yeah, there's a definite culture shock for players coming from 3e/4e/5e/Pathfinder to OSR games. Some OSR games mitigate it a bit by having chunkier classes and more options (Fantastic Heroes and Witchery for example), but I don't blame a player for feeling a bit deflated at how limiting a lot of OSR classes can be. For my money, OSR games are actually more difficult to DM than newer ones. The lesser mechanical depth on the player side requires you to make up for it with more engaging scenarios and non-mechanical challenges.

My players are a bit more veteran than yours from the sound of it, so luckily they're ok with not having a big campaign arc or villain to aim for. But they're still less than enthused about just going out hex exploring.  I've been stringing together modules (mostly from Dungeon Crawl Classics and WFRP), re-writing them to lead into one another as I go along. It's working well enough so far, and should get easier as the campaign goes along and there's more history to tie things into.

I find that the totally open sandbox is one of those things players say they want until they actually get it. Rather than plopping them down in the middle of a big map and saying "go nuts", I tend to see better results from giving them either a defined goal, or a menu of a couple of potential ones, and then a lot of freedom in how they achieve them. I don't really like big plot arcs myself, but after this campaign I'll probably go to something with a mission-based or a-to-b journey structure.

I do think a lot of players of later (post-TSR) editions of D&D have been conditioned in a totally different way in terms of approach and problem solving.  Instead of using your limited abilities to creatively solve challenges, like, for example, casting create water in the villain's throat or casting silence 15' radius on an object and tossing that at the enemy caster's feet, they're always looking for specific situations to use their cool abilities or signature moves.  I saw this firsthand in a game where all of us except one (the son of one of the other players) were 30 plus year D&D vets.  The whole time we played the teenage kid was just reading the rulebooks, trying to wait for scenarios when he could use very specific powerful abilities.  So rather than adjust tactics to situations, they wait for the situation to fit their preferred tactics, if that makes sense.

Quote from: Persimmon on February 13, 2024, 01:48:17 PM
I do think a lot of players of later (post-TSR) editions of D&D have been conditioned in a totally different way in terms of approach and problem solving.  Instead of using your limited abilities to creatively solve challenges, like, for example, casting create water in the villain's throat or casting silence 15' radius on an object and tossing that at the enemy caster's feet, they're always looking for specific situations to use their cool abilities or signature moves.  I saw this firsthand in a game where all of us except one (the son of one of the other players) were 30 plus year D&D vets.  The whole time we played the teenage kid was just reading the rulebooks, trying to wait for scenarios when he could use very specific powerful abilities.  So rather than adjust tactics to situations, they wait for the situation to fit their preferred tactics, if that makes sense.

Players do what they are conditioned to do.  A GM can lead them to water, but can't make them drink.  Of course, video games put a giant thumb on the scale, too, that has to be overcome. 

It can be overcome. I get younger players (and some older ones that never have known any different) to change.  But you can't expect it to work exactly the same way it did 40-50 years ago.  Instead, I've found it helpful to be explicit, both negative and positive.  No, you can't roll on your "history" skill to figure something out without investigating.  No you can't roll "perception" to see if you can discover something until I call for a roll.  Repeat the current scene info.  Ask again "What do you do?"  If they are really stuck, say, "Would you like to do X, or Y, or Z or something else?"  (Make sure to include the "something else").  Stay after it, and the light bulb will go on.  Once it goes on, it pretty much stays on, with maybe a little positive reinforcement.

There are some habits so bad an ingrained that you can't break them by giving alternatives and waiting for action.  You have to push.

Quote from: Persimmon on February 13, 2024, 01:48:17 PM
I do think a lot of players of later (post-TSR) editions of D&D have been conditioned in a totally different way in terms of approach and problem solving.  Instead of using your limited abilities to creatively solve challenges, like, for example, casting create water in the villain's throat or casting silence 15' radius on an object and tossing that at the enemy caster's feet, they're always looking for specific situations to use their cool abilities or signature moves.  I saw this firsthand in a game where all of us except one (the son of one of the other players) were 30 plus year D&D vets.  The whole time we played the teenage kid was just reading the rulebooks, trying to wait for scenarios when he could use very specific powerful abilities.  So rather than adjust tactics to situations, they wait for the situation to fit their preferred tactics, if that makes sense.

Players respond to incentives the same as anyone else. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a player try a creative solution and get shot down by their DM. I'll use one of your examples:

--Player decides to cast silence on a stone and throw it at the enemy spellcaster.
--DM rules that this will take them two rounds, either because spells take a full round to cast, or because throwing the stone is an attack and you can't cast and attack in the same round (depending on edition).
--Player sighs, but takes two rounds to go ahead and do it anyway.
--On the enemy caster's next turn, he steps 16 feet away from the stone and goes back to what he was doing.

The player now realizes that he's wasted either one or two rounds doing nothing productive. When this kind of thing happens, you can see the wheels turning in the player's head as he thinks "Ok, guess I'll go back to either casting damage spells or doing my basic attack every round". This is not unique to WOTC-era editions. In fact, my experience has been that OSR DMs are more likely to be hidebound to the RAW, rather than less. It's doubly damaging when OSR DMs do it, too. In 3rd-5th edition the player can at least try to come up with a creative use of their feats/spells/powers and rely on the RAW being on their side. An OSR character is stuck with a handful of spells per day and their basic attack action.

I don't even always blame DMs for this. A lot of these creative solutions are either game breaking or highly unrealistic, and encouraging creativity without allowing for videogame-esque exploits is a delicate balance. I recently had my players fighting a big plant monster, and one of them wanted to light a torch to throw at it. Great idea, but I couldn't in good conscience let them pull a torch out, light it and throw it in one round. Using the Create Water example, both the third and 5th edition SRDs specify that you cannot create water inside a living creature, and I think that rule was in effect in 2nd edition, too. There's an obvious reason for that. If you could just teleport a gallon of water into the enemy's lungs with a first level spell, you've got an easy instant kill on any air-breathing enemy. It'd become the first way you tried to kill every single enemy you came up against, and get just as boring as a regular attack. I suspect that even in the early days, most DMs wouldn't have allowed it. 

Like a lot of other things in life, it's not enough to want to allow "creative" use of spells.  It has to be facilitated by the situation.  Fortunately, setting up more interesting situations is a good GM skills to have, whether the players take "creative" advantage of it or not.  So many of the "creative" uses (and thus the scare quotes) are really things that someone tried, it worked once, and then they try to ride it into the ground.  It's a game of gotcha between GM and players.

Instead, it works a whole lot better if there is some interest in the location, arrangement of the rooms, things to hide behind, etc.  Sometimes, even if this wouldn't exactly make sense in a medieval location.  If the GM gets in the habit of doing this, then sometimes the players will come up with things that are good for that location, but they wouldn't even expect to work elsewhere.

I once had players toss kegs of oil down a long shaft to kill some intelligent giant bugs going after them.  I didn't setup that "scene", let alone force it.  Instead, I'm in the habit of finding ways to have:

1. As many chances for vertical movement as I can plausibly fit.
2. Will leave things lying around in odd places that fit what is going on.
3. Make sure that things are tough enough that the players can't just fight through everything.

So when the players had to retreat up that shaft in hurry, knew the bug had reinforcements that were going to be on them in a few minutes, remembered the strange pool of oil they had spotted on the way in, and were desperate--they gave it a try.  It almost didn't work, because they almost blew up a keg on the brink before they could get everything going. If they had missed a few key rolls, I'd have let it happen, too, and they knew it. 

When I put that oil there, I had some vague idea of it potentially becoming a trap.  The party getting involved in a fight in the cavern where the pool was, and it getting lit during the fight.  Instead, I got a memorable retreat, followed by a memorable desperate fight, followed by a decision to go in again after that success.  With no chance that they would try to "game" that solution in the future.

Just because some adventuring "ingredients" work well over and over again, it doesn't mean you must let them lapse into formula.