Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118044I always just saw 10 foot poles as the ultimate grognard item. Something that just requires your PCs to poke every inch and corner or be killed by an Animated wall, floor, ceiling, chest, staligmite, or some other ambush predator that existed purely as BS gotchas from a much more GM Vs Player hostile time.

Hmm, I don't know who you've played with, but I never encountered a hostile DM vs hostile player environment in any game that I have ever been in both as a DM and as a player. I can see how never having had the chance to play in a normal old school game would warp you view of old school games.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1118045As opposed to the current state of passive aggressive player vs. GM days of the present? Yeah, there are a lot of players that seem to think it is fun to fuck with the GM and the game in ways that only they find fun--and many current players will then cry when the GM responds with anything but acceptance of their stupidity. I think things like organized play encourage this bullshit.

No one needs those kind of players, if they can't drop it and insist on being assholes, there's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out.

Quote from: rawma;1118071Case in point. The only reason to do the 10-foot pole dance is so you can complain about what Spinachcat eventually did anyway, not because it's going to save you.

You have my deepest sympathy, here is a blanket and a comfort dog. Oh and a box of chocolates, I hear they are good for soothing hurt feelings.

Quote from: Zirunel;1118096Anyway, leaving aside the merits of 8' vs 10' poles, I still got the impression the "10' pole" in D&D was always just a joke.

The guys (and gals) I played with always found spears to be way more useful in a dungeon.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118104My GMing career actually began following the pundits advice from his blogs, and the end result where a bunch of miserable players (And me as well in the end) and allot of yelling.

I will have to take a look at The Pundits blog and see if that is logical. What year did you start reading the blog? I just want to have an idea of where to start looking for this advice that supposedly caused "a bunch of miserable players."

Quote from: ElBorak;1118128Hmm, I don't know who you've played with, but I never encountered a hostile DM vs hostile player environment in any game that I have ever been in both as a DM and as a player. I can see how never having had the chance to play in a normal old school game would warp you view of old school games.

If you have never encountered it, it must therefore never have existed.

Quote from: ElBorak;1118127Wow, Shrieking Banshee, I knew that 5E seriously limited player agency compared to OD&D and horribly Nerfed the non-spell casters, but I didn't know it was that bad, thanks for the warning about 5E.:rolleyes:

Grognards would rather EAT a baby then admit any wrongdoings of OD&D. Like if your like that Im not even gonna bother. I won't waste my time arguing with a brick wall.

We have never brought along 10' polls because so many of our characters carry spears. However, the 10' poll concept does come into play when we go indoors or underground, where a spear might be a poor choice in a fight. One or two guys usually lug a spear along anyway, because there are other, rare, uses for a long pole.

Quote from: Blankman;1118030Yes, encumbrance and penalties for carrying too much has always been a thing. Keeping track of how much you are carrying is usually important in old-school play. But I'd rather be overencumbered than dead. And shooting with a range penalty is better than not being able to shoot at all.

Go right ahead because if the party is running away from the enemy then your going to be left behind. If player XYZ wants to load themselves down and move like a snail my and the other player characters are not going to suffer for it. If the player insists on being a liability both going into and out of combat they suffer the consequences of their poor tactical choices. As for range penalties hope you have high bonuses to hit as at least in PF every 10 feat past the range increment is a -2 cumulative penalty. Daggers can be thrown 10 feet so throwing one 25 feat means a -4.

Quote from: RandyB;1118035So good-natured ball-busting and positive reinforcements produce results?

Whoda thunk it?

Yes and no and more importantly the gaming equivalent of reading the room must be taken into account. If the player is getting angry continuing with the good natured ball busting may not be the smartest thing to do or to be done at the end of the game. Not everyone likes to be told (especially today) if they are making mistakes or created a bad character. Most people can take advice as long as the DM or player is not being a jerk. If your going to be an asshole and you picked the wrong player or DM to act like that towards. Well if they come out swinging I'm going to break up the fight yet take my time doing so.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118044Did they prepare toilet paper? Increases the chances of disease!

The truth is that what counts as "Well Prepared" depends mostly on how pedantic the GM wants to be, and for that, there is no limit to said pedantry.

I always just saw 10 foot poles as the ultimate grognard item. Something that just requires your PCs to poke every inch and corner or be killed by an Animated wall, floor, ceiling, chest, staligmite, or some other ambush predator that existed purely as BS gotchas from a much more GM Vs Player hostile time.

Seconded.

Too many Dms forger we are playing D&D and not the latest sequal to the SAW franchise. At the same time adventuring is a dangerous business and any player who whines everytime their character receives one point of damage is not welcome at my table either

The rarely seen sextuple post.  Holy forum courtesy fail, Batman. :rolleyes:

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118144Grognards would rather EAT a baby then admit any wrongdoings of OD&D.

Not true.  I started in '78, so a grognard, and I'll freely admit that the Greyhawk supplement was a huge wrongdoing. :cool:

Many bits of gear are, or ought to be on auto-pilot, like 10' poles, torches/lanterns, and others. One sentence covers their use for the entire game, and every game thereafter, unless the DM is an anal retentive POS.  If you don't bring one, well, improvise or maybe suffer for it, or not.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118144If you have never encountered it, it must therefore never have existed.

I didn't say it doesn't exist, I just said I never encountered. But be sure of this, if I had I would have been smart enough to walk away and find or start another game instead of whining about a bad DM years later and stupidly assuming that all DMs are like that and using my delusional assumptions to color all my comments.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1118144Grognards would rather EAT a baby then admit any wrongdoings of OD&D. Like if your like that Im not even gonna bother. I won't waste my time arguing with a brick wall.

Grognards leave the baby killing and baby eating to the SJW liberal leftists. Killing babies is something they are good at. Playing D&D not so much. But whining, you folk are great at whining.

Oh BTW saying that fighters are limited and boring compared to other classes is about incompetent as is possible for a D&D player to be.

It's interesting to consider that old school play is usually considered to have competent characters by default. The idea that it is absurd to have a "rope use" skill as any adventurer worth his salt would know how to use a rope. The same with survival skills, etc. The current mentality is that if it wasn't on your sheet you can't do it. Sorry, no use rope skill, you fail.

When it comes to equipment however it seems to be reversed. The old school way assumes that characters are competent but not when it comes to preparation. You didn't buy that 10' pole or spikes? Guess you're screwed. Wouldn't any adventurer worth his salt however think about having those things? The current mentality is reversed on equipment with nebulous adventuring packs. I think OD&D could work with nebulous adventuring packs as it would still require the player to think about what tool to use when without the "gotcha" effect. How you balance that with the resource management aspect of OD&D play would need work however.

Quote from: ElBorak;1118187Grognards leave the baby killing and baby eating to the SJW liberal leftists. Killing babies is something they are good at. Playing D&D not so much. But whining, you folk are great at whining.

...you really need to just stop responding to people who use idioms, or something. Because all you manage to do is embarrass yourself, and somehow assume that everyone who uses one at you is left of your politics.

QuoteOh BTW saying that fighters are limited and boring compared to other classes is about incompetent as is possible for a D&D player to be.

Once you get to the point where adventures are in fantastical places, the fighter is fucked, full stop.

Underwater adventure in a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean: how does the fighter get there? Does he hold his breath the entire time? Meanwhile the cleric is casting water breathing and the druid turns into a dolphin.

Princess was captured by giants who took her to their castle in the clouds: how does the fighter get there? Flap his arms a whole lot? The ranger uses his animal friendship powers to get a hippogryph buddy and the monk can walk on clouds.

Fighters absolutely are limited, and that's the problem. In terms of D&D progression, the character concept of "dude who is good with swords" keeps until maybe like 5th level or so, and then it tanks. Pretty much every other character class in the game has ways of getting outside assistance or supernatural power that lets them do crazy - dare I say heroic - things. Meanwhile the fighter gets... better at swording things to death?

The concept is just too narrow and has too short of a shelf-life for D&D. Now if you don't go past 5th level or all your adventures are of the variety that can be solved by "has thumbs," then sure, fighters are great.

John McClane is a fighter. Inventive, determined, hardcore, good in a fight. All that jazz. And for the kinds of threats that a vanilla action hero faces, he's definitely a dude you could bring along. But if you're going to go fight aboleths at the bottom of the ocean along with their sahuagin minions? He either needs to be kitted out in some hardcore equipment (which is at the whim of the DM, mind, not something he inherently has), or the character can't even participate, he can't even get to where the adventure is.

And rogues have the same problem.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1118193...you really need to just stop responding to people who use idioms, or something. Because all you manage to do is embarrass yourself, and somehow assume that everyone who uses one at you is left of your politics.

And you need to stop trying to make excuses. Calling someone a baby eater is not an idiom, it is a vile insult. Extremely vile.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1118193Once you get to the point where adventures are in fantastical places, the fighter is fucked, full stop.

Underwater adventure in a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean: how does the fighter get there? Does he hold his breath the entire time? Meanwhile the cleric is casting water breathing and the druid turns into a dolphin.

Wow, just wow! Have your ever played D&D? It doesn't seem like you have or you must have played in the lamest games ever.

The fighter puts on his ring of water breathing  and it lasts longer than the clerics spell too. Or he could put on a polymorph ring and turn into a an appropriate sea creature whether a dolphin or something more deadly. Same for all of these, fighters get to use magic items the same as anyone else. Besides which depending on how deep your bottom of the ocean is that spell could wear off before the cleric even gets to the bottom. Just because the spell users have spells doesn't mean they are automatically a leg up on the other characters.

Quote from: ElBorak;1118207And you need to stop trying to make excuses. Calling someone a baby eater is not an idiom, it is a vile insult. Extremely vile.

You're excessively literal. No one other than you thought the person was saying you literally eat babies (but I do... Veal is delicious )

I'm as right wing as they come and even I can understand that the person was merely expanding on the idiom previously used. Since you are excessively literal I will explain it to you.

It started with the elaboration of the idiom "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" meaning "don't throw out the good with the bad."

It was first used here with the elaboration of "grognards like to bottle up the bath water and give it as much love as the baby" meaning, in the poster's opinion, grognards focused just as much on preserving the bad elements of old-school gaming as the good parts.

Finally, it was claimed that some grognards are prone to "eating the baby" meaning they don't just keep the bad stuff, they're prone to killing what's actually enjoyable about playing RPGs.

So, again, for your overly literal brain... the claim is that grognards often give as much love and care to promoting bad and unfun parts of old-school gaming (that were endured to have the good parts) and some outright kill the parts in the name of perserving the bad parts because "tradition."
 

QuoteWow, just wow! Have your ever played D&D? It doesn't seem like you have or you must have played in the lamest games ever.

The fighter puts on his ring of water breathing  and it lasts longer than the clerics spell too. Or he could put on a polymorph ring and turn into a an appropriate sea creature whether a dolphin or something more deadly. Same for all of these, fighters get to use magic items the same as anyone else. Besides which depending on how deep your bottom of the ocean is that spell could wear off before the cleric even gets to the bottom. Just because the spell users have spells doesn't mean they are automatically a leg up on the other characters.

And where did he GET the ring of water-breathing? The GM gave it to him.

Or rather gave it to the party who decided the fighter gets the ring as his share of the loot. Meanwhile the druid and cleric get equal shares, including their own magic items.

I will say, at least in old-school games where all the rules get followed the magic user is more equal; tracking every component, declared actions in reverse initiative order with casting times being ruthlessly enforced and disrupted by even a single point of damage, randomly rolling for all spells known and later found, etc.

The thing is I've NEVER played with an old-school DM who didn't handwave one or more of the limiters on old-school casting to make it more fun for those players, but gives NOTHING to the fighters.

In short... this may have already been posted here, but it's worth repeating... it says for 5e, but it applies to pretty much every edition;

https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1461/36/1461365206743.png

Quote from: Chris24601;1118230The thing is I've NEVER played with an old-school DM who didn't handwave one or more of the limiters on old-school casting to make it more fun for those players, but gives NOTHING to the fighters.

I think some of it had to do with how the DM learned the game.  If you learned it as a player from another DM, you tended to at least start with doing things more or less the way you had seen it.  In my case, I learned it from the books and a lot of trial and error.  We didn't handwave anything.  

The interesting aspect of that was that it took me a long time to understand the idea that "No one wants to play the cleric."  In our games, it was instead, "No one wants to play the wizard."   It got so bad that for some time we had a house rule that the player that rolled the highest Int must play the wizard.  When we switched from 3d6 in order to 4d6, drop lowest, but still in order--one player got an 18 Str and an 18 Int on the same character.  The party loved that guy.  He still only had one spell and lousy hit points, but he could hit, do some damage, and most important--carry stuff in and out of the dungeon.