Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 12, 2022, 08:36:33 PM
These are all things that many OSR games fix.  I like Dungeons and Delvers Dice Pool for all the reasons it's not like D&D.

1.  No insane hit point bloat.  A warrior starts with 5 hit points, and maxes out with 8. 
2.  Very skills based.  Like D6 Star Wars, everyone has attribute + skill to do pretty much everything, including attacking.  In this game you have all the skills.  Many may only be 1D4 + 1D4 and roll a 5 is easy difficulty, but you have them.
3.  No savings throws.  Stuff like being poisoned is called a status effect and typically are negatives to skill rolls, of which attacking is a common one. 
4.  Armor doesn't raise your defense target number, what D&D calls Armor Class.  It's just 1-3 more hit points per fight.  In fact, you have three different defense numbers.  Parry, dodge, mind. 
5.  No Vancian magic.  Again, this games uses attribute + skill, in this case Intellect + Arcana skill.  Even non magic users have Arcana, but they just the use it to recognize magic, or "remember" lore about magic related stuff.  A wizard isn't OP as their damage is on par with warriors.  Archers may use up ammo a wizard doesn't bother with, but archers out damage them. 

It's my favorite fantasy game right now.

You may have just sold me on this system.  I have been curious about it.

Quote from: Greg Bruni on October 15, 2022, 08:11:00 PM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 12, 2022, 08:36:33 PM
These are all things that many OSR games fix.  I like Dungeons and Delvers Dice Pool for all the reasons it's not like D&D.

It's my favorite fantasy game right now.

You may have just sold me on this system.  I have been curious about it.

I recommend it.  Right now the dice pool version is sold on Big Geek Emporium. The author, David Guyll removed it from DriveThru RPG for some reason.  His call I suppose.  I like the Biggus Geekus guys, so supporting their new online store they made to protest Drivethru RPG censorship isn't a bad thing to me. 

https://biggeekemporium.com/product/dungeons-delvers-dice-pool/

It runs on two simple premises.  That dice progress from D4, to D6, D8, D10, and end up at D12.  And that you roll an attribute dice and a skill dice, plus often a few other dice from character customization traits, and pick the best 2 results to add up.  It's a lot like Star Wars D6, but far less math. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 16, 2022, 03:01:22 AM
It runs on two simple premises.  That dice progress from D4, to D6, D8, D10, and end up at D12.  And that you roll an attribute dice and a skill dice, plus often a few other dice from character customization traits, and pick the best 2 results to add up.  It's a lot like Star Wars D6, but far less math.

The Sovereign Stone/Cortex mechanic. I'm interested. I've always wanted to see a good take on that mechanic as all the others feel like something is missing.

David Guyll was on the Legion of Myth podcast where he mentioned where he got the dice mechanic from.  It was from some board game.  Roll all the dice, pick the best two and add them up. 

It's similar to Savage Worlds, but that game is your skill dice and a D6.  I don't like SW for leaving the underlying attribute out of the typical roll

I like the Delvers system better.  Like a Barbarian Dwarf with the Slayer and Soldier talents.  You roll a D8 strength attribute, D6 melee weapon skill, a D4 for using a 2-handed weapon, and a D4 if it's a hammer or axe.  My test roll just now resulted in a 3, 5, 4, & 1.   So I get a 9 from weapon skill and because I'm a slayer.   You can't roll past your maximum, but those extra dice often stop you from rolling badly.

It's an OSR game, but again, it fixed things I don't care for in D&D.  Cookie cutter characters are not a thing as you get 15-20 talents at character creation, 3 from your race, and over 10+ from your class to customize your PC, and upgrade as you go as many talents have three ranks. 

This whole thread was about OSR games, and other than those couple games that strictly recreate old White Box, B/X, BECMI, AD&D and AD&D 2E I think most OSR games are just people who house rules D&D to fix it, then turned that into a game you can buy thanks to digital PDF books and print on demand.

I'm honestly shocked that WotC are even still in business.

Quote from: Krugus on October 12, 2022, 08:29:40 PM
My least favorite bit of DnD rules?

Vancian magic.

After playing a slew of other TTRPGs, it is the Vancian magic I don't care for.

It could be done better and like others, I've made my own system to replace it.

I agree that Vancian Magic is bonkers.  Amnesia should not be the side effect. 

However, I have a weird house rule that keeps Vancian magic, but makes more sense.  It also retains spell books.

Scroll reading magic. Everyone knows that if you read a magic spell scroll, you get to cast magic once, then the scroll becomes blank, drained, evaporates, etc.  Its a one use consumable. 

What if your typical wizard was somebody who can read a scroll, but it only becomes useless for 24 hours.  They get their scrolls and bind them all up into a spell book.  If you want to cast fireball three times, you better have three separate fireball scrolls in your book.  You still only can cast X spells per day, but nobody is memorizing anything. In this universe magic spells are in writing. 

Because I like 3.0 / 3.5 / Pathfinder 1 more than OSR, I'll answer for that first.  My beef there is the way skills work.  As written, they seem reasonable, but when played at the table, my players (several who have played these games for over a decade, on and off) are routinely surprised by the skill checks and DCs at least once or twice a night.  There's also the much more common complaint about social skills being undefined in terms of what they do, and some tables basically playing them as mind control and others almost entirely ignoring an asked-for roll, leaving them ultimately as a houserule of varying efficacy that the PCs must for some reason give up combat acuity for in some fashion.  I'd expect a big table of examples out of a skill system, so that anyone who wants can figure out some range of "how it should work", hopefully a much more narrow range than we actually see.

For OSR, I have a lot of minor complaints that I think later versions did better, but none so egregious as the decision to make humans have absolutely no extra powers whatsoever, and all the crap that followed from that.  Humans are easier to roleplay, true, but without something like 3.X's 'bonus feat', everything must be interpreted as being worse than humans at something, which ended up with demihumans with like a level 8 cap or something.  This cap is appropriate in a game that goes to 10th or 11th level- no higher, no lower.  After all, the demihuman must pay for their early game competence, and their bonuses are likely worth around a level's worth of power, so a game that stops at 8th gives them no penalty, and a game that stops at 12th leaves them overpenalized for a built in flashlight and a +1 with bows or whatever.  The demihuman cap in my games was always crashed into, and workarounds usually included wish spells or other quests, all just to play a fucking elf.  Meanwhile, multiclassing was also a patch for this to some degree (the level caps were to encourage you to multiclass, and therefore look more like the old race*class combinations), which meant that multiclassing was ultimately cheesy garbage as well.

Not all OSR has this limitation, of course, and some lean into it in novel ways, such as ACKS, which has multiple things to pick from.  Ultimately, the stuff ACKS has done and the stuff that 3.X did are the only ways around this that I have seen that work well.

Quote from: Krugus on October 12, 2022, 08:29:40 PM
My least favorite bit of DnD rules?

Vancian magic.

After playing a slew of other TTRPGs, it is the Vancian magic I don't care for.

It could be done better and like others, I've made my own system to replace it.

faserip did magic best imho.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 16, 2022, 06:04:12 PM
What if your typical wizard was somebody who can read a scroll, but it only becomes useless for 24 hours.  They get their scrolls and bind them all up into a spell book.  If you want to cast fireball three times, you better have three separate fireball scrolls in your book.  You still only can cast X spells per day, but nobody is memorizing anything. In this universe magic spells are in writing.

More generally, moving the restoration requirements onto the spell in some way is an interesting change. I've done something similar with demon-powered magic, where each demon empowers a single spell and requires a certain amount of rest between summonings.

The only downside we found with this approach was the need to track which spells were cast when, since they'd then be recovered at different times of the day. In practice, doing so was trivial, and no more difficult than dealing with the edge cases around rest requirements for the wizard.

Vancian casting has a lot of discussion here.  I was exposed to D&D long before I had read anything by Jack Vance (I suspect that's the case with roughly half this forum, maybe even more).  In the Dying Earth stuff, the method of casting spells is portrayed really great, and I understand why it seized so many minds immediately.  It's completely and totally appropriate to that setting, and many others, a concept that can easily be placed into a lot of magical worlds.

But Vancian casting doesn't just mean jamming spell slots into your brain, it's also very much responsible for the type of spells we ended up with.  Some, such as The Excellent Prismatic Spray, and Imprisonment/Freedom (along  with the idea of reversability), are copied directly out of Vance's stories.  Suspiciously intricate spells are the hallmark of dungeons and dragons- even the evocation favorite, Fireball, relies on a pea-sized bead shooting out and then creating the pressureless fireball.  Simple cones like burning hands are designed in a magical fashion (as compared to red dragon breath, which seems much more primal).

The final thing that ties Vancian magic so tightly to OSR (and to a lesser extent, newer D&D versions) is the easy balance of it- once you understand about what a fourth level spell can do, making one is certainly possibly for both a player and a DM.  Giving out spell slots, items that cast spells, etc., all becomes reasonably templatable and understandable.  This rapidly fades if you move to a mana or magic points based system, and Gygax ranted against this multiple times.

And overall, I agree with him- adding MP or some other resource to D&D's Vancian spells really is an issue.  But adding a resource like that to magic, in general, is not a problem at all.

The issue is that to add that stuff correctly requires a lot of creativity, to keep the magical powers being created distinct and interesting, while not making them into the same thing as the Vancian spells.  I bet someone did that at some point.

Vancian magic has been popular just because the bookkeeping during play is primarily limited to crossing out a spell once you cast it. Downside is you get a huge bloated spell list your party wizard is constantly looking through.

Point systems tend to have more drag on actual play. No one wants to wait while the spellcaster figures out if he has enough points left to cast enlarged fireball, realizes his spell from last turn was undercast so he should have 2 more power points, etc...

Quote from: Zelen on October 18, 2022, 02:58:38 PM
Vancian magic has been popular just because the bookkeeping during play is primarily limited to crossing out a spell once you cast it. Downside is you get a huge bloated spell list your party wizard is constantly looking through.

Point systems tend to have more drag on actual play. No one wants to wait while the spellcaster figures out if he has enough points left to cast enlarged fireball, realizes his spell from last turn was undercast so he should have 2 more power points, etc...

Vancian magic also deals with structural/math issues that can happen with mana point systems that start to scale across many power levels.  That your 3rd level slot can't be cannibalized into a 2nd level slot and vice versa is usually a feature not a bug, though there are exceptions.    It's sometimes tricky to get those aspects in a mana point system right, and what works in one game can't just be blindly liifted into another.  For example, the Power Points in the various RQ games work well enough, because the different types of magic are designed to work with that system.  Trying to port it over straight into another game would likely fail.  Plus RQ puts other limits on how power scales.

Of course, the more "buckets" you have, the more cumbersome any system gets, and Vancian magic is not immune to that anymore than point-based systems are.  It's not an accident that those 3rd to 6th level spells coincide with what so many consider to be the most fun levels.  I'd argue it's not just the presence of the higher levels,though, but also the tacking on of every increasing slots for the lower ones. 

Quote from: Zelen on October 18, 2022, 02:58:38 PM
Vancian magic has been popular just because the bookkeeping during play is primarily limited to crossing out a spell once you cast it. Downside is you get a huge bloated spell list your party wizard is constantly looking through.

Point systems tend to have more drag on actual play. No one wants to wait while the spellcaster figures out if he has enough points left to cast enlarged fireball, realizes his spell from last turn was undercast so he should have 2 more power points, etc...

Again (sorry for the repetition), FWIW in my favorite versions the MU usually has FEWER spells to choose from (currently using SP with one new spell per MU level).

Also, you don't have to wait for the MU to pick new spells every day while all the other PCs gain nothing except maybe recovering 1d3 HP.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2022/10/spell-points-for-bx-and-osr-systems.html

Of course, "enlarged fireball", "undercast" etc. makes things more complex.

Alignment languages.

Penalties for alignment change.

Missile attacks being equally likely to hit any adjacent creature.

What happened when you tried to jump a goblin sentry and wrestle him to the ground. No early D&D game came close to getting this right.

No rules for what happens when a magic-user puts on armor. There are no penalties. It's apparently just physically impossible.

See much mention of vancian magic, was thinking earlier in D6 fantasy it's magic system has vancian as a side effect, let me explain:
So you can design a spell with a long casting time, days even, and cast it as a charged ward awaiting the trigger you set...essentially memorizing the a number of times equal to the charges you set. By default in D6 Fantasy it would seem there is no restriction on the number of these charge-ward memorizations you could have hanging ready, nor upon the number of active ongoing magical effects one can maintain at once. You must tailor your toolkit systems mechanics in advance of the campaign, always, this fact is what partially provides incentive to purchase modules and accessories that can shorten or expedite that very process. Our current attempts at a campaign are a merging of some marvel faserip concepts with becmi/d20 materials atop D6 Fantasy as a core engine...in Krynn of all places, for example. There isn't much I won't cannibalize but i prefer becmi over 1e.

Small update: all the things I dislike in B/X with the house rules I'm using to fix them:

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2022/10/my-favorite-bx-house-rules-changes-bits.html

Including:

    Race separated from class.
    Advantage/disadvantage.
    Backgrounds.
    Critical hits.
    Streamlined saves.
    Unified XP.
    Streamlined skills.
    Feats.
    Weapon details (especially 3e/4e), without going overboard (AD&D).
    I like "metaclasses" from 2e (warrior includes fighters, paladins, etc.), and also new classes such as the 4e warlord.
    Alternatives to Vancian Magic (spell points or spell roll)