RPGPundit Reviews: Lamentations of the Flame Princess ("Grindhouse Edition")

This is a review of the aforementioned old-school RPG (from right fucking now to be abbreviated as LotFP, since I can't be bothered to type that ridiculously long name), published by the publisher of the same ridiculously long name.  Written by James Raggi, whose name is of reasonable size.

This game comes in a box-set, a small sized one, with an incredible full colour cover illustration of a red-haired warrior girl in vaguely late-renaissance clothing (the aforementioned "flame princess"?) fighting against a freaky looking six-armed bare-breasted naga woman-thing.  The artwork is stunning as well as no doubt slightly shocking to those of more prudish sentiment than myself, which is pretty well the description of all the art in this game, which features a wealth of black and white as well as full-colour illustrations.  I would say many of them are beautiful, though I don't know if beautiful is really the right word to describe something meant to be in many cases intentionally grotesque, and there is a lot of grotesquerie in the art of this product.  Several of the images seem to feature the red-haired girl at different stages of her life, like glimpses of a story we are not fully told.  Its very clever.  That, and the art clearly tries to set the tone of the book as what the author himself describes as "Weird Fantasy".  The question is whether the rest of the game holds up to that, and whether or not that is a good thing?

But first, a bit more about the physical product: inside the box you get three booklets, all very well constructed and (at first glance) looking like they're built to last. They are the "tutorial" (95 pages long), the Rules and Magic (166 pages), and Referee (95 pages) books.   You also get a considerable number of very nicely-designed character sheets.  But that's not all! You get, best of all, a set of very tiny microdice.  They are the standard small rpg-dice set (1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d10, 1d12, 1d20), just very small in size.  Mine, at least (I don't know if everyone got the same set), are a very nice green with golden lettering that makes them quite easy to read in spite of their diminutive size.  Of course, I immediately started to use these dice, making them the only part of the product I've actually used thus far.  They're fantastic.

Now, as to the game in general: LotFP is an "old-school" RPG; though its definitely not a "clone" game.  At least, not the way I'm choosing to mark the dividing line: to me a "clone" game is a game that sets out to copy one of the original versions of D&D either identically or so closely that it really has nothing to significantly make it special compared to the original.  Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, those are all Clone games.  They are mostly a waste of time and space in my opinion.  Fortunately, the "Old School Renaissance" seems to be running out of precise editions to clone (unless they want to start cloning specific printings of the PHB or something, creating a series of games that are identical except in respect to typos fixed), and have finally started, very slowly, getting to publishing actual new material of note.  The finest example I'd had the pleasure of looking at thus far was Robert Conley's "Majestic Wilderlands", which is truly a masterpiece and has become one of those few games out of the dozens and dozens I've reviewed that has actually gotten to the vaunted position of being a Game I Actually Run a Campaign Of.

Raggi's LotFP is likewise not a clone of any specific version of D&D; it is its own thing, that heavily modifies some of the D&D concepts while staying very much an old school game (in some ways moreso than Conley's game).  Some of its changes are mechanical, but a lot of its changes are ultimately stylistic, trying to focus on something in the author's head he calls "Weird Fantasy", which isn't quite Horror, isn't quite gonzo, isn't quite gritty or dark, but is a little of all the above.   I have to say, my first impression, on my first reading of the rulebooks, was that Raggi had failed miserably.  His game did very little to back up the style he was going for.  It wasn't radical enough in its changes to the system, and what changes there were didn't have that much to do with what I felt he was aiming for. My first response was to just not like it.

Then I let it sit for a while, and came back to the rulebooks.  Only on the second reading, I decided to try to clear my head of all this talk about "Weird Fantasy", and instead just look at the game for what it actually is.  On that second reading, after I forgot about the framework the author was trying to promote, I came to realize something: LotFP is actually an incredibly tightly-designed, brilliantly rendered utterly kickass version of the D&D rules.  The "Weird fantasy" is mostly found in the artwork, a couple of altered or new spell descriptions, and some of the GM advice; it is, in other words, utterly tangential to the real value of the game: which is that its is one of the best hardcore "gritty" versions of the D&D game I've come across.  Now, I want to play this game; though I very much doubt it would be for the kind of adventures Raggi had in mind.  I want to run it for something like the Game of Thrones: a setting where fighters are badasses, you can have "specialists" in just about anything, magic is rare and dangerous, everything has a slightly-"realistic" slightly-"historical" emulative feel to it, and the monsters are as likely to be scotsmen as to be ghouls.

Maybe that is "Weird Fantasy", I honestly don't know.

Let's take a quick look at the three rulebooks.  This glance will reveal something very interesting, which is that two of the three rulebooks are mostly useless. I understand why they're there, but they won't really matter to most of the people who get this game, I suspect. This is "very interesting" because in spite of that the material in the third rulebook (the one with the actual rules) is just so fucking awesome that it still makes the game completely worthwhile.

I'll go in the order that I assume the books are meant to be read, thus starting with the "Tutorial".  To understand the raison d'etre of this book in the set you have to understand that Raggi has clearly meant to set up LotFP as an all-in-one introductory game for new roleplayers: it comes in a box set, it has its own little dice, he bothered to include multiple character sheets; it has absolutely everything that a theoretical complete newbie might need to play. Including the Tutorial book. I don't really know how logical or plausible it is that LotFP will be picked up by a lot of total newbies (as opposed to grognards that have been playing the game for nearly 40 years, who I suspect will be buying this game en masse); maybe in Finland (where the game was made) they desperately needed this kind of product? I don't know; I just have my doubts that such a specifically small-press endeavour would really require 95 pages of what is essentially a very drawn-out "what is roleplaying" intro. Indeed, the Tutorial actually begins with a section entitled "What is a Role-Playing Game".

Beyond that, it describes the dice, gives you a highly-structured "first adventure" meant to be read solo, then a slightly-less structured "fighting fantasy"-style second adventure (which continues from where the first left off).  This covers the first half of that book, and it does a fairly good job of very slowly introducing different rules concepts from the game, in a style reminiscent of the old "introductory adventure" in the Basic D&D box set (you know, the one with Bargle? And the Cleric chick who dies? The one in LotFP also has a bargle-esque bad-guy and a cleric chick who gets the shit kicked out of her, perhaps in homage to that, except of course that its more "weird fantasy" in its style, by which I mean more dark, edgy and grotesque).
After that you get a lot of very basic instructions about the game, how to handle rules, how to map, how to GM, and a 20-page example of play. The last section of the Tutorial is the "recommended reading" chapter for weird-fantasy inspiration; it includes detailed author-notes on Clive Barker, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe,  Clark Ashton Smith, JRR Tolkien, Jack Vance, Jules Verne, and HG Wells.  None of which gets me any closer to figuring out what the fuck Weird Fantasy is really supposed to be; it seems much more to me like a list of "writers the author really digs, who have very little to do with each other".

Anyways, that's the Tutorial.  I suspect that its the kind of book that 99% of the gamers who get LotFP will read once, if that, and then never ever use again.

Now, on to the real winner of the three LotFP books: the Rules and Magic book.  In 165 pages, Raggi gives us a very complete set of RPG rules that very much puts the lie to the notion that you need hundreds and hundreds of pages to do that sort of thing. I'm going to go through this book, but for the purposes of this review I'm going to assume you already know how the D&D rules work (would you really be reading this if you didn't?); and you should assume that the baseline set of rules here is "old-school" D&D in roughly the style of the Basic/Expert set.  That way, I won't waste bandwith trying to explain what a Saving Throw is, or how spells are memorized; and will just explain the ways in which LotFP differs from standard D&D.

For starters, you get the classes of Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Specialist, Dwarf, Elf and Halfling. At first glance you will note but one important variation there: "specialist" in place of Thief.  To explain the difference we should first cover what passes for a "skill system" in LotFP.

PCs can pretty much attempt to do anything in the game, and anything that's not so simple that it would succeed automatically or so impossible that it could not succeed is resolved by rolling a single D6.  Usually, a roll of 1 means success, everything else means failure (the GM can theoretically modify this according to conditions). The Specialist is the only class able to choose a number of specific "skills" where his base chance of success can theoretically be much higher.  The skills delineated in his class are "Architecture" (to study dungeon details and the like), bushcraft (for finding food in the wilderness and such), Climb, Languages, Open Doors (that is, by force), Search (to find things, including secret doors and traps), Sleight of hand, stealth (both moving and hiding), and Tinker (to open locks and disarm traps). The specialist gets points he can put into these skills to make their chances higher (up to a maximum of "6 in 6", where he only fails if he rolls a six, then rolls again and gets another 6); as well as these he also gets "backstab", which he can dedicate points to give himself a damage multiplier on a successful surprise attack on an opponent.  I did not find any rules limiting how many points you could put into a single skill at a time, so theoretically a specialist could put all 4 of his initial points into backstab to give himself a backstab x5 at first level.  Possibly a bit of overkill there, but I guess this game doesn't really dislike the notion of overkill; in any case, that's easy enough to adjudicate.  The interesting thing is that in theory you could use the specialist to have a character the "specializes" in things outside of this list of abilities. A music specialist, or a knowledge specialist, or anything you theoretically wanted to have.  The possiblities for house-ruling this abound.

Now, that x5 backstab at level 1 seems scary enough, but there's one VERY important rule-change regarding classes that I should mention here: in LotFP, Fighters are the ONLY class that gains bonuses to-hit as they go up in level.  Yes, you didn't misread that: every other class starts with a +1 attack bonus, and never gains any more by level, ever.  The fighter, on the other hand, gets a +2 initial bonus, and +1 attack bonus each level until level 9 (then stopping at +10 to-hit).   My initial thought was that this, right there, was a game-wrecker.  Certainly I could imagine that the first reaction of many players reading this would be shock.  But after a while, I started to think that for emulating certain types of games, this radical change could be quite good.  For starters, it makes fighters relevant and good as a class without having to add something special to them, magical or pseudo-magical abilities.  They can now finally do something no one else could.  Its one of the things that got me thinking about how this game, of all the different versions of D&D, is the one that would probably be best to simulate a "Game of Thrones" campaign; you have guys who are kick-ass fighters, and then guys who can be greatly specialized (or powerful) in other things but have basically no fighting skill.  It would certainly stop the potential problem of "20th level wizard who's never been in a physical fight in his life can nevertheless beat the shit out of a 3rd level fighter".

If you still think that this is too unbalancing, consider some of the other details of the rules: AC is ascending and based on armor-worn (+dex modifier).  Someone in Plate Mail with no shield or Dex modifier has an AC of 18.  A 10th level fighter could hit him with a roll of 8; but a 1st level (or 10th level) magic-user could still hit the guy, though with a roll of 17 or higher.  You can imagine that AC can easily get higher than that with modifiers; but the rules are also explicit that a roll of natural-20 always hits (and 1 always misses).  Likewise, the game supposes a world where magic items are rare, and those that modify armor or hit values are likewise rare, meaning that you're not going to see a lot of guys in +5 plate mail here.  Also in balance to this is the fact that no class has armour or weapon restrictions (except halflings, who have the standard size-related restrictions). Would that make the wizard too powerful or the specialist unrealistic? The rules also account for that: a wizard must be no more than lightly encumbered to be able to cast a spell, and the specialist can't be encumbered at all to use any of the skills requiring movement.  This means that a wizard can cast a spell in plate mail, but only just; he couldn't be carrying anything else.  Think encumbrance rules are a bore? LotFP has by far the best encumbrance rules I've ever seen in any version of D&D ever.  Its both simple and detailed enough (without becoming either so obsessive or so abstract as to be crapulent) that it allows everyone to keep track of their encumbrance easily enough, and to know exactly what it does to them.  The character sheet is set up to make it even easier to keep track of the encumbrance (which is basically a formula that gives you levels of encumbrance based on what kind of armor you're wearing, and how many objects you're carrying, ignoring objects of a very small or light quality).  I normally HATE encumbrance rules, but these are spectacular.

I seem to have wandered a winding sort of path in the above paragraph, but I did so to prove a point: the system design here is very conscientious.  It's tight.  Everything is done for a reason, or so it would seem in hindsight, at least.  It all comes together with great attention to detail to create a very playable kind of game.

Other changes to the classes are relatively slight: magic-users get a d6 hit points at 1st level (then go back to d4s for the rest), Turn Undead is not an innate cleric ability (instead, its a 1st-level spell). Clerics don't have restrictions to encumbrance for spellcasting, letting them cast fully-armored and armed.  Dwarves get the best hit points of the game, higher encumbrance thresholds and excellent saving throws (but do not get ascending attack bonuses!).  Elves cast spells and are very good at searching, they can cast spell with higher encumbrance than a magic user (letting them wear armor and such). Halfings get the best saves in the game, and have good bushcraft and stealth.  Each of the classes have a different minimum starting hit point number (if you roll less than that number on the die, you just substitute the minimum for what you rolled).

The equipment list is quite detailed, and has the peculiar quality of using the silver piece, rather than the gold, as its base currency.  This obviously adds a default-setting grittiness to the feel of the game.  There are very thorough pages of rules that cover dozens and dozens of different mechanics for action resolution in one or two paragraphs (most of them resolved by rolling a single d6). There's a lengthy list of retainers for you to hire, rules for owning properties or investing in ventures, and of course your standard rules for encounters and combat.  There are some good modifications to the standard combat rules, mainly in the question of maneuvers and such (fighters, dwarves, and elves get a couple of special maneuvers that other classes don't, and get a better deal when they "parry", that is, fight fully defensively).

The spell lists for Clerics and Magic-users are quite complete (in the old-school understanding of "complete"). Clerics also have rules for making protection scrolls (as well as cleric spell-scrolls), and holy water. Magic users have rules for making potions, staffs and wands. Both have rules for researching spells.  All those item creation rules (another area of rules I traditionally despise) are actually very good, they take time and cost money, and have a risk of failure; the more time and money a PC commits up front, the less likely that he'll fail.

The magic system is still D&D as per usual; but the spell lists themselves have been changed in subtle ways, to make magic a bit less about lobbing fireballs (indeed, both "Fireball" and "Lightning Bolt" are missing from the spell lists) and more about subtler effects and meddling with powerful forces.  There are still some of your standard magical effects (though some have been slightly changed): sleep, charm, cure light wounds (which heals 1d6, plus 1 point per caster level), and magic missile (one of the few directly offensive spells of the game, it does 1d4 damage per caster level, and can be divided into multiple missiles of variable d4 damage).    It is in the list of spells that perhaps the largest elements of the "weird fantasy" influence comes through, though to me it just seems your basic lovecraftian kind of deal. For example, the spell "Contact Outer Sphere" lets you ask a question (ie. contact outer plane), but you're contacting stars (the author uses real stars, like sirius and algol) instead of gods.

There are several spells which have quite random effects (like the "Strange Waters" spell that creates 20 small fish that start to die immediately, the caster and others have limited time to eat one or more, and each have a random effect, usually positive but not necessarily useful; you can eat more than one fish, but it can have negative side-effects, also randomly determined). Perhaps the most significant variant in the spell list that is indicative of the attempted "Weird Fantasy" atmosphere is the "Summon" spell: a first level spell, it allows the magic-user to summon bizarre beings from between the fabric of time and space, with randomly-determined forms and powers.  The higher your level, the more powerful an entity you can summon.  Once summoned, the Magic-user must make a "domination" roll against the creature; failing the roll means that the creature goes apeshit and will try to kill everything around it.  The creature summoned can be anything from an amoeba with adhesive antennae to a flowing colour with smoking teats, and then some.  Fucking up the die rolls for the spell can lead to really messed up creatures, like summoning up the "collective unconscious desire for suicide", or "the space between the ticks of a clock". Really spectacular failure in the attempted "domination roll" can cause literally thousands of extraplanar entities to invade the world.  That's right, you can essentially fuck up the entire world with a 1st level magic user.  Of course, the flip-side of this is that if he does well enough, a magic user can end up with incredibly powerful servitor entities to take care of those pesky fighters and their high attack-bonuses.

All of this brings us along to the third book, the "Referee" book.  I had good hopes for this book, but as it turns out it was mostly pointless filler.  That's basically alright, since the essence of everything you need in the game is pretty much in the rule book, though the referee book could easily have been so much more useful to provide additional cool shit, and it just fails to do so time and again.  Instead, it becomes more or less a sad afterthought.  I know that what its meant to be is the magnum opus or manifesto or whatever of weird fantasy, but there's so little I end up caring about in all of it that I feel like its just not worth picking up.  It could have been a lot better, if the emphasis wasn't (apparently intentionally) anti-mechanical.

A lot of it is "GM advice" (like we needed even more of that after the Tutorial); things like "the basics of adventure design", The "five elements of every good adventure" (which are deadly situations, freedom of choice, risk of failure and chance of success, rewards and variety), a diatribe against railroading, the importance of mapping, how to run a campaign, etc etc ad nauseum.  There's relatively little in that general advice category I really disagree with; its just all stuff that's pretty old hat to any old schooler.   Aside from that, what you get is prize tidbits like Raggi declaring his hate-on for "Sanity Point" style mechanics.  He insists, as though he's never, ever gamed with actual regular gamers ever, that actual players should just be left to judge how to best roleplay supernatural fear for themselves, which in my experience will end up meaning "I'm so scared that I attack the thing in a calm and focused manner, and my fear should motivate me to get a +4 to hit, dontcha think?".  He talks about how traps should be so utterly unique that he won't actually bother to give you any tables for them.  He talks about how random encounters should be more than just "simply lists of hostile encounters", and thus won't actually bother to give you any of those either.  He tells us that in Weird fantasy monsters should be utterly unique, so he won't actually give us any statblocks of monsters, only very very general guidelines of how to make them.  Magic items should be rare and special, so no random treasure or magic tables either (he includes precisely three magic items, all of which are virtually useless to PCs and would basically be considered Cursed items in any other game).

In short, he basically spends the entire book finding excuses not to provide DMG-style rules or tables that can actually be of use to a GM, and instead makes highbrow diatribes about the importance of uniqueness which stinks to me of a justification of his own laziness.  If he'd really wanted to explain to me what the fuck Weird Fantasy is supposed to be (filling out the glimpse he provides in things like the Summoning Spell), THIS would have been the place to do it.  Not with vague essays, but with shitloads of random tables and other such goodies.  He could have kept the guidelines too, if he'd really wanted to; but really, what's going to make more of an impact in how people will end up perceiving and running a game: an essay telling you "you should make your monsters unique and not like typical D&D monsters", or a list of 20 or so totally freaky and unique monsters?!  Why not give a long list of dark artifacts, rather than lousy guidelines?  This was where to put weird encounter-tables, rather than a lecture on not to make your encounters dumb.  Seriously, Vornheim, which I recently reviewed and which is published by LotFP, is full to the fucking brim with this stuff, and manages to create its sense of atmosphere with it about a thousand times better in about a dozen pages of random charts than LotFP RPG manages to in 95 pages of Raggi's manifesto.

Probably the best part of the Referee book is the short adventure at the end of it, which does a better job of giving you some notion of the style Raggi is going for, than all that came before it.  Its a weird adventure about some changelings, done pretty menacingly.  Still, I'd mostly call the nature of adventure grim and gritty (it potentially culminates in the burning down of an orphanage as part of a religious crusade), rather than anything that I can absolutely pin down as the elusive "weird fantasy".

Aside from that, the Referee book is such a wasted opportunity.  And I think it will end up causing the opposite effect of what it is probably meant to do.  I know that in my case, having not really had Weird Fantasy clarified properly, and having found no material of actual use to me in the Referee book, and now lacking some elements that ought to be present in this RPG (like a list of monsters, random encounter tables, and magic items), I'm going to just either use tables and monster-stats that are found in other D&D editions, or make my own with little regard to Raggi's essays.   Meaning that when I run LotFP, it won't be very "weird fantasy" at all.  On the other hand, had he actually put in those kinds of tables, there's no doubt I would have used them (particularly if they were as good as the stuff in Vornheim, or as the glimpses he gave us in the spell lists of this product), and thus would have by default given my game that kind of atmosphere, even if I didn't personally get what he feels Weird Fantasy is.

So what can I say in conclusion, about LotFP? Mechanically, its brilliant, bordering on a work of genius.  It shows the versatility of old-school D&D, which is what I think old-school products ought to be doing.   Majestic Wilderlands is its only rival here; and whereas MW is some badass high-fantasy, this is gritty fantasy at its finest.  This game is OD&D's answer to Warhammer.

Stylistically, not so brilliant; but honestly, I don't think the way to judge it is by authorial intent.  I don't quite get what Raggi tries to convey LotFP as, and thus you could say he fails in that regard.  And yes, had the author tried a bit less to invoke his vision through essay-writing and done a bit more of the "implied setting" sort of stuff you see in the actual rulebook (and had he filled the Referee book with similar "implied setting" actual gaming material), you would have had an even better product.  But if you look at it for what it actually IS, then what you get is a down-and-dirty gritty kind of D&D that's marvelous.

Maybe the highest compliment I can give this game is that while I'm not yet sure when, I am pretty certain that at some point I WILL be using these rules.  Maybe not how he thought it was made to be used, but that's actually to the credit of the versatility of the system.  If the thought of "oD&D's answer to WFRP" is something that appeals to you, if you want an old-school product that isn't just another clone, then I would strong recommend you pick up this game.  And don't let the "weird fantasy" hype scare you off.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Mario Grandi Oom Paul + Argento Latakia

I know you were sent  review copy, but do you know if there is a more convenient way to get this game besides ordering from the companies website?

Also, do you think the game is worth the $50 asking price?

Noble Knight Games is probably the easiest way to get it.

Quote from: KrakaJak;466000Also, do you think the game is worth the $50 asking price?

The Grindhouse edition costs exactly 32.50€. It's the euro-dollar exchange what kills it for the American consumer.

To the Pundit, thank you for the review, very informative.

Quote from: Claudius;466010The Grindhouse edition costs exactly 32.50€. It's the euro-dollar exchange what kills it for the American consumer.

To the Pundit, thank you for the review, very informative.

Also, the 23% VAT added to the box makes it sorta pricy, even for a European gamer - it killed my interest in the game a couple of months ago. This review, among other things, has rekindled my interest once again.

Thanx for the review, Pundit - it's a good one.

I would not personally be able to tell you the cheapest way to get it, though I see some people have already attempted to answer the question.

Frankly, I can say that LotFP is a truly awesome game.  Is it worth paying that much?  I can say that the books are fine quality, you get a set of little dice for it that are quite nice (and that must be what, a $7-12 dollar value right there? I have no idea what a set of dice goes for these days), the art is impressive (though sometimes controversial, see the comments on this same review on my blog to see a storm of controversy about some of the more graphic images), and you get a lot of pre-printed character sheets too.  The tutorial and referee books are mostly filler to me; the former could be quite useful to someone who was a total raw beginner to RPGs, though.

In short, I don't know. $50 is pricey, but there are few games I rate as highly as this.  And it is a very complete game all things considered (absent a few things like a monster-list, magic items or random encounters).  

I guess the only thing I can answer to this is "would I pay $50 for this game, if I knew what I know now about it, and didn't already have my review copy"?  The answer is yes, I think I would, though I'd be happier if it was closer to $30.

Maybe we can convince Raggi to do a version that is just the Rules book, for a lower price?

RPGPundit

Sold!

I just ordered the box, and with a nice 20% discount from the Gamer's Haven podcast with James & Zak, I paid around 45$ for it, s&h included. Look very much forward to getting my hands on both the pdf and the actual box.

I have a question which is sort of about LotFP and sort of not.

I have plenty of experience GMing fun old school games.  I have my own way of doing things, my friends have theirs.  It's kind of difficult for us to learn from each other -- we chat and share tips and methods, but tend to forget that stuff when we sit down to play.

I've read a lot of RPG books that contained perfectly fine GM advice, but it was paragraphs and paragraphs of text, and not something I could easily use in the middle of play.  Your review of the Referee Book made me think that it falls in this category.

I hold out hope that some game text will articulate old school GMing principles in a way that's actually usable at the table.  Something with visual structure that's thorough, clear, and easy to apply on the spot.  A chart with hierarchies, perhaps?  I dunno.  Anyway, I'm wondering if LotFP took any sort of a stab at this, how it worked out, and which other old school games might be doing it better.

Thanks!

Quote from: David Berg;468079I have a question which is sort of about LotFP and sort of not.

I have plenty of experience GMing fun old school games.  I have my own way of doing things, my friends have theirs.  It's kind of difficult for us to learn from each other -- we chat and share tips and methods, but tend to forget that stuff when we sit down to play.

I've read a lot of RPG books that contained perfectly fine GM advice, but it was paragraphs and paragraphs of text, and not something I could easily use in the middle of play.  Your review of the Referee Book made me think that it falls in this category.

I hold out hope that some game text will articulate old school GMing principles in a way that's actually usable at the table.  Something with visual structure that's thorough, clear, and easy to apply on the spot.  A chart with hierarchies, perhaps?  I dunno.  Anyway, I'm wondering if LotFP took any sort of a stab at this, how it worked out, and which other old school games might be doing it better.

Thanks!

Sadly, I don't think LotFP does this.

Though really, I wonder if you think that you have to stop and check GMing advice (not, say, random tables) mid-game, whether you have really figured out how this old-school stuff actually works or not?

RPGPundit

I fully agree that stopping to check GMing advice blows!  What I'd like is something more natural and concrete.  Maybe just the right set of roll-on tables would do it; not sure.

I'll ask a more general question.  What games or game products do you see best helping GMs run a good old-school session?

Thanks!

anyone else notice that the Elf is ridiculously overpowering compared to the other classes?

The Elf can use all of the various combat maneuvers of a Fighter, is on equal footing spell-wise with the magic-user, has D6 hit points instead of D4 of a Magic-user, can cast spells one-handed unlike a Magic-user, AND has its own special Elf-abilities. The only downsides I can see are that it takes a little bit more XP to go up levels, and the Elf is vulnerable to holy water.

So, my question is this, why the fuck would anyone want to play a Magic-user when they can play an Elf?

Hmm. That's quite a good pair of questions. I would like to see how the author would respond...

RPGPundit

Quote from: everloss;470078anyone else notice that the Elf is ridiculously overpowering compared to the other classes?

The Elf can use all of the various combat maneuvers of a Fighter, is on equal footing spell-wise with the magic-user, has D6 hit points instead of D4 of a Magic-user, can cast spells one-handed unlike a Magic-user, AND has its own special Elf-abilities. The only downsides I can see are that it takes a little bit more XP to go up levels, and the Elf is vulnerable to holy water.

So, my question is this, why the fuck would anyone want to play a Magic-user when they can play an Elf?

Certain Cleric spells like Bless and Protection Against Evil work differently against elves as well.

As characters rise in level, the fighter options mean less as far as matching up to the fighter (the fact that you can Press for a total of +3 AB is no longer so impressive at 5th level when the 5th level fighter gets +8 AB total from pressing. And half the time the Elf is 5th level, the Fighter is 6th with the same XP so there's an even bigger difference.

Over the long haul, the XP difference between MU and Elf is important. I run fairly XP-stingy games; my last campaign (I'm playing in someone else's at the moment) lasted almost two and a half years and the highest level characters were 6th or 7th level I think. That leaves considerable stretches with the Elf being a bit behind magically than a MU with the same XP.

But in a low-level 1-shot? Yeah, totally pick the Elf.

(I think the situation is even worse in B/X and BECMI, where the elf also has a weapon and armor options far beyond what the MU is allowed)

Quote from: JimLotFP;470130(I think the situation is even worse in B/X and BECMI, where the elf also has a weapon and armor options far beyond what the MU is allowed)

But didn't the elf need more XP to gain levels in the older versions of D&D? I have a vague recollection of having to gather 4000 xp to gain a level with my very first D&D character, an elf - he never got beyond 3rd level.

I guess my concern regarding the elf is that my campaigns rarely see any character higher than 4th level.

Thank you for the response Mr. Raggi. You gave me something to think about.