The Gaming Den

What Retroclones-like games actually separate race & class, so ye don't have the "Elf-Class", "Dwarf-class" or what have you? Ironically, a friend I know that's into Peasant-Fantasy dislikes "race as classes", finding it lazy, and taking away some choice he'd like Players to have.

Which given that noise, why would grognards like "race-as class" at all? Don't they like "some" basic options there? (Learned Conqueror Kings adds various type of Race-classes options)

I kind of wonder what grognards would do if you took 3.5 rules, simplified them just a hair, and then packaged them as "Old School" with no reference to 3.5. I wonder how many would realize the emperor is buck ass nude.

Aryxbez wrote:What Retroclones-like games actually separate race & class, so ye don't have the "Elf-Class", "Dwarf-class" or what have you?

Adventurer Conqueror King's main book has, for its dwarves, a "dwarf fighter" class and a "dwarf cleric" class. The player splatbook has, in addition, a "dwarven berserker" and a "dwarven rogue" class. They are similar but not identical to the human versions of such classes. A similiar sitch exists for elves.

Anything based on AD&D or 2E will probably feature the race/class distinction. So L&L's Advanced Rules, OSRIC, that Myth and Magic game, and so on.

Edit: Ogre mentioned Castles & Crusades, which is indeed more or less what you are looking for. It's debatable whether any product of the OSR is actually popular, but C&C doesn't seem to be hated by most people, and it gets mentioned on places like giantitp every so often. Which indicates some degree of visibility.

Aryxbez wrote:What Retroclones-like games actually separate race & class, so ye don't have the "Elf-Class", "Dwarf-class" or what have you? Ironically, a friend I know that's into Peasant-Fantasy dislikes "race as classes", finding it lazy, and taking away some choice he'd like Players to have.

Which given that noise, why would grognards like "race-as class" at all? Don't they like "some" basic options there? (Learned Conqueror Kings adds various type of Race-classes options)

ACK's players companion adds in the Elf or Dwarf version of the classes they didn't have in the 1st book so that's basically the system you want.

I kind of wonder what grognards would do if you took 3.5 rules, simplified them just a hair, and then packaged them as "Old School" with no reference to 3.5. I wonder how many would realize the emperor is buck ass nude.

Isn't that Castles & Crusades?

People are trying to rope me into playing Blood & Honor

Can someone provide an overview of what's good and bad about this game?

Well, I don't know about this specific case, but it's a John Wick game. Expect massive levels of DM fuckery.

Wick tells good stories. I would not actually want to play at his table based on the steamingly terrible advice he has written.

How is Castles and Crusades? Like, did anyone do a drunken review (or has one ready to go)?

Blood&Honor is a Houses of the Blooded port to feudal Japan. HotB is itself a bizarre FAT3 hack which marries the invoke/compel/whatever fate point thing to a base mechanic of getting some number of d6s and rolling for TN 10, but with the option to give up some of your dice for larger rewards if you meet the TN. Which is to say, it also hacks in the L5R/7th Sea Raises system, but gives up the roll/keep die mechanic for essentially a 'keep all' version, which is a lot easier to work with.

So it's kind of a bizarre Frankensteinian beast which has been subjected to the John Wick brand of zero destructive playtesting. Expect to see a lot of mind caulk.

There's also a strange sort of stab at increased player agency. For example, when you succeed on a roll to find out an NPC's secrets, you actually get to define some part of those secrets. That kind of thing is supposedly all over the place, although the examples are hideous in their unconscious lack of consistency. It's probably the most interesting part of the game, even if it runs into the sort of continuity issues you always get with retroactive changes.

Combat is incredibly deadly, and actual war is an excruciating death-slog. So fuck that noise, make a courtier or a priest and work the mechanics of just declaring that things you want have always been true.

violence in the media wrote:How is Castles and Crusades? Like, did anyone do a drunken review (or has one ready to go)?

Nope, but I did get to play a session of it at a local RPG Con few months back. It had an adventure w/some dangerous traps, I think attribute saves? (including changed modifier numbers a bit so that they're lower). I was able to kinda get a 3E-ish experience out of it by playing a Spellcaster w/Color Spray, wand of Paralyze, and Ring of Earth Elem command (my poor Geodude didn't hit once...).

At the con, the guy in question was pushing the product fairly strong, few people that played bought an entire core line. I also know he was a big fan of Gygax, unsure on past sale numbers thinking 2E/AD&D were D&D's best sales in its history? But I digress, I've had a very limited experience of it, but I believe its latest edition sought to crib from 3rd ed a little.

Today's episode: Shadow Conjuration

If I make 20% real Shadow Conjuration of a chair that could normally support a 200lb person, and a 100lb person sits in it, but fails to disbelieve, does it collapse?

If, while the person is still sitting in it, another person lies underneath it and activates True Seeing, does the chair collapse on top of them?

Still not as good as "What happens to someone who disbelieves shadow miracle'd demiplan?"

100lb person can sit in the chair without problems as long as he doesn't disbelieve it. If he disbelieves it, you need to determine how they interact now. ShadowChair is easier to break, so you would be perfectly justified in saying that it will collapse.

Somewhat borderline whether this is a game question, but it didn't seem worth a new thread of its own. Who is the most powerful magic-user people can name from a source older than 1970? This can include gods, as long as they are "people" like the Greek or Norse gods and not just big beards in the sky. Bonus points if they appear as protagonists in any stories.

The best candidate I can think of is the Monkey King, with Odin as a distant second. Circe and a lot of the usual suspects, while attested to be very powerful, don't really do all that much in-story in most cases, it's all reputation. Moses and various other biblical luminaries are disqualified because they can't really claim any agency over their power, it's all down to whether YHWH is in a helpful mood that day.

Zeus/Jupiter. He wasn't called Omnipotens Pater for nothing. While he's mostly remembered for adultery and bad parenting, there's a bunch of times when he threatens to beat up all the other gods at once if they piss him off.

Okay, technically true -but he doesn't really use magic much for that, just lightning bolts and a strong pimp hand.

Schleiermacher wrote:Somewhat borderline whether this is a game question, but it didn't seem worth a new thread of its own. Who is the most powerful magic-user people can name from a source older than 1970? This can include gods, as long as they are "people" like the Greek or Norse gods and not just big beards in the sky. Bonus points if they appear as protagonists in any stories.

The best candidate I can think of is the Monkey King, with Odin as a distant second. Circe and a lot of the usual suspects, while attested to be very powerful, don't really do all that much in-story in most cases, it's all reputation. Moses and various other biblical luminaries are disqualified because they can't really claim any agency over their power, it's all down to whether YHWH is in a helpful mood that day.

Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness is 1969 and some of the powerlevels of the characters put modern shonen to shame.

Who would win in a fight, Odin or The Thing That Cries In The Night? I have no idea but this is a modern pre-1970 example.

Thanks! Haven't read that but I clearly should -I've heard many good things about it.

Really strong pimp hand.

Book 8 of the Iliad, Zeus wrote: Come, try me, immortals, so all of you can learn.
Hang a great golden cable down from the heavens
lay hold of it, all you gods, all goddesses too:
you can never drag me down from sky to earth,
not Zeus, the highest, mightiest king of kings,
not even if you worked yourselves to death.
But whenever I'd set my mind to drag you up,
in deadly earnest, I'd hoist you all with ease,
you and the earth, you and the sea, all together,
then loop that golden cable round a horn of Olympus,
bind it fast and leave the whole world dangling in mid-air—
that is how far I tower over the gods, I tower over men.

He laid down mists and stuff. Threatened to smite other gods with lightning bolts so hard the wounds wouldn't heal for ten years, and during that time they'd be banned from Olympus.

While I agree that Sun Wukong is amazingly powerful, the Buddha still schools him easily.

He does -but the Buddha barely qualifies as a character. Maybe I shouldn't have opened the floor to gods, most of them aren't really what I was looking for. I did because a lot of them, like the Aesir and Tuatha De Danaan, are.

Yeah, but that's the Tathagata Buddha, who really does qualify as a sky-beard.

True. In that case, wouldn't Odin or Merlin be up there?

Merlin has a great rep, but he does surprisingly little in the source material. Mostly he advises Arthur, sometimes with prophecy. And gets conned by Nimue.

But Odin was my runner-up, yes.

Schleiermacher wrote:Somewhat borderline whether this is a game question, but it didn't seem worth a new thread of its own. Who is the most powerful magic-user people can name from a source older than 1970? This can include gods, as long as they are "people" like the Greek or Norse gods and not just big beards in the sky. Bonus points if they appear as protagonists in any stories.

The best candidate I can think of is the Monkey King, with Odin as a distant second. Circe and a lot of the usual suspects, while attested to be very powerful, don't really do all that much in-story in most cases, it's all reputation. Moses and various other biblical luminaries are disqualified because they can't really claim any agency over their power, it's all down to whether YHWH is in a helpful mood that day.

Not sure they beat the Zeus quote, but the genies in 1001 Nights do a whole bunch of stuff without breaking an apparent sweat. They don't seem to have any limits on their ability to just produce whatever stuff they want, where "stuff" includes servants and concubines.

On the other hand, the genies aren't really characters in the stories, so it may or may not fit what you're looking for either.

Schleiermacher wrote:Somewhat borderline whether this is a game question, but it didn't seem worth a new thread of its own. Who is the most powerful magic-user people can name from a source older than 1970? This can include gods, as long as they are "people" like the Greek or Norse gods and not just big beards in the sky. Bonus points if they appear as protagonists in any stories.

The best candidate I can think of is the Monkey King, with Odin as a distant second. Circe and a lot of the usual suspects, while attested to be very powerful, don't really do all that much in-story in most cases, it's all reputation. Moses and various other biblical luminaries are disqualified because they can't really claim any agency over their power, it's all down to whether YHWH is in a helpful mood that day.

The Ghost of Christmas Past?

Whoever Gandalf et al report to?

Dr. Strange?

Phantom Stranger?

Game On,
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