I would count chocolate in that bit of wealth. The Incans ransomed their emperor? I'll have to ask the wifey about that. She's Peruvian and her grandmother, up until reciently, had a home in the ancient Incan capital, Cuzco until the government took it. Digressing, Why argue about the amount of gold? Remember the Counterweight Continent on Discworld? Ah...Discworld. My own setting took its flatness from Discworld, only instead of a mountain at the hub, my world has a Mana tree guarded by the Twilight Elves...my reflavor of the Drow (I got so sick of seeing them used as baddies, I thought they needed some love.).
@Silvaki
Have you seen the reprint of the AD&D core...was it 1e or 2e they reprinted? The funds go towards the GG Monument fund.
@Pax
The group wants to start in Darokin. I've got a month to get ready. I kinda want a story with some plot without ending up like DM of the Rings and railroad the hell out of the game. The more I look at the Known World, the more it shapes my setting. It truly was a great setting despite FR being the most written about, which I ironically know little about.
The hoard of Smaug was supposed to be the biggest ever in Middle Earth, with the possible exception of Scatha.
And, not all was gold, and much of that gold was found/hoarded by the use of a Artifact.
Reading about the treasure of the Incas and Aztecs- the Spanish took out about 200 tonnes. That's just the Conquistadors. Note that when the Incas ransomed their Emperor, they filled a room 18' by 20' , 8' high with gold. That, when melted down, "only" weighed 11 tonnes.
So, since the worlds gold supply is 171,000 tonnes, that would fill much more than 10000 rooms that size with gold, way bigger than even a Godzilla sized dragon.
Sure, if melted down and compacted it is "only" a cube 75' on a side, but from the pictures, a lot was items, not all melted down into one glob.
Besides everyone knows dwarven coins are at best 10 karat gold. ; )
I think I did 1e and 2e wrong. I started playing in 1980 and did most of my tours as GM. Here's some things that are different in my play experience as I remember it from seemingly everyone elses:
1. Speed: I don't remember fights being all that quick. They were quick to get into, and quick to run away from, but the actual fights were pretty slow. We didn't use mats; we measured with rulers from representitive dice, minis or whatever we had at the table. Also I remember a lot of arguing over things like ongoing effects, terrain, vague spell conditions, etc.
2. The Magic Shoppe: I always had these (don't stone me). They didn't sell +5 Holy Avengers or anything, but you could always find scrolls and potions, perhaps the occasional ring or wonderous item. Wands, staves and rods were hard to find, also weapons and armor. But I liked the idea that the PCs could snap on a few extra powers here and there, whenever they were in town with some disposable cash.
3. High death rates = fun or acceptable: my players hated dying. I made a point to softball a lot and not kill a lot as a result. Once my players got high enough level I ran them through Tomb of Horrors and warned them ahead of time it would be lethal; I wouldn't pull punches. Regardless I was labeled a killer GM and a dirtbag by a guy who lost his 11th level dwarf to the sphere of anhilation wall sculpture.
4. EVERYTHING about random encounters: I barely used these; when I did I purposely re-rolled til I got something the heroes might be able to face. I did this NOT b/cause I didn't want to challenge them, I did it b/cause it was no fun killing everyone OR making them run away. Seriously, how much fun did I see on everyone's faces at the table when an ettin showed up wandering through a 2nd level adventure in the woods and the PCs had to ditch their horses as a diversion and flee back to town? (not much is the answer) Woo Hoo!
5. Slow EXP and level progress was fun: slogging through lower levels was really a drain on a lot of my players. They got bored with the low-power characters quick, especially one-shot magic users. My guys started asking if we could START campaigns at 3rd level or higher. So many of my games died due to boredom and frustration with low levels that it became really disheartening to even start a game.
I also remember the modules and dungeon mag adventures being really vague and basic story wise, and therefore not very engaging to my group. Some were iconic like the Saltmarsh trilogy or Keep on the Borderlands, but a lot of them took some shoehorning to make them fit. I did a lot of house ruling and hand waving. I have always enjoyed ad libbing games and plots, but back then I was also the Admin since all the rules rested with me as the GM and not many of the players knew them.
In short, the fun I DID have playing those games had nothing to do with the system.
I loved my friends and the bonding we did. Some of those guys are still in my life thankfully, despite distance, marriage, kids, etc. And sometimes we get together for a weekend of gaming. We never do this using the old 1e/2e system, but instead 3x and now PF.
Now when I GM my players all own the CRB, so they basically understand the flow of how everything works. They also understand Conditions; I call out "Entangled" and they do the calculations for me. Combat is still slow, but everyone stays engaged so I suppose that's something. And as for the death rates and random encounters and the maintaining of some kind of fear; I do that the way Hitchcock did - off camera.
They go out in the wilds and they meet some goblins; big whoop. But then at their encampment that night, just as they're bedding down, they hear a sonic boom in the distance. When they all rise and check it out they hear a trail of cackling, see a figure in a cauldron flying away and happen upon a 60' radius of trees shattered outward from a circular clearing. They've since asked nervously about this witch for 2 gaming sessions.
I'm not saying one version is better than the other, I'm NOT! I'm merely suggesting that for me PF is more in line with the kinds of games I've been striving for since I was a little kid. My players are responding well so I guess that's all I can hope for.
1. Speed: I don't remember fights being all that quick.
This was pretty normal for our group, too, in big fights against major enemies. It was smaller combats against weak enemies or wandering beasts that tended to be much faster, and that's the point. You could throw that kind of thing in fairly painlessly.
2. The Magic Shoppe: I always had these.
Nothing wrong with this either. For a lot of old-school GMs, disposable items were always a nice, if expensive, resource to grab up while in town. I usually had the shops in town sell potions (especially healing), scrolls, and the occasional wondrous item (and since 3e, low-level wands with a 4-8 charges or so). The magic item shop only really becomes a problem with the paradigm when PCs start thinking they can just walk out and buy magic swords, mithril chain mail, and staves of fire.
3. High death rates = fun or acceptable: my players hated dying.
Also pretty normal after second or third level. My group would sometimes lose characters to freak accidents while still level one, but after that, we rarely had anyone die for good except in very unusual circumstances. As a whole, I always found the high death rate of old school games to be more exaggerated in the telling than true. Maybe it was a Killer DM thing.
Tomb of Horrors is not the best example of old-school play, either. While all the traps are very survivable with sufficient paranoia, the way I hear it, ToH was specifically written as a tournament game because Gary was sick of people telling him his convention games were too easy.
4. EVERYTHING about random encounters: I barely used these...
Here is about the only place you diverge from my current grasp of the old school paradigm. The fun in random encounters is really less about actually using them, and more about the reaction the threat of them inspires in the players.
Random encounters suck the fun right out of a game if you aren't using them for their intended purpose, which is a tax on time that saps your resources and gives you no treasure in return. They are the thing that should be stopping the party from frivolously sleeping in the dungeon every time the MU casts all his spells. What they are is a way to punish PCs for loitering around a dungeon too long and making a lot of noise. They work best when used least: ideally, your players know every time you make a random encounter roll and are desperately trying to avoid giving you excuses for it.
You should never base the entire adventure around random encounters unless you are extremely good at improvising; and most of the time when you do use them, you should write your own table based on the monsters that already live in the area. You also have to find a way to communicate when there's a chance of running into something way out of the PCs depth, like that ettin. That way, your players know its a possibility, and they can prepare for it (maybe by getting hold of some giant raw steaks laced with iocaine powder).
5. Slow EXP and level progress was fun: slogging through lower levels was really a drain on a lot of my players.
I've heard that Gary himself actually used character levels 1-2 as a kind of newbie tutorial and let his experienced players start PCs at level 3. Personally, I think the concept of adding your whole Constitution score to your first level HP was one of the few good things to come out of 4th edition.
I don't know that the speed at which you level matters all that muchto the old-school mindset. I think the bigger idea there is that you carve out a niche in the world, build a domain, get minions, and become less of a murderhobo as you advance.
I apparently also played a different 2e.
Optimizing and minmaxxing was constant. High str dart specialists, humans dual classing level 1 everythings before game even started, twinking proficiencies to autosucceed on everything but a 20, choosing rogue or ranger race and armor to max out certain percentile skills... more random death meant more rerolling new characters meant pulling out all tricks to keep a character alive to be able to roleplay more with them..
Faerun, at least, was full of magic shops. Xoblob Shop and the Aurora's Realms catalogs come to mind...
Corebook had rules for crafting items (spend money, roleplay, DM fiat, get xp) as I recall.
Frustration on lack of perception and sense motive skills lead to even more paranoia, thieves that can steal your pants without you noticing, dopplegangers getting you alone and naked..
There were plenty of attack and ac modifiers to keep track of.. the only thing i saw that spend up combat was system mastery... DM describes a beasty, and the players all immediately rattling off its stats and best tactics against it...
I apparently also played a different 2e.
Optimizing and minmaxxing was constant. High str dart specialists, humans dual classing level 1 everythings before game even started, twinking proficiencies to autosucceed on everything but a 20, choosing rogue or ranger race and armor to max out certain percentile skills... more random death meant more rerolling new characters meant pulling out all tricks to keep a character alive to be able to roleplay more with them..
Faerun, at least, was full of magic shops. Xoblob Shop and the Aurora's Realms catalogs come to mind...
Corebook had rules for crafting items (spend money, roleplay, DM fiat, get xp) as I recall.
Frustration on lack of perception and sense motive skills lead to even more paranoia, thieves that can steal your pants without you noticing, dopplegangers getting you alone and naked..
There were plenty of attack and ac modifiers to keep track of.. the only thing i saw that spend up combat was system mastery... DM describes a beasty, and the players all immediately rattling off its stats and best tactics against it...
Yeah, a lot of the stuff with maxing skills and magic shops got started in 1e and 2e. There was a lot of variety between games, and how much crazy stuff there was in your game depended a lot on your DM. The 3e mark is not a magic cutoff where Old-School stops and New-School begins - there's kind of a weird gradient of schoolishness from the original books through AD&D and Basic up through the modern editions. The 2e Player's Option and Complete Guide books, for example, were like a candy store for minmaxers. I remember reading those as a teenager and thinking "Wow, actually using all of this stuff would completely destroy my game."
That said, the current old-school crowd is largely made up from the sort of people who liked to be able to fit their character sheets on index cards, but found the recent editions too complicated to support that well. So the rules-light approach is mostly what they mean when they talk about old-school.
Faerun's an interesting case, since it was TSR's flagship setting for a long time. Apparently it started fairly at a pretty normal magic level for the time, but proceeded to ratchet it up every time a new supplement or novel was published. It's real easy to open Pandora's Box, and very hard to get it to close it again.
In our group, every rogue was a halfling, and none of them ever had less than a 95% chance to succeed at anything except Read Languages, which never came up in our games in the first place. It was ridiculous. I ended up making a human rogue just because I got bored of all the ubercompetent rogues and wanted to see what it would be like to not autosucceed at every percentile roll by 4th level. (Everyone else thought I was nuts.)
That's actually a recurring memory for me from 2e: purposely making non-optimal choices just to be something other than a clone of every other character ever played. I still can't run an elf ranger or a dwarf fighter or a halfling rogue. Too. Boring.
@ The Big Mc: re - random encounters, I should've asked for a definition since yours and mine are different. I read random encounters as these bizarre non-sequitors that a buddy of mine was fond of, just for the shock value. You open a chest...FULL GROWN BENGAL TIGER!
What you describe above I call "wandering monsters" and I used those all the time. As you say, I used them sparingly in answer to character actions, but often enough that campsites had watches, if they HAD to sleep in a dungeon they were paranoid, and they generally kept the PCs pace at a decent clip.
I never "punished" though. I have ALWAYS been a softie GM. Once they got out of the dungeon, if they were REALLY bad off but were honestly trying to get away, I'd let them.
The same guy with the tiger-chest, he punished us once. Badly. We got caught by some randomly generated xvarts; we were near their cave trying to drink some water. Now bear in mind we're 4 urban characters in a 2e game stranded in the wilds w/no supplies. My character, the only one that can at least identify edible plants, pulled off an amazing roll to find the spring in the first place...and we're ambushed.
battle ensues, we're dragged into their lair, and more fighting occurs. We find our way back out again and my character, who saved some custom spells through the whole adventure, now uses them after running a mile away from the lair. In the woods, as dusk is falling and it's freakishly cold out, our starving and thirsty characters huddle in a copse of trees where my character casts 2 Wall of Wood spells to build a lean-to.
My buddy rolls...random encounter. The xvarts followed us into the woods, set fire to our encampment (despite our rogue and I having camoflauged the lean-to with leaves and brush), nearly kill my hawk familar and do manage to kill my character and one other.
All of this from 2 random rolls.
Yeah, sounds like you were using the they way they are meant to be used, then. As amusing as the tiger chest must have been, I had to watch that kind of "random encounter" trainwreck an entire campaign before I figured out where I'd gone astray.
Please don't misunderstand me about punishing, either - I don't mean you have to get vicious and kill people every time one shows up. Just that you use random monsters as bad consequence to poor choices, like standing outside a monster lair ringing a dinner bell. I like to keep about 2/3rds of them level appropriate or slightly weaker - just enough to force the party to waste a couple of spells or potions - and make sure any out-of-depth monsters I employ (I try to have at least one really big and scary one) can be reliably tricked, bought off, or run from.
That xvart story is exactly why. Short of surrendering and offering a bribe or a service to the tribe for a guide out of their territory, I don't see much you could have done to escape.
Yeah, sounds like you were using the they way they are meant to be used, then. As amusing as the tiger chest must have been, I had to watch that kind of "random encounter" trainwreck an entire campaign before I figured out where I'd gone astray.
Please don't misunderstand me about punishing, either - I don't mean you have to get vicious and kill people every time one shows up. Just that you use random monsters as bad consequence to poor choices, like standing outside a monster lair ringing a dinner bell. I like to keep about 2/3rds of them level appropriate or slightly weaker - just enough to force the party to waste a couple of spells or potions - and make sure any out-of-depth monsters I employ (I try to have at least one really big and scary one) can be reliably tricked, bought off, or run from.
That xvart story is exactly why. Short of surrendering and offering a bribe or a service to the tribe for a guide out of their territory, I don't see much you could have done to escape.
Oh man; we tried bribes (they only wanted food, the one thing we DIDN'T have), we offered to do a quest for them, we tried to fight our way to a point in the lair where then we could SNEAK away...nothing worked. In the end we ground our way out.
I think it just comes down to this: my GM at the time wanted to prove a point and kill someone. He didn't want it to seem arbitrary (rocks fall, you die) but he wanted someone to by the farm for whatever reason. Ironically none of my "homemade" spells worked and my one spell, grease (paid a ton of money to research since it was non-cannon per the GM) failed to trip up any of the xvarts, though it did provide us an escape route from the initial ambush.
Well anyway, thanks for the advice.
Eh, no problem. It's a thing I've thought about a lot recently for a megadungeon I'm building. It's hard as hell to implement one of those properly without a few oldschoolisms, and its not always easy to sort ideas that were actually stupid or broken from principles that I just used to misinterpret.
I think I did 1e and 2e wrong. I started playing in 1980 and did most of my tours as GM. Here's some things that are different in my play experience as I remember it from seemingly everyone elses:
1. Speed: I don't remember fights being all that quick.
2. The Magic Shoppe: I always had these (don't stone me). They didn't sell +5 Holy Avengers or anything, but you could always find scrolls and potions, perhaps the occasional ring or wonderous item. Wands, staves and rods were hard to find, also weapons and armor. But I liked the idea that the PCs could snap on a few extra powers here and there, whenever they were in town with some disposable cash.3. High death rates = fun or acceptable: my players hated dying. I made a point to softball a lot and not kill a lot as a result. Once my players got high enough level I ran them through Tomb of Horrors and warned them ahead of time it would be lethal; I wouldn't pull punches. Regardless I was labeled a killer GM and a dirtbag by a guy who lost his 11th level dwarf to the sphere of anhilation wall sculpture.
5. Slow EXP and level progress was fun: slogging through lower levels was really a drain on a lot of my players. They got...
1. You are right, each round was faster but the battles often went on for 10 rounds or more.
2. Right, as I said, potions, scrolls, magic arrows and what not, were all commonly available. PC’s would check in at any interesting looking shop to see what was available, and often something interesting was. BUT the point is, you could not expect to have a +2 ring, a +2 amulet, a +2 cloak a quiver of wands of CLW, and so forth. You got what you found, and what was offered for sale, and that last was not something to count on.
3. We didn’t have high death rates. DM’s who did there were called “Killer DMs’ .
5. Like I said before- at the lower levels, advancement was very fast.
Eh, no problem. It's a thing I've thought about a lot recently for a megadungeon I'm building. It's hard as hell to implement one of those properly without a few oldschoolisms, and its not always easy to sort ideas that were actually stupid or broken from principles that I just used to misinterpret.
What kind of megadungeon? I'm working on a town with one section completely overgrown with decades of magic-induced wild growth. It essentially wilderness + ruins + underground dungeons.
Are you using the Mad DM's megadungeon zones, populating it manually...what? Should this be a different thread? I'm such a nerd...
My current efforts are going toward designing the destroyed remnants of a giant subterranean fortress kingdom of darkness, inhabited by the now-splintered fragments of the once-monolithic armies of evil still entrenched within. A bit like Angband from the Silmarillion would look after World War III got through with it. I'm not a hundred percent sure what the Mad DM's method is, and a quick Google didn't bring it up, but basically, what I do is a zoned approach.
This is the third megadungeon I've attempted, and if my previous efforts taught me anything, its that you have to subdivide the thing into small chunks or you never get anywhere on it. If you'd like I can give you more details on a more topical thread.
My current efforts are going toward designing the destroyed remnants of a giant subterranean fortress kingdom of darkness, inhabited by the now-splintered fragments of the once-monolithic armies of evil still entrenched within. A bit like Angband from the Silmarillion would look after World War III got through with it. I'm not a hundred percent sure what the Mad DM's method is, and a quick Google didn't bring it up, but basically, what I do is a zoned approach.
This is the third megadungeon I've attempted, and if my previous efforts taught me anything, its that you have to subdivide the thing into small chunks or you never get anywhere on it. If you'd like I can give you more details on a more topical thread.
Sorry, The Angry DM
I really SHOULD do something about this early onset senility...
Oh, I remember reading that Angry DM article a few months back. It was pretty solid.
Yeah, I do something very similar to what he does, but a bit less formal and without the fancy-pants stat blocks. I like my dungeon notes to be a lot shorter than his so I don't have to constantly leaf through them. But the divide-and-conquer approach with regions, zones, and faction rosters is basically the same.
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Well, it's that time of year. Just got done washing 3000 miniatures, bought a new game table - a beautiful boardroom table, had my finished basement carpet steam cleaned, painted the walls above the 1/2 paneling, dusted the projector... now I will be unpacking 16 boxes of Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, AD&D, and more.
As soon as I find my guide to Karameikos, I'll look up Daroken and drop you a line. Maybe it will inspire some ideas for your campaign.
One tip until then... Take all your own campaign ideas (even the ones you said you had readied for the forgotten realms or whatnot) and drop them into Daroken. The key to having fun is the imagination and spontaneity. These are two wonders of early gaming that are lost in the shuffle of a downloaded society. Tear apart any canon you don't wish to use, and use the stuff you like in any fashion you like. That's what it meant to be an early gaming "DM". And once you do so, stay internally consistent with all the workings of your world, even though it is set in Daroken.
That said, I'll skim some stuff and try to drop you some ideas this month. Good gaming!
Pax
A couple of suggestions (I don't know whether they've already been mentioned: this thread is too long to read :)
1. Don't be afraid to house rule A LOT. The further back you go in D&D history, the less defined the rules were and the more rules people made up themselves.
1a. As follows from this, don't be afraid to change monsters from what they are in the monster manual. Gnolls may not have had levels, but there was absolutely no reason the DM couldn't say "the gnolls' leader is 8HD".
2. Feats didn't exist. Fighters in particular were very simple and standardized compared to 3E fighters. In 3E terms, 2E fighters had a standard progression of feats, every fighter getting the same "feat" at any given level.
3. Nerf cleric offensive spells. Clerics' spell capability was very support-oriented before 3E.
4. Half-orcs were part of the standard rules in 1E but not in 2E. So you can have them, or not, it won't effect the flavour.
The editions that have been reprinted are 1E and 3E. The monster manual for 2E was printed in a binder format, the idea being that instead of having a bunch of Monster Manuals I, II, III etc. you'd get a bunch of loose pages that you'd insert into the binder. This turned out to be a total pain.
By the way, there was a "0E" before 1st Edition, if you want to go really old school. D&D was already 5 years old when the first AD&D book was printed. (Even more house rules!)
The monster manual for 2E was printed in a binder format, the idea being that instead of having a bunch of Monster Manuals I, II, III etc. you'd get a bunch of loose pages that you'd insert into the binder. This turned out to be a total pain.
By the way, there was a "0E" before 1st Edition, if you want to go really old school. D&D was already 5 years old when the first AD&D book was printed. (Even more house rules!)
Yep, since they went ahead and printed monsters on the back of each sheet, which meant soem new monsters would have to go between a single page.
Right. The Original Three Vol set, + Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc.
Played those. The supplement I wrote was for that era.
Boy, talk about "vague guidelines".
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Thanks to the OP for posting this topic. I've found this entire thread a great read! This entire discussion has got me ruminating about the differences between editions, and so I started to write a reply that grew into a new post on my blog, heh. But to save you having to click over, here goes:
Several people in the thread have said that old-school play involved more real-world time passing between gaining new levels of experience.
Sure, I can see that being true once you got to higher levels of play in 1e and 2e, but that wasn’t true at the earliest levels: to take the most extreme example, the Thief in AD&D 1e achieved 2nd level at 1,251 XP, then 3rd level at 2,501 XP. And advancement speed also depended on the GM, who could drop a big treasure hoard in 1e, where gold equaled XP, and level up the characters as he or she saw fit. Heck, Gary Gygax even introduced a rule that no character can advance more than 1 level of experience at a time from a single play session — something unheard of in D&D in later editions.
One thing I like about the older rulesets was that the “sweet spot” of mid-range levels — at which the players no longer were common pushovers, and still had not maxed-out the limits of the game system and able to overpower all monsters and obstacles in their path — was baked-in to the XP progression charts. Sure, the first few levels were obtained fairly quickly, but because advancing to the next level involved a doubling of the previous level’s XP requirement, each subsequent level involved a much longer effort than the previous one.
At the same time, each character class could only obtain so many Hit Dice; after 9th level or so, you could only get +1 hit points or +2 hit points per level, and regardless of your Constitution score.
Together, these rules presumed a “training period” during which adventurers strove toward a heroic ideal, with progress being quick at first but eventually slowing-down and plateauing. This was definitely true of the Fighter and Thief classes, but then there were the spellcasters who continued to uncover new secrets of the universe, who at the very-highest levels continued to obtain new tiers of power. Still, for them the XP requirements were so large that every “unlocking” of a new tier of power entailed a significant amount of play. This led to increasing imbalance among the classes, but at the same time it was consistent with the concept of magic being all-encompassing and powerful and was seen (for the Magic-User at least) as the reward for being extremely weak at the lowest.
Starting with D&D 3rd Edition, there was assumed to be a standard number of encounters to advance to each new level — about 13 encounters — and this remained at each level, all the way up to 20th. So the new norm of what every Level 1 adventurer was potentially capable, if they “simply worked hard and tried,” was to the 20th level adventurer. Gaming-time-wise, you skidded past the “sweet spot” at the same rate as you did the earliest levels. At the same time, the Fighter-type and Thief-type classes also continued to obtain abilities that kept them power at a closer pace with the spellcasters.
The end result is the opposite of a plateau in the “sweet spot”: a geometric curve upward in power that parallels the progression between levels of spellcasting power. And these new tiers of power are achieved at the same, unchanging rate. This is figured into the math of D&D 3rd Edition and its derivatives (including Pathfinder): the XP rewarded for defeating a creature is doubled for every 2 Challenge Rating (CR) levels one goes up. And CR by definition is equivalent to PC levels. So therefore one 5th-level PC “packs the same punch” as two 3rd-level PCs, just as one 13th-level PC packs the same punch as eight 5th-level PCs. And so on, and so on.
This, combined with the flat rate at which one obtained experience levels, has two effects: (1) the “sweet spot” is truncated and supplanted sooner by high-level play, and (2) gone is any sense of any an ideal to what mortals can achieve. To clarify this second point, there no longer is an in-world “elite club” of the mortal world’s movers and shakers — in 1e, there wasn’t much of a difference between a 14th level Fighter and an 18th Level Fighter. But in 3rd Edition forward, the difference is immense. The legends of your community are not nearly as legendary, when viewed in light of their higher-level neighbors, or in light of what they eventually could be if they went on, say, two more adventures. (Incidentally, this also compounds the difficulty of creating a believable “sandbox” setting with widely-varied encounter levels, and makes the escalation of monsters’ power over the course of a campaign more extreme and conveniently-coincidental.)
And so, in 3rd Edition D&D and its derivatives, the “pinnacle,” that achievement of legendary status, lies at 20th level. Instead of savoring the taste and feel of the “sweet spot,” the players during middle levels of play are still hurtling toward ever greater levels of power, with the expectation of attaining that greater power baked-in to the XP and rewards system.
This is my long-winded way of saying that, when Pathfinder RPG goes through its next iteration years from now, I would like the “sweet spot” to stay sweet much longer. In the meantime, I am wondering how maybe I could “fix” the recipe to make it better suit my tastes.
So to answer the OP, here is a draft houserule I am thinking of for Pathfinder:
To recalculate the XP chart so that I can expand the "sweet spot". The Medium XP progression assumes a 20-encounters-per-level progression. I would recalculate the chart so that each level of experience assumed so many "encounters". It would be roughly like this:
Levels 1 and 2 - 13 encounters
Levels 3 through 5 - 20 encounters
Levels 6 through 12 - 40 encounters
Levels 13 and up - 60 encounters
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I apparently also played a different 2e.
Optimizing and minmaxxing was constant. High str dart specialists, humans dual classing level 1 everythings before game even started
Fair enough about that darts but the dual classing is not possible in the matter you discribe in 2e. You had to get to 2nd level in a class before dual classing. This could be done up to four times. Given the need for a 17 in the prime stat you wanted to dual class into unless your dice were extremely lucky we never found it too much of an issue.
S.
In my campaign I've been running AD&D 1st ed and 2nd ed. adventures from old Dungeon magazines using the Pathfinder ruleset.
The stunning lack of balance in those adventures make things very unpredictable for the PCs. The level recommendations vary wildly and usually seem chosen on a whim. Some adventures have been complete push-overs, others have had the PCs fleeing in the first encounter.
Whilst I adapt the mechanics to Pathfinder, I leave the encounter make-up(i.e number of monsters, treasure etc.) as written. A recent encounter left the PCs trapped in a room facing 1d12+10 shadows. I rolled high, and it nearly wiped out the party.
Despite the random element, the players (who are all old school) don't seem to mind, and it certainly makes the game world feel more real.
In our group, every rogue was a halfling, and none of them ever had less than a 95% chance to succeed at anything except Read Languages, which never came up in our games in the first place. It was ridiculous. I ended up making a human rogue just because I got bored of all the ubercompetent rogues and wanted to see what it would be like to not autosucceed at every percentile roll by 4th level. (Everyone else thought I was nuts.)Just out of curiousity, how? Was there something in the Complete Thief or another splatbook that let you do this? As far as I can tell the best you could get by level four even as a halfling with 18 dex (which shouldn't have been guaranteed with rolled abilities and only a +1 racial boost) is 50% across the board. You can't get 95% until 15th level or so.
Honestly, I don't remember. I was a new player then and wasn't familiar with the rules. They basically walked me through character creation. I know the group picked and chose from several different books and mixed 1e and 2e rules, depending on which they liked better, and they ignored racial caps. I'm positive no one ever had a 15th-level thief; the highest-level any of our PCs got before 3e was 9th. I know they took the base percentages, added racial adjustments, and then they had a pool of extra percentage points they distributed among the thief functions as they saw fit, based on their Dex score, I believe?
It's entirely possible they were cheating as well, frankly. :)
Hm. Were the flat percentages in the 1e table higher than those in 2e, what with the extra points you got to customize with in the new edition? Because if so, I can virtually guarantee they took the percentages from 1e and then added the extra points from 2e. They always worked out of both Player's Handbooks.
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Hm. Were the flat percentages in the 1e table higher than those in 2e, what with the extra points you got to customize with in the new edition? Because if so, I can virtually guarantee they took the percentages from 1e and then added the extra points from 2e. They always worked out of both Player's Handbooks.
Indeed there is no way by RAW to get %'s that high at such a low level. Sounds like an extreme house-rule.
Hey guys, OP here to throw some more thoughts into the pot. This has little to do with the rules. Tell us all your most memorable adventure or campaign (condensed) from 1e or 2e. Answer a few questions:
1.) What about it did you love the most?
2.) Is there something you'd change about it?
3.) Were you running homebrew or a module?
4.) What would you do to emulate, convert, or otherwise bring the same experience to your Pathfinder game.
I'd simply love to get some of those Paizo peeps over here to here about their experiences with 1e and 2e and how it came to affect them as players/GMs and what they carried over from those experiences into Pathfinder. I know they're lurking here somewhere...Personally, I'd love to see them put out something truly retro...even with the art.
This thread is absolutely amazing. There are so many minds together here discussing the roots of the game we all know and love. I remember a time when I was ridiculed for playing...although that doesn't compare with what some of you faced when the game was first born. I am comforted by the fact that there are so many people here sharing their stories, memories, and thoughts on the game. I know that ultimately it is the people that have brought the game into this wonderful era of play and acceptance, even if it is only among other players in some cases. I'll be posting an update on my "old school" game soon, including a plot concept for the campaign for your reading pleasure and critque. This thread has greatly influenced my own campaign world as well and I may post snippets about it here when the mood strikes. I've also got another thought to throw into the pot, but I'll save that for later today. I wonder if anyone else is going to go for that old school feel as I am in my game now...or at least try it out.
Stand outs for me...
Return to the Tomb of Horrors.
Night Below.
Mud Sorcerer's Tomb (Dungeon magazine)
G1,2&3 (Total hack fest)
Ravenloft.
Hidden/Lost Shrine of Tamochan (I have nearly finished converting this to PF).
Halls of Tizen Thane (White Dwarf)
Lair of Modred the Mighty (White Dwarf)
All That Glitters (UK series)
Barrier Peaks
All memerable for FUN. Good mix of puzzles/investigation except for the G series which was just plain ol' hacking.
*Sigh* I miss the days of a single line being the stat block sometimes and things like a room with a dozen trolls with a carpet of flying for no real reason....
1. I loved the expectation in their material that anyone playing or running would get the inside jokes of it all; devs names shamelessly embedded, f u's to players who thought modules were too linear or tournaments too soft. This was pre-internet, so in order to unravel all this you had to spend a couple hours w/Rick, the owner of Rick's One Stop Comics or someone similar who could jaw for hours about the "inside dirt" on the game.
I also loved how self contained everything was. Using the random charts in the back of the DMG I created some memorable, random dungeons for friends that became the stuff of legend. With these as the basis I never had a need for elaborate prep or expansive adventure worlds; I really could have a game that never left a single village (a la Diablo 1).
2. Ironically it was that same randomness I took out in my games in actual play. When I say I used the random charts, I mean I'd roll, find an ogre let's say, and then start a pyramid down from him for what was on that level of the dungeon. I never ran my homebrews like some of the modules that had an ogre next to a bunch of kobolds, next to a minotaur for example.
I also did a TON of houseruling back in the day. Movement gray areas, skills, doing cool things w/your attacks...all either one-off rulings or houserules. In 1e I practically had my own ruleset and there were still areas of gray. This was a problem because you'd get into arguments like one player pulling off some cool, higher ground maneuver, but now ALL the players want something similar for their characters; unfortunately they DON'T like it when the monsters do it and it makes already powerful monsters insanely so. So NOW you say no as a GM and start to reign it in, only one guy at the table STILL wants it... you gat the point.
3. I used the lower level modules as campaign kickstarters. Keep on the Borderlands, the Saltmarsh Modules, the Silver Sword one from 2e. Then from there I'd go mostly homebrew. I supplemented here and there w/the occasional Dungeon adventure. I remember using Tomb of Horrors a couple times but I almost got killed over it. Ironically I started at the age of 6 in the Demonweb pits and I've played through them and the G modules a couple times (still own them too) but I NEVER ran them.
4. There aren't any mechanics I can think of bringing back. I like the deliberate even-handedness of the gameplay now. Things are fairly streamlined now and as a GM I have to do less admin and rules lawyering b/cause even though there's MORE rules, they're all in the hands of the players as well as me via the CRB. As a result when I say "the goblin has you grappled still from last round. Now, what can he do..." my players pipe up and remind me he can pin, release, move the PC into another square, etc.
One thing I do try to add to my games though is that same sort of inside joke mentality and a spark of randomness from time to time. The "magical calamity" backstory in my current homebrew is a direct tie in to the major plot of my last campaign - last one the players destroyed a black dragon that was siphoning the power of the wild and elves were compensating by tapping the power of the First World with crystals; my current homebrew begins where for the last few decades, w/out the dragon to balance it and the elves not able to shut it off, the First World power made the wilds of the world grow w/such ferocity that they overtook much of the civilized areas.
To represent the randomness I throw in encounters between major plot points. My characters are low level but so far I've thrown in a wyvern flying over the forest, a pair of treants and a Giant topiary guardian working with some leshys. My players have so far been smart enough to realize many of these were at the edge of or beyond their capability so they've hidden, run, or parlayed with these creatures.
I think that's the ONLY downside I've seen in the transition from 1e through to now. As mechanics have shifted into the hands of the players and less randomness occurs there MAY be a growing tendency for players to think they can take out anything, any time and thus never run from/avoid fights. I think it's ok to throw them a curve, every once in a while :)
Coming in late here, but I'm a big Pathfinder player/GM and also played/GMed all the earlier editions. There are definitely some good things about 2e that I think have been lost in the modern game.
Here's a long blog post of mine talking about going back and running 2e today and realizing the major changes - including the bad ones - that the 3e/3.5e/Pathfinder strain have made to the game.
I like Bill Dunn's suggestions from the very beginning of this thread. I'd love to play a more old school Pathfinder game (and I try to do that in the campaigns I run, myself). This does NOT mean going back to the crappier mechanics like THAC0 and all the weird crufty stuff like weapon type vs armor and weapon speed that we all ignored then anyway.
My rules are similar to Bill's:
- No unlimited magic choice
- No making everything level appropriate
- Remove large swaths of the rules and use GM rulings based on what makes sense in the world
- Don't use the battlemat except for when you really, really need it
I'm running a Pathfinder campaign into its third year and I do all this regularly. We don't use tactical maps except for very complex encounters. I don't have "magic shops" and players can't just buy/sell whatever they want, making magic items less of a CharOp tool. I use random encounters and don't fuss about what CR they are (at sea, they had to escape a shoggoth at level 5 or so by feeding a nearby passing ship to it and skedaddling).
On the removing rules/making sense in world - sure, it's "describe how you're searching before you roll," but also the sheer bulk of the PF rules has become a pain in the ass. Combat near the water? Time for a law degree! Stealth? Impossible to sneak up on a farmer because "there's no facing rules." I simply say "we're not going to worry about the big ol' nest of rules - we're going to do what makes sense, as adjudicated by me. Yes, you can sneak up behind the farmer."
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1.) What about it did you love the most?
2.) Is there something you'd change about it?
3.) Were you running homebrew or a module?
4.) What would you do to emulate, convert, or otherwise bring the same experience to your Pathfinder game.
1. The extra randomness of the world forced you to concentrate more on your play in the moment as a player. Although everyone would agree that throwing four red dragons against a first-level party is just asking for a TPK, you never knew what would be around the next corner, so you learned how to prepare for it. You couldn't make nor expect to trade for the exact tools you want for your "build," so you learned to use what you found instead of get rid of everything for cash and convert.
2. 1e's fiddly bits were less conducive to deep roleplaying than later editions--even thought you definitely could still have a lot of it. 2e was better in that regard.
3. I always ran homebrew. It was quicker and cheaper than buying and using modules, and you could get a similar experience--better, even, because it was tailored to the party. The one exception is C1, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, because it was just plain awesome. 2e, on the other hand, had very few adventure modules worth picking up--but lots of great world books.
4. I've heard it described this way, and I would still agree: 1e had the best dungeons, 2e had the best worlds, 3e had the best mechanics. To play "old school," I'd keep the mechanics. I'd use CR and WBL as guidelines, and remind the players that not all encounters are fair or meant to be beaten. I'd restrict the economy to remove full-catalog Magic Mart, and even full-catalog spell availability (remember when you had to find your spells?). They just won't buy the Cube of Force, you'd better use it instead of thinking to convert it into stat boosters and metamagic rods. I would also encourage organic character development. It's okay to have a 20-level progression planned out, but, you know, things happen. Just as your plans to have made your first 10 million dollars by 30 probably need to be shelved, it doesn't mean that you're a failure--but you will be if you insist on schmoozing with Wall Street and not taking care of your kids (which you didn't expect 15 years ago). Make sure that it's perfectly okay not to be completely optimized. A character is like a bonsai, a balance between its desire to grow and develop in a certain way outside your control, and the care and strategy you use to develop what you get.
Thanks to the OP for posting this topic. I've found this entire thread a great read! This entire discussion has got me ruminating about the differences between editions, and so I started to write a reply that grew into a new post on my blog, heh. But to save you having to click over, here goes:
Several people in the thread have said that old-school play involved more real-world time passing between gaining new levels of experience.
Sure, I can see that being true once you got to higher levels of play in 1e and 2e, but that wasn’t true at the earliest levels: to take the most extreme example, the Thief in AD&D 1e achieved 2nd level at 1,251 XP, then 3rd level at 2,501 XP. And advancement speed also depended on the GM, who could drop a big treasure hoard in 1e, where gold equaled XP, and level up the characters as he or she saw fit. Heck, Gary Gygax even introduced a rule that no character can advance more than 1 level of experience at a time from a single play session — something unheard of in D&D in later editions.
One thing I like about the older rulesets was that the “sweet spot” of mid-range levels — at which the players no longer were common pushovers, and still had not maxed-out the limits of the game system and able to overpower all monsters and obstacles in their path — was baked-in to the XP progression charts. Sure, the first few levels were obtained fairly quickly, but because advancing to the next level involved a doubling of the previous level’s XP requirement, each subsequent level involved a much longer effort than the previous one.To recalculate the XP chart so that I can expand the "sweet spot". The Medium XP progression assumes a 20-encounters-per-level progression. I would recalculate the chart so that each level of experience assumed so many "encounters". It would be roughly like this:
Levels 1 and 2 - 13 encounters
Levels 3 through 5 - 20 encounters
Levels 6 through 12 - 40 encounters
Levels 13 and up - 60 encounters
I too, value the "sweet spot", which I think is levels 5-9. I agree mostly with you chart, but honestly, in earlier ed you went up to 2nd level after the first real nite of adventuring. In other words, we often had a "roll the character" and "meet in a tavern, followed by a brawl" gaming nite, then next gaming nite was 3-4 encounters, then you leveled to 2.
So, I'd put 1>2 as 5 encounters,
3>5 as 13
5-7 as 20
8-9 as 30
then go as you do.
I've be able to get my hands on eleven of the old gazetteers for The Known World, not including the Dawn of Emperors...it was a little difficult, but it helps to know where to look. It'd be nice if the new TSR could lay hands on the old Mystara affects. WoTC let the copyright go out on the name Mystara, but nothing else.
Have you seen this, Luna?
Oh my. That's brilliant. Definitely downloading for future use. Love the AGE system!
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There was also an adventure compendium knocking around somewhere on that site. There's lots of other good AGE stuff there too. One called Dragon Hack recreates many of the pathfinder races and classes. I forget where I found it, but there's also Firefly: Hurtlin’ Through the ‘Verse...yes, AGE Firefly. You know you want it, Freehold.
A number of people have mentioned this but the more I read it the more I recall.
Randomness. You rolled for stats. You rolled for HP. Often within adventures you found items or locations with random effects. Random encounters were part of the landscape.
So much of these things are now gone. Most or all encoutners are at or near level. Point buy at creation. Items are linked to economy in a purely systematic way so without consulting the GM a player can assume what items he can find and for how much.
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Hey guys, OP here to throw some more thoughts into the pot. This has little to do with the rules. Tell us all your most memorable adventure or campaign (condensed) from 1e or 2e. Answer a few questions:
Sorry not a lot of time to answer your questions but:
Modules U1-3
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
Danger at Dunwater
The Final Enemy
Hands down stand out as the best of best when I rate things on my "Did I have fun scale"
Gold pure frik'n gold.
I'm with Kthulhu in that d20 made D&D different and new - this doesn't automatically translate to 'more fun' by any stretch'.
A number of people have mentioned this but the more I read it the more I recall.
Randomness. You rolled for stats. You rolled for HP. Often within adventures you found items or locations with random effects. Random encounters were part of the landscape.
So much of these things are now gone. Most or all encoutners are at or near level. Point buy at creation. Items are linked to economy in a purely systematic way so without consulting the GM a player can assume what items he can find and for how much.
This. A lot of the charm in the old school style lies in not being totally sure what your cards were going to be. You couldn't rely on getting standard stats, or finding a particular item or spell, or (in the better class of game) on meeting a standard palette of enemies. You had to be willing to adapt a lot more to the circumstances and play for the moment. Once you got into the mindset, that's a lot of the fun part - you didn't have to worry about being underpowered once you hit level 13, you just sort of just rolled with the game and found out where the cards would fall. That part isn't too hard to do with any system. I wrote an excel sheet a few years back that generates a character with random stats (3d6 or 4d6-lowest), race, class, sex, description, alignment, deity, and one-sentence character backstory. These days, when I start a character in almost any game, I usually just hit start and play whatever comes up.
How generic older-edition characters were actually helped deal with a lot of that randomness. In OD&D up through about Core 2nd, if you made a bad decision leveling, there just weren't many places for specialization or customization options. The few you had (including ability scores) were low enough impact that a badly-made or unlucky character wasn't much worse than a well-crafted or lucky one of the same level. The further back you go, the more that holds true: IIRC, the maximum modifier for ability scores in OD&D is +/- 1. Each class also generally had a very wide range of proficiencies, so you could capitalize on a wide array of nice finds. It didn't matter that much what kind of weapon you found, the fighter could always wield it to good effect - you weren't limited by taking a lot of spiked chain specialization feats. And since your character's stat growth also virtually stopped at level 10, there weren't too many scaling problems at high levels (other than the entire quadratic casters / linear fighters thing).
PF definitely has less flexibility in character builds - almost every character is somewhat specialized, even if only by a few feat choices. I played with a guy once whose fighter had an overly narrow specialty in lucerne hammers, and would always complain that nobody made magic ones. If you are going to embrace a lot of randomness, it's important your players understand that awesome powers within narrow specializations are not always going to be a very good choice.
Have you seen this, Luna?
It is neat, but I am unfamiliar with the AGE system at all. Man, reading all this stuff about The Known World is making me want to play in it. I've been told that you're doing something right when you wish you could be a player in your own game or world. Not having a game right now is driving me crazy.
I can't decide if I should use 15 point buy in my game or roll for stats using 3d6 reroll 1s or 4d6 drop lowest. I'll repost my list of changes from upthread here. I've placed a couple of notes in italics
- 15 point buy character creation with max hp at 1st level and the chance to roll for starting gold or taking average. Slow Advancement on XP.
I still can't decide if I should point buy or have them roll for stats. Pros and cons of each?
- Ability score cap at 18/20, depending on the class in question (e.g. Casters, not including Ranger and Paladin, will have their primary casting stat capped at 20. The 20 cap for most other classes will be in Strength.) The ability score point gained at 4th level intervals will go into the lowest or second lowest stat.
- Class/Race restrictions much like what were in AD&D. I will be allowing Half-Orcs remain as character options as well as Barbarian and Monk. The Sorcerer will be limited to Arcane Bloodline only. I will be sticking to the CRB only. I will probably also try to bring the Bard back to it's druidy root and modify the spell list accordingly, either by stating that bards get their spells from the druid spell list or some other way. Multiclassing will only be allowed in one other class based on the same limitations due to race. There will be no Prestige Classes.
- No Item Creation feats. Magic items will be rare and the subject of quests. I will keep ability score modifying items to a minimum. I will be allowing them to use the craft skill to make/repair their armor and such if need be.
I'm on the fence about Craft (Alchemy). Should I allow it, or will it mess up the feel that I'm going for? As far as the CRB is concerned, there really aren't many alchemical items that can be created.
- Wandering Monsters could be much more power than the PCs. They way you guys talk is that I should never wear the GM kiddy gloves with vets and to do so would seem to be an insult. I must kill PCs...a lot.
- Only rare monsters will have class levels, and they will be Warrior or Adept, unless it is a Lich or something. Kobolds speaking in their own language only seem to say the word "Kobold". If a Kobold speaks in Common, it must end every string of speech with the word "Kobold".
- Magical healing outside of general hit point healing (e.g. Restoration and the like along with Raise Dead and such) will be more expensive and have material components that will probably be the subject of quests.
- I need more randomness, like some sort of gumball machine, which would be fun to implement in game.
These are my Class/Race Restrictions. They aren't completely traditional, mostly due to the addition of more classes. Suggestions? Only those with human blood can be Sorcerers.
Dwarf: Cleric, Fighter, Paladin, or Rogue
Elf: Druid, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, or Wizard
Gnome: Bard (Maybe), Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, or Illusionist
Half-elf: Bard, Druid, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, or Wizard
Halfling: Cleric, Druid, Fighter, or Rogue
Half-Orc: Barbarian, Druid, Fighter, Rogue, or Sorcerer
Human: Any Class; Only Humans can be Monks.
I also think I may import the Deities from my setting into Mystara instead of using the Immortals as deities.
I need your thoughts. This is the part where Pax, InVino, and Adamantine Dragon come in and post something because they're old. XD Just kidding guys.
I'd honestly suggest eliminating Class/Race restrictions. I can't remember anyone that enjoyed that back in the day. Everything else feels fine right now. Tired, I'll have to look more tomorrow
I still can't decide if I should point buy or have them roll for stats. Pros and cons of each?
Advantages of rolled stats:
Some people find randomness inherently fun and exciting.Leads to unusual non-standard characters that don't fit the 'fighter always dumps charisma' mode.
Makes character generation quicker as there are less decisions to make - good if a lot of PCs die.
More of an 'old-school' feeling.
Disadvantages of rolled stats:
Some people like the challenge of optimising their characters effectively.
Makes gameplay less balanced - do you adapt adventures to allow for the possibility of a fighter with a low CON?
Reduces balance between players - if one PC winds up like Gandalf and another like Bilbo, will the Bilbo player get jealous of Gandalf winning all the battles himself?
Rewards players with low stats for getting themselves killed if they can just get a new player with new stats.
Stops players being able to play whatever type of character they want.
I still can't decide if I should point buy or have them roll for stats. Pros and cons of each?
Be warned: Rolling for stats will also make your characters less optimized, especially if you use 3d6, and especially especially if you do stats in order. This is doubly true in 3.x/Pathfinder because ability score modifiers are larger, and they kick in more quickly than in older games - the AD&D threshold for a +1 to anything was usually 15.
You should definitely expect encounters to be a little bit tougher for your group if they don't get to optimize their own stats. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - a lower power level won't stop an encounter from being fun - but it is something you will need to keep in mind when designing. You'll probably want to start off by lowballing your estimates and nudge the difficulty upwards till it feels appropriate for the group.
Disadvantages of rolled stats:
Makes gameplay less balanced - do you adapt adventures to allow for the possibility of a fighter with a low CON?
I would dispute that it makes the game play less balanced. Rather, I think it make it more balanced. Point-buying the stats favors classes that are dependent on fewer attributes like the wizard, cleric, or sorcerer because it makes it possible to dump stats for more points to spend and because it allows the points to concentrate on the prime attribute. Rolling offers better balance between single-attribute and multi-attribute classes.
My recommendation: 4d6 (drop lowest), six times. Arrange to suit. If you're feeling merciful, have them roll up two sets and pick the preferred set of the two.
I have used all sorts of variations. I had con 14 and one other stat of choice 16 roll the rest in order once to allow people some control but some chaos. Roll 2 characters choose the best. Reroll one stat, whatever. As long as the dice mean something they eliminate the dump stat, which is the most important thing.
You have to remember in old school it generally didn't matter mechanically if you had a 9 or a 14 they we're just for flavor. That matters in pathfinder, it's a 3 point difference. So old school you could roll and if one person got two 16's and 4 10's they were no worse off than someone getting 2 16's and 4 14's
Neither way is better. But if you really do want old school flavor you gotta roll.