Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design: Across the Editions — Encumbrance
Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.| osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com
Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.| osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com
Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.| osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com
Roger Moore battles to the death with the AD&D XP calculation rules, Dragon #89| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
As a hexcrawl fan I'm always in need of more lairs and smaller sites for exploration, and Coldlight Press has done a good job fostering such (in a addition to becoming a welcome new voice in the module review game). A few months back they held an Adventure Site Contest, which ultimately produced some very nice small-scale adventure areas.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Part of writing my game has been trying to make it setting neutral, so that (for example) races don't do anything, because a GM may want to make their elves the usual tree-huggers, or may want to make them flesh-eating cannibals or fey with a completely alien morality or whatever instead. A ruleset where elves have a bonus to hide in forests or dwarves gain the ability to see in the dark and understand stonework creates an implied setting: mechanics that effectively state the way things are...| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
There is a certain type of game feature that I call an anti-feature. It's the sort of thing that a) everyone adds to their game, and b) no one gets excited by. For that reason, even if you've put a lot of work into playing around with it, it's not something you can really advertise as a selling point of your design, because if you even think to do so (and people usually don't—this kind of feature is essentially the Invisible Man of Chesterton's Father Brown stories), people think you're...| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Sigh.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Something that came up recently, as it does from time to time, was the claim that later in life Gygax started his players off at third level rather than first, specifically in the context of his own private OD&D games.The implications of this vary, interestingly, as people read into it what they want. That Gygax felt he had made a mistake back in the day and sought to correct it is the most common and most basic interpretation. Some however take it further, using it as a cudgel against th...| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
EDIT: New drafts are uploaded in the first few days of the month (though sometimes I skip a month). A changelog for drafts is available at the bottom.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Back of a TSR t-shirt advertising the upcoming third edition.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
From "Revenge of the Vampire"| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Comparing the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 2nd Edition game to the first edition (now over 15 years old!) is like comparing a Porsche 959 to a Model T Ford. Both are great cars for their times, but which would you want to drive in the 1990s?| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
I want to do some more research for the next OSR History installment, so the series is on hold for a week or three until I acquire some materials I need.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Dragon #22 - nothing to do with this article| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
There are a lot of articles about what makes a game OSR and what the Old-School Renaissance is. Some are quite informative and succeed in boiling essential elements down into digestible morsels; many aren't worth the bytes spent to release them into the electronic wild. However, even with all the writing on what is and isn't OSR, I still notice plenty of players asking "what is OSR, anyways?" More importantly, just as many seem to skip the question phase and move right to operating unde...| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Everyone has their preferred number of players, and of course some games are better at different player group sizes. For| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
I was working on my magic item chapter and, as expected, pretty much | Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
At the end of my last post I referenced the use of a table that added further structure to encounters. I've long been fond of What are those wandering monsters up to?, from the late, lamented 1d8 blog, and do use it once in a while. However, with random encounters being essentially entirely improvised encounters, generated then and there and often several times a session, I found it a bit taxing to constantly roll on that table and come up with a narrative on the spot to match the result.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Not what I had in mind when I googled my post topic.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Updated October 2022. | Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Someone asked how the various treasure classes compared across editions (and with Labyrinth Lord), and since I had already done the work analyzing this for Simulacrum, I thought I'd post the results (along with what I wound up going with, as usual).| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Whew, okay, PhD done. Now I can write and generally have a life again.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
In a previous post I examined how the old-school TSR rulesets tackle encumbrance, by taking an assumed equipment baseline and seeing what a PC would look like with that in each edition in terms of burden levels. As a follow-up, I'm going to examine a series of retroclones and see how they tackle the issue.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Hot Springs Island | Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
The idea of the hexcrawl has fascinated me ever since I first read about it. Like I think a lot of people--especially those without access to Judges Guild products--wilderness adventures in general were largely passed over by myself and my gaming buddies when kids. The idea of aimlessly wandering around the wilderness getting eaten by bears or 1D4x100 orcs or whatever rather than "actually playing the game" didn't hold any excitement.| Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design
Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.| osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com
Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.| osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com
