This is the srd that is now cc-by licensed. They have been thoroughly cowed into doing something good
The cc-by license cant be revoked, it can be used commercially, and it doesn’t require putting anything you add to the srd under the same license. It’s probably the best possible license for open sourcing an rpg.
That is really cool. I hadn’t followed the latest developments so I wasn’t aware of this. However, I’m still worried about my beloved OSR, as this appears to just cover 5e. Of course, the OSR never really used the SRD for the actual rules, since the SRD used for most OSR products was generally 3e. I’m sure the OSR can adapt to using the 5e SRD going forward, despite it being a couple steps further removed from an OSR-style game(one can definitely argue that 5e is closer to OSR than 3e, but I’m speaking more about terminology and its use than game design).
But I still think it is important that the attempt to de-authorize and/or revoke the OGL 1.0a fails. I want all the wonderful OSR products based on it to continue to exist in their current form, without the creators’ needing to jump through nonsensical legal hoops.
This is also important because it includes some stuff that was arguably copyrighted even under the old OGL. Like it was clear that you could use 5e’s rules in your own product (which would have been true even without the OGL), and it was clear that you could quote parts of the SRD verbatim in your own product (this is really what the OGL added to normal copyright), but it wasn’t clear whether WotC still retained copyright on certain proprietary ideas that were not licensed under the OGL. Like if you were writing your own adventure module and wanted to use a xorn, you could obviously use the xorn stat block and talk about a rock monster that eats gems and whatnot, but could you call it a xorn? It’s not a broad cultural idea floating around like an orc or a vampire. So people would rename and reflavor that kind of stuff in their products to avoid copyright issues, which is just sort of annoying (“this is a rockeater, ok, definitely not a xorn 
”). Now all the monsters in the SRD (which is not nearly all the WotC monsters! but is a good sample), as well as other specific proper nouns, are free to use and people don’t have to worry about them.
Yes, this is exactly how a lot of OSR products used the OGL, to obtain the rights to use all those nouns. I don’t know how much the spell and monster lists have changed between 3e and 5e, but if there is a pretty significant difference then that could be an issue for the OSR.
Apparently Wotc is leaving the OGL 1.0a untouched as well:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1439-ogl-1-0a-creative-commons
This is great news. Total 180 in Wotc’s direction. Glad to see this bone-headed error corrected. It would have been almost as bad for Wotc as it would’ve been for players. The money Wotc stands to make in the future is not from niche fan communities still using the OGL 1.0a.
One approach to “make 5e combat more interesting/faster” is to cap HP, because HP bloat is really hard to work around in the sense that even if you hit for 40 points of damage, everybody’s high-level so that monster has like, 215hp, let’s do it all again next round I guess. The specific one that I’ve seen used is “cap levels at 5 for PCs, from thereafter you continue to gain feats/attribute points, nothing else”. You also cap HP for non-PCs as well.
So to revisit the above scenario, suddenly the 5 PCs and the dragon all have somewhere around 45hp each. That’s a lot scarier! Everybody involved now has to deal with the possibility that a bad round = death. In essence, you are taking the tension that you get at 1st level and extending it along the power curve of gaining levels. It also encourages negotiation/diplomacy over just immediately piling into combat, or, planning and getting an asymmetrical advantage before going into combat (ambushes, applying maluses, hit and run, etc.).
I always forget it’s an official thing, but 3.5 had that massive damage threshold where if a single attack did more than, I think, your constitution score, you gotta make a fortitude save or be incapacitated.
It won’t make turn to turn combat more exciting but it adds an extra and potentially sudden win/lose condition to be mindful of.
I conducted my first legit boss fight in my power rangers Spelljammer game - against a “bionoid”, which is, of course, Guyver D&Dified by those 2e nerds in '91:
Overall it went okay. I definitely lowballed its power when I started nerfing it to be able to fight 6th level players.
I learned how dope Legendary actions and Lair actions are for making a cool boss fight! Really breaks up the turn economy.
A lot more comfortable building bosses now.
One of the players chose to take on the Gyver suit after beating the boss, meaning he’s now cursed by the Batship in a very Power Rangers-ass way. Still hammering out how this curse would work, but I’m thinking maybe something like, for every kill he gets, it counts up a ticker, and when that ticker reaches full, he goes feral and will attack friend and foe alike, or something like that.
Also had a successful snowboarding minigame!
Players were caught in an avalanche, pushed off the deck of their spelljammer, and placed onto a board where, Battletoads-style, obstacles appeared at one end (trees, rocks, logs) and progressed towards them in a line at a rate of 10ft a turn.
The players rolled acrobatics to find a piece of debris or a log or rock and make that into a makeshift snowboard. They were then put into combat as the boss and his goons came through the snow behind them, also on boards.
(I played this quietly on a bluetooth speaker)
Players had to avoid obstacles (and to my delight, started pushing enemies into them), and they could also attempt tricks as a free action to buff their attacks (or eat shit, on a fail). I cobbled together a system for this from a few reddit posts, where you could go for either a Sick Trick (DC 16) or a Legendary Trick (DC 21), getting 3d6 toward your attack on a success.
I then just progressed through slides from FF7’s snowboarding minigame for the different sections of the course, like the trees and a split in the path.
Went awesome! Players did a ton of things I didn’t expect. Two of the players - a thri-kreen and a gekko - chose to go prone on their boards and stickbug it to move back and forth. It ruled.
I realized I have a gift certificate from a couple years ago for shop that sells gaming stuff, and this might be a reasonable excuse to pick up that super expensive 5e-derived Dark Souls RPG that’s supposed to have a broken combat system (if it’s the fixed reprinting). The rest of the people in my old pre pandemic gaming group were intrigued when I mentioned it in our still barely holding on text thread and it might be a good way to kickstart things with them again if they’re not all busy with new kids and new careers.
That or buy some DCC stuff to use with my Pathfinder 1st edition stuff that I’ll probably never move away from (only because I can’t talk anyone into playing AD&D 2nd Edition with the Skills & Powers rules or the Ghost Dog RPG…)
So I picked up the Dark Souls RPG for like $8 plus a gift card.
The book looks classy but just uses a bunch of canned promo art from the games. It also seems very Dark Souls III centric, and I think I’ve only played like ten minutes of that one while being held up on replaying but never finishing 1 all these years.
The big change from D&D is HP is replaced with a Position Point system which is a combined pool for both HP and points that get expended for special abilities. This is supposed to be ripe for abuse, but on paper is seems like a neat extra dimension to add something extra to combat. I always struggle with trying to make combat interesting.
There’s also the bonfire mechanic, which didn’t even occur to me as being something they’d adapt. Re-doing encounters seems like an unfun way to spend a session. There’s a random status penalty table that you roll on when you revive (which includes a chance of permadeath). There’s potential ability point penalties which I suppose might make your character unplayable. I gotta reread that section to see if there’s any concessions about that.
Since the rules are still rooted in D&D, the equipment list differentiates itself not with a bunch of new stats but with magic item style effects being tacked onto the weapons and armors from the game, often requiring position point expenditures to activate. Otherwise it’s all traditional armor class and damage die listings. There’s also a simplified slot-based encumbrance system rather than the old school weight based one that everyone would forget about a couple sessions in.
The monster section is fun, although with the position system, I’m not sure how straight forward it’d be to drop them right into a 5th edition game. Most of the monsters have a couple different attacks which are straight out of their patterns in the game, and the big guys even have second phases (which apparently was also a thing in video gamey 4th edition?). I guess there’s a second monster book coming.
The book is pretty thin on narrative stuff, which is guess is Soulsy in a roundabout way. There is a random Souls-style area name generator which is super cute but brief. We each could probably cook up a much meatier percentile die based one. Aside from one page sections on areas from the first and third games with random monster tables and some stage setting words there’s not much to bite into here. There’s also no sample adventure to get you started either which seems like a fatal misstep for something that’s going to attract a bunch of first time players.
I always had a fascination with the Diablo II D&D supplements that spanned that gap between 2nd and 3rd editions. Those felt a bit less stand-alone that this does, if you’re looking for something to incorporate into an existing game. Those also had the benefit of really leaning hard into the randomized aspect of that game and feeling like a throwback to the rear of the original DMG with all those really weird tables.
Been digging World of Dungeons, the streamlined two page take on Dungeon World. It feels real nice. 2d6 feels like good dice to roll. Makes me not like polyhedron fetishism so much. But I also like roll under systems too cuz I’m a freak. Been using the no permanent HP scores house rule, which makes things wild but makes the roll to gain HP at level less important. Way it works is that instead of having a definined max HP, you just roll your hit dice after a long rest and if that’s higher than your previous HP, than that’s the new HP score.
WoD was definitely the best thing to come out of dungeon world. There are so many hacks out there and I have stolen ideas and mechanics from all over with them
The first one seems the most interesting
My plan worked and it now looks like I need to cook up a scenario for the Dark Souls RPG. I’m hoping I can get away with a 70s style graph paper dungeon with a handful of moody rooms and couple concessions to the game like a pit trap leading to some basilisks, some exploding barrels, and like a cackling guy who hangs out in a secluded place and has five arrows to sell. Oh and they’ll get invaded by a guy who’s a big asshole. Otherwise I have no idea what to do with this setting. Maybe they’re trying to ignite the furnace beneath the great crematorium or something because some gloomy guy said so?
I am curious to figure out how to play RPGs with just my partner. I can imagine two ways of doing this with a system like Call of Cthulhu (my favorite and most familiar) where I am the DM and a player character, or another version where I just DM games for her.
Anyone have any experience doing things like this? I can imagine it being kind of fun to do basically a single player adventure where one person is the DM.
one person dm one player character does work! I’ve done it a few times, and its an entire subgenre of rpg design too
The most notable example I can think of is the horror rpg Murderous Ghosts by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker, which really opened up the design space with its innovative ‘choose your own adventure rulebook’ format.
wahhh!! this is so cool! i’ve been hankerin to play more RPGs and it never occurred to me that we could do something like this.
I’m having a very 1997 moment discovering that there’s a lot of great RPG resources online.
I don’t usually look up nerd stuff on the internet (outside of SB) because of all the nogoodnicks that dominate everything, but that tip here about Dark Dungeons being a Basic Rules Cyclopedia rewrite a bit back and discovering that I have a couple already handy things by way of old itch charity bundles had me up late the last couple nights reading zine format adventure module PDFs looking for some ideas. I think I only came across one that was super fucked up in a bad way.
If I can load this stuff up in my ancient iPad 2, it might be a new era.
