i continue playing Wolves upon the coast and it continues to be the best
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Please, Carcassonne Was My Father’s Name: The Board Game Thread
https://bsky.app/profile/claytonian.bsky.social/post/3leldsgmzxs24
I fanslated Lodoss, Ghost Hunter, Double Moon, and many other games and scenarios. They are all in this folder. Occasionally I update the files or add new ones.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gsxyHn3Kw8eEoVFFFy2w7Z2lGtehfzVC
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Finishing a WHFRPG campaign of nearly 3 years today, closing out the Enemy Within. A weird feeling to be moving on. Good in some ways since the DM is planning on lowering the number of players (we had an 8 person party) but I started this in-person and eventually it moved online when me and another player moved and were remote. As a result we’re not sure if we’ll be in touch with this group as much and I’m not even sure what game we’ll play. Just happy to have a weekly touchpoint. Very ready to make new characters since I find character creation to be one of the most fun things to do in these.
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on the subject of analogue phantasy star, there’s now a fan translation for the japanese phantasy star gamebook from the 80s!
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Will hopefully be able to try playing more RPGs with another group in the coming weeks. I’m still interested in Old School Essentials. I will have probably 3-4 players at my table, and a lot of discussion around B/X or OSE online make me think that won’t be enough. My instinct then is just, well, to make it work. If classic adventure modules are too deadly, then adjust the encounters to be challenging/interesting but fairer for players. The alternatives for doing an adventure like B2: Keep on the Borderlands are like to play with double the group count or have a hoard of hirlings following the party, or have everyone at the table running two PCs each which just doesn’t seem fun to me. I also got a set of adventures made for OSE that I am hoping are a little more manageable, given they are from the modern era where I think most tables aren’t running with 6-10 players like D&D supposedly was in the tournament “golden era”.
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My feeling is you can totally make it work, and in terms of speed of play (especially if ppl are new to the rules) i would much prefer it to a party of more than 4 players. With more players, people start having to wait longer for their turns in combat, and then stop paying attention … and then you have to explain everything to them and it slows the whole thing down massively.
I don’t think people play in quite the same way that they used to, some old examples of play suggest some games had ‘Leaders’ who were saying what everyone was doing. Not sure how common that was, but it might have helped with the above i guess.
I personally like the hirelings solution, it’s very useful if someone dies because they can take over a hireling. Also i think the tendency for hirelings to have simple distinguishing characteristics can be fun in play. It can also be useful for the DM to have an NPC to point out the problems with the party’s suicidal plan. There’s some downsides in taking hirelings (reduction in treasure, possible betrayal), and i think some players dislike them, so i’d give the players the option of taking them or not.
I think some games explicitly link Charisma to interactions with hirelings, too, not sure if OSE does.
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OSE has a whole chapter on hirelings and charisma determines their loyalty modifier and how many retainers a character can manage. The implication is that the retainers are DM controlled but player directed. Like everything, no one is going to arrest you if your essentially treat them as secondary PCs.
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OSE is essentially (ha) trying to be a drop in replacement for playing old modules, right down to including dated stuff like stat blocks for “Man, Whirling Dervish.” But it’s all logically organized whereas the old books can feel a bit stream of conscious at times.
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10000000%
Which is why I’m always a bit weary of going all in on multiple characters per player.
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Hirelings sounds like the right way to do things, yeah. We did get into a fight in the brief two-session group I ran during the Summer with hirelings, and it felt totally fine.
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Everything depends on the dynamics between you and the players. You’ll eventually get comfortable and have a good sense of what works.
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You can also do a dcc style character funnel. In DCC you start with an adventure tailored for a massive party of level 0 characters, four per player, and the surviving character in each squad becomes your main.
When I last played we went through the moathouse from temple of elemental evil this way
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That’s a really funny idea. Would love to do this once I get a sense for whether controlling multiple PCs would overwhelm my players.
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There’s no role playing in the gauntlet. The characters should be autogenerated so there’s no attachment. It’s just like a simple playground to get players comfortable w/ stuff to understand how crazy the game can be and then they get attached to their character who survives grows so on and so forth…
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its hard not to get attached to the character that survives. They survived an ordeal that probably had a lot of darkly funny moments throughout!
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I just started a DCC game and it’s definitely an adjustment but I like the flexibility it provides. As everyone’s party is dying off we get to refine character dynamics through trauma and motive in response to events which I am liking
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I downloaded the core rule set and will give it a read through. Maybe I can lift part of DCC to form the start of our OSE adventure, if i wanna get fancy (which, I always do).
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Discovered some pre-made Funnels for Old School Essentials online. Zed and Two Noughts and Tangled. Going to propose the idea to my friends and chose one or the other. Most of us have played BG3 (one person has six hundred hours in it) but none of my players have really any experience in pre-5e d&d, so an alien abduction funnel ala the intro to BG3 that Z00 presents might be kind of a perfect introduction to the similarities and differences in tone between osr and 5e.
I have PDFs for these, let me know if you want them.
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okay but now I wanna RP in a Peter greenaway campaign
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