yeah one of the reasons I was curious is because black dahlia was a new release in 1998 so it would’ve been full price, not like some trash like Critical Path or the Daedalus Encounter or whatever. my guess is that it was a similar price to what you stated because it was still shipping with 8 CDs
lol sorry I just remembered what thread this is
(Paywalled article)
Well, turns out my vibes detector was well calibrated, jay is a shithead and steve jackson games colluded with her to rob the other writers and artists of her game
A tale as old as time: an entire artistic output of wholesome cozy games, combative and aggro online schtick, and scratch the surface to find
"I don’t know this person. Who is this hypercapitalist pretending to be the soft, queer, indie communist?”
So yeah I think it is a good idea not to back this new edition of toon
I’d wondered why a company of aging Texas libertarians was so eager to hire a theoretical leftist trans woman.
When did you first start working with Steve Jackson Games?
Well, I can tell it was in 1980, because that’s when the Demon cover came out.
I was living in Houston working as a darkroom technician when my friends from college invited me to Austin to attend a feast put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism They told me to bring my Demon painting because they wanted to show it to Steve Jackson, who happened to be the local Baron at the time. When, in medieval garb, I showed the painting to Steve, he looked at it and said he wanted it for the cover of the Space Gamer magazine. And so, surrounded by knights and ladies in waiting, I made my first professional sale to Steve Jackson Games for $250.00, and began my career.
Shortly afterwards, Steve decided to hire me as their typesetter and staff artist. That was half of a good decision. As a typesetter I sucked big time, but soon Steve was able to support me as full time staff artist. I was glad to leave the Selectric typewriter’s frenzied golfball behind and work entirely on science fiction and fantasy art.
Richard heard about Denis in a roundabout way through the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Denis created a painting with a demon and a brave adventurer and sold it to Steve Jackson Games. Richard had been active in the Austin SCA, Steve Jackson was the Duke of the Society chapter in Austin. One day he showed Richard Denis’ painting. At the end Richard purchased the image with the demon for the California Pacific version of Akalabeth, and this is how Denis and Richard came into contact. Denis worked as a staff artist at Steve Jackson Games and designed among others a set of miniatures called Cardboard Heroes (1980), a set of 40 full-color 25mm cardboard figures for use in fantasy roleplaying games. One day Richard came by to show off his work on Ultima 1. Denis agreed to create the cover art and the illustrations for the manual.
“Natty bo ace” this game is happening in Baltimore. I gotta find these boys
We’re getting into combat for the first time with my b/x game. A group of level 1s have run into a room full of mummies, waking one of them on accident. I have found it interesting to let players roll for attack, but to roll their damage dice secretly, and tabulating the monster’s health behind the scenes.
Does anyone feel strongly about letting players know just how many numbers of HP their weapons deal in damage? I can imagine obfuscating this through description of monster wounds being slightly unsatisfying, but I think there’s something cool about it.
you’re reinventing one of the earliest debates in roleplaying games, before they were even called rpgs, whether players should be allowed to know the rules and how much of the rules should they know
That early debate mostly settled on maximal information to the players but there have been games since that obfuscate damage. The opposite of what you’re doing is actually the rule in the horror RPG Unknown Armies: that players should not know their own damage numbers. Instead the GM tracks it and describes the wounds they receive as viscerally as possible. Because of the nature of the system, the players always know how much damage they deal but it is easy to hide how much damage they receive.
In general, if the players are having fun just keep doing what you’re doing, no reason to change. If it turns into too much bookkeeping for you or if the players voice dissatisfaction, then go to how its usually done, with players rolling their own damage dice. Both approaches are valid
i’ve often seen (and used myself) the practice of having the players roll their own damage, and then describing to them how much that seems to have hurt the target/how much visible damage they see inflicted
Yeah I’m doing occasional checkins, and plan to change things as needed. Glad to hear this has been a concern for many players for many years 
Happy I asked because I feel like I always learn so much when asking about conventions of RPG play.
Damn! That is so scary!! Love this idea.
This is, I think, the default. In NoRA, I also let players roll medicine checks on monsters which if successful give them some insight into the monster’s overall health.
I’ve been playing Call of Cthulhu lately, and it would be fun to have regular damage work as above (players know how much they’ve taken and how much they’ve dished out, without knowing what the “target” is in terms of an enemy being downed) and then treat Sanity as fully obfuscated.
the recently-released adventure, sutra of pale leaves has a secret, second kind of mental damage representing the amount of the character’s mind that has been overwritten by a psychic virus. the players don’t even know that this stat exists, let alone how they’re doing with it. there even checks made against it, where i just tell them to roll a d100 without saying why
it is a lot of fun
I think this mechanic originated in the big Delta Green king in yellow campaign, Impossible Landscapes. It is a really cool idea
Tulpa gave you the correct advice, as always. I guess I would press further and say, the damage your players do isn’t really relevant in a vacuum, what matters is how much damage they do relative to the hp of the thing they’re attacking, and it’s much easier to obfuscate the latter than the former. Seems to me like you’re rolling a bunch of dice for no reason, you could let your players do it and give yourself a break. Especially since in a b/x game damage numbers are all within a narrow range anyway, it’s not like 5e where you might do 4 damage or 38.
But as always, if everyone’s enjoying it, keep doing it.
We recently did a flailsnails type adventure where any character from any system was allowed and we had an Agent from Delta Green use the phone from IL to “call in a favour”… holy shit it was pure cinema. The guy running him did a session report.
https://halforc.itch.io/meatheads
have you heard of Meatheads? I play in a biweekly game, its an insanely good time
Ordered copies of the Call of Cthulhu campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and the rulebook for Shadowdark. Looking forward to some RPG reading.
