Pronounceth Spawn:
I got my copy of Dyson's Delves, the limited edition hardcover version, the other day from Lulu. This isn't a review since I haven't used it in play yet. I've just been reading it and looking at it and walking around my house with it and enjoying the thing as a physical, non-computer-enslaved object.
Saying the work of Dyson Logos is awesome (or even AEWSUM!!!!1!!) is like saying water is wet, charcoal is black, bacon is delicious, and so on. The reader learns nothing new about the subject with such descriptions of the obvious. Hence this is not a review.
Why buy this book when you can just download many of his maps for free? you might ask. Aside from the new material he's added and the clean layout ... and the thing is handy-sized and lays flat, and there are so many sweet maps right there in your hand and you don't have to be looking at a fucking computer to use them ... well, perhaps in terms of a stunted marginal-utility theory there is no point in buying this book.
But seeing so much quality work in one small package rather than having it stretched out over years of blog posts is impressive to me. Much easier to flip through a book than flip through a blog. I'm so happy this book exists, because -- yes there's all the 'inspiration' you can get from it, and even multiple layers of nostalgia if you remember the original post or have played one of these dungeons -- you get to see one person's style and sense of the B/X paradigm concentrated in one object. And it's all The Goods and none of the BS: no polemic; no "The Way The Game Used to Be" essay; no "What's an RPG?" introduction; no "Rah! Rah! OSR!". Just balls-out quality stuff on its own terms. It makes me want to play B/X D&D because it's self-exemplary of all the best, most challenging and fun aspects of the system, while not being system-exclusive.
For me this book stands alongside other recent idiosyncratic works I'm stoked by, like The Dungeon Alphabet and Vornheim: The Complete City Kit. In the after-times when the e-media evaporate I may still have these books as I negotiate the post-apocalypse.
Rock.
Showing posts with label Dyson Logos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dyson Logos. Show all posts
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Low-level B/X-LL Thieves are Ninja Hipsters
The Spawn of Endra sends out this important bulletin:
So we're here playtesting Carter's scenario for the OSRCON game he's running, The Tower of Death*, and I rolled up 2 3rd level PCs, a Thief and a Magic-user. I've been playing a cleric for the last year and a half that we've been gaming, so I took the opportunity to play some new classes that I haven't worked with for ages.
This may not be news to many of you, and forgive me for not having read your post about it from 2009 (but do send a link in the comments), but I found out that low-level thieves are the last folks you want searching for traps. Looking through the tables and randomly opening up the LL rules to "Traps and Trap Detection" (p. 45), I learned that a first level thief is actually worse at finding traps (14% success) than a non-thief (1 on d6; 16.666%), and WAY worse than a dwarf (1-2 on d6; 33.333%). Weird. I thought maybe this is one of those odd miscues in Lab Lord rules, but in fact my Moldvay Basic has it even worse: Thieves go 10%, 15%, 20% for the first three levels where everybody else is d6ing the night away. In Lab Lord the thief only gets as good (almost ... 0.333% short of being as good) as a generic dwarf at LEVEL 5!
As one of our players described the exchange after the thief fails to find the 8th trap in a row that the dwarves detected: "Yeah, well, I just always wanted to be thief growing up. I never said I was GOOD at it, it just seems really cool to be a thief. That's what I'm doing." So B/X essentially encodes into thieving the dynamic of hipster ninja-ism.
Yeah, you know all this lore about shuriken manufacture and funny slippers, and can quote every ninja film and manga, but you couldn't climb over a chain-link fence in real life if you really had to. The skinny jeans make it hard enough, but then how does the ninja hipster approach the fence while maintaining proper ironic distance? The ninja hipster finds itself trapped in a Zeno's Paradox of continually edging closer and closer to the fence, never quite reaching it ... and then the non-ironic Rottweiler bites into his/her ass, tears a chunk out, and irony must be put aside -- if only briefly.
[No, wait. On second thought, here's a ninja slippers referent worth considering: Chanclas de Ninja, by Brownout.]
At any rate, this mechanic deserves a closer look, but it may be another reason to favor Dyson's 2d6 Thievery mechanic (found in the delicious Dyson's Dodecahedron #1) over the percentile approach of B/X-LL. Either way, you've got to make the average thief always do better at detecting traps than other PCs, or at least as good as a dwarf to start off with. Otherwise, why bother with the Thief?
___________________________________________
* It lived up to its name, by the way. 3 of 5 PCs were killed pretty quickly. No biggy. We re-rolled and regrouped in old school fashion. Some of this was owed to two players not knowing the "shields will be splintered rule" was in effect.
So we're here playtesting Carter's scenario for the OSRCON game he's running, The Tower of Death*, and I rolled up 2 3rd level PCs, a Thief and a Magic-user. I've been playing a cleric for the last year and a half that we've been gaming, so I took the opportunity to play some new classes that I haven't worked with for ages.
This may not be news to many of you, and forgive me for not having read your post about it from 2009 (but do send a link in the comments), but I found out that low-level thieves are the last folks you want searching for traps. Looking through the tables and randomly opening up the LL rules to "Traps and Trap Detection" (p. 45), I learned that a first level thief is actually worse at finding traps (14% success) than a non-thief (1 on d6; 16.666%), and WAY worse than a dwarf (1-2 on d6; 33.333%). Weird. I thought maybe this is one of those odd miscues in Lab Lord rules, but in fact my Moldvay Basic has it even worse: Thieves go 10%, 15%, 20% for the first three levels where everybody else is d6ing the night away. In Lab Lord the thief only gets as good (almost ... 0.333% short of being as good) as a generic dwarf at LEVEL 5!
As one of our players described the exchange after the thief fails to find the 8th trap in a row that the dwarves detected: "Yeah, well, I just always wanted to be thief growing up. I never said I was GOOD at it, it just seems really cool to be a thief. That's what I'm doing." So B/X essentially encodes into thieving the dynamic of hipster ninja-ism.
Yeah, you know all this lore about shuriken manufacture and funny slippers, and can quote every ninja film and manga, but you couldn't climb over a chain-link fence in real life if you really had to. The skinny jeans make it hard enough, but then how does the ninja hipster approach the fence while maintaining proper ironic distance? The ninja hipster finds itself trapped in a Zeno's Paradox of continually edging closer and closer to the fence, never quite reaching it ... and then the non-ironic Rottweiler bites into his/her ass, tears a chunk out, and irony must be put aside -- if only briefly.
[No, wait. On second thought, here's a ninja slippers referent worth considering: Chanclas de Ninja, by Brownout.]
At any rate, this mechanic deserves a closer look, but it may be another reason to favor Dyson's 2d6 Thievery mechanic (found in the delicious Dyson's Dodecahedron #1) over the percentile approach of B/X-LL. Either way, you've got to make the average thief always do better at detecting traps than other PCs, or at least as good as a dwarf to start off with. Otherwise, why bother with the Thief?
___________________________________________
* It lived up to its name, by the way. 3 of 5 PCs were killed pretty quickly. No biggy. We re-rolled and regrouped in old school fashion. Some of this was owed to two players not knowing the "shields will be splintered rule" was in effect.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
More Bardery for Labyrinth Lord
Amongst the various other goodies Dyson pointed me toward in that post was yet another gamer's take on a Bard class for Labyrinth Lord. I am most eager to look this over -- it is available at Djeryv's Graveyard, under "Sections" ~ "Labyrinth Lord" in the left-hand column (or direct download here). At first glance, it looks like Djeryv's Bard is geared toward the AEC's "Advanced" options for LL, whereas the Bard that Spawn of Endra and I came up with (available under the "Downloads" tab above or here) is a mish-mash of the Delving Deeper Bard class and Dyson's own 2d6 Thiefin' house rules.
Great stuff! Thanks for sharing, Dyson!
And perhaps Djeryv's Bard should be added to the Links to Wisdom wiki?
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