Swords & Wizardry
The comments section on my recent post about the differences between racial abilities in 1e AD&D and the new Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion attracted the notice of Dan Proctor and he weighed in a number of topics, one of them the sheer number of games seeing the light of day now that the Old-School Renaissance seems to be in full swing:
I think the real concern people have but have a hard time putting into words is that it is hard to support every clone (ish) game that is coming out or will come out. Many many more will come out, I have no doubt. I think what people are feeling is “support fatigue.”
How many more of these should we high-five before we say screw it, who cares? That’s a legit question, and I don’t have an answer. Honesty I don’t think any of us should feel an obligation to support every new retro game that comes out…one might ask why support AEC instead of OSRIC. I’m not asking anyone to.
I was thrilled to have Dan leave this comment, as it addresses something I’ve been wanting to write about for some time.
In July I wrote:
I’m also wondering how many people actually play multiple systems. Is it uncommon? With so many retro-clones, spin-offs of retro-clones, and new games out there now, not to mention the originals, do many players utilize several of them? Or do most pick a single system and stick with it?
Personally, I cannot materially support (in terms of purchases) every old-school game out there. I cannot even support every one I think is particularly good. First, the financial commitment would be far greater than I can afford. There is a lot of product being released, much of it of very high quality. I cannot even justify the expense of Labyrinth Lord hardcovers at this time, even though LL is my choice of one game to rule them all. There are a few products I’ve purchased to show my solidarity with the creators, and there will be more in the future. But not very many. If I don’t think I’ll use it at the table, I probably won’t be spending any money on it.
But even more limited than my gold is is my time. I simply don’t have time to play all the games I would like to check out. The whole reason I chose to go All Labyrinth Lord All the Time was that I was having trouble getting anywhere on my proposed S&W White Box game. And it wasn’t a lack of interest, as I was (and still am) very intrigued by the power curve of White Box. But there is only so much time in the day and so many players to play, so I won’t be spreading my effort over a half-dozen cool games. Unfortunately, this means that some games I’d sure like to try, such as Ruins & Ronin and Mutant Future, probably won’t get a chance.
I think most players are in the same boat as I am. I’ve made my choice (at least for now) and others will have to make their own choices based on their own interests. Some will pick multiple games. Some will play one or two but buy material for many others. I don’t know which direction things will take, though it appears that there will be a small number “bigger” games and a large number of “smaller” ones.
I’d hate to see good games struggle because things are so diluted, but the market will have its say. Fortunately, the publishing options available mean that nothing has to permanently “die,” and I think that quality material will always be in demand.
If you write it well, they will play it.
UPDATE: From a comment:
Arguably, extra gaming time is better spent expanding a smaller game than grokking a bigger game. Add to that the ease with which publishers can nuance games with house variants and setting/genre tweaks, and yes, we’ll continue to see more titles than we can keep up with.
But I think you hit the nail on the head: the required number of games is as many as it takes to find one you like.
I don’t think that we’ll reach a state of truly “too many” old-school retro-clones and retro-spin-offs. Such a state would be similar to having “too much” beer or “too many” girlfriends.
But (and this is a big “but”) once one finds the right game, beer, or woman, the others usually sort of fade into the background.
UPDATE 2: Grognardia linked to yesterday’s post with Dan Proctor’s comments. That in itself is cool, but I encourage you to check out what James has to say on the subject.
I’ve been thinking about the hit point method explicitly stated in Swords & Wizardry White Box, the “re-roll all hit dice” method:
Hit points are re-rolled each time a Player Character advances in level—however, if the re-roll results in a character having fewer hit points for their new level than their previous level, ignore the re-roll and retain the prior amount.
This is obviously different than the “standard” method of simply rolling an HD and adding it to a PC’s previous total at each level advancement, but I’m thinking of using it in my Labyrinth Lord game. I’ve got a few posts on this topic planned for the next few days, but I lucked out when a discussion of this erupted on the Swords & Wizardry board. I encourage you to check it out, starting about here for the in-depth analysis and this thread for an excellent summary.
During the discussion, Random ran one million (!) simulations of the various totals at various levels and posted the results. Using his numbers, I put together a couple of charts to display the curves at 5th and 7th levels for fighters:
Hit Points Standard and Re-Rolled at 5th Level
Hit Points Standard and Re-Rolled at 7th Level
The number on the bottom is the hit point total, the number on the left is the number of times that result came up out of 1,000,000. Keep in mind that S&W WB uses d6 hit dice for fighters. Click the images for a better look.
As you can see, the re-roll method has a slightly sharper curve to the bell and tops out a little higher than the standard method, but not by a whole lot. Random’s simulations showed an average difference of less than 1.88 hit points at 10th level, something I don’t find significant enough to spend any time worrying about.
I like the idea that a “bad” HD roll, say a roll of 1 when advancing from 5th to 6th level, can be “made up” at the next level. The cost, of course, is the fact that hit points may not increase at all if earlier rolls were particularly good. As for narrowing the bell, drawing most characters toward the mean, I don’t see that as a problem, though those who are convinced they can beat the odds and get nearly max hit points each level won’t like it.
Tags: Labyrinth Lord, rules, Swords & Wizardry
Brave Halfling Publishing has a few more boxed sets of Swords & Wizardry White Box available for order.
When these are gone there will be no more until November.
Kilgore ordered his.
UPDATE: Alas, it appears that the extra run has also sold out. There are 25 sets in reserve for January 20th, the official release date.
Tags: Swords & Wizardry
Labyrinth Lord comb-bound full-size and digest
For some time now, my plan has been a two-pronged approach to fantasy gaming. Labyrinth Lord by the book with only a few house rules would be one side of the coin while a totally customized Swords & Wizardry White Box system would provide an outlet for for all sorts of ideas in a game with a simpler foundation and a lower power curve.
However, I’ve been struggling to find any time to spend on the White Box side of things. Heck, I’ve been struggling to find time to spend on any gaming lately. I made the decision some time back to put my Forbidden Jungle sandbox campaign into White Box, but as my work on that has languished Forbidden Jungle has ground to a halt. Looking into my immediate future, I don’t see much realistic chance to spend any amount of time on S&W in the coming two or three months. Considering that I had wanted to have kicked off Forbidden Jungle already, this is not acceptable.
Of late, I’ve been pondering the switch to All Labyrinth Lord All The Time. Despite a lot of coolness in the S&W White Box system and an awesome S&W community online, I’m having trouble justifying splitting my time and effort between two systems, particularly when one of them is going to require a significant amount of work before it’s what I want it to be, and the other is already up, running, and going great.
Since I’m pretty limited for time these days, there’s no real rush to make a final decision on anything immediately.
I’m also wondering how many people actually play multiple systems. Is it uncommon? With so many retro-clones, spin-offs of retro-clones, and new games out there now, not to mention the originals, do many players utilize several of them? Or do most pick a single system and stick with it?
A while back, Verhaden had a post up that began thus:
For a while, there has been a lot of talk on various forums and blogs about the usefulness of having a RPG system in booklet format. The discussion seems centered around utility and a certain rules-light-DIY philosophy, tinged only a bit by nostalgia and novelty. I can see the appeal of having books you can print out at home, keep in a small Munchkin-sized box, and store in your glove box or something for in-promtu gaming purposes. It sure as hell beats lugging around three 400 page hardback books.
Kilgore's WhiteBox
I strongly prefer digest-sized booklets for game use. Yes, there’s certainly some nostalgia there (though I must admit mine is for the black LBBs of Traveller rather than the brown LBBs of OD&D), but I find them easier to use and keep behind the screen while playing.
And, come on, isn’t the nostalgia+utility factor one of the driving ones behind the “old-school renaissance”?
I’ve printed up my Labyrinth Lord PDF digest-sized and used comb binding. I’d prefer coil over comb but a comb punch is available at work. Either one lies nice and flat when open, even with higher page counts than anyone’s LBBs.
I’ve also used digest-sized comb-binding for my Swords & Wizardry White Box rules. My long term plan for S&W is to assemble myself a customized White Box book incorporating all of my house rules plus monsters from the Monster Book.
I print my booklets using Clickbook by BlueSquirrel. It’s got a lot of printing options and allows me to easily combine different formats into one booklet (or other size/style) as needed. It manages the two-sided printing, working with both duplex and standard printers to get your pages sorted and printed as needed. However, it is not free. At $50 it’s not a killer, but if it’s only going to be used a few times it’s probably tough to justify the expense.
A free option is BookletCreator.com. You select a PDF to upload and it sends you back a new PDF with the pages ordered for booklet printing. This leaves you to print the odd-numbered pages, get it back into your printer correctly, and print the even-half in reverse. Though I always seem to need at least two tries at this, the price (free) is right if only a few booklets are going to be printed. I ran up a couple of copies of Dungeonslayers as a test of the service and it worked great. (Just make sure to select “Letter” as your Result Sheet Size for digest booklets.)
[UPDATE: I also think there's a booklet option in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat. I use Foxit, so I'm not sure about it or how it works.]
Another route for limited printing, of course, would be to go down to Staples or Kinkos and get it done there. It’s not free, but the price might be worth the saved hassle. Plus they’ve got a number of binding options available.
Bat, meanwhile, has a nifty little carrier that just begs for digest-sized booklets. I may have to look into something like that.
In our Swords & Wizardry White Box game, we’re using Ascending Armor Class [AAC] on a trial basis. I’ve declared that a minimum of ten sessions with AAC will be played before I listen to any feedback, and that after the tenth session I will decide how many more sessions will be played before a final decision about whether to continue using it is made.
Before I go any further, I must make a confession: When deciding between Swords & Wizardry (Core) and Labyrinth Lord, the requirement for AAC in S&W was a large part of the reason that I chose LL. I simply wanted nothing to do with AAC, as I considered the standard AC system to work perfectly well.
However, as I prepared for S&W White Box, after about a dozen sessions of LL, I decided that perhaps completely eliminating the combat tables would help me, as the game master, keep things flowing along a bit better. So I’m giving it a try.
Something else that’s swayed my opinion a bit is the reaction that pro-AAC players get from old-schoolers on the various message boards. So many old-schoolers almost sound like broken records with “you can do anything you want in old-school D&D“, “you can do anything you want in old-school D&D“, and “you can do anything you want in old-school D&D” over and over again whenever someone asks about rules or how to handle a particular situation.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: renaissance, rules, Swords & Wizardry
I’ve long been less than thrilled with the cleric class as far as the mythological/religious aspects are concerned. With a few exceptions, we’ve generally played clerics as non-denominational, so to speak, and pretty much ignored the larger religious implications of the class.
7th Level Cleric?
Clerics must be either Lawful or Chaotic (no Neutral clerics allowed), and Chaotic clerics can only memorize the reversed versions of reversible spells (dark instead of light, cause light wounds instead of cure, etc.). Lawful clerics should not cast the reversed versions lest they risk the path to the dark side. Clerical magic originates from a mystic power with lawful and chaotic sides that constantly battle each other for supremacy.
Clerics attempting to cast spells while wearing plate armor must make a saving throw or their spell will fizzle.
Finally, turning undead is no longer an innate ability. Instead, a Lawful cleric may memorize the spell Turn Undead:
Turn Undead (Command Undead)
Spell Level: C1
Range: 120 ft
Duration: 3d6 minutesThis spell causes undead to turn and flee for the duration of the spell based on the results from Table 20: Turning Undead. Undead unable to flee will cower helplessly, though if the caster attacks any turned undead the spell is broken for all those affected.
Chaotic clerics can command undead successfully affected for the duration of the spell in a manner similar to charm person. Mindless undead will obey without question, but those of greater than 5HD may be able to resist commands contrary to their motivations.
A result of ‘D’ on Table 20 indicates that the target undead are destroyed (if the cleric is Lawful) or that the command period lasts for 24 hours rather than 3d6 minutes (if the cleric is Chaotic).
Qui-Gon Jinn from Episode I is the Jedi who immediately springs to mind here. Clerics in the service to various godlings, demons, and other supernatural powers do exist, but the spells of clerics come from the mystical power that binds the universe together.
Tags: Swords & Wizardry
Kilgore’s been waiting for this because of the focus on thieves in both Swords & Wizardry rulesets. I want to check out what’s included before making final decisions on my own White Box Thief.
Also available is the S&W Monster Book. Though this was created for the S&W Core rules, I picked one up. Conversion to White Box should be a snap, and I’m sure some of the nasty critters will find their way into my Labyrinth Lord game, as well.
Definitely check out these new offerings, as well as everything else at Mythmere’s store. Lots of good stuff.
(The White Box rules are undergoing corrections, so maybe hold off on those if you can. Hate to say it, but I know I’d be unhappy if I ordered something only to see a new and improved version released the following week.)
Tags: Swords & Wizardry, thief
