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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 11, 2023 19:41:53 GMT -5
I agree with all of your points, but the first one. I use initiative and do it by individual. Due to the sheer amount of characters in play, each player rolls for their entire group of characters. Highest roll goes first, so that player resolves all of his characters at the same time. It goes to the next player until the end of the round. I personally don't use automatic level up. I require the characters to go through training. I don't use fire and forget magic, but have spellcasters use Spellcraft, Arcane or Spellcraft, Divine to cast spells. Failure means the spell doesn't go off and they don't lose the slot. Success means the spell is cast normally. What it does is that it allows me to use critical failures and successes for their spells like melee characters. I played 2E with segments and combat was glacial, we had seven player, but then all the monsters rolled individually too, so tracking what segment 40-50 monsters acted on each round and rolling initiative every round, it was bad enough for the players, but I could not understand why the DM would do that to himself. Now you are not using segments so that helps. I like to run combat really fast and as I call on each player in five seconds or less we are on to the next player. 16 Players made about 80 seconds tops for the player side of a melee round and then about the same speed for each monster. That meant each melee round ran in about 3-4 minutes tops in a game. Often an entire melee round was about 150 second or less. In OD&D I always assumed that it was on the job training and then you leveled up when you got XP. In later versions when training came along, I was not interested in it. I had a 2E DM who made us travel through three cities, two weeks travel between them to find people that could train everyone. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 11, 2023 19:43:05 GMT -5
I agree with all of your points, but the first one. I use initiative and do it by individual. Due to the sheer amount of characters in play, each player rolls for their entire group of characters. Highest roll goes first, so that player resolves all of his characters at the same time. It goes to the next player until the end of the round. I personally don't use automatic level up. I require the characters to go through training. I don't use fire and forget magic, but have spellcasters use Spellcraft, Arcane or Spellcraft, Divine to cast spells. Failure means the spell doesn't go off and they don't lose the slot. Success means the spell is cast normally. What it does is that it allows me to use critical failures and successes for their spells like melee characters. I have thought about changing magic a bit but mostly just adding or rewriting spells. IIRC Arneson had spell failure. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 11, 2023 20:20:09 GMT -5
Segments never were a part of 2E. It's something your DM implemented from 1E. He also ran combat poorly. I would never run it that way. I don't recall any DMs I knew that ran it that way either. I don't mind how long my players take since they're considerate of everyone. Combat really goes by quick. Training in my game consists of a roll and that's it. Yeah, last I checked he is closing in on 90,000 posts on another forum. I have no idea why he ran it that way, but he was super committed to it. Also every encounter (every encounter) was designed to be a near TPK. We had one TPK and a bunch of near TPKs, every encounter was designed specifically for our party. He believed you should never have an encounter that was not more powerful than you were and they always attacked, there was never any other option. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 11, 2023 20:47:21 GMT -5
With a DM like that I'd exercise my no game is better than a bad game. Some people are just bad DMs. You can't take away player options as that is just bad form. They played for about a year and a half before we called it quits. But we were all coming to hang out and not for the game. I did not play until about 6 months after my wife passed, so I played just about 7 months until the lockdown started and we just never went back. If my wife had not been sick, I would never have shut my game down which is why there were playing with him to begin with. One guy moved to Atlanta toward the end of the lockdowns and another is burned out, he has tried running a game three times and flames out after a couple of months. The other guys in that group are not interested in OD&D. I would have to build a new group from scratch. However, if can find more energy, I want to get a play by post game going here. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 11, 2023 21:46:47 GMT -5
I hope you are able to run a game again and feel better. Are you in a game now? No, not in a game right now, I don't think any of our active members are in a game right now. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 12, 2023 0:54:57 GMT -5
If you can figure out your sound problem you can join mine. I'd love for you to be a part of it. I have not been able to, even with talented help in four plus years, so it may have to wait until I replace this computer, which given my lack of funds, I hope I don't need to do for quite a while. I have had this one for I think five years now. It has a 6th gen i5 processor but only 8GB RAM so a little light on ram. NVMe boot drive 128 GB and I have a 256 GB NVMe backup. But when Windows 10 stops being supported I will have to go to one of the Linux distros to use on the Internet. I won't go to Windows 11, too many downsides, the worst is giving Microsoft the ability to encrypt my drives and deny me access to my data. Also the move to make it to so you cannot login to your computer without an active internet connection. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 12, 2023 11:51:29 GMT -5
My one techy friend, actually a former boss at an old job, bought me one and yet it did not work. Now when I connected it to my flip phone it worked just fine for conference calls. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 12, 2023 13:52:13 GMT -5
Hmm that is really odd. Is it a software setting that's messed upon? I don't know, I have had several people more tech proficient than I set down at my computer and work on it. None of them have been able to get it work and none of them understands why. One guy was making $200K a year in computer tech at the time. He thought before he sat down that I just had the settings messed up. |
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 12, 2023 19:47:38 GMT -5
So if your internal sound doesn't work and you used a headset with its own sound card it doesn't work that's really strange. I've never heard of it happening before in all my years of building computers. Are you sure you got a headset that was USB and had a built in sound card? Not USB so probably doesn't have a sound card. I followed you link, but I can't afford that any time soon. Sound works for you tube and other videos I click on, but not for these things. |
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Post by El Borak on Oct 5, 2023 22:56:43 GMT -5
One of the things that didn't make it into OD&D was the counterspell. I have always thought that should have been a spell, but I have not come up with what I think is a good rule for it.
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Post by The Semi-Retired Gamer on Oct 6, 2023 5:57:19 GMT -5
One of the things that didn't make it into OD&D was the counterspell. I have always thought that should have been a spell, but I have not come up with what I think is a good rule for it. I would be interested in that. |
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Post by hengest on Oct 6, 2023 12:03:31 GMT -5
One of the things that didn't make it into OD&D was the counterspell. I have always thought that should have been a spell, but I have not come up with what I think is a good rule for it. Didn't they have something like that in 3E? I haven't ever made much in the way of a coherent magic system, but I like the idea of a defending caster blowing out two spells of the same level or higher to destroy an enemy spell in the casting. |
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Post by muddywater on Mar 28, 2024 13:38:55 GMT -5
One of the things that didn't make it into OD&D was the counterspell. I have always thought that should have been a spell, but I have not come up with what I think is a good rule for it. Didn't they have something like that in 3E? I haven't ever made much in the way of a coherent magic system, but I like the idea of a defending caster blowing out two spells of the same level or higher to destroy an enemy spell in the casting. I think counterspells are a fun part of the game. Just make a matrix like the attack matrix - caster level vs caster level and roll for a target number. It could be really simple to see if it works for not. |
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