Aaron The Pedantic

Stop Pretending Harry Potter Magic Doesn't Suck Attack Cantrips are, by far, one of the most ill conceived leftovers from 4e's combat focused design. Truly, there is no real need for them in Fifth Edition. Nearly everything that could be looked at as a gap in design that necessitates these free damage tossers is addressed by some other aspect of the game. Here's why attack cantrips rustle all of my jimmies... They Belittle Mundane Attackers First thing's first. Your level1 caster doesn't expend any resources at all when they use a cantrip.  Anyone who uses ranged weaponry is suddenly at a disadvantage if they're tracking ammunition.  If you aren't tracking ammunition, there are many knockdown effects that follow, as demonstrated here:  Youtube: Why Resources Matter in D&D .  What about the melee attacker who decides to throw a weapon?  Are they expected to track THAT ammunition?  Yes?  Why?  Why is it that arrows are expected to be infinite, b...

Pictured: Me asking a player why they should know what a contraption does. One of the things I adore about the Rules Light OSR is the comfortable inclusion of implied abilities of characters that can be used at an improvisational level. Such implied abilities are often merely gaps in the code in OSR systems, or an overt detail that lacks any kind of explicit mechanical scripting. Perhaps the easiest way to represent this is through the B/X Class structure.  The system tells us directly how good a class is at attacking, what weapons they can use, what armors they can use, how spells work if they have them, how thief skills work, et cetera.  These are explicit abilities.  But it should be painfully obvious that this does not run the entire gamut of what adventurers will be doing throughout their careers.  So what happens when we approach these gaps? Put simply, we interact with the fiction of the world.  We have to ask ourselves, "what is a Fighter, where do they ...

 Holy hell, it's been a long time since I updated. The Cha'alt game has been chugging along just as much as ever.  I fully intended to do a write-up much more frequently, but things kept on happening in such a way that getting it up to date would mean either leaving things in an odd place or possibly accidentally leaving hints for my players.  We don't want that! I'll try to break these things up into segments and recite things as best I can. Traveling the S'kbah Cha'alt, as written, admittedly didn't come with regional encounter tables for traversing the desert.  The more I look at it, the more it seems to be a very brief gazetteer regarding most of the civilizations and a very detailed funhouse dungeon.  So, I took the creatures that Venger offered as possible encounters and put them on a table.  By this point, Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise was released, so there were some particular encounters I was able to pull from as well.  I also made use of a desert...

Whew, I'm tired. I stayed up all night.  Literally.  But it was an incredibly productive night.  Anyway, you don't care about that.  I finished the rough draft of the rough draft of my new Christmas adventure, Murder 'Neath the Mistletoe.  It's a B/X style adventure inspired by LotFP's No Rest For The Wicked, my love for old Santa stories, and my fucked up desire to turn something wholesome into something twisted.  The players arrive in a tiny village with a dark secret.  Every four years, the villagers sacrifice one of their own to a coven of hags in exchange for peace and prosperity, but this year, the sacrifice survived.  Imbued with the power of the cruel hags, this Santa knock-off is coming to town to lop off some heads. This particular adventure is much more dungeon light than my usual sorts. It basically works in three phases. Phase I: Investigating the town. Phase II: Hunkering down to survive the blizzard or venturing out to seek survivor...

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. FEEDBACK AND PLAYTESTING IS GREATLY APPRECIATED! This is by no means anything terribly original, but I feel that there is room for a tiny additional segment of character creation that could add something interesting. I'm revising the Dungeon Crawl Classics occupation chart to fit my purposes for Old School Essentials (I will be referencing sections from the Old School Essentials Rules Tome) . If you're familiar with DCC, one of the neat ways it interfaces with its 3e roots is that it has a very simplified skill system.  This format CAN be translated directly into Old School Essentials (B/X) in several ways, but you run the risk of introducing an entire new d20 based skill system.  Instead, my aim is to introduce slight benefits that work directly with the pre-existing format.  When gaps are presented that can be filled in, I'll try to fill those in. I've removed some of the occupations and added several that I felt were missing. ...

Today, we have a creature from Germanic folklore. The Bergmönch, a lumbering giant more than twice the size of a man, toils endlessly in the mines of the world. Its eyes, the size of human heads, burn like flames in the darkness. Its long white hair and pale skin set the tone for the undoubtedly cold reception that visitors are likely to receive. It dons plain black robes and carries an enormous oil lamp in one hand with a 5' tall hammer in another. It can often be found doing pointless tasks, such as shifting collected ore from one pile to another. Its presence is either a boon or a blessing. For those who act in ways that annoy the Bergmönch, death awaits. For those who honor their profession and show respect to the Bergmönch, he will show aid. BEHAVIORS: -He speaks and understands Giant, Lawful, Neutral, Dwarvish, and the most common tongue in the region. -He is incredibly hot blooded. He will kill those who frustrate him without remorse.  -He is partial to thos...

A lot of the discourse I see on alignment seems to veer one of two ways: 1. Alignment is outdated and restricting, putting a stranglehold on players that dictates how their characters should act in particular situations. 2. Alignment doesn't really add anything to the game. I'll try to tackle these in some sort of organized chaos. Is alignment outdated? By edition standards, yes. Fifth Edition has undeniably removed any semblance of significance that alignment may have on the game. At this point, alignment is strictly a barometer for general disposition that gives DMs a shorthand on "how should the character think about things?" Spells and features that target "evil" or "good" actually target specific creature types instead. Clerics and Paladins can lose their powers for ticking off their deities or breaking their oaths, but these things are generally very tangentially connected to alignment. Among old school gamers, alignment lives on ...

The Player Experience in 5E vs OSR, a Brief Comparison (Skip to next session if you want the bullet points) In Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, player characters are heroes. From the very beginning, 5e PCs are well beyond the capabilities of the average populace.  They have above average ability scores, they get a full hit die + CON HP, Spellcasters start with several spells to choose from with multiple castings per day and cantrips they can use at-will. Martial classes start with benefits that put them significantly ahead of 1HD creatures, such as Fighting Styles, Second Wind, Martial Arts, etc. This also says nothing of the many skill proficiencies and expertise. This gap only increases as the game goes on. By contrast, games in the OSR tend to be far less charitable to starting characters. For a basis of comparison, we'll focus on Old School Essentials, as it's a direct retro-clone of one of the most foundational editions in the OSR, Moldvay B/X D&D from 1981.  Wha...

 A lot has happened since my last post!  I'm going to try to get things caught up rather quick-like. We've been using a lot of downtime activities to give the PCs opportunities to do things that they would otherwise be unable to in a session without holding the other players hostage.  Here's an idea of what things have been going on in the Gonzo desert wasteland. All of the PCs were interviewed by a prestigious local journalist.  They were given a list of questions that she'd ask and they had the chance to think of the best answers that their characters would give.  Due to the serious waves that the party has made with the ruling class, the journalist's editor seized her notes (her manuscript ended up being skewed in favor of the PCs, which is now a quest item that has been hinted at) and released an overly negative article, taking things they said in the worst context and using it against them.  Admittedly, Breeder-san made it pretty easy. Here's the artic...