Roleplaying games | Greymerry Faire

Posts Tagged ‘Roleplaying games’

Free D&D

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 0D&D, building a dungeon, campaign world, Delving Deeper, Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy, Old School Renaissance, OSR, Role Playing Games, Roleplaying games, RPG, Swords & Wizardry, Table Top Role Playing Games, Tabletop games, Tabletop RPG, The Gygax 75 Challenge, TTRPG on April 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

(Or, rather, at no extra cost to you, as long as you already have the proper dice, pencils and paper, graph paper, and notebooks. Also, a computer or smart phone and Internet connection.)

These are some resources I’ve recently discovered, that allow one to set up and play a fantasy tabletop dungeon crawler.

First, the rules: this is called “Delving Deeper”, and is a cleaned-up version of the original Dungeons and Dragons—specifically, the 1974 “White Box” version. There are three booklets one can download. Version 4 is the latest complete revision.

Second, there is a booklet that describes how to create a campaign world, in which your players’ characters can adventure. It’s called “The Gygax 75 Challenge”, and can be procured here.

Third, and as a companion to “The Gygax 75 Challenge”, there is a single page product by Matthew Colville’s MCDM company, that asks several questions to help develop ideas for a fantasy world.

That should be all one needs. Another product that is technically free, if you don’t mind being a moocher, is the “Swords & Wizardry Core Rules”. I bring it up because it has more extensive rules, with illustrations for creating dungeons than “Delving Deeper”.

If you need dice, there are free online dice-rollers available. For the real thing, starting out, I recommend checking out Walmart, which has been selling sets of dice with bags for around 8 to 10 dollars. Each set contains 42 dice, and six bags. Or, you can find out if you have a comic shop nearby, which might also have gaming dice.

Addendum: versions 1 and 2 of “Delving Deeper” contain a sample dungeon map in book 2. I don’t know why this was removed from the later revisions.

They did put up the sample dungeon as a separate product.

Addendum #2: here are a couple of sites that explain how to use the Chainmail combat rules in Dungeons & Dragons.

Using Chainmail with OD&D

Click to access compleat-chainmail.pdf

The Compleat Chainmail

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THAC0 for fun and profit

Posted in Dungeons and Dragons Basic, Misc TTRPGs, tagged Ability Scores, AD&D, AD&D 1e, B/X, BECMI, Dungeons and Dragons, Moldvay, OSR, Roleplaying games, Tabletop RPG, THAC0, To Hit Armor Class 0, To Hit Armor Class Zero, TTRPG on April 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

THAC0 (“To Hit Armor Class Zero”) isn’t difficult to understand, despite what the rumors say.

This is *especially* true if you are a player (that is, not the game’s referee).

It is only marginally more complex than what is known as “ascending armor class”, where the player rolls a twenty-sided die, adds any bonuses or penalties, and tells the referee the result.

With THAC0, as a player, one rolls a twenty-sided die, adds any bonuses or penalties, subtracts the total from 19, and then tells the referee the result.

The player’s part is finished.

The referee compares the number told him by the player to the target’s armor class. If it is the same or lower than the target’s armor class, then the attack is successful, otherwise, the player’s character missed the target.

For example, the player rolls an attack, and gets a result of 16. He subtracts 16 from 19, a difference of 3. He tells the referee, “I got a three”, or, perhaps, “I hit an AC of three.” The referee checks the target’s armor class, which is a 5, and replies, “You hit the monster.” Or, the armor class is a 2, in which case the referee says, “You miss.”

1. To reiterate, if the player’s character has a bonus or penalty, then said bonus or penalty is applied to the die roll before subtracting from 19.

For example, if the player’s character has a strength score of 16, which grants a two point bonus to melee (hand-to-hand) attacks, then the player will add two to the roll, and then subtract *that* number from 19, and tells the referee the final result.

If the player’s character has a strength score of 7, then the character has a one point penalty. He must subtract one point from the die roll prior to subtracting the result from 19.

2. Depending on a character’s adventuring profession, he will improve his ability to hit armor class zero. Fighters will improve THAC0 by one point when they reach the fourth level of experience (this is in the Cook-Marsh Expert Rules). A fourth-level fighter will subtract a d20 roll from 18 instead of 19 (after applying bonuses or penalties).

Congratulations!

You have completed this course in Old School Table Top Roleplaying, earning 3 credits toward your degree as a Master Adventurer, and the coveted “THAC0 Genius” badge. Go forth to victory!

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It’s “Hit Points” not “Health Points”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged D&D4e, Dungeons and Dragons, Gamey-ness, Gaminess, Health Points, Hit Points, Roleplaying games, Torchbearer on January 7, 2015| Leave a Comment »

So, I’ve been looking through the RPG-oriented sites I like to visit (www.enworld.org, forum.rpg.net), and the subject of “Hit Points” has come up, with the observation that the idea of hit points seems “gamey” (that is, rules that help move the game along, but don’t necessarily lend themselves to imagining a world). Hit points seem gamey, in my opinion, only if one thinks of them as “Health Points”. That is, if they are considered to represent wounds that the character has sustained, then they are rather “gamey”.

But that’s not what the game says. According to the (D&D 4th Edition) Rules Compendium: “Hit points measure the ability of a creature to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on its feet throughout the battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They also represent skill, luck, and resolve–all the factors that combine to help a creature stay alive in combat.” (p. 256)

In other words, in a game that relies on mathematics, hit points are a mathematical representation of a character’s health, morale, and skill, all wrapped into one tidy statistic.

I don’t know, maybe that is sort of gamey…

Torchbearer is a game with a different process for determining character health: a list of conditions (like, “Hungry and Thirsty”, “Sick”, “Exhausted”, etc.). Each time a character fails a check, he acquires an additional condition. If the character has every condition, then he dies.

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