The state of Post-OSR content
- Thread starter Yora
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The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
Not backing Demon Bone Sarcophagus? I've got high hopes...
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
Thank you! I knew I didn't imagine it. Squeen is trying to gaslight me!
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
Page 37 of the DMG: "it is best to use one actual day = one game day when play is not happening."
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
That's a very soft statement. Emphasis added...because that conditions everything. A perfect example of putting too much emphasis on a minor remark. "Ha ha. We got those AD&D guys again! Hop on this Ship of Fools---chase the hashtag!" Ridiculous--the stupid grows tiresome (e.g. it takes years to build a castle--gonna wait for that?). Pull as many misleading quotes as you like, I will never believe that was the intent or practice. Common sense man! I've played this game for 20 years now...you are not going to bamboozle me with cracked-mirror versions of the past. I understand the practical intent of that statement, and strict 1:1 adherence is a pure b***s**t interpretation. Nice try.
Let's have this discussion again in 10 years, #BrOSR, after you've tried to make it work. Rubbish.
AD&D works. Inane misinterpretations of AD&D sputter out and die.
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squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Feels like a "Reunion Tour" album, trying to recapture the magic. I am skeptical -- fool me once...
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
The concept exists in the DMG (therefore "Jeffrogaxian") though yes, it's more of a suggestion and not a dictate. So therefore your statement that it appears nowhere in the DMG is false. Neener neener neener!
I PREFER to be part of #POSR, thankyouverymuch.
(either that or #NOSR).
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
And how could I forget #dOhSR!
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
Hmm. Maybe #LOSR would have been the better appellation?
There are Eyes that see in places that are hidden. Little birds that listen and watch where I go not.
A sly indirect comparison, off-handed. Your tutors have taught you well. You are incorrect. The term has always been incoherent and used to describe an aesthetic and a social club more then a philosophy. You can refer to Patrick Stuart's original delineation in my post.
You must have been in the Swine War. Have you recanted your master's teachings?
Real life timekeeping is only a useful tool to coordinate mutiliple groups exploring the same persistent world. In single group campaigns it is an uneccessary restriction.
People have been bugging me to do a thematic analysis of Maze of the Blue Medusa but it really does not extend beyond the envelope of 'Bourgeois Contempt for Normalcy.' Ennui, the burden of being overly loved and the rather nebulous concept of 'time' by people that could not pass a high school physics course to save their life. The Sadhouse Dungeon
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Then it's of limited use and only applicable to a niche scenario. That style is also of the short-lived variant, IMO---almost tournament-like in that it will necessarily cover a small period in time and campaign scope.
Whatever it may be --- even in my naive return to the hobby, I recognized it to be far too hip for me to ever pull off successfully.
Pangs for those lost, joyous, childhood days. It turned to rot, but what guffaws were had, and what great Beasts were hunted.
So then. I once wrote an essay where I lambasted the idiotic foundations of Artpunk and lamented its corrosive effects upon the hobby but I deleted it because it was rather too mean and it was Christmas. Let me try a nicer version.
If we wish to examine why this contemporary material, of which Artpunk is simply the most salient, platonic version, so often falls short we must first examine what makes the original games compelling. In my conception, this can be reduced to three pillars.
* A set of rules and rulings that together make up 'oldschool play' and are distinct from 'new school' or ' modern' rpgs in key ways. Others have written extensive guides on what is or is not oldschool, but as a shorthand; Characters that are randomly generated and not built, A rules light chassis allowing for flexibility and improvisation, resource management, combat/exploration/interaction, Gold for XP and procedural generation.
* Rules meant to emulate fantastic adventures in the spirit of the Appendix N, with deviation from that spirit being possible in minor degrees but with some essential quality being lost if the deviation is too great. The rules may be ported, but if the underlying assumptions are too greatly altered they no longer make sense.
* Gameplay that is fundamentally challenge oriented, with the understanding that the game is meant to be enjoyed and mastered as a game, and roleplaying be layered atop and around it as beautiful ornamentation, but never to displace the focus.
My contention is that Artpunk, as in, the central group just outlined, as well as its offshoots and the nebulous area of 'adjacents' have methodically chipped away at this foundation and the resulting desintegration is in many ways inevitable. This desintegration has taken place as follows.
* The minimalism espoused by Zak S (and his importance is key, I think) and his compatriots, which started a trend towards rules-light games, one-page dungeons and the extirpation of many systems and procedures considered 'unneccessary' but the iterative removal of which drastically oversimplified and bowlerized the gameplay until what was left was eventually a hollow fascimile. The trend can be seen today in games like Mork Borg, Knave and Troika; hollow fascimiles suitable only for short-lived, meaningless romps, lacking any technical depth and requiring no investment. It can be seen in One-page Dungeons, Five Room Dungeon and what I assume shall be the Two-room dungeon before long.
* The trend towards minimalism would normally be balanced by the need to continue to provide meaningful challenge as a central objective but this also fell by the wayside as the focus shifted towards, not even the roleplaying of the 90s but something even less meaningful, creativity, novelty and themes. We were meant to evaluate adventures based on the amount of ideas they provided, the emotions they conveyed to the participants and the little dopamine thrills. You can see a shadow of this in the works of Patrick Stuart, who after DCO published a book entirely devoid of mechanics and even in Veins of the Earth struggles to provide a framework around which the exploration of the underdark can take place. The disconnect is Actual Play. I am cautiously hopefull since the remastered edition of DCO that he at least considers people playing the game in Demon Bone Sarcophagus but I remain skeptical. You can see signs of the extreme degeneration in some later era (pre-Zakfall) Lotfp modules and definetely in the Mork Bork modules where very often the adventure is treated as a sort of theme park ride, not as a gauntlet. Troika modules are even worse.
* Furthermore, the erosion of the challenge based focus could have been delayed if adventures were still cast in the mould of the spirit of the Appendix N. Even if we are only pretending to be the heroic characters of the pulps, rather then players facing the challenges that they faced, they are still performing the same process, albeit it with some inefficiency because of a refusal to metagame. Unfortunately the focus on novelty and artistic expression, fuelled by undercurrents of rather darker, more unpleasant sentiments, meant that this too had to vanish. The key part here is that it was not replaced with anything else. Lotfp very clearly drew a line in the sand and stated what it was about as opposed to its parent. A line that could have been followed (and occasionally was). With Artpunk no such thing was done. There was, in the beginning, a sort of coincedental overlap of minor works of fantasy, the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, M. John. Harrison's Viriconium and arguably Ghormenghast, and occasional minor inspirations pop up (Gene wolfe in the case of Troika, for example) but there is no direction to the current. Everything is an aesthetic, replicated by further aesthethic. What an adventurer is, what an adventurer is supposed to do, this is all meaningless now, there are no common assumptions.
While practitioners with extraordinary talent or some degree of knowledge that preceded this collapse can still reliably produce work in the new format, newschoolers are hopelessly lost, and cannot be taught how to make compelling works from the Artpunk examples they are given. How could they, when the very purpose of such material has been erased?
There is, perhaps, a hopefull note. It is not difficult to replace nothing with something. Participants in the Artpunk climes that catch, beneath the garish yellow layout and ugly flailing of the Artpunkmen some faint glimmer of the power of oldschool gaming will soon move on in search of greater things, and, if they can bypass the constant invective and scorn cast upon the old ways by the would be resentful luminaries of the NuSR, they will take up the old ways. People soon tire of novelty. We shall see what substance they will flock to (but reading fifteen different threads on KotB on Reddit with about one in ten complaining about supposed problems, I am not overly worried).
Well, Vecna doesn't have much counterplay available to him. He showed up in the middle of an ongoing fight between PCs and Geryon, Bauchelain (modeled as a MPMoM Conjurer Wizard, just for kicks, with the undead tag) and Korbal Broach (modeled as an MPMoM Necromancer Wizard). Players said afterwards BTW that neither Bauchelain nor Korbal Broach felt particularly wizardey, which is kind of why I wanted to try them out. Players said they just felt like undead Vecna henchmen with summoning powers.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Vecna got caught in a Wish (Druid's Grove) early on, failed to pseudo-Counterspell it (rolled a 16 vs. a DC of 19). That basically neutered all of his offense and special reactions. Then someone else used a Divine Intervention to ask for a Hallow (teleport block) which prevented Dimension Door, and someone else cast Telekinesis and restrained him from even exiting the area on foot. I fought back with an attempted Dispel Magic (got Counterspelled, couldn't upcast it because Vecna can't do that, couldn't counter-Counterspell because Druid's Grove prevented me from seeing the Counterspeller), then an attempted Globe of Invulnerability (would have cancelled Hallow and Druid's Grove and Telekinesis simultaneous; got Counterspelled again and the Counterspeller rolled well enough to succeed), then basically just gave up and started stabbing hopelessly for a while until I realized that Geryon could Wall of Ice to break line-of-sight and prevent Counterspells. But at that point, Vecna didn't have another Globe of Invulnerability ready (it's only 1/day) so he couldn't retry, and then the Wall of Ice got melted, and shortly after that so did Vecna. It was about an eight-round combat, but neither Vecna nor his minions did much damage, in part because by the time Bauchelain and Korbal Broach started lobbing Fireballs, the PCs had a circle of power up, and the damage Vecna was able to inflict just got healed via Heal pretty quickly. More details here: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?647054-Vecna-Playtest-Notes
His lack of wizard spells and his utter dependency on vision to make his powers work was a fatal combination. I had previously run another Vecna test battle where Druid's Grove was pre-cast before he got there (PCs showed up to the ritual magic site, killed the defenders, and waited for Vecna to arrive), and that battle was even shorter and deadlier because the PCs in question weren't so defense-oriented and had more nova.
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Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
Seems like a weird oversight for a half-blind boss monster.
For whatever it's worth, WotC's version of "Vecna" isn't missing an eye or a hand, although in my description to my players I had them both missing anyway. Apparently WotC thinks it's cooler to say "this Vecna travelled here from the past, from before he lost his eye and hand." I have no idea why they think that's better than drawing a clear connection to the infamous Eye of Vecna and Hand of Vecna by making those parts be missing.
("Head of Vecna" on the other hand...)
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Yora
Should be playing D&D instead
I've seen that term a couple of times over the last year. What's that even supposed to mean?
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
I think I was more curious about the effect of triggering an event in realtime than an actual play report since most of that 5e(?) crunch went right over my head. I've done 5-10 sec countdowns. Often out loud. But never had a 'this needs to happen before the end of the game session' trigger before.
I've run all the classic Vecna adventures. Two in 2.5e and one converted to 3.0 I believe. Fighting Vecna was significantly more difficult for my players. Maybe the rules systems, maybe players inexperienced with high-level play? For the life of me, I can't conjure further memories of the adventures. I suspect they were railroady and unmemorable. Also, weed is a hell of a drug...