Review: Outcast Silver Raiders

So I saw this turd making it's way through the usual channels, IE the sewer that is YouTubers review columns, and noted there was no push behind it so I decided the best thing to do was review it after literally everyone stopped talking about it or paying attention to it's existence forever.  The same thing that should have been done to ShadowDark, but we weren't that lucky.

This is, more or less, the same game.  Its a 5E lite with death saves, no actual Saving Throws, advantage/disadvantage, a skill list, etc.  About the only thing OSR about this is actually using a different die (the d6) for ability checks as well as using the d10 for what this system calls "saving throws" that are actually just reactive ability checks.  This game even has an action economy in combat.  It's the definition of a 5E lite.  OSR is just a short for the title, it is not OSR in any way, shape, form, or idea.  

It wanted to ride the Shadowdark train by doing the same format - good art, piss poor rules that were close enough to 5E to hook some suckers.  That's the player's book in a nutshell.  Moving on to the Referree's book, we hit some paydirt as to how retarded this author is, likely on purpose:

This is what the king calls bullshit.  I have made no secret that OSR stands for "TSR D&D Compatible" full stop.  This game isn't it, so this game isn't that.  This is an attempt to co-opt and subvert the term, redefining it into something murky and nonsensical.  Then idiot normies who hear it think it's a murky nonsensical term when in fact it's been made clear many times before and they've been effectively gaslit.  DIY is a big part of OSR, that's why TSR compatibility is important. 

DIY also sadly does not include a gate to keep, or else I would keep it.  There are people out there who should be coloring well within the lines, and basically everyone should start playing a given game RAW and diverge from that based on actual table experience and issues, not the perceptions of the GM as to what could become issues at some point in the future.  Tinkering is fun but books of houserules have a bad reputation for a reason.      

Like Shadowdark, there was no design work done in this game.  Everything was borrowed from elsewhere, including stupid gimmick mechanics:

The language throughout this set of books is extremely weak and feminine, which gives some tonal whiplash when juxtaposed with the artwork which is great and bloody.  In fact I would love to see this art in a game that actually warranted it:

Do you see the problem?  What a referree does is call for a check or call for a save, not ask.  Asking implies the player can say no.  It's the pussy form of these sentences.  I didn't bring this up earlier but in the player's guide female pronouns are predominantly used.  I noticed a few too many and decided to do a CTRL+F and figure out exactly how many each were used (putting a space before and after, to make sure the word was used in it's entirety.  Sure I'll miss some "she's" and "he'll" but this is good enough of an indication.

He 2
Him 1
She 21
Her 52

Most of this was due to a female player and character used as an example.  But you seriously make a game called Outcast Silver Raiders and have female pronouns dominate?  Who the fuck do you think you're trying to sell this game to?  

So the majority of the Ref book is actually a solid understanding of the underlying OSR philosophy, the problem is it doesn't fit the metamechanics of the 5E-lite in the Player's book at all.  The author has the gall to put the following in this book:

When the following was present in the previous book:

This is an ocean of text to be a lesser mechanic than "hit 0 HPs your character is dead" or even "hit 0 HPs and you're unconscious and lose 1 HP/round, dead at -10" that most actual OSRs use.  This is all straight from 5E.

Another reason this product seems schitzophrenic, or that someone based wrote the GM guide but some pussy libtard wrote the core, was that there is a section on "fantasy races" at the end of the book.  The math for racial bonuses is fairly poor, so that tracks.

Plus the extended class list in the GMG includes 5E-isms like the Warlock and every built class seems like a 5E-lite class.

And with that, I'm on to the last book in the boxed set.  The Mythic North.  The book that should be good enough to make me want to buy this boxed set and throw the other two books in the trash were they belong.  

"The Mythic North is a hexcrawl" Immediately after this, the map is so tiny that the hexes are almost invisible and all the points of interest are marked as if it's a pointcrawl, not a hexcrawl:

Bear in mind this is a page in a digest-sized hardcover, so ridiculously unusable at an actual table.  The "Hexploration" charts aren't bad but I own the Tome of Adventure Design and Ultimate Toolbox so I'm not hurting for inspiration.  Another issue is that the hexes are TINY.

Then we hit the factions which is where this book goes off the rails entirely.  

The leader of the Southerners is an impotent king.
The leader of the Northern rebels is a woman with no real personal issues.
The leader of the Order of the White Hawk is a bisexual dude.
The leader of the Clergy of St. Lewiston (male) consorts with, and/or has trapped, a demon.
The leader of the Monks of Debrooken has an illigitimate son and consirts with demons.
The leader of the Cult of the Ram is a woman with no real personal issues.

So, this is not at all a shades of gray sort of setting it's selling itself as.  The Cult of the Ram is basically Robyn Hood and she/her merry they/thems.  Both women are painted as the heroes (at least in this section), men all the weak/villainous other than the gay dude who's sorta just there waiting to respond to the highest bidder.  He is the closest this setting has to a gray character and we frankly didn't need to know his sexuality to say that.  

Now I said all that but in the next section we get to a giant random encounter table, one of which drops this shit like a hammer: 

Which makes me think this entire boxed set was written by someone with schizophrenia.  There are points where I am Jack's complete lack of surprise and others where Tyler Durden takes over and writes some shit I probably wouldn't use even at my table.  

I feel like if these two could meet somewhere in the middle, and someone who didn't suck was actually designing an OSR game, we could get a really good product out of this.  As it stands every other page is too woke and lame, and every other other page is sometimes even too based.  This entire module is tonal whiplash: the RPG.  Maybe they'll make a second edition that's actually an OSR game.

Review: OSRIC 3E

Well, a few years ago I posted a "review" of the product I expected OSRIC 3e to be.  Last year, I appended to that review because of certain developments.  This year, the game has been produced and for a hefty sum of $0 it can be yours too!

If you buy it then, like me, you'll have overpaid.

OSRIC 3 fails on a base level.  The initial development of this "game" was actually a smokescreen to continue producing AD&D1E content.  It wasn't even intended to really be playable initially.  2E "fixed" that and made the game into a sort of near-perfect realization of an end goal.  I say near-perfect because it was missing some stuff they should have included, but it was also missing some stuff that really shouldn't be included.  And it was officially better off out of Matt Finch's hands, who dropped the project because he wasn't in the UK.  Long and dumb story, not going to bother telling it.

So what does OSRIC 3E do?  It brings back some of the shit that should have stayed gone, and turns the game into 2 books to do so.  So it's not even convenient anymore.  It also does something else that's awful.  It pisses on Gary Gygax's grave.  That's the part I'm focusing on here.  Not Finch's bizarre need to change the word "race" to "ancestry".  Quick aside, there's an actual explanation, kinda:

The question is begged, why the fuck can't you just use "race" Matt?  HMMMMMM?  Seemed good enough for OSRIC 2E.  Is it because your girlfriend's other boyfriend told you not to?  Where are your balls man?  It's not like anybody gives a shit what they say on blusky and none of those woke retards are going to buy this book anyway.  Plus it's FREE now.  This is just to be a shithead and potentially kill OSRIC by cucking it into irrelevance.  Admit it, bitch.  You did this same shit to Swords & Wizardry.  All the balls were in Bill Webb's court when you worked with FGG.

Since the last time I shit on Matt Finch's name, I learned he has a much younger girlfriend and she may be the reason why he's swan dived off the woke retard tree and hit every fucking branch on the way down.  Well I hope the BJs are worth it, because she sucked your fucking brain out, dude.  

I thank god I had the wherewithal to know with utmost certainty that Matt Finch's inclusion would fuck this edition of OSRIC up, in every sense of this sentence.  The Player's Guide has only one mention of Gary Gygax, that being: 

Which is absolutely fine.  This is the normal sort of thing to see in an OSR product.  His name is not repeated elsewhere in the Player's Guide, which is also fine.  He didn't need to be peppered throughout both books to maintain the old school spirit, it's an overly good statement to stand in solidarity with the forefathers that basically designed the game you are regurgitating and, to be frank, the very reason I or anyone in the entire world knows who the fuck you are.

As you can tell by my tone, this is not maintained in the GM Guide.  Of course this acknowledgement blurb is copy/pasted, but there are 2 more instances of Gygax name in this book.  The first is on page 30:

So, the first time his name is brought up it's to make a joke of the harlot subtable on the DMG page 192.  A subtable you didn't include in this, what is supposed to be a reproduction of the AD&D1E rules.  Not only did you not include the subtable (which could be forgiven if you weren't such a dick about it as it was itself a joke by Gygax), you omitted your own expanded variant of it from OSRIC 2E (page 174):

This is proving that there was a time Matt Finch and/or Stuart Marshall realized the original table was funny.  I miss those guys.  Instead, we have men standing on the shoulders of giants to merely have a better vantage point to piss on the giant's face.  Both versions of OSRIC broke up the City/Town Encounters Matix and into two and actually created a less useful design in the process.  This would be something I would fix in my own index of AD&D, should I have made one.  Making part of the product less useful than the original should probably not be a design goal.

So where does the other instance of the big man's name occur?  I'm sure if Finch is somehow reading this he rushed to his PDF copy to CTRL+F it. I'll save you the trouble, it's deep within this half of a wasted page on the GM Guide (p 86, an apt placement as it should be "eighty-sixed")

So this drek could easily be cut.  Like the terms "men" and "women", old schoolers have no problem understanding the difference in the terms "evil" and "good".  Actually mentioning changing terms from something understandable to something incomprehensible isn't justified by a lame paragraph, even if the subtext is that your girlfriend told you to from the next room while fucking another dude.  The entire next page is wasted text as well.  I'm not going to bother reposting it here, it's an entire page to say "monsters don't have to be the alignment given but usually are." 

This is all so effortlessly bad.  How did we go from S&W complete 2nd print to this?  144 pages with nearly all the options from AD&D as well as good layout and masterful writing to this bloated 600 page pile of horseshit that can't even manage to keep hardly any tables on one fucking page.   

So I will now explain exactly what OSRIC should have in it.
1: A plain English translation of the vast majority of AD&D1E.  Even the stupid hooker table, preferably without commentary.  This is a historical reference text, not an opinion piece and especially not your libtard girlfriend's opinion piece.
2: Instead of the bullshit initiative system, the one everyone actually used instead (d6 individual, monsters use "side" initiative or "type" initiative, low roll goes first).
3: An integrated option of ascending AC, the only objective mechanical improvement on the game post-TSR.  When I say integrated, I mean you don't have to hunt for it.  Finch managed to do this in S&W as well, though the explanation of BAB was hidden at the very bass-end of the combat section.
4: Other than the core three, monsters also sourced from the MM2 & Fiend Folio, for a more complete view and usability.  
5: Editing to where all this fits inside a 300-page book.  I think you can easily fit the entire game system in a 300-page book (maybe 400), sparing every word you can throughout.  It absolutely doesn't need to be 600 pages across two books, and frankly doesn't need any art outside the cover.  This is a reference and index compilation, it's not supposed to be a sexy game book or books.  
6: An index.  That meaning, this book directly has references to the source material.  So the harlot table would reference the DMG page 192.  It would be drastically easy to do: PHB is "P", DMG is "D", MM is "M1", MM2 is "M2", and FF is "F".  In order to avoid copyright issues you'd have to omit the actual explanation of these references, but accepting the intelligence of your audience goes a long way.         

I will now explain exactly what OSRIC should not have in it:
1: Psionics
2: The Bard
3: The Monk
4: Weapon v Armor AC adjustment tables.
5: Non-weapon proficiencies, skills, or anything else created outside the core of AD&D1E other than the aforementioned ascending AC rule.

This endeavor would not be difficult for even a second-rate technical writer with any experience at all.  Fuck I could have done this as a high school kid.  It's stupid this hasn't already been done.  This is what everyone wants out of OSRIC.  It's basically "OSE but for AD&D".  Minus a bunch of shitty color plates, multiple formats, and stupid rules-expansion books.

The Unsung Genius of Iron Falcon '75

This is not a review.  It's gushing in autistic detail over a brilliant minimalist solution to an age old problem.

That being, generally, Hit Points.  In the beginning you have too few, at the end you have too many.  Hit Points are also the reason Demihuman level limits mostly don't work.  There's a clever solution for all of this on pages 6-7 of Iron Falcon '75.  I think it revitalizes OD&D and is a much better, cleaner solution than previous efforts.  But it's hard to articulate without showing off.

In the system you don't get extra HP for high Constitution.  Because your Constitution itself dictates your starting HP.  From there on you gain 1HP/level if Fighter, 1 HP/2 levels if Cleric or Thief, and 1HP/4 levels if Magic User.  

So let's do some math.  2.5 Mil XP for a 20th level fighter.  That's a fighter with 3-18 + 20 HP.  So the majority of even the capstone XP class will be inherent HP from their origin, for at least half their leveling career if not more.  This fixes A LOT.  But let's not belabor the math.  Oh, to be clear, I will operate as HP usually operates here, we keep seperate totals for each multclass and the best result is what the character gets.  If there's a Fighter class in the mix, it'll almost always be the Fighter class.

2.5 Mil XP (what's required to make a 20th level Fighter, the benchmark):

18th level Human Cleric: 12-27 HP Avg: 19.5
20th level Human Fighter: 23-38 HP Avg: 30.5
18th level Human Magic-User:  7-22 HP Avg: 14.5
20th level Any Race Thief: 13-28 HP: Avg: 20.5

Now this actually synergizes with another mechanic - Doubles and Triples.  Rolling 10+ to hit grants full double damage.  Rolling 20+ to hit grants triple damage.  Fighters are the only ones who can logically get there, so it's an added boost to them.  Back to math though, let's interface this with Race-Class level limits:

2.5 Mil XP: Dead Ends:
4th level Halfling Fighter: 7-22 HP, Avg: 14.5 DEAD END
7th level Dwarf Cleric: 6-21 HP Avg: 13.5 DEAD END
6th level Dwarf Fighter (<17 STR): 9-24 HP Avg 16.5 DEAD END
8th level Dwarf Fighter (18 STR): 11-26 HP Avg 18.5 DEAD END
6th level Elf Cleric: 6-21 HP Avg: 13.5 DEAD END
4th level Elf Fighter (<17 STR): 7-22 HP Avg: 14.5 DEAD END
5th level Elf Fighter (17+ STR): 8-23 HP Avg: 15.5 DEAD END
8th level Elf Magic-User (<18 INT): 5-20 HP Avg: 12.5 DEAD END
9th level Elf Magic-User (18 INT): 5-20 HP Avg: 12.5 DEAD END
4th/8th level Elf Fighter/Magic User (<17 STR, <18 INT): 7-22 HP, Avg: 14.5 DEAD END
4th/9th level Elf Fighter/Magic User (<17 STR, 18 INT): 7-22 HP, Avg: 14.5 DEAD END
5th/8th level Elf Fighter/Magic User (17+ STR, <18 INT): 8-23 HP Avg: 15.5 DEAD END
5th/9th level Elf Fighter/Magic User (17+ STR, 18 INT): 8-23 HP Avg: 15.5 DEAD END

Non-Dead Ends: 1/2 and 1/3 speed XP to advance
6th/14th level Dwarf Fighter/Thief (<17 STR): 10-25 HP Avg 17.5
8th/14th level Dwarf Fighter/Thief (18 STR): 11-26 HP Avg 18.5
4th/14th level Elf Fighter/Thief (<17 STR) 10-25 HP Avg 17.5
5th/14th level Elf Fighter/Thief (17+ STR) 10-25 HP Avg 17.5
8th/14th level Elf Magic User/Thief (<18 INT): 10-25 HP Avg 17.5
9th/14th level Elf Magic User/Thief (18 INT): 10-25 HP Avg 17.5
4th/8th/12th level Elf Fighter/Magic User/Thief (<17 STR, <18 INT): 9-24 HP Avg 16.5
4th/9th/12th level Elf Fighter/Magic User/Thief (<17 STR, 18 INT): 9-24 HP Avg 16.5
5th/8th/12th level Elf Fighter/Magic User/Thief (17+ STR, <18 INT): 9-24 HP Avg 16.5
5th/9th/12th level Elf Fighter/Magic User/Thief (17+ STR, 18 INT): 9-24 HP Avg 16.5

Adding the half-elf would be absurdly complicated and I already went through most of that for the Elf, Let's give the best case scenario for dead end and non-dead end:

8th/8th/6th level Fighter/Magic-User/Cleric: 11-26 HP Avg 18.5 DEAD END
8th/6th/12th level Fighter/Cleric/Thief: 11-26 HP Avg 18.5

Ok so lots and lots of basic math later we can see that surprise surprise the worst deal on HP isn't the Halfling Fighter but the Dwarf and/or Elf Cleric.  Well it's the Elf cleric because he doesn't get 4th level spells AND his HP is the worst of the entire grouping (Constitution roll permitting).  The Single Class Fighter has the best at average 30.5 HP at this benchmark.  The fact that Thieves run a little faster than everyone else up the level chart makes them better than the cleric outside of the absence of Armor.  

Thieves get two more boons on these 2 pages.  The Thief Abilities Option makes their first level more survivable with a low ability of Hide in Shadows at 25%.  Their starting Picking Pockets is boosted to 40%, which means a starting Thief may actually be fun to play.  Perish the thought!  

Lastly we have the Unarmored Combat option, which basically says your BAB is also a Defense bonus if you're unarmored.  I'm not sure how well that works out.  

So I said ALL that to say this is a masterclass in minimalist design for maximum impact.  The only real downside I see is all those dead end class decisions.  The simplest solution being that they aren't maximums, but instead we double all XP costs for levels higher than those.  This works but is hard to visualize, as with multi-classing you're dumping XP in multiple experience buckets so making unattainable levels cost twice as much you're multiplying multiples, meaning the XP is 1/6 value for those who have exceeded their level limit and are multiclassed thrice.  The math is somewhat hidden because of the experience buckets vs doubling numbers after a time.  Prime requisites become more and less important, as they make a few early levels easier to obtain but it all evens out when the later levels cost the exact same regardless of ability scores.  

RIP Stranger Things 2016-2016

No mistakes in the title.  Spoilers ahead but who cares.  Watch the first season and never bother with the rest.

So I've been rather quiet about Stranger Things, the other shitfuck trashfire that pushed normie lemming morons toward D&D, at least most of them half-stupidly went toward D&D 5E instead of the game actually presented in the show, a mish-mash of B/X and AD&D 1E.

But it's final episode aired earlier tonight so I wanted to say -  Goodbye, Goodnight, and Good Riddance.  

In Season 1 there was some minor D&D references, and for the most part they were fairly apt and correct.  I consider Season 1 to actually be a good show, and like True Detective, it would be better if there was never a follow up and it stood on it's own forever.

In Season 2 they introduced "Demodogs" but otherwise didn't reference anything D&D related.  This is because I don't think the Duffers actually know anything about D&D.  If they did then someone would have named "Demodogs" either Hell Hounds or Blink Dogs, because they are things from D&D and fit diagetically into the setting.

Season 3 was annoying pointless filler, everyone knows this.  Nothing really advances and everyone just member-berries that Malls were a thing once.  Also they finally add a chick in it and make her lame and gay, in spite of chemistry Joe Keery and Maya Hawke have during this season, which dissolves and is never seen again, but that actually makes sense.  We're already in "Modern Audience" mode so basically everything romance and sex has to be on the back burner or non-existent unless it's a mixed-race couple.  Then it can exist but probably should be a C to D plot, which is what happens with Lucas and Max.

In Season 4 we steer back to D&D.  The excellent Eddie Munson is prominent throughout the season, meaning he's assuredly going to die horribly, but at least he gets a guitar solo beforehand.  D&D is portrayed incorrectly as the montage shows a d12 rolled with a d20 at the same time during a session, but there is a very, very small chance that this actually happens in AD&D1E.  Infinitesimal.  Also Lucas' lame bitch kid sister proclaims her character is an X level Rogue (I think it was 9th), which has multiple stupid connotations including the idea you can transfer characters between different DM's campaigns and that there was a Rogue class prior to 3E in the year 2000.  There actually was but there's almost no chance that a fan-made character class an obscure article in Dragon Magazine is really what she's talking about.  Later we have "Demobats" make their first (and last?) appearance, with two characters (Eddie and Dustin) who would instantly note and categorize their behavior as literally Stirges.  

Lastly "Vecna" arrives.  While Vecna was a thing at the time, in the form of flavor behind a few artifacts, there's a very real demilich that would more likely be cited - Acererak from Tomb of Horrors.  Now because his name is basically impossible to say aloud I understand why they would have used a better pseudonym for the big bad of the series (that - spoiler alert - is also the Mind Flayer because that's the easiest way to kill them both at the end which is really the middle of the final episode) I realize they'd want to go with Vecna because it's easier to say and generally sounds cooler.  But a teen in 1985 who is into D&D would have likened him to Acererak (or perhaps Strahd) not Vecna.  

In Season 5 we mostly go thankfully without D&D references until episode four, badly named "Sorcerer" or "The Sorcerer" or whatever.  In any case, the first instance of the Sorcerer existing as a D&D character class is in D&D 3.0 in the year 2000.  Especially in the lame-ass way they used it (because Mike specifically and word-for-word defines the Sorcerer class from 3E, meaning the writers probably used ChatGPT to look it up and copy/pasted it into the script).  Previous editions (like the ones from 1987) would have either lumped this in with the Magic-User, Mage, or Psionicist.  Technically everything anyone uses in the entire show is Psionics, and that's existed since AD&D 1E and therefore would be acceptable terminology, but I'm sorta picking nits there since the "demogorgon" wasn't exactly similar to the D&D Demogorgon.  It's OK to have some artistic embellishment if it is thematic.  'Demodogs' and 'demobats' fucking suck as names, though.  When you have the opportunity to use Hell Hounds and Stirges, seriously use the better terminology dipshits.  

Tonight the final episode aired.  I started typing this post after midnight.  There were at least two bad references to D&D in the final episode.  The first was during Dusty's Valedictorian speech, he referred to "two" types of chaos, "chaotic good" and "chaotic bad".  Of course even 5E lemming retards know that the alignments are three, and they are chaotic good, chaotic neutral, and chaotic evil.  Dusty, being an adamant and avid D&D player during the time it literally gets his ass kicked to do so (this happens early in the 5th season) would not make these mistakes.  Later, more mistakes crop up as Dusty's character during the D&D session is described as a "bard" which is a nearly impossibly hard class to get into in AD&D1E.  

Millionthly they are fighting Strahd in supposedly I6 Ravenloft and the party has dwindled down to Will the Wise, a "Sorcerer" now that everyone's forgotten the AD&D terminology that he's a Magic User.  There's some bullshit present that may or may not exist that is hindering him from casting spells (I don't remember what they said and won't bother going to watch again) so someone asks him to whack Strahd with his stick and Lucas says it will "only do 6 damage and Strahd has 30 HP left" which are both things Lucas, a player, can't possibly know.  Also Max is playing something called a "Zoomer" which I assume is just a semi-clever reference to her generation and not an outright fuckup of D&D lore.  Lastly Dusty the "bard" dies during the combat, really the first thing that we see at the table, and his death is basically ignored after the encounter resolves, as it wouldn't fit Mike's denouement.  This I can forgive, likely the party could resurrect the "bard".  

What I can't forgive is them spitting in the audience's face.  Basically how Mike's campaign concludes is a TPK, which is how a lot of proper campaigns end.  But Max, being a bitch, bitches about not having an I-Win button to fix it and have the game come to a satisfying conclusion.  What is then introduced is a magic bullshit deus-ex-machina where Eleven's NPC (not sure if she ever actually played D&D at any point in the show) has a summoning incantation which allows the GM to narrate the big bad being killed by said friendly NPC.  This was presumably set up in a previous game session that nobody could possibly remember.  But Will is the one who is alive at that point and makes "the call".  This is actually the kind of bullshit campaign ending everyone who actually plays RPGs hates.  IE not theater kids or other excessively estrogen-filled tables (soyboys, cucks, the gender challenged, sexual deviants, modern women who use excessive estrogen like testosterone, etc).  "You fucked up and Strahd killed you all, way it goes" is a better ending than "NPC comes out of the woodwork to save your punk asses.  Feel heroic?"    

This show has never gotten D&D right since it's first season concluded.  The writers never took it seriously and the actors never took it seriously enough to give a flying fuck since their paycheck cashed just fine.  I hear there is a lawsuit against the Duffers claiming that they stole or plagiarized the first season's manuscripts off someone else.  I'm frankly apt to believe this claim.  They don't know old D&D worth a shit and couldn't be arsed to look ANYTHING up.  Fuck 'em, I hope they lose.

Stranger things was a good season of television, and a bad series of television.

Why Minis on a Mat > Theater of the Mind

I got off track a bit in this rant and decided real examples were necessary.  Yeah it was almost two years ago, things tend to cyclically come up in my head. 

This is a battlemap scenario.  I have placed all the potential enemies, kobolds are the pennies, giant rats are the red and blue dice, the party is made up of two warriors (quarters), a thief (red dime) and a cleric (other dime).  What has happened in the fiction of the world is the party entered this cave, the thief scouted ahead and noted the kobolds in area 1 and the rats in area 2.  On his way back to the party he fell into a pit trap.  He has survived at the bottom with a few HP.  This action alerts everyone in area 1 and 2.  The brackets around the pennies outside the cave entrance are surprise kobolds that will come out of nowhere and cut the PCs off (they're hiding at the tops of trees and have been stealthfully descending while the party has been scouting the area), locking the party inside in a veritable deathtrap.  That's D&D for you.

That's 14 kobolds to keep track of (in 2 squads) and 18 giant rats, along with the positions of the 4 PCs and their movements. 

This is an image of the next round, the ambush kobolds have moved in, the rats ran down the hallways, the kobold guards moved in to engage, one jumping down to run the thief through and missing, killing itself.  Dead coins are turned to tails (I failed to do this when setting up the initial pic, fixed for this one).  Our fighter and cleric have had a good first round, each killing an ambush kobold from the front and living through the first barrage of attacks.  We're now down to 11 kobolds and still 18 rats.

This last image is the end of the next round, the party finally succombs to numbers, the fighter and cleric are downed, and another kamikaze goblin takes out the thief at the bottom of the pit.  Two of the MANY giant rats jump down to gnaw on the thief's bones.  The surviving fighter will most assuredly die on the next round, if nothing else by being bombarded with disease saves from all the giant rat bites.

Now, only a complete idiot thinks that TotM would be anywhere near as expressive and tactical as these three images show a battlemat with even a completely limited budget can be.  And I'm only using snapshots, imagine seeing things actually move in real time!  I was able to easily follow the rules for movement and everything else, and anyone can plainly see there's a corpse of the thief, a dead kobold, a living kobold, and two giant rats in the pit.  We see exactly how many are on the "west" side of the pit, exactly how many are in the "south", exactly where they stand to the "east" side.  If a Magic User were to happen near the cave entrance and see what was happening he'd know exactly where to aim his sleep spell and loose it to cause the most damage.  Every element of tactics in the game such as this dies with TotM.  

And with the objects given here, a minimal placement of walls and position of enemies, none of which indicating what enemies are what other than strictly differences in said objects, theater of the mind is still in full effect and use.  The battlemat is an added benefit, not a hindrance.  It isn't two George Washingtons and two FDRs going up against a squad of Lincolns and two teams of dice.  You still have to imagine the scene, it's just easier to share that imagination with objective gamespace.  So many fewer questions come up. 

"Are these the kobolds to the north or south of us?"
"You said we hear skittering to the west hall, did you mean east?"
"There are HOW MANY rats coming?"
"Where did the kobold jumping on me come from?"
"You said you attack the kobold... which kobold?"

This is why I say those who use TotM solely don't really game.  They spend the entire goddamns session fielding questions a battlemat could answer in so much less time.  Anyone who's actually run the game on a battlemat realizes they exist for VERY GOOD reason and don't play without them. 

Now I could hear you say "but there isn't always this many enemies to keep track of!"  Well guess where I pulled this encounter from?  It's the first cave, the Kobold cave, in the Caves of Chaos which are in turn the main dungeon area from the one and only B2 Keep on the Borderlands, the archetypal and legendary starter module.  That's right, this game used to start you in a killbox full of death.  If anything it only gets more complicated from here.  I remember entering the watchtower of the Temple of Elemental Evil and being absolutely swarmed with enemies of several types.  I wouldn't even know to run away without the battlemat showing empirically how screwed we were.

And that's why "TotM Only" elitist prick "GMs" can suck hairy monkey balls.  I frankly don't think they even game, bro.

Review: Dungeons & Delvers

So I ran into a blog of a gentleman named David Guyll.  Apparently he unsuccessfully had an anonymous blog called yourrpgsucks or the like, really a man after my own heart.  Most of his takes were solid gold, then I saw that he'd actually written his own game.  So, sight unseen, I ordered it with a Lulu Black Friday coupon.  What arrived was... less than solid gold.  

So it turns out Dave likes 3E and 4E.  A lot.  And beyond the default ability score bonus schema of B/X (and BECMI), this game is pretty much a mashup of 3E and 4E.  Which means it's complete shit.  The end.

Well, the art is fine.  It appears that the Guylls don't like drawing men, so it is predominantly women.  But races are called "races" and it was "published" in 2020, so it's not woke.  He also isn't very good at action shots, so the art is all very posed.  But otherwise there's no real issue.  I don't judge based on art & layout anyway, none of that shit matters at the table.  On the other hand, there is no index, which is a ding for a 500+ page book.

Now it's important to define why this game actually is shit.  It's really the impetus of the OSR, if not our motto and battle cry.  When D&D started caring about characters more than setting, caring more about Players than GMs, it all turned to shit.  And this game is a hack of those games (WotC D&D).

Now as a 3E variant, it's ok.  It borrows a lot from 4E; for example, there are no real spell lists for magic users, it's all powers like 4E.  The game uses wounds and vitality like Star Wars d20 revised but nonsensically both escalate over time, so you end up with a giant meat balloon problem even worse than your standard HP meat balloon problem.  Then looking at the Critical Hit solution and how Vitality and Wounds expand over time, there isn't really even a point in the separation.  This is just bizarrely asinine.   An ending Fighter likely has 42 Vitality and 142 Wounds, for a total of 184 HP.  And this is in a system where weapons do the exact same damage as every other version of D&D.  

A comparatively a max-statted BFRPG Fighter rolling perfect HD has 121 HPs at 20th level.  More likely has around 90 HP.  This is not in question in Delvers as there are no rolls for either version of HP, they are entirely statically derived so every max statted fighter will top out at 184 HP.   This is just one of the tens of problems with WotC D&D math.  It frankly doesn't exist in a meaningful sense.  It only cares about the endorphins gained by plusses, not systemic integrity.

The backswing of 4E and it's apparent motto was "sure lots of plusses, but at least we should get the game part right!"  with mixed results, even for those who enjoy it decry it as a combat simulator and an exceedingly long one at that.

The standard races are here, except halflings have been renamed kobolds.  Wacky races are also here including cambion (tieflings), cthon (stone people), ishim (aasimar), kytherian (warforged), tarchon (dragonborn).  On the plus side, there is a very small blurb at the beginning of races that says the wacky races are considered wacky by the populace, not just the player base.

Classes are ripped straight from 3E.  Identical.  Can't even pretendsies call a Rogue a Thief like an actual OSR game.  Also we have subsystems out the fucking wazoo.  Gone are the days when a different spell list was a different flavor of magic.  Now we have the Bard with a pool of Rhythm, Cleric & Druid with a pool of Favor, Monk with a pool of Ki, Sorcerer with a pool of Mana, Warlock with a pool of Eldritch Power, and the Wizard with a pool of Willpower.  Do they all operate the exact same?  No.   Most have the same increment over time, but the ones I've checked have independent subsystems you have to keep straight.

Skipping the rest of classes because it's just a variant of 4E for north of 200 pages of the book, longer than most legitimately good OSR games altogether, we hit Skills.  It's blessedly not completely asinine, he pared the shitty d20 list down to 20 actually fairly relevant skills.  The game points out relevant abilities to each skill, which means it gets halfway to the idea that you should just use ability scores for "skill" rolls, but sadly like WotC D&D the game relies on ability score modifiers to the point that they are considered the ability score itself.  So 18 Strength isn't a +3 modifier, if you rolled 18 on your Strength score, you have a Strength of +3.  Another dumb move proposed and implemented by a slavish adherence to WotC window-licker math.  The good news is that I haven't ran into any strands of blue hair stuck in the crevasse of the spine yet.  This is shaping up to be just an OSR heartbreaker in name only, it might actually be a decent evolution of 3E but sadly I'm not the target audience and Dave put OSR on his back cover which makes his game MY target.

Back to the book: then we get to skill perks which are just ways to subdivide skills into subskills and burn down what small amount of goodwill that I presented early on in the previous paragraph.  Then we hit Craft skills, meaning there's even another god damn skill system in this game.  Then we hit the Cooking craft skill and it appears Dave is a fan of Breath of the Wild.  So yeah, strike everything I said and reverse it, he almost didn't suck at page 3 of his Skills chapter, he fucking ate it with another 10 pages or so.

Equipment's next, it's basically 3.5 equipment except longswords have been renamed arming swords and two-handed swords have been renamed longswords.  Oh and it runs a silver standard like all pretentious retards who think that matters in any way.  In traditional failure fashion this game uses both Armor Class and DR, and Dave can't even be arsed to name the armors used, they are categories of Light, Medium, Heavy, etc.  Oh look, hirelings.  Like that's going to be a thing.  Ah, lame alchemical concoctions from 3E.  

Blah blah combat, 3E action economy, each weapon type has a crit table, Saving Throws: We get 5E saves AKA Castles & Crusades saves AKA no saves.  So ability scores aren't good enough for skill rolls but are totally good enough to eliminate saves from existence entirely.  Whatever dude.

Short and Long rests to replenish the two different pools of HP.  I get that this is some form of attempting avoidance of the 15 min adventuring day.  It's just a quirk of the early D&D levels.  Don't get your panties in a bunch about it, it's not worth all this fucking effort.

Almost 300 pages in and a big list of conditions show up which remind me of 5E but probably should remind me of 4E if I had read it enough to remember it.  

I hit the game master section (295).  Until the character tables on page 314, it is a respite from the retardation of previous pages.  It picks back up on page 325, traits and goals are pretty neat.  A few example rules I guess aren't completely awful, I did get some nostalgia from "0 level characters" though it may have existed in 3.5 somewhere, I remember it from the 2E DMG.

Then we get 100+ pages of monsters, though it's not a lot because it's 3E style statblocks.  After that come treasure, and we hit special materials before I find something interesting again.  Which are a few new-ish types - Cold iron (fae-bane), ironwood (really hard wood, lol), madiron (cthulhu metal), moonsilver (faerie silver), sinsteel (demon weapons), skyiron (meteoric iron), sunsteel (angelic weapons), thaumaterium (anti-magic steel), and venomite (inherently poisonous metal).  They mostly have their own mechanics, though skyiron is just adamantine (adamantine also exists) and moonsilver is just steel-hard silver.

We then hit a blog post section with random books, trade goods... Ah, magic items.  Mostly the usual suspects but a few newbies join the fray.  It makes me wish this was written for a different system, there is some fun and creative stuff here... And then the book just ends on page 515 like a wet fart.

As I said early, no index, no outro, nothing.  I would say there might be 20 pages of worthwhile content in this entire book, and some of that is rehashed GM advice.  Anything systemic would have to be reworked to be useful to the average OSR goer.  The cardinal sin of "OSR" products is indeed sinned by this game, that being that it is not TSR D&D compatible and still puts OSR on the back cover.  

It is banished from the OSR, as is anything David produces from here on out.  I read his blog, I know he knows what he did before he did it, and I don't give second chances to knowingly breaking the rules.  

He is too fun to be dead to me, and not a woke retard, so let's see if he produces something better in the future.  Preferably something that actually tries to be OSR instead of merely lying on the cover.  I've never let anyone back in but stranger things have happened.

Rant: 4D, and Youtubers are STILL near universally elitist pricks

This rant is a continuation or perhaps more specific application of this other rant from a few years back.

Relevant YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPteHoaMNMc

I would say not to give this guy views but he's a tiny tuber so it won't matter one way or the other.

I watched this video for exactly 30 minutes, which is most of it.  I came away with two thoughts:

1: The game session was completely fine.  No notes.  It looked to be relatively harmless fun, they slowed down for the new player, but that's expected and encouraged.  Overall good DMing, good playing, nothing to write home about and also nothing to admonish*.

2: The critic/YouTuber is a fucking dillhole.  Now I can smell these fucking 4D cultist tubers based on their criticisms of other people's play.  While I've rallied against both the game being played and 4D in the past, I want to say they are equally bad.  The game is only worse because it has more influence in the hobby overall, having curb-stomped proper OSR creators like Chubby Funster into kowtowing for relevancy.  If 4D was as popular, this hobby would be dead.  

Why do I say this?  Because the only thing that seems more fragile than woke Millennials' sense of humor are fanatic Gen-X cultists' "immersion".

If your immersion requires a rigid adherence to a form of group decorum and maintenance of a social contract, it's not worth having.  Not only that, if you have to modify your language to maintain it, you're actively breaking "immersion" to do so.  Because immersion doesn't happen in the voice or manner of speaking, it happens in the mind.  So speak naturally and get immersed like a normal person, you pussy.  

As long as players aren't being actively disruptive, talking about out-of-game things or playing with a phone or laptop, or cross-talking over others, there's no issue.  The game session presented in the video has no issue*.  

*Other than the game.  The game being played is fucking shit, and not OSR.  As I've stated plainly in the past, 5E lites and games more minimalist than Microlite20 are excommunicado.  They are awful and should die horribly.     

If you care about layout you're fucking retarded.

There is not much else need be said beyond the subject.  Layout is something smooth-brains care about when it comes to RPGs.

The community currently seems to have a penchant for promoting layout, hence the popularity of ose, shadowlark, mork bork, the odds, ben milton's shit, etc.  I think he's really to blame, the first to really start harping about layout because he plays to the normiest of normie crowds and is the archetypal reader-reviewer (as in not a player-reviewer).  Layout needs to be serviceable, sure.  Paragraph breaks between topics is a good idea.  

But what we're seeing now is basically a fetish and bent toward assisting the ADHD-addled to barely be able to concentrate.  It's a handrail in a non-handicapped toilet. This is contributing to the learned helplessness of the era.  The same shit is going on in Hollywood, creating entertainment now meant to be seen through the periphery of vision around an omnipresent cellphone playing Candy Crush.  They're literally fighting for scraps of attention when before even the worst of movies had an intent of creating collaborative commercial art.  

Sure it was always for money, as is most of the RPG sphere, but at least it was giving an experience people wanted in exchange for it.  Products were dictated by quality.  Sometimes good things died.  But now all good things are dying and low-effort shit is being lifted up.

To the Woodshed: WFRP2 Hit Location, Success Levels, and Initiative

 As I said before in my fake review of WFRP2 it is the best edition of WFRP by the numbers.  That doesn't mean it can't be improved.  I think I got a bit hasty in that review in throwing babies out with bathwater.  So I'm scubbing my houserules or rebuild or what have you I presented in that review (leaving it there for posterity).  Let's start fresh.  As I touched on to in this rant, There is a gimmick mechanic in WFRP2 which WFRP4... deproved on?  Worsened?  Impaired?  They sucked dick at it.  

WFRP2 on left, WFRP4 on right.

As you can see, the percentages are totally fucked for the new version, but that's besides the point as the chief gimmick of the mechanic which was tenuous in WFRP2 is complete nonsense in WFRP4.  Breaking it down

WFRP2 --> WFRP4
Head: 15% --> 9%
Right Arm: 20% --> 20%

Left Arm: 20% --> 15%

Body: 25% --> 35%
Right Leg: 10% --> 11%
Left Leg: 10% --> 10%

As you can plainly see, a retard wrote the WPRP4 percentages.  It's worse than that, though.  Considering how the mechanic works it exists to improve the "ones" die to make it more relevant.  That means that as you increase percentage of ability, you increase your chances of hitting less likely targets.  So the items aren't in the correct order in the chart.  Neither of them.  Bizarrely 4E is closer, but I think it's a complete accident, like any and all improvements in 4E.  And as I've shown the percentages are flatly eyeballed and insane.  And at least partially made to soften the game by funneling hits into either the body or right arm and away from the head or left arm.  You know, the important bits.

My suggested fix: 

Head: 00-09

Body: 10-39

Left Arm: 40-59

Right Arm: 60-79

Left Leg: 80-89

Right Leg: 90-99

Which can be shortened to just looking at the second percentile die (the "ones" die) and not doing any swapping or calculations whatsoever:

0: Head

1-3: Body

4-5: Left Arm

6-7: Right Arm

8: Left Leg

9: Right Leg

So that's the start for WFRP2E.  Remove the gimmick mechanic.  

Second thing is actually a takeaway from 4E and it's only improvement on the system: Success Levels in skill rolls are based on the "tens" die instead of any math of determining how much you succeeded by via subtraction.  The math is identical but easier to just flip it and use it like a blackjack mechanic.  So rolling a 07 is probably a success but isn't great (0 success level), and rolling a 35 is only great if your skill is 35 or higher because it's the best possible success level you can get (3).  If you roll higher than your skill, you still fail.  If you still need failure levels for any reason, subtract your skill's tens place (+1) from your roll's ten's place and you'll get that too.  It's also an easier calculation, and basically never necessary, but there you have it.

So there's me improving the game without removing any mechanics, just adjusting them to play better.

On to Initiative:

The closest we get to good is WFRP4's final word on the matter, but because it's WFRP4 there's an "initiative bonus" which is derived from an Initiative ABILITY SCORE.  This is excessive dumb design for the sake of excessive dumb design since Agility works just fine and has uses outside of initiative.  The best solution for WFRP Initiative is d10 + Agility Bonus (IE the tens digit of the Agility score).  That's it.  And obviously no Initiative ability score.  I do also support WFRP2's stance on side initiative for enemies (or grouped initiative) to save time.  This is the best of both worlds and allows chaos to reign in combat instead of the ability score really being the meat of the "Say" as to when a character or enemy goes.

This is part 1 in a series where I fix the game.  No idea how many parts we'll end up with.

A Eulogy for the Heavy Setting...

Heavy settings are all but dead.  Few still exist.  Mostly Harn.  Technically Rifts.  But once we had heavy settings all over.  I spent several fortunes getting many of the heavy settings I wanted from my youth like Scarred Lands and WFRP2.  The heavy setting began to die in the year 2000.  WotC saw it was not profitable so avoided actively creating settings for 3E beyond Forgotten Realms.  White Wolf picked up the slack with Scarred Lands, what is the unheralded best 3E setting.  Fuck Eberron.  Eberron is for retards.  Mostly because Eberron wasn't actually a reaction to 3E, it was a setting being built from the days of 2E and converted over.  Obviously they bolted random shit on to it like steampunk and terminators.  And that chrome veneer is all it took to get the normie gamers to dance.  That along with 3E's twinkability.  All the "good shit" in Eberron came with Eberron, the "good shit" in Scarred Lands came from 3E.  That's the difference.  Ingenuity.   

The shift had begun though.  During the later 2E era more and more player-side products were being sold.  Less adventures and more random shit to bolt on to the system.  3E built this as a core design feature.  It was made to be able to create additional classes, prestige classes, and feats in later products.  The bloat could not survive.  The game was destined to die, and it only lasted 5 years.  5E lasted twice as long.  It only devoted 2 books maximum to any given setting.  Most got one.  Or a boxed set which was still one book, just spread over three and put in a box so they could charge 3-4x the price.  

Why I bring this up is that the plight of heavy settings, the focus on character options instead of world options, is the thing that killed D&D.  Or rather changed it into something unrecognizable.  And as goes D&D so goes the entire hobby.  Even in the OSR, settings are extraordinarily light or non-existent.  FGG has dropped the Lost Lands.  C&C mostly pushes... player options.  They're playing the same stupid game as WotC for the same reason (quantity of players' wallets vs GMs' wallets).  I can't blame them but I also won't play.  

Even the incomparable Kevin Crawford started out his venture into the fantasy genre with a relatively deep setting in Red Tide.  Or at least the beginnings of one, expended in lore mostly by The Crimson Pandect, a strange window into that world based on it's spellcasters.  But even he has succumbed to the lure of core products and keeps producing similar games over and over, now with baked in micro-settings rather than the deep settings of yore.  Even Atlas of the Latter Earth is somehow a full length book of a micro-setting.  So many words used to not say much.  

In 1988, a little 102 page RPG came out of Canada called High Colonies.  As far as I know it was never supported.  It almost didn't need to be, it was a fairly light game and fairly dense on setting material.  Was it playable?  Yes but took heavy investment by the GM.  This is something that flies on the wayside.  

In 1992, a little 240 page book came out and was later revised in 1997 called Over the Edge.  It was fairly well supported, but didn't need to be.  The core book contained a deep setting of The Edge, the city on the crazy island of Al Amarja.  

I am talking pagecounts because it's not required that deep settings have lots of pages or copious amounts of supplementary materials, but it doesn't hurt.  What they do need is stuff.  Specific stuff.  Not general 10,000 ft view stuff.  The OSR is littered with this low effort bullshit.  It promotes laziness in GMs and even more laziness in players.  We don't need either to be lazy.  While this is a leisure activity, a universal truth is that effort makes everything better.  In fact, potential and genius don't mean shit without effort behind it.  

And we seem to be out of effort.