Cephalon Dusp's Archives

    Unfortunately, OSR has a bit of a problem in its dungeoneering rules. As Delta points out in this blog post , the source material for OD&D (Chainmail) used 1 minute turns in 1:1 combat, but a mistake was made moving things over to the new game giving us the 10 minute turn. The two most notable issues this causes is that spells last significantly longer than they were balanced for and that adventurers explore dungeons incredibly slowly (120 ft per 10 minutes is about 0.14 mph).     The naive solution to this is to simply revert back to using 1 minute turns as should have been done originally. While this does solve both of the main problems of the 10 minute turn, it also has the unfortunate side effect of entirely breaking the dungeoneering rules which heavily rely on a 10 minute turn. After all, it would be a little strange to be checking for encounters every 3 minutes and resting for 1 minute out of every 6. Never mind the horrors that result if you were atte...

    Learning more about historical realities can have some surprising applications for RPGs. For example, it is often a semi-intuitive fact that people in the past didn't tend to have secondary/family/last names. In Europe at least, if you needed one you would just go with a profession (John Smith), a physical trait (John Tallman), or even where they lived (John Hill).      That as a fact is a bit overlooked, but doesn't seem unreasonable. I would wager many people would have a moment of realization about hearing about something like that before. In terms of RPGs, this means that for most people, you shouldn't bother coming up with a last name for them. If you need one, go with what pops into your head first.     (On a secondary note, people were sometimes very opposed to the idea  of having a set secondary name, due to how it was perceived as a tool of authority to make taxation, enforcing laws, and so on easier. People didn't lack family names b...

    One of the most common tools people will come across in tabletop RPGs are hex maps. They divide a map into a number of hexagonal sections to ease measuring distances, plotting trips, and filling in new areas. Obviously, this comes with limitations that a plain map does not have and can sometimes pull people out of the fiction that they play in, but hex maps have their uses, even if only for the DM.     The problem with hex maps is that it is normally important to have several maps at different scales, such as one for nearby areas, one for the kingdom, and maybe a world map. Obviously all of these levels need to agree with each-other, but what scales to put them at is a pertinent question.     Unfortunately, it is one that does not have any single satisfactory answer. Still, I will be working to discover what I believe are the best sets of mapping scales for use in the general OSR space.  For those not interested in reading the article and my reason...

       Wow, it has been quite a bit since my last post. My new schedule is pretty hectic and the posts I really want to make are going to take more time than I seem to have, so instead I will write this apparently simple post instead.      I recently came across a post on Delta's D&D Hotspot  that I found very interesting. I will quickly summarize the post for anyone who doesn't feel like reading it (I recommend reading it). In short, the formula OD&D uses for determining if someone hits someone else in combat can be written as: d20 roll + mods >= 20 - level - AC      From there, this can be trivially rearranged for a variety of different systems, including what 5e D&D uses: d20 + level/bonus + mods >= (20 - AC)      In this schema level is replaced with your appropriate bonuses and AC is the hidden THAC0 AC that still sort of underlies the system. (20-AC) is how you convert that THAC0 AC to be the m...