[S&W] Keep on Borderlands- Oldschool experiment
AzaLiN:
This sucks. Could anyone offer some input to get these stupid mods over with? I want to play again, this is going nowhere.
4e base
Food: proposed:
no food for the day -->start combat dazed, save ends. This seems extreme for the first 3 days, but okish afterwards.
no food for (days=constitution) --> dazed, weakened, and slowed until you eat. imo this sounds like no fun to me.
no food for (days=conx1.5) -->die. This seems weird as 10con--> die in 15 days w/o food, but you are adventuring after all.
remove daze/weaken/slow: eat for days equal to days past (days=con). ex, 10con, 13 days, means eat 3 days to recover completely.
Weight: if carrying (strx5-strx10) weight, you have -2 to run speed, and must roll endurance in order to run. other rules as in DMG. imo this sounds sort of... weird too.
resting: recover (total surges/2) per night's rest, up to a max of (total surges/2); if you had more before you slept, you don't lose any though, you just don't gain any either. I dislike this too.
that's as far as we got tonight... comments? If anyone has a preexisting system, I can probably implement it in an overarching way to just skip these mods.
contracycle:
Quote from: AzaLiN on January 10, 2010, 12:09:47 AM
agreed. That's why I think of 4e as a sort of board game. By the way, have you heard of the houserule where you don't let the players know their PC's hp? you just tell them 'bloodied,' staggered, near-death, or unconscious/dead. More bookkeeping, but I want to try it out- it undoes some of the gamism/board game mode thinking, and forces the players into a more imaginative situation.
I did try that for a while, but found it rather unsatisfactory. It makes players quite uncertain, and with a resource as vital as their HP that's not necessareily a good thing. In the end I was happy for them to have their own HP and therefore make informed judgements rather than rely on on extra layer of guesswork. Also it encouraged me to be more interpretive and less literal with diced outcomes; plus play tended to be me scribbling frantically and them sitting around twiddling their thumbs, which had the effect of moving play as a whole out of their hands and into mine.
Try it out and see how it works for you, if they have lots of other powers and whatnot to monitor and track that effect might not be significant.
Callan S.:
Quote from: AzaLiN on January 10, 2010, 08:06:50 PM
This sucks. Could anyone offer some input to get these stupid mods over with?
How did mods come up before? Did you allow this to start happening, or did it just happen? Have you given some impression you've agreed with it for as long as the campaign goes (which if it's traditional, is forever), or can you just say 'What I'm offering to run now has no room for discussion about mods unless I feel like starting it'?
AzaLiN:
Ok, this thread was about one thing and now its about another, so I'm going to say it's dead unless we resume an actual old school campaign. Thanks for the replies everyone, but it looks like the result of the experiment is to assimilate some aspects of old school play into 4e without playtesting s&w as much as we could have first.
If however anyone wants to discuss S&W topics or old school d&d topics, I'm still down, I just can't link it to an actual campaign I'm running unless things change!
Finarvyn:
AzaLiN, if you are interested in more discussion of how 4E can blend with S&W and/or OD&D you might check out my OD&D discussion board (in my signature). I know that some 4E players hang out there and maybe they have a different perspective on some of your issues.
Too bad that it took hours to generate characters. This might have left a bad impression in your mind, as well as those of your players. In general I find that S&W characters can be generated quite quickly, with spellcasters taking a bit longer because they have to ponder spell selection. Otherwise, with familaritiy it should go faster.
I agree that old-school combat is often "roll once and wait" but if players are ready to go it should move along quickly. You might let the players have copies of the combat tables and let them know the AC of the creatures they are fighting. That way, they can look up the to-hit number in advance and when it's their turn they can quickly roll and announce the result. Another poster mentioned that players can "ham it up" a little and describe their action and result in a narrative manner rather than just "rolled a 3" kind of language, and I encourage that as well.
In general, OD&D/S&W/AD&D/C&C and other games of this style tend to play a lot faster once you get the hang of it. Hopefully your players will get fired up and you can continue with your experiment in play style! :-)
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