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Showing all 292 replies.
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>>97967404
I think combat as a consequence isnt exactly exclusive to OSR. Generally its a pretty good philosophy because forced combat encounters feel more like a chore rather than something naturally taking place.
But you don't care, you just want to act like a faggot on the internet for attention.
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>>97967456
>Generally its a pretty good philosophy because forced combat encounters feel more like a chore rather than something naturally taking place.
If players want to find another way out of it, they're welcome to.
But OSRfags act like it's badwrongfun for a group of Vikings to attack your town and if you can't move at 200x speed and 360-surround the town in burning oil and then bribe the Viking leader to surrender with fake gold you carved out of wood and painted with paint that doesn't exist, you're a shit DM. They're basically on par with the LE NAT20 I FLAP MY ARMS AND FLY wackadoos, who they ironically nurse a deep hatred for. I think Horseshoe Theory can honestly be applied to TTRPG player belief spectrum as well as politics.
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>>97967404
>Why do OSR boomers constantly repeat this meme
They don't. Fake grognards say shit like this because they think it makes them sound wise and intelligent. As if they were scholars who studied the ancient art of roleplaying, under Gygax himself, the one man whom they believe had perfected game design and TTRPGs so completely that he is the only person who should ever be listened to when it comes to how to play games. They also conveniently ignore that Gygax tried creating more games after getting kicked out of TSR and that they all sucked, because they like to believe that he retired on top and that he went down in history as the greatest game designer to ever live, beloved and envied by all in the industry. Because they are retarded.
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Combat IS the literal fail state...
You don't have the 'epic' fight with the bbeg... you sneak into his war tent while disguise as prostitute and slit his Throat while sleeping!
THAT'S How you end the war!
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>>97967523
>he needed to dress up as a prostitute to sneak into someone's tent to kill them
Given the rest of us can dress normally and achieve the same result I think you might just be trying to magical realm us, bro.
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>>97967456
Combat as a Consequence makes more sense if you're running a game like Call of Cthulhu, where the party is going to be a handful of detectives and academics digging into a mystery, and a lone cultist with a knife could reasonably just up and kill someone if they're not careful.
It makes less sense in any game that has a dedicated class named 'Fighter', 'Warrior', or 'Fighting-man', because why would the game include a type of character whose sole purpose was to fight monsters if fighting monsters was considered a failure.
The only time 'combat is a fail state' makes sense is if everyone in OSR games always played Thieves and Magic-Users, which would allow them to do all of their favorite tricks of bribing enemies or using the environment to their advantage, but also give them a bunch of other strict mechanical benefits for non-combat purposes.
You know who's really good at killing sleeping enemies? The classes that can magically put people to sleep or Move Silently. And yet the same people who push combat as a fail state are also the type who sincerely believe that anything other than a male human fighter is special snowflake bullshit.
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>>97967404
>You have all these tools for combat from your class but if you end up in combat is a fail state
I saw the video recently and I think there is a difference between Level 1-2 Characters sneaking around because they can die to anything and level 3-4 being more bold. People liked combat back then and still like it now, being cautious is just up to the players. Even in Lost Mines of Phandelver you could have your party die to the first encounter due to lucky rolls from the GM and that was the introductory adventure to 5e.
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>>97967549
In real life, self-defense experts teach that de-escalation and avoiding fights is the ultimate tactic. Even if you can single-handedly win any fight that comes your way, one wrong move can mean you kill a guy. He stumbles and trips down a flight of stairs, he gets knocked out with a perfect punch and then falls and cracks his head open on a coffee table. He's a mental midget who reaches for a gun and starts firing blindly at you and everyone near or behind you. All of these things mean months, maybe years, of legal trouble, possible jail time, and worse.
But that's real life, not D&D. Realistically, there would be no dungeons with hordes of gold awaiting some wandering murderhobo. Historically, a few weeks of trudging through the wilderness with soggy boots would have your hero dying of various poop diseases and boot rot. You'd be better off simply getting a job at a local farm or apprenticing under a tradesman instead of taking up a sword. But that's not the fucking game we're agreeing to play because we're not all pedantic faggots, are we? We're playing a game where knights and wizards and dickass thieves kill monsters in dungeons and take their loot.
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>>97967404
COPIED?!?! fucking RETARD
RETARD ALERT CLASS
yeah lucas invented the real asymmetrical warfare and everything that doesnt show up in star wars is simply a derivative of his teachings.
anyway
go bait your hook with sumfin better
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>>97967404
"Combat as fail state" is a reflection of stakes and risk. If you are playing a system where risk mirrors combat in real life? Yeah, it's a fail state unless you've strongly adjusted the odds in your favor.
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>>97967617
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>>97967404
>words words words
Too late, anon. I have already thrown a flask of burning oil at you. Now smoke is filling the room and you can't stop coughing for long enough to form a sentence. None of what you just said actually happened.
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>>97967912
This guy >>97967523
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>>97967404
>Why do OSR boomers constantly repeat this meme
OSR x-gen here. We don't. Combat is not a "fail state", D&D is literally a wargame, so combat is one of its two core mechanics, the other one being procedural exploration. See picrel.
It's plebbit retards such as yourself who believe and repeat that bullshit.
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>>97967404
There's a certain type of neckbeard that likes to feel they've won by outwitting the DM.
The DM devised a cool dwarven clockwork dungeon? Run the opposite way. There are some monsters ahead? Waste an hour going around them or negotiating. NPC is reasonable and friendly? Kill them. These guys also waste a bunch of time by interrogating every detail to try to catch the DM contradicting himself.
It's honestly best to just not play with them. Game with people who just want to see interesting stuff happen.
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>>97970007
It's a good shock therapy term to people who are used to facing intentionally balanced encounters. It's a wargame where you are "the average Brettonian", and "the average Orc" is a deadly threat to you. If you slam your stack headlong into their stack apropos of nothing, you are taking a phenomenal risk. Thus, a successful raid is reliant on a solid plan to minimize risk, one of the largest parts thereof being to not get caught in encounters you haven't prepared for and secured the advantage beforehand.
So, yes, "unplanned encounters are a fail state" would be more strictly accurate, but it doesn't have the same punch.
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>>97967523
In a good game this is possible, and will involve a lot of gameplay or narrative building to accomplish.
However, consider the following
>BBEG is a boogeyman invented by the local state to rally a major escalation against their rival - like Hannibal was invented by the Romans
>You entering Hannibal's tent you're just murdering a useful idiot and hindering the local state's plans
>You're now secretly hunted by the state after claiming responsibility
>You are not informed of this
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>>97967404
Because Gold = XP, so they were incentivized to maximize profit and minimize risk while in newer editions, you are encouraged to slaughter those walking xp bags beyond some vague guidelines for GMs to award some equivalent xp if they don’t just monkey mode every encounter
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>>97972538
>still doubling down
See, you're being a perfect exemplar of the mindset and why people go to so much effort to try and break it in prospective old school players. You implicitly assume that because the encounter exists, that it it is intended to be fought, there and then. This is not the case in the old school. Encounters are not placed for pacing, they are not balanced for the party to overcome, and the first objective of every encounter is to not suffer the end of your campaign. Consequently, a stand-up fight is very, very rarely the best solution to an encounter, especially one that arrives unexpectedly.
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>>97972636
Your attempts to be witty only paint you as a pedantic faggot. Being able to circumvent combat does not mean it is the only expected way to engage with the game.
When you say shit like this?
>Encounters are not placed for pacing, they are not balanced for the party to overcome
It tells everyone that you are the kind of guy who thinks he can rules lawyer and weasel his way through every single obstacle and challenge. Meanwhile, your GM is wondering why he even invites you when you're such an annoying cunt about playing a game of pretend.
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>>97972751
>attempts to be witty
A truly impressive misreading.
>Being able to circumvent combat does not mean it is the only expected way to engage with the game.
When every single round of melee combat on even footing has a roughly 20% chance of character death, you learn very quickly to spend as few rounds as possible in that state.
>thinks he can... weasel his way through every single obstacle and challenge
Welcome to the fucking OSR. Get out of the box or get used to rolling new characters. You seem to be deeply upset that the key to a WARgame campaign is to treat it like a protracted WAR and not get into fights you might not win. In later editions, that is handled by the GM. In the OSR, it is up to the players to manufacture those conditions, or failing that, to decline that engagement.
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>>97972925
It's precisely because of that attitude that people get past level 2. And players who didn't start at high level carry those lessons forward into the rest of their careers as they delve deeper and into greater challenges, because reckless overconfidence in your newfound abilities is the surest way to starting all over.
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>>97972969
>Hey guys look at this great meme game that definitely happened, believe me it happened, I even wrote down a place it happened and it's where the special forces trained, it happened
>My party got locked in a dungeon! Did they have a choice? No.
>Could they go around this obstacle? Nope. DM wanted them to go through it, so there was no alternative route!
>We got funneled down a hallway that was set on fire! Did we have a way to prevent this or deal with it? Nope!
>Did we strategize like normal people did? Nope! We screamed and held our hands over our faces like normal people do and not like people trying to exaggerate in a story
>Did we have any way to avoid injury, such as ways to find cover ourselves? Nope! But the Kobolds did! They fired at us through murder holes and launched molotovs at us with impunity!
>Did we get a chance to retreat? Sort of! But when we retreated, sacrificing our shit so we can run, we just ended up in a second Kobold lair!
>Oh and we talked like normal people, saying things like, "You want I should burn us all up instead of them?"
>So then what happened next? We were given a way out of the dungeon to a lower part of the dugeon where we fought flame demons that killed half of the party
>Oh, well at least you got treasure and levels? Nope, we had to go back out the way we could so we died.
Picrel is my response if this bullshit story were true.
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>>97967750
>>97967986
Mythras+4D roleplaying solves pretty much everything at my table.
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>>97973490
And this is why D&D turned into storygame bullshit. Turns out that the market of people ready to fight a war against an opponent with human intelligence that is just as dedicated to not playing fair as the PCs is pretty small.
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In my old D&D group there we 2 players who just outright refused to do anything conventional and always tried hairbrained plans there we no mechanics to govern. It lasted all of 3.5. It was not until 4e that they learned to just stick with their mechanical abilities.
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>>97967549
And yet all the popular CoC modules have unavoidable combats that make you instalose the scenario if you lose or avoid them.
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>>97970237
All WFRP modules have unavoidable combats that make you instalose the scenario if you lose or avoid them.
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>>97974849
>>97974852
90% of OSR modules have unavoidable combats that make you instalose the scenario if you lose or avoid them.
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>>97978083
I know that. Why'd you quote me?
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>>97967404
Tabletop games should not involve combat in the first place. It always boils down to a terrible abstraction of what real combat is like, there is no proper fighting only "roll to hit" and the psychological effects of fighting and killing is never implemented.
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>>97974852
Completely false. The Enemy Within (the most popular set of modules for WFRP) include pointers on how to keep the campaign going even if everything goes horribly wrong and the bad guys win. Vol V even includes an awesome hypothetical scenario where a Chaos cultist becomes Emperor and the Old World becomes a dystopian nightmare.
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>>97970453
Of course they do. If you don't go to a place where there are undead, you don't encounter undead. If you don't go to a place where dragons live, you don't encounter dragons. Everything you encounter is the result of decisions you make. How could it be otherwise?
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>>97985810
>>97985906
>the adventure being able to go off the rails is... le bad
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>>97986340
I think we're on completely different frames of reference here. You're treating the module as the be all and end all of a campaign, when it doesn't have to be. To tie back to the ye olde editions discussion, aborting the delve and just leaving means that you're aborting the delve. You're wasting money and time, walking out with nothing, everyone who came along expecting a cut is making loyalty checks, and life goes on. Perhaps that's the real point behind it all: it's okay to lose, because life goes on. So lose in the way that costs you the least, and when winning will cost more than losing, lose like hell.
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>>97986376
Here are the relevant posts in case you got lost:
>>97974852
>>97985711
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>>97986384
I'm ducking in and out. My contributions to that line are >>97970237, >>97985929, >>97986334 and >>97986376. So, coming from my perspective that views the old school almost as much as a mindset as the rules that it formed in response to, my reaction to "you can lose the scenario" is "so what? Losing is part of the game, it happens on occasion, and the world should react accordingly. What do you do next?"
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>>97987996
>>97988020
examples, please
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>>97986304
You can keep playing with the modules after losing. You can play Vol II after losing Vol I. You can play Vol III after getting completely btfo in Vol II. You can play Vol IV after losing Vol III. The entire campaign is designed so that you can keep playing after losing instead of starting over from the beginning. It's one of the reasons WFRP 4E is so good.
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>>97985720
You fucking autistic retard. Contrivance also means anything that is "forced, artificial in order to resolve situations (e.g. a plot contrivance). You know, a contrivance, like the bullshit railroad deathtrap that are Tucker's Kobolds (disguised as NPCs who are le epic smart).
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>>97997662
>>97991688
>Word has multiple meanings
>Clearly referencing the one
>"Yeah like [second meaning]"
I mean this lovingly: kill yourselves. Do not reproduce.
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>>97967549
I think combat as a consequence is less accurate than saying combat with consequences.
I've always seen it as 'martial classes' being there as part of the preparations for combat with consequences. If you are going into a dungeon to fetch the treasure/McGuffin/monster parts for your spell components you want to have a dude who can fight. That said you also don't want to fight say an entire orc tribe all at once which is where your thief and mage classes come in and even your more socially orientated ones.
Rather than fighting the orc tribe head on the idea in older styles of games would be to avoid unwinnable combats, strike where possible and use the mage and thief to whittle down numbers, etc etc.
>>97972740
Yeah but it's the key to the OSR mentality, especially since a large number of older gamers (I'd even say the majority of 80s gamers) got their start with the B/X red boxes.
>>97971063
Holy Carthaginian cope batman.
Next you'll say the Romans were the aggressors and that the Carthaginian baby eaters didn't deserve their cities to be salted.
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>>97971063
>Hannibal was invented by the Romans
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>>97998237
the threat level of Hannibal was invented by the Romans.
Just like the threat level of the USSR was invented by the CIA, who knew damn well it didn't have the economy to actually be a superpower despite desperately trying to keep up. Their population was starving in day to day life, much less able to feed an army on the move. Their technology was decades behind. Their infrastructure crumbling. All incentives for innovation were gone and their scientists and engineers were fleeing. Glasnost proved that basically not a single citizen held patriotism in its heart for the USSR, complying only out of necessity, and most assuredly going to desert the moment they got a change if war ever broke out. The CIA didn't know? Their job was literally to know, they didn't know??? But a scary USSR meant more authoritarian political control and more military spending for them and their contractor buddies.
Or how Kim Jong Un insists that the US hates north korea with a burning passion and would invade and rape and pillage it immediately if he wasn't singlehandedly holding it back, when the average US citizien barely even thinks of north korea and when they do see it as a joke ran by a tin pot dictator compensating for stereotypical korean tiny penis?
Or how Trump is desperate to provoke either open rebellion or a foreign attack from somebody anybody he doesn't care who, so he has a boogeyman to justify war powers and martial law.
It's a classic strategy, make the enemy look big and scary so people give you money and unchecked power to keep them at bay.
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>>97997795
>I've always seen it as 'martial classes' being there as part of the preparations for combat with consequences.
CoC has the equivalent in the form of shotguns and sticks of dynamite, so this isn't a meaningful distinction.
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>>97972912
You guys are hating but this anon is right. OSR games have different pressures on players than more modern games. Caution in choosing when to fight is heavily rewarded. Obviously you sometimes run into fights where you can't or it is very difficult to flee so it is a good idea to think ahead about what your plan is if that happens but normally a combat encounter is something you opted into.
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>97967404
Attention seeking 'tard.
Still, seems enough people don't get it, so I'll explain
In OSR games combat is pretty lethal. As a general rule if your in a fair fight your in the wrong fight, and have fucked up hard.
Ideally you want to avoid fair fights and get as big of an advantage as possible before initiating any combat against peer grade foes, or "balanced" opponents.
So in a way, if you end up in a fight - a fair fight that is - you have failed.
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>>98031875
NTA, of course you don't. What you do get to decide is if you want to get/stay in that fight. If you are in a situation where you are slamming your fighting-men into their melee fighters with nothing else in play and saying "this is fine", you are doing it wrong.
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>>97998365
>the threat level of Hannibal was invented by the Romans
Because Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae were all false flags, naturally.
The major difference between the Second Punic War and the US versus every tinpot dictatorship in modern history is that they were ACTUALLY AT WAR, you fucking fool. Hannibal was LITERALLY an immediate and existential threat to Rome. They didn't need to big him up because he proved it himself several times over.
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>>98031994
>>98032003
Sounds like you're just a shit GM.
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>>97967549
>It makes less sense in any game that has a dedicated class named 'Fighter', 'Warrior', or 'Fighting-man', because why would the game include a type of character whose sole purpose was to fight monsters if fighting monsters was considered a failure.
Because you want someone to be able to fight if you have to, just like in Shadowrun ideally only the face should do anything, but the street sam will turn out useful more times than you'd like
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>>98032030
your homebrew sucks
>>98037380
you don't play games
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>>97967404
>I cast Summon Hitler
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>>98042248
thats for if the players push for parley. and thats fine for if you want to use it, otherwise the first branch is more than enough.
>>98042666
what a remarkable troll attempt
>Uh, the original three D&D booklets are actually just D&D homebrew!
what meds are you not taking?
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Someone convinced me that in a OSR type fighter, thief, wizard game; thieves are only a detriment to the game because having the "skill roll guy" be a class means things like traps are more likely to just be resolved with rolls instead of description and creativity which makes it more intriguing. It also makes it so that fighter has a lot less to do unless he's in combat, instead of encouraging everyone to take part in this type of stuff.wha's the argument against this? It hurts my soul because I love the thief
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>>98043394
The main points against that would be that Thief skills don't fully supplant normal methods of discovery. A lot of those skills start off at around a 20% or worse chance.
You are still more likely to disarm a trap by poking and prodding with a 10 foot pole than you are for a Thief to try and chance it with a roll.
I would compare it to how elves just have a 1/6 chance to find secret doors automatically. It doesn't prevent other characters from finding a secret, it just means that one character has a chance of doing it for free.
Though the odds being low also feels important there.
It's also important to note that some of the typical Thief skills are slightly misleading in terms of what they cover. Climb Walls for example is explicitly about sheer surfaces that would otherwise be impossible to climb, not just any random cliff.
I could see a case for the list of skills and percentages needing a rework, to more cleanly add to a party's toolkit in a similar way to a magic-user by doing things that other characters explicitly cannot, or by only getting a random chance of passively succeeding at more generalized tasks.
There might even be a case to be made to give the Fighter a list of their own skill specialties. Bend Bars/Lift Gates could be something Fighters get a flat chance of or bonus to, for example.
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>>97967549
Even a dude called "Fighter McWarrior" has some sense of self-preservation and will pick preferably safer and less resource-straining option.
In a dungeon not wasting resources means that you can dungeon crawl further and thus potentially grab more loot or reach your other targets (that BBG you actually must kill etc) that much easier to take on.
A dedicated combatant that blows all his options on the first goblin group they encounter is as good as dead.
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>>98044893
I'll not call tho combat a "fail state". It's just part of the game. But the player must be smart about picking fights and assert if it's actually worth to slaughter everything in front of them or it's fine to not bother with some enemies.
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>>97967404
Combat is only a failstate if you fail the combat.
If a GM wants to incentivize this form of gameplay they should make it very clear to the players that the consequences for initiating combat is an encounter that will be extremely unfavorable for them.
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>>98044913
NTA, it's two interrelated statements.
>combat you don't gain anything from is needless risk
>combat on even footing is needless risk
To extrapolate from >>98044893, it's almost a survival horror loop, in that very classic Resident Evil sense. You don't want to be spending your HP and spell slots on fights that don't progress you towards your objective (you DID have an objective for the delve, right?), and often the cheapest way out of a needlessly risky fight is a flask of oil and a torch. As I said way back up thread, "combat is a failstate" is an introductory shock term to open the door for explaining all this to people stuck in the "see goblin -> fight goblin" loop without understanding that in this style of play the goblin is just as much of a threat to him as he is to it.
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>>98047138
he's 100% right. if you think ANY version of d&d or d&d derivated games (yes even that one you're thinking about) isn't entirely about combat you're a performative nogames who never held a dice and knows about rpgs only through blog posts and youtube videos.
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>>98042708
>muh three troonlets!! look how informed i am I've read about this on some retard's blog!!!
listen here, we're not in your tranny discord server. stop with your special snowflake mentality if you don't want to be made fun of. nobody here cares.
>>98044016
true
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>>98047421
Haha yeah, 3LBB sure are, uh, "troonlets"
>some retard's blog
no, i read it in the book itself
>tranny discord server
So is this one of demorilization posts where you just shit all over everything in order to wither the user base?
Because calling ODD a tranny game is a fascinating angle
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>>98047530
yeah you are. you're trying to deflect from the fact you're a nogames who read some shitty homebrew by some retard (actually you read some blog that summed it up) and decided that combat is a fail state based on literally nothing. stop heaping up offtopic troll replies to obfuscate the point.
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>>98047669
I have never thought that combat was a fail state, nor have I posted that, so I'm not sure what gave you that impression.
But besides that, I'm really curious about why you think that the original 3D books published were "shitty homebrew by some retard"? Or how acknowledging those books makes somebody a tranny?Are you saying that Gary was a retard, or are you confused about the source of those rules?
>Some blog
Again, I read those rules in the book itself.
I have no idea how anybody could think combat is a fail state, since monsters guard treasure, and one of the main classes is "fighter".
You just seem really angry and defensive for absolutely no reason, when I agree with you. That being said, just because combat is not a "fail state", doesn't mean that there is not plenty of good reason for certain encounters to be ran away from, and if you run away, having extra methods of slowing down or tricking the enemies pursuing you definitely helps a lot.
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>>98037380
>just like in Shadowrun ideally only the face should do anything, but the street sam will turn out useful more times than you'd like
This only makes sense if you get so lost in the sauce that you forget that Shadowrun is a game and in a game it's actually bad if one player never gets to utilize his skillset and contribute meaningfully to the group.
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>>97967404
My understanding when it comes to OSR or any "good" adventuring game is that you can have a situation/problem/room/adventure/mystery explained in a detailed fashion and then address it with a logical solution. Combat being one of several options, but costing you resources/risk of being a life or death struggle. The serious problems come up when these options are over emphasized while simultaneously being down played or discouraged. Shadow Run 5th edition was infamously shit about this. As in 95% of the rules pertain to combat and yet the "fluff" seems to discourage you engaging in it. Some of the White Wolf games are similar.
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>>98031998
Cannae is the most suspicious of all.
Such a victory wouldn't be seen until Napoleon. It's of course possible that Hannibal is the type of legendary wacko to make it work, but it's also very suspicious.
nApollon being an invention and a myth isn't too much of a stretch either.
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>>98048380
>nApollon being an invention and a myth isn't too much of a stretch either.
However, it's easier to imagine that he merely adopted mythical name for himself and prestigious stories, some true, others less so.
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>>98059762
They might have never learned to use different color dice rolled simultaneously for different sections of the table. A surprising number of people don't figure this out on their own it seems and think they have to roll them all in sequence.
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>>98000960
It's amazing how much /tg/ discourse is just grogs pretending not to understand something when they're losing an argument. Thus making discourse impossible and slowly killing the board.
Is your izzat on an anonymous forum really that important?
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>>98059762
Because you could map these same results to a single die roll (with appropriate modifiers). And there's no way for either side to influence the results in between. All it does is delay the result, every single time reactions are rolled.
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>>98059802
Actually, B/X D&D combat is the most exciting D&D combat because your fate really does feel like it hinged on every roll. Missing isn't just "aww I didn't get to put enough damage in the fight" it's "oh shit he's not dead yet and 1 more hit might kill me" and this often goes from 1st to 3rd level. Even after that though it can easily go downhill as a level 5 character, I lost at least one of those to just a couple of worgs.
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>>97998365
>the Romans killed 300,000 of their own soldiers, got their own allies to defect to a non-entity, and dressed up as Carthaginians and despoiled the Italian countryside for the better part of a decade, but big Livy doesn't want you to know this
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>>97967549
>Combat as a Consequence makes more sense if you're running a game like Call of Cthulhu, where the party is going to be a handful of detectives and academics digging into a mystery, and a lone cultist with a knife could reasonably just up and kill someone if they're not careful.
/thread
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>>97967404
In certain oldschool games it wasn't necessarily a fail state, but there was once a time when resource management actually mattered. You wouldn't want to take literally every confrontation because then you'd be weakened for when it mattered; there was less of an emphasis on "the" combat being a setpiece that absolutely has to happen.
It's basically just a difference in design philosophy. Modern gamers treat combat like it's a video game, like it's just fated to happen, has to happen, must happen, because that's the content.
In older games it was just another part of the simulation.
I do agree with you that they're being fucking obnoxious about it, and it's doubly retarded and pathetic when they try to apply this logic to games like 5e where combat obviously isn't a fail state.
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>>98095667
nta
His B/X series is scripted. He's stated several times he needed to script to keep them tight and not ramble like he tends to.
I'm just clarifying. I like Tenkar and I think he has done a really nice job with the the B/X series.
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Why the fuck would anything be a fail state in a game that roughly simulates adventuring for the joy of experiencing the problem solving challenges within the game.
If your party plans to sneak in and steal the thingy, then yes combat is a fail state FOR THE PARTY IN CHARACTER. From the perspective of the players it's just things unfolding as they do.
I think the only true "fail state" from the player perspective in the game is character death. Followed by quest failed. The rest are just parts of the game that shift towards more or less favourable outcomes. Combat is fine. If you can win it its fine, if you cant win it its fine because you get to solve the problem of how to get out alive/without the quest utterly failing.
But hey, the essence of ttrpg is that
>Everyone plays differently
>With different goals
>And some of them dont play well with others
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>>98108725
>I think the only true "fail state" from the player perspective in the game is character death
Yes, precisely. Monsters are like traps: if they are making attacks, you have set it off, and now you're just rolling dice to see how many people die for it. Do not fight the enemy, destroy him before he gets his act together.
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>>98109116
Combat =/= death
The most effective way to achieve no combat is by staying in town and working a day job.
Hmmm something is missing there isnt it?
Face it. Combat is not a fail state but a core enjoyable experience that people actively appreciate about the game and that oossibly can be considered the nost core, since wargaming is actually the very source of the hobby.
Just because you are always avoiding combat does not mean others are wrong for not doing so, or at a different rate. Just stick to your preferences in your own games and let others enjoy what they enjoy.
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>>97973490
Tucker's Kobolds is contrived bullshit, but I did run some goblins who would fire muskets and then use their bonus action hide to retreat into woodland that really annoyed my group to fight one time.
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I take the Metal Gear attitude that combat isn't a fail state, it's a penalty round for failing the stealth or persuasion game.
You know, like when you fail to spot the crossdresser and you have to take one for the team.
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Combat is a fail state if you got jumped and or don't want to initiate the combat. Theres a lot of grey area to this shit, and way too many people just walk in and expect to whack enemies and win.
Like it's mindboggling how many people will stare at you slack jawed when you have them think about the enviroment around their character.
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Honestly the real meme with OSR is how they tell you to play bee ecks or OSE and then you immediately run into the issue of looking at how retarded some of the classes (fighters being an NPC class and thieves having lmao% success chance by raw) are if you haven't been doing your daily Talmudic OSR studies.
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>>97967404
it's not that combat is a fail state it's that combat is be both chaotic and deadly enough that going into it blindly without some sort of plan or advantage is too dangerous to casually consider and any non-chaotic aligned person or creature will agree and therefore also be wary to blindly throwing themselves to their deaths. Combat should be like this because it's what makes fighters stand out when put next to fucking wizards, when tables turn and all of a sudden a group of monsters or even a lesser devil are in your grill in an unprepared scenario (which the DM should be trying to orchestrate at every turn), the casters and rogues find themselves very liable to get shredded. Fighters on the other hand aren't only not afraid to get their hands dirty, but with their ever increasing THAC0 and D10 hit die they're purpose built to cut clear paths through these events without dying. If this balance is severed and you make combat not the dangerous blender it should be you'd end up with the martial class being purposeless, forcing future systems to shoehorn in class specific abilities that are given to the player through levels that work and are described exactly like magic spells, therefore also sucking away what makes casters special and ending up making the entire class abilities section a textureless gray slough from end to end.
wait a minute...
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>>98124378
And mage players trying to rush, like that wizard kid form Nightmare on Elm Street 3.
Are they just used to Final Fantasy style combat, where it's an abstraction and range and position is irrelevant?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Z9uZCAfuE
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>>98112389
I will extend the olive branch in that the style of play certainly existed and was popular, as evidenced by D&D becoming less lethal to PCs over the course of its editions to facilitate that level of foolhardiness. Back before the rise of the OSR, that was all anyone around here knew about pre 2e: it's the one that fucking mulches characters. To go back to old editions today and attempt to run them as straight hack-and-slash when there are no less than 5.5 editions and countless other systems that do it better is, bluntly, playing the game wrong. THE thing pre-AD&D does that later editions do not is challenge the players' creative thinking over their characters' stat blocks. It is, at its core, a game of risk management, and the comparative death rate between a reckless party and a cautious party tells which one is correct, and they will most likely be having more fun with it, too.
An umpired historical wargame campaign is not a 40k match. It is an environment that demands long-term planning, preparation, and knowing when to cut losses to avoid destruction. THAT is the wargaming origin of D&D.
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Combat in OSR is explicitly a fail state.
Just for reference, fail state isn't the same as losing:
>A fail state generally refers to a condition in a game or political simulation where a player or leader has failed to achieve their objectives, resulting in a negative outcome that often prevents further progression or success.
You failed to find a better or more beneficial solution to the encounter and the negative outcome is that you're now engaged in combat, which is risky, resource intensive and likely to mean you don't get as far going forward before you have to retreat, rest and recharge.
To give an example, in a game I was running the players were exploring a lost city that belonged to a tribe of lizardfolk as part of a job they'd agreed to do for some locals, rescuing a bunch of hostages taken as slaves by a cult:
They encountered four different factions, all of which were incredibly dangerous
>Troglodytes: The degenerate local guardians who only come out at night and are hostile to all non-lizards
>Angry lizard ghosts of the recently slaughtered inhabitants, who had been attacked and killed by followers of a Sun God cult
>Sun God Cult who were now trapped in the largest temple by the angry ghosts
>A big fuckoff lizard, sacred to the locals, which emerged at random times to eat anything in its path
First group they meet is the ghosts who they notice by observing from a distance, finding animals drained of their life force close to the city, ect.
So they decide to only move by day and carry a small shrine with protection from undead cast on it, letting them set up a base in the city limits which they can retreat to come night.
At night the Troglodytes, who have been observing the humans (who they believe are with the cult since what's the difference between one human and another anyway) attack that night. The players haven't prepared an escape route so they have to fight, but they did choose a room with only one entrance giving them a choke point to hold.
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>>98124681
Only for the non-sentient undead to attack the Troglodytes by jumping them from behind.
Now, the natural thing to do here would be to let the Troglodytes die and laugh from behind the protection circle. But my players are a bit smarter than that, they have their lizardfolk guide call out to the leader of the Troglodyte raiding party and tell him that they can come inside the circle to parlay.
The Troglodytes accept and the entire crew spends a very long, smelly, uncomfortable night getting to know each other and come to appreciate they've got a common enemy. They warn the players about the big lizard and the sun cult then invite them to come meet their chieftain directly.
Party accepts, and after some hashing about they find out there's an underground entrance into the temple the sun cult are in, the Troglodytes as a whole are no longer hostile to them and even get some Troglodytes who are happy to join the crew.
They scout out the sun cult that night, planning to kill them to a man from the start since fuck the sun cult.
But what they realize during their scouting is the sun cult have lost their most powerful members to some kind of whacky fuckery involving a trap in the temple and therefore lack the priestly power to escape the hordes of undead outside.
Now, if not for the hostages they would probably just take their food and leave them to their fate.
Instead they sneak in, find that some of the troops with the Sun cult aren't true believers but rather tribal warriors who are none-too-pleased about being led to their deaths like this. They help kill the leader of the tribal auxiliaries and replace him with someone more amiable who acts as their man on the inside, moving the hostages to somewhere out the way of the fight to come. They then attack and work their way through the cultists.
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>>98124684
They do run into another problem in the temple when they accidentally unleash a chaos beast and this is pure combat as a fail state since their only options are "Shit-shit-fuck-fuck, find somewhere we've got a terrain advantage then form a kill wall and bait it into it. Oh god it turned Kev inside out. Ahhh!" or run away and abandon the place entirely, maybe leaving the hostages behind even if they can't get to them quick enough (They absolutely had time to bring the hostages out before this mind you, they just didn't because they were too focused on clean up. They had other, better options and failed to exercise them)
Finally they deal with the local undead, who they now know are led by the murdered priesthood of the temple, which they do by going to where the undead are lurking and throwing the heads of the sun priests at their feet before going "We cool right?"
Turns out they are indeed cool as fuck after that and the undead priests even offer them work going to the nearby lizardfolk tribe, killing the usurper currently leading it and the sun priests who supported him, which nets them both safe travel through the city, as well as a banging artefact from the deep catacombs of the lizardfolk (A sentient weapon)
Keep in mind they left behind a shitload of treasure, the catacombs were a whole thing in and of themselves that they only visited in terms of "The Lizardfolk guide gets permission from the priests to go pick up a single item" when the place was a trove waiting to be plundered.
But they met their objectives and more, the main one being "Find the hostages and bring them home alive" without unnecessary risk to themselves.
Everything else was just gravy, and the dungeon was filled with allies, safe locations and less dangerous (if less monetarily rewarding) because of how they approached it.
All because they went in with the mindset of "Combat is the last argument of Kings, not the first."
You see the difference it makes?
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>>98124681
>>98124684
>>98124688
This is unplanned and poorly executed combat.
Combat on even or disadvantageous terms is the problem, not combat where the party has a strong position.
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>>98124681
>>98124684
>>98124688
>PCs kill the leader of the tribal auxilliaries, then attack and work their way through the cultists (via combat)
>PCs accept a job from the undead priests to go kill a lizardfolk usurper and the priests supporting him
Even this story has multiple examples of where combat wasn't even a failstate or a bad option, but was outright necessary and earned the party allies and rewards.
The only example you have of combat as a failstate is "accidentally unleashing a chaos beast", but if it was an accident from poking around in a temple, that could just as easily have been "accidentally unleashed a plague of locusts" or "accidentally unleashed a flood of acid".
The failstate isn't that there was combat, itt's that the party triggered a deadly trap. Except it wasn't even that, because they still managed to kill it and all the hostages lived. It being combat arguably made things more manageable than if the trap wasn't something they could simply retreat from and stab to death.
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>>98132928
Exactly. So many of these idiots act like OSR D&D was just winning every encounter through "le epic 500 IQ negotiation and convinced all the dungeon factions to fight each other" bullshit, when they fought just as often. The only difference is that the combat was actually a danger, so there were reasons to try to avoid it if possible, but this turned into "combat is le fail state" retardation by stupid fucking autistic OSR players..
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>>98042137
>rolls dice
You
>rolls dice
Encounter
>rolls dice
A group of
>rolls dice
Orcs
>rolls dice
36 of them
>rolls dice
7 of them are in a lair
>rolls dice
They are hostile
>rolls dice
But uncertain
>rolls dice
So they will immediately attack you
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>>97967614
Doesn't it depend on the person?
There's IRL mercenaries that want to fight so how should combat be a fail state for them?
Also what about MMA fighters and such?
Most fantasy adventurers are kinda just mercs who are extremely good at fighting so resolving a situation with a fight is a winning outcome for them most of the time.
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>>98044711
Dear god you're a fucking retard. What that means is that for the purpose of looking for secret doors, you're better off replacing that with 6 elves. Likewise, 6 elves can do a lot more poking and prodding with a 10' pole than a thief can.
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>>97967549
I think combat is a fail state comes from the idea that you can't be killed in a fight, if you're never in a fight. That you don't have to concern yourself with how powerful something might be, if you avoid fighting it or find a way to kill it without interacting with the combat rules. It doesn't matter how good someone is with a sword, when you barricade their bedroom door and burn the house down. On the other hand it's also boring as shit, and no sane DM would award XP for defeating an enemy this way, because you never contended with that enemy, you never overcame the challenge they represented, you cut the knot rather than untie it.
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>>98146604
>>98154442
Low level characters in a resource scare area can easily create that tension with even mundane creatures. You can replicate the survival horror feeling just by making resources limited and hard to recover. No more unlimited time to rest, resting has consequences or there's a time limit for the campaign, maybe healing/spells take even more resources than normal due to some curse on the land, food spoils more quickly.
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>>98160120
>On the other hand it's also boring as shit
Speak for yourself, but but you're probably not alone in that assessment. To make the GURPS analogy, that's basically the Tactical Shooting vs Gun-Fu dichotomy.
>no sane DM would award XP for defeating an enemy this way
Which is why gold is XP
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>>97967404
There's a lot of geezers that like orbiting communities that they were a part of when they were younger rather than playing as part of the crowd.
In this case, the idea of actually playing a TTRPG rather than just talking about fun stuff they'd do as a rogue or artificer is a bother. So combat (which has the largest amount of crunchy gameplay involved) is disliked and they try and dodge around ever having to do it.
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