Відео

Tad of an epic volume, isn't it!

You and I are in the same boat there. No way was I going to pay for a playtest, and haven't looked at the game since for exactly the reason that they pushed the playtest as a product. I can't trust a publisher that chooses to walk that road.

Good stuff 🙂. My own claim within the playtest was arguing against archetypal monks using spears, and writing for Dragon and Dungeon with nothing but the playtest packets for rules reference - that was fun!

My hope is that most of my videos have no expiry date, so all good on the "year" bit 🙂 I'm glad I managed to re-aquaint you. T5 is a great toolbox, regardless of the Traveller edition or derivative you play!

There was a fun UK RPG zine scene. I liked that some of the bigger magazines (White Dwarf and Imagine, for example) used to run columns on the more "underground" ones. Random quality, but some good stuff in them! Tortured Souls! caught me with it's covers. Very evocative - felt like the contributors ought to have names like Waite and Crowley...

Oh no, not Grufnagnir the Colourless!!

It's very thin on the ground, but I would recommend looking at the Kellri collected version - it is really well done, and will give you a good overview.

@@WillyMuffinUK Already downloaded!

@Rich_H_1972 cool - my vague googling target hints can't have been too bad 🤣

​@@WillyMuffinUKI love Pelinore, discovered it a few years ago 7-8 maybe? Never knew about the Kellri edition until this video; thank you!

@Fnordathoth Kellri has some good stuff - just a shame the blog now seems to be dead. You can find re-do's of the Gamemaster Publications adventures there, too.

Thank-you! You, too.

Thank-you. Google should help. - no direct links for this one, though, for obvious reasons.

Thank-you! You'll find some more 2E odds and sods in the View over the Milieu series, too.

All I can say by way of explanation is that I try to be as positive as I can 😉

And to you!

Absolutely 👌. Very much looking forward to the Random Encounter Show Special!! youtube.com/@randomencountershow?si=CJd_yYT500vCVu7O

And to you! 🙂

Dammit, I was going for a punk aesthetic 🤣 I'll have ice cream with that jelly, please!

And to you and yours too!

I've tried Go. It's fascinating, but I may be too ensconced in a Chess mindset to get a full grasp on it's tactics.

@@WillyMuffinUK Yeah. I got back into chess after a long hiatus. I’m in Japan, but it’s hard to play both games and improve at both. Most of my time is with chess. (On Lichess.) I play Go on the side, but hope to go to a Go camp here in Japan around August. Mainly it’s a way to connect to the culture here.

@@seop1721 Sounds like a good plan. Food and games, always a good way to absorb a culture and have fun at the same time 🙂

Happy to pin the correction - thank-you 🙂

You too! No, I haven't got to looking at it yet. I have a fair list, with little time.

To be fair, with an age rating of 8+, so was (A)D&D in general.

OK, so... The challenge of old adventures roughly correlates to the challenge of 5E - meaning, an adventure designed for PCs 4-7th in old money is about the 4-7th range in new money. The caveat here is a lot of older adventures were designed for larger party numbers - the scaling does not work well if you use the original party size recommendation. Stats for monsters, spells, magic items - read straight from the 5E books. Personally, I like to scribble the ones needed out in shorthand as part of prep, rather than referring to the books. Assign DCs on the fly. Because DCs are relatively fixed in 5E (e.g., medium difficulty is DC15 regardless of level etc.), this is straightforward. Now, for "deadly"... The real measure of deadly comes within the encounters. The rest is what happens between encounters. To this end, some old encounters need to be tweaked a little to bring them to new - this is where modern CRs don't quite match the designer intuition old encounters were built around. It doesn't take long to see what sort of things need tweaking for a particular group to maintain the challenge - net hit points, for example: for a 5E party with a high damage output, you may need to add more enemies to an encounter to maintain the desired challenge. However, this isn't unique to 5E - even when playing an adventure in its native rules, it's still sometimes needed. Designers don't know your party, so challenges are always assumed. As for the "in between" side - healing is faster in 5E, which reduces attrition and changes the healing experience (under old rules, a character might be incapacitated for weeks before getting back to full hit points). It enables play at a faster rate. However, if attrition is something you want to keep, allowing short rests to recuperate abilities, but take out the hit point restoration part of it. That brings the reliance back onto healing magic, as it was back in the day, to alleviate attrition. To go all-in, limit hit point restoration in long rests, too. Removing short rests doesn't quite do it, as so many abilities are based on short rests/recharge on short rests. Reducing Hit Dice affects the in-encounter survivability, where it's really the attrition over several encounters that made older rules deadlier. Personally, I wouldn't do it. For adventuring where attrition might be a thing - deserts, the premise of module A4, etc. - 5E gives you fatigue and similar rules that serve to erode characters' abilities to survive. You could also bear in mind that even short rests require somewhere safe for the PCs to lick their wounds - in a dynamic dungeon or similar, spending the minimum amount of time for a short rest (1 hour) hanging around in one spot isn't always the best option. Imagine, say, the Caves in B2. The PCs would have to work hard to secure an area where they could spend an hour to safely rest up. That's not much different from ye olde days - just, in toto, sped up a tad.

@@WillyMuffinUK thank you for the speedy and very in depth reply. :) ...i'm sorry to say that, as i imagined and as you said in the video, the feel of the game is just different and trying to recreate the old magic, so to speak, feels like a waste of time and energy: i'm better off keeping AD&D or BECMI at the table. i *am* sorry because i would love to give 5e raw a try, as a different game, but alas i have nowhere the time to do that. and if i had, i'd probably pick up ddc rpg, some parts of which i have stolen for my "ad&d" game (in inverted commas because it's heavily house ruled anyway). one more thing: keep up the great work. i don't comment much, but i do appreciate the channel. :)

@SimonMas Don't be sorry - that other games and editions exist gives us all a plethora of options to make something we personally enjoy 🙂

Perhaps - but why not both? In fewer pages, the original did more - that's the issue. Further, all the stats for ship to ship are represented in the 5E set - just not a full set of rules for using them.

Thank-you, and I hope you have fun with it! At this point, I hope you find a copy without breaking the bank :/

Ah, I really ought to do a fuller video putting my thoughts about "old school" out. For me, it's a term so fuzzy that it fuzzies itself so thin as to be meaningless. Anyway - I hope you find it useful! I'm having a lot of fun playing around with it. I should probably put a "live play" solo example together using it with AFF.

Thank-you 🙂

We have the D&D Adventure System board games, which are a spin-off from 4E. As an RPG, the mechanics of 4E I think would work brilliantly within a computer RPG-type tabletop association. Or even as a more advanced layer to the Adventure Game System - Legend of Drizzt with full-fat 4E could be fun, and I guess ties into your D&D Tactics concept, too.

I might tidy the office one day... Although it has a certain atmosphere to it. Probably something to do with the miniature paint fumes!

I can safely say (as someone who works very closely with Arion Games) that it is neither of those things. This is a 443 page monster sized book, which is 200 pages more than even the Return to the Pit book, which itself is big! As for quality, it runs to exactly the same standards as all of Arion Games FF/AFF books. Fighting Fantasy (and therefore Advanced Fighting Fantasy) uses line art as standard - it's part of its genre - and it is all hand drawn, no AI crud here. The writing is as good as any AFF product, if not better.

It's all relative. You are, of course, welcome to your opinion. For me, value comes in how much use I would get out of a thing. This is one book I've already got more use from than books half it's size, and twice it's price. I do think the printed copy price is overcooked, but the £20 is on-point, and the current £11 is very much a bargain. Which is also my subjective opinion on the matter 🙂 Not everyone can like or find use in everything! What a crazy world that would be.

It certainly is a monster, and very well put together. It's just a shame Russ Nicholson isn't still with us to provide his evocative style of line art to the AFF line.

Thank-you, glad you found it useful 🙂

AFF and Tunnels & Trolls are great for solo, and some of the simpler "D&D-like" ones - Black Hack, Swords & Wiizardry, et al. Anyway - hopefully tonight there will be another video up that might help you on your solo gaming journey. If I can get my editing under control... 🙂

I would say go for the current edition, but that's Rolemaster Unified and is not complete as yet. Rolemaster Fantasy Role-playing ( www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/91995/Rolemaster-fantasy-role-playing ) is the basic rulebook for the "middle edition" (aka Standard System/RMSS/RMFRP - trying not to use too many bits of jargon). That's a good entry point for that. There was an earlier Rolemaster: The Basics boxed set, which more or less serves the same purposes. For the classic version of Rolemaster, there used to be a starter version called Rolemaster Express. This is out of print, even on DriveThruRPG, but you might be able to pick it up from eBay or similar. Other than that, the full classic rules aren't difficult - start with Character Law ( www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/88652/Rolemaster-classic-character-law), but eventually you will need Arms Law, Spell Law, and Creatures & Treasures. You'll be able to find them in links from the Character Law link above. I also have a video going into character creation using Rolemaster 2nd/Classic. That may give you an idea on what is involved.

Link to the character generation video : ua-cam.com/video/O3RXNRge-rk/v-deo.html

@@WillyMuffinUKThanks! I actually bought The Basics, but I will likely pick up the single rulebook as well.

@oldercloudify I hope you have fun in your RM journey 🙂

I hope so!

There is simply no-one quite like him! And now I want to join the Canadian Cult of Moorcock!, 🙂

Thank-you! And keep on gaming yourself 🙂

Thank-you 🙂

Thank-you - I'm glad you find them useful 🙂

Yeah, there's a lot of "hate the game because of the company" stuff. Not a thing I really want to do here. As a aside, I wasn't overly impressed with The One Ring and the previous D&Dified edition, which has led me to not look at it so much in its current form - but, interested to hear how you're getting on with it, and maybe change my mind and give it a go?

Sorry for the late reply, I haven't gotten around to playing it yet but if you were unimpressed with TOR LOTRRP might not peak your interest unless you want to add some of the rule changes to your existing 5e games. Long rest can only be held in towns and cities, if you are on the road you have ro deal with short rest, levels goes up to 10 with some options for feats and what not without going beyond 10th level. The travel system is overhauled to be more like TOR which I feel is an improvement from base 5e's travel system. ​@WillyMuffinUK

If TOR didn't intrest you, LOTRRP won't either as it's essential just TOR ported to 5e. Using it because it's easier for the kids to learn than TOR is and I know 5e better. I do think the travel mechanics are better than the stock 5e ones. If nothing else get it for the rule options ​@WillyMuffinUK

We've all been there, my friend. You say they are words of wisdom, but they come from experience.

That's a random anecdote, but I love it!

@@WillyMuffinUK Random anecdotes are my specialty.

@whangbar Don't ever lose that!

Sounds like we have similar taste.

I've already written far too much. But I'll dd one more thing. It's Thanksgiving here in the United States, and I'd like you to know that discovering your channel this year is something I have been Thankful for. Here's to many more returns.

Very much on point. I think sometimes we as a community get bogged down with corporate politics, and forget that - it's players, not publishers, that keep games alive.

Cheers! 🍺

Hopefully new job settling in time done, Scouts transformation should be sorted this weekend, and I can get back on track. Hopefully!

Sort of... There's a lot more differences between 1st and 2nd than people realise - but yes, it's easy to flip between the two.

@@WillyMuffinUK Oh there's differences certainly, when one gets into the weeds. Was just opining that similar goals were in mind it seems. No radical changes made: for better or worse. Your statement about KOTB being very different in play makes sense. Arguably, one could say that not having the attrition kill off players, resulting in multiple characters being generated might allow for a more enjoyable game. Guess it's a subjective thing: much like each person's edition of choice.

@squirekev yep, that's definitely my take on it too 👍

I'd be interested in hearing why?

Thank-you! My accent is all over the place. I live in the Midlands, my family are from the North - I ended up with an odd mixture.

​@@WillyMuffinUKey up Yorkshire man here.. Have you played with the setting the middlanders by monkey blood designs.?

@YorkshireMatt Midderlands? Oh most definitely yes 🙂. The books were too green for me to miss.

Check for antigravity!

Thank you for your kind words 😊 I'm revisiting Sherwood in video form, hopefully soon. As you know, Robin and his tales are a bit of a lifelong passion for me!

@@WillyMuffinUK I'll be looking forward to it, I really enjoyed your videos on Arthurian legend.

@pnptcn they were a bit of a ramble, but I enjoyed doing them.

Van Richten's definitely is. I don't have the Eberrron book - but I am glad to hear that it's a good one.