Lessons from the Long, Rich Game

 Before I begin, THIS IS NOT A SESSION REPORT.

While I'm gonna fail the Joesky tax for this post, this post does have actual pedagogical purposes: to talk about what I've learned about GMing from the two? years (we started in early 2024 apparently) I've been playing in Retired Adventurer's Imperium Maledictum campaign.

RA's campaign is the kind of game I've personally always wanted to run, incredibly deep and rich and involved worldbuilding with a ton of NPCs and plots and setting elements to engage with. No matter what I ask, or what I want to do in the game, RA has an answer to make my thoughts and ideas fit the setting and his pre-existing materials. To borrow a term that I think one of the other players came up with, it's "maximalist worldbuilding;" not meaning throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, but thinking about lots of the setting and detailing it in engaging ways, allowing us as players to explore it and share these ideas and come up with fun shared interpretations.

It has been an incredible experience, and it's also illuminated some of the problems that I'm having as a player at some points, and how I've had those problems reflected to me by players in my games in the past. I didn't really know what they were or how to handle them, and I think I have a better grasp on how to approach those issues now.

We have lots of posts in the OSR blogosphere about how to play 0-level characters who didn't get a stat above 5 at character creation, or how to create effective danger in dungeons or whatever. But we don't have a lot of posts about how creating a living, detailed setting to play in actually works out in play. So that's what I want to do here, arranged as a series of lessons that have been kind of coalescing in my head as I play.

Lesson 1: The Players Don't Have Direct Access To Your Mind

I know, I know, this sounds crazy and/or possibly obvious. But I think it's something I've been particularly failing to think about when I run rich games, and I think it's really, really worth repeating because it underlies so much of the other stuff I'm going to talk about. 

Importantly, the players don't have direct access to your mind means they don't have access to any of the information you do, unless you tell them. Again, this might seem obvious but it's really important: your players don't necessarily have your foregrounding in the setting, your players don't have any idea of any extant connections between any of your NPCs, your players don't know many things you think might be "obvious" from your prep.

Think about how many times you've run a puzzle or a mystery or something else along those lines and something that has seemed glaringly obvious to you is completely missed by the players until the game has come to a dead stop for an hour. In other words, unless you make something completely explicit you cannot rely that the players have understood it completely (and even then it may take repetition).

Lesson 1.1: The Players Don't Have Your Energy Level

Why does it take repetition sometimes? Simple. Your players might be tired, distracted, disabled, or any number of reasons. And all of those are valid: I'm not looking to criticize anyone for not coming to elfgames in anything less than top form and perfect concentration, I'm just pointing out that it happens. For the Imperium Maledictum game it starts at 11am my time, which is actually early for my body's sleep schedule (due to a sleep disorder) and I've got to wake up, get caffeinated and have my ADHD meds kick in before I'm really playing well. Some mornings I have been very glad I am playing a "dumb fighter" character and can just shoot gun and roll dice and kind of grunt while the other players do smart things. My brain just isn't working.

To RA's credit, this has never been a problem for him, and he's always been understanding when I need a reminder about something that he has explained. I bobble names quite frequently; sometimes I've mixed up secret identities and accidentally stated something that if I'd actually said it in character it would have ruined our secret communist plots. So when I'm saying sometimes it takes repetition, I'm speaking from experience.

Lesson 1.2: The Players Don't Have Your Prep

Unless you literally have god-tier players they're very unlikely to be spending remotely as much time thinking about or paying attention to the game outside of sessions. This is fine! This is just a basic part of roleplaying games: players don't generally need to think about the game as much between sessions, while GMs are of course working on preparing whatever is going to or might happen next (depending upon your prep style). This conversely means that for players, "the game" is often just a mental box that gets opened at game time and closed at the end of it - which means they're not spending nearly as much time experiencing the game, the characters, or the setting. This ties back into the repetition part: players may need things from the previous session repeated, because they're not thinking about them between when they happened and the next session.

Now, I'm not going to lie, after 2+ years of this game, it has started to seep in and I do think about the next session and what needs to be done outside of it. But I know I don't have great recall, so what I'm thinking about often means I'm sending a Discord message to RA asking for clarification on some small part I can't remember (for example, "who did that third slave control rod belong to?") as part of thinking through the game in downtime. For next session we need to find this assassination sniper dude, track down who in Torrence Kanal's company Bondak Human Resources exactly worked on manipulating the slave control rods, and make sure we get all this evidence to the Arbites or Lloyd Croydus-Yeerkus (wait has that name been an animorphs reference this whole time I would not put that past RA) to "win" our current problem. But for me, especially as someone with ADHD, that is definitely in a "not now, tasks for later" box mentally that I'm not going to be thinking about until Saturday morning. (In contrast, writing this post is a task for right now kind of thing.)

Lesson 2: Player Engagement Is Good, Even If It's Wrong

One problem I've had running richly detailed games in the past is that when the players did attempt to engage with the game outside of the actual sessions they'd write session reports or whatever and I'd always feel it was a bit of a drain on my energy/time because I'd actually have to look at what they'd did and then I felt like I had to correct it. Like I was their mom or a schoolteacher or something. Because they had it wrong.

And I don't mean big things, like if someone had the party accounts wrong and they only got 20,000 copper pieces out of that last hoard when they thought they got real rich off 20,000 gold pieces. I mean that I would get frustrated at players getting character names, places, or other identifiers wrong. And, sad to say, I was judging them for it. This is my really cool game that I spent all this time and energy working on why can't you understand every name I tell you perfectly the first time and repeat it correctly forever. Do you not like my game? Why don't you have the energy or attention to get it right? That's not too much to ask! GM SMASH 

Suffice it to say, that was a really shitty attitude and I'm sorry for any of my last players who had to deal with it. I was wrong and bad and yes I do go to therapy. (And if you're wondering why I was wrong, see the entirety of Lesson 1. Just simple human interaction stuff.)

To get out of this bad cycle, it's worth reframing player engagement: any interaction with the game outside of the time of a regular session is extra energy and time a player is choosing to dedicate to the game, and that dedication is worth valorizing. That action, even if it appears "incorrect," is a player opening that box of thoughts that normally only comes out at game time, and intentionally adding something to it. As a GM, that is exactly what you want.

And really, what's the problem if it is wrong? If an NPC's name is mispelled slightly incorrectly, it doesn't matter a ton, unless it's creating confusion with other NPCs or betraying some truth of the setting (hidden noble blood or something.) Correct the engagement only if you need to, but otherwise just provide a correct counterexample in your own GMing. For example, I mentioned the NPC "Torrance Kanal" above. Well, his name is actually "Torrance Kunal" but RA just didn't say anything about me spelling it incorrectly, it's only when we looked at his name written down that I noticed I had it incorrect. And now I know to write it correctly in future!

Lesson 3: Explication is Good if The Players Ask For It

Some of the best worldbuilding in RA's campaign has come from him explaining a part of the world and then us players taking it and running with it in silly/unexpected ways. For example, we were taking a long train ride at the beginning of our first adventure, and us as players were bouncing off each other, describing how we'd be killing time on the train ride. One of the PCs, Massud, mentioned that he'd thought his character would probably have some sort of video show equivalent he'd be binging to keep busy. "Hey RA what kind of show might that be?" "Oh, well there's To Love a Saint, the longrunning popular series about a young bumbling member of the Ecclesiarchy solving crimes." And that answer has spun into the PCs buying bootleg video CDs of the show to stay up to date when we'd otherwise miss the airing, the actress herself showing up as a celebrity at a society party, and the main character's haircut becoming a shorthand for 40k Karen-types in our game.

It doesn't need to be that silly, either - the planet the game has mostly taken place on is a producer of dranj, a natural product which can be converted into promethium (40k fuel for all kinds of vehicles, power production, etc). I did outright ask RA once how the actual chain of promethium production on Kangyur works, and that has been relevant because the various companies involved in that production are some of the factions we've been working with and against in various ways. (And also it helped illuminate why a Chaos cult was trying to turn all the dranj into a chaos demon.)

I mention this because one of the usual indicators of a "bad" GM is someone who's created all this setting lore or story and won't let the players actually play, they're just reading off their notes and assuming everyone else will be interested. The distinction between that and what RA is doing is that he has that information, we know that he does, and he provides it when we ask for it. Because it's something we've asked for, we're already displaying interest, and then we're able to take what we're interested in, work it further into our play through our PCs, and cooperatively build the world and the story together.

Lesson 4: The Players Are Excited To See Your Prep (Your Living World)

Going along with this is that the players are excited to see what you've come up with. Of course they are! If they weren't interested in your deep detailed game they wouldn't be playing in that deep, detailed game after all. So don't be afraid to show that prep. Don't be afraid to make it explicit, to show how excited you are that the players have finally figured something out, or that something unusual in prep is finally being used.

My example from this (and what got me thinking about writing this blog post) happened last session. Those three slave control rods I mentioned, I needed to establish chain of custody for who had them at what time as part of the murder mystery case. So I went to the one group I needed to ask, and questioned who had their control rod. I already knew their answer (a slimy fixer dude named The Worm) but I needed details about the when. The answer was a bit off though: the group in question confirmed the Worm had taken their control rod at some point, but they couldn't remember exactly when or how. The previous session had involved a lot of discussion of psykers manipulating memories, and the way the group was acting matched manipulated memories perfectly. But that was even odder - they weren't even trying to hide they were manipulated, and the Worm himself didn't really have any connections to psykers to do this memory manipulation. I realized what it was - someone else had manipulated the group's memories to target the Worm. There was a whole other player involved in this situation, and I had no idea who it was (or even if it tied into the murder mystery!)

That was when RA showed his prep: he outright told us that whatever this was, it was a result of campaign faction play ongoing beyond our characters. It was immensely cool to hear that, and to know that the setting and the characters were existing beyond just our 3 hours on Saturday morning. It made the setting come alive in a whole new way.

I'm not saying to show the players everything; don't make a point of drawing attention to it. But when you have the opportunities to show the players parts of the larger world - news updates, tavern rumours, or just the effects of a monthly events table - go for it. They'll love it.

Lesson 5: Use Durable Player Resources

This one is a pretty common idea for many long-running games, and you've heard it before many times I'm sure. Having a durable, reusable source for all (or most) player information, especially about the setting, that can be referenced whenever the players want to (ie: not only during sessions) is really important and helpful for long-running games with lots of detail.

Whether you use Miro (RA's resource of choice), Obsidian or WorldAnvil or a wiki or whatever, we've all heard this suggestion before, and I like many of you have started these and haven't been sure if players actually get use out of them.

RA actively makes them part of play, and that makes it much fresher and easier for us to engage with. When we want to look something up, we already know that it's there, because we've been shown it. When we start a new adventure, we're told that the map or other important details is available on the Miro board, and then we know to reference it ourselves when we need to.

Conversely, RA has also been responsive when we work from the Miro board. In our last session we were trying to focus on Torrance Kunal, and we looked at his part of a prepared relationship map, which is this:

We knew a lot of these names, but hey who's Nan Zaya? Oh, she's a sex worker that Torrance Kunal has been seeing for a long time as an open secret. Well it sure seems like we should go see her when we're trying to get dirt on Torrance Kunal. And we did, and now we're debating if 15 million credits is worth whatever information she can give us (such a sum requires our patron's approval, and is not insignificant.)

But spending all that money could be worth it, if we get this other part of the Miro board cleaned up as a result:

This is basically the relationship map for our current mission. We're trying to get our group (Solomar Holdings) into the Water Cartel, and keep our enemies out. The thing I really, really like about this setup is how "tactile" it is (obviously it's not actually touchable it's a cloud collaboration platform but you get the idea). It feels like a setup for a children's playground game. When the timer (days left) runs out, we want to be in the middle and we want our enemies to be outside of the middle. It's very graspable and easy to engage with, and it's felt solid to see the various pieces move in and out and around as a direct result of our actions (the water cartel itself and the presence of the Antler King being products of things my character has done). 

RA showed us a peek of what next adventure's part of the board is going to look like and it's got like a hex and counter exploration/territory control thing going on with a bunch of sites that already sound great to explore. I'm excited for it!

By bringing this resource directly into the game, by making it something directly approachable to our characters during play, and by letting us affect its structure and results, the "Miro board" has become a living part of our play, not just something that we reference for worldbuilding as an adjunct to play.

This is everything I can think about for now. I'm sure some other stuff will come to mind, I'll try and keep some notes and make another post when I've got some more ideas to share. Hopefully some of this is useful to you!

A 2026 Project

 I’m not making a new challenge, everyone seems to be doing that, but I am posting this as a public record that I am committing myself to doing the Starter Box Challenge by Primeumaton.

This is to give me a kick in the ass for eeikagame, my long-gestating retroclone for running Forgotten Realms games. So time for me to write rules and populate a tiny hex crawl using Deadsnows in Silver Marches and to go from there.

Public commitment!

Running D&D from a homeless shelter

No, seriously! That’s what I’m doing right now, and this is a blog post about how I’m doing it. This can also be useful if you’re trying to run a game with very little in the way of supplies, helping you organize your thinking and what few resources you have.

Oddly in a homeless shelter you actually have a lot of free time. I have an assigned bed, a storage box under the bed, and a locker (with a lock) that’s considered “mine,” so I don’t have a lot of space to spread out or keep a lot of resources. I do have that time, however, and since running RPGs is one of my favorite hobbies then I decided to start a RPG game while I’m here.

I needed a way to run said game - thankfully, I have my trusty iPad Pro with keyboard cover, which is what I’m typing on right now, so essentially a laptop. It’s not super comfortable to use in bed, so I sit at a table in the shelter’s TV/meeting lounge and do most anything requiring more than a few sentences of typing that way.

It’s not like I discovered some secret group of players here. People come and go far too often for me to set up a consistent group, and there’s a lot of little crises or things that often upset schedules. Instead I’m running a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) style asynchronous game on the Purple/Queer OSR Discord server (link: https://discord.gg/6vqF25E). The channels I use for the game on that server are #under-illefarn-ic and #under-illefarn-ooc; and even if you’re seeing this post years later you can likely find them archived on that server if you want to look at the actual game.

For people who don’t know how running D&D or other RPGs as a CYOA works, the “players” as a collective group take control over one or a group of characters and collectively vote on what the characters do. You often don’t get quite as granular as actual RPGs themselves do - for example, the first combat I asked the players which salvaged weapon they wanted to use, then ran the combat myself and wrote out the results for their entertainment. Like a CYOA book, choices should always be meaningful and usually interesting: the second combat I began by asking the players which direction they wanted to approach from, which affected which combat actions they had access to. The important factors are those distinguishing choices the players make as a group (making it a group activity as opposed to a CYOA, and also making it faster than infamously laboriously-slow play-by-post gaming) and the asynchronous messages you send as DM to update the game, which makes it suitable for my life at the shelter.

The other thing a CYOA allows that’s really beneficial is that it provides a lot of space and time to dig into the specific details of the game, the setting, or the narrative. I’m running a prepared adventure (more on that below), and because the players are reading the game text at their own pace, I’m comfortable cutting and pasting entire read-aloud text boxes right into the game channel. (Note that formatting is very important - running this on Discord, I use bold and italic formatting to note when an actual Choice is available at the end of an update, and emoji responses are the ways players vote for what choices they want to make.) For me, I’ve repeated my reputation of being a DM with a lot of passion about the Forgotten Realms and a lot of knowledge to share about the setting, so this is a very fertile way for me to play the game at a manageable pace with however many players are interested, and show them what interests me about the setting/how I think it should be played. I think they’re enjoying it so far — I hope they are!

The Forgotten Realms dovetails into my first big suggestion about what to do when running a game in this situation — run what you’re familiar with. Seriously, don’t think about projects or ideas you’ve been long-germinating, or criticisms you’ve had of the systems or settings or adventures that you’re the most familiar with. Just run whatever you know and are interested in, and that’s enough. For me, the CYOA is actually taking place in Pathfinder 1e, because I know 3e/PF well enough to run up through many uncommon scenarios without any referencing and can explain it to any players with questions. While Pathfinder is an unusual choice for an OSR Discord, and it doesn’t work very well for solo play, it’s something I can very simply run the entire game of and confidently make rulings/report gameplay results about, and that makes it far and away the best choice for such things for me.

That’s also why I chose to run a Forgotten Realms game - again, I’m familiar with it, I know a lot of it and can meaningfully represent it well with little referencing, and I’m confident in my ability to make it interesting to the players. But why did I pick a prepared adventure?

Well that brings us to my second suggestion — consider the resources you do have access to. Many games have free System Resource Documents, artless varieties, or preview versions available online these days. You might be able to grab online PDFs that you have already bought on DTRPG, Bundle of Holding, or elsewhere. If you have your own personal computer or other storage device and can do it without risking other people’s legal status, computers, or privacy you can sail the seven seas of course - but don’t hurt others doing it. The adventure I was thinking of running, N5 Under Illefarn, is a classic for introducing new players to the Forgotten Realms - and it is available for sale as a PDF on DTRPG. But I didn’t even need that - there’s a revised, updated and expanded version by longtime Forgotten Realms designer, Eric Boyd, available for free on candlekeep.com, called Under Illefarn Anew. (Boyd has a lot of experience writing adventures for Dungeon and as official D&D products prior to 2008, so I was confident  in his version being a good experience to share with others.)

While the original Under Illefarn is written for 1e, Under Illefarn Anew is updated to 3.5 D&D, which then makes Pathfinder 1e an easy choice as a system to run the game in. Pathfinder 1e has its entire rules available legally and for free online at Aonprd.com, and characters and adventures from 3.5 can be done in Pathfinder 1e quite easily. (Pathfinder 1e characters are very slightly stronger, but not enough to invalidate the challenge of an adventure, maybe enough to get an extra normal-difficulty encounter in in one adventuring day.) There would be material from the 3.5 supplements included in the adventure, but anything I couldn’t remember (which is a lot) I could probably search for.

And then I chose the path less traveled by. Well, I didn’t, my players did. See, N5 Under Illefarn does have an optional previous adventure - N4 Treasure Hunt, which is a 1e adventure that was retrofit into the Forgotten Realms after publication. Treasure Hunt is a bit interesting - it’s one of (maybe the only?) published 0-level D&D adventure, with the PCs starting off as enslaved captives kidnapped to be sold to pirates and using their wiles and wits to escape after the slave galley crashes on a forbidden island being scoured for the treasures of the legendary Sea King. 

So that was actually our first CYOA choice - did people want to skip right to the Forgotten Realms content in Under Illefarn, or play the 0-level experience in Treasure Hunt? Being OSR players with a death drive so large it demands its own stroad, they picked Treasure Hunt, and that’s what we’re playing through now. Since it’s happening in a CYOA, I’ve restructured the adventure a little bit - the original has multiple players teaming up to escape together, but we’re playing it like a DCC funnel. The players get one captive, take them as far as they can, if that captive dies we roll up the next, repeat until they run out of their seven captives or until they escape from the island. (Ironically, their very first captive died in the very first combat — the second is being quite a bit more successful.)

This posed an interesting problem. There are no rules for 0-level characters in Pathfinder 1e. In fact there can’t be due to a fundamental underpinning of the 3e/PF rules: all creatures/characters have at least 1 HD, although this HD can be fractional for very small and very weak characters (like a cat or a sprite). Indeed, if you’re only familiar with pre-3e D&D, this is a significant change; non-adventuring characters prior to 2000 in D&D were 0-level characters with maybe 1 hit point and no to few other stats. In 3e/PF, they’re written up as their own 1st level characters using specific “NPC classes” such as commoner.

But there’s actually a step before that, and it’s a weird quirk of how the 3e system works. If all characters are supposed to have a Hit Die, what about babies or children? Is there some prelapsarian character state? Actually, yes! Page 13 of Savage Species has a sidebar on “1 HD Creatures” that is probably the best explanation of this - everyone starts with a single Hit Die of their creature type (for most ancestries, humanoid [if you’re not familiar with 3e/PF, hit dice of a specific creature type are essentially classes unto themselves]), and then gives up that Hit Die when they take their first level in a class. So by starting our captive for Treasure Hunt with their 1 humanoid Hit Die, which is significantly weaker and less featureful than an actual class level, we can replicate the 0-level experience in 3e/PF. But no one’s really written the rules for doing this down anywhere, so here you go.

From the top, this post’s Joesky Tax: Rules for 0-level characters in Pathfinder 1e

(This is written in Pathfinder rebuild template format. If you don’t know how to interpret this, look at a non-simple template in a Pathfinder bestiary.)

Note: This entry assumes the ancestry of any character you’re making is humanoid. If you don’t know how to tell, the racial entry for the ancestry and/or the monster entry for that creature should tell you. If the creature is not humanoid (for example, you’re making a warforged or a leshy) look up the details of that creature type in a Bestiary and apply those stats in place of anything that conflicts here, especially HD size, base attack bonus/save bonuses, and skill points.

Your base entry for using this template is a racial entry from any Pathfinder book.

CR 0-level characters are weaker than 1st level characters in terms of abilities and very likely have lower statistical values. I’d count them as being half-level for encounter calculations needing their character level.

Type The character’s type is humanoid. Apply any subtypes from their racial entry. Calculate BAB, saves, and skill ranks as shown below.

Hit Dice The character’s hit die is a D8. Because they do not have a level in a PC class, they do not gain maximum HP at first level. You can provide half the D8 (4) or roll as you see fit, but don’t forget to apply Con modifier and that they must have at least 1 hp.

Saves The character receives a +2 class bonus to Reflex.

Base Attack Bonus The character’s base attack bonus is 0.

Attacks Unless their racial entry gives them a natural attack, they have the standard unarmed strike by default. This is a bludgeoning attack with 20/x2 crit that only deals nonlethal damage: 1d2 if the character is Small, 1d3 if they are Medium. For having a humanoid Hit Die, they are proficient in all simple weapons.

Defensive Abilities The character is proficient with any armor they wear, including shields.

Feats The character receives 1 feat of their choosing. I strongly recommend choosing a passive feat that helps with combat that fits the character. In particular, if the character will benefit from Weapon Finesse, take it (and don’t forget the standard unarmed strike can be finessed). Other possible options are Toughness, Combat Reflexes, or Improved Unarmed Strike.

Skills The character receives 2 + Int skill points. Class skills are Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Heal, Profession, Ride, and Survival. Most 0-level adventures use “secondary” or “non-combat” skills as a possible way to give the character a tiny bit of an edge from their non-adventuring professions. You can duplicate this by giving them access to Background Skills from Pathfinder Unchained even though they shouldn’t have Background Skills due to not having PC class levels. (If you want to randomly generate a past profession, the 1e DMG and 2e PHB have a table that can be used. Don’t forget how useful Profession [driver/sailor] can be!)

Abilities Technically, if you want to play by the rules exactly, the character should have either 3d6 rolled six times arranged in an order of their choosing for ability scores, or the basic array of 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 (again arranged as choice.) However, if you want the characters to actually survive you may wish to use the elite array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) or 4d6 drop lowest arrange to choice as if they already had class levels. For a “funnel-type” play, using random ability score rolls and rolling in order without rearranging can be fun. (To give my PC in my game an extra edge, I gave them 5d6 drop lowest two in order, which was the extraordinary good starting option in 3e and I believe is equivalent to 25 point buy on average in Pathfinder 1e.) Don’t forget to apply bonuses and penalties from their racial entry.

Special Qualities Be sure to apply all possible abilities from their racial entry. Some special qualities (for example, a half-elf’s multitalented) may not make any sense to use now; I recommend letting the quality or choice be “saved” until the character reaches 1st level in a character class.

Advancement The character must gain 500 XP to reach level 1. I recommend being generous with goal/quest XP to aid in reaching this number. Smart players of 0-level characters will avoid combat as much as possible, and that’s often a fun part of 0-level adventures.

When the character reaches 500 XP, they level up to 1st level and lose their humanoid hit die. Treat this as if retraining a class level (Ultimate Campaign), but the PC needs neither a trainer nor downtime to complete this process. Additionally, they may retrain their first level feat choice for free as part of this. Remember that they gain maximum hit points from their first class level Hit Die.

Optionally, if it fits your campaign, the PC may spend 3 days with a trainer (of their new class) in downtime later (ie: after the 0-level adventure is complete) to completely finish off their advancement. This costs 30 gp in training costs. You might want to restrict some class features until this training is complete (but don’t be a jerk about it. For example, a 0-level character becoming a wizard may have a very limited spell selection at first and only acquire more spells after they’ve undergone training and learned how to manage their spellbook. Choose things that fit well narratively.)

AD&D isn’t a burger, it’s a meatloaf

This is a response to Eric Diaz’s “The AD&D burger” so you may want to go and read that first.

I do agree with Eric that AD&D is better than B/X, but I think his chosen analogy (the burger) is reflective of a discursive problem with how the OSR community often approaches AD&D (and by AD&D in this post, I strictly mean AD&D - 1e and 2e, published by TSR and later by WotC until August 2000).

Eric discusses the burger as something you can take and remove from - it’s twice as large and twice as filling as the hypothetical “B/X meal”, but it’s also easier to remove toppings you don’t like from the burger. His examples are “bards and monks, weapon versus armor, and weapon speed,” to list a few.

He notes that many OSR games, including his own, try to reach a “happy medium” between the two; choosing specific things (like separated race and class) to add to the B/X standard; but he also notes how his “ideal D&D” would be a cut down AD&D (implied to be 1e) at around 120 pages, instead of B/X with AD&D parts added onto it.

I think this still reifies the discursive problem. Everyone thinks of creating their own OSR system or retroclone as choosing B/X (or rarely AD&D) and stitching the two together by addition or subtraction from one base to the other. It’s a mix, but a mix of whole parts: this is perhaps why Eric is reaching for the burger analogy, because it matches this discourse. You’re taking parts from one and sliding them into the other, customizing the burger (which is what Eric describes.)

But I think this does AD&D a disservice both in terms of how it was designed, and what it can offer us as designers/DMs/players/gretchlings/screaming small children of the crying moon.

One thing that’s well known about the design of AD&D 1e was that Gygax was trying to make the play rules of D&D more concrete and consistent for reliable tournament play (the prevailing model of conventions at the time.)[1] Because of this, the AD&D 1e rules go over many of the same game situations and concepts as B/X but in more detail or more systematically, contributing to AD&D’s greater “meatiness.” (Eric Diaz touches on this element in his own “what can be taken from the 1e DMG for B/X review” series, with an example here: https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/07/ad-dmg-cover-to-cover-part-v-pages-47.html)

I think it’s elements like these clarifications and consistencies of the basic moments of play that get missed under the “burger model.” Discursively, the OSR will flip through the core rulebooks for AD&D 1e, grab race/class split, grab the bard, and maybe grab a few polearms, but when you’re looking through the DMG to add “extra” to your B/X game you’re not going to look at Appendix O about treasure weights and container limits despite it possibly being the single best written description about how coin-based encumbrance works in actual play.

Another good example is in the 2e DMG - we’re always looking at random encounter tables, how to do them better, how to tweak the probabilities, how to make them have “memory” or cross-table compatibility. Did you know that the 2e DMG discusses creating random encounter tables that cover all of this? Seriously, check out Chapter 11: Encounters (in the “black book” revised or premium reprint editions) which walks you through creating random encounter tables and building your own library of them for your game. Again, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an OSR game touch on these materials, despite it being a clear example of how to create and use these play structures (and I know this for sure, because when I was 9 and learning AD&D encounter tables were one of the things I realized I had to make ahead of time for my first, disastrous adventure. They weren’t good tables but I had them!)

One thing I’m struck by, paging through the 1e PHB as part of writing this post, is despite it being “advanced” that so much of the “extra text” (the “double meat” part of the burger) is devoted to explaining the core gameplay elements of D&D in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen any other player-facing D&D core rulebook do. It actually explains what tricks, traps and specials are from the player’s perspective, and provides advice and suggestions for handling each.

So yes, the AD&D core rulebooks are the “bigger burger” but I think they have a lot to recommend that isn’t taken as burger toppings.

That’s why I think the OSR should move away from the “burger model” and towards a “meatloaf.” Unlike the burger, when you make meatloaf you get all your ingredients, you put it in a bowl, you mix it up (and if you have a morale score better than a goblin’s you do it with your fists like a Superhero) and the end result is a congregate heterogenous combination of everything you put in there. Yeah, if you’ve ever made homemade meatloaf you know it’s not perfectly mixed (again if you’re doing it with your hands THE RIGHT WAY) and you do sometimes get a bit that’s got a lot of onion or sage or whatever, but everything is mixed together.

And that’s why I think we should look at meatloafing our B/X and AD&D mixes. Don’t just grab parts that you like, whole. Read both in comparison, in conversation to each other, like people would have back in the day, and let the rules seep into each other. Let the B/X uncomplicate the AD&D when it fits, and have the AD&D offer more suggestions, clarity, and expansions of core mechanics when it suits you.

Don’t take this as me saying you need to take everything from AD&D though. While I know why weapon speed and segments exist, we’re probably better off without them and just grabbing something like a 3e concentration check if you want that mechanic. (And the conversation of how much we should really be taking from 3e is left for another blog post.)

Joesky Tax: I ain’t got one. I’m blogging in a literal homeless shelter and while I do have something gameable I could post, it’s best suited to a post about how I’m actually running a game in said homeless shelter. Fail!

[1] The 2e AD&D core rulebooks do the same thing, although with slightly different presentation as the “tournament rules.”

Trapfinding and "rules elide" as a design goal in 3e D&D

 This started as a question on the queer OSR server (discord invite) about if a rogue's trapfinding ability in 3e is an example of Jared Sinclair's "rules elide" in effect.

I think rules elide matters a TON for 3e D&D. In fact, it (although not under the same name) was one of the primary design goals.

A lot of people think of 3e as the first "modern" D&D. It's the first one produced by WotC instead of TSR, it's the one that really made a break with old-school play design and goals, and it's the one that really started on stuff like character builds and balanced set piece combat that characterize "modern" Dungeons and Dragons.

But in reality, like every other edition of every RPG, 3e is a response to what was going on in the game immediately before it, and what the problems and issues were with 2e as designers, players, and the people who made 3e saw them to be. When we really think about 3e as a "modern" D&D, most people are thinking about 3.5, especially later 3.5 when a definitively "modern" approach to supplement and game design had been developed (an emphasis on character balance, set piece combats, and character creation with "builds" of interlocking parts.)

But 3.0 is a different beast in some ways.

And one of the fundamental problems with 2e as the game designers of 3e saw it was just how inconsistent 2e was as a ruleset. (My source for this is the 3e preview articles in Dragon Magazine, 1999-2000.) 2e was an iterative improvement upon 1e AD&D before it, and 1e AD&D was an iterative improvement on OD&D (largely by Gygax as an attempt to formalize and integrate the rules into something suitable for fair tournament play.)

In neither 2e or 1e had there been an attempt to completely strip down, refashion, and rebuild D&D from the ground up as a refresh of the core game design. Indeed, if you compare the two, you can see that they substantially have the same math and game concepts, but 2e adds more options, clarifies various parts of the rules, and rewrites parts to make them for "useful." (My quotation marks.) For example, the 1e DMG has huge portions devoted to random monster tables for various parts of campaign/adventure design, while the 2e DMG has far fewer specific tables and instead devotes that same space to teaching a DM how to create them with specific mathematic models (a 2-20 range you get from rolling a d8+d12) and filling them with the much larger, much more diverse array of monsters 2e had. However, those same monsters, with minor conversions you can do in your head on the fly, are usable in either version. (This also extends to player content: the Complete Wizard's Handbook for 2e specifically says it's usable with 1e games as well.)

Why did neither 1e nor 2e do this complete refresh? It's pretty simple: the rules worked well enough. There was a strong enough play culture and a strong identity of what D&D "was" that even though the rules were wobbly sometimes (math not quite working, the vagaries of divining what Gary Gygax meant in the 1e core ruleboooks), the overall core play experience was good enough for the vast majority of players. (2e, if you've never read it, does an absolutely terrible job of actually teaching you how to play or run D&D, but most of the rules are there, it just doesn't tell you how to put them together into anything. It assumes you already know, from someone else teaching you or experience with Basic/a starter set game.)

And the designers of 3e didn't disagree with this. Instead, they had a problem with the second-order effect of it (not how this core design of AD&D previously worked, but what it created in things following from it). And that second-order problem is pretty easy to see: if you look at 2e supplements, they are, universally, a MESS. Not each one individually, but taken together, they are completely indigestible. And one of the biggest problems is that they had to keep reinventing wheels. 2e had a much, much larger publication history than 1e did, and each "core line" rulebook was also interacting with the flurry of individual settings, each with its own variant rules. It was impossible to keep everything straight, so 2e supplements are full of notes like "this supplement uses the psionicist class as developed in The Complete Psionics Handbook" because they had to specify all that stuff. But wait, that version of the psionicist was made obsolete by the later version from Player's Option: Skills and Powers. What if you wanted to use Skills and Powers and the Dark Sun stuff that depended upon the Complete Psionics Handbook? Good luck.

It wasn't just the issue of overlapping, substituting publications though. Each of these takes on say, psionics, or seafaring and weather, or adding additional armor types and functions, would be going back to the 2e core rules and then building from there. And because the 2e core rules were a bit wobbly, the resulting rules in these supplements would be just a bit more wobbly, and these rules would conflict with each other from supplement to supplement. (If you've worked to ever make something physical, like a box, you're familiar with this: get one dimension slightly off, then everything else is off just a little bit more to match the first wrong dimension, and everything ends up fucked and your box wobbles.)

So when the grand refactoring of 3e occurs, putting everything possible into d20+modifier versus DC as the core mechanic and solidifying all the other parts of the game from that basic core mechanic and shared, common terms, it's attempting to create a solid foundation for 3e, not just in the core rulebooks but in any other supplements. And as a 3e player who spent a lot of time staring at these supplements, it worked pretty well. 3e isn't perfect, not by a long shot, but you can look at the vast majority of its pieces right from the 3.0 core rulebooks in 2000 to the final releases in 2007 and they use the same rules and they have the same mechanics underlying them. (You do still have the problem sometimes of overlapping, substituting publications though. It was possible to have a "legal" option from early in the edition that wasn't legal later on.)

How does this relate back to the trapfinding ability though? Well, it's pretty simple and yet also illustrates the design problems that 3e did struggle with. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so it made sense to tie the traditional "thief skills" into the overall skill system that 3e added. (That system was itself an evolution of non-weapon proficiencies in 2e, which were one of the biggest problems with wobbly overlapping rules. 3e offering a mostly-authoritative general list with the same core mechanic as everything else made a big difference in clarity and consistency.)

So, great, rogues are the best at skills, they've got their same skills as they've always had, but they'll be the best at them in terms of having the most and being good at them. And this also makes adjudicating those skills easier, because now there's no difference between a thief's climb walls thief skill or the Climbing nonweapon proficiency, it's just one Climb skill. (Thief in this case meaning the 2e or earlier class, and rogue being the 3e class.)

Except. If other people can take thief skills now. If they're all just the same skill. Why take a thief at all? You can just spread out the thief bits and have the wizard do it or something. So the rogue's trapfinding ability is specifically included as a form of "role protection," saying that you must have a rogue to disable these kinds of traps and no one else can do it. This trapfinding rule exists solely to protect the rogue's role in the party and make it so no one else can replace them.

There's actually very few rules like that in 3e that are specific to one class to the point of excluding others. Some feats work like that, but by and large 3e is explicitly built to allow you to get to whatever character build goal you want from a variety of starting points. All the way back in the 3.0 DMG at their introduction, it tells the DM that prestige classes shouldn't require specific classes to take, but instead have character statistic requirements that can be met in a variety of ways. (So instead of having a prestige class require being a 5th level barbarian, it requires the attack bonus of a 5th level barbarian and a barbarian's rage ability; this means you could meet the requirements with 1 level of barbarian and 4 levels of fighter, for example.)

This example is actually relevant to trapfinding, which is that it's a 1st level ability for a rogue, so you can just grab one level in rogue and do the rest of your levels in say, ranger and still be able to find traps just as well as a character of the same level who's only got rogue levels. (And you very specifically want that level in rogue to be your very first level, because 3e's skill system is a goddamn mess and if you do it any other way you will be catching up literally forever. But I digress.)

Back to rules elide. Yes, 3e D&D has a very formalized system for trapfinding and disarming. To refer to Jared Sinclair's post, it's got a system that's like his Example 2 about lockpicking. But I think the how of how 3e gets to that formalized system also tells us a lot about the game, as Jared discusses with his examples 3 and 4. Indeed, 3e wasn't telling us that locks or traps aren't important: one of the slogans used for its release as 3.0 or around then was "Back to the Dungeon!" - WotC wanted you exploring ruins and disarming dangerous traps and fighting monsters and wresting magical treasures from them. That's very clear if you look at the adventure design guidelines in the 3.0 DMG, 3e is absolutely trying to be a classic dungeon crawl game yet again. (This is a response to 2e, which got away from the dungeon for grand plots and frankly weird, stumbling, adventures stemming from the popularity of the Dragonlance module series.)

But trapfinding still isn't the only way you can interact with a trap in 3e. Indeed, the trapfinding ability itself notes this - most characters can try to find traps using the Search skill, but only the rogue can find the vast majority of them (basically anything harder to spot than a pit trap covered with a rug). Most people can try to disarm traps, but only the rogue can disarm magic traps. If you've played a dungeon crawl though, not all traps are disarmed. Players do other things: you go around a trap, you avoid it, you set it off hoping you'll be out of the area of effect, you hack it to pieces before it can go off. And 3e does allow for these interactions, because it very clearly has dungeons mapped out on graph paper with 5 foot squares (yes, 5, not 10 feet) and its traps do describe their area of effect and use the common mechanics for how to resolve them (so an attack roll versus AC, or a saving throw to get out of a trap's way.) Again, we're seeing that refactoring 3e did in the design here: 3e doesn't have special rules for resolving a trap's effects because wherever possible a trap uses the same rolls and rules as standard attacks or spells. Breaking a trap works the same way: there's no specific rules for breaking traps, but there is a common set of rules for breaking or attacking objects, and traps follow those rules so you can resolve breaking a trap with those same mechanics 3e has already given you.

I think the reason that I was asked if "rules elide" applies to the trapfinding ability is because the trapfinding ability says a lot about how the game is supposed to work in 3e. It does formalize using Search and Disable Device to interact with traps, and it does carve out that place for the rogue and only the rogue to be doing this activity. However, this isn't really any different from previous editions of D&D, because thieves also had Find/Disarm traps in their thief skills. 3e has just expanded these to general skills that mostly anyone can use, it's just that the trapfinding ability is required to make the best uses of them.

However, I do think "rules elide" applies differently to interacting with traps overall in 3e, and I do think it was an intentional choice on the part of the designers. If we go back a couple paragraphs, you'll note that I've listed the standard ways most PCs interact with traps, and how 3e does provide the mechanics for resolving those interactions. But what about other interactions? What if you want to do something non-standard? What if you got a giant lodestone and just rolled it through a dungeon and set off all the traps that way? The 3e rules can't account for that, can they?

No, they absolutely can't. They admit as much, on page 9 of the 3.0 DMG, that "often a situation will arise that isn't explicitly covered by the rules." with some tips on how to resolve such situations. However, we've just spent a lot of time and space discussing how these standard interactions are accounted for, and I think that is actually the elision: a flip in game design principles.

Think about how an OSR game is written. You write up your classes, your races/ancestries, your spells and your monsters. Writing an OSR ruleset isn't really a tabula rasa experience, but what you're doing is essentially trawling the dream sea: you're picking things you like and explicitly putting those in the rules and saying "okay, fighters in my game work like this and fireballs explode like that and dragons are this dangerous." Anything you don't say isn't set in stone. You're not saying people can't play other classes or have other spells, but this is the start of what you've put together.

Writing the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons is a little different, because there's no tabula rasa at all. It's the new edition of D&D, for crying out loud! So when you're making those same choices and putting those things in the rules, you're dealing with a lot of existing expectations about what D&D should contain in its races, classes, and so on. (There was a huge outcry over the 4e PHB 1 not containing gnomes or druids, for example.) And 3e contained many of the classic standards, including ones that hadn't been included in 2e's core rules: half-orcs, monks, assassins.

It's not just limited to character building blocks, though. It's also the process of figuring out how people play the game and either facilitating that or telling them what needs to be done differently. And again, 3e contains the rules for the common ways to deal with traps - and no uncommon ways. To echo Jared's point, by providing resolution mechanics for the common interactions with traps, 3e is also suggesting that other ways aren't meaningful to the game's rules. They're possible (you can lodestone the trap) but you just do the fallbacks for situations that aren't covered by the rules. And I think this was intentional by the designers. Go back up and look at the discussion of how 2e supplements kept reinventing the wheels of mechanics like sailing and weather; each one of those was performing its own elision about how to resolve sailing mechanics for your ship campaign, and none of the pieces fit together because those elisions weren't the same. In contrast, 3e is making the choices about what to elide right now, in the core rulebooks, and is just leaving the rest out.

In other words, 3e's design principle isn't "provide some stuff, and let the players fill in the rest of the possibility space" it's "provide everything we can, to make the possibility space manageable collectively for everyone playing the edition." And that is a deliberate choice, because 3e was responding to a previous design model that hadn't been working for years. Now, this assumption that 3e's designers can provide everything might seem arrogant, but I think it's less arrogant than it appears. 3.0's designers (in contrast to 3.5's) were a lot of old TSR hands. WotC essentially absorbed the entire TSR design staff, got them to do 3.0, and started their infamous Christmastime yearly cuts AFTER 3.0 was released. So the people who made 3.0 had a lot of experience designing D&D already, and were able to draw upon that experience when providing everything they could, because they had a fairly good idea of what most D&D players did or wanted or required from the game already. They weren't blank-sheet thinking about "how do PCs interact with traps," they had decades of experience telling them what needed to be accounted for. Therefore, the common interactions were accounted for in the published rules. 

(As a related aside, this approach lead to a misconception about 3e's design philosophies: a lot of people look back at it and think it was some sort of simulationist attempt to create the guiding physics and metaphysics of a complete D&D world because of everything 3e covers, and then those people get upset when the pieces don't come together to create a complete world simulation like if it was GURPS or HERO System. [Common examples are the peasant railgun or the value of ten foot poles and ladders.] That's a misunderstanding. Instead, the pieces 3e provides are meant to account for the games and experiences people had been playing D&D for, and are meant to be consistent as game mechanics, but there's no effort to simulate a world beyond the players themselves. [Note the word simulate here. 3e cared about the world beyond the players but it didn't attempt to mathematically or philosophically simulate it as a complete system. The game doesn't concern itself with providing details on how much money a town of NPCs makes, it tells you how to build that town as a play experience and have the PCs go to a tavern or do some shopping or have a quest there. That distinction is often lost because people get confused by the existence of say, trade good tables. Trade goods exist because they're treasure or plot objects for PCs, not to simulate a whole economy around the PCs.])

Now, does the rules elision around traps in 3e matter? It absolutely does, because the decisions of what statistics apply to traps and how to interact with them means that there's player characters who are good at traps or not good at them. Related to "role protection" is the idea of "spotlighting," or who gets to spend time being the important character doing things in an RPG session. If the rogue has the trapfinding abilities, then the rogue more frequently gets the spotlight time about traps because they're the best at overcoming that obstacle. They get to be the center of attention with traps. (This isn't solely reserved for the rogue though. Adamantine weapons in 3e D&D can cut through basically any non-adamantine material like butter, so there's often a fun experience of a PC getting an adamantine weapon and then resolving traps or locked doors for awhile by just cutting walls open and going around any obstacles. Same obstacle but a different PC gets spotlighted.)

This issue is even stronger when you think about how 3e does character building, with characters accruing new and better abilities as they level up through a series of player choices. There's absolutely a social pressure to give the spotlight on dealing with traps to the rogue when not only are they the rogue, but they've taken a feat to make them extra good at disarming traps and spent their extra money last downtime on a set of magic thieves' tools. Consequently, the other common options of how to resolve traps fall to the wayside, because the social spotlight goes back to the rogue. And even more so, the uncommon options get completely forgotten. (Don't need to carry the lodestone when the rogue can disarm anything short of a god's own chastity belt.)

And this is why people feel that 3e and later games encourage "playing from your sheet" in terms of just using the abilities there, instead of being creative. The sheet improves as a function of player choice, and people want to see that choice made meaningful in play, so it demands the spotlight. A felicitous imagination of what to do is replaced.

I don't think that's any different in OSR games, though. (At least traditional ones, like S&W or OSE. Your game may vary.) PCs still gain levels, and magic items add new capabilities. Eventually, players do figure out a best option or a best character for doing something. They decide upon their own procedures, and they do carry the lodestone around to each and every dungeon. A lucky roll on a treasure table gives the wizard a scroll of passwall, the wizard makes the roll to scribe it into their spellbook, and then the whole party can enjoy just getting around traps instead of having to deal with them for awhile. Eventually, the same social pressures and spotlights will emerge, and in my experience it doesn't even take very long; a few sessions in and an OSR group will probably have figured out a go to mapper and caller and those get spotlights the same way.

The distinction is just that there's less explicit rules elision in these OSR rulesets, generally, and that there's less agency in OSR games to allow players to craft the specific characters they want to get the specific outcomes and spotlights they desire. (It's the long-term effect of rolling a random character and getting attached to their story, instead of creating an OC and being attached to their story before seeing it in play.)

To conclude, rules elision is a thing in D&D in general. If you don't want it for trapfinding, you're going to have to go back to OD&D and skip the Greyhawk supplement. And that's a legit way to play! But it's certainly not what the designers of 3e D&D were doing 20 years on, and I don't think it's reasonable to think that they would. Is 3e still D&D though? Yes, absolutely.

A simple tool for numbering random tables

 I have been thinking of a spreadsheet like this for ages, but I never actually made it. Until today. Lots of people probably have little tools like this saved for their own use, but I've never actually seen anyone share one, so here it goes.

This is a Google Sheet that simply takes a list of table entries and their corresponding ranges and does the math to get the ranges ready in readable format.

Here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UsxxiB5VMaYJseEtQfcZGpEO-m8FqrSmWnJEhEAPTc/edit?usp=sharing

(Make a copy of your own use, of course)

Step 1) All you need to do to use this is copy and paste your own data into it. It takes two columns of input: the right hand column (B) is your actual entries, expressed in text (I'd recommend maybe just putting stubs here if you have especially complicated text, especially stuff with formatting or "non-standard" characters in the sense of not being alphanumeric in standard English.) The left-hand column (A) takes your range of numbers that correspond to that entry. When you enter values into these columns the sheet might get confused for awhile, that's fine.

Note: the tool does not know what sizes dice come in, it doesn't even know what rolls are. it's just adding numbers. so if you have 4 entries for a d4 table they just get numbers 1 2 3 and 4 (and you can probably do that by hand, so you don't need this any way.)

Columns A and B can extend as far down as you need them to, you'll just need to adjust the other columns to match.

Step 2) Sort Column B (your entries) in whatever way you want your entries to be sorted by. If you look at most RPG tables (at least, most I've encountered), they're actually sorted alphabetically by entry and then the result ranges filled in to match. (Here's the OSE SRD for an example.) To sort Column B alphabetically (what you should do as the default unless you know better), select the top left data entry (column A row 2). Then go to Data - Sort Range - Advanced Range Sorting Options. Here, click sort by Column B A to Z. When you do this, it should change the sheet a lot. In particular, Columns B and G should be the same text, sorted the same way.

Step 3) If you have more entries than were originally on the sheet, you need to drag the entries in columns D, E, F and G down to match your number of entries in columns A and B. Doing this is a simple drag operation. Click ONCE on the top left entry in column D, let go of the mouse button, then click once again and drag your cursor right to column G, then down as many rows as these columns already contain data (by default, down to row 12.) Release the mouse again. Click on the little blue dot in the lower right corner, then drag it DOWN as many more rows as you have you have data in column A. (So if you had 15 rows of data in Column A, drag down to the 15th row in these three columns.)

When you're doing this, it should look like this or similar after the first drag select. You can see the blue dot at the lower right for the second drag select.

When you do this, it should fill out all of columns D, E, F and G with the data you need. In particular column F should look like your dice ranges.

If you have less entries in column A than were originally on the sheet, it's simpler. Click on the lower-right cell you want to empty (by default this will be column G row 12), let go of the mouse button. Click again and drag left and up until you select the other cells corresponding to empty entries in column A. Then hit Backspace or Delete on your keyboard to empty the cells.

Step 4) Click once in column F, row 1. Then click again and drag (like you did in step 3) to the lower-right entry in column G (in the example, this is row 12). Now right click to bring up the context menu and select copy, or hit the copy shortcut on your keyboard (ctrl-C for Windows, Command-C on MacOS). Switch to whatever you're writing your game in and paste it there. Most applications will recognize this as text in table format - so if you have a table already formatted, paste into the upper left entry you want to put data in and it'll fill out the rest of the table automatically. If you just paste it into the document itself, it'll insert a basic table and fill the data in there.

If stuff looks weird, click on the headings for columns F and G and make sure they're both set to plain text type. (Icon on the application menu bar that looks like the numbers 123 next to the phrase "Defaul...", click Plain Text in the drop down.)

Enjoy!

(Disclaimer: I don't know complicated Excel or Google Sheets shit. Like I said, lots of people probably already have tools like these made. I tried to explain it as easily as I could, just in case someone really has trouble with computers. I just did an Excel bird course in university for a "science" credit.)

(Behind the scenes details: column D is the previous row in C + 1. [Hardcoded to 1 for the first line.] Column E is the same row's column D plus the same row's column A. Column F is the most complicated part, it looks something like "=IF(D2=E2, D2, JOIN("-",D2,E2))". The IF statement checks if D and E were the same, and if so it just prints E [accounting for a one number range.] Otherwise it runs the JOIN, which prints D and E with a hyphen between them [one of those things that means special shit to computers, so it's put in quotes so it's just accepted as text], for the common display of dice roll ranges. Column G is just column B repeated for easy copy and paste. Again, really simple shit if you actually know Google Sheets.)

 

5 Latter-Day Magic Items Converted to OSE

 Here's five magic items from later editions of D&D converted to rules-light, old school presentations. I've used Old School Essentials as a base, since it's the current lingua franca for much of the OSR.

Thanks to spearsandspreadsheets for giving me some ideas for what to convert!

Dwarven Plate

Sources: 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide

This massive suit of plate mail is made of adamantine (found in meteorites), impregnable against any attack.
Weight Weighs 1,000 coins.

Protective Qualities The wearer reduces the damage dealt by any physical attacks against them (weapons, monsters, or traps) by 3.

Resistant Highly resistant to any damaging effects and saves as a level 12 dwarf.

Unenchanted Special because of its materials and is unenchanted by default. A spellcaster may be able to enchant it using magical research.

Immovable Rod

Sources: 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide (note: there's already an OSE version of the immovable rod in the Advanced Treasure book, but this is a bit closer to the original)

This rod is a flat length of iron with a button on one end.

Anchoring: Pressing the button causes the rod to anchor itself to its current position in space. Once anchored, it can only be moved by a wish or other godly magic. (Even gravity does not affect the anchored rod.) An anchored rod can support up to 80,000 coins of weight.

Releasing: Pressing the button again releases the rod.

Ladder: Two or more immovable rods can be used in concert as a ladder unaffected by gravity.

No Charges: Does not use charges, may be used an unlimited number of times.

Ring of Climbing

Sources: 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide

Grants supernatural climbing abilities.

Climbing: The wearer can climb on most surfaces automatically. They have a 1-in-4 chance of climbing a sheer or slippery wall or other vertical surface. If the roll is failed, the wielder falls at the halfway point, taking falling damage as appropriate.

Ring of the Ram

Sources: 2e Dungeon Master's Guide, Baldur's Gate II

Grants the power to attack enemies or objects with telekinetic force that looks like the head of a ram.

Attacking Enemies

Usage: A target within 30' may be attacked for 1d10 damage.

Resisting: The target may save versus spells to resist being knocked down or pushed away 30'. Circumstantial modifiers may apply (target is unusually stable, unusually strong, or larger than human-sized).

Attacking Objects

Usage: An object within 30' may be smashed open, with a 5-in-6 chance of being broken. Magically locked or held doors or portals can be broken open by this effect.

Resisting: Magical or enchanted objects may save versus spells to resist being broken.

Usage frequency: The ring may be used up to once a day.

Screaming Bolt

Sources: 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide

A crossbow bolt that screams as it flies, causing fear.

Number Found: 1d4 screaming bolts are found at a time.

Enchantment: +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls when used.

Screaming The bolt screams through the air as it is fired. All enemies of the wielder within 20' of the bolt's arc of fire must save versus spells or be struck with fear and spend their next turn fleeing from the wielder at maximum speed.