How would YOU change Shadowdark?

Nightfly said:

Good lord, NO. Noooooooooooo!

I would never want to tell another player that they're having badwrongfun, but if we're not rolling for stats, I honestly question the entire point. Just play 5e! And that's not a knock, because I love 5e. But Shadowdark is going for a different vibe, and rolling 3d6 is IMHO a vital part of that vibe. If someone wants to roll 4d6 drop the lowest, sure. Allow a player to swap two scores to play their preferred class, maybe. But not rolling at all? At that point we're no longer actually playing Shadowdark, and we've left the OSR/nuSR sphere entirely.

3d6 down the line, as Crom intended.

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You’re literally pulling a badwrongfun thing.

Why do you care? Like, really, how does this affect you? Is my playstyle like cooties or something? Are you afraid that my methods will “weaken” or “soften” your brutalist old school mentality?

OMG someone plays differently than you and doesn’t get a hard on when their character has crappy stats, starts with 1 HP and dies from the first goblin attack. Oh me oh my.

Take it easy, tough guy. Your solid iron balls are safe.

Edit: LMOA at nerds macho posturing about their preferred elfgame experience hahahahah

Nightfly said:

3d6 down the line, as Crom intended.

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I found that the Dragonbane method works great for Shadowdark:

Roll 4d6-L and assign it to a stat. Repeat the process, one roll at a time. You must keep the assignments, except you may switch the last roll with another stat.

there is uncertainty in the character stats, which is fun, but a degree of control for players, which is also fun. Best of both worlds.

I have not done it yet, but I am also considering using DB's card based initiative system for SD.

NN said:

And the point of me adopting a new system is that it supports some sort(s) of gameplay better than the systems I already have.

What is Shadowdark/B-X/AD&D/3E/5E/DCC/Powers and Perils/ going to do better ?

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I might have an answer, as someone who was unimpressed by Shadowdark for the last year, who wondered the whole time "What's the big deal when this is basically OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Castles & Crusades, Swords & Wizardry, etc, with a torch timer gimmick?" "Why did this one game matter when it's basically just a collection of rules that we already know, kinda don't need to even look at the book to run it because it's second nature to any GM who's run D&D from 1974-1999?"
And I think I've finally come to the answer I've been struggling with since Shadowdark's release: we don't need it ... it is nothing special. It's D&D stripped down to the most basic it can be. There's no matrices. There's not a list of class features you get every level. There's not a list of ability score/alignment/race restrictions to qualify for a class. There's not percentile skills for thieves or THAC0.
It's what I would have in my brain if I had to recreate D&D from memory. It is the fundamental core that is left when all b.s. is stripped away.
And let me assure you, I was a critic of this game. I was with Castles & Crusades since the White Box. I wrote for Swords & Wizardry. I have backed several OSE Kickstarters. All those have orders of magnitude of junk in them compared to Shadowdark - I just didn't realize it until I decided to write this post at this very moment.

Bae'zel said:

Take it easy, tough guy. Your solid iron balls are safe.

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Whoa, friend. No need for ruffled feathers. I meant no disrespect or insult. Just my opinion, and heaven knows my opinions are often stupid. I apologize if I expressed myself a little too forcefully.

It's like the old The Ship of Theseus question: at what point have you changed a thing to the point that it's no longer that thing anymore? Like, you can make a chocolate cake with 8 eggs, or 2 eggs, or no eggs. You can even make it without flour, since "flourless chocolate cake" is a common dish. But you can't make it without chocolate, right? At a certain point we can say, "That thing you just baked is not a chocolate cake, it's a meatloaf." And there's nothing wrong with a meatloaf, but it isn't the same thing.

Likewise, if we're taking all the randomness out of character generation, I respectfully think we're doing something different. Maybe I'm biased as an old fart who rolled 3d6 in order back in the eighties, but I think that element of the game is foundational. You need cocoa in a chocolate cake, and you need to largely go where the dice lead you in an OSR game, especially during character creation. That's one of the things that makes it an old-school game in the first place -- possibly even the main thing. There's obviously some wiggle room there, since people have been fudging 3d6 rolls since the seventies. But if you dump that entirely, I think you've lost one of the pillars of that style of play and now you're more or less playing modern D&D. Which is fine! I love modern D&D too, and that's mostly what I play. 90% of my D&D characters use pointbuy. But if I did that for a Shadowdark character...well, I truly feel that I wouldn't be playing Shadowdark any more. Being surprised by how your character ends up is one of things that defines that experience for me, and scratches a different itch than 5e's customized, powerful characters do. Both are fun, but not the same. In my humble opinion.

No hard feelings, fellow stingbat?

Retreater said:

I just didn't realize it until I decided to write this post at this very moment.

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This post was quite the journey.

Nightfly said:

Good lord, NO. Noooooooooooo!

I would never want to tell another player that they're having badwrongfun, but if we're not rolling for stats, I honestly question the entire point. Just play 5e! And that's not a knock, because I love 5e. But Shadowdark is going for a different vibe, and rolling 3d6 is IMHO a vital part of that vibe. If someone wants to roll 4d6 drop the lowest, sure. Allow a player to swap two scores to play their preferred class, maybe. But not rolling at all? At that point we're no longer actually playing Shadowdark, and we've left the OSR/nuSR sphere entirely.

3d6 down the line, as Crom intended.

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How is not rolling leaving the OSR sphere if you’re still okay with 4d6, swapping scores, etc? Standard array is just guaranteeing a viable character with no fuss.

Retreater said:

It is the fundamental core that is left when all b.s. is stripped away.
And let me assure you, I was a critic of this game. I was with Castles & Crusades since the White Box. I wrote for Swords & Wizardry. I have backed several OSE Kickstarters. All those have orders of magnitude of junk in them compared to Shadowdark - I just didn't realize it until I decided to write this post at this very moment.

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Perfection is not found when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Lincoln, probably.

Its for sure part of the appeal for me. The core book is just this distilled essence of what D&D is, without all the extra bloat and crap that gets in the way of playing an enjoyable game of pretend.

I have to agree that for me (YMMV) rolling stats in order is intrinsic to my enjoyment of SD. It has been very freeing for me.

One reason it works particularly well in SD is that ability scores are used in fewer places than in some other games. No bonuses to damage, Con bonus to HP only at first level, etc.

Heck, a Fighter with 10 Str is perfectly viable.

The one bone I throw to choice when rolling stats is that I allow "inversion": you may replace all 6 stats, in order, with (21 - N). So 3's become 18's, and 18's become 3's, etc. It's a pretty interesting option.

SlyFlourish said:

One thing to recognize is that spellcasting checks replace spell attacks and saving throws. Most of the time, when you succeed on a spell's check, it just does the thing. There's no saving throw on the monster's end (most of the time). So if you got rid of spellcasting checks, all spells would auto-succeed all the time.

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I just realized that, even after running it, that monsters have no ST. So they dropped monster saves and replaced it with spellcasting checks? That's bad, bad design. I knew the checks for casting punished the casters, but now it gets a clearer. This seems almost as if they didn't want magic in the game at all, but then came up with this dog-water magic system during the latter phases of development. THAT'S why it didn't make sense compared to B/X and 5e.

Thanks Sly