I figured it was about time I got around to actually reading B/X. It's always held up as the lingua franca of OSR, after all, and no matter how different I want my own rules to be, I feel like I should be familiar with what we're all ultimately referring back to. I've played OSE before using the free player quickstart rules, but that's my only exposure. I'm not going to do a full review or anything, but I figured I'd jot down some things that stood out to me as I went.
I'm reading the Moldvay version of the Basic Rulebook, pdf purchased from DriveThru. I like the art, and it's cool to see a lady magic-user as the adventurer of primary focus doing cool shit, even if that dress is...yeah.
Part 1: Introduction
I actually really like how the book explains the basic concept of the game, what it's about, the roles of the players and DM, what winning and losing mean and don't mean. It's fairly concise and gets the important stuff across well. I guess I assumed stuff this far back would have clunky ways of explaining all this stuff, since I still think of RPGs as a New Thing at this point and assume, I guess, that a lot of the language we use to describe it now still didn't exist.
The fact that all creatures besides the PCs are technically considered monsters is hilarious to me. Especially since the book explicitly says "yeah, totally normal humans you meet in a dungeon are absolutely monsters." Also interesting is the fact that the book calls out talking to "monsters" in the exact same way it does stealth or combat, not just as a "hey, once in a while you might meet monsters that are willing to negotiate." Like, it seems to suggest it's totally viable to play the game intending to talk and negotiate with just about everything you meet in the dungeon. I knew talking to monsters was always part of things, but I hadn't thought of it as something people would expect to be doing as much as or more than fighting or evading stuff.
The fact that the book needs to devote an entire section to explaining all the different ways it uses the word "level" is also hilarious.
Part 2: Player Character Information
The way the book talks about ability scores definitely doesn't give me the impression that they're not supposed to matter. I know by this time, ability scores have much broader mechanical effects than the very earliest version where I understand they literally only affected experience gain for certain classes. But still, hearing some people talk, you'd think making them do more is a newfangled concept.
The option to raise your prime requisite by reducing your other scores is also something I always forget about--I feel like I've only ever seen it reproduced in OSE. I'm not really sure why it seems so consistently abandoned otherwise. It seems like it doesn't interfere with what makes random ability scores good (quick to generate, no decision-making required, can inspire unorthodox characters), it's not super fiddly, and it's surprisingly grounded in the fiction as explained by "you train to improve at one thing and sacrifice development in others." I kind of like it. Probably still just keep my "swap two scores if you want" that I stole from LotFP, but still.
Okay, I'll defend thieves as a class all day, but yeah, the thief skills as implemented in here fucking suck. "Hear noise," so only thieves can say, "Hey, I'm being quiet and listening for monsters coming?" Most of them you can at least justify by them being specialized skills (lockpicking, picking pockets) or saying thieves can do them under exceptional circumstances or are just better at them than everyone else (hide in shadows, climb walls), but listening, really? Come on.
Reading the cleric makes me think I need to start treating undead as more special. So many dungeons put skeletons everywhere as the standard mook enemies. I've done it. Though my current setting doesn't really have undead anyway.
Halflings having Strength as a prime requisite is again hilarious.
I can't believe magic-users can't use staves as weapons here. If anything, that seems way more iconic than daggers. Though thinking about it, I actually don't even know if there are rules for staves in this book.
"[Thieves] do steal--sometimes from members of their own party." Oh, they...actually just say it. Welp.
I was prepared for the alignments to be less stupid than they're sometimes made out to be; they are not, and honestly even worse than I expected. "A Chaotic character does not work well with other player characters"--why have it as an option, then? I guess people saw player conflict as a more normal part of the experience? I dunno, I don't mind PvP in something like Apocalypse World because in that game, players have ways to avoid losing their character in a way that isn't interesting to them. In OSR, having to be prepared for my PC to be murdered by somebody else's doesn't sound like a fun addition to things, the game's already deadly enough. I feel like if you wanted to have this style of alignment, it'd be best to establish it as something the players should hash out amongst themselves and come to an agreement on what they're open to--a fully Chaotic party could be a great time if everyone knows that's what they should expect.
I still can't wrap my head around alignment languages. Best explanation I can come up with is that they're just meant to facilitate communication between PCs and monsters, to avoid too many cases of the PCs wanting to talk to something but not sharing a language with it. But it still feels goofy to me. And situations like the one avoided by alignment languages can present an interesting challenge--how do the PCs communicate to a monster that they want to parlay without a shared language? How do they make themselves understood? Those are answerable questions. I want players to describe their characters scratching pictures in the dirt with a stick to communicate with the deep faeries, that sounds awesome.
"Note that playing an alignment does not mean a character must do stupid things. A character should always act as intelligently as the Intelligence score shows..." (Emphasis mine.) Hmm, evidence of an intention that characters be defined in the fiction to some extent by their ability scores, in contrast with the attitude some OSR folks seem to adopt today. I'm biased, of course, since I like ability scores.
Oh, no combat staves listed in the weapons, yup. I feel like Gandalf definitely thwomped someone with his staff at some point, but I haven't read the books in a while.
I'll try and continue with the rest of the book in further posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment