What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

The individual books are what make up the box set. I love it. The Tome is definitely far more practical for PDF use though.

The two advanced books are indeed AD&D material. The additional classes are nice (Acrobat, Bard, Druid, Illusionist, Paladin, etc.) but totally optional. There are also AD&D based rules to separate race from class. The Druid/Illusionist spell book is kind of a must if you get the Advanced Fantasy book for self-explanatory reasons.

There is also a free version of the rules if you want to look at it, and an SRD on the Necrotic Gnome website. It is extremely well-supported, and has kind of taken the OSR world by storm.

Remember though that it is not really new rules. It is straight B/X, even more so than other retro clones like Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry. The key is in how it is organized and presented. You might be surprised at how terse and efficient the rules writing is, especially if you compare it to the old TSR books. I’m not exaggerating that it is easier to read and learn than most board game rulebooks.

On hirelings- I like them, but they are low stakes fodder. Chris Kutalik’s Fever Dreaming Marlinko (a GREAT city-focused book) has an amazing way to handle hirelings. They have a UNION. And they may take umbrage at how their members are treated by adventurers...

Our weekly AD&D campaign is on hiatus since our FLGS has closed down open gaming in store. So last night we played old school Villains and Vigilantes using Roll 20. It was a little slow getting started since some of us were new to the app but by the end of the night we had started getting the hang of it. We had started fighting the Crushers at an electronics company when we called it for the night. Certainly won't replace face to face for me but the experience was a good alternative to no gaming at all.

Brewmiester wrote: Our weekly AD&D campaign is on hiatus since our FLGS has closed down open gaming in store. So last night we played old school Villains and Vigilantes using Roll 20. It was a little slow getting started since some of us were new to the app but by the end of the night we had started getting the hang of it. We had started fighting the Crushers at an electronics company when we called it for the night. Certainly won't replace face to face for me but the experience was a good alternative to no gaming at all.

I ran a lot of V&V in my early role-playing days. It sounds like you might be playing Crisis at Crusader Citadel, which is one of the best adventures published for the game. The very best adventure is a two-parter written by Bill Willingham, an early D&D artist who later wrote the long-running Fables comic book for Vertigo. The two-part adventure is Death Duel with the Destroyers and The Island of Dr. Apocalypse. There were also some interesting villains in the Most Wanted supplements.

Yeah I'm pretty sure you have it pegged correctly since we started out at the Crusaders Citadel. We were discussing a couple of weeks ago which superhero system to use, Champions or V&V.and we settled on V&V. I probably played more Champions back in the day but always enjoyed V&V as well.

Champions is a game for power-gamers, munchkins, rules lawyers, and accountants. Character generation is a complex and lengthy process, and a single fight can drag on and on. (And Autoduel Champions is one of the weirder game supplements that I've ever seen, offering super-powers for Car Wars or high-tech vehicular combat for Champions.)

V&V 1st edition was a bit thin on rules, so it needed more relaxed players and a focus on fast-paced storytelling. V&V 2nd offered a little more structure and guidance but some of the systems produced silly results at either extreme. I haven't tried any edition after 2nd, and haven't even played since the mid-'80s. Character generation is a breeze, though the results are fairly random.

Shellhead wrote: Champions is a game for power-gamers, munchkins, rules lawyers, and accountants. Character generation is a complex and lengthy process, and a single fight can drag on and on. (And Autoduel Champions is one of the weirder game supplements that I've ever seen, offering super-powers for Car Wars or high-tech vehicular combat for Champions.).

Yeah there were a LOT of players like that. I did love the pulp Justice Inc. version but part of that might have been the more restrained characters and my love for Doc Savage and The Shadow. Our GM was planning on building our characters from our description if we went the Champions route.

I've picked up Living Legends and V&V 3.0 but haven't had a chance to play them yet. Reading through 3.0 they did add a points based character building option if you don't want the random roll. And we did roll characteristics in our game instead of having to assign scores based on yourself!

Last night played some Call of Cthulhu 7th edition on Roll20. Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor by Harley Stroh. We dodged Egyptian police, investigated a murder/suicide scene, solved some cyphers, and fought some cultists. Looking forward to the rest of the scenario.

DEATH IN LUXOR is a really fun, pulpy module. I don't think a Stroh module has ever let me down.

Speaking of which we finished up our Roll20 game of DCC, the last act of SAILORS ON THE STARLESS SEA. Ended in fine fashion. No spoilers, but man running games with no attachment to the outcome is the way to go. And everything has a chance. Wanna do something stupid? Get a 15 or higher, or maybe 20 if it's really stupid. Either result leads to fun times.

We will probably continue with DCC next week, this time with level one PCs! Shocking. Unfortunately most of their companions drowned horribly, so they don't have the assumed bonus of looting the corpses of their compatriots.

I just finished running my group through DA2 Temple of the Frog using Labyrinth Lord. It took about 18 sessions, 8 months of playing 2-3 times a month. Using a stealth approach and hit & run tactics, they got thru it mostly intact(2 character deaths out of 6 players). I think we're going to play Tomb of Annihilation on Roll20 for the next few months.

Ran my third session of Old School Essentials last night over Roll20. We had to switch over to Discord for audio but overall it was really fun. RPG's are obviously way better in person but I was surprised at how smooth everything went.

OSE is just great. So clean and easy to run and almost any old module translates perfectly. We've had two character deaths so far and even that's been fun for a bunch of 5e players who've never really had to be afraid for their survival. There's 3 characters that are almost to level 2 and they're sweating it out!

Anyone have any experience with the FFG Star Wars RPG system? I got a good deal on the Age of Rebellion book and a set of dice. I figured if nothing else, the kids love Star Wars. Holy shit, the rulebook is massive. I haven't really been able to dive into it yet but I'm a little put off by the unwieldiness of the thing. Is it any good or am I better off running a generic system or something like Scum and Villainy to get that Star Wars feel?

I am not a huge fan of the FFG SW games. Partially this is because I am not a huge fan of SW generally, and have no patience for the canonfapping that tends to surround the property.

The core system is fine. I like how it splits out success/failure and advantage/disadvantage onto two separate axes. But the rest of it is really overly complicated for my tastes. Characters builds and feat trees and a bunch of cruft.

Scum & Villainy is the way to go IMO. If you or your group are huge SW fans then it might be worth the official license.

The only SW RPG you need is the classic WEG d6 one. FFG did a reprint a couple of years ago, and it is well worth having. The modules are fairly inexpensive. They are fast, loose, and fun. No need to get bogged down in a bunch of bullshit to run a round blasting Stormtroopers and acting like rebel scum. I’ve really enjoyed my games of it. I could not care less about the later versions.

I’m now running OSE on Roll20...it’s a little clunky, but it works and in some ways it’s better than the table. We are still in B2, and OSE runs it like a dream. Just had a hilarious turn of events where two Gnome PCs decided to interpret “detect construction tricks” to mean that they were some of code inspectors...managed to get out of a pickle on a tavern by calling out problems with the rafters, the floor joists, accessibility, etc. They also killed an Owlbear in that session, which killed an NPC (A nude man they saved from a hobgoblin torture chamber) and a PC barbarian. Players gasped when he got ripped apart. No one cried about encounter balance.

Getting ready to run Sailors on the Starless Sea...very excited to get some DCC going. One of my players has a Halfling chicken butcher, another rolled up a hen as their item...sounds like a hilarious imbroglio waiting to happen.

Does anyone know how to make Roll20 roll the weird die? D7, d16, d24 etc.?

Roll20 supports any and all weird dice just like any other roll. So:

/roll d16+3 Attack cultist

... for example.

I did a one off 5e session on Rolll20 last night. Went a lot smoother and was more fun than I'd expected, but I don't have the highest bar right now...

I'd be stoked to play with y'all, lemme know if anyone gets something going.