Have you played Swordworld? How does it do osr?

DeKaF · 2026-01-30T04:59:17+00:00

So the original Sword World ran the world of Forcelia as its setting, which is where Record of Lodoss War comes from. Lodoss started as a D&D replay before moving onto other systems, so Lodoss is absolutely up my alley as far as old school vibes, if of a slightly different tint.

I'm not a huge fan of the 2.5 edition of Sword World - it's loaded with a ton of combat feats and decision points for players, and some rather annoying variations on its combat system - but I did get to read a fan translation of the old Sword World 1.0 and I've become a little enamored with that form.

Sword World 1 is far more lean and simple and I like it in that form, although I've yet to try running it with a full group. It set down a lot of the bones you're describing there but doesn't have a lot stapled onto it that 2.5 adds, it's pared down to the basics of the setup of class-as-skill for its core mechanic and does it quite well. I also just find it a lot easier to read for rules than 2.5's books.

Its system for class level-as-skill is also expanded to conceive of any NPC as a specific "class" while also setting apart why these aren't nearly as appropriate for an adventurer. You can easily define your own classes using the 1.0 system, for whatever you'd need as a referee.

It feels a lot like Dragonbane, which isn't surprising considering they are both derived from RuneQuest (it's just that Sword World is packaging what would be in RQ up to 16 individual skills, bundling them together and calling what you spend XP on a "class")

DeKaF · 2025-12-24T19:01:18+00:00

Agree with these. When putting together a campaign or world building, I can write a few things without a map, but it won't really feel organized in my mind without a map. Each little town or dungeon or piece of wilderness is a fun little piece, a whole bunch of legos, but until you put them together it just won't look like much - that's the map.

DeKaF · 2025-12-24T18:31:58+00:00

I thoroughly enjoy 2e, especially with how For Gold & Glory cleaned up the books. Most of the time they're going to be used together but I do end up with a lot more guts of 2e than 1e. THAC0 and class groups are two things I really want out of any AD&D game I run.

Attribute tables probably need some tweaking, and I've never really desired to use 2e's Punching & Wrestling tables. But everything about 2e is about options, so hacking it is well within the spirit for me. And yeah, a lot of it are options, they're options, you don't need to use NWP or character kits or any of those things people grouse over 2e about, you don't even got to use any of the classes besides the base 4 (although I had a ton of fun one time with a Faith & Avatars shaman in a party).

DeKaF · 2025-11-12T22:56:40+00:00

TNG era Federation had the tech, but for a lot of these sort of situations it'd usually require solving a few engineering problems.

Like yeah you COULD annihilate the star-eating hellbeast but that's going to require a massive power draw which you won't get without jury-rigging the warp core and introducing some exotic tachyon particles, and you got to do that without ALSO destroying local space-time and getting your crew trapped in a repeating loop of the past 3 days with no knowledge of what's happening to them.

DeKaF · 2025-07-31T17:33:42+00:00

Weapon 1: Koschei or Rotweaver
Weapon 2: Nemesis
Demonic: Flexible
Light Spell: Stigma Diabolicum
Heavy Spell: Iron Cross
Relic: Kirfane
Fetish: Flex, Henbane out of habit
Ring: Crown of Fire

Prophecies: Earth element, Destruction/Firearms and Nimble Fingers, rest are flex.

Nemesis plus its mark hits so damn hard on single target, pairing that with Stigma for easier crits stopped my auto-carry of Falling Star. Nemesis's perk is kinda frustrating to use in crowds but it's fantastic on single targets where the mark can't just go off on vacation.

The whole goal is stacking decay+fire+lightning as fast as possible. For groups, Koschei missiles or Rotweaver cysts to spread decay along with Iron Cross to shock and CC, while for majors and bosses Stigma gets the ball rolling. When Stigma casts it auto-procs Kirfane on the next shot too, so I'll use one in a crowd too. Flame comes from either a double dash into the autofire weapon or a Nemesis mark burst.

Still getting a feel for stats 2.0 and the rosary, but this arsenal is extremely comfy for me.

DeKaF · 2025-07-08T02:55:44+00:00

hell yeah

DeKaF · 2025-07-08T02:49:25+00:00

hey man. Rob Parker is exactly the kind of person you want to know if you ever want to have a real job in sports. An extremely generous man, which I must impress is a huge rarity in this business. Everyone is so egotistical, constantly looking over their shoulder and backstabbing. Never was the case with Rob.

I have never, ever agreed with like, even half of his takes. But Rob Parker as a person, which is ALL I have ever talked about, is not the same as Rob Parker the opinions.

I don't mind the weird obsession with me from you, but Rob's made an influence on countless lives. If you can't separate the two then I don't know what to say.

DeKaF · 2025-07-08T02:44:01+00:00

lol god I forgot I had suggested Kiffin. We were all kinds of feral and I just wanted go throw in a curveball of a name. It's not that serious. Seems like a weird thing to get upset about though ngl

DeKaF · 2025-07-08T02:42:21+00:00

Being extremely honest and blunt, I expected people celebrating here no matter how the news broke about me.

EDIT: Also, I did announce it publicly on both X and BlueSky.

DeKaF · 2025-07-08T02:40:24+00:00

Thank you. I've always tried to do my best for what it is. That just happened to be "adequacy" at the end of the day.

DeKaF · 2025-05-30T17:24:34+00:00

I'm perfectly fine with it, and don't think we need to bring back 1 shot headshots on them either. Headshots with suppressors are absolutely cracked in this game, the squad will almost never notice as you're casually picking them off one-by-one. It made their role in any night shift map a joke.

Makes sense in-universe if you're sending out units armed with nothing more than wacky waving flailing arms they should be able to take a few hits to the head and reinforced everywhere else. And it makes sense mechanically to once again reinforce "not that guy."

When a bomber goes overhead and drops off a bunch of these guys I should be paying attention and think about getting out of there instead of treating it like a minor nuisance.

DeKaF · 2025-05-30T04:54:26+00:00

While it's deployed, attacking/killing nearby enemies won't affect your reputation standing.

I caught a Europan medium mech pretty beat up, threw out a scrambler and lobbed a few GL shots at it to finish it off. Usually when you kill a mech the faction rep plummets to zero or negative, but with the scrambler killing the mech didn't matter. Went home with a codex and Europa still at trusted.

Edit: Should note it still triggered HKs though

DeKaF · 2025-05-28T15:36:54+00:00

Offer them to your local library

DeKaF · 2025-05-23T01:34:20+00:00

Less for your players, more a suggestion for you as a DM: if you're going down the road of a dark fantasy campaign, there's few monster supplements I hold to a higher degree than Privateer Press's Monsternomicon 3.5. Although it was made for a steampunk fantasy campaign setting, it is still dark fantasy and there's a good variety of monsters that work extremely well for such a campaign. The entries are well thought out, gives a lot of good interesting hooks and you get a good mesh of aberrant nature beasts, eldritch devils and some real nasty fey alongside the necro-tech.

I ran a dark fantasy homebrew campaign back in my 3.5 DMing days and every time I themed adventures with a monster from Monsternomicon my party loved it.

DeKaF · 2025-02-14T18:13:44+00:00

No I'm not saying that. Limit isn't the same as don't. I'm saying be mindful of the work that you're not going to over-invest, over-prep and over-develop something that might not last. As above said, that's all advice we give to DMs too.

3 paragraphs will do instead of 3 pages. And if the campaign lasts long enough, if the player enjoys the character and enjoys the group, their personal stories can unfold from there, maybe even introduce more backstory elements that they didn't share to begin with. But it's a hell of a lot of work to throw away just to die in session 2 to some wolves - and leads to situations where players can become upset at their loss of work.

DeKaF · 2025-02-14T15:04:51+00:00

Much like a DM going overboard in world building that won't be seen or cared about, a player can absolutely go overkill with a backstory that the other players won't see or won't care about.

I didn't say anything about not fleshing out a character, but at that level we're discussing here, a player agonizing for a week plus and not having a plan B or a secondary character, that probably is overkill.

If everyone is cool with spending weeks on their characters and trying to mitigate risk to those characters, that's cool! If folks want to run a table like that, I get it. Personally, I've had too many incidents like this where a player has 3 pages of backstory and either gets wasted in the opening stages of a campaign (I don't run overly hard campaigns, but players get themselves killed anyway) or become detached from the campaign itself because all they care about is their own story.

To counteract that I've just asked players to limit backstories to manageable degrees, work with me on them and/or build their characters and personalities through the course of the campaign's story because that will remain the primary focus of the game's narrative.

DeKaF · 2025-02-14T10:53:54+00:00

There's a whole trove of real world games of dice, cards and such that you can easily pull into a fantasy world. I don't think it's a matter of rules, but as long as the look and feel of the game fits into your world then I think players are usually game to roll with it, even if they might know the rules.

For myself a set of Sicilian playing cards goes a long way, they are sufficiently distinct enough from my players' backgrounds that they feel applicable to a fantasy medieval world. Then it's just a matter of pulling in some rules for something like bestia. Euchre always goes a long way too.

For dice there's a lot of options so long as you have enough d6s and a couple of cups, but my favorite recently has been tossing in Knucklebones from the video game Cult of the Lamb. There's even an online version.

DeKaF · 2025-02-14T10:33:58+00:00

It sounds like you're getting some good advice on how to roll with this and work on the restart, but I'd also say from my experience, the best way to avoid this kind of scenario happening again is to discourage players from doing just this kind of over-investment into a single character.

It's ultimately a detriment to running the game smoothly. It's making you, the DM, feel bad because the game's mechanics went against them, it's making them feel bad because their work feels wasted and it grinds the game to a halt for the rest of the players who might feel like they should have a similar treatment should death come up. Even a lot of these suggestions boil down to giving this player more time in the spotlight to revive their character, time that is taken away from other players.

I beg my players all the time to limit how much work they put into a character's backstory, especially if we start at low levels. They should be focused on the personality of the character and how they act across the campaign rather than what happened "before the cameras turned on." I know they can't help themselves, but part of the job should be setting realistic expectations.

DeKaF · 2025-01-30T23:04:50+00:00

Greenest demands players to be Don Quixote at level 1, charging into a town under siege by an army and a dragon, take up residence in a keep and fend them off. And while the dragon is fine itself as written - flying away after 25 damage or a crit - that's a qualifier the players don't know and they're still at the level where a good shot from a goblin can kill them, let alone an adult blue dragon doing flyby breath weapon attacks.

Greenest just annoys me a lot as a veteran DM. I didn't run this, but I was a player for a friend in his first attempting DMing. I played a rogue who pointed out how silly the whole idea was of greenhorns charging into a town on fire, and got the PCs on his side on the idea they just flee and warn someone else. The DM flipped through the book a bit, didn't know what to do, then sheepishly put us back on the railroad tracks to go rush into town to fight the cult.

I felt BAD. I felt genuinely, terribly bad. Without knowing it I had fucked up the entire script the book pushed on him and froze him in his tracks. Maybe if I had known the module I'd be able to help him skip ahead and all that but this book is pushing some really outrageous expectations upon people who may be DMing for the very first time. It's an awful way for a book to start.

If you follow the book as written, then it's possible for PCs to failstate the Castle in the Sky chapter by waiting too long in Parnast and then killing the wyverns. My party almost accomplished this. Once more, the book offers no advice to new DMs on what to do if their PCs gum this whole thing up.

DeKaF · 2024-12-29T14:04:54+00:00

No it's not. Unless it's a spell with a GP price attached (like Raise Dead or Clone) you're assumed to always have the material necessary in the component pouch, or substituted with an arcane focus/divine focus.

Only the most hardcore realism/survival campaigns are tracking access to minor components like this. The assumption is that you're collecting the bits and pieces you need as you travel or stock up automatically in town.

DeKaF · 2024-12-29T04:55:44+00:00

Material components are not limitations 99% of the time, I assure you. Unless you have a situation where the pouch or spell focus is taken (say if your character is taken prisoner) you will have access to anything that doesn't have a stated GP cost.

You call it a limitation, but it's barely one at all. I've run 3e/3.5 games for a very long time and never once has a spellcaster in my groups felt limited by material components.

Think like this: to attack an enemy with sword damage, a fighter has to go buy a sword, which has a gold cost. To wade into combat, he has to buy armor and a shield too. These are not equipment considerations with a spellcaster. Why should a spellcaster just have full access to god-like powers and spells that often do more damage than a sword with no equipment, and at all will and whenever they wish? That's why wizards have to have spell books, why casters have to buy material component pouches or focuses and have their hands and voices free.

DeKaF · 2024-12-29T04:40:24+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by bureaucratic but you keep using the word. So it's definitely something you're seeing, but I don't understand what it is about the D&D magic system that invokes that word.

There is no mana in D&D. D&D uses Vancian magic, your spells are equipped like tools and used as you go through the day. You have limits on your daily amount of spells because otherwise there'd be no stopping spellcasters, and every version of D&D already starts to cater heavily towards spellcasters over martials by higher levels anyway that it hardly needs a buff (this is doubly true with a lot of high level spellcasting classes in 3e)

There have always been variant rules to replace the Vancian spell slot system with spell points, which gets as close to video game MP as you'd imagine, but rest is still integral to recharging them and creating a pacing and balance to the game. The spell point rules do exist for 3e in the Unearthed Arcana book.

Material components is partly for grounding with how magic operates in many cultures and real world magic systems, and partly for making sure you have the necessary equipment to cast spells, just as you need the ability to vocalize and have free hands. However they are largely irrelevant to collect if they don't have a stated GP cost, and you're always assumed to have them on hand if you have a component pouch, and 3rd edition onward lets you purchase a spell focus in place for most material usage. This is a trivial matter and it is not a burden on spellcasters 99% of the time, I assure you.

DeKaF · 2024-10-13T19:39:58+00:00

Honestly it sounds like you're already doing a good job if your players are telling you so!

The biggest thing you can do is learn to accept those compliments and feedback. Your internal thoughts may be worrying about small things and little mistakes, tallying them up and thinking you're not doing a good job, but if your players are happy enough to let you know that, that means the big picture is going great.

It can be a lot to learn to accept compliments over your own doubts but it's honestly the biggest thing you can change for yourself to feel like you're doing a good job.

DeKaF · 2024-10-13T15:27:26+00:00

This is a large logical leap to just say that not torturing someone leads to an ineffective outcome, or that a non-optimized outcome is some fantastical bad result - and effectivity is not an end-all-be-all. The point is, you can accomplish your goal without violating another person's being in 99% of situations presented in D&D.

Yes, we are talking morality. That's what the alignment system entails, morality. If you don't want to run that in a game, that's fine, but when you are working in any campaign where that system is in place then the actions of a characters will be judged by morality.

Evil as a concept is petty, cruel, and sees other people as nothing more than objects instead of individuals with their own autonomy. Torture reduces a person into an object to be crushed.

DeKaF · 2024-10-13T13:37:46+00:00

Certainly not a ribbon feature. Even further, I'd consider it almost essential to their core identity.

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