Vox Arcana - Blog

 After talking with my players at length last night, I'm exploring old-school gaming again. Turns out, ACKS gets many, many things right, as far as it relates to my preferences for running these types of games. Upon further examination, we can integrate these types of things into a modern DND game (not necessarily 5e, but still).

  In old school D&D, dungeon crawling is an exercise in resource management. Those resources are: Torches Time

  Source: Zach Wolf's excellent Realms of Peril sandbox Travel rules in TTRPGs have been a constant thorn in my side. In theory, there should be some interesting gameplay and decisions that result from overland travel. In reality, it’s never led an interesting gameplay decisions for my players. Mayhap I’m simply running the rules incorrectly, or incompletely, but I still want to take some time to think about it, hence, this blog. In general, there are fundamentally just two components to (theoretically) make overland travel interesting. Those are resource attrition and time. Resources include things like player HP, stat penalties, rations, and torches. Time usually translates to how many random encounters you must make to get anywhere. This works as a sort of multiplier on resources: Yes, we have enough resources to travel to the dungeon that is one week away, but how will we plan for the one that is two weeks away? A party of players wants to move from one side of the map to ...

siofragames.itch.io ​  This is maybe on of the coolest damn things I've ever seen. I'm posting it here so I can find it later. 

My issues with the 2014 version of D&D are well-documented. At this point, it's almost become a separate hobby, wondering how I can fix the game. I once compared modern D&D to Old School D&D to a Chevy Silverado and a Bicycle; one is easy to maintain and modify, and the other is not. Modern (i.e. non-old school) D&D is much like the truck in this scenario, and one shouldn't pop the hood unless he is willing to make a mess and get his hands dirty. …And possibly break something important. For today, there are a few things I'd like to call your attention to. Namely: Lack of challenge for players Lack of long-term consequences Lack of survival mechanics (even though they SEEM to be present) The overpowered nature of spells and cantrips (see point 3) The lack of a consistent economy The overpowered nature of magical items, especially weapons Lack of meaningful/useful CR system Outrageous power curve after level 6 It's only fair to list things that I do l...