You some kind of addlecove, mate? Last berk who so much as tried to speak to the Lady wound up in a way wot even the foulest Tanar'ri would need a great keg o' Styx Wash to get through the day after seeing it.

Seriously, don't fuck with the Lady of Pain. Thankfully, the group I ran my Planescape game for had no problem with that.

I had no issue with her in PS:T. I was much more, and still much more, scared of Lloth.

Fair enough. Me, I'll start being afraid of Lolth when she loses her stat block, or at the very least when it consists solely of variants on "you lose". Also, I kind of have a hard time taking Lolth seriously after her earlier appearances in D&D books.

Pfft. Her and Tiamat still make a deadly team

Gods in D&D don't have a "stat block". There "stat blocks" for the avatars of the gods, which is how they manifest themselves in the Prime Material Plane. But if you go "fight" Lloth (or another god) at home, in their plane (the Abyss for Lloth), they are orders of magnitude more powerful than the avatars, and there is no stats for that - it's variants of "you lose", basically.

That said, I'm more in awe with Her Serenity Our Lady of Pain than with anyone else, remember what She did to Aoskar ;) But that might be for being a Planescape DM for more than a decade ;)

I cannot understand this wanting for (A)D&D (especially the editions prior to 3.0) system CRPGs. It was and is a terrible system design-wise. Massively and unnecessarily complicated and completely lacking in elegance & logical consistency. I know most of us tabletop veterans started out with (A)D&D and it is hard to escape nostalgia and familiarity even if it means sticking with a poorly designed game but Holy **** guys! I mean really, RuneQuest and Tunnels and Trolls came out right after the original D&D was released and both have better system designs (MUCH, MUCH better in the case of RQ). I only bring that up to illustrate the point that it is not as if D&D was a well designed game system that went unsurpassed for decades. D&D is a lot like the DOS operating system in that it was probably the best OS for a while (and the only one for non-Apple/Mac users for a while) but it was surpassed by other systems (like Windows 98 and XP, Linux). At some point one should at least study RPG system designs and let (A)D&D go the way of the Do-Do bird.

I don't know about that. Well, I have never played tabletop D&D, but I just played Baldur's Gate last year, with no nostalgia and no idea what THAC0 was, but I think the system works very well. It took me a while to learn all the rules, but once I understood why negative AC was good, and all the other seemingly weird rules, it made so much sense to me. I have tried playing NWN, but am still not used to the new ruleset. I love AD&D 2.d ed. and I have no idea why.

I'd have to agree with you, though my progression of playing the 'tabletop' or 'pen and paper' role-playing games (you know, back then they were called Role-Playing games, and then computer versions were only just barely getting the CRPG acronym, how times are changing....) started with Basic Dungeons & Dragons (you know, the one where an elf was a 'class'?) on to Expert D&D (raised the max level from 3rd of Basic) and then went on to play Avalon Hill's Powers and Perils, where I learned how to do Exponents!

Then, since PnP (Powers and Perils) stopped being made, and we had just about everything ever published for it (I have now in my older days re-bought all of our damaged books off of eBay, and now am only missing one thing they published), we decided to switch to AD&D 2nd edition.

Played that for years, bought tons of stuff, but it always felt like they had gone against their word. With the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's guide, it was supposed to be, "Here are the base races and classes, and you can sort of specialize, to keep things straight and easy." then they started adding all the <class> handbooks, which added back in things like Monks, Assassins, etc from 1st Edition AD&D. Plus I wanted a bit more realism out of it, after having a battle last a month of game time (since each 'turn' is a full minute in AD&D 2nd edition.) I figured it was time to find something else.

Then I found GURPS and haven't really looked back. I've tried 3rd edition D&D and 3.5 as well, and it just seems they replaced everything that was D&D and made it so your entire character is just a bunch of base numbers with modifiers. They still have no personality to them.

I had heard 4th edition D&D was meant to be geared so that video games were easier to be made based on the rule set, which pretty much is a slap to the face of the long time players. So I say meh to anything past NWN2.

Very interesting story. I think I really ought to get a group together and play some tabletop games, I just don't know what to play now. I thought that 2nd ed. D&D sounded about right to me, but I'm not so sure. For historical purposes, what is AD&D 1st edition like? I think I heard that combat is number-table based?

AD&D 1E was pretty much the same as 2E except for some major improvements. 2E's use of THAC0 replaced the original chart for what to hit scores for a character of a given level and class would connect against a given AC; 2E just gave what it would take to hit something with AC 0, and required doing math to derive any variations. Also, 2E got rid of the table of AC bonuses and penalties against certain weapons; I guess the idea was that certain weapons would have an easier time getting through certain types of armor due to some weapons being better suited to ripping through chain mail or whatnot, but it was another fiddly factor that was irritating to keep track of at best and ripe for abuse by twinks at worst, from what I've heard.

You want to talk history, though, D&D 1E is where things get weird. Iirc, classes didn't exist, as your race defined your class; if you were a dwarf, you were a warrior type, if you were an elf, you cast magic, etc. slaapliedje probably knows more about that than I do, though.
Maybe, but you can at least theoretically hit one of them with a natural 20 or something, and you might be able to kill them (or rather their avatars, I suppose). Someone tries rolling an attack roll against the Lady and gets a nat 20, the best thing I could imagine happening is that they manage to actually charge for about a second more than they would have been able to otherwise before they become bacon confetti.

Sweet Christmas, what in the Hells were you fighting?

EDIT: wait, when you refer to 'turns', are you referring to 'rounds'? Those are two very different things in 2E; iirc, a turn = 10 rounds, so a round would last about 1 minute and a turn would actually last about 10 minutes.

I've played D&D for thirteen years and NO matter how many times people say that its an instant lose situation, this still amazes me. This right here.



You can kill a god. However, in D&D, like most settings, it requires something of equal power to fight. I.E. You either have to be an Avatar, A Divine Champion or a Demi-God. I have fought Lloth over three campaigns, and have actually fought her on her home plane, and lived. It was what caused my Fighter to Ascended to "Demi-God" status as the Lord of Blades.

That depends a lot of your DM I guess. There are no real official rules on "how to kill God" . But as a DM I used to use the following set of semi-official rules (ie, they have all been stated or at least hinted to in one official book or another) :

1. Only a Power of higher or equal status can kill another Power. A Demi-God can only be killed by another Demi-God or higher, and a Greater Power can only be killed by another Greater Power. Lloth is an Intermediate Power so there is just no way a mere Demi-God can kill her.

2. A God can't maintain its status (ie, Intermediate Power) without followers. So if you actually, as a Demi-God, wants to kill Lloth, you've to hunt her followers until she has very few of them - that probably requires a lot of politics to mount alliances, and millenia to unfold. Once she has (almost) no follower, she'll fallback to Demi-God and then you could kill her.

3. A God at home (in its domain) is enormously powerful. It controls the laws of physics. A mere mortal can be squished like a bug by a mere thought of any God at home, whatever the mortal hit points and saving throws and whatever. You an only venture in the domain of an hostile God if you're yourself Demi-God or higher, or if you're shielded directly by one. Like, if you carry an artifact made by a God, or your sword is an avatar of a God or something like that. But you can't fight a God at home and then advance to Demi-God, you've to be Demi-God to survive being in the realm of an hostile God.

I have read somewhere that the character system for Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic and KotOR2 was actually based loosely on the D&D ruleset. Of course the weapons and "spells" and skills are completely different for a sci-fi setting, and your low-level character could solo the first few levels without too much danger of dying, so I don't know if it's really true.

Also, for computer games, I always prefered open-ended classless character systems such as that used for [url=http://people.ku.edu/~s499p797/cythera/skills/]Cythera game world [/url] rather than the class-based rules of D&D. This allows you to slowly grow into a character and customize them based on playstyle as they level-up, rather than being forced to make far-ranging game decisions before even starting to play the game!

For anyone looking to do a casual Pen-and-Paper game and willing to do a bit of browsing on eBay, the original D&D softcover ruleset from the 70's (I think it was just called Basic Dungeons & Dragons) was 20 pages long, covered all the basics for Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Thief to level 3 and came complete with a dungeon! Also the Fighting Fantasy paragraph-based adventures were quite ingenious in that they reduced a character to 3 stats: Skill, Mind and Luck and used only a single 6-sided die to resolve combat! Steve Jacksons FF "Sorcery" series added a spellbook (all spells are listed in an Appendix in the last book "Crown of Kings"). There was also a FF title called "Citadel of Chaos" that included a spellbook, one of the best in the series imo. With a bit of imagination, this is really all you need to get started playing a casual and fun roleplay game.

As was already stated in an earlier post, D&D as a PnP rule system was quickly surpassed by competitors. It survives because it was the biggest and most widely used and because D&D expanded into other media entertainment forms, not because it was the best. Runequest (for fantasy) and Traveller (for sci-fi) are better PnP game systems, if you can stil find a copy. Today GURPS is probably the way to go if you are looking for a current open-ended ruleset for a face-to-face game.

Or you, yourself, become the Living Conduit for your God, i.e. an Avatar.

This is where I get lost. Do you have to take turns within a minute in real time? Does each turn represent a minute, what? I never understood what it meant by time in tabletop dnd 2nd ed.