OD&D – On the Tabletop

Five-O

January 27, 2024April 6, 2024Aron Clark3 Comments

Fifty – I’m Fifty

Today I’m celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m 53 myself this year and my experience with the game goes back over forty years. It’s strange to consider how this one game of imagination has impacted me on the whole, and I’ve written some about that here:

A Gift

My fascination with The Lichway adventure continues and today I’m happy to release a new copy edit of the adventure. Tomorrow I’ll run this adventure for a friend’s birthday celbration.

You can download this copy edit here.

Print Copies

Following my return from GaryCon XVI there are a limited number of print copies available, cost is $2.50 plus a little something for shipping. If you’d like a copy please get in touch. You might also be able to grab a copy from Black Blade Publishing if you prefer.

Acknowledgement

My own copy edit of The Lichway is not the first, there is a very fine effort from 2023 which you can find here. Please let me know if there are other such efforts so they can be linked here.

ChatGPT-DM

March 26, 2023Aron Clark7 Comments

Last week I read a blog post from an author who was pushing on ChatGPT-DM to run a game of D&D with little success. I didn’t exactly agree with how this author was interacting with the bot so I attempted a similar exercise. You can read a log of this exchange here.

While I had great fun engaging with the bot in the end I concluded that the bot itself has limited memory capacity and no logical decisioning needed for a game of D&D.

I had hoped to be able to teach the bot to do basic DM functions like make a reaction check and apply those results to the evolution of an encounter. It was not to be.

Finally I asked the bot to create a short blog post on our experience along with the challenges we faced:

Recently, I had the pleasure of playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT, a language model trained by OpenAI. We decided to create three characters: Neria, an Elf Lord, and her two bodyguards, Farman and Vaseline, who were also sea elf fighters.

Despite the challenges, we had a lot of fun playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT. The language model was quick to respond and provided us with interesting scenarios and challenges. We enjoyed the interactive nature of the game, and it was exciting to see how our characters’ actions influenced the game’s outcome.

Overall, our experience playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT was both fun and challenging. We encountered some difficulties with different rule sets, but we were able to overcome them and continue with our adventure. We look forward to playing more games with ChatGPT in the future.
https://chat.openai.com

Perhaps an embellishment, but no matter.

A Sword By Any Other Name

January 5, 2022January 5, 2022Aron Clark4 Comments

While crawling the web for an old school D&D mystery I stumbled on a pdf of Different Worlds No. 4 from 1978. In those pages are plenty of insights of the early days of the hobby. Most exciting to me was an article by J. Sapienza with many d1000 tables to “produce interesting and unique magical weapons”

To the Google Sheets! We now have a tool to quickly produce magic weapons in-line with Sapienza’s original ideas. Find that tool here.

Some examples of the tools output follow and while the formatting is a bit rough the text can be easily captured and modified to suit any need.

Finally, Sapienza mentions that his article was originally published in issue 32 of “The Wild Hunt”. Another old school D&D mystery that requires investigation – RPG Geek gives a clue here, but I’m no closer to reading those ancient pages.

If you can help with digital scans of The Wild Hunt I would be most interested.

How do you play?

December 3, 2019September 13, 2020Aron Clark6 Comments

My cousin Christopher taught me how to play D&D, he gave me the context to digest the text. Without that starting point I would have been lost. I imagine that today this is still the case for new comers to the hobby.

Last year (?) in my exploration of the OSR RPGs of today I stumbled on the concept of solo RPGs. This looked like a good way to explore the roots of my hobby without the complexity of organizing a face-to-face game.

Selecting Ruins of the Undercity for my first effort I was surprised to read that I would use whatever core rules I desired to play this game. As I wanted an experience as closely aligned with how the game was original played, I selected the 3 little brown books that started it all.

*Trouble was the text for these rules wasn’t very clear and rather disjointed*

So I set about drafting a summary of these rules that would allow me to better understand the core mechanics and refer to easily during play. 12 little pages that I should now print on brown paper (which I’m very proud of) you can find them here.

I haven’t yet returned to Ruins of the Undercity, or my exploration of solo RPGs, perhaps one day.