Posts

Showing posts from July, 2022

Usage & Hazard Dice: How to Emulate Bookkeeping with Dice

You are on my old URL! You will be redirected in 5 seconds...

Psst, ODD74!

I've lurked on your forum for a couple of years! That is me in the new user registration thread; I just now wanted to make an account because I was trying to investigate to where my infamous post about the OSR was being referred. So, I wanted to reply on the thread where it was linked because there was some discussion about hazard dice and similar abstract mechanics, and I wanted to give some context for why it's used (and also clarify my own feelings about it, since my take on it was less because I use it actively and more because I think it's a useful teaching tool). I also just want to participate in general because I think OD&D is really interesting and the discussions on the forum have always been really insightful. It would be great to have the opportunity to talk about the game with y'all and learn more from y'all's perspectives. Thank you! Sincerely, Marcia

Death & Taxes in Mausritter

You are on my old URL! You will be redirected in 5 seconds...

Empire of Dirt

Image
The great worm Letun rules over the underworld with iron fist and squiggly body. She protects the surface dwellers from the pesky mole people, in exchange for nothing but the dirt which she inhabits. However, when rumors spread that the ground beneath the town was rich with bitkojn, a mining company bought the surrounding land and began tearing away at it. Is there any hope for the town’s inhabitants, trapped between a mining operation and a dark place? Letun ( HD 15, AC 6, Mv. 6): The empress of dirt. Like other purple worms, Letun swallows up her target on an attack roll 20% (4 pips) over the minimum score required. Her victim will die in 1 hour, and is fully digested in 2 hours. She is intelligent and can speak. The Glabers When humans first ate of the fruit of knowledge, their eyes were opened to the world around them. They cast their eyes upon the sky and saw the heavenly hosts, and they saw wild beasts in the fields and fish in the waters. Then they looked upon themselves and

Markets Without Capitalism? Reevaluating Commodity Circulation in Capital Volume I

Image
Lately, I keep seeing people discuss whether there can exist markets without capitalism. This is often phrased in terms of Marx's terminology for commodities. The circuit of commodity circulation, C-M-C, signifies the sale of a commodity in exchange for money, which is then used to buy another commodity. The circuit of capital, M-C-M', is the process by which money makes more money: a capitalist purchases someone's labor time, and then keeps the product of that time spent working. This product, since it contains newly-exerted labor (in the abstract), is worth more than what was invested in its production. The capitalist can then sell the product for more than was spent. It is not, therefore, uncommon for market socialists to advocate for their platform using the language of Marx's critique of capital. Since C-M-C and M-C-M' are distinct circuits, and M-C-M' appears most obviously in the form of industrial wage labor, it seems that a society can be organized arou

On Thieves: A Trifunctional Analysis of OD&D

Image
My friend Ava Islam and I were talking about how thieves could possibly be integrated into OD&D without compromising the integrity of its simple system with little mechanical variation between characters. Her solution is to treat thieves as a parasitic class that steal abilities from monsters by stealing their treasure [1]; unlike other characters, her thieves are also not limited by how much they can advance per session or how much XP they can receive from higher-level feats (i.e. from looting higher-level floors or defeating higher-HD monsters). This incentivizes the thief to pursue riskier jobs than other classes, and also to hold onto treasure rather than selling it and/or receiving XP for it. It’s very interesting and worth checking out, so please do that and also support Ava’s transition fund (link) ! My original (less interesting) thought for a while was to explore thieves as a viable option for characters with poor prime requisite scores, which in OD&D are strength fo