G+ Preservation: What's Keeping You from Getting through This Door?

This post documents content from the G+ 1d∞ OSR Obstacles Group. Continued thanks to all the wonderful contributors to this group, and more broadly, to the late, lamented G+ scene.

So, why can't you get through this door?

• A burning bush whose fire is not extinguished by water. Kyle Maxwell

• Whoever opens the door to GOAL will have his/her life force bound to that of the guardian of GOAL. Handy Haversack

• The 20-foot moat of lava in front of it. Charlie Vick
• There's a tree, grown through the doorway completely. It's holding this section of the dungeon up. Someone chopped through part of it at some point, but their axe is on the floor next to a busted skeleton with a ceiling-stone atop it. Charlie Vick
• It's a Possession Door. You can walk through it, but good luck with the ghost that'll sneak into your head. There's a bunch of warnings about this in broken common, Dwarfish, Gobbo, etc. Charlie Vick

• The shadows that enshroud it are alive and must be placates by a sacrifice of something valuable before they will allow anyone past. Trey Causey

• Chained across it with unbreakable manacles you find an innocent, perhaps even somebody you know. They're vague on how they got there, who took them, and why they are chained to the door, and are vague - but not conclusively vague - when questioned about details and facts of their life before the kidnapping. Benjamin Baugh

• When you reach for the door handle, it twists away from your hand like a fearful hound. If you lunge and grab it, the door bites. Benjamin Baugh

• The door is fungus, that regrows when you cut at it, and releases poison spores if damaged. The key is a particular mushroom, but it must be alive when slipped into the weird depression where a mundane door would have a keyhole. Some mushrooms grow in soil, some on wood, others must root in flesh to live. Benjamin Baugh

• It's just big enough to fit your unarmored arm through. Rogue Prismatic Golem

• It is always 1 foot shorter than you, getting smaller as you crouch down. At the same time it shrinks, a hidden door opposite it grows, which you can easily back through. John Stater

• The door looks just like the door of your childhood home. Behind it, you can hear the sounds of the worst thing that ever happened to you as a child. Benjamin Baugh

• The door is covered in decades if not centuries of spiderwebs, shrouded in dust. Here and there, deadly venomous spiders can be spied in the dusty depths. A helpful sign indicates that the room is coated in magnesium dust that will flare instantly if exposed to flames. Myles Corcoran

• The door is locked, but swings open when pushed. Exactly one minute after walking through the book, you are teleported back in front of it. The trick is to run through the next room into the next-next room, grab the key on the skeleton, and use the key to unlock the door. (The lock controls the teleportation on the doorway, not the door itself.) Arnold K.

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

An Abominable Fancy

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