Hey, find a medicine man and you can actually get some good trade for those.
Apparently even today still, IIRC leaches actually do get used for legitimate medicinal purposes in the modern day. Them and maggots, I believe for cleaning out necrotic flesh.
I like THAC0 because it forces my brain to shift into an older style of play. With AAC I have a habit of subconsciously (and unfairly) comparing whatever game I'm in to 5e simply because of the mechanics. THAC0 really allows me to enjoy older editions and OSR games as their own thing.
If you really want the feeling of thac0 at your table you can just do AC - attack bonus to find the number you need to roll over, and bang your head against the table for the rest of the experience.
I was part of a campaign that was running for a few years that unfortunately ended abruptly before I could ever naturally reveal the several puns and references I packed into my character from the outset. The set up for the ones I remember are my character was a large, friendly paladin whose highest stat was in Charisma, who largely wanted a group of friends and his highest goal was to be called their pal, who wanted to be called by his last name by his friends, who was half angelic/celestial (can't remember the name of the race), who had dark skin, a large muscular frame, bald head, and short facial hair, whose starting gift was his blessed chainmail, and whose name was Cronwier Aderb.
The references that I remember are that he was designed in the image of a meme with Terry Crews photoshopped as a paladin (stats also reflected this meme), his blessed chainmail was his Hole-y Armor, I remember there being something about his name reflecting a crown but I can't remember the pun or reference, and lastly he wanted his friends to say "this is our pal, Aderb." That last one I remember I specifically came up with after the DM asked if my character was going to be "like your dark souls character, another paladerp?"
Playing PbtA games taught me that fictional positioning can have just as big an impact as mechanics. You can't wrap a mace around someone's ankle, but the chain of a flail...
Every system has to decide where to draw the line on the prioritization of realism versus simplicity and speed of play. On one extreme you have the "one page RPG" system where you have exactly two stats and everything uses one or the other, rolled on a single D6. About two thirds of the way to the other extreme you get "Pathfinder has a rule for that," with some systems going into truly absurd levels of detailed minutia in ways that vary from being mote or less mechanically consistent to the old school D&D method of the designers pulling a random table out of their ass for every new thing they don't have a rule for yet and filling it out with whatever nonsense comes to mind in that moment.
I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.
I agree with this sentiment. I know people love 5e and PF because the interesting choices are when they build their character and deciding what feats and abilities work well together. I tend to gravitate to OSR style games because for me the interesting choices happen around scarcity of resources ( torches, food,money, hp, etc).
What annoys me is when they don't have weapons have distinct special abilities, but they do have different damage dice. You end up with a situation where some weapons are just better than others, and if you think a greataxe fits your character better than a greatsword, you have to choose between dealing less damage, having a weapon that doesn't fit your character, or houseruling that weapons that don't have other differences deal the same damage and ignoring all those stats.
I'm pretty stoked this came up in my feed today. I was actually one of the players in that campaign! We played in a small, virtual group during Covid. I sent this thread to Garlic~
The coffee shops weren't a big part of the campaign, but it was definitely a recurring theme. He did a great job world-building and there were backstory elements he added in for us. I did miss the Starbucks reference until it came up and I echo the collective groan we had. There were other puns and fun adventures we had in the campaign.
Fair point! I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just interesting to me cause I'm not used to it. I usually run D&D as medieval (like ~1300 AD) European fantasy with magic and a little bit of anachronistic renaissance stuff.
Depends on the magic. Fireball was used in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, so that's not anachronistic. But if you want to do elemental transmutation, that wasn't discovered until 1896. You could have it in steampunk.
That being said, it's only anachronistic if your setting is this world. No reason why the equivalent of an inn wouldn't be serving a stimulant beverage of some kind.
Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.
Something like that probably wouldn't have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.
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