Rule Postmortem & Refining

Now, for each rule I find it important to provide a reasoning

Summer is a good time to look back and reflect. It's also a good time to refine and hack away at my personalized go-to system. So let's get to it. Earlier this year, I ran an 8 player sword-and-sorcery OSR campaign at a student organization on my campus. It started as a short intro to OD&D, but the campaign proper was switched to my under construction house-ruled B/X. It was a wonderful time as we tried new things, classes, and mechanics and I'm eternally grateful for my patient players who helped a lot in all the death and playtesting. 

59. That's the number of pages of the final document. It's just shy of the Basic and Expert books which was definitely not my intention. It consisted of remixes and adjusted versions of all the vanilla classes (save for halflings which I dropped), expanded info on ability scores and how to use them, a streamlined encumbrance system, an expanded selection of weapons with modifiers, an expanded selection of armor with minor damage reduction baked in, combat ruling additions, expanded crit tables, a large overhaul of magic (spell acquisition, spell research, high level ritual spells), clerical sacrifice and congregations, expanded turn undead interactions with accompanying typing of undead, redone spell lists for all classes, high level play content, psionics (...yes I know), and 11 custom classes. 

While a fun foray into tinkering, let's just say that I learned 99 ways to not make a house ruled system. But seriously, I really learned a lot from this and I think I have a thing that really fits my needs, something that gets at what my 59 pages of content were attempting to do but in a mechanically elegant manner with a far far smaller page count to boot! 

Clearer Goals, Better Methods

Necropraxis has a wonderful post from last Summer about "evolutionary" trends being applied to traditional fantasy roleplaying games. Reading this, I found some of the unspoken goals that I had in mind and, in a way, they really explain some of the areas where this hacking forray went astray.

"Keeping chargen fast and easy"

I directly drew away from the simple roll stats, pick class, buy gear done in a game with a high mortality rate. Whether it's adding complexity to existing classes and adding complex classes or adding "proficiency" choices at level one (fighters can have a fighting style or command each with different abilities) or even just expanding the equipment section tenfold, character generation was far more complicated than vanilla B/X. The end result of this was that it took longer which in turn made losing a character a harder pill to swallow. You couldn't just spit out an array, get some gear and go. 

This has a lot of effect on play, since we had a lot of fragile characters in a deadly system where losing one is now more of a time investment than before. This resulted in a lot of extremely cautious behavior and death went from a fun "haha what a terrible way to die" as new characters are rolled up to a groans and scanning the ~16 classes and gear lists for things. 

"Minimize bookkeeping"

I used Delta's stone encumbrance system to great success (check him out in the sidebar). It was super successful in keeping people away from the number crunching and more focused on the fiction. I'll be leaning into a simpler system going forward, but it was definitely a big success.

One thing that really didn't minimize bookkeeping was the expansion of magic. It just added so much complexity and tracking and referencing with relatively small mechanical benefit.

I do think that the rather rigid method of time tracking that we used did have some negative effects and caused the game to focus a little more on resource management than I intended. Not that resource management is inherently a bad thing, though.

"Maintain tension at desired level of difficulty"

I don't want to make conflict and violence "sport" in my OSR games. I want it to be a heavy choice, a dangerous face, and not the first choice of action (unless victory is a given). I also don't want the game to be a "misery-crawl" that is too punishing or overly deadly. The good news is that characters' survivability is increased in general in Whitehack along with my addition of a "shields will be splintered" rule. This allows me to stay true to the low hit points and "zero means death" (in most cases), maintaining the lethal and high stakes feel while increasing survivability and steering into the sweet spot of a fun and tense low-level feel.

"Develop content that will see play"

This is the big one. My B/X house rules were full of expansions to stronghold level play, ritual level spells, becoming a lich, creating undead, waging war, spell expansions to all levels, magical research was overhauled, etc. None of that saw play. Our arc and adventure was wrapped up nice and tidy well before anyone reached level 9 or to a mechanical point where B/X and my rules would let them engage in that "high level content".

I am most certainly done with that. I want these awesome types of rules to be available from the get go and grow organically from there. Whitehack's leveless spell system is a great answer to it as well as it's advancement scheme in general. What did get used and enjoyed quite a bit, however, were our interesting classes (even though portions of their later requirements weren't used, their diverse abilities seemed to be quite fun). 

"Minimize numerical inflation" 

The additions I made to the rules added significant complexity to the B/X combat rules. I wanted to add depth and option but it kind of blew back in my face and most of it largely went unused. I think this is because it was a collection of several different modifiers and conditions. We had to keep them in mind during play and in hindsight many were not intuitive. Using Whitehack completely addresses this issue. 

Rather than several different specific modifiers for several different situations it uses a few broad modifiers to cover many situations. Granting 5e-esque advantage/disadvantage for skill tests and a flexible granting of "Combat Advantage" (in the form of +2 to hit and +2 damage, with referee able to double or triple that) for things such as higher ground, striking a surprised foe, flanking, etc. It allows me and my players to focus on the fiction to look for advantages rather than looking for a few codified examples.

In Conclusion

The campaign was stupidly fun. I enjoyed it and I feel like my players enjoyed it too (despite some of the grueling losses!). Learned a lot about my particular playstyle and most importantly, I think I've really hit that sweet spot of a game and rules that does exactly what I want it to!