OSR Means Simple Rules, or Something

Everything should be made

as simple as possible, but no simpler.

-- various attributions

The current state of rules for my OSR game:

I start with Labyrinth Lord, except I use the 1st ed. AD&D/OSRIC hit dice for character class and weapon damage. Which character classes to use is still a fluid concept, including race-as-class. Thieves are still a conundrum, because I like Procedural Lockpicking and feel that many of the listed thieves' skills can be performed by anyone, although I'm intrigued byDyson Logos's 2d6 thief skills table.

Speaking of skills, I don't use them. Everything is based either on a character sheet ability, the resourcefulness of the players, common sense judgments, or a die roll as determined below.

AC ascends, and starts at 10. I use the Dex bonus to hit, and add the Str bonus to damage, for both missile and hand-to-hand combat. Intitiative is individual, roll 1d10 + Dex modifier.

Saving throws are mapped from Castles & Crusades, except the base number is determined by the saving throw in Swords & Wizardry. I add a modifier to the roll based on class, any attribute bonus, and selected prime attributes" (from C&C, but with different values), and use the C&C mapping of old-school saving throw types to new (e.g., "Breath Weapon" = Dex).

Anything not covered in the rules that can be resolved as a yes or no question, I use a d20 and a save. Anything where success can be measured in degrees, I use either a generic 2d6 table adapted from the Moldvay/LL "reaction roll" table, or 3d6 (or more) vs. some attribute. The latter is more likely to be used in contested challenges.

Magic use is per Holmes, plus a bit of 1st ed. Material Component fluff. I use the Holmes scroll creation rules so my low-level M-Us can have a little more firepower. I have two house-ruled exceptions to spell use: Read Magic and Detect Magic are both innate skills of Magic Users, although it takes 10+ minutes to use, whereas casting them as spells is near-instantaneous.

I have my own set of grappling rules. Combat maneuvers are like Telecanter's, except I use a saving throw to determine whether damage is taken or the maneuver succeeds. Languages are also per Telecanter, although I have a slightly more detailed way of handling them. Encumbrance is per Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is also mentioned in the Telecanter document.


It's that simple.

cheers, Adam

Minigames

I've noticed a term popping up here and there lately in the OSR world: minigame. No, not those minigames, but smaller, home-brewed rules for covering some aspect of character life that wasn't reflected in the official rulebooks. Telecanter's Port Trading system and Zak's Mass Combat suggestions are two excellent recent examples.

To me, the reason this kind of supplementalism is hitting stride right now stems from a couple of things:

Like I said before, many old-school gamers don't see, beyond a reasonable minimum, the need for niggling consistency, or at least uniformity, in a rules system. The problem with Core Mechanics is that they reduce every possible modelable situation to the same die roll, whether it's a dice pool or a d20. Reducing a search through a port town for goods to trade to one or even a series of d20 rolls loses all of the flavor that searching, stealing, bartering and bickering provides. Transforming all of that flea-bitten nastiness into a sum of dice roll modifiers and a target number is best reserved for people who don't really want to play it out.

(As an aside, this seems to be what Complex Skill Rolls in 3.5 and Skill Challenges in 4e D&D seem to want to be: a way of embracing a different dynamic flow while still reducing everything to a d20 roll. I'm fascinated, but ultimately unconvinced, by this approach.)

But this kind of situation is exactly the challenge-the-player-not-the-character style of play that many in the OSR prefer.

The characteristics I've seen of this type of minigame are:

1. It lends itself to that fabled desideratum, "player agency": as Zak says, the GM can give the PCs "...a choice of choosing the enemy rolled or any tougher one. Choosing the tougher one subtracts from the number of total encounters." In Telecanter's case, it presents a mini-challenge with more information than dungeon exploration typically offers--a role-playing puzzle of sorts.

2. It also lends itself to using/creating random tables, which are both a boon and a curse for the GM. It's a curse if you want to come up with your own tables, but a boon once you have them, because now you can quickly and painlessly generate a batch of content. And there are countless tables available from the web.

3. The tables, however, are optional: one benefit of them is that the players can't game the GM by trying to diving "what Adam would put here". But if they're not available, there's no reason why this style of content generation isn't amenable to good old seat-of-the-pants making it up.

The best point of all of these rules options, however, is that they are short, simple, and above all *optional*. Each one could be hammered out by players and the GM through verbal give-and-take, or
skipped over with a die roll, or otherwise hand-waved away. But the use of these mini-systems, and the selections of what situations to model with them, becomes an element of gamemastering style. And that embrace of individual difference, while still holding to a core set of rules, is why I think there's such a recent explosion of them.

cheers,
Adam

Because I Could

The OSR game for my Pathfinder crew went well. Since it was a one-shot, I just created characters for them (a process which took < 1 hour for all three) and had them visit (yet another) ancient temple in search of the legendary statue of...y'know, it was just a one-shot.

I had intended to use the night as a showcase for combat tactics, giving them a ruined overground area with rubble, walls, and a couple of hollowed-out buildings so they could play with setting their own traps, exploiting cover, utilizing verticals, and the like. There wasn't so much of that, but there was some old-school dungeon crawling in the secret underground chambers. Since there was no "spot" check, but there were obvious traps, the players were going slow, asking relevant questions ("what do the tiles look like?" and "how many holes are there in the wall?") and making smart decisions ("I can cast Protection from Normal Missiles and set the dart trap off"). Chief among these was the use of the Cloak of the Mountebank to steal the idol and disappear before the ethereal Chimera could materialize and attack, although D., the rogue's player, decided to taunt it before disappearing and lost a dozen hit points from claw/claw/bite for it.

Feedback was positive, especially from the two who'd played 1st and 2nd edition D&D before, but even the one who'd only played 3.0 and later enjoyed it; the general opinion was that they'd felt more immersed because they were really looking at things. A question came up on reddit about how to increase immersion, and (though I didn't post to it), the answer was clear to me: don't have Spot/Sense/Notice checks, but let the players ask about the world around them.

So, it was a good night for showcasing what the old-school does well, and my players like it, but I still want to run a good mass combat one of these days. Fortunately, they've given me the go-ahead to try some more, so I will get the chance to one of these days soon.

cheers,
Adam

Because I Can

I'm going to run an OSR-style game for a group I usually GM Pathfinder for tomorrow. I'm pumped. Since it's a one-shot, I'm going to have less context than usual. As a result, I'm going to make it a display of the things you can do in an old-school style, which is, in my humble opinion, everything you can do in the new-school. In particular, I'm going to single out something that gets a lot of attention as being a strength of 4e: exploitation of terrain features.

I think I'll have the opportunity for chase or combat in an abandoned, multi-storey temple of some sort; I want to exploit the verticals. And I'll have some rubble to create rough terrain, and perhaps have the whole outdoor part take place while it's raining, so smooth surfaces become slippery and soil becomes mud. It'll be an opportunity for players to find and exploit cover and partial shelter, to try to funnel enemies into single-file formations, that sort of thing.

cheers,
Adam

Unified Mechanics vs. Quirkiness for Quirk's Sake

When I think of 1st Edition AD&D, I don't think of the word "streamlined". Thief skills are based on a percentile roll, finding secret doors is rolled low on a d6, initiative is rolled high on a d6, attacks and saves are done with the iconic d20. Magic resistance is a percentile. The switch to 3.x/Pathfinder changed that: now almost everything is done as a d20 roll against Armor Class or a target number, with bonuses and penalties applied based on the situation and the skills or experience of the character rolling.

Some people think the OSR is all about quirky rules, and doing things the old ways for Old Times' Sake, or maybe because we're just crusty old reactionaries. Personally, I don't like a rule because it's charming, or old, or new. I like a rule because it models a situation in a way that lets me conceptualize it and think of options for play. And different situations (arguably) need different models.

Take Call of Cthulhu's experience system, for example: if you have used a skill successfully, you roll a percentile after the adventure to see if you've improved. If you roll higher than your current skill, you improve by 1d6. The beauty of this system is that it models actual skill growth in an elegant way: when you're inexperienced, you're unlikely to succeed that often, so you don't get to roll much. If you do, though, you have a high chance of improving. The combination of success rate and improvement rate picks up speed until the 50% mark, when it becomes less and less likely that you will make the improvement roll even if you do apply the skill successfully. By the time you approach 100% in a skill, it's nearly impossible to improve, even if you succeed almost all of the time.

But that's not how the Resistance Table works. The table is based on opposing attributes (Strength vs. Strength or weight, Power vs. Power, etc.), assuming that equal ratings gives a 50% success rate. A modern designer might look at this and think "Wait! There's two systems here, where there only needs to be one." This hypothetical designer might decide to make a game based entirely on the Resistance Table, adding numbers to attributes to represent skill (Strength plus Sword Rating, or Dexterity plus Stealth); that might be a fun game to play, but it ignores the simple fact that Skills and Resistance Rolls were meant to represent different situations, and don't necessarily benefit by being modeled with the same numbers.

I mention this because my OSR-based game (cobbled from many sources) uses a modified Siege Engine mechanic (adapted from Castles & Crusades) for a lot of things. It's an attribute-based roll and offers an elegant way to customize your character without littering the sheet with feats and skills. I like the rules I've come up with, but I have no compunctions about altering or adding to them. It might be that a situation only has a few identifiable states, so it could be modeled with a d6; it might be that the situation falls in a bell curve, in which case 3d6 (or other combinations) might be called for. Or perhaps a d100 roll, if I want to break out the calculator and figure out the math to a single percent.

Whichever it is, I think it's better to allow the situation to guide the numbers. It doesn't have to be "quirky", nor does it have to hew closely to an imagined Universal Resolution Mechanic; all it needs to do is be (a) fun, (b) fair, and (c) capable of being influenced by wise player choices.

cheers,
Adam

The Legacy of Vecna

Release of word/sound-stored energy is not particularly debilitating to the spell caster, as he or she has gathered this energy over a course of time prior to the loosing of the power. It comes from outside the spell caster, not from his or her own vital essence...[B]ecause spells tap power from other planes, any improper casting is likely to cause the spell not to function... (Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master's Guide, 1st ed., p.40)

 The tomes which held Turjan's sorcery lay on the long table of black steel or were thrust helter-skelter into shelves. These were volumes compiled by many wizards of the past, untidy folios collected by the Sage, leather-bound librams setting forth the syllables of a hundred powerful spells, so cogent that Turjan's brain could know but four at a time. (Jack Vance, "Turjan of Miir", from The Dying Earth)

Magic is not an exact science in Gygaxian D&D. Magic-Users study, learn their spells, absorb the words of power and marshall their material components, then cast them; I think that term is appropriate, not least because it summons up an image of a quarterback throwing a Hail Mary pass. The power comes from other planes, other dimensions, and no matter how skilled a mortal becomes in its use, there's still the danger of failure and unintended side effects.

I like that. It makes magic eerie and wondrous, no matter how familiar I become with the game. Something in your brain disappears as soon as you use it, as though the spell were some kind of symbiotic entity waiting to be unleashed. How freaky is that?

I also acknowledge that the Vancian explanation of magic neatly limits the power of Magic-Users, especially at lower levels, and I have no doubt that it was this game consideration that led Gygax and Arneson to adopt the "fire and forget" aspect of the Dying Earth's magic. But they could have done otherwise. They could have made spells less potent; they could have had made magic an alien technology that needed periodic recharging; they could have decided that expensive and hard-to-come-by material components were necessary for all spells. But of all the limits they could have placed on magic, they selected this one. That D&D uses Fire and Forget is a sign that the weirdness of Vancian magic was intended to be a part of the feel of D&D, and not just a mechanical limit on the class. (The other sign is the inspiration for this post's title: "Vecna" is an anagram of "Vance".)

For this reason, I'm not fond of Sorcerors in Pathfinder, or feats such as Eschew Components. Nor am I a fan of insisting on using the term "prepare" instead of "memorize" for spells in 3.5. And the "At-Will" and "Per Encounter" powers of 4th edition completely break with Vancian tradition. Each of these is an attempt to change the specific flavor that the game's creators deliberately put there. I said it to a friend a little while back: it's cool that you like a game that doesn't have Vancian magic; you just like a game that isn't D&D.

I know that sounds a little smug, but I really mean it about the cool part. Lots of great games aren't D&D, and I've had fun playing some of them. I even had a good time playing one game of 4th Edition. And I think there's plenty of room to improve the mechanics of the game in ways that weren't obvious in 1974. But for me, it's only a homonym for the game I love unless it sticks to a few main ingredients, and one of those is the Vancian magic system.

cheers,
Adam

Introductions

Hi, I'm Adam--or that's my nickname, in any case.

I'm an RPG player and DM/GM. I started back in 6th grade, 1979, in suburban Detroit. It started with a friend, Matt, who pulled out a tiny map drawn on what was probably a 3"x 5" sheet of paper and said, "Want to play Dungeons & Dragons?" I hadn't heard about James Dallas Egbert yet, but someone else said that if you played the game, you'd go crazy. I didn't believe it; still, there was a bit of the appeal of the forbidden to it, even though none of our teachers had any comment about it at the time. And Matt was funny and a little hyperactive, so he was always fun to be around.

Other kids played first. This wasn't a group experience--you had to wait your turn to play D&D, the way he played it. So one kid played and we all watched and listened. Matt started and said "You're a guy, and you have a sword and some arrows and..." then he rattled off a short list of things like torches, oil, and rope. The map he'd drawn was a simple little maze with some larger areas that represented rooms, and the object was to get out. I could see the map and it wasn't that hard to trace the routes, but those rooms, he said, had monsters, and you had to fight them to get out.

He didn't use dice; he simply explained what kind of monster was there (I recall gray ooze being a favorite of his), and someone said what action he too, and Matt said if it worked. More like a Zork-style text adventure than an RPG, but we didn't know better until my friend Bob got the Holmes Basic D&D set.

After that came AD&D, and RuneQuest, and Traveller, and Tunnels and Trolls, and a host of other games. I gamed pretty heavily for about four years, but gaming tapered off when I turned fifteen. Why, you say? I don't rightly know, but other things (work, school, girls) took up a lot of my time, and I put the books away. In the next twenty years I played maybe five games; and somewhere, in the dozen or so times I moved in that interval, much of my game materials was lost.

But I got back into it when I moved out West. In 2003, a colleague of mine who knew I liked Fantasy and Sci-Fi turned the topic of converstation to RPGs one day. He played a bunch of White Wolk stuff, including Vampire: the Masquerade and Aberrant, and I joined in on a few games. I won't say much about that, other than to say that dice pool mechanics were interesting, and it was fun to roll dice. But I really wanted to play D&D. 3.5 was out, and I used an Amazon gift certificate to buy the slipcased set, and started to put together a campaign that had been knocking around in the back of my mind for, oh, ten years or so--more on that another time. I convinced some of the White Wolf crowd to come back to d20, and we had some good times. When 4th edition came around, one of them bought it...I borrowed the books, took a look at them, and the best thing I can say about them is, they're not my cup of tea. (Not that I drink tea, for that matter.)

Things happened. Gary Gygax passed away. James Maliszewski started his inimitable Grognardia . The retro-clone wave started gathering momentum, and the OSR was born, as coherent a group as Occupy Wall Street (with all the good and bad that that connotes). I discovered that I liked the earlier system more than 3.5 or Pathfinder (which I still run), for reasons that I'll go into later. I bought used copies of the 1st Edition AD&D books, as well as Castles & Crusades, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and the freely-downloadable stuff like Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord. I'm running two games now, a Pathfinder game set in a land I call Mellorande, and, for lack of a better term, an OSR game loosely based on  Ben Robbins's Western Marches.

I'm blogging because I'd like to talk about some old-school stuff...nuts and bolts stuff like wandering monster tables, adjudicating combat stunts, and how powerful or common magic items should be. I hope to share ideas (polite terminology for mooching off of creative people), share experiences, and hopefully not offend too many people in the process. So if you see something you like on my blog, let me know!

cheers,
Adam