My recent background-watching videos covered the Old School Renaissance (‘OSR’), which looks to revive a lot of old-school D&D-style play.

I started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so a renaissance intrigued me.

Strange Premises

While I’ve not heard of some of the more egregious rules returning (thieves tracking 10% chance to ‘walk silently’, level-caps on everyone but humans), the games seem to preserve far more than they should of A,D&D, and the like, including Vancian magic, and classes.

I’ve made an alternative World of Darkness system, where players enter Contests instead of Combat. Here are the highlights from a campaign.

Setting

In Belgrade (in Hungary), in the year 1130 AD, four people fell to the Cainite embrace in a church, and were forced to survive the political machinations of the existing power structures.

Faster Fights

Fights resolved much faster than standard White Wolf battles. Almost every roll of the dice resulted in a new development - enemies would never simply dodge or soak a roll, which meant that no roll felt wasted.

Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others.

System Excellence

Dr Who

One of the Dr Who RPGs (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system. The initiative turn-order was:

1. Speak
2. Run
3. Use an item
4. Attack

This clearly produces unrealistic results. The system cannot allow anyone to shoot someone before they flee, or flip a switch before someone finishes a monologue. But it represents Dr Who amazingly well.

Radio dramas often have their characters speak so as to indicate their actions.

Does anyone have an extra blanket? If I get cold I’ll wake up with a bad back.

Hearing this, we know

1. The group is sleeping outside,
2. the speaker is old, and
3. the speaker wants to sleep.

I wonder if the group adopting this habit might enhance games.

I tried this for one game, and it didn’t take. Perhaps it would work better with other players. Perhaps I should have put in some XP reward for a couple of games, just to get into the swing of it.

As established in the previous article, the World of Darkness’ combat system sucks. But the right system can make everything better.

(If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf)

No Combat Emphasis

First off, I’m not making a combat system. The World of Darkness deserves something better. But I am absolutely binning the old combat system. There it rests, in the bin, with a couple of ashtrays emptied on top, and stale beer-juice festering with it at the bottom of the bag.

White Wolf games always mentioned how small their system was - roll a number of D10’s equal to your Wits + Athletics (or whatever), and count all the dice which land on 6 or more. The player then reads the dice like so many runes, and the final result would yield detailed information.

• 0 successes means failure, or at least no progress.
• 1 success meant you fixed the car enough to get to the next town.
• 2 successes means the car works, but imperfectly.
• 3 successes were just ‘success’.
• 4 successes suggested it was better working than before the fix.

It works eloquently, and the constant demand for interpretation really helped drive stories forward.

Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I’d like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

An elf punching a dragon to death because of monk-training isn’t realistic.

    You think dragons are "realistic"?

No, but a certain semblance, in certain regards, to reality, which we might call ‘verisimilitude’, meaning ’the quality of seeming like-reality’, helps suspend disbelief, and enriches the tail.

That last bit’s bunkum, and here’s why.

Tabletop RPGs have struggled with pronouns more than most places, because they speak through constant examples.

The fighter rolls a ‘10’ on Initiative, and the goblins roll and ‘8’. He goes first.

A,D&D used the default ‘he’, throughout all examples, and in the second edition, printed a small box explaining that they chose this pronoun to be unambiguous, but that the reader should understand that ‘he’ would also include female fighters.

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can’t happen in RPGs, and that’s a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP).

Reasons People Created Hit Points

Hit Points make sense as a standard game abstraction, until they apply to PCs. If PCs routinely die from a bump on the nogin from a kobold’s rock, then the game’s not an RPG, it’s just a very slow war-game, played one miniature at a time. Arneson (I believe) arrived at the solution of HP, but it wasn’t much of a solution until PCs gained enough HP to stop being killed in one hit.

Oh young one! So you think you have an idea. Well let.me.tell.you: EVERYONE has ideas. Nobody cares if you have ideas. The real results are in work, in the execution. It’s about labour, not inspiration.

I’ve seen this kind of patronising lecture a few times on various RPG boards, and speaking as someone without any ideas, I fundamentally disagree.

Most of my RPG work has involved taking other people’s ideas and polishing them. I have the stamina to write, review, test, and repeat for months. Sometimes years, if the ideas still feel fun.