x-in-6 Roll to Retain Spells for OSE, et al.

This one is an untested idea.

What if the spell slot tables for casters in OSE and other such games was instead their x-in-6 chance of retaining spells of that level after casting it? 

Okay, surely this has been done before, right? But if anyone's talked about it online, I could not find it. If you know of anywhere this already exists, feel free to let me know in the comments. If you've tried it yourself, by all means share your experiences!

Anyway, I will likely give this a go the next time I run a game in the B/X family. Vancian magic is probably my players' least favorite part of games that use it, and I'd like to see the fun they'll have casting every spell they know at least once, maybe more, a day. Would this get messy in high-level play? Probably, but we've never reached high level before wandering over to another game. I'll cross that bridge if we come to it.  

Also, I much prefer roll to retain vs roll to cast. My tables have played roll to cast games a bunch over the years, and none of us particularly enjoy that aspect. I've taken to houseruling roll to retain into any such game we play. Null results won't stop me from playing something, but the less there are the better if you ask me.

P.S. Yes I know in Old School Essentials that would mean a 14th level Cleric would be able to cast infinite level 1 spells. That sounds really cool to me. 

x-in-6 Fighter Maneuvers for OSE

This one does what it says on the tin.

Damage and a maneuver? In this economy?! Well, yes. Inspired by the d6 thief skills in Carcass Crawler #1 by Necrotic Gnome, the house rules used in the 3d6 Down the Line Actual Play, and of course Mighty Deed of Arms from Dungeon Crawl Classics. I used it when I ran Old School Essentials earlier this year. Here's what it looks like.

Prowess
If a Fighter succeeds at an attack, in addition to dealing damage they can attempt one maneuver. The maneuver has to make sense; you couldn’t, for example, trip a flying opponent or a Gelatinous Cube.  
Push: Push the opponent 5 feet.
Trip: Knock the opponent prone.
Disarm: Strip the opponent of their weapon.
Intimidate: Force a morale check, as long as the opponent has not already passed two of them.
Ensnare: Prevent the opponent’s movement next turn.
Taunt: The opponent gets -2 to attacking anyone but the Fighter.

Each maneuver starts at a 1-in-6 chance. At 1st level, a Fighter has 6 expertise points to allocate.Every odd-numbered level thereafter, a Fighter gains 3 points to allocate.

 

Now, you may be asking yourself why. For many, the OSE (or B/X) Fighter is perfect as-is. If that's the case for you and your table, that's wonderful. However, mine is not convinced by the, "but they get magic swords!" argument. Especially when you consider the Fighting-Men in OD&D got all that and a bag of chips*. Besides, I love house-ruling and hacking the games I play with my friends. We have specific tastes, myself most of all, and our enjoyment takes precedent over a dogmatic adherence to the written word.

Others may be asking why as in, "why not just use Mighty Deed of Arms from DCC?" Some of my players struggle to come up with things when given something so open-ended. The structure of having six maneuvers to choose from emboldened their creativity. And the others pushed the boundaries of those limits, as they always do in any similar situation.

In other words, it worked for us. If you think it'd work for you and yours, try it out and let me know how it goes.

*Literally always being better at fighting than the other two classes, including multiple attacks much sooner if you used Chainmail.

 

Speedrunning Combat

This one's about using Otherkind Dice in old-school play.

There are two things I love. The first is the aforementioned Otherkind Dice by Meguey & Vincent Baker, without whom this post wouldn't exist*. I think about those dice a lot, maybe once a week. My game design drafts are full of possible ways to use them. 

My second love is combat in old-school roleplaying games. It's dangerous, but it rewards planning, creative item use, etc. Also, compared to modern fantasy games, it's fast. Still, there are things that slow it down, like turns/phases/actions, to-hit rolls, hit points, etc. Some games out there even do away with some of these things to speed it up. I love that, too.

But what if there was something that kept what I like about old-school combat, but was even faster? Like, really fast? What if OSR stood for Otherkind School Revolution? Maybe it would look like this:

Combat
When two forces clash and it is obvious who would win, they do. The GM will say what the consequences for the losing side are.

Otherwise, grab 3d6 and consider the following:
-Do the player characters have tactical advantages (high ground, surprise, superior numbers, etc)?
-Are the player characters using items to bolster their chances (molotovs, caltrops, oil, an optimal weapon, etc)?
-Are the player characters using magic to tip the odds in their favor?

Add a d6 for each advantage, item, or magic the characters employ. Then, answer the same questions for the opposite side. Take away d6 as appropriate.

The players then roll the remaining d6 and assign results to the following tables/index cards:

Characters
Were the player characters injured?
0: They were all killed or captured, at the GM's discretion.
1-2: One of them was killed or captured at the GM's discretion. determine randomly if no one volunteers. The rest were injured.
3-4: Half of them were injured, one gravely so. Determine randomly if no one volunteers.
5: One of them was injured.
6: Miraculously, none of them were.

Resources
Were any of the items or spells they used lost or broken?
0: Yes, all of them.
1-3: Yes, half of them. Determine randomly if no one volunteers.
4-5: Yes, one of them. Determine randomly if no one volunteers.
6: Somehow, not a single one.

Enemies
How did their opponents fair?
0: Completely unscathed.
1-2: They suffered minor injuries.
3-4: Half of them were injured, one gravely so.
5: Half of them dead, captured, or fled—players' choice.
6: Completely routed. they are all dead, captured, or fled—players' choice.

Now, how would I hack this into a pre-existing game like B/X? Perhaps I'd add a d6 for each THAC0 score improvement. Multiple d6 if Turn Undead was used against low-HD opponents, that could probably work. I'd probably just start playing with it and come up with solutions as they arose.

But I'm more interested in what a new game that uses this combat would look like. Would it use Otherkind Dice for everything? I'm of two minds about that. Games that have a single resolution mechanic are usually easier to pick up and play. Grab some d6s and the relevant index cards and you're set. That sounds fun! On the other hand, Otherkind works best when there's at least three result cards in play whenever a roll is called for. It could be a challenge to make a game that includes everything I want to leave to chance while also only rolling when the situation is complicated enough to warrant three result cards. 

And then there's the ritual of it all. This is hardly new territory, but resolution mechanics are rituals we enact while playing make-believe. And even if we can resolve everything in a game by flipping a coin or rolling a d20 and adding a number, there is something fascinating to me about the various parts of a game using different rituals to find out what happens next. 

Anyway, I'm excited to continue tinkering on an old-school game that speedruns combat. I'm sure I will come up with enough of something to play with my friends. I already have a near-complete draft of overland travel on a hex map that uses Otherkind Dice. Maybe you'll see that in a future post. 

*I originally posted about this on Bluesky. I was encouraged by Amanda P to blog about it, so credit to them for this entry as well.

Three Notes Make a Chord

This one's about NPCs.

I've been using published materials in the games I run for about two years. Dungeons, modules, hex/point crawls, pamphlet adventures—you get the idea. Before then, everything was home-made. For decades. So this has been a new experience, and an incredibly fun one.

But I can't help feel something is missing. Granted, this is often intentional. The majority of these games I've sat behind the screen for could be categorized with one or more three letter abbreviation ending in SR. The games, and the things people make for them, leave a lot of blank canvas on purpose. My overactive imagination loves that. 

Many of those blanks, I can fill in at the table. The one piece of the canvas I like to work on beforehand is NPCs. Sometimes you'll crack open a module and they'll just be a stat-block, maybe a defining characteristic or a single facet of their personality. They are hardly ever fleshed out in a way that facilitates speaking extemporaneously as them while portraying an actual person as complicated as you or me. 

In other words, they tend to be one note. Which can be okay—good, even. After all, a guard checking the PCs' weapons at the gate doesn't necessarily need to be a complicated character. But what about when I want a level of depth that one note doesn't provide? 

I make a chord. Which is to say, add two notes. What are those notes? Whatever is missing that will help me improvise dialogue as a dynamic character. This isn't about creating memorable characters, that's for the players to decide. If anything, it's a tool for an improv scene. 

There are two things I want in my three note chords. One is a mannerism. What sets them apart from another NPC I've played, what sets them apart from myself just speaking to my friends? The other thing is drives. Plural, as in two of them. Two desires, whether material or cerebral, that cannot be achieved simultaneously. Dual north stars that will inform how I act and what I say that I can toggle between.

Since this is an exercise in practicality, here's an example of an NPC I played:

Hiwa: She/her. Late 20s, brown skin, short black hair, dressed in fine Belarran clothes, always drinking wine. Drives: To sabotage House Zabala, to defy her aunt. 

This was at a noble's dinner party, hence the ever-present wineglass. There's my mannerism. I mimed holding it, I paused to drink from it, it was great. Then there's the conflicting drives. Her aunt was the head of a powerful guild, a noble-by-way-of-wealth, and House Zabala was the guild's greatest rival. So I get why she wanted to sabotage House Zabala, but I don't know why she wanted to defy her aunt. Maybe she resented the position she was put in, maybe she had a thing with a Zabalan noble. Whatever her internal conflict was didn't matter when it came to roleplaying as her. The important thing was I had two modes I could flip between. Every time the players spoke with her, even mid-conversation, she could feel the obligatory tug of duty or inversely decide she was a young woman there to party. 

She got quite drunk as the night wore on. Her plays at political maneuvering became sloppy and obvious, and rebelling against her aunt took precedent. By the end of the party, she was shielding her eyes against any light and complaining about every loud noise that rattled around her throbbing skull. Well and truly wine-drunk in the worst way. Would I have come up with all of that on the spot without a chord for her? Maybe, but probably not.

Naturally the session revolved around a murder mystery that the players solved quite brilliantly. But that's not the point of this story. There were 10 NPCs between the noble partygoers and their harried workstaff. The players interacted with all of them, could tell them all apart (even if they didn't always remember their names), and never quite knew what to expect when I opened my mouth because they couldn't peg these people as one-dimensional. 

It was our most memorable session of that campaign, one we all still look back on fondly. And for me, it wasn't just fun. It was easy, because I found a tool that works for me. 

I think about NPC chords every time I see one with a single note. I can't say I've been great at fleshing out characters in the supplemental material I've been using in recent years, but that's going to change. I'm about to start a Shadowdark campaign in The Gloaming from Cursed Scroll vol 1. So if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make some chords.