The Ticking Clock - My favorite mechanic for Death

How death and dying are handled in most OSR games, even between different editions of old-school D&D, varies wildly. The most popular version, B/X, has death happen immediately when a PC reaches 0 hit points (and usually even has most of your magic items destroyed, just to rub it in). 

I've looked at dozens of games that want to make this slightly less lethal, more lenient, and most of them handle things the same way: You don't die immediately at 0HP. But you might just after. Roll death saves every round after dying to see if you die. Roll on a death-and-dismemberment table each time after going down to 0HP that you take damage. Die at -10 HP or some other negative number. 

Immediate death at 0HP has something a lot of these solutions unfortunately throw away. There is an incredible tension you get when a single stray arrow or lucky hit has a good chance of killing you forever. The more you can reliably just drop unconscious, and suffer no lasting consequences, the less hesitant you become to solve things with your sword all the time. You'll probably be fine, right?

Now obviously that's not suited for what every system is trying to do. There are some games that I think don't need death at all - 5e manages to be simultaneously too non-lethal and too lethal; death is so rare that you can reliably get into fights to solve problems, which the game is built around and assumes you need to do, but that rarity means it never feels like a part of the intended gameplay loop. Death in 5e is a record-scratch moment of "Wait, what? That's not supposed to happen". Once you dip below a certain threshold for lethality, death becomes an interruption to the game, not an integral part of it; I think such systems would be better with no random chance of character death at all, instead using alternative consequences for losing. Because losing in 5e means dying, and dying interrupts the cool heroic-fantasy story you're trying to tell, so the GM just fudges the dice or pulls a deus ex machina out of their ass to save you and get things back to what you're actually there for.

I don't run OSR systems to be heroic fantasy. I run them to be survival horror, or at least any genre where combat is a big deal. Where risking getting stabbed is incredibly dangerous. I think it leads to more interesting games than systems where combat is something you can rely on, because murdering things is one of those hammers that makes every problem look like a nail. When combat does break out, it's tense! You could die! And so death-at-0HP seems ideal.

Unfortunately, this comes into conflict with another ideal.

It's very very common to see players shy away from OSR games with the reasoning, "How am I supposed to get invested in my character if they could die at any moment??" This is not an unfounded criticism I can handwave; I got my start with RPGs running 5e for my friends, and for all my critiques of that system, that improv-theatre part of it where we got invested in our little underdogs and their stories was the main attraction. It was the biggest reason we showed up to play, second only to getting to hang out with friends. It was fun. And addressing this is important if we want to have the same sort of fun with the OSR games I run instead of 5e now.

So how do I deal with this in my games? Where's the sweet spot between tension and character investment? Let's talk about Grave.

Grave's an odd, very nice game. It's a Knave hack designed for dark-souls games, which gives it some odd quirks that contrast typical sword-and-sorcery fare, like how all the players are undead who collect and eat physical tangible souls to level up. One of these quirks is the death system.

A PC in Grave can die at least 10 times before for-reals actually dying for good and being removed from the game. This seems absurdly generous compared to your typical OSR game, but a few points: You still die at 0HP, and critically, your extra deaths never come back. When a low-level rat scores a lucky hit and drops you in a fight, that wound never recovers. And the permanency of that means PCs still treat entering combat as a life-or-death decision. Every death accumulated is a ticking clock.

I think this is also more satisfying from a narrative/roleplay standpoint. In a traditional D&D game, including 5e, death is usually sudden and unsatisfying because it's so uncommon and out-of-nowhere. No real tension because it so rarely happens. But what if you could see your death inching closer?

Over the course of a campaign, watching a PC rack up more and more permanent scars, you can see it coming. Your death. It's a ticking clock, and both the player and their character can tell they're getting closer and closer to death's door. You could get a lot of drama out of that. Creating this sense of inevitable doom, tinged with a little hope that maybe you'll retire before the clock ticks down completely, allows a player to prepare for the loss of their character so it's not so sudden. Your final death becomes closure instead of a story cut short.

I've been thinking about how to implement this in more standard fantasy games (where you aren't playing undead that constantly revive) and I think I want to keep a little bit of a die roll, a little uncertainty, but still ensure you get a few guaranteed not-deaths for the first few times you fall in battle. So here's how I'd probably handle it:

Every time you reach 0HP, you gain 1 scar. Then, roll 1d6 + your total number of scars. If it's 10 or higher, you die. If not, you fall unconscious. Taking damage while unconscious gives you another scar and another roll as if you just dropped to 0HP again.

I love the image of a PC visibly racking up more and more scars on their body as they get close to death, especially being able to say where each one came from. Getting more world-weary and paranoid as the clock ticks down and they can feel death catching up to them. Maybe have near-death PCs get little visits from the grim reaper or something.

Progress on Iron Halberd (IV) - Gods, Clerics & Miracles

Back to Iron Halberd! It's been a long while (five months, actually) since I've had anything to say, primarily because I've been focused on other projects, and because the work I had been doing on Iron Halberd hasn't been in a polished enough state for me to want to show off. But here we are with some real news!

So far I've been pretty happy with Iron Halberd's character customization. While it's technically classless, I tend to think of it as more having just a very flexible multiclassing system between three extremes: Fill your inventory with big weapons and heavy armor for a Fighter; with tools, rope, caltrops, lockpicks, and such for a Thief; and with spellbooks and potions for a Wizard. 

Out of the four classic D&D archetypes, that leaves only the Cleric missing.

Clerics are tricky, because having a cleric means having healing magic. I have complicated feelings on healing magic. Iron Halberd uses relatively slow natural healing; though even that healing rate is much more generous than old-school D&D (or at least B/X which I'm familiar with) which had you restore only 1d3 hit points every rest. This is something I actually really like; healing so slowly gives a real weight to the damage you take. Being stabbed with a sword feels dangerous, and taking damage isn't just a today problem.

Healing magic can throw a wrench into that whole dynamic. Iron Halberd's spells work on a per-day basis; you spend Spirit to cast them, can cast them in a worse form for no resource cost, and you get back half your Spirit every day. If I just throw in a "Cure Wounds" spell that restores a d6 hit points (or more or less since IH's magic is the roll-on-tables kind) then the whole balance of that slower healing is thrown off. Worse, it means every party needs a healbot because the difference between a healer-less party and a healer-having one is just way too many hit points.

So, divine magic can't just be another magic tradition like arcane spells or necromancy. What I ended up going with instead was more interesting.

Being a cleric is kind of outside that whole system the other three archetypes use - it's only tangentially related to your item slots and your Spirit resource (both of which you can use to be a better Cleric, but you don't need either of them). You become a cleric by getting the attention of a god enough that they extend the offer to you. So any player can become a cleric midway through a campaign; it's more a condition than a class in the traditional sense. It's a reward for what you do in the world, the same way gold and magic items and followers are.

The relationship with your god is deliberately front-and-center in the cleric's mechanics. All cleric powers are fueled by it. Upon becoming a cleric, you get a resource called Divine Favor which starts at a pretty low number. Usually 3. That's the max amount of favor you can have at once. How do you increase your favor? By impressing your god, doing great deeds in their name, and furthering their goals. Your maximum favor goes up by 1 to 3 (depending on the significance of your deed) when you do something big for your god.

As long as you have any favor, you can cast miracles. Similar to regular spellcasting, divine magic is a gamble, but in a different way; for regular spells, you always pay the same cost, but the outcome of the spell is random. For miracles, the outcome is usually exactly what you want if successful, but the cost is a die roll. You tell the GM what you want to ask your god for, and the GM tells you what die you roll to see how much favor it'll cost, with a bigger die for bigger miracles. Gods are fickle and unreliable.

The miracles themselves are undefined and open-ended. You can ask your god for literally anything within the scope of your god's domain, and it's up to the GM to decide how plausible that is. Why so vague? Well, mostly to give the GM more leeway in deciding what the hell gods even are. Or what role they serve in the GM's setting. This whole system is optional and designed to be opt-in for GMs that have gods in their settings at all.

Of course, the book provides examples. I think any system this vague and open-ended needs pretty clear examples to not feel like the GM is being asked to do the designer's work for them. 

Hoping to get more Iron Halberd news out soon as well, particularly for the new update's Stronghold system.

Previous update

GRAVE Campaign Diary (I) - The Sandbox

I have a regular thursday group I play RPGs with - at first D&D 5e, but we've been branching out - and I've finally gotten a chance to start a campaign of Grave. 

I've talked about how much I like the system before on this blog, but by this point I'm actually a few sessions in and I wanted to record how things have gone so far. Not only is this my first time with the system, but it's my first time running a real honest-to-god sandbox game - no plot, no predetermined story, just a world and a bunch of little adventure hooks. Until now the closest I've done is run D&D-likes in a sort of middle ground, where between sessions sometimes I'll ask players what they plan to do next, but all of those still mostly had overarching predetermined plots. They've come close, and we had fun, but I'm going all in on sandbox play this time, and it's gone great so far.

The setting
Grave is explicitly designed for Dark Souls inspired games, so I figured I'd rip off the main gimmick of dark souls and have the setting be defined by a cycle it's stuck in, of constantly fading and then being reborn. After a few hundred years the world starts to decay, corruption spreads, and someone has to gather up the souls of the strongest warriors in the world and use them in a ritual to start the cycle over again - and the next Age is themed after whoever ended the previous age. The setting's currently in the tail end of the Age of Spiders.

The players are undead, which show up around the tail end of every age with an instinctual drive to kill all the demigods and rebirth everything. Stuff like souls as currency and players being undead are part of Grave's mechanics, and I wanted a setting designed around the premise, and so far it's worked out well.

The sandbox
A lot of my other attempts at a sandbox have boiled down to linear stories where the players just follow a predetermined path until it ends and then they pick another linear path. I've concluded the reason they end up like this is because of the way I hand out adventure hooks. I'd give out too few, and the ones I did give out were usually too big to ignore - very little room for the players to decide what adventures they wanted to go on.

Here, I went with a different strategy. First, I slapped one big but very open-ended and optional quest in front of the players: Kill all the demigods that rule the land, here's where they live. Or don't. The world won't end if you blow off the quest, it's just something your undead gut is bugging you to do, to give you something to work towards to get you motivated. If you do want to, there's five of 'em, they're all in different directions, and they're all way higher level than you are so if you wanna take em out you need to figure out how the hell how to first.

Then: supplement the one big quest with a bunch of smaller, little adventure hooks, mostly from a rumor table. The rumors provide little bits of info about the surrounding area and what can be found in it - "some say X treasure can be found in Y area, north of Z", etc. Since I'm running an OSR system where you mostly have to find new spells, weapons, and souls (XP and currency) in-world to progress your character, treasure hunting becomes much more appealing than it ever was in my 5e campaigns - I've never had players so motivated just by greed, in a good way.

The thing tying everything together is a hexmap, which I'm new to. When I ran 5e I'd always just waive travel time, but the hexmap is the thing that makes everything here work - the world is laid out concretely enough that I always have a solid answer when a question is asked. How long does it take to get from point A to point B? Let me look at the map. 3 days. What does that entail? Exactly this many random encounters. This structure is critical for ensuring interesting stuff happens - more importantly, it's for ensuring interesting stuff that I didn't come up with happens, because coming up with stuff constitutes effort on my part and feels... deliberate. In worse cases, contrived. The hexmap fixes that.

The players
I'm running for my thursday group, which has three players: an Actor who really likes to lean into the roleplay and get into character, a Schemer who's always getting his character into trouble and poking and prodding at everything in my games, and an Audience member who's pretty passive but always shows up on time and always happy to be there. It's a good group, with good chemistry, where I very rarely get silence when I ask "what do you do?". I'm just going to refer to them with the titles I've given them here, for their privacy.

The Campaign!
I started off with essentially a prison break. There are factions who support the status quo and therefore don't want the current age to end, and undead are by default sorted into wanting the age to end, so the status-quo faction rounds up wandering undead and locks 'em up (which tends to be more effective than killing them because of the whole multiple-deaths mechanic that Grave gives to PCs). 

So the PCs wake up in a cave filled with mostly empty coffins, one of them actually currently locked in a coffin. We do the thing where everyone introduces their characters - Actor is playing Slaine the Unforgiven ("the unforgiven" is what they rolled on the big d50 table of titles Grave has. Did I mention Grave has that? It's cool as hell.), a big burly fighter-type whose player asked to reflavor Slaine's two-handed weapon as a big frying pan so she could be a chef (obviously I said yes). Schemer is playing Temple the Bold, an ambitious dwarf who gets to shoot lightning since he picked a homebrew class tied to my setting. And Audience Member is playing Jin the Inheritor, a desert warrior with a little bit of spellsword flavor that gets to teleport around.

Slaine died within 20 minutes from sticking her head in a hole and there turning out to be a monster inside. The players need to unlearn bad habits, but Grave's multiple lives make it a good system for new players who need to do that unlearning.

Jin died near the end of the session in the big fight where they broke everyone out. The exit was heavily fortified with watchmen, a couple tower-mounted ballistae, and a big gate that required a turn of two people turning separate cranks near the gate simultaneously to open. I, also, need to unlearn bad habits - this gate was essentially a big combat encounter, a boss fight, that I didn't really include any way to bypass, and the NPC allies in the dungeon were primed for a fight. But defaulting to combat is a bad habit. It's something the players should only ever opt into because of how lethal it is. Entirely my mistake. 

The ogre they bribed to help them died in the fight. The entire lead up to the fight ended up being a very good little tutorial for OSR play - lots of very dangerous encounters the players managed to make the most of instead of rushing into combat. They took to it very well. 

That was the tutorial. There to get the players acclimated to exploring and dealing with random encounters with mostly just their wits. Once that gate was open and they got out into the wider world came the sandbox. They found their way to a town and I broke out the rumor table, and they must've spent an hour or two just scheming based on the results of the table and the big quest with the demigods I laid out in front of them. Debating where to go, what to do, what to bring along. I know a lot of people think of that stuff as the part you slog through to get to the actual fun, but I live for it. It means decisions. And making my players make hard decisions might be the most fun I get out of GMing.

Schemer, in my 5e games, was always the crazy minmaxer who'd get so damn excited about the absolute bullshit he could pull off with the right combination of character options. At first, he was a little disappointed that Grave's system meant he couldn't have the stuff he wanted for his build unless he stumbled upon it, but I responded "no you don't, figure out where the stuff you want is and go get it yourself" and he said "we can do that??". And then it all clicked for him and since that moment he's been an ambitious bastard. He's already saying concerning things about building an airship. It's great.

One of the things the players rolled on the rumor table told them about a dungeon rumored to have a small fortune of souls (which for them means money) hidden at the bottom, guarded by something terrible. The whole session at the outpost, they'd been lamenting their lack of funds as they looked at all the potential hirelings they could recruit, gear they could use, rations they were running out of, every little expense being a tough decision. Which was fantastic - it means they're going to be greedy as hell. That's what I want in a game economy; always more stuff to motivate you. I never want a situation where players have a pile of money and no idea what the hell to do with it all. That means they disengage and treasure stops motivating them as much. Once my players learned where a ton of treasure was, they all resolved to head there next session.

Anyway, the thing down there was a medusa. There's a lot of treasure in this little catacomb, very tempting, so I wanted an equally nasty monster to go with it. In a game like Grave where deaths are more lenient, a medusa turning you to stone - a fate worse than death - is the perfect survival-horror monster. The players make their way through the woods to the catacombs, a place used to store the bodies of some long-forgotten civilization in the hopes the bodies would rise as undead when the age neared its end, and this is where they got to experience tracking torchlight for the first time.

Unfortunately Grave's rules for torches are extremely lenient - you can fit five in a single item slot and buy five of them for a single soul each (for context, weapons range from 100-300 souls). They're absurdly cheap and take up very little space. This is bad - it means they're no longer an interesting decision to make, just a tax. I'll have to increase the price of torches going forward. 

After a few hours of very careful dungeon crawling with lucky results on the random encounter table, the players reach the bottom and encounter the medusa. It's by no means friendly, but doesn't like to engage up close; PCs can still attack in melee (poorly) while not looking at it, but attacking from range is nearly impossible without getting a glimpse of it. After a tense conversation, it decided to let them get killed stealing from the actual guardian of the treasure - a big stone golem posted near the most prestigious person buried here, in a room filled with souls for her to take should she ever rise as undead.

The golem patrols the treasure room and is programmed never to run too far from it, even to chase intruders. It's immune to most attacks and incredibly sturdy, so the PCs can't do much to it. It's also much slower than the PCs, so it can't do much to them, either - so they figure they can essentially kite it infinitely while they take whatever they want, running into the treasure room, stealing some souls, and then running back before the golem catches up (since it wanders back to the treasure room the moment it exceeds its patrol range). 

After the second cycle of this, the golem's limited intelligence decides to block the entrance to the room instead of sit in it until a PC arrives. I'm also rolling encounters and tracking torchlight the longer they do this. So it isn't quite as reliable a strategy as they first thought. In the end, with how much they'd run into down here, they elected to leave the dungeon with their riches and return later after figuring out what to do about the golem.

This is good! It means the players are un-learning the habit of "this is the content the DM set in front of us, so we're doing it" (a habit I encourage in more linear campaigns, but here I'm ready to tackle the daunting task of pre-making an entire region to explore before asking the PCs where they want to go) and instead learning that encounter balance is their job. I don't scale encounters to meet the party, just set powerful monsters where they should be, and if the players bite off more than they can chew, they suffer the consequences. So seeing them internalize that mindset, and decide themselves what they're confident they can tackle, is a win for me.

That was the end of last session. There's more to explore in that dungeon and in the surrounding area, more dungeons to find scattered around the region and more rolls to make on the rumor table once they regroup at the outpost. I have no idea what's in store, in a good way. This whole sandbox thing, all the tables to roll on to find things out instead of having me just decide what happens, is like winding up a big complicated rube-goldberg machine and watching it go off. I made the machine, but I have no clue what results will come of turning it on. All I have to do between sessions is expand the regions I've laid out.

A nice thing about making players track rations is it makes exploring harder the further you go from civilization - the further you go, the more rations you need, and you can only carry so many. So as the GM I make all of the adventure sites closest to the outpost first, since that's the place they want to keep returning to between adventures and (at least at first) don't stray too far from for fear of running out of food. Now that they have a good bit of treasure, that might change, but we'll see.

Progress on Iron Halberd (III) - Crafting & other subsystems

This week's build of the game can be found here.

As Iron Halberd gets closer to playtest release, I've mostly been going through and making sure all of the little subsystems are in place. There's a decent amount of moving parts that interact with each other, with a heavy focus on time and inventory management. Let's go down the list!

Crafting
Crafting is the big thing here. It takes some inspiration from Kibblestasty's crafting system for 5e, to give credit where credit's due. It's more of a skeleton to make it easier for the GM to build on than it is a comprehensive list of everything you could craft.

• Most crafting ingredients are given a classification within the system, but are still also listed as whatever they are in-world, and both the classification (e.g. something like 'uncommon monster organ' for the heart of an ogre) and the specific item itself (ogre heart) are relevant.
• Crafting recipes are mostly suggestions, and if the player and GM agree something should work, than it does even if it deviates from what the rules list. This explosive potion's recipe might call for gunpowder, but if you have the gas glands harvested from a fire-breathing dragon, which produce flammable fumes the dragon ignited for its fire breath, that should probably make a perfectly good - no, better - substitute.
• Crafting ingredients are broken down into creature parts, reagents, and ores, which are then classified with a source, type and rarity. Other items can also be used as crafting ingredients, but items whose primary purpose is crafting are classified as those things under the crafting system.
• There's specific recipes and tables to roll on for brewing potions, scribing spell scrolls, repairing and forging weapons/armor/tools, and creating artefacts (aka magic items). The GM is heavily encouraged to use the crafting system more as a foundation for their own ideas than a comprehensive list of craftable items.

Exploration & Downtime
Time outside of combat is measured in dungeon turns & downtime turns. Dungeon turns are 5-10 minutes, downtime turns are a good chunk of the day (you get one per PC at the end of a day after setting up camp, or two if you're staying in a city and not adventuring). Hexcrawling is done on a timescale of downtime turns while dungeon crawling is done on a timescale of dungeon turns. Many other subsystems like crafting and foraging are measured in downtime turns as well.

Dungeon crawling has simplistic rules for light & visibility, differentiating between candle, torch and lantern light with more light meaning a higher chance of being detected in random encounters.

Followers
There's a little minigame for randomly rolling multiple prospective followers whenever the PCs are in town looking to hire. Followers have randomly rolled HP, item slots, starting gear, personality traits and faults. All followers have a fault and they're designed explicitly to make dealing with followers a little more of a hassle than just "you pay me so I'll do what you say". They still generally follow orders, but they might be cowardly, greedy, reckless, argumentative, or otherwise difficult to deal with. It makes each individual follower a bit more than just stats on a page. 

I'd like to think it makes the hiring process a bit more interesting, too. Are you gonna take the cheerful dwarf with a hefty 8 hit points, but has a habit of recklessly charging into danger? Or the naive young blacksmith's apprentice who rolled 2 hit points but also happens to own some lockpicks that might come in handy?

XP & Genre
Iron Halberd uses different XP awarding tables based on what tone and direction you want your campaign to have. Currently there's only two: Heroic & treasure hunting. Heroic awards the most XP for helping others while treasure hunting rewards you mostly for discovering loot. Hope to add more.

Magic! (and cool stuff martials can do)
I really enjoyed figuring out this game's magic system, and I'm very happy with the niche it currently occupies. The last thing I wanted is a 5e situation where martials are limited to one niche (killing stuff) while magic-users are just as good at killing stuff and can also fill every other role you could possibly want to fill. So I flipped the script here: Martials are the flexible, versatile characters, while casters are limited to the niche situations their spells cover, the tradeoff for the rare taste of unfathomable arcane power.

The magic and maneuver system here are where the game's DCC and Grave influence is strongest. Everyone uses the same resource, Spirit, for both spells and martial maneuvers. There's no list of codified stuff your martial can do - if you have spirit, you can spend it to do something extra fancy on top of attacking. Disarm, parry, leap from balconies, swing on chandeliers, throw pocket sand, etc. in the same turn that you stab someone with your sword. It's limited only by the player's imagination and what the GM agrees is reasonable (which should be most things!). By design, it's open to whatever a martial might want to do with it. It's reliable, flexible, and covers many situations.

Then there's spells. Spells are unreliable, unpredictable, rigidly specific and rare. But some of the things they can accomplish eclipses the feats of the most skilled warrior - that's the tradeoff for all of those downsides. It's magic, it bends reality, warps minds, stops time, creates, destroys, grants all your wishes, as long as you roll really high on that casting roll and don't turn yourself into a frog or whatever. 

Spells can also be cast at-will, without spending any limited resources, albeit with a much smaller casting roll bonus than if you spent spirit. If you would roll 1d12+6, you now roll 1d4+2. Note that a d4 has a much higher chance of rolling a natural 1 and now you see the tradeoff. Casting a spell at-will and having it fail locks you out of casting that spell without spirit for the day, too. I included at-will casting specifically so a caster who rolled a +0 for their Spirit stat would still be viable, but even other than that edge case I think it introduces a neat little gamble.

I also really like the quirks. Some spells have a little quirk table: The first time you cast the spell, if it has a quirk table, you roll to see what your quirk is. And then every time thereafter that you cast the spell, it has that quirk. Quirks range from different aesthetic changes (see what horrible thing your Toxic Cloud spell smells like!) to different mechanical tradeoffs for the spell (your Charm Person spell is big enough to cast over two people at once, but it's now way flashier and harder to hide). Only about a third of spells have quirks so far but I'd like to add more if I think of any.

You can start with, at most, three spells, but that's a rare edge case you'd have to be very lucky to get. You can only ever guarantee yourself one spell at character creation, if you're willing to give up the potential for all your other equipment to not suck.

Spells are also mostly utility. Only about 1/4 of them directly deal damage, while another 1/4 don't do that but still have some reasonable combat use. 

Hey, I think we're about done
Yeah, this should probably be enough to run a nice functional game of Iron Halberd. At least as far as I can think of, all the loose ends are tied up that were preventing this from being fully playable, like the last couple spells missing and not having "downtime turn" defined anywhere in the book. 

I'll probably throw this thing up on itch soon and spread it around. At time of writing though I'm tired and have a D&D game tomorrow so I'm going to sign off and pass out. If you've been excited for the game, it's playable now, so give it a go (character sheets are linked in last week's post).

Previous update

Here, have a Zelda-like Knave hack: Octave

Yes, I'm still working on Iron Halberd. Writing posts about Iron Halberd is harder than writing the actual game, so I'm just late on those blog posts. But while I was doing that, I got distracted by another project, and while that's usually bad, this time it resulted in an actually fully finished, playable, complete game!

Here's Octave, a Zelda-like sword-and-song style Knave hack. 

A short rundown of what's changed from Knave to make it suit Zelda's lighthearted heroic fantasy more, as opposed to Knave's gritty sword-n-sorcery:

• Dying is replaced with a slightly more storygame-y system, where dropping to 0HP doesn't kill you but recovering from it moves the bad guys' plans forward. What would be a TPK instead means the bad guy wins and you have to deal with the fallout. Death mostly only comes from an opt-in heroic sacrifice mechanic where players can give their character a dramatic death to hold off enemies or make one last stand against a villain. Starting HP is also increased.

• Characters are randomly rolled but still equally competent, so you can't end up with a crazy overpowered or useless hero. The random starting gear is tweaked to include iconic zelda stuff like bombs & boomerangs, and XP is replaced with finding heart containers to increase your stats.

• The Stamina system from Grave is adapted here for combat maneuvers & spellcasting. It fits well. Spells are also split into "Songs" cast with instruments for heroes, and "Dark magic" for villains (and less scrupulous heroes who risk being corrupted into a villain).

• A mechanic for villains' evil plans to give the losing-moves-the-bad-guys-plans-forward thing some structure. The game requiring an explicit capital-b Bad Guy isn't super fitting for the old-school playstyle, but it fits right in with the type of stories zelda games tell, so it works here.

• Lots of other slight tweaks for the zelda vibe. You play explicitly heroic characters, some of the random backgrounds you can roll are things like 'royalty' or 'prophesied hero', and the PCs are a bit more special than the peasant nobodies you roll in Knave, which changes the feel of the game quite a bit.

Is this even technically still OSR anymore now that it feels more like heroic fantasy? I have no idea. But it's done and it's zelda-y and I'm proud of it, so here it is. It's also pay-what-you-want, so checking it out costs only your time.

Progress on Iron Halberd (II) - Let's chat about character creation

When I ran Knave for the first time a few months ago, I was expecting a lot more friction than I got. This is the group that until recently I mostly ran 5e for, and going from 5e to Knave is a pretty big jump in expectations and style. Rolling for stats is something I never liked in 5e, but I wanted to take this new game on its own terms and trust that it knew what it was doing. 

I stated we were rolling for stats but the players didn't have to use all of the random personality tables, emphasizing that that stuff was optional since I didn't really expect the players to enjoy having so little control over the characters they got. And while they were a little hesitant like I expected, once the dice started rolling we were all hooked. There's something weirdly magical about character creation being out of your hands, just revealing them bit by bit one die roll at a time. Being handed a character that you didn't hand-craft and just having to make do. It gives you the same feeling as tearing the wrapping paper off a christmas present, filled with anticipation and wondering what's inside.

The whole experience really sold me on random character generation, so that's what Iron Halberd does. You can just let players assign their stats deliberately, if you really want; I physically can't stop you. But players are encouraged to roll with it, and also to go the whole way and use the actually-optional random tables for the RP side of your character (appearance, personality, background etc). 

I'm going to go into further detail but first I want to ask a small favor, actually. Take this week's version of the Core Book and either this printout character sheet, or this little text-file character sheet I made in notepad and just roll up a character. Shouldn't take more than, say, ten minutes? And post a comment with your thoughts, if you have any. Or don't, if you don't feel like it, but I'd appreciate it. Anyway!

Iron Halberd's PCs
The one thing I didn't like about Knave's stat gen system was that, being a traditional roll-for-stats system, some characters suck and some characters are overpowered. The appeal of rolling, for me, is keeping what kind of character you get pretty much out of your hands. I never found the power differences worth anything. I know some people swear by their rolled-complete-garbage-stats characters, and for them that's the appeal of rolling, but it's never fit for me.

So I went and stole Knave 2e's stat gen system instead and tweaked it to suit my purposes. Everyone ends up with the same stat total, but where they put their highest stats is randomly decided. I had a more complicated system for this in last week's version, but after 4 of my 5 playtesters all got the rule wrong despite my efforts to make it understandable, I decided it was too convoluted. Someone who buys the game and runs it out of the box won't have me there to explain shit, and it didn't gel with the more streamlined direction I want for this game. So we have the current stat gen system which I'm very happy with.

The six attributes are:
Power which increases the damage of your weapons and the potency of your spells.
Vitality which increases your max HP and HP regained from resting.
Stamina which increases your item slots & Fortitude save.
Speed which increases your initiative & Reflex save.
Accuracy which increases your to-hit rolls.
Spirit which fuels maneuvers and spells & your Will save.

Now you'll notice Strength and Intelligence and the like aren't there. The reason for that is because every stat spread needs to be useful for each character; a +3 Power, +0 Spirit character makes an equally good weapon-using, heavy-armored melee fighter as a +0 Power, +3 Spirit character. It's just how that power manifests that changes based on stats.

I guess being a thief-y character is an exception if being a thief to you means being fast and accurate, but to me being a thief is more about spending those limited item slots on lockpicks, rope, torches, a 10-foot pole, a crowbar and a grappling hook instead of spellbooks or heavy weapons. You could play a big, strong, lumbering thief just as well as a dextrous and agile one.

Speaking of, your starting gear is also random, but you get to pick a themed starting gear kit. Traveler's kit for an even spread, soldier's kit for a guarantee of some heavy combat gear, dungeoneer's kit for the kind of tools I mentioned above that thieves use, or scholar's kit for some magical stuff and at least one spellbook. 

The overarching theme here is that you randomly roll lots of stuff, but you can still nudge your character in the direction you want them (though of course you can always just randomize everything if you want). You get to pick your ancestry, pick the general mechanical theme of your character, but the exact way that character manifests can still surprise you. You can make the choice to swap two of your stats, but doing so forces you to randomly roll your ancestry and starting gear kit. I like the blend of random rolling and still presenting the player with choices to make; making the player pick small aspects of their randomly created character helps to sort of hook them, make them invested. 

Mostly diegetic progression
Once character creation is over, leveling is slow and the rewards are small. You get +1 to a stat every level. That's it. Why would I reduce the impact of leveling this much? Isn't getting stronger fun?

There's two main reasons. The first is verisimilitude (i.e. realism). I'm not really a huge simulationist, most of the time; I only care about realism to the point of fixing immersion-shattering discrepancies between the mechanics and the fiction. But the progression of character strength in modern D&D, and the obligation to scale up encounters to meet it, is immersion-shattering. A farmboy starts adventuring at 1st-level, and four months later he's powerful enough to wipe out his hometown single-handedly. Nothing that threatened him at 1st-level is remotely threatening at 10th-level, so now instead of rats and bandits he fights mindflayers and dragons. 

I hate that. I put up with it when I run 5e and we sweep the immersion-breakage under the rug, but I hate it. It's reasonable that you'd get better at adventuring the more adventuring you do, but modern D&D takes it too far for my liking. A 5th-level PC is so far beyond a 1st-level PC that 1st-level problems no longer matter.

So Iron Halberd does let you get stronger, but more slowly. More believably, is the intent. You need to be 9th-level before you're twice as strong as a 1st-level character, numerically. At least disregarding magic items, alliances, political power, etc.

The second reason for the slow progression is those things I just mentioned. All of those ways you progress in-universe, tied to your in-universe accomplishments. In modern D&D all of that stuff is the side dish - your class is the main course, because your class gives you so many abilities that that's where most of your power comes from. Iron halberd flips that on its head. Gaining levels is just gravy; your real power comes from all the stuff you did and obtained during the game. 

You dive into a massive ghoul-filled crypt and emerge a week later wielding a badass black sword with a skull on the hilt. You discovered a long-lost magical incantation that drains the life force of your enemies. You're loaded with gold that you use to buy yourself a small fortress and hire an army to help you topple an evil empire. You're a hero to the people for solving their undead problem, and now they'll back you up, trust you, maybe even fight for you.

You probably gained a few +1s from leveling up in there, but that's not the real treasure you got from that adventure, now is it?

Oh right, the races
Well, not "races". They're called ancestries here, because it's 2022, and because a lot of people feel like the real problematic thing about races in fantasy RPGs is that they're called races, which I disagree with but whatever, it's fine and ancestry is a perfectly fine word for it. Anyway. The ancestries.

Human, elf, dwarf, halfling, goblin, orc. Nice simple selection. There's no real description of culture or anything like that here, since Iron Halberd is setting-agnostic. Maybe orcs are evil in your world, maybe not. They aren't in my settings, but I'm not your boss. Each ancestry gives you +1 to your choice of two stats and one ability. Humans get an extra background (skill), elves sense magic, dwarves sense gold (or other metals), halflings are lucky, goblins have good hearing (I felt like they should, since they're always drawn with those big bat ears) and orcs are just really physically strong. Each of these is obviously useful for dungeon-crawling in some way. I'm happy with how the abilities turned out.

The back of the book has a list of "uncommon" ancestries with more specific, bespoke abilities. They're in the back of the book because less people will look there, and that means they hopefully actually will be uncommon in people's home games. They explicitly require GM permission, and if they're allowed and you randomly roll your ancestry you have a smaller chance of getting one. I like them existing, but I sympathize with the annoyance at parties full of multicolored tieflings and bird-people with no humans in sight. More power to players who want to play those kinds of characters - I see nothing wrong with those characters individually, which is why I included the uncommon ancestries at all - but a whole party of them clashes with a lot of settings' intended tone and flavor.

Orcs and goblins don't feel out of place in a party to me, because of course a D&D fantasy world will be full of orcs and goblins. Minotaurs and satyrs and gnomes and demons are unusual in a party, but you know what those creatures are, because those things exist in most fantasy worlds - just in the monster manual instead of the playable character section. The races I dislike most are the ones where I won't recognize the name. If I'm skimming D&D races and I see "loxodon" or "kalashtar" or "firbolg" or whatever, I'm immediately uninterested in them because they don't already have a place in the fantasy I enjoy. They feel made-up and don't fit into settings not constructed around them.

The uncommon ancestries section also has stuff for human-centric and human-only settings. Human-centric makes you roll on a table for the chance to potentially play a non-human (with human always available) while human-only just locks away nonhumans entirely and lets you pick any stat when you play a human.

Oh right, the classes
Iron Halberd is completely classless. At least, by default, it is, if you're just using the core book. Anyone can use any weapon and any armor and any spell, so long as they spend the item slots on it.

But that system is really easy to bolt a classes mechanic onto, if you wanted, theoretically. It just subtracts your ability to use certain gear, and in exchange gives you some neat abilities. So the companion piece to the core book is a book of 32 different classes which effectively just use the base character as a template to add and subtract from. 

32 is obviously excessive for a streamlined OSR game. It's needlessly specific and self-indulgent. But because this is a streamlined OSR game, every class is like half a page, at most, which means they're actually really easy to make. If I ever want to make a game with this kind of unnecessarily huge shitload of character classes, I'm not gonna get another opportunity like this one!

A side effect of this is that classes are really easy to homebrew. Take 15 minutes, think about what fantasy the class is supposed to represent, subtract proficiencies as needed and then add fitting abilities roughly as strong as the removed proficiencies.

Since the core book is free and the classes aren't, I'm not going to link the class book here, but I will show a list of the classes included and class mechanics, plus a few examples of classes in the book. I had fun coming up with a few "normal person" classes like merchant, scholar, blacksmith, chef, etc. and balancing them against a more fantastic warrior or wizard - I think there's a lot of fun in having those exist in a fantasy world alongside more typical fantasy characters. Feels more grounded, and Iron Halberd's slow progression makes it the perfect game to play a Regular Farmer Guy getting dragged into an adventure.

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Progress on Iron Halberd (I)

I do a lot of rambling in this one so I'm just putting the good stuff here at the front: Here's the current Iron Halberd core book. It's not finished and it's sort of semi playable, maybe. Not really. Take a look.

My take on an old-school ruleset has been in development for a while, and it's far along enough I feel like it's in a good spot to show people. The driving direction behind this game was a realization of what exactly I want out of the OSR, because some things appeal to me and some don't - and I still haven't found anything that fully scratches the itch. The closest thing so far is Grave, a dark-souls-y Knave hack.

So Iron Halberd takes heavy inspiration from Grave and the game it was hacked from, Knave, but it does bolt on bits and pieces of Dungeon Crawl Classics, GLOG, B/X D&D itself, and a little bit of what I actually did like about D&D 5e and its kind sprinkled in. Here's the pitch:

All stats are useful for all characters. Any attribute spread on any character is roughly equally viable. The stats used in Iron Halberd are tailor-made to suit this concept instead of the six D&D scores. 

Randomization is lateral, not vertical. The appeal of rolling stats for me is randomizing how you play, not randomizing how good you are at your chosen playstyle. 5e completely fucks this up because you already pick what you're going to be, so all rolling stats does is give you a chance to either suck or be stronger than everyone else. The rolling method in Iron Halberd results in equally strong PCs whose power manifests in different ways.

Semi-random character generation. Characters are partly hand-crafted and partly randomized. Attribute spread is randomized, but your ancestry isn't. You have some control over which starting gear tables you roll on, but you still roll randomly on those tables. You can swap two attributes at the cost of randomizing your ancestry and starting gear pack.

Flexible melee & unpredictable magic. All characters have a limited resource which is used for both spellcasting (if you're a caster) or fancy combat maneuvers (if you use weapons). I don't have a codified list of maneuvers in here - it's just whatever you can come up with. Spells have you roll on that spell's table; they're unreliable and always a gamble.

Leveling doesn't do very much! When you level up, you gain +1 to one attribute (capped at 4 + a third of your current level) and that's it. Why? So leveling becomes a more secondary form of progression. Accruing magic items, favor with factions, followers, land, titles, all become more significant ways to increase your strength when compared to the relatively minor gains from leveling up. Oh, and because...

Less HP bloat, and the original meaning of 'bounded accuracy'. When 5e was being formed, one of the design tenets it touted was Bounded Accuracy. While this has come to mean the slower proficiency progression 5e has compared to other systems, the original intent was: Nothing in the game world becomes stronger just because you got stronger. 

Which... didn't end up happening, in 5e. You still need to pull out the CR 5 monsters because the players are level 5 now and CR 1 monsters' numbers are just too low for them to matter. And I'll put up with having to scale fights to my players so we can have a functional game, but the system takes a big hit to immersion because it feels like there's no in-universe consistency in how dangerous anything is. How dangerous is a stab wound, in-universe? If you're a 4 HP commoner, a longsword stab from someone with +0 strength has a 50% chance of dropping you instantly. If you're a 5th-level adventurer, being stabbed stops feeling like being stabbed unless you just start inflating the damage enemies deal. 

Any specific damage value is lethal to everyone below a level threshold, dangerous to anyone within that threshold, and insignificant to anyone above the threshold. It ends up feeling gamey and immersion-breaking. If, say, natural nonmagical fire you'd see in a burning building deals 1d6 damage each turn you stand in it, that'd be extremely lethal for regular people but laughably ineffective against most creatures in the world. 

So the highest HP you can ever have in Iron Halberd as a 20th-level character is about 30 (38 with optional classes if you build for it), and that's if you max Vitality to the detriment of your other stats. 1st-level characters start with about 13 on average, 18 at most. That's more than you'd start with in old D&D, but the slow scaling means you stay around roughly the same amount of being-stabbed-before-you-die for most of a campaign, which I like for verisimilitude reasons.

...at some point there I stopped making readable bullet points and started rambling, but I feel like the points I made there are important enough I'll leave it in. What else was I saying?

Anyway, there's the pitch. Many sections of the book are unfinished, but fleshed-out enough to give you an idea of where the system is headed as I keep filling the holes. The planned monetization scheme for this is the core book will be free forever, then as soon as I have any sort of supplement (which will most likely be the classes), a one-time $5 payment gets you that supplement plus all future content released for the game. As a customer I hate not being able to see a game before I buy it, so I like having some sort of free version available for my games so people can try them out before spending any money.

I'll probably post about specific parts of the game as I flesh them out more, but at time of writing I'm satisfied enough with the game so far to show it off.

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