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.

Previous update - Next update

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.

Next update