Agreed. I only like OSR game systems if “hacked” a bit. Small things like maximizing HP per level or applying ideas like “Fail Forward”, Fate points or 5e’s advantage/disadvantage. Or making zero HP “unconscious” rather than dead.
I actually do this in any game system, honestly. 5e included.
Have you given DCC a try? You have the level 0 funnel as a meat grinder (meant to be more more hilarious and tongue in cheek) but then after that you have some more of the power and adventure (with lots of craziness going on) with a stripped down 3.x inspired ruleset
Honestly no. I got a pretty big PDF library of that system on a Humble Bundle, but haven't delved too deeply. For me, the character funnel and specialty dice were initial turnoffs. I could ignore the funnel, but the special dice I'm not sure how to get around, considering we're exclusively on a VTT.
I would say give it a go. On reading, a lot of people dislike the idea of the funnel, but in practice, end up enjoying it. You still might not, but I’d honestly try it with a one shot. Most vtts should allow you to roll those funk dice
.I've never played a game using the Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland rules, but they seem feasible for this purpose? Basically, from my reading, hp is more about how much energy your character has and is not real harm. It is replenished after basically a short rest. After you run out of hp, damage is subtracted from your strength score and that represents actual wounds. There are no attack roles, and armor just provides damage reduction.
Take back the reigns, by force if you must. Haha
We'll see, I might basically say I'm gonna start it shortly after Guns and Gears comes out and then just kinda hold to that and see what happens, I've got our extended playgroup regularly asking when its gonna happen since they're not gaming much right now.
Makes more Worlds Without Number noises.
If you haven’t, I’d suggest taking a look at Principia Apocrypha. There are a few primers on OSR-style play, but this one does it in a PbtA-style list of principles.
Something like an osr with a slot inventory system can give you something akin to the modularity of pathfinder 2e but still in a stripped down rules-lite package. So lets say you are playing knave and you have 11 inventory slots and you start with the usual lantern, crowbar, etc, but as you go out and adventure you find magical items that do feat-like things. For each adventure you could decide which of these items to 'equip.'
I suspect one reason for that verbosity, IMHO, is that SWN/WWN is very much trying to also teach and elucidate on how to run a sandbox.Makes more Worlds Without Number noises.
Yes, I know. The book is overly verbose. I think it reads fine, but it obscures the rules (especially compared to Old-School Essentials). However, if you want a system where characters start out pretty awesome, and have a chance of surviving being Morally Wounded, WWN does that.
The sandbox creation sections are generally much better than the player-facing rules ones. The part on building the backdrop for your setting makes extensive use of bolded text to call out the important steps. It’s very easy to know what you need to do, and you can then read more on what that entails if you’re not sure. The rules sections mostly aren’t like that. For example, if you want to know what’s involved with preparing and casting spells, you need to parse a page or so of text to get everything. It doesn’t have to be like OSE, but WWN could be a lot better.
Check out Necrotic Gnome’s adventures for Old-School Essentials. Excellent keys (including adversary rosters on the maps for many of them), Jaquayed dungeons, and some pretty weird and interesting stuff. I converted Winter’s Daughter to PF2 for my group, and they loved it.
I also really like the formatting in their adventures. I would almost call it game-changing. I don't think Paizo or Wizards could do it in their products because so much more information is needed.
I don’t think I can agree. The only differences between the key format Necrotic Gnome uses and what Paizo and WotC do is Necrotic Gnome uses bulleted lists to organize information (quite effectively, typically) and replaces the boxed text with a descriptive block. Some Necrotic Gnome adventures also use adversary rosters (monsters are depicted on the map, so you can see who is nearby), but that’s not a key thing.
The problem with keys that present information inefficiently is that they’re hard to use at the table. It shouldn’t be necessary to prep the key to run an adventure. One should be able to use it as-is, which is unfortunately not true of many pre-written adventures. Technology won’t fix that.
