Old School Essentials is so hackable. Hacking a game is the heart of old-school gaming. I am free to modify this and make it mine. I have already reviewed numerous books for this system, and the classes are so easy and expandable that this serves as a quick and simple 5E replacement.
I am done with 5E and our AI overlords. The 2024 game is 100% crunch now, with all mechanical rules in place, and it is a war game, not a role-playing game. There is a current crop of designers working on the Seattle games that focuses on tactical rules and tightening everything up, and you see this also in Pathfinder 2E, Draw Steel, and other games. I don't want to have to "spend actions" on the most trivial things, and leaving some decisions up to referees is a good thing.
And I don't want role-playing to be just a miniatures game.
There is no room left for interpretation and imagination in these games. Our imaginations are being ruled and regulated to death. The entire world is trying to reinvent Warhammer figure battles, but with a small party and in a dungeon. Every little thing needs a rule.
Add the Index Card RPG (ICRPG) to our 5E replacement toolkit, and you'll have a fun book to enhance our modded game. Index Card is a far better narrative game than even Daggerheart or Cypher System. This has the advantage of speed, ease of play, and the right level of abstraction to get the point across.
And like Cypher System, the challenges in ICRPG are rated on a d20 target number, reduced by special gear or training, adjusted by difficulty, and rated with a "hearts" of difficulty to overcome them.
It also revolutionizes abstract play while keeping the familiar d20 mechanics intact, far better than Nimble 5e, and without needing to mess around with the broken 5E damage scaling.
And it is a small book, able to do any genre or setting with a straightforward set of rules, portable, easy to reference, and it can also work as an add-on book for OSE (or any d20 game), offering novel ways to up the tension, present challenges, and resolve interesting situations. The encounter design in ICRPG is far better than Cypher, in that it gives you tips on story architecture and room design.
- D.E.W. = Danger, Energy, and Wonder.
- The three T's = Timers, Threats, and Treats
- The three D's = Damage, Disruption, and Duration
- And various types of encounter structures for rooms.
- 10 are given, but many more are possible.
ICRPG is far more mechanical, interactive, and environmental than Cypher, setting up each "room" like a board in a Zelda video game to solve and navigate through. Where Cypher embraces the traditional RPG, ICRPG embraces a board or video game, much like Shadowdark's tight, board-focused play style.
If you are playing Shadowdark and looking for an excellent narrative game that doesn't require hundreds of pages of rules, can be played in any setting, and doesn't require a complete Daggerheart approach, consider ICRPG. In fact, playing ICRPG will make your Daggerheart and OSE experiences much better, since you will begin to understand the mechanical environment and structured encounter design.
ICRPG trains you to become a "board designer" for video games, a skill few modern games teach. These skills are directly translated over into any game you use them for, but ICRPG builds a game around them. And the book is small, portable, and packed with fun.
I wish Wizards knew how to write "small games" these days. The indies are killing it, while traditional publishers are mired in the shelf-breaking collector's market.
Sorry, games written for collectors can't be played.
I like the small books that pack a lot of information. So many of today's games are bloated, expensive, terrible masterpieces of paid-by-the-word bloat and excessive, overwritten rules. If it takes 1,000 pages to present your game to me, you are wasting your time. It is obvious these designers do not know how to deal with limitations and simplifying rules to they become iconic, simple, and classic.
Once you "go simple," your mind is freed from these bloated hot-mess games that take up shelves of space and force you to defend their sunk costs. You will never play it all. They are preying on the collector market and the whales. The games are not even written to be played.
You are free to mod and change things in a small, one-book game. Or two.
You are far less dependent on the enlightened game designer royal class with smaller games.
Your life is arguably better.
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