Big Boxes of Junk

When I start a game design, I typically start with a giant box of junk. All the things I want, all the pieces, all the story parts and characters, all the systems, and everything gets thrown into the box in a huge, happy, messy pile of junk.

And it sucks as a game.

A lot of designers make the mistake of stopping here and shipping the game. I have shelves full of games that feel they stopped design at this point. They are huge boxes of a thousand different things, as if variety alone made up for a lack of cohesive design. Ironically, this is how Pathfinder ended for us, with dozens of books from several publishers and no real central concept or theme to anything. Sticking to the core book, there was a focused game there, but the curse of the splatbook and chase for financial sustainability ruined what was a clean, interesting take on 3.5 and bloated the game into something that tried to do everything - and many of the classes and powers started to repeat each other and be shuffles and multiclass classes mixers in one class.

But back to designing and my big box of junk. So I throw away the design, keep the pieces, and redesign the whole thing. Maybe I could focus this better on just the best parts. So I have a box full of the best junk only this time!

And it still sucks.

So I begin another process of refolding and refactoring again and again, taking one aspect of the game and aligning all the pieces along that idea - rotating the matrix of pieces to focus on the one of the central ideas. If you have a game "with" monster capturing and training, what happens when you make the game "all about" monster capturing and training? Let's take the pieces, make monster training the central core, and see how everything else lines up.

Supporting Concepts Matter

You may discover entire parts of your game become meaningless and can be discarded. A crafting system? Well, why force players to puts lots of time into crafting - away from their monsters - when we could focus that time on bonding and training the player's monsters? Wouldn't that time be better spent closer to the game's focus and fun? The answer is almost always yes, and you begin cutting features or aligning others to support the main idea.

Crafting pet equipment? A better use for a crafting system in a monster training game because you are still spending that time for your monsters instead of yourself, if you need crafting at all. It is so easy to drop in systems that end up weakening your concept, but at first glance, they seem great to toss into the box.

Please note, don't get too attached to your design - it still may suck.

Your Premise May Be Bad

You may discover that your central premise sucks, let's say your heart isn't into monster training, and you toss out that entire part of the game, shift everything again, and align the game along a new set of core fun features and concepts. Everything else shifts and aligns around the new core, and you begin throwing out and strengthening your core idea. Instead of monster training, let's focus on putting dragon souls into weapons and armor. Everything then aligns to this new idea, does it support the concept or take away from it?

I have had designs get to this phase, a focused, unified whole, yet they still weren't fun. It takes a while of working through things, throwing things away, and really getting to know what you are trying to do and also why you are designing a game. After a while that becomes a feeling, why am I doing this?

Stick with it, there is fun in there somewhere, and it will take a lot of experimenting, redesign, and patience to find.

Playtest!

And then you start playtesting, and everything still sucks.

But you are in a better place now, because you now have a focused design and play experience with something that has a fun core, but broken mechanics. Mechanics can be fixed and tweaked to align along the fun parts of the game.

I wrote a very cool mini rules set, found out it did not focus on the parts I really needed it to focus on, most of the rules were never used, and the parts I did think were going to be fun and work beautifully - sucked. It was okay though, I learned a lot from the playtest and this is all good data. When you playtest, expect to be blindsided about your initial assumptions and how wrong and unfun they are.

Playtesting is the point in the process when you discover how utterly wrong you are. I laugh a lot at myself during this time and ask myself what was I thinking. You do have to approach this process with humor, because being too hard on yourself leads to frustration.

This is why I print all my rules out and scribble all over them with data, cross out things that suck, and make notes like the printout is note paper. Things will get better, but the more you playtest the better they get.

You may need to refocus your design at some point, so there will be back to the drawing board moments. Do not be afraid to toss things away and start over. This is your best skill as a game designer.

My Designs Suck  - At First

I did a design recently that went through these steps, starting off with a big box of junk that sucked. It took a couple transformations to get it to a point where it was less "everything cool" and into "a cool something special." I had to rotate the feature matrix and transform the game several times, with plenty of thrown away work, before I could "see" the game hiding in there.

Sometimes it takes time and repeated tries. Even your highly refined and focused ideas, the ones you get most excited about, can be completely wrong. They can blow up in your face. You will sit there holding a pile of broken bits of rules and concepts and wonder, what happened?

But once you see the game and it captures your imagination, you can rebuild and realign your feature set to support the fun, and toss out rules, patches, and features that distract from your idea.

The game is there, trust me.

Just keep at it, and keep refolding and rebuilding your idea until you find it.

Planning Tools: Articy Draft 3

So I am planning with a tool called Articy Draft 3. It is a nice tool, sort of a set of index cards on steroids, and you are able to extend and subclass any object in the planning tool. Need an entity, which is basically a "noun" type thing in your game? You got it. Need to extend the entity base class as a main or supporting character? You can do that too, and even define custom properties for those base classes, such as a blank character sheet you can fill in for each character. You can extend the entity class to be an equipment item and give it weight, cost, damage, AC, and other values.

This is a first impressions review, so I may be missing a few things, so be warned. But I like first impressions reviews because they give the beginner an idea of what to expect when starting, and how easy the tool it to begin being somewhat productive with.

It also has a storyboard grid for laying out flow, with story parts, folding many cards into one, linking folded cards, and all sorts of other storyboarding tools and useful functions. You can lay out adventures, conversations, scenarios, or even a book in the flow grid and connect events with characters, places, items, and other concepts you come up with.

There is also a location tab that allows you to build maps, drop down characters, link those locations to the story flow, and take all of the noun items you build in your entity creation and all of the story flow parts to your own custom maps and locations. You can put down pawn-like markers for characters on maps to place your characters on a map the size of a room to a universe.

It is not a virtual tabletop, and it is not multi-player. This is a tool for teams or single designers to create structured experiences like games, modules, adventures, or stories. There is no die-roller, web client, or any other virtual tabletop functions. They have sort of a Powerpoint presentation mode for flows, but I have not figured it out yet. We are talking game design and planning today, not playing.

Easy to Get Lost

One point is that it is very easy to get lost in this tool, and I found myself fighting it as it started shaping my idea instead of my idea's structure and flow - the one in my head - being dominant. I threw out several versions of my plan as I found myself collecting junk again, making giant lists of everything, and ending up with junk drawers of hundreds of things, dozens of relationships, but no real plan.

I did a story, but the structure took over the story in several ways, and I found that the central core ideas in my story were sidelined to unimportant story branches. This is just as much on me as it is the tool, as not every idea translates well into a structured grid. It could be my idea is not baked enough and it needs several more revisions, and in my feeling getting to the point where you are writing things down and throwing them in the recycle-bin is a lot better than having them sit in your head and go nowhere.

There is a benefit to doing a lot of work and being forced to throw it out. Your idea gets refined with each iteration, more focused, and improves with each revision. You also start to quickly find the problems with your idea and begin to weed those out.

My advice? Do not get too invested in one project file to rule them all. Keep making them and throwing them out. Keep your project resources in a resource directory apart from your planning board and keep this as the giant sheet of newsprint on the table you can scribble all over, pull a fresh sheet onto your workspace, and tear off the old one to dispose of.

Adventure Design

This tool is a bit of overkill for designing a B/X adventure for a one-shot, as it is a professional level planning tool If I were writing a module to publish? Yes, I would use this tool as my first choice sine it organizes and collects ideas, stats, story parts, maps, and all the other bits that go into an adventure. One word of warning, what you design in this tool can be so complex getting it out may be an entirely different challenge.

You could design a B/X adventure so complex and intricate that describing it in traditional book form would take hundreds of pages, and I am still not sure many people could successfully take a complex, twisting narrative and present it in a traditional PDF adventure module. The idea may be clear in Articy and inside your head, but would readers ever get all of the ideas that you want to communicate?

You could have a battle in a B/X module where you face the vampire count, and if a player has a certain item, such as a stopwatch, the narrative could branch and turn into an incredible narrative. This would be clear to the designer in the program, but to the referee reading the module, or even the players playing through it, may not be obvious and the entire arc ignored as they hack and slash their way through.

A side note there too on audience expectations. Yes, that optional narrative arc is great for a story game, but in a more traditional hack-and-slash game that effort may be wasted as your audience came for one experience but the tool allowed you to design another. Don't get distracted by a tools cool capabilities and allow it to steer you off course, and be aware of what your audience came to see.

One could also create a story so complex and intricate that translating it into a game engine, such as a visual novel, RenPy, Inform, Twine, Unreal, Gamemaker, Godot, or other game or story engine would be darn well next to impossible. You could create it and lay it out, sure, but you could easily outstrip your ability to manage that much complexity, code, and engine expertise to get whatever you design out of there without a team of dozens and a couple million dollars to invest in a game company.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give when using this too is: be aware of the limitations of your target format and your own abilities. Also, be aware of your target audience and what they expect.

Export: Possibly an Issue

The tool has export functions for game engines and various formats, but for story and adventure design I have found, so far, that all my work is staying inside the tool and I am using it as a reference library. This was one reason I stayed away from learning this tool for so long, I was hesitant to adopting a proprietary tool that I could not export from easily in my planning and design work.

Part of me wishes you could export a visual novel or standalone story experience directly from the tool, as that would be ideal even for demos and rapid prototyping. Or even a PDF of the entire idea in book format. They may have an extension for that somewhere, or they may not, I do not know enough at this point as this is a first impressions review. They do have a variety of exporters, including Word and Excel spreadsheets along with JSON and XML, so it is possibly a matter of time or searching for the one that fits your needs. There is an API toolkit too, so further work in this areas is possible.

If you are writing a B/X style adventure for a PDF release, a visual novel, or a novel, yeah, I feel you will be doing all of the exporting and copying over the idea to the new format yourself. What you do gain is superior organization and refactoring abilities, so at least all of your ideas will be easier to pull out and describe. All of your relationships and links will also be easier to reference and organize.

You can get the raw data out in a variety of formats, but for my needs and use cases, I will be doing a lot of the work on format translation and presentation.

A Keeper!

This is a nice tool, and after using it a day it has already found a spot in my game design workflow. After a couple hours I was feeling somewhat productive, and it started revealing flaws in my ideas and designs. That is priceless, and if a tool has me throwing out work because it is garbage of my own design I find that highly useful and increases my productivity.

For highly imaginative types, you have no idea how valuable it is to have tools that collect the garbage in our heads, put it into bins, and allow us to see it as a whole and toss out whole parts at once is to our workflow. For some people the ability to collect, organize, and throw away garbage is more important than the ability to nicely organize things on index cards on a corkboard. The more you wreck, scribble on, destroy and rebuild your idea the better. Don't be shy, and do not be afraid to throw it all away and start fresh.

I need a tool that organizes chaos, lets me see the destruction as a whole, and hauls away the mental debris like a garbage truck and a street full of dumpsters - leaving me with the best parts.

This tool does that job.

Automation and Repetition (and Repetition)

D&D's "passive perception" mechanic always kind of bugged me like "take a 10" or "take a 20" did. Not as something I really disliked, just as something that felt like an unneeded mechanical dongle to stop arguments or eliminate a broken rule by writing another rule to patch the issue.

In the "take a 20" example, this simulates trying something over and over again until you do roll that 20 (or a 10 if you were in a hurry). I played a lot of games where I only allowed a skill roll ONCE for a given course of action. That lockpicking skill roll meant something, that was your one shot, your one chance, and if you blew it there was no rolling again.

Think of another way, because narratively it was always more exciting and interesting to me to make that skill roll mean something more than "a failed first attempt." No, all your "failed first attempts" are included in that skill roll, and we are rolling for the end of the process. You roll for the last roll.

Even in fiction and movies it is always more exciting to see a pass or fail attempt, and then watch the characters deal with the result instead of trying again and again. Yes, as someone kicks a door open, there may be more than one kick, but that is all the same skill or ability roll. It is not "one roll per kick."

With passive skills I feel we are in the same area. Why not have a "passive combat skill?" All monsters with an AC lower than your passive combat skill are auto hit, just roll for damage. Well, a combat blow is a single pass-fail event, right? So why can't that be for skills as well, in the larger, narrative sense? If your game is moving more towards storytelling, why not make larger narrative assumptions about skill rolls and eliminate the "turn by turn" roll repetition of pure simulation?

Story-wise, the elf ranger gets one attempt to lead the party through the evil forest. On a pass, the story goes one way, on a fail, it goes the other. Both results could have goods and bads, without taking a month off to "take a 20" for a navigation roll and just assume success.

If you are putting in a system to auto-assume success in a story game, then your failure results need fixing. They are not interesting, block the story, and provide no enjoyment other than delay. In an old school game? Fine, fail and suffer! In a story game, a failure condition should branch the narrative - not stop it dead in its tracks. Otherwise what is the point?

Some modules with those "locked doors that block the story" suck for a story game and those doors should not be in there. Or there should be another way around. A referee needs to spot these module design issues and make allowances - designers make mistakes, and not all modules are good for all types of games (without modification). Again, in an old school game? Different entirely, you are locked behind that door until you turn into the skeleton encounter in room #10.

If you are going to automate something away to the point of not checking for it, the question has to come up - why not eliminate the mechanic entirely from the game? I feel there is just way too much silly automation and allowed repetition in games these days, where they assume a passive perception check like a radar system, or taking "extra time" to guarantee a certain roll because they are hand waving around rolling a d20 for every skill check all night until it passes.

The game may have a problem that if repeated checks are necessary for most skill rolls, then I would say your game's difficulties should be lowered and make them a single pass-fail check and be done with it. Also, if your game needs passive skill levels, you are introducing another system of "number versus number" checking whenever the party enters a room. What is everyone's passive perception? Number versus number time again!

Why?

Even if you write them all down, does checking that list of numbers every time the party moves into an unexplored area really save you much time over the old way? It just feels like more bookkeeping and simulation to me, like a game with submarines and passive sonar ratings with circles of detection radius sliding around a map.

You could probably eliminate passive perception in a purely storytelling game just through writing careful room descriptions that allow players to pick up on inconsistencies in the environment. The light from the chandelier passes right through the table. The shelf is not flat against the wall. One of the chairs it tipped over. The coat rack is full except for the second hook. The floor has a strange star like pattern that repeats down the center of the hall until the doors.

Those could be nothing or they could be something. Let the players pick up on it and ask the referee questions.

If you eliminate passive perception, you are eliminating the builds that specialize in passive perception. But, really, are those needed? If everything was included in the room descriptions those points would be freed up for other abilities. There are times when creating a passive perception game only feels like it serves the passive perception system that originated in versions of the game that were more geared towards simulation than storytelling.

Also, in old school games the way I play them, there is no perception roll (outside of the special cases, such as the passive abilities for dwarves and elves). Listen to the referee's words and pick up on things. Pay attention and react accordingly. My way of doing it, of course, is not the best and everyone has their own style and preferences. My way of playing is to eliminate the "layered systems" that feel more like patches, and get closer to that one-on-one of a referee and those listening to the words spoken.

Internal Mechanics vs. External

I watched a Youtube video about switching from 5E to the OSR games and the differences between the philosophy between the two systems. It struck me how D&D 3 through 5 have moved dramatically away from internal mechanics, and leaned heavily on external mechanics. What am I talking about? Well, pull up a chair and let's think this through.

Mechanics = Game Mechanics

Obviously, when we talk about mechanics in the terms of games we are talking about game mechanics. The rules, how things work, what to roll and when to roll it, and how the rules shape the choices you make. We all know what these are so I am not going to explain the obvious. Next section!

Internal Mechanics

Take a game like Monopoly, one of the quintessential board game experiences and a game that has a lot in common with OSR. The board can be seen as a dungeon, and while you don't roll for movement in the OSR, you do "land" on situations that require you to use internal mechanics to solve.

I land on a property. Do I buy or do we start an auction? Do I have enough resources and money? Am I saving for something a few spaces away that I really want? How would buying this help or hurt other players? Can I block a set by buying this? Is it useful for a trade?

You go through a lot of thoughts in your head when the game puts you in a chance situation, and while your success at your action is not guaranteed, you are heavily weighting risk versus reward against a pool of limited resources in your head for the entire game.

You are playing the game with internal mechanics - and while some choices may be influenced by game rules, the majority of them are not written down and you judging risk versus reward. Your game piece may have some special abilities as the game goes on, in Monopoly it is your cash and properties, in the OSR is is your cash and class. Everyone starts roughly equal, weak and powerless. Your power builds as you play the game. You can be put in an unwinnable position early, and come back out of nowhere if you keep playing.

External Mechanics

Imagine a version of Monopoly with these rules (and I bet it exists or it has been house-ruled somewhere): the car rolls 3d6 for movement. The boot can kick a player off by 1d6 spaces when they land on them. The thimble pays half in taxes and fees. The hat gets $300 at "go" and so on.

Let's add feats and special ability cards the players can purchase for themselves when they land on the fictional "university" space. Let's give each game piece a list of powers they can have when they "level up." Let's give each property level and special powers when you invest in it! We need a 300 page rulebook for the Monopoly RPG now!

Okay, stop - it is fun to think of this as a thing and like anything Monopoly I bet it would sell well. But stop and think about your mental process when you would play this game, are the choices you are making when it is your turn mostly inside your head managing resources, or are they mostly navigating the rules and how you would get an advantage within them?

When a situation is presented to you, while resources management may play a factor in your decisions, a huge part of your decisions are now in a space inside the rulebook. You are not thinking internally but externally.

To be fair, the OSR has external mechanics in the ways things work, but like Monopoly, the mechanics are kept to a minimum and the classes are deliberately designed as "playing pieces." Your resources (hit points, spells, gear, and gold) are what you are managing and the primary driving force behind your decisions. In newer games, you are wondering if you should position your figure flanking to gain advantage, your character build, and all sorts of other "rules in the book" considerations before you are thinking about resources.

Are External Mechanics Bad?

Not really, if you enjoy navigating your way through rules and working up combos like a chart of fighters and combos in Street Fighter, hey, I am not one to say your fun is bad. There is a skill to working through the complexity and masses of rules, and designers sometimes put in less than optimal choices in order to create optimal ones. Your job is to figure out the puzzle and optimize.

My issue is when everyone knows the optimal path and one class build is all people play with when playing that class. Every character feels the same (until the next expansion), and the same powers and abilities are repeated at the table, over and over. You see a ranger come to your table, know their power rotations, and like clockwork, the player flips a switch and runs a script in combat. A, B, C, and D with you sometimes messing them up with an unexpected event.

This is just game design, and some games do it well, while others fail. Now games can fail for some and not for others, just like some movies are universally panned but become cult classics for a devoted fanbase. This is all personal preference, and what you enjoy is probably not the same as what I enjoy. But we are all gamers so it is good.

The Notion of a Game

We are getting deeper into psychology here and understanding the notion and concept of a game. A pretend activity where there are winners or losers. A set of rules, equally applied, and everyone is roughly equal to start. The power (or positions) of players change during the game. There are random factors introduced to simulate chaos - just like in life. The players' skills are important factors in success, but they do not solely determine who wins or loses (what the randomness is for, honestly).

Skilled players can deal with chaos better than unskilled ones, though at times unskilled ones may get lucky and succeed against a more skilled player.

OSR keeps to that core game design concept strongly, and there is a lot of resource management. Instead of picking up a "double shot ability" at 3rd level, you are thinking about how much weight your archer is carrying, how much they can haul out without getting weighted down, how many arrows they have left, and lots of other internal resource management factors that determine success.

Your resource management choices are the same ones everyone else follows, and these choices are the ones that help you mitigate chaos the best. The rules do not help you or protect you from chaos. They are merely there to lay out how your resources work, your gold, your hit points, and how your spell pool works if you have one. The external mechanics are mostly for resource management.

For me, resource management and playing that internal mind game is what I enjoy about gaming. Again, you may be different, and you know what - you probably are. I also found that the resource management skills these games taught me helped me greatly later in life. I am not gaming the system to get ahead. I work hard and I don't spend a lot of money. I can find pleasure in simple things, reading, writing, and making art, and don't need to feed myself a diet of expensive entertainment.

Gaming has made me a better and more successful person.

But back to games. A lot of your thinking with internal mechanics is done internally, what you have, what could happen, and how you are going to best deal with the possible situations that come up. In this way, the OSR is a lot like Monopoly, and in a way, also a lot like real life situations where we are trying to live life, spend our money wisely, pursue our goals and reams, and find comfort and security in a dangerous and chaotic world.

Rotations

I see a lot of talk on Youtube about Pathfinder 2 having "rotations" for maximum character damage output, where characters repeat the same sequence of powers over and over again.

Wait, is D&D 4 still a thing in 2020?

I kid, and I do not play Pathfinder 2, but I have some experiences to share on the subject. We had that same "power rotation" issue in D&D 4 but at least in that game, positioning and the map mattered a huge deal in damage output. There was also a "passive healing" in the careful use of controllers to stop or hinder enemy attacks - reducing the damage output of the other side.

Without a map and just powers? We played D&D 4 like that too, and it got tiring for some players to be shouting the same power names over and over again like they were some Pokemon where the only word they knew was their own name. Green flame blade! Green flame blade!

People would walk by our game room and stare at us like we were all insane.

D&D 4, of course, broke apart terribly as the levels went higher and the expansions ruined the game, with Wizards even revising the entire game and Monster Manual in the Essentials line - and still requiring the original books. Such is the legacy of MMO-like designs, they are easily calculated, exploited, fragile, and get boring and repetitive as time goes on. This is why MMOs completely change classes on a rotation, nerfing and buffing to drive interest, and repeating an "evergreen" cycle of changes as the game goes on.

You can't do that with a book. And if you do, you are doomed to follow the D&D 4 route of continually releasing expansion books to keep the game changing and interesting. And doing what they do these days with "temporary power" systems that are only good for one campaign book, such as a Desert Adventures book introducing campaign-only tweaks and powers for all the classes that change the balance and feel - for that campaign only. They do this in MMOs all the time with "potency" or "azurite energy" or some other silly grindable number like some sort of Zynga-Facebook daily stamina game of the 2010 era.

Yes, mechanical interest is a part of game design. It breaks apart some when Internet forum figures out your best-path map and everyone is expected to play one way. And then the job of the referee goes from managing the world to "tricks to stop power rotations to keep things interesting." This is what happened in D&D 4 for us as well, I started to develop encounters with the sole purpose of breaking up power rotations - and they do this in MMOs too. Nope, you are all on a raft of flaming barrels going down the rapids! Dodge the logs!

We went from playing the game to fighting it.

It was worse on the referee's side, because after a while players figured out I was trying to screw with them by breaking up their best rotations, and then they started to find ways not to get into these encounters and fight enemies on neutral ground where the rotations could come into play.

We went from fighting the game to trying to outwit each other's encounter setups.

All in service of some fake concept like game mechanics. It got tiring, like some Cold War game of cat and mouse between submarine commanders, with the rules being the battleground. Our campaign ended up with us trying to develop a simpler set of rules that did the same thing, but that never worked out. We bought into the power-rotation and battle-chess system, and it burned us out.

Mind you, this is D&D 4 and not Pathfinder 2, but the story feels similar enough for the thoughts to come up again. Maybe they can manage the beast this time, and I need to read in further - but my Pathfinder 1 books prevent me from buying into another edition. Also D&D 5 is good enough for many, and I have that.

Also, if I am doing fantasy, I have a wonderful choice of B/X systems where I can sidestep the entire power rotation concept and focus on the story, characters, and action. I am a bit skeptical these days of MMO-style RPG designs that are too tightly designed and easily min-maxed, and prefer the simple - and me and my players will fill in the rest.

Subclasses as Primary Classes

As the bards, rangers, illusionists, druids, assassins, and paladins begin adventuring through our B/X games - I wonder if somehow they belong. Not as in get rid of them, but as in, "Were they ever implemented correctly?" I am thinking of this as in adding them in a way that doesn't take away from the central four classes in the game. I know historically these have been staples of fantasy gaming since AD&D, the moment when the basic four classes were all there was and the huge change began at "race as class."

And the door was opened to expanding the game beyond the core four classes.

So the question becomes, why play one of the original classes? A ranger does more than a fighter, flavorfully the ranger is more cool, and all the fighter really has is "better numbers" or "different attack options." When you introduce subclasses into the game, you make the original classes less interesting to play, and all of a sudden you are backporting cool into the original four when they were fine to start with.

Skill Rolls for Subclass Abilities

The old saying "a ranger is a fighter with a bow" comes up. Robin Hood did not have spells or dual-wielding abilities. You could simulate a ranger as a fighter in a game like Basic Fantasy by letting the player make nature-style skill rolls that a ranger would have as a background option and keep the game simple and maintain the strength and role protection of the fighter class.

Basic Fantasy also has that built-in leveled "skill roll" mechanic that makes this easy.

Same with bards, a thief with a musical background - or a mage-bard if your bards are mages. All of a sudden I have two music flavored classes by using bard as a background option instead of creating a standalone bard class that competes with the others. What about music? Let them "do what music does" through skill rolls, charm a crowd, soothe the savage beast, and so on through skill rolls - those don't need to be spells. In the case of the magic bard, well, they are spells and that is how they cast them. The magic bard's music background skill could also be used for any other music related check, and you are done.

Illusionist? That skill roll could be used to create minor illusions, manipulate the ones they create, and see through others. You could do some mechanical stuff within magic user to give them double daily use of illusion spells in a spell slot, and forbid them from scrying and informational style spells. Whatever you want to do in magic user is fine, but keep it in the original class with as few changes as possible. Same thing with ranger, adjust the allowed weapons and armor, and give them a +1 to-hit with ranged weapons and forbid them from wearing metallic armor.

Paladin? I would make paladin a background option of cleric, finally let them use edged weapons, and limit them in another interesting way. Perhaps forbid them from harming like-alignment foes, tithing, and getting constantly sent on missions against evil (or good if anti-paladin). You don't have to weaken or change cleric much in this case, and the base cleric is still a core of the game, while paladin is just a cleric flavor (and retains access to the full spell list). The one thing I never liked about AD&D paladins was that weak spell list. Here? A special type of cleric with some benefits, and some limitations to trade them off.

Let the base classes use their "class skill" for interesting uses too, fighters could identify foes, or know the origin of weapons and armor; thieves have a lot of cool skill rolls just on their own; clerics know rites and religions; and mages know history, spells, and other magic knowledge. Your background determines what your class skill roll covers. A mage-bard would know more about music than general wizard magic, but still know some things.

Parties of Subclasses?

And I am still sticking to the basic four classes, and the core party and play balance is not upset, but I have the options and flavor I always wanted. You get into these groups where you have a bard, ranger, druid, and illusionist and all of a sudden some core abilities the game's balance depends on are missing. Maybe no access to the heals the game expects you to have, or the bard's thief skills are sub-par. Do the additional abilities make up for it or is there a problem here? In AD&D I might say I felt there was a problem of parties of subclasses and things never felt right, or I had to fudge rolls to keep the play balance feeling correct.

I Still Like Them, but I Wonder...

Yes, there is a case to be made for nostalgia and unique class mechanics. Design wise I find those interesting too. But we should not feel beholden to the past or what came before, or feel if a game doesn't have a class and a player wants to play something similar, that we should limit them. With a little hacking and creativity, we can come up with custom class-mods to the original four (or how many ever your game has), and create something unique that the player could have a hand in creating with you.

I just wonder at times how really needed dozens of classes really are. I mean, it is nice to have options, but once you have dozens of almost-similar classes and variants in the game where you are doing numerical trade-offs to keep them feeling different you have lost me. The B/X style classes in Old School Essentials are really cool, and they are an example of what I would say "true" feeling subclasses would have been. The ones in AD&D never really impressed me, they felt like blends with weaker versions of powers other classes already possessed.

But if someone wanted to craft a custom B/X class at my table, I would jump at the opportunity to be creative with them. Rule zero applies to how your group interprets the game and how they design characters. You can change anything, even before you pick up the dice.

Basic Fantasy: Monopoly Style Rules

Flipping through my wonderful spiral-bound copy of Basic Fantasy (a format I honestly wish more publishers would use) it struck me how universal this set of rules has become. One could say that about all of B/X, or at least the B/X core rules, as many games have went off in a million different directions as of now. But this set of rules sticks to the most basic of basic 4+4 setups: cleric, fighter, mage, thief and human, elf, dwarf, halfling. Nothing else, no race-as-class options, no paladins or rangers, no 9th level spells, and no AD&D options thrown in there just because - the rules set feels to me like the best of what you need to have fun, and nothing extra.

Now, I like my extras, but there is a point where you put so much on a hamburger it becomes a salad on a bun with an inconsequential piece of protein lost in there. More is not better, and as B/X matures I feel we are entering this "more is more" phase where retro content is mined for an ever-expanding product line for each game. Pathfinder 1st Edition became that for us, two shelves full of books that I feel these days are honestly only good for mining for OGR content. The game got too big, with too many options, and it felt like it collapsed under its own weight (along with one of our shelves holding it).

Basic Fantasy sticks to the basics, and it throws out everything that isn't needed. All of the options around "this or that" such as ascending vs descending AC are tossed out. It feels like the original set of Monopoly board game rules to me. It isn't 100% B/X, but it is B/X enough with modern mechanics that all the confusion has been removed and just the best parts retained.

Also, I feel no pressure to include classes and spells from expansions outside the basic book. These days I buy a game from a big publisher and I know a year or two from now the game will change entirely, players with the new book will want to play that, and as a referee I will feel bad about not supporting "official" content. And other players will want the book too, and the entire experience as a referee will suffer.

The business model for games written by big companies are 100% dependent on the number of referees in the community, and it gets harder and harder to manage the larger the game becomes. It is like shipping a video game console and having a controller shortage that gets worse over time. Somehow I feel the timing of a release for a new edition of the game is an entry point likely determined by a graph somewhere tracking the number of referees left in the game. I assume a longer-term graph instead of one at launch, as all games tend to follow a decrease in interest curve.

The Advanced Content

Old School Advanced Fantasy feels like that to me, a set of rules in a different universe where the D&D and AD&D split never happened. We have B/X Bards and Paladins. We have most everything from the Monster Manual. More is more, and while I love all the new options and content, the core experience feels slightly lost in the bun. I look at the Old School Essentials Basic Fantasy book and see a simpler game. I have both, so it is a choice now, but the difference exists.

I would still play the Basic version of OSE, just to keep the experience focused and having that classic feel.

I suppose when it comes down to it, Old School Essentials feels more like a traditional role-playing game, where Basic Fantasy feels like a set of rules for a board game. I could break out the original Dungeon! board game and play that with Basic Fantasy. If I want to tell a story, give a group a plethora of options within B/X, develop a colorful world and setting, and have lots of different factions and pieces to play with I will definitely go with Old School Essentials. Labyrinth Lord always sits there in the darkness calling though, and it is a solid option too if you really love that "D&D is evil" heavy metal vibe going on with that game.

Thinking back, I seem to recall that AD&D was created by TSR to create a new game from the original rules and there was something about royalties and creators - so it was messy. A lot was added and changed, there were rules tweaks everywhere, and the systems were made different to a point where the two games were not compatible. If there was no pressure from the business side, I wonder how many of the AD&D changes would have made it into D&D if the two had stayed one game.

Historical note, Wizards did buy the rights from both sides and D&D 3.0 unified the game back into one system, and brought us the OGL - which is a historical and brave moment that helped build the world we see today.

As creators build new games from the shadow of the additional content introduced by later products, I feel there is a valid question here about crafting a product that is unified and does something well versus a more kitchen sink approach.

Some B/X games are more boxes of Lego bricks that can be crafted into anything, while others do a specific setting well. Some building block sets come with a few blocks, while others come with many. One game can't be everything to everybody (but some do come close). I really am a fan of many B/X games, and there are times I am in the mood for one and not the other.

And since they are all B/X, I only have to keep a few differences in the way they work in my head. Or not. It all just works well and is similar enough if you cross-pollinate rules and concepts nothing will be broken.

The Board Game

One thing I love about Basic Fantasy is it is printed (from what I know) at-cost, so there is no commercial need to keep new books coming out. They are there if you want hard copies, and this is done as a convenience. No salaries or advertising budgets need to be payed, next year's books don't have to be planned, and the rules just stay what they are. No expansions are planned - other than the ones you make yourself or download from other people.

That is a simple, user-focused community that I love, like a group of Unix users all contributing programs, scripts, and utilities to help each other out for free. While I love my art-filled, stitch-bound, beautiful professional quality books that other games bring to the table - there is a side of me that craves the simple, user-focused, open-source style community of Basic Fantasy and the no-extras and no-nonsense base set that everyone begins with. It is like the Raspberry Pi in a way, you build a community around a common piece of "hardware" that works well and is well-supported, and all of a sudden a lot of cool things start happening.

No, it doesn't have all the cool things my other games have, but what it does have is a strong and vibrant community without the motive to produce more and better content. The game is free from commercial pressure, and that, along with this beautiful spiral bound edition, are key features the game ships with.

Even in these days of the incredible offerings out there (and on my shelf), I feel there is still a place for a simple set of rules like this in my gaming world. These are my Monopoly-style rules, perfect for hacking or just messing around with.