Brainstorming How I'd Rather Play D&D

Gus L just wrote a post about treasure with respect to encumbrance (link), and I know he's going to write a sequel that gets into more theoretical depth (and incorporate it into one of his adventures). So, this post is probably going to be a little redundant even if I beat him at posting about it. This is more for my sake anyway, to brainstorm about how I'd like best to play my very own special Dragons & Dungeons game given my admittedly casual experiences. You think I have time to play year-long campaigns when I have one too many pretentious French theorists to read?

Grocery Shopping for Rules

Something that's always felt like a pain when starting a new campaign is upfront decision-making. I might be speaking to the choir given that most of y'all are 'old school' gamers, so we often look down on games like Dungeons & Dragons 5E (or 4E, or 3E... hm) for making a whole production out of building characters. It's much more fun, for me anyway, to get handed a character and have to make do with it. I've cited Prismatic Wasteland last week, and I'll cite him again (link).

Something else that's sort of a pain in the ass is player-side functions, by which I mean having to make lots of calculations upfront or on the fly to play the game. In my post last week, I discussed the evolution of ability scores across the publication history of Dungeons & Dragons as they became more kinetic (link). That is, ability scores ended up being used directly throughout the course of the game than when they were first introduced in the original 1974 edition of the game. The strength score alone was applied to accuracy rolls, damage rolls, and door-opening rolls (am I forgetting anything?).

This trend has never gone away in post-OSR games, such that games like Into the Odd and Knave will rely on such statistics to define character abilities instead of relying on character types. There's good enough reason for this and it is often an elegant solution when it doesn't become too bloated, but the more that there are statistics on top of statistics (e.g. your strength score determines how many things you can carry, or there's specific calculations done for applications of each ability), the more of a pain it is for me personally.

So, what's one nice way to adapt old school rules in a way that's less of a pain than works that are currently published? I shouldn't pretend to be objective: this is my blog and I get to make the rules.

Rulescraftery

Read my lips: no new bonuses.

It was a lie when Daddy Bush said it, so I won't feel bad breaking it. Nevertheless, this is the principle I want to keep in mind. I don't want bonuses for swinging swords, opening doors, or holding things. The more I'd have to look at my character sheet to decide whether or not I can do something, or the more time I have to spend before a game making a character, or the more debilitating differences there are between my character and someone else's, the more annoyed I'll be.

The most important thing for a game where you're sneaking around and stealing shit is figuring out how much you can carry. I don't think coin encumbrance as per 1974 D&D is that bad, since really all it does is add granularity to a weight system that otherwise works in pounds, and abstracts treasure into coins. Gus's post, I think, relies on the intuition that such a granular system is a pain, and that once we have an encumbrance system that is itself abstracted (i.e. into item slots), we can finally get our hands on more interesting discrete items of treasure: bottles of wine, lush fur coats, etc.

Each character can carry ten items on their back without penalty. For each item past the tenth, the character's speed is reduced by 1" from a base speed of 12". The maximum possible is twenty items.

In other words, read the least significant digit. If your character is carrying 13 items, their speed is reduced by 3". I know I myself am not one for fine-tuned movement rates, but just having this as a measure from 0 to 10 is more useful to me than having to do any division or book-checking. You could rephrase this as "You get 1 point of encumbrance for every item above 10 you carry," and then do something more abstract with it (e.g. use that as a quick difficulty scaler for handling pursuits).

The point isn't having variable speed rates or whatever, but just that there's intuitive ways to do things without checking a book all the time.

A copper-grade treasure is worth a week's wages, and it earns you 1 XP. A silver-grade treasure is worth ten times as much in value and in XP. A gold-grade treasure is worth a hundred times as much. You need 200 XP to advance to the second level.

200 XP is equivalent to 2 gold-grade treasures, 20 silver-grade treasures, or 200 copper-grade treasures. The secret thing is that you multiply each such treasure by 100 to convert them into coins (or, rather, one item slot can carry 100 coins). I follow Gus's advice that having discrete items of treasure is more interesting and intuitive than counting change, especially having played this way in a recent Mausritter game where our party was awarded a prestigious Apple Watch (C) by an ant queen in exchange for mouse-made weapons. It's more fun.

Something that might be interesting, if not a bit too involved, would be a requirement that in order to earn XP, you must invest the money at a bank or an enterprise. The idea is, besides getting into some fun domain play, that you still hold onto that value albeit in a different form rather than hoard it or spend it flat-out. That's neither here or there, though; it's a whole new topic that I want to play with separately.

I'm honestly fine with this being a basis for whatever. Like, combat can wait, actions can be d6 across the board, and procedures barely change enough between rulebooks to warrant philosophizing on them. So long as there's less character-specific information and less book-checking for how to handle things, I'm happy.