Yet Another Retroclone

Early Design Theory

I nearly exclusively run modules. I abstract the space between adventures, and liberally apply The Campaign Stitch to link modules together.

I’ve taken my group on a tour through different game systems before landing on OSE, which we’re playing because I think it has the best module ecosystem. I haven’t found a system that provides a larger number of modules worth playing, where those modules have low prep time.

I think OSE does a great job being a reference, but not a great job explaining how to play, especially in the context of state-of-the-art theory.

Here’s my (current) ideal for a good rulebook. Sections and bullet points are not ordered. This is from the perspective of someone totally new to the hobby, and endeavors to prescribe an opinionated but battle-tested way to run modules.

Before You Start

• Explanation of the core gameplay loop for both the players and GM.

• Recommended materials: multiple sets of dice, 1 inch wet-erase grid, circular tokens for PCs, meeples for NPCs, A 3-ring binder and hole punch, 6-square-per-inch graph paper for mapping, mechanical pencils with good erasers, a cheap tablet for having module PDFs at the table.

• Recommended reading to understand the tropes and tone being emulated. Fafhrd and the grey mouser, conan, earthsea, elric, dying earth, etc.

• Prepare a cheat-sheet. Keep it spartan, and only include things you have a hard time remembering or inventing. For me, that’s reaction rolls, signs/clues, and good names for unnamed NPCs.

Player-Facing Rules

• Fast character creation. 3d6 Down the line. Small list of classes (mage, thief, fighter, cleric). Ancestries (including human) all get one small thing. Armor is simple (unarmored, leather, chain, plate). 4 simple categories of weapons (d4/d6/d8/d10). B/X saving throws.

  • Give fighters scaling bonus damage and cleaves.

  • Carcass crawler style thief

• Abstract adventuring gear. OSE simple encumbrance: move speed based on armor, go slower when you’re carrying a lot (more than 40ish pounds of non-armor). Be mature about it.

• Don’t worry about counting rations, torches, and ammunition. I promise they don’t matter and that these problems are immediately trivial.

• Use 3d6 to generate modifiers (-3 to +3). Discard the raw number. Having a stat and modifier is needlessly confusing. Modifiers represent standard deviations.

  • Explanation of the stats (str, dex, con, wis, int, cha) and what different scores look like. +1 STR means you’re 1 standard deviations stronger than the average human. Only 15 in 100 people are stronger than you.

• Advancement rules: xp for monsters and treasure brought back to safety.

• Hexcrawl, Urbancrawl, Dungeoncrawl, and Encounter procedures. (Note that these smoothly transition into each other). Abstract almost everything into one of these.

• Price and availability guidelines for goods and services, both mundane and magical. Both buying and selling.

• Contextualize money (weight, wages, monthly expenses for standards of living).

• Structure for collaboratively coming up with rulings. Discuss the chance of success, consequences of success, consequences of failure, and cost. Accepting higher costs or greater failure consequences helps negotiate higher chances or success consequences.

• Examples of rules as rulings

  • A 1st level fighter attacking a troll has a 30% chance to succeed. If they do, they deal 1d8 damage. If they fail, nothing happens. In order to try, they have to use their round.

  • Someone trying to listen for a creature being quiet on the other side of a door has a 15% chance to succeed. If they do, they find out what sort of noise. If they don’t, nothing happens. In order to try, they have to spend a dungeon turn (~10 minutes).

• How to Map a Dungeon

How To Prep A Module

• Read through it once

• Redraw the dungeon maps as 10ft squares. Include a table of which/how many monsters are in which rooms directly on the map.

  • Instructions for drawing simple but readable and unambiguous dungeon maps

• Audit the dungeon map and key. Make sure that the key matches the map. The number of times it doesn’t is absurd, and you want to fix this before play.

• Make sure that the room descriptions are self-contained. If the room has a locked door, make sure it explains where the key is. If it references something happening in another room (like a flickering light), make sure it tells you which room. You should not have to turn a page to run a room.

• Figure out the web of connections between the important people and places. Make sure there’s at least 2 ways that the players could decide to go somewhere or talk to something important. The number of times that there’s something cool, but the players have no way of knowing it exists is staggering.

• Making boring or repetitive combat dynamic (get players out of the standard operating procedure where they create a choke point and then focus fire the highest-threat lowest-health baddie until they win).

• Make sure each important NPC, item, and place has, at least, a terse description.

  • Examples

    • Ingrid the Alchemist. Thin, sheepish, awkward.

    • The Ring of Soul-Catching. Silver. Black, misty gem set in grasping fingers.

• Figure out/decide roughly how many people the main town has; that’ll inform market and service availability.

• Transform railroads or plots into situations

• For each trap and secret door, figure out the mechanism and tell. Players disable the trap by narratively interacting with the mechanism, and discover the tell automatically when moving at exploration speed.

• For each major faction, figure out what they want, why they haven’t gotten it yet, and what they’re doing about it.

• Organize information into 2-page spreads in a 3-ring binder. Binders are wildly better than notebooks because you can rearrange and insert pages.

• Make sure the dungeon has an appropriate amount of loot (more to come here). Giving out too little loot is annoying for players, and too much loot is annoying for the GM.

• Make sure the dungeon is nice and loopy (multiple routes between rooms). If it doesn’t have loops, just add them. Secret doors are always an option.

• Scrutinize bespoke random procedures invented for a single room. They’re almost always bad. Pre-roll random loot (what is the point of random loot that will only occur once?). Transform other stuff into a choice between two rulings (typically offer a chance for partial success at a low time cost, or full success at a large time cost).

• Re-skin places and people to make them related to previous modules and future modules.

Lists of Stuff

Adventuring Equipment, Monsters, Spells, etc

How to Run a Module

• The primary loop is

  • 1. GM describes a situation, and asks “what do you do?”

  • 2. Player’s describe their actions and intents

  • 3. GM resolves how their action and intents affect the situation. If a ruling is needed, discuss it before proceeding.

  • 4. The actions normally take time. Track this time and fast-forward to the next interesting situation. Repeat.

• Track time with poker chips. Each chip is ~10 minutes, so do 8 stacks of 6 (each stack is 1h) to represent an adventuring day abstractly. Move the chips to a different pile as the adventuring day wears on. Stops all the questions about what time it is.

• Keep a calendar on one of your 3-ring binder pages. Jot down deferred and upcoming events.

  • Pregenerate simple but consequential weather. 1d8: 1: Horrid weather; slower travel, can’t rest, higher chance of surprise. 2-3: Bad weather; higher chance of surprise. Two bad weathers in a row is horrid weather instead. 4-8: Good weather.

• Abstract stuff outside of the core gameplay procedures via the rulings framework (chance, success consequence, failure consequence, cost). Keep the focus on hexcrawling, dungeoncrawling, and combat.

  • They want to find out who has been creeping on Warwick the Blacksmith by staking out his house? Discuss the chance that plan will work, what will happen if it doesn’t, and what it costs them (time). Resolve it!

  • They want to sell the authentic robes of St. Andrew in Brandonsford for 1200g? Discuss the chance that’ll work (15%?), what will happen if it doesn’t (lower price? have to hexcrawl to prigwort?), and what it costs (4 hours?).

• If the module doesn’t specify how to distribute rumors, give each player 1d4-1 (the procedure from B1). They got them from travelers on the way to the place if the module doesn’t specify. Write them all down on a piece of paper, cut them out, shuffle them, and have players draw.

• Know what the first scene is and make sure there are easy connections to things that lead forward. It’s like a serve in tennis; it’s the only time in the game where you know exactly what it’ll be like ahead of time; may as well have a strong serve.

• Describe rooms vaguely and conversationally. Give them what they can find out by standing at the doorway, looking, smelling, and hearing. Don’t assume they move and don’t assume they touch anything. Torches can make out fine details (like writing) at ~10ft and vague shapes up to 40 feet. If they want to find out more about one of the things you mentioned, they ask. Give them any secret door/trap tells if they were moving at exploration speed.

• Use your prep work for factions to inform reaction table results and ongoing adventure consequences.

Appendix

• Worked examples of module prep using well-known adventures

• Examples of play

• Designer’s commentary

• Index
  

---

Pre-Empting the Gnashing of Teeth

There are 3 choices above that probably stand out and cause immediate distress:

1. Removing the raw attributes in favor of their modifiers.

2. Abstract adventuring gear.

3. Removing light management.

I’ll address them in order!

Removing Raw Attributes

In B/X, the raw attributes are used for a small number of purposes. They generate modifiers, allow attribute tests (1d20 <= attribute), and can get increased or decreased (like a ring that provides +1 CON or a ghost’s touch that reduces STR by 1d6 for 2 days). They’re also used as roleplaying inspiration.

The B/X modifiers (as opposed to the modifiers in 3e and beyond) are based directly on the normal distribution. In a normal curve, 68% of the samples are within 1 standard deviation (and thus 16% is above it), 95% are within 2 standard deviations (and thus 2.5% are above it), and ~99.8% are within 3 standard deviations (and thus .1% are above it).

In B/X, 48% of stat rolls are a 0, 91% are within +/- 1, 99% are within +/- 2, and 100% are within +/- 3. That means that the modifier itself maps really cleanly onto ideas about standard deviations.

So rather than your roleplay being informed by having 15 strength or whatever, your roleplay can be informed by having +2 STR, which you can interpret as being in the top 1% of humanity, and likewise with the rest of the stats.

For attribute increases or decreases, simplify to having the mod go up or down by 1. I’ve always thought it was weird that you can put on a ring of +1 con, go from 11 CON to 12 CON and it does almost nothing mechanically.

We can replace attribute tests with our structure for rulings, which is largely inspired by Action Intent Duality - Bastionland. I ignore the leverage bit (I think it’s implied by the rest), and advocate for coming up with a percentage directly. I think direct percentages are easier to reason about than X-in-20 or X-in-6.

Rather than saying “Make a STR test to jump over that 15-foot gap”, we’d instead discuss “GM: You want to jump over that gap? What do you think a fair chance for that is, and what do you think should happen if you fail? Player: Well, I have a +2 STR, so I think I have a pretty good shot; maybe 80%? And how about if I fail, I can catch the ledge and we’ll take it from there? GM: How about 60% if you want to catch the ledge on a failure, or 85% if you’re willing to risk cratering.”

The negotiation phase really helps to make sure everyone is on the same page about the situation.

Abstract Adventuring Gear

Here’s something I think is wild. B/X mentions that a character will earn roughly 3/4ths of their XP from bringing back treasure. That implies a Fighter will have earned ~1500g by the time they’re level 2. In a party of 5, that’s 7500g of money to spend.

Say you’re paying a porter 1g per day. They could pay 25 porters for 300 days, just off of their level 1 money! The sum price of all of the adventuring gear is 179g. They could buy each item in the list 40 times over and still have money left.

Compared to how much money adventurers are bringing back, gear is trivially cheap. Labor is also cheap, which means that they can hire a handful of schmucks to haul everything around for them.

In context, the Barrow in the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford’s first room; the one before any threats has 230g on the wall. That’s enough to buy all of the equipment and labor to carry all of it. It’s enough to buy 1380 torches.

As far as I can tell, adventuring gear is so cheap that it doesn’t matter except at character creation when everyone is turbo poor. Labor is so cheap that you don’t have to choose what you’re carrying in any significant capacity.

And! I think that it’s way more fun when folks can think outside the box and solve problems creatively. There’s a million OSR stories about people using tools to circumvent problems. We can either lock that behind the players explicitly stating before they set out what all gear they’re bringing with them, and having this lengthy planning session and weight management spreadsheet problem, orrrrrrrrr

You can buy Adventuring Gear for 2g each; everyone can carry ~15 of them before it’s cumbersome. If there’s some specific mundane thing you want, you can mark off an Adventuring Gear and declare you have it.

Want a sack to carry all of these coins you just found? Want a ration to throw to a guard dog? Want a flask to put mysterious liquid in? Want to spill some caltrops behind you? Mark off an Adventuring Gear.

Removing Light Management

In B/X, 6 torches (6 hours of light) costs 1g. B/X doesn’t specify how many coins a torch weighs, but the rules cyclopedia gives it as 20 coins, implying that a torchbearer can carry ~20 torches before they’re encumbered.

So, for the extravagant price of 4 gold, you can hire a torchbearer to carry 18 torches for you. Each PC can carry 3 more on them for emergencies. So a party of 5 PCs hires 3 torchbearers between them and each carries 3 torches for a total of ~70 hours of light and at the cost of 15 gold (3 gold per party member). It feels so pointless. Spend effort and focus on more fun stuff!