Ostensible Cat

Wow, it's been three years since I’ve posted here. I’ll be honest, I’ve been doing a lot less gaming and a lot more art. Since my last post regarding gaming with my daughter, I think my daughter and I have found it very frustrating to make much progress in playing D&D 5e. Now, before this comes off as an old school gamer bashing newer systems, I think it has less to do with 5e and more to do with my evolving views on what works for me in gaming. It turns out that my preference in gaming is maybe moving away from class-and-race-based ttprgs as exemplified by D&D and its offspring. Now I’ve been playing TTRPGs since 1981, so none of these is new to me, but I think in that time, I have identified the aspects of gaming that really don’t flow well for me. Since I’ve been a late-life assessed neuro-spicy person, the masking and desire to just nug through things has just completely evaporated. Character creation seems to be a very challenging process for both my daughter and m...

So far, things are going ok. It is a bit daunting to take the guts of an RPG system, tinker with it and roll your own, but I am still optimistic that I can make a playable classless D&D variant that is playable and still compatible with old school RPG materials. So what do I have so far? Basicall the builds for low level Fighters and Magic Users are starting to really come together. That includes variant builds of fighters. The challenges will be to see how well they scale as they level. The plan right now is to have a basic level progression that all characters follow and as they go, they use XP to buy class abilities to mix and match and make the type of character they want to play. So theoretically, there could be those that want to progress and not purchase any class abilities but they would also have very basic combat and magic capabilities. I say basic in that magic theorectically is available to anyone, but all magic has a price and only those schooled in the arts can mitiga...

Ok, so I've had some time, energy, clarity of thought, alignment of the stars and planets, or whatever that has allowed me to make some progress on my classless OSR system. I've pretty much been consulting a bunch of OSR games such as Swords and Wizardry (Whitebox/Core/Complete), Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea (naturally :) ), Knave, the Black Hack, and even some 3.5 books and Palladium fantasy, and Arduin Grimoires amongst others for inspiration. So far, what I've decided is to lean heavily on Swords and Wizardry Core for the base system, particularly around attributes and bonuses. I love the Black Hack's take on saving throws. I mean, I really have always wanted to make the difference in say a 14 wisdom and a 15 wisdom quantitatively meaningful. Therefore saves are attribute checks, where the character rolls their attribute score or lower on a d20 with modifications for the type of challenge they may face. As for character creation, I'm still ...