Category Archives: DnD

Old School Hack

This past week was the beginning of my oldest son’s post-1st-grade summer vacation, so I figured it was high time to expose the lad to Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t have my 4th Edition handy, so we busted out the 3.5 Player’s Handbook and whipped up a paladin. His choice. He went off on a grand little adventure, and had just earned enough experience points for third level (I only let people level up when they have some downtime) when a particularly-lucky goblin cut short his adventuring career. Rather than go through all the paperwork of making another D&D character, a task that stretches the limits of a six-year-old’s attention span, we gave a new system a try.

Old School Hack is a free-to-download rules-light system that encourages fairly free-form play, is explicitly geared towards low-preptime scenarios, uses only two types of dice, and weighs in at a whopping 26 pages. Character generation is a breeze. Roll 2d10 six times to get your stats (which don’t have a direct bearing on your ability to whack a mace upside an orc’s head), pick a class ability, select a general type of weapon (my boy’s Thief has a “reach weapon,” which could be any number of things but we say it’s a spear), select a general type of armor (four choices, nothing complicated), decide whether you have a shield, figure out why you’re adventuring to start with, and roll a die or two for starting wealth and off you go. Each character class has a highly-reasonable list of starting equipment, a selection of four class abilities that you can pick up as you advance in levels, everything you need.

Play is simple, with an order of events spelled out cleanly between six types of things you can do, and which takes precedence over which. Attacks are 2d10, with one die being designated the “face die;” if the face die shows a 10 and the total was good enough to hit the target, you hit him right in his stupid face. Take that, bad guy! No need to roll for damage, most things do 1 damage on a hit. Why sweat that stuff? When you make up a bad-guy the hit-points you give him (or whatever metaphor your game uses) are really just there to rough out how many hits from the player-characters the thing can withstand. There isn’t even a big list of monsters’ stats. Just determine if it’s a minion, a guard, a big bad-guy/villain, or a really big monster. No problem.

There’s no getting bogged down in foot-by-foot movement rules, it has an “arena”-based scene setup that reminds me of FATE’s zone system. One of the six things you can do is move from one arena to a neighboring one. Another is to impede somebody from doing just that. This makes for plenty of tactical movement for your actual at-table needs unless you’re seriously itching from from miniatures tactical skirmishing. In which case there are lots of tactical miniatures combat games out there to slake your thirsts.

Player advancement is handled as a side-effect of the “awesome points” game mechanic, by which players reward each other for outstanding play. If you see another player doing something awesome, grab a token and give it to him. These tokens represent awesome points, and you can spent them back into the collective pool to improve your rolls, temporarily get new abilities, and mitigate damage taken. Once you’ve earned and spent twelve awesome points, you can go up a level. There’s only four levels, so this isn’t the game for you if you want to run a multiple-year epic tale. Your characters start out highly competent, and can end up somewhat awesome.

Your character’s main stats (which have cool names like Brawn and Cunning and Daring) aren’t directly used for attack and defense. Instead you use them for the wide variety of non-attacky, non-defendy actions you might take. They even have a convenient diagram to give players and DMs a good idea of what to use for what:

If you find yourself needing to run a pick-up game from time to time, Old School Hack is a great tool to keep at your disposal. The price is right (a free PDF), so you’ve got nothing to lose but a little bandwidth and some time.

Guards

“Four wards alone –
Hold onto those, and curse the vulgar.
Ox, plough, fool,
From-roof–there are no others for you.”
— Late Medieval Gangsta Rap

The Riddle of Steel

In their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield, and we who found it. We are just men, not gods, not giants, just men. And the secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle.

Several months ago I came across an oddly-named archived thread from 4chan’s /tg/ board. It was entitled “Pike To The Dick,” and for some reason I went ahead and read the thing. Turns out there was a pen & paper RPG published several years back called the Riddle of Steel. Its rules were of such a nature that reading a series of posts showing people playing it did not immediately make a whole lot of sense. I was intrigued, and pressed onward, reading additional archives and jumping in on an ongoing thread or two before running a handful of my own.

A little subculture had appeared on /tg/, where instead of the usual neckbearded “elegan/t g/entlemen” prattlin on about Warhammer 40k, Magic the Gathering, and feuding over Dungeons & Dragons variants there were a bunch of (presumably still neckbearded) “fech/tg/uys” with at least a passing interest in historical european martial arts putting on mock battles using this funky out-of-print game system. I got it in my head to try and learn the rules well enough to maybe actually expose my regular playgroup to it once our then-current campaign was at a good stopping point or our DM needed a break.

This is somewhat problematic. Any fair review of The Riddle of Steel as published by Driftwood Publishing would be incomplete without bringing up at least the following points:

  • It is out of print. It isn’t in-stock at your local gaming store, it was never available print-on-demand, and online retailers don’t appear to have it in stock either
  • Even if you obtain an electronic copy, you will likely find the rules to be rather poorly organized. It follows the time-honored tradition of starting with character creation rules, then moving on to how the world works in general and some information about the presumed setting of the game, but inserts the rules for combat maneuvers into the midst of character creation, leaving the actual combat rules for a later chapter, and the rules for combat recover to a later chapter still. The section on magic may as well be spot-welded onto the side of the book, as the mechanics of spellcasting and how it relates to character creation, don’t appear until even later, after rules for things like overland travel, falling, have all been discussed. It was so tangled I made a wiki so I could learn it as I cross-referenced things rather than try to wade through the book front-to-back.
  • Several key aspects of making the game playable are heavily reworked by later books. The Riddle of Steel Companion book overhauls how skills should work, making them much more conceptually accessible. The Flower of Battle clarifies and expands the combat system, reworks initiative, and greatly expands the number of arms and armor available in the game. Of Beasts & Men provides a number of useful stat blocks for stock NPCs and some rules to help deal with non-humanoid combatants (the core rulebook had no rules for determining hit locations on quadrupeds like horses or dogs, which one might reasonably expect to see happen in a fantasy RPG). Each in turn has some serious flaws that I won’t get into at the moment. Suffice to say that the authors seem to have a habit of getting outreaching themselves a bit.
  • Oh dear god the art and layout… The only good thing I have to say about the art and layout is that there are some very nice depictions of a variety of melee weapons in the Flower of Battle, and about ten good pictures total in the rest of the books combined.

All of that should serve to scare anybody away from this game, and any of them may have contributed to its commercial extinction. I don’t really know the backstory on that, but I’m pretty sure nobody went from rags to riches publishing the Riddle of Steel. But if you can look past all these flaws, I find it to be a diamond in the rough:

  • The Spritual Attributes system replaces experience points, FATE tokens, aspects, etc. as a mechanism for character advancement, utility tool for ensuring that player characters are effective when dramatically appropriate, and guidance system for keeping characters true to their concept. In this game, you specify as part of your character sheet, what is important to you and what your goals or loyalties or passions are. When acting in accord with one or more of these (or at least actively trying to), you have access to additional dice. When acting in accord with one or more of these, you reinforce these attributes and are rewarded with points that you can later use to improve your skills, proficiencies, and other attributes. You don’t get more effective by killing goblins; you get more effective by killing goblins for a reason that is valuable to your character. Or by grabbing somebody important to you and running away from the goblins. Or by joining up with the goblins to exact revenge upon your enemies.
  • Several layers of abstraction that are common to RPGs are thrown to the wind in this system, particularly in regards to combat.
    • Most games either make attacks and damage so abstract that the distinction between “I punch him in the face” and “I kick him in the balls” are purely narrative and stylistic, or that attempting to make such a distinction is penalized (because you clearly are trying to game the system in some way to your advantage). In the real world, two people wouldn’t attack each other at random locations. They would deliberately attempt to cut at each others’ heads and hands and so forth. The Riddle of Steel system doesn’t penalize called shots; it requires them.
    • Most games take an approach that generally requires that antagonists take turns. I attack you, you attack me. Taking D&D as an example, it is see a fight as two people standing five feet away from each other, waiting passively for their turns to act while the other wails away at him. In The Riddle of Steel, you only have the initiative if you take it, and once you have it you only relinquish it when you get wrong-footed by your opponent’s defensive actions. Just as you must actively select and perform offensive actions, you much actively select and perform defensive actions.
    • Ain’t no such thing as hit points. Every successful attack incurs some degree of blood loss, pain, and shock, and may cause its recipient to fall over, drop a held item, or fall unconscious. For particularly successful attacks, this can include dismemberment, broken bones, or instant death. It’s a good thing you were actively defending.
  • It has a dice-less character creation system that requires prioritization. If you want to make a character that has excellent skills and great social standing and tremendous proficiency with weapons, you are going to need to sacrifice some of your core attribute points and take a couple of fairly severe flaws. This isn’t just a point-buy where you can bump up your attributes by taking a fist-full of inconsequential drawbacks. You have to choose on a scale of A to F where you prioritize your race, social standing, attributes, skills, proficiencies, and your gifts or flaws. Contrast this with systems like Shadowrun or GURPS, and tRoS feels like it’s practically immune the min/max syndrome common to point-buy systems
  • While there are no character classes as such, the skill packages system does a fairly tidy job of getting you a number of conceptually-appropriate skills for your character. Distinctions between the skill set of a knight or a soldier or a highwayman are clear and functional. There is nothing to prevent overspecialization, but it isn’t a terribly rewarding practice either; if you pick two skill packages that have the same skill listed, you get the skill at a slightly better rating, that’s it.

From the fech/tg/uy deathmatches on 4chan, I was under the impression that this was an exceptionally lethal, brutal system. Having played it for two months straight, I can report that this is only partially true. The Riddle of Steel suffers from overly-effective armor. If you have a character that stands a reasonable chance to take down a knight in a suit of mail with a full-faced helm in a protracted duel, you are likely able to slay an unarmored man outright. I don’t know know what a good fix for this would be, but the stereotype of an armored knight wading invincibly into battle against lesser-equipped rabble and taking all comers is quite possible here.

If there’s a single game that I would love to see get the thoughtful attention of a good editor and a thorough playtest to work out some kinks, it would be the Riddle of Steel, hands down. Perhaps a kickstart project is merited?