{.right} Halberds and Helmets Podcast Why homebrew? D&D as an oral tradition: keep what you like, add what you need, drop what you keep forgetting. What is Old School D&D for me? Few mechanics, open world that grows due to in-game action, players control risk in-game, players make meaningful choices.
Links:
2013-11-05 D&D ist Verhandlungssache
2013-12-10 Writing Your Own RPG Rules
Hello, this is Alex speaking, and this is the Halberts and Helmets podcast. The first episode, I want to talk about my game, a fairly simple old school, D&D game, very simple rules. It’s not very special, but it’s mine. And talking about, it provides a framework for me to talk about all the other games I like to play. So I’ll be using the books that I wrote or the pamphlets to just speak about all the other things that are somehow related. And since this is the first one, we’ll start with the cover page where I just write about old school. So what is old school? Who the hell knows? Nobody knows. I think so. Where do we start? I think, I think maybe we should start by why Homebrew at all. Why do we write our own games? Our own Heartbreakers that are more or less the same? So if it’s all the same, why do it? I think fundamentally role playing games are about using your imagination to run the game, using rules, to enforce consequences. So you just, it’s not just telling any sort of story. We are enforcing consequences. If you hit someone, then there are going to be consequences. If you attack someone there’s a risk involved and this is where the rules come in and where we throw dice and all of that.
So that’s one part where we use our imagination. And the other part is where we go one level up and we think about the ways in which we actually want to do this. What sort of rules do we want? What sort of stories do we want to tell? What sort of risks do we want to take? So on the second level, changing the rules is part of the game. We buy some rules and we start playing and then we don’t like this. We change it. We drop stuff that we don’t like. We drop stuff that we don’t remember. We add stuff that we read online, or we add stuff that we decide upon at the table.
And so the text evolves, it changes. And so what you can do is you can, you can use your rules as written as the book that you bought, and you can start keeping notes, but if your rules are short and your notes are long, then at some point you might as well just write a new book. It’s going to be a small book, but it’s going to be your book. I think, I think that’s, that’s what I wanted. I started keeping notes and I read all this interesting stuff on the blogs and Google+. And I liked it and I wanted to do, to use this. I wanted, I wanted to use shields that splinter because I wanted my characters to be a bit more robust. I, I wanted to use the death and dismemberment tables because I thought I liked this Napoleonic feeling of having grim veterans of all the dungeon adventures, missing legs and arms and begging for, for a little bit of money. And this grim feeling of well it’s harsh. You might die, or you might lose a limb. It’s going to be dangerous. Cause that’s what I like. I, I like it sounds weird, but I liked the fear. I like my characters. I love them. But I also like to fear for them. This is what adventure is for me. When I, as a player, fear for my characters, that’s risk, that’s when I feel good, when I accomplish something, because I risked it, it wasn’t cheap, it didn’t just involve some talking. It involved facing the consequences of bad rolls.
Okay.
Anyway, I lost track of what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that role playing games are playing a game of imagination and an evolving set of rules that reflect the way we want to play the game and writing your own system is a bit like that. You just keep a record of how you want to run things. And in this particular case, we’re talking about Halberds and Helmets. And I wrote down some of the things I value on the first page. For example, I said, I want very little mechanics. The entire player book is just 18 pages, long, 18 pages, is plenty. It’s good enough. It doesn’t have all the spells and it doesn’t have any skills and it doesn’t have feats and it doesn’t have multi-classing and it doesn’t have … it doesn’t go up to level 20 or 30 or whatever. It just has the things that I need.
Having a few rules also means that there’s a lot of freedom. It means that all the things that don’t require rules, can we just, we can just handle it by talking about it. If we don’t know how, how much damage you’re going to take if you jump from the 20 meter high tower into the ocean below, we’ll just talk about it. Think about it. The guys in Acapulco do jumps, at the swimming pool, we do jumps. Maybe it’s just not a problem, 20 meters. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be scary, but it’s going to be okay. So maybe no damage.
And then we just move on. A Little discussion of how, how do you think we should resolve that this, that, something else. And then we move on. So if you don’t have rules for falling damage, then we can just find a ruling right there and then, and it’s not important. We don’t need to write it down. We don’t need to codify it. We don’t need to remember exactly from which height we fell. Next time. We’ll just use the same procedure. Just talk about it. I also say that there’s no planned ending. There is no big meta plot. There are going to be plots in my campaign of course, if a evil guy shows up and my players don’t act on it, then I’ll try and remember the guy. But it’s a bit like rules. If I forget about the bad guys and that’s okay too, but sometimes I’ll remember and they’ll come back and there’ll be consequences in the game.
Another thing that I, that I really like is when the world doesn’t move too fast, when it’s basically static like a dungeon, except that I don’t want to run all my games in a dungeon. I want to run the games on the surface, in town, all around. And I don’t want to pressure my players into doing this or that on a timer, because if the world is going to end in two weeks, then we really have to do just the thing. And who picked the thing? Well, the referee picked the thing because they set up a timer. If the world is going to end, because of “I don’t know who” then the person who introduced “I don’t know who” forced the plot upon everybody else at the table. And I don’t really want to do it.
Therefore, what I say to my players is it’s going to be an open world. And if you start looking in a particular place, then I’ll add more details for the next session. Just the game is going to grow where you’re in-game actions indicate that you want to know more. So if you investigate the dungeon, that dungeon is going to get deeper. And if you interact with the town mayor, then the mayor and his family and his opponents are going to be more important. And I’ll add some. This is how the players decide where the game is going.
And that also works for risk. For example, I’ll say there is a dragon in the swamp to the east. Then if the players want to play with dragons, then they can go there, they can go east. And again, they can look for the dragon or risk the dragon or whatever. It’s unfair to just jump a dragon on them out of nowhere, I think, but offering this sort of choice where you say, well, there’s a swamp to the east and it has a dragon and froglings and the temple of this or that that’s fair. If the players want this kind of game, then they can just go there and I’ll tell them there’s also big sewers underneath the city. If they want sewers and searching through the muck and all of that dark corridors and slime, then they can go down there and it’s up to them. Now, try and provide some information beforehand so that they can judge, whether this is going to be appropriate for them. Is it appropriate because of the theme, of the danger, of the risk they’re willing to take? I think that is where agency comes in, where you can feel powerful about the decisions you make, because there was information you acted upon it and it changed the things that happened. That’s really important to me.
I want to come back to them to the simple mechanics, why simple mechanics? I think simple mechanics have the benefit that they’re quick to read. I think that’s very important. And simple mechanics also benefit from remembering. So if somebody played D&D, they know about six abilities, they know about hit points. They know about armor class. They know about rolling a d20. They know about rolling damage. They know that you can roll, saving throws to avoid bad stuff happening. That’s great. That just jump starts everything. Otherwise you’re stumped. You have to look it up. And it’s really nice. If you have lady Blackbird in front of you and all the rules are on the character sheet, that’s great. But if the rules are in a big book, that’s about 200 pages long or more, that really tires me. And it’s hard to explain to people and it’s hard to get people on board. Whereas if I can just point them to this 18 page PDF of mine, I feel pretty good about it. And I think they’re going to be on board quickly and easily. No issues.
Yeah. So basically that’s what I talk about on the introduction. I guess I don’t talk about it for as long as I talked about it right now, but, these are my values. This is how I want to play the game. If you want to talk about how you play the game and what things you value, what sorts of campaigns you run, I’ll be happy to take your comments, send them by email, or, send me your MP3 files. I’m just using my phone and making a voice memo. Let’s see how that works. Cheers.
#Halberds and Helmets Podcast
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It’s great to hear your voice for the first time. I really enjoyed this first episode.
I wrote up some transcripts https://takeonrules.com/2018/12/19/helmets-and-halberds-podcast/
https://takeonrules.com/2018/12/19/helmets-and-halberds-podcast/
As usual, you’ve given me a bit to think about. It may be time to dust off my heartbreaker.
– Jeremy Friesen 2018-12-19 22:28 UTC
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Oh wow, that’s a lot of quotes you assembled from the audio! Thank you for the kind words.
I noticed that the link https://takeonrules.com/2018/11/26/own-your-game-system gives me a 404 *Page not found* error.
https://takeonrules.com/2018/11/26/own-your-game-system
And I noticed that I hadn’t listed your name in the copyright section of the two PDFs! Fixed that.
– Alex Schroeder 2018-12-20 06:58 UTC
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Thanks. The 404 is a draft post…hmm, time to write something.
– Jeremy Friesen 2018-12-21 19:56 UTC
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A Bad Turn of Words: Fantasy Heartbreaker argues that we should stop using this word, this slur, this self-deprecating phrase to talk about our games. Well said!
A Bad Turn of Words: Fantasy Heartbreaker
– Alex Schroeder 2019-01-07 06:44 UTC
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Really enjoyed this first episode. And your comment on ’the fear’ in dungeon crawling/adventuring ring true for me too. James Holloway did a special episode of Monster Man on The Pathetic Aesthetic a while back that crystallized a lot of what I’m looking for in fantasy adventure games. Probably worth a listen if you haven’t already. Cheers!
https://monsterman.libsyn.com/special-episode-the-pathetic-aesthetic
– Daniel Lofton 2018-12-21 15:57 UTC
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Thanks for the recommendation!
– Alex Schroeder 2018-12-21 18:02 UTC
