Combining New School and Old School

It's all about house rules and how to create 4e feel with B/X Rules. Oh, and it's George Strayton's fault.

My Heroes of Karameikos Project

What I Imagine a 4e Essentials Rulebook for Mystara Would Look Like

I’m rekindling a fan project. This will be offered for free to anyone who reads this Substack, providing you’re interested, where I am creating a “house” version of D&D that I’d love to play.

Every week, I post my Weekly Geekly Rundown on a variety of topics in the geekosphere. I try to have the Rundown be consistent with what it contains, but from time to time it’s missing one of the main categories due to time constraints and the real world stepping in. The intention of the Rundown is to highlight stuff I’ve discovered/encountered on “teh intarwebz” (that series of tubes filled with cats) that I think is interesting and to provide a little commentary on the stuff. I’m trying to do a little of what Walter Lippmann argued was a central role of journalism, to provide some sense of the environment outside of what readers might encounter on their own. The entertainment environment is HUGE. There is more content, content worth engaging, than one can comprehend, let alone engage with in several lifetimes. The explosion of communication technology has made it even worse. The real environment is massive and incomprehensible, as the real “serious news” environment was at the time that Lippman wrote, so we all have our own limited “pseudo-environments.” This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It’s just a thing and I want to help expand my readers’ pseudo-environments and have them expand mine. That’s the whole point of the Rundown.

As a part of my regular reading, I’m a lurker and reader of many blogs within what is often called the Old School Renaissance (OSR) gaming community. That’s a bit reductive of a statement since the OSR community is several communities that have vastly different ideas of what constitutes “old school” and a host of other fights. I will leave that level of granularity to those various communities because they all share one factor, and that’s discussion of older role playing games¹ and I like to read about older Role Playing Games and see how people are innovating and updating those mechanics in fun ways.

Some of the ideas coming from that community are quite inspiring to the Role Playing Game fan and I heartily recommend that you hunt down several of the many blogs devoted to discussing Old School games. Unlike me, you’ll probably find a single niche that matches your particular tastes. That’s great. The OSR environment itself is too big to really fully experience, so I get that you might want to hang out in the area that most closely aligns with your personality. I’m an oddity here. I’m ecumenical in my OSR consumption. I will say though that any journey into OSR-land should start over at Grognardia. James Malizewski’s blog was really the first in depth appreciation of the games of the early era. Politics and culture wars are a part of the various OSRs, and James gets caught up in them from time to time too so you’ll not only get to see the best of OSR but some of the internal fights as well. After that, you can decide whether you want to wander the fields of Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, or one of a host of other games and communities in the OSR-space. There is no one OSR and there is no one concept of grognard.

Many passages around the sun ago, that’s years, I read a couple of things that had a major impact on my gaming life. The first was finding Blackrazor’s blog and reading his B/X Companion. It was a bucket of cold water in the face that awakened me to the idea that it was possible to just write your own continued rules for old games you loved, and that they didn’t have to be mere house rules.

The second thing I read was George Stayton’s Legends & Labyrinths blog. That blog no longer exists and the old url for the site redirects to Justin Alexander’s blog The Alexandrian. I read George’s blog on the recommendation of one of my players, who was playing in a Los Angeles based D&D game where George was the Dungeon Master.² He told me that George was doing something really interesting that fused the rules of 4th Edition D&D with those of 1st Edition AD&D to make a game that had modern options but old school danger. I was intrigued by the concept, so I checked it out.

Unlike many OSR gamers, and I'm not sure George would consider himself completely old school, Strayton's blog wasn't devoted to using the OGL to create a re-envisioned version of the D&D of old with "old school mechanics." Those blogs and games often, though not always, have a certain disdain for 4th edition D&D in general and a special ire for D&D Essentials. Strayton's blog was a sharp contrast to the typical older edition blog. His was dedicated to playing 1st edition style games where death is around every corner and adventurers aren't necessarily "heroic" using the 4th edition D&D rules set. His particular recommendation was to use Essentials as the basis, and his house rules were a modification to that core rules set. For a time, I used a number of his house rules in my regular 4e D&D game.³ After meeting George on several occasions, I was invited to be a developer on a role playing game based on his house rules, a game reviewed by old school blogger Tim Brannan, but that’s a tale for another time.

Reading his blog also inspired me to try to get my group to play Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D again. The group's session wasn't quite what I had hoped it would be. I measure the quality of a game session by how much fun the players have in a session, and one player felt particularly hopeless during the very first encounter. It wasn't a good start. It required a reset and restart, but it did turn out fun for me as the adventure continued. I think it eventually became fun for the group as well. The experience made me realize what I really like about Moldvay/Cook Basic and what I really like about 4e.

I love the archetype driven nature of Moldvay and Cook’s design and its quick and easy mechanics. I don't like its almost capricious lethality. Characters can die at a moments notice. While this is fine for a horror game, I don't like that in a High Fantasy game. My favorite D&D setting, Mystara, can in no way be considered anything other than High Fantasy and a capricious lethality seems out of character for the setting. There’s a kind of dissonance between a setting that has goofy inventor gnomes manufacturing steampowered zeppelins and combats where a magic user can be killed by what is essentially a pin prick.

What I enjoy about 4e is the clarity of the rules set, how the actions of one player interact with the other characters in the game. The rules reward and encourage team play because of how the actions interact. Characters have defined roles and those roles can coordinate in wonderful ways. The game also allows players to feel heroic, while still feeling at peril during combat. I have considered using Robin Laws' mark up system in Hamlet's Hit Points to highlight how 4e combats nicely follow plot beats, but others have already touched on the topic. What I don't like about 4e is the tremendous number of powers, feats, and magic items. Yes, they allow for creativity, but they also create so many combinations that a player can become lost examining the puzzle pieces and never get around to actually playing the game. There’s a reason I prefer the Essentials line, and post Essentials products, to the earlier material for 4e. Essentials characters tend to be archetype driven like Moldvay/Cook characters, instead of frameworks with which to engage in spreadsheet manipulations and refining.

My research for this week’s Rundown got me to reading some OSR blogs for ideas and that reminded me that I had begun my own OSR adjacent project back in the day. I decided to take my love for these two systems and write my own modified rules set. It’s where that image above showing Heroes of Karameikos comes from. It’s a project of house rules based primarily on the architecture of the Moldvay/Cook rules sets, but that incorporates some of what I like from 4e. In a twist on the traditional "old school" line "New edition rules, old edition feel," my game rules intention is to be "Old edition rules with a new edition feel." I’m doing the opposite of what Shadowdark is doing⁴. Shadowdark streamlines Old School rules while making them even more lethal. I want to use the simplicity of Old School rules while having a little more survivability.

I’ve already written up a couple of classes and will be doing more as the weeks and months go by. I'll try to post at least one Heroes of Karameikos update bi-weekly starting with character generation and moving on to each of the classes.

For those of you wondering...

Yes, Elf will be a class. Or rather, Elf will be several classes.

1. For the record, I will no longer be using the neologism TTRPG or Table Top Role Playing Game to describe role playing games. I might from time to time use FRPG, the super old “Fantasy Role Playing Game” term that was created in the 70s to differentiate from the psychological and sexual role playing communities, but I won’t use TTRPG. Why? Because CRPGs are the new kid on the block. They don’t get to steal my slang. That suxxors and “to the curb” with all that nonsense. I’m screaming at clouds to the end on this from now on.

2. George Strayton was a screenwriter on Hercules and Xena as well as the Dragonlance Animated film. One can critique the Dragonlance film on many levels, but one cannot say that the person who wrote it wasn’t a long time fan or one who didn’t know Role Playing Games. George worked for West End Games for a time too, where he was one of the writers who shaped the Expanded Star Wars Universe a project that is making Disney a lot of money but was work for hire.

3. Yes, I ran a regular 4e game. I did so for five years after running an 8+ year 3.x campaign. There are certain moments from my 4e gaming experience that I can’t help but look back upon fondly. There’s the time when I was deep in character acting out a villainous soliloquy when a player, who was playing a Dragonborn Paladin, shouted out “Shut Up! Evil!” and rolled for initiative mid-spiel. It was glorious. There was the time they fought an Evil Dwarven High Priest of Tharizdun and shoved him into a cistern and had the Ranger use its ranged attack abilities to keep him trapped there and unable to get out. There was the time when a different Evil High Priest had begun a ritual to pierce the veil between worlds and summon an Elder Being from the intermundia into Greyhawk using a massive doorway as the portal, only to have one of the players rush to the door to hold it closed while shouting “Zuberon! PIKE!” in his best Leroy Jenkins voice. Good times indeed and great role playing.

4. For the record, I really like Shadowdark and I backed the Kickstarter early. I’m just going for a different vibe.