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Below is a post I made to Facebook.
This is a long one, aimed at the referees out there. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read it. But there is a TL;DR at the top.
TL;DR I’ve spent 10+ years looking for the Perfect System, am I alone in this search?
I’ve been on the search for the ever elusive Perfect System to run my games in. I’ve been on this search for the past 10 or so years that I’ve been refereeing games. Initially I ran Pathfinder 1E. It was the Perfect System because I didn’t know any better. Then we got to higher levels with that system and it was no longer perfect.
Then a friend introduced me to BX (Basic/Expert) style play. I loved it! Play was fast and deadly. But I was still so inexperienced I was afraid of trying to understand those old and archaic rules. At some point I heard the term OSR and started poking around OSR style games and discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Dungeon Crawl Classics was like a light suddenly being turned on in the dark room that was Pathfinder 1E high level play. It was fast and deadly like BX. It had a magic system that was completely random based on dice rolls. In fact almost everything in that game was random. After 4 years of playing I got a little tired of random. Random sometimes meant game breaking, which was not good for long term campaigns (my preferred style of play.) Then I found Old-School Essentials (Advanced).
OSE Advanced was fast and deadly like DCC but without all the gonzo game breaking shit. It had rules for domains (awesome!). It had lots of options for character classes. So many I actually had to limit which classes players could play as. It had race as class just like DCC. Race as class was a little weird but for simplicities sake I went with it. It worked great! I’ve got a game going on now that’s a 2.5 year campaign based on OSE Advanced as the system. But then along came Hyoerborea.
For the longest time I was afraid of descending AC. I’d been told by people who were around when it was being used that descending AC and THAC0 were the devil. Then I got ahold of Hyoerborea 2E. The setting was AMAZING! But it used descending AC and THAC0 (or so I thought.) one thing no one ever explained to me was that descending AC and THAC0 are related to each other. Kind of. But they are completely separate things!
To compare it to all the ascending AC games AC is just AC. Whether it goes up or down. Super simple. THAC0 is just a bonus to hit! Once I made that realization descending AC no longer looked as scary as it used to! But it took until Hyoerborea 3E was released to come to this realization.so I was finally comfortable with Hyoerborea enough to run it. It was like a breath of fresh air the way it codified rules. Don’t get me wrong. I loved OSE advanced enough to run it for 2.5 years. But I had to make up A LOT of rules on the fly.
The OSE Advanced game was a west marches style game. I used the hex map from Isle of Dread as the map for the island but made the contents of the island all myself. Making up what was on the island and keeping it all straight took a TON of my bandwidth as well. Aside from Advanced OSE I run 3 other games as well. Ideally each game would take up about 25% of my prep time. OSE is currently taking up about 70% of my prep time. It seems a change was in order. And I had been eyeing OSRIC as a way to run 1st edition modules. Then along comes Castle of the Archmage 10th anniversary version and I get to be a proofreader on it. Yay!
So I’ve got an early preview of the adventure in my hands to be able to prep it. I’ve got a system I want to try out that’s a cousin to a system I’m currently loving. But I start reviewing the OSRIC rules. It uses segments. While cool and all I don’t think segments are conducive to fast play at the table. So I have to rewrite the initiative rules. No big deal, honestly PF1 initiative rules (1 move 1 action per round) are actually pretty elegant. Just switch it over to a group initiative. Then I start looking at the combat rules in OSRIC. They can be a little wordy.
So I re-write the combat rules to fit on the front and back of a single piece of paper. I realize at this point I’m doing a lot of heavy lifting for something that was supposed to free up my time. But I’m hoping with the up front rewrites out of the way once I start running the adventure I’ll have more free time to focus on my other games. Maybe.
At some point I wonder if it’s worth it to just write up my own system. Which I am kind of doing anyway. But I refuse to give into that temptation and follow all the gamers who have come before me in creating their own fantasy heartbreaker. I will not be one of those guys. Lol
Have you found your perfect system? If so what is it?
This is a long one, aimed at the referees out there. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read it. But there is a TL;DR at the top.
TL;DR I’ve spent 10+ years looking for the Perfect System, am I alone in this search?
I’ve been on the search for the ever elusive Perfect System to run my games in. I’ve been on this search for the past 10 or so years that I’ve been refereeing games. Initially I ran Pathfinder 1E. It was the Perfect System because I didn’t know any better. Then we got to higher levels with that system and it was no longer perfect.
Then a friend introduced me to BX (Basic/Expert) style play. I loved it! Play was fast and deadly. But I was still so inexperienced I was afraid of trying to understand those old and archaic rules. At some point I heard the term OSR and started poking around OSR style games and discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Dungeon Crawl Classics was like a light suddenly being turned on in the dark room that was Pathfinder 1E high level play. It was fast and deadly like BX. It had a magic system that was completely random based on dice rolls. In fact almost everything in that game was random. After 4 years of playing I got a little tired of random. Random sometimes meant game breaking, which was not good for long term campaigns (my preferred style of play.) Then I found Old-School Essentials (Advanced).
OSE Advanced was fast and deadly like DCC but without all the gonzo game breaking shit. It had rules for domains (awesome!). It had lots of options for character classes. So many I actually had to limit which classes players could play as. It had race as class just like DCC. Race as class was a little weird but for simplicities sake I went with it. It worked great! I’ve got a game going on now that’s a 2.5 year campaign based on OSE Advanced as the system. But then along came Hyoerborea.
For the longest time I was afraid of descending AC. I’d been told by people who were around when it was being used that descending AC and THAC0 were the devil. Then I got ahold of Hyoerborea 2E. The setting was AMAZING! But it used descending AC and THAC0 (or so I thought.) one thing no one ever explained to me was that descending AC and THAC0 are related to each other. Kind of. But they are completely separate things!
To compare it to all the ascending AC games AC is just AC. Whether it goes up or down. Super simple. THAC0 is just a bonus to hit! Once I made that realization descending AC no longer looked as scary as it used to! But it took until Hyoerborea 3E was released to come to this realization.so I was finally comfortable with Hyoerborea enough to run it. It was like a breath of fresh air the way it codified rules. Don’t get me wrong. I loved OSE advanced enough to run it for 2.5 years. But I had to make up A LOT of rules on the fly.
The OSE Advanced game was a west marches style game. I used the hex map from Isle of Dread as the map for the island but made the contents of the island all myself. Making up what was on the island and keeping it all straight took a TON of my bandwidth as well. Aside from Advanced OSE I run 3 other games as well. Ideally each game would take up about 25% of my prep time. OSE is currently taking up about 70% of my prep time. It seems a change was in order. And I had been eyeing OSRIC as a way to run 1st edition modules. Then along comes Castle of the Archmage 10th anniversary version and I get to be a proofreader on it. Yay!
So I’ve got an early preview of the adventure in my hands to be able to prep it. I’ve got a system I want to try out that’s a cousin to a system I’m currently loving. But I start reviewing the OSRIC rules. It uses segments. While cool and all I don’t think segments are conducive to fast play at the table. So I have to rewrite the initiative rules. No big deal, honestly PF1 initiative rules (1 move 1 action per round) are actually pretty elegant. Just switch it over to a group initiative. Then I start looking at the combat rules in OSRIC. They can be a little wordy.
So I re-write the combat rules to fit on the front and back of a single piece of paper. I realize at this point I’m doing a lot of heavy lifting for something that was supposed to free up my time. But I’m hoping with the up front rewrites out of the way once I start running the adventure I’ll have more free time to focus on my other games. Maybe.
At some point I wonder if it’s worth it to just write up my own system. Which I am kind of doing anyway. But I refuse to give into that temptation and follow all the gamers who have come before me in creating their own fantasy heartbreaker. I will not be one of those guys. Lol
Have you found your perfect system? If so what is it?