Ye Olde Fantasy: System Assumptions

Ye Olde Fantasy‘s tools are system-neutral – I have run many campaigns in my pseudo-medieval setting using various rules – Original Dungeons & Dragons, Into the Odd, Basic Role-Playing, OpenQuest, and often a freeform Free Kriegsspiel style game.

So, it would be easy for me to handwave and say, “Just run this however you’re going to run it,” but I have been on the reader side of such text before, which has always frustrated me. I will not write a whole new system, but I will tell you what I will assume. I will also explain why I rule situations the way I do, so hopefully, this will broaden the applicability of these systems with a bit of interpretation.

I will assume you’re running something like a variant of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, one of its more stripped-down cousins like Into the Odd or Cairn, or a version of RuneQuest/BRP. If you’re not – then you’ll need to adjust these tools, but I will guide you with the intent of each system to make that easier.

Attributes

I assume you’re running a game with an attribute equivalent. What those are doesn’t matter much other than they represent your character—typical stuff like Strength, Intelligence, Charisma, and the other usual suspects. I suggest adding an attribute (if your game does not have it) in Social Status, which will get its own post.

In some places, I may say, “Make a Strength check.” This might be a d20 roll under, maybe it is Strength x 5 on a d%, or perhaps you don’t have a “Strength” score and use tags with 2d6 vs. 8, and you decide your tag of “Brawny” applies +1. Whatever that may be, you need a way to make a check against this stat and get success, failure, critical success, or critical failure. I’ll say what I do in these situations, but I suspect you already have your version of such checks.

Skills

Here’s a contentious topic for the old-school D&D crowd. I will mention skills in a few places. For example, as part of lifepaths, I may say, “Take Athletics,” or “Roll Lore to try to get into the Academy lifepath” with pass/fail events. I use skills in a lifepath generation system, as well as downtime. I’m not telling you that you must use an extensive skill list; note how they’re used in their particular subsystem. If you instead prefer to have a background tag, then when you roll up that you were a Turnipmancer, you can write that as a tag on your sheet and trust your table to rule that you’re able to do Turnipmancy effectively without the discrete skill.

Since BRPs already have a skill system, I’ll propose a system for use with old-school D&D if you wish (of course, aside from the Search and Listen at Door and Thief Skills and all other skills already existing in D&D :P). The tl;dr, if you don’t want to wait for/read that post, is “use the Traveller-style system that Kevin Crawford uses, like in Wolves of God or Worlds Without Number.”

Saving Throws

Saving throws are also mentioned but in a general, non-specific fashion. I may say, “Make a save vs. poisoning by your chancellor”- likely to be D&D’s classic Save vs. Poison. In OpenQuest, this is the Resilience skill. Sometimes, I’ll get more out there; I know I have a “save vs. your cottage being burned down,” which might be Save vs. Breath. Or it’s a skill check to stamp out the fire. I enjoy leaving it as an exercise for the player to say how they respond, but that might be annoying, so I might get more precise as I write these. Comment when these come up if they infuriate you.

Classes

While I love D&D’s archetypical class system, I no longer play too many campaigns with it, preferring to let everyone do everything (in the context of how they play). So, I will not make assumptions about any specific class, but I will suggest a few places where the B/X standard classes may come into play if you use them. For example – when to take a class using the lifepath character generation system, adding Magic-User levels to the Summoning or Alchemy systems, etc.

Levels & Experience

Hand in hand with classes – I will not assume levels but mention where they could apply. Levels are a great abstraction, mainly when using classes, but they are optional for the kinds of games I run. Any form of advancement and progress should work hand-in-hand with these. It’s your game, and it can be great to get your table on board with the “goal” of the game through an advancement scheme. But you can also eschew that and trust players will strive for what we all find interesting.

Onward

That covers it, so let’s move on to our first proposed subsystem for use in a pseudo-medieval fantasy game – the Social Status attribute.

Ye Olde Fantasy © 2024 by Justin Hamilton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0