Statistics in the OSR market

My OSR house rules have slowly evolved into a game of their own, and I've been kicking around the idea of publishing them after 'Bastards is all grown up and finding its own way in the world. To this end, I've done some amateur market research by way of straw polls. I'm sure none of these are statistically significant by way of sample size, but here they are.

Screencaps are here from the time at writing, but if you want to weigh in, I'll leave links to each below the poll itself.

http://strawpoll.me/7025086/

This poll had the most results, and it confirms to what I predicted. The most popular edition chosen was Moldvay Basic, but nearly twice as many people weighed in and said that they didn't care one way or another about the specific edition. What did surprise me was that OD&D beat out BECMI/RC and AD&D by a decent margin. I can't be sure if this is because OD&D is more popular than I thought, or because more people thought it was underrepresented than the other editions.

Since the leading result didn't care what edition it was, that leads to the next question: how much do we care about faithfulness to the core material?

http://strawpoll.me/7044557/

The results here are more definitive than the first question, but we have an even smaller sample size. That said, it completely conforms to my expectations. Because OSR stuff is so broadly compatible, the overwhelming majority seem more interested in seeing innovation than faithfulness to the old rules.

http://strawpoll.me/7139460/

This last one I've been kicking around for a while. Book formatting is something I've written about before and it's an interesting topic for OSR. Depending on the edition and game, we've seen it done a number of ways. The results here surprised me.

I've never gotten to experience LBB OD&D, but I've always loved the physical presentation of it. The amateurish doodles give it a naive charm, and the nostalgia factor is high. The actual booklets themselves have a kind of versatility that you lose in single-volume sets, as they allow you to have multiple people looking different things up simultaneously. If you can acquire them separately, it also means you can have multiple copies of the character creation section if you need it to speed up the process. I think it may also be less intimidating to initiate a new player into the game with a half-sized 30-page booklet than handing them the 300-page player's guide from certain other editions of the game.

For the first day or so that I monitored this poll, all four options were at a dead heat, with at most a vote or two between them. I assumed that the single volume 8.5x11 would ultimately win out, as it is the most common form RPG books take. I was pleasantly surprised that the 6x9 took the lead. I've written about how much I love this format ever since I picked up the Burning Wheel Gold book.

Even if the above changes significantly after the time of posting, I think I will stick with the 6x9 as the target size for a new book. This is not just because I genuinely enjoy the form factor for it, but because it creates a secondary possibility as well. It's easy to lay out the book at 5.5x8.5 (half-page LBB size) first and create the game in such a way as it can stand as multiple booklets and then just slightly upscale the same layout to fit a single-volume 6x9 without changing page numbers. Print on demand being what it is, it would be easy to offer both for people to pick at their preference. I can easily see someone using the single-volume hardback and a couple extra character-creation booklets at the table.

Under/Over

Continuing my LotFP tinkerfest:
My biggest bugbear with the current setup is that some rolls are roll-over, others are roll-under. This bothers me, as players get confused as to which way the rolls should go.

As it stands, attack rolls and saves are roll-over. Ability rolls and skills are roll-under. I'd like to align them all in the same direction:

Option A: Roll Over

Move everything to a roll-over system. Attack rolls can stay the same (d20+AB vs AC). Saves would be the same (equal to or greater than your save number).

Ability Score would have to be roll 1d20+Ability. 21+ is success.
Skills would have to be 1d6+skill. 7 is success.

Benefits:

• Rolling high is by virtue of language and conditioning intuitively good. "Natural 20" automatically triggers something in most gamers.
• Ability Scores can be directly opposed, with each side rolling d20+Ability to determine the winner.

Drawbacks:

• Double digit+double digit math is something that will produce an "uhhhh" every time it is rolled.
• Defeats the point of recording skills in pips, as part of the charm was the visual representation on the sheet actually looking like the d6, and needing that or under.
• 21 and 7 sound arbitrary (even if they aren't), and begin to stray into TN/DC territory, which I'm not a fan of for this kind of game. The simplicity of roll-under is that what you see is what you need.
• Save numbers go down to improve instead of going up, which is slightly counter-intuitive. 

Option B: Roll Under

Attribute and Skill rolls remain as they are now. Saves are easily converted to roll-under: you just take what they are now and subtract them from 20. A sheet could have the updated saves and no one would notice the difference.

Attack Bonus would need renamed (it's no longer a bonus), but is functionally the same. If you had +2 before, it would now just be a roll-under of 2. AC would go back to TSR era "lower is better."

Your attack roll would then be a d20  with the goal of rolling under your Attack Score+EnemyAC. 

Bonuses can universally be assumed to apply to the score itself, rather than the roll, so a +1 bonus is still good.

Benefits:

• No math required anywhere except the attack roll, but that always needs math unless you want to make a chart (Note to self: consider chart). What you see is what you need.
• Pips on dice retain their charm.
• All Stats go up to improve - except for AC? Hrm.
• AC listed in other retroclones/TSR material can be used more or less as-is. 

Drawbacks:

• "Roll low to succeed" is inherently less intuitive. "Natural 1" doesn't hit the brain the same way as "Natural 20."
• Enemy AC now modifies your roll, instead of being the target you need to meet. Not sure if this is less intuitive. Could be fixed through a THAC0 style table, but that goes back into "is this more or less intuitive than the alternative? If you did go that route though, AC could be positive as well.

At present, I'm liking B more than anything, but debating whether a return to a THAC0 style chart is better or worse than weird AC mechanics.

Band of Bastards: Working Cover

Something I've been working on lately, and I'm exceptionally excited about - I managed to throw together the cover layout for the Band of Bastards book. Well. Sort of.

This is an experimental cover that I'll show on it's own merits before I bother explaining it. Just for a moment click it, enlarge it, and take it in. Bask in it. Bask.

This is an experimental cover. I think it was Luke Crane that really advised for an indie-dev to sit down and really invest in some nice cover art, more than anything else, because you're going to use that cover art for publicity and marketing again and again and again. In theory, the investment should pay off in spades. It is, after all, the face of your game.

The thing for me though is that I've never much cared for the art on the cover of a book. At best, I nod and go "oh, neat." and move on. At best, it helps me identify the specific genre (Oh, she's wearing a bronze breastplate, this must be a set in antiquity), but I'm far more likely to totally ignore it, or be actively turned off by it.

Conventional wisdom demands one place a certain kind of artwork on their cover. Usually this is either a collection of the characters on the front, hoping to speak to "this is what you can be," or some kind of scene on the front depicting the nature of the game - for fantasy games, this is usually someone fighting some kind of monster.

I think the problem for me has always been that when it comes down to it, I have no investment in what's happening on the cover. This is not my character, that's not my story. Since the overwhelming majority of my campaigns are home-brewed, I'm generally not even looking to the cover for atmosphere.

The above cover was my thought on "what if we tried something different?" I intentionally gave it that "old book" look, and I think the details came out very well. The leather texture, the binding, the faux gold leaf. It would in fact make for one sexy glossy hardback, and look gorgeous on a shelf. I even love the fact that it doesn't immediately look like another fantasy RPG book - but it does look intriguing.

On the other hand, this could all be one man's eccentricity again. By publishing time, you might have exactly what you expect in an RPG book - some dashing scene of blood and swordsmanship.

For now, I'm going to sit back and enjoy it.

Regards,