Only the gods know how many hours, words, and bottles of whiskey went into this project. What I can tell you is that a 77,000 words, 250 pages, and 379 days later, I have a solid draft available for playtesting. It will almost certainly have mistakes, typos, and broken bits inside.. but it's the single largest and most complete thing I've ever released and that's a personal milestone.
Check it out here: https://www.grandheresy.com/blog/2018/11/15/sword-amp-scoundrel-020
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Saturday, November 3, 2018
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
As a game concept, ammunition sucks. There's an argument for tracking ammunition. It's realistic. It costs money. It takes up space. In the context of OD&D it makes sense to track ammunition because resource management is an explicit part of the game. The more gear you take, the more room it takes up in your pack, the slower you go. The slower you go, the more monsters and things you run into. The less room you have in your pack, the less loot you can take back. It's an intrinsic part of the risk/reward.
On the other hand, that is not something Scoundrel really cares about. Encumbrance in our game doesn't care about weight, money is mostly abstract, and even the buying of ammunition is sort of an odd proposition because it's mostly an r1 expense.
So is there any real need to track ammunition?
The only circumstance I can think of in which th game would actively care about ammunition is in the circumstance where running out of ammunition would be narratively interesting and even that doesn't necessarily require marking off each arrow loosed.
In the OSR world, some people have adopted an interesting piece of gaming praxis called a "usage die." You might have d8 worth of arrows. After every fight, roll the d8. If it comes up as a 1, it shrinks to a d6. Repeat until you either buy more arrows (increasing your die size) or you get down to a d4 and roll a 1 -- indicating that you are now out.
The main benefit of this setup is that you aren't erasing and rewriting a total every time you make a ranged attack. You're still doing some accounting, but it's something you do post-combat, rather than during.
It makes me wonder first if such an idea could be adapted to Sword & Scoundrel (there are ways, I'm sure) and then second if that would actually be desirable in a game where we have taken a substantially more simulationist approach with so many other aspects of weapons and combat.
Floating ideas. Feel free to toss in feedback.
On the other hand, that is not something Scoundrel really cares about. Encumbrance in our game doesn't care about weight, money is mostly abstract, and even the buying of ammunition is sort of an odd proposition because it's mostly an r1 expense.
So is there any real need to track ammunition?
The only circumstance I can think of in which th game would actively care about ammunition is in the circumstance where running out of ammunition would be narratively interesting and even that doesn't necessarily require marking off each arrow loosed.
In the OSR world, some people have adopted an interesting piece of gaming praxis called a "usage die." You might have d8 worth of arrows. After every fight, roll the d8. If it comes up as a 1, it shrinks to a d6. Repeat until you either buy more arrows (increasing your die size) or you get down to a d4 and roll a 1 -- indicating that you are now out.
The main benefit of this setup is that you aren't erasing and rewriting a total every time you make a ranged attack. You're still doing some accounting, but it's something you do post-combat, rather than during.
It makes me wonder first if such an idea could be adapted to Sword & Scoundrel (there are ways, I'm sure) and then second if that would actually be desirable in a game where we have taken a substantially more simulationist approach with so many other aspects of weapons and combat.
Floating ideas. Feel free to toss in feedback.
Almost a Year to the Day
That's how long I've gone between posts. It's an impressive feat, really. Then again, that's how I've always dealt with this poor blog. I will go through active bursts of content and then get out of the habit for an age.
I won't bore you with the details of the last year. Personal stuff, health stuff. Some ups. Some down. Life goes on. Very little of it would be of interest to anyone who wasn't part of it, and none of it is relevant to this blog's stated purpose. Instead, I'll update you on the one thing that is:
What began as an attempt to make a streamlined "quick play" style rules set for NaGaDeMon last year turned into an overhaul of the system itself. Seventy-three thousand words later, Sword & Scoundrel is preparing for its most complete release to date. Higgins is off doing bigger and better things, but I've wrangled a couple volunteer editors to pour over prose on my behalf. With luck, they will have that back to me in relatively short order and I can get the layout done.
This is the first version of the game that is "complete." All of the absolute core material is there. The core mechanic, character creation, combat, social stuff, gear and equipment. You can make characters and play the game. It's shocking that it's taken me years to have all of that together in a single document, but it's unbelievably relieving to have the bulk of it behind me.
The only parts of the game now missing from the original vision are the GM section and magic. Both of these are fairly massive things in their own right, but neither are absolute requirements for using the core material. The GM section is my next project, but anyone with significant GM experience can likely run the game as-is. This is doubly true if you've been a Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World GM in the past.
The magic system isn't strictly necessary at all (the very first version of the game in ye ancient Song of Steel days didn't intend to have one). It's useful for a lot of fantasy stuff, but you can play without it. Much of the Sword & Sorcery genre sort of works on the premise that sorcery is for the antagonists, not the heroes. I'll get to work on that after the core system and GM stuff is all settled. My ambitions for it are as such that it isn't something I would want to rush.
In the meantime, I'll keep you posted.
I won't bore you with the details of the last year. Personal stuff, health stuff. Some ups. Some down. Life goes on. Very little of it would be of interest to anyone who wasn't part of it, and none of it is relevant to this blog's stated purpose. Instead, I'll update you on the one thing that is:
What began as an attempt to make a streamlined "quick play" style rules set for NaGaDeMon last year turned into an overhaul of the system itself. Seventy-three thousand words later, Sword & Scoundrel is preparing for its most complete release to date. Higgins is off doing bigger and better things, but I've wrangled a couple volunteer editors to pour over prose on my behalf. With luck, they will have that back to me in relatively short order and I can get the layout done.
This is the first version of the game that is "complete." All of the absolute core material is there. The core mechanic, character creation, combat, social stuff, gear and equipment. You can make characters and play the game. It's shocking that it's taken me years to have all of that together in a single document, but it's unbelievably relieving to have the bulk of it behind me.
The only parts of the game now missing from the original vision are the GM section and magic. Both of these are fairly massive things in their own right, but neither are absolute requirements for using the core material. The GM section is my next project, but anyone with significant GM experience can likely run the game as-is. This is doubly true if you've been a Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World GM in the past.
The magic system isn't strictly necessary at all (the very first version of the game in ye ancient Song of Steel days didn't intend to have one). It's useful for a lot of fantasy stuff, but you can play without it. Much of the Sword & Sorcery genre sort of works on the premise that sorcery is for the antagonists, not the heroes. I'll get to work on that after the core system and GM stuff is all settled. My ambitions for it are as such that it isn't something I would want to rush.
In the meantime, I'll keep you posted.
Thursday, November 2, 2017
NaGaDeMon Update 1 - Scope
I came across this post from immersion studios which is perfectly topical for what I have in mind. Boiling a system down to a quick start guide is an interesting and slightly daunting process. Figuring out what to include and what to trim is tricky under the best of circumstances. This is even more tricky for a game like Sword & Scoundrel, where play can be focused in different arenas.
The two immediate attractors are drives and the combat system, so any introductory to the game will need to leave those two factors largely intact. The former will be simple enough. The latter will need some slight modification, I suspect.
A big concern I have at the moment is in the word count. The existing scoundrel material is over 50k words so far and we're have maybe half the total content I'd like to generate for the core book. Boiling the core of that down into a smaller package will be a tricky task all by itself.
At this stage, I'm optimistic. We'll see how long that optimism holds out.
The two immediate attractors are drives and the combat system, so any introductory to the game will need to leave those two factors largely intact. The former will be simple enough. The latter will need some slight modification, I suspect.
A big concern I have at the moment is in the word count. The existing scoundrel material is over 50k words so far and we're have maybe half the total content I'd like to generate for the core book. Boiling the core of that down into a smaller package will be a tricky task all by itself.
At this stage, I'm optimistic. We'll see how long that optimism holds out.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
November Update and NaGaDeMon
Another month passes. I've been under the weather lately and nowhere near as productive as I'd like to be as a result. However, a new month is a new opportunity and November is a particularly exciting month. For those that aren't familiar, November is National Game Development Month — NaGaDeMon (how can you not love an abbreviation like that?) — which makes it the perfect time to start that project you've been kicking around in the back of an old notebook.
I had a mighty temptation to indulge in my ongoing affair with OSR, but I will stay true. Instead, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to tackle Sword & Scoundrel from a different angle. From the beginning, I'd talked with Higgins about making a kind of "Basic Edition" Scoundrel. It would be the same game built on the same rules, but with minor abridgements and all the optional clutter removed. The purpose of such a project would be to serve as a kind of entry-level version for people who were curious about the system but could be intimidated by the massive tome the full game will inevitably become. Alternatively, it should be able to stand-alone for people who like the angles the game plays but want something a little more lightweight and flexible.
The finished project should be more or less compatible with the full game so that players who learn on the basic edition won't have to re-learn much (if anything) if you transition to the full game.
I'll keep you posted on development.
I had a mighty temptation to indulge in my ongoing affair with OSR, but I will stay true. Instead, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to tackle Sword & Scoundrel from a different angle. From the beginning, I'd talked with Higgins about making a kind of "Basic Edition" Scoundrel. It would be the same game built on the same rules, but with minor abridgements and all the optional clutter removed. The purpose of such a project would be to serve as a kind of entry-level version for people who were curious about the system but could be intimidated by the massive tome the full game will inevitably become. Alternatively, it should be able to stand-alone for people who like the angles the game plays but want something a little more lightweight and flexible.
The finished project should be more or less compatible with the full game so that players who learn on the basic edition won't have to re-learn much (if anything) if you transition to the full game.
I'll keep you posted on development.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
OSR Project #2: The Danger of Skills
There's an argument floating around that will claim that skills expand what your character is capable of by letting you invest in a bunch of different things, rather than being confined to an archetype like a class. I'm here going to have to argue that the opposite is true.
Skills by definition impose limitations on what your character is capable of.
When OD&D was released, there were only three classes - Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User. All of these characters were assumed to be dungeon-delving adventurers and have all the skills and abilities appropriate of such. Later, Greyhawk was released as the first D&D supplement and it added Thief as a class. Suddenly, the dynamic of the game changed.
The thief is essentially a class based around having skills. Climb walls, hide in shadows, move silently, pick locks, disarm/detect traps, etc. The Thief as originally written is Dungeoneer: The Class. This creates a lot of weirdness compared to how the game was played before. If you listen to Arneson talk about his early D&D experiences, everyone acted like a thief before the thief showed up. Everyone was sneaking around, picking locks, hiding and setting up ambushes, disarming traps, etc. The creation of the thief changed the way the distribution of abilities was perceived. Because the thief has a mechanical means of doing these things on their sheet, suddenly those things became the domain of the thief. Worse, because the thief had a mechanical ruleset for doing these tasks, it gave the implication that because no one else had access to these mechanics the thief was the only one who could do it. (There is a very interesting argument to be made that the nature and wording of the thief's abilities was supposed to imply a slightly supernatural character to them, thus everyone could sneak but a thief could literally disappear in a shadow. I actually prefer that interpretation, but it is outside of what I want to discuss here.)
When there is no mechanic for a thing, it's in the common domain. Anyone can attempt it by navigating the fiction. When you introduce a mechanic for a thing, you codify it and ultimately limit it in some way. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's an inherent side-effect of having a mechanic for it.
Now to make this less esoteric, consider for a moment Aragorn as a Ranger. In OD&D or AD&D, I can stand on the wall at Helm's Deep and make an impassioned speech because there is no Oration or Speechcraft skill. I can get up there, do my thing and feel pretty damned heroic about it because of course I can do it. I'm a big deal adventurer. The GM might nod and approve. The GM might even let me roll something to see if it has a mechanical impact on the fight. Who knows.. But it's entirely within my wheelhouse. Because there is no mechanic for it, it's up for grabs.
Now pretend we're playing 3.5e instead. Now there's a Diplomacy skill (or whatever it's called in 3.5) that exists for trying to influence NPCs. The existence of this skill means that in order for my character to be good at the thing governed by the skill, I need to invest mechanical resources into making them do so (in this case, skill points). What was something that I might have done and could have done because I thought it was cool and might have made a memorable scene becomes an area of the game I can no longer meaningfully interact with unless I spec out my character specifically to do so. I have to buy back the thing I could have done before, had the skill not existed.
Worse, because there is now a mechanic attached, if I do give an impassioned speech at the walls of Helm's Deep, the GM might make me roll for it anyway and because I don't have the skill I've introduced a risk. I might botch the roll and the GM penalizes the troops for my good intention. The GM might decide that I get up there and somehow drop my speghetti because a lot of games are written with the assumption that a bad roll means the character fucked up.
Where before this was a fun and optional thing that at worst would have been neat to play and at best might have given me some kind of fun bonus from a GM trying to encourage such things, I now have to weigh the risks of even attempting a thing that the game says I'm mechanically bad at because I don't have skill points invested in it. At best, I look unheroic and dumb, at worst, I might accidentally penalize my troops for having tried.
In the 3.5 ranger's case this is even more punitive because I've spent all of my skill points buying the abilities that previous editions gave me just for being part of my class.. And we'll not even talk about how different classes in 3.5 don't have access to certain skills and thus you have to invest even more character resources if you want to do something like be a fighter who also knows how to talk to people.
If you want an even more banal example.. There is no AD&D, B/x, or OD&D character who can't ride a horse. And yet, in 3.0/3.5/pf, Ride is a skill. You can technically ride without it, but if you want to do anything with the horse or avoid any perils of said horse, you now need to drop points in ride.
Making something a skill inherently walls the thing off from the open domain of play. If there's no cooking skill and you want to cook something, you are generally assumed to be able to do it because it's beneath what the game cares to simulate. The moment you create a cooking skill, you are mechanically a shitty cook until you invest resources in being able to do something you otherwise would have been able to do for free.
Skills by definition impose limitations on what your character is capable of.
When OD&D was released, there were only three classes - Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User. All of these characters were assumed to be dungeon-delving adventurers and have all the skills and abilities appropriate of such. Later, Greyhawk was released as the first D&D supplement and it added Thief as a class. Suddenly, the dynamic of the game changed.
The thief is essentially a class based around having skills. Climb walls, hide in shadows, move silently, pick locks, disarm/detect traps, etc. The Thief as originally written is Dungeoneer: The Class. This creates a lot of weirdness compared to how the game was played before. If you listen to Arneson talk about his early D&D experiences, everyone acted like a thief before the thief showed up. Everyone was sneaking around, picking locks, hiding and setting up ambushes, disarming traps, etc. The creation of the thief changed the way the distribution of abilities was perceived. Because the thief has a mechanical means of doing these things on their sheet, suddenly those things became the domain of the thief. Worse, because the thief had a mechanical ruleset for doing these tasks, it gave the implication that because no one else had access to these mechanics the thief was the only one who could do it. (There is a very interesting argument to be made that the nature and wording of the thief's abilities was supposed to imply a slightly supernatural character to them, thus everyone could sneak but a thief could literally disappear in a shadow. I actually prefer that interpretation, but it is outside of what I want to discuss here.)
When there is no mechanic for a thing, it's in the common domain. Anyone can attempt it by navigating the fiction. When you introduce a mechanic for a thing, you codify it and ultimately limit it in some way. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's an inherent side-effect of having a mechanic for it.
Now to make this less esoteric, consider for a moment Aragorn as a Ranger. In OD&D or AD&D, I can stand on the wall at Helm's Deep and make an impassioned speech because there is no Oration or Speechcraft skill. I can get up there, do my thing and feel pretty damned heroic about it because of course I can do it. I'm a big deal adventurer. The GM might nod and approve. The GM might even let me roll something to see if it has a mechanical impact on the fight. Who knows.. But it's entirely within my wheelhouse. Because there is no mechanic for it, it's up for grabs.
Now pretend we're playing 3.5e instead. Now there's a Diplomacy skill (or whatever it's called in 3.5) that exists for trying to influence NPCs. The existence of this skill means that in order for my character to be good at the thing governed by the skill, I need to invest mechanical resources into making them do so (in this case, skill points). What was something that I might have done and could have done because I thought it was cool and might have made a memorable scene becomes an area of the game I can no longer meaningfully interact with unless I spec out my character specifically to do so. I have to buy back the thing I could have done before, had the skill not existed.
Worse, because there is now a mechanic attached, if I do give an impassioned speech at the walls of Helm's Deep, the GM might make me roll for it anyway and because I don't have the skill I've introduced a risk. I might botch the roll and the GM penalizes the troops for my good intention. The GM might decide that I get up there and somehow drop my speghetti because a lot of games are written with the assumption that a bad roll means the character fucked up.
Where before this was a fun and optional thing that at worst would have been neat to play and at best might have given me some kind of fun bonus from a GM trying to encourage such things, I now have to weigh the risks of even attempting a thing that the game says I'm mechanically bad at because I don't have skill points invested in it. At best, I look unheroic and dumb, at worst, I might accidentally penalize my troops for having tried.
In the 3.5 ranger's case this is even more punitive because I've spent all of my skill points buying the abilities that previous editions gave me just for being part of my class.. And we'll not even talk about how different classes in 3.5 don't have access to certain skills and thus you have to invest even more character resources if you want to do something like be a fighter who also knows how to talk to people.
If you want an even more banal example.. There is no AD&D, B/x, or OD&D character who can't ride a horse. And yet, in 3.0/3.5/pf, Ride is a skill. You can technically ride without it, but if you want to do anything with the horse or avoid any perils of said horse, you now need to drop points in ride.
Making something a skill inherently walls the thing off from the open domain of play. If there's no cooking skill and you want to cook something, you are generally assumed to be able to do it because it's beneath what the game cares to simulate. The moment you create a cooking skill, you are mechanically a shitty cook until you invest resources in being able to do something you otherwise would have been able to do for free.
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
OSR Project #1: Deconstructing Ability Scores
I've gotten my freelance work done for the day, I've gotten some Scoundrel work done for the day. Now I'm allowed to write about OSR stuff. That's how this works, right?
I've been kicking around the D&D six-scores setup for a while now. While they are a fairly well-rounded way to measure a character, they've always struck me as a bit odd for an OSR game. Ironic, I know.
In OSR (for the duration of this post, being shorthand for "TSR-era D&D editions and the games that directly mimic them"), the overwhelming majority of things in the game have no ability scores whatsoever. Looking through the monster manuals very few, if any, entries bother listing ability scores. Most will give a broad category for intelligence so that the GM knows how to play them. Every so often a rare monsters of impressive strength will have a strength score listed in their description just in case it comes up. Even monsters comparable to PCs (Elves, Dwarves, Humans) have no ability scores RAW, even when those NPCs are given character levels.
What this means is that ability scores are mechanically a player-facing mechanism. RAW, they are unique to player characters. NPCs only have them if the GM decides to detail one out for whatever reason. Immediately this makes any real concerns about ability scores as a kind of simulation moot. Instead, they seem to exist only as a source of player character bonuses. This becomes even more apparent when you look into OD&D, where attributes played a very small roll overall compared to modern games. Dexterity would get you a bonus on missile fire, Constitution increased your HP, and Charisma played heavily into retainers/followers/hirelings... but the main function of Strength, Intelligence, or Wisdom's seemed to be as prime requisites. Later editions add further bonuses and modifiers to different ability scores, but they ultimately remain PC-specific bonuses.
If ability scores are less "defining the simulationist parameters of your character in the world" (because again, NPCs don't have them, RAW) and more "bonuses PCs are eligible for" then it changes how we have to interact with them. The question becomes: in what ways do we want characters to be defined that interact with the mechanics of the game?
Let's examine the traditional six and what they do strictly from the mechanical bonuses they (usually) provide.
I already knew that I didn't want modifiers for to-hit or AC, so a whole lot of what Strength and Dexterity do immediately goes out the window. Intelligence and Wisdom also ring kind of hollow, for me but for different reasons.
Intelligence has always struck me as at-odds with the premise of OSR, at least in regards to the play style in which I am interested. It's incredibly difficult to play a character who is smarter than you are, as so much of intelligence is in the ability to make decisions and collate information. You as a player are only as intelligent as you are. You can get around this to some degree if the game has significant skill-like mechanics your Intelligence score can influence, but an OSR game typically doesn't and "roll to see if your character figures it out" goes against the player-skill principles that I want to pursue.
The opposite arrangement tends to be no better. When you give an intelligent player a dumb character, they wind up being a comic relief most of the time (which may or may not be good, depending on the tone you want in the game) but they also tend to wind up being far more clever than their intelligence should suggest because in most scenarios players want to succeed. For an OSR game that is supposed to be challenge or objective-based, trying to get players to make decisions that they know are going to be more likely to fail is putting the player at cross-purposes with the game's reward mechanism.
The mechanical weight of Intelligence is unimpressive as well. Bonus languages are okay, but aren't particularly interesting and I'm not at all interested in modeling your ability to speak properly. I've heard quite Lenny impressions already, thank you. Meanwhile, Wisdom basically only exists as a saving throw adjustment which is also kind of lame.
Given that I want a game that is more explicitly about player skill, I'm thinking that the best move here is to merge Intelligence and Wisdom. Wisdom will remain as an ability score and take on the linguistic functions, as well as any kind of knowing or noticing-stuff roles it might have otherwise had. Most of the functions of Intelligence are better left as player discretion. It's up to you how smart your character is and you ultimately display that intelligence through the choices you as a player make for your character.
The other major impulse I have is to merge Strength and Constitution. There's an argument to be made that lifting capability and endurance are not intrinsically related (the power lifter vs the distance runner) but in a game where we've already decided that most things don't have ability scores at all, this level of simulation isn't strictly necessary. Further, if we strip Strength of its combat bonuses (as I planned to do for dexterity as well), then the ability is left somewhat anemic on its own.
Suddenly, we're down to four ability scores:
Until part 2.
I've been kicking around the D&D six-scores setup for a while now. While they are a fairly well-rounded way to measure a character, they've always struck me as a bit odd for an OSR game. Ironic, I know.
In OSR (for the duration of this post, being shorthand for "TSR-era D&D editions and the games that directly mimic them"), the overwhelming majority of things in the game have no ability scores whatsoever. Looking through the monster manuals very few, if any, entries bother listing ability scores. Most will give a broad category for intelligence so that the GM knows how to play them. Every so often a rare monsters of impressive strength will have a strength score listed in their description just in case it comes up. Even monsters comparable to PCs (Elves, Dwarves, Humans) have no ability scores RAW, even when those NPCs are given character levels.
What this means is that ability scores are mechanically a player-facing mechanism. RAW, they are unique to player characters. NPCs only have them if the GM decides to detail one out for whatever reason. Immediately this makes any real concerns about ability scores as a kind of simulation moot. Instead, they seem to exist only as a source of player character bonuses. This becomes even more apparent when you look into OD&D, where attributes played a very small roll overall compared to modern games. Dexterity would get you a bonus on missile fire, Constitution increased your HP, and Charisma played heavily into retainers/followers/hirelings... but the main function of Strength, Intelligence, or Wisdom's seemed to be as prime requisites. Later editions add further bonuses and modifiers to different ability scores, but they ultimately remain PC-specific bonuses.
If ability scores are less "defining the simulationist parameters of your character in the world" (because again, NPCs don't have them, RAW) and more "bonuses PCs are eligible for" then it changes how we have to interact with them. The question becomes: in what ways do we want characters to be defined that interact with the mechanics of the game?
Let's examine the traditional six and what they do strictly from the mechanical bonuses they (usually) provide.
Strength: to-hit bonus in melee, damage bonus in melee, ability to bend or break things.
Dexterity: to-hit bonus for ranged weapons, bonus to AC, bonus to initiative
Constitution: bonus HP, sometimes resurrection chance.
Intelligence: ability to speak, languages, sometimes bonus spells.
Wisdom: magic-based saving throws, sometimes bonus spells.
Charisma: reaction adjustment, maximum retainers, morale of retainers
I already knew that I didn't want modifiers for to-hit or AC, so a whole lot of what Strength and Dexterity do immediately goes out the window. Intelligence and Wisdom also ring kind of hollow, for me but for different reasons.
Intelligence has always struck me as at-odds with the premise of OSR, at least in regards to the play style in which I am interested. It's incredibly difficult to play a character who is smarter than you are, as so much of intelligence is in the ability to make decisions and collate information. You as a player are only as intelligent as you are. You can get around this to some degree if the game has significant skill-like mechanics your Intelligence score can influence, but an OSR game typically doesn't and "roll to see if your character figures it out" goes against the player-skill principles that I want to pursue.
The opposite arrangement tends to be no better. When you give an intelligent player a dumb character, they wind up being a comic relief most of the time (which may or may not be good, depending on the tone you want in the game) but they also tend to wind up being far more clever than their intelligence should suggest because in most scenarios players want to succeed. For an OSR game that is supposed to be challenge or objective-based, trying to get players to make decisions that they know are going to be more likely to fail is putting the player at cross-purposes with the game's reward mechanism.
The mechanical weight of Intelligence is unimpressive as well. Bonus languages are okay, but aren't particularly interesting and I'm not at all interested in modeling your ability to speak properly. I've heard quite Lenny impressions already, thank you. Meanwhile, Wisdom basically only exists as a saving throw adjustment which is also kind of lame.
Given that I want a game that is more explicitly about player skill, I'm thinking that the best move here is to merge Intelligence and Wisdom. Wisdom will remain as an ability score and take on the linguistic functions, as well as any kind of knowing or noticing-stuff roles it might have otherwise had. Most of the functions of Intelligence are better left as player discretion. It's up to you how smart your character is and you ultimately display that intelligence through the choices you as a player make for your character.
The other major impulse I have is to merge Strength and Constitution. There's an argument to be made that lifting capability and endurance are not intrinsically related (the power lifter vs the distance runner) but in a game where we've already decided that most things don't have ability scores at all, this level of simulation isn't strictly necessary. Further, if we strip Strength of its combat bonuses (as I planned to do for dexterity as well), then the ability is left somewhat anemic on its own.
Suddenly, we're down to four ability scores:
Brawn: Physical fitness, strength, endurance, vitality. Plays a roll in carrying stuff, improves HP, bends bars, unsticks doors.For what I want to do, I think that's perfect. As an aside, if someone was interested in a 3e style "three saves" setup, it winds up corresponding perfectly. As an added bonus, fewer ability scores make it much harder to have a dump-stat. Dexterity is mechanically the weakest of these options, but I've got some ideas on how it can come into play more as well.
Dexterity: Agility and fine motor control. Increases initiative, is probably useful for mobility stuff.
Wisdom: Knowledge, willpower, judgement. Bonus languages. Interacts with magic in fun ways (saves, spells, etc).
Charisma: Leadership and bearing. Reaction adjustment, maximum retainers, morale of retainers
Until part 2.
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