Oddlike Games with Knacks

One of the things I love about Oddlike games is their simplicity. Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, and games in that family are structured so that you don't need many attributes, skills, feats, and special abilities to describe a character. A few numbers, some equipment, and a good concept are all you need. I don't want to lose that simplicity, because it’s the biggest selling point for me. But sometimes, particularly for a longer campaign or a very detailed setting, I find myself wanting a little more nuance--different ways to distinguish one character from another, to give players a guide to how their character might approach challenges, or to show something about the world these characters inhabit. So how do I add that detail without burying a simple, elegant system under a burdensome layer of rules?

The most obvious approach is to borrow from Electric Bastionland and Cairn, using backgrounds that come with particular abilities. In Electric Bastionland, failed careers help establish who a character was before becoming an adventurer, while Cairn uses backgrounds to give characters a little history and some practical skill or competence. Cairn, in particular, is a good starting point for me, because for the last few years, I have been working on a big game for a generic Medieval European setting. With inspiration from the careers of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st and 2nd editions) and the social settings of Burning Wheel, I’ve been experimenting with a list of background careers, each associated with two abilities appropriate to those backgrounds. For example, a former village healer knows something about medicine and natural philosophy; a sailor understands seamanship and rigging; a burglar knows how to break in and move quietly. These can help differentiate characters, not with game mechanics, but by suggesting the kinds of work people do, the knowledge they’ve accumulated, and the roles they play in society. A list of backgrounds can become a small piece of worldbuilding and exposition in its own right (and that’s what I’ve been working on). 

For now, I'm calling these abilities Knacks, although I'm not married to the name (I’ll have to spend some time with the trusty old thesaurus). A Knack isn't a skill that automatically adds a bonus to a roll--that’s not in the spirit of an Oddlike game. It doesn’t allow a character to do something no one else can do--in Oddlike games, anyone can try anything. In my view, a Knack tells what a character with a particular background can reasonably be expected to do, know, or accomplish, in a “better than average” sense. A herbalist searching for medicinal plants might identify a useful remedy without a roll; a burglar might not need to roll to bypass an ordinary lock, while a character without that experience would have to; a sailor or a farmer might recognize a dangerous change in the weather before the rest of the party does. Sometimes a Knack could make an otherwise impossible action possible. Sometimes it could provide information, establish a useful contact, or give a specific advantage in a dangerous situation. And sometimes it could simply mean there’s no need to roll dice at all. The point is to provide a guide for the player and GM about what is special about that character because of their background, rather than add modifiers or special rules.

Here are some examples of the backgrounds with Knacks and starting equipment, from what is becoming a rather lengthy list: 

Village Healer

A practical local healer who treats everyday injuries and illnesses using experience, traditional remedies, and whatever supplies are available.

Physician. During a Long Rest, you can provide competent basic medical care, treating everything from disease to broken bones to ability score loss.

Natural Philosopher. You can identify unfamiliar plants, animals, minerals, and natural phenomena when they occur in familiar climate/terrain; the GM may give you one useful fact.

Starting equipment: Small medicine chest, bandages, needle and thread, knife, mortar and pestle, and a few jars of salves or dried remedies.

Military Engineer

A specialist who builds or dismantles fortifications, plans defensive works, prepares siege approaches, and solves practical problems involving terrain and structures.

Architect. You understand how buildings are constructed, where they are strongest, and where they are likely to fail.

Carpenter. Given timber and tools, quickly construct sturdy wooden furniture and structures and make ordinary repairs.

Starting equipment: Measuring cord, compass or simple surveying instrument, mallet, chisel, notebook of sketches, and other small tools.

Friar

A member of a mendicant religious order who travels or lives among ordinary people, preaching, teaching, seeking alms, and serving the poor.

Performer. Given an audience, you can earn a meal and a place to sleep through performance, if the audience has the means to offer them.

Forager. Where edible plants or game genuinely exist, you can find enough to supplement your group’s food without a roll, given time and suitable conditions.

Starting equipment: Psalter or other religious text, walking staff, begging bowl, pouch, sturdy sandals or shoes, and a weatherproof cloak.

So at this point, particularly for my long-planned Medieval game, this is my best idea for “complicating” Oddlike games: add detail to characters, but resist the temptation to turn every detail into a mechanic. My goal is to start with a simple Oddlike system and introduce backgrounds and Knacks to make characters feel more individual, so that their previous lives matter, and to help the game’s setting to emerge from the rules themselves without paragraph-style exposition or history lessons. The goal isn't to make an Oddlike game more complicated, but to give its simplicity a little more texture. Time will tell how well this succeeds.

The Sack: Rome, 1527

Rome is burning, the Pope is hiding, and you're owed six months back pay. It seems like a good time to go shopping. 

I’ve finished a little solo game called The Sack: Rome, 1527, inspired by the infamous sack of Rome by the armies of Charles V. The Imperial army included thousands of German Landsknecht mercenaries, many of whom hadn't been paid in months. When the army descended upon Rome, discipline collapsed, and the soldiers turned to looting one of the wealthiest cities in the world. You’ll take the role of a squad of these opportunistic soldiers, wandering the streets in search of treasure while the city burns around you. Your objective is simple: collect 20 Loot and get out of Rome alive. What could possibly go wrong?

The game is deliberately rules-lite, but it has a fairly strict turn sequence. You’ll explore a randomly determined series of locations--churches, palaces, taverns, countinghouses, and the occasional burning tenement--and spend precious turns trying to get your hands on whatever hasn’t already been stolen. Meanwhile, Swiss Guards, angry citizens, fires, barricades, and other Landsknecht will complicate your plans. It’s a little exercise in solo gaming, resource management, and historical misbehavior. I hope it’s short, simple, and entertaining. You can find it on our Free Stuff page, or right here.

Descending AC to Ascending AC: 19 or 20?

One of the little puzzles that comes up when you’re playing old-school D&D with a modern approach is the question of ascending Armor Class. Although I grew up with descending AC, I am used to the newer convention where a higher AC is better, and I prefer it. Most so-called retroclones try to be as much like the old game as possible, but, with a few exceptions, have nevertheless adopted ascending AC, or at least offer it as an optional rule (which tells me something). But in the original game, lower was better. So how do you convert one to the other? 

I’ve seen people recommend subtracting descending AC from 19, and I have repeated this advice with great confidence. Then I saw some other charts that use 20. Which is right? The answer appears to be that both formulas are correct, depending on the rules you’re converting from. In the world of “old D&D”, B/X and AD&D are often used interchangeably. Back in the day, our standard approach was to play B/X but filter in cool stuff from AD&D, so the two are not clearly separate in my adult mind. So it’s important to remember that B/X and AD&D are two different beasts. 

In the B/X rules, unarmored characters have an AC of 9. The conversion is Ascending AC = 19 − Descending AC. So (for example) AC 9 becomes AC 10, AC 5 becomes AC 14, AC 2 becomes AC 17, AC 0 becomes AC 19, AC −2 becomes AC 21 (because, in case you need a reminder of 5th grade math like I did, subtracting a negative number means adding it). And so on.

AD&D, on the other hand, uses AC 10 as its unarmored baseline. That's why you'll often see the formula expressed as 20 minus descending AC instead. So, in the above example, all those ascending AC values would be one higher. This confused me at first. You’d think, since I’ve been playing these sorts of games since 1983, I’d know that already. But there’s a lot I don’t know about the hobby I grew up with. For example, it wasn’t until my friend Joe busted out his sister’s Mentzner Red Box that I was even fully aware of the differences between B/X and BECMI. I am clearly not up on my nerd acronyms. 

So, if you’re mixing B/X and AD&D (using monsters or modules from one in the other),  I guess the important thing is to be mindful of that one-point AC difference. In our Back to Basics B/X campaign, we’ll use the 19-based formula. But if I’m borrowing material from another edition (and I will, because we’re starting with The Village of Hommlet, written for AD&D), I should be using the 20-based formula with that material.

It’s a small distinction, but these little details will matter while I’m trying to keep the game running smoothly. Luckily, all these conversions are easy enough to do in your head on the fly, but to make it even simpler I intend to go through the module and convert everything in advance. It’s easy math, it doesn’t take long, and in the heat of the moment at the table, I’ll be glad I took the time.  

Rolling Up Characters Together

As part of our Back to Basics B/X campaign, we’re thinking about getting together in person to roll up characters rather than having everyone do it individually ahead of time. Typically, we create our characters separately, but I think there’s something to be said for doing it in person. In Basic/Expert D&D, character creation is typically pretty quick. Roll your ability scores, choose a class, buy your equipment, and you’re pretty much ready to go. We won’t spend a session zero working through elaborate character-building options (there aren’t any) or generating backstory before we ever sit down to play. The dice will give us what they give us, and we’ll get on with the game. I hope that approach will be refreshing. In crunchier games, there are so many different character options and “builds” that a lot of study is required and careful choices must be made. You need to know how the rules work before you can make meaningful character creation choices. Such games may well require a session zero, or time spent individually in research. But B/X isn’t one of them. 

Of course, newer games are not wrong to take a different approach. Some systems cleverly build world-building, character relationships, and backstory development right into character creation. And I love the idea of a Fiasco-type setup that establishes webs of relationships between characters. However, I have occasionally met the idea of a session zero with less than total enthusiasm, mostly because our game time is limited (we play twice a month) and I don’t want to spend time talking about the game, I want to start playing. However, I can see the value in a session zero. It can be a fun and interesting way to start a campaign and I have nothing against it, but it’s not what we’re after in this case. I think it could be just as fun (if not more so) to discover who our characters are through play, rather than working it all out beforehand. We can compare our rolls, joke about terrible ability scores, talk about who’s going to play what, and start imagining how this unlikely collection of adventurers might work together. Just as importantly, we get to spend time together as friends. There’s conversation, laughter, and the kind of spontaneous creative interplay that can be hard to manufacture when everyone creates their character alone at home. Character creation doesn’t have to be about preparing to play. It can be part of the game itself. 

For me, that’s what Back to Basics is really about. After years of playing online, I want to get back to sitting around a table with my friends, rolling real dice, sharing refreshments, celebrating each other’s good luck or laughing at our bad luck, and enjoying the pleasure of being in the same room. I don't think we need a system to help us create (or learn about) the game world before we get going. We’ve already got a world of our own: the friendships we’ve built over the years and the memories we’ve made. We’ll have plenty of time to discover who our characters are, how they relate to each other, and what the setting is like once the adventure begins. For now, I say let’s get together, roll some dice, and see what characters show up.

Don't Worry About the Market

In a social media gaming group I moderate, one of the questions I see over and over again from aspiring designers is, “What kind of game should I make? What are people looking for right now? What genre is hot? What system should I design for?” I understand the question, because I asked it myself once. And someone gave me some advice that has stuck with me ever since: follow your heart, and the market will find you. Just make the thing that interests you. Make the weird game you wish somebody else would make. Make the adventure you would actually want to run. There is no crystal ball that will tell you what the RPG market will want by the time you finish the project, and if you do what everyone else is doing, you're probably just making a slightly worse version of something that already exists. Your enthusiasm and authenticity is the one of the few things you have that someone else doesn’t. 

Now, if you want to make money doing this, by all means, go for it. But go into it with your eyes open. The RPG business is precarious, and the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen suggests that the overwhelming majority of people who design games do not make a living from it. One guy who has published 20 games, some of which you’ve heard of, makes about $10,000 a year. Nothing to sneeze at, but not enough to live on. Even “full-time” RPG creators may be combining design with freelance work, Patreon, convention income, teaching, another business, or a spouse’s income. I can’t find enough reliable data to put a percentage on the number, but the people who actually make games and discuss it on various forums are consistent in saying that making a living exclusively from tabletop RPG design is the exception, not the rule. That’s not meant to discourage you. It’s meant to liberate you. You don’t have to build the next D&D. You don’t have to convince investors that your game will capture X percent of the market. You can make something small, strange, personal and affordable, and if fifty people love it, you've made something that didn't exist before. I did that, and while I don’t make enough to live on, I earn $80 to $250 bucks a month. That's not nothing, and I did absolutely no market research (or marketing, for that matter).

 

And please don’t use AI to make it. It’s getting harder to tell whether people are using AI to write, but it's still easy to tell when people are using it for art. AI can be a powerful tool for a starting point in research, and a fun toy for goofing around, but for publication, it’s the easy way out--the refuge of someone who, deep down, thinks they aren't talented enough, or who is a little lazy, and who wants the appearance of having made something without actually learning how or bothering to make it. I speak from experience here. I can actually draw fairly well, and even I was tempted to use AI art for a few products just to get it done quickly, because I was lazy and I wanted a result right now. I did this with my games BEAT and Top Men and I paid the price with some bad reviews. I pulled them from the market and I’m working on original art for them now. It was a good lesson: even if you don’t have an ethical problem with it, the community will likely crucify you. If you can’t draw, that’s fine. Neither can a lot of RPG designers. If you need art, public-domain material is your friend. Find old illustrations, engravings, photographs and decorative elements that you can legally use, then transform, collage, crop, recolor and recombine them into something that is actually yours. This isn't some kind of cheat: Johan Nohr's MÖRK BORG explicitly credits “a couple of Public Domain images” alongside his own graphic design and artwork, and his design for Into the Odd has even more. It’s also OK to copy the poses in pictures from old magazines--sports magazines, body building magazines, martial arts magazines, car magazines, and the icky ones aimed at “soldiers of fortune.” Lots of artists use real-life models, and that’s no different. And if you feel your art is too amateurish, remember the wonderfully crude illustrations in the earliest D&D books. The right audience doesn’t necessarily need polished corporate artwork. Sometimes they’d rather see evidence that an actual human being made the thing. 

As for layout and design, some people who do the writing and art themselves, but use AI for layout. This is, arguably, more appropriate. But it’s not that hard to learn some basic graphic design, and cost is not a factor. You can use GIMP, which is a free Photoshop-like program. Scribus is a free desktop-publishing program roughly like InDesign. You can learn typography and composition. It’s not like learning trigonometry. Any reasonably diligent person can use these programs. I worked in the newspaper business for 20 years, so I had a head start, but it’s not unlearnable. Even just a few hours with a tutorial should set you up for a lifetime. 

And remember, you don’t have to compete with the big boys. You probably can’t. You don’t need a warehouse full of books, a distributor, a printing contract, a marketing department or ten thousand dollars in startup funds, or physically attractive paid influencers to pimp your game. You can make a PDF and put it on DriveThruRPG or itch.io. They exist to support independent publishers uploading and selling their own PDFs and print-on-demand books, without the traditional publishing infrastructure. If you eventually need money for a print run or professional art, Kickstarter is there--but crowdfunding brings its own headaches, obligations and risks, so don’t assume it’s free money. And you don’t need it to make money. I never have. Just start small. Make the thing you want to make. Use inexpensive or free tools. Learn as you go. Yes, the indie RPG market sometimes looks like it’s been buried under an avalanche of well-intentioned but uninspiring products or AI-generated stuff, but that’s actually an opportunity for you to shine. Genuine human effort is obvious, and its imperfections make it authentic and special. You don't need to be the biggest game on the shelf. You just need to make something that somebody sees and thinks, “This was made by somebody who really cares about this.” That’s a market worth finding. You may not make much money, but I’ve made a little bit, and better yet, I’ve shared what’s in my heart with a niche group of like-minded people, got some recognition and creative validation, and made a few friends along the way. That’s better than money. 

When B/X Doesn't Tell You What to Roll

One thing that has puzzled me about B/X D&D since I was a kid is what you're actually supposed to roll when the rules don't tell you what to roll. I’ve seen people ask this in public forums and the answer is usually something along the lines of, “do whatever you want, you’re the DM.” And I get that. I’ve been doing whatever I want for some 40 years. But there is something to be said for investigating the best practices used by others, being internally consistent within your own games, and pondering what the designers’ intent was in the first place. 

Most readers are probably well aware there is no general “skill check” system in the main body of the rules. There is no universal list of skills that applies to everyone, and there isn't a rule saying that any time somebody tries something difficult, you make a Dexterity check or Strength check. But here's the funny thing: if you dig all the way to the back of Moldvay Basic, there actually is a rule for exactly this. Under “There's Always a Chance,” Moldvay suggests that the DM can have a player roll 1d20 against the appropriate ability score, with a bonus or penalty based on the difficulty. So the ability check isn't some later invention imposed on B/X from the outside. It's right there in the 1981 rules (although it seems like an afterthought). The difference is that it is presented as one of the DM's tools for dealing with situations the rules don't otherwise cover, not as the universal resolution mechanic that it eventually became.

The door rules are a good example of the other way B/X handles this. A normal dungeon door is often stuck or locked, and an unlocked but stuck door has to be forced open. Everybody gets a 1d6 roll, with a 1 or 2 succeeding, and the character's Strength adjustment modifies the target number. So a character with a good Strength score really does have a better chance of forcing the door. In other words, B/X uses ability modifiers to modify a d6-based chance when the rules specifically say to do so. What it doesn't say is that every generic 1-in-6 chance should automatically become a 2-in-6 chance for somebody with a +1 ability modifier. Secret doors, for example, are simply 1-in-6 for ordinary characters and 2-in-6 for elves. There is no instruction to add an Intelligence or Wisdom modifier to that roll. So as a DM, I think you can certainly decide that a particular 1-in-6 roll should be modified by an ability score, but I wouldn't claim that this is a general B/X rule. The precedent is there, but the universal rule isn't.

And then we get to the thief, which is where things get potentially out of whack. The Thief class was a later addition to the original pre-B/X rules, and that class alone uses a percentile system for special abilities. Suppose the party finds a locked door and the fighter says, “I'll pick the lock.” What happens? If I simply say, “Make a Dexterity check,” I've created a pretty ridiculous result. A first-level B/X thief has only a 15% chance to open a lock, while a character with a Dexterity of 13 would have a 65% chance if I'm using the Moldvay “roll under your ability score” rule with no difficulty modifier rule. The fighter is suddenly more than four times as good at the thief's special skill. So I can't just assume that every action that sounds appropriate to an ability score should be resolved with an ability check. The thief's Open Locks percentage is a specific procedure for a specialized activity. If you want the thief to matter, you have to respect that procedure. A non-thief might be allowed to attempt something clever with a lock--perhaps by dismantling the door, breaking the hinges, finding another way around it, or using some piece of equipment--but “I pick the lock” isn't automatically the same thing as “I make a Dexterity check.”

What's especially interesting, though, is that the fighter doesn't really have a corresponding list of things that only fighters can do. Everybody can force open doors. Everybody gets the benefits of Strength when doing so. Everybody can search for secret doors, everybody can listen at doors, and everybody can attempt plenty of ordinary physical actions. The fighter's special territory is overwhelmingly combat: better fighting ability, better weapons and armor, and the advantages that come from being the class built around hitting things. There isn't necessarily a noncombat action that belongs exclusively to the fighter. That makes me think the better way to look at B/X is not “every class has its own list of things it can attempt.” Instead, there are three different situations. Sometimes the rules give everybody a specific chance, like forcing a door. Sometimes they give a particular class a specialized procedure, like the thief's Open Locks percentage. And sometimes the rules don't say anything at all, in which case the DM has to make a ruling--possibly using Moldvay's ability-check rule.

And that, I think, is the real lesson. B/X doesn't assume that every uncertain action needs to be converted into a standardized check. Sometimes the answer is obvious and you don't roll. Sometimes the rules give you a specific roll. Sometimes the player's description of what he is doing changes the situation enough that the DM can simply make a ruling. And sometimes, yes, you roll under an ability score because Moldvay specifically gave you permission to do that. But I think the order matters: first decide what the character is actually doing, then decide whether a roll is necessary, and only then decide what kind of roll makes sense. If you start with “Which ability score do I roll against?” you can very easily end up making the character sheet more important than the circumstances of the situation--and, as the poor first-level thief demonstrates, you can accidentally make the wrong character the expert.

Of course, this is also one of the chief arguments against playing older editions in the first place. When the 3E team did their reboot a quarter-century ago, this must have been on their minds. There is a perfectly reasonable argument that it would be better to have one universal mechanic that handles everything consistently. I’ve made this argument myself. It is certainly easier to teach: whatever the character wants to do, find the appropriate ability, determine the difficulty, and roll the same kind of check. I'm not really arguing against that here. I'm not trying to prove that B/X's approach is better, because it’s not. I am asking, what does B/X actually do, and how do we run it without so many house rules that we’re effectively replacing it with a different game? If we're going to play an older edition on its own terms, then its rules gaps, its wonky procedures, and its unspoken assumptions are part of the game we're choosing to play. We can decide that we prefer a universal mechanic--and I do--but that's a different discussion from figuring out how the original game expects us to handle the situations it doesn't spell out.

Stop Rolling to Find the Clue

Here’s a mystery-solving rule I wish more RPGs would adopt: stop rolling to find the damn clues. If there's a bloody footprint on the floor, the players should be able to see the bloody footprint. If there's a letter in the dead man's desk, they should be able to find the letter. If there's something unusual about the murder scene, don’t make the players roll a Perception check (or whatever) to determine whether their characters notice. You built the mystery around that information. So give it to ‘em. 

I’m thinking about this a lot because I'm working on an RPG called Roosevelt’s Detectives, about a special squad of detectives working for Theodore Roosevelt in 1890s New York. I've been trying to figure out the best way to model mysteries in an RPG, and I keep coming back to the same idea: the mystery should be solved by the players, not by their dice. If the players search the victim’s room and roll badly, what exactly has been accomplished? I haven’t made the mystery itself more challenging. I’ve simply hidden the adventure from the people who are supposed to be playing it.

That doesn’t mean I want a game with no dice rolls. Quite the opposite. There are plenty of things a detective might attempt where failure is interesting. Can you get a nervous witness to talk? Can you identify an exotic poison? Can you convince somebody to let you examine the body? Can you establish that two pieces of evidence are connected? Those are great things to use dice for because the outcome could significantly change the story. But finding the evidence shouldn’t normally be one of them. Without the evidence, there is no story. Give the players the facts. Let them make the connections. Let them come up with the wrong theory. Let them accuse the wrong guy. That's where the actual detective work (and fun) happens.

So I think RPG mysteries work better when we stop treating information like a reward that has to be unlocked with a successful skill test of some sort. The players aren't watching a detective on TV. They are the detectives. If they search the desk, tell them what's in the desk. If they examine the body, tell them what they can see. Then get out of their way and see what they do with that evidence. Maybe they'll figure out who the murderer is. Maybe they'll completely mess it up. Either way, at least they solved--or failed to solve--the mystery. The dice shouldn’t do that for them.