Of Luck and Loss
I've been running a semi-open table for a few years now. There are five core players, but we've had another half-dozen or so join in at various points in time.
Since the beginning, I've slowly refined my player onboarding to what is now a player handbook, with all the house rules, custom spells and relevant setting info.
Back when this campaign first kicked off, I wanted to try OSE as close to rules-as-written as possible. Gradually we added in house rules and tweaks based on player feedback. Due to these changes, the game is slowly evolving into AD&D 1e.
Equity to both Kith and Kin
One thing I'd like to improve next year, is flexibility during character creation while remaining fair. When we started, stats were rolled strictly 3D6 down the line, but this can force players into characters that they don't necessarily want to play. Sometimes a new player really just wants to be an elf, but the dice gods decide otherwise.
While I enjoy the challenge and emergent choices from randomised stats, spells and equipment, not all players do. So how can I accomodate both randomised characters, and crafted ones?
Court Chaos to Earn Fortune’s Favour
Next year I want to introduce a new mechanic:
- Players have the option of rolling straight down the line, or assigning their stats in any order. Choosing the former will earn them two Luck points.
- Players can gain another Luck point for rolling for gear and equipment instead of choosing it.
- Magic Users can randomly roll their first spell for another Luck point or forego the point and choose a spell instead.
- Luck points are spent much like DCC Luck—at any time during gameplay, they can expend Luck to reroll a single die.
- Luck can be earned in other ways like exploration and narrative achievements.
I like this because I can reward players by playing my preferred method, while being flexible for those who don't enjoy that particular style of play. The points aim to address the unfair advantage of picking which roll to assign to a stat, and I'm looking at other ways I can incentivise specific gameplay by awarding Luck.
Part Boldly With Thy Stroke of Luck
Luck also helps address another big pain point with B/X-related adventures, and that is the propensity for monsters and traps to insta-kill. Traps, hags, basilisks, giant spiders, all have various save-vs-death attacks, and I see a lot of discussion online about how to lessen these abilities. Instead of rewriting every one-hit-kill attack, a player-side mechanic is much easier to implement.
Giving players a chance to re-roll a failed save may encourage bolder actions for those who have banked a lot of luck points.
For now I'll be adding this to my rules and will report back next year some time with how it went down.