Although Fantasy Hack and Dark Heritage 2 have diverged, and I'm not really making updates to Fantasy Hack anymore, I am still making minor tweaks to the rules of Dark Heritage 2. I'm a little unsure how to proceed if I ever decide I want to use Fantasy Hack instead of Dark Heritage 2 again; probably just use Dark Heritage 2, update the races, and maybe a few of the appendixes to be the same as the current iteration of Dark Heritage. There are two rules tweaks that I've either already implemented in one case or am seriously entertaining implementing in the other, thanks to the convincing videos provided by Dungeon Craft below. Dungeon Craft is a curious guy, who plays 5e, but who uses a lot of old school paradigms and old school themed house rules in his game. Naturally, as a player of m20, which is based off of d20, my game is somewhat different, but then again, I'm perfectly happy to adopt a houserule from any system whatsoever, if it works better than what I'm already doing.
The first change is to initiative, and the Dungeon Craft guy proposes a number of scenarios all the way from "there is no initiative at all" to team iniative, to just straight, static DEX score as your initiative. I'm leaning more towards team initiative with a d6 (in fact, I'm actually updated the document to include that as of its latest revision, but I might yet tweak it a bit more after further thought). Anyway, I'll let you watch the following video and decide for yourself what you think would work best for your game, however.
The second change I'm considering doesn't replace anything that I'm currently doing. I have the same problem with "griddy" combat that he refers to, but I dislike representational combat at all, and lean heavily towards "narrative" combat. I don't need miniatures, terrain, battle mats, or any other physical representation for combat, nor do I want to explicitly encourage it with rules that make that seem more likely to be used than not. Now, this doesn't mean that I think those things are bad, or that you shouldn't use them. Although I will admit that I like to draw perhaps a harder, brighter line than most between role-playing games and tactical miniatures games. I do, however, want to make sure that any games I dabble with are perfectly and comfortably usable without them, although if you wish to, you certainly could.
This video talks about replacing a rule from 3e on (flanking) that I don't use in my m20 game with a 5e rule for advantage. In other words, it adds a rule, but as he says, it's a rule that I think encourages the game to play out much more like how I'd like it to play out. And the advantage of advantage (ahem) is that it's incredibly simple to implement.
Anyway, I'm fairly certain that I'll be adopting these two systems into the game. As I think about and write up the text that explains my use of cinematic advantage, I'll also revisit my initiative system and make sure that I'm happy with the implementation of it that I have.
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