I say frequently that I'm not old school, but I am old fashioned. By this I mean that while I don't really like the rules of old D&D, most of the aspects of how the game as played that I hold were formed during the Holmes BD&D, Moldvay/Cook B/X or earliest AD&D eras of the game, when I played as a young chap. But that's a little bit vague and maybe ephemeral. While many aspects of my game would be familiar to the OSR (even if the rules are quite different in many ways) they'd probably be extremely confused by my lack of dungeons and focus on mysteries, intrigue, skulduggery and horror. In many ways, my game would feel more like a Call of Cthulhu game in a fantasy setting, or maybe a spin-off of some kind of the old WFRP game moreso than a D&D game at all. (I do, however, claim those as old school. WFRP was written specifically for a British market in the 80s where Call of Cthulhu was more influential in many ways than D&D was.) To quote from an earlier post of my own:
I'd been familiar with the expression, said by a guy online years ago, but which I thought was very clever, that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was the game where you started off thinking that you were playing Dungeons & Dragons, but before very long, you discovered that you were actually playing Call of Cthulhu.
As some of the discussion in the Enemy in Shadows Companion says, this is actually more literally true than I ever imagined. When Bryan Ansell, the original owner of Games Workshop when it was still a scrappy independent little company, tasked some of his folks to write WFRP, his mandate was to write a Cthulhu adventure for Warhammer. Davis himself notes that at the time (1986 or so) the state of British roleplaying in particular had moved out of the dungeon; Call of Cthulhu was very popular in the British market, and had done a ton for encouraging investigation and NPC interaction. The Thieves' World product was also very successful at the time. It's little surprising then that on reading the first volume (before I read that in the commentary for the companion) that I thought that the adventure felt very little like a D&D adventure and quite a bit like a Cthulhu campaign, although set in a High Middle Ages setting rather than a 1920s or modern setting, and with a lot of tools to encourage people who weren't used to this paradigm to explore almost sandboxy elements too. The closest thing to a dungeon is some sewer exploration, but you just go in looking for clues, not to "clear them" of monsters, or find treasure or secret doors, or traps, or whatever.
That said, there are plenty of good ideas in more modern versions of D&D, and I've specifically implemented many of them. The rules of Dark Fantasy X are based on m20, which is a somewhat radical restructuring and stripping down of the d20 (3e) rules. I've included a beefed up Heroism Points, which works better than Action Points, but are basically the same idea, and they can also be used as Healing Surges, a 4e mechanic. This is in part because I've eschewed the typical D&D healer/cleric "archetype" as non-archetypal anyway, and have instead decided on trying to make the recovery system feel like an action movie.
While I haven't specifically called out minions as an option in the text of Dark Fantasy X or any of the X-family games (or the games that led up to them, for that matter) I definitely consider the 4e minion concept as fair game to be used. There's really nothing to it; they're anything that you would have the PCs fight normally, but they go down with one hit; i.e., they only have one functional hit point. Because of this, you can throw a great deal more of them at the characters than you otherwise might, and it creates a very different dynamic. But it's such a simple concept that it hardly needs to be repeated.
While I understand (sometimes) the appeal of 5e, at least relative to 4e, I have had very little interest in that edition, in part due to the often ugly art direction; although that was hardly new to this edition, the aggressive diversity quotas is obnoxious beyond reason in 5e compared even to 3e or 4e. Mostly, though, in the words of Mr. Darcy (which are ironically quoted in the noble background as a personality trait), my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever, and my good opinion of WotC was teetering before the end of the 3e era, and was lost shortly thereafter. I decided that I don't need D&D at all anymore, and I have little interest in playing it when I have Dark Fantasy X that I could be playing instead, which meets my personal quirks and tastes much better. I seriously doubt that WotC could possibly lure me back unless they did something so dramatic that they turned off the majority of their current audiance to do so. That said, I know people who have many of the books, and I've (somewhat in spite of myself) flipped through and even read some of them, and I've specifically looked up rules that I decided I might like to adapt.
Notably, the X-family of games has adapted advantage/disadvantage as a core rule to "swashbuckle" up any action scenes and encourage players and GMs alike to use the task resolution system to do things more interesting than "I hit it with my sword." By describing in natural language something that your character would like to do to gain some kind of tactical advantage or just to do something cool and entertaining, you can make a check to see if you gain advantage. What an elegant and quite honestly brilliant rule.
I have not read the players handbook all the way through, but on a whim, I decided to borrow a copy again and have a look at the backgrounds. I also looked at the background in the Curse of Strahd as well as the backgrounds in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. Normally I'm not a fan of very much character backstory, in part because it can inadvertently enable and encourage My Precious Character Syndrome™, which I quite cordially dislike. However, these are quick and dirty points that take little effort to understand and implement, and hardly make for overly twee emotional attachment to your character. That said, there's an art to implementing them in a game for which they weren't really designed.
(It's hardly a unique idea, of course. I mean, Traveller was having you role up character backgrounds as part of character generation way back in ye olden days, and I toyed with some space opera backgrounds for Ad Astra, that became Space Opera X, several years ago. I prefer them to not include mechanical perks, however, and be focused on roleplaying opportunities. If the player can't immediately use them to bring the character to life right out of the gate, then they aren't very useful, and a +something to some skill check or whatever isn't very useful to roleplaying.)
One of my favorites of these systems was included with the OSR space opera game White Star, which gave many if not most characters a specific ally and a nemesis, both of which are gold for GMs and should be tons of fun for players too. I might whip up an ally and nemesis table just for the heck of it that applies to the Dark Fantasy X setting specifically.
Backgrounds, as described in the PHB5e, have a number of elements. Not all of them are relevant if you want to port backgrounds into Dark Fantasy X, which I would not only approve of, but actively encourage.
- Proficiencies. This is a mechanic specific to 5e, and is not relevant to Dark Fantasy X, except as a suggestion on how you might want to attempt to build your character.
- Languages. This is unique to D&D. Dark Fantasy X actually doesn't have any languages built in, or rather, they are inherent to the setting, but not spelled out in the rules. Hmm... Maybe I should add a small section for them. But if I don't, that's OK. Regardless, my languages will be unique to the setting, and will have little bearing on whatever D&D languages are in use in the backgrounds as written.
- Equipment. You don't get equipment for free in Dark Fantasy X, but most of the equipment I've seen in the backgrounds that I've read is of nominal value and almost any starting character could buy everything listed therein with his spare change. You may want to, to roleplay out your background.
- Favorite xyz. Not every background has one of these, but this would be like the Charlatan's favorite scheme, or the Criminal's criminal specialty. I wouldn't roll on the table; I'd handpick one, and occasionally more than one, as a roleplaying hook.
- Feature. This is a roleplaying element rather than a mechanical one, and while they're a little D&D specific, they can be tailored to Dark Fantasy X with very little trouble, unless they're for a very specific D&D element, like heathen religious cults and whatnot.
- Personality trait. I wouldn't roll on this table. I'd pick from it, and I'd maybe pick even two or three of them.
- Ideal. I'm not a huge fan of what they've included here, but it's harmless enough. Look them over and decide if they actually offer you anything helpful. If so, feel free to use one, if not, ignore this category.
- Bond. These are pretty good, but you may have to read the list and extrapolate one from there to get exactly what you want. To be fair, the rules for backgrounds already tell you to do that. It's just a roleplaying hook. Go for it.
- Flaw. I love a good flaw or two in a character, to give the player a simple hook to sink his roleplaying teeth into right away, and as a springboard for potential future adventure. Feel free to pick as many as you like.
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