I'm considering making some minor changes to the Dark Fantasy X ruleset. (Luckily, I didn't get around to printing it yet, so I didn't "freeze" it after all. And even if I had, I could probably reprint easily enough.) Making all of the pseudo-pregens caused me to reevaluate certain aspects of chargen. This will be a minor enough change, assuming I decide to go forward with it, that it will merely bump the Dark Fantasy X document from 1.4 to 1.4.1 rather than to 1.5. Although I admit that my criteria for determining that level is handwavey and belongs more to my gut than any actual process or procedure.
Specifically, I'm thinking of changing slightly the way Health (or hit points under the old nomenclature) is generated. Right now, all classes start with 5 and add (or subtract, if it's negative) their STR bonus. This leads to a pretty wide range of hit points, and I'm not 100% sure that I like having two pregens with Health scores as wildly divergent as 2 and 8—with the possibility of it having been between 1 and 12 if you use races like the woodwose and have a maximum STR score. That's not as flat as I'd like, and I've come to agree with the idea that your class can (and probably should) have a bigger role in the Health score.
What I'm proposing, and I'm thinking about it a bit before making the change is that each class will have added to its description the effect on the Health score. Fighter's health would be a 6 + d6, Thief's health would be a 3 + d4, Outdoorsman's would be 6 + d4, Expert's would also be 3 + d4, and the Shadow Sword would be 5 + d4. Those numbers might fluctuate a bit, but it would garner average starting health scores of Fighter: 9½, Thief: 5½, Outdoorsman: 8½, Expert: 5½ and Shadow Sword: 7½. STR score would no longer affect your Health in this scheme. While those are the averages, the ranges are flatter; the lowest of the low Health classes would still get at least 4 hit points on a minimum roll, and the highest of the high classes would get 12, and the range would be appropriate to the class.(Actually, that was probably already mostly true, because a fighter with STR as a dump stat wouldn't make much sense.)
I've also thought about the concept that Health isn't just based on your STR, since any of your attributes could contribute in various ways, allowing characters to put their best stat as a bonus to the starting score of 5. That would make the ranges even flatter, although higher. But I like the class-specific ranges better.
In addition to the change in Health described above, I might make a health bonus be a racial bonus for some races like woodwose and orc in particular, although if so, I'd have to beef up all of the races in some small way to compensate.
Making Health part of your class balance means I'd probably have to do something else to the classes to tweak them a bit. I'm thinking of changing the way affinities work, or at least the names of them. The Expert is generally expected to have affinities for Knowledge roles, but I'd like to expand the scope of what the expert can do by giving him affinities that are more broad and useful. I'm not 100% sure how I'll do this yea, but I'll give it some thought. I'll probably review the 5e proficiencies and see if that's fertile ground for where to make affinities. In addition, the Thief will probably get an affinity to all kinds of normal "thiefy" skills; climbing, sneaking, lockpicking, trapfinding and trap disarmament. Yeah, yeah... the traps stuff is pretty old school, which my game is not, but it'd come in useful here and there. Maybe I'll just make it "traps" more generally and it'd apply to finding traps, disarming traps, and even creating traps if that's what you like.
If I'm messing with that, it will also have some impact on the class customization stuff, which might have to be rethought a bit too.
Which makes this lean into needing to bump to 1.5, especially if I consider the following changes too. But first, let me break up this wall of text with a Hero Forge image of iconic character Stefan in disguise. Which, I'll be honest with you, was done as much because I wanted to experiment with the new leather armored clothing than for any other reason...
So, I'm also considering changing a bit how combat works, notably that your STR score is not added to damage. The Fighter's bonus to damage therefore becomes much more significant. I may cascade changes to the monster list as well, and make sure that damage is not out of whack between characters and monsters. If so, that will definitely be a more significant update. And finally, in the wake of the resolution of the OGL issue, I'm considering reverting some of the terminology back to more familiar terminology, like Health to Hit Points and Fortune and Doom back to Advantage and Disadvantage. If for no other reason than because I'm sure that I'll continue to say those words all of the time without thinking about it. Even if I don't reference the OGL or the CC in the document, which I don't think I will, the chance that that leaves me legally vulnerable to anything seems astronomically remote at this point.
This will also mean that I need to redo my pregens and iconics, but that's less important than updating the rules themselves.
I'm always on the fence about hit points. I like players rolling hit points, both as a player and as a GM, but I also want to protect against overly bad rolls that make your character essentially disposable. I like lower hit points rather than over-the-top hit point scores, so that players are more reluctant to get into gratuitous combats, and are much more careful... but I don't want literally every attack to be a risk of character death. I'm always second-guessing if I went too far in one direction or the other from a Platonic ideal state. Hence, although I'm liking this scheme better than what's in place now, I'm going to think about it for a little while before implementing it. It also makes me rethink my determination to have extremely slow leveling where more than half of the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER campaign would have characters at 1st level, and they'd only level up to 2nd for the last third or fourth of the campaign. Maybe 1st level should be faster and levels 2-5 should be the longer ones, with advancement beyond that being extremely rare and/or slow. Rare in the sense that I'd infrequently play any campaigns with characters that went that high, or slow on the off-chance that I do, that they progress in levels 6-10 much slower than the already slow levels 2-5.
Oh, and because I couldn't create Scooby as an animal companion very well, I'll probably add a 1 HD dog option that isn't quite as physically weak (because of smallness) as a cat. More like a 1 HD version of a wolf.
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