Game mechanics update

As alluded to as an offhand epilogue to my last post, but I'm considering some updates to the Dark Fantasy X ruleset. Although these updates won't actually change the way the game plays too much, they'd change it from a structural standpoint into a game that technically isn't m20 anymore. Here's what I'm considering:

• Instead of the three m20 attributes of Strength, Dexterity and Mind, I'd expand the list to the full "D&D" list of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma (which I think is the 3e order, not the original order. But frankly, I don't care.) This will make the game a bit more compatible with other "D&D-like" products, and just make it more familiar. Ultimately, checks will still be the same; you'll just have a few more attributes to choose from when coming up with what kind of check to make. To be honest with you, I'm not quite sure why m20 wanted to eliminate half of the attributes anyway. It's not like the number of attributes going from six to three affects the complexity of the game at the table, or anything like that. Skills and checks would remain unchanged. I think the familiarity of the six traditional attributes is worth more than the elegance of having three. Plus, although I can sort of see justifying the folding in of Con into Str, I think all three of the mental/psychological/presence, etc. attributes being folded down to one makes it too broad to be very definitive.
• I'm strongly considering going classless, and creating a small list of class features that can be taken a la carte. Although the term comes with some baggage, I'll probably call them feats, and you'd take them at various points as you level up (but not every level). The existing class features will probably have to be rejiggered a bit to make this work without being really wonky. Spells may be considered part of this too, or they may be part of equipment; i.e., you find a spell you can learn it. There would be a limited number of feat slots; at most one per level. Considering that classes are meant to be very customizable, this isn't as radical a change as it seems.
• I think my spells focused a little too much on being "flavorful" rather than easy to use at the table. I'm strongly considering adopting spells from Knave or some-such and just grafting them in in place of what I have currently. In fact, although I have the first edition of that game, I just backed the Kickstarter for the second edition, which should ship in June. These are drier spells, but that's OK—I've long been suspecting that my Lovecraftian renaming of the spells was more cumbersome and was a bug, not a feature. 
• Speaking of both spells and Knave, I'm thinking of adopting an item slot limit, and having spells be in the item slots, as mentioned above. I'm not normally a fan of item slots, and I didn't like how it was initially described to me in Knave, but I think that if I pull "class features" out of items and treat them as a different kind of character feature, that it'll actually work quite well.
• The monster list will be revised somewhat too; I'm going to replace HD with Levels, for instance, otherwise simplify checks for monsters a bit. 

Anyway, these are things that I'm thinking about and haven't completely decided on. It would be kind of ironic if I came around to—basically playing an OSR game of D&D after all, in many ways, without the stuff that I never liked about D&D, with custom races, and... well, the OSR isn't the same as the actual old games. The better OSR games took elements from how old games worked, and fixed rules that were confusing or dumb, like THAC0, for instance, or gave them a twist. It wasn't necessarily a modern twist, but it was a twist that benefited from decades of game experience, at least. If Dark Fantasy X ends up becoming a hybrid of what it is now with a few elements, including spells, grafted on from Knave or some other OSR game, that would be interesting, but OK.

Frankly, my disconnect with the OSR is less about the rules—especially as OSR games that aren't explicitly clones of old D&D have proliferated more recently—and more about what you're expected to actually do and how the game is to be run. I've talked about it before, but it's probably worth redoing and updating my "why not the OSR" manifesto, where I castigate the concept of dungeons and pixel-bitching exploration and offer an alternative just-so story to the Hickman Revolution than the just-so story that the OSR offers. Not to mention how poorly—despite stated intentions and the claims of its disciples—D&D resembles the very literature that it claims to emulate and mimic. But I'll save all that for another day.

And just so this isn't a wall of text, here's a new Hero Forge character for the Dark Fantasy X setting that I don't think I've posted before, as well as a couple of ratlings that I got from someone else who shared the link to his Hero Forge models.