Well, I've made the changes as advertised to my DARK•HERITAGE HACK system. I've added optional (although not exactly recommended) rules for continuing advancement beyond 5th level, I've given each class four more talents to choose from, and I made a section of General talents, which can only be taken as cross-class talents, but they are available to anyone.
All said, a relatively minor update, based on material cribbed from Fictive's excellent expansion to the original Old School Hack rule-set.
http://dwimmerlaik.wikispaces.com/Dark%E2%80%A2Heritage+Hack
Some of the new talents are probably not play-tested all that well. In fact, just reading through them as I was borrowing them, I thought to myself that some of them are probably a bit too good, while others probably could use a little beefing up. However, I've never been much of a fan of power-gaming and worrying too much about game balance. Each individual GM will have to be the arbiter of any potential issues in play; with good players (like the kinds I prefer to play with) game balance isn't really an issue, because my players don't take advantage. Most of these talents, even the potentially unbalanced ones, can be used to create a bunch of fun with the right players.
As always, feel free to be more activist about what you allow and don't in your own games, of course.
Showing posts with label DHH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DHH. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
More hacking
Well, I had supposed (since I didn't know of anything else at the time) that when I was making my own DARK•HERITAGE HACK game, modded off of Kirin Robinson's Old School Hack--that I knew all about the entire Hack "family" of games. After all, I also had a copy of Redbox Hack, the game that Kirin initially used as a baseline to design his game, and I also had a copy of Corey's Hack version of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. My own "hack" game was largely a hack of the three of them together, looking to maximize faithfulness to my setting with minimal interference with the rules.
Of course, I should have guessed that I was hardly the only person besides Corey to think of further refining the OSH rules to better serve my own setting. Check out this handy link here for a lot of Old School Hack resources, including a greatly expanded version of OSH, with lots more classes (here called templates) for use, and a number of other optional rules (including Madness rules--so I wasn't original there either.) Naturally, I've noticed that I could run DHH using just elements from his rules. If OSH is meant to hearken back to the Redbox D&D (which it is), then this one could--maybe--be called the Advanced OSH--given that it includes a number of new rules that add somewhat to the complexity of the game, especially if they're all used. I don't really need the complexity, but I do like the new options. I need to spend more time looking over them to decide if I like his version of some of the classes better than mine. It's entirely possible that I will!
Also, there's a number of adapted settings in there--Hyrule (the setting of the Zelda games) for instance, and The World Between, the setting for Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque (featured on my shortish blogroll) is also included (for the curious, that's where the Madness rules make their debut.)
So anyway... since I just discovered it, that's my announcement of the find for those curious. Fun stuff. I know everyone's on pins and needles to discover if (or how) this new material will affect my own hack of the rules, DHH. Rest assured, I won't keep that groaning burden of suspense on you for long, and any ideas that I like and want to steal will be first posted in the comments section of this post, and then gradually adopted into the wiki document itself.
Of course, I should have guessed that I was hardly the only person besides Corey to think of further refining the OSH rules to better serve my own setting. Check out this handy link here for a lot of Old School Hack resources, including a greatly expanded version of OSH, with lots more classes (here called templates) for use, and a number of other optional rules (including Madness rules--so I wasn't original there either.) Naturally, I've noticed that I could run DHH using just elements from his rules. If OSH is meant to hearken back to the Redbox D&D (which it is), then this one could--maybe--be called the Advanced OSH--given that it includes a number of new rules that add somewhat to the complexity of the game, especially if they're all used. I don't really need the complexity, but I do like the new options. I need to spend more time looking over them to decide if I like his version of some of the classes better than mine. It's entirely possible that I will!
Also, there's a number of adapted settings in there--Hyrule (the setting of the Zelda games) for instance, and The World Between, the setting for Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque (featured on my shortish blogroll) is also included (for the curious, that's where the Madness rules make their debut.)
So anyway... since I just discovered it, that's my announcement of the find for those curious. Fun stuff. I know everyone's on pins and needles to discover if (or how) this new material will affect my own hack of the rules, DHH. Rest assured, I won't keep that groaning burden of suspense on you for long, and any ideas that I like and want to steal will be first posted in the comments section of this post, and then gradually adopted into the wiki document itself.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
DHH - final?
http://dwimmerlaik.wikispaces.com/Dark%E2%80%A2Heritage+Hack
Well, there's the rules. I "hacked" Old School Hack (along with a bit of Redbox Hack and DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND Basic Game--all of which are variations on the same ruleset, basically) into something that I can use for my setting.
For the most part, I went with Kirin's version of the rules--that is, the Old School Hack version, but with Corey's class sheets--minus the ninja classes, which were too specific to his setting to really fit in mine. When I imported Kirin's Fighter and Thief classes back into the mix, I also discovered that Corey had re-used a bunch of talents from the various OSH classes and mixed them up. That meant that I also needed to "remix" some of the talent offerings a bit to make sure I didn't have any duplication (since there's a rule for taking cross-class talents already, I figgered duplication was a Bad Idea™.)
Other than that, where I differed most from Kirin's vision were in two ways--1) I didn't want to emulate any version of D&D (Redbox Hack curiously doesn't feel nearly as much like Redbox D&D as OSH does--which I'm sure was one of Kirin's design goals for modding it into OSH), and 2) I really dislike role-protection, and wasn't interested in following that route. I also didn't catch a few other latent "Old School" isms in the rules, like the way in which stats are rolled and assigned; I didn't follow suit. On accident at first, since like I said, I didn't notice the difference, but now that I've had them pointed out to me, I prefer the way I have it set up anyway.
The "hack" games are a curious artifact in some ways--while in many ways they are meant to be nostalgic and reminiscent of "old skool" D&D gaming, in many ways they're also very modern in the way that they operate--very rules-lite and easy to run (not that Redbox D&D wasn't also relatively pretty rules-lite, but it evolved into something that was not, of course.) Since I feel a bit less nostalgic than many gamers about my early D&D days--y'know, the days that drove me away from D&D and into (eventually) the arms of the Storyteller system with their pretentious approach to gaming--it's natural that what I'd like best about the Hack games are the more modern aspects and what I care quite a bit less about are the more nostalgic elements.
Also, I added a few new elements. They weren't exactly revolutionary, but they were new to the Hack family of games at least--the concept of Race that's separate from class, and the concept of Sanity. I treated Race as mostly a roleplaying hook, but each race has the ability to take a racial talent. This takes the place of a class talent if you choose to take it. You can never take another race's racial talent as a cross-class talent. And, of course, you have to choose to take it in place of one of your class talents, so it's not a freebie talent. And Sanity works very similarly to Health in many ways. It's perhaps a little bit more complicated when you get a "mental scar" but as someone who's had tons of fun in the past with Sanity episodes in Call of Cthulhu games, I think that the minor complicaton addes significantly to the game for those who like that kind of thing. If you don't--well, it's easy enough to ignore.
Only one or two of my talents were newly written by me; so I was more about reorganizing the existing game into something that fits my setting than I was in actually designing stuff. I don't really consider myself a game designer anyway, and writing mechanics is something that I don't particularly like doing or feel comfortable with much. But kitbashing existing mechanics into a new form--I'm all over that.
Well, there's the rules. I "hacked" Old School Hack (along with a bit of Redbox Hack and DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND Basic Game--all of which are variations on the same ruleset, basically) into something that I can use for my setting.
For the most part, I went with Kirin's version of the rules--that is, the Old School Hack version, but with Corey's class sheets--minus the ninja classes, which were too specific to his setting to really fit in mine. When I imported Kirin's Fighter and Thief classes back into the mix, I also discovered that Corey had re-used a bunch of talents from the various OSH classes and mixed them up. That meant that I also needed to "remix" some of the talent offerings a bit to make sure I didn't have any duplication (since there's a rule for taking cross-class talents already, I figgered duplication was a Bad Idea™.)
Other than that, where I differed most from Kirin's vision were in two ways--1) I didn't want to emulate any version of D&D (Redbox Hack curiously doesn't feel nearly as much like Redbox D&D as OSH does--which I'm sure was one of Kirin's design goals for modding it into OSH), and 2) I really dislike role-protection, and wasn't interested in following that route. I also didn't catch a few other latent "Old School" isms in the rules, like the way in which stats are rolled and assigned; I didn't follow suit. On accident at first, since like I said, I didn't notice the difference, but now that I've had them pointed out to me, I prefer the way I have it set up anyway.
The "hack" games are a curious artifact in some ways--while in many ways they are meant to be nostalgic and reminiscent of "old skool" D&D gaming, in many ways they're also very modern in the way that they operate--very rules-lite and easy to run (not that Redbox D&D wasn't also relatively pretty rules-lite, but it evolved into something that was not, of course.) Since I feel a bit less nostalgic than many gamers about my early D&D days--y'know, the days that drove me away from D&D and into (eventually) the arms of the Storyteller system with their pretentious approach to gaming--it's natural that what I'd like best about the Hack games are the more modern aspects and what I care quite a bit less about are the more nostalgic elements.
Also, I added a few new elements. They weren't exactly revolutionary, but they were new to the Hack family of games at least--the concept of Race that's separate from class, and the concept of Sanity. I treated Race as mostly a roleplaying hook, but each race has the ability to take a racial talent. This takes the place of a class talent if you choose to take it. You can never take another race's racial talent as a cross-class talent. And, of course, you have to choose to take it in place of one of your class talents, so it's not a freebie talent. And Sanity works very similarly to Health in many ways. It's perhaps a little bit more complicated when you get a "mental scar" but as someone who's had tons of fun in the past with Sanity episodes in Call of Cthulhu games, I think that the minor complicaton addes significantly to the game for those who like that kind of thing. If you don't--well, it's easy enough to ignore.
Only one or two of my talents were newly written by me; so I was more about reorganizing the existing game into something that fits my setting than I was in actually designing stuff. I don't really consider myself a game designer anyway, and writing mechanics is something that I don't particularly like doing or feel comfortable with much. But kitbashing existing mechanics into a new form--I'm all over that.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Post president's day
I mostly finished by modifications to DHH. It's a short enough game system that putting it out there on the wiki wasn't hard. Right here, in fact, you can get the entire game system.
My attempts to get a game off the ground, on the other hand, are moving much more slowly than my attempts to get the rules hammered out.
I'll keep the blog posted either way.
My attempts to get a game off the ground, on the other hand, are moving much more slowly than my attempts to get the rules hammered out.
I'll keep the blog posted either way.
Monday, February 13, 2012
DHH Guiding principles
I've now spent a fair bit of time looking over the three "hack" documents I have, "Redbox Hack," "Old School Hack" and "Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island: Old School Hack Version." Curiously, I've found that all of them have things that I prefer to the other two, but none of them alone really completely "does it" quite right for me.
"Dino-pirates Hack" is the closest, but that doesn't completely work either. Here's a few comments on what I like and don't like about each version. Or more honestly, in many cases, it's not about what I like or don't like as much as it is about what works for DARK•HERITAGE and what doesn't.
Old School Hack is an ENnie Award winning game, and the first one that I heard of and read. It's certainly got the best presentation, the best layout, and the tools near the end to facilitate a graphical representation of the arenas and whatnot is really pretty cool. Curiously, it's also a much better emulation of "Red Box" D&D than Redbox Hack. Of course, that's also part of where I have problems with it. It's too D&D. I don't really like Elf and Dwarf or Goblin as character classes.
I'm also not convinced on the Awesome Point economy and the way it's set up. I know that it's worked in plenty of playtests, but I don't know that it's been playtested as a campaign vehicle as opposed to a one-shot or shorter game vehicle. I can also imagine the incentives that it's supposed to engender, but I tend to find those kinds of incentives built right into the games that blatantly come across as kind of corny and gimmicky. I can imagine leveling up happening way too fast for my taste as well, based on the Awesome point economy the way it's structured. I prefer Redbox Hack's more traditional "XP" system to a big bowl full of Awesome points that anyone at the table can give to anyone else, and which they have every reason to as often as they can..
Also, I have a dislike of landscape format documents and character sheets. I don't know why they seem to be more popular these days in pdf format. I'm a traditionalist there too, I guess, in preferring portrait style layout.
Speaking of which, Redbox Hack eschews fancier layout for clearer text, in my opinion. I had an easier time following the thread of how the game works in that document. Despite the shortness of all the documents, I still find my eyes glaze over reading mechanics these days, so that was appreciated. Kirin's layout on OSH occasionally had me wondering what part of the page I was supposed to go to next, and I felt like just following along with the text was occasionally difficult, because it bounced all over in little boxes and columns and non-traditional page layout that made it a bit hard to follow. Although it looked really Spartan in comparison, the RBH organization was a lot easier for me.
The implied setting is a bit weird however; anthropomorphic animals being a character class isn't something that I'd likely get behind. I also thought the attributes in OSH made a bit more sense to me than those in RBH for whatever reason.
Dino-pirates Hack (not its real name) was the one that was closest to what I'm looking for right out of the box. However, it really wasn't meant to stand alone, and well... it doesn't. The one-page summary of the rules is nice as a reference, but you couldn't possibly understand how to play just from reading that.
The classes were a lot more likely to be useful to me, although I'd still need to customize them a bit for DARK•HERITAGE before using them. I also really liked the sample adventuring goals page, which was a nice little addition--not necessary, but quite helpful.
So my hybrid DARK•HERITAGE Hack will feature attributes from OSH, classes mostly from DPH, and advancement and the Awesome point economy mostly from RBH. I'll add a few tweaks to all of those, especially with regards to advancement. I also want to inject a bit of roleplaying elements into a game that's not necessarily designed to focus on them--I want to include a Sanity trait, and have a Sanity mechanic that harks back to the classic Cthulhu mechanic of the same name.
I also want to include a small bestiary and a few other tools as part of the game up front; none of the three has that, although there is an online supplementary bestiary for OSH that I could use as a starting point.
"Dino-pirates Hack" is the closest, but that doesn't completely work either. Here's a few comments on what I like and don't like about each version. Or more honestly, in many cases, it's not about what I like or don't like as much as it is about what works for DARK•HERITAGE and what doesn't.
Old School Hack is an ENnie Award winning game, and the first one that I heard of and read. It's certainly got the best presentation, the best layout, and the tools near the end to facilitate a graphical representation of the arenas and whatnot is really pretty cool. Curiously, it's also a much better emulation of "Red Box" D&D than Redbox Hack. Of course, that's also part of where I have problems with it. It's too D&D. I don't really like Elf and Dwarf or Goblin as character classes.
I'm also not convinced on the Awesome Point economy and the way it's set up. I know that it's worked in plenty of playtests, but I don't know that it's been playtested as a campaign vehicle as opposed to a one-shot or shorter game vehicle. I can also imagine the incentives that it's supposed to engender, but I tend to find those kinds of incentives built right into the games that blatantly come across as kind of corny and gimmicky. I can imagine leveling up happening way too fast for my taste as well, based on the Awesome point economy the way it's structured. I prefer Redbox Hack's more traditional "XP" system to a big bowl full of Awesome points that anyone at the table can give to anyone else, and which they have every reason to as often as they can..
Also, I have a dislike of landscape format documents and character sheets. I don't know why they seem to be more popular these days in pdf format. I'm a traditionalist there too, I guess, in preferring portrait style layout.
Speaking of which, Redbox Hack eschews fancier layout for clearer text, in my opinion. I had an easier time following the thread of how the game works in that document. Despite the shortness of all the documents, I still find my eyes glaze over reading mechanics these days, so that was appreciated. Kirin's layout on OSH occasionally had me wondering what part of the page I was supposed to go to next, and I felt like just following along with the text was occasionally difficult, because it bounced all over in little boxes and columns and non-traditional page layout that made it a bit hard to follow. Although it looked really Spartan in comparison, the RBH organization was a lot easier for me.
The implied setting is a bit weird however; anthropomorphic animals being a character class isn't something that I'd likely get behind. I also thought the attributes in OSH made a bit more sense to me than those in RBH for whatever reason.
Dino-pirates Hack (not its real name) was the one that was closest to what I'm looking for right out of the box. However, it really wasn't meant to stand alone, and well... it doesn't. The one-page summary of the rules is nice as a reference, but you couldn't possibly understand how to play just from reading that.
The classes were a lot more likely to be useful to me, although I'd still need to customize them a bit for DARK•HERITAGE before using them. I also really liked the sample adventuring goals page, which was a nice little addition--not necessary, but quite helpful.
So my hybrid DARK•HERITAGE Hack will feature attributes from OSH, classes mostly from DPH, and advancement and the Awesome point economy mostly from RBH. I'll add a few tweaks to all of those, especially with regards to advancement. I also want to inject a bit of roleplaying elements into a game that's not necessarily designed to focus on them--I want to include a Sanity trait, and have a Sanity mechanic that harks back to the classic Cthulhu mechanic of the same name.
I also want to include a small bestiary and a few other tools as part of the game up front; none of the three has that, although there is an online supplementary bestiary for OSH that I could use as a starting point.
DARK•HERITAGE Hack!
Although the name initially quite seriously turned me off, for completely unrelated reasons, I finally got around to checking out my friend Kirin's Creative Commons uber-short game Old School Hack. And guess what? I found it quite good. I also checked out my other friend Corey's adaptation of OSH to his Dino-Pirates which is actually a closer analog to anything I'd be interested in doing with DARK•HERITAGE than the original OSH is.
Still, go check out Old School Hack, Dino-Pirates Hack, or even the original Red Box Hack for an interesting take on a rules-lite approach to gaming with a focus on being fun and kinda crazy.
The system is a good one, I think, for my goal of having a simple, fast and loose system that works well for Pbp (although it's a great party-game system to pick up and run in person too.)
To that end, I decided that if the whole Red Box Hack was only 23 pages, the original Old School Hack was only about 25, and the Dino-Pirates substitution document was about 10, then I could certainly come up with a DARK•HERITAGE HACK (DHH) without too much trouble and put it out there too. And with the Creative Commons license, there was no reason that I couldn't. And because Kirin and Corey are friends of mine anyway, I didn't expect that even without the CCL I'd have any trouble with it.
So, in addition to my ongoing series of FRPG posts about running a non-D&D fantasy game, and my ongoing setting detail posts, I'm also going to have a few posts here and there about my DHH as I work on it, and then, of course, I'll post the completed document here too.
And then I can also have it as another option for rules. My DHH will probably be more closely based on the DPoNI hack of OSH than on the original OSH itself, which has a more standard D&Dish feel to it in many ways.
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