Halbardier Re-spin

(reposted from my frotz.prose.sh blog)

Helmbarten is Alex Schroeder's fantasy take on a Classic Traveller-style game, and I liked it so much I wanted to build a sci-fi game out of it. Alex and I did some work on it,  settled on Halbardier as a name, and then I never finished my work on it.

I have started to get back into it and I am working on it when time allows. I've had some different ideas since I last work on it, and this all may change again as I catch up to where I left off. I may stick with what I have in the book so far, but I started wondering what if the game universe looked more like Dune in the far future, where cultures are strange and three guilds or factions govern the interactions of all of the peoples in the galaxy.

It's not complete, and I'm still trying to come up with interesting and novel ideas. With that in mind, presented here is the work I've done so far on the three core careers of this idea and their skill choices. 

Viator

Viators are collectors and collators of the vast amount of information spread throughout the human Diaspora. To a Viator, knowledge is as important as breathable air or consumable food.

All Viators get Library-1 as they receive their first implant and the initial database implant. 

• Exoterics index, collate, and flesh out the hard data the Viators collect across the galaxy.
• Esoterics focus on "the knowledge within", and have developed some psi talents.
• Entrists further the Viators' goals by influencing groups of people external to the Viator society.
• Explorers discover and catalog resources for use by the other three branches of the Viator ideology, or for exploitation by the Spacer or Fighter organizations.

| 1d6 | Exoterica   | Esoterica | Entrism      | Exploration |

| --- | ----------- | --------- | ------------ | ----------- |

| 1   | Computer    | Charm     | Infiltration | Ship Ops    |

| 2   | Library     | Library   | Library      | Library     |

| 3   | Bureaucracy | Illusion  | Sneaking     | Survival    |

| 4   | Language    | Distract  | Spying       | Vehicle     |

| 5   | Society     | People    | Fighting     | Tinker      |

| 6   | Science     | Eyes      | Streetwise   | Fighting    |

New Year - New(ish) Me

(repost from my frotz.prose.sh blog)

The end of the calendar year is drawing close, and my life has sort of settled down and perhaps this year I will have some time to write a little on my blog. It's hard for me to commit, as my attention wanders and small changes in my life tend to make big disruptive waves.

Platform Change

Aside from my work stuff (boring boring boring) and personal life (cringey tempest-in-a-teacup sort of stuff), the biggest change recently for me has been to switch away completely from living on the Windows platform to a 100% linux-based setup. I still have to have VMs to run the occasional Windows software, mainly for clients, but all of that takes place from within Linux and all of my personal stuff has been switched over.

I am hopeful that being able to use some better tools and processes will help me clear out my backlog of projects I want to tackle (just thinking about the list exhausts me, so I won't enumerate even a portion here), and maybe help me de-clutter my digital stuff a bit.

I landed on PopOS! for my desktop OS. I'm not really a GNOME fan (not of the "new" GNOME that replaced the old GNOME2, anyway), but System76 has made some nice enhancements to the interface and I'm really digging it, and I can stay on a stable release. Plus PopOS! has good support for my nVidia graphics card.

I hate, hate, hate the rolling-release model for day-to-day tool use; I want to be able to power on, log in, and get to work -- not worry that one of my tools has broken and then have to roll back or find an alternative. I have Fedora Silverblue on my laptop but I expect to replace that with PopOS! as well as I've spent too much time fiddling with it to get the same sort of parity. Since I don't use my laptop as much I don't know what I was thinking -- it needs to be more stable than my desktop, not less. Unfortunately my hardware tends to be too new or require too many non-free drivers to use Debian, so I'm going to have to relegate it to my server.

Dungeon23

I'm going to try to do my take on the Dungeon23 project, but since I don't like following rules unless they're like a consensual agreement between parties I'm not going to follow along precisely. I figure I can do one area a week, but one room per day and using a paper journal and all that is just bollocks for me. I need less clutter in my home, not more. One area per week, digital content, and we'll see how it goes. I will probably put it up here once I get the logistics of hosting the images and files and I guess licensing figured out.

Other stuff

I expect I will post more ramblings about games as well - lately I've been thinking of the identity crisis of D&D and -alikes; the games can't seem to decide if they're supposed to be a coordinated team effort, or just the antics of superstars who are working side-by-side. I blame video games for this mentality (an easy scapegoat even if it's not totally accurate), and I expect I'll write up some stuff about this. Maybe some of it will actually be useful for discussion.

Wrap up

I think that's enough for one day. I hope if you're reading this your 2023 is better than your 2022 (no matter how good or bad your 2022 was). Maybe I can stick with this this year!

*** End of Line ***

19724

 Last week was my birthday, where I passed the 19,724 day milestone. That's a lot of days under one's belt. Aside from still working more than I want (of the seven days I set aside for myself I was able to forgo work on only two days), I've spent the time between then and now reading 15 books and messing around with a certain space MMO. 

(edit - forgot to account for leap years :-/ )

Meatless (mostly)

 (reposted from my frotz.prose.sh blog)

I have reduced the amount of meat in my diet significantly, to try to help address some health issues I've been experiencing as I approach my middle fifties. I would say I went from 13/14 meals per week containing meat as a primary course to perhaps 4/14 containing meat at all, and maybe 1 or 2 per week where it was featured as a main course.

I say meatless, because I have not gone vegetarian. I still eat animal products like yogurt and cheese regularly. The (mostly) comes from an occasional breakfast or dinner with my partner, where I may indulge in something more than an egg or two (the bulk of my remaining meat consumption).

On the one hand, I hate being constrained. I hated when I had to give up drinking so much caffeinated sugar water, I hated when I had to cut back on the amount of coffee I drink, etc. But I get used to it -- after a month or two, I still remember the "great" days when I ate or drank what I wanted all the time, damn the consequences, but I don't feel like I really miss the experience so much. I just don't like not (really) having a choice.

It's been the same with the (mostly) meatless diet. It's not what I expected. I pictured endless dishes from a variety of cuisines that were known for featuring in vegetarian diets, but that is not what I've been doing. I have mainly been 'exploring' - trying to turn the vegetables and fruits I'm familiar with into dishes that I can eat regularly and in sufficient quantities to satisfy as main courses.

Thankfully, I only have to do this for myself which makes the process easier. However, my partner has been interested in trying some of the things I've prepared, and they have liked some of them (some of them, not so much :/ ).

I don't normally cook by recipe, so it's hard for me to provide anything that might be useful to someone, but I can give a general idea of some of the things I've made that both of us have enjoyed.

The caveat is that we both spent our formative years in southern California in the US, and Hispanic cuisine there was an important part of our diets, so I've focused a lot on replicating some of those foods, at least in spirit. None of these were invented by me - it's either something I ate when I lived in California, or inspired by something I ate from that time.

Bionicos

This one is essentially a fruit and dairy dish. It's simple and flexible, and may or may not sound appetizing. The idea is to take a mixed bowl of fruit (where I grew up this was a mix of local fruit grown in California and tropical fruit from Mexico), chopped/cut/pared into bite-sized pieces, and mix it with equal parts yogurt or sour cream and either sweetened or unsweetened condensed milk. I usually use thick yogurt (Greek style, as it's known in the US), mix it with an equal amount of unsweetened condensed milk, and then sweeten to taste with whatever I have on hand for the task. Mix the dairy together, sweeten it to your taste (I like mine a little sweet and a little sour), and pour it over the majority of the fruit. Top this with some more fruit, arranged for a pleasant presentation, or sprinkle muesli or granola or toasted grains or nuts or whatever on the top to add a little crunch. With the temperatures here hitting the mid- to high 30s for over a week straight, we had this for our evening meal more than a few times as it was cool and not particularly 'heavy'.

Tostada pizza

These are stupid simple. Per pizza, fry two small corn tortillas until they are the texture you like (crispy, chewy, whatever you prefer). Take one, cover it with refried beans, mashed beans, mashed & fried chickpeas, lentils, or other legume of your choice (spiced and cooked to your preference). I top the legumes with enchilada sauce (guidelines below this one), and shred some cheese.

Then I put another tortilla on top, another layer of beans, another smear of sauce, a little more cheese. Once I put together a few of these, I bake them for a few minutes in an oven or appliance until the cheese melts and crunch away.

Sauce

My sauce usually starts with some olive oil, to which I add a minced aromatic like garlic or onion. I let that cook for a bit, then add some finely ground chili powder of some sort and a little flour and make a roux (stir it around for about a minute until the flour starts to brown and absorbs most of the oil). Then I will add some diced or pureed tomatoes or tomatillos, any other seasonings (salt, cumin, whatever you'd like), and let that cook for 10+ minutes. I usually go with a ratio of equal quantities of oil and chili powder, and add just enough flour to get the roux going. You may want to add a bit of water to your tomatoes if you'd like a thinner sauce (I like it thick, but thin is good, too!).

Nachos

Another stupid simple dish. I take several small corn tortillas, and cut them into eighths. I fry them until they have an appropriate texture, and then drain them. Tonight I fried up about 400g of diced mushrooms and aromatics, mashed up and fried (since I had the skillet out) some white beans (called navy or pea beans here in the US) and seasoned with chili powder, and then topped the tortilla chips I made in the first step with the bean mixture, the mushroom mixture, and then added some cheese and melted it all for a few minutes. Like the tostada pizza, use whatever legume you prefer. I've also used chickpeas, lentils, roman beans, pinto beans, cannellini, and black-eyed peas.

Oddity

(reposted from my frotz.prose.sh blog) 

I grew up in a sort of in-between time and social class. I was a teen in the early 1980s, and while my family did reasonably well financially my parents didn't feel like the expenditure for a "real" computer ($1,600+ USD for an IBM PC or compatible around 1983 or so in 1983 US dollars) was worthwhile. I certainly didn't earn enough money to purchase something like that for myself with the sorts of jobs I could get, but I could afford an Atari and then buy various add-ons as time went on.

Since no one in my family graduated from a college or university (until my youngest sister), I had no idea what the Internet was, but I definitely was into BBSes and CompuServe in 1984 after I got my first modem (and then had to get my own phone line to avoid tying up the house line when people could reasonably expect to use the phone). I even wrote a couple of BBSes with a high-school friend of mine who also had an Atari, and we ran our own for a while until we got interested in something else.

It is probably nostalgia creeping up on me, but I miss the ease with which one could start programming back then. The machines all came with a rudimentary BASIC interpreter, and one could pay for Pascal or other "serious" programming languages when one bumped against the limitations of BASIC. I think we wrote our BBS software in Pascal or a strange little language called Action! that was Atari-specific. Our first BBSes were strictly interpreted BASIC, of course, and 300-1200 bps and a single user at a time (I couldn't afford more than one phone line) meant that aside from bugs even the BASIC BBSes ran reasonably well.

The programs were less functional, to be sure, but also it was much simpler. We didn't need SDKs or APIs, or dynamically linked anything. When I got into linux around 1993 or 1994 I was really surprised at how much faster a statically compiled system booted on my junk 486sx computer I had. Even now I occasionally try to compile software statically, but it seems mainly a fool's errand that leads to tears unless it's something like ffmpeg (which I do still statically compile).

I don't know why I was thinking about BBSes or my old Atari, but I sort of miss the old single-host BBS. I was never super big into FidoNET or the other gateways - I liked the little self-contained islands where one got to know the other users, and the little cultures that developed on those isolated systems.

That got me to thinking about setting up a BBS that could accept ssh, and there are some packages still around and apparently in use so maybe I will. I ran a Mastodon server for a while but in the end many users just used my low-pop Mastodon instance to get their feeds from octogon.social or the main Mastodon instance so I eventually took it down so the cobwebs wouldn't choke out the local channel.

As usual there's no real point to this post - just my reminiscences and (maybe?) nostalgic cravings.

Dissatisfied

 (this is a repost of content from my blog at frotz.prose.sh)

I am dissatisfied with a lot of things, but I'm only going to talk about one thing today and that's my dissatisfaction with some aspects of my shared world hexcrawl game.

I wanted to run a fun, interesting exploration game that also rewarded players who wanted to send their characters out into the wilderness rather than into one of the two big dungeons that are close by.

I don't feel like I am really doing as well as I could - since XP in the rules system we're using Halbards and Helmets is based on the amount of gold spent in the game and there aren't piles of gold just lying around regular characters in my game lag behind those who spend time in Stonehell or Barrowmaze.

I am also trying to find the right balance of in-game world events happening, along with local points of interest, so characters have a choice of different activities to pursue.

Originally I planned on using the wilderness random encounters right out of the B/X blue book, but the frequency of the checks seemed like it would result in a lot of dead first-level characters.

Then I thought I would use the Halberds & Helmets rules but as-is it is really designed for travel between dungeons or adventures, and I planned on running a game that was more about exploration in and of itself.

I have included the 'Ravaged Ruins' section of the Judge's Guild Ready Reference Sheets into my encounter check process, and the one location that popped up was interesting, but those results still don't occur very often. On a d6, 1=random encounter, 2=ravaged ruins, and.... and that's it.

I think I am going to add a third entry to the daily encounter check - 3=lairs. These will be the lairs of the types of creatures who are found on the random encounter table. I hope this will add more "points of interest" to each of the hexes, and provide characters with another way of funding their advancement aside from the two dungeons.

I will see how it goes, I suppose.

Complexity

(this is a re-post of my content on frotz.prose.sh) 

Even though I don't participate in organized play like D&D 5E's Adventurer's League or Pathfinder's Pathfinder Society, I did participate in both for quite some time. I took a hiatus from participating with RPGs as I was a bit burned out from running weekly sessions, then COVID started, and so the hiatus continued. Recently I started playing with some great folks in Europe where we do short 2-hour sessions and limited duration campaigns using lightweight rules. It's been a lot of fun, and I haven't yet felt the telltale indicators of burnout.

My partner and I were discussing some new bit of needless complexity in the MMO EVE Online yesterday, and it started me off thinking about complexity that enhances, versus complexity that obfuscates or is just "complexity for complexity's sake".

The games I'm playing and running at the moment have an ethos of simplicity. Because the sessions are short, we try to pack as much into a session as possible and so complex rules don't seem like a good fit. I run a hexcrawl in a shared world with two other referees, and I'm using Alex Schröder's Halbards & Helmets, a sort of B/X-lite, to do so. It's worked pretty well; we've had to explore some additions to the rules to address funding certain enterprises, but mostly I run right out of the rules.

All of this sort of has coalesced into my mind as I still listen to the occasional "actual play" Pathfinder podcast, where the "complexity for complexity's sake" is definitely evident in the way the referee and the players handle their games. I do like complexity in games - GURPS, Shadowrun 3E, and d20 3rd edition (less so the revised(3.5) edition or Pathfinder) are some of my favorite systems. However I always felt a tension (not a bad thing necessarily) between providing enough complexity to keep players interested but not so complex they tune out. It was a fun line to walk - I felt like I did a reasonable job of "drilling down" when circumstances warranted really getting into the nitty-gritty but I kept things moving without turning everything between combat encounters into a hand-wave-y exposition from me.

Listening to these podcasts makes me think not everyone views complexity as a dial to be adjusted, rather than a switch set to "on" or "off". I like it as a dial, but not everyone does, I guess. Some like as little as possible all the time, and some like the opposite. Sort of like some people like only homegrown vs prepackaged campaign settings and modules, or really letting the imagination fly vs. treating a tabletop game like it's an analog version of a console or computer game with limited input and options.

I don't know where I'm really going with this, other than I don't find complexity for the sake of being complex fun. 

Hex Crawl pt.2

 In Hex Crawl pt. 1, I discussed the results of testing three different methods for determining the wilderness exploration experience for the hex crawl game I will be running. 

Aside from the method used to determine random encounters, I also want to have things like weather, adverse/beneficial events, site discovery, and foraging occur as well, all without the necessity of making several dice rolls and consulting an ever-increasing number of tables. 

The wilderness rules from Halberts & Helmets (hereafter referred to as "H&H") are simple and easy to use, but they don't help me with any of the exploration aspects I want to incorporate. The 17% chance of encountering anything (good or bad) limits their exclusive use as that would translate into days and days of travel with nothing happening unless I dictated (and I don't like doing that).

Moldvay/Cook B/X (hereafter referred to as "B/X") has more depth to the variety of encounters, but as presented they are "monster" encounters and so don't help with the exploration aspects, as well as proving to make travelling in the wilderness a near-certain death march for low-level characters.

I think the Traveller 5 flux mechanic can form the basis of the system I need. It can handle both beneficial and adverse results, and (good for me) serve as more of a narrative guide for a day's activity while exploring, all while making exceptional events less frequent (thus more memorable and potentially easier for my 1st level characters to deal with).

Using Flux

Rambling background

Before I outline the way I see flux working for me, I would like to explain a particular hang-up I have as a referee. I don't like dictating story beats, or guiding the narrative, or otherwise directing players. This has been my biggest hang-up when trying to run a game system like Numenera or other Cypher system games. I don't like the "GM intrusion" mechanic - it degrades the experience of what I would otherwise consider a great modern rules-light d20 system. I like to participate, as a player (of a different sort), rather than dictate. I prefer improvising when rolling randomly to determine an adverse or beneficial effect or situation, rather than trying to force a story beat or situation on players. I know, it doesn't really make sense in playing a game where I make stuff up for people. YMMV.

To use flux for my wilderness mechanic, I need to step away from details a bit and think more of the experience of a given day, as a whole. I have to direct things a bit more than I would normally prefer, but conversely I can tailor the individual day to exactly what the players are up to.

For example, presume the players have elected to spend a day foraging rather than travelling. In our game we've decided that players can forgo movement for a day, so that everyone can focus on gathering food or water or whatever. They have a base chance of 1 in 6 to gather 1D6 units of supplies), unless they are playing a thief in which case they have a 2 in 6 chance of gathering 1D6 units of supplies. The players can elect to do one roll for the entire group (using the highest skill), or break into smaller groups (each group using the highest skill), or even do it individually; it's all up to them to decide.

First, I have the players roll 1D6 - this is the "light" die in flux parlance. I likewise roll 1D6 (the "dark" die), and we determine flux. 

Example 1: Flux -1

(-1 to skill checks)

The players know today may not be a good day for this - maybe the weather is terrible, maybe someone is having digestive issues, or maybe their hearts are just not into it. Regardless of why, they know that their chances of success today are reduced. Only skilled characters (thieves) even have a chance.

Example 2: Flux +2

(+2 to skill checks)

Today is gorgeous - the weather is beautiful, everyone feels great, plants and animals are in abundance, even the water looks clearer. This is a great day to gather the supplies. 

Example 3: Flux -4

The players have had a restless night. There's been a lot of movement of some kind of creature or creatures in the area and maybe it's best to get out while they can, like all of the local wildlife (roll an appropriate encounter for the terrain). Or, someone is really sick from something they ate, and can't move. Or scavengers or vermin have eaten some of the party's supplies.

Example 4: Flux +5

Finding food or supplies presents no difficulty. Everyone can find whatever they need without making a check. In addition, one of the players has discovered a cave that holds the remnants of a couple of structures. They are solid enough that they can be treated as a safe area in the future. Investigating them might even yield some tools or artifacts from the ancient builders.

Example 5: Flux 0

Today is just a normal day for procuring food or supplies. No bonus or penalty applied. 

Summary

So, using flux in this way is less procedural than I would normally prefer, but I find myself excited by the potential of this during game play. I can apply the effects of a flux roll based on what the players decide to do, and they know up front what sort of day it looks to be. I can still use random tables to determine things like ruins or encounters, but I also have some flexibility in what to apply. We'll see how it goes!

Hexcrawl pt.1

 In a couple of weeks, if things go well, I will be running a hex crawl in a shared world with two other referees (Alex and Peter) who run dungeoncrawls.

Since we've already got two dungeon games, my wilderness game is not an intermission between travelling to new dungeons, it's about exploration. The starting area is largely unexplored - there is next to nothing known about the surrounding areas (I believe we're kind-of/sort-of using the Wilderlands of High Fantasy as a reference point, but we're located below map 18 so it is definitely a make it up as you go situation).

Background

Our shared game world is using a mix of Alex's Halberds and Helmets (hereafter referred to as "H&H", player rules(english and german) and referee rules) and original Moldvay/Cook B/X ("B/X"). I originally intended to run the hex crawl straight out of B/X, but I've had some difficulty reconciling that system with the style of game I will be running.

Our sessions are short - we have a two-hour time limit - and with three of us alternating on the same day of the week, we try to keep things simple enough so that people can jump right back in without a lot of recap or discussion.

Everyone picks a randomly generated character and hirelings from a list pre-generated list, and they all start at level 1

Alex has his own hex crawl rules in H&H, but they're a bit too "rules-light" for my needs; conversely, the B/X rules have some depth but are not overwhelming, but are either potentially amazingly deadly or a bit of a grind for higher-level characters. In addition, for either system I would need a separate method of determining whether players discover something - our world is being generated as it's explored, and I want to minimize the amount of content I hand-place on the map.

As all of the characters are level 1, I started thinking about how encounters would play out, so I simulated 14 day/night rolls using the H&H method, the B/X method, and using the Flux mechanic from Traveller 5. 

To make things even more challenging, there is no healing while travelling. Players can only recover hit points while in a settlement or other safe area. There are no clerics in H&H (they're just magic-users with a religious devotion), and no one is making or selling healing potions or concoctions.

I tested results by generating 14 day/night rolls and comparing the results from the H&H and B/X mechanics. For flux, the daylight roll was the light result, and the nighttime roll was the dark result. I did this test using the actual dice I will play with, not with a PRNG. I could've used the 2d6-7 method, which would've generated the same result.

Results

Halberts and Helmets

H&H uses one roll during the day and another during the night, with a table that varies by region. Using a clever mechanic, it can generate day or night encounters from the same table. The chance for encounters is a flat 1 in 6 for either time.

H&H generated 4 encounters across 14 days and nights. 

Moldvay/Cook B/X

B/X uses one check per day, unless the referee decides to do more. The chance for an encounter is determined by the local terrain, and there are tables and nested tables to determine the specifics of an encounter. I opted for a single check during daylight, and another for night.

B/X generated 5 encounters for the clear/grassland terrain (which in this game is not really present except around settlements); it generated 10 encounters for woods, river, desert, ocean, hills, or barren, and 14 (!) encounters for swamp, mountains, and jungle. Most of the terrain in the area fluctuates between woods/river and swamp, so that is a problematic result for a party of 1st level characters and their retainers, not to mention a *really* slow exploration game where the sessions are limited to two hours at a time.

T5 Flux

Flux is a simple mechanic - roll two differently-colored dice and subtract the darker color from the lighter. Alternatively, one may roll 2d6 and subtract 7. The result will be a number somewhere between -5 and +5, with a tendency for results to cluster near 0.

Flux generated 6 negative results (-1, -2, -2, -3, -3, -4),  6 positive results (1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3), and 2 zero results.

Summary

To put it in game terms, using the H&H rules, and encounter would occur on the night of the 6th day, during the day on day 7, during the day on day 8, and on the night of the 13th day.

With the B/X rules and presuming the players stay away from swampy areas, they would have random encounters on the night of day 2, the night of day 4, the day of day 6, the day of day 10, the night of day 10, the day of day 11, the day of day 12, the night of day 12, and the day of day 13. Swampy areas would've been worse, with multiple day/night/day encounters.

That's just too many encounters for a game that takes place in 2-hour sessions, much less for a group of level 1 characters.

I think Flux will be a good fit for me and the game I want to run, but I'll have to explain why and how in the next post.

continue on to part 2

Helmbarten und Halberts

 Alex Schroeder created a rules-light RPG loosely based on the principles of "classic" Traveller, the science fiction game - more specifically, the 1977 or 1981 versions of the so-called "little black books" with some inspired parts from the latest edition of Traveller. 

The German version of the game is called Helmbarten, and Peter Frölich and I helped translate that into the English version called Halberts. Four of us - Alex as referee, Peter, PresGas, and I - have been playtesting the included setting and the rules. Notes on our sessions and characters can be found here.

Unlike Paul Elliot's Mercator or Doc Grognard's Adventurer, Helmbarten is not a straight historical or fantasy adaptation of the original Traveller rules, and doesn't require having access to any of the Traveller books. Instead, it draws inspiration from what sets Traveller apart from other RPGs with origins from the same time - simple task resolution, easy character generation, and (perhaps the biggest difference of all) entirely front-loaded character advancement. 

It doesn't focus on, or even have rules for, gaining experience or item acquisition to increase character power during play - as a player you determine how much risk you want the character to undergo to continue to advance at the time of creation, and then you play that character.

To explain a bit: 

A character in Helmbarten doesn't advance in the fashion of D&D and the other RPGs inspired or derived from it. A Helmbarten character develops in 4-year blocks at the time of creation. At the end of each 4-year stint, the player determines if misfortune strikes the character, and (presuming the character hasn't died) determines if they want to continue in the same career for another 4 years, take a year off to attempt to switch careers, or simply begin adventuring at their current state of advancement. Increasing age and increasing likelihood of a stroke of misfortune are weighed against gaining new skills or increasing those the character already has, as well as the final material or social benefits the character will have once they start adventuring.

The lack of resource acquisition and management during play really makes Helmbarten play differently - you're not out to gain money or experience to improve your character's hit point total or gain the next feat, or learn new spells, and there's no tree of magic items to "climb" to ensure you have the proper power level or build. Your character's survivability (their three physical stats, combined) represent all of the "hit points" your character will ever have.

The default setting is a fantasy Alpine region with a Merovingian feel, but the framework for populating the game world and fleshing it out make it really easy to develop different settings. I myself am working on putting together a few "supplements" that are based around the Sea Peoples of the Mediterranean, an Avestan setting, and an ancient-era Fertile Crescent inspired setting.

As I mentioned earlier, the four of us have been playtesting.  I've become quite immersed in the setting, and I have particularly enjoyed the way the process of character creation generates a character and then gets out of the way of gameplay. No messing around with experience points or gold or consumable resource management - you just "run what you brung".

Our game sessions are short by modern conventions (roughly two hours every two weeks), and our "backstory" is comprised mainly of what we generated through random rolls on the career tables as we generated our characters, mixed with emergent backstory developing through our interactions with Alex's NPCs. It plays like it reads on paper -  a rules-light game system for a short series of adventures that everyone just has a lot of fun with. For me it's also been really immersive in ways I didn't expect.

Maybe it's related to the way that the character advancement is out of the picture once you've created a character. It could also be that I am playing with great players (Peter and PresGas), or that Alex is a fantastic referee, or that because our sessions are short we really focus on playing. It might be that this game really strikes on the key points of what I've always wanted from an RPG. I suspect it's all of that combined that has made this one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played in.

Dilemma

I have a lot of posts on a variety topics in various stages of completion, but for the past several weeks I've been in the grip of a dilemma. I'm not sure I like this hobby any more.

This is a hard realization for me to come to. RPGs have been a hobby of mine, off and on, since 1981. 40 years of wasted time and effort, if this feeling is true for me. That is a lot of wasted time and effort - so much so that I don't even know how to count the cost. I'm in my early fifties - I don't think that I would have another 40 years to spend on anything, which makes the prospect of so much time and effort spent such an existential problem.

The root of my dissatisfaction comes from what I feel are the implicit acceptance of concepts that I abhor. It seems kind of silly, but I think that like many prevailing attitudes that are harmful to the development of our societies are so ingrained as to be invisible without a lot of introspection, games also have these harmful prevailing concepts or assumptions. Libertarianism, racial and gender-based stereotyping, cultural appropriation or stereotyping, the propensity of might-makes-right as the go-to or sometimes only solution to conflicts, and the list goes on and on. This hobby carries a lot of baggage, and while I've done my best (not always successfully) to try to keep that shit out of my games, I'm tired of it.

My partner, who is much smarter than I am, thought I should try to put what I want into words, and see if there are others who might feel the same way about some or all of what I'm thinking. It's a great idea, but the more I think on the subject, the less I feel that a) I can really put my dissatisfaction into words that would make sense to anyone else, and b) that there are likely many people who feel the same way as I do.

I suppose, to give my partner's idea a chance, I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss this with anyone else who also finds these sorts of things problematic.

Worldbuilding in My Own Way

 This post will be a rambling thing, like my thinking. If you're happy with how you develop the history of the world in which your games are run, feel free to skip.

When I think of worldbuilding, I don't think of it in the way it is generally used now, with multi-page design documents that detail the history or even pre-history of a world, the great wars between spiritual planes, the rise of individual peoples, and so forth. What I think of the term is somewhat different, and of course to make my definition sensible, I have to provide some rambling, seemingly off-top thoughts.

Most game worlds now for virtually any tabletop engine are a libertarian's wet dream, in my opinion. Roads, food, money, items, rest and recuperation, etc. are all just present for whomever can afford them. They have sprung from nothing, whole-cloth, to be taken or used by whomever is best equipped to do so. No one made a magic item that is discovered - it has no secret or old purpose. It is just a magic item to fill out a loot table.

But these sorts of goods and services don't just exist. Someone had to make them, and there was a reason they came to be. Thinking of why these goods and services came to be, and the consequence of their existence, is what I mean about worldbuilding.

I don't want to even get started on the topic of money (for this post at least). 

Let's talk roads instead. Even in a civilization with modern heavy equipment, roads require an amazing expenditure of resources in many forms to bring into existence, and in pre-modern times the investment in labor would be even larger. 

For the idea of a road to come to mind, there has to be a need that will be addressed by the road's construction that isn't satisfied currently. A person or group with sufficient influence determines the need, and then sets in motion the process of procuring the resources and deploying them to build the road. 

There have to be resources available (foremost labor) to make the road, and of course there are resources associated with labor that also need to be addressed.

The road, in turn, makes civilization of the the areas near the road more likely, even if resources aren't optimal, as it makes travel over it just that much easier, thus making resources used for exploration or travel go a little further.

So, for an example of my thought processes, I will provide this hypothetical example of a multi-hex road network in an area of moderate population, with at least one ruin.

I'll use Caius Trismegistus (C3, as they refer to themselves), a historical magic-user of no modern note, as the prime mover. They are a three-souled revenant ruler of a frontier hex they've subjugated. A complex of ancient ruins was the main feature of the hex, and after C3 and their hirelings dealt with the inhabitants in the ruin and beat down the local wildlife, C3 has decided to use the location as the starting point of their own demesne.

C3 would like to:

• a) convert the ruin they're currently using as their fortress into a stronghold proper, to serve as their residence and base of operations, 
• b) establish a population to convert the resources of the area they control into goods or materials that other people might want, so they can 
• c) accumulate goods, material, and people to protect the borders of their conquered territory and to purchase the necessary rare elements they need to continue their all-consuming magical research. Attracting a population will make it easier to gain more resources, and will also facilitate running the whole operation without needing to micro-manage the day-to-day affairs of their territory.

In order to facilitate the construction of their stronghold as well as bring in residents to convert the untapped resources of the hex they've conquered into usable goods and services, C3 knows they need to make travel and transport as reliable, safe, and expeditious as possible. To that end, a network of roads would seem to be the first order of business:

• a road to the nearest trade port (Port Mud) two hexes away, where goods and people can be gathered or recruited to be brought along to the stronghold,
• a road or roads to the nearest convenient (within 1 hex) locations for construction materials and resources to be used for payment or trade, and
• a road to one or more areas (also within 1 hex) where food production in some form can be undertaken for the (hopefully) swelling population of the territory, and
• other roads to other resources, as they are identified and as capital and labor permit.

C3 knows that any workers they recruit will want to be compensated for their labor. They have sufficient gems, precious metals, and other items from their decades of adventuring to bootstrap the project, but they know magical research requires the expenditure of tremendous resources and so acquisition of trade materials should actually be a high priority on the list. Otherwise, they'll have to spend decades more adventuring, thus delaying their magical research or perhaps even dying, thus setting the research back even longer.

C3 expends some resources to hire labor from Port Mud to hack a rudimentary road from Port Mud to the ruin, along with guards to keep the laborers safe, and provisions for both groups. Meanwhile, C3 also hires a prospector, who identifies an area that would be a great local source of limestone, and identifies a location for an opal mine. As the labor to establish a road goes on, month after month, C3 have been taking great care to be sure the remains of those killed in the process (as the area between their pacified hex and the port is still wild and dangerous) are "treated with the greatest respect", compensation is offered to the families, and proper local religious services observed. In fact, C3 have been collecting the remains to use as an additional labor team of restless dead (the creation of which is a spell they have mastered), though not within sight of any of their living hired hands. They use these tireless laborers to establish, if not roads, at least tracks to the quarry and the mine to ease the construction of more improved roads at a later time.

Years pass. The road network has been established, the Main Road (as it becomes known) to Port Mud has been improved with rest stops and watch stations, the stronghold constructed, and additional mines for gems and a massive petrified forest are established. The roads see use not just by C3 and their forces, but by explorers and traders in their own right, along with others who have brokered agreements with C3's agents for exploiting the mines and quarry themselves. A local population center never really takes off as locally-sourced food supplies never truly thrive, but C3 accumulates enough remains to create and maintain a massive restless dead labor force. Discrete inquiries find suitable individuals willing to oversee and control the local 'population' in the quarry and mines, and C3 can finally get down to the real work of research.

We don't know what became of C3's research - the passage of many generations has worn away the historical details as it has some of the constructions and improvements. All that is remembered in the port (now a city) of Mud is that the ruins further inland have been shunned for generations as a region where unholy (in the terms of the ascendant local religion) practices took place. Some limestone is still pulled from the quarry, and there are tales of opals and other treasure to be pulled from the ground. Still, the region is, while not a frontier, not heavily settled, and it can be dangerous. Trade roads to settlements beyond the immediate region still use some of the bones of C3's original road network; the old Main Road in particular has held up well over its long history.

Information on the past doings of C3 might be found as ledger entries for labor or sale of opals or petrified wood in a buried cache of fired tablets used for recordkeeping in C3's time, or the surveyor's report may survive forgotten in the ancestral shrine of one of his descendants, or in the records of the religion predominant at the time in the form of sacrifices made for the dead. And of course, there are still the ruins of a road network buried among roads leading to their settlements, leading to quarries, mines, and the ruin of a stronghold built among even older ruins of which literally nothing is known. In this more modern age where a hypothetical game would take place, perhaps there are even penny-dreadful stories about the Necromancer of the Badlands, inspired by bits and pieces of Caius Trismegistus' history that have survived as folklore.

I just wrote all of this as I went along, in a sort of stream of consciousness as I was thinking about this hypothetical location. One could write it up in more detail about the origins of the city of Mud or which civilization built the original ruins, what happened to those inhabitants, and so on, but I don't know that those details really add anything to the above. I feel there should be some things in a game that are just not discoverable. 

I think some local rumors of the sort dungeon-delving folks and gossips would be interested in, why there might be legions of restless dead milling around an old opal or petrified forest mine, why the region is shunned now, etc. are enough to get started. Details on the local geological strata, the population of the entire geographic region, or the history of the currently ruling Hegemon can wait for when those things become pertinent.

Another person might want to think of the research of Caius Trismegistus and the products (so many failed products, and some successful ones), or maybe another group has stumbled on the ruins (from another polity that came about as a result of a successful network of roads), and is even now making use of some of those products. 

I wouldn't want to add too much detail, though - information systems through history have been unreliable (as generous a term as I could apply) up until very recently. Specific, factual knowledge was not the priority of historians of the pre-modern eras - their work was aimed to either rehabilitate or slander historic personages, or to put forth concepts that were either in fashion, or that the writer wanted to be in fashion. Facts seem to be limited to financial transactions or religious observances, and were generally ignored outside of those spheres. While we're not playing a recreation of the Ancient Near East (I'm not but I would be interested - ping me), we're also not playing a recreation of modern society, and easy access to truthful information is as anachronistic as cars, electronic computation, or a fully developed global economy would be.

At the end of all of this, does it really make a difference how I came at it? I don't know, truth be told. I do find I am more satisfied with my own work if it is internally consistent and logical (for a value of logic that is applicable to a game with magic spells and creatures from other realities), and for me that means I start small and in the past, and work my way up and out. I try to think on how interpretations distort based on the political and religious climates in between, and how rare it is for true information to survive intact. I try to keep anachronisms out of my games where they don't fit, and this sort of process helps me with that. 

OD&D session

I had the opportunity to run an original D&D game for some folks a month or so back. I ran the game as vanilla as I could - we used CHAINMAIL for initiative and round structure and I used the weapon vs armor type rules from the Greyhawk supplement for the alternate combat system, but otherwise I ran the system straight from the original Men & Magic.

It was fun - the players were a mix of those familiar with the older rules and those who'd only played 5th edition. I like my house rules like anyone else, but for a one-shot (it ended up being a two-shot but was designed as a single session) I thought it would be more fun to keep it as close to what was written in that little booklet as I could.

For ability generation, I had everyone (I had six players) roll 3d6, and we recorded the results. I then rolled 3d6 and replaced the lowest result with what I had rolled. Everyone could then use this array in whatever order they wanted for their characters.

Virtually everyone took the 15, the highest roll at the table, and put it in Constitution, though I did have a player choose Charisma instead. The fact that the prime requisites don't do anything other than adjust the rate of experience gained made it easier for characters to look at using their highest rolls for abilities that give them mechanical benefits such as an extra hit per hit dice, a +1 to ranged attacks, or even a better reaction roll, than for simply making a fighter with a high strength, a wizard with a high intelligence, and so forth. At first level, where everyone had to roll their first hit die, min/maxing consisted of picking Constitution as the best ability.

For equipment, I used the OD&D equipment lists from (now) Necropraxis, which helped speed the character creation process up. I still had a couple of players who wanted to generate their starting gold in the traditional manner and purchase it, but the lists were appreciated by most.

One potential 'house-rule' that I used was in the interpretation of the 'withstands adversity' entry for Constitution. Rather than having a player die when reduced to 0, I allowed anyone to roll a d20 for a 'death save' instead. One of the characters was dropped to 0 as he tried to run past a line of crossbow-armed highwaymen. As a 15 Constitution has the 'withstands adversity' entry, I told the player he only had a 5% chance to actually be dead, and let him choose the number that would represent a failure. Unfortunately for him, he chose 20 and rolled a 20, so his poor magic-user ended up dead. For other another character who had been reduced to 0, they were able to limp along and continue adventuring, with the understanding that they would be killed if they were hit again for damage.
For anyone interested, here is a summary of the rules and interpretations I used:

• The table rolled the stats using 3D6, and were allowed to arrange that array as desired
• The encumbrance and movement rules from Men & Magic were used
• Elves were allowed to start the session as either Magic-User or Fighter (player's choice)
• The Alternate Combat System (the d20 method) was used, with adjustments made for weapon vs armor type (from the Greyhawk supplement)
• No player character or hireling has darkvision, regardless of race. The players were told to presume that every monster, regardless of type, could be presumed to see in the dark
• Players rolled their character's first hit die
• Any character reduced to 0 rolled a 'death save', a % score based on their Constitution
• Turn structure and initiative were used from CHAINMAIL
• Elves were allowed to split move and fire, per CHAINMAIL

Changes to the d20 mechanic to fit the Moldvay Basic style

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series - the introduction and table of contents can be found here.

In order to bend the D&D Third Edition rules into the tiny box that holds my re-imagined Moldvay Basic, the biggest change is probably going to be to the core d20 mechanic. There will be other changes, but this one will affect the way attacks, skill checks, and saving throws are handled so it's probably the most important.

For the solution, I propose this set of AC/DC (for Armor Class/Difficulty Class) tables. Will they work? I have no idea. The idea is to provide one table for characters and their associated NPCs, and another for "monsters" (which is the game definition of any NPC not under the control of the players).

Here's the table for the Characters to use:

Character	AC / DC
Level	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
Normal Man	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	20	20	20
1st-3rd	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	20	20
4th +	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

Any time a character or one of their NPCs makes an attack, needs to make a save, or to do something that you deem requires a roll, you consult this table and look up the appropriate number along the top to find the result. One could adjust the table to cover AC 10-20, or expand it higher if you want high level DCs -- I based this table straight off the Moldvay Character Attacks table on page B27. It's not groundbreaking, but remember that all characters use this table, regardless of class. Later on I will talk about using feats or class abilities to modify this, but this is the core combat/save/skill check engine.

Now, for monsters, it's going to be more involved. Even though we're limiting characters to only two stages of advancement (or three if you count their NPCs) Monsters can have 17 hit dice or more. Of course, if you want a really gritty game with lots of rolling you can use the Character AC/DC table, but let's look at how the Monster AC/DC table looks:

Monster's	AC \ DC
Hit Dice	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
Up to 1	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	20	20
1+ to 2	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	20
2+ to 3	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
3+ to 4	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
4+ to 5	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18
5+ to 6	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
6+ to 7	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
7+ to 9	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15
9+ to 11	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14
11+ to 13	02	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13
13+ to 15	02	02	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12
15+ to 17	02	02	02	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11
17+ or more	02	02	02	02	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10

No surprises here, though I never noticed the 2-HD bump beginning with monsters who had 7+ HD. I suppose if you wanted to have an "overpowered" Basic-style game you could use this table for characters, but I rather like the fact that a 10th level Fighter is going to be significantly outmatched in terms of to-hit capability when compared to a 10 HD monster.

Now, I am assuming with this system that we will use the standard 3E trio of saves - Fortitude, Reflex, and Will, along with the character bonuses to those saves based on level and a target DC. Maybe you prefer the increased granularity of the old save system, and/or you prefer to not have your character's saves increase, beyond a +2 bump at 4th level, and you don't want to use DCs? Let's see how an adapted Saving Throw table might look:

	DC for Type of Attack
Character	Death Ray	Magic	Paralysis or	Dragon	Rods,
Class	or Poison	Wands	Turn to Stone	Breath	Staves, or Spells
Normal Man	14	15	16	17	17
Cleric	11	12	14	16	15
Fighter	12	13	14	15	16
Rogue	13	14	13	16	15
Sorcerer/Wizard	13	14	13	16	15
Dwarf/Halfing*	10	11	12	13	14
Elf*	12	13	13	15	15

The asterisks next to the Dwarf/Halfling and Elf entries are if you are aiming for a race-as-class style game.

This table should be pretty straightforward - the number is the DC that the character will need to meet or exceed in order to save against the particular hazard. Just be sure to use the correct level (1-3, or 4+) if you use this. It doesn't exactly line up with the old table (you would just use the number above as the target rather than the DC if you wanted that) found on B26, but it still reflects the variety of saves for each class and improves with the jump at 4th level. If you just use the old table as-is, characters of level 4+ gain a +2 bonus to their saving throw rolls.

I will talk more about classes in a later installment, but clearly most of the 13 classes in the Third Edition player's handbook aren't directly represented above. One question about using the five-fold saves above is whether it would be better to consolidate the classes, a'la Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (i.e., Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers all use the Fighter entry), or to expand them. For me, I'll just use the 3E-style saves but I thought it would be interesting to look at the old system and think how to adapt a newer system to use the old saves.

That's it for this installment - In my next installment I'll look at characters - races, classes, abilities, and so forth.

Basic 3E - Merging the 1981 Red Book and 2000 Third Edition

This all started because I had a strange idea that resulted from a conversation with someone - what would it be like to play a game using only Moldvay Basic -  not by capping the character levels at 3, but instead capping the spells, saves, and attack progressions to what's printed in the 1981 version of the Basic rules. Moldvay Basic has information on Cleric and Magic-User/Elf spell slots and Hit Dice to 6th level (though listed as for NPCs), as well as the attack matrix and save adjustments for characters level 4+.
The articles in this series won't be so much about clear-cut rules, but mainly my musing on how to go about bringing this idea of a Basic-style game and merging it with the parts of the Third Edition rules that I like. Hopefully this will mean that someone who likes the basic conceit but uses a different edition (revised 3E, Pathfinder, or whatever) can use these as a springboard to develop their own.
The way I envision the outline of this series is as follows (I will update this post with the link and title when the appropriate article has been posted):

• Changes to the d20 mechanic to fit the Moldvay Basic style
• Possibilities for hit points, armor class, and the like
• Characters, races, classes
• Spells
• Magic Items and Item Creation
• Miscellany

My hope is by the end of the series I'll have a working system that I can coalesce into a document no larger than the size of the 1981 Basic book - 64 US Letter or A4 sized pages. Fingers crossed!

Alternate Magic system for Wizards

I've been thinking of wizard spells being affected by the specialization school of the wizard, rather than being a generic effect duplicated by every wizard who casts the spell. I'm working from the spell schools as defined in 3rd edition and later, though it could be applied to older versions of D&D as well. For example, Magic Missile effects would vary by the caster's focus:

• Abjuration: Target of each missile must save or be stunned for (caster level) rounds. Each missile above the first to hit a single target increases the save difficulty by 1.
• Conjuration: Caster chooses heavy darts or nets at the time of casting.
• Darts: Targets are hit for 1d4+1 damage per missile.
• Nets: Targets are entangled for (caster level) rounds. Each additional missile to hit a single target increases the duration of the entangled condition by 1 round.
• Divination: Targets are automatically hit for 5 damage for each missile.
• Enchantment: Target of each missile must be saved or be fascinated for (caster level) round. Each missile above the first to hit a single target increases the duration by 1 round.
• Evocation: choose fire or ice at time of casting. 
• Fire: Target must save or catch fire; each missile above the first to hit a single target increases the save difficulty by 1.
• Ice: Target must save or be slowed for (caster level) rounds. Each missile above the first to hit a single target increases the duration by 1 round.
• Illusion: Target must save or be struck unconscious. Each missile above the first to hit a single target increases the duration by 1.
• Necromancy: Target must save or have STR or CON (caster's choice) temporarily reduced by 2 for (caster level) rounds. Each additional missile adds 1 to the reduction, and 1 round to duration.
• Transmutation: Target must save or be transmogrified into a small, harmless animal (chicken, mouse, etc. - caster's choice) for (caster level) rounds. Each additional missile above the first to hit a single target increases the save difficulty by 1.
• In cases where a saving throw is required, a target that makes a save takes 2 damage per missile that hits instead.

This will obviously require some re-working of the wizard's spell list, to eliminate duplication of effects. Keep in mind not all spells will be usable by all wizard specialists.

Simple(ish) Social interaction for d20

The next time I run a d20-based game, I'm going to try this relatively simple social hack my partner and I came up with for players interacting with NPCs. This system should work with just about any d20-based system. The examples below are based on Moldvay B/X and compatibles, but with a little modification should work with AD&D, 3E/Pathfinder, 4E, 5E, and so on.

1. Referee first determines the disposition of the NPC or group of NPCs (target) the players want to interact with. This is done with a standard 2d6 reaction roll.
2. Presuming parley is possible, the referee generates a Coercion/Persuasion spectrum for the target by rolling 3d6, and using the modifier determination method for their system. Negative modifiers represent susceptibility to coercion, and positive modifiers represent susceptibility to persuasion. An example using the Moldvay Basic rules:

Score	Spectrum
3	+3 Coercion / -3 Persuasion
4-5	+2 Coercion / -2 Persuasion
6-8	+1 Coercion / -1 Persuasion
9-12	No susceptibility
13-15	+1 Persuasion / -1 Coercion
16-17	+2 Persuasion / -2 Coercion
18	+3 Persuasion / -3 Coercion

3. Players desiring something from the target then attempts to convince the target to provide what the player wants by either using coercion or persuasion. The player states the method (coerce or persuade), and gives a general explanation of the action the character takes.
4. The referee determines the appropriate ability (if any) that might apply, and the player rolls a d20 vs the Moldvay Basic rules combat table (reproduced below; p.B27), applying the bonus/penalty as determined by their choice of coercion or persuasion, plus any relevant ability modifier. Note that this table should be used even if the players are using the Expert rules to keep such interactions challenging for higher level characters. The disposition number becomes the armor class number on the table. Any results higher than 9 are treated as 9, and results lower than 2 are treated as 2, just to keep things simple.

Character	Disposition roll
Level	9+	8	7	6	5	4	3	2 -
1-3	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
4+	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15

5.  If the d20 roll +/- spectrum modifier +/- ability modifier (if any) is equal to or greater than the number on the table, the target will (perhaps grudgingly) acquiesce.
6. If the players simply want to alter the disposition of the target, they can attempt it by following the same procedure. On a success, the disposition score improves by 1 (up to a maximum of 12).

There is room to tinker here beyond simply adapting for a particular ruleset; some possibilities:

• One could extend the disposition roll out on either end instead of compressing the high and low ranges,
• The referee could invert the disposition number if the players attempt to improve the disposition of the target, requiring a harder roll to improve it,
• Results don't necessarily need to be binary - it should be easy for a referee to incorporate degrees of success or failure based on the roll's proximity to the target number, 
• The referee could instead use a fixed target number for specific actions.

Credit goes to The Discordian for the initial idea and helping me hash it out, and to the BreeYark article How to Use a B/X Combat Matrix for Everything for the (brilliantly simple) idea of using the Basic Combat Matrix.

XP For SR3

Good Karma is the experience reward system used in Shadowrun 3E. In between activities, characters can expend karma to improve attributes, improve existing skills, or learn new skills. These rules are somewhat complicated, and may be subject to simplification at a later date.

Attributes

On the table below are two scores for each attribute by meta-human type. The first value is the racial modified value, and the number in parenthesis is the attribute maximum. To improve an attribute less than or equal to the racial modified value, a character must spend 2 times the new attribute score in good karma to improve the attribute. Values between the racial modified value and the attribute maximum cost 3 times the attribute score to increase.
For example, a human who wishes to improve Body from 4 to 5 would require (5 x 2=)10 karma.
The same human who wished to increase Body from 6 to 7 would require (7 x 3=) 21 karma.
Attributes must be increased one point at a time - a character cannot 'skip' from 5 to 7 without purchasing 6.

Attribute	Dwarf	Elf	Human	Ork	Troll
Body	7 (11)	6 (9)	6 (9)	9 (14)	11 (17)
Quickness	6 (9)	7 (11)	6 (9)	6 (9)	5 (8)
Strength	8 (12)	6 (9)	6 (9)	8 (12)	10 (15)
Charisma	6 (9)	8 (12)	6 (9)	5 (8)	4 (6)
Intelligence	6 (9)	6 (9)	6 (9)	5 (8)	4 (6)
Willpower	7 (11)	6 (9)	6 (9)	6 (9)	6 (9)

Skill Improvement

Skill improvement costs are different for active and knowledge skills. The table below shows the needlessly complicated cost calculations:

Base Skill	Active	Knowledge/Language
New Skill Rating is ....
Equal or less than the linked Attribute	1.5	1
Equal or less than 2 x Attribute	2	1.5
More than 2 x Attribute	2.5	2
Specializations
New Skill Rating is ....
Equal or less than linked Attribute	.5	.5
Equal or less than 2 x Attribute	1	1
More than 2 x Attribute	1.5	1.5

Learning New Skills

New skills can be purchased at a skill rating of 1, at a cost of 1 good karma. This is true of Active, Knowledge, or Language skills. Once a skill has been learned, it is improved according to the table above.

A new specialization can only be purchased for an existing base skill. To begin a new specialization, the character must buy the specialization at a rating 1 point higher than the base skill. With a new specialization, obtaining a new specialization does not reduce the base skill.

A character may have as many specializations as equal to their base skill rating for that skill.

Simplified hacking rules for SR3

This is a proposed hacking simplification for Shadowrun 3E. It retains the dice pools, the operational and special utilities for a deck, the deck ratings, and system ratings. The main changes are to the target number to determine a success, and the elimination of the 28 distinct but ultimately limiting actions into 5 broad categories of actions.

Systems are still identified in the format Security Rating-Access/Control/Index/Files/Slave.

Security Rating is a color code followed by a number. The color code (blue, green, orange, or red) is a shorthand indicator for how quickly the system responds to unauthorized operations. Higher difficulty systems respond faster to the security tally than lower difficulty systems. The number is the size of the dice pool the system will use when attempting to detect or oppose an unauthorized user.
The ACIFS code references the strengths of 5 separate subsystems on a particular host.
Access is used for tests involving access and authorization.
Control is used for tests involving altering or executing commands.
Index is used for tests involving locating files, information, or other resources.
File is used for tests involving uploading/downloading/creating/deleting files
Slave is used for tests to control devices under the direct control of this host, such as maglocks, security cameras, etc.

I also use the security rating as a helper when randomly generating the values for a host. The table below lists the various values that are typically assigned to a particular security rating:

Rating	TN	Dice Pool	Values	Tally Step
Blue	3	4-6	8-10	5-7
Green	3	5-7	9-11	4-6
Orange	4	7-9	11-16	3-5
Red	5	8-13	13-19	2-4

TN refers to the target number on a d6 for a success. Rather than use the variable target number in SR3, I am using a fixed TN based on the difficulty of the system.

In the simplified system, the hacker determines which of the subsystem or subsystems on the target host  he or she wants to interact with each round. The security value for the subsystem indicates the number of successes required to obtain full access to the subsystem, at which point the hacker no longer has to make tests when interacting with that particular subsystem.

Operational utilities that the hacker has loaded into his/her deck will modify this number of successes - the utility rating is subtracted from the subsystem rating, and the difference is the actual number of successes needed, with a minimum of 1 success required.

Note that full control of a subsystem isn't always required for an action; the results of an incremental success (cumulative total of less than the total required) should be communicated to the player as to what new information or actions are now available.

Finally decryption/encryption will be handled as an isolated system. The encryption strength of a remote host can be determined randomly with a value tied to the host's security rating, or assigned a number. A hacker who is encrypting data from his deck will use the deck's MPCP rating to determine the strength of his encryption.

News excerpts - June 14 2065

Excerpts from the morning news on the 'net:

• New York Post: "Eight people were injured, two of which are in serious but stable condition, after an emergency crash barrier suffered a malfunction yesterday. The barrier, located near the Midtown Pedestrian Zone entrance at 7th Avenue and 39th Street, released without warning, injuring several people. 'An equipment malfunction resulted in the injury of several people, and we are conducting a full investigation,' said NYPD, Inc. spokesperson Tariqua Enqar. 'We're conducting a full audit of the emergency traffic control systems surrounding the Pedestrian Zone to make sure there are no additional failures,' she said..."
• Bitcoin Buzz: "Share price for local courier service Hustle & Bustle suffered a major drop this morning as the rumor mill is buzzing about the loss of a very lucrative contract with Aztechnology. The contract was purported to account for more than 60% of H&B's annual revenues..."
• rumormill.nyc.mastodon: "Spitfire Lightning: a little birdie tells me that the azzies are pretty pissed at the nypd and nyc corps after some property of theirs was lost yesterday. no chirping on the nature of the lost property, but i hear aztech is angling for some concessions from the city's corp and using the shitshow in midtown as an excuse..."
• hiflyers.ny.mastodon: "FlyingHi: I'm hearing reports from some fairly reliable sources that there's some sort of illness spreading through the Straekker Orbital. Anyone have anything concrete on this?"
• My Body Is A Weapon: "Chepi School, Inc. has apparently suspended operations in the wake of an ongoing investigation that a performance enhancer demonstrated through MMA rising star Steel Hicks was responsible for the deaths of dozens of people."