A couple of years ago, I rekindled my interest in making a game inspired by the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert boxed sets for Dungeons & Dragons. I had been aching to do a game inspired by the B/X rules and I wanted them to incorporate some of what I thought were the stronger elements of Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons (4e). In particular, I wanted to bring in elements similar to the two Essentials player books (Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms) and some of the thematic books that came after the Essentials launch (in particular Heroes of Shadow and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos). Eventually, work and my dissertation led to me stalling out before I could really get into stride, but I recently read comments by someone I follow on Twitter about how running an OSR game for their group didn’t work out because most OSR games lacked the cool abilities that modern games have. That gamer’s lament reminded me that I was not alone in seeking a game that balanced new and old ideas and renewed my desire to play. The Essentials tier of 4e gave characters a lot of cool abilities but also had a bit of a B/X feel thematically. I thought that I could combine the simplicity of B/X with 4e to create something truly magical.
In my earlier “Combining New School and Old School” article, I talked about my initial inspiration for the mashup and mentioned that one of the people who inspired me was George Strayton, who had worked on West End’s Star Wars roleplaying game. My friendship with George has definitely shaped how I view a lot of online D&D debates. He’s a dedicated fan, and a great DM, who was also a writer on Xena/Hercules for a period of time. I don’t know if he wrote on that series before or after West End published the Hercules & Xena Roleplaying Game, and I’ll have to ask him someday. He also wrote the screenplay for the Dragonlance animated movie. While I know that my love of that film is in the minority, the one thing I can assert with full confidence is that whatever the flaws of the film are, it was written by someone who played a lot of D&D and deeply loves Dragonlance.
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George was also the lead designer on the one Fantasy Heartbreaker project I worked on as a developer, The Secret Fire. The game was written expressly to be a Heartbreaker, though we hoped it would be a successful one. We designed it to evoke the narrative style of many of those earlier games and added a dash of 3.x to the mix. Since it is a product of the self-publishing era, rather than the print-a-ton-of-books-and-lose-money era, it isn’t truly a Heartbreaker. After all, what led Ron Edwards to call games “Fantasy Heartbreakers” was his lament over how much money people often lost in the production of the older games. That’s not the case with The Secret Fire. We didn’t make a lot of money from the game, but I don’t think it hurt George financially…though it might have. Since I worked on the game, I will be borrowing a couple of ideas from it. Sadly, the game never did catch on as much as I wished it had. Playing it, and playtesting it, was one helluva good time, though, in large part because George is a fantastic DM.
In my second post on Heroes of Karameikos, I moved out of storytelling and justification mode and began to present both my basic philosophy and how I was going to treat character attributes in my B/X-inspired game. Like James M. Spahn did with his upcoming Blades of Power game (back it on Kickstarter like I did), I am starting with B/X but know I’m going to end up somewhere very different. James talks about how he began with B/X and ended up making his own thing in an interview with Agranak Studios, and I imagine I’ll end up in an equally different place.
Anyway, the nuts and bolts of my second post were that I wanted to design a game that had defined roles, abilities that interact with each other and the environment, and to provide a feeling of being heroic while still having it feel like the characters are in danger. I wanted options, but I didn’t want an avalanche of powers, feats, and magic items that could turn character building and advancing into a spreadsheet. 4e has options and choices, but B/X has archetypes and I believe if I use archetypes to frame options, I can create something really interesting. An example of how I wanted the characters to feel heroic, but still vulnerable, was in my recommended attribute system. I recommended picking a class first, which empowers the player. After that, the player gets to roll 4d6 and pick the best three dice for ONLY their Prime Requisite attributes. That means that the characters are better than average at the things that fit their archetype, but are more than likely average everywhere else.
I also talked a bit about when and how characters can die but hadn’t fleshed that out mentally yet. In fact, I’m still working on that as I am writing this. I’ve got a few ideas I still want to try out…and convince you all to playtest. One thing I’ve been putting a lot of thought into is the skill system I want to use. One of the critiques of 4e was that it didn’t have rules for “role playing,” but I’ve already responded to that accusation when I wrote about how 3rd Edition brought in a lot of the feel of GURPS and Hero with a mechanics-based mindset. In doing so, gamers who were used to “roll playing,” where you roll to see if you persuade or find a secret door using a skill, thought that a game that minimized those all of a sudden didn’t have role playing elements when the exact opposite was true. That’s a discussion to return to another time though, in part because I really like GURPS, Hero, and 3rd-Edition-style roll playing.
Having done all of that other legwork though, it’s time to finally start putting together the underlying structure of the game. It’s time to present the foundation and my philosophical design pillars.
The purpose of this article is to build the skeleton that later Heroes of Karameikos articles will add muscle to. This article lays out everything the basic class entries will do as we progress. It will answer what the primary roles are for the Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, and Cleric. It will also cover how some of these assumptions might change when I eventually bring in the Elf class, a class that is essentially two classes combined. While I wrote a bit about how abilities work in the last entry, this article touches on the nitty-gritty and in it I hope to cover several topics. I want to provide the design pillars and add a small handful of universal rules that produce the 4e feel. I also want to give a brief overview of what full character creation will look like and provide a template for every future class article.
I want to make one promise right up front though. I want to make sure that the B/X rules I love stay B/X. I am keeping descending Armor Class, the attack matrix, race-as-class, Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic, and the prime-requisite XP bonus. I am not throwing any of that out. The new-school feel comes from a thin layer added on top of the underlying B/X engine. I want to be clear. The 4e additions only chrome additions and I do not intend to overwhelm the original design. The key is to keep it simple and allow for fast and fun gaming experiences. If you want furious, you’ll have to play Savage Worlds.
The Four Pillars
Everything in this game answers to four core design pillars. When I wonder whether rule should be included or not, these pillars are how I will break the tie and decide.
1. Keep the old bones and add new muscle. The B/X engine is the engine. I will add muscle. I will be clarifying roles, adding signature maneuvers, and providing a new survival mechanic, but I will be keeping the original skeleton. If a thing already works in Moldvay (and I think most usually do), it stays.
2. Everyone has a role. This is the heart of the 4e feel. Every character has a clear job in a fight. That version of D&D used the language of Massively Multiplayer RPGs (MMORPGs) to describe the roles (Defender, Striker, Controller, or Leader), but those were already there under different concepts from the tabletop days. We either called them different things like “meat shield” or had yet to fully classify them in D&D terms, though Champions by Hero Games moved a long way towards creating official definitions with things like Brick and Blaster. I want to use these newer definitions of roles because they are easy for non-tabletop gamers to understand, they allow me to create different archetypes within the four classes (something Daggerheart also does), and I want to make sure that the things characters do make the party better. Old school games are about how parties support one another rather than just making individual characters epic. This type of balance is what Dr. J. Eric Holmes, author of the original Basic Set, argued was at the core of D&D’s design philosophy. It was this party balance that created meaningful play experiences, and he explains how in his book Fantasy Role Playing Games. He argued that a “balanced” party wasn’t one where everyone was just as powerful as everyone else, rather that every character filled a role. The four core B/X classes already embody the four roles almost perfectly, though I’ll be tweaking here and there and creating different archetypes within the classes. Most of these archetypes exist in the old rules and I am just renaming and sharpening them.
3. Mortally Heroic. I want the survivability of High Fantasy without removing the teeth of Sword & Sorcery. My favorite setting, Mystara, has steam-powered gnome zeppelins AND gritty back-alley executions. The player characters in Mystara are not as fragile as 0-level characters going through the Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel Sailors on the Starless Sea. Mystara isn’t a setting where a low level wizard dies in a fight with a common house cat due to a mere graze. I want the characters to get a little more cushion. They will still face the real threat of death and bad luck still has consequences, but the deaths will not seem too arbitrary. I also want to make sure that the mechanic stays relatively stable in how much benefit it provides as characters level up. The benefit shouldn’t disappear as characters gain in level.
4. Archetypes over algebra. I know that 4e get a lot of flak on the internet, but Essentials taught me a few valuable design lessons. Not the least of these is that a player should only have to make a few evocative choices and then be able to jump straight into play. This isn’t GURPS or Hero, they shouldn’t have to optimize a build across forty splatbooks. In Heroes of Karameikos classes get a small number of strong, flavorful options. Each class will have underlying archetypes instead of feat trees of nigh infinite branches. I don’t want players to have to pore over books every level in order to go power shopping because they think that’s the only way they will matter. The classes I design will be closer to Shadowdark where they fit on a couple of pages. If it takes me more than that then the archetype is too complicated. If a player wants a character with different options, then I will design classes that fit those options in a tight and narratively consistent manner. I’m thinking of specialty archetypes like the one I created for a B/X Swashbuckler class.
I want to keep the old school as much as possible, so here’s the entire “new-school” layer in five easy pieces (I clearly watch too many movies). I will try to remain true to these rules and am writing them out so that all future race and class entries will make sense immediately to anyone familiar with this initial skeleton.
Rule 1 — Roles
Every class has a role, and the role tells you what your abilities are for. The four core classes as presented in Basic and Expert line up like this. It is important to note that these are as presented in B/X and not the later BECMI. Fighters in BECMI eventually get multiple attacks; that never happens in B/X… which is a part of the critique the group I read about on Twitter gave. I may eventually do a version of this game based on BECMI later, but for right now I want to stick as close to B/X as possible. So much so that I’m using B/X fonts in my tables.
The table above includes a quick breakdown of the classes using the “role” lens of modern MMORPGs. It lists a B/X class and then the role it fills and how B/X rules fill that role. Looking at the table, I think that the Fighter is the only class that needs any new gimmicks in order to make modern gamers feel like they have options. Sure, they can pick different weapons and armor, and those choices matter, but that’s still more limited than a lot of modern gamers like. The baseline in Moldvay is that fighters “have no special abilities” and I want to shift that a little. Everyone else mostly needs their existing kit framed as a role and given one signature interaction. That signature interaction is what makes each new archetype (combining class and role) feel a little different. In my first pass, each class entry will define exactly one of them. As I expand design, I might add new signature interactions to each role, but most archetypes will only get one…even when we are talking about race-as-class cases like the Elf.
Defender → Mark. In 4e, some Defenders have the ability to “mark” other characters. When an enemy is marked, there is usually some additional effect that the character who did the marking can activate. For fighters, this effect is that you can make enemies worse at attacking anyone but you. Sometimes you will get to punish the enemy for trying.
Striker → Quarry. Marking works differently for Strikers in 4e. You still pick a target, but in this case you will do more damage to it under the right conditions. This takes the B/X backstab power and generalizes it to any class.
Controller → Hinder. Controllers change the shape of the battlefield. They modify the terrain and their area effects don’t just damage the opposition. They also impose conditions on opponents and change the shape the battlefield. One of my favorite things about B/X is watching a Magic-User coordinate with the party to create a Breach, Sleep, and Clear moment. It feels epic, but it requires the entire team. When it fails, due to players trying to cast Sleep on creatures that are immune to it, it creates real tension. As fun as that is, I want there to be more and different opportunities to emerge for Controllers. Naturally, that iconic combination will still be at the center of game play. Everyone loves kicking open the door (breaching), using Sleep, and clearing (murking the gobbos) Rainbow Six-style.
Leader → Inspire. The leader archetype was something that was officially added in 3.x with the Marshal in the Miniatures Handbook, but the B/X Cleric is very much the original Leader class. They are more than healers. They can boost the abilities of other players with spells like Bless or improve their morale through spells like Remove Fear. While it’s easy to see these effects as spells or prayers, it is also easy to visualize them as speeches.
I want a couple of rules that increase survivability and extend adventuring beyond the single-encounter workday that can dominate first level play in OSR if things aren’t done right. Breach, Sleep, and Clear can typically only happen once a day when you are starting and without that powerful combination characters can get hurt in combat. I lifted this rule from 4e and modified it a bit to make Constitution matter for every class. Remember, I don’t want any dump stats in my design.
Second Wind. You can catch your second wind a number of times per day equal to 1 + your Constitution modifier (minimum 1, maximum once per encounter).
You may use an action on your turn to catch your second wind. If you do, you regain hit points equal to one roll of your Hit Die Type + your Constitution modifier (minimum 1), and you gain +2 to Armor Class until the start of your next turn as you guard and recover.
I am considering limiting this to just defender archetypes, but it has two elements that I might want every class to benefit from. First, it gives characters a self-rescue button. This means that one unlucky round won’t necessarily end a character’s life/adventuring day. Second, it turns Constitution into the survival stat for every character. The high-Con Fighter is a rock, and the low-Con Magic-User gets some benefit from it even if they can’t lean on it the same way a Fighter can. That’s exactly the “every attribute matters” texture Moldvay advocated for in his “Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art” appendix. It also provides a real benefit to the lucky Magic-User that might create some epic moments.
This isn’t too far removed from Moldvay’s own design. Moldvay Basic already prints an optional survival rule on page B6 where you reroll a 1 or 2 for first-level hit points. I’m just being more generous about it. I don’t think spending an action to roll 1d4 (a Magic-User’s Hit Die in B/X) plus Constitution modifier is game-breaking at low levels and it doesn’t scale upward. It’s only a single die’s worth of recovery. At higher levels, this isn’t even a round of attacks from a monster, but it makes a big difference at lower levels.
Rule 3 — Dying and Death
In B/X your character normally dies at 0 hit points. Sure, the module Keep on the Borderlands says that you can allow your players’ characters to be merely captured at this level, but the baseline assumption is that having hit points above 0 means you are alive and fully healthy and 0 and below means you are dead. That’s really stark. In Heroes of Karameikos, I will move the goalposts a little while trying keep the danger closer to old-school by using a system that already exists in B/X. Instead of having a death save be a 55% likely success like in 4e and 5e, a character in Heroes of Karameikos makes a saving throw vs. Death Ray or Poison. This ties the “new fangled” death save mechanic to the iconic “am I about to die?” save. When I ran B/X (not my full Heroes of Karameikos variant) for my twins’ D&D group this at the end of summer, I used this rule and I think it worked well. One character who suffered to to bad combat rolls survived and one who made foolish choices didn’t. It could have gone the other way too, but it gave the players a sense that “there was always a chance” which made the death more acceptable when it happened.
Dying. At 0 hit points you fall Dying. You are unconscious and helpless. You are not dead until you take damage equal to your Constitution score, below zero (a Constitution 13 character dies at −13). Any single blow that drops you past that threshold kills you outright.
Death Saves. At the start of each of your turns while Dying, make a saving throw vs. Death Ray or Poison.
Failure: you die.
Success: you cling to life, but you are not safe. Roll again at the start of your next turn, and every turn after, until you are healed or stabilized.
Natural 20: a surge of will. Spend a Second Wind, if you have one, and act normally this turn. If you do not have a Second Wind, you stabilize and are unconscious.
If you are at 0 hit points from damage, any healing ends the Dying condition and restores you to the hit points healed. An ally can also stabilize you with an ability like a cure spell or a successful Heal knack. This ends the need to roll death saves. If you went below 0 hp, and the healing roll only increases you up to 0 hp or less, you remain unconscious at 0 hp until healed or the fight ends.
I like this better than the way that 4e and 5e handle death saves. First and foremost because it reuses an existing B/X saving throw instead of inventing a death save table or using the overly kind death save rules from modern editions. I also like that it’s class-flavored. The sturdy classes (Cleric, Dwarf, Halfling) have the best Death Ray/Poison saves and cling to life longest, while the Magic-User who has the worst Death Ray/Poison save and the fewest hit points is the most likely to die from being involved in combat. No Magic-User in their right mind runs into melee. The wise ones stand in the back chucking daggers from their bandoliers of death. The rule also scales the way I want. At 1st level your save target is 8–13, so an unaided dying character is on a roughly two-round clock (50/50 twice) and the party’s Leader had better hurry to stabilize them. As your save improves across the levels, veteran characters cling to life far more reliably, but they are still vulnerable to death from monsters because monsters do larger amounts of damage. Higher-level characters die because a catastrophic blow from a Dragon bypasses their Constitution buffer and not to a goblin’s lucky scratch. Lower-level characters, who fight monsters who do less damage per attack, tend to die from the scratch more often than catastrophic attacks. Though I should mention that the failed death save in the game I ran recently was from when one of the party’s Fighters ran in to fight an Owlbear. The damage wasn’t quite enough to bypass the Constitution buffer, but it was close so when the save failed the player did not complain. The static negative Constitution cushion shrinks in importance as monster damage climbs.
Rule 4 — Skills, In Brief (Full System in a Later Column)
The second post in the series (the first with any mechanics) promised a skill system, and I am working on it, but I’ll be presenting the initial class offerings before the skill and combat articles so I want to give you a glimpse of what I am thinking. I’ve made another “informed by the modern” choice here that, more than any of the other choices, shifts whether this game feels like just one more retroclone or like its own thing. At first, it’s going to look a little like Inspectres, orPowered by the Apocalypse, but in the end I hope you’ll see it’s really B/X inspired.
I do not want to use the common roll a d20 under an ability score for skills. Instead, I’d like to roll 2d6.
The Skill Roll. To attempt something uncertain, roll 2d6, add the modifier of the governing ability (−3 to +3), and add any knack bonus from your class or heritage if you’re trained in the particular knack.
Read the total on the table:
Difficulty modifiers can be used on the roll: Easy +2 · Moderate +0 · Hard −2 · Brutal −4.
If you are a fan of B/X, that table might look very familiar. These are the exact breakpoints of the B/X reaction roll (2 / 3–5 / 6–8 / 9–11 / 12). B/X has a resolution mechanic for a lot of uncertain human outcomes using 2d6, such as reactions, morale, and loyalty. All I am doing is making this same table more universal in practice so that it applies to skills as well. I really like the stability of the bell curve in certain situations over the flat increments of the d20. The results on this table are centered on the mixed result without needing a huge range of numbers.
There are two other things I like about this system. Where the B/X proposed rule has you roll equal to or under a statistic, this roll is roll-high-is-good and matches the way attacks and saves work instead of inverting that vibe. Additionally, the math is flat across levels. In this case the modifiers come from abilities and training, not from a level-scaling table that cancels itself out. This explains how 0-level carpenters can be masters of their craft and doesn’t require every NPC to be superhuman just to do their job. This pairs naturally with the one-tier B/X narrative frame and also prevents the global escalation of “leveled” characters that have come to dominate modern games. B/X characters don’t go from gongfarmer to god like they can in BECMI or 3.x. In this system, the difficulty axis is just Easy / Moderate / Hard (Brutal for the truly desperate). Anything beyond what 4e calls Heroic scale simply isn’t a thing mortals do in this game.
Where Knacks Fit In.
Knacks are what I am calling skills in this rules set, because I like the sound of a player saying “I have a Knack for that.” I’m a big fan of Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage series and he uses the term to describe low level powers, but I’m using it here to describe skills. In the rules I will use GAZ1’s Skill (Ability) notation for Knacks, so you’ll see things like Knowledge of City Guard Tactics (Int), Riding (Dex), Persuasion (Cha). The ability in the parentheses tells you which modifier to add. Being trained in the knack adds a flat +2 on top (a number I might change after playtesting because that might be too much of a benefit). If you have no knack for the task, you roll anyway, raw 2d6 plus the bare ability modifier, because in this game, as in Moldvay’s, there is always a chance. Each class grants a few knacks, and each character’s background grants a couple more. The Thief’s percentile skills survive intact as that class’s signature suite of abilities. I’m leaving that untouched because I am a fan of how B/X is a game of multiple subsystems.
Rule 5 — Encounters and Exploits
One of my favorite aspects of 4e is the fact that it has mechanics allowing each character to do a “cool thing every fight” by giving every character an Encounter Power. While some of the names for the Encounter Powers could be goofy, and the fact that 4e called everything Powers was bad technical writing that alienated some fans, the fact that people could “go nova” once per Encounter was pretty cool in my opinion.
In Heroes of Karameikos most class abilities are at-will. Characters have basic attacks and might have a stance they adopt or the ability to use a role’s signature interaction like marking an opponent. I want to make sure that each class gets a small number of Exploits in addition to their at-will abilities. These Exploits are stronger maneuvers you can use once per encounter if you are a martial class or that cost a spell slot if you are a caster. I am taking inspiration from Robert Schwalb’s article on formatting and 4e and his formatting template. Depending on how playtesting goes, I might eventually make this 3 times a day or 1 + Prime Requisite Bonus a Day instead of once per encounter because that might be too frequent for old school feel. Right now I think once per encounter hits the sweet spot, but we’ll see.
“Once per encounter” is the resource that paces the cool benefits. Players want things like disarm, rallying shouts, and perfect backstabs, and an encounter is a good pace for that, but so is an x-times-per-day mechanic and that might feel more old school and less 4e. One benefit to once per encounter abilities is that there’s no new bookkeeping. A typical low-level character in my game will have one stance and one or two exploits. I’m basing that on the Essentials presentation of 4e, which simplified things so that classes had a few pieces, all of them good, and didn’t need a spreadsheet.
Now that I’ve shared some of the underlying assumptions of the game, let’s look at the basic steps in character creation.
Making a Character
Making a character takes about ten steps. If you’ve made a B/X character, half of these are from the earlier rulebook, but the new-school flavor is concentrated in Steps 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8.
Step 1 — Choose your class first and become familiar with your role. Pick from Fighter (Defender), Thief (Striker), Magic-User (Controller), or Cleric (Leader). The first classes offered will be these classic combinations, but later classes (or subclasses) will mix class and role in hopefully interesting ways. Choosing first means you know which ability score to favor before you roll, and it lets you know your job within the party. Remember, early D&D was a game of “party” balance and not mechanical balance and choosing first lets you make sure you have a balanced party.
Step 2 — Roll your abilities. For your class’s prime requisite ability, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die. You will roll 3d6 in order for the other five abilities. If your class has two prime requisites (like the Elf does in B/X), choose which one of them gets the 4d6 roll. The other will be rolled as a part of the straight 3d6 in order, just like any other character would do. This nudges you toward being good at the thing your archetype represents, while keeping you pleasantly average everywhere else.
Step 3 — Note your prime-requisite XP bonus. Unchanged from B/X:
The 4d6 roll in Step 2 exists partly to make this bonus more likely. Heroes should feel a little better than everyone else.
Step 4 — Roll hit points (with a heroic floor). The standard method is to roll your class Hit Die and add your Constitution modifier (minimum 1 per die). Alternatively, at first level (and only first level) you can take the maximum die value instead of rolling. First level is where B/X is cruelest, and a maxed first die is can make a big difference at a time when every hit point matters. If you think that is too generous, you can use the Basic book’s own optional fix and reroll any 1 or 2 on hit dice at first level. Folk D&D is about house rules and this is very much a Folk D&D variant.
Step 5 — Determine your Second Wind Benefit. Your Second Wind heals one Hit Die + Con modifier, and you can use it 1 + Con modifier times per day (minimum 1). Write the value down and change it if your Con modifier ever changes due to magic. Right now, I’m letting all classes have this ability, but I might change it to Fighting classes (or Defender roles) only at some point in the future after playtesting.
Step 6 — Buy equipment. Roll 3d6 × 10 to determine your starting gold and purchase your equipment from the B/X equipment lists. Buy your armor, weapons, torches, iron rations, and whatever else suits your fancy. Make sure you don’t forget to buy a ten-foot pole.
Step 7 — Attack values and saving throws. Use the B/X Character Attacks table and the Saving Throws table for your class and level. Nothing changes here.
Step 8 — Armor Class. You bought armor in Step 6, now is when you read the AC off the B/X armor table as normal (descending: lower is better). If your table prefers ascending AC, convert with Ascending AC = 19 − Descending AC. In that case, you’ll have to change from to-hit numbers to to-hit bonuses. Both produce identical results, but I default to descending because I want to pay homage to the original rules and because I actually prefer them.
Step 9 — Pick a heritage. The first set of rules I’ll be writing are for Karameikos and that means that the heritage choices will be Traladaran, Thyatian, or a demihuman race. Your heritage grants a language and one knack (a trained skill like fishing because a Traladara fisher’s child knows rivers and weather and a Thyatian gentry-child knows letters and heraldry). Pick one more knack that fits your character’s history. These are your first entries in the skill system, and they’re the seeds of who this person is in the Grand Duchy.
Step 10 — Alignment and name. Pick from the three alignments of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Alignment is not morality, it is an “alignment” with the cosmic forces that shape the universe. Do you side with Law, a power of creation that ensures stability and order or do you side with Chaos that both creates and destroys as the moods of the Laughing Gods Who Live in the Spaces Between the Worlds shift? It’s up to you who you side with, or whether you side with anyone at all. In my games, alignment is actual allegiance and not a moral code. Provide a name for your hero and you’re done. Tou should be able to make a Heroes of Karameikos character in about the time it takes to make a Moldvay character.
The Class Template
So that the class entries stay consistent (and stay short), each one follows the same template. Here’s the outline, so you know what’s coming when the Fighter and Cleric arrive in the next entry in the series (no promises when that will be):
Role & Tagline — Defender/Striker/Controller/Leader, and the one-line description.
Prime Requisite(s) — what gets the 4d6 roll.
The B/X Core — Hit Die, allowed armor and weapons, save category, the XP/level table.
Role Feature — the signature interaction (Mark, Quarry, Hinder, or Inspire), with mechanical specifics.
Stance — an at-will choice that’s always on in an encounter after the player activates it.
Exploits — the small set of once-per-encounter maneuvers (or spell-fueled tricks), gained as you level.
Knacks — the class’s trained skills.
Progression — what you get at each level, at a glance.
The game will start with four classes and the four core roles that use this template, but this combination gives us the option for 16 classes by combining class and role. A party with one of each should feel like a 4e party while playing like a Basic party. You’ll have the Defender holding the line, the Striker liquidating a threat, the Controller bending reality and changing the battlefield, and the Leader keeping everyone standing tall.
Next up: The Fighter
I am starting with the Fighter in the first class article because it’s the class B/X left empty-handed without special abilities. This gives me the best opportunity to give a clean demonstration of my whole method. For the fighter, I’ll take the bare-bones Basic fighter and turn it into a proper Defender with a Mark, a stance or two, and a couple of exploits and I won’t alter the underlying mechanics significantly. If the Fighter works, the rest is downhill, because the other three classes are already better fits with the core roles. I’m still thinking about the Cleric. We’ll see where I end up there.
Please tell me where I’ve got it wrong in your opinion. What would you change? The survivability dial in particular with maxed first-level HP, Second Wind capped by Constitution, and dying at negative Con is one of the things I’m willing to dial down from 11 to a more lethal 6 or at least provide options. So if it feels too soft or too generous for the game you want to run, now’s the moment to say so.
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This is awesome. Thank you.
I always leave my stance in default mode in my own bx house rules rarely thinking to use the different ones.