I’d like to specifically call out Kaprou’s amazing work over at Fictive Fantasy in expanding on the game and offering so much amazing work in the Old School Hack vein, so much so that I’ve given him a permanent spot over in the sidebar here.

Recently Old School Hack was mentioned in an RPG.net thread about design & layout, and some criticized it for being too busy.

I think this is fair, actually. Old School Hack’s origins are very much from play-aids, character sheets and quick-reference printouts you can throw down individually to help facilitate play. Its current form doesn’t really read as a book that well because a certain degree of single-page cohesiveness and page individualizing as a goal.

This may be why the game’s layout speaks to some and not to others, I don’t know. I’ve always been upfront about Old School Hack’s nature as an experiment in RPG presentation, and I’m interested in continuing and refining that experiment. The fact that I’m professionally involved in typography and layout design was actually challenging for me to get over – I had to give myself permission to consider it an exploratory, amateurish project.

It’s been over a year now and this has become the highest priority to finalizing the Basic Game, in order to establish a strong precedent for compiling the next Heroic Game tier. I’d like Old School Hack to look more like a book. Of course I’ll keep around the Beta version of the game for Legacy reasons for anyone that prefers it.

As I finally start to get some free time over the holidays and climb back onto the designing horse, my first hopes are to redesign the Old School Hack character sheet from the ground up with Campaign play in mind. I’ll try to drop some teasers as I do so, so stay tuned.

Have a happy set of Holidays, everyone! As gamers, we have much to be joyful for.

I had planned on offering some small increases of power as players reached the next tier. I’m thinking of changing that a bit – making those increases in power still not tied to “leveling” – as in, experience you gain just from playing the game – but instead tie them to in-game quest pursuing, so that that particular advancement is more of an active goal in play rather than a passive benefit of just playing. Developing such a system also feels like it encourages more Campaign-ish play, which is certainly another goal of the Heroic Game (if you’ve gotten this far, you’re committed, right?)

I want to come up with a cool way for players and DMs to come up with a quest – something significant that represents an accomplishment of a goal in-line with the character’s themes, and then tie it to some sort of process or ritual or descriptive event that helps explain the character’s growth in power the way that “just adventuring” explains the character’s expanded breadth of abilities.

Of course it remains important that this not be narratively limiting or morally defining – the quest for power being something of an inherently selfish act that not all players are going to want their characters to be motivated by – so for instance a paladin-y character might perhaps pursue the reward of power as a painful and difficult-to-establish divine commitment to justice or benevolent rulership or something cool like that. Less “reward” and more “commitment to responsibility” or something.

I might loosely categorize them in the same way that the weapon model works so, f’rex:

• Glory - Achieve some feat of prowess that makes you famous, your power comes from a heroic aura.
• Justice - Right a grievous wrong that has been plaguing innocents, your power comes from virtuous recognition.
• Influence - Find a leadership role in the world to fill, your power comes from notoriety and responsibility.
• Wealth - Acquire a magical item of power, your power comes from bonding to it in some way.
• Loyalty - Align yourself to a cause greater than you, your power comes from representation.

I dunno, that’s just throwing things against the wall. Might be interesting to try and tie them into the Attributes in some way, but that might be just a silly attempt at cohesiveness.

And speaking of silliness – it’s a pretty common criticism of Old School Hack that the Awesome Point system can sometimes encourage a certain over-the-topness that makes it hard to play “seriously”. In my own games, I’ve certainly noticed that, but I’m also aware that that’s a tendency to a lot of my gaming in general, I’m a fun-loving, over-the-top kind of guy. But the whole “let’s be as awesome as possible” may seem like something that’s just straight-up psychologically difficult to sustain, so maybe that too erodes people’s interest in long-term play.

Simple solution: What if all you did was change the language? Instead of Awesome Points, call them Hero Points or Thrill Points or something? And then decree that people only hand them out when someone does something Heroic, or particularly Thrilling, or whatever? It seems like that alone could change the tenor of the game subtly enough to give it some gravitas and thus a little more emotional investment.

Just a thought, maybe something to go into a future Afterword/FAQ page or something.

I have the hex-based combat tracker pasted in one corner and under the laminate of my wet-erase poster sheet and I’m at the point now where I’m convinced that things just go quicker and more descriptively using it with the tokens I can just slide around during the declarative part of each combat round.

It comes down to the scene having a little more depth if the players aren’t thinking in terms of “I do one of these 6 cards in front of me” and more along the lines of “I just come up with something that relates to what’s going on right now in combat and then we’ll quickly figure out which phase is most appropriate to it.”

The micro-negotiation of that particular player/DM exchange – the bit between the DM asking, “what do you do?” and then someone moving the PC token into one of the combat phase hexes, in many ways, that’s become the juiciest part of the game.

I’m not opposed to using the combat cards. In fact, the combat cards were an absolutely crucial part of playtesting and of nailing down the combat order and the combat system to where it is; and I don’t want to make any sort of canonical declaration about not using them here. I want to recognize that there are probably players out there that prefer the more tactically-focused playstyle of using the cards, the convenience of having those rules more specifically handed out to everyone, so I plan to keep them in the rules for people to have them if they want them.

Which brings me to one last point in this post, which is that it remains very important to me that the game stays somewhat untethered from playstyle advocacy. Certainly there are playstyles that Old School Hack favors. Certainly there’s a particular style of play that I enjoy, and certainly I wrote the game with the direction of that playstyle in mind.

But the position I’ve tried to maintain is that people are welcome to use these rules however they want. That’s something I’ve taken from the old school bloggers and gaming philosophers that I respect the most, “here’s some cool stuff, go nuts, use anyway you like”. I’m not staking some sort of equitability position here – personally I do think there are “right” ways and “wrong” ways to roleplay – but the internet’s full of those arguments and I see no need to add to them.

I do occasionally get people asking for what I would call “official” rulings on the right way to play Old School Hack, and I always find myself hemming and hawing at how to answer them, because I don’t consider myself the final authority on how to play Old School Hack. Certainly I’m the final authority on what gets put down on paper (er… e-paper) for the OSH documents that I host on this site. People like Matt Jackson and Andrew Shields have taken the system and done awesome things with it, maybe in ways I might not’ve, and that’s not only okay, that’s a good thing and something I want to encourage.

Read the rules, enjoy playing with them, and make the game your own!

I ran a short one-shot at GenCon for the Roleplaying Public Radio guys and they recorded it. If you’ve got two-and-a-half hours or so of ear-time free, feel free to give it a listen; it was a fast, fun romp with some really creative characters!

Old School Hack at GenCon, hosted by Roleplaying Public Radio:

(Duration: 2:39:39, 73.1MB)

DM: Kirin Robinson

Players: Ross, Caleb, Meg, Simeon, and Scott

 
Also at GenCon I got to meet and have a wonderful chat with the Machine Age Production folks, and convinced the awesome David Hill to take a look at the game, and lo and behold less than a week later he’d not only checked it out but had worked up a Fallout hack of it called Retrocalypse that’s already making the rounds of the internet.

And a few more cool links I want to share:

• Ethan Gilsdorf of Wired Magazine’s GeekDad gave Old School Hack a shoutout in their GenCon wrap-up article.
• A blogger named Jim Dickinson wrote up a really heartwarming Actual Play story about playing Old School Hack with his kids, this one brought a tear to my eye.
• Matt over at Lapsus Calumni threw together some pretty awesome OSH wallpapers, both in iPad size and full-screen, check them out!

Thanks again for all the awesome support from everyone!

The great thing about fan awards is that really the award belongs to the fans. You guys have been great, and I can’t thank you enough. In a lot of ways many of you are not just fans, too, but co-creators of the game.

In danger of forgetting to mention some of you (and worse, not actually knowing all of your names), I still want to give some very important shout-outs:

• I could not have made this game without the awesome help of Scott Moore, Luke Withrow, Matthew Breen, Matt Glickman, Mark Causey, Corey Reid, Susan Applegate, my awesome gaming group, my lovely wife Sabrina and of course Eric Provost (I would love your email, Eric, this award is at least half yours!).
• Secondarily I want to thank the awesome advocates of the game, please check out their great blogs: Tim Ballew (Risus Monkey), Nakia Pope (Professor Pope), Corey Reid (Scratch Factory), Andy Hauge (Player’s Side of the Screen), Matt Jackson (Lapsus Calumni), Dyson Logos (A Character For Every Game), Rob Lang (The Free RPG Blog and 1km1kt), the Kobold Courier and of course John Harper (website surge FTW!). I’m sure I’ve forgotten people, please let me know!