What rules do you play, and why?

If you don't care about other referee's naval gazing about rule sets, skip this lengthy and somewhat rambling post. Fair warning....

For the last couple of months, I've played ad hoc rules while trying to decide between totally custom house rules (based on Torch and Sword), pure 1974 LBB OD&D, pure Labyrinth Lord, OEC Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Core Swords & Wizardry, or Whitebox Swords & Wizardry. I know that the choice of rule system matters surprisingly little during actual play, but for some reason it's something I think about a lot. I established these criteria:

• A living rule set relatively free of intellectual property entanglements, which unfortunately rules-out OD&D
• Something that looks more like LBB OD&D than any other edition, which eliminates OSRIC (with which I've been increasingly impressed), Labyrinth Lord, and (to some extent) Core S&W
• Something I can tell people I play by name, without having to qualify with a million house rules

I'm looking forward to Delving Deeper and Champions of ZED, but for the time being the above criteria directed me to Swords & Wizardry Whitebox. Labyrinth Lord Original Edition Characters was also in the running at that point, but I chose Whitebox because I like many of the new rules like AAC, and Whitebox leaves more room for referee rulings (compare the spell descriptions, for example). The only problems I have with Whitebox:

• The 6x9" format of the PDF is great for Lulu, but makes it hard to print a quick copy on 8.5x11" (or 4.25x5.5")
• Marv's prose style is slightly too conversational and verbose to suit my idiosyncratic minimalist preferences. That's nothing against his great work, it's just my Strunk-n-White-ish bias.

I took the Whitebox RTF and created a LaTeX document that gives me tremendous flexibility in output format—I can easily output an 8.5x11", half-page booklet, or whatever other format I want. It also lets me split the rules into as many booklets as I want; I decided on a player booklet and a referee booklet. I made some minor edits that satisfy my stylistic leanings without modifying any rules.

I still want to make a lot of house rules, but I've decided that I'll isolate those changes to the referee book. Amazingly, I only felt compelled to make a couple of minor changes to the player booklet.

"Languages: For campaigns that give each race its own dialect, Dwarves should be able to speak with gnomes, goblins, orcs, and kobolds."

I changed to:

"Dwarves speak the dwarf, gnome, goblin, and kobold languages."

"Languages: For campaigns that give each race its own dialect, Elves should be able to speak with gnolls, goblins, orcs, and hobgoblins."

I changed to:

"Elves speak the elf, gnoll, hobgoblin, and orc languages."

Those are the only actual rules changes to the player rules. The next most dramatic change was to the wording for alignment.

"Alignments in the game are described as Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. In general, Law also corresponds to being “good,” Chaos corresponds to being “evil,” and Neutrality simply means that the character is indifferent between the two moral polarities. It is quite possible for the Referee to make the alignment system more complex: perhaps Lawful only means that you are in favor of centralized hierarchies in society, in which case you could actually be Lawful Evil as well as Lawful Good. It is a matter of preference if you want to make the alignment system more complex."

became:

"Choose an Alignments: Law, Chaos, or Neutrality. Law promotes the order of human civilization, while Chaos favors a world beyond human reason."

Everything else in the player rules is very minor grammar/style stuff. The changes to the referee booklet will be more dramatic.

In short, you could sit down and play with me using the stock S&W Whitebox rule book without any problem, and I can publish stuff without having to explain or standardize a bunch of house rules.

The only thing that would be better would be if I could distribute my house rules with art (although I understand why Matt put that stipulation in the license). I'd love to commission or license a few pieces from Peter Mullen, Stefan Poag, and John Larrey.

If anyone wants the LaTeX files or PDF sans art, just let me know. Most likely, I'll publish the referee stuff that deviates from stock Whitebook here in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: Here's a ZIP file of the PDF and LaTeX files for my house rules player booklet.

GM merit badges

Stuart made GM merit badges. I awarded myself PC Death Is Likely, "Rule Zero" Is in Effect, I Mirror Back Player Ideas, Focus on Exploration & Mystery, Prepare to Run!, Rules Tinker, and Player Skill badges.

I'd like to earn the Roll in the Open, Tactics, and Gonzo badges.

I almost never fudge results these days, but I still roll behind a screen—mainly because it's a convenient place to hang my reference charts, and rolling in front of it would mean standing up. Maybe I need a smaller screen or some way to do without one.

I appreciate the importance of tactics, but I don't feel like they figure significantly enough in my games to justify the badge. That's partially me and partially my players. I need to include more affordances for tactical play, particularly exploitable environments.

Gonzo. I have pretty strong gonzo tendencies, but don't give them much play in my current game. That's largely because I'm running Stonehell for the first time, and want to see what it's like before drastically altering its tone. The campaign I'm writing myself has a significantly higher quotient of gorilla kings, robots, and masked aliens. When I get around to running that, I'll feel better about earning the Gonzo Badge.

Thanks, Stuart. The GM badges provide a good vehicle for self evaluation.

Building a better GM

On Hill Cantons, ckutalik asked GM's to list their three best practices, techniques, or tricks used at the table.

I don't claim to be an exemplary referee. After all, it was only a year ago that I started playing again and discovered the OSR. However, I've found the following techniques help me at the table:

• Always say "yes" to players.
• If the players, in their deliberations at the table, theorize about something more interesting than what you actually planned, drop your plans and use the more interesting idea.
• Never keep the players waiting—not even for 30 seconds—while you look up something in a rule book. Just make a plausible ruling and move on. You can check the rulebook after the session.

Death or dismemberment

This is a house rule I recently created to replace critical hits. If a character would be killed or rendered unconscious by an attack, the player can instead opt for the character to survive with one hit point and roll on the following table.

Elective Dismemberment (2d6)

2. Arm severed at shoulder
3. Arm severed at elbow
4. Hand severed
5. Eye plucked out
6. Ear lopped off
7. Lost a finger
8. Ear chopped off
9. Nose cut off
10. Foot severed
11. Leg severed at knee
12. Leg severed at hip

Re-roll if the character can not be further dismembered in the way described (e.g.—both legs already lost).

One of the characters in my game is already down a hand. The blacksmith made him a little something for his stump.

First Fantasy Campaign on incentivizing carousing

From page 50 of Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign:

"Many characters wonder what they should spend their money on and what it will get for them in exchange. [...] Wealth: Merely the stockpiling of Gold, Silver and similar items of value by the player. If these items are stolen, the player loses full value immediately upon discovery and may lose levels as a result."

That will only happen once or twice before reluctant players take advantage of the carousing rules!

Trimming the spell lists

Roger of Roles, Rules and Rolls asked what the magic-user spell list should include if limited to six first level spells and three spells of higher levels. I made my picks, and I think you could have an interesting game within these constraints.

1st Level:
1. Charm Person
2. Detect Magic
3. Hold Portal
4. Light
5. Shield
6. Sleep

2nd Level:
1. ESP
2. Invisibility
3. Knock

3rd Level:
1. Dispel Magic
2. Fireball
3. Fly

4th Level:
1. Charm Monster
2. Polymorph Other
3. Remove Curse

5th Level:
1. Animate Dead
2. Contact Other Plane
3. Teleport

6th Level:
1. Geas
2. Enchant Item
2. Reincarnation or Stone to Flesh

7th Level
1. Cacodemon
2. Limited Wish
3. Simulacrum

8th Level
1. Mass Charm
2. Permanency
3. Symbol

9th Level
1. Prismatic Sphere
2. Shape Change
3. Time Stop

Speculation about Gary's Greyhawk

I think all of us who have seen this picture of Gary Gygax running Greyhawk have spent a few minutes speculating about it.

Since Evan at In Places Deep asked about the map key...

A cursory count puts the number of rooms in the neighborhood of 120. Gary's key has 18 numbered lines. Additionally, there are two color codings (pink and green).

At least some keys correspond to multiple rooms. It looks like seven or more rooms are labelled "2".

If we imagine that each key corresponds to seven rooms, that accounts for every room on the map. (I doubt that's actually the case, and clearly some rooms are unkeyed.)

Even if only one key corresponds to one room, that would be about one in six rooms keyed. If each key corresponds to 2-3 rooms with non-keyed rooms empty, that's close to U&WA ratio of empty to non-empty rooms.

Cyclopeatron's observations about running Arneson's Blackmoor Dungeons may be instructive:

"[...] the keys have virtually no information beyond what treasure and/or monsters might be in a given room [...] the generally empty nature of the dungeon causes an interesting tension to build. Empty... Empty... Empty... Empty... Screaming, confusion, blood, fire."

I don't see anything to make me think the page in the picture is not the complete key for the facing map, particularly if checks for wandering monsters happen every turn.