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Spore and XP I am currently designing my heroic OSR game. One big touchstone for my heroic OSR game is Spore, a game developed by Maxis. In it, you gain DNA points to grow from a cell, to a creature, to a tribe, to a civilization and ending at galactic force. I intend to focus on the creature stage as you stop evolving after the creature stage.  You can gain DNA points from eating plant matter and other creatures to later, befriending and killing other species. I thought I could just replace gold with DNA and call it a day. That felt lazy and did some further thinking. Why do these creatures want treasure? They aren't even fully sentient. So I created a XP checklist inspired by games like Dungeon World and Vagabond. Since I don't use XP for gold, the only reason I had it was for shopping. Shopping is the bane of my existence in ttrpgs so I just decided than and there that there was no gold and shopping, instead treasure can be more ordinary items like rope and 10 ft poles.  ...

Heroic OSR All the talk recently about reducing lethality in OSR games got me thinking about "A Quick Primer For Old School Gaming". One of the Zen moments mentioned in the primer is Heroic, not Superheroic. I find a lot of OSR games focus on mud farmers growing over time to be monarchs and sorcerers. I personally don't like this as free time is becoming more and more scarce. I won't be able to run enough sessions to get players to the end goal of monarch, sorcerer or homeowner. I like ruling not rules, I like that problem solving outside the sheet is important, I like the avoidance of game balance but I don't want to play mud farmers all the time. This looks like a job for me.   From Land of The Blind A game that has what I am going for is FIST by Claymore. The only issue is it is more modern and I want to run fantasy. Break!! by Grey Wizard and Madrinan, from what reviews I have read, gets closer but it is unclear about how I am supposed to play the game. All ot...