Replacing Dolmenwood’s Engine part 1: Custom Classes, Custom Stats

I recently picked up a full set of Dolmenwood books (minus adventures). And the core campaign book blew me away, and I knew immediately that I needed to run it next. It gave me the same feeling reading the ology books as a child did… Then I opened the Player’s Guide…

So… this is my first exposure to the OSE rules and I am not a fan… Now to be fair, I have not played or DMed OSE yet. And maybe I will change my tune when I actually touch dice for real, but there’s so many things that annoy me, that I’m much more inclined to pull the whole engine block out and go from there.

Now at first I thought, let’s run His Majesty The Worm… but I don’t feel like I have a good enough footing with that system to adapt stuff to it… I much more excited to run The Castle Automatic RAW when that ships.

But I digress… I wrote my own rpg system once before, I can do it again. (I sadly lost it when my Alma mater deleted my google drive when they ended their google contract) And this time I’m going to follow the doctrine of Copy and Paste.

So join me as I take an angle grinder to Dolmenwood’s Player Guide.

Goals and Intentions

I want to run a Romantic, Heroic campaign in Dolmenwood, with a moderate amount of crunch. Enough crunch to pay homage to Dolmenwood’s OSR heritage and get the players tactical minds working without scaring away math averse players.

Any given procedure’s should be clear enough that its basic premise can be written on a 3x5 notecard taped on the inside of the GM screen or handed to the players.

Designing for the Character Sheet

This might be news to some of you… but many players do not read the rules. I know, crazy right?

In all seriousness though, most players learn  to play from the DM and the other players and they feel out the rhythm of play as they go. To these players, the rules exist to arbitrate edge cases.

But all players will absolutely look at their character sheet.

The character sheet exposes the mechanics of the imagined world, provides a window into what kinds of interactions and information are gamified and therefore important. The character sheet binds, focuses and sparks their imaginations. In a sense, the character sheet is your game’s UI and controls. The behavior of your players is greatly influenced by what buttons are on their character sheets and how good it feels to push them.

Ideally, I want players to keep their noses out of their character sheets and focused on their imagined surroundings. I’m going to try to be mindful of what buttons I give the players.

Custom Attributes

I think the attributes of a game are an excellent way to establish tone, and genre.  They can be evocative descriptors of the lenses through which we interpret our character and their abilities. A character with grit, wit, brawn and heart is going to feel different than a character with dexterity, intelligence, strength and charisma.

In imagining attributes, I immediately ran into a problem… no matter what I tried, I couldn’t come up with a list of attributes that felt right for each class. (And I do want to keep the classes… for the most part. A lot of them are very evocative of the fantasy I want to capture)

So I thought, “Why fight the classes? Why shouldn’t each class get to have custom attributes?”

I began by writing out a set of generic attributes for a hypothetical classless character:

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Courage
• Charisma
• Wisdom

Strength governs melee combat, how many injuries you can sustain before death, inventory capacity and the usual athletics checks: running, jumping, lifting, swimming, and climbing.

Dexterity governs ranged combat as well as stealth, perception, lock picking, pick pocketing, and evasion.

Courage mostly determines your Heroism. Heroism is a resource that is spent to use your character’s talents and spent to avoid injury (and maybe other things too). In Romantic Heroic Fantasy, being courageous and standing tall for what you believe in gives you plot armor.

Charisma governs first impressions, speech checks, the ability to sense deception and manipulation, recruiting and commanding retainers, and how many vernacular languages your character speaks.

Wisdom governs lore checks, the number of ability slots your character has, providing guidance to an ally, how many formal languages your character speaks and how many scripts your character can read and write.

Let’s start with the class that sparked this idea: “I wish Knights had a chivalry stat.”

 

Knight

• Valor
• Dexterity
• Chivalry
• Wisdom

Valor is a knight’s strength, courage and determination to fulfill their duty. In effect it’s a combination of strength and courage.

Chivalry is a knight’s adherence to their code of honor and how well they project their fealty to virtue. In effect, Chivalry is a knight’s version of charisma with a couple differences: I want it to be better at commanding and managing retainers, but it cannot be used to willfully deceive.

Bard

• Strength
• Beauty
• Courage
• Wisdom

Beauty is a combination of Charisma and Dexterity. It represents a bard’s ability to move and talk with grace and presence and to produce beauty through art. It’s probably going to factor into casting bard songs in some way. I debated a lot about calling this stat “grace” or “gracefulness”. But the idea that Beauty is a force to he reckoned with has such a fairytale vibe… and I mean beauty in a sublime sense… You can still play a gnarled, scarred, fugly creature that is beautiful in an ineffable, indescribable, or abstract way. It also gives bards a sort of “my job is beach” vibe that I find hilarious.

Transgressour

• Strength
• Finesse
• Courage
• Cunning

The thief/rogue class was a bit tricky at first. My initial thought was to give the thief a stat that would be good at sneaking and lying, like many other systems. But I couldn’t find a word that didn’t feel overstretched. At the same time I thought about the core fantasy of a highly agile and dexterous thief and what weaknesses would preserve that fantasy (i.e. what flaws can a character have while still being a “good thief”)

A dexterous thief who’s a wimp, a coward, a dullard and socially inept. All of those options are still within the core fantasy. But I will say that being a clever deceiver is a secondary fantasy. With all that in mind, here are the stats:

Finesse is dexterity plus. It does everything dexterity does but also steals (pun intended) movement checks from strength: running, jumping, climbing, swimming.

Cunning is a thief’s wit and foresight, and does the job of wisdom and charisma. Cunning is used to make the perfect plan and construct the perfect lie.

Friar

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Faith
• Charisma

Faith is the combination of Wisdom and Courage. It represents a friar’s belief and devotion to their One True God (as well as the many many other gods who’ve been absorbed by the promiscuously syncretic religion sweeping through the Empire). Now, I feel the vibes and flavor of friars is less dogmatic and zealous and more gentle, curious and monastic. A friar’s faith is not blind, but academic and skeptical. They show their devotion to the divine by questioning its existence, investigating philosophy in good faith, and careful and respectful study of religious, secular and heretical texts. This is not to say that the Pluritine Church does not have elements of dogma, fundamentalism, and zealotry, it absolutely does, instead they are the result of low faith scores rather than high faith scores. Basically a high faith friar is like Indiana Jones.

Ranger

• Prowess
• Courage
• Charisma
• Wisdom

Prowess is the combination of Strength and Dexterity. The Ranger is intended to be Dolmenwood’s fighter and hunter combined. I want this class to evoke characters like Strider, Madmartigan, Conan, and Deathstalker; that is to say, (seemingly) unaffiliated warriors with a roguish streak who are more at home in the woods than the city streets. I think prowess fits these wild characters that don’t see a distinction in the way their body interacts with the world. Precision and force are both fundamentally expressions of the underlying athleticism of the noble beast.

Enchanter

• Strength
• Beauty
• Courage
• Wisdom

The enchanter and bard share an attribute list… so what? There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play DND! I think it’s good to let your designs be a little wabi-sabi. Plus, in my opinion the fantasy of the enchanter and the bard overlap pretty significantly.

Magician

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Courage
• Charisma
• Wisdom

I’m stumped with this one. And I would love to hear feedback. I think because I’m so biased towards wizard classes in games I sorta bent everything around that bias. But I thought about the core fantasy and what dump stats still preserve that… and really a wizard only needs wisdom to effectively do their job (maybe courage for a bigger resource pool).

One option I’m considering to spice things up is to make intelligence the basic stat, and wisdom becomes the advanced version granted to magi (and possibly others too). But this doesn’t solve the fact that all the other classes have 4 stats and magicians would be the literal odd one out. But perhaps that's not necessarily a problem. The magician is probably going to be a very powerful class, perhaps having the handicap of more attributes to balance is a fair trade.

Where’s fighter and clerics?

Fighters are boring and clerics sound like the worst. They can still be a part of the world, but not for the players. If a player is really intent on playing a religious zealot cop… maybe I don’t want that player at my table.

Anyways how do I end a blog post again?

All these various custom stats and exceptions to the base rules might be too noodly. But I think giving each class such unique relationships to the core stats is going a long way to giving each class its own playstyle and feel.

Anyway we’ll see how it goes at the actual table.