Dungeons of the Dusk Witch Design Notes
This is my rules lite dungeoncrawling hack. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Everyone is entitled to reinvent the wheel at least once. Sure, I could have just used Searchers of the Unknown, some one page ruleset, or even the venerable B/X, but I thought it would be a productive exercise. I wanted to see just how far I could strip down a ruleset, while keeping it friendly to new and unfamiliar players. It's like taking an engine apart and putting it back together to see what pieces are left. Of course, that exercise would be useless if I didn't journal my own thoughts on why I made the decisions I did.
I made this page specific to the one-shot I'm running because I figured it'd be less confusing to my players to have a one-stop shop. If I make major revisions, I'll just drop a new blog post or upload a free PDF to itch.io.
I stopped including "welcome to RPGs" and notes to players in my rulesets years ago, but I thought it would be useful here because I have (and likely will have) such a diverse set of RPG experiences in my games. I also thought it would be good to frontload whatever expectations I could. No two games will be the same, but if I can briefly and succinctly present my philosophy and goals, it will help players orient themselves. I'll probably do a bit more of a detailed safety briefing before the game.
Character creation is purposefully omitted. I will use this sort of ruleset in games where I'm handing out pregens, so the only person that needs to be concerned with character creation is me.
Characters need to be defined in as few bits as possible. I included the ones I think are most necessary for a dungeon game: six stats, HP, skills, and equipment/encumbrance. I certainly could have trimmed the stats down, but I think keeping the canonical six will help make it accessible for players only familiar with 5e or related media. Skills contain not just professional or technical skills, but everything that would be included under thief skills, turning undead, "cantrips" or other minor magical effects in other games. I'm not going with a standard "skill list" (other than Stab and Shoot mentioned below), I'll just make up skills as I need them for each game. Having said that, I'll probably frequently use common and broad skills that show up in many popular games for compatibility and familiarity. I hope my encumbrance system is simple enough for players; we'll see if it even comes up.
For resolution, I stuck with a roll-over system, because I expect that most players come with a "high roll = good" instinct. It means a character with average stats and no skills has a 50% chance of success, something which I think will be reasonable. I designed these rules to be as high speed, low drag as possible. I didn't want a pileup of modifiers, so the only thing skills do is give advantage (or remove disadvantage as the situation calls for.) I think this is easy for players to understand and decreases the number of operations they need to do, especially during combat.
Exploration seemed like an important thing to call out. I could probably have omitted this, but I wanted to frontload that light and time are important, and give players the info they need to make decisions. I also figure if I know I am going to call things a certain way, I should just put that up front. Light is especially important because of the later underground sections.
There's a lot of focus on surprise and positioning, but that's the most important and fun parts of D&D/OSR/etc. combat to me. I like that with a few simple rules, tactics matter, beyond just "when do I fire off my special ability."
I wanted keep combat the same as the skill roles for simplicity, and changing the target number by the monster/character's AC was the best way I could think to do that. We'll see how it works in play. We'll also see how the Shoot and Stab skills granting advantage work in play. I worry slightly that it's going to swing the power way too high. Other than the brief note that their combat works the same, I omitted how monsters work. That's something I can handle on my own; my players don't need to worry about that.
I did end up omitting morale rules. I just don't think it will come up in the sort of rapid-pace one shot context I'm running. It's very important for long-term dungeon play with lots of different enemies, but there are basically three monsters in this module, two of which don't even use morale. If I think a group will retreat, I will have them retreat. I feel confident on making that call.
Healing and injuries are simple because this is a one-shot, a funnel, and the point is to watch characters get exploded. These guys are gonna have 1-6ish HP, most of them probably won't even get a chance to get healed. I might cut this part entirely at some point.
Spell slots, upcasting, cantrips, the distinction between known spells and prepared spells - all of that is way too involved and complicated for a one-shot, especially a low-level one. Spells are expendable items. I like having spells in items so they become part of the encumbrance system, and I find it's easier to grok for players unfamiliar with proper Vancian casting. I also do not want to try to keyword a bunch of spell effects or have a very defined formula when across all the characters, there are probably going to be like, six spells total.