I said to Christian Mehrstam a while back that Whitehack was basically the game I had been waiting twenty years for...
I said to Christian Mehrstam a while back that Whitehack was basically the game I had been waiting twenty years for someone to write. I wasn't kidding, the attached photo is of the rules I wrote for my own game back in 1998.
Cool! How did the damage modifiers work?
ReplyDeleteChristian Mehrstam They were added to the damage dice of the weapon.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I saw it this morning though I realised that it would have been simpler and tidier to just have the success level of the roll be the randomiser for the damage and have the weapon apply a flat bonus.
Hehe, I get that it's added to the damage :). But if you let the attack roll be the randomizer, it means that the higher AR you have, the harder you get hit once you get hit? A percentage attack roll is better for that, as you can flip it or add the d10s to get a base damage that is then modified.
ReplyDeleteChristian Mehrstam You are correct. I probably adjusted it on the fly or something.
ReplyDeleteThe game didn't stay in this format for long. We kept the roll under blackjack d20 rolls but we had opposed defence rolls (at the request of my players who wanted to feel like they could respond to attacks).
There were other similarities. I had a loose freeform magic system in which the players would tell me the effect they wanted, I would suggest what dangers and side effects that might involve and then they would roll dice and I'd figure it out.
I was happy for players to play whatever occupation or species they liked.
The actual game that I remember running was a bit of a mess though. I was winging it and not taking enough notes so there was no consistency. Some of the players loved it, the others left.
Actually you know, I think I might have just left it with the armour defending you from the weaker hits and so the more lethal hits were also the ones that got around the armour.
ReplyDeleteBy the end the game had a damage resistance value as well which lowered incoming damage that might have been in place at this point too, so even if your leathers were never going to prevent that +10 hit, they would at least knock a couple points off of it.
The notes are a mess, it was always a work in progress. I figured that at some point I would figure out all out and get it right and then I would write it up properly. I think Tribe 8 came out just then and I forgot all about it.
That is so much alike how things work for me! I get ideas constantly, write them down, and then I lose the notes for a year or five, and when I find them again, it's usually "damn, it seems I already solved this new problem I've been thinking about for the last week—5 years ago ..." :). This is painfully obvious when I open my first two Whitehack notebooks (I'm on my third now).
ReplyDeleteChristian Mehrstam I used to spend so much time trying to write a system I liked that I would never get around to actually planning the scenarios for the games I was running. I was doing that usual '90s RPG thing of getting totally hung up on something that didn't make sense (usually Armour, Damage and Healing, or the number of attacks per round) and I'd spend ages on the maths finding a solution which was totally unfun in play.
ReplyDeleteI got better with age but the OSR in general, and Whitehack in particular, have freed me up to stop worrying about these things. "Here's a framework for a fun game, you can reskin it to be whatever you like, and if you don't mess with it too much everything will work out fine."
I still do fiddle with systems, I'm sure you've noticed. I'm still slowly working on the Col/D system (short for Collateral Damage) about superheroes and Space Marines and similar trying to fight off the bad guys without destroying the neighborhood. What can I say? It's fun.
Christian Mehrstam "(I'm on my third now)" - HUZZAH!!!!! :D
ReplyDelete