I understand and completely sympathize with the desire to emulate the old school playstyle. But I have to say that certain persons who share this prediliction are pushing the School-O-Meter back a little too far. Case in point is James Maliszewski’s disdain for the Thief class, which seems to me to be based mostly on the fact that it didn’t appear in the original D&D brown/white box rules, instead being added in one of the supplements.

First of all, I need to say that James’ blog is a great place to go for ideas and insight on old-school play, regardless of where exactly one wants to set the bar. But I don’t feel that older automatically equates to purer, or better in any meaningful sense. In fact, I think that the original D&D rules are a big mess, filled with contradictions and presented in a manner that makes the rules almost unintelligible to a modern audience. This is why I much prefer using something like Castles & Crusades to emulate that kind of playstyle, or, failing that, why I’d rather use D&D 3.5, despite that ruleset not neccessarily being a particularly good match.

A big part of this is, of course, my own personal value for ‘Old School.’ I started with the Moldvay boxed Basic Set but moved swiftly into AD&D, which was, from my experience, a common approach back in 1981-82. The Thief class was a prominent feature in both, and I have an additional fondness for it because one of my own first and formative experienced with D&D was with the solo module Blizzard Pass, in which one plays a Thief. I therefore have a big soft spot for the class.

But that’s beside the point – which is that for me ‘Old School’ means the days of Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. By 1981 or so AD&D had become the default platform for play, and only a comparatively few players stuck with the older rudimentary form of the game. It helped that AD&D first edition stayed relatively stable from a rules standpoint for as long as it did, the only significant rules addenda being the relatively mild (by modern standards,) ones in Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and the two Survival Guides. Even those mostly introduced changes in the form of new classes, magic items and spells, with fundamental mechanical changes being fairly light except in the new emphasis on Non-Weapon Proficencies, the implementation of which I considered halfassed even at the time.

There’s another variable at play in my case, however, which is that a great deal of my formative experience didn’t come from D&D, but from Rolemaster, which I owned in the 80s but which I didn’t play until the early 90s – but when I did play, I played it extensively and exclusively, for a number of years. Therefore, any attempt at emulating my old-school ideal means incorporating some of the aspects and/or flavor of Rolemaster.

The current default version of that game, the Rolemaster Standard System, is somewhat bloated in a similar way that D&D 3.0/3.5 was inflated from its previous editions; the rules are detailed enough to feel confining rather than liberating. And while a version of the older system is now available, RMSS addressed some of the issues I had with those rules, and the so-called Rolemaster Classic represents a step too far back, much like James’ dislike for the Thief class strikes me as a step too far in the direction of intentional archaism for archaism’s sake in the case of D&D. That step eliminates a lot of clutter that I don’t like, but it also eliminates some features that I do like and would prefer to retain.

Of course I could houserule together an amalgam of RMSS and the older rules, but I hate doing stuff like that – I would rather build from scratch, or at least from a well-understood and freely publishable base (i. e. and Open Source system,) since I could then share it freely, or even publish it. I’ve gone through the mental excercise more than once of taking the basics of d20 and shaping them into something Rolemaster-esque while clearing away a lot of D&D chaff. In principle this is easy to do, at least by the standards of RPG design.

One tenet I’d start with would be that there are classes and levels, but that the former would not completely block you from picking up any particular in-game ability. I think that both elements could easily be exciused from the d20 rules, and I’m disappointed that some efforts (notably Traveller d20,) chose not to do so. But for something like this, I’d keep them. The Rolemaster approach is to base everything on the skill system, and that’s what I’d do here. Spells, combat bonuses and the like would all be based on skill ranks.

Combat would be a blend of D&D and Rolemaster; it’d work basically like D&D 3.x, but there’d be no feats and you’d be able to elect to put some of your combat bonus into defense. Armor and protection would work just liike it does in D&D 3.x. And of course, you’d have to develop critical tables, although I’d leave out the attack tables and just have an array of damage types, with a single percentile critical damage table covering all of them, with maybe another one for exotic damage types such as those dealt out by magic.

I’d want to keep the Rolemaster convention of making rolls generally open-ended; I always found that this added a dynamism to combat that was lacking in games like D&D, whose battles appeared to have more tactical options enumerated in the rules but which never felt as alive to me. Magic is trickier, but I’d keep the general level of spell utility about what it is in D&D, but adding the Realms and pure/hybrid distinction of Rolemaster.

So there, mostly fully imagined but not actually designed, is a sort of Crypto-Rolemaster built on the bones of D&D. It’s something I’ve love to play some day. As for designing it… well, I’ll let you know when I make some progress, but don’t turn blue waiting for it.