Matakishi's Tea House

Hi All,

While writing the upcoming Runequest homage - Tales of Prax, I got to thinking about the core mechanics of Dead Simple.

Dead Simple Fantasy was originally written as a quick to pick up, beer & pretzels version of old school D&D. However, over the last couple of years it has become obvious that a lot of people are playing it as a stand alone replacement for modern D&D and its clones.

That said it is time to revisit some of the core mechanics to allow gamers to be able to play their adventurers for longer than a game or three.

The first change is to obsolete the D10 and replace it with a D20. This allows more scope for variation and for adventurer development.

To support this change, and make new adventurers able to survive, I have increased the initial attribute points from seven to ten, and made the range assignable from 1-3 to 1-4 per attribute.

I have also kicked out the doubling of the Toughness skill for reasons that will become clear in the paragraph below.

So, if you maximise one or more of a new adventurer's attributes he will have some aptitudes of 8. Add a racial bonus and you could have an adventurer with an aptitude of 10. Make that skill 'Trained' and it could become an 11, giving the new adventurer a 55% chance of success with his best skill. This seems perfectly reasonable.

I have added three new spells to the Wizard's repertoire: Befuddle, Countermagic and Ignite. Countermagic is particularly interesting as it is the first spell that can be cast, out of sequence, in response to an enemy action. They can only do this once per turn so must choose which enemy spell to counter carefully.

Wizards can still cast spells repetitively but are now limited a little by having to make a successful Knowledge check to do so. This slows them down a little and stops them becoming reliable Gunships.

I have also included a chance for their poor victims to resist, by deducting a target figure's INT from the Knowledge check. This came about after players complained to me that they were getting zapped by enemy Wizards without any chance to defend themselves.

The Bloody Combat section got a rewrite to improve clarity in Tales of Prax, so I have copied over the best parts of that to Dead Simple.

That's about it really. Thanks to everyone who has commented on Dead Simple and especially to those who have encouraged me to continue with this project with their tales of adventure and derring-do.