Developer Musings: Adventure Zines for System Neutral vs 5E - Part 3

Designing a System Neutral adventure.

Apr 03, 2024

Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A weekly blog-letter exploring topics in the tabletop gaming arena. We explore design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop. If you find this post useful, please share. Find part 1 here and part 2 here.

Introduction

We’re looking at design considerations for creature and adventure design for 5E and System Neutral. In Part 1, we laid out bullet points for the overall concepts of focus. in Part 2, we reviewed the focus of D&D 5E creature design and what is needed for that creature to function as the audience expects. In this third and final part, we will walk through the design aspects of converting this creature concept and 5E stat block into a usable system neutral iteration.

Our goal is the same, reduce the bandwidth of the game master and enable ease of implementation of a fun an interesting scenario for the players at the table.

Design

Old school renaissance/revival, New school renaissance/revival seem to be about simpler stat blocks and less overhead. I read a number of game rule books looking at how we wanted to approach a system neutral offering and a recurring tenet of these kinds of games in contrast to games like D&D and Pathfinder, is having players look for solutions “outside of the character sheet”.

Character sheets contain and provide a minimal structure for your character, and in most games the inventory is restricted and easy to track but also more important than in 5E. For design purposes, this also makes creating enemies simpler. We can generally feel out a stat line and then stick to special abilities with short descriptions to transmit the intended operation to the game master without handcuffing them.

In contrast, 5E requires very specific language in order to function with the 5E system, this helps create a standard design environment, but also can create design gaps and unintended consequences and complexity for the person piloting the creature in the heat of battle. I very much enjoy the opportunity to thin out the verbiage and decrease the overhead.

For comparison, here is the system neutral version of the Vorlokus - our glass canon magic using baddie and below is the original 5E stat block for comparison:

What’s different

The first thing to note is we are able to reduce the entire statblock for a mean monster down to one page of text, and I believe it is just as deadly in OSR situations as the 5E one is.

You’ll notice we only have modifiers for the abilities as this is the only number needed in games where you are rolling over a DC and since the numbers are all lower and simpler in the fashion of older school games, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to translate to a roll under even without the actual stat numbers.

To deliver as much to the reader as possible we have to focus on the important tenets of the creature design:

Magic spell slinging artillery
Fast mover
Utility to apply extra damage
Utility to move even faster
Glass cannon - hits hard, but crumples if pinned to one place and beat on

The other design considerations to keep in mind are the ones I have in place for the entire Almanac Of Abominations System Neutral that give compatibility with the games in the space - leaning in the direction of Shadowdark.

Some of the refreshing feeling that comes with running OSR/NSR games is that many of them are vague in the right ways. One of my major complaints of the 5E system is that it is vague in a way that makes it more difficult to run the game well, while OSR/NSR games define what needs defining, including GM mindset, for running the game as designed, and leaves the specifics on execution on things like status effects. So you can know how the game is intended to be played and ignore that or not, and then you can make up any new statuses or interesting special abilities for your baddies without worrying about “breaking” the game system. This is how Undead Ichor became very easy to implement. It’s just a status I made up.

As long as I am explicit, the exact verbiage is not nearly as important. If the GM understands what I’m going for, it is easy to transmit intent to a point where they will run it the way they want to and not feel hindered or robbed if they don’t use the block in the “right way”. To me, this is very freeing both in design and in use at the table.

With the increased movement and the chance to cast spell versions of the abilities listed in the 5E statblock, this monster is ready for show time.

What else?

The changes that make the System neutral stat block more usable also make it unnecessary to include the piloting insights that were included in the 5E version of the zine. That said, we wanted to include more value for the GM, so we also changed the battle maps out for fully fledged Dungeons with maps and map keys for each monster.