Adventurous solutions for mechanical issues!

"Wereleopard" by Luigi Castellani

One of the things I like the most about OSR games is that they usually don't waste much of your time on character creation, letting you get to fun of the game as quickly as possible. However, one of the complaints I hear from people outside of the OSR (and even some of the people playing its games) is that there isn't many mechanical options during character creation. Accustomed with newer games where you can choose between 900 classes, 5000 skills, and 3 million talents, they look on OSR games and their less than 10 classes, no skills, talents and other stuff as not "flexible" as their usual games.

But I believe this is not true. OSR games just focus on a different kind of flexibility and prefer to focus on it during play, and not outside of it with hundreds of mechanical options that, in the end, just limit your choices inside the game itself. The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG thought me a great lesson about it that I made sure to implement in the Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells - Addendum book. Character customization should be a product of playing the game, and not just a question of choosing this or that ability outside of it.

That means if a character wants to become a barbarian, with that iconic "Rage" ability that improves his combat capabilities temporarily, he must accomplish some great deed during play and the reward will be this special ability. If another character wants to have an animal companion, he will have to do something else to get one, but it all must happen inside the game, not outside of it. This makes the acquisition of these abilities that is just a mechanical choice in other games a integral part of play in OSR RPGs, involving not just the player, but the whole group.

So the proposition I make (that is reproduced in my game) is that: Make the acquisition of special powers, skills and even membership in organizations part of the game. Make it happen during play, not outside of it. When a player asks for some special or different ability, think of something cool he should do in the game to get that, or work out with him a adventure idea to make him earn that benefit.

As an example, I present you the following examples:

• Battle Fury: In order to learn the ability to harness your internal fury for battle prowess, you must journey to the northlands to find and dominate the primordial wolf spirit in a single battle.
• Join the 7 Circles of the Magi: To join the secret society of these legendary wizards, you must first find out the identity of one of them and then best them in a wizardly challenge that is chosen by the challenged member.
• Learn to take the shape of an animal: You must find go to the spiritual world and find the totem spirit of that animal. Then, if he accepts you as a friend, you must prove your worth in a series of challenges to be taught the secrets of assuming its shape.
• Immortality: To forestall the passage of time for his body and soul, you must venture to the cathedral of entropy, in the shadow world of death, and steal the candle that symbolizes your life time. Death, however, will not be happy about this, and might try to get it back.
• Talk to the Dead: The character has to literally die and then adventure as an spirit in the shadow world to make it back. Doing so allows him to "temporarily" die to talk to nearby spirits of the deceased.

Referees can obviously devise other ways to acquire these abilities and come up with their own list of abilities and feats necessary to obtain that. But in the end, the purpose is to make acquisition of these abilities and cool things part of the game play and not just mechanical choices outside of it. I believe players and referees will appreciate them much more this way. What do you think?

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