White Box Adventure, issue 1!

I was working on this right before my near-death experience last fall (ie, involved a mimic masquerading as a ladder). I was just reminded of it and thought I should get around to releasing it! Thanks to Narmer for reminding me.

It can be found at https://mattjackson.itch.io/white-box-adventures

White Box NPC cards

 

I have been playing a solo White Box game for a few days now and I am developing NPCs in the locations the PCs frequent and I wanted a similar system to the character sheets I posted recently so I tweaked the design I had into an NPC card. Might still make some changes but I wanted to share.

I am using a handful of random tables, a few books, and some Tarot cards for much of the game's direction. Thinking I might compile/combine these into a single document for ease of use but also so that others might be inspire to try their hands at solo RPGing.

April Map 02

 

click to embiggen

White Box index character sheet!

 

You have no idea how long I have been looking for a 'good looking' but useful index card character sheet for White Box FMAG, as in one you could actually print on a 4x6 card. There are some floating around but many are either too verbose with stuff or they are just plain ugly to look at. I have been thinking about how to make one and today I had a couple of hours of messing around to get something I actually liked. Thanks to Alex and Steve for suggesting improvements to the design. I am going to keep playing with it and will drop a PDF once I am fully happy with the design and it has been vetted in play.

I am planning on starting up some more solo gaming and I wanted an easy to read, not-fugly, card to use for my characters. I am thinking I may make something like this for NPCs in the game as well.

April map 01

click to embiggen

Fixing OSE To Hit Bonus progression

If you have spent more than an hour talking to me about OSE, you undoubtedly know that I hate the plateau effect

To explain, here is the typical Fighter progression in OSE. Notice how our combat based character gets exactly zero better and actually hitting things for 7,999 experience points? At this point he gets better to the magnitude of 2 points. Then, they need to score another 55,999 xp to get better. This always drove me crazy. Your character plods through the dungeons for days or weeks, never really getting better and the SUDDENLY he jumps up by TWO points. I cannot think of one thing that goes through three (or four, or five) iterations and then goes up by two points. Shouldn't there be growth by one point somewhere along the way??? Just fails to pass the common sense test for me. 

Now, about this time some well-meaning asshat grognard is going to come along and explain how hit points increasing is a measure of their ability to get better in combat, or some other halfbrained idea.  And YES, I know the historical reasons as to why it goes up by two or three points every three or four levels. I get it. Whatever. This is my blog, so hop off. 

This method is dumb. Always has been dumb. Period. Full stop (for you old people like Brandon).

My friend Steve came up with the mathy behind this better idea. I opened up Affinity Publisher and fixed the original OSE page below. Thanks Steve!

Now, your favorite fighter can not suck at second level and actually show he has learned some fighting stuff when he killed those 100 goblins! Look at that!

I also did the cleric, original:

Better:

Thief, original:

Better:

I will continue to work on these and post more classes soon.