Hack'D & Slash'D 2E

A quick health update - I had a few different treatments this week, and all is well. I keep on keeping on, and I actually start my five-week substitute teaching gig tomorrow, so that's something.

Regarding gaming - as is my wont, I was tinkering with a supplement for Hack'D & Slash'D and things got out of control. Therefore, I have officially begun work on the second edition of Hack'D & Slash'D. You can follow along with progress on the game in the link. It's my up-to-the-moment draft, so odds are decent that when you pop in I will be working on it.

Part of it is just MORE - more tags, more signature spells, and more monsters.

But a more important part is that it's more nuanced, and has a layer of fiddly bits. As a for instance, I have added a few combat options like disarming your opponent, knocking them down, or pushing them back, with a simple way to resolve these situations, and a tag that allows a character to be better at these sorts of combat options. I'm adding abilities for monk-like characters, and rules for dabblers who only progress in magic half as fast as true casters. My previous goal was to get 80% of what D+D can do into 10% of the space. Now I'm aiming for 95% of what D+D can do in 15% of the space.

I want there to be a simple enough game that if I just want to play a fighter with a big sword, I can make my character in five minutes and have very little to keep track of during play. If I want to play a hybrid caster/warrior with a variety of options, I can spend fifteen minutes to make sure I've got everything balanced out the way I want it.   

As you might expect, I'll use this space to talk about the process as I go. The first step was to get a draft together that was the first edition along with all of the notes I've been gathering and the material I'd developed for the Companion. Now that I'm there, I can start cleaning up and fine tuning.