The difference between a heartbreaker and a craphack is, you think a heartbreaker will be finished.
I started using the word “craphack” a few months ago to talk about my in-progress fantasy d20 elfgame. (This is a separate project from CRAWL, which has entered a process of hibernation. Its no longer in active development.)
I had a lot of names for this thing. It really started when the OGL shit hit the fan and I was already seeing how affordable low-run booklet prints were. The idea of creating a booklet with a bunch of my house rules and favourite tables, and getting it printed, became a kind of cool idea. Simultaneously, WotC quickly jettisoned a bunch of the coolest ideas for 5e 2024. Initially I was like: well, let’s compile those ideas and I’ll make a home game out of what I liked.
I called this document 5e Killer. This stems from a phrase I said in early 2023: If you are a major TTRPG publisher and you aren’t already working on your 5e Killer for release in Fall 2024, you’re fucking up.
I am not a major TTRPG publisher. But why not do my own? At least for my home game.
Somewhere I got pissed at the limitations of “sticking to 5e.” I also realized I was just tinkering with it. I did finish a version of this doc. We are playing my 5e game with it now. (I do not like the changes 2024 5e, or any other base ruleset, has implemented. I like this setup enough.)
But, this wasn’t “done.” Many core problems I had with 5e were still sort of there. Unsure of how to solve them, I backburnered it and began looking at other systems. Perhaps I would find someone else’s heartbreaker and be able to modify that, or find a perfect beginning point I could launch out of.
I spent most of 2024 experimenting with other ideas and doing other projects, including converting my Dungeon23 megadungeon to OSE, writing it up, and running the Kickstarter. I spent a month and a half making an OSE house rules document and compilation in anticipation of printing that out, both for home use and convention play. While doing this I actually started to solidify some more ideas about what I liked and what I wanted out of…all of this.
While doing this, little bits and pieces have always come into focus. I now have a canonical equipment list for basically all fantasy games going forward. I have a d100 magic item list and I’m slowly working on d100 spells (although Skerples may yet beat me to the punch). And, I found Outcast Silver Raiders, a game I initially called my “forever game,” about three weeks after I made my first document compiling info for the latest version of my craphack.
The craphack doesn’t exist except in my head. There are like 8 versions of half formed thoughts, in Discord self-messages and Affinity Publisher projects and Google Docs. They are, if anything, a dialogue with myself, wherein I repeatedly ask: What do I want out of the game?
- I like the idea of hit die as damage die; weapons shouldnt have variable damage.
- I like the idea of saving throws existing separately from skill checks, existing separately from attack rolls.
- I like having lots and lots of classes and ancestries. About 10 each is a sweet spot for me.
- I like games where you always roll high to succeed. I am not a fan of roll under.
- Likewise, I like the DM being able to set a difficulty class/target number for the player to hit, even on skill checks. Some doors are harder to open than others, some locks are harder to pick than others. (The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic exists and is brilliant, but I prefer to use it for situational bonuses: this is an objectively DC15 check but if you do a thing you can have advantage to maybe do it easier.)
- I like monsters having simpler statblocks than players do, with their primary stats being hit die and number, AC, and what they can do on their combat turn. I can make them do anything I want outside of that. I’m the DM.
- Somewhere I have a table of every monster “type” and their average 5e stats and I want to expand on that to create basically a monster Rosetta stone for this game, combined with established and working power sets, so that I could easily create monsters on the fly during sessions without having to prep them.
- I don’t mind even the most mundane classes (like fighter and thief) having a few “special abilities,” like 5e Action Surge or whatever. But IMO 5e gives you far too many of these, and worse, has too many options. (For my “forever game,” I don’t think I want subclasses.)
- I like OSR vibes for mechanics, but people played heroic games with these same systems for 15 years, and anyone who says otherwise is fucking kidding themselves.
- I like and use miniatures but also sometimes use theater of the mind for some encounters, especially against solo non-boss monsters. The system should easily support both.
- I like individual initiative. I think there’s still some improvement on my “everyone rolls a d6, if the monster beats any players they roll first, btw lower is better” system. I also wish I could use the Initiative Clock but I think it’s a little too fiddly.
- We don’t need bonus actions or minor actions or anything like that. Too much design. You can move and do one other thing.
- I like having a defined list of spells and at least semi-Vancian magic with spell slots. I am open to not having spell slots, but spellcasters should still pick from a list of pre-defined spells. No Knave, Cairn, bastards.-style “combine these random words to make a vague spell and work with the DM to figure out what it does” nonsense.
It’s REALLY easy to see where all of these ideas sort of overlap and become relevant to how I imagine playing the game and the flow state that I desire. It’s rules that don’t get in the way and give all players an equal amount of cool shit they can do on their turn besides attacking. It’s also easy to see how many games are outright thrown out by what I am imagining: no Cairn, Knave, OSE, Shadowdark, 5e, Five Torches Deep, etc. etc. (The only one that actually does hit the mark is, appropriately, Outcast Silver Raiders.)
So, where does this all coalesce? As I move around pieces and think about this, it might never coalesce. When I was on Take Flight, Cat and I talked about the idea that you might never finish The System, and That’s Okay. It can be the old car that your dad tinkers with in the garage every other weekend and says, one day I’ll get it all fixed up, I swear. It’s his hobby, the same way game design can be your hobby–even if you are also a professional game designer with other projects that definitely are moving forward, being published, that you’re doing the work on.
But my craphack exists and I swear one day I’m definitely gonna finish it, for sure.
