I have continued my habit this year: rather than reading books, I am writing my own stuff. I have been working on my own RPG on and off for a couple of years now, and in the last month I have gotten most of it done, at least the basic rules anyway. It is my own variation of D&D 5E with some Shadowdark thrown in, and a healthy topping of house rules.
I started this project back when Wizards of the Coast went through their OGL debacle and everyone was making their own rules because WotC sucked. I, of course, have had ideas about how to do an RPG for at least 40 years, but never really did much with them. My idea included getting rid of the old 3-18 attribute scores and just using the modifiers. In the basic game, there would be one Race (Species, Ancestry, whatever) that got a bonus to each of the attributes, then there would be a Class to line up with each attribute, for which there was a bonus as well. So six Races and six Classes. I also wanted to bake multi-classing into the system: at 1st level, you pick your primary class, and at 2nd level, you choose your secondary class. This works out to 36 combinations, each with its own set of abilities. Something like this:
| Primary Class \ Secondary | Bard (CHA) | Cleric (WIS) | Fighter (STR) | Rogue (DEX) | Warden (CON) | Wizard (INT) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bard (CHA) | Sovereign | Troubadour | Duelist | Minstrel | War Chanter | Maestro |
| Cleric (WIS) | Evangelist | Fanatic | Templar | Monk | Druid | Occultist |
| Fighter (STR) | Swashbuckler | Paladin | Warlord | Ranger | Barbarian | Eldritch Knight |
| Rogue (DEX) | Charlatan | Soul Thief | Assassin | Mastermind | Shadow Stalker | Arcane Trickster |
| Warden (CON) | Skald | Crusader | Juggernaut | Wild Stalker | Titan | Runesmith |
| Wizard (INT) | Spellweaver | Theurge | Battle Mage | Illusionist | Blood Mage | Arcane Master |
I also wanted to implement a hero point system that allowed players to directly affect gameplay and create an alternate route to building interesting characters outside of the Class/Leveling system. There were things in D&D 5E I wanted to kill as well, like Bounded Accuracy, which is nice for simplifying the system, but was also a hamstring on characters and gameplay.
I also started working on a stripped-down version of D&D. I wanted to strip out all the complicated bits:
- No subclasses.
- No feats, just attribute increases.
- No skills; use attribute checks + proficiency if it feels right.
- No backgrounds.
- Pick simple spells for the casters.
- Ignore weapon properties.
- No Bonus Actions.
- No Reactions (except Attacks of Opportunity).
- No Short Rests.
- Always-on Initiative by Dex, no rolling.
This leaves just the important parts of the game, where the more complicated rules can be added back later. I also wanted to speed up combat, so in the monster book, I halved the hit points and doubled the damage done by monsters. The monsters are now easier to kill, but their attacks are far more deadly, which makes fights more intense. Yes, you can one-shot the monster, but they can probably one-shot you too.
Both of these games are different sides of the same coin. They each bring something different to the table. One extends and expands the game to be something more comfortable for me and my group. The other is a simplification of the game to make it fast and easy to play. I will probably playtest my variant at some point, though I am not sure how that will go. Strip D&D is just a thought experiment; I will likely never do anything with it.
DEC PDP-11 Emulator
Another project I have been working on is getting the Kek PDP-11 emulator to run on my PicoCalc. The emulator runs on a Raspberry Pi Pico. The problem with the original code is that it does not support any kind of keyboard or display; you could only access it via serial port. My idea, instead of adding these peripherals directly into the emulator software, was to just build a separate terminal program that talked to the emulator via a virtual serial port. The emulator would run on Core 0, and the terminal would run on Core 1. This meant Kek itself would need very few modifications, just a patch or two. This idea worked pretty well, but the problem is the Pico's limited RAM made it difficult to find anything that would run. I tried several SIMH software kits, but found only a single Unix v5 image that worked, and once loaded, there was only about 64K of memory left, not much overhead really. The Unix v5 image is also pretty minimal and not very useful for anything.
This led me down another rabbit hole. I got to thinking about the DECSYSTEM-2020 we used in our computer classes in high school. I thought it might be fun to set up a SIMH emulator in a Docker container that I could access via SSH and play some old BASIC games. Setting up the Docker container was easy, and finding a standard TOPS-20 operating system image was pretty easy as well. The problem, of course, was the old BASIC games that we used to play on it, like Star Trek and Hammurabi. These programs were of course available all over the internet, but they were all the Microsoft BASIC versions, not the DEC BASIC 2 versions. This is where Claude Code came in. I fed it the DEC BASIC 2 user manual and told it to convert all the programs for me, and it did so pretty effectively. I gave it my credentials to SSH into the Docker container, and Claude even typed them into the other computer for me and tested them, all 108 of the BASIC programs. It took all afternoon, but it was totally worth the wait.
