Game Name Game

Back when 4E was looming on the horizon, I started working on what I called Project 39, my attempt to combine the best of what I had seen in the 4E mechanics with what I wanted to keep from 3.5.

4E hit, I blew up my campaign world to accommodate the huge shift it represented, and we converted our ongoing campaign to 4E. That last a few sessions until I hit on a way to do more granular advancement (something I frequently tinkered with in d20) and hit on the idea of 4lacarte, an a la carte advancement system where players bought powers, feats, skills and what not piecemeal, rather than a surge of power once in a while when they leveled.

Cruising the InterBlogs, I stumbled across Robin Stacey's Microlite system. The idea behind Microlite was to boil down D&D to its barest bones, with the basic rules taking up a couple pages. A small community developed around the idea, all doing their own takes on it. I realized it would be easy for me to distill down what I was doing into a simplified system, basically just expanding slightly on the Microlite idea but keeping my idea of advancement divorced from level. I called it MicroZ.

Microlite was bought by Seth Drebitko of Kobold Enterprise. Microlite20 or M20 continues to have its community and Mr. Drebitko is continuing to develop the system. However as thing progressed I could see his path and my development path were diverging enough that I felt that my system was not quite Micro and many of the mechanic introduced to M20 were not ones that met my needs.

I flirted with the name z20, a play off d20 and the z in Oz. But it isn't very descriptive, then I hit on an idea for a name that sums up the core of my iteration of d20. Skill20.

Advancement in Skill20 mostly hinges on Skills. While there is Stat (Ability or Attribute such as Strength) advancement, Stats don't change much over time. Skills are the driving force in this game. Hence the name.

I'll go into more details on Skill20 in a future post.

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MicroZ First Beta

A lot of this probably won't make complete sense as I've been a slacker about posting my MicroZ stuff online.

First off, MicroZ is a condensed d20 system, inspired by Microlite. The biggest difference is that I do away with the class/level system, making it skill based and using feats to define what would be class abilities. I keep some of the best aspects of the 4th Edition of the World's Most Popular RPG (4E for short) in the mechanics, namely having defenses instead of saves.

In Microlite and MicroZ, the Vancian system of magic is replaced with point fueled spell casting. In Microlite hit points are used, in MicroZ there is a separate pool of points called Focus. One of the big reasons for this was the healing loop... if someone can heal more hp than they spend to cast the healing spell, they can go on indefinitely.

Last night was my first beta test of the system and a scenario I want to run at GenCon in 2011. The group was composed of one of my alpha test players, several experienced gamers, and two players who had never played an RPG.


The good part was that the newbies were able to play the most complicated characters, both spell casters, fairly easily. The character sheets were easy to follow and the session didn't bog down for mechanics.

Overall the story of the scenario was well received. In a nutshell an undead mayor decided he was going to take a new wife, a farmer's daughter from the adjacent kingdom. It was the players' task to track her down and save her from the her wedding day.

The biggest flaw in the scenario was that the fights were too easy. The characters never felt like they were really in any danger and still had plenty of resources left at the end of the final fight.

The biggest system issue is that spell-casters need to be nerfed. They were able to blaze away with spells and didn't come close to running out of Focus. Right now I'm mulling on whether to reduce the amount of Focus characters get or raise the cost of casting. As usual interesting ideas flit through my mind that I discard to keep from complicating and bogging down the system.

The rogue feat was pretty under-powered. In the session, it gave the character +3 damage when flanking, on crits, and on surprise attacks. It never came into play, and compared to lightning bolts and searing rays, and extra +3 seemed pretty puny.

I was also concerned about the fighter feat, which adds the character's Strength bonus to the DR (damage reduction) of armor was over-powered, but the "tank" never got hit. Still, I need to revisit it, as most of the monsters would have needed a critical hit to hurt the tank.

All in all, I got a lot of good notes. I'm glad I'm doing this a year in advance rather than a week.

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More MicroZ Magic Musings

First let me say I hate retyping spell lists.

While I was working on MicroZ Supers, I came up with a mechanic to reflect the exertions of using more strenuous powers without taking them directly from hit points a la Microlite and MicroZ. Characters would have a Stamina score, equal to their Hit Points, akin to the Endurance stat used in Hero Games. More taxing powers and putting in extra effort would cause fatigue, as would taking damage, which would be applied to Stamina. Once Stamina hit zero, nighty-night.

There are a few more details, but that gives the jist. It would be possible for characters to run out of steam without being in danger of dying from it. I've begun to chew on whether I can apply this mechanic to MicroZ Fantasy.


(At this point my play-testers/guinea pigs MB and Weasel are probably going "here we go again".)

The trick is that the whole point of distilling D&D to a Micro game is to simplify it. Would this add to much complexity? Because now we'd have to track Stamina and Hit Points separately, with different rules for recovering Stamina.

My other worry is that spell-casting is more restrained than 4E and 3.x. And I like that, I've often sought a less videogamey approach to magic for my games.

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Feats For MicroZ

Note to self - I really need to update lordoz.com so I can actually post the rules for perusal.

Note to reader(s) - MicroZ is inspired by and based on Microlite d20.

Note to blog - don't worry blog, I won't leave you for microblogging like Twitter. I need more than 140 characters.

Any ways, feats. I decided that I still needed some crunch and customization options to differentiate characters a bit more. What I had seen in my a la carte experiments was that players loaded up on feats, both because they provided useful abilities and they had a flat rather than escalating cost.

I had two design decisions to make. How to handle and reign in the gaining of feats, and what kind of mechanics did I want to use for the feats themselves?


The first was simple when I hit on it. Break feats down by Stat association and tie the accumulation of feats directly to the Stat. Want another STR (Strength) feat? Buy up your STR. This limited the number of feats a character could have, meaning I could also keep my feat list small without characters ending up with most of them. But assigning gaining of feats to odd numbers greater than 11, I made to odd Stats actually useful rather than a stepping stone.

As for the feats themselves, in the case of skill-affecting feats I borrowed a page from Star Wars Saga d20 and used feats that gave a reroll under certain conditions or uses of skills. It's also possibly to expend an additional feat to upgrade it to rolling twice and keep the best roll. I just had to make sure not to let it be available for combat (including magic) skills.

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MicroZ - Testing Starting

So I got some positive feedback from my players when I sprung on them converting from 4e a la carte to MicroZ. The downside is that we haven't tested combat yet, they were too busy role-playing, investigating, and rescuing innocents from burning farmhouses to get in a fight. I expect the combat system to get a workout next game session when they catch up to the nefarious brigands that set said farmhouse fire.


At some point I need to clean up my LordOz website and post the MicroZ rules there, but I'm partly waiting to see how things shake out with the recent sale of Microlite d20.

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Micro-ing Weapons

I'm continuing on my adaption of Microlite for my own evil purposes.

Originally I thought that weapons would be a matter of copy and paste, but as I looked at the weapon tables, a couple of things struck me.


The first was that even in Micro form, D&D clung to an esoteric assortment of weapons for what I could best attribute to nostalgia. The original D&D was derived from war-gaming, and that pedigree shows in the variety of weapons. But when was the last time someone used a pick? How about those various flavors of polearm? In the interest of keeping MicroZ micro, I started dropping weapons.

The other thing I noticed was that simplification made certain weapons in each category more desirable than others. Why use a scimitar for d6 when you can use a bastard sword for d10? Why use a dagger for d4 when you can use a shortsword for d6? So I began looking at the weapons in the various categories and tried to balance them. It meant adding a little more detail, but hopefully I'll do so without encumbering the system.

In some cases it meant tweaking damage values... the scimitar, longsword and bastard sword in one hand all do d8. A flail only does d6 but is +2 vs. shields, a shortspear does d6 but can be thrown and a rapier does d6 but subtracts 2 from the DR of armor.

DR of armor? That's another post.

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Starting on MicroZ

First to give credit where credit is due, and in case you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, Microlite is a super-condensed form of D&D. Intrigued by the possibilities I've started tinkering with the system.

Two of the big considerations are adopting Microlite for my level-free experiment, and adopting it for my campaign world.


Stats was easy. I'm keeping the three used in the original Microlite design, Strength, Dexterity, and Mind. While I debated on the idea of combining Intelligence, Wisdom/Willpower, and Charisma into the Mind stat or not, I finally squashed my mechanics-hydra by rationalizing that specific aspects of mental abilities are also reflected in skills.

Speaking of skills, level-free construction and the voices in my head required me to beef up the 4 (or 5 for expert) skills used in Microlite. My skill list consists of Athletics, Discipline, Influence, Knowledge, Magic, Melee, Missile, Subterfuge, and Survival. While this may seem to be a bit much for a "micro" system, these skills also replace attack bonuses, caster levels, and armor class (more on that in a later post).

Each class has three class skills, which they start with 2 ranks each. Class skills are less expensive to advance than other skills, but there's no rule to keep a fighter from buying up ranks of Magic. It will be more expensive and he won't have a mage's special abilities for casting, but effectively multi-classing is a matter of investing skill points.

Advancement is easy now (compared to my 4E a la carte). You have class skills, other skills and stats.

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Microlite Musings

First I suppose I should explain what Microlite 20 is. It's pre-4 D&D distilled down to its basic essence. Its beauty is in its simplicity and just reading the system makes me yearn for the "old days" of D&D.

Of course, what happens when I read a game system? My brain starts thinking of ways to muck around with it.


Oz, have you ever ran a game you didn't tamper with? - actual player quote.

If it's so simplistically perfect, why mess with it? Because I need some meat with my potatoes. The Expert addition actually takes a big step in the right direction. But I've gotten attached to the granularity I've gained with my a la carte rules-mods for 4e and Star Wars. The questions running through my mind -

Can I mod the rules to capture the flexibility and flavor of my current game?
Can I do so without creating something so complex that I might as well have stuck with what I have?
Can I balance it? (The biggest challenge of a la carte)
Can I use it easily with existing source materials?
Can I actually finish it before another shiny object distracts me?

Why couldn't I have stumbled across this before my vacation?

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