Years ago I designed a simple,
system-neutral framework enabling me to describe game stats for
characters and creatures – as well as difficulty levels for various
tasks – without committing myself to a single game engine.
I called
it the Any-System Key. It
fit it on two pages, one for the basic concepts and the other a kind
of worksheet for listing relevant skills and translating difficulty
numbers (a third page added later offered some sample stats across
genres). The system focused on using basic skill descriptions and
three levels of adversaries (henchmen, boss, and mastermind) to give
gamemasters some guidance adapting these notes to their preferred
game system. The
Any-System Key worked fine for the game
material I was writing at the time, primarily pulp content like
Heroes of Rura-Tonga and
Pulp Egypt, using
game engines like the
D6 System that
relied heavily on skills and difficulty levels to define play
parameters.
But now I’m considering designing
some supplements in the medieval fantasy genre, something more
compatible with the class/level system of Dungeons & Dragons
and the numerous retro-clones made popular over the last few years by
the Old School Renaissance movement (OSR).
Like the Any-System Key, the OSR
version seeks to describe characters, creatures, and other
difficulties (such as those corresponding to saving throws, thief
skills, and turning undead for clerics) in broad terms, providing
enough material so gamemasters could port such setting concepts into
their preferred OSR-style game engine.
