Heroic Old-School Roleplaying
Core Rules: The Basics
Designed to emulate the fun and fantasy of the earliest versions of the world’s most famous roleplaying system, without getting bogged down by an excess of rules.
These rules are still a Work-in-Progress, so if there’s some rule or feature you need that isn’t here yet, feel free to either use the equivalent rule from your favorite B/X-compatible retroclone, or roll a die and see what happens.
How to Play
There is one referee. Everyone else is a player.
The referee’s job is to describe what’s happening in the game, and the players describe how their characters respond.
Sometimes, dice are rolled. These dice are described by how many sides they have (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d100).
Doing Things
Simple tasks are assumed to succeed. If the task is dangerous or complicated, roll the dice for an Ability Check.
For most checks, roll a 20-sided die (d20) and add the ability’s modifier.
- A natural 20 means a critical success: the check succeeds, and often includes a bonus for the roller.
- An 11 or higher is a success.
- A 6-10 represents a partial success: the check succeeds, but with a potential complication.
- A 5 or less is a failure.
- A natural 1 means a critical failure: the check fails, and often includes an extra complication.
Abilities
Each player character (PC) has 6 abilities that help to define how they can interact with the world. Each ability has a score from 3 to 18, and each score determines the modifier used when rolling a check for that ability.
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Strength (STR): Raw physical power, affects melee damage and carrying capacity.
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Dexterity (DEX): Speed and agility of movement, affects armor class (AC) when under attack.
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Constitution (CON): Mettle and gumption, affects hit points (HP) gained at each level.
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Intelligence (INT): Knowledge and reasoning, affects languages known and arcane magic.
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Wisdom (WIS): Experience and insight, affects divine magic.
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Charisma (CHA): Appearance and social capability, affects hirelings and eldritch magic.
Saving Throws
When something (bad) happens to a character or monster, they can usually make a saving throw to avoid some (or all) of it.
To make one, roll 1d20 and consult the appropriate table (with higher results doing better).
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Death: Poison, death ray, bleeding out.
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Wielded: Wands and other aimed items.
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Paralyze: Paralysis, petrification, being buried alive.
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Blasts: Breath weapons and other area effects.
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Spells: General magic, including from rods and staves.
Alignment
Cosmic principles that represent broad world views
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Law: Order, truth, justice, and civilization. Typically prosocial.
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Chaos: Anarchy, power, chance, and destruction. Typically pro-individual.
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Neutrality: Balance, mediation, and detachment.
Character Creation
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Roll Ability Scores.
- Roll 4d6 and keep the highest 3 (aka “4d6KH3”) for each ability.
- Either roll 4d6KH3 once for each ability in order and see what kind of character comes up, or make all 6 rolls and assign the results to fit a particular class and/or race.
- On Roll20, all 6 scores can be rolled at once with this command:
/roll [[4d6kh3]] [[4d6kh3]] [[4d6kh3]] [[4d6kh3]] [[4d6kh3]] [[4d6kh3]].
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Determine Starting Level.
- If playing a legacy character, update starting XP appropriately.
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Roll Starting Hit Points.
- Type is determined by class, number is determined by level.
- Re-roll any 1s or 2s.
- Modify the rolled value by CON modifier.
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Choose Alignment.
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Note Starting Languages.
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Buy Equipment.
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Determine attacks and AC.
Legal Information
This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.