One of my recent home projects has been working on converting the 1974 rules to a 1d100 roll under percentile system to work as the underpinnings for my homegrown “OSR” system. The first part of this has been relatively easily, take every value that operates on a base 20 and multiply it by five. Then make a list of all of the ancestry options and classes. There ya go, at least a quarter of the work is done. But while we’re here we might as well fix some of the problems that I have with the way fantasy gaming has progressed as well as it origins. So let’s start here with ancestries.

I want there to be six sort of “core” ancestries to this system for setting reasons: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Orcs, and Goblins. I also want to be able to express some of the cultural and biological differences between these ancestries in the process of ability score generation without falling off the deep end into pure race science. Now some of you might disagree with whether or not the way certain games does this is problematic or not and some of you (a small minority but the opinion nonetheless does exist) might contend that is a sort of inherently problematic thing to portray. I’m not going to delve too much into this here because I have a whole essay on the subject cooking in the background that will hopefully see the light of day sometime soon.

Anyways, the solution I devised to this problem is three-fold: 1.) be more explicit about what each ability score represents and the fact that is an abstraction of a mixture of biological variance and social/cultural conditions 2.) rename Intelligence to Education 3.) instead of giving certain ancestries a flat bonus to or restrictions to ability scores I chose to have the ability scores which reflect these differences and variances be rolled by 2d6+6 as opposed to the regular 3d6. This serves to keep the possibilities of the range similar, putting a lower floor which still reaches into the realm of incurring penalties and also keeping the ceiling the same for each ancestry while skewing the averages higher. This will look like the following example:

Dwarf
STR: 2d6+6 EDU: 3d6 WIS: 2d6+6 CON: 2d6+6 DEX: 3d6 CHA: 3d6

This serves to represent the tendency of Dwarves to be stronger and heartier on average and the tendency of Dwarven culture to promote strength training, occupations that require a lot of upper body strength (like smithing), and the traditionalist and religious bent of the overall cultural milieu. Together with a detailed write up on the cultures and tendencies within those cultures for each ancestry seems to be a much less problematic way to portray difference in a positive light. I am very interested though to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject (people not fascists).