Not Dead Yet

 I've been writing Fantasy Heartbreakers for some time. I've made a few. One motivator is that I'm a technical writer by day. I have no control over what I write about or even the style. Being a trained Graphic Designer this leaves me a bit frustrated as I like playing with fonts and page layout.

So before Covid hit I was invited to play 5E with a guy who worked with my wife. I read up on the game and made a character, and we had one game before the world shut down.

So back to reading those rules. I read the hardcover and the free-be rules and found them both lacking. There is a combination of writing for newbies with an organization that leaves you confused. I played AD&D back in the day so I muddled through it but the thing should have been better. It was overdone and begging to be streamlined. It might have great mechanics but they weren't as clearly laid out as I felt they should have been. There is a thing with writing that sometimes you review your own work and you see what you knew you wrote, not what you actually wrote, and I think there was a bit of that going on when they organized the book. I could be wrong, who knows. 

So then, before Covid, my step-daughter, her boyfriend and another friend tried to get into a game at our local game store on beginners day and were given a bad time. They didn't have characters written up and the store seemed to not want them there. Being charitable I can assume the DM who runs the beginners table on Mondays was out, or he thought they wanted to play just so they could mock everything. Being not-charitable, being rude to newbies is hardly the way to expand the game and the Game Store running the tables should fire that person if they don't have a really good reason why.

She told me about it recently and it made me think back on 5E again, and I decided my next project, my next Fantasy Heartbreaker would be to gut, re-organize, and reskin the 5E rules to make them usable.

I tried to keep it as pure as possible but I simply couldn't. I hate spell slots so I had to change that. I decided to go for a Dark Fantasy feel so Halfling and Elves were out (although I'll do something with them alter). Tieflings and Dragonborn are just stupid, so they were gone. I like group initiative every round so I had to change that as well. So there are little changes, but nothing that would be confusing for someone playing Not Dead Yet and then moving on to 5E.

I also decided I would organize it compartmentally, that is trying to keep bits on a page or 2-page spread so that a topic didn't share space with a different topic. This would make it easier for someone to remove my Movement section and add their own, or remove how I handle Spellcasting and add their own using a PDF divider and merger.

So that is the backstory of Not Dead Yet. I expect to discuss why I made certain design choices on this blog, and perhaps include examples.  So here is a link to the game: 

DELETED THE LINK in disgust at OGL 1.1