First Time Playing: Whitehack

Whitehack, written by Christian Mehrstam (and available here) is billed as "a complete fantasy role-playing game in 64 pages" and wholly lives up to that claim. It takes core gameplay ideas and inspiration from an older era of tabletop games and approaches them with newer, distilled game design sensibilities boasting being able to "run 40+ years of material in the world's first rules tradition..." The core mechanic is d20 roll-under attribute (e.g. if you have a Strength score of 12, and you're attempting to crush a tomato can, you would have to roll 12 or under to succeed). As someone who started playing D&D during the 3.5 era, having to retrain my mind to understand 'low is good and 20 is the worst' was a fun little game in itself. Another interesting difference between Whitehack and most modern d20 games is that "Attack" rolls and "Saving Throws" have their own stat that also have to be rolled under to succeed (AV or 'Attack Value' for the former, ST for the latter). 

What I Loved

The first thing that jumped out at me when I read this system, and the thing that I love the most after finally playing is Whitehack's approach to player Classes. It has a unique take that I really haven't seen anywhere else, and am thrilled to dive into more in the coming sessions. 

There are three Main classes (and two "rare" classes) that are a non-traditional approach to how classes normally work in most systems. You have The Strong, The Deft, and The Wise, each of which has a separate advancement table, and all have different ways they interact with the rolls throughout the game, as well as a single unique ability in which it interacts with the game world. For example, The Wise is the only class with access to magic, which are called 'Miracles' in Whitehack, and are a freeform approach to cover pretty much anything the player and GM can agree upon. 

The main thing I love about this is that your class doesn't define your character. Every character has a set of Vocations, Affiliations, and Groups that take care of that. I.E. if you wanted to play an "Assassin" of some kind, you're not locked into picking The Deft; a Strong Assassin or Wise Assassin are just as 'viable' (if you're concerned about trivial things like balance) and would be just as interesting and fun to play. In fact, the current game I'm running features two Deft characters that play completely different (one being a 'Deft Ninja' and the other being a 'Deft Exorcist').

Next Time I Play
Each character has a resource called 'Slots', and this denotes how many of their unique class things  that they currently have access to, and can use once-a-day. As much as I love the lower hit-point higher lethality OSR style games, I also love player characters having special abilities that allow them to do things outside of the normal actions. I'm contemplating either increasing or lifting the restrictions of how many times a day they can use these abilities. I'm hoping this will allow characters to stay unique in how they approach situations, add a constant level of flair and style to their actions throughout the day, but also not necessarily break anything or transform the game into something else it's not really intended to be. At the same time though, I feel completely fine leaving it as is. It's a weird guessing game right now because the game seems likes it's already extremely fine-tuned which gives me a little pause when it comes to hacking it.

This will definitely take some experimenting and course-correcting, but at the end of the day, that's 80% of what tabletop roleplaying games are anyways, right?

Final Thoughts

I've heard so many people praise this system, and when I finally got my hands on it I wasn't sure if I had been bamboozled or not. Sure, on the first few reads things like the magic system and the classes definitely intrigued me, but I wasn't sure I "got it" just yet. It's very minimalist in its design, both in in-game mechanics and in production. The fat is trimmed in almost every paragraph, and is very plain language in that at first I found it hard to flip through and find things for reference or rules clarification. After running the game though and seeing it in action, something inside me definitely clicked. Its minimalism and straightforwardness makes for a great experience for both GMs and players. It also features a great toolset for GMs and referees in general that cover setting and adventure design, as well as a variety of other topics that you would need for tabletop gaming.

With it being an OSR or D&D retroclone, there's always a handful of baggage or hacking that a lot of DIY D&Ders bring with them to a new system (I know I'm very guilty of this). That being said, I can't find much that I would want to change. As minimalist and direct as it is, I can't help but feel it's so satisfyingly complete as an rpg product. I'm almost deterred to make some adjustments to the ruleset, as I feel like every rules decision was purposeful and made for a reason. I'm looking forward to finishing this campaign and many more with this system.