GOZR Action Classes

In GOZR, you have three primary stats, which are called Action Classes: Cunning, Magic, and Prowess. All rolls are based on one of those stats. The lower your stat's number, the better. Why?

ORIGINS OF THE THREE STAT SCHEME

Because GOZR's system started its life as another game called Dead Wizards, a sword & sorcery RPG set in the city of Kanebok, which later was folded into the Black Pudding setting of Yria. (I have a lot of lore that only really matters in my head, but I gotta say it out loud.)

I dropped Dead Wizards but had already conceived of the rudimentary elements of the game's system. I thought about my favorite sword & sorcery characters and what kinds of things they got up to. I decided that they most often deal with situations by their wits (Cunning), strength and skill (Prowess), and their natural or supernatural reaction to sorcery (Magic).

I think this concept is well-supported in RPGs. Games like Into the Odd, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, and Barbarians of Lemuria have three or four stats. D&D can be boiled down to three basic types of characters: fighting, clever sneak, and wizard*. Daniel Sell, author of Troika!, has a blog post that looms large in my brain and has influenced my thinking on games ever since I read it many years ago. In that post, he proposes an OSR house rule where all PCs are "adventurers" and at each level of experience you pick one of three skill sets to improve. And yes, they are fighting, skill use, and magic.

My concept of the game is that everyone is a hero, in the S&S sense. Larger than life. A cut above. Not your run of the mill milksop. So when it comes to dice rolling, you really only deal with things by might, skill, or sorcery.

*Original D&D had fighter, cleric, and magic-user. This is fine... but in sword & sorcery (as I perceive it) you don't need a cleric. The wizard and the priest are often one and the same. But I do think it's a useful distinction to include a sneak along with a fighter. It's elegant.

WHY STATS ARE LOWER-IS-BETTER

So that explains why I went with three stats. But why are the stats low instead of high? A lot of folks struggle with this. But it's super simple.

They started out as D&D armor class or saving throws.

The first iteration of Dead Wizards was basically a hack of OD&D. But then I morphed it to use the original armor class system as the core mechanic. Then it was as short leap of logic to say "hey, every roll is a saving throw!" or "hey, this is just like rolling to hit an AC in old D&D.".

And that meant the stats needed to get lower as they got better, exactly like a saving throw. I called them Action Classes because that makes sense to me and I thought the acronym "AC" was easy. Yeah I know... this is confusing to some folks because it's not really armor class. But just think of it like this... "what the AC of this action?"... and suddenly it'll make perfect sense to you, I promise.

The great benefit of this is that you know your target number already. It's right there on your character sheet. Since all rolls are player-facing, that means you know exactly what to roll. "My AC for smacking that wizard in the face is 10. I need to roll 10+ on a d20 to ring his stupid bell."

The GM can impose "unluck" to give you a -2 or worse penalty on that d20 roll to give some tooth to more dangerous tasks. And enemies have "threat", which allows them to do unexpected rules-breaking things like taking half damage or resisting magic.

WHY NO STAT-GETS-GOODER RULES?

The reason GOZR has no built-in method for improving those basic stats is also really simple. I didn't want power bloat. I didn't want to have a clunky system for improving a stat too much since you would end up with various modifiers anyway. If you start the game with an 8 in Prowess, then your fighting skill is 65% right out of the gate even if you have nothing to modify it. Finding a weird sword might get you some +1 or something. Being Lucky gets you +2. You can quickly approach 80% or better.

Your ACs can change, but they will do so organically, through play. For example, my friend Andy ran a wonderful GOZR adventure for our Monday night group and my gooz's Prowess was improved by 1 due to messing around with a magical (or super science?) dolmen of some sort. That's how you do it.

SUMMARY

• GOZR has three stats because those are the three things that S&S adventurers tend to muck around with.

• GOZR stats are lower-is-better because the stat itself is the target to roll.

• GOZR doesn't have built-in stat improvement rules because you don't need them.