If weapon durability has a million fans, then I am one of them.
If weapon durability has ten fans, then I am one of them.
If weapon durability has only one fan, then that is me.
If weapon durability has no fans, then that means I am no longer on Earth.
If the world is against weapon durability, then I am against the world.
Game Start
OSR things don't tend appeal to me for the tendency for gritty settings and the expectation of high lethality, Mausritter frames it in a way that is fun and does appeal to me, which then made me understand what the style of play even if I don't really want to play it too much, but I am still interested in tabletop games so other night I dove into OSR/OSR adjacent blogs, reading a bunch before coming across the posts from Prismatic Wasteland–How Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Proves Me Right, its sort-of companion post The Secret to Realism in Games which talk about verisimilitude and Zelda-militude, and Adventure Game vs OSR from Questing Beast which proposes a style (or perhaps a mental framing) of "adventure game" alternative to OSR (and others).
So I proceeded to download, read and skim many games in the OSR space over the course of one night and revive my childhood dream of making a Zelda tabletop game and write a messy Notepad .txt file.
Starting my list with stuff I like about BotW/TotK; turning bugs into tasty potions, worldbuilding fed by resource gathering, and weapon durability (which I think is fun and good and the games would be worse without it, even if in BotW at least it's flawed).
Usage Die & Combat
As I love weapon durability I want to try to emulate that to some degree, and the Usage Die from The Black Hack fits that goal well–gear can have a die from d4 to d20, when its used you roll and if its a 1 or 2, the die decreases by one step, it could be used for durability, resource gathering, loose ammo tracking, among other things.
I am considering two paths for rolling in combat–cutting Hit Rolls to speed up combat and only rolling damage–or–cutting Damage Rolls and doing flat damage based on weapon, which might be better if working with lower numbers and smaller health pools.
For either option I had the idea of rolling a weapon Usage Die with every Attack and when it breaks it does double the damage, but there's math to do about how fast a weapon would breakdown and at different sizes, but I don't know how to work that out as I have a hard time with numbers, so that's for later.
(Jason Tocci's Grave has good ideas about stamina to consider as well.)
Stats
For the sake of the Zelda aesthetic I want to have Hit Points be represented by Hearts, each with two segments (i.e. 2 Hit Points per Heart), and start somewhere between 3 and 6. Having weapons work on that scale might work better with flat damage (e.g. Knight's Broadsword deals 1.5 Hearts of damage).
For attributes; the quick answer is Power, Wisdom, and Courage, but Courage is more of an ambiguous use in action oriented gaming. My other surface level idea is sort of still in that spays with Power, Focus, and Reflex, less pinpointed on Zelda but more workable.
Usage Die, Resource Gathering & Cooking
There's not often crafting in TTRPGs besides "spend money and time to get something" (which is just shopping) probably because resource collecting is very video game-y and not fun unless its a quest for a specific item.
The loose idea I developed is a limited arrangement of resources depending on weather and/or biome you gather sort-of passively while exploring (on a hex grid of course), the amount of a Resource is represented by a Usage Die, then using them to cook useful potions or food, by possibly either burning them and the effectiveness of what you made determined by the size of the die, or rolling the Usage Die of the used resources on a table or hex-flower of some sort to determine aspects of the resulting potion or dish.
Environmental Obstacles
The weather hex-flower is cool!
I played too much Oregon Trail as a child, and too much BotW/TotK as an adult, I think weather impact in games is a lot of fun and you SHOULD stop adventuring in winter or die. Disrupting plans and forcing the use of supplies or spending time to find another way.
In Tears of the Kingdom you can turn sticky lizards into sticky potions to let you climb wet or slippery surfaces, such as in the rain or a wet mossy cave, but in the other direction, being near lava can set you and your flammable gear on fire, prevented by fire proofing potions that you drink that also fire proof your clothes, somehow.
Last Notes
Not many Zelda TTRPGs have hit for me because they're often frequently surface level sort of Character Party Adventure games and don't touch upon Zelda-ish themes or feelings in anyway.
coolwayink's Forgotten Ballad is explicitly inspired by Zelda and I feel touches on it well, and Jack Harrison's Artefact I feel meshes well with Zelda Feelings (trademark pending).
If this post is unreadable I have elected to deflect all blame to ADHD. 💛
Other things I am thinking about as I hack away at this:
- The Witcher
- Monster Hunter
- Cairn
- Cushion against character death while maintaining threat
- How unreadable the hyper condensed OSR-style monster stat-blocks are
