A few people have been making their own B/X classes in the Old-School Essentials style recently, which is wonderful to see! My hope is that once the game is officially released (PDFs expected in about a week, print expected in the autumn) that we'll see lots of creative content coming out. (For anyone who's interested in publishing content for Old-School Essentials, check out the
Third Party License!)
This post provides a little insight into one of design principles behind the Old-School Essentials style, for the interest of people who are interested in structuring their own creations in a similar way.
What is the Old-School Essentials Style?
When I refer to "the Old-School Essentials style", I'm not referring to the visual design of the books (e.g. the choice of fonts, table colours, etc.). Rather, I'm referring to the design principles that I used when writing, editing, and laying out the text.
One of the most important OSE design principles is that each piece of content should fit onto a single page or spread, for the sake of usability. Looking at the books, you'll notice that no individual pieces of content (e.g. classes, spells, monsters, etc.) are divided across multiple spreads. This means that the reader will never have to flip a page back and forth when reading something, which is great for usability!
One Class per Spread as a Limit on Complexity
In the case of class descriptions, this principle also has a second purpose: it serves as a limitation on class complexity. If you look at the
Classic Fantasy: Genre Rules book, you'll notice that each of the standard B/X classes fit completely on a single spread (i.e. two pages side by side). This includes all relevant tables. The standard cleric and thief classes -- having special abilities that require quite a bit of explanation -- push the limits of this, but still both fit on a single spread.
When creating my renditions of the AD&D classes and races for the
Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules book, I used this "must fit on a single spread" principle as a convenient yardstick for limiting the complexity of the classes to B/X-like levels. It's
very easy to get carried away when writing a class, adding verbiage and slews of flavourful abilities, until one ends up with something that it significantly more complex than the (pretty minimal) B/X classes. This layout principle proved an absolutely perfect tool for reining things in.
What is "One Spread"?
There's a catch: what exactly constitutes "two pages / one spread"? A spread of two Letter sized pages is a very different matter to a spread of two Digest sized pages -- it's possible to fit a
lot more information on the former. So for the purposes of using the "one spread per class" principle as a limitation on complexity, the exact size of the page that we're talking about becomes very important. The font size is also important, of course, as you can squeeze lot more information onto a page using an 8pt font than with a 12pt font.
The Official Formula
So for anyone who's interested in creating their own classes using the same limitations that I used in the official Old-School Essentials books, here's the magic formula!
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| I shall leave conversion into fractional parts of yards as an exercise for the reader |
Please Share!
Myself and others in the Old-School Essentials community are always keen to see new classes and other material! If you feel like sharing, please drop by the Necrotic Gnome
MeWe group or our
Discord server.
