Adventures sometimes pause to yell numbers at you. It isn’t enough to know that the guard room contains three bugbears; you must know their armor class, their hit points, their movement speed, and whatever other numbers the adventure feels obligated to spurt. This isn’t universal of course. Other adventurers will instead point you to the back of the book (or even another book entirely) where they have a page dedicated to bugbear statistics. Both alternatives are all well and good when the adventure-writer knows for a certainty that these collections of vital statistics will be relevant and useful for the reader. But there is a conundrum for the writer of a “system-neutral” adventure.

Not only as a digression but also to put on my debate-nerd hat and define my terms. “System-neutral” tends to mean gaming material, typically an adventure, that does not assume the reader will use any given system (e.g., B/X, 5e, Errant, your own baroque hodgepodge) in connection therewith. “System-agnostic”, by contrast, takes this a step further and does not even assume that you will use a system at all! As for which term to use, I am basically agnostic, but I will use system-neutral herein because that is the phrase I hear most.

What is a system-neutral adventure-writer to do? One option is to just use stats from a commonly-used system (in the P/OSR context, this is often B/X D&D). Though that option is not very appealing because (1) it requires some level of conversion for everyone not using that system and (2) this solution isn’t a solution at all so much as an abnegation of the problem—it says the answer is to simply not write a system-neutral adventure. Another option is to include multiple sets of stats. I’ve taken this road myself with Big Rock Candy Hexcrawl, in which I provided stats for Old-School Essentials, Knights of the Road and Errant (it is technically the first adventure for Errant!). This involves a lot more work than the first option and only slightly reduces the odds someone will need to convert the stats to their system of choice. But there is a third option.

My preference is to outsource stats entirely to the system. I accomplish this by comparing whatever needs stats to something diegetic and let the systems do their work. That probably needs some examples to grok. For instance, maybe I’m describing a new monster, the Razor-toothed Hornbeast. Rather than saying the Hornbeast’s claw attacks deal 1d8+2 hit points worth of damage, which is purely non-diegetic system information that needs to be converted as the Hornbeast travels from system to system. How to convert these types of stats isn’t immediately apparent, though various methods exist depending on the system. But what if you just said “damage as sword”? Now there is an easy reference point for any system that involves swords (which is probably a greater number than the systems with hit points, since swords are a thing that do exist in the real world). So the Hornbeast now does 1d8 damage in Old School Essentials or 4/6/6/6/6/8/10 damage in Troika. “Stats as sword” moves easily between all these systems with their different ways of mechanically depicting how harmful an attack might be. And this neat trick isn’t limited to attacks. You could say that the Hornbeast has defense as leather armor or stats as bugbear.

What is fun about this approach is that it allows the adventure to be somewhat different for different systems. If I say that an enemy has stats as a wolf, for D&D-type games that might imply a fight, though even that isn’t a universal experience, wolves may be tougher or easier combatants in some systems rather than others. But what if you are running the adventure in something like Wanderhome? (Running an OSR-style adventure in a more story game influenced game like Wanderhome may strike you as similar to jamming an N64 game cartridge into a VCR player, but the adventure writer really has no control over how their adventure will be used. Maybe I want to play a bunch of pastoral, anthropomorphic characters in White Plume Mountain or whatever.) In Wanderhome, a wolf might be just another NPC (or a “kith,” in the parlance of Wanderhome). Maybe best practices would be to add more description that to games like D&D would be fluff like saying “stats as a hungry wolf” and now the hypothetical Wanderhome player might be inspired to give this kith the “Starving” trait from the “system” of Wanderhome (also, while “wolf” doesn’t have explicit mechanical meaning in Wanderhome, it does help to personify the character because different animals tend to embody different personalities in anthropomorphic media; see, for instance, the wolf cast as Sheriff of Nottingham in Disney’s Robin Hood).

Speaking of Wanderhome, its creator, Jay Dragon, has a new game currently crowdfunding, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, a game to which I am greatly looking forward. It is fiddling with some new concepts, like drawing from legacy-style board games, that really spark my imagination as it relates to designing RPGs, regardless of the system. It only has a few days left!