Scenes from a Merseyside Gaming Emporium

I was moseying around Liverpool city centre today on the way to my office, and decided to head into Forbidden Planet - a chain of shops which sells mostly stuff that I don't think self-respecting adults should be interested in (action figures, Dr. Who DVDs, comics), fantasy and SF books, and - increasingly rarely - RPGs.

Before I went to live in Yokohama, way back in 2002ish, I remember Forbidden Planet's RPG section as being pretty extensive. It had, in large quantities, GURPS, old WoD, Call of Cthulu, MERP, D&D, RuneQuest, Shadowrun, Rifts, and so on, as well as more obscure stuff like Continuum. (Some of the books they had may have been out of print by that stage.) The shelf space was probably about 3 yards wide and a yard and a half high with two or three racks.

Now, there is only about a yard of shelf space on one rack. It contains, to my recollection (I may have missed something):

• Pathfinder stuff (Christ, that rulebook is thick: do people actually read that?)
• D&D 4e stuff, including the Red Box rip-off/revamp which I forget the name of
• Mongoose Traveller (one copy of the core rules, nothing else)
• the AD&D 1st edition core rulebook reprints for the Gygax memorial fund
• Mouse Guard 

I find a couple of things quite surprising about this. First - no World of Darkness. I'm surprised that line has tailed off. Since I don't really play those games I can only speculate, but did the new WoD alienate old fans and fail to replace them, a la Dungeons ampersand Dragons?

Second, almost everything is either D&D or a D&D spin-off. The great alternatives of old - Rolemaster, RuneQuest, etc. - might as well not exist, for all you'd guess. This is doubly true of the other heavyweights like Call of Cthulu, GURPS, Shadowrun, and the like. When people say that it wouldn't matter if D&D went away, I have my doubts. Other games may fill the void, but it seems just as likely that the hobby would simply die as a going concern.

Third, Mouse Guard?

And finally: if you assume that shelf space maps perfectly to the number of players (which it probably doesn't) you would have to conclude that the number of RPG players in Merseyside has declined in the last decade or so by what, 90% or something?

The Weird World of Free Role-Playing Games

Jhkim's list of free RPGs is, I think, the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind (not that I've spent a great deal of time looking for others). It makes for interesting, strange reading - you get a sense, scrolling through it, of just how odd a hobby this is. I mean, just go and look at the list. Look at it. Is your mind boggling? It should be. There are over 500 games on that list.

In some sense I feel obscurely proud of all that creativity (glory by association) but in others I find it faintly depressing. Who, for instance, has ever played ARPLE (the "All-purpose Role Playing Logistics Engine")? Bestial Acts? (It's based on the dramatic theories of Berthold Brecht!) What about Fantasized Adventures, set in the world of Ba'kara? It has 6 arch-duchies.

I'm not poking fun, I hasten to add. Producing a free RPG is more than I've ever done. But don't you get a kind of empty feeling looking at the list and thinking of all the hopes and dreams that those designers might have had? Even though I'd suggest the vast majority of those games (the ones which aren't retroclones, previews of "real" RPGs, or the odd success story like Barbarians of Lemuria) have never been played once by anybody other than the designer and his friends. 

No Abstract Wealth Please; I'm British

I ran a second session of Diaspora yesterday afternoon. I think my overall feeling is that the jury is still out. Some aspects of the game worked well, but others really didn't (although I have to hold up my hands and say that for some reason I felt really off form, like a striker snatching at chances).

What I dislike most about the system is that it abstracts wealth. The way economics works is, you have a "wealth track" which represents how financially secure you are. If it goes down to zero - you're out forever: fiscally dead, reduced to a lifetime of flipping burgers or serving as a debt slave, or whatever. (This in itself is something I strongly dislike, by the way - as long as a PC is alive I want his player thinking about ways to get out of whatever difficulty he is in. That seems like a large percentage of "the game". I recognise that there is a sort of 'story' oriented view that it is interesting to have available the negative consequence of being removed from the narrative permanently, but death seems to me to be the only genuine way of doing this. Though I digress.)

You take financial 'damage' by failing an assets roll. What this boils down to is, to see if you can afford something, you roll against your assets skill. If you miss the required target, you take hits to your wealth track. You can mitigate this damage by taking consequences - from the minor (you are worried about your finances and it might affect your concentration) to the major (you owe a loan shark a shit load of money), but you always get what you want to buy. This is supposed to represent an interesting choice (either don't take a risk and never get anything, or get whatever you want but take a huge risk, potentially involving what is effectively death, in the process), but at least to my gaming style it feels like it takes away something interesting.

That "something interesting" is that, by keeping wealth concrete and not abstract, you prevent players being able to get all the things they want - and this forces them to do interesting things to get the money they need to do that. Wanting better stuff is one of the key seeds from which adventure sprouts, to use a rather shit metaphor. You want a spaceship but don't have the credits? You go out and do whatever it takes to afford one - or you steal one. You want a sword +5 but you don't have the gold? You know there is one at the bottom of that huge abyssal chasm full of hordes of demons - so you go down. Maybe keeping track of gold pieces is a bit bean-counter-ish to some people (I get the sense the Diaspora designers are that kind of person), but it seems to me to be a vital element in giving the game any sort of engine and stopping the players being reactive.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but I have to confess to feeling as if there is something crucial missing when wealth is abstracted in this way.

Big is Beautiful

It's long been my view that TSR-era D&D, taken as a whole, is the most brilliant game there is. No - I don't mean the system is brilliant: it isn't. No sensible person would design a game that way nowadays, knowing what we now know about game design, which has undoubtedly got better since 1974.

D&D's brilliance comes from the fact that, plain and simply, it has the biggest "brain trust" of any game system on the planet. Like Manchester United, who can draw on football playing talent worldwide, or like the USA, which can siphon off the intelligent and talented multitudes from every corner of the globe, D&D has for decades been the biggest game around, and that means that it can draw on more creativity, talent and innovation than any other system.

The perfect example of this is, of course, the OSR and what is going on nowadays on Google+ (mainly, it has to be said, thanks to this guy more than anybody else). There are hundreds of extremely talented, thoughtful, entertaining and clever gamers pooling their ideas daily on teh internets, and the dead giveaway is that almost (though not entirely) all of it feeds into one game - D&D.

Far from seeing this as a bad thing, I embrace it. Perhaps if I wasn't interested in its own peculiar and idosyncratic take on the fantasy genre I would bemoan D&D's dominance. But I love it, so I don't.

D&D, you are the bestest game in the whole wide world.

The Luck (Stat) in the Head

As long-term readers of this blog may know, I spent probably more of my formative years playing Cyberpunk 2020 than any other game. Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of messed up system, very much "of its time", but one of its great qualities is its Luck stat, which is at least as systemically important as any of the others (Intelligence, Reflexes, etc.). Naturally, the tendency for beginner players and GMs is to treat Luck like a dump stat - give it 2 points, the minimum required, and use your points to improve your other skills. This is because Luck in the core rules is pretty useless - you just spend Luck points to get bonuses to rolls. Zzz.

I gradually developed a more expansive approach to Luck - so much so that anybody who treated it like a dump stat would be a fool, a fool I tell you. Luck in my Cyberpunk 2020 games became, essentially, a primitive form of FATE point, giving the players a kind of control over the narrative: if a player asks me something and I don't know the answer and feel like making one up would be arbitrary on my part ("Is there a CCTV camera nearby?", "Is there a stapler in the office?", "Is there a taxi passing by?") I have them roll a d10. If the result is less than their luck, they get the answer they wanted. If not, they don't. I might also use luck if I can't think of a way to resolve something (there's a car crash and the players didn't decide in advance who was in the passenger seat - they all roll a d10 and add their luck and the lowest is the unfortunate one who gets thrown through the windscreen).

I've always liked this approach, because it makes me feel like it aids my objectivity (I'm neither giving players what they want nor deliberately refusing them what they want) and I enjoy the thought that luck is an actual 'thing' that has real-world effects; there's not only an element of luck in the things that you do as a player (rolling dice to see if you succeed), there's also an actual, almost physical phenomenon in the world which shapes the destinies of the people in it. And because it tends only to be used for things that are relatively trivial ("Is there a taxi nearby?") but which could literally be the hinge between life and death, it feels true as an accurate reflection of the rather random nature of life. 

Zonal Combat

What do you say we lighten things up around here and talk about abstract mapping?

Diaspora has an interesting approach to combat, which would work equally well with D&D - indeed any game system you can think of with a bit of tinkering. I've been tinkering with it. It goes something like this:

When combat looks likely, the DM draws a map, and then divides it up into zones. Zones are not a grid, and do not represent strict distance. Rather, they represent a combination of space, ease of travel, view, and time to pass through. Thus, an open field might be one zone, but a nearby cottage with three rooms might be made up of three separate zones, because the time it takes to sprint across the open field is the same as the amount of time it would take to move between rooms cluttered with furniture. Likewise, a thick forest full of boulders might be divided up into three zones, whereas an area of light woodland of the same "size" might just be one zone - representing the speed with which one can move through each area.

With me so far?

If there are borders between zones (a hedge, a wall, a ditch, a door) these have numerical ratings indicating how long it takes to pass through them. So a hedge might have a rating of "2", indicating that it takes 2 "zones" worth of effort to cross over. (You can climb over in the same amount of time it would take to cross 2 zones.) This is called the "pass value". 

Pass values can change if there is a doorway. If there is a doorway, the pass value is 0 - unless the door is shut, in which case it costs "zones" to open it, indicated by a number, called the "opening value". (A wall would cost 2 "zones" to climb over, so it has a pass value of 2, but it has a gate which would cost "1" zone to open, or an opening value of 1. So the hedge has a pass value of 2/1.) 

Each turn, the player gets one zone of movement and an action. The zone of movement might consist in eroding pass value (e.g. getting half way over a hedge with a pass value of 2), or opening a doorway (e.g. eroding an opening value from 1 to 0.) The action would be the usual sort of thing (cast a spell, attack, whatever). Or he can give up the action to make two zones' worth of movement.

A turn is however long it would take to cross a zone. This means that combat can scale up and scale down to suit the situation. A fight taking place in an area covering a square mile of countryside, or taking place in a few rooms in a hotel reception, would follow exactly the same pattern - it's just that the zones would represent different levels of abstraction. The zones in the former would probably be bigger by area on average, and a turn would be longer (maybe two minutes in the former as opposed to around 10 seconds in the latter). But the rules are exactly the same. Only two things would really change. First, the larger the zones and the longer the turns, the more abstract attack rolls (the attack roll would represent a period of maneuvering and trading blows), and the smaller the zones and shorter the turns, the less abstract attack rolls would become (the attack roll would represent literal single attacks). The other thing that would change would be pass value. A hedge separating two open fields, each about 100 square yards and represented by a zone each, would perhaps have to have a higher pass value than a hedge separating two small gardens of 10 square yards each.

Example:

Here, the open spaces are fields and easier to cross than the woodland areas, so their zones are spatially larger. The stream and hedges have a PV (pass value) of 2. The barn in the middle is its own zone, full of bales of hay. Red lines indicate zonal boundaries; green lines are hedges; blue is the stream; the black line is a road.

Creation by Question

I ran a first session of Diaspora today; it was entirely comprised of setting- and character generation, which went well - so far, the system looks interesting, and I can't wait to get it started and see how it works in practice.

What struck me while playing is that it's important for lots of questions to be asked during the game. That sounds like a banal observation, but it isn't: I'm not talking about the necessary sort of questions that players have to ask ("Where is the exit?" "What are the orcs carrying?" etc.) but questions which spur the questionee to think, and thereby create.

For instance, I was describing one of the worlds, in one of the systems we were creating, as being a water world, populated by Melnibonean-esque decadent epicureans. One of the players cut in, "Do they live on the surface in big floating cities, or under the water, or what?" And I was forced to think, "Well, where do they live?" And in answering the question more detail was added to the setting: creation by question in action.

There is a lot of power in this, and it applies not just during shared setting-creation type games like Diaspora: it applies in any kind of game - I'm reminded of a Yoon-Suin session I ran online in which one of the players asked whether hijras existed, and I had to think, "Well, do they?" The answer was yes, and another detail was added to the world. But it just as frequently happens during character generation too: "My character is about six feet, built like a brick-shit house, and he's carrying a glaive." "What does the glaive look like?" "Well....It's engraved with runic patterns." "What do they mean?" "Er...he doesn't know, it's a family heirloom and it's a mystery." And so on: questions have power.

I think this comes from the fact that, like using random generators, questions spur creativity through restricting the options. It is the same adage that I've used before: give a man a paper and pencil and say "write a story" and he'll take 10 times as long to come up with something than he would if you'd said "write a story about a murder", and it'll probably be 10 times less interesting. Likewise, saying to somebody "Come up with a world" is a thoroughly different proposition to saying to him: "What is the geography of your world like? Is there a desert? What kind of people live there? Are they warlike? Do they do drugs?" By restricting his creativity, you give it legs.

D&D: Enabling Amorality Since 1974

I played in Patrick's weekly LOTFP game on Wednesday. (There's an actual play here.) The highlight of the night was probably Patrick's off-the-cuff "Don't you die on me, man!" rule: if you are willing to shout "Don't you die on me, man!" at the top of your voice while stabilising somebody on negative hit points, you automatically succeed. It only works if you play in public, though.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was amorality, and how D&D in particular (but role playing games in general) facilitate it. It really was remarkable how, literally within 10 minutes of joining the game, my character had conspired to loot a crypt, burgle a church, and murder an innocent old woman in cold blood for the crime of being a witness to our theft - and that such goings-on were treated as an almost mundane event within the context of the game (although the DM, to his credit, did disapprove of our awful behaviour regarding the old woman). That could almost be a motto for D&D, I think: the mundanity of amorality.

Let me make a few things clear before I proceed: first, I don't think this is a bad thing. Secondly, I'm well aware that D&D doesn't have to be played this way, often isn't, and perhaps shouldn't. And thirdly, I use the term "amorality" advisedly - what I am talking about is not so much evil or badness but merely the absence of ethical thought: a total deliberate abandonment of moral sentiments, almost nihilistic in its scope.

D&D enables amoral behaviour: that is my contention. It allows you to give voice and effect to actions and beliefs that you would never exercise in real life - in other words, to give free reign to your id without that pesky super-ego getting in the way. In this respect it is rather like Grand Theft Auto, or Grand Theft Auto is rather like D&D: it is a sandbox in which being bad has no real consequence, and your inner demons can come out and play.

There are, however, limits. There are behaviours and beliefs that are not even acceptable to air within the context of a game of D&D (probably rightly, in my opinion); there are lines that oughtn't to be crossed. And the laws of the jungle - a kind of quid pro quo altruism - intervenes too: players help each other in the hope and expectation the favour will be returned. So, despite the fact that my character partook in the murder of an old woman without a second thought, he was kind to the lantern-girl he hired to join the party in entering the dungeon, and assigned one of his dogs to protect her. When the idiotic fighter (complete with irritating 17-year-old player) ran off and fell down a pit trap, the rest of us helped him out because he'd sacrificed material gain in order to find us healing earlier that day. There are moral rules, of a kind.

This suggests that morality enters D&D alongside the "real world", when that intervenes. Player-characters tend to behave better towards one another than to NPCs, because what happens to them matters in the real world: they have players who are real people and who are really invested in them. And likewise, player-characters tend to behave well towards in-game children and animals, because cruelty to children and animals is so utterly unacceptable in our society that it cannot be seen as anything other than abhorrent and evil even in the context of make-believe. (Rightly, I might add.) This is also true "at the margins": rape and torture are likewise so unacceptable in our society that they can generally only be seen as evil in-game, again probably rightly.

Otherwise, all bets are usually off. As I said, I don't particularly see this as a bad thing: it is probably a sign of good mental health that you are able to let your id loose and reign it in at will. The capacity to switch off one's own capacity for moral thought is probably an indication that, otherwise, one's moral compass points in the right direction.

If this entry has been somewhat rambling, it is because it's been 3 weeks since I blogged, and my blogging muscles are atrophied. Bear with me: I'm like a footballer returning from a hamstring injury, or a Carlos Tevez-esque lay-off - I can't quite do the full 90 minutes yet, and need a 60th-minute substitution.

GHOST/ECHO, Dice Strategy and Negotiation

We spent the evening playing a one-shot of GHOST/ECHO. (This was an episode in my group's shared world, which we have given the banal but accurate description "To The Stars", and which I have posted about here and Patrick has posted about here.) We had fun with it and came up with something that was serious and ridiculous in equal measure, in fitting with the setting as a whole. I think I can characterise my group's style as being full of great, sometimes profound, setting ideas but unable to take actual play very seriously at all. I think that combination works well.

In any case, GHOST/ECHO is a minimalist game par excellence - it fits on two sides of A4 paper, on which nary a centimetre is wasted, and it has only one, simple mechanic, which can be boiled down as follows:

If you want to do something in any kind of situation of conflict, challenge, or difficulty, roll 2d6. Then assign one die to the "danger" and one die to the "goal". High is good and low is bad. So if you get 6 and 5, you could assign the 6 to the "danger" (meaning you escape harm) and the 5 to the "goal" (meaning you succeed); if you get 3 and 4 you can assign the 3 to the danger (meaning you take some harm and the danger remains) and 4 to the "goal" (meaning you have a partial success), and so on. It gets most interesting when you get 6 and 1, obviously.

What I like about this is that it forces you to make choices - to strategize - with your dice rolls. In some situations you might want to sacrifice success to escape harm, whereas in others you might want to succeed so much that you take whatever harm is coming your way. You have to be tactical with your luck. I like that mixture of decision-making and randomness. You can't govern the dice results and they force you to make tough choices, but you do get a choice.

Because it's so abstract, it also forces you to make everything up as you go along. "Harm" and "success" can mean almost anything you want to construe them to mean, and will probably end up being dictated by GM fiat - although the players can offer their own suggestions and perhaps negotiate. This makes the game a bit like what I imagine MAR Barker's Perfected Games Rules to have operated like in practice, though of course in a slightly more complicated fashion. Yet more evidence for the fact that if you scratch a story-gamer you will find an Old School Revivalist and vice versa - they just don't know it yet.

The game itself encourages a make-it-up-as-you-go-along, by having only the most thinly described implicit setting, which is essentially constructed of keywords that you give your own meanings to. Whether you appreciate this or not is, of course, a matter of "YMMV" - as I believe the kids put it. We tend to roll with that sort of thing because we're laid back about rules and fiat, but I understand not everybody necessarily feels that way.

In any case, it's free and takes about 2 minutes to read. Can't say fairer than that, now, can you?

Everything is Dolphins

Two links for your amusement and edification. The first is Everything is Dolphins, a homebrew RPG in which, well, everything is dolphins. It is best described by its "discoverer":

Everything is Dolphins occupies a curious place. While it is clearly the work of someone new to the design of role-playing games, it also displays the some of the sophisticated sensibilites one would expect from an old hand. Rather than the excess of complexity that clutters most freshman efforts, Everything is Dolphins offers concision and simplicity. The author gives few examples to illustrate how to use the system and no sample adventure, leaving much to the player’s imagination (and effort). With its bare bones, lacunae, and undeniable beauty, Everything is Dolphins is the role-playing game analogue of outsider art.

That discoverer is the owner of PlaGMaDA, the Player Generated Map and Document Archive, whose "mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space":

The Archive will solicit, collect, describe, and publicly display these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right.  By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations.

A laudable goal. Take a look at the Archive. You'll not be disappointed.

Generic = Bland

This thread provides interesting food for thought for someone such as me; I'm not old by any means, but I'm getting older, and I'm also busy. Nowadays, the prospect of picking up a 200 (or more likely 400) page-long tome of new rules fills me with dread and boredom rather than excitement, and I find that my attention span is only a fraction of what it used to be. It doesn't help that most RPG rule books are full of extraneous crap that no sane person could possibly want to read, like page after page of "game fiction" with no purpose other than exercising the game designers' frustrated-novelist demons, either.

So the thought has occurred to me: isn't it easier to just give up on learning new systems and pick one generic system which will allow you to run anything?

And yet I'm obviously not alone in finding generic/universal systems unutterably bland and dull. Whether it's GURPS, d20 Modern, Savage Worlds, or whatever else, something about a generic system leeches all the enjoyment out of gaming for me. The process ceases to feel immersive and begins to feel increasingly gamey in the worst sense, almost like a lesser simulacra of what role-playing is: all the flavour disappears.

I'm pretty sure this is to do with authorial voice and authorial intent. Because, while I might despise the kind of ridiculous fiction which appears in some game books, it can't be ignored that there is something personal in the best RPG systems. OD&D is not just a fantasy role playing game - it's a fantasy role playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Pendragon is not just a game about Arthurian romance - it's a game about Arthurian romance created by Greg Stafford. Apocalypse World is not just a game about the post-apocalypse - it's a game about the post-apocalypse created by Vincent Baker. Cyberpunk 2020 is not just a game about cyberpunk roleplaying - it's a game about cyberpunk roleplaying created by Mike Pondsmith. (I could go on, but you get my drift, I think.) Those games and, I would submit, most games that really work, contain something personal of the author in them - something that communicates passion, mood, emotion and personality above and beyond merely being a ruleset. They come from something the designer loved, not something the designer thought would fulfil a certain function.

Pretty much by definition, then, I feel, generic rulesets will lack the crucial element of authorial personality. They will by necessity be an exercise in engineering rather than flavour, because they are created not from the heart but the brain, and this will inevitably lead to them feeling dry. They may be exquisitely designed. But they won't contain any spirit, or passion - and they will inevitably tend to dullness.

(Naturally, there is one exception to this: Risus. But Risus always defies categorisation.)

Warhammer FRP 2nd Edition: What D&D 3.x Should Have Been

I'm enjoying running my Warhammer FRP PBEM game. Proceedings have been amusingly chaotic and the party members have an interesting tendency to attack everything on sight, which should prove entertaining in the long term.

I'm also enjoying the system, which is rare for me - generally speaking my philosophy on system is "Who gives a shit so long as you have motivated players and good characters, and we're not playing Blue Rose?" But WFRP really scratches that itch I have for realistic, gritty, low-fantasy nastiness, plus mutants, chaos gods and unreliable firearms.

The best thing about WFRP is the combat, which is both tactically fun but also pretty authentic in feel - the characters seem fragile in the same way that real people are fragile, and armour and shields are often the difference between life and death. It's a far cry from the weird D&D world of hit points, armour class and abstract mechanics - which is part of the charm, of course, but just not a proper fit for so many styles of gaming.

What interests me most about WFRP is that the combat is at least broadly similar to D&D 3.x's - everything is based on full and half actions, swift actions, free actions, etc. - but the difference is that WFRP's system just works, whereas I never felt D&D 3.x's did. Attacks of Opportunity were always annoying and fiddly; grappling and unarmed combat generally was a mess. Worse, the obsession with the tactical minutiae of combat never sat right with the level of abstraction at which the traditional mechanics existed - combat itself was exceptionally detailed tactically, but at the point at which hits and damage (the meat and bones) came into play, it suddenly morphed into something very simplistic. By contrast, WFRP combat is always at the same level of abstraction and the same level of detail, whether you're working out what actions exactly your character can do this round, or working out where he's been hurt and how badly. More importantly, its combat isn't likely to be ruined by overly powerful magic-users doing everything, or by killer class-combination "builds" dreamed up by annoying adolescent boys with nothing better to do with their time and posted on the internet.

WFRP's system is so robust and fun, in fact, that I think it would work perfectly for historical gaming, especially around the period which the Warhammer world is roughly analagous to. I can just imagine a game set in the Italian Wars, or during the Conquest of Mexico, or during the zenith of the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Byzantium, perhaps.

The Imp of the Perverse

I've been more-or-less using BECMI D&D as my default for Yoon-suin, but the contrarian, obscurantist part of me (which is a rather big part) keeps wanting to use something Unusual. Candidates include:

• The oft-overlooked and almost entirely unknown Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System, with its Sword & Sorcery vibe and colour-coded charts. Advantages: atmosphere, ease of use, can probably be included whole with whatever pdf I put out without invoking the Dark God, Litigation. Disadvantage: Obscure.
  
• Advanced Fighting Fantasy, the by-all-accounts-horribly-broken, but incredibly rules-lite (Tunnels & Trolls eat your heart out) system of my youth. Advantages: Almost criminally easy to use and learn, endearing disregard for realism, cool Dark British Fantasy vibes lurking somewhere beneath the innocent exterior. Disadvantages: Legally dubious, would require extensive rule-fiddling.
• Risus, the Anything RPG, because I love it so. Advantages: Easy to use, simple, free to use. Disadvantage: Has 'humourous' connotations I don't necessarily want.
• Some sort of hack of Amber Diceless, which is my new obsession after I finally started reading the copy I've owned for about 16 years. Not a serious option, but hey.
• Swords & Wizardry, which I'm sure you all know. Advantages: Easy and simple, free to use, familiar to 95% of role players. Disadvantage: A bit too fashionable for my obscurantist tastes.
  

I probably will end up sticking with BECMI. But the Imp of the Perverse is calling me...