Introduction

Wizards With Crossbows was created to be the perfect fantasy roleplaying game—for one particular campaign at one particular table.

Let me explain. A few years ago, I was stuck trying to choose the right ruleset for a new campaign. I knew the type of game I wanted: an open table game about wilderness exploration, filled with danger and excitement, like the one that Ben Robbins described in his famous essays about West Marches. But the right system seemed impossible to find.

I'd started out looking at the “fifth edition” system, which at that time was very popular. There was no question that it was a good game design, with its simple and memorable rules written in crisp natural language. But it wasn't quite the system I was looking for. The character classes had too many special powers for a story about getting lost and starving in the woods, while the monsters and hazards came with a great deal of unnecessary foam padding (which is to say, they weren’t nearly as deadly as they looked).

What about the old “third edition” rules, which I had loved so much in my youth? The rules were gritty, the monsters were deadly, and the detailed skill system would be perfect for outdoor exploration. But I felt burned out on that game and on all its close derivatives. The sheer number of character options and the endless fiddly modifiers made the game unapproachable for beginners, unbalanced for experts, and overwhelming for the poor referee. I never wanted to sit through a tedious four-hour combat again, flipping through rulebooks and counting squares.

Then, there were the many wonderful “Old School Renaissance” games to consider. I admired the way these games used clear procedures to bring structure and clarity to topics like dungeon movement and monster morale. I loved the way they emphasized interaction with the details of the fictional world, which for me is at the very heart of fantasy gaming. But all too often, the rules felt vague or inconsistent, leaving the onus of interpretation on the referee. That’s fine in principle, but I was looking to run a game with a competitive aspect. I needed a system with detailed rules, that would keep things fair for multiple parties—and that wouldn't leave me culpable when beloved characters died!

I kept on looking at different systems, some large and some small, some famous and some obscure. Many had elements I adored, but nothing felt completely right. There are games that promise every sort of experience, in dozens of innovative ways, but I really was looking for a very classic foliage-hacking and dungeon-delving experience: the game I had been promised so many times, but never quite seen. In the end, I realized the only way I could get exactly the system I wanted was to write it myself. I already knew more or less what I was looking for. It was just a matter of writing it down.

The result was the first version of the game you are reading now. It was originally written over about five months of evenings and weekends, utterly consuming my thoughts as I grappled with different variations for every rule. While some sections of the text are derived from existing OGL content, the vast majority has been rewritten and tweaked in one way or another to fix problems and to help meet my goals for the game.

Since then, we have used these rules for over a hundred game sessions. My players have helped find many weaknesses and flaws in the rules, which I have done my best to correct. Doubtless, many more such flaws remain. Nonetheless, playing with these rules has brought me and my table hundreds of hours of pleasure. If nobody else ever uses them, they will have served their purpose well.

Dear reader: I have my doubts that you will want to use these rules exactly as I have written them! After all, they were created by and for the kind of person who is never happy with things until they are just precisely so. But even if not, I hope you will find some intriguing new ideas in this game, as I have in the many games that served as its inspiration.

This game uses the classic “third edition” system as its starting point, to take advantage of its deep mathematical consistency, the wide range of largely compatible OGL products, and my own familiarity with its design. But my goal was to create a game that played very differently at the table. I wanted a game that moved fast and felt alive. I wanted rules that were as simple and memorable as they were extensive and all-encompassing. I wanted to cut back at the thorny metagame of character optimization, which constantly threatens to swallow the real game of exploration and adventure. And I wanted to incorporate some of the best ideas and mechanics that had emerged over the past two decades of RPG development. These, then, are the major things I have changed.

No small circumstantial modifiers. I’ve tried to delete anything that sounded like “Halflings receive a +2 bonus on ranged attack rolls against creatures summoned by third-level spells.” The majority of the time, the number on your character sheet should be the number you roll. The remaining circumstance modifiers in the game are those that flow directly from the fiction and apply equally to all characters—like cover, for example.

No “buff” spells. That is, anything you cast at the start of combat to change your statistics by a couple points, like bless, divine favour, or bardic inspiration. These spells are bad because (a) they waste everyone's time with extra math; (b) they make people spend combat turns on boring actions; (c) they are “boring but optimal” instead of “risky but exciting”; (d) they waste spell slots that could have been used on more interesting spells; (e) they lead to power creep; (f) they promote the “five-minute adventuring day” where the party can't fight effectively without a full load of spells; (g) by existing, they make people afraid to enter combat without them; and (h) their effects are usually difficult to vividly imagine or describe. I have retained only a small number of buff spells with long durations (bless weapon, mage armour) or especially exciting effects (haste).

No counting rounds. I’ve changed the duration of virtually every spells or effect with a duration greater than 1 round and less than 10 minutes. As a referee, I don’t want to waste time counting rounds in the middle of an exciting combat to see if the barbarian has “run out of rage.”

No waiting for your turn. I’ve removed individual initiative and replaced it with a side-based system. In my experience, this single change can reduce the time spent on combat by about 33%. The big benefit is that players who have already decided their action can go first, while those who need time to think can go last. In these rules, the players’ individual initiative rolls do still matter for deciding who gets to act before the monsters in the first round of combat.

No grid. I’ve rewritten the combat rules about movement and positioning to rely on relationships like who’s in front of whom and who’s engaged with whom, instead of who’s in what square. My goal is that the majority of combat encounters can be played without using miniatures and a grid. At my table, we normally rely on verbal descriptions like “I stand behind Jones” and “The nearest orcs are 140 feet away… closing to 80.”

No swift actions, bonus actions, minor actions, immediate actions, partial actions, move-equivalent actions, or other such monstrosities. This game uses only standard actions and free actions, plus a move which can only be used for movement. If it’s too big for a free action, it’s a standard action. Each turn, a player should be thinking, “What shall I do next?” rather than “How can I optimize the use of three different resources?”

No stacked multiclassing or prestige classes. Instead, when you multiclass, each of your classes improves in parallel. Increasing your Barbarian level doesn’t raise the cost for your next level of Wizard. You use the best stat in each category, so if you’re a Wizard 4 / Barbarian 3, then you have the combat stats of a level 3 Barbarian, and the spellcasting of a level 4 Wizard. This change is fundamental: it drastically reduces the need to plan out your character “build” from level 1. Instead, you can spend your XP on the class that currently seems most appealing on the margin.

Simplify character creation. There’s no domain bonuses for clerics, no school specialization for wizards, no bonus spells for a high Intelligence modifier, and no synergy bonuses for skills. Making a first-level character takes long enough without having to make these little fiddly choices and research all their potential long-term consequences.

Simplify feats. I have drastically reduced the number of feats in the game, simplified their prerequisites, and removed almost all of the feat chains. The ideal is that there should be one obvious feat to improve each aspect of a character, rather than many similar feats each improving the same thing in different ways by different amounts.

Simplify spell lists. I have drastically reduced the number of spells per class per level, while keeping the majority of memorable and popular spells. You should be able to look at your new spell list and determine in a few minutes which spell you want to learn, rather than needing to look up dozens of spells to make sure you aren’t missing something better. This change also leaves more room for players to express their creativity through individual spell research, which I treat as a core part of the spellcasting rules.

Simplify spell parameters. I have drastically reduced the amount of tagged metadata on each spell. Instead, you can trust that the majority of spells work in the obvious way. Every spell has a casting time of 1 standard action unless otherwise stated. Every spell has an instantaneous duration unless otherwise stated. Every spell has verbal and somatic components, period. Every witch or wizard spell has a material component, period. Every cleric or druid spell has a divine focus component, period.

Simplify spell descriptions. I have rewritten every single spell description from scratch to be as concise and straightforward as possible. I’ve tried to include the important details while leaving out the ubiquitous paragraphs of commentary about all the things the spell does or doesn’t do in overly specific scenarios. This might mean a little more referee discretion is required in some cases, but in my opinion it’s worth it. To aid the referee in these tricky cases, I’ve added a new mechanic for “bending spells,” where the player can make a Spellcraft check to attempt something slightly outside the usual use case for a spell.

Simplify spell slots. This game uses the system from “fifth edition,” where spell slots can be spent to cast any prepared spell of the appropriate level. This makes life easier for spellcasters, and makes up for the fact they no longer receive bonus spells. This change also effectively removes the whole raison d'être for the Sorcerer class, so I have deleted it.

Simplify bonus types. This game has no competence bonuses, enhancement bonuses, morale bonuses, insight bonuses, luck bonuses, sacred/profane bonuses, resistance bonuses, or any of the other bonus types so obscure I’ve forgotten them. If it comes from a spell or item, it’s a magic bonus and you only get the largest one. If it comes from anything else, then it stacks. My goal is to completely kill the annoying minigame of matching up a dozen items and spells with different keywords to maximize your AC. Just keep the one with the largest number on it, and give the rest to your friends.

Reduce bonus stacking. I have tried to reduce the number of different things that apply bonuses to the same number. For example, in this game, racial skill bonuses don’t stack with normal skill ranks. I want to encourage more “broad” characters, instead of “narrow” ones who are afraid to engage with challenges outside their focus. I also want to make it easier for the referee to predict the range of statistics a character is likely to have at a given level.

Rethink spell scaling and metamagic. Spells don’t scale automatically with the level of the caster. Instead, metamagic can be used to increase the power of their spells while increasing the level of the slot required. Metamagic is available to all spellcasters of third level or higher, with no feats required.

And more! Aside from all of the above, I have made countless adjustments, improvements, simplifications, and additions. I have done my best to correct long-standing balance issues—except the ones that are the most fun.

The rules are not the game.

The rules are an abstract simulation of a living fantasy world. As such, they are inherently incomplete. The rules cannot capture every possible action, circumstance, or interaction. If they could, we would be playing a board game or a computer game. But the beauty of a role-playing game is that it is open-ended, a game of unlimited possibility.

Not only are the rules incomplete, sometimes they are wrong. The rules are designed to produce reasonable outcomes in an ideal typical case. They’re like a physics calculations based on the assumption that a cow is a frictionless sphere—or, more to the point, that an orc is an axis-aligned five-foot cube. The rules are perhaps best seen as guidance to the referee on how to adjudicate the most common situations. It would be a mistake to regard them as absolute laws.

Nonetheless, the rules are there for a reason: to imbue the fantasy world with a consistency and a predictability that resembles the natural laws of reality. The rules provide consequences to actions, and reflect established facts about characters, creatures, and abilities. When in doubt, follow the rules. When they are unclear or incomplete, use the existing rules as the basis for a reasonable judgment.

Referees: it is your duty to overrule the normal procedures if they threaten the sense and believability of the game—but also to explain to the other players why and how you have done so. Be honest, and don’t pretend to be infallible. Simply envision the fictional world, and describe what seems to be true. Never allow yourself to cheat, fudge the dice, change hit points, or otherwise meddle to save the lives of those fated to die. Treat the consistency and believability of the campaign as a sacred charge: for the feeling of life is a fragile thing, that will shatter if not carefully guarded.

The game’s title alludes to the importance of resource management and attrition in a wilderness adventure campaign. Sooner or later, there comes the moment when the spells run out, and the wizards reach for their crossbows.