So I'm rather fond of the narrative dice system that's in FFG's Edge of the Empire and Genesys system. One of the things I really like about Genesys is that it's a template to really adjust the game to fit the setting you wish to run. It's very primed for solid home brew systems. But it can be a bit chunky in rules overhead.

I'm wanting to inject a little bit of the old school mind set into the newer and chunky system of Genesys/EotE. The vast majority of OSR resources are DND retroclones and other old school games, but I don't see a lot of a retroactive approach to other systems like Genesys. I would really like to have a system that I can take a few players, go over minimal rules explanation, and just get to playing - just to see where it goes.

I don't want to diminish the importance of Session 0, but sometimes I just want to kick the ball and get going. Reminding players the rules over how aiming works, and rules maneuvers, and what they can and can't do in combat, or how how they can spend advantages... let's just play and we can adjudicate the rules and dice as we go. That's really one of the beautiful things about OSR games. Single page character sheets, no need to dedicate a few hours on a character. The GM, in a couple hours before hand, can develop a janky map and start running. Here are some concepts I've found regarding OSR (along with some of my interpretation or notes over each):

Rulings over rules - The ability for a character to describe what they want to do, and not check their character sheet to see if they can do it. Less emphasis on hiding things behind dice rolling and letting things be more apparent.

Combat as war, not sport - Fights aren't guaranteed to be fair or winnable. You don't fight because it's "fun". You fight because you think you'll win.

Fictional positioning matters - While I think this system does a good job of making fictional positioning a factor, it's often at the result of the wonderful dice and not ingenuity. If a PC jumps onto a frag grenade to save the rest of the party, the grenade should probably kill the PC, regardless of what the mechanics/dice might say.

Player skill, not character skill - I will be honest, this is one of those OSR aspects I still struggle with because of -reasons-. But I read a good example of what this would entail. But ultimately, it's that the player is suppose to be greater than just the numbers and abilities on the character sheet.

Game balance is not a priority - I actually think the Genesys/EotE system is good on this. It has a simple set of rules and guidelines for making things easy or difficult. The only real issue is that I find most PC characters to be too "head and shoulders better" than the NPCs, so there's often very little feeling of risk against vitality involved.

Character loss is possible and accepted - You go into a game like this knowing you very likely will die.

Character personalities/backgrounds expected to develop in play - You don't need a lot of background information. The story will be emergent. You aren't starting play as a wizard or some skilled fighter. You're a baker. The town chicken-butcher. Or maybe a krill farmer. As things happen to you, you grow your character.

Sandbox campaigns over linear narratives - I haven't found this system to be very good for sandbox campaigns, and this is where I have a lot of difficulty coming up with something compelling. I think the rule-book expects a solid amount of preparation by the GM. I would love to find a good way to improve on the sandbox approach.

Low-prep but not zero-prep (creating the world just ahead of the players exploring it, or using library content) - Hand-in-hand with the Sandbox campaign. While there is some "library" content in the forge, a lot of it is just settings, and not adventures. Which I understand as this is a pretty theme-agnostic system. But even for EotE, which has been out for a rather long amount of time, there's a dearth of adventures shared online.

Tools to help generate content on the fly - Again, the rules lack these sort of resources. Sure you can have a list of NPCs, etc, but there isn't any random encounter generator to shake up the more stagnate events.

I've taken some approaches that I'm working on, focusing a bit on making combat a little more lethal:

• Characters roll for their characteristics. 2d6, drop the highest.
  https://anydice.com/program/18edb

In the system, a characteristic (Similar to ability scores) of 2 is basically "average", but the mean will still be slightly higher than average. (2.53). I tried searching for a clean method of randomly determining characteristics, where 2 is the average and anything above 4 is nearly non-existent. And there are some more complicated methods to achieve this, but 2d6, drop highest is the most elegant I've come across.

• Wound Threshold is 5 Brawn

System as written: Brawn is basically a combination of strength and constitution in the system. Wound Threshold is similar to hit points, except it counts up. You can suffer wounds beyond your threshold, but when you do you exceed your threshold, you are knocked unconscious and suffer a critical wound. It is normally calculated as 10 Brawn.

Before going on further, there's another element at play, and that's the armor. Armor adds a statistic of "soak" - and basically soak absorbs wounds up to its rating. So if you get hit for 10 wounds, and have a soak of 3, you would incur 7 wounds. You can have some weapons that have a pierce quality but that's not as important for this discussion at this moment.

The reason I bring this up is that, as written, it is not hard to have a character that can shrug off any attack that does less than 10 wounds (which is a pretty substantial hit) for several rounds of combat before they would be killed. I'd prefer there to be more risk of combat without going down to route of performing GM hi-jinks.

• Characters don't fall unconscious when they exceed their wound threshold.

RAW, when you exceed your wound threshold, you suffer a critical and fall unconscious. In order to actually be killed, you need some sort of environmental impact (like falling into lava), or have a pile of critical wounds.

What I would propose is that you don't fall unconscious, but every attack you suffer incurs an additional critical wound.

I think this is actually WORSE than just going unconscious, because healing critical wounds isn't suppose to be an easy thing. It gives a chance for characters to realize they are losing a battle and retreat. When critical wounds start stacking, the grim reaper is pulling up into your proverbial drive way. But as a character, you still have the ability to act.

• Soak never applies to strain.

Strain still has a threshold of 10 Willpower, but this is the non-lethal version of taking someone down. While some effects cause a character to suffer strain and ignores soak, most stun damage is still has soak applied. On top of this, a lot of stun damage weapon qualities require 2 advantages on the attack to take place. And if you don't require 2 advantage, you have to be in short range. I feel like these design decisions end up making non-lethal attacks far less likely to happen. But by having it avoid soak makes non-lethal combat far more viable and interesting. Strain is already pretty dynamic in that it's easiest to incur but also the easiest to recover. It's one of those situations that would also humanize (de-superpower-ify) the action economy a bit more.

Thoughts on this?

Do any of you know of any good tools for generating random encounters, or NPCs? Stuff to introduce on the fly? Tools to minimize preparation?