IC: Esoteric Enterprises
I was in the aforementioned previous EE game for a rather long time and had a great experience in it. I never experienced a crippling/disfiguring injury, I pulled off a number of difficult tasks, and I explored the occult underworld with some key allies/friends.
The ruleset as written is punishing, and I can see your point, it's just...it's an OSR game, the rules are meant to be like this. It's an inherently very different game from something like Urban Shadows or the Buffy/Angel ruleset or WoD.
And, I mean, I love all of those games, honestly--they all do their own things very well, I think. But they're incompatibly different takes on this genre, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's actually a good thing, having various modes and manners of telling stories.
I especially understand your misgivings about the Criminal being the only one with skill increases as they gain experience. In the game I played, which encouraged regular solo play, this was solved by allowing characters to increase their chances at improving skills.
However, in the intended group playstyle of such games, there is simply no real need for anyone other than the Criminal to have high skills. There is an intentional and rigid division of labor in terms of character types. The Criminal is like the Thief of old, being the one with skills no one else had access to, which improved over time. The Mercenary gets an attack bonus, to make every Mercenary inherently better at fighting. This means you'll be joining up with others to increase your chances of survival. That's simply the game.
This game is a truly wonderful, weird instrument for telling stories in this genre, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, it might not be everyone's cup of tea, and that's also fine.
EDIT: I think another super important part of this conversation is that the skills and mechanics of an OSR game do not represent the totality of things that you can or are encouraged to do. You can do all sorts of things that do not require skills or attributes or mechanics. Nothing wrong with that.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:05, Fri 03 June 2022.