So You Want to GM What's OLD is NEW

I’ve been GMing What’s OLD is NEW for a while, about 5 years at time of writing, and I came to it from a background of playing and GMing the world’s most popular fantasy TTRPG, the one with the dragons and the dungeons and stuff.

If you are also coming from there, or perhaps any number of other TTRPGs, I think you might find this article useful, as it compiles my learnings from my last 5 years GMing WOiN into the things I wish I had known when I started out.

Obviously beyond this there’s basic GMing advice like to be a fan of your players that you should keep in mind when GMing as well, but hopefully this post will help with things specific to running WOiN.

This post will probably be pretty eclectic, and not have a proper through-line like a lot of my other articles do, but I hope it’s useful.

Starter Characters

Starter characters in WOiN have a pretty well-defined level of experience compared to the most popular fantasy TTRPG. In that game, first level characters can be anything from a promising mud farmer to an established hero, all depending on how the GM chooses to flavor things and what backstories the players write for themselves.

In WOiN the lifepath system and the guidelines given for skill ranks help with understanding what a starter character is like much better.

A default starting character in WOiN is grade 5, which averages 27 years for most characters, though final age can vary depending on heritage. While especially dedicated characters will be able to get their skills up to 6 or so, most characters will have their primary skill around rank 3, which is considered “skilled”, and is normal for an average professional in that skill.

What this means is that the average starter character has had a childhood, a basic education or apprenticeship, and a couple years of on-the-job experience that make them an unexceptional member of their trade. Gifted individuals may rate an expert in their narrow field but be lacking in breadth of understanding of other skills as a result, and on the other end you may also extend the length of time a career takes to make your character older. This would mean that the character was for their life a somewhat uninspired but average character within their profession.

Because of the use of d6s instead of a single d20 to resolve skill checks, which results in a bell curve where average results are more likely than extremes, this actually means that WOiN starter characters will be more consistently skilled at their best skills than an equivalent character in the world’s most popular fantasy TTRPG, but outside of their profession they will also be less likely to have breakout success in something they don’t have skill with unless they spend significant amounts of LUC. This increased level of consistency with tasks in a character’s wheelhouse and the higher number of abilities granted by 5 grades compared to 1 character level also makes it quite acceptable to remain at starter grade for a couple sessions, rather than what seems like a common habit of GMs to take level 1 characters and level them up to 2 after the first session, or to just start at level 3 when people get interesting abilities.

The career system in WOiN lends itself very well to this level of skill and will give backgrounds which match it. Characters who take a single career following an origin which supports it will generally be narrow specialists, while characters with a little more variety in their career show the character moving around in focus through time. A Wizard’s Apprentice who takes four grades of Mage will be very different from a Commoner who goes into Loremaster into Alchemist x2 into Mage, even though both are called a Mage in their descriptor.

This concept of the power level and scale of characters is important to take into account as the GM designing adventures, because it means that for starter characters, the threats and impacts that are encountered should generally be of a difficulty appropriate to average professionals. The players will be unexceptional at the start of the game, and that’s OK.

Because of how XP Rewards work, players who start at this grade will also increase in power fairly quickly, as power is pretty directly correlated to max die pool, which grows quickly at early grades and is discussed in more depth in XP Rewards.

Building Starter Characters

If you have anyone who is playing WOiN for the first time, then it’s important to set expectations for what a starter character is like (see Starter Characters, above), and to ensure that the character that comes to the table has been built well enough to get the spotlight every good player deserves.

I recommend that for someone’s very first character, you as the GM build it for them unless they have thoroughly read the book. Get together with them in a call with a screen share, or on a couch together with the book and a character sheet, and build it in front of them, asking them for guidance at every step of the way, and explaining your reasoning for making the choices you do.

Don’t make the mistake I did and have the whole group making characters together, with you watching over their shoulders. This is how I got a primary fighter in my game to arrive at the first encounter with no skill in his weapon.

But whether you’re making the character for them or not, there are some guidelines that you should follow for someone’s first character (though more experienced players can break these guidelines later if they wish). Importantly though, these guidelines apply to anyone who is playing WOiN for the first time, regardless of how much experience they have with other TTRPGs.

The character has a shtick; maybe they’re suave, or a mechanic, or have knowledge of secret histories and forbidden magics, or maybe they’re really handy with a set of lockpicks. Think about the primary rolls which would be made for the shtick (maybe CHA negotiation and CHA bluffing for being suave, LOG engineering and DEX engineering for a mechanic, etc.). In the final character, at least one of these should be rolling at their max die pool, which is 5d6 for basic starter characters, just based on the attribute and skill - no equipment bonuses. Secondary skills for your shtick should probably roll at 4d6 without equipment bonuses.
If your game will have any combat at all, the character should have at least one attack that rolls at their max die pool. Any less than this and characters will feel useless in combat, which isn’t fun for anyone. This still applies to casters too! Psionics and magic careers both offer exploits which allow a character to make attacks in combat, and these should probably be rolling at the max die pool! For someone’s first character, even if they’re a utility mage, I recommend requiring that they take an exploit which allows them to inflict damage or debilitating conditions during combat.
Your characters should have their relevant defenses at 14 or higher. For non-casters, at least their melee and ranged defenses should be at least 14, but ideally they will pick either their mental or vital defense and bump that up to 14 as well. For a caster, they should likely have their ranged and mental defenses at 14, and ideally choose either melee or vital to be high as well. Characters with several defenses lower than 14 will be hit all the time in combat.
Even for campaigns without combat, characters should likely put some effort into increasing their mental and vital defenses in order to deal with persuasion, poison, and disease.
Armor skills are unnecessary to wear armor, but skill in medium or heavy armor can reduce the defense penalties they impose, and the bonus to SOAK high quality armor gives only applies if you have enough skill with that type of armor. This means most starter characters probably won’t have skill in armor, and that’s OK. They’ll get it later.

XP Rewards

A mistake I often see made is giving out XP only for combat encounters. The book kinda addresses this with the title of a subsection in Advancement, “Defeating Enemies and Overcoming Challenges”, but I don’t think that’s explicit enough. Give your players non-combat XP.

The reward system is based on giving fractions or multiples of the players' current grade in XP to them for overcoming challenges, based on how hard the challenge ended up being for the players to overcome. Things they just breezed through should give either no XP or half their grade rounding down, and things that were challenging should give XP equal to their grade, with especially hard things giving higher multiples.

Just like in combat, this is done more or less by vibes and how the encounter actually went, but as a vague guideline I would consider an extended task with a difficulty based on the players’ max die pool to probably be a Medium challenge.

Specifically, a Difficult [16] DC is approximately a 50/50 chance of success with a 5d6 check, the max die pool of starter characters, so a Difficult [16] extended task is likely to be a Medium challenge.

This may seem like overall there’s approximately a 50/50 chance of success for the task, and that seems a little harsh for a Medium challenge, but in reality it’s usually not that bad since players usually have something up their sleeves to give themselves circumstance bonuses, from luck dice to traits to consumables like herbs and drugs, or exploits granted by careers and temporary buffs.

This means that social encounters, puzzles, skill tests, and other situations should grant XP, and that means your characters will be getting quite a bit.

Combine this with the suggestion that you give your characters XP for one medium encounter for each “story milestone,” which it’s recommended be about one per session, and it’s reasonably likely that your characters will be getting 3-5x their grade in XP per session.

This means that on average, your players will be getting a new career grade every three sessions or so, and using the extra XP beyond the about 12x current grade (that is, 10 x the target grade XP) needed for that from those sessions on incremental advances.

Character Growth

While this may seem very fast and you may be tempted to slow it down if you prefer slower-rolling campaigns, it’s important to know how power grows in WOiN. Character power does not grow by the same amount for every grade. The actual power of characters is more or less determined by their max die pool, which grows quickly at first, but slows down drastically as characters progress.

This effectively gives players a fast growth curve as they grow into their characters, but then stops the explosive growth of power to give the GM space to tell the story they want at the scale they want it once those early grades are over.

The second part to growth of characters is that while the max die pool grows more slowly as characters rank up, the rate at which they gain new exploits remains constant. This helps with making sure players always feel like their characters are growing, and giving them new tricks to pull as the game goes on, without massively increasing their overall power level.

The third part of character advancement that changes with grade is how easy it is to acquire brand new skills. The number of sessions required to get a new grade will remain constant throughout your game, but the cost of a few ranks in a brand new skill relative to the XP gained per encounter will decrease as the game goes on. That means that higher grade characters will be able to branch out to new skills more easily and make more rounded characters. I would encourage players to go for this, and I recommend that you as a GM allow the players to buy these at any time except during active combat.

New skills, careers, and exploits bought during play with XP is generally understood to signify the first notable application of training or study the character has been undertaking off-screen for some time, so it can be appropriate for those to be “brought out” at any time. If you allow purchasing skills during play, allow your players to purchase them in response to a particular action they are trying to take. If they try to chat someone up at a club and you ask for a CHA roll, allow them to say that their character has been practicing telling jokes and to buy a few ranks of carousing before making the roll.

One consequence of this slow growth of the max die pool once you’re at grade 8 or higher is that the expected lifetime of threats is much longer than in the world’s most popular fantasy TTRPG. In that game if you wanted a Hydra to appear in the game you could look it up in your bestiary and see what challenge it poses. You might have it as a challenging boss monster for characters of level 5-6, then appear again as a standard encounter at level 8, and again as a minion for some other boss at level 10 or 12. Assuming an average of 3-4 sessions per level, that only accounts for around 20 sessions for a hydra to go from a boss monster to a minion. This means that if you want a hydra to be a challenge for your characters, you really only get one or two shots at most if you don’t want your monster variety to take a hit, and before long these creatures won’t be anything your characters care about at all.

In WOiN, since the max die pool doesn’t scale linearly, they can remain a threat for a much longer period of time, allowing them to establish themselves as threatening creatures, but to remain threatening even if you’ve faced them before. Hydras are max die pool 11d6, which means they could be introduced as boss monsters as early as grade 11 when the players have an MDP of 8d6, but they don’t cease to be a deadly boss monster until grade 15, over 12 sessions later. And at that point, they don’t cease to be a threat, instead they may become an appropriate monster to be leading a group of other lesser threats, or to appear in a pair in a den, still offering a deadly challenge to the party. Hydras don’t cease to be a serious threat on their own to the players until grade 20, nearly 30 sessions after they first became a viable opponent, at which point they still stand a serious chance of killing a player if they face off 1:1. They aren’t degraded to minion status until grade 33, nearly 70 sessions after they were first introduced.

The impact of this is that even without putting effort into customizing monsters using the wide range of tools provided in the SRD for such a purpose, you can build opponents with a strong sense of cohesion who remain dangerous threats to the party for enough time to be narratively relevant, instead of having to move to a “monster-of-the-week” style game where once you’ve seen a given type of monster, you can generally know you’ll never face it again except as a weak opponent in team fights or in potentially unbalanced random encounters.

Non-XP Rewards

The book really doesn’t give recommendations for many non-xp rewards, just leaving it up to the GM. I don’t think this is particularly helpful.

The one thing that the book does give a recommendation on, it relegates to a sidebar that would be easy to miss because it’s nowhere near the section on advancement. That is REPUTATION as reward. The book recommends that the party get one point of REP when they complete an adventure, as long as the deeds in the adventure are likely to get out, and consider giving an additional point in the middle of the adventure if the party does something particularly spectacular. I think this is an important suggestion that’s too easy to overlook, so I’m including it here, even though the book is pretty explicit.

The closest thing that the book contains to a monetary guideline for player rewards is the Example NPC Wages table, which shows how much a given character would earn per month and have on hand in savings, and how much they would carry.

Alternatively, PCs can earn a monthly wage by generating a starting wealth roll just like at the start of the game, although given that this number is usually pretty low compared to the different NPC wages listed, I assume that the PC’s monthly wage includes room and board appropriate to their status for free.

You could use this as a guideline for encounters, assuming that adventurer has a similar sort of income to various other professions, or based on their potential wealth rolls, and split that up based on how many encounters you expect to run per in-game month.

I don’t think this is a great way to go though, if for no other reason than the pace of advancement has more to do with how much money the players will be using than the pace of time. Sure, the cost of rations and lodging is higher in WOiN than many other games, enough to make it actually a logistical concern for games built around that, but in those cases you will likely be much more careful with non-xp rewards than in most games.

I suggest giving non-xp rewards in proportion to the intended challenge of an encounter that the party deals with. Using the max die pool of creatures, I recommend giving twice the cube of the median MDP of an encounter. So an encounter with a few mdp 4 goblins and an mdp 6 goblin shaman might give about 120 gp, including saleable equipment and cash, some mdp 6 bandits around 425gp in stolen goods and equipment, while an mdp 15 fire dragon might have 6750gp in minor magic items and saleable alchemically active body parts.

For some monsters they may also have a home base that’s significantly harder to go after, and I recommend that such a location hold about 20x the amount of goods, if the party can carry it all, and remember extradimensional bags aren’t basic equipment! That would mean the same bandits would have almost 10k in camp equipment, food, stolen goods, armor, weapons, etc., and that the dragon’s horde would contain 135k gp in money, art objects, magical items, etc.

If the party is able to get ahold of non-liquid assets from such an encounter, probably multiply the cost by another 10x and use the stronghold or 1000x and use the starship construction rules to spend most of it. For an NPC this should be approximately equal to their yearly salary (or in the case of starships well beyond that, but starships are expensive), or for an organization use its REP pool squared as its MDP. Probably increase this further in later tech levels.

Along with monetary rewards (or quasi-monetary rewards like saleable alchemical components harvested from magical creatures), I recommend giving out various types of unique equipment to the party.

We’ll start with consumables. Try to give consumables, and don’t worry about them being too powerful for the most part. If they’re mostly unique that can make them hard to sell since you’d have to find a buyer, and the next step is to look to create moments where they feel impactful.

Try to keep a list of particularly cinematic consumables that the party has, and keep a log of how long it’s been since the party acquired them, and how many they have. If the party has several of the item, try to create a moment where one of them is the perfect solution to a problem within a session or two, in order to show off the power of the item.

Then, try to make sure that old consumable items the party has almost forgotten about get a perfect moment to shine, and if they don’t remember that they have it, maybe offer up a chance to roll a LOG check to remember it.

The consumables you give could be simple things like the ones available in the books as herbs or drugs, but you should feel free to think of other things that are out of the box, including scrolls or wands with magical effects you invent, grenades (see my homebrew grenades for how I run those), potions, stim packs, temporary cybernetics, etc.

The other thing to consider giving is non-consumable equipment. There’s the obvious form that the equipment can come in, as higher quality versions of equipment the party has or wants, but another type of equipment I like to hand out are ones with unique attacks with powerful effects that won’t have long-term consequences on the game’s balance.

You can do this by making a piece of equipment which has an attack with a fixed die pool that’s not based on player attributes. For example, if you give the players access to an item with a 1/day 7d6 magical attack that inflicts the Restrained condition, in the early game you can count on the players being able to consistently use this to great effect, but because that die pool is constant, the magic item will cease to be particularly useful to the party by the time their MDP gets to 8 or 9d6.

If you allow player skill to affect these items that can also affect how the item scales over time as well. If that same 7d6 magical attack benefits from the transformation skill and the item is Exceptional quality, then until the party has a 7d6 MDP it will be a powerful weapon. But once the MDP continues past that it will simply become another tool in their toolbox that fits at their current power level until they reach an MDP of 11d6 or higher, because they can benefit from the +2d6 equipment bonus as long as they have a transformation pool of at least 2d6.

This way that the equipment can grow with player skill and MDP also offers a great way to run ancestral weapons. Simply make the ancestral weapon of exceedingly high quality, likely Mastercraft or Artisinal, which allows the weapon to only be a little better than a regular weapon in the hands of the average wielder, but it will continue to grow with its owner until they reach 6 or 10 points in the skill, or 15 if you choose to make the weapon Legendary.

The second recommendation I have for such weapons is to make it so that if it has enchantments, lock them behind a required skill level, to make the weapon’s growth be more than just attack bonuses.

Encounter Design

When building encounters, there’s some baseline guidance that’s available from Morrus on the forums, and it’s pretty good. I’ll summarize here in case that link goes dead.

The monsters know what they’re doing and use all the same tactics the players do (and they should be using a lot)
Try to approximately balance MDP total on both sides of a combat (4 grade 5 PCs means 20d6 total MDP, so try for a similar amount on the enemy’s side in general)
Monsters with MDP less than the party basically don’t count unless they’ve got things crazy stack in their favor. Use them if you want the players to feel awesome.
Monsters with MDP+1 is a medium difficulty monster, the PCs will probably use some limited resources like LUC or consumables, but they won’t die.
Monsters with MDP+2 are difficult. Generally use them as a leader along with some weaker monsters.
Monsters with MDP+3 are deadly. Either use as a single opponent if it’s real big, or throw in monsters with equal or lower MDP than the party around it.

To further adjust this beyond simply saying tactics can throw this out of balance, consider action economy. Creatures with MDP lower than the party generally don’t matter much to the action economy as their attacks are unlikely to do anything at all and all they will do is delay the party from taking down the real threats, but for creatures with a high MDP, action economy will matter more, as they will usually have fewer actions than the party.

I suggest using LUC dice for them on gaining extra actions to help balance this, and consider how larger monsters affect this as well. For each size category a creature is above Large, they get one additional action per turn, offset into different parts of the initiative order. Use this to allow single large creatures to actually be something of a threat to the party.

The purpose of this is similar to legendary actions, legendary resistances, and lair actions in the world’s most popular fantasy TTRPG, which also uses these to help alleviate issues with action economy when the party faces a single opponent.

Beyond just considering the power of monsters to include in a fight though, also think about the battleground that fights take place on. In general, you should ensure that both sides have access to cover, unless it’s an ambush situation. Ranged weapons are extremely powerful in WOiN, and you should make use of them in nearly every combat. Cover helps with making sure that they don’t entirely dominate the action.

I’d also like to share some quasi-official errata that was shared by Morrus in the EN Publishing Discord about the Getting Pinned Down rule, which is a little confusingly written.

The intention is that for each turn a ranged character continues to fire at an opponent, they will get an additional +1d6 to ranged attacks against the target until they move at least 10’ in one round. If the attacker ever goes a full around without attacking the target, they lose all accrued bonuses. Some versions of the description of this rule make reference to the idea of “chipping away at cover”, but this is not intended to be read as rules text, namely you can pin down someone not in cover, and the pinned down bonus is not capped at the cover penalty (also cover penalties don’t stack between different forms of cover officially). This also means that a character can take a move action to become blocked for a round to prevent all ranged attacks against them to reset that bonus, assuming that the cover they are using permits becoming blocked.

In addition to cover, I recommend that every encounter has at least one stunt area. These are always cool when they’re used, and I don’t use them enough. I’ve set a personal goal to use one in every combat I run, and I think you should too. Also tell your players about stunt areas! I recommend doing so explicitly by saying “this is a stunt area” the first few times, but as time goes on do it just by calling a little attention to it in your description of a location, or by having an enemy use it.

Beyond just stunt areas, try using different environmental tags too. There’s a number of them listed in the book, but you can invent more if they’re appropriate to your situation. Not every combat will have a varying environment, but I recommend that you try to have at least some variation in environments in every setpiece encounter. But beyond just variation within an encounter, don’t be afraid to just apply an environmental tag to an entire encounter! This won’t add variety within the encounter, but it will add variety in the longer scope of your game. Have some fights in the rain, or in the dark, or in the hazy smoke of a forest fire that’s floated over the town.

Difficult terrain is also listed as an environment tag, and I do recommend you include some in your encounters, but it’s also the most boring kind of environment tag. I would say use it alone sparingly, unless you’re specifically trying to show off a player ability like a Ranger or Sylvan Elf’s ability to ignore difficult terrain caused by thick plant growth.

The other thing I’d recommend is to try and include some verticality in your encounters. High ground is important to both melee and ranged characters in WOiN, and circumstance bonuses are how one side gets an edge over the other side in this game. If neither side can get any circumstance bonuses and both sides have appropriately high defenses and soak scores, things are going to turn into a slog fest, and almost nobody likes those.

Conclusions

Not really any common thread among this to tie together, so I’ll just leave it with a hope that this article has proved useful for you, and that you have fun GMing your game!

Starter Characters#

Building Starter Characters#

XP Rewards#

Character Growth#

Non-XP Rewards#

Encounter Design#

Recommended EONS Articles#

Conclusions#