Over the summer, I spent a lot of time reading up on OSR games, and gaining a new appreciation for that style of play. I’m working on a DnD mashup game called The Broken Throne that combines my favorite mechanics from earlier editions with house rules from DIY DND blogs round the web.

I’ll write a more in-depth post about that later, but today I want to look at one of my favorite mechanics, notches. I first heard of notches via Last Gasp Grimoire, but Logan’s system for tracking weapon and armor degradation is a bit too complicated for my taste, so I looked for a way to slim it down a bit.

My main complaint was that there were two values you had to track, quality and notches. In Logan’s system, rolling a weapon’s quality or less made you add notches equal to the quality, and from then on if you rolled quality or less you had to roll over notches on the weapon’s damage die or add another notch. Gaining notches equal to the damage die or failing to roll over the notches broke the weapon.

I tried a couple things, but the most straightforward solution was to eliminate the quality value and just use notches. Weapons start with 1-5 notches. If you roll notches or lower on an attack roll, try to roll over the notches on the damage die. If you successfully do this, add another notch. If not, the weapon breaks.

For armor, if you roll notches or lower on a defense roll (I use contested defense), add a notch and subtract 1 AC. Armor breaks at 0 AC.

This has a couple interesting effects. First, it makes it possible, though very unlikely, for high quality weapons to break on the first swing, which wasn’t possible in the original rules. Second, as weapons take damage the threshold at which you test for breakage rises. Thus, the breakdown escalates more quickly over time, rather than remaining static.

These rules are a bit harsher than Logan’s, but I’m willing to pay that price for simplicity.