Gelatinous Icosahedron

The first mode of adventuring most of us old schoolers learned was the classic dungeon crawl, in which a party of adventurers explored an enclosed, often underground, area. Dungeons were, and are, generally drawn on graph paper at a scale of 10 feet per square, and explored on a time scale of ten-minute turns. Movement is given in feet per turn. Among the strengths of the dungeon crawl are that it provides natural barriers and boundaries to channel exploration, and that pretty much all the interesting features can be explicitly noted, either on the map or in the dungeon key.  The next mode was the wilderness or hex crawl, so named because the map is typically drawn on hex paper with one terrain feature representing each hex. Hex crawls are conducted on a scale of miles -- the exact scale varies, but 6 miles per hex is widely regarded as optimal -- and take place on a time scale of days. Movement is expressed in miles per day. Hex crawls are great for long range overland travel, and...

 So, I'm doing some thinking about project Unlikely Heroes. Having made the decision to abandon the quixotic quest to create my ideal version of D&D, I'm feeling completely liberated from D&D's rules and mechanics. They may inspire, but the no longer bind me. And what better way to put the exclamation point on that newfound freedom than by jettisoning one of the most iconic features of the game, the sacred Six Ability Scores? It's certainly not a terribly radical idea. Despite ability score generation being the very first step of character creation, mechanically, ability scores aren't a core part of the old school D&D engine. They're a bit of color and flavor; that's all. The game would play just fine without them. It might even play better without them. You wouldn't have to worry about players who roll dismal or mediocre ones, nor those who hit the jackpot with every score above average. You don't have the player of the fighter with 13 ...