Dragonbones Light: A minimalist hack of dnd

Hello,

A little while ago, RPGuru92 a Reddit user asked me if it was possible to adapt the SAALT concepts to Dungeons&Dragons. Here is the beast!

SAALT = Live or Die. Do what you want, but do it fast!

For those who don't know SAALT, you can see:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316321/SAALT--The-simplest-ruleset-of-the-World

or https://lbrpg.blogspot.com/2018/09/solo-rpg-simplest-world-ruleset.html

So, my first answer was to say no. D&D is primarily a resource management game, whereas SAALT is a narrative game. And then I thought, "Still, so many free (ogl) resources to exploit! There must surely be a way"

There's a whole bunch of D&D light, including Searchers of the Unknown, but the HP management is still too heavy. The idea was to keep the spirit of dungeons and dragons but to gnaw all its rules to the bone:

Continue to do dungeon crawling
To be able to use all the resources of all the versions
Keep only the essential
Improve the game according to my personal taste (make the game more pulp)

So I took D&D and removed everything! Only AC and HD are left.

pdf version here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/387407/Dragonbones--a-very-light-hack-rpg

To give you a quick idea:

Characters

We will keep the level (HD) and the armor class (AC). For the 5th, HD=CR/4

Warrior: all armor, Bonus ToHit: add his HD
Thief: leather only no hield, Bonus ToHit: adds his HD/2. Adds +3 to his thieves ability rolls + backstab
Cleric: all armors, Bonus ToHit: adds his HD/2. Turn undead (DC = 11 + lvl - HD). Spells: use existing material
Magic-User: no armors, Bonus ToHit: add his HD/3. Spells: use existing equipment
Monsters: use natural AC, ToHit: add level (HD)

Health points

Characters have 3HP or 4HP (for the easy version).

Monsters do not have fixed HP. The stronger a character is, the easier the monster is to kill.

Monster HP = 2 + character's lvl - monster's HD

Doing stuff/save rolls

Roll d20 vs DC 15 (20 for epic stuff). What is easy/medium is automatically successful

Fighting

Initiative. d6+agility bonus
Attack. Hit if d20 + ToHit bonus => AC
Damage. All weapons inflict 1 point of damage (except powerful spells)
Elimination of weak monsters. At the end of the turn (when everyone has played), the monsters with a base of 1HP AND that have suffered a failed attack are eliminated/flee.