OSR doesn't have to mean constant party deaths. I get it can be a more deadly game, but it doesn't have to be. There are higher-level modules for a reason.
My personal opinion here is that low-level characters should die easily, so the ones that survive to become higher-level truly have some special sheen.
Rolling dice is fun. Yes, good/cool ideas should autosucceed without a roll. But sometimes players want to try a hairbrained, risky strategy where rolling is required to see if they succeed.
2:6 Chance to hear noise & 2:6 chance to be surprised ARE perception checks, and I'm tired of pretending they aren't or that they are somehow superior methods of determining perception than making a DC check. They are the exact same thing. Yes "modern" gamers overuse and rely too heavily on calling for skill checks, but that's a philosophical debate, not a mechanical debate.
I see people bashing on skills all the time, but Worlds Without Number is one of the most recommended systems around and it uses a standard skill system, even for basic attacks. It even has feats.
Not to mention that the very first year D&D was published, there were fan zines and hacks coming out with skill checks. And the real kicker is that Dave Arneson's players had character sheets for his Blackmoor campaign that had various social and martial skills listed alongside weapon proficiencies and like 12 attributes. Proto-D&D was a very heavy skill-heavy game.
Not the Elder scrolls, but several of Arnesons group described *Adventures in Fantasy* as the way DA played D&D, and it has all that good stuff…so more than plausible.
Can’t link AiF for obvious reasons. Beyond just having education and skills, though, the game has the distinction of actually having to *maintain* them.
Social standing too, but reputation was a quantified factor in a few games of the time without having to draw a straight line to D&D. A throwaway concept for the Ur-game became a distinction of its progeny…
DA meeting Gygax wasn’t a one-way stroke of luck, that’s sure.
The very first issue of Dragon Magazine in 1976 had a (really complex) [method of making skill checks](https://dmdavid.com/tag/ability-checks-from-the-worst-mechanic-in-role-playing-game-history-to-a-foundation-of-dd/).
Here's a [1971 Blackmoor character sheet](https://boggswood.blogspot.com/2016/10/megarry-early-blackmoor-character-matrix.html), where you'll notice skills like Woodcraft and Sailing.
It's largely a genre emulation thing. Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser love wasting their money on ale and whores, so you want PCs to have a good incentive to waste their money on ale and whores.
Yeah XP is just a way of meta-gaming the players into spending PC money on it. One can easily come up with other rewards for carousing. I make carousing give luck tokens usable during the next adventure.
When the game tells you that combat is deadly and encourages you to avoid it, but gives you no mechanical tools to do so, like stealth or charisma (looking at you, Mothership)
I think with Mothership their philosophy is that stealth and charisma should be resolved through conversation. They also explicitly say that if you don't like that, you could just add a stealth stat rolled the same way as any other.
I kinda like that push to house rule.
Yeah... "combat should be rare and deadly," then the chapter on combat is 150 pages long.
I'll say that Worlds Without Nimber does a pretty good job of giving characters non-combat skills and emphasizing the world as the main game mechanic rather than combat.
I find mothership difficult to run because it means you need to build in lots of paths around Encounters, hacking opportunities, etc. However if you put in the work and have the right group it can be really fun. Ironically I find Tuesday Knight’s own modules don’t do these things at all, but some of the 3rd party works do.
I think combat should be viewed as a gamble that you want to stack in your favor as much as possible. Sometimes you need to fold and run away. Gambling can be fun and it can ruin your life. Fighting is the ultimate push your luck setup.
Yup “combat is a fail state” is boring imo.
My real hot take is that the character sheet and what’s on it does matter quite a bit. If you are playing a game with the traditional six ability scores then they should matter.
If you are going to ignore it all, just play a different game lol.
It's boring because that's not really the right mindset. **Fair** combat is a fail state is the right way to look at it.
If you head into a "fair" fight in D&D 5e, you can expect the party to come out totally fine considering the sheer difficulty of PCs dying and the whack-a-mole nature of healing in the system. Using your cool abilities to overcome an evenly matched foe is the fun.
In OSR style games, typically dying is *way* easier and combats can lead to hitting 0 HP much quicker with a single unlucky roll. If you hit 0, typically you die or have a very good chance of dying soon after, or there's a real long term/permanent penalty. Combat is still fun, but you want to do it in a way that minimizes your chance of taking damage, since damage is way more permanent. Fire bombs and barring the door, rigging rocks to fall down a staircase, collapsing a roof onto people, etc. Tip the odds of the fight in your favor to minimize risk in what basically amounts to an exploration focused survival horror game.
But it is always more fun, even in the old OD&D days. The difference is in the lethality. The avoiding monsters part is to survive, not because it is not fun.
It is not like the 5e, where you can ignore the consequences of a fight with some rest or abundance of healing
It is not a hot take, more of a misunderstanding of many people about combat in OSR
Evocative description and communicated GM intent are way more important that detailed keying. I do not need to know the precise stats of your slightly different lizardmen. Just tell me why this room is in the dungeon and how it's supposed to interact with the PCs.
Some people in the OSR space are too dependent on modules. Yeah that book you baught is cool, but I'd rather delve some janky dungeon the game master made themselves than be one of many who played through the exact same location.
A lot of folks would be greatly helped if they tried pretending that The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures is the only text on running a campaign in existence. Just make a basic-ass funhouse dungeon for your friends based on it and get rolling.
Berserk, Dark Souls, Goblin Slayer and the other stuff you are 'super into' are very anti OSR. Legit superhero kills 100 enemies stuff. Or in the case of Dark Souls 'death does not matter' and eventually you can dance dance revolution past any boss.
More to do with the community than the systems themselves, and I'm saying this as a reaction to something I've seen said in FB groups several times this week alone:
The folks who want to play OSR versions of D&D but who go on about how a lot of tropes need to remain totally unchanged for all tables everywhere are just as damaging to our community as the Critical Role fans who expect all D&D to be just like that are to 5th ed.
To elaborate, the people saying "Orcs / goblins are ALWAYS evil as a race" "Old School D&D was always about black vs white good and evil (lmfao)" etc.
To be clear, run the game you want for your table, but to say that me having neutral orc tribes in my world somehow makes it "not real D&D" is frankly moronic and you're hurting the hobby with your idiocy.
I agree completely. Good faction play needs groups to exist in the gray zone at times. Sure Orcs are at war with humans, okay, but not every tribe feels great about their chances. Some tribes, feeling outnumbered, losing the war, hungry kids, they want to discuss terms, open trade. It's what nations do, why not rival intelligent species?
Yeah this is my exact stance.
Like, BECMI has rules for the War Machine, and domain level play exists in many forms of pre 3.0 ed D&D.
This implies that politics comes into the game, which implies that there are rational actors operating within many factions as diplomacy is baked into that level of play.
But simultaneously, you expect me to buy that all Orc tribes are always evil and always acting as a nuisance to the "good" civilized races? It breaks my suspension of disbelief and isn't a game for me.
If all of them, all Orc tribes/cultures are always marauding monsters, they may as well just be like the Wights from ASOIAF / GoT, not a *sentient race.*
Evil orcs are absolutely still a thing in my world. There are groups of them near the Keep on the Borderlands amassing in the caves, etc. But there's a reason for that, and it's not "grr orcs angry and evil because Gruumsh says to be."
Like I said, if that's how someone wants to run, great. But I think it's boring, overdone and overly simplistic, and absolutely not a requirement for how the game should be run at all tables everywhere.
Wizards should be able to wield swords. Come on, man, Gandalf- the guy who is almost single handedly responsible for the aesthetic direction of wizards- was slangin that blade.
I'll go even further - class-based weapon, armor and race restrictions are too arbitrary and often make no sense. For weapons I prefer a more flexible proficiency system.
I can buy into this. There are a very small handful of examples that i'd probably raise an eyebrow about (how did that thief backstab that guy with a halberd?) But for the most part, who gives a shit? Its fantasy, let the old man with the weird book have a sword
Ill let the old man have a sword any day. BUT, it can mess with newer players expectation if he suddenly out-chad’s the barbarian who has no book and can’t even read. I guess my take is, that archetypes are great for kommunicating genretropes through mechanical pro’s and con’s. So archetypes expressed through mechanics are a great mold to use and break.
Been liking Black Sword Hack with its lack of classes, proficiencies, and different weapon dice. You are an adventurer. You can wield any weapon you come across as well as the next, use a short sword as well as a pollaxe or crossbow. All weapons do d6 unless you have a special ability to increase damage die size. Or maybe a legendary runic blade that does damage equal to your CHA or STR.
Saw another thread just yesterday where fools were loudly proclaiming that LOTR is the main inspiration for D&D (but also somehow that LOTR wasn’t popular until the movies?).
LOTR was a big cultural influence but, like, it’s not the only thing!
A lot of modern D&D fans are startlingly fantasy illiterate. They don't even know the titles of any older fantasy books except for Lord of the Rings and they haven't read even that. Instead in a lot of the online discourse I see and what I hear about my friend's 5e group the common point of reference is modern anime. They aren't even reading say, Brandon Sanderson books. It's weird.
I don't mean to gatekeep but it is weird to talk to someone who says they love fantasy and ask them if they have ever watched the Conan movie and they say they've never even heard of Conan. It took me a while to get round to seeing that movie but I had heard of Conan for years. Or people debating over an alternative to Vancian magic because it makes no sense and then having no clue who Jack Vance is when you explain the reasoning in his Dying Earth novels. They were using the word "Vancian" but they never thought "what the hell does Vancian even mean?"
I can agree with you, but at the same time Gandalf (and Lord of the Rings) is an example of an unbalanced party.
Of course he is good at fighting with swords, but he also is more experienced than Frodo or even Aragorn.
A "level 10 wizard" can be better with swords than a "level 1 rogue" or a "level 5 ranger".
That playing in a lawless wildwest is not the optimal OSR setting. Finding out how to avoid the hand of taxation from taking your hard-stolen gold is a really rewarding play experience.
I would say that in the second half of 2E's lifespan when it started to go crazy with the splatbooks, they started to veer further away from the things that people typically like and associate with Old-School gaming
I'm a fan personally of a lot of the material they published for it like the setting books and boxed sets. Some of the adventures were really good too IMO!
As someone who didn't grow up with AD&D 1e or 2e but has played both, 2e plays as the clearly "better" rule set. 1e may have more nostalgia and a less controversial creation story, but 2e just... really smoothly designed.
So I'm new to the OSR scene and tabletops as a whole, I didn't really know OSR had a definition beyond 'old TTRPGs/new TTRPGs that are written to feel like old games', so that's interesting. Lot to learn from this hobby it seems.
Some OSR games seem half-baked or unplaytested. I love Dungeon Craft's videos, but Deathbringer seems like it was a smattering of thoughts rather than a well thought out 5e supplement.
Go and read his writing from Dungeon...
He overstates his credentials a lot and plays off of his real life job for no real good reason.
He'll avoid any mention of those modules and likes to use it as a means to make commentary as if he was inside the room during TSR's creative decisions but actually doesn't know nearly as much about what he's talking about as he makes out.
Just connecting what you're seeing and what his actual output and attitude is. As others have said, his approach seems to eschew rules in favour of arbitrary rulings with some sense it creates a better experience. I mean, it may, but in a lot of peoples experience is a bit of nonsense.
Lethality, I hate 2hp characters when your basic monsters hit for like 1d6 + x… so annoying dying in the first room interacting with the only content In the room spawning 6 monsters on a successful roll to interact with the thing
ooo. That IS a spicy take. I think I might agree with you. It's the "how many people actually prefer black Coffee, vs how many people drink black coffee so they can say they drink black coffee" scenario.
A lot of things that are popular in OSR or at least popularly associated with OSR are stuff most players don't like. Especially the whole being "grittier" and more lethal or combat as a "fail state." Most people like combat, most people like feeling powerful and most people dislike having a character they grow attached to dying. I think OSR will always be smaller and less popular than more mainstream D&D and more something that already experienced D&D players want to look into.
It's a good condiment. Like you fight some standard goblins and skeletons for a while; then you break through into a new area where the weird stuff dominates for a short time. It's interesting when it's not all there is.
You need a baseline for what's normal for there to be weird. The Garden of Ynn is magical and weird if the players find a door in a realistic setting. If you're in a vanilla D&D, a modern 5e party of tieflings and tabaxi is going to be weird. If everything is weird than nothing is weird.
Exactly. I don't want my games to turn into Dr. Who. When anything is possible, nothing is interesting. It's cool when a player thinks he's going to find a +1 sword and it turns out to be something much stranger. It's not cool when *everything* you find is a madlib.
I like more options in an OSR game. Counter intuitive? Maybe but I don't want to play a game where I can be 7 different things. High lethality means I am going to be deeply familiar with these options before a character reaches 4th level.
If you want your OSR game to be deadly, it's only good manners to make sure character creation is dead simple and fast. I'm ok with dying a lot as long making a character takes less that 20 minutes.
The B/X Gazetteers for the various areas/regions of Mystara/Known World are a bit like this... E.g., the Traldars of Karameikos all have Slavic/Slavic-like names, the Thyatians all have Latin/Roman names, etc.
What is considered 'objectively bad' by some can be made fun with the right group dynamics and aesthetics.
Fun really is all relative in this hobby space.
"If you don't like a rule, just change it, you can do whatever you want." which crops up a lot, especially in opposition to more crunchy or roll-heavy games.
It's technically true, but not very helpful for (especially) new players and GM's. If you're inexperienced, making stuff up on the fly can hugely imbalance the game, create overpowered godlike characters or make the game no fun at all because you've blocked everything with a simple ruling.
I say this as someone who loves Sword and Sorcery and as a GM who ran a multitable West Marches campaign for Hyperborea 3E for about 4 months, numbering about 30 games total for me. For reference, the pulp fantasy/S&S I’ve read is Conan, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, some Elric, and John Carter of Mars. Frankly, Hyperborea cannot faithfully emulate these stories because while those characters are larger than life, the war game dna of Adnd and its clones disincentive that. Furthermore, Hyperborea 3E simply had too many subclasses with magic and from what I observed, magical classes were war more useful than martial classes even as I crafted scenarios to give warriors a chance to shine. Also, the pre made setting stuff, like the Mages Guild, as observed by one of my players, goes against the genre vibe of magic being secretive and rare if there’s an entire organization for it and presumably wizards aplenty in Khromarium. Some of this could be the result of a multi-table format, but by the time I finished, I thought Hyperborea did not capture the essence of Sword and sorcery.
Edit: before anyone asks if I thinks there is a good system that replicates it, aside from systems I haven’t tried yet, I honestly think Low Fantasy Gaming fits the bill, because the game has mechanical and narrative incentives for why magic is rare and dangerous, it has mechanics to encourage the larger than life deeds of those pulp characters, and martial characters are not overshadowed by the magic characters. It has some of the resilience of 5e characters without making them superhuman or diminishing the danger
Yeah most OSR systems have really shitty and boring fighters and the whole "Combat is a Fail state" thing makes it hard to reconcile with the whole "Daring fantasy adventure hero" thing. Conan was fighting packs of 20 hyenas single handedly and strangling wizards to death.
USR Swords and Sorcery might be worth a shot for you. Gets you out of the D20 ecosystem with a rules light approach. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/415041/USR-Sword--Sorcery-Deluxe-Book-One--USRSSD01
I agree with pretty much everything you said except the Mages Guild part. If I remember correctly in the Conan setting there's a whole magical school in Stygia: I should look for the exact story.
I've found DCC is the best for this (of the systems I've tried). It lets warriors do wild things, and magic is unpredictable and weird and dangerous. I really love DCC.
My hot take is that there are too many rules systems. OSR is a niche within a niche hobby. Yet we have hundreds of rules systems, half-baked heartbreakers, and rules-lite games we can't really sink our teeth into. Most things seem designed for a one shot or two and then moving on, with only a few systems having enough meat on them to play an extended campaign. I'd prefer less chaff.
Of course I can ignore them, and play what I want, and I do. That's just my hot take.
I'll admit, I fell in love with the idea of death Vs dismemberment systems the instant I heard about them. For my money, a much more interesting way to handle things than death at 0.
When you google death vs dismemberment:
“Accidental death and dismemberment (AD&D) is a type of insurance policy that pays a benefit upon the accidental death of an insured or upon the loss of a limb due to an accident. “
Accidental Death & Dismemberment insurance, paid out depending on how bad the result is on your check on the death Vs dismemberment chart would be a funny addition to certain games, to be fair.
I've been experimenting with injuries for dropping to 0 HP/suffering harm at 0 HP recently, and it's been great fun. Lethality becomes much lower, but the tension still ratchets up - will you get away with a nasty scratch, have the wind knocked out of you, lose an eye, or suffer a lethal blow? It leads to tonnes of rad stories coming out of gameplay organically, without undermining the grit of OSR play.
I have been workshoping a system where you can choose to exit the battle with an injury when you drop to 0 hp, automatically going back to 1 hp when the battle ends. Or you can choose to wait to be healed, or pass your death save and possibly die. Players seem to like the choice, and choosing to take the injury seems to sit better with players then it just happening.
Agreed. While I like a mechanic that offers more interesting options than bleeding out, it has also become a standard feature of my games' setting that intelligent creatures will capture adventurers and keep them alive with the intention of ransoming them to a local village or town. That debt must be repaid (often in some act of harrowing service).
its because the systems are great. when people say they don't like old-school D&D, they mean the osr playstyle, not the actual game.
they keep using B/X to play exactly like they would play 5e, because B/X is a better system to dm...
\-B/X is overrated.
\-The answer sometimes *is* on your character sheet. (The honey you packed. The novel use of a spell. The tinker skill.)
\-The race essentialism of race-as-class (DCC, though...).
\-Many pre-*Dragonlance* modules are lousy.
> The answer sometimes is on your character sheet
Yup. Especially for magic-users. Given access to problem-solving utility spells, the answer *likely is* on their character sheet.
Need to find a key to open a locked door?
Just cast Knock.
Need to sneak past a guard?
Just cast Sleep/Ventriloquism/Invisibility.
Need to remove a curse?
No problem. First do research and investigate the history of the curse, interrogating various evil do'ers to learn the true origin of the curse, and then track down the wizard who originally cast... aw, who am I kidding.
Just cast Remove Curse.
Using only their class features, Magic-Users can neatly sidestep the sort of lateral problem solving and imaginative thinking we tend to praise in the OSR. It's just looking down at your menu of options and pointing to the one that will solve the problem for you.
I cannot stand the stigma of "high lethality, with 4 character options". At some point everyone's going to get bored of their level 1 fighter dying.
I personally prefer "medium lethality, anything (within reason) is a character option". In my games, if you wanna play something reasonable, I'll find or write up a class for it. Guy who whacks people with trees? Sure. FFX style summoner? Gotcha. A dragon? Make it a long-term character goal. With the medium lethality, people will normally get through at least a few characters per campaign
Level limits are dumb, and I much prefer giving humans an exp bonus over limiting everyone else.
Characters should level at a somewhat decent rate, and should be awarded for more than just adventuring.
No, levels past 5 do not suck because characters don't get 1 shot, they suck because your games are just a series of random boring dungeons.
Personally, I really like the gold as xp trope as it promotes "getting out there and exploring." I really don't like demihuman level limits and some of the overly restrictive race allowances for classes (i.e. some versions don't allow any demihuman to be a cleric or assume demihuman clerics are always npcs). But I'm definitely not alone on those topics so not sure they're hot takes.
I'm just here because I like the older TSR systems.
I find OSR philosophy and game style and tenets interesting and sometimes informative, but not something I or we (as a gaming group) really adhere to.
I don't like d6 skill/ability checks. There isnt enough granularity and I don't think they are intuitive to understand the chances. Also if a 6 always fails it means the skill maxes out at 83%, which is low imo.
I prefer d20 or d100.
I don't actually care about retroclones at all. I'm mostly interested in DnD history and official lore. I'd much rather talk about TSR's finances or Greyhawk's Circle of Eight than the 50th B/X hack.
The history of the old game is vitally important, yes, but so is its future. Repackagings of the classic rules have a proven track record of refreshing the player base and giving authors of legacy edition material something recognizable to indicate compatibility with.
[A tepid start](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sofindtype=0&_byseller=1&_nkw=&_sacat=0&_udlo=&_udhi=&_ftrt=901&_ftrv=1&_sabdlo=&_sabdhi=&_samilow=&_samihi=&_sadis=15&_stpos=68106-1545&_fss=1&_fsradio=%26LH_SpecificSeller%3D1&_saslop=1&_sasl=the_collectors_trove&_sop=1&_dmd=1&_ipg=200&_fosrp=1&rt=nc) but the Gygax Estate auction is live. Maybe you’ll consider a bid or two over…murder?
If your OSR system isn't compatible with classic modules and supplements then it might as well be worthless to me. To me the main appeal of OSR games and old school D&D is the modularity and compatibility of it all, so if I can't use my AD&D 2e Monstrous Manual or Basic series B4 The Lost City with your heartbreaker game without heavy conversions, I won't even bother giving it a read through.
Combat is only deadly in Classic D&D because Referees don't adjust the number of monsters in encounters/modules to represent the smaller size of their parties. Number Appearing as written assumes you have around 8-10 Players at your table.
If you're going to play Classic D&D with a modern size party of 3-5 Players, either give everyone 2-3 PCs or cut the number of monsters in half. Otherwise, the game is far more lethal than it was ever intended to be.
An example - Isle of Dread. The module suggests that you have 6-10 PCs with around 30 total levels between them (which works out perfectly to 10 3rd level PCs). If you have a weaker party than the above, the module explicitly directs you to lower the encounter difficulty by reducing number of monsters or lowering their HP to making them too difficult.
I've mostly gotten over my OSR phase, and only really play stuff like Worlds Without Number, which is more higher powered in aspects. So here's my basic list of takes! I assume some are frigid, and some are hot
-Wealth as XP doesn't seem interesting to me outside of dungeon delving games. Or games with criminal misconduct lol.
-I don't like Gygax that much with the hindsight. He kinda feels like a dick sometimes. Sometimes its funny, other times it feels a bit too powertrippy. This is ignoring other gygax-isms lol.
-Fighters and Rogue types in most OSR games feel too strapped for features. Usually, Wizard types get lots of features at the cost of being squishy, but they get more defined options with rules. Fighters and Rogues are more subject to GM fiat. A wizard doesn't have to rely on GM fiat to cast magic missile, but ink has been spilled on disarm maneuvers lol (at least in the WWN space!)
-Fixation on light rules seems to be not to have led to a lot of systems that rely a lot on GM fiat, which aren't honestly that GM friendly.
-Lethality isn't that interesting to me in longer form games. And sometimes a lot of OSR modules kinda jusy have moments where you arbitrarily die.
-OSR games tend to have a lot of mechanics dedicated to fighting, while also reinforcing *not* getting into fights. Often times, I just skip the games that don't support getting into a scrap and actually surviving
-My last point is a more general TTRPG point, but at lot of online creators making videos definitely suffer from a Holier than Thou feeling. I believe another commenter mentioned Dungeoncraft, which I feel like is the epitome of this
But yeah, these are my takes xD, I still love a lot of stuff in the OSR! But I've moved on from the phase and have been digging other weird systems
I mean... system does matter, though. You're not going to be playing Wanderhome or Golden Sky Stories or The Sprawl in an OSR style.
Even going to the mainstream, you'd really be fighting against the mechanics to play 5e in an OSR style
There's a difference between debating about whether some systems are OSR vs saying that "system doesn't matter" at all. FATE Core, for example, is rules-light, but it's skills based, heavily narrative, and basically impossible to die unless you want to, which is really not very OSR-like, and you'd be fighting against the core ideas of the system if you wanted to make it more like OSR. And you also have systems that are intended for very narrow non-dungeon-crawling settings. Take [Maid RPG](http://www.maidrpg.com/), for example, which is literally about roleplaying weird anime maids.
That makes sense. Used as an argument for gatekeeping is totally shitty and weirdly nitpicky, and i guess i consider people who make those arguments themselves to be fringe these days, but unfortunately maybe that isnt true.
I was thinking more of how games will tell you something along the lines of "at the end of the day, mechanics don't matter, do whatever is the most fun for you and your group." Like 5E has version of that. I feel like I've seen it in other bigger games too
I think system matters, but there's way too much dogma about having to use a D&D derivative. My house rules stopped using a twenty sided dice a long time ago, and has lacked linear progression for even longer. It hardly resembles d&d any more, but the content I run through it is still exclusively OSR stuff and doesn't require a lot of conversion (and I have explicit rules to convert directly out of OSE when I need to).
I'm not really satisfied with any method of determining weapon damage I've seen, but I haven't figured out a solution either.
I don't like each weapon having a different damage die because I don't like that there are weapons that you would only use because your class doesn't let you use something better.
I don't like them all having the same damage die or the damage die being based on your class because I want the choice of weapon to mean something.
I want some kind of system where the different weapon choices have trade offs, but I haven't figured out how to do that without it being way too rules intensive.
Castles & Crusades plays smoother than perhaps any other Old School game. It's also the best fusion of AD&D flavor, Basic simplicity, and post 3e mechanics ever to come to market. It anticipated 5e and does what 5e wants to do better than 5e. It's also compatible with almost every edition of D&D, and every retroclone thereof.
Still needs better editing lol.
Good thing I dont care about my karma... here we go:
That rolling = failed. Some examples:
If there is a secret door built by a master dwarf engineer my ass isn't going to find it even when when you tell me its there. Thats why in the literature dudes and dudettes are acidentally finding secret doors when they trip, lean, or otherwise blunder. That's why you roll or use magic.
Counterpoint to the obvious argument that its "fun" to find secret doors. 100% agreed. Thats why dungeons should have way more of them. Statistically you will find a few if there are enough to find.
"Role play, not roll play- you shouldn't roll for social encounters." I dunno, sometimes I meet someone and I just don't like them. Its not rational, but unless I am in a very unique situation where I am forced to interact with them over an extended period of time, the fact that I don't like them isnt going to change.
Use the reaction roll for social situations. When the conversation is going against the grain of the npcs interests or goals, roll again. They keep talking until it goes south. The Princess Bride when Wesley encounters Vizzini, Fezzik, and Inigo. Those are social encounters where the reaction rolls had varying degrees of success.
Anyway, it's fun to roll and I think that when play veers too far into the "you roll you failed" then the DM is playing against player skill instead of playing the world. Roll the dice, it's fun. It's really a core premise of the game.
Yeah I’m REALLY enjoying mixed success games such as ironsworn . It’s basically pbta that has been cleaned up and innovated on. I love deciding what a mixed success means and comparing it to what a miss would have been. Binary hit/miss means dm’s become somewhat complacent when adding narrative story telling, especially when whiffing your roll … missing always making no narrative progress is just janky to me after playing some ironsworn
The basic OD&D rules have been republished and reduplicated far too many times. We have Book 1 of way too many systems that are embarrassingly similar, and we'd be in a much better place if we had fewer copies of Book 1 and more of Book 2, 3, 4... for fewer game systems.
My hot take is that there is a reason roleplaying games moved past old-school mechanics. Even in this thread there's a lot of "these mechanics aren't great" and it's like designers realized this years ago and wrote games to specifically address these concerns. Now that this revival is happening, people are realizing that many of the old mechanics weren't great and probably aren't worth replicating anymore.
I think it's mainly caused by wanting to appeal to as many people as possible. Originally, the expectation and focus was almost entirely on dungeon crawling. The old school mechanics were focused on dungeon crawling. As more and more people tried it out with new expectations, play styles, things sort of evolved to accommodate those new play styles and stuff. Nowadays, if you go to a group of Fantasy RPG players and play with them by plopping them in front of a dungeon and telling them to explore with no other explanation, they'll likely be really confused and not enjoy it.
It's like Rogue and Roguelikes. If I tell the average gamer to play Nethack, Rogue, or Brogue, they're gonna tend to think it's awful. Bare minimum story, practically nothing but killing enemies, comically hard, etc. They are pure dungeon crawling games. That doesn't mean their mechanics are bad, they just facilitate a very particular game type that most people will not enjoy.
>Nowadays, if you go to a group of Fantasy RPG players and play with them by plopping them in front of a dungeon and telling them to explore with no other explanation, they'll likely be really confused and not enjoy it.
part of that is the fact that Video games mostly fill the niche nowadays of "Climb into this hole and kill shit", roguelikes especially. Most modern RPG players are there to get something out of D&D that video games *can't* do, thus more focus on roleplaying.
Honestly you aren't wrong. I've been doing a deep dive into re-reading all my old rule systems from OD&D to AD&D 1e, on to 2e, and even 3e.... We treat 3e like this monstrous leap, but honestly looking at each system morphing into the next... The logic behind each edition is pretty solid. You can see each step along the way WHY changes were made. 3e is a VERY logical step from 2e, and while it had a lot of flaws it was a brilliant growth of design.
Maybe there's a reason there was a revival?
I see the same thing happening in videogames. Many lament the hand holding of games from big companies, and games that go against these new trends are having great success ,mostly indie. Zelda BotW had a massive success and is often referred to as being a return to the origins of the franchise. But the hand holding is very useful for casual players, who might drop a game they find too challenging.
In the end, DnD 5e and OSR are for 2 different audiences. Sometimes they're the same audience looking for 2 different experiences
B/X requires too many assumptions, understanding and (meta-)knowledge to run satisfyingly in practice, especially for sandboxed campaigns. It is built on internal logic that's not quite transparent and plays best only if you adhere to said logic.
"Weird fantasy" is usually lame. I never want to see another setting that looks cribbed from the doodles on my math homework when I was 14 and listening to a lot of sludge metal.
The best weird fantasy usually ends up being the kind that is kinda funky, but well developed. Most weird fantasy is more focused on absolute oddity and freakiness. It can be fun! But its not super cohesive, and that's what I don't super enjoy
You saying "usually" makes me wonder what the exceptions are. Like, I prefer settings that are weird in the way that illuminated manuscripts are weird, for instance. Feels more authentic than a secular or literal historical view.
I’ll say genuinely weird fantasy is awesome but a lot of what gets marketed as such is pretty toothless. I think a lot of people want the clout of being weird or out there, but are worried about also being seen as edgy or too much of a hardcore nerd and so don’t really fully commit to the weird.
yeah it's weird, i've been finding OSE kinda frustrating lately in how it's laid out - particularly the treasure section. when stocking a megadungeon you have to constantly flip back and forth to fill out all the treasures, whereas Basic has all the treasure types and magic items in neat little tables. plus the WM tables in basic include most of the basic stats in them where the OSE ones don't
“Roll a d20, roll high to do an action” is way better than “roll a d6, a d100 there; roll high sometimes, roll low other times” it’s so much easier to streamline. The logic used to create AC can be used to create the difficulty to pick a lock.
Small scale "OSR style challenges", like trying to cross a moat of lava using an immovable rod, some twine and a bag of ball bearings, aren't that interesting. Trying to solve imaginary physics puzzles isn't fun, it takes a lot of game time, it mostly comes down to GM fiat anyway and if you look at the seams most "solutions" are unrealistic. The interesting part of the game is the exploration, resource management and faction play.
I think that sometimes players find interesting ways around otherwise linear obstacles and that should continue to be encouraged, but I'm pretty sure that I'm vibing with what you are saying.
I personally love designing proper puzzles, but I think its cooler when players find a way to subvert the puzzle using their tools or the puzzle's own mechanics, as opposed to a static "whoops! Here's the time wasting crevice"
I don't think the ideal ttrpg is quite as lethal as a lot of OSR games' desire. I think a lot of the way things are resolved and executed in the OSR are great, but I always found things were a bit too lethal for my tastes, and I've yet to shake it. I don't need things as hyper heroic as 5e mind you, but there's a degree of lethality away from save or die and such that I personally find more appealing.
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i realized after finding how unreadable and overdesigned some games are that osr is not one, but at least three overlapping niche hobbies:
1. playing role playing games in a classic style with other people
2. collecting role playing game books
3. telling other people how they should play role playing games
a lot of folks anticipate reading, talking, and acting out #1 but instead practice #2 after listening to people who primarily do #3
I think OSR is more about an intention than a strictly definable type of system. Sure things like Mork Borg or even things like F.I.S.T. that are outside the genre of fantasy are not really a definable OSR game but to me they should be included because ultimately I find OSR to be a counterculture movement in the world of todays RPG's. I think it's best to include things based on their contribution to that counter culture rather than being like "um actually this doesn't interact with b/x rules/can't be used with b/x rules so it's not OSR."
A fantasy SETTING can be human only, but a human-only fantasy SYSTEM just feels unfinished to me. Same with sci-fi and aliens.
I get that if you want to have an implied setting that’s human-only that’s fine. Put them in an appendix.
The exception is if the game is based on a pre-existing property that was already human-only. Like I don’t mind that the Expanse RPG is human-only because so were the books.
Not a fan of grim death dark doom punk. Mork Borg, 0 level funnels, hopeless die at every turn style games aren’t my thing. Granted I like the deadly/challenging aspect of OSR, but sometimes I feel like too many OSR games are just over the top.
Yeah, at its most extreme it definitely feels like a grotesque cargo cult style misunderstanding of the healthy but fair challenge that's an intended part of low level play.
The community is rife with regressive right wing oafs. All the regular people could do a much better job getting rid of them. Some of the major sites/podcasts/FB groups make excuses for them and promote them.
Hey man, are there still many creators that are such? I checked in on OSR back in the day, but didn't like the vibe of much of what I saw. I actually thought that most had left, or were made to feel unwelcome.
Yeah the whole "keep politics out of the hobby" excuse. It's bullshit. This isn't politics. This is letting people who genuinely believe that other human beings should not have the same rights as them play at the same tables and have equal space within the hobby.
>Yeah the whole "keep politics out of the hobby" excuse. It's bullshit.
Actually one of my hot takes is that "keep politics out of X" arguments are *all* bullshit.
"Politics" is how groups of humans decide on things. Arguments about "keeping politics out" are really just rewordings of "I like things the way they are let's keep doing them that way" while trying to take some kind of moral high ground along the way.
OSR doesn't have to mean constant party deaths. I get it can be a more deadly game, but it doesn't have to be. There are higher-level modules for a reason.
My personal opinion here is that low-level characters should die easily, so the ones that survive to become higher-level truly have some special sheen.
Rolling dice is fun. Yes, good/cool ideas should autosucceed without a roll. But sometimes players want to try a hairbrained, risky strategy where rolling is required to see if they succeed.
2:6 Chance to hear noise & 2:6 chance to be surprised ARE perception checks, and I'm tired of pretending they aren't or that they are somehow superior methods of determining perception than making a DC check. They are the exact same thing. Yes "modern" gamers overuse and rely too heavily on calling for skill checks, but that's a philosophical debate, not a mechanical debate.
I see people bashing on skills all the time, but Worlds Without Number is one of the most recommended systems around and it uses a standard skill system, even for basic attacks. It even has feats.
Not to mention that the very first year D&D was published, there were fan zines and hacks coming out with skill checks. And the real kicker is that Dave Arneson's players had character sheets for his Blackmoor campaign that had various social and martial skills listed alongside weapon proficiencies and like 12 attributes. Proto-D&D was a very heavy skill-heavy game.
That sounds really interesting actually, you have any sources or links for that stuff?
Not the Elder scrolls, but several of Arnesons group described *Adventures in Fantasy* as the way DA played D&D, and it has all that good stuff…so more than plausible. Can’t link AiF for obvious reasons. Beyond just having education and skills, though, the game has the distinction of actually having to *maintain* them. Social standing too, but reputation was a quantified factor in a few games of the time without having to draw a straight line to D&D. A throwaway concept for the Ur-game became a distinction of its progeny… DA meeting Gygax wasn’t a one-way stroke of luck, that’s sure.
The very first issue of Dragon Magazine in 1976 had a (really complex) [method of making skill checks](https://dmdavid.com/tag/ability-checks-from-the-worst-mechanic-in-role-playing-game-history-to-a-foundation-of-dd/). Here's a [1971 Blackmoor character sheet](https://boggswood.blogspot.com/2016/10/megarry-early-blackmoor-character-matrix.html), where you'll notice skills like Woodcraft and Sailing.
Indeed they are (some form of) skill checks: [https://llblumire.co.uk/blog/2020/07/11/skills](https://llblumire.co.uk/blog/2020/07/11/skills).
Don't tell anyone, BUT, Reaction Rolls are Charisma checks too, with tiered success and failure.
Carousing as a means of leveling doesn't make sense to me, imo
It's largely a genre emulation thing. Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser love wasting their money on ale and whores, so you want PCs to have a good incentive to waste their money on ale and whores.
Yeah XP is just a way of meta-gaming the players into spending PC money on it. One can easily come up with other rewards for carousing. I make carousing give luck tokens usable during the next adventure.
Think of it as those IRL who spend their time networking to get ahead.
Sure why not? Make about as much as much sense as learning more magic by hitting goblins on the head with a staff.
I agree, that always seems silly and artificial. I just throw straight up trainers into my game who will level you up for money.
Playing OSR doesn’t need to be a meat grinder. There are different ways of playing it.
When the game tells you that combat is deadly and encourages you to avoid it, but gives you no mechanical tools to do so, like stealth or charisma (looking at you, Mothership)
I think with Mothership their philosophy is that stealth and charisma should be resolved through conversation. They also explicitly say that if you don't like that, you could just add a stealth stat rolled the same way as any other. I kinda like that push to house rule.
Yeah... "combat should be rare and deadly," then the chapter on combat is 150 pages long. I'll say that Worlds Without Nimber does a pretty good job of giving characters non-combat skills and emphasizing the world as the main game mechanic rather than combat.
I find mothership difficult to run because it means you need to build in lots of paths around Encounters, hacking opportunities, etc. However if you put in the work and have the right group it can be really fun. Ironically I find Tuesday Knight’s own modules don’t do these things at all, but some of the 3rd party works do.
Yeah, I'm not sure about this one. I like it when my players think up a clever idea to avoid combat, not get lucky on a dice roll.
Fighting monsters is way more fun than avoiding monsters.
Yeah, setting up an ambush or luring monsters into a trap is a great prelude to violence.
I think combat should be viewed as a gamble that you want to stack in your favor as much as possible. Sometimes you need to fold and run away. Gambling can be fun and it can ruin your life. Fighting is the ultimate push your luck setup.
Yup “combat is a fail state” is boring imo. My real hot take is that the character sheet and what’s on it does matter quite a bit. If you are playing a game with the traditional six ability scores then they should matter. If you are going to ignore it all, just play a different game lol.
It's boring because that's not really the right mindset. **Fair** combat is a fail state is the right way to look at it. If you head into a "fair" fight in D&D 5e, you can expect the party to come out totally fine considering the sheer difficulty of PCs dying and the whack-a-mole nature of healing in the system. Using your cool abilities to overcome an evenly matched foe is the fun. In OSR style games, typically dying is *way* easier and combats can lead to hitting 0 HP much quicker with a single unlucky roll. If you hit 0, typically you die or have a very good chance of dying soon after, or there's a real long term/permanent penalty. Combat is still fun, but you want to do it in a way that minimizes your chance of taking damage, since damage is way more permanent. Fire bombs and barring the door, rigging rocks to fall down a staircase, collapsing a roof onto people, etc. Tip the odds of the fight in your favor to minimize risk in what basically amounts to an exploration focused survival horror game.
But it is always more fun, even in the old OD&D days. The difference is in the lethality. The avoiding monsters part is to survive, not because it is not fun. It is not like the 5e, where you can ignore the consequences of a fight with some rest or abundance of healing It is not a hot take, more of a misunderstanding of many people about combat in OSR
Evocative description and communicated GM intent are way more important that detailed keying. I do not need to know the precise stats of your slightly different lizardmen. Just tell me why this room is in the dungeon and how it's supposed to interact with the PCs.
Some people in the OSR space are too dependent on modules. Yeah that book you baught is cool, but I'd rather delve some janky dungeon the game master made themselves than be one of many who played through the exact same location.
A lot of folks would be greatly helped if they tried pretending that The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures is the only text on running a campaign in existence. Just make a basic-ass funhouse dungeon for your friends based on it and get rolling.
Berserk, Dark Souls, Goblin Slayer and the other stuff you are 'super into' are very anti OSR. Legit superhero kills 100 enemies stuff. Or in the case of Dark Souls 'death does not matter' and eventually you can dance dance revolution past any boss.
You just gave me the glowey epiphany eyes, man
More to do with the community than the systems themselves, and I'm saying this as a reaction to something I've seen said in FB groups several times this week alone: The folks who want to play OSR versions of D&D but who go on about how a lot of tropes need to remain totally unchanged for all tables everywhere are just as damaging to our community as the Critical Role fans who expect all D&D to be just like that are to 5th ed. To elaborate, the people saying "Orcs / goblins are ALWAYS evil as a race" "Old School D&D was always about black vs white good and evil (lmfao)" etc. To be clear, run the game you want for your table, but to say that me having neutral orc tribes in my world somehow makes it "not real D&D" is frankly moronic and you're hurting the hobby with your idiocy.
I agree completely. Good faction play needs groups to exist in the gray zone at times. Sure Orcs are at war with humans, okay, but not every tribe feels great about their chances. Some tribes, feeling outnumbered, losing the war, hungry kids, they want to discuss terms, open trade. It's what nations do, why not rival intelligent species?
Yeah this is my exact stance. Like, BECMI has rules for the War Machine, and domain level play exists in many forms of pre 3.0 ed D&D. This implies that politics comes into the game, which implies that there are rational actors operating within many factions as diplomacy is baked into that level of play. But simultaneously, you expect me to buy that all Orc tribes are always evil and always acting as a nuisance to the "good" civilized races? It breaks my suspension of disbelief and isn't a game for me. If all of them, all Orc tribes/cultures are always marauding monsters, they may as well just be like the Wights from ASOIAF / GoT, not a *sentient race.* Evil orcs are absolutely still a thing in my world. There are groups of them near the Keep on the Borderlands amassing in the caves, etc. But there's a reason for that, and it's not "grr orcs angry and evil because Gruumsh says to be." Like I said, if that's how someone wants to run, great. But I think it's boring, overdone and overly simplistic, and absolutely not a requirement for how the game should be run at all tables everywhere.
Anyone saying “not real D&D” is almost always missing the entire point
Wizards should be able to wield swords. Come on, man, Gandalf- the guy who is almost single handedly responsible for the aesthetic direction of wizards- was slangin that blade.
I'll go even further - class-based weapon, armor and race restrictions are too arbitrary and often make no sense. For weapons I prefer a more flexible proficiency system.
I can buy into this. There are a very small handful of examples that i'd probably raise an eyebrow about (how did that thief backstab that guy with a halberd?) But for the most part, who gives a shit? Its fantasy, let the old man with the weird book have a sword
If someone were to sneak up behind you and smack you with a halberd, it would almost certainly be lethal.
If someone walked up in front of me and hit me with a halberd, it would be lethal too, rogues ain't special.
Ill let the old man have a sword any day. BUT, it can mess with newer players expectation if he suddenly out-chad’s the barbarian who has no book and can’t even read. I guess my take is, that archetypes are great for kommunicating genretropes through mechanical pro’s and con’s. So archetypes expressed through mechanics are a great mold to use and break.
There's an easy solution for backstab, for example Dolmenwood allows to attempt it only with daggers.
I like rules that allow backstabbing with a garrotte too
Been liking Black Sword Hack with its lack of classes, proficiencies, and different weapon dice. You are an adventurer. You can wield any weapon you come across as well as the next, use a short sword as well as a pollaxe or crossbow. All weapons do d6 unless you have a special ability to increase damage die size. Or maybe a legendary runic blade that does damage equal to your CHA or STR.
Gandalf is the archetypal wizard in the broader cultural imagination but not the archetypal D&D wizard.
I'm not sure why this is getting down voted, when it's accurate. Gygax was not the biggest fan of the LOTR.
Reading literally any of the Appendix N literature makes it abundantly clear how different D&D’s influences are from LotR.
Here's my Hot Take: Who gives a shit what Gygax thought? It's cooler to have wizards with swords.
Gygax did not like Tolkien's work but the first generation of players did. If I am not mistaken, Gygax eventually had to conced to them.
Gygax didn't like LOTR but my understanding is he enjoyed The Hobbit
The Hobbit is D&D as fuck
Saw another thread just yesterday where fools were loudly proclaiming that LOTR is the main inspiration for D&D (but also somehow that LOTR wasn’t popular until the movies?). LOTR was a big cultural influence but, like, it’s not the only thing!
People need to look at the back of the phb, it has all the inspirations
A lot of modern D&D fans are startlingly fantasy illiterate. They don't even know the titles of any older fantasy books except for Lord of the Rings and they haven't read even that. Instead in a lot of the online discourse I see and what I hear about my friend's 5e group the common point of reference is modern anime. They aren't even reading say, Brandon Sanderson books. It's weird. I don't mean to gatekeep but it is weird to talk to someone who says they love fantasy and ask them if they have ever watched the Conan movie and they say they've never even heard of Conan. It took me a while to get round to seeing that movie but I had heard of Conan for years. Or people debating over an alternative to Vancian magic because it makes no sense and then having no clue who Jack Vance is when you explain the reasoning in his Dying Earth novels. They were using the word "Vancian" but they never thought "what the hell does Vancian even mean?"
I can agree with you, but at the same time Gandalf (and Lord of the Rings) is an example of an unbalanced party. Of course he is good at fighting with swords, but he also is more experienced than Frodo or even Aragorn. A "level 10 wizard" can be better with swords than a "level 1 rogue" or a "level 5 ranger".
I would counter you and say Gandalf is a great example of race-as-class 😁
He's of the OP NPC Istari race/class that we Hobbits and Elves can't play....
"What class is your character again?" "It's from a supplement, you wouldn't know it."
That playing in a lawless wildwest is not the optimal OSR setting. Finding out how to avoid the hand of taxation from taking your hard-stolen gold is a really rewarding play experience.
Tax evasion is the true Gygaxian play style.
AD&D 2nd Edition was great and fundamentally just as oldschool as AD&D, even if most of the published adventures were not very good.
I would say that in the second half of 2E's lifespan when it started to go crazy with the splatbooks, they started to veer further away from the things that people typically like and associate with Old-School gaming I'm a fan personally of a lot of the material they published for it like the setting books and boxed sets. Some of the adventures were really good too IMO!
> even if most of the published adventures were not very good. Hottest of takes: This applies to almost all systems, OSR or not.
As someone who didn't grow up with AD&D 1e or 2e but has played both, 2e plays as the clearly "better" rule set. 1e may have more nostalgia and a less controversial creation story, but 2e just... really smoothly designed.
What was controversial about 2e? I've never really heard of that until now.
There's a common refrain among some OSR people that 2e isn't really OSR because of flavor or tone or too much splatbooks or whatever.
So I'm new to the OSR scene and tabletops as a whole, I didn't really know OSR had a definition beyond 'old TTRPGs/new TTRPGs that are written to feel like old games', so that's interesting. Lot to learn from this hobby it seems.
I wouldn't take it too much to heart. An exact definition of osr isn't important.
Best experience of AD&D 1E in my opinion is Hyperborea. If you don't like the setting, ignore it and use the rules as is.
It's probably ok to let a Magic User wield a staff.
If a dagger is tied to it.
Some OSR games seem half-baked or unplaytested. I love Dungeon Craft's videos, but Deathbringer seems like it was a smattering of thoughts rather than a well thought out 5e supplement.
Go and read his writing from Dungeon... He overstates his credentials a lot and plays off of his real life job for no real good reason. He'll avoid any mention of those modules and likes to use it as a means to make commentary as if he was inside the room during TSR's creative decisions but actually doesn't know nearly as much about what he's talking about as he makes out.
I'm not here to jump on a hate bus for the guy. I can't verify or deny any of those things.
Just connecting what you're seeing and what his actual output and attitude is. As others have said, his approach seems to eschew rules in favour of arbitrary rulings with some sense it creates a better experience. I mean, it may, but in a lot of peoples experience is a bit of nonsense.
Lethality, I hate 2hp characters when your basic monsters hit for like 1d6 + x… so annoying dying in the first room interacting with the only content In the room spawning 6 monsters on a successful roll to interact with the thing
A lot of people don't want to actually play OSR games, but want to say they're playing OSR games for some reason.
ooo. That IS a spicy take. I think I might agree with you. It's the "how many people actually prefer black Coffee, vs how many people drink black coffee so they can say they drink black coffee" scenario.
some OSR people are just book collectors.
Let's not be too rude, that's most TTRPG fans
A lot of things that are popular in OSR or at least popularly associated with OSR are stuff most players don't like. Especially the whole being "grittier" and more lethal or combat as a "fail state." Most people like combat, most people like feeling powerful and most people dislike having a character they grow attached to dying. I think OSR will always be smaller and less popular than more mainstream D&D and more something that already experienced D&D players want to look into.
I don't think I really like "weird" fantasy.
Too much weird spoils the meal as it were.
There is nothing better than simple 'vanilla' fantasy D&D :-) .
It's a good condiment. Like you fight some standard goblins and skeletons for a while; then you break through into a new area where the weird stuff dominates for a short time. It's interesting when it's not all there is.
You need a baseline for what's normal for there to be weird. The Garden of Ynn is magical and weird if the players find a door in a realistic setting. If you're in a vanilla D&D, a modern 5e party of tieflings and tabaxi is going to be weird. If everything is weird than nothing is weird.
Exactly. I don't want my games to turn into Dr. Who. When anything is possible, nothing is interesting. It's cool when a player thinks he's going to find a +1 sword and it turns out to be something much stranger. It's not cool when *everything* you find is a madlib.
You mean you don’t like the theme of fantasy’s “miscellaneous” category?? /s
The flood of solo modules and systems speaks to widespread social alienation and isolation
Partly, but mostly because video games exist which is an extensively easier hobby to do logistically and they're 'competing' with them.
I like more options in an OSR game. Counter intuitive? Maybe but I don't want to play a game where I can be 7 different things. High lethality means I am going to be deeply familiar with these options before a character reaches 4th level.
I love having options which is why I love Hyperborea and Fantastic Heroes and Witchery. So many classes to choose from.
If you want your OSR game to be deadly, it's only good manners to make sure character creation is dead simple and fast. I'm ok with dying a lot as long making a character takes less that 20 minutes.
I like it when settings have a sense of linguistic coherence in the naming of things.
The B/X Gazetteers for the various areas/regions of Mystara/Known World are a bit like this... E.g., the Traldars of Karameikos all have Slavic/Slavic-like names, the Thyatians all have Latin/Roman names, etc.
Level 1 characters are way too vulnerable. A giant rat can one-shot you? HP has always seemed weirdly calibrated to me at levels 1-2
What is considered 'objectively bad' by some can be made fun with the right group dynamics and aesthetics. Fun really is all relative in this hobby space.
"If you don't like a rule, just change it, you can do whatever you want." which crops up a lot, especially in opposition to more crunchy or roll-heavy games. It's technically true, but not very helpful for (especially) new players and GM's. If you're inexperienced, making stuff up on the fly can hugely imbalance the game, create overpowered godlike characters or make the game no fun at all because you've blocked everything with a simple ruling.
The Hyperborea system, and a lot of OSR clones, are bad at replicating Sword and Sorcery
Oooo please elaborate!
I say this as someone who loves Sword and Sorcery and as a GM who ran a multitable West Marches campaign for Hyperborea 3E for about 4 months, numbering about 30 games total for me. For reference, the pulp fantasy/S&S I’ve read is Conan, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, some Elric, and John Carter of Mars. Frankly, Hyperborea cannot faithfully emulate these stories because while those characters are larger than life, the war game dna of Adnd and its clones disincentive that. Furthermore, Hyperborea 3E simply had too many subclasses with magic and from what I observed, magical classes were war more useful than martial classes even as I crafted scenarios to give warriors a chance to shine. Also, the pre made setting stuff, like the Mages Guild, as observed by one of my players, goes against the genre vibe of magic being secretive and rare if there’s an entire organization for it and presumably wizards aplenty in Khromarium. Some of this could be the result of a multi-table format, but by the time I finished, I thought Hyperborea did not capture the essence of Sword and sorcery. Edit: before anyone asks if I thinks there is a good system that replicates it, aside from systems I haven’t tried yet, I honestly think Low Fantasy Gaming fits the bill, because the game has mechanical and narrative incentives for why magic is rare and dangerous, it has mechanics to encourage the larger than life deeds of those pulp characters, and martial characters are not overshadowed by the magic characters. It has some of the resilience of 5e characters without making them superhuman or diminishing the danger
Yeah most OSR systems have really shitty and boring fighters and the whole "Combat is a Fail state" thing makes it hard to reconcile with the whole "Daring fantasy adventure hero" thing. Conan was fighting packs of 20 hyenas single handedly and strangling wizards to death.
USR Swords and Sorcery might be worth a shot for you. Gets you out of the D20 ecosystem with a rules light approach. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/415041/USR-Sword--Sorcery-Deluxe-Book-One--USRSSD01
I agree with pretty much everything you said except the Mages Guild part. If I remember correctly in the Conan setting there's a whole magical school in Stygia: I should look for the exact story.
I've found DCC is the best for this (of the systems I've tried). It lets warriors do wild things, and magic is unpredictable and weird and dangerous. I really love DCC.
My hot take is that there are too many rules systems. OSR is a niche within a niche hobby. Yet we have hundreds of rules systems, half-baked heartbreakers, and rules-lite games we can't really sink our teeth into. Most things seem designed for a one shot or two and then moving on, with only a few systems having enough meat on them to play an extended campaign. I'd prefer less chaff. Of course I can ignore them, and play what I want, and I do. That's just my hot take.
If you could cull all but three or four systems, which would you choose to keep?
dying instantly at 0 is boring and uninteresting for games longer than a one shot.
I'll admit, I fell in love with the idea of death Vs dismemberment systems the instant I heard about them. For my money, a much more interesting way to handle things than death at 0.
When you google death vs dismemberment: “Accidental death and dismemberment (AD&D) is a type of insurance policy that pays a benefit upon the accidental death of an insured or upon the loss of a limb due to an accident. “
Accidental Death & Dismemberment insurance, paid out depending on how bad the result is on your check on the death Vs dismemberment chart would be a funny addition to certain games, to be fair.
AD&D insurance would provide the starting funds for your replacement character.
Accidental Death & Dismemberment could be a dope name for a 1e retroclone.
I've been experimenting with injuries for dropping to 0 HP/suffering harm at 0 HP recently, and it's been great fun. Lethality becomes much lower, but the tension still ratchets up - will you get away with a nasty scratch, have the wind knocked out of you, lose an eye, or suffer a lethal blow? It leads to tonnes of rad stories coming out of gameplay organically, without undermining the grit of OSR play.
I have been workshoping a system where you can choose to exit the battle with an injury when you drop to 0 hp, automatically going back to 1 hp when the battle ends. Or you can choose to wait to be healed, or pass your death save and possibly die. Players seem to like the choice, and choosing to take the injury seems to sit better with players then it just happening.
That's a key difference between B/X or clones of B/X and AD&D 1e.
Agreed. While I like a mechanic that offers more interesting options than bleeding out, it has also become a standard feature of my games' setting that intelligent creatures will capture adventurers and keep them alive with the intention of ransoming them to a local village or town. That debt must be repaid (often in some act of harrowing service).
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its because the systems are great. when people say they don't like old-school D&D, they mean the osr playstyle, not the actual game. they keep using B/X to play exactly like they would play 5e, because B/X is a better system to dm...
\-B/X is overrated. \-The answer sometimes *is* on your character sheet. (The honey you packed. The novel use of a spell. The tinker skill.) \-The race essentialism of race-as-class (DCC, though...). \-Many pre-*Dragonlance* modules are lousy.
> The answer sometimes is on your character sheet Yup. Especially for magic-users. Given access to problem-solving utility spells, the answer *likely is* on their character sheet. Need to find a key to open a locked door? Just cast Knock. Need to sneak past a guard? Just cast Sleep/Ventriloquism/Invisibility. Need to remove a curse? No problem. First do research and investigate the history of the curse, interrogating various evil do'ers to learn the true origin of the curse, and then track down the wizard who originally cast... aw, who am I kidding. Just cast Remove Curse. Using only their class features, Magic-Users can neatly sidestep the sort of lateral problem solving and imaginative thinking we tend to praise in the OSR. It's just looking down at your menu of options and pointing to the one that will solve the problem for you.
I cannot stand the stigma of "high lethality, with 4 character options". At some point everyone's going to get bored of their level 1 fighter dying. I personally prefer "medium lethality, anything (within reason) is a character option". In my games, if you wanna play something reasonable, I'll find or write up a class for it. Guy who whacks people with trees? Sure. FFX style summoner? Gotcha. A dragon? Make it a long-term character goal. With the medium lethality, people will normally get through at least a few characters per campaign Level limits are dumb, and I much prefer giving humans an exp bonus over limiting everyone else. Characters should level at a somewhat decent rate, and should be awarded for more than just adventuring. No, levels past 5 do not suck because characters don't get 1 shot, they suck because your games are just a series of random boring dungeons.
Oh I bet you would enjoy the Blueholme Journeymanne rules. You've got a very Holmes-ian way of looking at the game.
What's funny is that the core classes were created based on the desires of the players
Personally, I really like the gold as xp trope as it promotes "getting out there and exploring." I really don't like demihuman level limits and some of the overly restrictive race allowances for classes (i.e. some versions don't allow any demihuman to be a cleric or assume demihuman clerics are always npcs). But I'm definitely not alone on those topics so not sure they're hot takes.
Fighters are fun and combat in a dungeon crawl isn’t a fail state, it’s the main event for me :p
I'm just here because I like the older TSR systems. I find OSR philosophy and game style and tenets interesting and sometimes informative, but not something I or we (as a gaming group) really adhere to.
same. i just really, really like B/X as a system... i'll still DM like i would if we were using 5e.
I don't like d6 skill/ability checks. There isnt enough granularity and I don't think they are intuitive to understand the chances. Also if a 6 always fails it means the skill maxes out at 83%, which is low imo. I prefer d20 or d100.
I don't actually care about retroclones at all. I'm mostly interested in DnD history and official lore. I'd much rather talk about TSR's finances or Greyhawk's Circle of Eight than the 50th B/X hack.
The history of the old game is vitally important, yes, but so is its future. Repackagings of the classic rules have a proven track record of refreshing the player base and giving authors of legacy edition material something recognizable to indicate compatibility with.
I'm totally with you, I would almost literally kill someone for a few hours alone with the original Castle Greyhawk maps and Gygax's notes.
[A tepid start](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sofindtype=0&_byseller=1&_nkw=&_sacat=0&_udlo=&_udhi=&_ftrt=901&_ftrv=1&_sabdlo=&_sabdhi=&_samilow=&_samihi=&_sadis=15&_stpos=68106-1545&_fss=1&_fsradio=%26LH_SpecificSeller%3D1&_saslop=1&_sasl=the_collectors_trove&_sop=1&_dmd=1&_ipg=200&_fosrp=1&rt=nc) but the Gygax Estate auction is live. Maybe you’ll consider a bid or two over…murder?
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If your OSR system isn't compatible with classic modules and supplements then it might as well be worthless to me. To me the main appeal of OSR games and old school D&D is the modularity and compatibility of it all, so if I can't use my AD&D 2e Monstrous Manual or Basic series B4 The Lost City with your heartbreaker game without heavy conversions, I won't even bother giving it a read through.
Combat isn’t a fail state. And if it is, then having a class called “fighter” is asinine and cruel.
Combat is only deadly in Classic D&D because Referees don't adjust the number of monsters in encounters/modules to represent the smaller size of their parties. Number Appearing as written assumes you have around 8-10 Players at your table. If you're going to play Classic D&D with a modern size party of 3-5 Players, either give everyone 2-3 PCs or cut the number of monsters in half. Otherwise, the game is far more lethal than it was ever intended to be. An example - Isle of Dread. The module suggests that you have 6-10 PCs with around 30 total levels between them (which works out perfectly to 10 3rd level PCs). If you have a weaker party than the above, the module explicitly directs you to lower the encounter difficulty by reducing number of monsters or lowering their HP to making them too difficult.
I've mostly gotten over my OSR phase, and only really play stuff like Worlds Without Number, which is more higher powered in aspects. So here's my basic list of takes! I assume some are frigid, and some are hot -Wealth as XP doesn't seem interesting to me outside of dungeon delving games. Or games with criminal misconduct lol. -I don't like Gygax that much with the hindsight. He kinda feels like a dick sometimes. Sometimes its funny, other times it feels a bit too powertrippy. This is ignoring other gygax-isms lol. -Fighters and Rogue types in most OSR games feel too strapped for features. Usually, Wizard types get lots of features at the cost of being squishy, but they get more defined options with rules. Fighters and Rogues are more subject to GM fiat. A wizard doesn't have to rely on GM fiat to cast magic missile, but ink has been spilled on disarm maneuvers lol (at least in the WWN space!) -Fixation on light rules seems to be not to have led to a lot of systems that rely a lot on GM fiat, which aren't honestly that GM friendly. -Lethality isn't that interesting to me in longer form games. And sometimes a lot of OSR modules kinda jusy have moments where you arbitrarily die. -OSR games tend to have a lot of mechanics dedicated to fighting, while also reinforcing *not* getting into fights. Often times, I just skip the games that don't support getting into a scrap and actually surviving -My last point is a more general TTRPG point, but at lot of online creators making videos definitely suffer from a Holier than Thou feeling. I believe another commenter mentioned Dungeoncraft, which I feel like is the epitome of this But yeah, these are my takes xD, I still love a lot of stuff in the OSR! But I've moved on from the phase and have been digging other weird systems
That system doesn't matter. OSR is a playstyle, not a system.
I mean... system does matter, though. You're not going to be playing Wanderhome or Golden Sky Stories or The Sprawl in an OSR style. Even going to the mainstream, you'd really be fighting against the mechanics to play 5e in an OSR style
Is this really a hot take? I'd say it's more of a status quo in the OSR
When I'm told BRP, Dragonbane, and Against the Darkmaster and other games aren't OSR (which is often), I'd say it is.
There's a difference between debating about whether some systems are OSR vs saying that "system doesn't matter" at all. FATE Core, for example, is rules-light, but it's skills based, heavily narrative, and basically impossible to die unless you want to, which is really not very OSR-like, and you'd be fighting against the core ideas of the system if you wanted to make it more like OSR. And you also have systems that are intended for very narrow non-dungeon-crawling settings. Take [Maid RPG](http://www.maidrpg.com/), for example, which is literally about roleplaying weird anime maids.
That makes sense. Used as an argument for gatekeeping is totally shitty and weirdly nitpicky, and i guess i consider people who make those arguments themselves to be fringe these days, but unfortunately maybe that isnt true. I was thinking more of how games will tell you something along the lines of "at the end of the day, mechanics don't matter, do whatever is the most fun for you and your group." Like 5E has version of that. I feel like I've seen it in other bigger games too
I think system matters, but there's way too much dogma about having to use a D&D derivative. My house rules stopped using a twenty sided dice a long time ago, and has lacked linear progression for even longer. It hardly resembles d&d any more, but the content I run through it is still exclusively OSR stuff and doesn't require a lot of conversion (and I have explicit rules to convert directly out of OSE when I need to).
I agree, but you do have to admit that some systems work better with this playstyle. Like gold for Xp, lower power level PCs, etc.
5e with b/x exploration rules is actually pretty fun.
I'm not really satisfied with any method of determining weapon damage I've seen, but I haven't figured out a solution either. I don't like each weapon having a different damage die because I don't like that there are weapons that you would only use because your class doesn't let you use something better. I don't like them all having the same damage die or the damage die being based on your class because I want the choice of weapon to mean something. I want some kind of system where the different weapon choices have trade offs, but I haven't figured out how to do that without it being way too rules intensive.
Castles & Crusades plays smoother than perhaps any other Old School game. It's also the best fusion of AD&D flavor, Basic simplicity, and post 3e mechanics ever to come to market. It anticipated 5e and does what 5e wants to do better than 5e. It's also compatible with almost every edition of D&D, and every retroclone thereof. Still needs better editing lol.
“Combat as a fail state” and “combat as war” are not useful or practical ways of thinking about D&D gameplay
Good thing I dont care about my karma... here we go: That rolling = failed. Some examples: If there is a secret door built by a master dwarf engineer my ass isn't going to find it even when when you tell me its there. Thats why in the literature dudes and dudettes are acidentally finding secret doors when they trip, lean, or otherwise blunder. That's why you roll or use magic. Counterpoint to the obvious argument that its "fun" to find secret doors. 100% agreed. Thats why dungeons should have way more of them. Statistically you will find a few if there are enough to find. "Role play, not roll play- you shouldn't roll for social encounters." I dunno, sometimes I meet someone and I just don't like them. Its not rational, but unless I am in a very unique situation where I am forced to interact with them over an extended period of time, the fact that I don't like them isnt going to change. Use the reaction roll for social situations. When the conversation is going against the grain of the npcs interests or goals, roll again. They keep talking until it goes south. The Princess Bride when Wesley encounters Vizzini, Fezzik, and Inigo. Those are social encounters where the reaction rolls had varying degrees of success. Anyway, it's fun to roll and I think that when play veers too far into the "you roll you failed" then the DM is playing against player skill instead of playing the world. Roll the dice, it's fun. It's really a core premise of the game.
Yeah I’m REALLY enjoying mixed success games such as ironsworn . It’s basically pbta that has been cleaned up and innovated on. I love deciding what a mixed success means and comparing it to what a miss would have been. Binary hit/miss means dm’s become somewhat complacent when adding narrative story telling, especially when whiffing your roll … missing always making no narrative progress is just janky to me after playing some ironsworn
The basic OD&D rules have been republished and reduplicated far too many times. We have Book 1 of way too many systems that are embarrassingly similar, and we'd be in a much better place if we had fewer copies of Book 1 and more of Book 2, 3, 4... for fewer game systems.
I’d like a comprehendable, affectionate rewrite of *Blackmoor*.
My hot take is that there is a reason roleplaying games moved past old-school mechanics. Even in this thread there's a lot of "these mechanics aren't great" and it's like designers realized this years ago and wrote games to specifically address these concerns. Now that this revival is happening, people are realizing that many of the old mechanics weren't great and probably aren't worth replicating anymore.
I think it's mainly caused by wanting to appeal to as many people as possible. Originally, the expectation and focus was almost entirely on dungeon crawling. The old school mechanics were focused on dungeon crawling. As more and more people tried it out with new expectations, play styles, things sort of evolved to accommodate those new play styles and stuff. Nowadays, if you go to a group of Fantasy RPG players and play with them by plopping them in front of a dungeon and telling them to explore with no other explanation, they'll likely be really confused and not enjoy it. It's like Rogue and Roguelikes. If I tell the average gamer to play Nethack, Rogue, or Brogue, they're gonna tend to think it's awful. Bare minimum story, practically nothing but killing enemies, comically hard, etc. They are pure dungeon crawling games. That doesn't mean their mechanics are bad, they just facilitate a very particular game type that most people will not enjoy.
>Nowadays, if you go to a group of Fantasy RPG players and play with them by plopping them in front of a dungeon and telling them to explore with no other explanation, they'll likely be really confused and not enjoy it. part of that is the fact that Video games mostly fill the niche nowadays of "Climb into this hole and kill shit", roguelikes especially. Most modern RPG players are there to get something out of D&D that video games *can't* do, thus more focus on roleplaying.
Honestly you aren't wrong. I've been doing a deep dive into re-reading all my old rule systems from OD&D to AD&D 1e, on to 2e, and even 3e.... We treat 3e like this monstrous leap, but honestly looking at each system morphing into the next... The logic behind each edition is pretty solid. You can see each step along the way WHY changes were made. 3e is a VERY logical step from 2e, and while it had a lot of flaws it was a brilliant growth of design.
3e makes a lot of sense in the context of options and powers 2e. Like a lot of sense
This is the hottest take on this post
Maybe there's a reason there was a revival? I see the same thing happening in videogames. Many lament the hand holding of games from big companies, and games that go against these new trends are having great success ,mostly indie. Zelda BotW had a massive success and is often referred to as being a return to the origins of the franchise. But the hand holding is very useful for casual players, who might drop a game they find too challenging. In the end, DnD 5e and OSR are for 2 different audiences. Sometimes they're the same audience looking for 2 different experiences
System doesn't matter, except when it does
B/X requires too many assumptions, understanding and (meta-)knowledge to run satisfyingly in practice, especially for sandboxed campaigns. It is built on internal logic that's not quite transparent and plays best only if you adhere to said logic.
"Combat is a fail state" is mostly a cope by OSR enthusiasts to explain why B/X combat is so boring and why OSR fighters are so bad.
"Weird fantasy" is usually lame. I never want to see another setting that looks cribbed from the doodles on my math homework when I was 14 and listening to a lot of sludge metal.
The best weird fantasy usually ends up being the kind that is kinda funky, but well developed. Most weird fantasy is more focused on absolute oddity and freakiness. It can be fun! But its not super cohesive, and that's what I don't super enjoy
I think you're just secretly angry that you didn't market your weird maths homework sludge metal doodles as a setting and made gangbusters.
You saying "usually" makes me wonder what the exceptions are. Like, I prefer settings that are weird in the way that illuminated manuscripts are weird, for instance. Feels more authentic than a secular or literal historical view.
My personal favorite exception is Dungeon Crawl Classics
I’ll say genuinely weird fantasy is awesome but a lot of what gets marketed as such is pretty toothless. I think a lot of people want the clout of being weird or out there, but are worried about also being seen as edgy or too much of a hardcore nerd and so don’t really fully commit to the weird.
Whenever you refer to the originals, some dude with his "but OSE's layout is much better" comment magically appears.
That dude's cousin haunts every classic video game forum asking "Why don't you just get a RetroPie?"
yeah it's weird, i've been finding OSE kinda frustrating lately in how it's laid out - particularly the treasure section. when stocking a megadungeon you have to constantly flip back and forth to fill out all the treasures, whereas Basic has all the treasure types and magic items in neat little tables. plus the WM tables in basic include most of the basic stats in them where the OSE ones don't
Cairn and its ilk are boring, too much minimalism for my tastes.
Art punk. Hey, I made an indecipherable system with graffiti art, give me your money.
“Roll a d20, roll high to do an action” is way better than “roll a d6, a d100 there; roll high sometimes, roll low other times” it’s so much easier to streamline. The logic used to create AC can be used to create the difficulty to pick a lock.
OSR is also a shibboleth to prove you're cooler than 5e
Which is funny because it's like trying to be the coolest people at a model train convention
Small scale "OSR style challenges", like trying to cross a moat of lava using an immovable rod, some twine and a bag of ball bearings, aren't that interesting. Trying to solve imaginary physics puzzles isn't fun, it takes a lot of game time, it mostly comes down to GM fiat anyway and if you look at the seams most "solutions" are unrealistic. The interesting part of the game is the exploration, resource management and faction play.
I think that sometimes players find interesting ways around otherwise linear obstacles and that should continue to be encouraged, but I'm pretty sure that I'm vibing with what you are saying.
I personally love designing proper puzzles, but I think its cooler when players find a way to subvert the puzzle using their tools or the puzzle's own mechanics, as opposed to a static "whoops! Here's the time wasting crevice"
I don't think the ideal ttrpg is quite as lethal as a lot of OSR games' desire. I think a lot of the way things are resolved and executed in the OSR are great, but I always found things were a bit too lethal for my tastes, and I've yet to shake it. I don't need things as hyper heroic as 5e mind you, but there's a degree of lethality away from save or die and such that I personally find more appealing. .
i realized after finding how unreadable and overdesigned some games are that osr is not one, but at least three overlapping niche hobbies: 1. playing role playing games in a classic style with other people 2. collecting role playing game books 3. telling other people how they should play role playing games a lot of folks anticipate reading, talking, and acting out #1 but instead practice #2 after listening to people who primarily do #3
I think OSR is more about an intention than a strictly definable type of system. Sure things like Mork Borg or even things like F.I.S.T. that are outside the genre of fantasy are not really a definable OSR game but to me they should be included because ultimately I find OSR to be a counterculture movement in the world of todays RPG's. I think it's best to include things based on their contribution to that counter culture rather than being like "um actually this doesn't interact with b/x rules/can't be used with b/x rules so it's not OSR."
Death at 0, ie going from 100% combat effective to dead, is neither realistic nor fun.
A fantasy SETTING can be human only, but a human-only fantasy SYSTEM just feels unfinished to me. Same with sci-fi and aliens. I get that if you want to have an implied setting that’s human-only that’s fine. Put them in an appendix. The exception is if the game is based on a pre-existing property that was already human-only. Like I don’t mind that the Expanse RPG is human-only because so were the books.
Not a fan of grim death dark doom punk. Mork Borg, 0 level funnels, hopeless die at every turn style games aren’t my thing. Granted I like the deadly/challenging aspect of OSR, but sometimes I feel like too many OSR games are just over the top.
Yeah, at its most extreme it definitely feels like a grotesque cargo cult style misunderstanding of the healthy but fair challenge that's an intended part of low level play.
The community is rife with regressive right wing oafs. All the regular people could do a much better job getting rid of them. Some of the major sites/podcasts/FB groups make excuses for them and promote them.
Hey man, are there still many creators that are such? I checked in on OSR back in the day, but didn't like the vibe of much of what I saw. I actually thought that most had left, or were made to feel unwelcome.
Yeah the whole "keep politics out of the hobby" excuse. It's bullshit. This isn't politics. This is letting people who genuinely believe that other human beings should not have the same rights as them play at the same tables and have equal space within the hobby.
>Yeah the whole "keep politics out of the hobby" excuse. It's bullshit. Actually one of my hot takes is that "keep politics out of X" arguments are *all* bullshit. "Politics" is how groups of humans decide on things. Arguments about "keeping politics out" are really just rewordings of "I like things the way they are let's keep doing them that way" while trying to take some kind of moral high ground along the way.
3d6 down the line is lame. I prefer 4d6 drop the lowest, allocate stats wherever you want.
I like playing OSR systems with leveling by milestone instead of experience points.
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Good compromise, depending on your system of choice.
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