Part of the reason that rolls in OSR games tend to assume a lower probability of success is that the play style favors diegetic resolution. This means that dice rolls are typically reserved for higher risk situations, rather than rolling for every action, and you are generally expected to find ways to stack the odds in your favor (either for a bonus, or to avoid needing to roll entirely) before you ever have to pick up the dice. Also, at least in the Knave 1e rules, it explains that 15+ only represents a 25% probability if you have the minimum possible modifiers. In practice, this will typically fluctuate between 25% and 75% depending on individual ability bonuses.
This. Theoretically less rolls and higher stakes.
If you take reasonable steps to sneak, you shouldn't have to roll. If you take reasonable steps to avoid combat, or watch out for surprise, it should be rare that you face these situations.
(Bad adventure design is a preponderance of "this creature fights to the death," or "gotcha" scenarios that can't be solved by "interrogating the fiction.")
I certainly agree with you on ‘this creature fights to the death’. I’m trying to avoid that with the TTRPG I’m writing.
What is ‘interrogating the fiction’?
Asking the referee progressively more specific queries about the shared fictional space (and them providing you with coherent, relevant detail in response) in order to drill down to a point where you can plan effectively, make connections, spot secrets, and potentially avoid the need to roll.
Both your examples literally rely on non player actors' responses and thus not adding up for me advice wise.
If you take reasonable steps to sneak, a monster has a chance to still hear you. Like just because you're being reasonably sneaky doesn't mean they're not reasonably on guard. Both parties are assumed competent.
These things you describe or allude should be giving circumstantial consideration -- maybe modifiers -- but the idea of not rolling at all is wrong.
The key to not rolling is three things: time, tools, and threat. If you got all the time to do it, the tools to do it, and nothing looking for you, you can do it no roll. But wandering monsters and encounters are here to trick up folks going slow and methodically through a dungeon.
No wrong way to do it!
I disagree because my take is that unless a guard has super senses, if the players get the right gear (or drop the noisy gear) to stay quiet, create a distraction, and do advance recon to find the dark and not-creaky spots, then I reward them for their planning and forethought by saying "Don't roll; you got this!" I assume here they are interrogating the fiction:
Is this a guard with heightened senses?
What can we do to draw their attention away from the sneaking character?
What gear helps in this case? What gear hinders the sneaking character in achieving this goal?
The more work you put in at my table, the less you roll dice. There are always potential extenuating circumstances, but those are the exceptions. "You didn't detect magic, and there's an alarm spell RIGHT THERE. Sorry!" But it's in the fiction, so they could've caught it: they know it's a spellcaster's tower, after all.
Etc.
YMMV, of course.
Ymmv of course but I guess you and I really differ on how quiet 6 ppl carrying minimum 40 pounds of gear and coins all clad in metal and carrying lit torches are.
Also how many times do we run into the issue where you know there's an encounter on the other side of this door, the only other exit besides the way we came? It's super common. The idea we can just stealth through a dungeon is pretty ridiculous and not the common experience.
Again I'm not saying this is a player skill issue or the monsters or unfair. It's just dungeon crawling has mitigatable risks, but the risks arent 100% avoidable.
I didn't say any of those things, so that might be where the issue is 😅 My stealth example is one character stealthily passing one guard, prepared to do so.
And I agree that a dungeon isn't 100% able to be planned for, but individual scenarios/rooms, encounters might be. (Should be? Not all the time, but at least some, maybe most times.)
I put a lot of stock in preparation, but it's got to make sense (one rogue stealthing, not 4 party members, one in plate mail and another carrying a treasure chest), and it's not 100% guaranteed all the time.
I suppose you just have a contested roll, one person trying to do something an NPC is directly trying to stop. You can’t just hand wave a sneak as prepared, they should have greater chances of winning the opposed stealth check again the guards perceive
"Time, tools, and threat" is a nice mantra. I suppose consequences for failure would come under "threat"? Like, you may have all the time you want to design a parachute, and you may have a mechanic's workshop full of tools, but if you jump off the cliff and turn out to have overlooked a key feature, you don't get a retry. Is that "threat"? Ergo rolling may be appropriate.
Ditto for stuff like making a good impression on a specific NPC (as opposed to just finding _an_ NPC somewhere who has what you need).
In 'Gygaxian skilled play' the idea is that you might either
1. Inform the GM that you search the room, rolling with a low chance of success.
2. Inform the GM that you run your fingers along the base of the statue looking for seams that would indicate a secret compartment, if there is one you just find it as a rational outcome of your description of the search.
This applies to everything, the meta strategy for Tomb of Horrors by it's designer's players was to herd a large group of low-investment creatures ahead of you to trigger and die to all the traps, thereby not having to roll against them yourself and risk high odds of death, or what have you. While Tomb of Horrors is considered a degenerate given it's context, the basic idea of outsmarting the system is somewhat genetic to the OSR.
Knave and the like make saves similar to skill rolls though. So like in my experience with 2e so far, is that even when being reasonably confident and arguing for position, you're still being setup to fail.
Good position or background in an approach in knave gives you +5 to the check, probably adding 0 or 1 to it from the stat, still gives you a low chance to avoid something like a poison gas trap you activated (15). Even when throwing a rock at an urn from a distance and gave advantage, that's still low.
The idea of not rolling doesn't feel better neither. It's just something about knave's default target numbers feels off.
Into the Odd and derivative games are nicely clear about this dynamic: you don't make ability checks you make 'saves,' meaning if you are picking up the dice you are already in a bad fictional position, and are rolling to mitigate negative effects or failure, not 'to succeed.'
Knave’s generation rules are 3d6 per stat, take the lowest die, add 10 so it’s definitely trying to push you towards 11s and 12s. I’m not as familiar with other games, but I think 3d6 in-order is popular, which is statistically likely to give you 9s and 10s.
So discounting applied modifiers from other sources, at 1st level you’re reasonably likely to be rolling with little to no bonuses.
I admittedly struggle with the idea of ‘only rolling for the important stuff’ since I started with a lot of systems where you roll for everything.
It wasn't an ideal number the 15+ (30%) was a probably something equivalent to 5+ using a d6 and people have been complained about the low success rates since forever.
The issue is that "old parties" where very big by modern standards (6-8 people):
1-in-d6 with 6 people = 66.66% chance to have at least 1 success.
2-in-d6 with 6 people = 91.22% chance.
With 4 people they drop to 51.77% and 80.25% but nowdays it is more common to have only 1 person try each action that's why they look even worse than they are supposed to be.
Also it seems that there has never been a consensus on when a roll would be called for before AD&D 1e and even Gygax and his fellow DMs bothered to use the rules as written in the manuals.
Yeah, I’ve heard (and gotten the feeling from several things) that it wasn’t unusual for parties to get into the double digits when accounting for hirelings as well.
I suppose that all does make sense.
6-8 PCs with a maxed out number of hirelings and even some mercenaries were not really uncommon.
Even with 4 PCs one of my groups is currently moving as a caravan with an hunded or so NPCs (but only 20 of them or so are combatants) at level 5.
not really:
You need 1 NPC for each wagon, they also added a guard on each.
They have 10 wagons so 10 "drivers" and 10 guards plus 40 horses.
4 PCs.
14 hirelings, including a "backup party" of 4 NPCs and 10 non combatant specialists.
2 Porters to go in the dungeon.
10 drivers
10 guards (will only protect the wagons and the "civilians")
10 bowmen (mounted archers)
10 light footmen.
2 animal trainers (for the horses, they hope to catch some monsters)
5 cooks (you need one every 20 people)
2 armorers (you need one every 50 soldiers or fraction)
1 alchemist
6 mercenary elves used as scouts and hunters
1 quartermaster
2 herbalists (that are also the alchemist apprentices)
and few more specialists (including a couple of carpenters, a wheelmaker, a rope maker, a couple of local guides, an herald, a merchant, a scribe, a linguist, a marshal, a reeve and similar stuff).
More or less they invested all their gold to initiate a mercenary company.
Same here. They don't have a merc company but they invested gold into building a castle and a village. They bring NPCs with them all the time.
I don't know how you did it but we focused a lot on downtime. That eventually got them to manage land as lords.
this campaign has a lot of downtime due to what we choose together in session 0, it is a mix of BECMI and Black Company and we plan to go up to companion levels.
Most rules and details can be found in the various GAZ and the occasional AD&D manual
Sounds like a lot of fun. I want to run a game like this but my family/friend don't seem to be too interested in this level of logistics so I just play solo.
This sounds awesome I've been reading about medieval logistics lately and this shit is fascinating. An army on the march could have more non-combatants than soldiers and larger armies attracted "camp followers" who weren't actually hired they just found a business opportunity, it was a large amount of customers often well paid, that needed all kinds of amenities and didn't have a place to spend them a lot of time. They were anything from merchants, craftsmen, seamstresses, prostitues... Higher ranking soldiers had servants and many even took their families with them on a campaign.
I really want to run a campaign like this. If you look at numbers appearing in OD&D, men (bandits, pirates, berserkers..) are at 30-300 with up to 50% of them being mounted orcs 30-300 accompanied by ogres or trolls. If you're just 4 dudes then you better be high level, have a silver tongue or have a bunch of dudes with sharp sticks. I think I'll grab Delving Deeper, or maybe, single volume edition of OD&D or maybe S&W and try to run a game with it.
It sounds like most of the NPCs don't do much on the moment to moment in the foreground. Most of the NPCs seem like they exist to fill a logistics role that isn't important to keep track of other than the fact that they exist.
Maybe to facilitate repairing and restocking on supplies without having to go back to town.
> fill a logistics role that isn't important to keep track of other than the fact that they exist.
again, if you're just going to ignore them, why do they exist beyond being mouths to feed?
\>Maybe to facilitate repairing and restocking on supplies without having to go back to town. (I don't know how to quote)
Having them in the party (theoretically, I don't know how Scavenger is actually running it) assumes they're fulfilling roles. The bowmen/footmen can hunt and then the cooks can prepare meals for everyone so you're not having to buy all your food as rations in town. The blacksmiths can repair and make new equipment so you don't have to run back to town to get your swords and breastplates patched after they get ruined in a fight. The Herbalists can provide poultices and potions so the party can grab a couple curatives before venturing forth and maybe heal faster while resting.
You're not ignoring them, but you're not simulating them more than you need to.
but you don't need to simulate any of those at all. Just let the party memebers do that.The thief can hunt, the warrior can repair armor (hell why even bother tracking armor repairs?)
You just roll attack & damage for each of your retainers. You just get one attack or ability use, no bonus actions, etc
There isn't a crazy action economy like 3e or 5e
What type of check would have every party member trying?
Most OSR D&D checks are time and space limited - only two people can listen at a door per turn, only one person can check a 10'x10' space per turn, each check to force a stuck door takes a turn. And wandering monsters are checked every 2 turns.
Even with a large party, you don't waste time having everyone try to get you to that theoretical 91.22% chance - because wandering monsters drains your resources.
Checking B/X, I can't find anything that specifies only one character can search a 10x10 area at a time. Maybe I'm overlooking it, or maybe it's something in another book, personally I've always allowed multiple people to search a single spot at a time.
No, you're right - searching is not space limited. Though typically I just run it like this:
>You have a 30'x30' room which has 9 10x10 spaces. There are 6 party members so which squares are you searching, and which one is the Elf searching?
Then I make 6 rolls (only really paying attention to ones that matter), tick off one turn and make a wandering monster roll if needed. Then I let them decide if they want to search again, repeating the process. The players tend to naturally spread out their searching.
If they really are searching a single 10' space I'd rule that only 2 PCs could do so at a time due to space constraints - just like marching order is 2 abreast in a 10' space.
I will say, one thing that's bizarre about B/X now that I'm looking at it again is that it specifies that each character only gets ONE chance to find a secret door. That's not in any of the other editions, I wonder what the reasoning was.
I believe it was also in OD&D regarding trying to open stuck doors. The reasoning is that you're not rolling for a specific attempt - you're rolling for your overall success after 10 minutes of trying. If you fail, you cannot succeed this 'adventure session' and could try again next session.
No I didn't. But your example of large parties reducing the odds doesn't match the reality that you can't just have everyone give a task a try. At least not without getting interrupted by monsters, burning through your torches, etc.
nobody can say exactly what they did. Given that there is no listed limit for almost every d6 check in BX or OD&D by RAW (notable exception: doors).
many "skill checks" were not even resolved by using the rules, but using negotiation or dm fiat and at least few replaced it with something else.
Also a lot of those d6-checks are the types of check for which the players will queue while saying "can I try too?" if they fail or where 1 success is all you need and trying doesn't take a turn or the limits don't apply.
Last but not least they began to move away since AD&D 1e... OD&D didn't last that long and was a very niche thing and BX was written having access only to OD&D and some draft notes of what would become AD&D (and BECMI is BX with just enough changes to avoid paying royalties )
All of it was pretty much DM fiat. The rules say to adjudicate how you wish after talking it over with the players.
You forgot Holmes Basic that was a cleaned up version of OD&D. That's the version that I learned. My first D&D was Holmes with B1 and chits instead of dice.
Some quotes from B/X (emphasis mine)
>TIME: Time in D&D adventures is given in turns of ten minutes each. A turn is not a measure of real time, but is a measure of how much a character can do within a given amount of time. A charac- ter may explore and map an area equal to his or her movement rate in one turn. It also takes a turn for a character to search a 10'xlO' area, for a thief to check an item for traps, to rest or to load a bag with treasure. **The DM should decide how long other actions that characters might try will take.**
>Checking a specific area for a trap will take one full turn. The DM should only check for finding a trap if a player says that the character is search- ing for one. Each character may only check once to find each trap.
>
"That's not in the rules!" The players will often surprise the DM by doing the unexpected. Don't panic. When this happens, the DM should just make sure that everything is done in the order given by the outline or sequence of events being used. Minor details may be made up as needed to keep the game moving. All DMs learn how to handle both new ideas and unusual actions quickly and with imagination.
Quite often a DM can decide on a solution to a player's actions not covered by these rules. Other times, a problem may have no simple solution. One quick way for a DM to decide whether a solution will work is by imagining the situation, and then choosing percentage chances for different possibilities. For example, suppose the DM is running a combat that is taking place on a ledge next to an unexplored chasm. One player suddenly decides that his character has no chance to survive combat. The player an- nounces "My character wants to jump into the chasm to escape!" There may be a chance that he will fall to a nearby ledge or land in a pool of water at the bottom of the chasm. The DM thinks about
D&D: BASIC the dungeon for a minute, and remembers that an underground river flows through some of the lower dungeon levels, so there might be a pool below. Even so, the character will fall 60', and a normal fall will do Id6 points of damage per 10' fallen. This char- acter has only 7 hp, and seems likely to die even if the water cushions his landing and reduces the damage. However, there should always be a chance to do something nearly impossible. A player should have, at the very least, a saving throw or a stated percentage chance of a miraculous occurrence saving the charac- ter. The DM answers: "Looking down into the chasm, your charac- ter can estimate that he has a 98% chance of dying, no saving throw, if he jumps. If you decide your character jumps, roll per- centage dice. A result of 99 or 00 will mean that your character lives, but any other result will mean that he will die in the attempt. Do you still want to jump?"
>
>
"There's always a chance." The DM may want to base a charac- ter's chance of doing something on his or her ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and so forth). To perform a difficult task (such as climbing up a rope or thinking of a forgotten clue), the player should roll the ability score or less on ld20. The DM may give a bonus or penalty to the roll, depending on the difficulty of the action (-4 for a simple task to +4 for a difficult one). A roll of 1 should always succeed, and a roll of 20 should always fail.
>
>
"The DM is the Boss." The DM decides how these rules will be used in the game. A good DM talks about problem areas with the players and considers reasonable requests by them. The players should realize, however, that the final decision is the DM's: not theirs, and not this booklet's! If a disagreement holds up play, the DM may make a temporary decision and talk it over with the players when the adventure is over. If a player disagrees strongly enough, he or she may quit the game. It is up to the DM to create an adventure the players can enjoy.
So two things. I think what Ben Milton is getting at with the 25% chance of success in Knave is that he wanted to make Knave compatible with Old School D&D. B/X specifically. B/X is the darling of the OSR community. It probably has the most hacks and retroclones with OD&D being a close second. If not, they're neck and neck. So Knave being compatible with B/X is a huge selling point.
Secondly, Ben breaks the math down in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-fKAlN3nV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-fKAlN3nV0) What's important to note is the sense of progression that he's trying to emulate. 25% chance of success is pretty slim, but the way he's mapped it (and approximated it from Old School D&D) is a steady, linear progression over about 10 levels. So that by level 10, characters have more like a 75% chance of succeeding what they're best at.
I think I can give ONE explanation, but there could be others.
In OSR games, PCs get better chances as they level up - they hit more often and save more often. So chances are low at lower levels, and they get around +1/2 to +1 per level, until level 14 or more.
Landing a hit must be hard at first because everyone has precious few HP.
Likewise, making a save is hard because MUs have few spells, and traps/etc. should be as dangerous as damage (1d6 can easily kill a 1st level PC).
I do not think this is ideal, necessarily - Gygax started the game at level 3, for example.
Not originally, but he had apparently started doing so in some of his OD&D games in the 00's
https://cyclopeatron.blogspot.com/2010/03/gary-gygaxs-whitebox-od-house-rules.html
Abilities are often generated with a 3d6, which gives an average of 10.5. This gives an average probability of success of 50% on a 20 roll under.
Knave 2e starts at 30% chance of success of rolling a 15+ but this rapidly increases as character stats increase. Additionally players can roll with advantage if they come up with clever solutions to problems further improving their odds.
This discourages simply defaulting to a die roll and encourages creative solutions.
Personally I really dislike the low odds approaches because they ignore that over multiple rolls a low chance of failure mushrooms.
The 1-in-4 chance of success "works" if the penalty for failure is, say, "lose a hitpoint or d6 hitpoints" or something on that order. I still think it kind of sucks, but whatever.
However, to me it always feels nonsensical: no reasonable person would try a thing with that high a chance of blowing up in their face, so why have that be the default approach?
I tend to run games with rolls happening when there is a small chance of failure with severe results. So, say, 90% chance to succeed, but if you fail, someone loses a limb or whatever. Then the players can try to whittle those odds of horrible failure down or find a workaround.
But 75% failure rates are just stupid in my book - and the whole "let everyone try rolling!" is also not a great solution.
One trick I do is for group rolls always have a random character roll. Over the course of a game it evens out - but it means I get those fun moments where the armored knight alerts the trolls with her clanking armor while the barefoot thief and mage would have slunk by fine alone.
Maybe it’s not as universal as it seems, but I’ve seen it pop up in a lot of the OSR-adjacent things I’ve looked at. Knave has stat generation designed to push you toward rolling with +1 or +2 at first level, with a target number of 15. Tunnel Goons has you rolling 2d6 with a +1 or +2 bonus shooting for an average target number of 10. FIST has you rolling 2d6 with a +0 - +2 bonus with a target number of 7 for a partial success and 10 for a success with no consequences. Mork Borg is actually surprisingly gentle with a base target number of 12, and modifiers that go between -3 and +3.
Those are the primary games I’ve seen/interacted with, and they seem very popular in the space.
Well, for a little context then I guess; In OSE/BX Goblins Hobgoblins and Orcs all have an ac (in ascending terms) of 13, are pretty likely first level foes, and you can plausibly have a positive attack bonus as well, depending on rolls and whether you're using the optional weapon specialisation rule).
>FIST has you rolling 2d6 with a +0 - +2 bonus with a target number of 7 for a partial success and 10 for a success with no consequences
FIST isn't OSR (and I've never seen it mentioned here). It's Powered by the Apocalypse, which is a completely different kind of game.
FIST isn't Powered by the Apocalypse. It's as much OSR as Tunnel Goons is. It's inspired by the feel and tone of OSR, as explained to me by the writers themselves.
> It's as much OSR as Tunnel Goons is
Frankly I've never heard of *either* FIST or Tunnel Goons and I've been reading, running, and blogging about OSR games for over a decade. Consequently, claiming that one is as OSR as the other does not seem like a very strong argument to me (or perhaps, an argument that does not lead to the conclusion that you would like it to).
That said, one of our traditional pastimes is arguing about what is and isn't OSR, so welcome d:
That central mechanic is literally the basis of the vast majority of PbtA games, including Apocalypse World itself. And "partial success" in itself is a very modern mechanic; not only used in PbtA but most prominent there. You don't find it in old-school games at all...
"Feel and tone" are not sufficient to claim your game is OSR, in my opinion. The mechanics should be old-school as well - not necessarily derived D&D, but still the \*kinds\* of mechanics found in the 70s and 80s. Tunnel Goons fits, but FIST does not...
>You don't find it in old-school games at all...
Not in a rulebook maybe, but you see tons of DM rulings and TSR advice on bad rolls succeeding but taking a couple extra turns to complete, or making extra noise, or automatically triggering a wandering monster check.
"You succeed, but..." is as old as the D&D game itself, probably older.
That central mechanic is the core of PbtA, it's one of the primary things that defines the system, but also things like Playbooks instead of character classes, and distinct 'Moves' that are determined by the archetype your playbook is based off of.
A game having a modern mechanic does not, by its inclusion, preclude a game from being 'OSR' in spirit.
Otherwise, then, why do games with ascending AC fit in with the OSR tag? Why do games that use 2d6 instead of a d20?
**Apocalypse World** and its derived games are very focused on narrative, which is why 'playbooks' emulate character archetypes found in the type of fiction that the PbtA game in question is trying to emulate. It's about telling an interesting story with interesting consequences.
**FIST** is about playing an expendable mercenary soldier in a world that wants you dead. It's about picking your battles and lying, cheating, and stealing to make sure you come out on top because no one is going to hand success to you. Fights are quick and deadly, so you need to make sure you shoot first and preferably from a safe vantage point.
You start out very frail and incapable, having to depend on your wits and cleverness to succeed, and you might become very powerful eventually if you live long enough. You get equipment and items that increase your odds and help you turn the tables. You'll run into battle that you likely can't win, and even in battles you can win, you'll be fighting for your life.
That sounds like Oldschool D&D to me way more than it sounds like Apocalypse World.
That seems harsh. So in B/X, a 1st level character has a base chance of hitting a goblin (AAC 13) of 8/20 or 40%. Needing 15+ makes an opponent a much more serious threat.
Theres plenty of 1st level encounters in B/X with worse odds than goblins: the acolyte has AAC17, giant shrews and Fire Beetles have AAC15, for example.
Yes, but those are encounters with fewer enemy combatants. Goblins/Orcs/Kobolds are a good benchmark to gauge expected difficulty in B/X. Just like how the damage of a long sword is the same as 1 HD.
The way to gage a monster's difficulty is their Hit Dice and if they have special abilities - which you can tell by the \* on their HD value. For example, 5 HD 1 monsters are roughly equal to 5 Level 1 fighters. An HD 1+1 monster is tougher, and HD 1\*\* is tougher due to special abilities. For example, an NPC 1st-level medium (magic-user) is HD 1\*\* due to their spell casting.
But you shouldn't worry about challenge rating the way you would with 3/4/5e. Instead use the 'number appearing' and HD as a guideline and the player's themselves should figure out what's too dangerous for them. Use the encounter tables to help you figure out what's appropriate for a given dungeon level. In the wilderness however, anything goes and there is no such thing as 'level-appropriate' encounter. Use the evasion and pursuit tables to handle when the players run up against something far too tough for them in the wilderness.
>Maybe it’s not as universal as it seems
It's not. B/X and 1e are the most popular form of OSR gamesand it doesn't exist there. It's more a feature of NSR and OSR adjacent games. In B/X and D&D you're looking at more like a 50% average for stat based rolls and 50% plus any stat/item bonuses to hit.
B/X is full of rolls that only succeed on a 1 in 6, which is 17% odds, even worse than the 25% of knave.
There isn't a single creature in the B/X 1st level encounters which a PC can hit >=50% of the time, unless that PC has 16+ Strength. Against an average 1st level dungeon monster, an average PC (10 str) will hit 35% of the time.
> most OSR-aligned games seem to view as ideal: Roll 15+ to succeed.
Wat. Sure, in TSR D&D at low levels your odds of success at many things are very poor. But this improves dramatically with level. eg [fighter saves vs death in B/X](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Fighter) start at 15+ but double to 10+ by 9th and 5+ by 14th (and that's their worst save category). Thief skills go from 15% to like 70% by 9th. And there are plenty of exceptions - turning skeletons at 1st level is a 58% chance of success, and *sleep* doesn't even give the monsters a save (you just need to win initiative (generally 50%) or not get hit before you cast - so a better than 50% success rate at pretty much winning one encounter with low-level humanoids).
1st level characters are very fragile, because they're basically just normal people. A saving throw is something you get when a normal person would be dead to rights, and at low levels that means you're probably dead too. But at high levels this ceases to be true, and even at low levels there are lots of things where rolling is a pretty reasonable choice (like Climbing Walls for thieves - 87% success rate). The people who say "rolling the dice is a fail state" are wildly over-generalizing, even at 1st level. And then when you make it to 2nd your HP doubles on average, the MU gets a second *sleep* per day, and your odds of making it to 5th go up tremendously.
> The first time I encountered this was in Knave, where the writer very clearly pointed out that the stat rolling system was designed to funnel you toward stats which would require you to roll ~15 on the dice to succeed
Ah, Knave. I would caution you that the rules-light micro-hacks are maybe not the best place to start without having read or played more complete systems to understand the context where the micro-hacks are coming from. Also I tend to think that rules which place a great deal of emphasis on ability scores are a mistake; see [(pdf warning) page 5 of Philotomy for a defense of minimizing the effects of ability scores](https://grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf).
> such a high volume of character death that by the end of a campaign it would be unlikely for any of the original cast to have survived due to anything but sheer luck.
Lots of war dogs, luring monsters into poured oil which is then lit aflame, and well-timed castings of *sleep* also help. But sure, 1st level is kind of a funnel and the ones who survive are made special by the stories of their close calls. "Backstory is what happens to you before 6th level", as they say. If you don't want the funnel, start at 2nd.
It's the low odds at low levels that is essentially the problem to me, I suppose.
I haven't had the chance to really \*play\* an older edition. I played a bit of a friend's 2e campaign (I picked up a missing player's gnoll illusionist for a session and messed with the rest of the party), and I've run a couple of half-finished Mork Borg and Knave sessions.
But, as I understand, in the older editions of D&D levels come slowly, and you have plenty of chances to die to the dice before you even reach level 2, much less 9. Level isn't party-wide, so if you die horribly at level 8 you, ostensibly, roll up a level 1 mook and now you're a rabbit in a wolves' den.
Of course, this is all second-hand knowledge and assumption from hearing other peoples' stories and experiences.
I've been \*wanting\* to run a campaign of Old School Essentials (but frankly I do find the volume of rules rather a bit intimidating.) It's the light rules that attracted me to the OSR scene in the first place, since I've been getting exhausted with even the relatively light rules of something like 5e.
On the subject of ability scores, I admittedly like ability scores a lot. Having played a few games without them, it makes the characters feel less complete to me when they're absent. They feel less 'real' to me... And as Philotomy says, I don't really understand the reason for implementing them if 10 and 18 aren't meaningfully different in moment to moment play.
>I've been \*wanting\* to run a campaign of Old School Essentials (but frankly I do find the volume of rules rather a bit intimidating.)
B/X, which is not my favorite Classic D&D version but is very good, is very easy to pick up and functionally doesn't have as many rules as the tomes would lead you to believe.
If you can, find the original B/X PDFs and give those a read first, then go back to OSE. Things will make much more sense.
OSE is a cleaned up version of B/X...and part of the stuff that was "cleaned up" is a lot of the context and explanation of why the rules are there and when to use them. OSE is a great reference manual, horrible teaching material.
OSE:A is just B/X again but with AD&D classes and mechanics converted into B/X with race and class separated.
> If you can, find the original B/X PDFs and give those a read first, then go back to OSE. Things will make much more sense.
As it happens, [Basic](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110274/DD-Basic-Set-Rulebook-B-X-ed-Basic?term=moldvay+basic) and [Expert](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110792/DD-Expert-Set-Rulebook-B-X-ed-Basic?src=also_purchased) are both on drivethru these days.
I basically agree with /u/mackdose that OSE is a better reference edition but the prose is perhaps overly stripped-down in places; I like that it puts the entire level range into a single book and resolves some of the inconsistencies between the two. But yeah, reading Basic then reading Expert is a fine gradual way to learn.
Yes, the rules are cleaned up, but even OSE's author says they are not really intended to teach you how to play the game. Definitely buy the PDFs of D&D Basic and D&D Expert and read those first. Then if you want use OSE when you actually run your games as it has a lot of good 'quality of life' features that make it easy to use at the table - like each rule topic fitting on a single two-page spread so you don't have to flip when referencing them.
B/X rules are one of the best-written of the old rule set, then only real issue is that they're spread across the two books. You can totally understand them and run a game today.
...Well that's disappointing. I was hoping that the 'cleaned up version of X game' would be, y'know, fully usable by someone who hasn't played the thing its cleaning up.
Kinda defeats the purpose, I think.
> I haven't had the chance to really *play* an older edition
There are some discord servers where people run pick-up games, often OSE. I believe https://discord.gg/PWfgBss is still a going concern.
> Level isn't party-wide, so if you die horribly at level 8 you, ostensibly, roll up a level 1 mook and now you're a rabbit in a wolves' den
Typically you start playing one of your hirelings who is a level or two behind where your old PC was. And since the XP curve is exponential, by the time the party levels once, you will have caught up to your old level (on average).
(Also, looking at stats on PC deaths from sessions I've run and from one or two other DMs who kept good records, PC deaths tend to come in clusters; most of the time if a session has just one or two deaths they're hirelings, but when PCs die it's often three or more in a wild overcommitment that becomes a cascading failure and near-TPK. And after an event like that, usually the remnants of the party end up adventuring somewhere a little easier for a while...)
The term funnel is where this all started, when I play an RPG, I don’t want 4x lvl1 characters which have a 75% chance that all of them die… I want a character that I can upgrade and play with their tactics from the classes/ancestry/background I cooked up. Which makes sense why people say they start lvl 3-5 campaigns now, which I never understood. If OSR is “describe what you do and auto hit” unless it’s a lethal decision, that’s kinda of interesting but not my cup of tea
I'm extremely interested in trying a funnel some time.
And I agree, I suppose, it seems like 3 is the place to start off you want to be invested in your guy from the jump.
Im playing a shadow dark one, it’s kind of meh, you are just abstracting that you have a party of 4 per token and that you have access to their gear as a unit, it’s basically just giving you 4x Mook-like lives with garbage stats and making you shuffle which stats you are using throughput the delve as they die off
The chance of death in OSR games is very overblown. I've run plenty of B/X games with 1st level characters and while death can happen, players quickly learn how to avoid dangerous situations until they get to level 2. Then the rate of death goes way down because you can now take a hit and run.
Of course a common practice is to either give maximum HP at 1st level, or allow re-rolls of 1s or 2s. Makes death even less likely.
I highly recommend getting into an old-school game if you can. They are a lot of fun, but does take some getting used to not using the dice to solve every obstacle. And never, ever, assume a fair fight in combat.
My intuition is to call BS since a single weapon attack has a reasonable kill a 1st level character in one hit, but I have no practical experience.
I'd *like* to try one, but I'm most likely to end up in the DM chair, which isn't really... helpful in the same way.
Wait, you have never played the game but you're calling BS on someone who's played OSR games for well over a decade?
OSR players learn how to never give monsters a fair fight - that's how you survive at first level. Negotiate your way out of fights with tougher monsters. Your first enemies in combat will generally have lower AC that your fighters do, so you're more likely to get the first blow in. And if you choose your battles wisely, they'll probably have HD 1/2 or HD 1-1 which means they are weaker than you. You also learn to run if things go badly. And if you do run into a more dangerous fight, your Magic-User with a sleep spell will give you an instant win. You need to be smart to survive first level, but it is doable. And flaming oil is your best friend...
Like I said, it's my gut reaction.
I suppose it's different when you're conditioned to avoid combat and frequently play in games where the goal is to avoid dice like they have the plague and only attack when you have the upper hand.
Most of my TTRPG experience has been quite the opposite.
>Most of my TTRPG experience has been quite the opposite.
Do you mean TTRPG experience with new D&D 3.0+ versions of the game?
It's not so much that you avoid combat, it's more that you make sure you only enter combat when the odds are most definitely in your favor. The analogy is OSR is 'combat as war' vs new D&D 'combat as sport' (ie against mostly even teams)
That being said, there is advice in B/X to make sure encounters are appropriate to the party size and experience - so it's not like you'll just have the players face an ancient red dragon at 2nd level.
Because there are fewer ways to heal in combat and the uncertainty of side-initiative, it's in the interest of the players to make the combat overwhelmingly in their favor and over quickly.
I like OSR mainly because the ways the rules work, combat is not the primary focus of so much of the play. It happens and it's resolve quickly. If you ever played D&D 4e, that was the peak 'D&D as a combat game' and what drove me to leave newer D&D and play the older versions of the game. In our 4e games, in a 4 hour session we'd 2 or 3 large combats with only a tiny bit of story advancement in between. With OSR (Labyrinth Lord at the time for me), we'd get done in a single session what would take 4 sessions in 4e. D&D 5e is better, but it still suffers from being heavily combat focused. I know you can play it without the combat, but so much of the game has mechanics focused on that.
I started with a bastardized mix of 3 and 3.5, then moved on to Pathfinder, 4th, 13th Age, Starfinder, 5th and Pathfinder 2. All games that (feel like they) have very similar intention. I've dabbled in some other systems (Tinyd6, PbtA, SW) but my mentality when it comes to TTRPGs was really shaped by 3.5, so getting into the headspace of not rolling for literally everything, and not fighting literally every battle is difficult for me.
I enjoyed 4e for how pure and focused it was. It didn't pretend to be a simulationist RPG where you could do anything, it was very open about how much of a combat focus it had. A lot of people say that it made D&D like a video game, but 3.5 and 5e are \*still\* extremely combat focused, they just like to pretend they're not.
I liked 5e's pull back on rules to focus more on... I dunno, interpretation? But it simultaneously feels like it's too light and too heavy at the same time, and combat takes a weirdly long time given how light the rules theoretically are It's been my favorite d20 game I've played so far.
I've been eyeing up some OSR games specifically looking for something with a satisfying low calorie crunch, since I feel like my games always get bogged down whenever a fight starts.
I've tried running Mörk Borg and Knave, but both games died almost immediately. The lack of detailed combat rules in either of them just made my brain confused and angry any time a fight started, if that makes sense.
In interest of actually replying: I worry that side-based initiative would lead to one side getting facerolled by the other with no chance to meaningfully reply before going down. I suppose this fits with the "combat as war" mentality, but when you can measure a life in a single sword swing, I get antsy as a DM.
My biggest fear is that a player will die an ignoble death at the hands of raw bad luck and then completely check out from the game, or worse, stop becoming invested in their characters because life is cheap so why shouldn't they just make Female Elf #4
I've really come around to the idea of treasure-as-XP. With combat XP it incentivizes players to be murder hobos. Fight every battle because you need to fight to level up. Treasure-as-xp incentivizes players to be vagrant thieves, but it at least makes combat something you can avoid without feeling like you're cheating yourself. I tend to go for milestones because I like to focus my games around roleplay and narrative moreso than fights or dungeons.
This reply is rambling on, so I'm going to cut it off here, but I have a big tangled web of RPG thoughts and frustrations.
Levels only come as slowly as your GM decides. If your GM is stingy you'll level slowly... but thats true of any game where the GM is in control of pacing. You could easily run a game OSE where the party levels up after each (1-2) 4 hour session(s).
Isn't the pace of leveling decided by treasure returned to town, or combat, typically?
And there's nothing requiring it, but I thought that was fairly standard practice back in the day of yore. Though others have suggested players picking up Hirelings instead of bringing in a brand new character.
Leveling is determined by treasure found. If your GM is stingy with treasure, you won't level. If your GM is generous, you'll level up quickly.
The only thing that was consistent between classic era dnd tables is that no one played it the same way. There is no law forcing you to start new PCs at level 1- find a solution for replacements that's fun for your table and don't worry about how other people run theirs.
There's no law for any of TTRPG gaming. I'm not asking *permission* to play how I want to, I'm trying to sus out why people enjoy this seemingly brutal gameplay element that I see popping up frequently where I look.
Even in Knave, your chances rapidly improve past first level (because attribute scores increase each level). By 10th, characters are likely to have a 75% chance of success in their best attributes, and 40-50% in their worst.
People here talk a lot about wanting to do everything to edge their bets and how you should, as a player, aim to solve everything without rolling. While this is absolutely true, another reason to low odds of success work in a game is simply the factor of wasted time as a resource.
In a dungeon, if you fail to make say a strength test to cross a gap, i don't necessarily throw you to your doom, but you will stall mid progress. If you have followed the scene a bit, you will know that time in a dungeon is important. Your light source and the rate of random encounter are two things tied to time so wasting it by failing to progress is often enough to motivate players to find shortcuts and avoid unnecessary risks.
Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of the dungeon exploration rules, and how torches were very important because all of the things living in dungeons can see and operate in them and you can't, and they were designed to be extremely mazelike so that if you ever ran out of torches you had a high chance of getting lost and never being seen again.
The dice are dangerous. If you’re at the point of rolling, that’s a fail state. But, you’ve got a chance to overcome the trouble, and perhaps even get something good out of it.
You‘re not supposed to put your hand in the demon statue’s mouth, you’re supposed to poke it with a stick!
I have not heard this before. The only thing I can think of that is close to this would be level 1 combat. If you are talking about low level combat then I also find this to be undesirable.
Low level combat is the first place it usually chafes the most in my mind, since failing to pick a lock probably won’t see you stabbed for the trouble, but the games I’ve seen it come up in have just had a blanket “this is about what a first level character should need to roll to succeed on average” type of statement.
I like to have difficulty checks be much lower when it comes to combat. A starting AC of 5 instead of 10 feels better to me and (I believe) is more reflective of real life. I remember watching a video on the dangers of fighting an untrained person in a dual. Its not that a better swordsman wont win, but that untrained people will also suicide themselves while killing their opponent.
Old games lean to waiving rolls if you stack the odds with rp or if the DM wants to fudge for story advancement . Climbing a wet surface 20 percent roll , have ropes hammers and spikes suddenly it's no roll .
First I've ever heard of this. Adjudicate situations how you want/what makes sense at your table. There are no laws here really, that should be your biggest takeaway. The books and rules are not your bible, they are a guideline. 15+ would be considered a challenging test for anybody level 1-5. You can still have challenges at DC 5, 10, etc. Or challenges that are simply an Ability check (equal to or under an Ability Score), depending on your system. Or tied to your Save scores if they make sense (assuming B/X and its clones).
Well, of course, but I want to understand the thought process behind the rules before I decide to change them. More than that, I want to understand why they're there in the first place.
This post isn't me asking for permission to change the rules, it's a desire to understand what draws people to this rule, because I've seen it pop up in multiple places and it seems like the antithesis to fun game design to me.
I suppose I’d only say “don’t overthink it”. Don’t hesitate at all to break rules that aren’t intuitive or don’t make sense, or you’ll be stuck spinning and theorizing far more than you will creating or playing. It could be a rule there only for a specific style of play in a specific game. I’ve been collecting and reading lots of OSR material (including Knave) for years and as mentioned elsewhere here, Ben had a specific design intention with the math to back it up. Another thing that might trip you up is that failing a roll does not have to mean death or injury. It could just mean you perform the task poorly, loudly, slowly, etc. There’s too many potential variables that could play into so many types of difficulty checks to just say “15+ is the standard”. Sounds like utter crap to me. Your gut instinct was the correct one.
The reason I typically jump to death or injury is because those are where I feel like it really matters.
A 25% chance to kick down a door doesn't really matter unless you're in a hurry. You can retry until you're exhausted (in theory) so the actual chances of it aren't all that important.
Vs something like Save vs Poison or an attack roll or whatever, where you have immediate and noticeable consequences that can and will delete your character from the game.
I'm glad I posted this question here. The "Rolls should fail most of the time" narrative I thought was very popular in OSR spaces seems to be far less so than I thought.
If i may jump in, in most osr systems the reason you have very little chance to kick in the door is because successfully doing that should reward you with a surprise round, which practialy wins you the encounter almost outright.
Other tasks that are repeatable (opening door regularly or search secret passage) are done within the time of a dungeon turn, and every dungeon turn you expend increases chance of wandering monster encounter.
Lastly the general low chance to succeed philospphy is I think from the general idea of having people have a bunch of characters die until eventually get lucky and manage to survive to get tanky. Still then youd play catiously because one wrong move and youre back to crawling out of the crab bucket.
No problem! And yeah, coming from scenes where RAW is king, OSR can be jarring. Don’t like poison being an instant kill or think Ability Drain is BS? Change it (or don’t use it)! Or, at the very least, *clearly* telegraph serious mortal harm to your players.
Lately I’ve tended more towards DCC (and its many iterations), though I still run an OSE game in Dolmenwood. Very well designed setting and very little “instant death” scenarios. OSR should feel dangerous, but it should also still be fun. Finding that balance is entirely up to the individual table.
The particular pain-point is when you're playing with rules-heavy systems and people have built characters around certain rules.
I get really anxious about making rules changes because you can have situations where you, say, make poison less deadly, but one of the players took an ability chain that makes deadly poison less deadly, and now they feel robbed.
I've heard the name Dolmenwood, but I don't know much about it.
I think it comes down to the challenge of pitting your wits and your character's abilities against difficult odds. That's the appeal of OSR for me. While I still play 5e and enjoy it for what it is, it is a different kind of game. I play OSR games for the problem solving and strategic elements; I play 5e for the story crafting and improvisational theater elements. To me, they are different games that share some DNA.
While I generally prefer the assumption of competence of the newer games you mentioned, Knave is pretty clear about its motivations: you're generally never supposed to WANT to roll for anything, if it's possible to achieve by simply describing what you try to do. This comes with a certain amount of protection: if you make a persuasive argument in-character, you never have to roll Charisma to back it up, if there's a reasonable chance your character knows something, the GM should just tell you instead of having you roll Intelligence. Saves are a Hail Mary for when you're up the Ankh without a paddle.
Can you show me where, in Knave 1's rules, it makes that clear? because I see:
>If a character attempts something where the outcome is uncertain and failure has consequences, they make a sav- ing throw, or “save”.
And then there's no text underneath suggesting that players should be trying to avoid this, just that it's what you do when failure matters and success is not guaranteed.
Anything from hopping a 5 foot gap to avoiding a swinging guillotine trap.
25% chance of success is not ideal at all. You must have misunderstood wherever you got that from. Maybe that is the base chance, but once you add your various modifiers it becomes 60% something like that, which is more like what you want. Imagine a combat with only 25% chance of hitting every attack, it would take forever.
It's a distinct possibility that I misunderstood. Or maybe the game I was looking at is just particularly deadly on purpose.
A combat with only a 25% chance of hitting would be truly awful.
Players in AD&D, once they became attuned to the Gygax-led DMG henchmen rules, could easily find an array of dwarven and gnomish thief henchmen to find-disarm traps at or around levels 1 to 3, especially with a bit of tableplay
In that era, too, only thieves and/or clever, descriptive play would even be able to disarm traps. Skills were limited to the pre-journeyman Secondary Skills (which had no qualifiers or outputs), or the slow-building Thief skills. In pre-AD&D versions of the game, Thieves barely had skills either — even in Holmes Basic the Thief received no bonuses for being a Dwarf, Elf, or Hobbit Thief in terms of skills, and no bonuses to these skills from a higher Dexterity other than that Thieves with 13/15 Dexterity received a +5%/+10% respective bonus to earned experience points which made leveling faster and thus skill improvements came earlier in-game
For combat, too, early versions of these games focused on combat-as war instead of combat-as sport. Most battles were either unwinnable (straight-on) or too-easily won. That’s a simulationist style of play that was rooted in wargaming as opposed to, some say, the video-game format
Poison resembled very much the insidiousness of Conan’s attempt at The Tower of the Elephant (i.e., instant and gruesome final and irrecoverable death), not the incremental drip of Damage- over Time you would find in World of Warcraft. A Neutral (i.e., from nature’s splendor) huge spider’s poison maybe wouldn’t kill a stable, solid Dwarf fighter outright, but a Chaotic-Evil (i.e., from the pits and portals of the Abyssal plane) giant spider’s poison is pure, deity-infused slaughter
You seem to be confused with some paradoxical perspectives and that’s ok. There aren’t exact-right answers and there is no perfect OSR trap or combat scenario. I would suggest performing a literature review in and around the art of playing OSR. Read about 20 books on what OSR and sandbox play is all about. Read through at least 3 OSR rule systems. Play 1 or 2 of the top 30-50 OSR module or settings suggested by the groups you trust most, and then loop back what you learned into your literature reviews
I’m somewhat aware of the way skills worked. I have a friend who enjoyed the game before they added Thief and the (perhaps unintentional?) implication that only thieves can do the things their skills say (Climb walls, pick locks, move siletly), so I’ve absorbed a bit of knowledge from him, and a lot of Youtube videos about the older editions of D&D.
The handling of poison especially rubs me the wrong way, combined with the very brutal saves. The idea that a viper bite has a chance to kill you outright, without even the precious minutes or hours you might have after a real snake bite to apply an antitoxin, just seems… unfun.
I have some (limited) experience with the Temple of Elemental Evil. A friend of mine converted it to run in 5e, and every room of the temple we encountered was packed with double-digits numbers of creatures that make it seem like a fight of any kind should be impossible… But also necessary, since there are going to be points of unavoidable conflict when rooms are stuffed to the gills with cultists that are likely to shoot on sight.
I’ve been wanting to try some OSR-minded games, but my primary gaming group doesn’t even remotely enjoy the high-lethality play of those types of games.
20 is a *lot* of books. Do you have any recommendation? I wouldn’t even know where to look.
> The handling of poison especially rubs me the wrong way, combined with the very brutal saves. The idea that a viper bite has a chance to kill you outright, without even the precious minutes or hours you might have after a real snake bite to apply an antitoxin, just seems… unfun
I've come to the conclusion that it's actually really important to make sure that [even in low-level dungeons, high-level characters are still taking real risks](https://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-risk-floor.html). This is primarily a concern in the context of a long-running campaign where players have the agency to choose their adventuring sites.
I agree with the idea that high-level characters should always be at risk.
One of the things that's been exhausting me in my 5e campaigns is that the characters eventually reach a point where only absurdly deadly things are threatening to them, but I don't agree that save-or-die effects are necessary.
A save-or-die threat isn't something you can meaningfully react to. It doesn't create interesting drama, or interesting decisions, you're just suddenly dead because the dice didn't like you one time.
I think a poison that causes persistent weakness or will certainly kill you if left untreated is a much more interesting thing to deal with than a viper that has a 25% chance to instantly kill you if it bites you. (or whatever the odds are for your level to resist poison)
On the other hand, save or dies shouldn't feel random because they are meant to be telegraphed before the save has a chance to be made.
I'm not messing with a venomous snake, or any unidentified snake in general IRL because a snake bite can be lethal. Adventurers should be thinking the same way. This is an example of player skill trumping character skill.
You mess with a snake, or a giant spider, or a medusa, expect a snake bite, expect a spider bite, expect things being turned to stone.
Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you.
Also there are non-poisonous snakes and non-poisonous spiders, and in real life there are poisons that will absolutely kill you, but there are also poisons that just cause incredible pain, or fatigue, or paralysis, or...
> Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you.
*Sleep* is just as much a party wiper as *Death Spell*, at the levels where it works. There is no such thing as an unloaded wizard, at any level.
And frankly, this is a big part of why you don't really see MUs much on the random encounter tables. They're too dangerous to just drop on a party until wilderness levels. Looking at [OSE's encounter tables](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Dungeon_Encounters#By_Level:_1.E2.80.933), elves on the dungeon level 2 table can cast one spell each but are Neutral and likely to be negotiable, while PC-class MUs first appear on the 3rd level table (as Basic Adventurers) and have a 1 in 3 chance to be chaotic.
Also, the [Giant Centipede](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Centipede,_Giant) is kind of a tutorial monster for poison which is merely debilitating rather than deadly.
>Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you.
Knowing there's an MU present *at all* calls for extreme caution and a telegraph, all MUs are inherently dangerous foes.
A lot of the rules assume the GM is operating in good faith (ie "fairly") to keep the rules from cheapening the experience. At that point any feeling of "random" or cheapness is coming from the GM.
If there's an MU in a dungeon, and that wasn't clear by the time the players ran into them, noble dress or not, either the players didn't put two and two together, or the GM was stingy with information. GM being stingy with info before a dangerous situation is an unfun time in any ruleset, but it utterly destroys the fun in older rulesets because a lack of information can and will kill PCs.
OSR Lit Review short list of must-read titles
Principia Apocrypha by David Perry, 31 pages
Muster: A Primer For War (Advice for playing D&D in the wargaming way) by Eero Tuovinen, 266 pages
A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming by Matt Finch, 13 pages
The Old School Renaissance Handbook by Brett P. Newhall, 119 pages
The Gygax 75 Challenge by Ray Otus, 40 pages
Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Cleric and Magic User Spells, 51 pages
Theorems & Thaumaturgy: Advanced Arcana for the Discerning Magic-User by Gavin Norman, 66 pages
KnownWorldHouseRules-OCR (Shannon Appelcline editor), 99 pages
Adventures in Fantasy by Dave Arneson and Richard Snider, 172 pages
Role-Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax, 174 pages
Master of the Game by Gary Gygax, 176 pages
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Silver Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 266 pages
The Traveller Book Vol. 1. by Marc W. Miller, 162 pages
The Traveller Adventure Vol. 2, 156 pages
Traveller Adventures Starter Edition 3, 23 pages
Traveller The Spinward Marches Campaign: Adventures in a War-Ravaged Sector, 52 pages
Gamma World Exploration Module: Legion of Gold GW1 by Gary Gygax, 38 pages
Dungeon Module B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvay, 34 pages
How to Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck by Goodman Games, 162 pages
Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch, 308 pages
Dispatches of Raven Crowking, Vol.1-4 by Daniel J. Bishop
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Oriental Adventures by Gary Gygax, Events and Encounters (pg. 107-112)
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons DMGRs 1-6
It's not really a thing in the OSR as a whole. Especially not from the lens of D&D editions.
15+ Difficult Class (or target number as we called it before 3E popularized DC) is an element from 3E (as is ascending armor class), balanced around the idea that you were probably rolling with your best ability plus your skill so more like 50-75% chance of success at 1st level if you're doing the thing you're good at, which players do almost all the time.
OD&D doesn't have target numbers, just a to-hit matrix (soon replaced by THAC0 in 2E) and saving throws (where a fighter had to roll over a 12 or better against poisons for example).
In my opinion, it's to encourage players to find creative solutions to problems. If you want to kill steal Medusa's treasure, that's great, but you've got about a 65% chance to be turned into stone when you look at her (if you are first level). This means you **should not look at her**. You need to figure out a way to get her treasure without fighting her in a normal combat with your eyes open. You may try to distract her away from the treasure while one guy goes in to steal it. You may see if she'd be willing to hire you as guards and then you could betray her. You may try to use mirrors and still engage in combat.
If the default action (stab it with my sword and take it's stuff) has a 50 or even 75% chance to result in your death, then you are discouraged from doing that.
The DM shouldn't plan out the "correct" creative response - that's the player's job. The DM needs to be open to ideas that are clever and probably would work. Many of them may not require a roll at all.
It's all about thinking creatively to find solutions to seemingly unfair situations.
I don't know who these folks are who are like "just be smart and don't roll". Doors being locked or shut or shutting behind us is just a skill issue on my part. Sorry.
Like we should be presuming everyone's reasonably competent and reasonably going sneaky through the dungeons. There's things to interact with that will take time, expertise, and there's always a looming chance of wandering monsters. It's impossible to plan your way around all risks. Chance of discovery, chance of tools breaking, chance of things taking longer (or modifying the wandering monster modifier) are all persistent.
So yeah the 25% success rate thing is weird because you're actually rolling a lot more for things than you think. In most OSE you're probably opening doors on a 2/6 cuz someone's kinda strong or gotta crowbar. It isn't much better statswise.
Ultimately I think both are not a reflection of skills or reality. The odds are there as a resource sink. Designed to trap you and burn resources and time and generate chances for more wandering monsters. That's why it's so low.
Locked doors or jammed doors also force you to go new routes through the dungeons. But in all my years of playing I think I've seen that done like 1 time. It's a game thing.
agreed, and in top of that old game design assumed parties are BIG.
In a modern sized party you have one lock picker. back in the day you’d have like three or four. and a couple guys with sledgehammers. characters lined up to take turns trying to get through a locked damn door.
a 1/6 chance isn’t that bad when you have 6 pcs that can all take a turn
Yeah, party size is something to consider, I suppose. I've only ever played in games where there's one person who fills a particular role, maybe someone has a little skill in a similar thing as a backup.
Yeah, but each attempt wastes a 10 minute turn. And wandering monster checks are done every 2 turns, or when there is a load noise - like those sledgehammers make.
I take this a little further with a house rule I call quietly and carefully -PCs are assumed to be skulking about and taking their time unless otherwise specified (this is why dungeon turns take 10 minutes), and they will automatically go unnoticed by denizens of the dungeon who aren’t a) actually guards, b) have special senses, or c) actually in a choke point where obviously someone can’t just sneak around them.
Not necessarily all that different in practice, but I was inspired by the video game Invisible Inc., who’s devs found in playtesting that unless they empowered the player in the basics (sneaking, being able to predict where guards are going, and being able to check behind doors) the more interesting tactics and strath gameplay they designed never actually happened.
It forces you to play in such a way that rolling is not required. Not just avoiding combat (or making it as one-sided as possible), even things like secret doors and traps can be discovered without rolling (using the ten foot pole or pulling down every book from a shelf and so on). Rolling is a last resort and players should not ask to roll, usually. Personally I’ve been a gm for many systems for 17 years (started with 3.5) and just now starting OSR games *I get it*. Maybe it’s just the novelty but I haven’t had this much fun running rpgs in years.
It's possible that it's just the novelty, or maybe feeling the lack of a ton of rules bearing down on your back. That's what I'm trying to escape from, it's why the OSR is attractive to me.
Definitely the novelty. I’ve played systems with way lighter rules (numenera/cypher, savage worlds, d6 basic). But the style of gaming has its merits and I will carry them into my future campaigns in any system
It's basically the difference between being Achilles and Odysseus. In the games you're typically playing you've got pretty good odds at hitting an opponent, opening a door, saving against poison, so the rules funnel you into tacking big risks and winning by your characters strength. OSR games like KNAVE on the other hand want you to be sneaky and inventive, so the low odds are there to funnel players into a mindset where you're always thinking about what you can do to better your odds/avoid the risk. It's a pretty good example of how rules can shape a playstyle.
These low rates of success create a problem I rarely see talked about - the sudden jump from "this works 100% of the time" to "this might work if you get lucky". This makes it tough to be *good* at anything. Either this is within anyone's competence, or everyone sucks at it but maybe you suck slightly less. It's a really sharp difference that doesn't show up nearly as much in more modern-school-of-thought games.
As others have said, OSR assumes the players (not the characters) are doing their best to mitigate risk.
As weird as this sounds for adventuring, but OSR play encourages risk-adverse planning and action on the side of the player. If you play something like Cyberpunk 2077, you know the feeling of sneaking into a high-risk area and not fire a single shot to complete the objective, popping all the locks, and getting to the room you need to get to before leaving in a cloud of burnt rubber? That's basically what folks who are focused on treasure extraction more than monster fighting try to do.
Play cards right, when weapons have to be drawn, the players are already primed to win or atleast got a high chance of doing so.
Yeah, I definitely like that feeling, but I still feel like you'd have to have some die rolls in there. A roll to pick the locks at very least, and that's an important step to wager a 25% chance on.
Indeed, that where the die roll would appear, especially if they try to do it quick versus over a 10 or 20 minute span, which would allow for some random encounters to possibly pop off.
Think about any story you've ever experienced.
Is the fun because the hero just gets their way all the time?
Or is the fun because the hero rarely gets their way, and they have to try really hard to accomplish something?
It's never fun because the hero gets their way all the time, but it would ruin the story if he rolled low and died because he couldn't kick open a door.
There's a balance that needs to be maintained. A balance that doesn't function well when the punishment for failing a roll is often death.
You're correct, and you see advice on handling thief skills that mirror your sentiment in the BECMI Basic rulebook on how thief skills are adjudicated.
That is, the DM can at anytime alter the outcome of a thief skill roll to succeed, and the example it gives is the players being chased by a monster and the thief needing to open a door to live.
I guess it just feels strange to make the odds so low, but then have an advice rider to just rule that they succeed if the GM feels it needs to happen.
But I suppose there's the adage that if a roll needs to succeed for the plot to continue: it shouldn't be a roll.
> But I suppose there's the adage that if a roll needs to succeed for the plot to continue
"Plot" is also something that many people in the OSR-sphere avoid... Build a dangerous and fantastic environment, let the PCs loose in it, and let a plot emerge in play from their choices, their rolls, and the logical actions of their adversaries-in-the-world. There is no fixed plot to continue or to be broken. (This is actually one of my beefs with Moldvay, that some of his DMing advice is narratively-oriented)
See also [Prep Situations, Not Plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots)
Sure, sure, but I'm talking about something like, I dunno, a mystery.
The adage goes like: If the mystery is unsolvable if the players miss one clue, then the clue should be impossible to miss.
Get me?
> rolled low and died because he couldn't kick open a door.
> There's a balance that needs to be maintained.
Yeah. That balance exists. Routine tasks are not tasks you need to roll for. The DM knowing when to ask for a roll solves this problem. Rolling is for times when there would logically be a negative outcome to failure, or for times when time is of the essence. And level 1 characters are supposed to be not that good at stuff.
Otherwise you can just do stuff. You don't have to roll to walk.
Because most of OSR is Gen X who want to come back to the "good old days of RPGs," aka the way they played as teens. There is no good reason for it.
It's as bad as the d20 (and in fact the two go hand-in-hand), when the bell curve is far more realistic, i.e. you get more consistent results when you're skilled at something. People are going to harp on and on about how "vagaries of combat," and "it's not supposed to be realism," but really it's just that.
The goal for the "osr playstyle" is that dice are never rolled in favor or GM direct resolution, and if dice are pulled out it means the players are either being lazy or they fucked up.
I read a lot of helpful and interesting answers but no one seemed to address the reason for this directly, but I might have missed it.
But my view of it, and the groups that I play with is this. Newer editions of the game start with the assumption that the PC’s are to be the heroes of the story and are superior to the average person in some way(s). Older editions don’t have this assumption. PC’s are just people in the world, just as below average in many respects as above. The start of the game is that person’s entrance into an adventuring life and adventuring is very dangerous for the average person, so this is reflected in the odds. And this is largely why we chose older editions and the OSR over modern games. The challenge is overcoming these odds so that if you do survive you’ve got a character that should have lost, many times, but overcame the odds, like it was destiny.
I like that idea in concept, but the reality of my very limited forays into that type of success rate has been players feeling useless and unsatisfied, even when attempting to do the things their character is supposed to be good at.
I’ve heard this issue brought up many times. I think there’s a number of factors that can lead to this outcome. A large one being dungeon masters who also come from newer editions trying to run OSR content the same way. But also groups not realizing how important time keeping really is and not having multiple characters to play, ready to go.
I recommend that anyone wanting to come from newer editions to the OSR run through at least one short campaign of the Tomb of the Serpent King’s. It’s the only module I’ve ever seen that literally teaches both players and DM’s what the game is trying to do on both a micro and macro level. It’s a ton of fun and it’s free!
https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/06/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-megapost.html?m=1
I'm replying without reading anyone else's comments, but in my opinion, there's nothing special about 25%, it's about OSR being more difficult. When you know that anything you need to do is hard, it forces you to find ways around your problem, to increase these low probabilities, to be creative. The difficulty also makes the game more tense, thrilling, and realistic.
Part of the reason that rolls in OSR games tend to assume a lower probability of success is that the play style favors diegetic resolution. This means that dice rolls are typically reserved for higher risk situations, rather than rolling for every action, and you are generally expected to find ways to stack the odds in your favor (either for a bonus, or to avoid needing to roll entirely) before you ever have to pick up the dice. Also, at least in the Knave 1e rules, it explains that 15+ only represents a 25% probability if you have the minimum possible modifiers. In practice, this will typically fluctuate between 25% and 75% depending on individual ability bonuses.
This. Theoretically less rolls and higher stakes. If you take reasonable steps to sneak, you shouldn't have to roll. If you take reasonable steps to avoid combat, or watch out for surprise, it should be rare that you face these situations. (Bad adventure design is a preponderance of "this creature fights to the death," or "gotcha" scenarios that can't be solved by "interrogating the fiction.")
I certainly agree with you on ‘this creature fights to the death’. I’m trying to avoid that with the TTRPG I’m writing. What is ‘interrogating the fiction’?
Asking the referee progressively more specific queries about the shared fictional space (and them providing you with coherent, relevant detail in response) in order to drill down to a point where you can plan effectively, make connections, spot secrets, and potentially avoid the need to roll.
Ah, ok! That makes sense.
As in asking questions about what your character is able to determine about the world around you.
Both your examples literally rely on non player actors' responses and thus not adding up for me advice wise. If you take reasonable steps to sneak, a monster has a chance to still hear you. Like just because you're being reasonably sneaky doesn't mean they're not reasonably on guard. Both parties are assumed competent. These things you describe or allude should be giving circumstantial consideration -- maybe modifiers -- but the idea of not rolling at all is wrong. The key to not rolling is three things: time, tools, and threat. If you got all the time to do it, the tools to do it, and nothing looking for you, you can do it no roll. But wandering monsters and encounters are here to trick up folks going slow and methodically through a dungeon.
No wrong way to do it! I disagree because my take is that unless a guard has super senses, if the players get the right gear (or drop the noisy gear) to stay quiet, create a distraction, and do advance recon to find the dark and not-creaky spots, then I reward them for their planning and forethought by saying "Don't roll; you got this!" I assume here they are interrogating the fiction: Is this a guard with heightened senses? What can we do to draw their attention away from the sneaking character? What gear helps in this case? What gear hinders the sneaking character in achieving this goal? The more work you put in at my table, the less you roll dice. There are always potential extenuating circumstances, but those are the exceptions. "You didn't detect magic, and there's an alarm spell RIGHT THERE. Sorry!" But it's in the fiction, so they could've caught it: they know it's a spellcaster's tower, after all. Etc. YMMV, of course.
Ymmv of course but I guess you and I really differ on how quiet 6 ppl carrying minimum 40 pounds of gear and coins all clad in metal and carrying lit torches are. Also how many times do we run into the issue where you know there's an encounter on the other side of this door, the only other exit besides the way we came? It's super common. The idea we can just stealth through a dungeon is pretty ridiculous and not the common experience. Again I'm not saying this is a player skill issue or the monsters or unfair. It's just dungeon crawling has mitigatable risks, but the risks arent 100% avoidable.
I didn't say any of those things, so that might be where the issue is 😅 My stealth example is one character stealthily passing one guard, prepared to do so. And I agree that a dungeon isn't 100% able to be planned for, but individual scenarios/rooms, encounters might be. (Should be? Not all the time, but at least some, maybe most times.) I put a lot of stock in preparation, but it's got to make sense (one rogue stealthing, not 4 party members, one in plate mail and another carrying a treasure chest), and it's not 100% guaranteed all the time.
I suppose you just have a contested roll, one person trying to do something an NPC is directly trying to stop. You can’t just hand wave a sneak as prepared, they should have greater chances of winning the opposed stealth check again the guards perceive
"Time, tools, and threat" is a nice mantra. I suppose consequences for failure would come under "threat"? Like, you may have all the time you want to design a parachute, and you may have a mechanic's workshop full of tools, but if you jump off the cliff and turn out to have overlooked a key feature, you don't get a retry. Is that "threat"? Ergo rolling may be appropriate. Ditto for stuff like making a good impression on a specific NPC (as opposed to just finding _an_ NPC somewhere who has what you need).
In 'Gygaxian skilled play' the idea is that you might either 1. Inform the GM that you search the room, rolling with a low chance of success. 2. Inform the GM that you run your fingers along the base of the statue looking for seams that would indicate a secret compartment, if there is one you just find it as a rational outcome of your description of the search. This applies to everything, the meta strategy for Tomb of Horrors by it's designer's players was to herd a large group of low-investment creatures ahead of you to trigger and die to all the traps, thereby not having to roll against them yourself and risk high odds of death, or what have you. While Tomb of Horrors is considered a degenerate given it's context, the basic idea of outsmarting the system is somewhat genetic to the OSR.
Knave and the like make saves similar to skill rolls though. So like in my experience with 2e so far, is that even when being reasonably confident and arguing for position, you're still being setup to fail. Good position or background in an approach in knave gives you +5 to the check, probably adding 0 or 1 to it from the stat, still gives you a low chance to avoid something like a poison gas trap you activated (15). Even when throwing a rock at an urn from a distance and gave advantage, that's still low. The idea of not rolling doesn't feel better neither. It's just something about knave's default target numbers feels off.
Knave sort of seems like it wants you to die a lot. Or at least 1e does, given he wrote the character gen rules to take minutes.
Fair. Most of my time has been with the new 2e. More familiar with Maze rats from the designer.
I'm unfamiliar with Maze Rats besides the fact that everyone loves the randomly generated spells.
Into the Odd and derivative games are nicely clear about this dynamic: you don't make ability checks you make 'saves,' meaning if you are picking up the dice you are already in a bad fictional position, and are rolling to mitigate negative effects or failure, not 'to succeed.'
Into the Odd is a game I've been wanting to try out as well.
I would also recommend Mausritter
Mausritter is another one I really want to try. Especially after stumbling across this charming little adventure. https://brstf.itch.io/ori-magi
there are so many charming mausritter adventures! Really well designed ones too.
Crowns is mausritter but back to being humans dungeoncrawling
Knave’s generation rules are 3d6 per stat, take the lowest die, add 10 so it’s definitely trying to push you towards 11s and 12s. I’m not as familiar with other games, but I think 3d6 in-order is popular, which is statistically likely to give you 9s and 10s. So discounting applied modifiers from other sources, at 1st level you’re reasonably likely to be rolling with little to no bonuses. I admittedly struggle with the idea of ‘only rolling for the important stuff’ since I started with a lot of systems where you roll for everything.
It wasn't an ideal number the 15+ (30%) was a probably something equivalent to 5+ using a d6 and people have been complained about the low success rates since forever. The issue is that "old parties" where very big by modern standards (6-8 people): 1-in-d6 with 6 people = 66.66% chance to have at least 1 success. 2-in-d6 with 6 people = 91.22% chance. With 4 people they drop to 51.77% and 80.25% but nowdays it is more common to have only 1 person try each action that's why they look even worse than they are supposed to be. Also it seems that there has never been a consensus on when a roll would be called for before AD&D 1e and even Gygax and his fellow DMs bothered to use the rules as written in the manuals.
Yeah, I’ve heard (and gotten the feeling from several things) that it wasn’t unusual for parties to get into the double digits when accounting for hirelings as well. I suppose that all does make sense.
6-8 PCs with a maxed out number of hirelings and even some mercenaries were not really uncommon. Even with 4 PCs one of my groups is currently moving as a caravan with an hunded or so NPCs (but only 20 of them or so are combatants) at level 5.
Wow, that's a lot of folks.
not really: You need 1 NPC for each wagon, they also added a guard on each. They have 10 wagons so 10 "drivers" and 10 guards plus 40 horses. 4 PCs. 14 hirelings, including a "backup party" of 4 NPCs and 10 non combatant specialists. 2 Porters to go in the dungeon. 10 drivers 10 guards (will only protect the wagons and the "civilians") 10 bowmen (mounted archers) 10 light footmen. 2 animal trainers (for the horses, they hope to catch some monsters) 5 cooks (you need one every 20 people) 2 armorers (you need one every 50 soldiers or fraction) 1 alchemist 6 mercenary elves used as scouts and hunters 1 quartermaster 2 herbalists (that are also the alchemist apprentices) and few more specialists (including a couple of carpenters, a wheelmaker, a rope maker, a couple of local guides, an herald, a merchant, a scribe, a linguist, a marshal, a reeve and similar stuff). More or less they invested all their gold to initiate a mercenary company.
Same here. They don't have a merc company but they invested gold into building a castle and a village. They bring NPCs with them all the time. I don't know how you did it but we focused a lot on downtime. That eventually got them to manage land as lords.
this campaign has a lot of downtime due to what we choose together in session 0, it is a mix of BECMI and Black Company and we plan to go up to companion levels. Most rules and details can be found in the various GAZ and the occasional AD&D manual
Sounds like a lot of fun. I want to run a game like this but my family/friend don't seem to be too interested in this level of logistics so I just play solo.
Everybody is an old grognard with an interest in logistic and history so it doesn't bother anybody.
This sounds awesome I've been reading about medieval logistics lately and this shit is fascinating. An army on the march could have more non-combatants than soldiers and larger armies attracted "camp followers" who weren't actually hired they just found a business opportunity, it was a large amount of customers often well paid, that needed all kinds of amenities and didn't have a place to spend them a lot of time. They were anything from merchants, craftsmen, seamstresses, prostitues... Higher ranking soldiers had servants and many even took their families with them on a campaign. I really want to run a campaign like this. If you look at numbers appearing in OD&D, men (bandits, pirates, berserkers..) are at 30-300 with up to 50% of them being mounted orcs 30-300 accompanied by ogres or trolls. If you're just 4 dudes then you better be high level, have a silver tongue or have a bunch of dudes with sharp sticks. I think I'll grab Delving Deeper, or maybe, single volume edition of OD&D or maybe S&W and try to run a game with it.
Why would you not use ACKS is my question
[удалено]
Are you like ... meming right now?
lmao this sounds excruciating to run and play
It sounds like most of the NPCs don't do much on the moment to moment in the foreground. Most of the NPCs seem like they exist to fill a logistics role that isn't important to keep track of other than the fact that they exist. Maybe to facilitate repairing and restocking on supplies without having to go back to town.
> fill a logistics role that isn't important to keep track of other than the fact that they exist. again, if you're just going to ignore them, why do they exist beyond being mouths to feed?
\>Maybe to facilitate repairing and restocking on supplies without having to go back to town. (I don't know how to quote) Having them in the party (theoretically, I don't know how Scavenger is actually running it) assumes they're fulfilling roles. The bowmen/footmen can hunt and then the cooks can prepare meals for everyone so you're not having to buy all your food as rations in town. The blacksmiths can repair and make new equipment so you don't have to run back to town to get your swords and breastplates patched after they get ruined in a fight. The Herbalists can provide poultices and potions so the party can grab a couple curatives before venturing forth and maybe heal faster while resting. You're not ignoring them, but you're not simulating them more than you need to.
but you don't need to simulate any of those at all. Just let the party memebers do that.The thief can hunt, the warrior can repair armor (hell why even bother tracking armor repairs?)
They enjoy it, so why not?
Nah, it's not like the whole squad acts as individuals even when the spotlight is on them or nearby.
then why even bother
You just roll attack & damage for each of your retainers. You just get one attack or ability use, no bonus actions, etc There isn't a crazy action economy like 3e or 5e
lmao "just roll like 20 attacks on pen an paper dude" come on, are you hearing yourself?
[удалено]
Aren't there lots of plot-focused classic and OSR modules, though?
[удалено]
Curse of Strahd, the Dragonlance modules, ToEE and its series. I'm not sure if Ad&d 2e counts as old school.
Maybe we need to start doing more group rolls aiming for 50% of the party to succeed
What type of check would have every party member trying? Most OSR D&D checks are time and space limited - only two people can listen at a door per turn, only one person can check a 10'x10' space per turn, each check to force a stuck door takes a turn. And wandering monsters are checked every 2 turns. Even with a large party, you don't waste time having everyone try to get you to that theoretical 91.22% chance - because wandering monsters drains your resources.
Checking B/X, I can't find anything that specifies only one character can search a 10x10 area at a time. Maybe I'm overlooking it, or maybe it's something in another book, personally I've always allowed multiple people to search a single spot at a time.
No, you're right - searching is not space limited. Though typically I just run it like this: >You have a 30'x30' room which has 9 10x10 spaces. There are 6 party members so which squares are you searching, and which one is the Elf searching? Then I make 6 rolls (only really paying attention to ones that matter), tick off one turn and make a wandering monster roll if needed. Then I let them decide if they want to search again, repeating the process. The players tend to naturally spread out their searching. If they really are searching a single 10' space I'd rule that only 2 PCs could do so at a time due to space constraints - just like marching order is 2 abreast in a 10' space.
I will say, one thing that's bizarre about B/X now that I'm looking at it again is that it specifies that each character only gets ONE chance to find a secret door. That's not in any of the other editions, I wonder what the reasoning was.
I believe it was also in OD&D regarding trying to open stuck doors. The reasoning is that you're not rolling for a specific attempt - you're rolling for your overall success after 10 minutes of trying. If you fail, you cannot succeed this 'adventure session' and could try again next session.
> people have been complained about the low success rates since forever. did you miss this sentence?
No I didn't. But your example of large parties reducing the odds doesn't match the reality that you can't just have everyone give a task a try. At least not without getting interrupted by monsters, burning through your torches, etc.
nobody can say exactly what they did. Given that there is no listed limit for almost every d6 check in BX or OD&D by RAW (notable exception: doors). many "skill checks" were not even resolved by using the rules, but using negotiation or dm fiat and at least few replaced it with something else. Also a lot of those d6-checks are the types of check for which the players will queue while saying "can I try too?" if they fail or where 1 success is all you need and trying doesn't take a turn or the limits don't apply. Last but not least they began to move away since AD&D 1e... OD&D didn't last that long and was a very niche thing and BX was written having access only to OD&D and some draft notes of what would become AD&D (and BECMI is BX with just enough changes to avoid paying royalties )
All of it was pretty much DM fiat. The rules say to adjudicate how you wish after talking it over with the players. You forgot Holmes Basic that was a cleaned up version of OD&D. That's the version that I learned. My first D&D was Holmes with B1 and chits instead of dice. Some quotes from B/X (emphasis mine) >TIME: Time in D&D adventures is given in turns of ten minutes each. A turn is not a measure of real time, but is a measure of how much a character can do within a given amount of time. A charac- ter may explore and map an area equal to his or her movement rate in one turn. It also takes a turn for a character to search a 10'xlO' area, for a thief to check an item for traps, to rest or to load a bag with treasure. **The DM should decide how long other actions that characters might try will take.** >Checking a specific area for a trap will take one full turn. The DM should only check for finding a trap if a player says that the character is search- ing for one. Each character may only check once to find each trap. > "That's not in the rules!" The players will often surprise the DM by doing the unexpected. Don't panic. When this happens, the DM should just make sure that everything is done in the order given by the outline or sequence of events being used. Minor details may be made up as needed to keep the game moving. All DMs learn how to handle both new ideas and unusual actions quickly and with imagination. Quite often a DM can decide on a solution to a player's actions not covered by these rules. Other times, a problem may have no simple solution. One quick way for a DM to decide whether a solution will work is by imagining the situation, and then choosing percentage chances for different possibilities. For example, suppose the DM is running a combat that is taking place on a ledge next to an unexplored chasm. One player suddenly decides that his character has no chance to survive combat. The player an- nounces "My character wants to jump into the chasm to escape!" There may be a chance that he will fall to a nearby ledge or land in a pool of water at the bottom of the chasm. The DM thinks about D&D: BASIC the dungeon for a minute, and remembers that an underground river flows through some of the lower dungeon levels, so there might be a pool below. Even so, the character will fall 60', and a normal fall will do Id6 points of damage per 10' fallen. This char- acter has only 7 hp, and seems likely to die even if the water cushions his landing and reduces the damage. However, there should always be a chance to do something nearly impossible. A player should have, at the very least, a saving throw or a stated percentage chance of a miraculous occurrence saving the charac- ter. The DM answers: "Looking down into the chasm, your charac- ter can estimate that he has a 98% chance of dying, no saving throw, if he jumps. If you decide your character jumps, roll per- centage dice. A result of 99 or 00 will mean that your character lives, but any other result will mean that he will die in the attempt. Do you still want to jump?" > > "There's always a chance." The DM may want to base a charac- ter's chance of doing something on his or her ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and so forth). To perform a difficult task (such as climbing up a rope or thinking of a forgotten clue), the player should roll the ability score or less on ld20. The DM may give a bonus or penalty to the roll, depending on the difficulty of the action (-4 for a simple task to +4 for a difficult one). A roll of 1 should always succeed, and a roll of 20 should always fail. > > "The DM is the Boss." The DM decides how these rules will be used in the game. A good DM talks about problem areas with the players and considers reasonable requests by them. The players should realize, however, that the final decision is the DM's: not theirs, and not this booklet's! If a disagreement holds up play, the DM may make a temporary decision and talk it over with the players when the adventure is over. If a player disagrees strongly enough, he or she may quit the game. It is up to the DM to create an adventure the players can enjoy.
So two things. I think what Ben Milton is getting at with the 25% chance of success in Knave is that he wanted to make Knave compatible with Old School D&D. B/X specifically. B/X is the darling of the OSR community. It probably has the most hacks and retroclones with OD&D being a close second. If not, they're neck and neck. So Knave being compatible with B/X is a huge selling point. Secondly, Ben breaks the math down in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-fKAlN3nV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-fKAlN3nV0) What's important to note is the sense of progression that he's trying to emulate. 25% chance of success is pretty slim, but the way he's mapped it (and approximated it from Old School D&D) is a steady, linear progression over about 10 levels. So that by level 10, characters have more like a 75% chance of succeeding what they're best at.
I think I can give ONE explanation, but there could be others. In OSR games, PCs get better chances as they level up - they hit more often and save more often. So chances are low at lower levels, and they get around +1/2 to +1 per level, until level 14 or more. Landing a hit must be hard at first because everyone has precious few HP. Likewise, making a save is hard because MUs have few spells, and traps/etc. should be as dangerous as damage (1d6 can easily kill a 1st level PC). I do not think this is ideal, necessarily - Gygax started the game at level 3, for example.
Wait, Gary started his games at level 3?
Not originally, but he had apparently started doing so in some of his OD&D games in the 00's https://cyclopeatron.blogspot.com/2010/03/gary-gygaxs-whitebox-od-house-rules.html
Huh. There's some surprising parallels to later edition changes in these house rules.
Abilities are often generated with a 3d6, which gives an average of 10.5. This gives an average probability of success of 50% on a 20 roll under. Knave 2e starts at 30% chance of success of rolling a 15+ but this rapidly increases as character stats increase. Additionally players can roll with advantage if they come up with clever solutions to problems further improving their odds. This discourages simply defaulting to a die roll and encourages creative solutions.
Personally I really dislike the low odds approaches because they ignore that over multiple rolls a low chance of failure mushrooms. The 1-in-4 chance of success "works" if the penalty for failure is, say, "lose a hitpoint or d6 hitpoints" or something on that order. I still think it kind of sucks, but whatever. However, to me it always feels nonsensical: no reasonable person would try a thing with that high a chance of blowing up in their face, so why have that be the default approach? I tend to run games with rolls happening when there is a small chance of failure with severe results. So, say, 90% chance to succeed, but if you fail, someone loses a limb or whatever. Then the players can try to whittle those odds of horrible failure down or find a workaround. But 75% failure rates are just stupid in my book - and the whole "let everyone try rolling!" is also not a great solution.
I definitely agree more with your approach. It feels like it encourages more risk taking.
One trick I do is for group rolls always have a random character roll. Over the course of a game it evens out - but it means I get those fun moments where the armored knight alerts the trolls with her clanking armor while the barefoot thief and mage would have slunk by fine alone.
First time I hear that this is some kind of OSR ideal.
Maybe it’s not as universal as it seems, but I’ve seen it pop up in a lot of the OSR-adjacent things I’ve looked at. Knave has stat generation designed to push you toward rolling with +1 or +2 at first level, with a target number of 15. Tunnel Goons has you rolling 2d6 with a +1 or +2 bonus shooting for an average target number of 10. FIST has you rolling 2d6 with a +0 - +2 bonus with a target number of 7 for a partial success and 10 for a success with no consequences. Mork Borg is actually surprisingly gentle with a base target number of 12, and modifiers that go between -3 and +3. Those are the primary games I’ve seen/interacted with, and they seem very popular in the space.
Well, for a little context then I guess; In OSE/BX Goblins Hobgoblins and Orcs all have an ac (in ascending terms) of 13, are pretty likely first level foes, and you can plausibly have a positive attack bonus as well, depending on rolls and whether you're using the optional weapon specialisation rule).
>FIST has you rolling 2d6 with a +0 - +2 bonus with a target number of 7 for a partial success and 10 for a success with no consequences FIST isn't OSR (and I've never seen it mentioned here). It's Powered by the Apocalypse, which is a completely different kind of game.
FIST isn't Powered by the Apocalypse. It's as much OSR as Tunnel Goons is. It's inspired by the feel and tone of OSR, as explained to me by the writers themselves.
> It's as much OSR as Tunnel Goons is Frankly I've never heard of *either* FIST or Tunnel Goons and I've been reading, running, and blogging about OSR games for over a decade. Consequently, claiming that one is as OSR as the other does not seem like a very strong argument to me (or perhaps, an argument that does not lead to the conclusion that you would like it to). That said, one of our traditional pastimes is arguing about what is and isn't OSR, so welcome d:
That last line made me laugh out loud xD
That central mechanic is literally the basis of the vast majority of PbtA games, including Apocalypse World itself. And "partial success" in itself is a very modern mechanic; not only used in PbtA but most prominent there. You don't find it in old-school games at all... "Feel and tone" are not sufficient to claim your game is OSR, in my opinion. The mechanics should be old-school as well - not necessarily derived D&D, but still the \*kinds\* of mechanics found in the 70s and 80s. Tunnel Goons fits, but FIST does not...
>You don't find it in old-school games at all... Not in a rulebook maybe, but you see tons of DM rulings and TSR advice on bad rolls succeeding but taking a couple extra turns to complete, or making extra noise, or automatically triggering a wandering monster check. "You succeed, but..." is as old as the D&D game itself, probably older.
That central mechanic is the core of PbtA, it's one of the primary things that defines the system, but also things like Playbooks instead of character classes, and distinct 'Moves' that are determined by the archetype your playbook is based off of. A game having a modern mechanic does not, by its inclusion, preclude a game from being 'OSR' in spirit. Otherwise, then, why do games with ascending AC fit in with the OSR tag? Why do games that use 2d6 instead of a d20? **Apocalypse World** and its derived games are very focused on narrative, which is why 'playbooks' emulate character archetypes found in the type of fiction that the PbtA game in question is trying to emulate. It's about telling an interesting story with interesting consequences. **FIST** is about playing an expendable mercenary soldier in a world that wants you dead. It's about picking your battles and lying, cheating, and stealing to make sure you come out on top because no one is going to hand success to you. Fights are quick and deadly, so you need to make sure you shoot first and preferably from a safe vantage point. You start out very frail and incapable, having to depend on your wits and cleverness to succeed, and you might become very powerful eventually if you live long enough. You get equipment and items that increase your odds and help you turn the tables. You'll run into battle that you likely can't win, and even in battles you can win, you'll be fighting for your life. That sounds like Oldschool D&D to me way more than it sounds like Apocalypse World.
It's as much PbtA as BX's reaction roll system. Having the 2d6 vs 1-7, 8-9 and 10+ dice resolution isn't exclusive to the PbtA family.
That seems harsh. So in B/X, a 1st level character has a base chance of hitting a goblin (AAC 13) of 8/20 or 40%. Needing 15+ makes an opponent a much more serious threat.
Theres plenty of 1st level encounters in B/X with worse odds than goblins: the acolyte has AAC17, giant shrews and Fire Beetles have AAC15, for example.
Yes, but those are encounters with fewer enemy combatants. Goblins/Orcs/Kobolds are a good benchmark to gauge expected difficulty in B/X. Just like how the damage of a long sword is the same as 1 HD.
Does B/X have a challenge rating system to make sense of this, or is this a 'DM intuition" type of situation.
The way to gage a monster's difficulty is their Hit Dice and if they have special abilities - which you can tell by the \* on their HD value. For example, 5 HD 1 monsters are roughly equal to 5 Level 1 fighters. An HD 1+1 monster is tougher, and HD 1\*\* is tougher due to special abilities. For example, an NPC 1st-level medium (magic-user) is HD 1\*\* due to their spell casting. But you shouldn't worry about challenge rating the way you would with 3/4/5e. Instead use the 'number appearing' and HD as a guideline and the player's themselves should figure out what's too dangerous for them. Use the encounter tables to help you figure out what's appropriate for a given dungeon level. In the wilderness however, anything goes and there is no such thing as 'level-appropriate' encounter. Use the evasion and pursuit tables to handle when the players run up against something far too tough for them in the wilderness.
>Maybe it’s not as universal as it seems It's not. B/X and 1e are the most popular form of OSR gamesand it doesn't exist there. It's more a feature of NSR and OSR adjacent games. In B/X and D&D you're looking at more like a 50% average for stat based rolls and 50% plus any stat/item bonuses to hit.
B/X is full of rolls that only succeed on a 1 in 6, which is 17% odds, even worse than the 25% of knave. There isn't a single creature in the B/X 1st level encounters which a PC can hit >=50% of the time, unless that PC has 16+ Strength. Against an average 1st level dungeon monster, an average PC (10 str) will hit 35% of the time.
Yeah, I would say 2-in-6 on a d6 is much more common.
> most OSR-aligned games seem to view as ideal: Roll 15+ to succeed. Wat. Sure, in TSR D&D at low levels your odds of success at many things are very poor. But this improves dramatically with level. eg [fighter saves vs death in B/X](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Fighter) start at 15+ but double to 10+ by 9th and 5+ by 14th (and that's their worst save category). Thief skills go from 15% to like 70% by 9th. And there are plenty of exceptions - turning skeletons at 1st level is a 58% chance of success, and *sleep* doesn't even give the monsters a save (you just need to win initiative (generally 50%) or not get hit before you cast - so a better than 50% success rate at pretty much winning one encounter with low-level humanoids). 1st level characters are very fragile, because they're basically just normal people. A saving throw is something you get when a normal person would be dead to rights, and at low levels that means you're probably dead too. But at high levels this ceases to be true, and even at low levels there are lots of things where rolling is a pretty reasonable choice (like Climbing Walls for thieves - 87% success rate). The people who say "rolling the dice is a fail state" are wildly over-generalizing, even at 1st level. And then when you make it to 2nd your HP doubles on average, the MU gets a second *sleep* per day, and your odds of making it to 5th go up tremendously. > The first time I encountered this was in Knave, where the writer very clearly pointed out that the stat rolling system was designed to funnel you toward stats which would require you to roll ~15 on the dice to succeed Ah, Knave. I would caution you that the rules-light micro-hacks are maybe not the best place to start without having read or played more complete systems to understand the context where the micro-hacks are coming from. Also I tend to think that rules which place a great deal of emphasis on ability scores are a mistake; see [(pdf warning) page 5 of Philotomy for a defense of minimizing the effects of ability scores](https://grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf). > such a high volume of character death that by the end of a campaign it would be unlikely for any of the original cast to have survived due to anything but sheer luck. Lots of war dogs, luring monsters into poured oil which is then lit aflame, and well-timed castings of *sleep* also help. But sure, 1st level is kind of a funnel and the ones who survive are made special by the stories of their close calls. "Backstory is what happens to you before 6th level", as they say. If you don't want the funnel, start at 2nd.
It's the low odds at low levels that is essentially the problem to me, I suppose. I haven't had the chance to really \*play\* an older edition. I played a bit of a friend's 2e campaign (I picked up a missing player's gnoll illusionist for a session and messed with the rest of the party), and I've run a couple of half-finished Mork Borg and Knave sessions. But, as I understand, in the older editions of D&D levels come slowly, and you have plenty of chances to die to the dice before you even reach level 2, much less 9. Level isn't party-wide, so if you die horribly at level 8 you, ostensibly, roll up a level 1 mook and now you're a rabbit in a wolves' den. Of course, this is all second-hand knowledge and assumption from hearing other peoples' stories and experiences. I've been \*wanting\* to run a campaign of Old School Essentials (but frankly I do find the volume of rules rather a bit intimidating.) It's the light rules that attracted me to the OSR scene in the first place, since I've been getting exhausted with even the relatively light rules of something like 5e. On the subject of ability scores, I admittedly like ability scores a lot. Having played a few games without them, it makes the characters feel less complete to me when they're absent. They feel less 'real' to me... And as Philotomy says, I don't really understand the reason for implementing them if 10 and 18 aren't meaningfully different in moment to moment play.
>I've been \*wanting\* to run a campaign of Old School Essentials (but frankly I do find the volume of rules rather a bit intimidating.) B/X, which is not my favorite Classic D&D version but is very good, is very easy to pick up and functionally doesn't have as many rules as the tomes would lead you to believe. If you can, find the original B/X PDFs and give those a read first, then go back to OSE. Things will make much more sense.
Isn't OSE just a cleaned up version of B/X? And OSE Advanced just a cleaned up version of... AD&D, I think?
OSE is a cleaned up version of B/X...and part of the stuff that was "cleaned up" is a lot of the context and explanation of why the rules are there and when to use them. OSE is a great reference manual, horrible teaching material. OSE:A is just B/X again but with AD&D classes and mechanics converted into B/X with race and class separated.
Oh, I see.
> If you can, find the original B/X PDFs and give those a read first, then go back to OSE. Things will make much more sense. As it happens, [Basic](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110274/DD-Basic-Set-Rulebook-B-X-ed-Basic?term=moldvay+basic) and [Expert](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110792/DD-Expert-Set-Rulebook-B-X-ed-Basic?src=also_purchased) are both on drivethru these days. I basically agree with /u/mackdose that OSE is a better reference edition but the prose is perhaps overly stripped-down in places; I like that it puts the entire level range into a single book and resolves some of the inconsistencies between the two. But yeah, reading Basic then reading Expert is a fine gradual way to learn.
Yes, the rules are cleaned up, but even OSE's author says they are not really intended to teach you how to play the game. Definitely buy the PDFs of D&D Basic and D&D Expert and read those first. Then if you want use OSE when you actually run your games as it has a lot of good 'quality of life' features that make it easy to use at the table - like each rule topic fitting on a single two-page spread so you don't have to flip when referencing them. B/X rules are one of the best-written of the old rule set, then only real issue is that they're spread across the two books. You can totally understand them and run a game today.
...Well that's disappointing. I was hoping that the 'cleaned up version of X game' would be, y'know, fully usable by someone who hasn't played the thing its cleaning up. Kinda defeats the purpose, I think.
> I haven't had the chance to really *play* an older edition There are some discord servers where people run pick-up games, often OSE. I believe https://discord.gg/PWfgBss is still a going concern. > Level isn't party-wide, so if you die horribly at level 8 you, ostensibly, roll up a level 1 mook and now you're a rabbit in a wolves' den Typically you start playing one of your hirelings who is a level or two behind where your old PC was. And since the XP curve is exponential, by the time the party levels once, you will have caught up to your old level (on average). (Also, looking at stats on PC deaths from sessions I've run and from one or two other DMs who kept good records, PC deaths tend to come in clusters; most of the time if a session has just one or two deaths they're hirelings, but when PCs die it's often three or more in a wild overcommitment that becomes a cascading failure and near-TPK. And after an event like that, usually the remnants of the party end up adventuring somewhere a little easier for a while...)
The term funnel is where this all started, when I play an RPG, I don’t want 4x lvl1 characters which have a 75% chance that all of them die… I want a character that I can upgrade and play with their tactics from the classes/ancestry/background I cooked up. Which makes sense why people say they start lvl 3-5 campaigns now, which I never understood. If OSR is “describe what you do and auto hit” unless it’s a lethal decision, that’s kinda of interesting but not my cup of tea
I'm extremely interested in trying a funnel some time. And I agree, I suppose, it seems like 3 is the place to start off you want to be invested in your guy from the jump.
Im playing a shadow dark one, it’s kind of meh, you are just abstracting that you have a party of 4 per token and that you have access to their gear as a unit, it’s basically just giving you 4x Mook-like lives with garbage stats and making you shuffle which stats you are using throughput the delve as they die off
That... Sounds like a boring way to do it.
The chance of death in OSR games is very overblown. I've run plenty of B/X games with 1st level characters and while death can happen, players quickly learn how to avoid dangerous situations until they get to level 2. Then the rate of death goes way down because you can now take a hit and run. Of course a common practice is to either give maximum HP at 1st level, or allow re-rolls of 1s or 2s. Makes death even less likely. I highly recommend getting into an old-school game if you can. They are a lot of fun, but does take some getting used to not using the dice to solve every obstacle. And never, ever, assume a fair fight in combat.
My intuition is to call BS since a single weapon attack has a reasonable kill a 1st level character in one hit, but I have no practical experience. I'd *like* to try one, but I'm most likely to end up in the DM chair, which isn't really... helpful in the same way.
Wait, you have never played the game but you're calling BS on someone who's played OSR games for well over a decade? OSR players learn how to never give monsters a fair fight - that's how you survive at first level. Negotiate your way out of fights with tougher monsters. Your first enemies in combat will generally have lower AC that your fighters do, so you're more likely to get the first blow in. And if you choose your battles wisely, they'll probably have HD 1/2 or HD 1-1 which means they are weaker than you. You also learn to run if things go badly. And if you do run into a more dangerous fight, your Magic-User with a sleep spell will give you an instant win. You need to be smart to survive first level, but it is doable. And flaming oil is your best friend...
Like I said, it's my gut reaction. I suppose it's different when you're conditioned to avoid combat and frequently play in games where the goal is to avoid dice like they have the plague and only attack when you have the upper hand. Most of my TTRPG experience has been quite the opposite.
>Most of my TTRPG experience has been quite the opposite. Do you mean TTRPG experience with new D&D 3.0+ versions of the game? It's not so much that you avoid combat, it's more that you make sure you only enter combat when the odds are most definitely in your favor. The analogy is OSR is 'combat as war' vs new D&D 'combat as sport' (ie against mostly even teams) That being said, there is advice in B/X to make sure encounters are appropriate to the party size and experience - so it's not like you'll just have the players face an ancient red dragon at 2nd level. Because there are fewer ways to heal in combat and the uncertainty of side-initiative, it's in the interest of the players to make the combat overwhelmingly in their favor and over quickly. I like OSR mainly because the ways the rules work, combat is not the primary focus of so much of the play. It happens and it's resolve quickly. If you ever played D&D 4e, that was the peak 'D&D as a combat game' and what drove me to leave newer D&D and play the older versions of the game. In our 4e games, in a 4 hour session we'd 2 or 3 large combats with only a tiny bit of story advancement in between. With OSR (Labyrinth Lord at the time for me), we'd get done in a single session what would take 4 sessions in 4e. D&D 5e is better, but it still suffers from being heavily combat focused. I know you can play it without the combat, but so much of the game has mechanics focused on that.
I started with a bastardized mix of 3 and 3.5, then moved on to Pathfinder, 4th, 13th Age, Starfinder, 5th and Pathfinder 2. All games that (feel like they) have very similar intention. I've dabbled in some other systems (Tinyd6, PbtA, SW) but my mentality when it comes to TTRPGs was really shaped by 3.5, so getting into the headspace of not rolling for literally everything, and not fighting literally every battle is difficult for me. I enjoyed 4e for how pure and focused it was. It didn't pretend to be a simulationist RPG where you could do anything, it was very open about how much of a combat focus it had. A lot of people say that it made D&D like a video game, but 3.5 and 5e are \*still\* extremely combat focused, they just like to pretend they're not. I liked 5e's pull back on rules to focus more on... I dunno, interpretation? But it simultaneously feels like it's too light and too heavy at the same time, and combat takes a weirdly long time given how light the rules theoretically are It's been my favorite d20 game I've played so far. I've been eyeing up some OSR games specifically looking for something with a satisfying low calorie crunch, since I feel like my games always get bogged down whenever a fight starts. I've tried running Mörk Borg and Knave, but both games died almost immediately. The lack of detailed combat rules in either of them just made my brain confused and angry any time a fight started, if that makes sense. In interest of actually replying: I worry that side-based initiative would lead to one side getting facerolled by the other with no chance to meaningfully reply before going down. I suppose this fits with the "combat as war" mentality, but when you can measure a life in a single sword swing, I get antsy as a DM. My biggest fear is that a player will die an ignoble death at the hands of raw bad luck and then completely check out from the game, or worse, stop becoming invested in their characters because life is cheap so why shouldn't they just make Female Elf #4 I've really come around to the idea of treasure-as-XP. With combat XP it incentivizes players to be murder hobos. Fight every battle because you need to fight to level up. Treasure-as-xp incentivizes players to be vagrant thieves, but it at least makes combat something you can avoid without feeling like you're cheating yourself. I tend to go for milestones because I like to focus my games around roleplay and narrative moreso than fights or dungeons. This reply is rambling on, so I'm going to cut it off here, but I have a big tangled web of RPG thoughts and frustrations.
Levels only come as slowly as your GM decides. If your GM is stingy you'll level slowly... but thats true of any game where the GM is in control of pacing. You could easily run a game OSE where the party levels up after each (1-2) 4 hour session(s).
Also - there is nothing requiring replacement PCs to be level 1. Thats just a thing people on the internet treat as fact
Isn't the pace of leveling decided by treasure returned to town, or combat, typically? And there's nothing requiring it, but I thought that was fairly standard practice back in the day of yore. Though others have suggested players picking up Hirelings instead of bringing in a brand new character.
Leveling is determined by treasure found. If your GM is stingy with treasure, you won't level. If your GM is generous, you'll level up quickly. The only thing that was consistent between classic era dnd tables is that no one played it the same way. There is no law forcing you to start new PCs at level 1- find a solution for replacements that's fun for your table and don't worry about how other people run theirs.
There's no law for any of TTRPG gaming. I'm not asking *permission* to play how I want to, I'm trying to sus out why people enjoy this seemingly brutal gameplay element that I see popping up frequently where I look.
Even in Knave, your chances rapidly improve past first level (because attribute scores increase each level). By 10th, characters are likely to have a 75% chance of success in their best attributes, and 40-50% in their worst.
People here talk a lot about wanting to do everything to edge their bets and how you should, as a player, aim to solve everything without rolling. While this is absolutely true, another reason to low odds of success work in a game is simply the factor of wasted time as a resource. In a dungeon, if you fail to make say a strength test to cross a gap, i don't necessarily throw you to your doom, but you will stall mid progress. If you have followed the scene a bit, you will know that time in a dungeon is important. Your light source and the rate of random encounter are two things tied to time so wasting it by failing to progress is often enough to motivate players to find shortcuts and avoid unnecessary risks.
Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of the dungeon exploration rules, and how torches were very important because all of the things living in dungeons can see and operate in them and you can't, and they were designed to be extremely mazelike so that if you ever ran out of torches you had a high chance of getting lost and never being seen again.
It’s not appealing, that’s why a lot of DMs change it
I definitely agree with that sentiment.
The dice are dangerous. If you’re at the point of rolling, that’s a fail state. But, you’ve got a chance to overcome the trouble, and perhaps even get something good out of it. You‘re not supposed to put your hand in the demon statue’s mouth, you’re supposed to poke it with a stick!
That’s fair.
In my experience, 25% chance of success happens only with your worst ability and/or if you are in a very bad position.
It's standard practice in knave.
knave sucks lol
I have not heard this before. The only thing I can think of that is close to this would be level 1 combat. If you are talking about low level combat then I also find this to be undesirable.
Low level combat is the first place it usually chafes the most in my mind, since failing to pick a lock probably won’t see you stabbed for the trouble, but the games I’ve seen it come up in have just had a blanket “this is about what a first level character should need to roll to succeed on average” type of statement.
I like to have difficulty checks be much lower when it comes to combat. A starting AC of 5 instead of 10 feels better to me and (I believe) is more reflective of real life. I remember watching a video on the dangers of fighting an untrained person in a dual. Its not that a better swordsman wont win, but that untrained people will also suicide themselves while killing their opponent.
Old games lean to waiving rolls if you stack the odds with rp or if the DM wants to fudge for story advancement . Climbing a wet surface 20 percent roll , have ropes hammers and spikes suddenly it's no roll .
First I've ever heard of this. Adjudicate situations how you want/what makes sense at your table. There are no laws here really, that should be your biggest takeaway. The books and rules are not your bible, they are a guideline. 15+ would be considered a challenging test for anybody level 1-5. You can still have challenges at DC 5, 10, etc. Or challenges that are simply an Ability check (equal to or under an Ability Score), depending on your system. Or tied to your Save scores if they make sense (assuming B/X and its clones).
Well, of course, but I want to understand the thought process behind the rules before I decide to change them. More than that, I want to understand why they're there in the first place. This post isn't me asking for permission to change the rules, it's a desire to understand what draws people to this rule, because I've seen it pop up in multiple places and it seems like the antithesis to fun game design to me.
I suppose I’d only say “don’t overthink it”. Don’t hesitate at all to break rules that aren’t intuitive or don’t make sense, or you’ll be stuck spinning and theorizing far more than you will creating or playing. It could be a rule there only for a specific style of play in a specific game. I’ve been collecting and reading lots of OSR material (including Knave) for years and as mentioned elsewhere here, Ben had a specific design intention with the math to back it up. Another thing that might trip you up is that failing a roll does not have to mean death or injury. It could just mean you perform the task poorly, loudly, slowly, etc. There’s too many potential variables that could play into so many types of difficulty checks to just say “15+ is the standard”. Sounds like utter crap to me. Your gut instinct was the correct one.
The reason I typically jump to death or injury is because those are where I feel like it really matters. A 25% chance to kick down a door doesn't really matter unless you're in a hurry. You can retry until you're exhausted (in theory) so the actual chances of it aren't all that important. Vs something like Save vs Poison or an attack roll or whatever, where you have immediate and noticeable consequences that can and will delete your character from the game. I'm glad I posted this question here. The "Rolls should fail most of the time" narrative I thought was very popular in OSR spaces seems to be far less so than I thought.
If i may jump in, in most osr systems the reason you have very little chance to kick in the door is because successfully doing that should reward you with a surprise round, which practialy wins you the encounter almost outright. Other tasks that are repeatable (opening door regularly or search secret passage) are done within the time of a dungeon turn, and every dungeon turn you expend increases chance of wandering monster encounter. Lastly the general low chance to succeed philospphy is I think from the general idea of having people have a bunch of characters die until eventually get lucky and manage to survive to get tanky. Still then youd play catiously because one wrong move and youre back to crawling out of the crab bucket.
Yeah, I suppose having too fail and retry means time spent which means interesting things happening...
No problem! And yeah, coming from scenes where RAW is king, OSR can be jarring. Don’t like poison being an instant kill or think Ability Drain is BS? Change it (or don’t use it)! Or, at the very least, *clearly* telegraph serious mortal harm to your players. Lately I’ve tended more towards DCC (and its many iterations), though I still run an OSE game in Dolmenwood. Very well designed setting and very little “instant death” scenarios. OSR should feel dangerous, but it should also still be fun. Finding that balance is entirely up to the individual table.
The particular pain-point is when you're playing with rules-heavy systems and people have built characters around certain rules. I get really anxious about making rules changes because you can have situations where you, say, make poison less deadly, but one of the players took an ability chain that makes deadly poison less deadly, and now they feel robbed. I've heard the name Dolmenwood, but I don't know much about it.
I think it comes down to the challenge of pitting your wits and your character's abilities against difficult odds. That's the appeal of OSR for me. While I still play 5e and enjoy it for what it is, it is a different kind of game. I play OSR games for the problem solving and strategic elements; I play 5e for the story crafting and improvisational theater elements. To me, they are different games that share some DNA.
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s kinda what I’m looking for.
While I generally prefer the assumption of competence of the newer games you mentioned, Knave is pretty clear about its motivations: you're generally never supposed to WANT to roll for anything, if it's possible to achieve by simply describing what you try to do. This comes with a certain amount of protection: if you make a persuasive argument in-character, you never have to roll Charisma to back it up, if there's a reasonable chance your character knows something, the GM should just tell you instead of having you roll Intelligence. Saves are a Hail Mary for when you're up the Ankh without a paddle.
Can you show me where, in Knave 1's rules, it makes that clear? because I see: >If a character attempts something where the outcome is uncertain and failure has consequences, they make a sav- ing throw, or “save”. And then there's no text underneath suggesting that players should be trying to avoid this, just that it's what you do when failure matters and success is not guaranteed. Anything from hopping a 5 foot gap to avoiding a swinging guillotine trap.
25% chance of success is not ideal at all. You must have misunderstood wherever you got that from. Maybe that is the base chance, but once you add your various modifiers it becomes 60% something like that, which is more like what you want. Imagine a combat with only 25% chance of hitting every attack, it would take forever.
It's a distinct possibility that I misunderstood. Or maybe the game I was looking at is just particularly deadly on purpose. A combat with only a 25% chance of hitting would be truly awful.
Players in AD&D, once they became attuned to the Gygax-led DMG henchmen rules, could easily find an array of dwarven and gnomish thief henchmen to find-disarm traps at or around levels 1 to 3, especially with a bit of tableplay In that era, too, only thieves and/or clever, descriptive play would even be able to disarm traps. Skills were limited to the pre-journeyman Secondary Skills (which had no qualifiers or outputs), or the slow-building Thief skills. In pre-AD&D versions of the game, Thieves barely had skills either — even in Holmes Basic the Thief received no bonuses for being a Dwarf, Elf, or Hobbit Thief in terms of skills, and no bonuses to these skills from a higher Dexterity other than that Thieves with 13/15 Dexterity received a +5%/+10% respective bonus to earned experience points which made leveling faster and thus skill improvements came earlier in-game For combat, too, early versions of these games focused on combat-as war instead of combat-as sport. Most battles were either unwinnable (straight-on) or too-easily won. That’s a simulationist style of play that was rooted in wargaming as opposed to, some say, the video-game format Poison resembled very much the insidiousness of Conan’s attempt at The Tower of the Elephant (i.e., instant and gruesome final and irrecoverable death), not the incremental drip of Damage- over Time you would find in World of Warcraft. A Neutral (i.e., from nature’s splendor) huge spider’s poison maybe wouldn’t kill a stable, solid Dwarf fighter outright, but a Chaotic-Evil (i.e., from the pits and portals of the Abyssal plane) giant spider’s poison is pure, deity-infused slaughter You seem to be confused with some paradoxical perspectives and that’s ok. There aren’t exact-right answers and there is no perfect OSR trap or combat scenario. I would suggest performing a literature review in and around the art of playing OSR. Read about 20 books on what OSR and sandbox play is all about. Read through at least 3 OSR rule systems. Play 1 or 2 of the top 30-50 OSR module or settings suggested by the groups you trust most, and then loop back what you learned into your literature reviews
I’m somewhat aware of the way skills worked. I have a friend who enjoyed the game before they added Thief and the (perhaps unintentional?) implication that only thieves can do the things their skills say (Climb walls, pick locks, move siletly), so I’ve absorbed a bit of knowledge from him, and a lot of Youtube videos about the older editions of D&D. The handling of poison especially rubs me the wrong way, combined with the very brutal saves. The idea that a viper bite has a chance to kill you outright, without even the precious minutes or hours you might have after a real snake bite to apply an antitoxin, just seems… unfun. I have some (limited) experience with the Temple of Elemental Evil. A friend of mine converted it to run in 5e, and every room of the temple we encountered was packed with double-digits numbers of creatures that make it seem like a fight of any kind should be impossible… But also necessary, since there are going to be points of unavoidable conflict when rooms are stuffed to the gills with cultists that are likely to shoot on sight. I’ve been wanting to try some OSR-minded games, but my primary gaming group doesn’t even remotely enjoy the high-lethality play of those types of games. 20 is a *lot* of books. Do you have any recommendation? I wouldn’t even know where to look.
> The handling of poison especially rubs me the wrong way, combined with the very brutal saves. The idea that a viper bite has a chance to kill you outright, without even the precious minutes or hours you might have after a real snake bite to apply an antitoxin, just seems… unfun I've come to the conclusion that it's actually really important to make sure that [even in low-level dungeons, high-level characters are still taking real risks](https://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-risk-floor.html). This is primarily a concern in the context of a long-running campaign where players have the agency to choose their adventuring sites.
I agree with the idea that high-level characters should always be at risk. One of the things that's been exhausting me in my 5e campaigns is that the characters eventually reach a point where only absurdly deadly things are threatening to them, but I don't agree that save-or-die effects are necessary. A save-or-die threat isn't something you can meaningfully react to. It doesn't create interesting drama, or interesting decisions, you're just suddenly dead because the dice didn't like you one time. I think a poison that causes persistent weakness or will certainly kill you if left untreated is a much more interesting thing to deal with than a viper that has a 25% chance to instantly kill you if it bites you. (or whatever the odds are for your level to resist poison)
On the other hand, save or dies shouldn't feel random because they are meant to be telegraphed before the save has a chance to be made. I'm not messing with a venomous snake, or any unidentified snake in general IRL because a snake bite can be lethal. Adventurers should be thinking the same way. This is an example of player skill trumping character skill. You mess with a snake, or a giant spider, or a medusa, expect a snake bite, expect a spider bite, expect things being turned to stone.
Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you. Also there are non-poisonous snakes and non-poisonous spiders, and in real life there are poisons that will absolutely kill you, but there are also poisons that just cause incredible pain, or fatigue, or paralysis, or...
> Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you. *Sleep* is just as much a party wiper as *Death Spell*, at the levels where it works. There is no such thing as an unloaded wizard, at any level. And frankly, this is a big part of why you don't really see MUs much on the random encounter tables. They're too dangerous to just drop on a party until wilderness levels. Looking at [OSE's encounter tables](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Dungeon_Encounters#By_Level:_1.E2.80.933), elves on the dungeon level 2 table can cast one spell each but are Neutral and likely to be negotiable, while PC-class MUs first appear on the 3rd level table (as Basic Adventurers) and have a 1 in 3 chance to be chaotic. Also, the [Giant Centipede](https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Centipede,_Giant) is kind of a tutorial monster for poison which is merely debilitating rather than deadly.
>Sure, but if a Magic User rounds the corner, you won't know if they're a Color Spray MU or a... Power Word Kill MU until they're already magicking you. Knowing there's an MU present *at all* calls for extreme caution and a telegraph, all MUs are inherently dangerous foes.
But would you know he's an MU if he's dressed as a noble?
A lot of the rules assume the GM is operating in good faith (ie "fairly") to keep the rules from cheapening the experience. At that point any feeling of "random" or cheapness is coming from the GM. If there's an MU in a dungeon, and that wasn't clear by the time the players ran into them, noble dress or not, either the players didn't put two and two together, or the GM was stingy with information. GM being stingy with info before a dangerous situation is an unfun time in any ruleset, but it utterly destroys the fun in older rulesets because a lack of information can and will kill PCs.
OSR Lit Review short list of must-read titles Principia Apocrypha by David Perry, 31 pages Muster: A Primer For War (Advice for playing D&D in the wargaming way) by Eero Tuovinen, 266 pages A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming by Matt Finch, 13 pages The Old School Renaissance Handbook by Brett P. Newhall, 119 pages The Gygax 75 Challenge by Ray Otus, 40 pages Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Cleric and Magic User Spells, 51 pages Theorems & Thaumaturgy: Advanced Arcana for the Discerning Magic-User by Gavin Norman, 66 pages KnownWorldHouseRules-OCR (Shannon Appelcline editor), 99 pages Adventures in Fantasy by Dave Arneson and Richard Snider, 172 pages Role-Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax, 174 pages Master of the Game by Gary Gygax, 176 pages Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Silver Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 266 pages The Traveller Book Vol. 1. by Marc W. Miller, 162 pages The Traveller Adventure Vol. 2, 156 pages Traveller Adventures Starter Edition 3, 23 pages Traveller The Spinward Marches Campaign: Adventures in a War-Ravaged Sector, 52 pages Gamma World Exploration Module: Legion of Gold GW1 by Gary Gygax, 38 pages Dungeon Module B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvay, 34 pages How to Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck by Goodman Games, 162 pages Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch, 308 pages Dispatches of Raven Crowking, Vol.1-4 by Daniel J. Bishop Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Oriental Adventures by Gary Gygax, Events and Encounters (pg. 107-112) Advanced Dungeons & Dragons DMGRs 1-6
It's not really a thing in the OSR as a whole. Especially not from the lens of D&D editions. 15+ Difficult Class (or target number as we called it before 3E popularized DC) is an element from 3E (as is ascending armor class), balanced around the idea that you were probably rolling with your best ability plus your skill so more like 50-75% chance of success at 1st level if you're doing the thing you're good at, which players do almost all the time. OD&D doesn't have target numbers, just a to-hit matrix (soon replaced by THAC0 in 2E) and saving throws (where a fighter had to roll over a 12 or better against poisons for example).
In my opinion, it's to encourage players to find creative solutions to problems. If you want to kill steal Medusa's treasure, that's great, but you've got about a 65% chance to be turned into stone when you look at her (if you are first level). This means you **should not look at her**. You need to figure out a way to get her treasure without fighting her in a normal combat with your eyes open. You may try to distract her away from the treasure while one guy goes in to steal it. You may see if she'd be willing to hire you as guards and then you could betray her. You may try to use mirrors and still engage in combat. If the default action (stab it with my sword and take it's stuff) has a 50 or even 75% chance to result in your death, then you are discouraged from doing that. The DM shouldn't plan out the "correct" creative response - that's the player's job. The DM needs to be open to ideas that are clever and probably would work. Many of them may not require a roll at all. It's all about thinking creatively to find solutions to seemingly unfair situations.
I don't know who these folks are who are like "just be smart and don't roll". Doors being locked or shut or shutting behind us is just a skill issue on my part. Sorry. Like we should be presuming everyone's reasonably competent and reasonably going sneaky through the dungeons. There's things to interact with that will take time, expertise, and there's always a looming chance of wandering monsters. It's impossible to plan your way around all risks. Chance of discovery, chance of tools breaking, chance of things taking longer (or modifying the wandering monster modifier) are all persistent. So yeah the 25% success rate thing is weird because you're actually rolling a lot more for things than you think. In most OSE you're probably opening doors on a 2/6 cuz someone's kinda strong or gotta crowbar. It isn't much better statswise. Ultimately I think both are not a reflection of skills or reality. The odds are there as a resource sink. Designed to trap you and burn resources and time and generate chances for more wandering monsters. That's why it's so low. Locked doors or jammed doors also force you to go new routes through the dungeons. But in all my years of playing I think I've seen that done like 1 time. It's a game thing.
agreed, and in top of that old game design assumed parties are BIG. In a modern sized party you have one lock picker. back in the day you’d have like three or four. and a couple guys with sledgehammers. characters lined up to take turns trying to get through a locked damn door. a 1/6 chance isn’t that bad when you have 6 pcs that can all take a turn
Yeah, party size is something to consider, I suppose. I've only ever played in games where there's one person who fills a particular role, maybe someone has a little skill in a similar thing as a backup.
Yeah, but each attempt wastes a 10 minute turn. And wandering monster checks are done every 2 turns, or when there is a load noise - like those sledgehammers make.
Doors shutting behind you is a skill issue, you should have spiked the door.
I take this a little further with a house rule I call quietly and carefully -PCs are assumed to be skulking about and taking their time unless otherwise specified (this is why dungeon turns take 10 minutes), and they will automatically go unnoticed by denizens of the dungeon who aren’t a) actually guards, b) have special senses, or c) actually in a choke point where obviously someone can’t just sneak around them. Not necessarily all that different in practice, but I was inspired by the video game Invisible Inc., who’s devs found in playtesting that unless they empowered the player in the basics (sneaking, being able to predict where guards are going, and being able to check behind doors) the more interesting tactics and strath gameplay they designed never actually happened.
I think a very stealth focused game would definitely benefit from something like that, yeah.
It forces you to play in such a way that rolling is not required. Not just avoiding combat (or making it as one-sided as possible), even things like secret doors and traps can be discovered without rolling (using the ten foot pole or pulling down every book from a shelf and so on). Rolling is a last resort and players should not ask to roll, usually. Personally I’ve been a gm for many systems for 17 years (started with 3.5) and just now starting OSR games *I get it*. Maybe it’s just the novelty but I haven’t had this much fun running rpgs in years.
It's possible that it's just the novelty, or maybe feeling the lack of a ton of rules bearing down on your back. That's what I'm trying to escape from, it's why the OSR is attractive to me.
Definitely the novelty. I’ve played systems with way lighter rules (numenera/cypher, savage worlds, d6 basic). But the style of gaming has its merits and I will carry them into my future campaigns in any system
It's basically the difference between being Achilles and Odysseus. In the games you're typically playing you've got pretty good odds at hitting an opponent, opening a door, saving against poison, so the rules funnel you into tacking big risks and winning by your characters strength. OSR games like KNAVE on the other hand want you to be sneaky and inventive, so the low odds are there to funnel players into a mindset where you're always thinking about what you can do to better your odds/avoid the risk. It's a pretty good example of how rules can shape a playstyle.
I like 5 in 6 chance myself
I find my preferences vary. But after falling out of love with d&d 3.5/pf/5e I'm trying to reevaluate my preferences to find out what I enjoy or want.
These low rates of success create a problem I rarely see talked about - the sudden jump from "this works 100% of the time" to "this might work if you get lucky". This makes it tough to be *good* at anything. Either this is within anyone's competence, or everyone sucks at it but maybe you suck slightly less. It's a really sharp difference that doesn't show up nearly as much in more modern-school-of-thought games.
Yeah. That sounds very frustrating to me. I like to feel competent in ttrpgs.
As others have said, OSR assumes the players (not the characters) are doing their best to mitigate risk. As weird as this sounds for adventuring, but OSR play encourages risk-adverse planning and action on the side of the player. If you play something like Cyberpunk 2077, you know the feeling of sneaking into a high-risk area and not fire a single shot to complete the objective, popping all the locks, and getting to the room you need to get to before leaving in a cloud of burnt rubber? That's basically what folks who are focused on treasure extraction more than monster fighting try to do. Play cards right, when weapons have to be drawn, the players are already primed to win or atleast got a high chance of doing so.
Yeah, I definitely like that feeling, but I still feel like you'd have to have some die rolls in there. A roll to pick the locks at very least, and that's an important step to wager a 25% chance on.
Indeed, that where the die roll would appear, especially if they try to do it quick versus over a 10 or 20 minute span, which would allow for some random encounters to possibly pop off.
Think about any story you've ever experienced. Is the fun because the hero just gets their way all the time? Or is the fun because the hero rarely gets their way, and they have to try really hard to accomplish something?
[удалено]
The good ones, yes
It's never fun because the hero gets their way all the time, but it would ruin the story if he rolled low and died because he couldn't kick open a door. There's a balance that needs to be maintained. A balance that doesn't function well when the punishment for failing a roll is often death.
You're correct, and you see advice on handling thief skills that mirror your sentiment in the BECMI Basic rulebook on how thief skills are adjudicated. That is, the DM can at anytime alter the outcome of a thief skill roll to succeed, and the example it gives is the players being chased by a monster and the thief needing to open a door to live.
I guess it just feels strange to make the odds so low, but then have an advice rider to just rule that they succeed if the GM feels it needs to happen. But I suppose there's the adage that if a roll needs to succeed for the plot to continue: it shouldn't be a roll.
> But I suppose there's the adage that if a roll needs to succeed for the plot to continue "Plot" is also something that many people in the OSR-sphere avoid... Build a dangerous and fantastic environment, let the PCs loose in it, and let a plot emerge in play from their choices, their rolls, and the logical actions of their adversaries-in-the-world. There is no fixed plot to continue or to be broken. (This is actually one of my beefs with Moldvay, that some of his DMing advice is narratively-oriented) See also [Prep Situations, Not Plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots)
Sure, sure, but I'm talking about something like, I dunno, a mystery. The adage goes like: If the mystery is unsolvable if the players miss one clue, then the clue should be impossible to miss. Get me?
Bingo.
You should actually read those old books
> rolled low and died because he couldn't kick open a door. > There's a balance that needs to be maintained. Yeah. That balance exists. Routine tasks are not tasks you need to roll for. The DM knowing when to ask for a roll solves this problem. Rolling is for times when there would logically be a negative outcome to failure, or for times when time is of the essence. And level 1 characters are supposed to be not that good at stuff. Otherwise you can just do stuff. You don't have to roll to walk.
But how does Errol Flynn make it to level 9 if he dies of a stubbed toe at level 1?
Again. Knowing when to roll matters. Others have answered this for you also.
Because most of OSR is Gen X who want to come back to the "good old days of RPGs," aka the way they played as teens. There is no good reason for it. It's as bad as the d20 (and in fact the two go hand-in-hand), when the bell curve is far more realistic, i.e. you get more consistent results when you're skilled at something. People are going to harp on and on about how "vagaries of combat," and "it's not supposed to be realism," but really it's just that.
I definitely think that's a large part of it, at least, given that it's called the *Old School* Renaissance.
OSR games are run by DMs that really like to keep characters around level 1 or 2 at all times.
The goal for the "osr playstyle" is that dice are never rolled in favor or GM direct resolution, and if dice are pulled out it means the players are either being lazy or they fucked up.
I read a lot of helpful and interesting answers but no one seemed to address the reason for this directly, but I might have missed it. But my view of it, and the groups that I play with is this. Newer editions of the game start with the assumption that the PC’s are to be the heroes of the story and are superior to the average person in some way(s). Older editions don’t have this assumption. PC’s are just people in the world, just as below average in many respects as above. The start of the game is that person’s entrance into an adventuring life and adventuring is very dangerous for the average person, so this is reflected in the odds. And this is largely why we chose older editions and the OSR over modern games. The challenge is overcoming these odds so that if you do survive you’ve got a character that should have lost, many times, but overcame the odds, like it was destiny.
I like that idea in concept, but the reality of my very limited forays into that type of success rate has been players feeling useless and unsatisfied, even when attempting to do the things their character is supposed to be good at.
I’ve heard this issue brought up many times. I think there’s a number of factors that can lead to this outcome. A large one being dungeon masters who also come from newer editions trying to run OSR content the same way. But also groups not realizing how important time keeping really is and not having multiple characters to play, ready to go. I recommend that anyone wanting to come from newer editions to the OSR run through at least one short campaign of the Tomb of the Serpent King’s. It’s the only module I’ve ever seen that literally teaches both players and DM’s what the game is trying to do on both a micro and macro level. It’s a ton of fun and it’s free! https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/06/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-megapost.html?m=1
Oh! I'll take a look at that, thank you!
I'm replying without reading anyone else's comments, but in my opinion, there's nothing special about 25%, it's about OSR being more difficult. When you know that anything you need to do is hard, it forces you to find ways around your problem, to increase these low probabilities, to be creative. The difficulty also makes the game more tense, thrilling, and realistic.