D&D Drops ...the Ball

Here in the OSR, we have no gated content where part of the game is locked behind a subscription paywall. I can say the same for Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E over there in Open 5E Land. Pathfinder 1e and 2e (and Starfinder) are available for free online, and you can play without books or a subscription service.

Every other game I play, I own my PDFs.

My only problem with 5E now is buying the books twice, no matter where you go, and the lack of free character builders that are kept up to date. I got sick of paying for VTTs monthly just to host 5E characters, and not having 90% of the books I own as options, so I quit the system.

Old School Essentials and Swords & Wizardry are far superior options that do the same exact thing, but much easier, much faster, and much better. Daggerheart is still the better narrative game than 5E. Nimble is faster and easier and does the same thing. Pathfinder is practically free to play. Draw Steel is a good tactical game. Basic Fantasy RPG is free for everyone. DCC? C&C? OSRIC?

Any game in the OSR is a better guilt-free option.

And GURPS is always cool.

And now we have gated content for the haves and have-nots. It has been this way for a while with most VTTs with character builders, so this is a logical extension of the greed and grift in the hobby, especially around 5E, which was designed for live-service model support.

Pretty soon, if you defend this or keep playing games that lock up content and force most of the world to be have-nots, you will be a part of the problem with the hobby. Enjoy being the elites with your exclusive content. No wonder D&D YouTubers are quitting en masse. They probably have morals and a conscience and see the writing on the wall.

Blindly support these business practices and continue to support the game?

I'd quit too.

I'd hope it gets better in a few years and wait this out. But I am in the OSR, so I am happy.

And what to drop is pretty obvious at this point.

Swords & Wizardry is the OSE of AD&D

Want to play an AD&D 1E-like game, but don't want all the rules? Want something more than Old School Essentials, love the demons and devils of AD&D, and want to progress all the way to the highest-level 9th and 7th level magic-user and cleric spells? But you do not want all the AD&D rules? You do not want to get bogged down in all the minutiae and charts and tables of a 1E recreation? Do you want OSE-like hit die values without the higher dice of AD&D?

Swords & Wizardry is 1E-Lite, and quite likely the perfect game for you.

Where OSE is the beautiful simplicity and unmatched organization of BX, S&W is rules-light AD&D. This is the perfect zero edition set of rules, before AD&D came along and became an overwritten, heavily ruled, detail-focused, and messy set of charts and tables for every minor adjustment. S&W is the "fast table play" version of AD&D I always wanted.

And the single-saving-throw-number mechanic is still genius.

S&W is OSE for AD&D.

Now, S&W isn't as well organized as OSE, not by a long shot. But it does not need it. Where OSE is the meticulous layout and bullet-point presentation, S&W is more a freeform discussion of the game, done in as little text as possible, keeping it to just what you need to play. There are boxes that explain the history of the game's rules, making modding easy, and explaining how things were different in the 1970s versus the more structured 1980s.

This is also a key difference: S&W is rooted in the 1970s version of the game, whereas OSE lies closer to the cleaned-up, highly organized, and simplified 1980s. Before they removed demons and devils, and things were still very swingy and OP, like the S&W fighter, S&W preserves the 1970s version of the game before TSR went corporate, and we had the for-adults AD&D and for-kids D&D split and messy divorce.

S&W is from a time when there was one game for everyone, with everything in it, yet it retained the simplicity of BX. It was uncensored, unfiltered, and unafraid to leave things up to the players and the referee to work out. There are parts of this game where you are supposed to "make it up yourself," and that is the game's beauty.

S&W was not afraid to let some classes be OP in certain areas, like fighter and combat, whereas OSE tends to tamp down everyone's power and stacking abilities. S&W has combos that are OP at high level, and that is a beautiful thing. S&W also explicitly gives STR bonuses to-hit and damage only to fighters, and even rangers and paladins are excluded from this bonus (they have other powers).

S&W ends up having the best fighter class in the OSR and gives them a massive role-protection bonus. Other classes must make do, and it is not really a problem. I like this choice because it reduces the importance of ability score modifiers and does not make high-STR thieves OP. You can be a STR 7 thief and not have a damage or a to-hit penalty (though STR 6 or lower starts to get penalized for all characters). As an optional rule, high STR can be capped to a +1 for other classes (if the bonus is present), but only fighters get the full bonus.

Ability score modifiers are not as important in S&W as they are in OSE, and that is a good thing that avoids ability score inflation. Many more classes are viable (and not penalized) for a straight 3d6-down-the-line generation method here than in any other OSR game.

The game has expansions, too, covering modern classes like the bard and druid. So if you want expanded classes that go all the way to the highest level spells, this is your game. It is AD&D without all the complexity; it just runs and plays as fast as OSE, and it has the missing high-level game where you can cast wish, holy word, time stop, and gate spells.

Since the hit dice and AC values match OSE perfectly, everything is 100% cross-compatible between OSE and S&W, since they are practically sister games. Monsters, treasures, and adventures are all 100% compatible between OSE and S&W. S&W can be seen as a "character mod and full conversion" for OSE.

Racial level limits are higher in OSE than S&W, so if you use that rule, agree on which game is dominant, and stick with that. If you use OSE's suggestions, that opens the door to using any of the OSE races, including those in the Carcass Crawler Zines, as potential S&W races. This opens up tieflings, dragonborn, ratlings, and many other races to S&W play.

S&W is the missing AD&D-style rules and level expansion for OSE.

Where AD&D can be slower and heavier, with things like weapon speed and all the different values on the ability score charts, S&W sticks to the "fast and fun" play of OSE. You could play OSRIC 3.0 instead, but it wouldn't play as fast or be as easy to get into. OSE will win the new player experience battle, but S&W will win the high-level play and class options battle. Add in the OSE races, and S&W wins the player options battle in any OSR game.

If you love OSE but miss AD&D, then S&W is your dream game. This game often flies under the radar, but it is one of the original OSR games and is still going strong.

S&W is also one of the most moddable and open OSR games out there, easily pulling in everything you love about OSE and putting an AD&D framework on it all. You don't need to give anything up.

Confabulation and the LARP

Confabulation (confab) is the replacement of a mundane or distressing reality with a fabricated, false, or borrowed experience. When people complain about people "LARP-ing as freedom fighters" or some other cultural phenomenon, this is what they are talking about. People will talk themselves into a false state of mind, creating or adopting past experiences to replace a reality they want to ignore, supplant, enhance, or replace entirely with a new fake reality.

The current state of the hobby is full of this.

"I am my D&D character."

"I see myself in the game."

When I grew up, we never saw ourselves in the game. We were telling stories with others, and we knew about the dangers of self-insertion and getting too close to a character who could die. We never "pretended it was us" in there, and we had that one-step removal of "I am telling Frodo's story" and "seeing what happened."

This is also why the "dungeon turn" is so important. If my character dies because they ran out of torches and rations, guess what? This is that roguelike feature that early D&D had, which the new games do not. The dungeon turn is the "clicking clock of doom," just like the hourglass is in Shadowdark. If your character's fates are tied to an external turn track or timer, then we can accept their deaths more easily. We did not play by the rules, we pushed fate, and we paid the price.

In new games? No way. This is a story game, and "I am my character." I can never fail. How dare you say I am a failure? This triggers me! I can't deal with this; it hits too close to home!

If your game needs safety tools or you need to throw up the "X," then that is a red flag. Safety tools are only for story games and LARPs, not for role-playing games. In role-playing games, we have systems and simulation tools that keep us a step removed from the action, and it "never is about us as a person."

In LARPs? It is all about my persona and identity. The tools are needed. This is why I still support safety tools; they were present all the way back in the OG LARP game, Vampire: The Masquerade, where players had accepted methods to "fall out of character" and "deal with issues that come up in a LARP."

But safety tools in a pen-and-paper game? Why? Why would you be getting that close to your personal identity? Is this a LARP or is this a pen-and-paper RPG? Is somebody confusing a LARP and a tabletop game, again?

Game designers who know nothing about the hobby's history will always make this mistake. This is a clear sign of a designer coming in from other media who doesn't understand the hobby, or is trying to turn it into something else. Also, Wall Street wants this "identity gaming" thing to happen, since linking someone's sense of identity and self-worth to a commercial product generates recurring revenue.

And the YouTube live-play channels of actors will happily stay in character, only to confuse the issue.

And game designers and marketers who purposely "blur the lines" are doing the entire hobby a huge disservice. They are killing gaming and worsening mental illness in vulnerable players.

Another word for this is dissociation, a mental state in which the world feels fake, dreamlike, or detached, leading a person to substitute their own reality. This often takes the form of the game's reality replacing the real world's. This is why a lot of the new fantasy art "blurs the lines," and we see "people who look like us" and strange anachronisms, where the game's art feels like someone put on a pair of magic glasses and replaced everyone in the real world with their fantasy counterparts.

The danger is that the fantasy becomes more appealing than reality.

And people live their lives stuck in a false world.

It never ends well.

The real world will catch up.

And living in that fantasy is a helpful way to ignore real-world problems that will only get worse the longer you ignore them. It is better to use a structure to keep the game in perspective and not "live in the game's world" as your real-life "who you are."

The dungeon turn structure is a tool we used to protect ourselves from the deadly, harsh, and final reality of the game. We never had a "minigame for death" and tried to gamify that part of the game. That is ultimately gruesome and turning death into a "Russian roulette" game, that is, when you think about it, sick and very troublesome in a way.

Death was death.

Or "hovering at death's door," which simulated situations where paramedics and instant help were needed. But it was still a losing condition in that roguelike game that we played. You never threw up an "X" or had death listed on a safety tools sheet.

The game had structures and tools to protect us. And we respected the game.

And we never replaced our reality with the one in the game. It was a place we "visited" and "told stories in," but we never saw ourselves "living there" or it as a "replacement for our own reality." The Medieval world was an unforgiving, harsh, dirty, unfair, exploitative, and often poverty-ridden place of church and kings. Today's fantasy worlds are "reality replacements" in which everything is a perfect utopia, an idealized version of the real world.

If all you do is live in a fantasy world all day, you are doomed to lose the real one.

Blizzardification

The Bilzzardification of D&D began with D&D 3.5E and roared into full swing with D&D 4E. By the time we got to D&D 5E, this trend had become the norm, and barely anyone noticed.

The game has too many races, classes, and subclass options, along with pointless choices that carry no thematic weight or story consequences.

Like World of Warcraft, we get another half-dozen elf shapes with no real meaning in the broader story, some mechagnomes because the character editor just couldn't do that with normal gnomes, and all sorts of other "why did they add this" character options.

There comes a point when so many silly shapes run through my mind that it shuts down, the story becomes trash and meaningless, and the world's original charm is gone. This isn't about diversity; this is about storytelling and "less is more." The story never needed dozens of race options, especially if the core conflicts are watered down to the point where nothing matters.

More is more! And we get yet another thing to buy and try to fit into a world that stopped making sense a decade ago. I don't even know what World of Warcraft is anymore, other than "Fantasy Second Life" full of silly shapes and random things that never fit together thematically.

Same thing with classes, in World of Warcraft, we have a few different types of fighters now, and they all need to have class roles, niche protection, and enough differences to make choosing one over the other a viable choice. I miss the days of "fighter was it," and even the paladin class was a main tank trade-off with slippery aggro.

And in D&D, too many fighter classes created with a thesaurus not only make the original class boring and unappealing, but also force the designers to create "role protection" and "self-healing options" for every fighter to make them viable solo classes. There are too many similar fighter classes. It makes the original fighter a joke. Why do I play a fighter again?

Boring choice. Play a swordmaster. A battlerager. A shieldmaster. An arcane combatant. A jumping lancer. Don't mind the fact that some of these classes feel like multiclassed characters, such as the arcane combatant being a multiclass fighter/magic-user; they just are a "thing" now, and world builders are now forced to shove them into every world somehow.

Even multiclassing is being attacked by the thesaurus class designers, and making "better options" with a new class that makes the entire charm of multiclassing the weaker choice. Worse yet, you can multiclass the multiclassed replacement.

What are you even doing anymore?

These "tack on and add on" games give me a headache.

If you come out with a game and can't even preserve and support the original game's solid class choices, and you can't help yourself and replace them with every book you release, you are a garbage game designer. You can't even support the original game anymore without making the choice in it obsolete with your "new power gaming stuff" released in every book. Ultimately, it ends with the players all getting sick of it, everyone quitting, and you being "forced" to release a new edition to clean it all up.

Look at how much better 6E is now and all the problems it solves!

We had those problems fixed when 5E was released, and you broke the game since then.

And the ranger and rogue were broken on release, and still are. They will be broken in 6E, too.

This is why basic BX is so appealing to me. It does not change unless I want it to, and I can control everything that comes into the game. I have strict control of worldbuilding. No one is coming along and making a thesaurus "archer" class and replacing a subset of fighters on me. I don't need to fit the new garbage into my world. There are no silly circus-like planes to factor into my worldbuilding.

If I say "an archer is just a fighter that uses a bow," then the fighter class covers it. The gladiator is just a "fighter who fights in an arena." Seriously, one secondary skill could cover the entire class and be used for all the "optional flavor abilities." We don't need to invent game mechanics and track pool points for "crowd support" or "archery focus." Who cares? It is a fighter. Stop making new fighters!

Put the thesaurus down.

You aren't being innovative or smart by trying to replace the wheel. You are just making slightly worse wheels that are only usable in specific situations.

If I only want "the core four" races of human, dwarf, elf, and halfling - that is all that is in the book and all that I will support in my worldbuilding. Orcs are orcs, not something someone on social media said they were; so, outside people, unconnected to classic myth and disconnected from reality, can ruin my game and world-building. The list of "monsters as player options" gets worse and worse every year, and I expect mind flayers. displacer beasts, and beholders to be player options in 6E. And I will be forced to add them, along with every other silly thing they put in the game's art.

Game designers. Stop it. You have a problem. Get some help.

Less is more.

Too Many Classes

I get the feeling class choice is a fallacy.

There are a very limited number of roles in a dungeon party. Mind you, in 5E, where it is all "story gaming," and there isn't even a structure to dungeon exploration, with no time, resources, turns, or wandering monster checks needed, you are all just playing "soft pretend" and running pre-set combat encounters to give you the illusion of dungeoning.

You can play 5E like an OSR game, but you need to houserule the most important rules for dungeon exploration, and if you do not know them, you are back in story-gaming land, dealing with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat again as your Dungeon Masters, and you are being led by the nose through some adventure writer's story by the nose and shoved on that railroad.

If you did not know the terrible days of "modules on rails" of the AD&D 2E era, here we are again.

You have no dungeon turn structure in 5E, nor do you have any hexcrawl procedures. The game wasn't built for that. People port those ideas in from older editions, but they aren't there. The dungeon exploration turn structure is the reason we have class roles; that gameplay loop defines the game.

That dungeon turn procedure defines the resource game.

And the resource game defines the class roles.

In a game less about pretentious module-writer stories and more about sandbox dungeon exploration, the dungeon turn defines the experience. We forgot about this so completely that it took 5E players writing an entire new game (Shadowdark) to remind us of the beauty of this simple structure. While I love Shadowdark, BX does that all and more, without the need for out-of-game timers or table procedures.

Track time on the timesheet.

If a real-world discussion takes 30 minutes, tick off three turns on the timesheet.

Time tracking in BX is far easier than Shadowdark, and it is far more flexible. No phone or sand timers needed here. And you have the option to speed up time and mark off a dozen turns in the blink of an eye, if needed. If something takes two hours, we can just say it does, check off turns, make the rolls for wandering monsters, and pick up at that point. You can do this in Shadowdark, too, but it is built into BX as "the way." There is no real-time requirement here, yet time is just as important.

But the gameplay loop defines the class roles and structure. It sets the ground rules for the resource game.

This is not hard stuff; MMO designers know about this. Pen-and-paper game designers are happy to ignore it, since they can drone on and write new classes to infinity, and always give you something new to buy. The truth is, the more options and classes I have, the less viable dungeon crawling becomes, and the more towards a rules-light story game my game moves in the direction of.

Cleric, fighter, magic user, and thief.

The Fab Four of dungeon crawling.

John, George, Paul, and Ringo.

I do not need more than this. The bards, druids, illusionists, rangers, and other classes are fluff and distractions. They are not part of the core design. They bring fun stuff to the table for other types of play, and some are way too focused on one area and not others, such as bards monopolizing roleplay and interaction to the detriment of all other players. The modern designs of these classes often overdo it to an extent that they ruin the game for others or have such a narrowly defined niche that they are useless in a dungeon.

I like the other classes, and even the BX race-as-class options - they all bring something fun to the game.

But if I had to play without them, I could in a heartbeat. I don't need all these distractions. My games are better as a result. They are more focused, and the motivations are clear. The constant distractions of modern gaming and the too many choices that serve as shiny baubles meant to stimulate you are gone.

Yes, I am that "simple fighter" who "fights," but because I don't have rules for 1001 potential actions, I am not limited to that list of choices. I can do a million things as that fighter. Infinite things. I have more freedom of action with my BX fighter than I do with my 5E fighter. The rules are handcuffs in 5E. With every new book, they take options away from me. In BX, my fighter is an independent, free person of action and potential. Just because the rules don't explicitly lay out actions doesn't mean they can't be done.

BX is the complete opposite of Pathfinder 2. Pathfinder 2 has rules for pulling items out of pouches and packs. If they could, they would write rules for actions for coughing and sneezing. It is not a bad game, but this highlights the design focus and point of Pathfinder 2. That is a game where every conceivable action is laid out in the rules.

In BX, every conceivable action is laid out in my head.

There is a freedom in BX that no amount of page-count or rules can replicate.

Nor do I need infinite classes and infinite choices within them to give me "true player choice" and agency at the table. That one fighter could be "the archer" or "the gladiator." Or even "brawler" or "warmaster." Why do we need some game designer with a thesaurus making character classes, again?

What does that add to the game?

Or do all these thesaurus classes remove options from the fighter and relegate them to a boring and do-nothing class? If a fighter is my only choice, then that fighter is going to be so much more than these "every synonym and the kitchen sink" games designed by amateur influencer-gamer designers at these companies.

Do not invalidate the great classes in the game by designing "more fun ones" that "steal roles."

Is it that hard to see? Or do I need another 500 silly 5E character classes in my online designer to make the point sink in?

D&D is Being Run by Influencers (or Pod People)

I watched a few of the new official interviews with the remaining and current D&D team, and all I came away with was that anyone who works there wants to be a popular social media influencer.

Most of those who play live-play games want to be social media influencers.

I get the feeling it is less about the game and more about "them getting theirs."

Nobody reads blogs compared to other media types in the hobby; I never considered myself an influencer.

After a while, all these influencers start to look and talk in the same tone of voice, that strange candace where they ele-VATE their last syllable, while waving their hands in circles as they talk. Talking does not seem natural or relaxed; it is like they are struggling to stay afloat in the water, with all those jerky hand movements, and they are desperate for attention as they adopt an unnatural, alien inflection in their speech.

Again, they are so desperate for attention that they will speak in an alien tone of voice just to make themselves heard, and pretend to struggle in the water so your attention fixates on them. They adopt strange looks that seem fake, again, to get your attention and fixate on them. After a while, standing out in the crowd like this screams of "please like me" and desperation against a soulless algorithm, and I just feel sorry for them.

Compare this with a few in the OSR (and a few in the Dungeon Tube space), the game designers, and popular YouTube channels that run discussions, and they all sound like down-to-earth people. I can listen to them for hours without needing to be visually stimulated or hearing strange vocal quirks every 30 seconds, so I won't switch to my phone.

The hobby has an influencer problem.

The more I see it, the more I can't unsee it.

Skills Kill the Game

Where 5E completely loses me is in the lack of structure and a gameplay loop. You can see the character-first focus of the game, and then there is nothing else to it, except combat. The entire game exists for a weak narrative structure to be thrown over combat encounters, which is exactly what a D&D 4E adventure did.

Exploration is non-existent, and there isn't even a defined structure for the activity. The overland travel procedure is gone. The skill system does too much work, which is a sign of a designer who wants to lazily overload the game's "system mechanics" onto a skill system and call it a day.

You saw this design from D&D 3 and on, the skill-heavy theory of game design, where a massive skill system replaces the need for any other part of the game to have procedure and flow. You will see entire subsystems hidden in a skill description, such as jumping or climbing. While they reduced the number of skills in D&D 4 and 5, they did not reduce the importance.

You will often hear a player blurt out "I roll perception!" before it is even called for, some habit they developed, trained by the skill system, to roll that skill every time they enter a room.

It is really dumb.

What are you looking for again? What are you even doing? They treat the skills like a phone, holding it to their eyes so they don't have to think, consider the environment, or be careful. Nope. The skill somehow magically does all that. The skill system in 5E is an easy mode for auto-play.

Even the act of "failing" just means the next person in the party does it to ensure success. You can't get away with a failure state since the failed skill check waterfalls all the way through the party as "everyone tries it" since "they magically know the other person failed."

Back in the day, we called that metagaming, the taboo practice of acting on information your character does not know.

How do you know the other person failed a perception check? Ideally, this is a secret roll, but if the player rolls the die and rolls low, everyone else will jump in to ensure a roll above a 15. "I look too!"

In BX, it is player skill.

I search behind the curtains, using my spear or 10' pole.

No roll needed, you see the yellow mold on there without triggering it, and the secret door it clings to.

We burn it with our torches and cover our mouths, with everyone backing off as it burns. We go through the area with our mouths still covered.

That will force a wandering monster check due to the smoke, but it is dead and defeated. You are not affected. It also takes a turn for all of it to happen. Please mark your time tracker and check off your torch life by a turn.

There was no dice rolling in that entire sequence of events.

Sure, in BX, you can have profession or background skills, but those are just character flavor, with no "skill levels" or "mastery level," and they just are there if you want to use them. My dwarf is a blacksmith, so naturally, he knows how to do that, plus repair metal weapons and armor, and it is what it is. If there were a 14th-level character, he would naturally be crafting very fine and powerful weapons, but that is again a matter of a referee ruling and the player's course of action, materials, and facilities you have access to.

Could my dwarf craft a +1 warhammer?

What materials do you have? What type of forge do you have access to? Do you need a special runecrafting book? Do you need a mage to cast a ritual to enchant it, or bring it to a good dragon to bless the weapon? If the quest is epic or legendary enough, this may even rise to a +2 with a special property. No skill roll is needed. The dragon doesn't need to roll anything, either, when you get there, so get that out of your head.

This all happens within the context of the game and player action, adjudicated by the referee's common sense.

It just happens.

Why?

Just 'cause. That is how the fantasy novels did things. Read a few more of them to know.

We are not forcing the game through a 5E Play-Doh extruder press and a tiny hole that controls all action, and requiring the use of the dice for every action.

Where BX has elegance in design that comes from maturity in game design, 5E treats every problem as a nail and whacks it with a hammer. Modern game design replaces the need to use your brain with rolling the dice.

"I roll perception!"

You successfully see your character roll a d20. Everyone else does, too.

Now tell me what your character is looking at in the room, and what they are doing in the environment.

And put the dice down.