Mail Room: Blades in the Dark

This was the go-to narrative game about 5-6 years ago, and I held off because I already had a few other narrative games and my plate was full. The Cypher System was my favorite for a while, but I have cooled off a bit with the new edition; the art and layout are a bit too busy and distracting for my eyes. Blades in the Dark is also one of the games many new games copy from and borrow ideas from; one is Daggerheart, which is commonly mentioned as downstream from Blades in many concepts.

So, here I am, back again, taking a look. People compare it to FATE, but Blades is far more structured and procedural, which keeps the game from the narrative softness of either FATE or Cypher. Narrative games do rely on "out-of-game" structure, but Blades keeps the narrative action closer to the metal and avoids many of the "head jumps" that turn people off narrative gaming.

For example, in FATE, you need to jump out of character, consider what action type you are taking, apply out-of-character mechanics, and roll. You also consider various aspects and other OOC considerations, then need to "jump back into the head of the character" to keep the narrative flowing. This is why many prefer D&D to narrative gaming: there is very little head-jumping out of character, but even 5E begins to fray at the seams when you start managing its sloppy action economy.

The OSR is almost no head-jumping, and you stay in character constantly. The goblin runs up; you hit it with a sword. You see a lock; the thief picks it. You search for a trap; you find one. X does Y, and you follow the constant stream of decisions all the way to the goal.

Blades keeps you in headspace and narrative for most of the action, which feels nice for a narrative game. The only downside is the constant "yes, but..." of the 4-5 partial-success rolls, and the fatigue that comes from deciding what a "yes, but..." means on almost every roll. This is the same issue that Genesys or Daggerheart have, or any narrative game that incorporates partial success mechanics. This is the sort of thing that strikes some initially as "the best thing since sliced bread," but it can go stale just as quickly if you overuse it or make it too important, and you are "yes, butting..." every roll with bigger and bigger stakes.

People end up back in d20, and "X does Y" feels refreshing because failure is pass/fail and doesn't require interpretation. There is no interpretative fatigue. You fail. You see the next thing. You do the next thing. You succeed. And so on.

But like Genesys, the answer is almost always to reduce the importance of "yes, but..." and turn it into a quick ruling or next-turn modifier, then move on as quickly as possible. Save the big "yes, but..." for the most important moments, and don't drag the game through the mud by over-interpreting every roll.

Make a quick judgment and move on. Tick a clock. Raise the stakes. Remove a die. Break an item. Introduce a twist. Or add a wrinkle to the scene, like a crowd gathering, that is neither good nor bad, but could potentially complicate matters. A smart player could use the crowd as an asset to blend in and get away. A not-so-smart player now has a group of witnesses.

The "yes, but..." doesn't always mean "quantifiable negate game mechanic penalty measured by a number," as it does in an "X does Y" game. If you are trying to account for every point and level of negative effect, you are probably overthinking it, and that is leading to burnout.

If it takes you more than 30 seconds to think of the consequence, just pick something at random and keep playing. The first thing that comes to mind. Or ignore it because you are stuck in the narrative weeds. If it is not clear and apparent, it isn't that important, so drop it and move on.

Sometimes a "yes, but..." is just a normal success, and you don't need to overthink it. The whole thing could be a "yes, but you feel terrible about doing it that way," and move on. Let the player decide what to do with that. Make it up to the contact who took the brunt of the negative effect later? Your choice.

Blades in the Dark is a milestone game that changed a lot, and it still has plenty of fans at the table. I am looking forward to digging into this one.

The Best AD&D Style Games

Old-School Essentials put out the 2026 revision, and I have been sitting with the two core books longer than I meant to. Creative Commons instead of the OGL; the rules they actually needed to tidy; a pile of examples the earlier printings were thin on; and Advanced Fantasy is the only game they support these days. I like those books. I am just not sure they have decided which game they are playing.

Classic OSE was a restatement of BX: smaller hit dice, a short class list, race-as-class as the default shape of a person, spells that stop where Expert stops, and a level cap at 14. Advanced Fantasy was always the other product. Same procedures, extra classes, a race-and-class split, and a stack of AD&D features turned down so it wouldn't conflict with BX. It always reminded me of a cleaned-up version of the classic Labyrinth Lord game, or a BX+.

The revision brings first edition back into the game with optional d10 fighters sitting next to the old hit dice. Race-and-class sits next to race-as-class. High-level play is a DIY chapter that tells you to borrow from somewhere else if you want spells past what Expert printed. The publisher is clear about the cap: 14, and nothing BECMI is in the box.

So the question is no longer “is this a pretty BX book?” It is “is this BX, or is this AD&D Lite?” Once you ask that, you need to compare OSE Advanced to the other AD&D-like games on the shelf.

If you want AD&D-Lite: Swords & Wizardry

Swords & Wizardry Complete is my AD&D-Lite game. It is an OD&D zero-edition that gobbled up a bunch of expansion books and parts of AD&D, but refused to leave the 1970s and stuck with the little-book feeling. Assassin, monk, druid, paladin, ranger, one saving throw, 9th-level spells, characters that do not bounce off a wall at name level, and a monster list with magic resistance. That is what “lite” has to mean if the word is going to do any work. A demon can shrug a spell, and casters are not the masters of the universe anymore. We get the high-level spells and abilities here!

The high-level game is in the book.

OSE Advanced gives you the names. Paladin, ranger, illusionist, split race and class, and now the optional bigger hit dice. What it will not give you is the rest of that 1e machine, such as magic resistance, high-level play, and classes with a bit more depth. I still love the S&W fighter better than any other BX or 1E clone; this is peak OSR gaming. The single saving throw number is genius and erases pages of saving throw tables from the game.

S&W has a couple of expansion books that bring in barbarians, bards, illusionists, warlocks, and more monsters. If I want the "AD&D-isms" and don't want the full AD&D weight, Swords & Wizardry wins every time and comes with me in my travel bag.

If you want AD&D: OSRIC

If I actually want first edition, I play first edition, or I play the clone that exists so people can keep writing modules for it without the messy "for the first edition of the world's most popular role-playing game" prose. OSRIC was never trying to be the pretty book on the coffee table. It was a legal, usable AD&D clone so the community could ship adventures and say the name out loud. I am not waiting for it to become a lifestyle brand, and the game is already done, loved, and this is how we play 1E these days.

We had a major revision with OSRIC 3.0, and this is the new 1E standard-bearer. I know we can get the PoD books of the originals (with misprint errors), but I want the definitive source that opens the door for third-party publishers. I support OSRIC 3.0 with its new CC-based license. The originals are fine if it is "just me," but once we start playing with others and wanting new adventures and material, OSRIC will win every time.

OSE does not do that work. It will eat a mountain of BX and a lot of 1e content if I am willing to convert by feel, which I usually am, but that is not the same as sitting down with the 1e stack. I do not grab OSE Advanced because I want segments, weapon speed, magic resistance, and a spell list that treats 9th-level spells as optional. I grab it for BX procedures and a few extra toys. Oh, and the books are smaller and easier to travel with. OSE wins if I am on vacation and need a travel game.

When I want AD&D, OSRIC is the living clone. The revised OSE books are doing something else.

If you want AD&D-Plus: Adventures Dark & Deep

Joseph Bloch’s pitch has always been the continuation question I keep coming back to: what if Gygax had stayed and kept developing first edition instead of walking out of TSR in 1985? Adventures Dark & Deep starts from 1e and from the public hints about where that game was supposed to go next: new classes, a rebuilt bestiary, cleaned-up combat, and the whole thing treated like a product line that kept moving. This started as a what-if AD&D if Gary had stayed, and became a love letter to 1E with a few modern twists and treats.

I love this game but do not have the time to play it. This is my "ultimate AD&D" fanservice game. The combat is cleaned up, and weapon speed actually works. The skill system is genius. There is a Lite version that strips the game down to a playable core set of options, yet still is a remarkably complete game for the levels people actually play.

What OSE Advanced still is

I am not boxing the revision up. Leaving the OGL for Creative Commons is the right long-term move. The examples of play are what previous OSE printings were thin on, and one purchase path instead of five overlapping cores is easier for a new referee. I can still carve a Classic game out of the new books; they include a Basic Play section.

The old books are still fine. I can not upgrade, keep playing for decades, and house-rule in whatever I want. This is BX, not 5E. Factor in the Carcass Crawler zines, and I have more character races than any of the other three games on this table, including the new favorites people keep asking for. Those races will sit at a S&W table or an OSRIC table just as easily. The B/X world is still the more open room that way, and I am not locked to whatever a VTT character builder decided to support.

None of that fixes the focus problem. BX is a low-resolution game. AD&D is a high-resolution game. Put them side by side, and the BX picture gets blurry. Optional bigger hit dice, a parallel character-creation method, and a high-level chapter that admits I will have to loot another book for spell lists; that is two games sharing a spine, with the extra material not in the box.

If they later print a high-level book, a love-letter to BECMI, the conversation changes. One page of optional rules for high-level play does not turn OSE into an AD&D-clone, and so much is missing that this should have been left to another expansion.

OSE Classic, the discontinued Tome, the thing that made the line matter, was the best-in-class BX restatement. The revised Advanced books are a very good catalog of BX procedures plus selected 1e toys, scaled to Expert. As a BX game with extra hats, I will use them. As AD&D lite, they don't beat Swords & Wizardry Complete. As AD&D, they do not beat OSRIC. As the next step past an expanded first edition, they aren't even in the same room as Adventures Dark & Deep.

I try to know which feeling I am feeding before I take a book off the shelf. The new OSE will feed the BX one if I turn off half the options. For the other three, I buy the game built for them. For 90% of the cases, Swords & Wizardry is just right for me.

We just have so many good AD&D options these days that it is hard to see OSE plus one page of optional high-level play rules as real competition for any of them. The new OSE books should have left this out, or did a BECMI-like expansion later.

There Is More Here

I keep hoping A5E is the 5E I can still live in.

Not the brand, not the argument about who owns the shape of the game. The nights. I have sat through too many of those 5E evenings where the fighter is holding a turn and watching the spell list do the interesting work, and everybody knows it, and we still call it a party. The woods are a skill check you talk past so you can get to the room that was balanced. You write a personality in the margin, and the math never looks at it again. Short rest, next slot, next level. Then the page is blank, and you are supposed to care about a new subclass that arrived in a book you did not ask for.

A5E is the first time in a while the jobs felt like jobs again. Exertion and traditions give a martial character something to spend. I remember the first session I ran it, and the fighter was actually deciding things, not waiting for the wizard to be done. Exploration has parts. You can lose the afternoon on the way to the door. Weather, a hunt, a stretch of road that costs hit points before anyone draws. That used to be the part of the hobby I liked before everything became an encounter budget.

Even sleep is not free. A long rest wants a haven. Somewhere you can eat and sleep without a reasonable chance the night tries to kill you. An inn will do. A camp where somebody has to stay awake on watch usually will not. A ranger who knows how to knock together a small shelter in the trees can make one out there. A few spells and class features do the same. You can lie down in the open and get some of it back, but the worst fatigue and strife hang on until you make it somewhere that counts and you have supplies to eat. I have had 5E tables treat eight hours on a dungeon floor like a reset button. The journey keeps a receipt in A5E, and in other versions of 5E, resting feels like MMO hit-point regeneration.

I am sick of the MMO-isms in 5E. Somebody wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

Destiny is the piece I did not know I was missing. It points the character at something that will not wrap in three sessions. D&D and ToV let you say you want revenge, a crown, or to go home, and then the sheet treats that as flavor. Here the long hook sits next to the numbers. I have had characters in other 5Es who were very well built, and I could not have told you, two months later, what they were walking toward. That started to bother me more than the math arguments.

Multiclassing is usually a cheat or a lecture. You either stack the broken pair, or you sit there explaining why the table is not doing that. Synergy feats treat the mix as a build, which is a small thing until you have spent years policing 5E combinations and you are tired of being the hall monitor. Rare spells scratch a different itch. You hunt them. They are not the same list everybody already knows from the basic book, the one you have seen on every sheet since 2014.

That's not what a clone is for. A clone reprints the shape and settles a few arguments so you can keep your old adventures. I already have that. What I wanted was the language of 5E with a longer memory than the next game session. You do not come all the way back from the woods until you have a haven, whether that is a room in town or a shelter somebody knew how to raise before dark.

I do not know if that saves 5E for me. I know it is the version I pull when I still want that language in my mouth and I want the night to be about more than a room that was pointed at the party’s level. A tradition. A road that costs you. Sleep that means more if you earned the place you are sleeping. A destiny that keeps walking after the short rest. A reason to mix classes without feeling dirty. A spell I had to find instead of picking off a menu. I am running that and seeing if the hope holds, which is as honest as I can get about it right now.

Mail Room: Gate Pass Gazetteer 2025 (A5E)

Level Up A5E is the last 5E version I have on my display shelves.

The annual showed up in the mail, and I had to find a gap on the A5E shelf for it. There is a gap. That is part of why the shelf is still there.

Level Up is the last 5E I keep on display. Not the last 5E I own. The last one that gets to sit with the games I actually look at when I walk past. Gate Pass Gazetteer 2025 goes up with the official books, the ones written for this framework, the other yearly bricks. Everything else that used to lean on “it’s compatible” is in a closet. I stopped supporting that pile. It was too much. You can feel a game go sloppy when the characters feel like they come from different universes and the books get lost in a crowd.

This was the first 5E that worked for me in a way that still felt like a challenge. The numbers sat still. Hits meant something. Dying is not a coffee break. They kept bits from 3rd and 4th that I liked, and they left the danger in. They rewrote the SRD from the ground up so they did not have to live on the OGL, which at the time felt like homework and later felt like the reason the game could stay itself. Fighters had a job. That part still matters when I pull the book.

It is a niche version of 5E. I don’t need this to be a popular game. At this point, it doesn’t matter. Support is thin, and I have stopped feeling that was a problem. What they did print is solid throughout, and there is not so much of it that I need a second set of rules for what belongs on the table. Official sources only, and I have more than a campaign. Exploration that can actually go wrong in the woods. Social classes that do something besides talk while the martial character holds a weapon and waits. Martial classes that spend exertion on a tradition the way a wizard spends slots.

Those jobs are in the books. I do not have to handwave them into existence, or spend more on crowdfunding books to fix a version of 5E that will never be fixed.

The Gazetteer is the right kind of new spine for a shelf like that. A year of the magazine in one hardcover. More heritages, more archetypes, a couple of prestige classes, two combat traditions, challenges, junk items, a pile of monsters. It feeds the same game. It does not ask me to invent a second 5E, so the first one looks supported. I already know what that looks like. It is behind a door.

I am not making a case that A5E should have been bigger. I am looking at a lean official shelf that still covers the night, putting this year’s book in the space I have left, and leaving the closet shut.

The Save You Make...

I still remember the quiet when the referee said save.

Not a death save. That language wasn’t in the room yet. It was just a save, and everyone knew the empty space after it meant needle or gaze or something in a chest that did not care how long you had been walking around in the character. One number. You watched the die, and if it came up wrong, you were already reaching for a fresh sheet instead of a spell slot.

I am not dressing those nights up, and a lot of them were clumsy. The dungeon was the ordinary kind of unfair: too many doors, a pit with no speech attached, a monster that had not been told what level you were, and you brought extra character sheets because a room was allowed to finish someone. Save-or-die was only the blunt version of that. The book was not going to catch you.

Now I open a current-day adventure, and I can feel the courtesy before the first boxed text. The basilisk is still a basilisk; only petrified is a problem with a clock on it, and poison is damage plus a condition you can spend the next ten minutes fixing. The old fear is still sitting in the names, but the write-up has already decided the session should continue. Three failures, a word from across the map, a revival that costs less than the dinner you bought on the way over, and nobody is shoveling dirt on the character sheet.

The modules are built the same way. The numbers have been sliced so the party is supposed to walk out, the rest sits where you would expect to catch your breath, and the boss has enough hit points to feel like work without enough permission to actually end the night. “Balanced so you win” is treated as good manners, and I understand the manners, because nobody drove across town to watch a paladin become a garden decoration in the second room. I still notice that the fear left with the old save.

Video games stopped pretending about this a long time ago. Story mode, the painted line on the floor, a prompt you can skip if your hands are tired. You paid for the ending, so the ending stays available. Tabletop kept the dice and borrowed the courtesy. You still pick up the d20. The dungeon just isn’t supposed to mean it.

I still play this way. I like knowing the next page is waiting. I miss that second before the save, when the adventure module might actually kill your character. Lethal dungeons were not a philosophy. They were just rooms nobody had already sized for a listed level.

These days I look at a monster stat block or room description, and I can already see how the party leaves. That used to not be so certain.

Off the Shelf: Rifts

It was one of those moments when I feared I had lost them all.

A water leak in an adjacent room meant I could not get to my Rifts books, and I feared the worst. So they sat on a shelf while the carpets dried. I was worried about warped paper and ruined books.

All of them were fine. Not one warped page. Not one water-damaged cover. What are these things, indestructible? I have seen people's play copies of Rifts, yellowed pages, all the corners bent, a cover with more creases and bends than California fault lines, and yet still loved and used the day they were bought 30 or more years ago.

When Rifts comes around, people will still be playing Rifts with these same books.

So back in my room, on my premier game shelves, I put the copies right next to my SDC games. I do not care about the MDC thing; that is how we describe standing in front of a cruise missile in this world these days, or staring down the barrel of a tank. We have MDC weapons in this world; get used to it. Bombs, anti-ship missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, thousand-pound bombs, 30mm anti-tank cannons, and the other big things that go boom are circa 2026 MDC firepower. Even shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets dropped from drones with shaped charges count.

Does Rifts sit as a display game, or do I play it? I get the feeling that this time, I play. It slaps around the D&D multiverse by a good mile, making those worlds look soft and silly. These are true planar terrors, walking tanks that could crush you flat with a cough, or your skin falls off due to their bad breath. Rifts has always been over the top in all the best ways a game could be. The Rifts multiverse is the endgame of all games, including all games, superior to them all, more overpowered than them all, and giving back by making anything magic that stumbles into an MDC creature with MDC power. Even superheroes.

You get MDC! And you get MDC! Here's a six-shooter; even you get MDC!

Powergaming? Books full of OP items? Unbalanced OCCs that could crush some normal human OCC fool who stumbles through a rift from the 1880s? The whole "do we start a bar fight with MDC weapons?" problem. It is all here. Use what you want. Play a small, one- or two-book campaign. Do a one-shot, but it's likely MDC and will end the campaign with a successful hit. Import your favorite characters and kit them out with power armor. Drop your favorite superhero team in and make this world their new home. Everything has a place here. It's all good.

Back in the early 1990s, compared with the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms, Vampire: The Masquerade, BattleTech, Cyberpunk, Dark Sun, a dead Greyhawk, Megatraveller, Twilight:2000, and the other settings of the day, Rifts was better than them all, with maybe Cyberpunk's Night City coming close to the cool factor. D&D and TSR were dying.

People were tired of all the settings we put on pedestals today. I remember the time the "first OSR" died and took TSR with it. Even in fantasy games, we had Palladium, GURPS, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, MERP, and a few others that "did D&D better." AD&D 2nd Edition got heavily sanitized, politically correct, safe for every audience, and nobody cared. The game blew up with splat books. The Vampire subculture started, and continues to this day, with the people angry at VTM 6th. They realize people base their lives around these Kindreds and identities, right? Don't mess with people's goth identities; they are sacred, just like My Chemical Romance is a religious experience.

The hardest part of playing and enjoying Rifts is letting go of other people's negative opinions. In that sense, it is just like GURPS. These games don't deserve the repeated nonsense that people endlessly adopt as false lived experience.

We had an AD&D 2nd Edition game going back in the 1990s, and it was fun, but Rifts was always the one we waited to play. Nothing compared to blowing everything up and laughing about it. You both got to live in utter fear and wield weapons that could level city blocks. The game was pure power fantasy. Did you feel weak with the last character? Ask your referee about playing something overpowered next time for a massive revenge kick. Play an MDC Dragon or Godling if you want. The Coalition will hunt you, but since when did they ever NOT deserve it?

Rifts was awesome and full of character. Any god could drop in, hop off their MDC motorcycle with the nova cannon and missile racks, and offer a mission. If you remember Image Comics and Wildstorm, yeah, that was Rifts. I use my MDC cyber-claws to tear the front of the building off. Roll an attack, give me damage; all right, the building has no front wall, bricks are all over the street, and the bad guys inside are surprised.

Today's games are far too careful and afraid of their own shadows.

Today's players are lost, believing they don't deserve to have it all. A carefully balanced game is good enough for me.

Why aren't you living life?

Why aren't you experiencing something awesome? Another balanced 5E book won't fix your boredom with the game. You will just be complaining about broken this or broken that. Sure, the majority of Rifts is broken, but it still works fine that way.

Why are you so afraid?

If you fear giving characters power, you will run from this game screaming. If you embrace the anime-inspired overpowered attacks and weapons that can slice a hillside in half, you will be right at home here. If all you know in life is carefully balanced D&D 5.5E, I feel sorry for you. That's not true power. Even at level 20, where you are single-turn nova-blasting encounters, that is nothing compared to this. You are still relatively weak on the cosmic scale of things, and your carefully planned alpha attack will bounce off a tank, and your character sheet and identity-gaming avatar will be literal red mist.

And no, this isn't the end-of-edition D&D 5.5E overpowered characters, which are only meant to break the game so everyone begs for D&D 6E to come along and save us from the end-of-edition OP subclass options. They have done this to every edition of D&D they printed; they blow out the edition in a fire sale of OP releases, people "have fun for a little while" but "eventually grow tired of all the powergaming," and then "please release 6E and fix this!" Planned obsolescence means breaking your own game and riding off the YouTube hype to sell the last few books before you replace them all.

We broke the old game; please buy the fixed one.

Is Rifts broken? Mostly. Do I care? No. Is it being so all over the place part of the fun? Sure, why not? I am a roleplayer; I could make a ham sandwich work as a rule system. I can have fun with anything. Part of the challenge is making it all work together. The characters are so cool I don't even care. And the game wasn't intentionally broken to get you to buy the next one. It is a big box of stuff you pick and choose from; most of it works together, some pieces are wildly overpowered, and you learn how to become a better Rifts GM by playing, and not by copying YouTube streaming shows.

Rifts is a game I keep walking away from but can never truly leave.

Rifts will still be here. Just like my books, the game is a survivor.

Just like you deserve to be, too.

Games I Love, Part One

These are games close to my heart, the ones I can dig into and lose myself in. You see my favorites in a few of my blogs, where I drop science daily and let loose a stream of consciousness that few other blogs can unleash. SBRPG is my central home, a jack-of-all-trades blog where anything goes. But a few of my more game-focused blogs go deeper, and that level of consciousness is so rewarding.

GURPS is one, a game I can endlessly dig into and lose myself in. The character design system is the best in gaming, beating the sequined faux-plate mail pants off of 5th Edition any day of the week. Is it retro? Do you need software? Is it deadly and realistic? Is the combat system slow and a bit of a throwback? Yes to all of the above.

Is it so rewarding and deep that I don't even care? GURPS is the end-all, be-all of games. Two books do it all. I do not need thousands of dollars of crowdfunded 5E books selling me slightly altered variants of what I already have. The sourcebooks are some of the best overviews of anything you can imagine ever written.

GURPS was also written in the era of games "beating AD&D at their own game," so it had something to prove. A lot of the games I love today come from this same era and attitude. It is funny how nostalgia and pop culture can't seem to stop kneeling at the altar of nostalgia, and the faux-nostalgia that D&D 5.5E presents as some sort of AAA Gaming Fortnite remake. The OSR worships games I gave up on in the 1980s so I could play these games.

But what if I want to play gritty fantasy or hard science fiction? A realistic western? Ancient Rome? Any historical game? GURPS will go there, and it likely already has sourcebook support. If I want to play in a setting that isn't published anymore, or want better rules for the chassis? GURPS will do all that easily. Do I want to create my own world and develop my own magic systems? GURPS was built for that. I am not forced to take the 5.5E pile of planar stuff, cosplay art, and throwback Vancian magic bolted onto an infinite-cast MMO magic system with video game rest mechanics.

GURPS will let me design my own magic system.

Instead of writing a 14-page backstory, let's design a binder-sized world story with a unique backstory, history, and magic power system. GURPS gives you the tools to DIY. D&D asks you to wait to buy the next book.

Here's another "we gave up AD&D for this" game. Palladium. A game so stuck in the 1980s and 1990s that it brings back the sweet memories of the era. Please never change. I will play in a Ninjas and Superspies game set in the 1980s to a Miami Vice soundtrack forever. No internet and no drones, and cell phones were an oddity the size of a loaf of bread that only worked in a few major cities? Yes, take me back; I got the soundtrack right here.

Palladium Fantasy is another "nah, sorry AD&D, we got better over here" game that answered the armor-damage debate. It came with a fantasy world Wizards of the Coast never repeatedly ruined. The OCCs in this game are unique; they are all specialists, none of them are balanced against each other, and each one feels like "the best in what they do," and that is on purpose.

D&D 5.5E will take a job, such as a chef, and proceed to give them a 1-to-20 rack of combat, utility, healing, crowd control, and adventuring powers to make them a useful party addition to sell you the MMO lie. Palladium will make them a world-class chef and let them die in a dungeon holding a baguette.

Not every job needs to be the same, or have the same level of utility when it comes to killing things. Some have spells with a casting time of days, but nobody else can do this stuff. People call them "trap classes" because new players pick them because they sound cool, then referees throw them into a dungeon (the AD&D mindset on the other side of the screen), and they die. Here's a thought: run Palladium like Palladium, and give those OCCs things they can do. If you want a combat-focused game, pick combat-focused OCCs.

Again, you started to see the lie be crafted in AD&D Second Edition, where they elevated the bard to a full party role. Palladium lives in an era that says, no, some roles will not be artificially inflated to be dungeoning classes. This is MMO design theory: "we have to make any choice a viable one," and the D&D 4E issue of "everything feeling samey" comes up again and again. D&D 5.5E is already starting to feel this way again, but with the added benefit of martials getting the shaft again.

If I play a bard in Palladium, I will be having all sorts of social adventures, and I will never be a door-kicker. That is fine for me, and I can enjoy a game that runs at a different pace. I will never have the raw killing power of a mercenary fighter, nor the defensive nut of a knight, but neither of them will be as good as I am when singing a song and engaging in social hijinks. The game takes on an entirely different character; the OCC creates its own "world inside of a world" it operates in, and while combat works the same, I am not living in a dungeon crawler and pretending to be a social roleplayer.

Every time I play 5E and want to do social roleplaying, my character sheet screams at me to get in the dungeon and stop wasting my time. Palladium fixes that problem by narrowing the focus of OCCs and letting them play in their own sandbox and sphere of influence.

Why not use GURPS? Palladium is faster, uses d20s and 1d100, uses an AC-like AR armor system with "armor hit points", and feels more like an AD&D-style game. One simple core system, the same combat engine, multiple game worlds, TNMT (and back in the day, Robotech) on the side, and you have it all. I get to use all of my dice. I can get a group of AD&D players into Palladium pretty easily since 90% of the concepts are the same or product-improved versions of systems they already know, whereas GURPS will take longer to learn and get used to.

Don't get me started on Rifts. That is another "ultimate game" that I loved. Rifts, GURPS, and Vampire helped kill TSR when Magic: The Gathering sucked the life out of the hobby. Rifts is sort of like Americanized Robotech, and it fills that headspace completely when Robotech went away. We want power armor and weapons that can flatten city blocks, punch through bridge pilings, and few other games (even today) do that as easily as Rifts.

Rifts was the game that your mom bought you if "your mom was cool." This was the 1990s, so it exists in the decade after AD&D died, and brings back a whole other set of memories for me. If you don't understand the games that "killed the original OSR" back in the TSR days, you will never understand the OSR and will instead put it on a pedestal, along with its flaws, which these games directly addressed. Oh, and the end of Stranger Things should have ended with the kids either playing GURPS or Rifts, if they wanted to be historically accurate.

Don't get me started on power armor design systems in other games that require spreadsheets and graphing calculators. Non-starter. Be cool like your mom wants you to be. Play Rifts.

More games in this series are coming. These two were on my mind today.