Off the Shelf: OSRIC 3

I love Adventures Dark & Deep, but it is a massive game. The low-level starting guide helps a lot, but I'd still play it after I'd exhausted 1E. And there is a lot to play in 1E. Dark & Deep feels like a massive modded game, and while I absolutely love those, sometimes a clean, basic ruleset appeals to me more than a "more stuff" game.

I want something clean, tight, with limited options, easy for new players, and expandable.

And I want a game that works.

OSRIC 3 will never let us down, nor will it ever be torn up and changed. Version 2 was very close, and version 3 is the closest yet to perfection. The first edition was one of those perfect games, and the downfall started when they messed with the formula, started commercializing the game, and sanitized it in reaction to the Satanic Panic. The second edition is really only as good as it is because of the first edition, but it was always a step down from its peak.

OSRIC is like OSE Classic for AD&D.

Sometimes, BX or 1E is all I want or need. A simple alchemical base. A clean, constrained, blank canvas from which I can create a million ideas. I don't want the extra stuff, and I can add most of it myself. Sure, this game doesn't have bards, but the book above has a great bard, and people have been hacking homebrew classes into 1E for nearly 50 years. Besides, the bard has been a bit of a trash fire for the last three editions of D&D, and I don't mind a game that lets me step away from them for a while and bring back the one I really like. This is true of many other expansion classes, too.

BX works well with 1E, and most of it is fully compatible.

1E is the only game that ever delivered balanced high-level play. Forget 2E; the expansions and splat-books blew it up. 1E is the only version of D&D that you could play to maximum level, and it still worked. BX only goes to 14. 1E goes all the way. It will never be broken since, like the original OSE, it is a reference work.

And high-level play is still very deadly. Resurrection is never guaranteed. Death has a price. All characters will die in this game, either after a short, adventurous life or after settling down and having heirs. Any other game that keeps your character alive forever is lying to you.

And OSRIC is community-supported. This is its biggest strength. Sure, I can buy POD copies of the original books and keep them safe, but those will not be on sale or available forever. OSRIC will endure long after the company and IP are sold off and merged into another trillion-dollar entertainment monopoly. I love the original game, but I love the community more. This is why I support OSRIC. It is open-licensed. They can never take this away from us. It will never change. It uses the fixed numbers and math the hobby's creator approved.

It's a beginner's game for 1E. That has never been done, and not even the original 1E game is easy for beginners. I can teach someone this pretty easily. I can do this with the Dark & Deep basic book, too, but OSRIC feels like OSE Classic Fantasy to me. I can teach anyone 1E.

But why 1E over BX?

For the same reasons Gary made AD&D: to standardize the rules. To have consistent convention play.  To reduce arguments and eliminate rule inconsistency. To have a balanced high-level game, something we've lost in 50 years of D&D and never had since.

Sure, BX is the beginner game and always was, but for people who come together and play seriously, 1E was the version of the game best designed for official and convention play. 2E fell into the story-gaming and power-gaming trap, lost its edge, changed the math, and it bankrupted the company. BX does not create a solid, long-term, convention-ready ruleset that eliminates ambiguity and house ruling. You don't have to make much up to play 1E, and everyone can agree on the rules and rulings. Ultimately, this speeds play and standardizes the experience for everyone.

Gary knew 1E was the best version of the game for long-term play, and in more than 50 years, that is still true.

While my 1E books are the original source, OSRIC is the community edition of the classic, and far easier to hand a new player and for the community to support.

Video: The Fatal Flaw in 5e's Math

A good video from Mike Mearls today.

Wizards barely tested high-level 5E play. I do have a lot to say about this, but frankly, it is not his fault. When you work for a company that refuses to give you the resources you need, you do your best. I've been there many times. It all comes down on your back. You take it on yourself. You get the gray hairs. You go home every night feeling like you are heroically trying to hold it all together. 

Mike did his best here, and I thank him for being honest. We need more of this in our hobby, and we need to elevate moments like this. Honestly, from one creator to another, thank you.

It is not the person; it is the company that barely tested high-level D&D 3, 4, or 5 play.

And now they want to sell us Universes Beyond.

And possibly 6E.

I'm done. If Gary didn't touch it, I don't want it.

Hold On To Those Open License Games

Don't sell them. Don't give them up. And never stop playing them.

If a game cuts itself off and puts part of its rules or class designs behind a paywall, it isn't worth your time. It is all but garbage. If you need to play the game fully and it isn't open content, the rest of the game gets infected by a closed-source license.

Don't be fooled.

Even the defunct OGL is superior to many of these closed-source games. Hold on to those too. D&D 3.5E, Pathfinder, 1st Edition Mongoose Traveller, and others - preserve these.

ORC? Creative Commons? Other open "share alike" licenses that allow data portability? Good games. They deserve your time and support. Be careful with these; some lock parts away behind their paywalls, and the game doesn't work fully. These are bad games and not worth your time. If games start "pulling support back for open licensing," then you do the same.

Open-license games will be the last games they allow us to have when pen-and-paper gaming goes "AI streaming" and nothing is allowed to be owned. It will all be rentals. You won't own anything.

This is already how it is going in the video game space. Nothing is owned.

Games with open licenses are the last ones you will ever be allowed to own, share, and talk about.

Everything else will be locked into a subscription model.

Even housing is being forced down that path.

The OGL Crisis was not about D&D; it was about data ownership and freedom. It was about AI. It was about weaponizing IP law and having the state enforce rental schemes. It was about taking a game's math and data, putting it in a JSON file, and watching it blow away like dandelion seeds.

If you play a closed-source game, you're part of the problem. I don't care about friends or feelings, or how nice the books are. They aren't, and you are supporting rental models which forbid ownership and freedom. Some of these companies are now extending ownership rights in what you are allowed to say about a game, or they will take it away from you. Just look at AAA gaming. Free speech limitations are a part of the EULA.

If anything could be owned or shared, nothing could be forced into rental.

You can't take away a game everybody owns.

Refuse to rent.

Support open gaming.

The only games worth owning are the ones that allow full sharing.

Off the Shelf: My 2d6 Games

All of these are Cepheus-based, and each is the perfect amount of game to play with an AI. I see these slowly killing the last of my 5E collection, and that is a strange thing to say. I can be against AI art and still play these with an AI chatbot; it isn't taking anyone's job, and it is using the compute power they are giving away for free in a creative way.

Again, we are not making art.

We are just using the models as a text-adventure, and playing them by a real-world game's rules.

There is a difference.

Just make sure data sharing is turned off; I do care about privacy. Plus, read the terms of service. You gotta be careful. Never assume anything on these systems is truly private. It isn't. Or use a private, ethically sourced local model, which is where this is all going in 3-5 years. Make an informed choice.

But asking an AI to sort through a full 5E version and parse bonus actions, free actions, and those pages-long subclass designs wastes tokens and compute power. This will burn more power and resources from our planet, so the less tokens you use, the more you can help the planet, if you care about it that way. 5E is an incredibly inefficient, bloated, and overwritten to an almost laughable degree. Simple games that an AI can grasp and master are the future, plus the AI can make up all the things a simple game doesn't do.

All I need is a simple 2d6 resolution system that can be communicated easily to a model. An AI can do 8+ on 2d6, and I am betting an AI can figure out BX far easier and cheaper than it can 5E, so there is still an option there. BX is probably next, once I standardize on a system. It has to be lightweight, not a few hundred pages, and I want something simple that doesn't throw too many special cases at me.

But solo play with oracles? Without a computer, it works, but this does everything much more easily. Because we are using rules, wish-fulfillment is constrained. That can happen with solo play; you can cheat yourself far too easily or make rulings that make everything go your way. With an AI on the other side of the table controlling enemies, each one will be a challenge, and they will try to outthink me, pursue their own objectives, or stonewall me against a course of action. They will call in allies for help. They will set up roadblocks. An AI running the opposition makes them deadly and smart, and I do not need artificial challenge from "expanded monster rules" to make a foe deadly.

I have had AI opponents throw more challenge at me in text-based games than I ever had in years of trying to solo 5E. I sat there, perplexed, stunned at how carefully a foe had boxed me in and cut off avenues of approach, taking the high ground in a situation with a realistic thought process, and I was the one standing on the outside, feeling hopeless, like a frontal assault was the exact dumbest thing to do. And it was. The AI would even admit to boxing me out. I had to change tactics to something it didn't expect. I had to judge enemy injuries without an "easy rest" system like some video game, and tell the AI that the wounded needed to get off post to seek care and rest. Then, time could be used against them, and waiting until a shift change or a better time to strike at night became an option.

I have found oracles for solo-play tend to confirm your own biases and double down on your own thinking; if a situation is only going to be a frontal assault, then that is how you are going to use the oracle. You will either use the state machine and generations in the oracle to make the frontal assault easier or harder, and any 5E system will tell you, "the fight should be balanced," and you are meant to win anyway. By "balanced," it means "even the dumbest choice is a winning strategy."

An AI will make stupid mistakes and needs correction. You will need to speak to it "DM to DM" every once in a while and tell it that the last ruling or paragraph has completely lost the plot and all the marbles. You will argue a ruling or logical plot construction, just like you do with a real DM. You will correct it and make it roll back the last paragraph, because what it just said was so stupid it defies logic and reality. That is happening less and less to me, to the point where I am starting to see a local AI system as superior to oracle-based play.

An AI will create an infinite, procedural, realistic, and NPC-filled world for you in the blink of an eye. Anywhere you go, something or somebody is there. In the wilderness, there will be no one. You can "tweak the matrix" and suggest things to drop in, so it isn't without your input. Just like a DM, if you search for travelers along a road, you may find a few. You won't know where they are or what they are up to, but the AI may throw you a bone. Or it may not. Or you may eye-roll and tell the AI that, in a rarely traveled borderland region, no circus troupe would be wandering around. That call will be pulled back, and you will get something sensible. Those moments happen, and you need to be able to call BS on your DM. Just like in real life.

An AI DM on a local model running in text-adventure mode is close to what we think an "AI DM" will be, but don't be fooled. What is coming will be much more than this - transformative, with image generation, 3d map generation, 3d models pulled from the ether, and a system unrecognizable from any high-end VTT or even 3D MMO. This stuff will kill the VTT and MMO markets in one fell swoop as the new generation of models takes over and creates experiences that seem like magic.

And it is not you who will matter; the "normie" market will swoop in and decide if this is ethical or moral for you. To be honest, me sitting here playing in text-adventure mode like I was typing on a Unix teletype terminal feels honest to me, conserving power and tokens, sticking to simple games and text only, and trying to understand the experience before the market attaches to a hybrid 3D AI fantasy experience like a million lampreys and the choice is made for the industry, and the ethical thinkers are silenced.

The normie market will always throw a few billion dollars at something flashy and wasteful, which is how we got into the situation we are in with 5E. The lowest common denominator has the most money; ethics and conservation be damned.

What I do over here will be orders of magnitude less wasteful, keeping ethics and ownership of the games and IP concerns as hard constraints. I keep AI art out of the discussion. I try to be forward-looking while keeping my soul. I tweak my models and experiences to be as efficient as possible. I minimize token use, especially for repeated procedures. I will use power-efficient systems and chips. I use the AI and ask it, "Was that wasteful? Is there a better way to do this?" I will minimize RAM usage and expensive lookups.

The planet matters.

IP matters.

Ethics matter.

And I will walk away from games so stupidly complicated that they burn tokens every turn trying to figure out the game's action economy and power usage layers for each and every combatant. All I need is a simple ability score, skill, and combat system with one action per turn. Stunting, special attacks, and special uses of powers are up to me and my AI DM to figure out, exactly how we used to handle this in the days before overwritten rules.

BX clearly beats 5E here, and an AI DM turns the system into a more expressive and flexible system than the overthought 5E morass we are burdened with these days. If Wizards ever fails in the AI market, the blame will squarely land on an overcomplicated 5E ruleset that blows up when billions of tokens are burned trying to figure it out for the player base. They own the better game for AI, and hubris will force them to dismiss it and fail in their online strategy yet again. Don't get me started on how expensive all these tokens will be, and how they never needed to spend all that money delivering an inferior product for the job. This is their mistake to make, and their money to waste.

BX is the better game.

And my 2d6 systems are the king of simple, straightforward, token-efficient gaming.

I'll be over here on my Unix terminal having fun.

Off the Shelf: Traveller

I planned to put this in boxes and sell it until I learned I could solo-play it with AI.

That one thing changed everything for me. I could explore a universe, save my exploration to files so I could return to it, land anywhere on any planet, and have it read the UWP to generate an infinite world. The game is simple enough that any AI can make out a UPP and skills. The rest is up to me.

At least I am not using AI for art, I guess, but as my referee? Sure, let's go. Any planet, any subsector, and any place - infinite NPCs, adventures, and locations? I get it- no "AI DMs in D&D," but for something I pay for, for personal use? Sure, why not. Otherwise, these books are out the door. It is too big a game and a universe for me to explore, or even create content in my head for.

Yes, it does feel like giving up.

But I have never seen this universe this way, nor used my books in this way. Every one of them can be used. I did not waste the money collecting. Honestly, this is the first time this has happened to me with a 'collectors' game, seeing AI transform it into something playable. I limit the books, use it only to referee, and feed in information on characters and locations. It does the rest: it tracks the campaign, generates the missions and NPCs, creates locations, and I play.

As the models get better, VTTs may die off in favor of AI. I can only imagine an AI running a massively multiplayer universe using a pen-and-paper game and mutlliple DMs running in parallel, 24-7. The AI can handle maps and positioning. The AI will let you know if other players are nearby and what is going on with them. You will get notifications to connect your PCs and groups. The AI will create the character and storyboard art, or even live 3D models.

The VTT will be dead in the next few years.

The MMO will follow shortly after.

The concept of what a roleplaying game is will change in the next few years.

Yes, AI sucks.

But seeing this makes it feel inevitable.

Off the Shelf: Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition

Cepheus Deluxe Expanded Edition (CDEE) is still one of the best generic 2d6 games out there. If you were smart, you bought the black-and-white version while the giant striped sidebars were still there; at least they didn't hurt your eyes as much as the full-color version. The B&W version is a solid performer, and it gives you all the tools you need for science-fiction adventures in the "little black book" genre of gaming, and even better charts, tables, and tools for filling out a universe.

But great news! In August 2026, a new, sidebar-free, better-layout, updated, larger-font PDF is up on DriveThruRPG! I am waiting for the POD book and then diving in.

While the similar Cepheus Universal is more of a science-fiction genre-creation toolkit, CDEE does the core Traveller-style game loop even better than most versions of Traveller, and it does not come with an Imperium, so we are back to the hobby's roots. Where every Imperium and subsector was DIY, and we created our own 2d6 universes. Frankly, this is how I remember Traveller, having started with the original LBBs.

Games can get too big, and I am slowly moving back to one-book, no VTT, simple character sheet, DIY gaming. The era of 5E feels like it is ending, and the great "library games" of the 2010s and 2020s are starting to look more and more like dinosaurs than experiences. Yes, I have boxes of Traveller books, but this one is on my coffee table right now. This is the one I can hold in my head and play.

These days, I only have a handful of library games I want and need. Palladium and GURPS are two of them. BX or 1E will be there for my D&D, along with a nice Dungeon Crawl Classics collection (which I suspect will win my fantasy gaming top spot). If a game competes with a better one, I sell it.

CDEE, either the older B&W version or the 2026 revision, is an amazing game that holds its own. What I love about it is all the tables that help you fill out a universe, encounters, and tradeport encounters. This is the best "space trading" game between two covers, by far, and the exploration game is done very well, too. The 2d6 resolution system, with talents added to it, makes this one of the better 2d6 games, and it gives you plenty of customization and character tweaking.

Iam glad I fished this out of the garage crates today, and I am looking forward to playing it again.

Off the Shelf: White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game

As of this writing, this book costs five bucks on Amazon. Compare that to boutique OSR games that cost ten times as much. And crowdfunding campaigns where the top supporter levels are often 100 times that. Don't get me started on supporting a 5E habit, which can quickly run into the thousands of dollars.

And, arguably, you get more in this game than you do in most others.

Sure, this book is printed on cheap paperback newsprint, but who cares? My T&T 5.5E book is printed the same way, and I love it. For the price of three D&D hardcovers, I could buy three dozen of these books and hand them out to play with people in libraries, SCA events, and anywhere I go. Couple that with dice bought in bulk, and getting someone into the hobby would cost me eight dollars. Keep the dice; I just gave you a lifetime of fun and adventure.

It's one thing to play in someone's game; it is another to walk away with the complete rulebook and dice to play it. D&D is not that game anymore. Outside of free PDFs, most of the OSR isn't this accessible anymore, either.

Basic Fantasy on Amazon costs twice as much, but is a more premium product. I would like to see a low-cost option there, too. Of course, Basic Fantasy needs to be mentioned in the conversation since it is the standard-bearer in open gaming. Both are compatible, so you could easily play adventures for one with the other. I love White Box FMAG for its ultra-cheap, paperback smell, newsprint paper, no-frills, digest-sized feel. Basic Fantasy is still a full-sized book; this is digest-sized and ultra-portable.

This is so cheap it is in its own category of gaming.

But it isn't cheap in design or quality; it is a great, well-thought-out game with a solid design. More OSR games need no-frills editions. Why are we locking the hobby into expensive POD publishing options, where a copy of most OSR games runs from $25 to $100? Yes, full-color hardcovers are expensive, and the PDFs are often free, but we need to push prices down and get the games into more hands.

Newsprint, no-frills, digest editions are the way to go, subversive and easy to pass around.

In an era of pricey, expensive, get-rich crowdfunding, it is nice to see a game that puts its players first. Like Basic Fantasy, this one is worthy and cheap enough to give away for free as a gift to someone priced out of D&D, or someone whose parents can't pay the hobby's entry fee.