OSE: Multiclassing

In Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy, the optional multiclassing rules are surprisingly flexible and more lenient than those of many other games. A lot of the benefits stack, and there are no rules for "spell failure in armor" for multiclass characters, so for the most part, you get the best of both worlds. Stealth and armor are where the ability is limited, but this is common sense.

It is also possible to start a class later in your adventuring career, as long as you track each class's XP total, you will be fine. Do four levels as a magic-user and pick up bard? Your future XP is now split between them, and future hit points will be divided (and fractionals tracked) by the rules. Otherwise, it will work. The "using the best of" part of the rules for things like saves and attack bonuses will involve a few divergent comparisons, but it is not complicated.

"Best of" is pretty easy to grasp.

And I do not feel weaker in this system like I do in 5E. If my bard/magic-user ever gets to 14th level in each class, they will be a full-powered class in each, which is insanely powerful. I am not "giving up my 20th-level power" like I am in 5E, which just seems wrong and broken. Forcing us to give up powers in 5E is terrible design, and they shouldn't have to "incentivize" sticking with a single class like that.

If I ever level up a class that stops earlier, I can always go back to full XP in the class that can level past it. It "maxes out," and leveling goes back to normal. I can create a specialized 6-level micro-class in something a character could pick up (vampire, werewolf, gladiator, commander, ship captain, etc.), add it to a character, have them learn it as they level, add the powers and abilities as the class gets them, and then go back to normal when the micro-class maxes out.

Again, 5E creates problems that earlier editions do not possess.

All of 5E's classes need to go to 20th level, something BX does not require.

And 5E builds in negative reinforcement for multiclassing, which it does not need to do.

It will take forever and a day to get to my 14/14 magic-user/bard, and everyone else with a single class will be higher level, but I will have an amazing character who can reach full potential in both classes.

And OSE allows up to three classes.

Even many OSR games go out of their way to limit multiclassing, when it should be a group choice on what is allowed. Too many games cut too close to the cloth to emulate the original editions, when they don't need to, and allowing this to be anything you want is far more fun.

Especially when you start pulling in other BX-compatible games like White Star, Modern Necessities, or Dark Places & Demogorgons. Your ability to multiclass and create unique characters is far better than it is in 5E, much easier to manage, and it does not break the game. Secret Agent/Magic User? Sure, why not?

In rare cases, if it causes a problem, ban the combination. You have the power in BX; in 5E, I feel I do not.

The game suggests limiting race and class options to nonhumans, as in the original game, and creating allowed combinations that fit cultures and traditions. Some could even be disallowed, like paladin/assassin combinations, since they make no sense outside a god of assassins. Still, if you had one, you could do it; the game doesn't say you can't. And it allows you to freely mix and match, as long as you pay the piper with split XP.

Multiclassing in OSE is far better than 5E. It is not even close.

This is actually embarrassing.

Too Many Rules

There are too many rules in today's games. Designer hubris is killing the hobby. Every game needs to be an overdesigned, complex, thousand-page, dense, autistic rules monstrosity where every situation needs a rule. Every character option needs a page of rules. Every narrative possibility needs to be tightly controlled by a rule or a brand-new system, with something else to track. Metacurrencies create the need for new rules and systems for how the referee uses "fear" to counter the players' "hope."

Stop it.

Get some help.

The games of 2000-2026 have mostly been a disaster. Overwritten, obese, corporate controlling, live service, unfocused, hundreds of pages, complete messes. Most of the books are piles of fluff and garbage.

I love you, AD&D, but you started this mess. That was the first version of D&D to ever be horribly overwritten, sort of a glorious madman's manifesto on roleplaying and the hobby, a magnificent, unhinged, and train-of-thought document, but as a game, it started to diminish.

The real "game" was always BX.

The game was always BX.

Simple rules that reminded me of my Monopoly set: a basic framework for creativity, rulings over rules, the supreme importance of the referee as a neutral arbiter, and the basics for handling the game's critical points.

Combat.

Exploration.

Progression.

Magic.

There are four legs to this table, and there always were. Social? No rules needed, roleplay it. And I do not need a book full of rules for everything to ensure "convention play is being handled fairly." This is the designer and the company intruding on my game.

I do not work for you, TSR, Wizards, or any other random YouTube crowdfunded creator.

I am not here to enforce "the official rules in book #12" for this specific case that comes up once every 20 years. This is why the X-in-6 rulings, time considerations, applications of torch times, wandering monster checks, morale, retainer reactions, surprise, and all the other simple systems in BX merge together to form a cohesive game. Once you put a few hundred more pages of rules on BX, it stops being a game, and it becomes more of a technical document, like a C++ programming book. We are expected to "follow the code examples" to "produce our output."

The core rules of BX are enough. Once you read the book and put them all together, there is a clean, efficient, expressive, and fun game engine hidden in there when it all comes together.

You do not need a skill system.

You do not need 3,000 feats.

You do not need subclasses.

You do not need to "get something every level." This is what treasure is for.

You do not need 3,000 spells.

You do not need infinite ammo attack cantrips.

Casting rolls to "recast a spell" is player-coddling and cheating, absolutely ruining the balance of the game and diminishing the strength of martial classes. Once you start coddling players, handing out gimmies and freebie powers, you triple the amount of work it takes to run the game. Trust me on this. Trying to "get people to like you" or "giving them power to like your game" only leads to more work for the referee, and you are putting the burden of the work it takes to play the game on the referee. We do fall for this crap every time.

The old one-shot casters were fine, and it kept magic rare and special.

That one-shot magic spell is perfect.

The low-level life of a magic-user is not a broken design, but it is the game on hard mode and a challenge for the promise of near-infinite world-changing power later. Martial characters hold the line. Thieves break the game. Clerics care for others.

Bards? They have always cared more about themselves. Add them to your game at your own risk. Playing songs in a dungeon will attract an audience, and I will double-up those wandering monster rolls for your new "fans."

You pick a tough class to play, and you reap the rewards if you have a lot of luck and can make it work for you. Today's game design includes all the strategies for you, pre-chewed food that tells you how to play the game, class features that activate special rules, and they lead you down that regurgitated path the designers want you to walk.

I want to walk on the wild side.

I want to figure this out.

Modern game designs are limited-choice graphic novels with a limited set of paths and options that the designers allow you to go down. The design of 5E subclasses and those progression paths, all laid out for you, mirror the "X or Y" graphic novel choices perfectly. Curated designs. A curated experience. Narrative rules that tie the referee's hands. You are not supposed to activate the dragon's fire breath until you have the "fear points" to do so. Referee, stop breaking the narrative system the designer requires you to follow. You would not want to be accused of playing the game in a way the company did not intend.

Today's games reflect the ultimate live-service corporate control that today's leech-capitalism entities want to push on you to extract revenue streams from an audience. Microtransactions. Online character sheets. Digital book purchases. Subscription models. Season play.

Jesus, please chase the merchants from the temple. This is a game, not a timeshare sales pitch. If a game's sales pitch is that it "solves the problems of other games," then you should be automatically suspicious. They are trying to sell you answers to problems you never had, and more of their marketing will be trying to convince you that "you always had this problem." Well, yes, you did in many cases, because other games sold you answers to problems that you never had, and those solutions just failed when everyone saw through the sales pitch.

I am done. Certain games are everlasting and free of this nonsense.

BX is the rules of a sandbox world that you are expected to explore and thrive in. AD&D made the mistake of writing rules for everything. We never go to the point where the game morphs into the massive corporate control of today, but the road was chosen, and you see many parts of the design that would later become the nightmare reality of today. The standardization, high level of control, accepted ways of play, official rules, and other concepts that suck the life out of imagination and a magical, shared experience.

BX is the original Minecraft of roleplaying. And a word of warning, today's Minecraft has also lost its way in the era of corporate live-service gaming. There are a few versions of this game that I hold close to my heart.

That is where I am.

Back in the sandbox.

The Romance Fantasy Fallacy

Part of the problem with 5E is that it needs to be everything to everybody.

An old-school dungeon game.

A romance game.

A cozy game.

A social roleplay game.

A storytelling game.

A map-based exploration game.

A rules-light game.

A horror game.

A rules-heavy game.

A tactical combat game.

And it still has to be D&D.

And specialized games that do each one of those things better are replacing 5E. With Daggerheart moving into the romance market, Shadowdark killing it with old-school horror gaming, and Dungeon Crawl Classics with the old-school vibe, I have games that do those focused areas better. Tactical combat? Pathfinder 2 or Draw Steel.

I have games that do better than 5E, and since 5E tries to do it all, it doesn't do any one thing perfectly. And the game needs so many books that it dies under its own weight. I have eight plastic storage crates filled with 5E books, and the bigger the game gets, the more I end up disliking it.

I can't play a game this big anymore.

And for D&D, I have Old School Essentials or any other OSR game that matches the flavor or edition you loved and remember. For me, OSE is the pinnacle of dungeon crawling: focused and capable, flexible and specific when it needs to be, and with classes presented on two facing digest-sized pages. I am not flipping through a dozen full-sized pages to understand a class design, nor are my character sheets a dozen pages or more.

I am done with the days of supporting a game with a shelf full of books. If I can't throw it in a backpack or small tablet bag, I am done with the game. For 2d6 gaming? FTL Nomad. For fantasy? OSE. Those two games cover a lot of ground and can easily provide me with years of entertainment.

OSE beats Shadowdark for me since it is closer to the original, and supports many more generic fantasy ideas and worlds than the new-school dungeon crawler. Shadowdark is focused on table-play, that tense, group-based, timer-ticking loop it developed and supports wonderfully. As a dungeon board game like Monopoly or the classic Dungeon from TSR, Shadowdark is the best-in-class game.

For roleplay and campaigns? OSE wins hands-down. It does more. It does higher levels. It has more character options. It focuses on domain play as an endgame. And it doesn't get mired down in rules like an AD&D clone or 1E. And since OSE is so flexible, it can fill every role from the list at the start of this article. OSE as a romance game? Sure, I can make it work. You don't have silly, pedantic, please-keep-the-game-designer-out-of-this concepts like "romance dice" or some other stupid overdesigned tripe, but a real, actual storyteller and player figuring this stuff out on their own, which is honestly much better.

And trust me, any quirky, gimmicky, too-stupid-to-be-real game design trick like "romance dice" you will get sick of after about a day of use, and you will begin to tire of filtering your ideas through the designer's gimmicks and tricks just to do something common sense would handle much better.

OSE handles combat, advancement, exploration, and ability checks. Honestly, that gives me a lot of room to write my story, design my own silly concepts, and present it the way I want, without a know-it-all game designer pushing their ideas as "the right way to do it."

More gamers should tell these egotistical game designers to touch grass and get a life.

A basic set of rules is 99% of what you need to play "romance fantasy."

And stop wasting your money on "romance games" and learn how to write in the genre, and just adapt the game you are playing to support those concepts. Stop falling for the crowdfunding "new and shiny" trap, again and again, and realize the game you already play can do it better. Seriously, go pick up a "how to write romance" book and tailor your adventures around the concepts, challenges, conflicts, and roles presented in those writer-focused books, and skip the game. All a "romance game" does is repackage these ideas and write clunky rules around them that you will outgrow. It is always better to "learn the actual thing" and incorporate it into your current game than to "waste money on a new thing."

OSE is a better "romance fantasy game" than most any other game on the market, including the dedicated ones. It stays out of the way and lets you incorporate the concepts the way you feel they should work.

And 5E can stop trying to be all these things, too, since the game is dying a slow death of trying to do it all and collapsing under its own weight.

And honestly, if Pathfinder 2 is your jam, incorporate the "romance fantasy" ideas over there and use that game as your game engine. Same with Shadowdark or Draw Steel. For me, OSE does it all and can fit in a small travel bag, so it wins since it goes where I go. And there are so few rules that my ideas of "romance fantasy" gaming have room to flourish and grow here.

And "doing it for real" may teach you an actual skill you could use to write that romance novel or book outside of gaming, instead of constantly having these concepts repackaged, gamified, and sold to you as "new and inventive things" again and again on crowdfunding sites.

It is 2026.

Stop buying gimmick games.

You can hustle and DIY this all yourself and turn that into a sellable skill.

AD&D Started This Mess, and I Love that Game

I love AD&D.

But I also understand that it started many of the problems we have with D&D today. Race-plus-class, the proficiency system eventually turning into a full skill system, overloaded classes with tiers of power, ability unlocks at certain levels, hit point inflation, multiclassing, and so many other issues started here. We started to see power creep, and 5E is defined by power creep.

When there was very little wrong with BX to begin with, and that game is the essence and heart of D&D. I am hesitant to use "D&D" since the current game isn't even D&D anymore, it is 5E, and BX is a truer statement of what the genre really is, and what makes it special.

A bunch of the problems that AD&D introduced were later ham-fistedly fixed in every edition that followed, and they still never fully fixed the issues it introduced. The Wizards team keeps trying to make a broken game fun, even though the original BX implementation was never broken. They will keep "fixing" D&D in edition after edition, when, like Monopoly, the original BX-based game is fun, isn't broken, and doesn't need to be changed.

AD&D is what I remember and love, but it is flawed, and those flaws get us to where we are today. It is still so much better than 5E, and it is the ultimate fantasy role-playing game. An amazing amount of depth, options, and it retains the classic, old-school experience? AD&D is the true fantasy role-playing game. But is it the best version of D&D?

But there is still something about BX that remains the gold standard. Where AD&D added special cases and rules for things that rarely come up, and tried to be the "de facto" convention ruleset, BX is still more flexible, easier for worldbuilding, and captures the essence of D&D with a much more straightforward framework.

BX is the far superior worldbuilder to AD&D.

AD&D is the best generic fantasy game.

But if I want to live in the world of D&D, BX is the truest expression of the ideas. The tropes are built into the classes. The classes build the world. Even if you do "race plus class" BX, it is a stronger expression of the original D&D idea, since stat and hit point inflation are under control. There is less to track and manage. The game is more about the story than the characters or the acquisition of power.

Doing "race plus class" confuses worldbuilding. Before, humans and halflings were the sneaky, stealthy, thieving types. This is their nature. Elves were the magic and battle types. Drarves didn't do the thieving stuff; it wasn't in their nature. Yes, this is a simple view of the world, but it is valid. Even DCC does the classic race-as-class designs, and these are valid and very thematic. So they are used in modern games, and even ACKS does amazing race-as-class options.

If you want a dwarven "tomb robber," make a race-as-class and give them abilities unique to both dwarves and tomb robbers. This will not be a thief and is unlikely to backstab. It will have unique abilities that enhance its core role in the game. Maybe they will have a bonus for fighting undead? This is how BX works: you create a race-specific role, and you design an amazing class that fills a niche and worldbuilds the race it belongs to.

Every BX class does heavy lifting in worldbuilding. Paladins? Human only, this is what humans do with crusades and holy knights. No other race gets involved with this. Bards? Human, again, and the entire concept of an elven or dwarven bard would be an entirely different thing. Dwarven Loremaster and Elven Spellweavers come to mind, and those would be much more thematic and do amazing worldbuilding.

AD&D classes give up, and while that gives the referee more options in creating the world, everything becomes more generic. There are "allowed race and class combinations," but we are one step away from "allowing anyone to be anything," and here we are in D&D 3E and further.

But, for generic fantasy, race-plus-class is fine and needed. In this world, we have Drow paladins. Fine. This is a choice. But allowing race-plus-class makes a LOT of choices you may not want made. You may not want Drow paladins. That may confuse your world's core conflicts. This may give the player too much narrative control. In a Dark Sun world with no Drow and no paladins, both are choices the world does not support.

Plus, allowing a Drow paladin all of a sudden shifts the game's narrative focus almost exclusively on that player and the conflict with the evil Drow. Some character stories will hijack the campaign and allow little room for other players to take part, or even for the referee to tell a standard fantasy story (especially if Drow are distrusted on the surface world, and the entire focus of the campaign shifts to that one character trying to prove themselves).

The original BX sidesteps all of that by strictly limiting race-as-class options. The game is easier to worldbuild and run stories in, since the stories write themselves and the conflicts stay out of the way of the dungeon crawl and adventure.

Old School Essentials also allows "anyone to be anything" with their optional rules, and those are useful for one-off classes and special PCs and NPCs. The Drow assassin comes to mind, along with the Dwarven cleric. I still love the race-as-class options, and they are very thematic and support worldbuilding like no other game.

5E gets everything wrong by allowing anyone to be anything and making all the races the same. It is magnitudes more difficult to worldbuild and play because of this.

AD&D started us down this road, and they did have strict race and class level limits to try to fix the problems that arose. But this is our first fix, one in a long line of many that lead to today.

As much as I love AD&D and 1E as a generic fantasy experience, BX is the purest form of the dungeon game.

Anybody Can't Be Anything

I like the concept of 'race as class' in BX. The designs are thematic and iconic, and they force you to learn the unique style the race brings to the table. The Elf in Old School Essentials is an arcane caster, while the Drow are divine casters (with web also added to their spell list). Both can use all types of weapons and armor. There is clarity and clean design here, and OSE does not face the problem of 'too many races' because each must support 'race as class' while retaining its thematic design.

If you come from an AD&D point of view, where "anyone can be anything," the design gets muddled, and the thematic choice of a race is very weak. Nothing is special. An elven fighter can't cast spells, whereas an elven wizard can't use all the weapons and armor. In essence, all races become human variants, and typically, humans get an extra buff and still are the best choice in the game.

We lose more than we gain.

Before we had plate-mail-wearing 1d6 hit die elves that could use a bow and fling a fireball at level six.

After, we have a d4 hit die magic user who can't wear armor and uses a dagger or staff, and can't fire a bow. But they are an elf. I guess. Maybe infravision and detecting secret doors? Immunity to ghoul paralysis? Who cares, just pick human.

We lost that flexible, unique, iconic, armor-wearing, and bow-shooting elf who could cast magic spells for another human variant with infravision. The race-as-class elf is a uniquely crafted class that is, in essence, a multi-class option specially reserved for the elf. Humans can't do that, nor should they. In later editions of D&D, any race is anything, anyone can multiclass, and every option feels the same and is flavorless. There are very few viable multi-class builds. No race is special. Nothing is.

If I want a special Drow "spider rider," I will get out my BX class creation book and craft one. It is not too hard, and I will have a unique, thematic, and interesting choice based on the current Drow class, but less oriented towards divine spells and more towards mounted combat underground. Sort of a mix between the current Knight class and a Drow.

Or, as a one-off, I could use OSE's "race plus class" system and do a one-off pick for that NPC, and allow a "Drow knight" and be done with it. Most Drows will be the race-as-class pick, but there will be exceptions to the rule, and the OSE rules allow this. You can do this for exceptions, or you can do race-plus-class for everything.

I like the race-as-class designs in OSE enough to make them the standards in a campaign world, and leave the exceptional cases as one-offs for iconic NPCs. Having all elves knowing magic and being able to wield bows makes them exceptionally dangerous and cunning foes, and makes messing with them a very lethal affair. The Orcs should think twice about entering Elven forests.

In a race-plus-class world, most Elves are fighters, and who cares? Most everyone is a fighter, the orcs, too, and we lose the danger and iconic nature of Elves and their kin. Who has magic? All Elves do.

That is a compelling and cool campaign world.

It beats out the muddled, later "iconic" realms such as The Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk easily. We are not assuming "all Elves have magic" because "AD&D does not require it." Thus, the study of arcane magic goes back to Human norms, magic schools, and high wizards, and we assume this is true for the Elves, too.

Race-plus-class worlds adopt a human-centric perspective. We look at everything through a human lens.

Race-as-class worlds feel far more compelling and unique.

I Can't Play it Alone

It's over, again.

5E is packed up in my eight plastic storage crates, and in the closet, it is too big a game to play solo. The combination of the online character sheets, digital purchases, character sheets a dozen pages long, and all the rules is just too much for me. My brain can't handle it, especially for a party of characters.

I love Tales of the Valiant. This is guilt-free 5E for me, and the best of the 2014 rules.

It is just too much game.

First through third level, fine, I can do that. Any higher? Forget it, I would rather run a party of GURPS characters, it is less work on the character sheets. It works for a while, but by the sixth level, with four characters, it feels like a massive slog for no great benefit, and by the eighth level, with four characters, it dies.

5E is a better game with a group to manage the complexity, just like Pathfinder 2E. 5E may seem an easier game, but that is very deceptive, since complexity ramps up steeply past the 6th level. I love my ToV books; they are the perfect version of 5E, but the complexity as a solo player kills my enjoyment.

I only play solo.

So I end up not playing.

And 5E loses hard at this point; I can't deal with it as a solo player at all. It is not worth the complexity or constant, too detailed, overly complicated character builds. If all I play for is a story, I am better off with a simple game, such as a 2d6 game like FTL Nomad, or a solid BX game like Old School Essentials.

My 10th-level 5E character has a character sheet 16 pages long.

My 10th-level OSE character is half a page, and not terribly different than a 1st-level sheet. This is a clear win for me. I can solo a party of four to even eight with no problems. With 5E, eight characters require 30-50 sheets of paper, at 4 to 6 sheets per character. It only gets worse as they level, and at level ten, it could be over 100 sheets of paper for that same party.

Versus eight half-sheets that are no more complex than a level one sheet.

There is a point for the solo player at which a game becomes unplayable.

And if you find BX characters boring or lacking abilities, you are not playing BX right. Are you a bard? Roll CHR to do most of the other things that 5E locks behind feats and subclasses. And there are plenty of hacking guides for training and character options in BX, the amazing On Downtime and Demesnes, and the Carcass Crawler zines are prime examples of BX expansions that will make the game incredible and give you the customization you are looking for.

BX characters are infinitely more flexible and customizable than 5E characters since you gain abilities through your story in the world, and you just "add them to your character sheet" as you gain, train, or collect them. Cursed by an evil statue and gain a demon tail? Write that down, and it may be useful, cause negative reactions, or you can figure out a way to use it to pickpocket someone or grab an item, make a DEX check.

No feat expenditure needed.

No subclass choice.

No $80 Kickstarter books.

No new shelf is needed to store all these books.

No digital purchase on a VTT.

There is no hoping the online character designer supports the option.

You just write it down and have it.

If you don't have the imagination to play BX, and you need every rule laid out for you as if you were some computer compiling code, you should probably be playing a computer game and not a tabletop role-playing game. Games with depth and rules are fun, but D&D is not D&D anymore.

OSE is closer to what I remember.

And I don't need "rulesy rules" like Shadowdark to create fear and tension. I love Shadowdark as a board game, but it isn't the game I played, nor do I need torch timers and rules for what happens in the dark to make a dungeon scary. That is all in my head. A great BX referee can turn any dungeon crawl into something terrifying, just like the Tomb of Horrors.

Six rooms, goblins, a giant spider, one trap, a puzzle, and a carrion crawler? That is my Tomb of Horrors. BX turns that environment into a nightmare. My thief has 3 hit points, and the fighter has 5. One hit could kill either of them. Death is permanent. No death saves. You or the monsters can choose if your attacks are subduing or not, and what they want to do if they subdue you? That is terrifying.

When you get to AD&D, you begin to realize where we started to go wrong. AD&D is the beginning of the road that got us here. Too many rules, a rule for everything, and too many pages of the game. AD&D is the best game ever written, but BX is simple, expressive, does everything, and handles any situation clean and fast. With AD&D, I begin needing more books and rules again. I am locked into rulings. I am flipping through pages of rules to find something. Not knowing a rule could kill my character. While OSRIC, ADAD, C&C, and DCC are incredible games, I am tied to the books.

BX frees you from the books.

They are there if you need them, but for the most part, you don't.

The rule system is simple and invisible.

Things are resolved in a natural, consistent, and logical progression of rulings.

As things come up, rulings outside the rules are made, and the bare minimum of a rules framework handles the hard parts. Combat, spellcasting, light, and other factors are covered. The most important parts. The game then gets out of your way.

As it should be.

The D&D Collapse

Wow, I have never seen such a total collapse of a YouTube community before, and D&D YouTube is getting absolutely savaged right now, with creators quitting and ending their channels.

It is like they did the numbers, and wrecking your health trying to keep the plates spinning for a dying game is not worth it anymore, and going into the workforce and competing with AI for jobs is a better idea than D&D YouTube.

It is sad.

But the game in its current form can't support that much D&D content, especially when everything has been talked to death. Seriously, there are so many advice videos on prep, DM-ing, and other topics - much of the information is terrible - that nobody cares and everybody has had enough of being told how to play a game that should be easy to play. With the amount of advice out there, one would think 5E is the hardest game ever written in the history of gaming.

My shelves are full of 5E books, none of which I have time to play with. I find myself gravitating back to easier games, FTL Nomad for 2d6 science fiction gaming, and even games like OSE for dungeon crawling. I have no clue what 5E is these days, except for a version of BX that takes forever to create characters, takes five times longer to prep and play, and you need to pay loads of money to create online character sheets. The books are heavy, take up six shelves, and one small book replaces them all.

At this point, it feels like my "big games" are all dying with D&D.

I don't have time anymore.

They aren't interesting. They take up too much space and playtime.

And the communities are dying, especially 5E.

Downsizing feels like the clear winning strategy here. Play small games, enjoy focused experiences, and simplify my gaming life.