Removing Half Elves from Our Games

It makes me sad that half-elves and half-orcs were removed from modern games. Half-elves were the fifth-most-popular race option on D&D Beyond before D&D 2024 moved them to "legacy support."

They are mixed-race creations created out of love, not hate. They give bi-racial people an identity in the game and allow them to work through the struggles of belonging to two separate cultural identities and express those struggles within it. This is beautiful stuff, fraught with tragedy and a hard-fought victory in bringing both sides of the family together despite cultural differences. It allows us to mirror experiences from our own lives in the game and work out the divisions between our families and cultures.

And now, Tieflings are the popular choice because the choice that spoke to people going through this internal battle was removed. Why shift the cultural struggle stories to humans and demons? It doesn't make sense.

And Gary Gygax got this right 50 years ago, back during the 1970s, when media and television openly explored biracial themes and struggles in our family dramas and sitcoms. He first expressed those themes in fantasy gaming and brought them into the mainstream through the games that kids played.

Games Without Number

Right there on the same shelf as my Old School Essentials games sits my collection of ...Without Number games. There are some of the most amazing games in my library, easily complementing OSE games with fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic gameplay. Yes, there is another fantasy game in here, and it is worthy and BX compatible.

If a game ever fails me, these will do them all, and keep me in my beloved BX framework. The best thing about these games is that they are all BX-compatible, so I am not wasting library space keeping these or my OSE books out on the same shelf. I am gravitating towards games that work together and support each other, rather than the new "system of the week" pushed on crowdfunding sites, or the mess that 5E became.

Worlds Without Number is an interesting fantasy game. It reminds me a little of Numenera, a post-civilization fall into a feudal world where the old world is forgotten, and the advancements of that age are lost to the sands of time. This can be played more like straight traditional fantasy, too, with your typical elves, dwarves, halflings, and other fantasy races and monsters pulled directly from OSE. Either way you go, and even using this as your world-building book for OSE, you can't go wrong.

The magic system seems very strange at first, and almost like it doesn't do as much as a Vancian BX system, but it actually does more and operates on a higher power level. It is a very strange system, but once you wrap your head around it, you find it gives a magic-using character a lot of power and flexibility that a bog-standard BX wizard just does not have. Plus, you will gain world-breaking spells of power if you find them. The magic system here is very different, feels more materially satisfying, and offers greater tactical flexibility than BX, despite seeming far less in-depth.

The system itself is BX, but nothing like BX in feeling. It feels really good, strange enough to transport me to another time and place, yet familiar enough to run fast and stay out of the way. It is (and is not) your typical race-and-class system and feels fresh and amazing at the same time. If anything, the characters feel fully realized, like characters from a novel, and there are clear specializations at play here.

Shadowrun? Cyberpunk? Why do I need them? I got Cities Without Number right here, drop in some OSE races, and I have a Shadowrun-like world ready to go. Better yet, I get Tieflings, Dragonborn, Ratlings, Drow, and all my OSE favorites, along with OSE magic - and full OSE monster lists. It is honestly a better experience that plays on all my favorites, and allows for a true fantasy world inside a modern sheen of chrome and oppressive mega-corps.

The d20 System tried to do "D&D Shadowrun" with Urban Arcana. The pairing of OSE and Cities Without Number does it better since the races, monsters, magic items, and spells of BX all port directly in. This is a trivial conversion, and who cares if it does not make any sense? Some wizard somewhere blew a wish spell big time, and we ended up with a fantasy world put on top of Earth.

Or, you could say "this is not Earth" and randomly generate a modern world hex by hex, saying "this is a fantasy modern world waking up," and they uncover the "fog" and start discovering new cities, ruins, lands, and places in the world as the New Era awakens. There is a dragon over there, orcs over here, a ruined subhere there, a megacity over here, and whatever you want.

Now, I love GURPS Space.

But Star Frontiers, Space Opera, Traveler, Star Trek, Starfinder, and many other games can be done as well, and in the comfort-food framework of BX with Stars Without Number. Again, I can do a Starfinder or Dragonstar science-fantasy game easily with the OSE races and magic. It is easy, I get a full monster list to use as-is or reskin, and I can have a laser-basilisk if I want. A robo-dragon. A mutant ogre-kin. A metal-eating chrome-slime. The OSE monsters reskin so well, and even the spells can be converted to "space force" powers if you want. There are OSE psionic books, too, and you are free to do whatever you want here.

Why do I need Traveller 5E, again? This works, has no issues working alongside a BX game, and SWN does not need an online VTT character sheet to be playable. SWN does a great Traveller, and in fact, the star generation methods here are more tag and adventure-focused, and work out better for space exploration and discovering new adventures on worlds.

And I wrote a conversion article about 5 years ago where I renamed everything to fit different ideas, and it still works well...

SBRPG: Empires & Federations (Without Number)

You can play any variant of science fiction with SWN, and just swap the names of things, and you are good to go. A rock-solid BX engine, compatibility, and ease of play with any sci-fi genre? Drop in BX classes and monsters at-will? This is a solid, great game, and you are not getting fleeced every few years for a new crowdfunding sci-fi game.

And the ships and weapons of SWN are reskinned easily, too, and I could name the weapons one thing and have Star Wars, and another thing and have Star Trek. A procedural space hex-crawl BX "Star Federation" adventures style game? Where did I hear about that before? 

I had the Starfleet Voyages game in 1982 (my Sister bought it for her birthday, and we played it with her), and I miss it. I really miss those BX-Trek adventures; they were so silly and stupid, beaming down to a colony, hearing about trouble in the space mines, and exploring them with phasers and encountering Klingons like they were Orcs in a room, stealing space gems.

We were kids, dumb, and had the time of our lives with this one. We even ported in BX monsters to live on planets, like a planet with space giants attacking colonists. That is when you break out the big phaser rifles and photon grenades. BX-like systems, back then, could do anything. SFV was slightly different, but similar enough to feel like BX.

I can do BX-Trek directly with Stars Without Number, and the classes, powers, rules, ships, and universe generation are all right here. I just have to add Klingons as Orcs, Romulans as Dark Elves, and Vulcans as the Elf race, and we are nearly all set. It was such a rip-off of the obvious franchise, but we loved it; it was pure kitsch, with an innocence and wonder that few other games could capture.

SWN does this, Star Wars, Star Trek, Traveller, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Firefly, Star Frontiers, Alien, Space Opera, Starship Troopers, and everything else you can imagine perfectly well. I hope this gets a new edition someday with the updated rules found in Cities and Ashes.

Ashes Without Number is the new game, a massive post-apoc toolkit good for any post-apoc game, doing the game itself, or meshing with any BX rules. This game is the perfect companion to Gamma World, Rifts, The Walking Dead, Aftermath, Mutant Crawl Classics, Mutant Epoch, Car Wars, or any other post-apoc game you have in mind. The rules work well, too, again, mixable with BX if you want drow, goblins, and elves running around the wastelands. Play it on its own or with other games; this is a toolkit that will give you decades of fun.

Ashes can be used alongside Cities pretty closely, with Cities providing the system for urban environments, and Ashes filling in the wastelands between massive fortress cities. Most Car Wars games will work this way, with the places between fortified towns savage wastelands, while inside the walls is a more urban, almost Cyberpunk level of control and politics.

And again, I can reuse all my BX monsters directly in this game, reskin them as mutant beasts, give them laser eyes and radiation blasts, launchable quills, electified tentacles, or sonic attacks, and they are terrifying beasts of the wasteland. Why do I need to buy post-apoc bestiaries again? My imagination and a good source of BX monsters do far more, bonus points if I have a mutation table handy. Oh, wait, the game has that, too.

If you are planning a BX library to be your be-all end-all games you will support, the ...Without Number games are must-haves that support every other game on your shelf.

The Case for OSRIC Over Swords & Wizardry

Swords & Wizardry still has a lot of high-end combos and exploits that turn the upper-level game into a thrash-fest, where you can use a buff-focused caster on a monk to deal death and insane amounts of damage. This unhinged high-level game is familiar to those of us who enjoy Dungeon Crawl Classics, and that is a feature of 1970s gaming - not a flaw or oversight. The game was designed to have insane power combos at high level, and that is what it is.

This is also a feature of 70s gaming: if you reached a high level, all bets were off. DCC does this so well and encapsulates the feeling of the time; you go from hero to insane god of power. S&W has that swingy, unhinged play at higher levels, and it is meant to be a houserule, ban exploits, and serve as a "house system" for a group that likes to hack and add to the rules.

At lower levels, this is like "enhanced, houseruled BX" and it plays identically. There are flavor differences here in some of the classes, with slightly more abilities and power than a standard BX character. Some of these abilities are coming to OSE (fighter multi-attacks per round vs. 1 HD or less creatures, assassin backstab) in the next version, so S&W does get a lot right and sets the BX standard in many areas. The fighter is the standout class for me, and it feels much more satisfying to play than the OSE version, without needing to houserule or wait for next year's revision.

And, S&W is cross-compatible with any OSE race. OSE tends to set higher racial level limits, so that is more of a bonus than a drawback. I will play S&W and use the OSE races as-is, and it is a great-feeling combo, and I can have my dragonborn, tieflings, and all the nu-fantasy classics right there in a comfortable game with the OG classes as they were in the 1970s.

AC, hp, HD, hit-modifiers? The same across OSE and S&W. There is one saving throw number in S&W, which I still feel is genius, and lets that number be used for any saving throw effect. I am not trying to decide if a save is a wand or a spell. It is a save. Some classes get bonuses to specific areas. If a new effect comes along, such as a save versus entanglement, mental attack, parasites, life leech, or confusion, it is just the save number. We are done here.

In OSRIC, the high-level game is far better balanced and sane, and the game holds together much better without dipping into exploits or unintended consequences. The high-end game holds together, and it is not as wild or swingy. It is intended to be played "as-is" and not hacked or homebrewed. This is the OG 1980s convention-play official rules, and you don't really deviate from the book.

By the time we get to the 1980s, balance is important, and those groups grew tired of the high-level swingyness. The game lost something, that slapstick, freewheeling, punch. The rules needed standardization for convention play. We needed "one way to play" so we could all play together.

OSRIC is the perfect game for capturing a moment in time when gaming was at its best. Sorry, Stranger Things, nobody played 5E in the 1980s, and Wizards of the Coast and its Magic: The Gathering would bankrupt TSR ten years later. I was there when the hobby stores reduced the D&D and RPG space for MTG tables, and a hobby shop owner told me, "Nobody plays D&D anymore here."

If you want to play high-level AD&D adventures without having to houserule cheese combos out of the game, OSRIC will do a fine job. If you play DCC and love the cheese combos, and love seeing a monk slap a dragon around like he was Bruce Lee, play S&W. At lower levels, though, S&W works exactly like BX and does not feel unbalanced.

OSRIC will hold together at higher levels much cleaner, at the cost of increased complexity, more record keeping, and slower play. OSRIC also has the higher base hit-die values than BX, which I see as a negative. I don't like fighters having a d10 hit die since it inflates hit points and slows combat. Sure, you are more survivable as a result, but the more constrained and tighter hit dice of BX make the game more deadly, and fast-playing, and higher-level characters do not have as many hit points.

1E started the "bag of hit points" slog that got worse in every edition past this, and even AD&D 2E started to give monsters hundreds of hit points as a result of the tougher characters in AD&D. Combat got very slow by the time 2E rolled around, and people left for GURPS.

By the time we got to 4E, monsters had 1,400 hit points, and Wizards had completely lost their minds.

BX has the best hit dice and keeps the classic d4 thief and magic user that we have all come to love and fear. S&W shares that philosophy. ORSIC starts the hit point slog, and complexity and slower play increase as a result. More hit points do not equal a better game. In fact, constraining hit points makes the game better, since each point matters.

Also, death is an issue. In OSE, it is death at 0 hp. In OSRIC, it is bleeding out and death at -10 hp (OSE will get this in the revision). In S&W, it can be either death at 0 hp or death at a "negative level hp" with bleeding out. S&W feels the best to me, and gives me either option. Death is heavily houseruled, though, but it is worth mentioning.

That said, who plays games past level 14? I think maybe 3-5% of the gaming population plays games at this level. For 95% of everyone else, just picking up Old School Essentials will be fine for games that last way past the time when most campaigns wrap up and end. Level 14 is an epic power level in BX.

If you are playing that long and appreciate the pedantic depth that 1E brings, start and stick with OSRIC. If you couldn't care less about table modifiers, weapon speeds, and other 1E minutiae, stick with OSE. If you want the 1E feeling without the 1E rules and want things to stick closer to houseruled BX, play S&W.

I doubt you will ever see some of the exploits and cheese in S&W since very few play that high. You could play OSRIC, OSE, and S&W and barely see a difference up to level 14. There is a lot made about nothing here, and houseruling and banning silly combos is expected in S&W. Most do what we did, let it happen once, laugh, and then ban it as a cheese move. There is a magic in being the first to find these, and then the gods catch up to your tomfoolery and ban the silly combo.

Zeus would be sitting up on Mount Olympus, shaking his head and telling the epic heroes to "cut it out."

This is sort of the relationship between the players and the referee in these games, too.

The game and the rules were a fluid dialogue and free-form train of thought. They were less of a set of rules and more of a discussion of fantasy fulfillment within a loose framework.

As a side note, S&W uses the magic resistance mechanic from 1E, and S&W's monsters are closer to 1E in compatibility. Any OSRIC or 1E bestiary is easily a S&W resource. Also, with S&W, you get classic demons and devils out of the box, whereas in OSE, they come in a book being delivered next year. From the previews, the demons and devils in OSE will be their own thing, interesting designs that seem fun to play and have unique threats and mechanics. If you want to stick with the classic infernal monsters, S&W and OSRIC will be your best bet.

I like S&W since the classes bring more to the table than OSE, and the expanded classes feel great and play well. If I want a bard, I can have a bard. There are two bards, too! The bard is a storyteller druid, while the troubador is a performer illusionist. We also have necromancers and warlocks. The expanded classes rock and are a lot of fun. In OSE, the bard is more of a druid-style and feels more basic and straightforward.

That said, there is nothing wrong with simplicity. Where S&W classes have that oomph, the OSE classes are iconic and feel perfectly balanced. They are a touch on the simple side, and being a former 5E player, S&W's diverse assortment of class abilities appeals more to me (C&C is the same way for me).

Coming from BX, the straightforward and iconic OSE appeals to me greatly. 

Coming from 5E and DCC, the allure of S&W with its custom class abilities is irresistible.

Having grown up in the 1980s, there is nothing wrong with OSRIC or sticking to the tried-and-true.

One Point of AC and Stat-Flation

Old School Essentials, BX D&D, and Swords & Wizardry, along with White Box, use a base AC of 9 for unarmored targets. The ascending AC to-hit number (AAC) for this is 10 or higher on a d20. In AD&D, the unarmored AC became 10, with an ascending AC to-hit number of 10 or higher on a d20. The formulas are slightly different to calculate: in BX, 19 - AC equals the AAC to-hit; in 1E, 20 - AC equals the AAC to-hit.

I have always preferred the BX base AC of 9 to the later AC base of 10. For one, the extra room in the AC muber started introducing new types of armor to fill gaps, like banded or splint mail, and the armor game felt muddled in comparison. Fighters tended to head towards plate mail anyway, and more types of armor did not really add much to the game.

The differences in AC come up when trying to use 1E modules or monsters in BX games; you need to make a one-point adjustment in the AC value to get the numbers perfect. There is no AC 10 in a BX game like there is in a 1E game.

Sometimes the numbers are exactly the same, but you will see a one-point difference in the AAC value. The Kobold on OSE has AC 7 [12], while the Kobold in OCSRIC 3.0 has AC 7 [13]. You will notice that both numbers add up to either 19 or 20, but the 7 [12] number of BX just feels more natural to me.

Which game has the easiest to-hits?

S&W gives a +1 to-hit modifier at STR 13, and a +1 damage modifier at 16. Only fighters get these bonuses; a +1 cap optional rule is present for other classes. This is the most hardcore game, but it is also the fairest.

OSRIC gives a +1 to-hit modifier at STR 17, and a +1 damage modifier at 16, and this is for all characters.

White Box typically gives a +1 starting at STR 15, and in some games this only applies to damage, while in others it applies to both damage and to-hit.

OSE gives a +1 to-hit and damage modifier starting at STR 13, and this is for all characters. This is the most generous game, but also the least fair.

So, in general, S&W is the most hardcore game that limits ability score modifiers the most, while OSE is the most generous. OSRIC is less generous, while White Box is slightly more. I like the less generous games when it comes to ability score bonuses, since it takes the focus off having high ability scores, and it allows more of the 3d6-generated characters to be viable.

In S&W, a STR 7 character is not penalized in terms of melee damage or to-hit, so I can be happy with rolling a 7 for my thief's STR, and it will not affect their combat abilities one bit. In OSE, that STR 7 thief will have a -1 in both to-hit and damage, and with a 1d4 dagger as a weapon, that becomes huge. In OSRIC, a -1 to-hit. In White Box, same as S&W, no penalty.

That STR 7 thief is just not viable in OSE or OSRIC.

In S&W, my STR 7 thief is just as deadly with a dagger as a STR 15 thief. We have the same chance to force open a door. The stronger thief can carry 10 more pounds of loot. I can be a scrawny, no-good thief in S&W and still feel perfectly fine, not like I am being penalized.

3d6 generation is still viable in White Box and S&W; more characters can be played since the ability scores matter less. Shouldn't they matter? Actually, they shouldn't, since we want the focus to be on problem-solving and the environment. That +1 to-hit and damage will fool you into thinking combat is still a viable option, when in any BX or 1E game, it just isn't.

And the stat-flation that plagues D&D 3 through 5E started in BX with the universal ability score modifier table and those too-generous ability score modifiers. The moment you open up "bonuses for everybody" is the moment you begin to need heroic ability score generation methods, such as 4d6 and drop the lowest. You are trying to "give everyone a bonus" in something, and it starts breaking the game.

In 5E, a +4 for everybody at 18 breaks the game. And given most characters are guaranteed these days to have at least one 18 in their prime attribute, the entire game is just building a bridge on broken pilings. The original polyhedral dice begin to mean less and less the higher the modifiers go, to the point where they become meaningless. Even the d20 became meaningless in D&D 3.5E with +20 to-hit numbers, and the designers had no clue except "make the numbers bigger."

Wizards have consistently gotten the math wrong for the last 25 years, and we have edition after edition to prove it.

"4d6 and drop the lowest" is just trying to solve a problem that too-generous ability score modifiers introduced. Remove the importance of modifiers, and 3d6 is viable again. Ability scores become descriptors instead of critical numbers for the game. My weak, scrawny thief is just as deadly and should be treated as a serious threat. A low STR is just a physical description at this point and has less of an impact on the game, or a minor one at best.

If I get lucky and roll a STR 18 thief in OSE? A permanent +3 to STR and damage all the time, even with that 1d4 dagger. Sure, it sounds fun, but it introduces an imbalance and upward pressure on ability scores, where the 97% of other characters who aren't as lucky feel penalized and not viable.

My STR 7 S&W thief? Sure, he gets no bonus to-hit or to damage, but he is just as deadly as any other thief. The focus on ability scores is removed, and my character must be clever and interact with the environment to survive, rather than relying on them and the false sense of security they provide.

Combat in any version of the early game, 0E to 1E, is a losing proposition.

That +3 is not going to help you when a random goblin kills you with a shortbow. Sure, the +3 feels great, but it creates a mix of entitlement and a false sense of security. This is one of those times when "it doesn't matter" and "it does matter" are both true at once; it just depends on your perspective.

And once you put too high an importance on ability score modifiers as a way to "win the game," you will get into the physiological differences between races and genders, and that whole argument. My female, lithe, STR 8 Egyptian temple assassin is just as deadly and dangerous as that male half-orc STR 16 assassin with the bulging muscles. Remove the ability score modifiers, and you remove the entire argument.

Plus, if we are trying to simulate fantasy fiction, a high STR only really mattered for fighters and those moments the writer wanted to flex on cleaving enemies in two with a greatsword. For most other characters in that narrative, a high STR never really came into play that much. That STR 8 temple assassin is going to be just as deadly to Conan as any other, in terms of narrative fiction.

When you get too many game designers in a room, they will make the math matter more than the narrative fiction, and something of value will be lost.

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.