I love OSR versions of products. It makes me wish I could go back in time for half of the 3rd-party Pathfinder 1e books I own and have OSR versions of all of those great books. I can pick up a book written for Labyrinth Lord, Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, and most any other OSR game and use it with any one of the others. All of my old D&D and AD&D modules are usable as they are written.
Sure the above was written for Labyrinth Lord, but I can play this with anything from Swords & Wizardry to Castles & Crusades. Old School Essentials. Crypts & Things. Hyperborea. White Box. Basic Fantasy. The list goes on and on.
Why not play the AD&D or D&D Rules Cyclopedia reprints? I choose to support indie creators and communities. The more OSR games we have out there, the better the entire OSR community gets. This is about supporting diversity and choice, everyone should be able to play the game of their choice, or even create a game that captures their imagination. While having the original books is nice, ultimately they are limited and games that will never really expand or thrive with new adventures and experiences.
I can go to DriveThruRPG and find hundreds of OSR modules written for dozens of OSR games, written by small and indie creators with a love of the game. The original D&D and AD&D are still very closed-source games, and I support open-source projects because they benefit the world and help the individual over the corporation. I can buy a $60 mega-dungeon hardcover and have it be good forever, and usable with dozens of games.
My D&D 3.5, Pathfinder 1e or 2e, D&D 4, and even the few D&D 5 books I have are all tied to one game system. When I box up a game for storage, these books go with them. My OSR books stay out and they are always ready for whatever game I choose to play.
I know creating space for OSR stats in 5E books takes space and the market isn't that big, but it means a lot to us OSR enthusiasts. It also means I can use the book after D&D moves on an edition or two. The few 5e books I have I know will likely need updates when the game changes again, and I like a set of rules that really stays the same.
I did the "big consumerist" thing with Pathfinder 1e and collected all the books. To force me to collect another edition and double the size of my library feels wasteful. I would rather have OSR books I can use with many games than a book written for a specific edition of one game.
While I love my Pathfinder 1e books, there are books I can say "they were just trying to sell you another book" in that collection. There is a ton of waste in there, repeated classes and feats, same-enough spells, and really a sell-sell-sell mentality took over the line when it got hot. I can say the same about 5E these days, a lot of books, even from Wizards, you do not need and they reduce your enjoyment of the game.
If someone in the community writes the OSR game "Bad Dungeon" and it takes off huge, all my OSR books still work fine. When 5E or Pathfinder 2e go away, they go away, and you need to buy an updated book or hope things convert well enough. The old books do not go in a closet.
They stay out, ready to be played.
And also from an environmental perspective, having books that work forever and with each other is way better than supporting a consumerist model. Traditional books do not need electricity, and storing PDFs on phones or in the cloud takes electricity and resources. You are not reprinting the same content in "an updated version" and reselling those every 10 years with all the damage printing, transporting, selling, and tossing out an old edition books causes. I get tired of this "Amazon culture" of continuously selling you books, and then continuously replacing them with a new edition. Multiple starter sets. Reprinting monster manuals. Toss out the old, buy the new. Constantly consume. More, more, more. Bigger games! More options! More books!
Especially when there are a ton of single-book OSR games that just do it better with less.
It is funny, I go back and look at a lot of these games and see how the OSR is superior. If I want mages to do alchemy, I just house-rule how it works if it makes sense. In other games, I have to buy a book, read how it works, slow down the game to sort through dozens of pages of rules, often make one die roll and say it takes "X weeks and Y gold to make Z potion" and guess what?
If I would have house-ruled it I would have had an answer in 5 seconds, save $40, and keep my game streamlined without another book of rules to reference or carry around. All for an edge-case situation.
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