I bought a few D&D adventures a while back, and I discovered that the resale prices are about $3-4 per book, just like the 2014 edition, but they are now considered "out of date." I'm unable to obtain PDFs for them, as it's policy and walled garden content. I will probably end up playing most of these with Tales of the Valiant, since I have given up on D&D as a system, and ToV has good 2014 compatibility.
What good are these books if I don't own my PDFs?
Tales of the Valiant will be the system I will still be able to play all these with when D&D 6E comes out in a few years. All these books will be "previous edition" someday, and in a way, they already are. It feels strange to call ToV an "old school game" - but one of the most essential traits of an old-school game is to maintain compatibility with previous edition adventures, and what does that sound like? That sounds like ToV. With D&D moving on, ToV is now in the OSR. This feels so wrong, but it is true, and in a few years, it will be even more so.
As D&D moves on and abandons its history, we will see rewrites for every classic adventure and module, even classics like the Keep on the Borderlands, which does not need a rewrite. We are being told we need to buy the same thing repeatedly. Tyranny of Dragons proves we can have "new stuff," and we don't need endless nostalgia bait and companies forcing us to buy the same thing repeatedly because they feel they can pull at our heartstrings.
I'd love to see a new team create something like The Tomb of Horrors. Classics. All-time great adventures. These are beloved works of fiction and do not need cigarette pack warnings. Throwing these into compilations and cheaply converting them to 5E is disrespectful. Goodman Games did it the best by expanding and celebrating them, while printing the originals in their entirety to preserve them.
I doubt the current team at Wizards has the skill to create a classic like the Tomb of Horrors. I highly doubt we will see the innovative and original adventures our hobby needs to thrive and survive.
My problems are, 5E conversions have a "shelf life" on them, without ToV. The originals? I can still play them with any OSR game of my choosing, such as Basic Fantasy, Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, Adventures Dark and Deep, Castles & Crusades, and even Shadowdark.
All my OSR adventures still work fine! These can be played with any OSR game. They hold their value exceptionally well and can be played with anything I own. They are all "new stuff" created by talented people, and I am seeing new adventures and thrills, rather than retreads and conversions. I pulled these out of storage the other day, and guess what? All of them still work flawlessly.
Lovely to see you again, old friends.
And I don't need to depend on online character sheets to create a character, which is a strike against ToV and all of 5E. That dependency on online character sheets will be ToV's downfall when those eventually go away and become unsupported. With old-school games, I don't need any of that online garbage. Just some dice, pencils, and paper.
The world could end, and I will still be over here playing my OSR games.
D&D players will be wandering around like the hordes in The Walking Dead, moaning about their phone's 5G bars, and looking for an Internet connection. They will be cut off from their digital copies and character sheets, and I will still have mine. But you can never replace books. Books survive wars, plagues, and famines. Print is eternal.
Full-game 5E is flawed, and since it relies too much on online support, it will die. As sites close down, publishers pull their character sheet tools, VTTs get bought out and go belly-up, we will see huge groups of people lose access to their games and content. This also means Tales of the Valiant is flawed, and can't be truly considered an old-school game. Yes, you can run a character sheet by hand, but 5E was not designed to support that, and it was built to create add-on support sales. ToV is fun and I support it, but in a bittersweet way since I know the game has inherited a fatal flaw.
All my old school games?
As long as I have a hand, a pencil, and paper, I can play them.
Even the ones in science fiction, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, and other genres are all cross-compatible. Do I need a quick space alien mutant monster? One where several lifeforms were merged together by a space virus? The chimera from Old School Essentials (or any other old-school bestiary) looks nasty, so I'll use it as-is, just reskinning the looks, but the stats all work perfectly fine for Stars Without Number. Giant space bugs? Hey, that ankheg from OSE looks cool as a giant hive insect. Some ravenous space slime? A black pudding from the same book works well, and is only hurt by fire, so break out the flame units.
Do I need those for a post-apocalyptic game? I have the rules, and all my monsters still work. That chimera is just as frightening here, and just as deadly, and it doesn't need a stat block a page long to do it, either. This mutant could be roaming a long-abandoned research facility, terrorizing its main corridors. OSR monster stat blocks are wonderfully brief and concise, and like alignment, say a lot with very little text. This is another reason to love an OSR game over 5E.
Cyberpunk game? I have that covered, too. All those monsters and adventures still work. That chimera is something that escaped from a megacorporation's bio-research labs and is now crawling around the sewers, subway lines, and drainage tunnels of the city, causing havoc. It all works together, giving me instant access to adventure and on-demand content at my fingertips.
Fantasy game? I have dozens of old-school fantasy games that all work amazingly well. I have not even mentioned Worlds Without Number, ACKS II, AD&D (1e or 2e), For Gold & Glory, or Dungeon Crawl Classics in this discussion yet, but they are all compatible. That chimera? It is a chimera here. Everything still works together, and I have my choice of systems to play with.
All my old-school games work together in a way none others do. This puts the current crop of narrative and "post-5E" games to shame. All those games will let you down someday. Daggerheart, Cosmere, MCDM RPG, ToV, and all these "post D&D games" have a lot to prove. None of them works with anything I have, and they are asking me to "buy more."
Any OSR adventure I buy will be playable from now until the end of time.
Any OSR game I have will work with any of these adventures.
Old school games will never let you down.
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