The rules may seem rudimentary and straightforward, the characters may feel "too basic," and you don't have all the flash and gee-whiz of D&D 5E, but it is the better game. Once I had the perspective of Shadowdark, everything became clear.
OSE keeps and maintains a higher level of overall character power than D&D 5E.
Caster power, notoriously high in any Wizards version of the game, is balanced in OSE by a lack of defenses and low hit points. They are glass cannons in OSE, where in 5E, you can build effective "melee casters" with better ACs and offensive abilities than martial characters. Many casters are preferred over martial classes, primarily due to their damage output and overall flexibility.
Even martial classes are more powerful, due to monster hit points being lower, and the overall power of monsters not being on a curve, but linear. Additionally, the damage output is more consistent and steady. A fighter may seem tedious, but with weapon specialization and a few of the book's optional rules, you will find your best to-hit in the game, plus the most consistent damage output will cut through enemies like butter, and even strike down dragons with ease.
People need fighters like they need solid ground to stand on.
Even the thief, with 1d4 hit points, is like having a radar set along with their ability to hear noise. Additionally, if a thief fails to disarm a trap, it does not automatically trigger, and I am free to rule that it only happens on a critical failure. Critical failures (96-100) may mean it goes off, but the thief can get out of the way, or I may call for a save; the game is open enough to allow rulings, not rules, to give the referee freedom in deciding what happens in the narrative.
It's amusing that now we need to buy all these "narrative-focused" games, like Daggerheart, when the original basic rules gave us the freedom to do all that anyway. Later versions of D&D got so bogged down in the game rules and creating these intricate frameworks of internal systems that we forgot what we had.
OSE gives us narrative freedom, just in what it does not say. It assumes you know how to play, which D&D 5E conveniently "unlearned" the hobby in general, and now we are left searching for the thing we already had.
You don't need a narrative game; you need an imagination and a game that stays out of the way. It is like paying $30 for a 500-page book that tells you how to walk down the street. You know how to do this, just do it.
Modern narrative games only address problems introduced in later editions of the game. Too many rules slow down the game and put a stranglehold on narrative freedom. The concept is so straightforward; I don't understand why people struggle to grasp it. I don't need a game to give me "imagination points" to run a narrative, "doom points" to activate monster abilities, or give me special dice that tell me what to do. I have an imagination!
OSE is also not horribly overwritten. There are sections in the D&D Dungeon Master Guide that will go through two pages of fluff text discussing how to handle a topic in the game, and end with, "Come up with a way to do it yourself." Why did I buy this book, then? There are powers in 5E subclasses that take paragraphs of text to describe how they work, and paragraphs more in other places telling you how not to abuse those powers. D&D, and all of the D&D clones, are so horribly overwritten and wordy that they mark a low point in game publishing.
At least in AD&D, we had Gygax, and the overwritten style was highly entertaining and conversational. These days, this all feels like AI-generated fluff, ghost-writer drivel, and paid-by-the-word contractor filler. OSE was the first game to slap us awake with its brevity and conciseness, and scream at the game industry to "stop it with your overwritten garbage!"
Shadowdark smartly followed that model, and I consider that a sister game to OSE. The two are highly compatible and can co-exist nicely. Shadowdark is a stronger "map-based exploration game," while OSE is the clear winner for "campaign games." Shadowdark does win on the "how to play the game" advice included in the book, where OSE requires some outside knowledge.
You win either way with OSE or Shadowdark, and both are the best games of their respective generations.
OSE wins on character, power, simplicity, ease of use, openness, and expandability. Sure, you don't have 5E's "tons of weaker attacks" designed to "keep you busy" during those long, drawn-out combats that are impossible to balance anyway. 5E relies on that MMO model of making you weaker as you level, and relying too much on "too many actions" and "constant streams of weaker attacks" to make it seem like you are doing more than you actually are.
The exponential curve of monster power makes balancing fights very hard; either they are pushovers or TPKs. In OSE, monster power is linear, the fights are easier to balance, and you do not need a false CR system since you gain system knowledge on balance as you play and can judge fights easier due to that straight-line power scaling.
Do I generally know the party's dwarf fighter hits better than 50% and does 5-7 points of damage per turn? I can have a pretty good idea of how many turns that dwarf will take to defeat a 15hp monster. Two lucky hits or three average ones. If the beast deals 1d8+2 damage and hits less than half the time, I can easily estimate its damage output. Getting this sort of knowledge, and it will differ with every party, is how you "balance" fights in OSE.
People want to flail helplessly without a CR balancing system, but it is a fallacy. The entire CR balancing system never really worked in the first place, and the assumptions it is based on (X fights per day) never hold up at the table, since fights often take way longer than the designers will ever estimate. Besides, 5E's resource replenishment system is far too forgiving, which is supposedly a key component that makes the CR system work; however, it is again impossible to predict and manage.
Keeping the numbers and math simple is the best system to use for judging encounter difficulty.
And it is something we used to have before level scaling was introduced by Wizards in D&D 3.0, and that "MMO model" remains to this day.
OSE has the better balance, math, challenge estimation, flexibility, and maintains higher levels of character power longer. The game is trivially simple to read and understand. Shadowdark is its strong sister game, with a more focused approach to tabletop play. Both are excellent.
5E, in comparison, seems to go out of its way to waste my time and slow down the "content drip" in an attempt to force me to buy more books. There is more in the two-volume OSE Advanced books than there is in an entire shelf of D&D 5E books.
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