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.

Blizzardification

The Bilzzardification of D&D began with D&D 3.5E and roared into full swing with D&D 4E. By the time we got to D&D 5E, this trend had become the norm, and barely anyone noticed.

The game has too many races, classes, and subclass options, along with pointless choices that carry no thematic weight or story consequences.

Like World of Warcraft, we get another half-dozen elf shapes with no real meaning in the broader story, some mechagnomes because the character editor just couldn't do that with normal gnomes, and all sorts of other "why did they add this" character options.

There comes a point when so many silly shapes run through my mind that it shuts down, the story becomes trash and meaningless, and the world's original charm is gone. This isn't about diversity; this is about storytelling and "less is more." The story never needed dozens of race options, especially if the core conflicts are watered down to the point where nothing matters.

More is more! And we get yet another thing to buy and try to fit into a world that stopped making sense a decade ago. I don't even know what World of Warcraft is anymore, other than "Fantasy Second Life" full of silly shapes and random things that never fit together thematically.

Same thing with classes, in World of Warcraft, we have a few different types of fighters now, and they all need to have class roles, niche protection, and enough differences to make choosing one over the other a viable choice. I miss the days of "fighter was it," and even the paladin class was a main tank trade-off with slippery aggro.

And in D&D, too many fighter classes created with a thesaurus not only make the original class boring and unappealing, but also force the designers to create "role protection" and "self-healing options" for every fighter to make them viable solo classes. There are too many similar fighter classes. It makes the original fighter a joke. Why do I play a fighter again?

Boring choice. Play a swordmaster. A battlerager. A shieldmaster. An arcane combatant. A jumping lancer. Don't mind the fact that some of these classes feel like multiclassed characters, such as the arcane combatant being a multiclass fighter/magic-user; they just are a "thing" now, and world builders are now forced to shove them into every world somehow.

Even multiclassing is being attacked by the thesaurus class designers, and making "better options" with a new class that makes the entire charm of multiclassing the weaker choice. Worse yet, you can multiclass the multiclassed replacement.

What are you even doing anymore?

These "tack on and add on" games give me a headache.

If you come out with a game and can't even preserve and support the original game's solid class choices, and you can't help yourself and replace them with every book you release, you are a garbage game designer. You can't even support the original game anymore without making the choice in it obsolete with your "new power gaming stuff" released in every book. Ultimately, it ends with the players all getting sick of it, everyone quitting, and you being "forced" to release a new edition to clean it all up.

Look at how much better 6E is now and all the problems it solves!

We had those problems fixed when 5E was released, and you broke the game since then.

And the ranger and rogue were broken on release, and still are. They will be broken in 6E, too.

This is why basic BX is so appealing to me. It does not change unless I want it to, and I can control everything that comes into the game. I have strict control of worldbuilding. No one is coming along and making a thesaurus "archer" class and replacing a subset of fighters on me. I don't need to fit the new garbage into my world. There are no silly circus-like planes to factor into my worldbuilding.

If I say "an archer is just a fighter that uses a bow," then the fighter class covers it. The gladiator is just a "fighter who fights in an arena." Seriously, one secondary skill could cover the entire class and be used for all the "optional flavor abilities." We don't need to invent game mechanics and track pool points for "crowd support" or "archery focus." Who cares? It is a fighter. Stop making new fighters!

Put the thesaurus down.

You aren't being innovative or smart by trying to replace the wheel. You are just making slightly worse wheels that are only usable in specific situations.

If I only want "the core four" races of human, dwarf, elf, and halfling - that is all that is in the book and all that I will support in my worldbuilding. Orcs are orcs, not something someone on social media said they were; so, outside people, unconnected to classic myth and disconnected from reality, can ruin my game and world-building. The list of "monsters as player options" gets worse and worse every year, and I expect mind flayers. displacer beasts, and beholders to be player options in 6E. And I will be forced to add them, along with every other silly thing they put in the game's art.

Game designers. Stop it. You have a problem. Get some help.

Less is more.

Too Many Classes

I get the feeling class choice is a fallacy.

There are a very limited number of roles in a dungeon party. Mind you, in 5E, where it is all "story gaming," and there isn't even a structure to dungeon exploration, with no time, resources, turns, or wandering monster checks needed, you are all just playing "soft pretend" and running pre-set combat encounters to give you the illusion of dungeoning.

You can play 5E like an OSR game, but you need to houserule the most important rules for dungeon exploration, and if you do not know them, you are back in story-gaming land, dealing with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat again as your Dungeon Masters, and you are being led by the nose through some adventure writer's story by the nose and shoved on that railroad.

If you did not know the terrible days of "modules on rails" of the AD&D 2E era, here we are again.

You have no dungeon turn structure in 5E, nor do you have any hexcrawl procedures. The game wasn't built for that. People port those ideas in from older editions, but they aren't there. The dungeon exploration turn structure is the reason we have class roles; that gameplay loop defines the game.

That dungeon turn procedure defines the resource game.

And the resource game defines the class roles.

In a game less about pretentious module-writer stories and more about sandbox dungeon exploration, the dungeon turn defines the experience. We forgot about this so completely that it took 5E players writing an entire new game (Shadowdark) to remind us of the beauty of this simple structure. While I love Shadowdark, BX does that all and more, without the need for out-of-game timers or table procedures.

Track time on the timesheet.

If a real-world discussion takes 30 minutes, tick off three turns on the timesheet.

Time tracking in BX is far easier than Shadowdark, and it is far more flexible. No phone or sand timers needed here. And you have the option to speed up time and mark off a dozen turns in the blink of an eye, if needed. If something takes two hours, we can just say it does, check off turns, make the rolls for wandering monsters, and pick up at that point. You can do this in Shadowdark, too, but it is built into BX as "the way." There is no real-time requirement here, yet time is just as important.

But the gameplay loop defines the class roles and structure. It sets the ground rules for the resource game.

This is not hard stuff; MMO designers know about this. Pen-and-paper game designers are happy to ignore it, since they can drone on and write new classes to infinity, and always give you something new to buy. The truth is, the more options and classes I have, the less viable dungeon crawling becomes, and the more towards a rules-light story game my game moves in the direction of.

Cleric, fighter, magic user, and thief.

The Fab Four of dungeon crawling.

John, George, Paul, and Ringo.

I do not need more than this. The bards, druids, illusionists, rangers, and other classes are fluff and distractions. They are not part of the core design. They bring fun stuff to the table for other types of play, and some are way too focused on one area and not others, such as bards monopolizing roleplay and interaction to the detriment of all other players. The modern designs of these classes often overdo it to an extent that they ruin the game for others or have such a narrowly defined niche that they are useless in a dungeon.

I like the other classes, and even the BX race-as-class options - they all bring something fun to the game.

But if I had to play without them, I could in a heartbeat. I don't need all these distractions. My games are better as a result. They are more focused, and the motivations are clear. The constant distractions of modern gaming and the too many choices that serve as shiny baubles meant to stimulate you are gone.

Yes, I am that "simple fighter" who "fights," but because I don't have rules for 1001 potential actions, I am not limited to that list of choices. I can do a million things as that fighter. Infinite things. I have more freedom of action with my BX fighter than I do with my 5E fighter. The rules are handcuffs in 5E. With every new book, they take options away from me. In BX, my fighter is an independent, free person of action and potential. Just because the rules don't explicitly lay out actions doesn't mean they can't be done.

BX is the complete opposite of Pathfinder 2. Pathfinder 2 has rules for pulling items out of pouches and packs. If they could, they would write rules for actions for coughing and sneezing. It is not a bad game, but this highlights the design focus and point of Pathfinder 2. That is a game where every conceivable action is laid out in the rules.

In BX, every conceivable action is laid out in my head.

There is a freedom in BX that no amount of page-count or rules can replicate.

Nor do I need infinite classes and infinite choices within them to give me "true player choice" and agency at the table. That one fighter could be "the archer" or "the gladiator." Or even "brawler" or "warmaster." Why do we need some game designer with a thesaurus making character classes, again?

What does that add to the game?

Or do all these thesaurus classes remove options from the fighter and relegate them to a boring and do-nothing class? If a fighter is my only choice, then that fighter is going to be so much more than these "every synonym and the kitchen sink" games designed by amateur influencer-gamer designers at these companies.

Do not invalidate the great classes in the game by designing "more fun ones" that "steal roles."

Is it that hard to see? Or do I need another 500 silly 5E character classes in my online designer to make the point sink in?

D&D is Being Run by Influencers (or Pod People)

I watched a few of the new official interviews with the remaining and current D&D team, and all I came away with was that anyone who works there wants to be a popular social media influencer.

Most of those who play live-play games want to be social media influencers.

I get the feeling it is less about the game and more about "them getting theirs."

Nobody reads blogs compared to other media types in the hobby; I never considered myself an influencer.

After a while, all these influencers start to look and talk in the same tone of voice, that strange candace where they ele-VATE their last syllable, while waving their hands in circles as they talk. Talking does not seem natural or relaxed; it is like they are struggling to stay afloat in the water, with all those jerky hand movements, and they are desperate for attention as they adopt an unnatural, alien inflection in their speech.

Again, they are so desperate for attention that they will speak in an alien tone of voice just to make themselves heard, and pretend to struggle in the water so your attention fixates on them. They adopt strange looks that seem fake, again, to get your attention and fixate on them. After a while, standing out in the crowd like this screams of "please like me" and desperation against a soulless algorithm, and I just feel sorry for them.

Compare this with a few in the OSR (and a few in the Dungeon Tube space), the game designers, and popular YouTube channels that run discussions, and they all sound like down-to-earth people. I can listen to them for hours without needing to be visually stimulated or hearing strange vocal quirks every 30 seconds, so I won't switch to my phone.

The hobby has an influencer problem.

The more I see it, the more I can't unsee it.

Skills Kill the Game

Where 5E completely loses me is in the lack of structure and a gameplay loop. You can see the character-first focus of the game, and then there is nothing else to it, except combat. The entire game exists for a weak narrative structure to be thrown over combat encounters, which is exactly what a D&D 4E adventure did.

Exploration is non-existent, and there isn't even a defined structure for the activity. The overland travel procedure is gone. The skill system does too much work, which is a sign of a designer who wants to lazily overload the game's "system mechanics" onto a skill system and call it a day.

You saw this design from D&D 3 and on, the skill-heavy theory of game design, where a massive skill system replaces the need for any other part of the game to have procedure and flow. You will see entire subsystems hidden in a skill description, such as jumping or climbing. While they reduced the number of skills in D&D 4 and 5, they did not reduce the importance.

You will often hear a player blurt out "I roll perception!" before it is even called for, some habit they developed, trained by the skill system, to roll that skill every time they enter a room.

It is really dumb.

What are you looking for again? What are you even doing? They treat the skills like a phone, holding it to their eyes so they don't have to think, consider the environment, or be careful. Nope. The skill somehow magically does all that. The skill system in 5E is an easy mode for auto-play.

Even the act of "failing" just means the next person in the party does it to ensure success. You can't get away with a failure state since the failed skill check waterfalls all the way through the party as "everyone tries it" since "they magically know the other person failed."

Back in the day, we called that metagaming, the taboo practice of acting on information your character does not know.

How do you know the other person failed a perception check? Ideally, this is a secret roll, but if the player rolls the die and rolls low, everyone else will jump in to ensure a roll above a 15. "I look too!"

In BX, it is player skill.

I search behind the curtains, using my spear or 10' pole.

No roll needed, you see the yellow mold on there without triggering it, and the secret door it clings to.

We burn it with our torches and cover our mouths, with everyone backing off as it burns. We go through the area with our mouths still covered.

That will force a wandering monster check due to the smoke, but it is dead and defeated. You are not affected. It also takes a turn for all of it to happen. Please mark your time tracker and check off your torch life by a turn.

There was no dice rolling in that entire sequence of events.

Sure, in BX, you can have profession or background skills, but those are just character flavor, with no "skill levels" or "mastery level," and they just are there if you want to use them. My dwarf is a blacksmith, so naturally, he knows how to do that, plus repair metal weapons and armor, and it is what it is. If there were a 14th-level character, he would naturally be crafting very fine and powerful weapons, but that is again a matter of a referee ruling and the player's course of action, materials, and facilities you have access to.

Could my dwarf craft a +1 warhammer?

What materials do you have? What type of forge do you have access to? Do you need a special runecrafting book? Do you need a mage to cast a ritual to enchant it, or bring it to a good dragon to bless the weapon? If the quest is epic or legendary enough, this may even rise to a +2 with a special property. No skill roll is needed. The dragon doesn't need to roll anything, either, when you get there, so get that out of your head.

This all happens within the context of the game and player action, adjudicated by the referee's common sense.

It just happens.

Why?

Just 'cause. That is how the fantasy novels did things. Read a few more of them to know.

We are not forcing the game through a 5E Play-Doh extruder press and a tiny hole that controls all action, and requiring the use of the dice for every action.

Where BX has elegance in design that comes from maturity in game design, 5E treats every problem as a nail and whacks it with a hammer. Modern game design replaces the need to use your brain with rolling the dice.

"I roll perception!"

You successfully see your character roll a d20. Everyone else does, too.

Now tell me what your character is looking at in the room, and what they are doing in the environment.

And put the dice down.

D&D Beyond: Rental Content

Please stop calling it "content."

And this is the beginning of a digital-only game. I can see how the maps and pre-gen encounters would be useful, but the more concerning aspect is the inclusion of player options as "content," which ties features on your character sheet to a subscription model. Your characters are becoming rental-dependent pieces of a corporation's data model.

You know, I have nearly 100% upgraded to BX, so why do I care?

The maps are cool, but I can get similar ones and use them for any game in Roll20. It is that subscription-dependent, "you will never own this" character-focused options and spells, which you know will be must-haves and filled with power creep, that trouble me. Over time, the best build options will be dependent on owning a "master tier," and the game will turn into a live-service, pay-to-win model.

Welcome to the world of rental content, 5E players.

This is why I play BX.

The Sandbox

Every game presents its own unique sandbox. You get a base set of classes, races, magic, monsters, gear, and ideas to use to create your stories. Part of the reason I love Old School Essentials is that it is one of the ultimate sandboxes in gaming, classic, iconic, defined, and limited in scope to just the best of the best in dungeon adventuring.

I am sort of hesitant to use the words 'old school' dungeon adventuring since I really have no idea what modern adventuring is these days, other than 'a contrived plot leads you to a sequence of battle map-like areas.' We have not progressed beyond D&D 4E's 'series of combat encounters' in nearly 20 years, and 5E is still very much aligned to map and grid tactical encounter play.

4E used to have that sandbox, too. Early on, before the game became an MMO, where the classic worlds were "starting zones," and everyone was forced to adventure in the planes, starting at level 10. That model still exists in D&D today, and it is the death of the sandbox in D&D. This assumption killed the classic fantasy worlds of D&D, and it turned into "Plane Hoppers: the RPG."

5E never really felt like it had the sandbox to me, since the planar model was baked in. 5E always felt too big, too massive, like a fantasy universe simulator more than a sandbox fantasy game. I get this feeling from ToV and Level Up A5E, too. They are less focused on sandbox games than they feel like a "d20 version of fantasy GURPS." And 5E gets worse the more you add to it. It already starts off way too massive, and it just keeps getting bigger.

4E felt like it had a defined sandbox world, and it worked consistently and logically.

5E felt too generic and planar in scope. I get overwhelmed. There is too much in the game. And 2024 makes it worse since there are four subclasses per class. I might as well be playing GURPS if I am expected to design that hard. Yes, it is just four choices over a billion, but comparing 20 levels of four subclasses to plan out what I want and what I would be happy with? Give me a point-buy system and set me free to get what I want, since the designers will never make me happy.

OSE has one book or two books, maybe the Zines, and that is it. OSE is very "wrap your head around able," and I can memorize everything and run the game like a micro operating system in my head. With 5E, I can't store it all in my head, none of it becomes second nature, and I am forever tied to looking things up in those darned books.

With OSRIC 3.0, and especially Adventures Dark & Deep, I feel myself slipping again. OSRIC 3.0 I do a little better with, since it is so similar to OSE, but there are so many more rules to remember.

OSE has a few "planar spells," but it never goes beyond that. The entire game feels rooted in one world, without dragging the massive planar framework like a junky piece of furniture tangled with cords, dust, and some random strings wrapped around everything. You can "do planes," but for the most part, they are never brought up, and the game feels rooted in one world with very little, if any, planar travel. OSE does not even have the gate spell.

Sanity.

Finally.

A fantasy adventure game that just focuses on one sandbox world, manages that self-contained framework, and doesn't pull in 1001 garbage ideas and genre-breaking science fiction and weird fantasy elements. I am sick of "the planes" and "planar campaigns," and I am ready to return to smaller, more sandbox, manageable, and simulation-like standalone worlds. I don't need all my fantasy worlds in some multiverse where characters can jump between them in an instant, reducing them to background images and VFX in some trash-science-fiction movie.

It reminds me of that scene in the new Star Wars sequels where they used hyperspace to "jump between" iconic worlds, with no world mattering, them only existing as nostalgia backdrops, and them never being forced to interact with any of them. In the end, they were there to say "remember this," and they each meant nothing, and the entire sequence diminished every world and cheapened the entire universe in a very short sequence of film.

The modern theory and design concept of "the multiverse" is complete and utter garbage.

Bringing it into D&D destroys every classic game word, if it hasn't already.

Why, as a creator, do I have to accept a concept that diminishes my work? So, my world must be in your "planar framework?" Or your "labyrinth?" Or your "thousand worlds?"

I begin to think that those who push these concepts are either lazy, jealous, or anti-imagination. There is another class in that group that plagiarizes, too, claiming the work of greats as their own, even though they will never be anything close to them. To them, the multiverse exists so they can put mediocre work next to the creations of legends and have greatness prop up their weak, derivative, and trite ideas.

If I want "the planes," it means I must play with OSRIC 3.0, Adventures Dark & Deep, or other 1E games. These games have full support for that campaign model, with more planar monsters (demons and devils, at least, at the moment), the high-level planar spells, and support for the framework.

I can play "The Planes" in OSE, but it is my choice.

With 1E, that is baked in, and I accept its presence, but the nature of the planes is still entirely up to me, or if they are even survivable. I remember when we first did a planar exploration game in 1E, I had zero structure or reason for the planes; it was almost Lovecraftian, and some of them were not even survivable or breathable. Some had alien geometry where, if you walked down a mile-long tunnel and turned around, you would be facing a solid wall of rock. Turn around again, and the walls shifted and moved like you were in some bad video game with strange bugs.

The entire nature of these places drove my players mad.

They fled back to their home world as soon as they finished what they needed to do.

Those gates stayed closed, or my players actively hunted gates down and closed them themselves.

Nothing good comes from the planes.

But those are the planes. They aren't a utopia or socio-economic paradise, happy pastel-colored places full of frog people, massive cities, or what have you. They are often alien and incomprehensible. Most of them are unsurvivable. Many of them will drive a human unprepared to experience them insane. Most will not see "life as we know it" as anything worth consideration for survival, and you will be crushed like an ant, poisoned, enslaved, killed, abused, or swatted like a pest if you set foot in these places.

Lesser creators, again, will use a planar model to foist their dumb ideas into an official setting and force you to accept their world-breaking garbage because "it is an official book." Many of the Magic: the Gathering-based books in the D&D line are like this, terrible, lesser ideas forced into the D&D multiverse, with no real weight, fiction, or creative chops behind them, and they are garbage "me too" ideas which end up diminishing the greats: The Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, and others.

But those great settings are no longer great, anymore.

Years of mismanagement and abuse have left the classic D&D fantasy worlds in a ruined, corrupted, and unappealing state. They don't even have great novels in these places anymore. There is nothing special about them, and the fiction is mostly dead. While I have fond memories of these places, they exist as ghosts today.

OSE gives me a fresh start, two small, self-contained books that simulate "the classic fantasy world." Every OSE world could be "The Realms" or "Greyhawk" in the early days. Every time I start a world with OSE, it feels like starting a new Minecraft world, fresh, interesting, boundless, but using a limited palette of possibilities combined in infinite ways. The logical mechanics are consistent. The options are limited, yet expansive.

And I absolutely do not need the infinite character options 5E gives me; they hurt the story of the world and characters more than they help it. Too much focus is put on the characters. With my BX thief, sure, he may be a simple character, but that does not bother me at all in Minecraft. I am who I make myself in the sandbox, and my story and adventures matter more than a treed character build that takes a few dozen pages of character sheets to figure out.

If I am a complicated mess of choices and 5E build options, I am largely self-contained with powers and a massive 20-level entitlement syndrome baked into my build. I cease caring about the world. It is always about me. No matter what I do in the sandbox, I can always count on those powers being handed to me by the rules.

No wonder so many players of 5E don't understand the appeal of sandbox worlds. They are never forced to interact with one to engage and thrive inside it. Everything is given to them by the "mommy rule book" and "daddy game designer." They already have the next 20 levels of power, so they never need to build soft power or interact with a sandbox world. Every adventure is a pre-chewed story meant to drive progression along a set of rails.

If I am a simple BX character, I need to engage with a sandbox world to thrive in it. How I engage with the world, my stories, and the relationships within it will define my character's power. This "soft power" of my interactions and relations in the sandbox is often greater than any "hard power" the rules give to me. Who I am, the people I know, the gear I found, and what I built matter more than my character sheet.

That farm I struggled to build in Minecraft with the enchanting room to make magic weapons and armor? That took a long time to put together and set up. It took me numerous sessions and adventures to build. That gives me real character power. And none of it exists on my character sheet.

WotC Workers Try to Unionize

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wizards-of-the-coast-and-hasbro-miss-deadline-to-voluntarily-recognise-workers-union

I will always support a union.

However, I will find it hard to support the workers in Wizards who, for years, have insulted old-school players and blamed them for every perceived problem with the hobby. This group is more on the card-game side, but you know if push comes to shove, they will all stand together. I wish them well.

There is a difference here.

Unions are good.

But this current crop of Wizards creatives, I do not care for at all. They were certainly happy to blame us and put warning stickers on our childhoods, as if we were playing with damaged goods.

THAC0 the clown?

We're not clowns, and THAC0 is still better than bounded accuracy and the current mess you have in 5E.

The old school crowd is the first people kicked out the door when the game gets popular, and the first crowd they come crawling back to when times are hard. I have better in the OSR these days. Sorry, I moved on with my life and found another game.

"D uhn D" means nothing to me now. It's a sound associated with people who don't like my generation or the games we played. It embraces outrage for social media clicks. It is a live service model.

Good luck trying to tilt at the windmills of Wall Street, people. I hope you get your union. But you won't win. You will be fired en masse and replaced by contract workers running A-I. Welcome to 2026.

I don't understand how people still play those games.

Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/exalted-funeral/old-school-essentials-demonic-grimoire

This is a book I have been wanting the OSE team to do ever since they were B/X Essentials, in the way, way early days, when they were just developing this game. I still have my BXE books, and they mark the beginning of what would become something truly amazing and special.

Demons and devils were never in BX; they were always an AD&D thing, and it was understandable why they were left out of the original game and even OSE. Games like Labyrinth Lord had them, and that captured the era when we had them in the Monster Manual, and we just ported them back into our BX games back in the day. Demons and devils were always the ultimate bad guys in any campaign, the "final boss" behind any group of evil doers, and wickedness that always deserved to be stamped out and vanquished without question.

Unlike today, where every humanoid race eventually becomes a character option and is removed from the Monster Manual, there is no redeeming a demon or a devil. There is no amount of cultural whitewash to make a demon or devil acceptable and "fun for the whole family." They keep trying to normalize them with Tieflings and those silly cosplay horns and pastel skin they throw carelessly all over D&D art these days, but that is Satan's blood that made those horns and hooves, and they will forever have the taint of evil upon them.

Sorry, art department, the definition of pure evil isn't negotiable.

Redemption? Sure, but you lose the horns and hooves. You can't wear them to be cute. They are linked forever to the Fallen Angel of Lucifer. I am an absolutist about this since I respect the source material.

That source material. You can't accept that demons and devils exist without admitting that God exists, even in a polytheistic world with multiple gods. In pre-Christian days, the Devil was there, too, and the lore always surpasses the silly RPG gamebook. You can't just steal faith as myth, even though it is intertwined; D&D wants to live in a godless, faithless world where demons are valid character options, and alignment does not exist.

Faith is the root of all myth.

Myth is the heart of D&D.

The removal of alignment from newer versions of D&D, ToV, and Pathfinder was also a reason I dropped all of 5E and newer games. You take alignment out of the game, and the basic mechanical function of the battle of good and evil is gone. All of a sudden, a paladin can slaughter a village, pillage, and do all sorts of vile deeds - and still retain their holiness and powers.

The removal of alignment from D&D killed the game. This was a fatal blow. There was no coming back from this. There is no D&D without alignment, and even the simplified three-axis Law-Neutral-Chaos of BX does a fine job. The moral relativists killed D&D because they did not want players to be inconvenienced by the game making value judgments about them.

This is why the Satanic Panic happened. D&D became about "fighting Hell," and organized religion saw it as an intrusion into their domain of faith and salvation. You can play D&D and be a person of faith; they do not conflict.

To remove alignment is to cut D&D's heart out.

In short, the game stopped enforcing a moral code, and players adopted the "get me mine and hustle" attitude seen on TikTok, social media, and OnlyFans. To solve a situation, the game allowed you to choose the evil route, and you were never punished for it, nor should the referee ever punish a character in-game. Sin and wickedness are just another route to profit and success.

And the games added a "say no" option by throwing up an "X" and forcing the referee not to punish their characters for their actions, since consequences are triggering.

This is a great addition to the game, and I backed this. This will keep me from using OSRIC 3.0 as my demo and devil resource, and gives me an OSE-focused book to use as my guide to the darker powers that players will fight against. The other half of OSE is finally here.

Strong recommendation.

Standardizing on BX

You have many options if you standardize on BX as your game of choice. One is science fiction with Stars Without Number. This is as easy as science fiction can get, and all your BX adventures and materials are cross-compatible. This is easily one of the best science fiction games out there, and with a procedural universe generation mode of play, you get infinite adventures and a ton of expansions for the official campaign universe. Don't want an official universe? Randomly generate billions of worlds and have adventure seeds on each one.

This is the best BX science fiction game out there, and it stands the test of time.

Sticking with the Without Number games, you get cyberpunk with Cities Without Number. Add BX races and monsters in here, and you have BX Shadowrun with a classic gaming feel. The whole BX besiatry is usable too, so go to town with machine guns and minotaurs. This is one of my best BX Shadowrun replacements, and a worthy BX-style Cyberpunk game. This game is a major flex in terms of street-level play with faction and mission generation.

Add Ashes Without Number, and you have post-apoc gaming, again, with full BX compatibility. Need ogres and lizardmen for your Thundarr-inspired science-fantasy ruin? BX will supply the fun; just toss some mutations on them and have fun. This is a game-changer for post-apoc roleplaying, and the tables are instantly usable in any post-apoc game, be they The Walking Dead, Aftermath, Mutant Future, Mutant Crawl Classics, Mutant Epoch, or any other gonzo science fantasy game of your choice.

Worlds Without Number does fantasy, but we had a lot of fantasy games here. Still, the world generation charts here can yield decades of adventure and hex-crawling. These are the big four from Kevin Crawford, but having your entire BX library cross-compatible and your monster books working with any of these games makes life so much easier. These four books make a compelling case for standardizing on BX and storing all your other games; they do just enough, don't reinvent the wheel, and handle adventures in this universe well.

There are other amazing BX games, too. Dark Places & Demogorgons for 1980s kids on bikes adventures. This one looks fun, moved from its own system and ported to BX via the OSE engine. This one is a winner, fun, thematic, and 100% better than a licensed box set that presents a version of the game that was never played in the 1980s. At least this version of the game was played back then, and having it "run the game engine" is a far more authentic experience than another 5E game.

Besides, if I wanted to have them encounter any BX monster, learn BX spells, meet BX NPCs, and even adventure in BX worlds, I have my OSE books, and it is all there. This is far more fitting and accurate for running a "cartoon-style game" than any licensed 5E box set ever will be.

If we ever had 5E in the 1980s, the game would be ridiculed as overly complicated, math-heavy, impossible character sheets, and too much of a mess to ever be figured out and played effectively. I know the game Aftermath was 10% of 5E's complexity, and that game was savaged by 1980s gamers as impossible to ever figure out or manage. Aftermath these days would be rules-light compared to games like Draw Steel or Pathfinder 2.

White Star is an amazing space-adventure game compatible with BX. This is a more "Guardians style"-style mix with a little bit of "space empire and rebels"-style play. This is a more freewheeling science fantasy adventure game where you shoot lasers first, swing laser swords as a star knight, and ask questions later. This is getting a new version from the same team that did OSRIC 3.0, so it has a bright future ahead.

Operation Whitebox for WW2 adventures. There is a sister game, a tribute to this, with Operation B/X, which is another amazing game. Some of the best WW2 gaming is in BX, since the genre is so niche, but BX does it pretty well.

B/X Gangbusters is one of the best 1920s and 30s style gangsters versus G-Men games, and a worthy mention. Another very small niche game that BX fills very nicely.

From the same creator comes Tall Tales, a western-style game that offers more options.

Modern Necessities is an amazing supplement covering modern weapons and classes. This, plus OSE's core books, can run any modern game, movie, adventure story, or scenario very easily. If you limit hit points, make weapons deadly, and apply a little common sense, BX games with a level system can run modern games very well, and just as well as any simulation-style game.

This line of books also comes with the great Single Action book, which also does wild west style classes and gear, so you have another choice for cowboy roleplaying. Want to pull in werewolf and magic-user spells and have a weird west game? It is trivial and does not require a few hundred dollars in crowdfunding 5E books to play, along with the never-happening VTT support that actually playing requires. I swear, 90% of the 5E books I own will never get VTT support and are all but worthless.

It is hard for me to say future 5E investments are worth my time without VTT support, and most of what I bought, I can never use. They looked cool at the time, but I just wasted money on promises that the data entry tasks, digital purchases, and other support would never be completed.

And don't forget the X! Series Games. These are amazing minigames based on BX, and they are just the core pieces of the game. They are small, fast, and fun. All your BX stuff works with them, too, so reskin a few monsters, pull in space orcs, and just get playing. These are early favorites here on the blog, and they also have a lot of heart.

I am likely missing many games, and I have a few more of these on my shelf, but you get the idea. There is a wealth of gaming here that all use the same system, support all of your other books, and you can mix and match freely. You do not need a VTT, subscription, or online character designer to start playing!

And 0E and 1E are not that far off, and fully compatible, so you have OSRIC 3.0, Swords & Wizardry, and Adventures Dark & Deep to choose from. If you like the system and want the goodness and depth of 1E, you have plenty of solid choices that do not invalidate the BX side of your hobby.

All these games, plus a few adventure books, take up four shelves in my library. This is half the size of my 5E collection, but they mostly stand alone as books, and many are single-book games.

And there are too many great games on this list, and they are not all that hard: just roll 3d6 a few times, build a character, and get started in about 3 to 5 minutes of prep.

In a time where I have very little time to play, this is the difference between playing something and not.

BX is really the way forward for me.

OSE 2026 Update

OSE 2026 Update FAQ – Necrotic Gnome 

"The 2026 Update is not a new edition of the rules; it's just a new printing of the game with an updated presentation."

I put a link to the OSE 2026 Update FAQ, where they are cleaning up the core books and presenting a unified product core. They are breaking from the OGL and using CC content (finally), and cleaning up the game and providing examples of play.

Assassins get the thief backstab, and fighters get an optional "under 1 HD" multiple-attack rule. We are also getting an option for AD&D-like hit dice. We also include optional rules for "hovering at death's door" at 0 HP, which better align with 1E rules.

We are also getting a book for demons (launching tomorrow), which is a long-awaited addition.

The game is becoming OGL-free and more like the amazing OSRIC 3.0. OSRIC and OSE are already highly compatible (a 1-point ascending AC difference and the advanced class HD differences), and OSE 2026 gives you a rules-light BX version of the game, compared to OSRIC's 1E. It comes down to personal preference what you play.

Do you like the slower, more methodical, survival-focused play of 1E, and don't mind the extra rules baggage? Play OSRIC. I love 1E, and there are times I am down for all the extra rules, but there are times I want something where I can turn my brain off and just adventure with a rules-light game. For those times, grabbing a digest-sized copy of OSE and just starting to play instantly is a winner for me.

If you like the OSE race options, those are easily ported into OSRIC 3.0.

OSE, to me, feels like the rules-light, instant action version of the game. This is also the most compatible game with the world of BX, including the Without Number games, the modern versions of BX, Dark Places & Demogorgons, and everything else. If you want cross-compatibility, OSE is the winner. The Carcass Crawler zines also bring the game up to date with 5E, especially in terms of race options.

Another strong 1E option is Adventures Dark & Deep. If you want "all the extra stuff, plus 1E, and the kitchen sink," then ADAD is your game. If you want an easier game that focuses only on 1E, stick with OSRIC 3.0, and you will have less to learn and manage. I love ADAD, but the part of my mind that does not want all the extra complexity leans towards OSRIC 3.0.

OSRIC 3.0 and ADAD are essentially the same game, just done differently. It comes down to how much extra stuff you want, the additional systems ADAD introduces (revised combat, skill system), and the minor differences and tweaks to class designs. ADAD also raises the level caps of non-humans by the ability score modifier of the class's prime requisite ability, so ADAD feels heavily house-ruled. But these are all likely popular house-rules and logically consistent.

Both OSRIC 3.0 and ADAD are OGL-free for guilt-free gaming. Swords & Wizardry is here, too, OGL free and a solid choice. S&W is like OSE for 1E (built off a 0E base).

OSE is the easiest of these games.

I would put Swords & Wizardry here, between the middle and rules-light, but still strongly 1E.

OSRIC 3.0 is the happy middle.

ADAD is the most feature-complete, but the most complex.

It feels like the OSE 2026 Rules Update is a realignment towards the 1E rules, OSRIC 3.0, and ADAD. The BX side of the game remains the default mode of play, but the popularity of 1E seems to be driving this shift toward a presentation that supports the most popular 1E options and traditions, with optional rules to support them.

Also, OSRIC 3.0 and ADAD come with "batteries included," and the demons and other classic monsters ship with the core game. OSE wisely keeps them separate because the original game didn't have them, but there are times when it's just easier for me to have everything together in one place.

Is the hobby moving to standardizing on 1E and OSRIC 3.0? We still need a strong BX core, and OSE fills that role. But OSE shifting more towards 1E feels like the strength of 1E coming home and becoming the de facto standard for 2026 and beyond.

Is the OSR moving towards 1E?

I guess we shall see.

As Much as I Blame 5E...

I still like 5E.

I just hate what 5E has become.

It is bittersweet. In a way, it is a goodbye. I still have my books, my crowdfunding will mostly cease (Battlezoo and RFC are still very worthy), and I will pare down my books to my Kobold Press core and keep them in storage until I want to say goodbye.

But the entire game at this point feels unsustainable.

The D&D Beyond "season model," where content will be rotated in and out of support, is likely the last straw. The digital DLC. The over-dependence on VTT character sheets and the need to buy the books twice. The season model opens the door for them to "rotate out" books and force you to buy the new ones. It is a rapid level of content composting that is coming our way like a tidal wave of feces.

I can't anymore.

I am too old to be wasting this much money on a game, and the rest of you are likely too young to know better to not do this. Save now for retirement.

5E is a good game engine, and Shadowdark and Tales of Aragosa prove it.

5E's core implementation is broken all to Hell. Predatory. AAA game. Live service. Season models. Digital goods. Content recycling. Walled gardens. Time-locked, discontinued books create FOMO, turning it into a toxic force in your mind. Missing out. Ads everywhere.

5E became everything I hate about gaming.

But I still like the core game engine and the idea behind it. There is a merit to giving players tactical options and depth to their classes. But how it is done in 5E is the worst way to implement this design. Tales of the Valiant is a solid implementation with fewer problems, but the character sheets still go into a dozen or more pages. I can't support that.

5E has a place in my heart.

The same place that broken dreams and fallen legacies live in.

BX and the OSR are the path forward.

Character Sheets are the Enemy

The 5E character sheet is an abomination. This is every bit as bad as the original Pathfinder 2E character sheet, which had so many boxes and bubbles that the page could trigger a fear response in people who get unnerved by objects with too many holes.

Modern designers do not care about the character sheet. They leave it up to the software and web designers. I have had 5E character sheets go two dozen pages of printed text. I struggle to get GURPS to do four pages with a thousand-point character.

VTTs hide the problem. They use web code to hide most of the complexity and present a character sheet that looks like something out of the OSR, but with tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript behind the scenes. The reason they push VTTs is to keep the lie going and to delay it from all breaking down, as people cannot run characters by hand anymore.

The OSR? BX? 1E or 2E?

Running character sheets by hand is how you play the game. You do not need a computer. After the bombs go off and we are living in Mad Max, the 5E books will be burned for warmth, and everyone will be playing BX.

Modern designers think web and software designers will save their games and create persistent online subscription models so people can play their game and make digital purchases to buy the same book multiple times.

These designers create the problem and get rich selling you the answer.

And, yes, just because a game "has a name," everyone sees it as "the gold standard" and gives it a huge pass for openly ripping people off. No, sorry, modern gaming is the problem with the hobby these days. I am not defending predatory and exploitative anti-consumer tactics. The sunk cost fallacy is a death sentence for the hobby.

Sorry.

Everyone gets to a point where it has to stop for them. I am there. I don't have the time to play a game that takes up eight shelves of books. It just makes me unhappy to look at it. I would rather keep easier games on my shelves and actually play those than stare at a monolith of disappointment and too much work to even begin. AD&D 2E died from splatbook bloat. Along with D&D 3, 4, and now 5.

Season play is designed to invalidate older books, and is another corporate garbage "content composting" tactic meant to invalidate your recent purchases and extend the life of games even they know are bloated beyond their ability to survive.

Why, people, why?

Why do you support this?

Like Star Wars, Star Trek, and many other franchises, gaming has lost its way as it wandered Wall Street.

It's dead, Jim.

And I get the feeling many have just given up on attaching their dreams and fantasies to suckling the corporate teat. They don't care about subscription services since they have given up on their futures and dreams, and what use is saving money anyway? Gaming has turned into the opium of a generation, meant to live a fake life that most have given up on.

Gaming isn't about imagination anymore.

It is about having a life that most feel they can never have.

And the game designers and their web service providers are laughing all the way to the bank on the backs of broken dreams.

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.