OSE Confusion?

If D&D 5E players can figure out subclass options and multiclass builds, they can surely figure out "buy Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Player's Guide and Advanced Fantasy Referee's Guide" to buy the game.

It is simple.

I love these D&D and even OSR YouTube thumbnails purposefully confusing the situation by taking books that are clearly meant to be optional formats and collectors' editions, mixing them in with the main books, and acting all confused.

The problem with YouTube is that there is so much time to fill that creators will invent problems to solve and either say nothing, or make something that was never a problem, suddenly a problem. This is the "open mic curse," and it eventually happens to all channels.

The pretend confusion has gotten so bad that the next version of OSE will only have Advanced Fantasy and be two books, and the non-problems go away, which was never really a problem to begin with. Again, we are talking about 90% of the role-playing market playing 5E, and obviously not so confused that they are applying bard subclasses to fighters because "what subclass do I use?"

I recently got the nine-book set of Classic and Advanced, and it's perfectly clear when to use each book. I have the OG Classic all-in-one book and the two-book Advanced set, and it is perfectly clear when to use each. Most people end up buying Advanced, so it was never really that much of an issue.

I still enjoy the limited options in Classic and the more streamlined, simplified game to present. For some games, too many options will kill the game and take it off the rails. This is a chronic problem with 5E, where there are so many races, classes, and options that they all become too samey as the designers try to make "everyone do everything" so there are no glaring holes in healing, damage, defense, or utility.

The OG Classic book is still one of the best versions of the game, despite being far less popular, and is soon moving to a PoD-only format. In this case, less is more.

And, I enjoy the OGL versions of the game. I am glad they are 100% compatible, and the new books only add a few optional rules that can be houseruled into the classic books, since those are my play copies. For the most part, I only see the four small class changes and a few optional rules being used here; the OG books are still 100% usable.

You can literally put all the 2026 rule changes on a half-sheet of paper or in a Carcass Crawler Zine, keep that as a houserule sheet, and play by the new books with the old.