My 1990s Games

I am going through a strange phase where all my best 1990s games are making it onto my premier display shelves. Two exceptions are Traveller (more 1980s) and Dungeon Crawl Classics (2010s), but all the rest are solid 1990s games, around the time of the late 1980s and early 1990s:

• Palladium
• Rifts
• Champions
• Hero System
• AD&D
• GURPS
• Traveller

Two notable differences: AD&D is OSRIC, not the 1990s AD&D 2nd Edition. Vampire: The Masquerade is not represented. I have VtM, but I don't have room for it. Some of the editions are newer, such as Hero System/Champions and GURPS. Traveller for the 1990s should be MegaTraveller, which I have, but the base game and Cepheus fill the need nicely. Open and community licenses always win in this house.

Cyberpunk should be on these shelves too, and I will look for it. That is one that is in my garage now, but it belongs with them. Classic Shadowrun belongs here too, but I am a little cool on the 6th Edition. Maybe 4th will work.

Palladium and Rifts are on my shelves, and they bring me more happiness there than the 5E books they replaced. All I want are good times and great memories, and 5E feels hollow and lifeless to me. Some Open 5E editions are great, but I haven't really played with any of them, and I'd choose a game I played with friends in the 1980s and 1990s over today's crowdfunded, too-many-books versions.

Palladium is a system I can count on. Rifts is still awesome, and it is the game "your mom gets you if she is really cool." Not my words; one of my friends said that. And she was a really cool mom.

I will play a game with great memories over a modern game I feel nothing for.

As the 1980s fade into history, the real nostalgia upon us will be for this era, and I feel it. The 90s were a decade of change that saw TSR go bankrupt and D&D's future come into doubt. Comics ruled the era. Magic: The Gathering killed tabletop RPGs. But some of the best, highly tuned, post-Golden Age games were made during this time, and they delivered on the fantasy just as well. Champions/Hero System remains one of the best superhero games ever written and one of the best generic systems outside of GURPS.

If D&D 5.5E is Windows 11 Home Edition, Hero System is a Linux distribution for power users that still gets the job done. Hero System is one of those games that, once you learn it, you have zero reason to open a 5E book again, unless your group won't play anything else.

Hero System is the best game ever designed for special powered beings. I don't care what genre you play; if it relies on special powers, you should play Hero System and be happy here. Once you know how to DIY a power, you will never accept game designer handouts that are poorly thought through and never balanced. I have been burned too many times by 5E books, and even some official ones, to keep seeing them as competent game designers.

The biggest difference between Hero System and GURPS is that Hero System focuses more on powers than skills, while GURPS does the opposite. GURPS has the best setting books. Champions focuses on whiz-bang comic book powers and is the best system for them. GURPS does gritty, low-fantasy games best, whereas Hero System does high-magic, high-fantasy games best, and that feels more like 5E to me.

Hero System beats 5E for me since I can design anything I want and stop waiting for crowdfunding books to fill the next gap. Do I want a Pokemon to show up? I can design the Pokemon, and the book has all the powers somewhere. This is the easiest system for an "anything goes" campaign, and one of the best-balanced "powers" games ever written.

The "complete" books for this Hero System are simplified, easy-to-grasp starter sets that are the best entry point into the hobby. They have one for fantasy and another for superheroes. Champions Complete or Fantasy Hero Complete: start there and never look back. These are one-book games that will get you started.

Even Western Hero if you want a more grounded game without special powers. This is a Hero 6th Edition game, so it uses the newest rules, and since you are not as focused on powers, it is a good way to introduce yourself to the system. If all you are doing is fist fights and shooting guns, you will get a good introduction to combat and skill use without powers coming into play.

OSRIC carries my AD&D game, and I have For Gold & Glory, the 2E clone, and it deserves a spot. They're the same game, just presented differently, and FG&G even omits demons and devils, as 2E did. FG&G drops the assassin and adds the bard, though 1E bards exist in other community add-ons. For me? OSRIC is it, the greatest game ever written and the community version of it. I need nothing else.

I still like FG&G a lot. The game is beautiful and worthy.

GURPS always has a spot, too. We loved GURPS in the 1990s, and our love of Car Wars lasted into 2000. Our Car Wars campaign lasted 20 years. GURPS is one of those games I can pick up and never be let down by it or have it break. When I want something solid, reliable, and the best character-creation tool in the hobby, I reach for GURPS.

With GURPS, I don't need 5E. I have the tools to do it myself. While Hero System is similar, both systems are great and do what they focus on very well. GURPS is the better character builder; Hero System is the better power builder - though GURPS Supers is no slouch. If you see heroes as reflections of a character, you will gravitate towards GURPS. If you see heroes as someone defined by powers, Hero System will appeal to you more.

I have Edge Studios Star Wars on my shelves, but Star Wars is dying, and I may swap those shelves for something that speaks to me more. Sorry, Star Wars, we loved you, but you did this to yourself. You lost your way and made yourself irrelevant. It is a sad end for a great brand, and I feel D&D is following the same path. I'd rather play my older games and keep the good memories than be subjected to negativity and strife over the game's future direction. I don't care about the future direction for some of these games anymore; I have the versions I love right here.

Another missing 1990s game is Rolemaster. I have this in an upstairs closet, and once I make room, it can escape onto my shelves. While I love RMFRP, I would support the new version to keep the company around. It is still a worthy, solid 1990s-style game that delivers.

I am probably missing a few here, but these were our 1990s games. These deliver for me. These have memories. Some have fallen off, but most still feel good to me.

While I love the 1980s, the 1990s were the second-best decade for tabletop gaming. Even the second-best stands a mile above gaming today, as long as some of my 1980s stalwarts hang around on the shelves.

It Begins

I got an email today from Wizards (from my D&D Beyond account that I never use) stating:

Big changes have come to Wizards Accounts

It now runs on a new account system, giving you more digital access across Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast brands.

Sign in to check out your account profile and make sure everything looks up to date.

If you have social accounts connected to your profile, you'll need to relink them the first time you sign in.

Your Wizards Account is an all-access pass to the Hasbro + Wizards Family of Brands.

So it is not really a D&D Beyond or Wizards account anymore; it is a Hasbro "all-access pass." Notice they put Hasbro first. We will look back on this moment as the first signal of the next major change in D&D and every other game they make.

When I log in, will I get Transformers, MTG, and GI JOE news pushed to my feed before I have to dig for the D&D section? I get why they did this; why let new products fail to reach an audience when you have a huge platform here that isn't helping them? But I also don't want Transformers spam before I set up a D&D game. This also solves the problem of platforms like YouTube not pushing their live-play shows, and having those wither and die because nobody knows they exist.

This is clearly a "my audience is mine" sort of play, and also a statement that social media platforms aren't doing their job pushing the hobby they once were (or the price to feature content as a premium partner has skyrocketed). YouTube telling D&D creators to "find something else to make videos on" seemed very sus at the time, and I always wondered if the checks stopped coming in and YouTube started pulling D&D videos off people's recommended lists.

If that is the case, I can't blame Wizards for taking their audience and running. If Wizards can get D&D YouTubers to create over there and share revenue, that would be good. I doubt it, though.

From the FAQ:

Which brands, websites, and products are included?

You can use your Wizards account to log in to a variety of existing and future Wizards and Hasbro products. Current products include:

• Magic: The Gathering Arena
• Magic: The Gathering Companion App
• EventLink
• Wizards Play Network (WPN)
• Store & Event Locator
• SpellTable
• Secret Lair
• Dungeons & Dragons Beyond App
• Dungeons & Dragons Beyond Website
• Dungeons & Dragons Store Website

When future games such as Exodus release, you will be able to sign in with your Wizards account as well.

So this unifies the MTG and D&D logins, which is a bit surprising it took this long. This feels like they're trying to become a more generic "gaming platform" rather than a collection of games with different sites and audiences. With new releases coming out (such as Exodus) that people have low confidence in, this gives them a channel to farm interest and push the IP, and the same could be said for some of their video games, though AAA gaming is dead and dying.

If the next Xbox and a good video card cost close to two grand, then yeah, consoles and AAA gaming are dead. People will run games off CPU graphics for the next 10 years. Video cards will slowly die, and will the silicon be affordable enough to replace them? It is a good time to be a retro gamer, though, and even the retro RPG space is better than many current offerings. Cutting-edge PC gaming is facing an extinction-level event. As PC gaming gets more expensive, Wizards and D&D will have less money.

So, survival is job number one. If Wizards has to pay through the nose to get its new products out there, fewer channels are covering them, D&D YouTubers are quitting and cutting back, and YouTube isn't recommending D&D, it might as well consolidate its market and push new games directly to its customers. What else can they do? I don't blame them.

This also feels like something a company does before it preps itself for a merger or sale.

Off the Shelf: Hero System 6E / Champions

When the original Marvel Superheroes went out of print, Champions saved superhero gaming for us. This was in the early 1990s, when Marvel and Star Wars were still small brands, and TSR lost the rights to Marvel. We were left with a pile of Marvel gazetteers, a DC game we liked but never really played, and superheroes were changing to the Image Comics and Wildstorm style.

Marvel was dead.

Even trading cards couldn't save it.

And we were left with a few superhero games without a system. Sure, we could still run Marvel Super Heroes (MSH), but the game ran its course, and like Star Frontiers, the d100 system limited high-level play. And along came Champions.

In our home game, the Champions heroes and villains stepped all over the Marvel Universe of the 1980s. Our universes collided, and the Champions' bad guys were so much better than Marvel's. Mechanon, Dr. Destroyer, and Eurostar savaged the Avengers and X-Men simply because they were better-designed characters, not Marvel's soft, one-trick power ponies.

Champions is a professional-level superhero system designed to do anything. Unlike GURPS, which is more skill-focused, Champions focuses purely on powers and abilities, with skills as a minor part of the game. Champion is professional home audio, hi-fi gear, expensive speakers, heavy-gauge speaker wire, great amps, a powerful subwoofer, a professional mixer and receiver, and a record player with a diamond-tipped needle.

Champions felt like pro home theater gear compared to the cheap Sears hi-fi record player in a fiberboard stand with a black plastic lid and two cassette decks on top of a cheap Marvel Super Heroes AM/FM radio.

And what did we do with this system?

We converted our D&D Mystara campaign to it. Oh yes, this was good stuff; we were playing 5E in 1993. We had superpowered fantasy heroes long before many of you were born. Magic spells were multi-powers; elemental spells could summon ice creatures, and the speed chart was your bonus actions if you could afford them. The spells were good, and you could design them down to the hex pattern of the AOE. You could put magic spells in items and give them charges. Someone designed a magic mind-control helmet and made the goblins in the first cave in Keep on the Borderlands fight the other factions until they died. You still can't do this in 5E, yet we got up to all sorts of incredibly fun, silly stuff back in the 1990s.

Did the book care where the powers came from? No. If you were a mage, you had these limitations; if you were a cleric, you had those. You got more points for spells and powers. If you were a fighter, you had ability scores in the 30s and 40s, and you were a muscle-bound freak with tons of hits and skin so thick that crossbow bolts bounced off of it.

So I recently compared this system to 5E, and it is still the better game. It's dense at the start, but the complexity stays linear and flat as you go up power levels. In 5E, it just gets worse: turns drag on because nobody knows what to do, and battles become one-sided blowouts. All that indecision for a predetermined outcome.

And there are far fewer books than a 5E library.

And they do 1000 times more.

I can design any power fantasy in any genre with these books. And I am not paying game designers to do it for me and trickle out the next cool thing in a book that costs 50-80 dollars. All I need to do is learn the system, and I never need to blow money on 5E books that slow-drip options and force us to buy the book twice for the VTT version.

Champions and Hero System: you make your own balance. If you don't know the system, your character dies until you figure it out and get the next power you need to defend against whatever killed you last time. Low-powered, humans-only games are like GURPS with a very limited skill list. No superpowers; there's little reason to play, but the system is solid and still works well. As a universal resolution system, it runs fast, and it is skill-light.

And Champions characters were much better than Marvel characters. These were characters built for that high-end audio setup, far better tuned and crafted than heroes who let the spandex do their marketing. And, to be honest, you didn't care if a Champions character died; they weren't anyone, but another hero could replace them and pick up the torch. The game was dangerous because the characters were a bit generic and relied on comic-book tropes.

You could run an X-Men game where the characters regularly died and were never resurrected or retconned back to life because marketing complains and the artists don't know how to draw anyone else. We don't need the Krakoa recycling-waste-management island to bring everyone back so new writers can ruin them all.

Your characters died, and you created new ones.

Yes, you could retcon with a "comic book trope" and bring popular characters back to life, but you never had to, and you didn't need to. The fallen heroes got a marble statue in the city park, and people remembered them for their sacrifices. That was a part of the fun of playing a superhero RPG; few get that these days. We are forced to play with the official characters, and they never change. Nobody dies. Nothing changes. You play with the official sock puppets, and you are allowed to be happy within IP allowances.

Champions' heroes could fall from grace, and they could fall hard. Anything could happen. Go ahead and make that choice; the next writer won't save you or reset anything. You may end up the villain. You will probably go out in a blaze of glory like James Cagney in White Heat. However you choose to fall from grace, there are no guardrails here, and there are no retcons. The danger is real, and one wrong power blast could vaporize a crowd of innocent bystanders.

Just one small mistake can start a downfall, and it takes a lot to walk the true path of a hero. You fall, and you fall hard. After the crowd destroys your statue, the city will tear it down in disgrace. That can't happen to a Marvel or DC character. They are "profitable IP" and can never change, and when they are sold to the next company, here we go again.

And you don't know how good a superhero game can be.

Hero System went from the garage today to my coffee table, and now it's heading to an upstairs shelf.

How Much Game Do I Need?

I got a shipping confirmation for the new Kobold Press crowdfunding book for ToV, and my 5E books are heading into the garage. I like ToV; this is the best version of 5E out there, but 5E is far too much game for me. I will keep it, but it is heading into the garage once it arrives.

I hate that feeling.

Sometimes I feel like selling all my 5E books would make me the happiest, and I will just stick with OSRIC and OSE and have just enough "fantasy game" for me. I don't need all the 5E structure; it is too much. The entire 5E industry overwrites and doesn't care one bit about efficiency, conciseness, or compactness; the 5E market is the "bigger SUV" market of gas-guzzlers and shelf-eaters.

For a "power-based game," a superhero game gives me much more. Sometimes I look at D&D 5E and compare it to something like Champions, and the latter is the better choice. Why am I messing around with games that sell me prebuilt superheroes (powers on a level track) who talk like they're at Ren Faire? The designers prebuild these builds at level 20 and then slowly hand you the powers over 20 levels. They make money by selling you new ones once you get bored of the old ones.

It is the difference between a deep-fried fish sandwich at a fast-food place versus knowing how to fish and prepare your own food. The fast food is worse for your health, more expensive, and never what you want. Yes, learning to cook takes longer and isn't as easy, but it is far healthier, more rewarding, and cheaper to feed yourself with all-natural shelf staples and healthy foods.

And nobody in a superhero game is redefining terms, controlling the language, or telling me where my powers come from. I do that. I swear some of these games care more about thought control than about shipping fun games. Give me a generic framework, please, and I will tell players what these things are. Or games like Vampire, where some factions have these powers and others have those powers. Thematically, yes, cool, okay, but in the end you are all superheroes with different shapes and themes. Vampire stuff affects you, werewolf stuff affects others, and we are done; please pick your superpowers now.

Are you a mage? Oh, then you have to deal with the mage disadvantages. A demon? Then holy stuff hurts you. Same powers, different shell. We are done here, and nobody is buying predesigned packages that drip powers out one at a time with an illusion of choice.

My Champions stuff fits in one box, and it is in the garage.

My 5E books are nearly 20 crates of the same size.

That one box does far more than the twenty.

And most of the power comes from one book.

Off the Shelf: Adventures Dark & Deep

I still love this alternate 1E game; it is huge, expanded, full of great stuff, and all still 100% 1E compatible. Adventures Dark & Deep is the ultimate "Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy" version of 1E, and even the monster book alone is the definitive 1E bestiary, expanded, full of fun monsters, and worth the hardcover price.

As a standalone game, few have matched its scope and depth. This is the ultimate "modern" version of 1E, and it does compare nicely to OSE Advanced Fantasy. As your "core game," you cannot go wrong here, and this is easily decades of fun. The game also has expansion books, such as the Cthulhu Mythos, and they work well as either Dark & Deep expansions or 1E expansions.

So why play a "lesser" game like OSRIC 3? For the same reason you might prefer Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. Some do not want all the expansion content and just want to focus on the core, basic, original game. Expansions can muddy and confuse the game, creating too many race and class options for people to sift through.

You add bard and drow options, and people flock to them. Sometimes I want players to consider only the core, original, solid options, which is what the original adventures are balanced for, and I don't want a party full of special ancestries and hybrid classes. This isn't ruling them out forever, but the choice of game says what the game will be and where the focus will be.

Someone who has played a paladin or ranger will likely choose a new expansion class. Everyone wants to play a bard. Everyone wants to play an expanded ancestry.

Sometimes a more focused game delivers a better experience. The moment you open the floodgates of 1001 ancestry and class options (and subclass options), everybody can be anything, and those classic choices disappear. I am a star centaur dark reaver warlock hexblade antipaladin! Right. No.

This is why we need generic, be-anything, do-anything superhero games. If you want to be that, go play a superhero game and have anything you want. The death of the superhero gaming genre killed fantasy gaming, and the floodgates opened, letting fantasy become a superhero game with pre-canned builds companies can sell you for quarterly profits.

OSRIC 3 is a choice. Dark & Deep is an expansion, and it is also a choice. Both are entirely compatible and deserve to live on the same shelf. For me? Less is more, and I play OSRIC, just like many play OSE Classic Fantasy.

I'll migrate to Dark & Deep if I ever get tired of the original game's options. I will probably have fun here. This is just as "correct" a choice as OSRIC, and in some cases, the better one. But as I rebuild my gaming life, I want to start simple. For me, right now, simple is OSRIC.

OSRIC: Still Holding Strong

I do not regret my decision to upgrade to OSRIC. I still love OSE and my books, and I'm getting the new edition and the Demonic Grimoire soon. I'm looking forward to those books, and OSE is still a beautifully compact, portable game. In that feeling of "the tiny capturing the infinite," OSE still can't be beaten.

But OSRIC is wonderful, and one of its best features is how it limits character options. OSE has fallen to the modern design theory of "more is better," and we have all sorts of ancestries to choose from. As a result, the default world has too many ancestries, and each one means less. No orcs, no goblins, no ogres, no fox people, and no distractions. Humans alone have enough diversity; just look at our world if you want inspiration. You could add diversity to the other ancestries, too, but don't give any of them mechanical benefits. Giving every diverse ancestry option a special trinket is silly, reductive, pointless, and overdesigned.

Plus, I want my ancestries to mean something. Be an elf or a dwarf. Pick a diverse background for them. Celebrate that ancestry. It is rich, diverse, and an amazing culture to explore.

If people want special ancestries, talk to me as the GM. This isn't a rejection of all of them, and I know people will want to play as dark elves, but that option exists in 1E material, so talk to me. The world, as it is defined, will be what is in these books.

I can always pull in Unearthed Arcana for the dark elves, or any other 1E-compatible resource. Converting from OSE is another option, but you will need to set allowed classes and level limits (OSE has these; use them as a base, get the table's agreement, compare similar level limits, and adjust). You can pull in any OSE ancestry like this, so you still have choices; the default set just resets to the original 1E game's set.

I don't want the modern World of Warcraft style world, where 1001 funny-shaped player avatars run around, and the company keeps adding new ones while watering down and ignoring what they already have. It gets to a point where new MMO character options are introduced just to pump up quarterly numbers; the new option never gets proper respect or treatment in lore, and next quarter a new one comes out, the company will ignore it and shove the old one on a shelf like a toy that never gets played with. We get the same "sales mentality" in tabletop gaming, and it ruins our worlds.

Humans, elves, dwarves, and the core ancestries are amazingly diverse. There's already more than enough here. With limited choices, my stories and worlds are much better. I have focus again. My history and world-building are clearer.

But if I am pulling in OSE ancestries, why not just play OSE? I enjoy OSRIC's limited options better, and I always have my OSE books should I want something special or different. OSRIC's turn structure is superior, and phased casting gives casters real choice and balance. The fighters mean something here, especially with specialization. Rogues have real meaning with their backstabs. I have to mod and house-rule the game far less to enjoy it.

If I want a tiefling or dark elf, they are always there. But they are limited, special choices, which makes them feel special and unique. The basic books are all I want or need, and there is plenty of other 1E material out there to last me a lifetime.

OSRIC. vs. BX: The Fighter

It all starts with the fighter.

If there is one reason to play OSRIC over OSE, it's the party's core: the fighter. Without a strong fighter, the entire dungeon game falls apart, and we see this today in book after book of power-game caster powers, desperate to distract players and keep the "next OP thing" on digital store shelves.

Without a strong fighter, the whole game falls apart.

And in BX, especially OSE, the fighter comes off as just a good attack, a pile of hit points, and the best armor. I have to pull in zines to give the fighter any viability. It is not enough. Sure, in a basic game, the class is fine, but it doesn't scale in power and capability as well as OSRIC. The OSE fighter starts as one thing, and never really changes or feels powerful.

OSRIC makes a very good fighter, and this one competes with Swords & Wizardry on timing alone. Where S&W focuses on damage, OSRIC focuses on combat timing and structure, making the fighter the "lord and master" of the battle.

Weapon specialization for that first-turn, first-phase attack makes the fighter the first one to act. Every other turn, they go through phases 1 and 10 twice, and as they level, it gets better and better. And they get this from level one. Heroic assault at level 2 is the "slay the room" power, which OSE is only just adding. Might blow comes into play occasionally, but it simulates the overpowering effect of higher-level fighters outmatching some foes.

Multiple attacks and initiative-phase buffs make the fighter highly desirable to play. They have not only the best defense, but also an offense that can shape the fight.

Every other class sits downstream of the fighter. You can't even begin to understand or balance thieves, magic-users, clerics, or hybrid classes unless your fighter is rock-solid and desirable to play. If you can't get the basic core martial class right, you aren't playing D&D or a dungeon game. It is superheroes with funny shapes and accents, I guess, and the designers at Wizards are falling over each other trying to give every caster Fireball and Wall of Force. They really don't know what they are doing.

OSRIC sticks with 1E and gets it right. I haven't felt this positive about fighters since D&D 4E, which had some powerful fighters and martial classes, but was saddled with terrible, card-based play. OSRIC builds fighters into the timing and structure of the combat turn, and it needs few special rules beyond this simple design. I don't need a dozen pages of subclass rules, new martial feats, or any other modern designer dongle or rules hack.

What gets me here is how deceptively simple this is, yet it works. And OSE's fighter doesn't go all the way; it sits on a too-simple structure, meant more for rules-hacking and modding. This was Gygax's criticism of BX: the entire game felt too nebulous and undefined for organized play, and too "whatever the table felt it was."

I love BX.

But Gygax was right. A little structure solves many of the fighter's problems in BX and sets up the rest of the game's classes for success.

Off the Shelf: Legend

The original Legend game by Miongoose Publishing is still in print and worth keeping. This OGL game made all its test content open under the OGL and restates the RQ2 ruleset many loved.

Yes, I get that Mythras has replaced this under a better license. But this is original source data, like an original Unix distribution, much like the first Cepheus SRD, and it forms a pillar of our hobby. And yes, Mythras is a great game (albeit with a tiny font), but Legend is a small-book game that captures my imagination more than the massive hardcovers do.

The only thing that comes close is OpenQuest, another great fork of the original RQ-style rules. Cepheus, OpenQuest, and all the other fan efforts will keep these systems playable and open long after the rights pass to someone else, and things get locked away behind website portals, subscription services, and closed gardens. These will be the last games we can truly own and share.

When companies buy up the last available IP and move to smaller IPs, it will all be locked away, and you will be forced to pay for it through a subscription model. This is already happening in Hollywood, as the franchise series we loved are being merged and bought with the goal of making us rent our happiness and memories.

Even the defunct OGL is a path out of this corporate hellhole we all face.

If you are playing a closed-garden game, you are on the side of the media-powerhouse merger and rental model. They'll sell D&D like this for billions; prices will rise, legal threats will go out, and customers will be shoved into a portal for a monthly fee. Sorry. This is the road we are all looking at ahead of us. And once D&D is sold, other recognizable IPs and similar ones will be sold. Properties will be snatched up. There will come a time when Wall Street comes in and buys everything up like private homes, turning it all into rental properties. Some markets are so hot you probably can't find private homes anymore. 

We haven't gotten there yet in gaming, though in AAA gaming you can see the warning signs. You don't own your games. Physical media is being dropped. There will be no second-hand market anymore. They can wipe your games if you stop playing for a while or say the wrong thing online.

Again, we are a few years out from this, but you can see the warning signs in D&D with digital-only DLC and releases. Once the website shuts down, all that digital content goes poof. Gone forever. Like it never existed, and they can sell it to you again in the next edition.

The line is drawn now, at least for me.

And if you support closed-source games, you're honestly contributing to this mess and what is coming. All the closed-license games get sold. I start talking about them less and less. They're all dead ends, with no future, and really not worth my time. All of them will end up on AI and walled gardens. All of them will be state-enforced rental schemes.

I still have the open community editions of these games. I can still play them in 10 years. I can still create derivative works and self-publish.

In 10 years?

I doubt most people will even have what we have today.

There is Enough Game Here

More isn't better, and these days I will happily choose quality over quantity. I find OSRIC 3.0 far more of a game than I will ever use, and I don't lament losing copyrighted content from the original 1E books. Part of me finds it liberating; my worlds are truly my worlds now, and my creations don't include copyrighted IP. My worlds are mine, and I have enough monsters here to tell any story I want.

Since OSE is a smaller subset of this, and OSRIC is closer to 1E in spirit, this feels like home. I got the classic campaign bad guys here: dragons, demons, humanoids, giants, and all of my favorites. If I want, I have the Swords & Wizardry and Dark & Deep bestiaries close by, just in case I need an odd monster here or there.

I have been testing the rules and getting used to the combat round. The classic party of four, fighter, thief, cleric, and magic-user, is highly capable, and the martial classes shine brightly. They are tougher than I expected, taking down four 2 HD monsters in most fights and taking some damage, but they still feel capable and strong.

But the resource game is at its best. Characters get hurt and stay hurt in 1E, and there are no "cheap rests" to save you. Tabletop gaming has gotten entirely too risk-averse, and if you can't push your luck a little, that is not adventure, and there is no excitement. You take a few scrapes and bruises, and you keep going. You can't "heal your way up," and every resource gets taken down. Playing smart is conserving what you have and thinking your way around encounters. 

Creative play is cutthroat and smart play, not the "e-sport" dungeoning has become.

I don't like what modern dungeon-crawling has become. It is overly concerned with story, to the point where the story is more important than the game. It celebrates copying powers from anime and movies, and sits downstream of pop culture. It isn't itself that others copy. When D&D invented the Dark Elf mystique and culture, something that everybody copied, that was cool. When D&D is shipping "Airbender" classes, get out of here; you are being reductive and copying others.

Be the thing that others copy.

And 1E is the perfect example. A vague notion of what could have been came first with BX, and tabletop gaming peaked with 1E. Everything since has been a copy, a reductive version, or a weak attempt to recreate the original magic. 2E? Written out of fear. 3-5E? Wizards MTG-ification, card-based powers, and ultimately flawed and unsustainable card-season design theory gave us multiple incompatible versions over nearly 3 decades.

1E is the purest implementation of the idea, unburdened by decades of pop culture and fear. Nothing here is driving another book sale, and some argue that adding books to 1E makes it worse. A near-perfect game doesn't need much more, and that is freedom for me to fill in the rest with my ideas.

OSRIC vs. BX

What am I seeing that most of OSR YouTube is missing? Why am I so hyped about OSRIC? How does 1E fix most of BX's problems? Why is 1E superior to BX?

Timing.

In BX (going by OSE Classic), here is the turn order:

Combat Sequence Per Round (BX/OSE)

1. Declare spells and melee movement
2. Initiative: Each side rolls 1d6.
3. Winning side acts:
1. Monster morale
2. Movement
3. Missile attacks
4. Spell casting
5. Melee attacks
4. The other side acts in initiative order.

They follow a strict turn order to compensate for the lack of OSRIC turn timing. Spells must be announced at the start of the turn, so if you lose initiative, the spell can be disrupted if the caster is successfully attacked or fails a saving throw.

Note where missile attacks land in this turn order; this will come up.

If you aren't using this turn order in BX and are playing "fast and loose," you are missing the point and making casters too powerful. The entire BX turn order is a patch that tries to simulate 1E's elegant combat turn, but it breaks or forces attacker classes into a set order, eliminating any granular, meaningful detail in combat.

BX combat is "one size fits all."

Let's hit OSRIC, and I am NOT going to AD&D, since AD&D's initiative order is confusing because you are "rolling for the other side." OSRIC cleans this up and keeps the same core idea. In OSRIC, you roll for the phase when your side starts.

The order of events in OSRIC is as follows:

1. Determine Surprise (d6) and encounter distance.
2. Declare Spells and General Actions.
3. Determine Initiative (d6 and you go in the segment number you rolled, so a low roll goes earlier and is better). Missile attack bonuses may let individuals make ranged attacks before the main group attacks. Also, higher-level fighter-types may attack in specific segments with their Melee Attack Combinations instead of the rest of the group.
4. The party with initiative acts first (casting spells, attacking, etc.), and results take effect (except spells, which have casting times before they take effect). Note: Some actions may let the other side “interrupt” with an action, such as a fleeing attack or attacking charging opponents with spears set against a charge.
5. The party that lost initiative acts, and results take effect (except spells, which take effect when casting time ends).
6. The round is complete; declare spells and general actions for the next round if the battle has not been resolved (go back to step 2).

Seems very similar, right? I can't see the difference, and I did not at first, either. It is "just initiative," but lower is better here? Both sides go on their own roll, so how is that any different than side-based initiative in BX? So there are "10 phases" in a combat turn, so what?

Three things change that number:

1. Casters start casting the spell in their initiative phase and end when they complete the spell's casting time in segments.
2. High DEX missile weapon users can "jump ahead" and lower their phase by the DEX chart modifier.
3. Weapon specialization locks multiattack turns to phases 1 and 10 for those weapons.

There is a fourth thing for what OSE calls "slow" weapons, forcing them to always lose initiative, which is a hack and overly punishing. In OSRIC, weapon speed only breaks ties for combatants in the same phase, and the overly punishing BX rule for slow two-handed melee and missile weapons always losing initiative is gone.

The caster starts the spell in their phase and finishes "casting time" phases later, giving anyone in between a chance to attack them and disrupt the spell. This is the missing caster balance we have been looking for in every edition of D&D Wizards has put out. Are you a fast-attack specialist, or a high-DEX archer? Chances are you will be the one taking shots at enemy mages and ruining their spellcasting. And it is such a simple timing rule! Modern game designers have to think their way around the barn to get what Gygax gave us in 1E, and invent dozens of pages of subclass abilities and combat rules just to capture what a simple timing system built into combat does in 1E.

BX is too simple, and slow spells aren't any different from fast ones. What combat spell you pick matters here. Are you using a fast-cast combat spell (Burning Hands, fast, happens in the same segment), or winding up a massive, slow-casting fireball (3-segment cast time)? This is the baseball "bunt" versus "grand slam" choice casters need to make in combat. Do I cast something in the same phase, or wind up and hit them with a big spell later, risking losing it?

What? Betting theory in casting? Take a big risk for a big effect?

Quick, somebody start a crowdfunding campaign to write and sell a new game with these revolutionary rules! The same ones we had in 1980! Somebody make "Advanced Combat Casting" for 5E and sell these rules there, too!

BX spells don't have this built in, and none of them have segmented casting time. This is where 1E clearly beats the too-simple BX. The second part of caster balance is risk-reward, which BX and 5E both simplify out of the game, leaving us with overpowered casters again. They keep spell disruption, but entirely miss the point of the gambling choice casters must make.

It gets better. High-DEX missile weapon users jump ahead and can attack ahead of the party. If you know classic Tunnels and Trolls, this is the pre-combat "missile weapons phase" in that game, where missile weapon fire can happen before party action. The party may lose initiative, but the party's missile-weapon users can still go before the monsters. You can also hold your phase and wait for a monster to start casting, and target them. All this in a simple turn-order rule that other games ignore.

You don't get that in BX or 5E.

It gets even better, as if I need to pile on. The optional weapon specialization rules give you a 3/2 attack rate at levels 1-6 for two proficiency picks. The double-attack turns are the odd ones out, meaning on turn one of every combat, your specialized weapon attacks in phase 1 and phase 10. So, my fighter who picks weapon specialization for their longsword acts in phase 1 at the start of every combat, and they get an extra attack at the end of the turn to clean up. You get two attacks at the start of battle, and you always win initiative with that specialized weapon.

It is like getting a free action surge every other turn at level one. BX needs house rules and zines to spice up the fighter. The 1E fighter is plenty spicy.

5E writes dozens of pages of rules to address this and invents an overcomplicated, slow action economy system. They stack dozens of pages of subclass options to give me what 1E builds into the combat turn. Players flip through their character sheets while my 1E fighter knows exactly what they are doing this turn. 

Going first. Killing things. And mopping up.

And all this for only a moderate increase in turn-order and timing complexity. This is easier than 5E's action economy and overdesigned collection of special action types. Gary Gygax was a genius-level game designer, and today's designers often fumble in the dark trying to simulate this elegance and powerful simplicity. OSRIC just boils it down and makes it very clear what is going on, even to new players.

And since the spell lists have phase timing, it all works together beautifully. BX spells do not have this.

You may prefer BX's simplified combat; there are times when I couldn't care less about phase timing. But never assume "1E is BX with a bigger book and more rules" - it isn't. 1E refactors the BX system by adding a critical timing layer to combat and rebuilding D&D around the phased-combat system to better balance casters and buff martial characters. You don't need to "add spells" to balance martial classes, 5E! We have this in 1E! And OSR YouTube, for the most part, ignores this core difference and presents 1E as "rules-heavy BX."

If you read OSRIC, you will see most of the differences between OSRIC and BX are related to this phased-turn system. Once you understand this simple change, you unlock the power of 1E, and your games get much better and more tactical.

Gygax knew this was how you could fix casters and buff martial classes with an elegant, simple, clean phased-timing combat turn.

It is pure genius.

The 1E Bard

"The bard is an unusual class that starts out similar to the thief class, representing something like a medieval wandering troubadour, but at higher level is accepted into the secret society of bardic colleges and becomes a master of law, lore, and hidden knowledge, allied with the ancient druidic hierarchy."

-The Heroic Legendarium, p24

But OSRIC doesn't have a bard!

It does now.

Not having a bard felt limiting to me; I could hack one together with a multiclass thief/magic-user, but a classic bard class felt like it would push me more toward a 2E clone, like For Gold & Glory. We have an excellent bard, found over here in the Heroic Legendarium, an expansion for 1E material, but it works perfectly with OSRIC and any 1E game.

We have a d8 hit die and thief abilities that progress as thieves, but stop at 8th level. We get a morale buff, singing that negates monster singing attacks, and enthrall. What makes this version of the 1E, 2E, or 3E bard the best is that the book includes entirely unique "bard songs" used for the spells. Yes, bards, here you get your very own spell list. This is the premium deluxe; nothing held back. This book is mine, 1E bard. 96 music-based spells, all yours.

Since these are written for 1E, all spells have casting times and include segments. This is where BX spell lists break when trying to use them for 1E, and you can't claim 1E compatibility unless you include casting time all the way down to the segment, since 1E needs this for caster balance. Without segment-based casting, casters begin to become far too powerful. Time has always balanced casters, and lesser designers simplified the concept, thinking the audience couldn't handle the depth.w

Gygax knew how to balance casters: put them on the clock, let them get hit, and the spell gets lost. Instant martial advantage, and a huge buff to ranged, and rogues, the party's fast attackers were the anti-caster "spell defense" of the party. What do we get today? MMO DPS classes with a few skill tricks.

The more you see how Wizards removed the time factor in its versions of D&D, the more the house of cards starts to collapse. Even BX is weak to this comparison, and all BX derivative games share 5E's problems because of oversimplification. I have to call this out. I love BX, but I will call out its weaknesses and point to a superior design that fixes the fundamental flaw of oversimplifying casting time.

These bards are cool. They are the bards we deserved, and this book plus OSRIC is a match made in gaming heaven. You are not borrowing spells from other caster lists in a lazy hack, some sort of "house band" that never plays its own stuff. You get your own spells here, never borrowed, and you are not a "cover caster" recycling the greatest hits of other spellcasting classes.

Well, that makes a lot of my books useless, and it puts a lot of these other lazy game designer bard implementations to shame. If I see another bard implementation that sloppily borrows from everyone else's spell lists, I'm tossing the book out the window.

If you want 1E's superior design and a bard the game deserves, check out the OSRIC 3 plus Heroic Legendarium combination.

It's music to my ears.

The More I Learn OSRIC...

...the worse 5E gets.

There is an element of timing attacks, delays, spell disruption, and weapon specialization that OSRIC (1E, or AD&D) does in the base combat turn that renders most D&D 5E level 1 to 5 fighter abilities useless. The more I learned about OSRIC and its massively cleaned-up AD&D combat turn, the more Gary Gygax's genius shone through in a way that shocked me.

This is seriously good stuff. The original "advanced" game beats 5E by a mile, and my first-level fighter with a longsword specialization is making two attacks every other turn, starting with the first. So, an AD&D fighter has a permanent "action surge" every other turn?

Lethality is way down from Old School Essentials and most BX "death at zero" games. Because death happens at -10 hit points and "aid" isn't a roll, I have rarely had any outright deaths at level one. Even if my party is completely defeated, rarely, they go as low as -10, and as a game master, I can rule that the PCs are captured and ransomed, or that they need to attempt a breakout a week later from a cell.

AD&D is less deadly than BX?

What? This is not what D&D YouTube is telling me.

INT casters have a "max spells remembered" that is separate from Vancian magic slots, and they fill those slots from this "max pool," which they need to swap out and relearn from their spellbooks. Magic users are powerful, yes, but they are treated with far more respect and have more interesting learning and memorization mechanics here than "member a million spells' games. Magic users are cool and need to think ahead about the challenges they'll face.

Casting time and phased combat balanced caster power.

As I force myself to learn the system, the wisdom comes through. And future editions begin to fade. We really did have the best game back then. What 5E tried to do with special powers, 1E originally handled through structure and attack timing. We had all that before they tore it out of the turn structure and forced you to write it down as "subclass options" and powers they give as you level. They removed all the built-in options the turn structure gave us and turned them into record-keeping on the character sheets.

And a lot of new games live on assumptions and fallacies from older games, push some new designer trick, and call the old games clunky and too complicated. Design-wise, many crowdfunded games can't hold a candle to 1E. 5E breaks at high level; 1E doesn't, and it took us that many editions to figure out the company running D&D ships broken editions every time they bump up the version number.

1E doesn't break, and if you learn the system, it offers greater tactical options and a deeper caster game.

A few thousand monsters and spells, along with hundreds of subclasses, don't make a good game. It makes a worse one.

1E in the Age of BX

"Dictums are given for the sake of the game only, for if ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is to survive and grow, it must have some degree of uniformity, a familiarity of method and procedure from campaign to campaign within the whole." 

"If it is all too plain and too easy, the players will quickly lose interest, and your effort will prove to have been in vain. Likewise, if the campaign is too difficult, players will quickly become discouraged and lose interest in a game where they are always the butt; again your labors will have been for naught." 

"The danger of a mutable system is that you or your players will go too far in some undesirable direction and end up with a short-lived campaign. Participants will always be pushing for a game which allows them to become strong and powerful far too quickly."

-Gary Gygax, AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Page 7

The huge push for AD&D 1E had two parts: D&D's early game was going in a million directions and getting out of control, and business reasons (royalties) to consider when creating a new game. That last part sucked, but I get it. But Gygax's words at the front of the original DMG warned us against much of what came after.

One is a warning against BX. I get it; BX is an amazing creative platform, far better than AD&D, and people knew that back in the late 1970s when this all started to come apart and AD&D was needed. Go to a convention, sit down to play "D&D," and you don't know what you're playing. You see this today with 5E tables, and the push for standardization is strong and needed for organized play.

Another warning worth heeding is making the campaign "too plain", which you see today in the multiverse-of-magic model modern D&D 5.5E is built on: every world is a colorful box of marshmallow shapes, everyone has magic, the planes are everywhere, and magic replaces technology. Today's modern, cosmopolitan, sci-fi, alien-packed D&D is both too mundane and far too magical. No unique ancestry is special anymore. Magic is so common it is boring.

A power level that gets out of control kills your game and drives players away. I don't like DMing a game where players laugh at carefully created challenges, and D&D 5.5E is horribly broken above 10th level, and they admitted they slacked off on testing the game's balance. Gygax carefully balanced AD&D to work all the way up to high levels. Ever since AD&D 2nd Edition, they have been destroying that.

But compared with BX, AD&D gives me more mental stimulation and puzzle-solving, which I enjoy more than BX's straightforward, highly malleable game. BX is like Silly Putty; it can be anything you want: a sci-fi game here, a detective game there. Where BX falls short for me is in being too simple and too malleable. There is nothing to "sink my teeth into" regarding weapon speed, reach, and encumbrance playing a major role in my martial character's survival.

There is a sidebar here about "BX Incorporated" which feels like a lot of the OSR these days, and the non-BX options feeling like second citizens. Gary's feelings about BX being so malleable and undefined are both its greatest strength and fatal flaw. I love BX, but not every retro-clone needs to be it, and we've forgotten plenty of what made AD&D so great.

My BX mage can choose from infinite spells and understand them all instantly. In AD&D (specifically OSRIC 3), I have a maximum number of "understood" spells per level, which defines the pool I can memorize daily spells from. Sure, I can play an INT 9 magic-user, but I can only understand 6 spells per spell level, and I will need to swap them out and relearn them from my spellbook to put them into that memorization pool. Practically, your INT is high enough that you don't hit the limit unless you are very high level and have collected a few hundred spells. Realistically, this is the balance we have always needed for casters: it forces them to study and build spell pools to pull from when it's time to memorize daily spells.

I like this feeling for magic! The spells are so big and complicated that they're hard to hold in your head, and you need to keep studying to swap things out and pull in ones you haven't used in ages. This one rule creates the Gandalf who sits by the fire, reads his spellbook, makes room in his head for that wall-of-ice spell he never uses, and tells the others to be quiet so he can get his understanding to roll, so they can all live tomorrow.

In BX and D&D 5E, mages have infinite RAM in their memories and can hold 300 first-level spells in their brains, plus 1500 others. There is no "re-understanding" a spell, and mages become entitled and overpowered mana conduits of death, with far too much spell choice, no forced thematic study, and, frankly, boring and overpowered. BX at least makes them less survivable, but I love AD&D's quirky thematic rules that force a magic-user to "act like Gandalf."

And games that copy elements of AD&D but forget these Gygaxian fiddly parts emulate the math but miss the finer details that "make the dish complete." The new OSE adopts AD&D-isms, but it omits all the intricate, Swiss-watch, deeply thematic, genre-defining minor rules. Watered-down AD&D is sometimes like a fast-food restaurant trying to make its own version of what a 5-star chef would prepare. 

Better than the burger on the menu? Yes. Is it exactly the same as what the master chef gave us?

Clearly, no.

And AD&D 2nd Edition, a game I love, lost its soul and started to creep into story gaming, moving away from the fiddly, intricate mechanics that forced players who learned the rules to act like the class the rules presented.

And OSRIC 3.0 is the community-supported version of the game, always there, and easy to learn and teach. People can publish for this. Until Wizards puts the original books back in print (unchanged) and open-licenses them, this is the best we got. You can't touch perfection. This is as close as we can get, and it's something we can build a community around.

And AD&D/OSRIC is far less complicated than D&D 5E, especially when you factor in the action economy, how builds interact with it, and what's allowed and what isn't. Mid- and high-level D&D 5.5E play is more complex than GURPS, and the combat turns take far longer to figure out. With AD&D, the mid-complexity is harder than BX and low-level 5E, but it keeps a flat difficulty curve all the way up to level 20. BX stays too simple, while 5E gets far too time-consuming.

And the complexity pays off, especially for martial characters balancing weapon speed and reach, picking specializations, gaining those bonuses, and fine-tuning their combat profile. Oh, and if you are not wearing a helmet, roll a d6. On a 1, your AC is 10 this turn as the blow comes at your head. Ah, thank you; all those dyed Supercuts hairstyles in 5.5E with characters missing head protection, go away. Football players and soldiers wear helmets, so should you. BX doesn't do that unless house-ruled, but why house-rule when we have it here, and it is a standard rule at all tables?

The more I sit down, forget the biases modern games have implanted in my mind, read the original AD&D books, and learn the classic 1E game, the more I see what's wrong with today's dichotomy between BX and 5E.

Off the Shelf: OSRIC 3

I love Adventures Dark & Deep, but it is a massive game. The low-level starting guide helps a lot, but I'd still play it after I'd exhausted 1E. And there is a lot to play in 1E. Dark & Deep feels like a massive modded game, and while I absolutely love those, sometimes a clean, basic ruleset appeals to me more than a "more stuff" game.

I want something clean, tight, with limited options, easy for new players, and expandable.

And I want a game that works.

OSRIC 3 will never let us down, nor will it ever be torn up and changed. Version 2 was very close, and version 3 is the closest yet to perfection. The first edition was one of those perfect games, and the downfall started when they messed with the formula, started commercializing the game, and sanitized it in reaction to the Satanic Panic. The second edition is really only as good as it is because of the first edition, but it was always a step down from its peak.

OSRIC is like OSE Classic for AD&D.

Sometimes, BX or 1E is all I want or need. A simple alchemical base. A clean, constrained, blank canvas from which I can create a million ideas. I don't want the extra stuff, and I can add most of it myself. Sure, this game doesn't have bards, but the book above has a great bard, and people have been hacking homebrew classes into 1E for nearly 50 years. Besides, the bard has been a bit of a trash fire for the last three editions of D&D, and I don't mind a game that lets me step away from them for a while and bring back the one I really like. This is true of many other expansion classes, too.

BX works well with 1E, and most of it is fully compatible.

1E is the only game that ever delivered balanced high-level play. Forget 2E; the expansions and splat-books blew it up. 1E is the only version of D&D that you could play to maximum level, and it still worked. BX only goes to 14. 1E goes all the way. It will never be broken since, like the original OSE, it is a reference work.

And high-level play is still very deadly. Resurrection is never guaranteed. Death has a price. All characters will die in this game, either after a short, adventurous life or after settling down and having heirs. Any other game that keeps your character alive forever is lying to you.

And OSRIC is community-supported. This is its biggest strength. Sure, I can buy POD copies of the original books and keep them safe, but those will not be on sale or available forever. OSRIC will endure long after the company and IP are sold off and merged into another trillion-dollar entertainment monopoly. I love the original game, but I love the community more. This is why I support OSRIC. It is open-licensed. They can never take this away from us. It will never change. It uses the fixed numbers and math the hobby's creator approved.

It's a beginner's game for 1E. That has never been done, and not even the original 1E game is easy for beginners. I can teach someone this pretty easily. I can do this with the Dark & Deep basic book, too, but OSRIC feels like OSE Classic Fantasy to me. I can teach anyone 1E.

But why 1E over BX?

For the same reasons Gary made AD&D: to standardize the rules. To have consistent convention play.  To reduce arguments and eliminate rule inconsistency. To have a balanced high-level game, something we've lost in 50 years of D&D and never had since.

Sure, BX is the beginner game and always was, but for people who come together and play seriously, 1E was the version of the game best designed for official and convention play. 2E fell into the story-gaming and power-gaming trap, lost its edge, changed the math, and it bankrupted the company. BX does not create a solid, long-term, convention-ready ruleset that eliminates ambiguity and house ruling. You don't have to make much up to play 1E, and everyone can agree on the rules and rulings. Ultimately, this speeds play and standardizes the experience for everyone.

Gary knew 1E was the best version of the game for long-term play, and in more than 50 years, that is still true.

While my 1E books are the original source, OSRIC is the community edition of the classic, and far easier to hand a new player and for the community to support.

Video: The Fatal Flaw in 5e's Math

A good video from Mike Mearls today.

Wizards barely tested high-level 5E play. I do have a lot to say about this, but frankly, it is not his fault. When you work for a company that refuses to give you the resources you need, you do your best. I've been there many times. It all comes down on your back. You take it on yourself. You get the gray hairs. You go home every night feeling like you are heroically trying to hold it all together. 

Mike did his best here, and I thank him for being honest. We need more of this in our hobby, and we need to elevate moments like this. Honestly, from one creator to another, thank you.

It is not the person; it is the company that barely tested high-level D&D 3, 4, or 5 play.

And now they want to sell us Universes Beyond.

And possibly 6E.

I'm done. If Gary didn't touch it, I don't want it.

Hold On To Those Open License Games

Don't sell them. Don't give them up. And never stop playing them.

If a game cuts itself off and puts part of its rules or class designs behind a paywall, it isn't worth your time. It is all but garbage. If you need to play the game fully and it isn't open content, the rest of the game gets infected by a closed-source license.

Don't be fooled.

Even the defunct OGL is superior to many of these closed-source games. Hold on to those too. D&D 3.5E, Pathfinder, 1st Edition Mongoose Traveller, and others - preserve these.

ORC? Creative Commons? Other open "share alike" licenses that allow data portability? Good games. They deserve your time and support. Be careful with these; some lock parts away behind their paywalls, and the game doesn't work fully. These are bad games and not worth your time. If games start "pulling support back for open licensing," then you do the same.

Open-license games will be the last games they allow us to have when pen-and-paper gaming goes "AI streaming" and nothing is allowed to be owned. It will all be rentals. You won't own anything.

This is already how it is going in the video game space. Nothing is owned.

Games with open licenses are the last ones you will ever be allowed to own, share, and talk about.

Everything else will be locked into a subscription model.

Even housing is being forced down that path.

The OGL Crisis was not about D&D; it was about data ownership and freedom. It was about AI. It was about weaponizing IP law and having the state enforce rental schemes. It was about taking a game's math and data, putting it in a JSON file, and watching it blow away like dandelion seeds.

If you play a closed-source game, you're part of the problem. I don't care about friends or feelings, or how nice the books are. They aren't, and you are supporting rental models which forbid ownership and freedom. Some of these companies are now extending ownership rights in what you are allowed to say about a game, or they will take it away from you. Just look at AAA gaming. Free speech limitations are a part of the EULA.

If anything could be owned or shared, nothing could be forced into rental.

You can't take away a game everybody owns.

Refuse to rent.

Support open gaming.

The only games worth owning are the ones that allow full sharing.

Off the Shelf: My 2d6 Games

All of these are Cepheus-based, and each is the perfect amount of game to play with an AI. I see these slowly killing the last of my 5E collection, and that is a strange thing to say. I can be against AI art and still play these with an AI chatbot; it isn't taking anyone's job, and it is using the compute power they are giving away for free in a creative way.

Again, we are not making art.

We are just using the models as a text-adventure, and playing them by a real-world game's rules.

There is a difference.

Just make sure data sharing is turned off; I do care about privacy. Plus, read the terms of service. You gotta be careful. Never assume anything on these systems is truly private. It isn't. Or use a private, ethically sourced local model, which is where this is all going in 3-5 years. Make an informed choice.

But asking an AI to sort through a full 5E version and parse bonus actions, free actions, and those pages-long subclass designs wastes tokens and compute power. This will burn more power and resources from our planet, so the less tokens you use, the more you can help the planet, if you care about it that way. 5E is an incredibly inefficient, bloated, and overwritten to an almost laughable degree. Simple games that an AI can grasp and master are the future, plus the AI can make up all the things a simple game doesn't do.

All I need is a simple 2d6 resolution system that can be communicated easily to a model. An AI can do 8+ on 2d6, and I am betting an AI can figure out BX far easier and cheaper than it can 5E, so there is still an option there. BX is probably next, once I standardize on a system. It has to be lightweight, not a few hundred pages, and I want something simple that doesn't throw too many special cases at me.

But solo play with oracles? Without a computer, it works, but this does everything much more easily. Because we are using rules, wish-fulfillment is constrained. That can happen with solo play; you can cheat yourself far too easily or make rulings that make everything go your way. With an AI on the other side of the table controlling enemies, each one will be a challenge, and they will try to outthink me, pursue their own objectives, or stonewall me against a course of action. They will call in allies for help. They will set up roadblocks. An AI running the opposition makes them deadly and smart, and I do not need artificial challenge from "expanded monster rules" to make a foe deadly.

I have had AI opponents throw more challenge at me in text-based games than I ever had in years of trying to solo 5E. I sat there, perplexed, stunned at how carefully a foe had boxed me in and cut off avenues of approach, taking the high ground in a situation with a realistic thought process, and I was the one standing on the outside, feeling hopeless, like a frontal assault was the exact dumbest thing to do. And it was. The AI would even admit to boxing me out. I had to change tactics to something it didn't expect. I had to judge enemy injuries without an "easy rest" system like some video game, and tell the AI that the wounded needed to get off post to seek care and rest. Then, time could be used against them, and waiting until a shift change or a better time to strike at night became an option.

I have found oracles for solo-play tend to confirm your own biases and double down on your own thinking; if a situation is only going to be a frontal assault, then that is how you are going to use the oracle. You will either use the state machine and generations in the oracle to make the frontal assault easier or harder, and any 5E system will tell you, "the fight should be balanced," and you are meant to win anyway. By "balanced," it means "even the dumbest choice is a winning strategy."

An AI will make stupid mistakes and needs correction. You will need to speak to it "DM to DM" every once in a while and tell it that the last ruling or paragraph has completely lost the plot and all the marbles. You will argue a ruling or logical plot construction, just like you do with a real DM. You will correct it and make it roll back the last paragraph, because what it just said was so stupid it defies logic and reality. That is happening less and less to me, to the point where I am starting to see a local AI system as superior to oracle-based play.

An AI will create an infinite, procedural, realistic, and NPC-filled world for you in the blink of an eye. Anywhere you go, something or somebody is there. In the wilderness, there will be no one. You can "tweak the matrix" and suggest things to drop in, so it isn't without your input. Just like a DM, if you search for travelers along a road, you may find a few. You won't know where they are or what they are up to, but the AI may throw you a bone. Or it may not. Or you may eye-roll and tell the AI that, in a rarely traveled borderland region, no circus troupe would be wandering around. That call will be pulled back, and you will get something sensible. Those moments happen, and you need to be able to call BS on your DM. Just like in real life.

An AI DM on a local model running in text-adventure mode is close to what we think an "AI DM" will be, but don't be fooled. What is coming will be much more than this - transformative, with image generation, 3d map generation, 3d models pulled from the ether, and a system unrecognizable from any high-end VTT or even 3D MMO. This stuff will kill the VTT and MMO markets in one fell swoop as the new generation of models takes over and creates experiences that seem like magic.

And it is not you who will matter; the "normie" market will swoop in and decide if this is ethical or moral for you. To be honest, me sitting here playing in text-adventure mode like I was typing on a Unix teletype terminal feels honest to me, conserving power and tokens, sticking to simple games and text only, and trying to understand the experience before the market attaches to a hybrid 3D AI fantasy experience like a million lampreys and the choice is made for the industry, and the ethical thinkers are silenced.

The normie market will always throw a few billion dollars at something flashy and wasteful, which is how we got into the situation we are in with 5E. The lowest common denominator has the most money; ethics and conservation be damned.

What I do over here will be orders of magnitude less wasteful, keeping ethics and ownership of the games and IP concerns as hard constraints. I keep AI art out of the discussion. I try to be forward-looking while keeping my soul. I tweak my models and experiences to be as efficient as possible. I minimize token use, especially for repeated procedures. I will use power-efficient systems and chips. I use the AI and ask it, "Was that wasteful? Is there a better way to do this?" I will minimize RAM usage and expensive lookups.

The planet matters.

IP matters.

Ethics matter.

And I will walk away from games so stupidly complicated that they burn tokens every turn trying to figure out the game's action economy and power usage layers for each and every combatant. All I need is a simple ability score, skill, and combat system with one action per turn. Stunting, special attacks, and special uses of powers are up to me and my AI DM to figure out, exactly how we used to handle this in the days before overwritten rules.

BX clearly beats 5E here, and an AI DM turns the system into a more expressive and flexible system than the overthought 5E morass we are burdened with these days. If Wizards ever fails in the AI market, the blame will squarely land on an overcomplicated 5E ruleset that blows up when billions of tokens are burned trying to figure it out for the player base. They own the better game for AI, and hubris will force them to dismiss it and fail in their online strategy yet again. Don't get me started on how expensive all these tokens will be, and how they never needed to spend all that money delivering an inferior product for the job. This is their mistake to make, and their money to waste.

BX is the better game.

And my 2d6 systems are the king of simple, straightforward, token-efficient gaming.

I'll be over here on my Unix terminal having fun.