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.