Must Have Skills vs. Mechanics

Perception is a skill everyone must have in 5E. I really do not know why this is a skill at all; it is so common that it should just be made an ability score at this point. Some skills are so common and "must-haves" that they should be removed from the game and made core mechanics.

If your life depends on your ability to spot things in a dungeon, why wouldn't everyone have this trained?

Just give this to everyone trained and skip having to buy it, or get rid of these "perception skills" (like insight) and fold them into the rules. Create perception secondary abilities (physical, mental, magical, and social) and get rid of them as skills.

These "non-job" skills always bugged me. Blacksmith? Fine. Survival? Okay, passible. Religion? Good. Climbing? Another okay skill.

Perception? Who can get a job as a "Perception Expert"? Insight? What are these other than "screw the player" skills to punish those who don't buy them? Skills should mirror professions, not activities.

If something is in the game that is a core ability in perceiving, understanding, or participating in the natural environment, it should not be a skill. These should have baked-in mechanics in the rules, since they are so common that they are core to the game's experience. Remove perception from the skill list and bake it into the game.

Even movement skills should be trained to open up movement types, such as climbing, balance, hiking, or swimming, and the rest of the movement-related checks should be ability score rolls. They should just be checkboxes.

The entire skill system has always been a core flaw of Wizards' D&D, to the point that they rarely get things right, and have some situations where they lean on the skill system too hard to drive the game engine.

Fighting for Classic Star Wars

So many have given up on Star Wars that it feels hopeless. We are like Luke, sans hand, clinging onto a central shaft antenna, learning Vader is our father, and giving up all hope.

I know the feeling; this is the same feeling I got with 5E. There are some things I like about it; it is still D&D, after all, but I really can't agree with most of it. It is not that "I can't stand it" that is hyperbole; if "new Star Wars" is on, I may watch some of it, but I won't go out of my way to keep up on it or watch the newer movies again. Same with D&D 5E, I can play it, and it isn't terrible, it is just so clunky, the character sheets are massive, and I have better.

I just don't really care for the new Star Wars stuff.

Like, I do not care for the new D&D stuff. And that's okay.

But I am not going to throw out my great memories of either.

Legends Star Wars fans are sort of where the OSR was during the 3.5E days. Why do we need you luddites? What is this OSR thing? You people are insane for holding onto the past, clinging to outdated lore and stories, and looking like you worship clunky, worthless, old, and outdated material. 3.5E works well enough as an "old school" game if you want it! You just have to flavor it, and things are fine. Why aren't you using modern rulesets?

These days? The pure genius of BX is slowly dawning upon people. How the game was about mapping the unknown, the brilliance of group initiative, and the careful tracking of time and resources. The sheer magnificence of BX reveals itself in play, creating engagement, tension, and a fear of the unknown, and delivering compelling gameplay.

BX is rapidly replacing D&D 5E as people's game of choice these days. This is what the cool kids play. This is where the fun is. You won't get burned out or tired playing BX; you will have fun.

If all you enjoy is the Legends stories and universe, you will have fun.

You can dream here again.

This is the OSR fight. We know "real D&D exists," and we can hold it in our hands. We can play it. We love it for what it is, and the experiences it brings to our tables. The game is classic, the memories golden, and sharing the experience is unifying and creates bonds with others.

We may see the old stuff recycled into the new, but that does not tarnish or change our memories of it. We know what an AD&D beholder used to do; this wasn't a video game monster, destined to be a challenge and eventually defeated, no, the beholder was a permanent character-killer, disintegration-ray-firing, TPK machine. The beholder cut character egos down to size.

And we know real Star Wars exists; it is just so hard to stay focused, since what we are being given today is so poor in quality that we want to dismiss it all. The constant nostalgia farming and endless bringing back of the "greatest hits" diminishes our memories of the past; it is almost a reverse nostalgia, where the more they bring up the past, the less we want to see of it.

But I like classic Star Wars like I like classic D&D, and I will fight for it. Star Wars represented something magical, a call from the stars to be better, to reflect upon our sins, and to feel goosebumps at the sight of brave heroes overcoming all odds to stop evil and save the day. To hear the music, and cheer when good triumphs over evil, or feel despair when evil delivers a deathblow to the forces of good.

This is as much the story of tragedy as it is of heroes.

These are the stories of adventure series from the dawn of cinema.

In D&D 5E, it feels like you will never die, and level 20 is a sure thing. There is a boredom of inevitability with the system, a certainty that sakes me to say "so what" to the entire character progression system. I don't really care about 5E characters since I never feel any real threats to them.

In a BX game, characters die. In Star Wars, characters die. Given the nature of Star Wars, it is a bit harder to die than in BX, as you have a few heroic mechanics to save yourself, but those can and will run out if you are stupid and careless. Or just plain unlucky.

But, just like in BX, a character's death is not the end of the game. It is the beginning of a new character's story. In 5E, you have this immortality clause, which means if you do die, it is quite likely the end of the game, and you won't really want to create a new character of that level again, just due to all of the character sheet complexity and build choices.

What hurts is that it is hard to be a Star Wars fan right now. In the OSR, indie games and new content are constantly coming out. Even if D&D is taken off the shelves and never sold again, we still have enough like it to get by.

With Star Wars, we have one game and one source of new media. The game is worth your support, and I feel that playing it and loving the classic universe sends a message. What makes it hard is the constant negativity streaming in from the new projects, and you get despondent and feel hopeless, like "Star Wars is garbage."

Well, my memories aren't garbage. The games I played with my brother aren't either, nor are the characters we played in this universe. How I felt back then isn't either. How I looked forward to the movies and the excitement I felt while in line for the original releases of each film is not garbage.

And yes, I saw each of the first three movies in the theater in the first week of release.

Those weren't just good times, they were pure magic.

They ignited a passion in me for art, storytelling, and technology like nothing else could. Part of me feels that the forces seeking to diminish Star Wars know its power, and that this is an attack on our future as a people and species. I love space and technology. I love art and music. I love great storytelling. I love lasers and spaceships.

But we are in an age of the trite and mediocre. Corporate storytelling. Nostalgia farming. Live services and subscription models that force us to accept the lowest common denominator. It is easy to give up hope. The new movies are not on the level of what we had, and the television shows are mostly forgettable. It makes me feel that we can't bottle magic anymore.

But there is a way.

And for me, it is through gaming and the Legacy books and movies. I can capture that magic as much as I want, as often as I want, and all at my gaming table with a character sheet and a set of dice. I just need to imagine and block out all the negativity in my head so I can enjoy those good times.

Like a Jedi in training, I block out the negative emotions and calm myself, channeling only the good times that once were. With my mind clear, I can create thrilling tales and stories again. The universe can come alive. The dreams and emotions return. The dead feeling I had is gone. The hope shines brightly.

Dreams are worth fighting for.

Short Rests in Combat

Like many of you, I have a deep appreciation for 5E. It is a clean, modern implementation of D&D 4E, born out of 4E's Essentials line of books and revised by some legendary designers.

But a class feature allowing you to take a short rest in the middle of combat is just...

This means the system is so broken that nobody cares about what happens past the 10th level. You can't die; combat is auto-win-press-the-button, and now you get to press a button, heal up, and teleport out of the dungeon with all your loot.

I can go over to the dragon's treasure horde and shove it into my bag of holding. It is a short rest. After we are done, teleport us out. We have what we came for, including the captured princess. The divine pause button has been pressed. Even if this is patched to allow "no hostile actions," it is insanely, grossly, game-endingly overpowered.

Being able to "freeze frame" your enemies at the 10th level is so broken narratively that this insanely overpowered power will circumvent every end boss fight.

Here is another scary thought.

Evil 10th-level clerics with the same power.

The evil cleric walks up to you, divine intervention is cast, takes all your stuff, and your party does not wake up, ever. No one even finds your character's bodies.

It's just dumb.

I am sticking with Level Up and Tales of the Valiant.

At least with these 5E implementations, a community of testers was consulted, and their input and feedback were considered. You don't get these "game killers" dropped on you in the official rulebook, with little or no testing or input. More house ruling and more "not in my game" lists of broken content.

The ink is already on the page. They will likely have to patch this and invalidate your hardcovers again. Trust me, every 4E book was like this, too. With their processes, this has always been a systemic problem at Wizards, with the only exception being the original 2014 D&D and the all-star team that worked on the original 5E, who are all gone now.

It is a mess, and I bet it will be patched soon.

Sandboxed 5E

I can run a sandboxed game using the base three D&D 5E books. However, these days that is a tall order. The game has moved on; people have favorite builds in newer books from Wizards, rules have changed since the original books were released, and people expect the more recent features.

This is a lot like late phase Pathfinder 1e for me - I didn't want to play with anything else than an entire shelf of books. There is so much cool stuff to play with! Why just play with the core books? Are you crazy? Rogues suck!

In the PF 1e book, they fixed rogues, but this highlights the problem; as in D&D 5E, the base-book ranger sucks as well (so I hear). So I play with quite a few things broken and live with it.

This is also the appeal of One D&D, three base books with fixed classes. We must wait two years for that if the Earth lasts that long. Well, what to do in the meantime?

Go 5E, Blue Pill

One option is to collect tons of 5E books from Wizards and jump in. There is a lot of fluff and stuff I won't use, and the quality level of the builds and classes feels low overall - outside of the few rules in each book. Still, this doesn't address a lot of the issues the base game has; just sort of patches over them. Rangers, warlocks, and a bunch of other classes have a lot of issues and require multiclassing to be interesting.

Still, I am a little turned off by the crowd of hardcore optimizers out there who have created the optimal builds for everything to win the game, and a part of me feels 5E has been "beaten" and not really worth learning or starting this late in the game's lifecycle.

I built a party of 5E characters, and they feel uninspired and plain.

OSR, Red Pill

The obvious option is the OSR; let's get that out here. Castles & Crusades is so attractive when I compare it to any version of 5E. I look at 5E character sheets and see the same bloat many modern games have. The character sheets are long, with particular special abilities that apply to things that come up rarely or combat abilities that fit into particular places into the combat system, and need a paragraph of rules per ability on the character sheet.

I have seen entire sets of rules shorter than a printed mid-level 5E character sheet. Seriously 5E players and game creators, has no one noticed your character sheets are worse than Rolemaster or Palladium in terms of complexity? Love the game, but hate the bloat. I am leaving the tax forms of Pathfinder 2e out of this discussion too. Love that game too, but appalled they think of players as computers that can fill out excel spreadsheets and branch conditions in their heads.

Some games are just made to sell digital character sheet subscriptions to online services. Very little thought is put into simplifying rules because it would hurt profitability and retention.

And some games resemble a pen-and-paper computer game way too much.

With Castles & Crusades, I get everything on one 4x6 card that covers an entire character with the same depth and cool factor as a 5E character. It is easier than a typical OSR game, too; no lists of thief abilities, turning charts, attack numbers vs. AC, skills, proficiencies, or saving throws are needed on my character sheet. No huge paragraphs of rules printed on 4-6 sheets of double-sided paper for a single character.

Castles & Crusades is the game that sits in the back of your head, saying, "I can do that easier, faster, and with less record keeping than what you are playing now. And you can focus on story, not rules."

It even says that when I am playing other OSR games, "Why are you writing down thief skill percentages and all those specific saving throws? When did you ever save versus wands?"

Yes, C&C is annoying, but I love it and cannot live without it.

Yes, C&C is one of those games once you understand how much cruft it throws out, everything else feels clumsy and antiquated. Part of Wizards' 5E problem is that the game was designed across many books by many writers, and it kept sticking things on the giant sticky ball of rules with each new release. Again, 6E is a reset, but I do not want to wait.

5E Clone, Purple Pill

My final option is to play a sandboxed version of 5E. There is no sticky ball of rules spread across multiple books because the games are stand-alone complete versions of the game.

Low Fantasy Gaming, Into the Unknown, 5 Torches Deep, and Level Up Advanced 5E are perfect 5E clones that act as sandbox worlds insulated against outside changes from the official Wizards books. These are all great ways to still play 5E but play in a sandboxed environment where you can focus on a few books and have a clean and focused experience.

I like Level Up Advanced 5E a lot, and it is a wholly cloned version of 5E with tons of improvements. The game is just three books, created with the latest changes to the core 5E rules in mind. Tool proficiencies and other changes are in here, and this is a core set of rules I would like to learn. I know base 5E is more straightforward, but this game feels like it will preserve the 5E mechanics as played in 2014 to 2022, just like Pathfinder 1e preserved D&D 3.5 mechanics and still does.

Game preservation is essential! People grew up playing 5E, and we should keep the game around as-is for future generations to enjoy. I know, for 5E players, this sounds strange; just keep going with 6E and One D&D, and then Two D&D, right...?

Welcome to the OSR, 5E.

We preserve experiences for future generations to enjoy here.

We are a living museum of gaming.

One of the strange parts about being in this museum is your game needs to be "open source" and OGL and not really under the stewardship of Wall Street or other companies that want to "lock down" the game, hence why the 5E clones are so crucial to preservation. And the words "One D&D" have a double meaning in that Wizards only wants one D&D to exist. The one they control.

I want everyone to play, to be able to create a 5E game, and for what people love to be preserved.

Level Up is essential because it is the most complete and similar to how people play the 5E version of the game we have in the OGL community.

Low Fantasy Gaming is a fantastic set of rules with pulp-action and dedicated resource management mechanics. This, to me, feels the most like OSR, but also with some excellent 5E-style design and thought put into resource management. Where Into the Unknown and 5TD do "5E-like" sims of OSR games, LFG takes OSR concepts and codifies them into game rules.

This game also introduces several great "hardcore" rules that fit right into a modded hard mode 5E game.

That is the most "5E" way of doing things, strip mechanics you do not need and give players new mechanics to enhance and enforce flavor and genre.

5e Hardmode

This excellent rule supplement for 5E introduces many optional rules to make 5E a harrowing, gritty, Dark Souls-like experience. This is caused by the same folks who created Low Fantasy Gaming, so I love this company and the rules they put out.

Healing and Death

This is a needed set of rules to even approach 5E, as I can't stand the zero hit-point unconscious, healing word, zero hit point, healing word, rinse and repeat exploits of the base game.

This would not feel right if that was in a video game. Imagine playing a CRPG, and you could get away with the instant resurrection of seriously wounded characters by common heal spells. I come from the OSR, and zero hit points should mean something more than being knocked down by a non-lethal laser in a He-Man or GI Joe cartoon.

This set of rules is a small booklet introducing a few really great rules. Rule #3 is excellent; one death save at the end of the battle, fail and die. Healing magic or assistance gives an advantage. Combined with rule #4, that healing magic at 0 hit points takes 1d3 minutes to take effect, is another good rule.

Resting Rules

Combined with the resting rules (rule 5), they add the resource attrition game from Low Fantasy Gaming into 5E, which is beautiful. This set of rules doubles the class abilities and spells available, which seems like a massive boost in power, but these abilities are regained on a 2d6 roll with an average of "half expended" returned every long rest. Short rests do not return class abilities. Most of the results are "half" or "none" expended are returned.

It does seem like an odd rule, linking all spells and class abilities with long rests, but I can see the logic. Give the players a larger pool of resources, and make regaining them slower and harder, requiring a long rest. I am supposing doubling spells and class abilities and making them regain on long rests evens out with the ones regained with short rests and rapidly recharged over and over again.

Short rests are only good for regaining hit points with hit dice.

Retreat and Chase Rules

The book has rules for retreating from a fight and also chases. They mention the retreat rules are the most critical part of the 5e Hardmode rules since this allows the referee to throw any type of encounter at the party, balanced or unbalanced, and gives the party a heroic "escape" if things do not go well. This also makes refereeing the game much easier since you can play looser with balance and have more brutal monsters show up for a real challenge.

I sense OSR fans wrote this. And I really appreciate it.

Highly Recommended

Honestly, I can't see playing 5E without this. Level Up Advanced 5E or Original 5E would work great, with my preference being the former. This is a straightforward "mod" of the game that adds that wonderful and dangerous OSR flavor to 5E games, and it lets players stick with a 5E set of rules (what they are used to) and increase the difficulty of the game to epic proportions.

To me, this makes 5E a challenge, which interests me. I can't play a game that I know is too easy, or it is impossible to lose a character. I want that sense of danger. I like that thrill of overcoming impossible odds. I like that Dark Souls or Elden Ring level of challenge.

If a character goes down during a fight, that is a serious thing. No low-level spell or healer's kit will pop them back to their feet. They may suffer a severe long-term injury. This affects the balance of many written "boss encounters," but so what? Use the retreat rules. Or perhaps you will TPK. That should be a risk of adventuring.

I want resting to matter. I love that feeling of running out of resources, spells, abilities, and even healing hit dice for short rests. I also like resting to be a little unpredictable; maybe one character did not get a good night's sleep. All that factors into the adventure. Long journeys drain resources. Perhaps you need to rest a few days to prepare. Maybe that eats resources and increases the chances for encounters. Perhaps you need to use fewer encounters during a travel session and make spending those hard-to-recover spells and abilities a hard choice.

This is one of my "must-have" mods for playing 5E, and it hits all the right OSR notes for me and makes 5E exciting and tactically challenging again.

D&D 5 Players Talk OSR

I have watched a few discussions from groups that primarily play D&D 5 talk about the OSR on YouTube. The majority of them are fantastic, play the game you want, no edition wars sort of chats, so they are very nicely done. This is also not to say the discussions I watched apply to everyone, this was just a tiny sample size, but the thoughts I had after watching these are interesting.

How they reacted to some of the OSR standards revealed - not in anyone's personal attitudes or preferences, but in how Wizards developed the "secret sauce" of D&D 5.

Making the characters so powerful and impossible to kill negates the "bad dungeon master" or "deathtrap dungeon" syndrome.

As I watched these, those who loved the OSR's concepts, the focus on exploration, the decoupling of experience and combat, the rewarding clever play, and the multiple rewarding types of problem resolution - loved these aspects of the OSR. 

One in the discussions seemed shocked the OSR did not emphasize combat. There appeared to be a feeling the OSR did not reward or have any system of social interaction. They also lamented the lack of mechanical character customization. Pretty normal for OSR, so fair points.

What I felt they did not like the most was the feeling of horror, hopelessness, instant death, and powerlessness the OSR prefers. I got this feeling that few of them wanted to feel the "fear of the unknown" and the sheer terror of crawling around in a hole in the ground where avoiding combat was the way to go, and any character could die at any time in a combat encounter or because of carelessness.

Some even said, "Please tell us before you do this to our characters or incorporate these ideas into a game." Another said he loved the feeling of power in D&D 5, which ran counter to the discussion of needing to be careful in an OSR context. If someone has that much power, there is no need to be careful. I get it; pulling OSR concepts on a group of 5E players expecting the 5E experience is not nice. And this is a good point.

This was when the lightbulb turned on my head to the secret sauce of modern games. Combat is fun and gives a chance to show off. Wounds and lasting effects of any injury can be slept off in an hour. Resources instantly recharge like an MMO encounter. It is nearly impossible to die or even be taken out of a fight. The tabletop game is an action RPG video game you are meant to progress through and win.

All of this negates any fear of a "bad dungeon master" or a "killer adventure" and makes the game safe and approachable to play for the mainstream.

Either side is not wrong.

The OSR is excellent - and these are my games of choice.

D&D 5 is loved by millions - and is also excellent.

But why has the latter become massively popular? It is a good game, but in a sense, it always was, so what happened in this edition that changed everything so drastically?

People Were Afraid of D&D

But seeing those reactions to OSR concepts I just take for granted was eye-opening. I feel the reason why D&D was never really mainstream before D&D 5 was people were afraid of the game.

I even saw this back in the day when trying to recruit new players, "No, I don't want to play that."

They did not want to invest time, money, or interest in a hobby where a random group of people at a gaming table could "screw" them. Where anything they did got their character killed. Where they would never be "good" at the game since their character kept getting killed. The rules were too complex, and they felt "stupid," which often got their characters killed. A DM could hold a personal grudge against someone and kill their characters repeatedly. A DM could design a deathtrap dungeon with lethal traps and combat encounters and kill all the characters at the table.

Also, earlier versions of D&D were less focused on social interactions. It was really up to the group; you could either be hack-and-slash or go crazy in a social RP - with no rules - RP experience. The social interaction "rules" in the OSR are invisible and never written down because they are handled as the RP at the table and need no rules. Every group has its own way of doing it.

New games codify and create rules for social interactions to protect the players from "not knowing how" or "the DM with a grudge." Thus, any social interaction is "safe" because you can spec into social feats and abilities, and the "game rules say the RP is successful." Do you see the secret sauce there?

D&D 5's secret sauce is based 100% on removing the fear of playing the game with strangers and delivering a predictable experience.

This is like seeing a fast food or chain restaurant, not knowing the menu, but trusting you can walk into any of them and find something you would like to eat. You trust the company to train the chefs and employees to do the same job correctly and deliver a predictable experience. You do not need to "know the staff" to have a good experience there.

Delivering a predictable experience goes beyond just how the rules play; it extends into character builds, adventure design, monster challenges, how the party play model works, and every product shipped.

OSR Tends Towards Randomness

Also, you will see far more things in the OSR that break the "predictable experience" model. Lots of random charts and randomness in general, random corruption and mutation tables, insanity rules, panic rules that make you lose control of your character, random exploration, random or tiered spell effects, monsters that are mostly made up and unknown in each adventure, and lots of other chance-based events and consequences that take control out of your control and put your character's fate on a chart or a save-or-die roll.

Many great OSR experiences know how to leverage the unpredictable and use that to add enjoyment to the game. You see a lot of frustration in some video games with the "RNG" (random number generator) ruining an experience. This feeling plays into people's feelings towards the OSR and these types of games in general.

The OSR is a Trust-Based Game

With the OSR, the social contracts and connections with others need to be more robust - since you have players putting trust in each other and not "screw" each other with rulings or malicious refereeing. The love of the game and "doing it right" forms the bond of trust between the players and referee. The OSR relies on that currency of confidence and a shared love of the same to work. The most popular OSR games build this by building a love of the game in a community.

Differences are Cool

One type of design is not better, but the differences and design goals are fascinating. D&D 5 has a design goal of delivering a predictable experience, removing the fear of the game, and making the game easier to play with strangers. Character power in all of those goals needs to go up. Survivability needs to be high. Mistakes should be easy to recover from. Resources should replenish rapidly. Every fight should ideally start from the same level of power and resources to preserve balance. Randomness should be lessened. Retainers are discouraged.

The OSR is a resource management game. Combat should be avoided. Exploration and imaginative play are the keys to success. Resources do not recharge rapidly. An adventure wears down the party. Experience is often gold-based, so getting the treasure with the least risk and danger possible is ideal. Character power is lower to enhance the feeling of danger and increase the need to creatively problem-solve. Survivability is lower since the characters are simple. Randomness creates chaos, which plays against careful planning. And planning and hiring retainers are encouraged.

Yes, the OSR has some accessibility issues that D&D 5 solved, but I grew up playing the classics, so that is home to me. It is nice to live in a time where there are games that cater to everyone's tastes, and the communities are so cool with each other existing and sharing ideas.

Low Fantasy Gaming

A few games today have the playstyle of 5E, but they go way beyond the game and create their own look and feel. Functionally, there is very little difference between 5E and Low Fantasy Gaming (LFG), but in how the game plays and the tone it sets - it is entirely different.

You have the same concepts at play here, rolls with advantage and disadvantage, long and short rests, and all the same sorts of "5E pieces," but they are engineered to work in a completely different way and support the theme and tone the game. These are like the "heavily modded Skyrim" versions of 5E, based on the OGL, and they are true gems to behold.

LFG is the low fantasy version of 5E with less fantastical elements, more human-centric, less magic, lower power level, more lethal, and no magic as technology. It is 5E with the OSR feel. 5E players can drop right in and go. OSR players can get in too. It hits a sweet spot between OSR and 5E that feels very nice, like how Basic Fantasy bridged the 3E and OSR gap; this bridges the 5E and OSR gap.

Less Magic, More Grit

Less magic does not mean less fun. I feel modern D&D has morphed into "Magic: The Gathering: The Roleplaying Game," and magic is way too ordinary, not unique, and is used as a deus ex machina to handwave in modern technology. We need our cellphones, Uber Eats, lattes, convenient long-range travel, social media, and Roombas, so we will just invent "magic versions" of them and not force anyone to live like a primitive.

There are times I feel Pathfinder 2 ventures into this territory too with their heavy steampunk focus, and then there are times I think Pathfinder 2 does not know what it wants to be, so the game kitchen sinks in anything cool and hopes people like them for that. Pathfinder 1e was a kitchen sink game (with steampunk), but it focused more on the classic fantasy aspect of things, and you could easily ignore the high-tech stand-in aspects.

Tone-wise, once low fantasy genre-breaking elements of the game are introduced, it is hard to tell a player no, you can't play a cat folk or a goblin. I had had players who would purposefully pick silly or comedic options when we played dark fantasy, and while it was fun for a while, it felt like a denial of the game's genre or coping mechanism with the darkness. When the dice said "the funny person dies," the game usually ended, or someone got massively upset because their expectations were way off base from the start (and, as I suspect, they didn't want to play dark fantasy but did not want to say anything).

I know the player issue is challenging even bringing it up, but it does happen. This was decades ago, and we have since resolved this and understand each other these days. All is good.

They had this expectation because they were the funny, amorous, unique, crazy, different than the others, or unique ones traveling with the party, they would be immune to bad things that would happen. This is why I love Dungeon Crawl Classics; all those assumptions get tossed into the bin on your first zero-level funnel. Still, you can't force dark fantasy on players, and you need to play with people that love the genre.

Clear Focus

The game sets a maximum of 12 to keep some monsters legendary and brutal. The spells are completely entirely renamed. The classes are new and different. Magic is rare, mysterious, and dangerous. Resting does not instantly heal you. Wounds are dangerous. Death is easy.

The game feels like a reaction many 5E players have with the game being too easy and magic too ordinary and mundane. Seeing a party of players who can't die simply steamroll over every 50-dollar adventure is not fun. It is fun for the players in an empowerment sort of way, but for players who enjoy Elden Ring or Dark Souls style challenges and mysteries, an "easy mode" playstyle is not much fun.

And for dungeon masters, too, it gets boring to constantly see the players wipe out everything, and no one feels danger or any suspense. While I have not run 5E, I have watched quite a bit, and I have played games precisely like this, so I know how it is. Your players expect that they are all but invincible, and if you have a PC death, they naturally feel this is "obviously" DM bias against a player. I prefer games with a built-in higher level of danger and risk and ones that protect a DM where they can point to the genre and say, "dangerous world, in the rules, people die here."

Just Play OSR?

I know. Yeah, the obvious answer is to just play something like Old School Essentials or Dungeon Crawl Classics or any other great new classic B/X RPGs today. Labyrinth Lord. Swords & Wizardry. One of the tremendous AD&D clones. Why play an OSR 5E-like game?

Seeing a 5E game go in a different direction is very cool. The OSR style of play translates across the great game preference divide, and it isn't just an OSR thing. The style of OSR play is more a universal genre to be embraced by everyone, no matter what base set of rules you prefer and are used to.

This game is familiar, and it tweaks what people are used to and creates something cool and new.

Toolkit Options, You Decide

One of the absolute best things about the game is every third level, you get to create a unique feature for your class and character combo with your DM and from your imagination. They give examples, and while some are more rules-based (shield master/maiden giving a +2 AC with shields instead of +1), what you come up with is entirely up to you. The game invites you to tinker and play with the design as your character level and opens up the player's imagination and game designer skills. It could be something simple that means a lot to a player, such as "all horses love me" or "I have awesome tattoos that give me a bonus in reactions to others with body art."

It could be something more high fantasy if that is how your game rolls. The D&D 4's warlock teleportation movement power gets your fancy? Do the group and GM agree to include it? You got it. Poof!

Cool. Whatever. It is all good. Have fun.

This is your game. I would still roll for corruption for a magic-based power like that, though, just for fun, to give the ability a cost, be fair to everyone, and be consistent with the genre.

I love that open invitation to players to be game designers and have the power to customize their play experience.

Similarly, a "corruption" system for magic increases with every spell cast (or magic item used). The corruption effects, by default, all last for some time before they fade away, recede, or disappear. Only a terrible roll will make one permanent. But the corruption effects - by the rules - are all up to the GM. If you wanted to give a player cat ears or a demon tail, you could. If you wish to make them permanent by default, you could. If you want a new effect, you can just make it up. You could if you wanted a second corruption roll to make an effect permanent instead of adding a new one.

Some players feel magical corruption rules are the game designer "designing in" harsh GM punishments into the rules. This strikes a good middle ground, in that by default, most of the time, corruption is not permanent but something to live with for a few months before it fades. There is always a chance it doesn't, but that is rare, and ultimately it is up to the group to decide what they are comfortable with.

Rules Tweaks

The game replaces saving throws with a diminishing (but recoverable) luck attribute. Willpower and perception replace wisdom. Skills give a bonus and use a level-based reroll pool that mitigates the d20's fickleness. All ability scores are rolled equal or under for checks. They have an "exploit" system for heroics (minor, major, and rescues), so a player can try to disarm or know down an opponent when a blow lands. They have degrees of success for all dice rolls. They have "retreat and chase" rules to free up having to make every encounter balanced - you are expected to run at times, and it is smart. You don't know if a character is dead until after the fight when aid is given, and the body is checked.

Luck matters and can also be used as an oracle (with no luck reduction) to see if an old lantern has oil or an old tossed aside backpack has good supplies. Luck can also (with a reduction) be used to tweak unexpected results, like choosing a summoned monster instead of rolling it randomly or finding the same NPC you need in a town. Luck returns slowly, at 1 point per long rest, so it is steadily going down even during an expedition.

The game does a lot of pulp-heroic stuff and makes rulings on many OSR-style conventions to make handling them easy and straightforward. What you lose in "common magic" you more than gain in heroics and the cool stuff you can do during a turn. And it takes an entirely open position on specific combat actions, which in Pathfinder 2 are strictly controlled by tags and conditions. Here they are part of the "exploit system" where you can try to knock an enemy prone, shatter their weapon, stick the beholder in the eye, or do anything you can imagine and not have to check pages of conditions or tags on class features.

If you hit, you can do an "extra thing" - how big that thing is will determine if the heroic action is major (luck) or a minor (ability) check. If a mage falls off the cliff and someone is close, you have a "rescue exploit" that lets you make a DEX check to see if you jump over and grab their hand as a reaction. This even works for insta-death lightning bolts being flung at wounded characters to "push them out of harm's way."

Excellent stuff, and in many other games - not allowed.

The game has the "batteries included" sort of Savage Worlds pulp-adventure coolness built into the rules. And it probably comes from years of 5E play where the players were sitting there and saying, "wouldn't it be cool if...?"

Yes, it would be "cool if," so let's write a game that does that.

The Power is Yours

Part of me feels a party of Low Fantasy Gaming characters - even though they have less magic and lower hit points - is somehow more capable than a party of high-magic 5E contemporaries. Where in 5E, your rogue may hit with a dagger, and you are happy with the 4 hit points of damage, and you feel your turn is done; in LFG, you can attempt to also cut an armor strap with that attack and reduce the enemy's AC for the other players to take advantage of. This sort of "screwing with the enemy" is built into the rules and, as a player, makes me excited to play an LFG character way more than an OSR or 5E character.

Yes, in OSR, you can rule the same thing, but not every GM or player knows how the OSR magic works. Here, it is written into the rules. It is clear as day. Everyone can attempt this. If you are smart and play your turns right, you can actually get away with a lot more than a high magic system, and your characters will end up more empowered than in games that hang magic baubles on you and load you up with "now you can do something cool" feats at certain levels.

Characters here can do way more with less.

And they can do it practically for free.

The powers aren't locked behind a secret "yes, you can play it this way" or a restrictive tag system - it is just there, powered by imagination. You don't need a "magically interrupt and save another magic shield" that costs 50,000gp - every character comes with that ability built-in. Or a luck amulet costing 150,000gp. Or a sword of disarming that costs 35,000gp. Or a class option. Or a feat. Or a unique advantage. Or something locked behind a class power.

The more class options, build choices, powers, spells, and magic items you have, the LESS freedom you have after sorting through them all.

Low Magic = High Freedom

Low magic? Um, yes, if you want to call it that. I look at this game and see all the abilities restrictive game designers tried to hide behind magic items that come as built-in things characters can do. By going low magic, this game tells you, "You have all that built-in, no need for silly magic items."

Low magic here means high freedom.

What is the actual cost? You need to be engaged with the action, pay attention, and use your imagination creatively and inventively. There is always that GM-agreement thing for the action to avoid silliness, but a great GM will know how much fun a system like this encourages and play along with the creative coolness players come up with.

And if your group house rules that martial exploits can also be applied to spellcasting, you get even more options. Use that magic missile (lash of unerring pain in this game); a spellcaster can shoot weapons out of an enemy's hand with a spell. Oops. Things just got more fantastic.

Where other games would have you sorting through the rulebook and saying, "you can't do that," or "it doesn't say you can do that," this one gives you the rules for how it all works.

A Strange Game, but Cool

Yes, the game is low fantasy, but this is a fantastic pulp adventure if played right. Yes, it is low magic, but you can do more with your tools. Yes, the world is dark, but I feel you have more power to fight back against the darkness than in many other games.

And it mentions D&D 4E's "points of light" as an inspiration.

You don't need tons of magic items or tagged unique ability unlocks to be robust and have fun. In fact, having all of that can trick you into relying on "your rules" or "your gear" and take away from the fun you could be having without it. You can have all the magic spells, abilities, and items in the world and still feel relatively powerless. On the flip side, you can be invincible and bored.

Where is the sweet spot, and how do you get there?

By empowering the players' imaginations.

Dungeon Crawl Classics and the Early Years

You can see the Dungeon Crawl Classics seeds being planted with these early 3.5 adventures. They had the short adventure format down perfectly, the tone, the old-school feeling, the deadly nature of the dungeons, the shorter scenarios, the creepy factor, and the sense of fun in these early DCC releases.

But the game just wasn't there with D&D 3.5e. I feel what Wizards was releasing as rules just could not do these adventures justice. This is always my problem with big-publisher games and third-party material, and this applies to Pathfinder 1e and 2e as well, along with every version of D&D from 3e to 5e. You buy a third-party "cool setting" and it changes the feeling in a great, new way. And then the main rules trundle on with new releases and the main rules diverge in tone from the "cool thing" you want to keep cool.

And you have this cool dark elf sourcebook, and someone wants to play their war-forged fae-aspect plane-walking druid introduced in a later supplement. Not that I would say no, but the cool, unified, focused feeling of living and surviving in an underground world of shifting alliances and treachery feels lost with a plant-loving robot wandering through there. Sure, that robot is an outsider like a human down here would be an outsider, but this outsider is so outside the tone and feel of the setting they might as well be from outer space.

The D&D 3.5 Feel

D&D 3.5 feels like D&D 3.5, not really old-school. To me, there is this D&D 3.5 power gaming going on that feels hard to ignore. Cleave to great cleave. Feat choices. Multi-classing, and taking some of this and some of that. The higher-level builds that break the game, like the infamous whirlwind build. It starts off great like B/X, and then the characters get really inwardly focused on making their builds even more powerful. Old-school games don't have that tree-like build as you level, and to me, the characters feel more outwardly focused on the world, story, exploration, and strategy.

That exponential curve of power is built into a lot of the D&D 3 and later games. Where B/X games tend to be more linear power progression, games like D&D 3 and later start you off in a B/X feeling level one, and then quickly pile feats, choices, and power-ups to your class as you level. It is satisfying for players, but the downside is slow and complicated high-level play, tons of monster hit points and super-high ACs, an MMO-like dependence on magic item gear, and all sorts of interlocking combat rules, conditions, and rules interrupt mechanics that drag down play.

This is the shell game a lot of the newer editions play. It starts just like B/X, look! And then you hit high levels and the complexity of the system pulls the old "system mastery" platform lock in on you. If you don't stay on top of the builds, strategies, errata, new options, increasing combat choices, party synergy, and system complexity you can't perform well at the table. And often playing these games is so mentally demanding you don't have the time or desire to learn a new game.

Some people like the increasing complexity. I prefer games that have a fixed level of complexity at the start and to the end with a linear progression curve, so you have similar options, but you are better at them.

While these adventures at a low level may feel old-school, as you level things will progressively get more complicated and gameplay will slow down considerably.

The Early DCC 3.5 Adventures

They are still fun adventures, totally worth converting to your OSR system of choice, and this includes the DCC game itself. But they are not really DCC in spirit since they feel more like old-school tributes to the classics, so they have that AD&D tone and feeling to them.

This 3.5 series of adventures started in 2003. Of course, Pathfinder 1e steamrollered everything 3.5 back in 2009, and the world these were set in and the adventures themselves were sort of forgotten. D&D went 4e in 2008, and we liked that as a tactical miniatures game more than a roleplaying game. Pathfinder 1e, to us, was a continuation of the Grayhawk legacy of the level 1 to 20 heroic path. And we did find Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord back then as well, as the OGL was just getting started.

Dungeon Crawl Classics was released in 2012, and these adventures were more legacy throwbacks and it is still cool to be able to pick them up in PDF form and read them.

The Game, Refocused

Dungeon Crawl Classics was developed as an Appendix N rebuild of an AD&D-like game using the OGL if the conventions and tropes of the Appendix N books were seen as "more important" to the rules and systems of the game than the older Chainmail-based rules of the early era game. I love this reimagining of the game since it is almost like this Moebius-level art and style that changes your perception of roleplaying and fantasy gaming.

It is Heavy Metal, Moebius, grimdark, deadly, crazy, and gonzo. Once you get it, you cannot unsee it, and your perceptions of fantasy roleplaying are forever changed.

The old DCC 3.5 modules almost feel like "don't entirely get it" throwbacks in comparison, written for someone else's game and of high quality, but they feel like early works leading to the DCC game that feels like the result of someone's vision quest in life. There are hints and little clues in these adventures that you can see are clear inspirations for what is to come.

And DCC changed it all entirely and became a phenomenon.

Part of my problem with some of the 5E versions of AD&D modules is this tonal thing. D&D 5e just isn't AD&D anymore. The tone has moved on. To me, D&D 5e does not feel like a game where you wander into a room full of 30 kobolds and slay them all for 50gp and a tapestry. It feels wrong. It does feel more like a superhero game these days, with a lot of pop culture appropriation and anime emulation, with a dash of lifestyle branding and bucket-list life experience simulation tossed in there. The tone is way different.

Just like DCC's tone is way different.

And the tone matters. This is like Guardians of the Galaxy compared to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Worth Playing?

I still see the older DCC 3.5 modules as worth playing, perhaps in the Greyhawk-like world of Aereth, and this world could fit in all the classic A-series, S-series, B-series, and other classic modules in the world as sort of a throwback retro-remix sort of experience.

Heresy, I know. This world isn't even as detailed as Greyhawk or Mystara. But it does have a lot of the D&D 3.5-isms that later turned into main-game staples, such as tieflings and eladrin, which don't feel right in Greyhawk, at least not to me. And it has more than 50 brand-new adventures to collect and play. And if most of this world is undeveloped, well, I am breaking out my book of stickers and my sharpies and creating parts of the world myself - and that is a good thing. Hex-crawls here we come, and we are not stepping on anyone else's lore, sourcebooks, or novelizations.

A blank slate is a good thing.

I am a little torn on what system to use to play this with though. I would like to say Castles and Crusades for a more modern feel, but a part of me is just wanting to use Old School Essentials Advanced and have the perfect classic experience right there. Maybe throw in a few OSR things from Labyrinth Lord and other games. Sometimes simple is the best, and if you are going for classic feeling emulation, OSE is still one of the best games out there for that style of play.

I would not use the DCC system though, since that tone thing feels like a disconnect. With DCC, I could hex-crawl the entire world and just say "well the darkness has lifted like something out of Forbidden Lands" and go out and explore! Build the world as you go. Have crazy adventures in a post-apocalyptic world of the ancients, cross into extraordinary realms, and travel to the far future.

Comparing these early DCC adventures with what was to come is fascinating to me, but it also opens my eyes some to these classic-style adventures and what best to play them with. To me, the tone needs to fit the adventure. With the classic AD&D modules and these early DCC 3.5 adventures, the tone of OSE fits perfectly.

D&D 5e is a different thing entirely.

So is DCC.

My Go-To Games

Of the two B/X games I keep coming back to it would have to be Old School Essentials: Advanced and Labyrinth Lord. OSE at this point has become something of a D&D-like cultural phenomenon and is becoming the de-facto OSR rules set, and deservedly so because of its organization, clarity, art, and quality. OSE is very B/X, and even with the "advanced" style additions to this version it still feels like a new game to me, a B/X "what if" AD&D never happened and the ideas logically flowed into the original B/X rules and there was never a brand split.

The new additions to the game are balanced and "fit" well within a B/X world and design philosophy. There are some great additional classes that just beg to be played, like the bard and paladin, and they have been reworked to fit within the overall class balance of the game. OSE is also very approachable for those coming from 5E and other games and can replace 5E in many situations for that old-school experience you can't get with a more "play experience" engineered game like 5E.

Not to say that this is a fault with 5E, it is just very slick and does things to enhance the fun much like a videogame, MMO, or casino slot machine does. For example, death is hard because the game is designed to keep you engaged. Quitting or changing games is very hard if your story does not end. Your character can be an extension of your identity, and that is a further design choice to increase your emotional investment and keep you engaged in the game. Again, not bad things, but game designers know how to manipulate your feelings through an experience and they naturally want to keep you involved.

I still like Labyrinth Lord as my AD&D replacement (I know about OSRIC, I need to check that out). There are grumblings here and there about there not being any new developments for the game, how people wish it was as cleanly presented as OSE, and how it feels like it is getting on in years and needs a revision. I would like to see a cleaner and better organized edition, yes, but to me part of the charm of the game is "it is what it is." AD&D was by no means cleanly laid out, and if you can print out a few "quick reference sheets" you will have most of what you need. By the book reference will always be easier in OSE, but once you do it enough you know the book by heart.

If you grew up with AD&D, Labyrinth Lord feels more like that type of experience than OSE. I like it almost like I would an "AD&D emulator" where OSE feels like a "B/X emulator with reimagined AD&D content," they are not the same thing nor do I want them to be. There are things Labyrinth Lord does by keeping some of the class and build imbalances that I like, and once you start adding in variant classes from third parties that are not as cleanly balanced things feel right to me for an AD&D style experience. Pathfinder 1E to me is like this, there is plenty broken and unbalanced in that game and that is why I love it, even with Pathfinder 2E on my shelf.

When I want something balanced, the players may be new to this, and where every choice is great: OSE (either basic or advanced) and Pathfinder 2E are my top picks. And yes, OSE: Basic is still a great game, and not "less of one" now that OSE Advanced is out. I feel OSE: Basic is the more focused, classic and compatible game, where advanced is an evolution of that into an entirely new experience.

When I want something with the classic imbalances and an almost "modded Skyrim" level of customization with third party material: Labyrinth Lord and Pathfinder 1E are my top picks.

I don't feel I have to replace Labyrinth Lord for OSE, both can coexist and they are mostly cross-compatible.

When I want to play "what everyone else is playing?" Well, 5E, no question and no problem. I still appreciate the original version of that game, but we never really got into it, which I regret some. There is a new version coming anyways, so time to wait and put it aside to see what they do. And I have plenty to do while I wait with all these great games.

Retainers and Hirelings Through the Ages

The original B/X rules had rules for hirelings, specialists, mercenaries, and retainers; and also the books contained rules for buying ships and building castles. One could surmise that putting together a large expedition is a part of the game.

We go to the seaport and spend a thousand gold hiring a small force of laborers and mercenaries to excavate the ruined temple while guarding our work site from the tribal lizard-men who surround the site. Make sure to find a good captain to commend the men and an experienced crew boss to manage the workers. Oh, and we will need boats too to haul everything out - let's plan on a large haul.

You spend money to get money. You spend a thousand gold because you know there are tens of thousands of coins down there in that ancient temple to haul out with pack animals (you had to buy) down narrow mountain tracks while protecting your haul from the lizard-men who see that temple as a shrine to their ancient lizard god and will do everything to keep your almost-colonial ambitions for loot and wealth in check with a poisoned spear and ritualistic shaman magic.

The hirelings? In it for the money too - probably more than they will ever see in their lifetime, so they accept the risk of being eaten by a basilisk in exchange for making what would take years with sustenance agriculture, taxes, levies, droughts, family costs, and unplanned economies that eats a hole in the bottom of the money pouch for the average peasant.

People forget medieval economics these days.

The AD&D Era

By AD&D we started to see the shift towards the more traditional "adventuring party" style of adventure, and don't worry, enough bags of holding will keep your labor costs down to a minimum. You could teleport in and out with a small team and clean out almost any location with just five people.

There were some notable mentions of large groups of hirelings being needed for adventures such as The Tomb of Horrors and others, but I don't really remember any module requiring you to manage a large group of hirelings during the time we played AD&D.

To be fair, the rules for all types of hirelings are here, but the ramp up in character and magic item power moved our games from more of an expedition-based adventure model into a super-heroic one where a small party of adventurers could do anything. Given enough gates, teleports, bags of holding, floating discs, and other cash-hauling magics there was this work multiplier with convenience magic that allowed a small group of mid-to-high level adventurers to haul huge loads. This was one of those forms of power creep that entered the game at this time, "Here's a common problem, let's solve it with magic!"

You get these types of popular wishes of players and the magic naturally rushes in to fill the void, and I wonder at times if some decisions are better left as they are, and some core concepts left alone.

AD&D 2nd Edition I felt moved farther along the "party of heroes" model and retainers moved to the back in importance. Your characters adventured alongside the heroes from the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance - just like those characters - and who needs an army of unskilled labor weighing them down when adventure awaits! We kept the super-hero model of the iconic D&D party, based our adventures off the Tolkien-like book heroics, and never really fussed with hirelings in most cases.

D&D 3.x and Pathfinder

The concept of "character build as deck build" came into play with the 3rd edition of the rules and all of its subsequent variants, and I feel retainers and hirelings moved farther back in the entire scheme of things. This is my character build, and it can take on all comers! Who needs hirelings when my character sheet is the length of a moderately complicated tax form and I am ready for any special case rule thrown my way?

Pathfinder's adventure paths are also a great example of adventures built for characters of this generation of the rules, typically focused on the party of four or five heroes and built around a mathematical challenge rating system that ensures a slow-but-steady drip-drip of resources that will be used every encounter.

And the 15-minute adventure day was born because players tended to alpha-attack the first encounter with everything they had and then headed back to the inn to rest a day before they tackled the next challenge. This was also a way to mitigate resource management and bad luck, as a bad encounter ensured you needed to bug out and rest to recover your bad situation.

But retainers and hirelings? Really pushed to the back further I feel, and the concept of putting together an expedition of NPCs and random swords for hire seemed as alien to this generation of gaming.

World of D&D 4-Craft

By D&D 4 a character was essentially an MMO character, and I don't even remember hirelings being mentioned all that much in any D&D 4 book. I am pretty sure they were mentioned somewhere but we never used them in our "battle chess" type games of tight hallways and chambers, grid based movement, and some really fun encounters during the early days of the game that we enjoyed. We never had room for hirelings on the game board since all our play were those tight, one map, small corridor and room fights the game did so well before the books piled on and the game collapsed under its own weight of revisions and expansions.

We had fun with the game, but we felt hirelings were so far removed from the game - and characters were so powerful and cool - that we never bothered with them. It felt like a cool video-game on the tabletop and that is how we played it.

D&D 5

Hireling NPCs rarely become important during an adventure...

That quote is on page 94 of the 5e DMG, and a 2 gp a day cost for any type of skilled hireling in the PHB and that is mostly all I can find on the subject. Also, D&D 5 does not scale that well (from what I hear) with large numbers of low-level characters assisting in a battle due to the flatter dicing mechanics, so I can understand why you shouldn't really cheese your way through every fight with Robin Hood and his 20-man sheaf of merry archers in formation behind you vaporizing any enemy in the Monster Manual with vollies of longbow fire. We are still in the "party as the base heroic unit" model of adventure and game balance.

B/X Style Play

I like the focus on putting together a Tarzan-like expedition of no-name hirelings and specialists for an adventure. I like having to hire mercenaries to protect our camp and supplies, and buy (or pay) ships and crews to haul back the loot to civilization. I like worrying about our supply of pack animals and food, where we get water from, and being called away from the temple we are exploring to deal with an attack or threat to on the group we hired.

That is cool, literary stuff for me, and it feels good. I like developing interesting NPCs for these groups, mostly no-names but there may be an interesting few people in the mix to interact with and add flavor to the game. Plus this matches some of the old-time movies that I love where a brave expedition heads down to a lost jungle or Antarctica and braves all sorts of hardships and dangers while seeking the lost treasures of the ancients.

And in B/X games those extra tag-alongs are typically weak, unless they are expensive and skilled hirelings (which you can have a limited amount of). The rules are also simple enough where you could battle out most any action scene with hirelings and mercenaries thrown into the mix without spending hours running the combat.

I don't like the "magic-superhero" style of play where we loot a dungeon by opening up a gate between point A and B and shove the piles of gold through the magic portal with farm tractors. I don't like magic replacing the need for hauling tons of loot, like owning twenty bags of holding and shoving everything in them for a quick teleport home. I like difficult and limited magic in these situations, and limiting the number of "ease of use" magic items so large expeditions are still needed and the way to do things.

The heroes can still be heroes, and it does not change the cool story moments where a classic skilled five-person party is needed to get things done.

This is all interesting how things changed over the years towards more 'cinematic' and party-based play and away from the classic 'expedition to nowhere' novel-style party-plus-hirelings model of play. Tastes and styles of play change, but I find it interesting (and informative in choosing a game) to reflect back on the history of hirelings and expeditions in gaming and how everything changed over the years. It is also interesting that many B/X games faithfully keep the hireling, ship, specialist, and mercenary rules around so this era of play can survive.

Wargaming Roots: Wargame Complexity

A fun little snip on the design of the Tunnels and Trolls Adventures mobile game's "about" page strikes an interesting point here about the development of pen-and-paper games and the hobby's wargaming roots:

In 1975, as role-playing games were beginning their rise to popularity among the gaming community, Ken St. Andre found himself dissatisfied by the complexity and inaccessibility which rules systems of other games presented newcomers to the genre. Seeking a game with which to introduce his friends to the world of interactive storytelling, Ken set out to create a lighter and more flexible rules system which would provide players with greater latitude for heroic feats. He did away with the often times dauntingly complex stat sheets and tables found in the wargames from which the first RPG was descended, and created a game more inspired by the deeds of comic book superheroes. Ultimately, Ken named his game Tunnels & Trolls.

We have come a long way from the Chainmail "wargame" style rules to a more player-focused and I feel accessible B/X style, and then from there I feel we went deep into the wargaming side of the hobby again with D&D 3rd and 3.5 Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and then D&D 5. Our wargame roots are clearly on display and this has spawned an entire group of games these days that are more accessibility focused than complex wargame focused.

More Complex These Days?

In some ways, I feel we are way beyond the complexity of the 1970's wargame-roots games, especially with Pathfinder, D&D 4, and software like Hero Lab. D&D 5 I feel took a step back from the abyss, but I still feel the older B/X games and their clones do a better job at controlling complexity and focusing the action more on the adventure rather than the character.

Some products make me smile, like the Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a great book that tries to tamp down the complexity of the base game, explain things to beginners, and make a complex system easy to use. But really, when I think about it, I get this feeling if the effort were put into making the system easier and not needing a book like this would be a more laudable goal. Games that are simple and accessible to beginners do not need how-to books.

Part of me likes the complicated game though, and there are fans of this hyper-detailed genre of gaming, again, hearkening back to our wargaming roots and having detailed World War II wargmaes with rules for jammed turret rings, smoke capacity, the ammunition capacity and depression limits of of bow-mounted tank machineguns. I have played wargames like those, and while the one or two times that level of detail comes up in a 6-hour game you may be happy to have these rules, more often than not I find rules like this slow the game down more than they do add value.

I feel the same with detailed character generation systems. Our tendency as designers is to add more, to make options for every possible character type and background, and through universal inclusivity we weigh the system down so much we end up needing multiple pages for one character. Genesys requires three sides of paper for each character, and that has hurt our desire to play what should have been a simple storytelling game. Pathfinder, the king of complexity, requires Hero Lab these days, and it is not uncommon for us to be printing out six to twelve sides of paper for each character.

Less is More

And I look at the single-sided one-page character sheets of Labyrinth Lord and other B/X games and I see a lot of wasted space, and that is a good thing. I could do a B/X character on a quarter sheet of paper and put four to a side and still have plenty of room. Back in old-school Traveller we put one character on two lines of a sheet of notebook paper.

We still had fun with those games because we ran fun adventures and we didn't need detailed character essays for each player to pour over. I get this strange feeling at times that games use complexity to drive interest these days, that somehow a detailed character generation system makes up for a lack of compelling adventures and stories. That is really an unfair statement for many games, but I see so many games that are 90% character creation systems and then assume everything else, story, adventure, and how to have fun comes for free.

I would rather play a game that was 10% character creation and 90% story and background. Call of Cthulhu and Dragon Age are good examples of modern pen-and-paper games that minimize the game rules while maximizing story content and background information. I would put T&T in this category as well, especially with the incredible world-book in the Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition in the latest version of the rules.

B/X and Labyrinth Lord? These are more giant toyboxes with 10% character design and the rest of the 90% are monster, spell, and magic item lists. That toybox content is the story and background. There are times when I like this, since I make my own stories and worlds anyways, and other times when I miss having that world and story to play through (and save me the work).

How far off are the more modern games from the toybox model? It is a bit tougher to judge I feel, since you have a good portion of these games tied up in character design and it grows in size the more books you add to the system. My generic rule is: if a computer program makes character creation easy and error free, the character design system is heavy. If it takes me more than 5 minutes and a sheet of paper to design a character that is too long.

If you need to pass a book around the table for players to design characters you have dependencies in there that should be streamlined onto the character sheet (or eliminated from the game). If I play Pathfinder with a group again I would love to have class-specific character sheets, one for paladins, one for rogues, and so on...

Everything to Everybody?

It brings to mind the question, "How much character design do you need to tell a story?" There is a point where there is too much, where you are making a feat to cover a bonus to every possible action and interaction, such as a feat that allows you to call a truce during combat. These sorts of feats rub me the wrong way in two ways: this is codifying roleplaying and creativity, and you are adding unneeded complexity to the character design system. Without this feat...you can't roleplay this? When I am refereeing the game it becomes another added "thing I have to remember" in order to play when the one character in a thousand's player actually bought this feat and expects it to come into play.

In T&T or B/X? Hell, make a CHR saving roll or roll under Charisma at a minus whatever and we are done. In most every other game it is an ability score roll, the current situation, and referee judgment. Done.

In the 1970's wargames there was this tendency to start simple, and then balloon complexity with each new expansion and revision. Track performance in taiga and mud for armored vehicles. Fuel performance and ambient temperature. Snowshoe size versus snow type. Curvature of the Earth and muzzle velocity of off-board artillery. Most of the rules had some historical event behind them and they probably affected the outcome of some real-world battle somewhere...but there is a point where enough is enough.

If I equip my desert soldiers with snowshoes does that give them a movement bonus? If my winter partisans carry large desert water packs at what point do those freeze? Do I need a table for that?

And the more complicated wargame goes in the closet and the new game that was designed for fast and fun play goes on the table. That is where I am with Pathfinder. Completely bought in with both books and Hero Lab and we never play it really all that much. Great customers and lousy players.

Simple Games are More Fun for Me

So I come back to the old versions of games, the retro-clones, and some of the classics made back in the day where they saw this problem and designed against it. Labyrinth Lord and B/X. Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition. Other classics. There are some new games, such as Savage Worlds and FATE, that attack complexity of character design versus story and those are worth mentioning too.

I see a collection of huge books for a gaming system and my reaction is, "I don't have enough time for these anymore." Instead of feeling bad I switch games that I do have the time for. I am sensing another round of boxing games up coming here soon. It is a sad thing but also a good thing, since it lets me focus on games I want to play (and it frees up space for more games, like Traveller's new edition).

My thing is, play what you love - and some people love the complexity. I have moods when I love all the detail and choices. Be happy if you can find people who love what you do and play with them. As my players dwindle and I find myself more and more alone, my tastes and needs change. I want less record keeping and design. I want solo play. I want smaller rules and tighter designs. I want more story and world, and less rules. I want attribute systems that handle many things, and less flipping through books to find a rule that handles a special case.

My tastes are changing more towards the retro-clones and classic games that I started the hobby with because those are what I love and where I find the most comfort.

Fantasy RPGs and Loot

Our group had a discussion about itemization in fantasy RPGs, you know, your +2 magic sword, +1 chain mail, and +3 ring of protection sort of discussion. What game does the traditional "quest for loot" style of game the best? For this discussion we considered four games:

• D&D 5
• Pathfinder
• 13th Age
• D&D 4

Why is it Important?

Because...loot! There were some aspects of 13th Age and loot that started this discussion off, but it turned out to be a very interesting comparison between the games that we hadn't thought of. We do have some players with characters in our groups where loot and the acquisition of treasure is a very important thing, so much that systems with great loot rules and selections are a deciding factor in playing the game. Yes, I know, story matters, but I don't feel that it matters so much that it means the loot system needs to be radically changed or thrown out.

That said, this is admittedly a one-sided comparison of the games, and there are a lot more factors to take into account when determining what game is right for your group. Ease of play, ease of refereeing, story support, available adventures, published content, world support and a lot factors should go into that decision. But to just look at loot alone reveals some of the design goals behind the game, and this in turn gets at some of the inner workings of these games that is fun to study.

D&D 4 - MMO Loot

When we played D&D 4 the books were filled with page after page of the same item but with different stats. There were these pages-long loot sections with 'cards' of magic items with +1 to +6 versions of them going all the way from 1st level to 30th level. You had to get the 'best' version for your level, since the system felt like it was designed around everyone having level-appropriate gear.

We had encounters with a party that had low-level gear versus high-level monsters, and you could tell people missed a lot more often resistances rolls were tough to make, the monsters made their saves, and the entire encounter drug on forever and nobody had a good time. It felt like one of those 5 minute fights in an MMO where you spend forever killing a monster, only this was a fight 5 hours long and played on a tabletop.

Yes, D&D 4 had a lot of fun loot, but it was all 'you need to have it' and so evenly striated that none of it felt special to us. the game's loot system tired us out as much as sorting through 55 pages of green magic items in World of Warcraft's auction house tired us out. You had to have it to keep up, so we were left with this mess of a campaign where no magic item felt special and the party sorted through dozens of similar items looking for that next '+1 higher' item to get their character on par with the monsters again.

By he end of the game's life, the loot suggestions for the DM started to get kinda strange for us. Like having the players come up with a 'wishlist' of gear for the referee to hand out during the next few adventures. Sort of like an Amazon.com wishlist, but this one was for the gods (we guessed) and it felt like it was intended to end-run around random generation and avoiding the 'but his item breaks my character build' sort of random magic item handout policy.

And that was the last straw for us with that game. When character power depends that much on specific items for specific builds...no, this MMO feels broken and I am back to playing World of Warcraft.

13th Age - Story Loot

13th Age is almost an anti-loot game compared to 4th Edition D&D. The magic items are like D&D 4's, with a +1 to +3 range this time, and with specific functions based on slot, bracers do one thing while necklaces do another. They do have a cool system where magic item abilities activate on specific die rolls, even or odd results, and lots of cool mechanical interlocking rules - so there is some cool roll playing mechanics in here.

You can't buy magic items, which is a plus, but I find the lack of treasure types, monster treasures, suggestions, or tables of random loot to feel a bit lacking in my expectations for a fantasy game. The adventures I read seem also to be lacking in loot rewards so I come away with the impression that this game is more about story than it is grabbing a satisfying handful of gold coins and shoving it in your pocket. Adding to that is how magic items are handed out, as story rewards or as gifts from higher powers based on the system of faction relations built into the game.

I like loot as incentive in fantasy games, and this feels more story-like than loot driven.

If I had a group completely sick of the loot systems in D&D type games I would definitely go with 13th Age with them, since this game pushes loot to the sideline and focuses more on story and character instead of shiny objects and item power.

To be honest, 13th Age feels like a next-generation D&D 4 loot system with the wishlist feature removed but that referee-supplied loot mechanic still in place with the icon system and rewards. It doesn't feel MMO-ish anymore, but it does feel more like FATE for us, at least in story supplied loot as incentive or reward for story completion.

D&D 5 - Balanced Loot

D&D 5 is a highly balanced game with a lot of consideration to 'bounded accuracy' and other game design concepts. Magic items go from +1 to +3 and there are limits, such as limiting the number of magic items that can provide a benefit to three, as per the attunement rules.

It feels closer to the old-school versions of D&D in regards to magic items, and the game has a nice default selection which reminds me of the old AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

If ever there were a baseline game for magic item diversity and population, D&D 5 would be it. They worked hard to get rid of balance issues while still making magic items feel special, and the game has full support for monster treasure, hoards, upgrading equipment, and giving suggestions on what monster typically has what treasure. Most everything is balanced, so as a referee you can hand out a +1 whatever and still be reasonably sure the next game things won't be thrown out of whack too much.

I hear from forum posts that D&D 5's end game balance feels more single-character power oriented, where a one-on-one fight between a high-level character and a single high-level monster tends to go more the character's way. They say the end-game encounters in the game feel like they need to be groups of high-level monsters working together versus a single party and not a single-party against one creature. I need to do more study here (and some playtime to decide for myself) but from what I read, character power at the high-end of D&D 5 is very high on a one-on-one fight between a comparably leveled character and creature.

Pathfinder - Anything Goes Loot

Let's throw balance out the window (given a monty haul referee) and play Pathfinder. You can equip yourself into something like a minor god with some of this loot, and there are no rules on how much you can wear and equip - other than the highest bonus in a category is the one that applies, a +2 bow firing +1 arrows is still a +2 to-hit and damage bonus. Wearing a belt that gives +1 STR and a ring that give +3 STR is still only +3 STR. There are some rules in regards to effective caster level and item size that are worth following as well, which makes rings and wands less powerful than giant tomes or staves.

But if you are into stacking layers of loot and blowing balance out of the water, then Pathfinder is your game. A good game master is needed to keep things from getting out of control, but that insanely high level of crazy character power is there and attainable. Which makes gathering lot all that much more fun. Yes, part of the fun of the game in 3.5 D&D to Pathfinder is breaking it.

It is worth repeating, the referee is the one to blame if things get out of control, and I found they can go more crazy in Pathfinder than in other fantasy games. "But it was in the module," is not an excuse if a high-powered item ruins your campaign. I have had this happen, and the player in question becomes so attached to that item of power it gets tough to take it away. But rule #1 in all my games is easy come, easy go - all this stuff is paid for and you can lose anything at any time.

In other regards, Pathfinder is a lot like D&D 5 in selection, monster guidance, item tables, and loot rules. Pathfinder has been out a lot longer, so the selection with all of the books in the library is immense, so there is that to consider as well. There is almost too much loot at times, and I find myself yearning for the old-school games with the pared-down magic item lists.

In Pathfinder, there are high-level single-monsters that are designed to take on a party, so instead of D&D 5's more typical many-on-may fights you get Pathfinder many-on-one fights. Character power in Pathfinder trends to be more party and CR based, and at least I found as a referee fights are easier to balance and manage in Pathfinder than D&D 5. The traditional CR system carried over from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder really helps and is still a strong system today compared to other games.

Another article is needed to explore Pathfinder vs. D&D 5 balancing, but it does play into magic items in regards to ultimate character power, so it is worth mentioning end-game balance.

In Summary

Play what you love. They are all different, but again there is this expectations thing with what the game supports versus a view of the game that may be off a little. Every game does something different, and they do it very well, so knowing what you like and what each game provides is a key to finding one that you and your group enjoy.

I admit, my views of Pathfinder before I did this thinking were down in the dumps a little bit, and I had my doubts on if we would play another long-running campaign with the game. Now I realize the power gaming potential here, I can better run this game with players who like a lot of loot and hand our rewards to match their expectations. this is not to say you can't have a high-powered loot game in any of the others, just that both the danger to unbalance the game and to meet player's expectations works for me a little better in Pathfinder than some of the other games on my shelf.

But if I can get a D&D 5 game running as well I would jump at the chance, truth be told. It comes down to excitement level with me and my groups, and what they would like to play. Getting myself excited and ready is the other half, and I suppose I am lucky to have a lot of games to choose from and players who like a diverse group of games. I could do a loot-based game just as well in D&D 5, and really the trade offs are personal preference and expected power level. If players are expecting to break the game (and have it broken over their heads in return with monster magic use), I will go with Pathfinder. For a more traditional experience I suspect I would go with D&D 5.

Again, play what you love and be happy. But knowing how these games works helps you understand them a little better, and also helps you find the right one to match your group's expectations. And it bears saying your experiences with these games may be different than ours, because these games can be played many many ways.