YouTube: And We Won't Do It For You.

"I was trying to solve a confidence problem with information."

This is seriously one of the best D&D YouTube videos this year. Watch this, and avoid falling into this trap. No amount of watching "how to make a better game" videos will replace getting better by running an actual game. No amount of buying game books will ever give you greater enjoyment of it.

No amount of buying programming books will make you a programmer, 3d books for a 3d artist, writing books a writer, art books an artist, or anything else where you are fooled into the trap of "having something" then "means something."

You have them.

If you do nothing with them, you are still where you started. 

You will only digging that hole deeper for yourself and wasting time, thinking if you have a huge library, or keep watching these videos ever day, that you can somehow "magically" buy experience and "learn by having" or "be an expert by watching."

It will never happen.

The only way you get better is to actually do it.

To go out there, get your hands dirty, force yourself to work through it, and do it for real.

So, today, I want you to go do whatever it is you dream of, and get a start. And do a little more each day. This is the only way you get there. And stop watching videos and buying books thinking that they will make you who you dream of being.

Stop watching or buying the dream, and just go do it. 

Off the Shelf: For Gold & Glory

AD&D 2nd Edition was our heyday for AD&D, and we had a Forgotten Realms campaign that was fun and more story-based in this world. The expanded classes, the greater focus on normal monsters, and the "story XP" brought us back into the game. The game was not "kill for treasure," and we enjoyed the more action-oriented and story-based experience.

We played the Forgotten Realms as a low-magic setting, where magic was not all that common, and the world felt grounded and realistic. This was a serious world, far removed from the science fiction of Baldur's Gate 3, and there were no Eladrin, Tieflings, Dragonborn, or any of the 4E races in the world. The world was mostly human, with a scattering of the other races represented and in their own communities.

For Gold & Glory is the OSR AD&D 2nd Edition clone, and it is a great book and game. I pulled this out recently, and it still holds up well. AD&D 2nd Edition was the high point for many with D&D, and it mirrored the rise of the novels, most of which were NYT Bestsellers through the 1990s. This was the "novelization" era of D&D, and it still amazes me that with all that success and mainstream recognition, TSR went bankrupt at the end of the decade.

It shows you how the D&D cycle rises and falls, and how fickle the mainstream audience is. I get the feeling Baldur's Gate 3 and Critical Role were this era's "D&D craze," and we are entering the post-pop bust cycle again.

Demons, having been banned from the game due to TSR's reaction to the Satanic Panic, were gone from the setting, and the renaming of them to "Baatezu" and "Tanarri" was a profane mess of a solution, meant to hide them from prying eyes like men's magazines on the top shelf. The Monstrous Manual for AD&D 2e had the Balor, Maralith, Pit Fiend, and three of the Abishai, and that is all. You had to pick up the Outer Planes Appendix for the rest of the classics.

But still, removing them felt like a surrender. The players who wanted a darker role-playing experience all went to Vampire: The Masquerade. When D&D surrenders to the outrage mob, it begins a slow death, and it falls apart in about 10 years.

That said, our version of the Forgotten Realms excluded demons, and we focused on the classic monsters instead. If they were banned, this world would not have had them, and we would have moved on and focused on other evils. Perhaps the gods found a way to banish all demons in this world, and it was more like Mystara? It did not matter to us, but I still felt something important was missing. It was like playing a console RPG, wanting to have certain monsters and options, realizing the game didn't have them, and then accepting that and moving on with other things.

FG&G has a limited selection of demons in the rules, just like AD&D 2nd Edition.

All the AD&D 2nd Edition books work seamlessly with AD&D 2nd Edition, and the rules and game are not that different from AD&D 1st Edition. This update includes a cleanup, rewrite, demon removal, and clarification of the game rules, with a few new classes and options added to the game to cover characters in the books.

So, why not play AD&D 2e on print-on-demand?

For Gold & Glory is a community-supported game with a better license. When given a choice, I will always support the community-made game. This supports a larger ecosystem of creators, allowing people to create adventures for the system, and fosters a more positive, productive, and healthy environment than merely playing a dead game.

I would rather play with others than support a system that can't be created for.

But here is the problem with FG&G. I have a game that adds classes, supports classic content, has many more options, and clarifies class abilities to a better degree than either FG&G or AD&D 2nd Edition.

Adventures Dark & Deep.

This has all the classes and options that FG&G has, but it is not a pure clone. Actual design work was done on the class options to unify the mechanics, give them some design "oomph," and make everything more straightforward and make sense. Why have a clone of the second edition, when we have a vastly improved first edition to play?

I look at the bard class in AD&D 2nd Edition, FG&G, and Adventures Dark and Deep. The ADAD bard is the best of the bunch, with the abilities all clearly laid out, the mechanics behind them all unified to a single percentage roll, and the best abilities clearly explained. There are no questions here, nor are there diverging mechanics where some abilities use saves while others use percentages.

The design flex in Adventures Dark and Deep is real, and it pays benefits.

The second edition is a clean-up of the first edition, and having a rebuilt first edition that accomplishes the added pieces of the second edition, plus gives us more, is a clear winner to me. Adventures Dark and Deep is like the second edition of the second edition.

While FG&G is cool and evocative with its art, and the best 2nd Edition retro-clone, ADAD improves the first edition so much that a second edition isn't needed.

All the classic monsters are here, the demons and devils are here, and nothing is renamed. We have the best of the best in the monster book. We have all the classics, with nothing held back. The elder demon and devil lords are all here. We get angels. We get everything.

And if we want elder gods and monsters, we get those too in an expansion. The hits keep coming here, along with a fixed and product-improved remake of the old Oriental Adventures book, in Swords of Wuxia.

FG&G is a fantastic game, the best second edition clone out there. If this is all you want, to simulate that era, use the second edition monster books and adventures, and play in that world while supporting community content - you can't go wrong here.

Adventures Dark and Deep eclipses anything else in the first edition sphere of gaming, including every edition of second edition. For me, this has it all, the most, and with a level of streamlining and design that makes everything make sense.

The Age of the Digital Heartbreaker

 

D&D 4 and 5 were designed with the goal of getting you into digital services. Every major pretender to the throne these days likely has that same goal, to lock you into a platform, VTT, online system, or other digital support stream where you will be paying monthly fees for fake digital goods.

And it seems every company is trying to redefine fantasy to something they created, that they control the language of, that their special terms and lingo is how people speak in the hobby. You see this with the stupid redefining of terms, like race for species, lineage, kin, and 101 other synonyms for the same word.

This has zero to do with being sensitive and respectful. All of that hemming and hawing is fake social seeding of silly ideas spread by corporate planning and co-opted social media influencers.

This redefinition of terms is 100% about which corporation controls the language of fantasy gaming.

You control the language, you control the genre, and you control gaming.

Then, you force gamers to your support-and-services platform.

And I am slowly getting the feeling every major new system is somehow fake, or offering us gaming with strings and terms attached. I need to exclude Shadowdark and Pathfinder here, since the former is an OSR-style board game and the latter is a 3.5E fork and evolution. Though Pathfinder 2 does lean on the digital services pretty heavily, and running a tax-form-like character sheet by hand in that game is next to impossible.

My new definition of "what is a role-playing game" will include a hard requirement for being able to run a character sheet by hand, without software, without websites, and without digital tools. It seems like a Luddite requirement, but it is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff in the hobby.

If you require software to play the game, you are no longer a role-playing game. You are a computer game with tabletop features. If that character creation software, VTT, digital books, DLC, or paid service ever goes away - your game is dead and your players no longer have the ability to play it.

Oddly enough, Daggerheart is still on the "in" side, as this is more of a card-based game. This is a strange definition of what is a role-playing game, but if I own my Daggerheart cards, I will be able to play that game forever. D&D 5E is definitely out of the hobby by this definition, as there is no good way to play the patched, modern edition of the game without an online platform.

Even in Tales of the Valiant when I try to do a character by hand, I miss half of the things that should be on the sheet. 5E sucks when trying to craft a legal character, as there are dozens of special "oh, and you get this too" things that get post-it-noted onto a character sheet for special situations. Level Up A5E has twice the special tack-ons that ToV has, at least a dozen per character.

The "no digital" definition also plays into the "stop killing games" movement in a way, in that single-player games needing an "online requirement" and them "going away once the servers are shut down" is essentially a lie to consumers, giving corporations a digital plug to pull ownership from things you think you own. Even when there is no functionality in that "digital plug" to begin with, it adding nothing but an on/off switch the shareholders and flip to get you to "buy the next thing."

You seen this with D&D 4's digital services being removed from support.

The same will happen to all major tabletop games, someday. How many billion dollars will it take a media conglomerate to buy? Once a walled-garden is in place and consumers have no choice, it will be sold. Not having a walled garden devalues the brand, and it is the only thing preventing a major deal from going forward.

This is never about you and your games.

This is about the shareholders.

You see this countless times with services to "buy digital movies on" shutting down, with no compensation for people who "bought" movies on the service. Stop killing games? Right. Stop killing media. The problem is a subset of a huge issue. A war on private ownership by the communal-capitalist alliance. Ownership of everything from housing to entertainment to even food. Overseas investor money will come in to "own" your media and entertainment, one piece at a time.

Stop lying to yourself and sniffing the fantasy-scented corporate opiates. 

You see this with the current round of buyouts and media consolidation, where entire forms of entertainment are bought up and fire-walled away, with certain wrestling promotions split up between services that would cost multiple times what they once were just to enjoy the same thing, or less. If this trend continues, entertainment will only be for the rich.

Role-playing games? The ultimate DIY entertainment that nobody owns. They can't have that. People will not be allowed to create their own entertainment without renting the ability to do so.

How can you do your part to stop this?

Refuse digital services.

Stop renting anything. 

Stop supporting the redefinition of the language of gaming.

Never buy a digital book or book DLC on a VTT or platform.

Roll your characters by hand.

Own your PDFs and physical books. Own your physical media.

And stop supporting live-service tabletop games.

This is Your Brain on Games

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6869710/

The link above is to a study on neuroscience and taxi drivers; several similar studies have been conducted in recent years. The goal was to establish a pattern of increased use, or brain mass, in areas related to navigation. Some of these studies compared GPS users with those who relied on memory-based navigation.

The studies suggest a correlation between individuals who avoided using GPS and London drivers who had to navigate complex road patterns, who also had more tissue mass in spatial areas of their brains.

It makes sense that if you use that part of your brain more, with increased activity, it will become "trained" to perform complex tasks. The old bodybuilding adage applies: "The more you use it, the stronger it gets."

The other adage also applies: "You snooze, you lose."

This explains my childhood and our history of enjoying role-playing games, which were often written for college students, as well as our improved academic performance. We played the challenging games when we were growing up:

• Car Wars
• Space Opera
• Aftermath!
• AD&D
• GURPS
• Rolemaster
• Star Fleet Battles
• Squad Leader

We had a few other games for which we used the settings (Gangbusters, Star Frontiers, and a few others), but we always converted these to the more complex sets of rules because we enjoyed those games more than the simpler ones.

Some of these games required designing vehicles on spreadsheets, before we ever had spreadsheet software or computers, and we did them all by hand. Other games had vector math (Space Opera, Traveller) that you needed to work through for space combat.

Some games had flowcharts of turn actions and rule resolution (Aftermath), which required following complex paths of logic and if-then statements through the procedures until they became second nature.

Simulation-level wargames such as Squad Leader and Star Fleet Battles have similar deep rule structures, with rules filling up three-ring binders with page after page of how everything works, almost like learning a computer programming language just to be able to work through a turn of play. Our Car Wars battles lasted a week, and we would spend hours on the maps and tables keeping the simulation running. Turn by turn.

We didn't have a computer to simulate this, so we performed the calculations by hand.

We did massive Aftermath combats between people on foot, with over 100 participants, all by hand, turn by turn, in a gigantic deathmatch game.

AD&D was written in college-level language, and for us to learn the game, we had to break out the dictionary. Some games required you to dive into history (Gangbusters, Squad Leader), so our interest in history and the world was significantly higher than that of other kids.

GURPS required us to balance point-buy characters, and the rules depth expanded as profoundly as you could imagine. GURPS can approach Squad Leader in depth of play and complexity if you use many optional rules, or it can be a rules-light game if you want to play it that way.

We did not have computers.

We only had calculators, pencils, paper, rulers, and lots of gum erasers.

Today's Games

They don't excite me. They feel like they are written for children. They don't activate the parts of my brain that I used as a child. They feel mentally unfulfilled. They are too heavily based around the false idol of "social media identity," and they equate story depth with a fan-fiction level of storytelling.

None of them requires advanced math or reading levels.

When I play them, I have fun, but I feel that parts of my brain I enjoy using slowly wither away. None of these games excites me. None of them challenge me. None of them touch the parts of my brain that I enjoy using. There is nothing to them.

Figuring out an action economy and optimizing turn actions is the best part of 5E. That is the only challenge in the game. The rest of the game is a blur of storytelling mush and self-identity drivel. None of it challenges me. Most of it bores me.

After reading those studies, I now understand why.

I don't want simplified, dumbed-down, easy games. In a sense, it feels like they are rotting your brain. They are certainly not using the parts of my brain that excited me as I was growing up, and this is why today, when I play them, I can't understand why "everyone else loves them, but not me."

Shadowdark is compelling due to its tight simulation and ticking clock. The story is one of survival, requiring teamwork and efficient play, where you must optimize your actions and communication as a team at the table. The game creates a "game outside the game" that few even understand by just reading the rulebook.

If you never played Shadowdark with a group, you will never understand it.

The rules of Shadowdark? They are kept simple and do not challenge me. The "live play" social construct and contract of Shadowdark, all based on a countdown timer? That is highly exciting and mentally stimulating to me. One serves the other.

Go play Shadowdark at a con, if you are lucky enough to grab a seat at a game. There is a reason this game is hyper popular, and it is more than just the rules.

Narrative and Identity do not Replace Comprehension

D&D 5E, Pathfinder, Starfinder, and a bunch of these other newer games do not even touch the parts of my brain that give me those higher orders of mental stimulation. For others, they are fine, since they never had to develop that higher level of thinking required for advanced math, comprehension, history, and science. The only parts of their brains that are highly developed are those related to social constructs and relationships, which is why all these games have a strong sense of "character and identity" and very little else.

If all you grew up with was "who I am seen as on social media," you don't need many critical thinking skills to survive. You will never need math, history, or science. You live in the vapid and very transient now, with nothing existing before or after the moment. Your life is like that of a TV screen, existing only in the current frame, with nothing remembered before or mattering after.

But, do you need to slog through games with heavy math and reading levels to "just have fun?" No, you don't. But I enjoy them because those parts of my brain are wired that way. I am playing GURPS and ordering a new Star Fleet Battles set. Here is the question for you, though:

If you never pushed yourself that hard, how do you even know if you would enjoy them?

You will never know unless you try.

Also, the discomfort you feel when trying to learn them is actually a dislike, or are you now using a part of your brain that you aren't accustomed to? This may be similar to the soreness that follows a workout. Keep at it, and you may discover that you enjoy that level of analytical and critical thinking.

D&D's New Direction

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/2027-welcome-back-to-the-table-d-ds-new-direction

I wish them well.

I have seen this sort of community-focused manager in previous jobs, and they come and go. A lot of big community-forward words are spoken, and then reality sets in, and everyone realizes words do not make money. Every time I work for one of these managers, I want them to succeed and win. However, I have seen many fail due to investor impatience, and it's often time for a new manager to take over.

I really do want this to work.

I really want him to turn this around.

Part of the problem is that they have a version of the game filled with culture war debris from an era that many are done fighting and just want to forget that ugly period of history. They let a game that is supposed to be timeless get caught up in the current day, and we lost so much as a result. Honestly, humanoids (orcs, goblins, gnolls, etc.) as monsters were in the game for decades, and they needed to be taken out because of somebody's Twitter post? I can go down lists of terrible choices that were made, firing shots in a pointless battle, trying to own the other side, and that is done and over.

Every time I open a D&D book, I am reminded of how gamers fought each other over trivial matters. D&D 2024 is seriously dated, and as the years go on, this will get worse and worse. Their saying "this doesn't replace the 2014 books" feels like an admission they know these have not gone over well. They could never admit it, though. They have to sell through their books.

At least Tales of the Valiant keeps D&D 2014 intact. My humanoid monsters are there. The game manages to be progressive, but it doesn't slap old-timers in the face. Even if I wanted to stick with 5E, I would play someone else's version of it. Even Level Up A5E is a better version of 5E.

Not to mention 5E is horribly overwritten and massive. Shadowdark is the better game for 10-year-olds to play, and that book is tight, easily understood, plays fast. It doesn't stumble over itself trying to describe resting, action types, what can be done with what, subclasses, or any number of other terrible design choices made all the way back in 2014, and slapped patches on trying to fix ever since.

I doubt the D&D team has the writers or talent to fix this.

I go back to what I said, "Changing a few paragraphs of rules and charging people $200 for it will never get you to where you need to be. Get out of the rules business and get into the D&D business. You have so many versions of the game to sell at this point, making another will never fix the problem. Celebrate every edition and give up trying to tell people how to play the game."

The narrative gamers now have Daggerheart to play. The rules-light crowd has Nimble 5e and Shadowdark. The combat-focused crowd has both Draw Steel and an OGL-free Pathfinder 2. Most of the major OSR clones are thriving, and this is where the old-timers have gone. Old School Essentials, Adventures Dark and Deep, Swords & Wizardry, and Castles and Crusades are fantastic games. Dungeon Crawl Classics took the weird and gonzo crowd from you. The market is severely fractured. The special interest crowds have found better games to play.

D&D is a weaker "do it all" game living in a market of games catering to special interests.

But I also am tired of talking about Wizards and their problems. They showed the community the door during the OGL matter, and so many third-party creators walked away. The OGL is a stain on the hobby, something a few games still have to suffer with because there are no good alternatives. It never should have come to that. Anyone familiar with OGL publishing would have known this.

The rest of the hobby has walked away. We have open licenses galore these days. Thank you for the Creative Commons content. Please consider including previous versions of the game as well, but this is a long road to walk.

I doubt the new people in charge will be given the time or resources they need to navigate it effectively.

They need to make money with what they have.

And what they have today is starting ten steps back, when they should be that many ahead.

Still, I wish them well.

Off the Shelf: Traveller

This one was a surprise. I had this game sitting in my garage for a while. After getting my Brother label machine and organizing my storage boxes, I realized how much I missed this one. I still love the Cepheus community and all the fantastic work done there, and those are still some of my best games. But the Mongoose 2022-today version of Traveller is another thing entirely.

Mongoose Traveller is gaming's best implementation of a "space MMO" ever written. There is so much history here, so much written, tens of thousands of planets developed, dozens of adventures, hardcover after hardcover, and such a complete and functional universe to explore that you are missing out if you haven't got in a starship and explored it.

This universe is a lifetime of exploration and fun.

The rules are not that hard to learn, and the game is very straightforward and easy. This is far easier than D&D 5E, even with ship combat tossed in there. All you need are a few six-sided dice, and a decade of content is there for you to roam around in and explore.

Where Cepheus Engine falls short is in its generic and setting-free nature. If you want to build your own setting and universe, go with Cepheus Engine all the way. There are so many fun variants and mini-games built on the 2d6 engine, and a lot of these could also be considered Traveller expansions in their own right, especially the fantasy-themed ones.

I still love Sword of Cepheus, Westlands, and the later games in this series. The 2d6 community is a strong and vibrant place, with room for many ideas and games.

If you play Traveller, you are playing in the Imperium setting. There is simply too much "great stuff" here to explore, use, fly around in, visit, meet the aliens of, adventure on the worlds of, battle with, and interact with. There is even an entire sector reserved for your settings and expansion, so they left room for your creativity directly in the center of the universe map. Want to drop Star Frontiers directly into the center of the Imperium map? You have the space to do that. Grow the universe up and say they later discovered the Imperium, but keep apart from it in their own enclave. It's fine. It works. You have the room to do it.

The game scales well, too. You can play this as a macro wargame with battling fleets and surface armies, just as well as you can play a small, 4-person expedition to a hostile alien world. You can play a shipwrecked scenario like the classic Star Frontiers module series, which is sort of like a "fish out of water" game, like a John Carter of Mars style experience, and port in the great monsters and magic from the Westlands game. Severely limit ammunition, and force the players to craft bows and use melee weapons to fight the savage aliens of this new world.

Part of my love for this genre was rekindled by reading classic Wally Wood comics from the 1950s. I originally got these for Star Crawl Classics, a DCC-compatible science fiction game that is relatively simple but fun. After I started reading them, my love for Traveller came back. I wanted a game of two-fisted, laser-flinging, gritty survival, starship battling, classic, bubble-helmeted, hard science fiction again. I wanted strange space aliens and monsters wandering every habitable world. I wanted the buzz of galactic commerce and the patrols of star fleets. I envisioned struggling corporations forming exploration ventures on shoestring budgets, utilizing refurbished shipwrecks and other salvaged materials, and navigating challenges. I wanted players interested in exploration and science, problem-solving, and theorizing alien life.

Instead of inwardly-focused characters, I wanted a universe that gives characters a reason to care about what is outside themselves.

D&D's fatal flaw is its inward, get-me-mine, my-build, my-power, self-centered focus.

It sucks as a story, and it sucks as motivation.

Seriously, these classic science-fiction comic collections are wonderful. If you find yourself lost in the fantasy-gaming haze, too beaten down by the constant noise and fighting over the hobby, over what should be in and what should be out, there is an escape for you. All you need to do is grab that first rung of the ladder leading up into the rocket ship, close the airlock door behind you, strap yourself in the pilot's seat, and blast off into adventure.

While yes, modern Traveller does not do the bubble-helmeted look or style, that is just a minor flavor change and reskin to the spacesuits. The starships are not sleek rockets, but that is another reskin, or you could just hand-wave it off and say the ships look good enough.

You can also get over the "land the ship on the dungeon" problem that science fiction has by enforcing strict limits on what size and type of ships can land on planets, where they can land, and forcing difficult skill rolls for landing on unprepared surfaces, and inflicting severe ship damage if the roll fails. Avoid making landing too easy, where characters have a "personal RV and hotel" they can park on a space dungeon. Make the ship begin to sink into the soil after sitting there for five minutes, slide on an uneven surface, or have weather prevent it from taking off.

Introduce threats that make a parked starship a sitting duck for attack. Make targeting engines and other systems very easy, and roll some critical hits on a ship by passing pirate aircraft or starfighters shooting up a parked ship like it was Pearl Harbor.

Ensure the ship must use atmospheric craft to visit the surface, and make any landings "touch and go" to prevent losing either the vessel or the interface craft. Establish this as a standard operating procedure that all pilots must follow, and there are always space critters who can crawl in parked ships, chew on exposed wires, contaminate the vessel, or otherwise easily ambush those exiting the craft.

Put hostile bandits, thieves, hijackers, or other locals who would love to steal, loot, strip parts from, or take over a parked ship worth tens of millions of credits. Give them a few armored vehicles, and have the local forces of the corrupt governor impound the ship or declare it is theirs.

If you are lost, go back to the original sources of inspiration.

This world makes it so easy to forget, which is why we must look backward to move forward. the feelings these comic artists had about an infinite universe of limitless potential will light a fire in you. Let their enthusiasm cross the decades and find you.

What is essential is that the stories and tales of adventure are the same. We are fighting two-headed hydra monsters on barren worlds, meeting strange aliens and overcoming the language barrier, or engaging in space battles with star pirates. We are surviving against all odds after being shipwrecked on an alien world, where we are learning its secrets. We are taking a boat ride down a river as we deliver supplies to a remote outpost. We are mapping star systems to discover what lies beyond.

It is too easy to get lost in the introverted worlds of fantasy, where every waking moment is about "me and my identity" or "how will I be the leading character in this story?" Today's fantasy is pandering crud and consumerist garbage. It is a toxic, self-important, high-school clique of ins and outs.

I want to be lost in something bigger than myself.

There is a whole universe out there waiting.

Old School Essentials > D&D 5E

The rules may seem rudimentary and straightforward, the characters may feel "too basic," and you don't have all the flash and gee-whiz of D&D 5E, but it is the better game. Once I had the perspective of Shadowdark, everything became clear.

OSE keeps and maintains a higher level of overall character power than D&D 5E.

Caster power, notoriously high in any Wizards version of the game, is balanced in OSE by a lack of defenses and low hit points. They are glass cannons in OSE, where in 5E, you can build effective "melee casters" with better ACs and offensive abilities than martial characters. Many casters are preferred over martial classes, primarily due to their damage output and overall flexibility.

Even martial classes are more powerful, due to monster hit points being lower, and the overall power of monsters not being on a curve, but linear. Additionally, the damage output is more consistent and steady. A fighter may seem tedious, but with weapon specialization and a few of the book's optional rules, you will find your best to-hit in the game, plus the most consistent damage output will cut through enemies like butter, and even strike down dragons with ease.

People need fighters like they need solid ground to stand on.

Even the thief, with 1d4 hit points, is like having a radar set along with their ability to hear noise. Additionally, if a thief fails to disarm a trap, it does not automatically trigger, and I am free to rule that it only happens on a critical failure. Critical failures (96-100) may mean it goes off, but the thief can get out of the way, or I may call for a save; the game is open enough to allow rulings, not rules, to give the referee freedom in deciding what happens in the narrative.

It's amusing that now we need to buy all these "narrative-focused" games, like Daggerheart, when the original basic rules gave us the freedom to do all that anyway. Later versions of D&D got so bogged down in the game rules and creating these intricate frameworks of internal systems that we forgot what we had.

OSE gives us narrative freedom, just in what it does not say. It assumes you know how to play, which D&D 5E conveniently "unlearned" the hobby in general, and now we are left searching for the thing we already had.

You don't need a narrative game; you need an imagination and a game that stays out of the way. It is like paying $30 for a 500-page book that tells you how to walk down the street. You know how to do this, just do it.

Modern narrative games only address problems introduced in later editions of the game. Too many rules slow down the game and put a stranglehold on narrative freedom. The concept is so straightforward; I don't understand why people struggle to grasp it. I don't need a game to give me "imagination points" to run a narrative, "doom points" to activate monster abilities, or give me special dice that tell me what to do. I have an imagination!

OSE is also not horribly overwritten. There are sections in the D&D Dungeon Master Guide that will go through two pages of fluff text discussing how to handle a topic in the game, and end with, "Come up with a way to do it yourself." Why did I buy this book, then? There are powers in 5E subclasses that take paragraphs of text to describe how they work, and paragraphs more in other places telling you how not to abuse those powers. D&D, and all of the D&D clones, are so horribly overwritten and wordy that they mark a low point in game publishing.

At least in AD&D, we had Gygax, and the overwritten style was highly entertaining and conversational. These days, this all feels like AI-generated fluff, ghost-writer drivel, and paid-by-the-word contractor filler. OSE was the first game to slap us awake with its brevity and conciseness, and scream at the game industry to "stop it with your overwritten garbage!"

Shadowdark smartly followed that model, and I consider that a sister game to OSE. The two are highly compatible and can co-exist nicely. Shadowdark is a stronger "map-based exploration game," while OSE is the clear winner for "campaign games." Shadowdark does win on the "how to play the game" advice included in the book, where OSE requires some outside knowledge.

You win either way with OSE or Shadowdark, and both are the best games of their respective generations.

OSE wins on character, power, simplicity, ease of use, openness, and expandability. Sure, you don't have 5E's "tons of weaker attacks" designed to "keep you busy" during those long, drawn-out combats that are impossible to balance anyway. 5E relies on that MMO model of making you weaker as you level, and relying too much on "too many actions" and "constant streams of weaker attacks" to make it seem like you are doing more than you actually are.

The exponential curve of monster power makes balancing fights very hard; either they are pushovers or TPKs. In OSE, monster power is linear, the fights are easier to balance, and you do not need a false CR system since you gain system knowledge on balance as you play and can judge fights easier due to that straight-line power scaling.

Do I generally know the party's dwarf fighter hits better than 50% and does 5-7 points of damage per turn? I can have a pretty good idea of how many turns that dwarf will take to defeat a 15hp monster. Two lucky hits or three average ones. If the beast deals 1d8+2 damage and hits less than half the time, I can easily estimate its damage output. Getting this sort of knowledge, and it will differ with every party, is how you "balance" fights in OSE.

People want to flail helplessly without a CR balancing system, but it is a fallacy. The entire CR balancing system never really worked in the first place, and the assumptions it is based on (X fights per day) never hold up at the table, since fights often take way longer than the designers will ever estimate. Besides, 5E's resource replenishment system is far too forgiving, which is supposedly a key component that makes the CR system work; however, it is again impossible to predict and manage.

Keeping the numbers and math simple is the best system to use for judging encounter difficulty.

And it is something we used to have before level scaling was introduced by Wizards in D&D 3.0, and that "MMO model" remains to this day.

OSE has the better balance, math, challenge estimation, flexibility, and maintains higher levels of character power longer. The game is trivially simple to read and understand. Shadowdark is its strong sister game, with a more focused approach to tabletop play. Both are excellent.

5E, in comparison, seems to go out of its way to waste my time and slow down the "content drip" in an attempt to force me to buy more books. There is more in the two-volume OSE Advanced books than there is in an entire shelf of D&D 5E books.