My game vs OSR... a few comments

Before I begin, a quick summary of what I hope to accomplish—hobby-wise—this week. I have a busy week. I've put off my taxes, so they have to be done very soon. Probably that's a couple hours one night. I am busy Tuesday and Thursday, probably most of the evening. Saturday is a busy day. Monday I'm going to the store with my wife to make sure that I have stuff to eat this week. (Because I'm relatively recently diagnosed type II diabetes; along with almost my entire immediate family of my generation, I've discovered, and her schedule is kinda funky, we don't eat dinner together every night or even most nights. I cook something low carb on my own.) So, yeah... it'll be tough to do much. I doubt I'm whipping up a YouTube video or anything like that, because that takes at least a couple of hours to do. Maybe I can do a text only YouTube video on the four characters, but if so, that'll be all that I can likely do. I'm also really focused on reading lately, instead of frittering away my evenings. I'm almost done with Goodman Games' Gazetteer of the Known Realms, which I got on a humble bundle as a pdf a while ago. It's an interesting case study; I'll probably blog about it briefly when I'm done. I've also got a few other gaming books that I'm trying to get read in the shortish term, although two of them I've read before years ago. And I want to pivot to some non-gaming books, which I'm not reading all that much of, but I have quite a few of them on my docket right now. I had also thought maybe I'd draw another version of my map this weekend. It was six months ago that I drew the last one that I wasn't super happy with. But I didn't get to that. I probably won't, at least not right away. And I expect a few gaming things that I ordered to arrive this week. A new set of metal dice is supposed to show up tonight, and sometime this week two older 3e products that I've wanted physical copies of for a long time should be arriving; Heroes of Horror (used) and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (POD). Both will go on the list to read shortly after, although I've read both as pdfs in the past. I'm even considering ordering the original Curse of Strahd, (not the "remixed" version, or whatever they're calling it) to compare it to EtCR for the heckuvit. Actually, I think even if you don't care to play 5e, some of the campaigns are decent reads that can be readily raided for good material. If I get CoS, I might also shortlist Rime of the Frost Maiden and Ghosts of Saltmarsh as ones to pick up too. (I will say, though, of the various Ravenloft products, the very first module from 1983 still has by far the best cover art, which I'll include here.)

Honestly; that's about it this week. Reading. If I can finish the Gazetteer, the non-fiction book that I'm reading and if I get really lucky, one more gaming book, I'll consider that a fantastically successful week this time around, even if I don't do anything else. Next week, on the other hand, I'll expect to do more. 

To the topic of the post, looking over the character sheets I posted earlier this weekend, I had a few thoughts. Three immediate points of contrast between my 1st level characters and your typical OSR 1st level characters come to mind, which I think are interesting. I actually greatly prefer what I do, but then again, I've said many times that I'm old-fashioned without being old-school, and the OSR rules and OSR playstyle; well, I'm sympathetic to what they're doing in some ways, but I'm not interested in doing it myself.

First, my characters clearly have a much higher hit point total. The lowest hp character I have has 10 hit points; the rest are 14 or 15. OSR characters at 1st level will almost certainly have single digit hit points, even in the best case scenario. I watched a small segment of some ShadowDark solo play where the guy had a 1st level fighter with 1 hit point. Even when he leveled up, he rolled low, so he was a 2nd level fighter with 3 hit points. I don't have fighters per se, but my "fighter" has 14 hit points, and my "ranger" has 15. Even my expert/sorceress has 14, although she took a feat that specifically gave her a few more hit points. Now, granted, arguably ShadowDark isn't really OSR, because it doesn't use OSR rules, but it certainly does the OSR playstyle, maybe even better than some more overtly OSR games, honestly. So, my 1st level characters are considerably less fragile than OSR 1st level characters. However, by probably 4th level or so, they've caught up; OSR games have characters get hit dice as they level up, my game has them get 2 hit points. My hit point progression is much flatter than OSR games; it starts out better, but pivots after a few levels to being less so. After 4th or 5th level, my characters will be considerably weaker than OSR characters, if hit points are your guide, at least. But I've never been a fan of the overt change in genre of the game from a dark parody of a fantasy game with frequent character death with disposable low level characters that turns into super-heroes after a few levels. 3e, 4e and 5e characters arguably are always super heroes at every level. I found that the low level survivability of those games is desirable, however. The rapid increase in power level after a few levels is not. Bounded accuracy was a nice concept when 5e brought it around, but it only a little bit actually did what it said that it would. But 5e was constrained, in my opinion, by having to be too D&Dish. It couldn't do anything too radical without jeopardizing its appeal to the broader market. So I've actually taken the concept to where it really was "wanting" to be all along. Which, to be fair, many other games have done for years, if not decades. But D&D wasn't ever one of them.

Second, as briefly referred to above, I have feats instead of classes. While you can kinda sorta create classes by bundling feats in such a way that they emulate classes, you have the flexibility to do it any other way you like as well. These feats aren't really like the feats of 3e, 4e and 5e; they're more like class features decoupled from any class. You can call my four iconic characters that I created for this putative solo outing as a "fighter", a "thief", a "ranger" and a "sorcerer" if you like, but most of them have one or two surprising features built in, like my "sorcerer" having pretty high hit points, for instance.

Third, in OSR circles, it's often cited that ability scores don't matter very much. In fact, in OD&D, they really only impacted your XP progression (oddly.) In my case, that's clearly not true, since almost every roll will have an ability score component to it; attack rolls are based on an ability score, all checks and "saving throws" are ability score and skill score plus a d20, etc. Ability scores are probably more important than anything else going on with the character, especially at lower levels (after a while, skill and feats starts to matter more; the consequence of experience.) Fitzhugh, my "ranger", is arguably my best character, because I got extremely lucky on his ability score, or stat rolls. Had I not done so, he would have been significantly less capable at combat, and would have been more likely to be good only for outdoorsy stuff; very useful for traveling, but not in combat.

It should be noted, that I like the traveling "minigame" quite a bit. As an avid hiker, as one of my other hobbies, the overland travel stuff is as interesting to me as arriving where you're going, and exploring "dungeons" is banal and I've never liked it. Even back in the 80s I disliked it. I read a fair bit of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks as a kid (the original "solo play" paradigm) but while The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is considered a bit of a classic, and was probably the third one that I got, the ones that I liked best were Forest of Doom, Scorpion Swamp and City of Thieves. The first two in particular were heavily focused on overland travel challenges, and the last was, of course, an urban intrigue kind of thing. I also really enjoyed the TolkienQuest Night of the Nazgûl for exactly the same reason; it was heavily focused on overland travel and exploration. Firetop Mountain is the iconic dungeon-crawl, it was always one of my least favorite. 

Maybe that can be fourth referring back again to my character selection, I don't consider the cleric to be archetypal. It's been important because from the beginning, D&D has been set up to require a cleric. Having largely eliminated the need for magical healing to counter injuries in combat for other reasons, I don't consider the iconic 4-man party to be a lead singer, lead guitar, bass guitar and drummer... er, sorry, I mean a fighting man, magic-user, thief and cleric. I consider it to be fighter, thief, magic-user and outdoorsman. And even then, magic-user and thief are only weakly iconic compared to D&D, and aren't necessarily meant to play the exact same role either. People who are good at fighting, and someone who's reasonably good outdoors are the most important roles for a game where travel is important; any magic you get is supplemental and support rather than a core role, and thief-types are as likely to be con-men and fast-talkers as they are to be sneaky lockpickers and trap-disarmers.

But of course, anyone can be good at the Bushcraft skill if they want to. Affinity and skill focus both would be ideal (my "ranger" only has one of those so far). The rules do dictate, to some extent, what activities the game will focus on. Since exploration/travel is important to me and topping of your resources after combat isn't dependent on clerical magic like it is in D&D, the cleric simply isn't nearly as important a role as an outdoorsman or ranger archetype.