Let's talk about OSR games vs "modern" D&D games, whatever exactly that means (it's worth noting that the OSR is itself ~twenty years old, depending on exactly when you consider it to have started, and 3e is often considered a "modern" D&D game, even though it's now at least two (again, depending on how you count) editions and twenty-five years old itself, and has been out of print for over fifteen years. The OSR could maybe have been considered to have started with the publication of Castles & Crusades in 2004, but certainly by 2006-7 as Basic Fantasy, OSRIC and later Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry were published, the OSR was in full gear. No wonder there's so much confusion as to what exactly the movement even is; it's aged quite a bit, and there are people who were just little kids when it started who are now participating in it.
One oft-referred to perception is the lethality or deadliness of old school, and the supposed occurrence of PC death. Perception isn't always reality, so it's worth exploring a few points about this.
Professor Dungeon Master made an interesting video a few years ago about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which has a reputation as a very deadly game, but he also pointed out that much of that reputation was based on the art and the tone of the text rather than on the reality of how deadly it actually was. In fact, he pointed out that B/X D&D was considerably deadlier in reality especially with Fate points and other get out of death free cards that Warhammer includes. Well... I'm not sure that there's any other such thing, other than some GM fiat in other games, but having just read the Enemy Within (Director's Cut) it's clear to me that there is at least some expectation that in in this campaigns there's character continuity. Warhammer FRPG was specifically designed to be a Call of Cthulhu in fantasy with urban investigation replacing dungeon-crawling, which was very passe in the British market in particular at the time it was published, so it is very trad style.
But a lot of that perception of lethality in ye olden dayes could be how the games were actually played rather than anything inherent in the mechanics themselves. To some degree, early gamers, especially in the northern Midwest crowd of Arneson and Gygax, didn't particularly care about PC death, because roleplaying was a new innovation to their wargaming hobby, and they weren't really roleplaying all that much yet as we understand the concept now. Player characters were still mostly seen as game pieces in an unusual wargame where you ran a single character instead of an army or skirmish force of some kind. If your character died, well you rolled up a new one and tried again. No big deal. However, it didn't take too long for this to evolve. By the time Tom Moldvay wrote the Basic set, he said, for instance, "Sometimes I forget that [D&D] is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a movie I’m watching... A good [D&D] campaign is similar to the creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players as the adventure unfolds." The perception of the game as something other than an avant-garde spin on a wargame had set in, and it truly became a roleplaying game, at least for some groups. I'm quite sure that early gamers didn't really think too hard about lost characters, and it happened more frequently. At least, frequently relative to what came later. Not necessarily later as in "modern" rulesets, but later as in trad style gameplay, where people roleplayed their characters more, and that became the prevailing reason to play in the first place.
I suspect that a lot of the expectations of lethality are overstated, or at least it wasn't the designers' intentions, except in some tournament or deliberately meatgrinder style modules. Many of them refer to the idea that the expectation is that the game was for a larger group than most people probably actually played in. Certainly, a module will be pretty lethal for a group of 3-5 characters if it was calibrated and designed for closer to ten.
I think once again, the OSR has taken an element that was more common in the past than it is now, taken it out of context and pinned it in opposition to "modern" games rather than to the rise of trad playstyle, which predated "modern" games by the better part of twenty years or more (depending on the group). They've also exaggerated the old school position to a caricature of what it once was in a some games and declared that this caricature is The Way Things Were and The Way Things Ought to Be™.
It is, of course, the neo-trad style that is closer to what OSRians think "modern" games are like; the online Sims-like power-fantasy where you just noodle around with a character that's an idealized personified avatar of the player, and they don't even want to be challenged, just to experience the setting like a tourist. I've had characters die, or at least seen them, in modern games. I'm not a huge fan of plentiful character death, because I am, after all, a trad-style player who likes the whole experience to resemble a novel, like Tom Moldvay said in the intro pages of Basic, but I am old-fashioned even when I reject the precepts of "old school", and the risk of death is still important. I am, after all, also a fan of the Call of Cthulhu play paradigm. (Which also isn't as lethal as its reputation, I don't believe, but y'know. It's still considerably moreso than D&D of any version.) But as a trad player who utilizes what is, essentially, a rules-lite extreme derivation of 3e, a "modern" game, I find the neo-trad position to be just as radical and unlike what I want as the OSRians do.
I'm not sure how prevalent that style really is anyhow, or how closely tied to 5e it really is. The OSR's perception of this vast gulf of expectation between modern and old school here was, I think, pretty overstated.
As an aside, jumping back to the Warhammer reference above, I just finished reading the Enemy Within Director's Cut, including the Companion books. I have literally about 10-15 pages left in the last book, which I'll finish tonight. It's hard to take it seriously as a grim and gritty setting when they're so woke. They've obviously swapped what were originally a lot of male NPCs for female ones, who are supposed to be just as big, tough and masculine as the males. But they were a little sloppy sometimes in their editing, and occasionally the original name or pronouns will still poke through. I would never consider limiting PC choice by sex, or penalizing players for wanting to play a girl, but let's be real; women are not men, and it is really off-putting to see them treated as if they were. Just a few months ago, we had the fiasco of Olympic boxing where some men dressed like women swept the awards and actually seriously injured a few women boxers. Women are neither psychologically nor physically equivalent to men. And like I said; PCs are PCs; they're always special anyway, but if treating men and women as equivalent is prevalent throughout the setting, it seriously undermines its ability to be taken seriously. This is especially important for a setting like Warhammer which is meant to be grim, mostly serious (barring the puns) and as much of a horror/Cthulhu like setting as it is a fantasy/Tolkien like setting.
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