I'm not an OSR guy, as I've said many times before, but that doesn't mean that some of the OSR's complaints about "modern D&D" aren't completely valid in relation to my own preferred way of playing. Saw this interesting rant on reddit and thought that I'd "fisk" it, just for fun.
5e is a Trojan horse designed to look closer to "old school", but only superficially. Playing it without previous knowledge, leads to a game that is very far from OSR.
It features:
—characters that are complex at the start, instead of character that get complex over the course of the game (the ones who survive for long) as you have ~100 classes/subclasses + dozens of playable races, when accounting for all published rule books, each with their own unique little mechanics that nobody at the table knows about apart from the player who made them. Most of which are all flavor and no playtest.
I prefer characters to not be mechanically complex at all, but I don't have a problem with flat complexity. Many old games operate under similar expectations, including a lot of skill-based games like Call of Cthulhu and the rest of the BRP family, or GURPS, which I remember quite well from the 80s and 90s.
—a false declaration of intents, that the game is about exploration, combat and roleplaying with NPCs while lacking tools to support anything but combat, including not having reward mechanics but for combat, at least ones that are not just DM-fiat based (you can give characters "boons", whenever you feel like... Well, gee, thanks for authorizing me to do my job as a DM, I guess?) -so it also violates modern design principles, not just OSR.
I think its a category error to want or expect the game to provide mechanical support for everything that your characters are likely to do in game. On the other hand, if the game provides complex mechanics for some activity and nothing at all for others, then it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the game is in any way about those things, at least at a designer level. That said, sometimes there is material, it just isn't mechanical. If there are campaigns that feature large keyed maps and lots of NPCs to interact with, then the game certainly is "about" social interaction and exploration even if there isn't mechanics for doing so. But there certainly is material for it.
Of course, that also gets into the questions of what is the game about when you're putting some of the support in optional supplements, but that's just pedantry, I think.
—combat that is slow as hell, due to action economy design in the combat round and character complexity (in the words of its own designer: "it's hot garbage"). Players can wait a long time for their turn to come up, and they usually get distracted in the meanwhile, not paying any attention to other players turns, then spend their turn deciding which little buttons they have on their character's sheet to push this round instead of thinking about the combat and being creative, and that's it.
—combat that is just a time-sink, as it is designed with the assumption that PCs will always triumph and come out of it with little to no consequence. Again, citing one of the the designers own words: you already know where combat will lead, it only takes 45 minutes to get there. Experienced DMs have always tried to "fix" this by throwing more lethal monsters than what the official encounter budgeting rules called for, bu[t] all encounters in official modules are designed around that principle. Combats have practically no lasting impact on the game: resources that characters spend are always temporary, easy to recover, including HPs. Death is markedly rare. And even XPs: most published modules ditch the concept of XP-per-monster-killed and use a milestone-based mechanic where characters level-up all together when they reach a new chapter of the (largely pre-written) story.
This is all very true. The last point, about XP isn't one that I care about, preferring arbitrary advancement to XP accounting myself but 5e combat feels to me like rehashed 3e combat. Very deja vu in terms of how combat operates, and yeah—it's long, often boring, very meta (especially when it goes into discussion of squares of movement, etc. and other board-gamey meta abstractions that take you out of immersion in the moment) and honestly not very exciting, interesting or fun. Which is kind of ironic, given how much its a focus of the game mechanics. Although curiously, now he's talking about the way modules are written, to my point above. "The game" is more than the core rules. But he's cherry-picking just a bit when to apply that logic.
—very little tools to support DMing, relying a lot on DM's improv capabilities, and counting on them doing a lot of heavy lifting for everything that is not combat. The tools it does provides are often based verbose descriptions about how to go about doing world-building, but no little actual tools (the polar opposite of games like Worlds Without Number).
This is a curious one too; I know that there are a few games within the OSR (the above-mentioned Worlds Without Number) that are explicitly toolkit-like, but that's hardly the way most OSR games work. Most OSR games provide very little tools to support DMs too, relying a lot on DM's improv capabilities, and counting on them doing a lot of heavy lifting for everything that is not combat. That's largely always been the case with D&D, and the explicit toolkit approach of some modern games is the anomaly. Some random monster tables and treasure generators notwithstanding. The tools available in early D&D weren't non-existent, certainly, but they weren't that robust.
It was always my understanding as a kid, and this hasn't changed in the last nearly 45 years or so since I've been playing, that that was the DM's role, that's largely what made DMing fun, even. Having too many or too proscriptive tools that took that task away from the DM and randomized it was kind of cheating. Not in the sense that you're cheating the players out of anything, but you're cheating yourself out of the best part of DMing. Nobody I knew as a youngster would have been very interested in running that way; I think that's a modern approach based on a philosophical alignment towards RNG and middle-aged guys wanting shortcuts because they don't want to spend the time coming up with stuff on their own anymore. Even what tools were available were only infrequently referenced or used.
But I've always said that in spite of its name and posture, the OSR is a modern movement within roleplaying.
—nowhere, in any manual that I know of, are procedures and tool on how to design and run a freaking dungeon. And the game is still called "DUNGEONS and Dragons", yes. This also includes most published modules, which contain little in terms of dungeons, in general (with a few exceptions, where they tried to leverage famous megadungeons of the past, like Undermountain and the Temple of Elemental Evil) and has gone progressively worse over the years, to the point the publisher now seems to be actively resisting the very idea of having dungeons with a map and a key in their modules, replacing it with a map (they look nice, after all) plus railroady descriptions who assume the PCs will always explore the dungeon in one specific way.
I dunno. He may be right, although I don't think so; the 5e campaigns that I've looked at have more than enough dungeons for my taste. But again, my dislike of dungeon-crawling is well-documented. If he is right, and I don't think I believe that he is, then that's not a strike against 5e at all, but rather against the OSR.
—Wilderness exploration is similarly underdeveloped, with no specific procedure for running hexcrawling, point-crawling or anything else besides mentioning travelling speeds and the idea that you use the Survival skill a lot. The DM is again left to fend for himself.
I think the OSR, or at least some portions of it that aren't into super rules-light non-D&D games, have purity spiraled into wanting mechanical procedures for way too much, and not wanting to do much beyond those procedures. Many of the tools that they use are either cobbled together from various games, supplements or even third party products. Curiously, they also still point to the space within the game without rules for the DM to do things his own way as one of the strongest aspects of the OSR. Sometimes you can't win for losing, especially if you're just complainy by nature.
I know that there's a very reasonable desire to have all that you need to run the game in one place, but I also feel like the complaint here is a bit unfair; most OSR games don't really provide too much of this all in one place either. ShadowDark's hexcrawl information is mostly in the Cursed Scroll zines, for instance. Even back in the day, when you wanted to add wilderness exploration to your game, you had to add Expert to your Basic box.
If you want to hexcrawl, you certainly can in 5e, and you can find resources (for free, even) to do so without any trouble. It's mildly irritating that if you want to do it and want the rules right there in the DMG that they're not there, maybe. But again; the complaint is a little whiny sounding at this point. Hexcrawls and pointcrawls are not necessarily the only or best way to handle wilderness exploration, after all. Plenty of modern players aren't really super interested in doing either. And by modern, I mean guys like me who've been playing for 45 years.
—Very little in terms of hirelings management (it does have animal "companions" though) and stronghold building is a bolted-on, videogamey late addition to the game.
We didn't use these rules back in the 80s either. I know some people did, but the reason that these fell by the wayside is because this stuff wasn't really core to the game and never really caught on with the players, for the most part. This is an odd thing to complain about unless you're unable to envision D&D as anything other than exactly the game that you want it to be.
Gameplay is based on the DM supplying long-ass stories and weaving whatever characters the players will bring to the table with their three-pages-long backgrounds, often unrelated to the game world and campaign story, supplied at the start of the game, into it. Somehow. The characters complexity and players attachment to them often means that DMs are incentivized to provide a measure of plot armor for the PCs, which is reflected in the sportsy, videogamey, non-lethal combat system design, as to not frustrate players and to avoid having to find a way to weave new characters into an ongoing story. It also makes it more difficult to manage players absences -most groups I've played with refused to play a session if even one player was missing and makes downtime activities (codified only later, but at least present) something the DM needs to actively work towards by carefully managing plot hooks and ongoing events so the PCs have the time to stop in a hub and perform them.
That's not entirely untrue, I suppose, but those trends have nothing to do with 5e. Most of them were going pretty strong by the early 80s during the 1e and B/X and BECMI eras.
Again; the OSR isn't about rediscovering old-fashioned ways of playing, though. It's a modern movement that takes some old ideas but aligns them into a very modern philosophy and context that few players, if they could time-travel from the late 70s or early 80s would have recognized.
So, the game design seems to be built around the idea that the DM is not merely a referee for the players while they play, or, you know, a Dungeon Master, but a full-on entertainer working as writer, performer and director, and all good, fun 5e games I've run or have played in, came out good 100% because of DM's experience, skills and a bit luck despite the game and with little contributions from the players -not because they weren't trying but because the game does not support them doing much apart from designing new characters, leveling them up and using their powers in combat.
It's always been that way. The notion that 5e is unique here is whack. Long before 5e most of those items were dropped from the game because most other games never had them at all, and most D&D players never used them.
DMing 5e is often a chore, with the overall expectation they will be a supplier of good stories and a good performer/director.
Which possibly also explain the rise in popularity of the paid-for DM.
It can be, but it doesn't have to be. The ability to actually understand how to effectively run a game without it being a chore is the whole point of experienced DMing. I think it's a bit rich for old-school, experienced DMs complaining that the game doesn't offer tools for inexperienced new DMs who don't have that experience. OK, well so what? Don't you have that experience? Don't you already have material from older versions that you can adapt? Why are you getting upset on behalf of other people who aren't upset by the very thing that you think that they should be upset about?
5e was touted and marketed as a "back to the origins" edition, after the 4e debacle -which, according to many, is not a bad game per sé, but it's an entirely separate experience from RPGs and especially from D&D, having being designed with the declared intent of being a clone of World of Warcraft, but at least it got way less managerial interference from Hasbro than 5e. But it's really not. It's quite clearly a direct descendant of 4e, but without the tactical freedom and a thin hand of paint to make it look a bit more AD&D 2e if you don't look at it under the light.
This one is kind of ridiculous. 5e is clearly a cleaned-up and somewhat simplified (on some axes, anyway) descendant of 3e. And in spite of its "primitive" core mechanics, 2e was clearly reaching in terms of supplements, design philosophy and playstyle into the modern era. I think a lot of OSR folks are in denial about what D&D was after about 1981-2 or so, just because the core mechanics didn't change too much, and the game could be played differently than it was presented, if desired.
Guess what? Same is true for any other edition, or any other game too.
Overabundance of player options also create a bizarre "circus effect" where the official setting feels like nothing is special or magic, because everybody and everything is, always, reflecting the combat system (no teamwork, everyone is too focused on their own unicity to care for tactics and teamwork). That is also clearly depicted in the 2024 edition graphics, so, absolutely deliberate.
Speaking of 2e... that's exactly what 2e was famous (infamous) for throughout the 90s and 00s.
I think it falls quite a bit off OSR principles and aesthetics.
Fair enough, and true. Not really what the question that it was a comment to was asking (which was: Are character builds, like what we saw in 3.5, antithetical to OSR play style?) so I don't mind fisking it offline in a forum that isn't particularly pro-OSR.
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