Pseudo-adventure path

The string of adventures for early Third Edition is often called an adventure path of sorts, because they follow each other in level expectations, and you could play them in order without any additional content needed due to the leveling alone. However, they also aren't an adventure path, because there are no links at all between them, and they have no connection. They're all completely discrete, stand-alone adventures and the only thing connecting them is the trade dress, the release schedule, and the fact that they march forward by level.

The Sunless Citadel (1-3)

The Forge of Fury (3-5)

The Speaker in Dreams (5-7)

The Standing Stone (7-9)

Heart of Nightfang Spire (10-13)

Deep Horizon (13-15)

Lord of the Iron Fortress (15-17)

Bastion of Broken Souls (18-20)

On my re-read, or first time read as the case might be (I can't remember; these are all about twenty-five years old now) I've hit up the first three of them, having finished The Speaker in Dreams last night. It's interesting to compare them to the Paizo adventure paths, both because some claim that this is an adventure path of sorts, or a proto-adventure path (I kind of disagree, but I see the point—if there's no interconnected "meta" story linking the adventures, it's not an adventure path, just a string of unrelated adventures of appropriately linked level expectation) but also because of the way that they're written.

I've said for some time now that Paizo and even WotC (now, at least) write products that are meant to be read at least as much as they're meant to be played. I think that they realize that if they can make engaging products that people want to read that they can sell many more products than if they make products for play. Because people's ability to play modules is much more limited than their ability to read them. Of course, many people just write this way because it comes natural to them too, and they personally enjoy engaging to read products, and write them because they enjoy them, without thinking overmuch about the perhaps perverse economic incentives of writing game modules that are really more to be read than to be played.

There's often a lot of backstory, context, description, etc. Stuff that makes it feel more like a script or screenplay than a toolkit to play with. The Speaker in Dreams, on the other hand, is not that product. It's very much a toolkit, and while my mind often wandered while reading it, because its written like an older product; all practical and useable rather than engaging, I could see that this would actually be a great product to play in most respects.

One interesting point of discussion in old school circles is when exactly did the game became "not old school" anymore. There isn't a single answer to this, of course, because there isn't even a single answer to what old school even is. Let me present a handful of potential answers, though, and my case for why that one works:

- Tim Kask actually made the case in an older blog post (he's passed away now) that the release of AD&D was the end of old school. Certainly there was a fundamental shift in how the game was expected to work at that point; it went from being pretty rules-lite and freewheeling, counting on the creativity of the players and the judgement of the referee or DM to one that was extensively codified and detailed. That said, I don't think that this cut-off has caught on. But in some way, maybe it should have. Ultimately, I think that that's the main distinction between different playstyles; how much rules do you need, and how seriously do you take them? On the other hand, in my experience hardly anyone actually played with all of the rules of AD&D. Most people probably did something like B/X but with AD&D races and classes, honestly, which is why "Advanced B/X" retro-clones are among the most popular.

- 2e is often seen as a potential cut-off, especially with the release of "2.5" with the players and DM's options books. While the rules still maintained a high degree of compatibility with every other version of D&D and AD&D floating around at the time, the focus and presentation was decidedly modern and heavily influenced by the success of games that were tradder than trad and heavily focused on story and stuff like that, like the success of White Wolf and others.

- 3e is the most commonly given cut-off, given that the system was extensively revised, no longer had high levels of compatibility (according to most) and power level was increased. That said... as noted in my review of the module above, much of how the game was presented was decidedly retro, more so than 2e had been in fact, and compatibility is in the eye of the beholder (no pun intended.) Professor DM often says, and I completely agree with him, that you can pretty much run any version of any module of D&D with any version of the system on the fly. If I wanted to run a 5e campaign using 3e rules (or vice versa) I can and have just done it. If I wanted to run a Goodman Games DCC module or a B/X module again, on the fly. But you have to have the right personality to think that that's doable. Lots of people shudder at the thought. To me, it's no big deal. In any case, one of 3e's big mottos was "back to the dungeon" and in spite of a lot of updates to the system, in many respects the presentation and tone of the game was much more similar to much earlier AD&D rather than where 2e had been for many years previously. At least early on in the editions' life cycle.

Although I doubt most people would call 3e old school. That's a hard case to make, but I'm offering it anyway. But I already know most people will reject that paradigm, and probably for good reason. But I was struck by how "old school" the writing and paradigm of these early 3e modules are compared to what came later. It was certainly deliberately more "old school" than modules like 2e's "Dead Gods" or something like that, in spite of the revisions to the system. 

As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised by the Lovecraftian angle in this module too, without it being too "on the nose." Nicely done. I'm actually kind of excited about finding a venue to try and run this, honestly.

The Four Horsemen of TSR art

I'm a Gen X guy who remembers the 80s like it was yesterday sometimes. I have a fruitful albeit complicated relationship with the OSR, but mostly fruitful and friendly. The OSR and I are friendly acquaintances at least, if not close friends. One of the ways in which I'm sympathetic to the OSR is in preferring older style art to the technically adept but completely bland, soulless and very bright, polite, colorful and child-like stuff that is common today. D&D illustrations have, at the very least, lost their edge, look like DEI nonsense, and are generally not as good as older 80s and even 90s style illustrations; the only improvement is that the move to full color books for most things, which happened under WotC starting with 3e in 2000 is, well, obviously a technical improvement from the B&W interiors of the earlier material. 

That said, my relationship with the earlier artwork is also complicated. There were four big in-house artists during the heyday of TSR, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson and Clyde Caldwell. Prior to that, we had the likes of Dave Trampier, Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, and others. But the previous four were usually considered the Four Horsemen, or the Big Four, or whatever. Larry Elmore did the covers for the BECMI line of D&D boxed sets. While those aren't my favorite boxed sets, those definitely are my favorite covers! He also did the covers for the original Dragonlance trilogy novels. That means that to me, of course, he's the most iconic of all the TSR artists, and my favorite. I also particularly like how he painted dragons, like the ones in the BECMI art, so yeah. I bought an older D&D novel specifically and only because it had the same image as the Companion set as the cover, and I liked that cover so much that I wanted a novel based on it.

I also currently have t-shirts with the Basic and Expert cover art on them too. Elmore is super iconic to D&D and to fantasy as I envisioned it as a kid as a whole. I'm now less likely to go for the high fantasy image of fighters or knights fighting dragons with oversized magical swords, but I still love the imagery of it. Elmore also did, for what it's worth, the cover art for the Star Frontiers game, so he was equally iconic in the (admittedly much smaller) world of space opera gaming as he was in fantasy.

Clyde Caldwell is another great illustrator of the Big Four. He did a lot of stuff, including a bunch of novel and module covers. What I think of him most as, however, is the covers for the Gazetteer series of Known World (Mystara) setting material. But this piece, which is cropped, and which was the original cover for an early Forgotten Realms novel called Spellfire is probably my favorite Caldwell piece.

Keith Parkinson also did some stellar work. I wasn't as much a fan of his iconic dragons, like the cover to Dragon Magazine #1, but he did some other really great stuff. His work "Lord Soth's Charge" might be one of his most iconic pieces, and deservedly so. It's excellent. Undead may have been his specialty even. 

Parkinson also did some pretty iconic work outside of D&D, like the covers for the EverQuest boxes, some iconic other work for trading cards, other novels (he did one version of the iconically stupid but also bestselling Sword of Truth for instance). He also died relatively young (47) of cancer over twenty years ago.

Jeff Easley was the last of the Four Horsemen, and the one that I never could really get in to. He had some good art, I suppose, but he had a lot of stuff that I never liked. I especially associate him with the covers for late 1e books, like Manual of the Planes and others of that same vintage, the 2e covers, and other D&D-line products of the same vintage, like the various "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" boxed sets from the early 90s and the Rules Cyclopedia version. His monsters in particular looked weird and fleshy. His style was much more distinct from the other three, and his work is easier to spot, for the most part. I don't want to dog on him, but I just don't like his style as much.

Now, one of these days, I'd like to outfit a home office with prints of some of the best artwork available from this era. I've long thought that I'd like to have five or six pieces. Four of them would be the first four from the BECMI line; Basic, Expert, Companion and Master. Master I could possibly do without, but the other three are super, super iconic to me. What else to round off the list with is up for grabs still. Maybe even something more modern, like this Wayne Reynolds one. I have a high resolution image that I grabbed back when it was available (probably off of ENWorld or the WotC website, but maybe Waybe Reynold's own before he converted it to lower res versions) that I could literally make my own high quality print of if I wanted to.

Add to that my equally high resolution Pathfinder 1e cover art, which is similar in style, and I'd be cooking with gas.

My relationship with Pathfinder is even more complicated still. I've never actually played it, technically, but of course, it's a relatively modest revision of the 3.5 rules. At least, on the same level of modest changes as 3.0 had to 3.5. Because I played a lot of 3e and 3.5, I feel like Pathfinder 1e is very, very familiar to me. I have a lot of products from that line. Most of them, in fact, at least in digital form, and quite a few in physical form. But I probably wouldn't want to play or run them in their own native system; I'd convert them to whatever D&D-like system that I'd otherwise be running. Probably, if it were really all that D&D-like, an E6 3.5, or even something less D&D-like, like my own Old Night system. But that's no different than my attitude towards any version of D&D or it's product, and for all intents and purposes, I consider Pathfinder (all versions, but especially 1e) to merely be a slight variation on D&D anyway.

In the case of that artwork, it's less about it being super iconic and more about it being a good piece of art that I happen to already have in high resolution format, though, because I could extract it from my copy of the PDF.

Game popularity

Interesting video from Professor Dungeon Master.

First off; the caveats. Ranking of number of games at Gen Con is a dubious proxy for popularity at home tables in general. It's a proxy, but is it a good, close one? I don't know. That said, it's still an interesting thing in its own right anyway. A few comments that I thought were interesting:

First, I was immediately struck by the fact that a lot of Free League games hit the top 20, albeit at the lower levels. These guys are for real. I'm hearing more and more about their games, of course, and everyone raves about their production quality—although perspectives seem to be mixed on the quality of the actual game mechanics and stuff like that. I think that they are more coffee table books; people buy them to read them and look at the art, and because they look good on their shelf or on their table, but people rarely play them. I'd guess. With some possible exceptions, like their fantasy games, maybe. Of course, they probably are very eager to dip their toes into playing at conventions, which explains their positioning here. I'm not 100% sure that the Borg games really qualify; they're published by Free League, but not designed by them. 

Second, the difference between the 20th and the 1st is ridiculous. When the 20th place game has events in the 20s and the 1st place game has events over 1,000, then honestly, 20 is probably too many places. We're already in the long tail.

Third, Tales of the Valiant. I'm sure that they were hoping to be to 5th edition what Pathfinder 1e was to 3e and 4e, but it looks like they didn't manage it for whatever reason. Sounds like last year they were pretty popular, but they lost a lot of audience in the meantime. I wonder if the problem is that the game isn't great, or more that it just isn't necessary? Plus, the "OGL scandal" was a big deal on YouTube and to the perennially online, and of course to third party publishers... but did anyone else ever care? Like at all? Did most people even know about it? There's a bubble around online discussions, and people don't really care about what people are doing with stuff like the OGL, for the most part.

Although I do think that there were a lot of popular 3pp, or at least popular enough. I don't want to suggest that it was nothing, but it wasn't the catastrophe that people online pretended like it was. Ergo, the perceived need for Tales of the Valiant was a case of perception bias, and the demand for something like it was over-estimated by Kobold Press. At least, that's my opinion, uninformed though it clearly is.

Fourth, Call of Cthulhu is going really strong. Holy cow. I think that's the kind of game that gets played more at conventions and other one shots than in ongoing campaigns at home, so it probably punches a little above its weight, but that's still impressive.

Fifth, I think it's curious that he claims that ShadowDark is more popular than the rest of the OSR put together even though many people exclude it from the OSR. I've had opinions on the OSR and what is and isn't the OSR, of course, but if you think of the OSR primarily as "a scene" then ShadowDark absolutely is part of the scene, and probably overshadows at this point the scene. After all, I believe that you can use your B/X, AD&D or other old school modules and products with ShadowDark without much if any conversion needed. ShadowDark is at least OSR adjacent, and it treads the same territory as the OSR, and because it actually utilizes the past 40 or so years of game design improvements to do the same thing in a very familiar way, but better... well it's not surprising that it's kind of settled as the most popular iteration of that "scene" now. "The OSR is dead" has been claimed many times before, but I kind of wonder now if it isn't kinda sorta true, if ShadowDark, and even Mork Borg are many times more popular (by Professor DM's metric) than anything else in the scene, and both attract the same players basically for the same reasons, and they've really kind of abandoned the old D&D game play for an actual newer, improved iteration of the rules that is better than the old ones ever were. You could make the case that in the long run, 3e, 4e and even 5e weren't necessarily improvements on the old school D&D rules; hence the strong pull to go back to older rules and retro-clones. But now, ShadowDark actually treads the same territory and actually does so in an improved way? It's like it killed the OSR and is now standing in its place.

To back up this interpretation, Professor DungeonMaster himself not too long ago announced that his own game Deathbringer, which he's been talking about being in development for some time, and is expected to come out sometime in 2026, is now going to be a ShadowDark game. It can be used with ShadowDark, but can also be used instead of ShadowDark; basically it'll be like the comparison between Savage Worlds + Fantasy Supplement vs Savage Worlds Pathfinder. Completely stand-alone, but also completely compatible with ShadowDark. That may well be boosting the signal. I think Deathbringer will be fairly popular too, and especially so if ShadowDarkers can use it without conversion. More and more I'm seeing OSR products and even producers who used to make 5e products, explicitly targeting their products to ShadowDark. 

I've noticed that even on reddit, ShadowDark seems to be talked about a lot on the OSR subreddit. As much as any other game, if not more. I think he's on to something that the OSR has... kinda...been overtaken by ShadowDark. It just does the same niche of gaming better. 

Finally, where is Green Ronin? The AGE system? Mutants & Masterminds, etc? I'm not a huge fan of their systems from what I know of them, but I thought they were a relatively big player in the market, with big licenses and all that. Clearly not, if even the Alien RPG is outperforming them in terms of official events. I don't know what to think of their "fall from grace" if that's indeed what has happened to them. I also think its curious that they have not embraced 5e much at all, other than adapting a handful of their most popular past products to 5e (Book of Fiends, for example) but they otherwise seem to have spent more time embracing Pathfinder, even writing a full Adventure Path set in Freeport there; the existence of which prompted my Freeport Trawl. 

Seems like there would be a market for Freeport or Freeport-like products, but all of them are very aged and work with systems that are mostly out of print and outdated. Yet Pirate Borg was a hugely popular game at Gen Con. I dunno. Maybe they're just tired, or are terrible marketers, or have had to go get day jobs and their company isn't a big deal anymore. Seems like they're missing an opportunity here.

5e? 5e, yeah

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.

Megadungeons

Got an Arcane Library newsletter in my inbox this morning. It was a Q&A of sorts. Found this small gem buried within it.

1. I've always wanted to make a megadungeon based on the layout of a mega mall. Could you write some thoughts on dos and don'ts with copying existing architecture for dungeon maps?

Definitely! Existing architecture is a great place to get ideas for room shapes and how areas flow together. It's also handy to note how buildings are structured around major rooms, like temples or grand halls.

However, one thing to be cautious of is having your layout be too symmetrical or utilitarian. Dungeons are supposed to be mythical places that don't always make sense. In fact, it's that surprising and unpredictable factor of a dungeon's layout that makes it fun to explore!

If a dungeon is too symmetrical, it will be too predictable as far as a game board goes. You want to make your mega mall a bit surreal, a bit nonsensical -- something that would never receive an actual building permit. You could keep some realism by making your mega mall look like it was added to several times throughout the decades, placing things in a decidedly "non-ideal" layout.

Wow. I actually didn't even emphasize the "as far as a game board goes" line; she did that herself. At the risk of sounding like a snowflake Millennial, I "can't even" with the OSR playstyle anymore. If D&D (or ShadowDark) is a board game, then yeah, we're not even talking about the same hobby that I recognize. While I admit to seeing a fair number of smug trad folks writing articles, columns, reviews and more in the 80s with their dismissal of the dungeon as a passe, childish fad who's time had come, that overzealousness faded quickly. While I often talk about one of the two mottos of 3e, "tools, not rules" the other motto was "back to the dungeon" and people have been playing that way for a long time now. In fact, if anything, truly trad play is somewhat on the outs; we have a lot of hybrid trad dungeon play, at least in the D&D and D&D-like games sphere. The official WotC campaigns, and Paizo adventure paths all strike this pose. The only truly trad stuff that I regularly see is in other games, like WFRP or Call of Cthulhu. (Although I'm sure there's plenty more out there in other games that I'm not as familiar with.)

Maybe I'm making a false distinction between trad and "hybrid trad." What I really should say, probably, is that my rejection of dungeoneering in favor of more natural types of game play that resemble 1) almost every other non-D&D or D&D-like game, and 2) almost every story in the source material that D&D is supposedly based on (and every other type of story too, for that matter) is, curiously, a somewhat radical stance, apparently. Or at least it seems to be true that few people play that way, and maybe ever have. Maybe my time outside of D&D for pretty much all of the 90s has given me a skewed view of what the RPG hobby is and how most people engage with it. One so skewed that the 25 years since hasn't completely purged me of RPG.net think. Maybe.

Before I finished typing up this post, I found this newly posted video by Professor Dungeon Master that seems to talk, albeit in somewhat different language, about the great playstyle divide, and it's longevity. It's an interesting addition to what I said, I think, and should be watched as a different take (with similar conclusions, however) on the same concept.

Deadliness in RPGs

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.

Reddit is almost as bad as ENWorld

As the title says. I need to get out of internet conversations altogether. I rarely find that people are 1) intelligent enough to follow the logical outcome of what they even say, 2) discuss in good faith, or 3) exhibit anything at all approaching common sense. In fact, as both reddit and ENWorld have become more and more liberal, they are subject to the following problem, which rather than quote in part, I'll just link to. It's a very good piece.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-involution-of-the-liberal-mind

Anyway, today's particular nonsense came from a post in, I believe r/osr where someone asked what changes to ShadowDark one would make. Houserules, etc. There was a small digression where one guy said that he strongly recommended not changing anything until the OP had played with the rules as is first, and a couple of other people chimed in to suggest that was some kind of law or something. Now, at the bottom of this page, you may notice that one of my mottos is, in part, the famous Latin phrase "Eventus stultorum magister est." And the fact that I first heard it in Tombstone doesn't negate the wisdom of this ancient proverb. That advice given on reddit is lowest common denominator advice, literally for the fools—the stulti, who can't figure anything out except by experiencing it personally. It's ridiculous advice for anyone who's been a roleplaying hobbyist for any amount of time at all. But, I guess, if you're not smart enough to extrapolate how a rule will work in play or if you're even interested in using that particular rule, I guess maybe it's decent advice. Stumble around on your own the hard way if that's the only way you can learn. Sucks to be you.

This was especially notable given the example I gave. One of the things that I don't care for in ShadowDark is carousing, wherein you can spend treasure to get bonus XP. I don't like any GP = XP equivalency rules, or rules where you can trade one for the other. There's generally two reasons for this kind of rule; 1) to motivate people to go seek out after treasure (I have no interest in motivating players to do that, but Gary Gygax did, back when the game was much more wargamey and roleplaying hadn't yet really caught on as the actual main event of the hobby, because everyone doing it was an old wargamer.) 2) to bleeds off excess treasure, because now your characters have too much. I called it a patch, in fact, to bleed off excess treasure, because due to inertia from old school treasure distribution, which has for a variety of reasons never been addressed in D&D-likes, characters get too much for most GM's taste. 

Given that this situation has literally been the case in D&D-likes for more than 50 years now, the idea that I don't know if I like how it works specifically in ShadowDark is absurd. 

And then Kelsey Dionne, writer of ShadowDark jumped in and said that carousing wasn't a patch to fix excess treasure, it was a resource to be spent. That's semantics, though. If you have treasure to spend on bonus XP, especially the really spendy bonuses, then you have too much treasure, and the bonus XP is a method to bleed off that treasure. And advance faster. Both of which are, by my tastes, not desirable. Therefore, they're easily fixed by simply giving less treasure and getting rid of the carousing stuff altogether. Don't bleed treasure (that you now don't have anyway) off to advance faster, so that you have a slower advancement schedule—which is also better. 

And... just to add some visual interest, here's another piece of Midkemia cover art, from the book that follows the Riftwar Saga and kind of starts treating with the next generation; Arutha and Anita's spoiled twin sons.

I have to wonder if the artist, Don Maitz, is familiar with Arnold Friberg's famous Book of Mormon illustrations, given the obvious resemblance here to this earlier work. His biography doesn't mention anything about his religious affiliation, or even much at all about his personal life, other than that he's married to Janny Wurts, who co-wrote the Empire trilogy with Feist, a spin-off from the Riftwar Saga. Probably how he got the gig in the first place. Of course, you don't need to be LDS to appreciate the art of Arnold Friberg; I've often thought that any sword & sorcery fan would immediately click with his weird mixture of savage Mesoamerican, Middle Eastern and Roman style aesthetic. 

Speaking of OSR weirdness, here's another reddit post I made, on a thread on "what are your OSR 'sins'?"

The thread title hardly endears to those who already see the OSR as almost cult-like in it's application of the "correct" way to play. That said, I'm a fan of the OSR mostly because I'm old, I remember when OD&D, Holmes, and B/X were what we played because they were current, and I love the DIY, garage band, indie aesthetic that the OSR has brought back to D&D-like games. I'm not, however:

• Very interested in faithful recreations of the original rules that don't fix certain things for either mechanical improvement or to change the tone of the game. I greatly dislike the overly weak thief, even though I love the archetype, I greatly dislike Vancian magic, I disbelieve the illusion that the cleric is actually an archetype and I don't like using them, etc. I've also never had problems with a shorter skill system of some kind, having also played plenty of GURPS and Cthulhu back in the day and been very comfortable with the idea of skills, etc.
• I'm also not at all interested in the so-called OSR playstyle. I don't have "adventurers" as a social class of any kind, nor do I find the implied story of dungeon-crawling for treasure to be interesting in the least. I strongly dislike dungeons, especially if they're loaded with gotcha traps, puzzles, riddles, or other things that have never existed really in reality. My playstyle is quite trad, although modified with a number of old-fashioned caveats. Maybe paleo-trad. My games tend to resemble more a combination of The Godfather, Mission: Impossible and James Bond in a dark Warhammer FRP or Cthulhu-like fantasy setting, and my motto is that while maybe I'm not old school, I certainly am old fashioned. That said, I don't mind hex-crawling as much as dungeon-crawling, but maybe that's because hiking/backpacking is another real-life hobby of mine.
• I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea that games that adhere to the "OSR as playstyle" but which don't really resemble old D&D are actually OSR. I know that I'm going to gradually lose this argument more and more as time goes on, but I've got to give credit to Yochai Gal for trying really hard to get the NSR recognized as something separate from, albeit related to, the OSR, rather than part of the OSR as a whole. Part of his failure may well have been the toxic gatekeeping, purity testing and insane overly political stance of the NSR in general, which makes it more difficult to focus on the NSR as an actual category of game and playstyle that's separate from the OSR. Or maybe the different types of rules aren't as important as I think that they are, and the OSR and the NSR, from the point of view of someone outside of either, are too similar to bother splitting.
• Similarly, I'm a little ambivalent on some aspects of weirdness and gonzo. While I incorporate a great deal of Lovecraftian influence in my fantasy gaming, it's less of the cosmic horror and semi-science fiction elements, and more of the interdimensional horror and risk of character madness. Warhammer FRP and the Darkest Dungeons video games are more the style that I'm looking at rather that mi-go and Yithians taking people to their interplanetary cities or whatever. Demons are, in fact, demons, and not intergalactic aliens, or whatever. I also dislike science fiction elements in fantasy; or rather, I don't consider it fantasy anymore when they're present, and I prefer to keep them discrete. Don't get me wrong; a Thundarr the Barbarian meets Cthulhupunk sounds amazing, but I'd have to treat it like something completely separate from whatever I'm doing in fantasy. Probably another reason that I consider the NSR so different from the OSR, given that the NSR is "more weird" than the otherwise fairly traditional OSR.

This isn't part of my post, but while I'm giving credit to Gal for that particular attempt, I also credit (blame) mostly him specifically for the NSR being such a hotbed of woke politics and cancel culture nonsense. He's specifically the one most responsible for how toxic the NSR community is. Although maybe it was inevitable given the genesis of the NSR community in the early work of weirdos like James Raggi and Zac S. to begin with. It naturally gravitated to that kind of personality, even if the games themselves (some of them, anyway) aren't necessarily woke. Some of them, in fact, I'd actually probably like. But the community... blegh.

Maybe, given that the OSR has been around for a good twenty years now (depending on when exactly you consider it to have started.) I have to stop trying to think of it as a monolithic thing. There are a lot of people in the OSR doing a lot of different (and mutually exclusive) things. It's OK to be a fan of certain elements of it and not necessarily the movement as a whole. I think a lot of people are having trouble letting go of the idea that they're part of "the OSR community" but I do think that it's clear that original B/X fans and fans of NSR stuff are two different communities... at the very least. In reality, you can break it down into being fans of all kinds of specific games and not of others; just like being fans of RPGs overall. The OSR has become something too big to just treat it as a single thing, just like being "a gamer" is too big for that mostly too.

Doesn't mean that there can't be a lot of overlap between fans of various different games or even various broader approaches to gaming, however, even while acknowledging that being a fan of this or that isn't necessarily correlated with being a fan of that or this. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general; the assumption that because I play D&D, I must like any other RPG, or that I must like anime (I don't) or heavy metal (also don't.) But because the OSR was for quite some time united under a relatively singular approach and goals, it's been harder to give up the idea that it's not anymore.

B/X Omnibus

I bought the Moldvay B/X pdfs ($4.99 each) and the two modules that came with them (Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread) way back when they first went on sale, in 2013 or so, I think. But I hate reading pdfs, mostly. So I never read them. I've since, kind of recently, found someone who made a printable pdf of the two rules sets together, along with a few alternate covers. Because I own the pdfs, I figured I was legally in good shape to order up a Lulu copy. I'm quite happy with it.

Still not quite sure what I'll do with it, other than eventually read it... maybe sooner rather than later, now that I have it. It's a cool looking POD in any case. The third that I've bought ever, so it's a new(ish) endeavor for me to get into PODs. I also have 4th Edition Basic Fantasy Roleplaying and a copy that I bought o Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the 3e version of Curse of Strahd.

OSR Identity

Someone is wrong on the internet! I don't know why this bugs me, but it does. There's no reason for it to bug me. Pretty much everyone in the OSR understands that there are two camps, the OSR OSR and the NSR, is often what they're called. The idea that any mechanics can be OSR if the assumed playstyle is OSR, although that's sometimes poorly defined, is stupid beyond all reason. And on top of everything else, I don't identify at all as belonging to the OSR movement, or even liking the OSR playstyle. 

And yet; I'm sympathetic to the OSR movement in some ways, I'm cognizant of my history with D&D and the place it has in the hobby, and I want to see the OSR succeed without being dragged down by the toxic energy that often seems to accompany the NSR (largely due to Yochai Gal, Israeli designer of Cairn, and gate-keeper and woke secret police. To be fair to him, however, he recognizes that what he (and others) are doing is pretty different than what the OSR had been before he started doing it, and he made a brave enough effort to get the NSR label to really stick, before accepting the inevitable that he was going to be lumped in with the OSR whether he liked it or not, so he'd just have to always caveat which OSR he was a part of.

[T]he OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition. The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play. 

An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.

The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions using what S. John Ross would call "ephemeral resources" and "invisible rulebooks", and that the OSR calls "playing the world" and "player skill", respectively. Basically, by not being bound by the rules, you can play with a wider space of resources that contribute to framing differences in PC agency in potentially very precise and finely graded ways, and this allows you to throw a wider variety of challenges at players for them to overcome. I could write an entire post on just what random tables are meant to do, but they tie into the variance in agency and introduce surprise and unpredictability, ensuring that agency does vary over time.

I tend to date the start of the OSR from shortly after the publication of OSRIC (2006), which blew open the ability to use the OGL to republish the mechanics of old, pre-3.x D&D. With this new option, you had people who mainly wanted to revive AD&D 1e as a living game, and people who wanted to use old rule-sets as a springboard for their own creations. 2007 brought Labyrinth Lord, and the avalanche followed thereafter. The early OSR had Grognardia to provide it with a reconstructed vision of the past to position itself as the inheritors of, it had distinct intellectual developments like "Melan diagrams" of dungeons and Chris Kutalik's pointcrawls, and I would say it spent the time between 2006 and roughly 2012 forming its norms into a relatively self-consistent body of ideas about proper play.

Well, that's the OSR playstyle, more or less, and I suppose any game that utilizes that playstyle at the table can be called OSR if you go by that definition. That's how games like Cairn or Knave or Morg Borg or Dragonbane or ShadowDark can be called OSR. Because of principles! (Apparently Groucho Marx once said "Those are my principles... and if you don't like them, I have others.") But as noted above, the OSR was not originally about a playstyle at all, although it no doubt was correlated to what has lately been called the "classic playstyle" and in many ways rejected the dominant trad playstyle. The OSR was about getting the old rules that some people greatly preferred (along with the implicit necessities that those rules had on playing the actual game, i.e., greater risk of character death, much lower powered, non-superhero like PCs, etc.) The OSR was created to 1) create the retro-clones and get them out there, and 2) produce new material compatible with the retro-clones and by the transitive property of the retro-clones being compatible with the old rules, the new material was essentially about being compatible with the old rules too. But by and large, people played those rules using the same playstyle preferences that they used to play any other rules, regardless of what they were.

As the OSR developed, many younger gamers actually discovered that there was something to those old rules that the new rules didn't offer, and became fans. But it started getting all of these BS principles added to it, and people started talking more and more about the "correct" way to play, and thus the OSR playstyle was born. But this was a new and unusual development, and nowhere in the past did the rules dictate your playstyle, really. Certainly some rules may have encouraged some playstyles. This is obvious from my many years of playing 3e, and realizing that the complicated, careful and cautious tactical combat game was meant to be a feature, not a bug—its just that my playstyle was in conflict with it. And even today, plenty of people reject that idea of the OSR playstyle while using OSR rules. I just read a post on r/osr that was talking about how a guy was using the Rules Cyclopedia rules to run Pathfinder Adventure path campaigns, in spite of their clearly "more trad than trad" pedigrees. It's not clear to me exactly how he does so, as he called his games a "sandbox" and I've read plenty of Pathfinder Adventure Path campaigns, and only one of them can even generously be called a sandbox (although it seems to be the most popular one, maybe). But he's not even using retro-clones, he's literally just using old rules. (That's another development in the OSR; once WotC realized that they could make easy money doing nothing but adding pdf or POD copies of old products on their online stores, they did so. There's no reason for the retro-clones anymore, except that the retro-clones are often better written, better organized, and fixed a few minor problems that the old games stubbornly didn't recognize or fix when they were in print the first time around.) The OSR is all about playing old D&D, and less about any purported playstyle. Therefore, a parallel movement that prioritizes the so-called OSR playstyle and doesn't even have any interest in old D&D rules would seem to be the opposite of the OSR.

The NSR is a strange and unpleasant collection of individuals that arose from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess fandom, beginning with Troika and Into the Odd, but has now been expanded to encompass all manner of derivative remixes. The defining characteristic of the NSR is that they don't really have an interest in DnD and thus are disqualified from being OSR, yet claim to abide by OSR principles. Although there are certainly exceptions, and plenty of well-intentioned newcomers in their ranks, they are most famous for their aggressive gatekeeping and deplatforming strategies, paranoia, infighting and the toxicity of their communities.

NSR games tend to be extremely rules light, involve inexplicable remixes of already extant rules-light games, have limited long term potential, and are characterized by a short lifespan.

Now, granted, the sometimes OSR-labeled games I mentioned earlier; Cairn, Knave, ShadowDark, etc. are, by all accounts, good games. They're reasonably popular, (especially ShadowDark) and deservedly so. People who like OSR games may well like these games, and for similar reasons; the games work well with the playstyle that they prefer. In many cases, they are more tightly wound with the playstyle than any version of D&D ever was. But the taxonomist in me just rebels at the idea that something (b) that is a mirror image of something else (a) can also be called (a). But maybe its inevitable. I'm also irritated by the idea that revisionist Westerns, "anti-Westerns" are, in fact, Westerns. But most people consider them such, even when they recognize the differences between westerns and anti-westerns. Less well recognized but exactly parallel are the sword & sorcery of guys like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber contrasted with the anti-S&S of Michael Moorcock, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Even Gary Gygax himself doesn't seem to have cottoned on to the difference, or perhaps he actually preferred anti-S&S to real S&S. But again, people call both the thing and the anti-thing the thing. So the anti-OSR, or the NSR, is probably going to be called the OSR, even though it actually stands completely in contrast to what the OSR is. I doubt that it's going to go any other way. And why do I care? I don't even identify with the OSR. I really have no dog in that fight, no horse in that race. I reject the OSR—any version of the OSR—because I have little interest in playing old D&D rules, and even less in playing the "OSR playstyle." The many words that I've written about what exactly the OSR is comes from the perspective of a spergy taxonomic-minded outsider.

In any case, on r/osr, I found this recent poll, which I think is interesting. Clearly, as I said, it's a losing battle to call the NSR something other than the OSR, or separate it in the minds of most. It's the single biggest plurality. That said, I think splitting the other three into three is kind of dubious, and if you combine them, which is probably the best bet, given that all of those rules sets are broadly compatible and interchangeable, that is significantly larger than the NSR.

And like I said, the NSR isn't bad in terms of quality. It's just not OSR; it's something other than the OSR. It's a mirror image, in many respects, of the OSR. If those games were published in the early 80s, they'd be considered fantasy heartbreakers, or just very different games altogether, no more similar to D&D than RuneQuest is, or Tunnels & Trolls. If you consider the two branches of the OSR to be "playing the clones or old rules with new material" vs. playing the NSR, then the clones are at 382 to NSR 248. It's almost exactly a 2:1 ratio; the clones are two thirds of the community, the "neoclones" are a third. It's a significant plurality, but it's not where the community "is", so to speak. 

And, of course, I'm outside of the community altogether, but I'm not so far away from it that I don't wander into town to see what's going on quite a bit.

For instance, I also just ordered an "omnibus" POD of B/X. I bought the B and X games (plus the modules that originally came with them) back in 2013, I think, when WotC first made them available for sale. $5 each, so between the two rules sets and the 2 modules, $20. Just as a collector. I've searched them occasionally just for the heckuvit, but I haven't read them all the way through, nor am I likely to. But when I found that someone had made Lulu printable pdfs that combined them into a single book, I couldn't resist ordering a copy for myself. Much more convenient to use than my pdfs most of the time, and much prettier too. Much nicer looking even than the original staple-bound books would have been, for that matter. I think I may have printed the whole thing out from my printer and work and put them in a 3-ring binder at one point, but if so, I have no idea where that ended up.

Dragonborn, tieflings, and what is D&D?

Couple of things percolating in my head like a hot drink. First thing; I finished reading last night a pdf that I got as part of a DCC humble bundle a little while ago. The pdf was the Gazetteer of the Known Realms, and is basically a 120 or so page campaign setting for the DCC adventures. It was written before the DCC game, but it is part of the 3.5 OGL releases, and if you recall, the first DCC adventures were all 3.5 adventures. There's also a second part, another pdf that's part of the same "boxed set", which is Gamemaster's Guide. This was an interesting setting, to me at least. Not because it necessarily did anything that I really thought was exciting, or that I wanted to borrow or use, but because of what it represents. While a number of "3e-isms" were pretty obvious, especially with regards to psionics whenever they were mentioned, it was obviously and deliberately written to be a very "proto-OSR" setting, and I've heard it described online as what a Mystara boxed set would have looked like had the old D&D line ever released one (apparently, they didn't. Just the gazetteers. No doubt why they also used that name.) This is both its strength and its weakness; it's cool that it's such an old-school campaign setting, that it fits nicely next to Greyhawk or Mystara and even feels very similar in most respects to those settings. But it curiously is very, very D&Dish in the old school way; the way the setting is set up, the races and their arrangement and relationships, etc. As cool as that is, it doesn't do much that hasn't already been done many times, and as such, it hurts it as a product; it simply doesn't offer anything that we don't already have, therefore, it becomes completely superfluous and unnecessary. I'm still trying to decide if I think it was a waste of my time to have read it (and to turn to the second book in the boxed set) or not. 

One way in which it was just a little different than older settings like gray box Forgotten Realms, or the older Greyhawk gazetteers, or whatever—it has some proto-wokeness. The whole white colonialism bad vibe, which is understated but present, is one that we probably wouldn't even have thought of at all in the 80s, so I'm not sure that that can count, but the presence of all kinds of female knights and heroes is something that's always jarring to me; I've known too many women and I've known to many men to think of them as interchangeable widgets. The people who push that kind of nonsense come across as very bizarre to me. Like they don't know enough real people to understand human behavior, or something. I don't mine female characters, especially when played by women. But acting like women who act like men is common across the history of the campaign setting, and common across the setting overall is weird. DCC's setting Aereth, or whatever exactly it's called, does this.

That said, I came across this old post by Rob Schwalb from the lead-up to 5e. I think it's interesting, so I'll quote it (mostly) in full.

A few years ago, I woke up and realized what I thought was fantasy wasn't the same for everyone else. Sure, people have had worlds with winged cats that could talk, elves with red cloaks, and all sorts of tweaks and twists to the basic fantasy tropes for years. And I've always known that things such as the Empire of the Petal Throne and Jorune lurked on the fringes, but they were strange things wholly alien to my sensibilities. You see I cut my teeth on Tolkien, Homer, Mallory, Howard, Alexander, and the rest. The old red box D&D let me play in a version of fantasy with which I was most familiar. It let me tell my own stories set in Middle-Earth or wherever because the fundamental concepts about fantasy ranged from "one ring to rule them all" to forbidden dealings with Arioch to scaling the Tower of the Elephant. I knew elves didn't hang out in Hyborian Age and you would never find dwarves drinking with Gawaine, but in my youthful mind I could reconcile these differences because it was all fantasy to me.

By the time 2nd Edition D&D hit the shelves, I had already solidified my views and, with the frustrating absence of assassins, half-orcs, and monks aside, the game remained true to that vision. But over the next few years, the game began to change. TSR published settings that presented different ways to play D&D. Some, such as Birthright and Mystara, weren't that far from my tastes, while others challenged what I believed was true about D&D, notably Spelljammer, Red Steel, and Dark Sun. In some cases I embraced these visions; in others I rejected them. Thinking back, we never said we were playing D&D when we played Dark Sun. Instead, we said we were playing Dark Sun. (The same was true for Ravenloft now that I think on it.) I enjoyed those settings as games in themselves—games that just so happened to use the rules I knew so well. They weren't D&D; to me, but that was okay because they never spilled too far into the core (though the MC Appendixes would eventually chunk together all sorts of monsters from across a wide range of worlds).

The weird psychological game I played continued into 3rd Edition. The racial assortment stayed more or less the same as it had in previous editions. The game retained the core tone I had embraced years ago. Things would change. Supplements introduced new races, some expected (half-ogres and minotaurs) and some completely unexpected such as dusklings (Magic of Incarnum), illumians (Races of Destiny), and the hadozee (Stormwrack). Since these races lived in supplements, I could ignore them or use them at my discretion.

Fourth Edition, however, shocked me. I never imagined I would find dragonborn and tieflings in the Player’s Handbook. What about the gnome? Where did the half-orc go? D&D had gone and reinvented itself without consulting me! Imagine my horror. Why did the marshal deserve to be in the Player's Handbook in place of the druid or the bard? Everything I knew to be true about D&D had been shaken up, and I was left puzzled and a bit upset—not enough to explode in nerdrage, but enough that I was uneasy.

I was so certain and so confident the dragonborn didn't belong in D&D, I figured my players would reject the race as I did and choose something more in line with the D&D we'd always played. Imagine my surprise when one of my younger players, who was 19 at the time, immediately latched onto the dragonborn and warlord. Imagine my continued surprise when game after game my players ventured further afield than the classic array of classes and races. What I realized was that although dragonborn seemed ridiculous to me, the race had a great deal of appeal to my gaming group—the cantankerous, vulgar, twinkie group of players that they are. And if these old dudes could climb on board the tiefling, drow, dragonborn, wilden, shardmind train, then there must be people for whom these elements are fantasy for them. In the end, I made my peace with the weirder races and classes that have snuck into the game and broadened my horizons to at least not be offended that they exist. (I would use an emoticon to soften the last sentence but I won't stoop to that sort of nonsense here.)

We've talked a lot about what races and classes we would include in the next core player book. I've argued at great length about how editions never fall at break points in people's campaigns and that often an edition change means invalidating a choice a player has made about the character he or she is playing. I can imagine some folks were upset not to have a monk class when 1st Edition shifted to 2nd, just as I'm pretty sure some folks were upset when they couldn't play a barbarian right out of the gate when 4E landed. We've tentatively agreed that D&D; is big enough to accommodate the various Player's Handbook classes and races, and we want to make sure these options are available when the next version comes out. Although this move will certainly appeal to the audience who think dragonborn and tieflings kick ass, I wonder if their inclusion will offend people with opinions that matched mine a few years ago. I'd love to say that we're all reasonable people and finding a tiefling in the next version of the game doesn't mean they have to appear in every world or campaign, but, being an unreasonable person myself, I can understand how such a thing might be upsetting to people who have a clear vision of what D&D ought to be. Likewise, I think people who dig the Nentir Vale and the 4E cosmology would be livid if we ripped out the dragonborn and tieflings, whose fallen empires are so important to shaping the land. Is this a no-win situation?

I mean, he's not wrong, necessarily. D&D isn't just whatever the owner of the brand says that it is. At some point, it's not recognizable to people who played D&D in the past. People who don't seem to get that, and tell "conservative" gamers to suck it up because claiming that sexually ambiguous bird, rabbit or turtle people running bakeries is what D&D is are wrong; that's not D&D to me, or anyone my age, and arguably its so far away from what D&D was that even people who play 5e and have only played 5e, in a neo-trad playstyle, have got to see that as something severely removed from what D&D was. 

Of course, my perspective is that I don't also care very much what D&D is, because I've always been somewhat ambivalent to exactly what D&D is. My own perspective has changed away from the more "vanilla" approach of what fantasy is, from the mostly high fantasy stuff like Tolkien, Alexander, and even Salvatore and Weiss/Hickman of my teenaged years to something a bit different, and more weird tales (not that I didn't read pulp stories in my teenage years too, but at the time, I was more likely to read Tarzan and John Carter than Conan, honestly.)

UPDATE: Spotted on ENWorld. Why am I still going there? Anyway...

Sadly, it wouldn't be appropriate in that venue for me to respond "It's still super gay." Well, maybe appropriate isn't the right word. But it wouldn't be seen as funny. ENWorld is super woke. They make reddit seem sane.

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 3rd 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 3rd or 4th 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 off 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.