D&D General Why is "OSR style" D&D Fun For You?

[Hussar]

The fighter in my OSE game found...cursed armor.

The only magic suit of armor in the campaign?

 

[Hussar]

OSR tends to hard lock what your character can do by class. Hard lock you out of stuff.

Following the fiction in OSR is 90% the stuff not into the rules.

The basic translation that I’m seeing repeated stated is OSR if free form gaming with combat rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's the point.

The classes did the little they were designed to do rather well to very well depending on the game.

That didn't make it any less dull. Barring GM intervention, your real choices as an OD&D Fighting man added up to 1) Weapon, and 2) Target. As far as I'm concerned, that's simply not enough.

 

[Oligopsony]

The basic translation that I’m seeing repeated stated is OSR if free form gaming with combat rules.

I see where you get the impression but that's not quite accurate.

(Insofar as it's close to accurate, it also is for a lot of other games, maybe even most 5e tables, where d20+bonus is invoked and adjudicated in pretty ad hoc ways.)

Combat is a sort of rules wrapper, right? (The term of art is "procedures" in the subculture.) You have these known increments of time, people are doing things in that time, sometimes those things are known like "I swing my sword at him," sometimes they're improvised, like "I kick the rickety pillar to cause a distraction," or whatever.

Systems favored by the OSR include ways of putting a rules wrapper like that into dungeon and wilderness exploration. The wrapper is something like: "In ten minutes, you can move methodically and carefully through one room, or quickly and carelessly through three. At the end of the ten, GM rolls for random encounters" for the dungeon, for instance. Torches deplete after an hour, or according to die rolls. In the wildnerness, you have longer time increments, but rations are depleting, and you're trading off thorough exploration against time, and against random encounters.

Random encounters don't mean combat. They might be friendly (their disposition is random too) and overmatched or intimidated opponents will flee. They might be both unfriendly and stronger than you, in which case the correct decision is to find a way to not fight them - flee or bluster or bargain or beg or sneak around.

The GM is a neutral referee. She prepares locations, not stories. Concrete time and random rolls mean that the GM really can't preplan a story, though she will put thought into factions, worldbuilding, adventure hooks, all the rest.

That didn't make it any less dull. Barring GM intervention, your real choices as an OD&D Fighting man added up to 1) Weapon, and 2) Target. As far as I'm concerned, that's simply not enough.

The interesting decisions are meant to be outside of combat. (Which may not be what you're looking for! That's fine too.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

There aren't too many games where your class DOESN'T determine what you can do; that's sort of the point of a class system.

Maybe a very loose class system like in Whitehack or something. Or something with large amounts of customization within the class boundary like PF1.

There have been a few class systems that were sufficiently loose in one fashion or another that they mandated only very little about a character. The example I always gave was Alternity 1e: you could build a combat engineer starting from either a Combat Spec or a Tech Op and in play, they'd be almost indistinguishable, as the classes gave one special ability and changed the costs of various skills, but otherwise had nothing baked in.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The interesting decisions are meant to be outside of combat. (Which may not be what you're looking for! That's fine too.)

I want them in both places, and I especially don't want a lack of interesting choices in combat for the fighting specialist.

 

[Voadam]

I think OSR is very diverse, as was actual old school D&D.

There are a lot of one true way proponents for specific strands and philosophies, but take OSE which is B/X rules which means every PC can say "I check for traps" and roll a die for mechanical resolution without getting into lots of narration.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

N.B. older versions of D&D do indeed feature rolling for traps and secret doors; games designed with contemporary OSR ideals (which, despite the acronym, really is a newer phenomenon) tend to not have this.

That's a good point. Being extra good at spotting secret doors was, in fact, one of the big mechanical differences between elves and other races. (As I recall, it was a 2 in 6 chance, versus a 1 in 6 chance, with the expectation that, yeah, the DM was rolling dice for this.)

 

[bloodtide]

The basic translation that I’m seeing repeated stated is OSR if free form gaming with combat rules.

Well, more accurate to say free form gaming with combat, adventure and exploration rules.

The BIG thing OSR lacked is any sort of universal generic skill system. A character had some skill-like features and abilities, but they were self contained and came in lots of forms. You would have a 30% to notice an odd light, but you had a 1 in 6 chance of noticing a secret door. And in OSR, most things are mostly static....you can't "add" much to your chances most of the time. A character has a 2 in 6 chance of noticing a secret door....forever. Some things did go up with levels, but you had nothing like the 3e/5e customizable skill system.

OSR also lacked the combined skill idea that has grown in popularity in modern times. To just have one "athletic skill" that covers "doing anything" or one "search skill" that again just covers "doing anything".

OSR has tons of mini games. Come upon some strange sigils...well you have a 20% chance to read them....with a couple modifiers. But only for these sigils. The ones in the next adventure have some other mini game mechanic.

But maybe the BIGGEST thing was: OSR relied more on Real Player Knowledge, not fictional character skills. In an OSR game you would have your character hold a candle up to a wall to see if you could detect a breeze and find a secret door. You did not just "roll higher then a DC 10" to skip past finding the door in seconds in many cases. Even if the game had some lite rules, you were still likely to try Real In-Game Actions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OSR tends to hard lock what your character can do by class. Hard lock you out of stuff.

Following the fiction in OSR is 90% the stuff not into the rules.

What OSR games are you playing?