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

[Hussar]

What turns out to have happened, it seems, is that Gygax-DMG-style campaign play turns out not to have been the main approach to D&D play. We can see this in the DL modules, the express and radical changes in tone and instructions in the 2nd ed AD&D rulebooks, the emergence of the AP as the premier sort of module, etc.

But, again, we only have to look at the actual rules. Most lairs had about a 10-15% chance for 3 (ish) random magic items. A lair could be 300 orcs, that's totally true. But, it could also be 2 trolls. A single ogre counts as a lair. By the time you gained a level, you should have depopulated are rather large number of lairs.

The baseline for AD&D is more than ten magic items per character. That's why paladins are hard limited to 10. Thing is, a lot of people got this idea in their head that half a dozen magic items per character is shading into Monty Haul territory. But, it really wasn't. That was the baseline expectation. More than 10 magic items per PC. In a group of 8 (again, baseline in 6-8 players), that's about a hundred magic items between the group.

Fair enough, the majority of those would be consumables. No argument from me about that. But, even if only a quarter are not, that's still 25 (ish) magic items between the eight characters.

 

[pemerton]

But, again, we only have to look at the actual rules. Most lairs had about a 10-15% chance for 3 (ish) random magic items. A lair could be 300 orcs, that's totally true. But, it could also be 2 trolls. A single ogre counts as a lair. By the time you gained a level, you should have depopulated are rather large number of lairs.

That's one-third to one-half an item per lair. So even 30 lairs - which is quite a few! - is only 10 or so items as per those charts.

This is why I think the Men and NPC Adventurer magic items are quite important! They're in the neighbourhood of 1 or more items per NPC, at least at mid-levels.

The baseline for AD&D is more than ten magic items per character. That's why paladins are hard limited to 10.

This I agree with. Though I think we also have to accept that a lot of the more baroque aspects of AD&D design were eyeballed, rather than rigorously calculated and tested.

For the paladin, it's one suit of armour, one shield, 4 weapons and 4 other. Weapons might be a principal melee, a principal ranged (at least pre-UA), a dagger, and one other.

The monk's limit is two weapons and 3 other. Given that a monk can also fight unarmed, doesn't need armour or a shield, and is forbidden from using potions, this is in the same general ballpark as the paladin.

So what this suggests is that having the magic arms and armour a character needs is pretty standard. But having a stock of other items (wands, miscellaneous, consumables etc) is at the more "luxury" end, and paladins and monks aren't allowed to maintain such a stock.

Thing is, a lot of people got this idea in their head that half a dozen magic items per character is shading into Monty Haul territory. But, it really wasn't. That was the baseline expectation.

At least if they are heavly weighted towards arms and armour.

More than 10 magic items per PC. In a group of 8 (again, baseline in 6-8 players), that's about a hundred magic items between the group.

Fair enough, the majority of those would be consumables. No argument from me about that. But, even if only a quarter are not, that's still 25 (ish) magic items between the eight characters.

The more than 10 per PC is tricky, because MUs make the calculation harder: they don't have arms or armour, which suggests fewer items per character; but are magnets for wands and scrolls, which pushes the other way.

Overall, for what it's worth, I never experienced AD&D as a low-magic-item FRPG.

 

[Nikosandros]

Personally, I think that it is better to recognize that in the "olden days" playing styles were all over the place and that AD&D published material presented somewhat incoherent ideas. OSR style is mostly ex-post, but that doesn't make it less enticing, IMO.

 

[Hussar]

Personally, I think that it is better to recognize that in the "olden days" playing styles were all over the place and that AD&D published material presented somewhat incoherent ideas. OSR style is mostly ex-post, but that doesn't make it less enticing, IMO.

This I agree with. And, to be fair, I think the OSR has been pretty up front about their presumptions. Most of the time anyway.

It's mostly when we start actually having any sort of conversation about it that things get wonky. People take those OSR presumptions as historical fact and then use that to bludgeon others about the head and shoulders with a big old badwrongfun stick.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This I agree with. And, to be fair, I think the OSR has been pretty up front about their presumptions. Most of the time anyway.

It's mostly when we start actually having any sort of conversation about it that things get wonky. People take those OSR presumptions as historical fact and then use that to bludgeon others about the head and shoulders with a big old badwrongfun stick.

I haven't heard anyone say playing a certain way is wrong. Everything we do and say is filtered through our experience.

 

[Malmuria]

It's hard to take into account the variety of gameplay while also seeing if there are any historical trends--change over time--in that gameplay in general. There's certainly a trend toward a sort of fundamentalism as to the the way things supposedly were back in the day. I see this in discussions of racial ASI, for example, which don't take into account how limited in effect they were in AD&D as opposed to 5e (and then make claims about how its removal ruins 50 years of gaming etc etc).

The obverse is also true--a claim that current games are more "advanced" in their design compared to archaic things like xp-for-gold, without trying to take into account what sort of gameplay the latter encourages. Did xp-for-gold really mean that "combat was a fail state"? Probably not in practice. Yet, the fact that it was the default rule might be attributed to something other than a weird old rule that makes no sense.

Still, to my read, if you compare a 1st level Basic character with a 1st level 5e character, the latter has a lot more resources at their disposal (i.e. on their character sheet) to mitigate challenges, will level up more quickly, is less likely to die (death saves), and might be playing through a module that focuses on balanced encounters and moving the characters through rather than player skill and lethality.

 

[Voadam]

I see this in discussions of racial ASI, for example, which don't take into account how limited in effect they were in AD&D as opposed to 5e (and then make claims about how its removal ruins 50 years of gaming etc etc).

Not to mention B/X having no racial ability score adjustments.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But, again, we only have to look at the actual rules. Most lairs had about a 10-15% chance for 3 (ish) random magic items. A lair could be 300 orcs, that's totally true. But, it could also be 2 trolls. A single ogre counts as a lair. By the time you gained a level, you should have depopulated are rather large number of lairs.

The baseline for AD&D is more than ten magic items per character. That's why paladins are hard limited to 10. Thing is, a lot of people got this idea in their head that half a dozen magic items per character is shading into Monty Haul territory. But, it really wasn't. That was the baseline expectation. More than 10 magic items per PC. In a group of 8 (again, baseline in 6-8 players), that's about a hundred magic items between the group.

Fair enough, the majority of those would be consumables. No argument from me about that. But, even if only a quarter are not, that's still 25 (ish) magic items between the eight characters.

Yeah, I've noted before that I, for the most part, didn't do anything but use the tables from the book when determining whether magic items were present and what general types they were back in the day (I might have had the sub-tables with some very odd things on it, but for the most part whether you were getting a magic item and whether it was a scroll or a weapon was pretty much by the book) and there were tons of magic items in play after a while.

So low magic item awards (which as noted, always would have on the whole hit fighters and thieves the hardest) may well have been a common style in certain circles back in the day, but if so it was because the books were being ignored, not because people were following them.

 

[Reynard]

Not to mention B/X having no racial ability score adjustments.

One of the differences is that modern games let you construct a character, while games like AD&D and B/X had you literally rolling up a character. Once the dice had fallen, you had some choices to make, but the results of those die rolls had overwhelming influence on what you played. As time went on, more and more lenient, "construction" based alternatives appeared, from swapping two rolled stats all the way through point buy. And while there are certainly advantages to those systems, there is something about the direct simplicity of rolling 2d6 six times in order to find out what you get to play that is appealing.

 

[Jack Daniel]

OSR principles are definitely a reconstruction of a particular style of play, with elements of outright invention. It's clear that people played all sorts of different ways even from the very beginning. Even Gygax and Arneson seemed to have very different games. Even within the OSR, the bulk of the modules are for low levels, and many newer games don't even have levels.

But, my point in these kinds of threads is highlighting the point that @Malmuria very clearly outlines. OSR games are a view of older versions of D&D that just never applied to me. The presumptions that people are talking about in these threads never happened at my tables.

That's the point. I keep getting told that my experience with older versions of D&D was either "Well, no one actually played that way" or "You don't understand the rules" or "Well, DM's would just change those rules and would always change them in a way that lines up with my preferred playstyle."

It's incredibly frustrating. What is "old school" is often built on goalposts with rollerskates.

This reminds me of yet another viral/semi-foundational statement of what the OSR is about: Five Things That Needed Saying. It cuts right to the matter of the OSR being about one specific play-style, part reconstruction and part innovation, and largely uninterested in what people who weren't playing in an OSR-like style were doing "back in the day," even if they were playing in 1980 or 1977 or 1974.

OSR isn't for gamers who don't like the style, it's for gamers who do like it. (Astonishing that this needs to be spelled out.)

If the complaint is that some people are overstating the "authenticity" of the style, then okay, I guess there might be some people somewhere doing that, maybe. Cool story, but it's kind of beside the point. (I'm not convinced that it's a real issue, though. Sounds like more of a quixotic strawman if you ask me.)

If, on the other hand, it's just the general coopting of the phrase "old-school" that rankles, I sympathize, but I don't think there's any hope of changing the entrenched terminology at this point.