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Until I finally gave up and went into rules light alternatives, E6 was my solution to the genre confusion and outright brokenness of higher level D&d too. Now I'd probably do something even more simple: just slow leveling down and never get very high level anyway before ending the campaign and...

Which is ironic, but I agree. I think it even less resembles Vance now than it did thirty or forty years ago though.

Yeah they're great. Point is, though, I'm totally with you: how magic works is hugely influential on how the game feels. And D&D magic is really pretty unique and esoteric. No matter what else you do with the setting, if you've got D&D magic, your game still feels quite a bit like every other...

Just got Knave 2e recently. I guess I backed it quite a while ago, but I'm not sure if I've bought anything rpg related since then except maybe a fancy set of two of metal dice (Because I'm gradually migrating to only using that kind.) Does it count if I bought a canvas and leather backpack...

Walking taco. Frito pie and taco salad are things that I really like, but they're different, mostly because they're not made in a frito bag or meant to be eaten outside while standing up or walking around. That said, I'd never heard of them at all until I moved from Texas to Michigan, so it's...

It's just a kitbashed mess. It started off as Microlite20 kinda, but it doesn't really resemble that much anymore. The pseudomage was probably most inspired by the character Massha from the old M.Y.T.H. Adventures books. EDIT: You could probably get pretty close with a few minor houserules to...

In my experience, playstyle always trumps mechanics and people will tend to try and play every game using their preferred playstyle (unless they're deliberately trying to do something different to mix it up) regardless of what game or edition it is. If the mechanics fight against their preferred...

I ended up making my "D&D" game have Lovecraftian rather than Vancian magic, and I ended up--somewhat reluctantly at first, but later I embraced the concept--allowing or maybe deliberately houseruling the concept of a "pseudomage" who uses magic items rather than spells and plays just a bit more...

Yes. I ultimately wrote my own kitbashed game (while not claiming to have invented anything within it, it's the combination that's unique is all) because nothing else met my needs.

I like those, and I cannot lie. - Sir Mixalot

No. WotC referenced market research done prior to the release of 3e.

To get perfect fidelity, you need to just buy the old books on auction or as pdfs (or print on demand for pdfs.) The retroclones predate their availability and are generally considered to provide "close enough" fidelity in most cases. But how far they have to wander before they become "not OSR...

I know that there's not a lot of agreement on what exactly is and isn't OSR but I think that most people would agree that fidelity to the older rulesets, i.e. retroclones is kind of a minimum baseline. See this (admittedly long) four part blog post for instance: A Historical Look at the OSR —...

Ha! You're not entirely wrong with that flippant remark. But that's what I'm getting at; the playstyle preferences are OLD. But it took a while for everyone to figure out how to cater to them via system, which is why nobody's games looked alike.

Nods. Yep, absolutely. The OSR and modern old school isn't really the same as playing in the 70s and 80s. It's a highly curated attempt to mimic a tournament style game, but done more casually at home, is kind of the best way I've seen it described. I was playing back in the earliest 80s, and...

I always say that I'm not old school, but I am old fashioned. My tastes were formed mostly in the early to mid 80s, and I'm sympathetic to a lot of traditional ways of doing things in RPGs. That said, I never had any interest in a lot of things that the OSR claims as core to their philosophy...

I haven't the foggiest idea what you're concerned about. I'm replying also to the topic of the thread; what is new school. My hypothesis is that the seeds of all playstyles, mostly, that we're familiar with today go back to nearly the beginning of the hobby, and that they were mostly distinct...

Not really. Some older games hadn't yet figured out mechanical solutions to needs that their players had and therefore via a combination of inertia and lack of innovation may have resembled D&D more than an equivalent game today would. But there's a lot less of that than people assert, and that...

Ironically, player agency is one of the most strongly expressed tenets of most descriptions of the OSR playstyle, although they usually mean by that player driven sandbox exploration and player motivated goals. But again, that just drives home my conclusion that 1) "old school" is a modern...

There's no such thing as new school. When the OSR started defining what old school was, they just called everything that wasn't that "new school" regardless of how disparate the source or philosophy behind the origin of any specific element. The reality, of course, is that "old school" is itself...