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I have run extensive campaigns with both OSE and Basic Fantasy, and I am starting up a Shadowdark game shortly. I think OSE with the Advances Fantasy books is all you ever need to play a fantasy role playing campaign. Although Basic Fantasy provides an accessibility that is hard to beat. I...

My gaming resolutions for 2024: Game in person more. Restart or take another go at my old meetup game. Restart my condo building game group, and get more recruits in. Sunset D&D 5e./6e/whatever. Play/run all the other games I have in my library. For 2023 it was play less 5e and play more other...

S&F and K&W are ok. They don’t blow me away but are good enough to add some element of domain play. To me, they are more about adding a flavor of that game style as opposed to a well designed and integrated rule system. I am curious but not enough to back it. I can see a tactical combat game as...

I’m starting it and ran one session of the post LMoP content. Post LMoP is pretty bad. Fortunately, myself and my players are good at making things work. So the first chapter with all the crime investigations… the investigations are just filled with pointless ‘skill challenges’. They don’t...

The main reason I prefer XP is that it is an objective measurement of my character’s progress. I can know objectively that defeating 10 skeletons grants me X amount of XP. I can make objective choices for what I need to accomplish to advance my character. It’s not up to the whims of the DM...

For me 5e peaked between when the Basic rules PDF was released, to the release of the DMG. The game was fresh and open and I had a weekly game going. It was such a fun and casual time with an open ended/anything goes feel. It really reminded me of the good old days.

Your posts on Dungeon Fantasy have definitely led me to look into it. What is the easiest way to get into the game, do they have a quick start or free version? I’m familiar with GURPS but never played or ran it. Any good actual plays or demos on YouTube as well?

I’m in the same boat. I’m kind of done with 5e for a while (I’ve been running it since the playtest). Against the Darkmaster is getting a nice long look. Not sure how suited it is to pure dungeon crawling… for that purpose I’d just go with Old School Essentials. But it does seem a compelling...

That’s good to know. Honestly, 2E is the edition I’m least familiar with. But the saving grace is if you know the monster’s hit dice you can adjust the power level down. Yeah maybe a quick comparison of AC and abilities with some existing similar OSE monsters may be a good idea.

Should be doable. I’ve used AD&D monsters almost as written. Use OSE for attack/to hit based on hit die. Use OSE saves by class level (if it says Saves as F8 use saves for an OSE 8th level fighter) Use d8 for all monster hit dice. You might want to step down damage by a die size.l… I think PCs...

I've been running B/X and other retro clones regularly for about 10 years now. Here's my tips... Use the Reactions rules. - B/X and OSE can be very deadly if combat is commonplace and frequent, especially at low levels. The Reaction rules are key to mitigating some of the deadliness...

I've played ACKS, which has a cleave / 'chop til you drop' rule.. Wherein every time your character drops a foe to 0 hp, they can make an additional cleave attack against another nearby foe. The character gets a number of additional cleave attacks equal to its level/hit dice. There is also a...

I’m not buying any new 5E products. I’m in the process of sunsetting 5E as a game system for my campaigns. I’ll probably keep one game going, but any new campaigns will be something else. There is just too many great games out there that should be played and do things I like better than 5E.

What I would do is completely remove the bonuses from Expertise. The Expertise abilty does not increase your bonus on any skill it is applied to. Instead what it does is it adds another 'tier' of capability to the skill. So you now have Unproficient, Proficient, and Expertise as tiers of skill...

The classic approach is stock up on oil flasks. Light them up and throw flaming oil at enemies. Also (at least from classic D&D) wizards didn’t need to spend gold on armor, so they usually had gold to spare for holy water against undead as well.

I like the background abilities. I wouldn’t mind them branching out to expand at higher levels. But at least with what backgrounds I’ve been exposed to ( original PHB),they generally grant out of combat / role playing/ downtime benefits that don’t compound the issues I have with feats. I would...

That’s fine. I just likely won’t be updating to 5.5.

Feats were promised to be optional. If it is no longer to be the case I will be out for 5.5. I’ll use feats when I feel like it but there are times I will want to say no. I prefer to have the choice based on the my own preference.

Looks good to me. Pretry much an adaptation of Basic/Expert set dungeon procedures (which is the gold standard in D&D for dungeons) Remember to track torches and oil ( i use graph paper and put little marks at 6 and 24 turns). Also remember to slot in random encounter rolls periodically. It...

I’ve recently cooled down on OSE Advanced Fantasy a little. More and more I see how, with just the core Basic classes, I can just tweak to make any of those character concepts. But yeah, B/X is my favorite D&D and OSE is my favorite implementation of it. It is a fantastic game and I hope it...