D&D General Do You D&D OSR?

[jmartkdr2]

It don’t take a big hammer to give a minimum taste of OS to 5ed.

• Roll scores. That’s official.
• If rolled score is not enough use 3d6 instead!
• Roll hit points after level 1. That is official too. Even CR do it.
• No Feat, no MC. Also official.
• Use PHB only for PCs. Quite official.

The building of encounter in term of CR and Xp budget are not rules but rather guidelines. So without breaking any rules you can just do what you feel appropriate for your game.

No rules prevent attacking down PCs.

Some house rules may be useful. Banning leomund tiny hut and rope trick can easily add some tension in the resting process without rebuilding the entire game.

You rarely need a hammer with 5e anyways; it's already play-dough. Just smoosh it into the shape you want.

Just don't try to get it to hold up anything heavy.

(To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what heavy means in this analogy)

 

[CleverNickName]

I've got three gaming groups: one of them is the TSR-era BECM/Rules Cyclopedia D&D, and the other two are the WotC-era 5E D&D.

So I voted "I played TSR D&D when it was current and DO NOT now play OSR games but DO play WotC D&D." It's the closest to correct for me.

 

[Krachek]

You rarely need a hammer with 5e anyways; it's already play-dough. Just smoosh it into the shape you want.

Just don't try to get it to hold up anything heavy.

(To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what heavy means in this analogy)

For sure nothing heavy for 5ed, it is the creator of the « Casual school » style of play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

For the record that was intended as a good natured jibe, not an attack.

Don't mind me, I'm oversensitive sometimes. Even if it had been a genuine complaint, it wouldn't have been completely illegitimate position.

 

[Shardstone]

I will say, the OSR ecosystem of products and creativity >>> the 5E ecosystem. Despite the huge size difference, such as with Youtube influencers, OSR products are regularly more creative, more innovative, and more fun for me as a reader, GM, and player. Despite that, 5E books are no slouch i nthe ecosystem, and there is a lot of influence now in 5E-realms from the OSR which is closing the quality gap.

 

[Mallus]

Both my games are 5e now, but before that they were a Basic clone and 3.5e. A few years before one campaign was -- gasp! -- 4e that ran for a few years.

I like a lot about the OSR material I'm familiar with. Used quite a bit of it when I last ran AD&D. In the end I think I want a bit more crunch. Specifically, the ability to reflect a wider variety of character concepts with actual mechanics, while still operating within D&D's classic class-based paradigm. But less crunchy than 3.5e/Pathfinder 1e.

5e is pretty good at this.

 

[Desdichado]

I played OD&D, BD&D, B/X and AD&D in the earliest to middle 80s, then left D&D entirely right around the time that "1.5" was coming out, although not because of that. Came back for the 3.x era, didn't adopt 4e, and left d20 games for good in the late 00s or early 10s. I don't play any modern version of D&D, and am not very motivated to try them either. But I also don't play OSR games really. If you were to suggest, as I do, that to be truly OSR you need to replicate both the older style rules and the older style playstyles, I'd suggest that I don't mind OSR adjacent rules that implement some modern concepts on top of a rules lite OSR-like chassis, but I utterly reject an OSR playstyle paradigm. That's exactly the main reason I left D&D back in the 80s in the first place.

Although I do have my own fantasy heartbreaker homebrew rules, you could do something pretty similar with Shadowdark, Knave 2e or even Five Torches Deep and just ignoring all of the dungeoneering stuff and gold for XP, etc. house rule my custom races, and just not play them in a very OSR style.

 

[Quickleaf]

One thing this survey definitely shows: We are old (on ENWorld).

 

[Thomas Shey]

One thing this survey definitely shows: We are old (on ENWorld).

Well, the people that will bother to answer a thread/survey about OSR are.

 

[Quickleaf]

Well, the people that will bother to answer a thread/survey about OSR are.

Stop calling me out