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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7088296" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Could be. I never played the games in between, except for about eight hours of 4E, which admittedly felt even more cluttered and gimmicky.But there does seem to be a real difference in emphasis between AD&D/OSR and 5E in how they seek originality. I see OSR DMs talking about ways to make elves or trolls new and weird, or novel kinds of traps or curses; I see 5E DMs talking about new feats and character classes and new ways to gain slightly different kinds of mechanical bonuses that play out differently at the metagame level (i.e. what players do). 5E seems to lean very heavily on what AngryDM's "8 kinds of fun" would call "[mechanical] Expression": you have fun by building a character with a distinct set of options fixed at chargen time. It's not about the adventure and what happens during the adventure; it's about the PC and what powers they use during the adventure.Of course, it's not that AD&D/OSR doesn't have ad hoc mechanics--but those mechanics are always just a means to an end of expressing the weirdness of the weird monster/trap/curse.E.g. "10% of the time when bitten by a Wendigo, you are infected with a curse that reduces your Intelligence 1d6 points every day; when you hit 1 Int, you turn into a Wendigo thrall and if you are the appropriate sex, the Wendigo will mate with you to produce 1d6 Wendigo whelps, with a gestation period of 1d6 weeks. Giving birth to Wendigo whelps is always fatal to the mother." In this example there's a lot of weird, ad hoc mechanics, but they aren't their own raison d'etre. Contrast with 5E's Savage Attacker or Great Weapon Fighting Style, where the mechanic is weird, but the result is utterly pedestrian: a barely-detectable increase in average damage dealt. Mechanical weirdness for its own sake.I find that sort of thing increasingly uninteresting.</blockquote>

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