Shadowdark Finally Played Shadowdark

[Retreater]

A shame you have not corrected their misconceptions based on plainly horrible DMs who didnt have a clue.

With the exception of my wife, I don't game with the others regularly.
I also doubt my ability to run it well.

I will say however based on your various post campaign threads, any OSR game is a bad match for your wife.

Maybe, but she at least had hope that SD would be different by listening to interviews with Kelsey Dionne and watching a very fun live play at Origins '24 that she ran.
She claims to want only something light-hearted, fun, and empowering. She's a "butt kicker" to use the old appeal term. That seems difficult to do in the OSR.

 

[Retreater]

I was entertaining some homebrew ideas on how to fix that, but then in actual play it didn't ever impact my group (though it definitely made me question their unusual die rolling luck).

Right. I would give first casting for free. That way you could count on "critical" utility castings at least one time.
Other than that, I dunno, maybe the system would play okay for my tastes, provided the group got in the right mindset and you ran or prepped a good adventure for the system.

 

[Scribe]

She claims to want only something light-hearted, fun, and empowering. She's a "butt kicker" to use the old appeal term. That seems difficult to do in the OSR.

Yeah, light hearted and fun, certainly. Empowering? I think not lol

 

[EthanSental]

Enjoying the back and forth of this post versus the same type posts for 5e. I wrestle with my 2e nostalgia days and what I enjoy now as well. Even got the 2e redo For Gold and Glory and enjoyed reading through it, just hard to talk the group into it even with 2 of the 4 being from our original 2e group in the 90s.

Another group I try to play in that “loves” OSR falls apart after about 4th level in 5 straight campaigns using OSE, advanced OSE, labyrinth lord, advanced lab lord, etc. almost like a comic book reboot, energy is high at the start and just falls off and then flat pretty quickly…hiatus..new campaign…..hiatus….new campaign for 6 years straight. It never hits the feels we think we had from the late 80s or 90s D&D campaigns.

 

[Retreater]

It never hits the feels we think we had from the late 80s or 90s D&D campaigns.

My most nostalgic period included a consistent group of my best friends. We were in college, so no real jobs or responsibilities. We could stay up late, eat junk food. We hung out all the time, even outside the game. We talked motivations, campaign worlds.
Tragically, we lost one of our friends during that time. The campaign became a memorial to him and a way to explore our grief through symbolism, mythology, and roleplaying - examining religion, thoughts on the afterlife, our places in the world.
No game I'll ever run will match that. And I'm sure if we'd been playing Rifts or Cyberpunk at that time, I'd be here complaining that I couldn't "get back" to that perfect game.
And that's not the fault of Shadowdark, my goofy players on Sunday nights, the WotC controversies, or anything else I've been griping about on here for the past decade.