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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8273724" data-attributes="member: 694">Interesting that you took my description of a fundamentally continuous phenomenon and imposed a pass–fail binary on the idea. Maybe <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/miukdl/is_there_a_hard_list_of_requirements_for_a_work/gt75n6k/" target="_blank">this explanation from a similar conversation over on r/osr</a> will get the point across more clearly.I'm not sure that I agree. What few rules Mörk Borg has seem pretty clearly derived from Basic D&D. Though I will positively contend that it's a perfect example of the difference between OSR and old-school.Now this, I do not understand. Would you also argue that 99% of new players are better off playing 5th edition D&D than, say, RuneQuest or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or d6 Fantasy?It's a matter of emphasis. Not every game is out to focus on all of those elements to the same degree. Some RPGs cater to the desire to customize every little aspect of your original character, and some are perfectly content to let the character be an empty vessel for the player to inhabit, with little to no mechanical customization. Though it's not at all the same thing, one could draw a rough analogy with the distinction between a first-person Western CRPG with a heavily customized player character who has zero game-determined personality (everything about the character is left up to the player's imagination) vs. an old-fashioned JRPG with little to no mechanical customization but everything about the character (and the plot) predetermined by the game. The point is, it's okay for a given RPG not to be all things to all players.As has oft been said by many an OSR advocate, "OSR ≠ rules-lite." The desire for rules-lite games is part of it, but not the whole deal—just like B/X is the Rosetta Stone "darling system" of the OSR but not the whole deal. If one takes AD&D 1st edition as an example of another game still popular with OSR gamers, it's less important that the game be rules-lite than that it has relatively few player-facing rules. But the concern for rules and systems is perfectly understandable, given the OSR's strong "do-it-yourself" ethic: it positions the DM not just as a facilitator, referee, and world-builder, but also necessarily as a game designer with authority and capability equal to that of Gary Gygax or anybody else.As to the "minutia": different strokes. I wouldn't want to play a game where encumbrance or ammunition got hand-waved, because it would kill the verisimilitude for me. Random encounters have a perfectly cogent raison d'être in older D&D (they're there to keep the players moving through the dungeon quickly, tax their resources, keep the tension high, and they detract nothing from the game because combat doesn't eat much play-time at all). And as for difficulty… this gets so badly exaggerated IMO. Early D&D is no more the proverbial "meat-grinding fantasy Vietnam" than 5e is a cakewalk through Candy Land. It's just that early D&D isn't concerned with balancing single encounters so much as whole environments: the unit of play in early D&D isn't the encounter, it's the dungeon level (and the game is more about logistics and strategizing your exploration than it is about per-battle combat tactics). Different focus.</blockquote>

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