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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9792190" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Yep.  In other words... B/X and AD&D combat!  Or OSR games designed to recapture that spirit.What you describe sounds a lot like the repetitive loop of “swing magic long sword” that had me complaining about boring 1E combats circa 1988.  It did not help that some of the stricter DMs I played with back in the day saw attempts to try creative combat moves as “cheating”, because they had read Gygax’s stern advice in the 1E DMG or Dragon editorials and interpreted it to mean “if it is not in the official AD&D rules, you cannot do it” (ironically, a far cry from the freewheeling spirit of 70's OD&D and EGG’s actual Greyhawk campaign).  Ironic that the kind of swashbuckling maneuvers we learned not to bother trying are now part of the official rules.2E introduced more character customization options in both the core rulebooks and the splatbooks, so there were more decisions to make during Session Zero, but retained the core of the AD&D rules.  In my group’s experience 2E streamlined some of the clunkier rules enough for combat to actually flow a bit faster than it did in 1E, even when using the optional d10 individual initiative system.  We had never even tried to use the excruciating official 1E initiative rules, but had used the side-based d6 that most groups seem to have retained from B/X or BECMI.  I missed the edition wars during a long hiatus from tabletop games, but even I can tell that the biggest difference between early and recent editions is the introduction of feats and combat options that are obviously popular with players, but slow down combat and introduce lots of complexity for DMs trying to run boss monsters and NPC spellcasters.  The OSR was at least in part a direct response to the long, slow combats of games in the D&D3/PF1 family of games.  I am actually interested in learning PF2 in order to see what a game is like when it has been designed with a finely tuned action economy that is (AFAIK) more complex than 5E, but less complex than 3E.  I have seen PF2 compared to D&D 4E, but do not know how accurate that comparison is.Over the last half century D&D has evolved from relatively light rules (B/X, BECMI, AD&D) to very crunchy rules favoring optimized character builds (3E), and now the current D&D5 family of games (including Level Up, Tales of the Valiant, etc) seems like a compromise between two opposing camps.  The 5E compromise has been very successful in recruiting lots of new fans to the TTRPG hobby, but compromises will rarely satisfy purists of any type.  So it is good that those purists have other games to play, because I do not expect to see D&D return to either the rules-light OSR style or the high crunch of 3E.  But who knows!  Prediction is hard.</blockquote>

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