Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 7635234" data-attributes="member: 40233">OSR games tend to fit the expected playstyle better than more modern games: fighters fight, clerics back them up, and keep the team going, thieves are sneaky, and magic-users drop fireballs.  A plethora of tiny changes, seemingly unconnected, eventually built up a system where fighters no longer value strength, the highest damage dealers were the former thieves, clerics could do everything better than everyone else, and the mark of a badly played magic-user was throwing a fireball (5e excepted, which made fireball OP for its level just to make it popular again--and it still kind of blows compared to the old days).The art's better in the old books.  Somewhere along the way, they decided that the optimal art style for Dungeons & Dragons was a bunch of people standing around like they were in a fashion show in attire that was the LOTR films crossed with a Disney Princess movie instead of anything anyone had ever actually worn.  Oh...and the "realistic" armor which wasn't any more realistic than the loin cloths and fighting straps (which one could at least move in) of the old days had been.  OSR has vibrant pencils, charcoal and ink drawings instead of mediocre computer color, and Illustrator brush effects.  And OSR art generally has balls out action--OSR illustrations are of people doing things.  And those things are usually violent or at least interesting (and sometimes even sexy).  Give 5e credit...the monster art is generally top notch.  The same cannot be said for any illustration involving someone who might be a protagonist.The numbers are smaller, and there is far less focus on creating a uniform experience.  What I mean from that is...a dragon might have 28 hit points, and it's possible that the party will get lucky and slay the dragon in the first round before anyone is hurt (or get unlucky and be wiped out in 1 round by the aforesaid dragon).  By contrast, a modern dragon will have hundreds of hit points, the better to make sure it lasts the expected number of rounds, and does the expected number of tactically interesting things, so as to generate the expected amount of fun from fighting and defeating a dragon of that size and power, so that the players get the requisite amount of experience that allows them to progress in power by an expected amount to allow themselves to be challenged enough to be interested but not overly endangered by the next series of encounters.   It's all very studied, and all very clean, and it's even fun...for a while.OSR isn't perfect; much of the fun of being involved has been to be engaged in a form of historical recreation...how to create a game using these imperfect tools, but it's oh so worthwhile.</blockquote>

Verification