D&D General The Renewing Charm of the Old School Play Experience

[Krachek]

What is gone forever is playing without any idea of class balance, xp budget, number of encounter per day. Create a character without the existence of any guide about it. At this time the DM call were absolute truth the concept of errata or sage advice wasn’t even a possibility.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My son is not an adversarial DM at all. He pulls no punches though. Rolls in the open for combat and there are death saves. It strikes me a lot of the things I hated about old school D&D are the things I love about old school D&D.

I wonder if he'd feel the same way, on the other side of the table. With you as a DM "pulling no punches", and just wiping out PC after PC. At 16, he might be fine with it. Or not. At 12 I suspect he wouldn't have really enjoyed that, unless he is a bit unusual.

As an adult, it's a lot easier to be sanguine and just shrug at this sort of thing than it is when you're 10, 12, 15, or whatever I think. Especially if you actually were putting effort into the PCs and the roleplaying and so on.

It is certainly true that when the rules are ignored, the game can be whatever you wish. At a certain point, we are all playing Amber Diceless RPG, we just don't know it.

Amber has way stricter and clearer rules than D&D-type games from that era, so I guess this is a joke, but it's totally triggering my rules-nerd side. Amber isn't a "do what you want, there are no rules maaaaaan" game. It's precisely the opposite. The same is true for a lot of diceless games re: stricter/clearer rules than dice-based ones.

But when I look at old NPC item payloads, they can get pretty crazy by modern standards, too. A big part of advancement back then was getting all those fancy magic items.

Yeah this is something it feels like a number of OSR games either forget or attempt to retcon. Even looking at TSR-published adventures, or just rolling on, say, 2E treasure charts normally, the amount of magic items that appear is quite staggering compared to 5E. As you say, very often an older-edition NPC will often have magic armour, a magic weapon (or two!) and may well be packing potions and/or other magic items to boot.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Amber has way stricter and clearer rules than D&D-type games from that era, so I guess this is a joke, but it's totally triggering my rules-nerd side. Amber isn't a "do what you want, there are no rules maaaaaan" game. It's precisely the opposite. The same is true for a lot of diceless games re: stricter/clearer rules than dice-based ones.

I would say that while the action resolution system is excellent once you understand it, I would not go so far as to call it strict. It very much depends on ad hoc resolution by the referee.

Which is why, at a certain point, we are all playing it ... aren't we? Whether the ruleset is explicit and provides examples, or buries it under so-called strict rules and dice ...

It's really people talking, and then trying to decide how to resolve moments of ambiguity in their narratives. Everything else is just complaining about the difference between dice pools and bonuses.

 

[pogre]

I wonder if he'd feel the same way, on the other side of the table. With you as a DM "pulling no punches", and just wiping out PC after PC. At 16, he might be fine with it. Or not. At 12 I suspect he wouldn't have really enjoyed that, unless he is a bit unusual.

I would say he is unusual in that regard. He has had a grognard's soul since he was very young. He is much more old school than his old man!

 

[werecorpse]

It is certainly true that when the rules are ignored, the game can be whatever you wish. At a certain point, we are all playing Amber Diceless RPG, we just don't know it.

We rarely ignored the rules - some homebrew magic and monsters was about the extent - some of those 1e treasure hoards were extreme. We were just kids with unlimited time and we would grind hard, and we sure weren’t alone in the 80’s. I think G1-G3 had a couple of million gp in cash and multiple rings of wishes between them and some judges guild adventures had some pretty crazy gear. Hence my question about what game and what edition the OP was playing. We also played adventures where we lost plenty of PCs but the ones that finished ended up pretty well off. But as I say I think there is a difference between actual 1e and what is classed as an OSR style game. I haven’t played 5 Torches Deep.

 

[Shiroiken]

Fair enough. We can agree to disagree. I certainly have the occasional fatality in 5e, but the experience feels very different with the older rules to me.

One of the nice things about 5E is how easy it is to tweak. Double the XP to level, half the amount of XP from monsters, give XP for non-combat encounters (social, exploration, and quest), and this will give a feeling of taking a while to reach those higher levels, while not wanting to fight everything. Reduce the healing from a Long Rest to only Level+Con modifier, and require a Wis/Medicine check to get HP from HD during a Short Rest, which will keep a lethal level, as HP will be hard to come by without spending spells. Damage equal to your Con score while dying kills you instantly, rather than you full HP, and remove the ability of the Healers Kit. Remove Revivify, as that makes death less relevant at a lower level, and don't allow potions of healing to be purchased. Double the damage from traps and poison, and use cumulative falling damage (20ft = 3d6, 30ft = 6d6, etc.) to make exploration risky.

Using these suggestions, you return to a feel of old school AD&D, where death lay around every corner.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I would say he is unusual in that regard. He has had a grognard's soul since he was very young. He is much more old school than his old man!

Haha that certainly happens!

One of the nice things about 5E is how easy it is to tweak. Double the XP to level, half the amount of XP from monsters, give XP for non-combat encounters (social, exploration, and quest), and this will give a feeling of taking a while to reach those higher levels, while not wanting to fight everything. Reduce the healing from a Long Rest to only Level+Con modifier, and require a Wis/Medicine check to get HP from HD during a Short Rest, which will keep a lethal level, as HP will be hard to come by without spending spells. Damage equal to your Con score while dying kills you instantly, rather than you full HP, and remove the ability of the Healers Kit. Remove Revivify, as that makes death less relevant at a lower level, and don't allow potions of healing to be purchased. Double the damage from traps and poison, and use cumulative falling damage (20ft = 3d6, 30ft = 6d6, etc.) to make exploration risky.

Using these suggestions, you return to a feel of old school AD&D, where death lay around every corner.

Or, alternatively, instead of extensive rules changes which nerf/make boring some classes but not others, and force the party to "bring a healer" (probably a Druid for filthy Goodberry), and for that healer to blow all their spell slots on healing (something 5E tries to avoid), just use more Hard/Deadly encounters, and play hardball with the monsters, and you'll kill plenty of PCs in 5E and make them scared in a way they haven't been for a long time. Increasing the XP needed helps though, I do agree there, if you're not using milestones (if you are, just space them a lot further apart). Actually I would say not recovering all HP on long rest is good - though even dropping it to 50% gained is enough to massively change the dynamic (and you already only regain 50% of HD on a long rest).

One of the DMs I play with has changed no rules, and plays strictly "by the book" (you can bet he put in 6-8 encounters every adventuring day!), and the kill count in his 5E campaign is something I haven't seen since a particularly vicious 2E campaign. He just really hardballs the monsters. The only reason my PC is even alive is some astonishingly lucky rolling on my part.

 

[TwoSix]

Same, definitely. I ran a few of them, to be honest. But when I look at old NPC item payloads, they can get pretty crazy by modern standards, too. A big part of advancement back then was getting all those fancy magic items. Maybe not The Sword of Atomic Annihilation, but really, back then we all had all sorts of homebrew magic items in varying levels of insanity.

I think this is an oft-ignored aspect of OSR play. It's not that the characters had less power, it's that the power wasn't available as a player-choice driven mechanic. It was acquired through play and mostly random. It helps reinforce the idea of cautious play because if the character dies, there's no guarantee that you'll get anywhere near the same amount or type of power you've already required.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think is an oft-ignored aspect of OSR play. It's not that the characters had less power, it's that the power wasn't available as a player-choice driven mechanic. It was acquired through play and mostly random. It helps reinforce the idea of cautious play because if the character dies, there's no guarantee that you'll get anywhere near the same amount or type of power you've already required.

Exactly. Take a look at almost every class feature the Fighter gets as they level. In the earliest version of the game... you'd only get those mechanical features through acquiring magic items, not from receiving them as part of leveling up.

This is why even 5E doesn't give you a true "old school" feel... because of the all mechanics you get at each level of the game. A +1 sword will never feel important because your attack and damage bonuses are already pretty high just based on the new modifier chart, Fighting Styles, raising your ASIs, your proficiency mod going up, extended crit ranges, bonus superiority dice etc. etc. etc. That extra +1 from the sword is barely anything in the large swimming pool of bonuses you already have.

To have a real OSR experience... you need a Fighter who has like a +1 to hit, a +2 to damage, and that's it. That's the extent of their combat mechanics until they start finding magic items that let them do all the other stuff.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think is an oft-ignored aspect of OSR play. It's not that the characters had less power, it's that the power wasn't available as a player-choice driven mechanic. It was acquired through play and mostly random. It helps reinforce the idea of cautious play because if the character dies, there's no guarantee that you'll get anywhere near the same amount or type of power you've already required.

That's a good point. There's also some shades of this in rolling well in a more restrictive environment. If you actually roll well on 3d6 in order it's a big deal. You can't just grab another standard array and cut and paste. I also think that in many cases, some of the best heroic roleplaying is done in spite of fear of character death rather than in it's absence. That's not unique to OSR by any means, but it is a feature.