D&D General They were all dead. The final arrow was an exclamation mark on everything that had led to this point.

[DarkCrisis]

If you get the reference, you have good taste.

TLDR: 5E isn’t exactly wrong on survivablity.



I've been running OSE IE Old school B/X with some modern flair for the last few months in a sort of sandbox style game. It's been super awesome. Most fun Ive had DMing in a long time.

Easy to run and play. It's D&D without all the chaff and bloat.... and yeah it's deadly. A bit less so with some house rules for more HP and better saves etc etc.

But stuff like instant death poison or a well rolled damage roll, it's still got claws.

A month ago I'd have said that's just the way it is. It's tough but fair (No save sleep spell is a good balancer) and the chance of death makes the successes all the sweeter. Winning a battle or surviving a deadly trap by the skin of your teeth is such a good feeling.

Yet.

None of the original party remain.

Usually this wouldnt be a big deal in the sandbox style. The premise being "Go out and amass gold and glory." Problem is, I gave them a specific quest at one point to save a party member who's life is on a timer. No one is left alive to care except the cursed party member. Which again not really a big deal as its all apart of the gold and glory thing.

But I do feel bad that there is a lack of attachment to the characters. Level 1-3 can be brutal especially for Wizards and the like. I can see why a lot of campaigns start at 3 or better.

My point:

Reading some Dragonlance and Drizzt novels and you never worried about Drizzt or Tanis etc dying to a rando goblin or trap (lets not get to far into Tanis' BS death but the point stands). These characters didn't start at 1, more like 3 (and they had awesome stats). But yeah Raistlin or Regis survived their first few adventures. OSE/BX Fighter, Elf, Thief, Cleric, Dwarf, Halfling, etc et etc did not.

I usually rag on modern D&D for being to easy on the players. And when I say this I say this as a DM that main runs published adventures. The WotC official ones seem to want it to be easier than usual. Ive run non-official published adventures and found those to be a good challenge for the players (though not always just due to baked in stuff like multi saves and going nova.

5.5 looks to take that further but I had to walk through the fire to I guess really get it.

Now Im not saying 5th ed has it right but there has to be a middle ground. I'm looking forward to taking 5.5 for a spin and maybe figure out how to make the official adventures less of a cake walk. Dragonlance, Planescape, and Vecna to name 3 I currently own. Double the monsters? IDK

OSE works pretty well and it's easy to house rule up and down. Perhaps poison isn't almost always a death sentence? Or perhaps just start at level 3 or 4?

I get how "Your character is the one who survived to level 3" is in fact true and also "Living to level 3 is your character's back story" is also true. A rite of passage and all that.

Though I suppose on the flip side, OSE/BX characters are so simplified and easy to play compared to 5E making, understanding, and playing a whole new character is fairly simple. But yeah I want them to be Big Damn Heroes with some actual danger.

Much to consider....

 

[Cruentus]

Great to hear about your success and enjoyment of OSE. I'm also running solely OSE Advanced + house rules and Beyond the Wall games, for the reasons you outlined, and also loving it.

I find two things end up happening in our campaigns: 1) we tend to not have (either through gameplay, or player decisions) long quests tied to a specific character; 2) I encourage the engagement of retainers for the characters, who, when a character dies, can then be converted over into a PC. The latter allows for some of that continuity "Alas, Balian the Brave has died! I, Arturius, his shieldbearer, will pick up his mantle, and continue the search for Zardar the Magical!" Or, the party decides "Yeah, we're done with that, look at this new shiny over here!".

I also know that save or die poisons, and undead level draining are keystones of B/X and old school game play, but I struggle with them as well. I've tried to work up systems (either using a countdown die system for poisons), or ability score drains for undead, to try to still make them scary, but allow the characters to have the ability to mitigate it somewhat. Find an antidote, run back to town to get healed, rest, whatever. I go back and forth on them.

I do, however, strongly believe for me and my group, that the ease of building a character in OSE and B/X takes the sting out of character death - if it only takes 5 minutes tops to roll 6 ability scores, pick a class, a species, and off you go, then you don't feel like you put all this effort into the archetype, complicated chargen, a backstory, repicking all your abilities, feats, species abilities, etc. Though YMMV.

We're not going back to 5e in any way shape or form. We've moved off of that particular set of rules, and have either settled on OSE for our DnD fix, or have looked at other systems to get what we want - Warhammer Roleplay, Aliens RPG, L5R, etc., rather than modify DnD to try to emulate them, or to fit that square peg into the round hole.

 

[Quickleaf]

Played in an OSE campaign which had 2-3 PC deaths, many hireling deaths, and some undeath shenanigans. For our upcoming Dolmenwood game, the GM decided to adopt 2 house rules: (1) Death's Door, and (2) Exploration XP, which I think might afford some opportunities to advance beyond 1st level without extremely high risk of death.

As far as PC capabilities go... Even from OSE > Dolmenwood, you can see Gavin Norman adding a bit more to the classes, e.g. the Dolmenwood fighter is more interesting than the OSE fighter with choice of weapon talents at odd levels. I think you can – in hacking B/X or OSE – definitely play with how many features you want to give the characters... there's a lot of leg room there before reaching 5e levels of character power/options.

As far as adventure design goes... D&D tends to be pretty black or white. WotC adventures (with a few exceptions) assume player success; from what I hear the new Vecna adventure is a key example of this approach. OSE adventures let you fail, but failure is almost always = death and making a new PC; our run of Secret of Black Crag felt like a good example of that. What's much harder to find – and harder to write – are interesting non-death failure conditions that still allow for using the adventure.

 

[The Soloist]

Back in 1981, we got fed up with dying all the time, from random deaths. Half the group didn't want to continue. That is when we decided to start playing D&D at level 3. Also, we stopped using official 'killer' modules and created our own adventures. I don't recall ever starting at level 1 after that, for any edition, except 4e.

 

[Cruentus]

OSE adventures let you fail, but failure is almost always = death and making a new PC; our run of Secret of Black Crag felt like a good example of that. What's much harder to find – and harder to write – are interesting non-death failure conditions that still allow for using the adventure.

I think this is heavily dependent on the campaign and expectations. I see a much more careful approach to going through adventures in OSE than 5e. OSE, at least when I run it, is almost always sandboxy, and as a result, characters/parties can encounter creatures that are beyond their ability to defeat. So then the decision is run or fight or talk. There are very few situations, especially with intelligent creatures in my game, where parlaying is an automatic dead end.

I readily admit that when rolls go bad, or parties encounter monsters that are just too tough for them, then deaths can occur. Those are the vagaries of the dice. But my players will always try to tip the scales, or learn as much about an enemy as they can, and try to plan how to approach things to minimize risk. That style of game is not everyone's cup of tea, though.

I also have Dolmenwood, and that will be my next campaign (when I get the books). I agree that there is a lot of room to tweak things. I use Carcass Crawler Fighting Styles (and weapon specialization from OSE:A), improved Thief Skills, and other optional rules to make fighters and other classes more interesting (i.e. anyone can specialize in my game, you just use your weapon slots to do so). I've also adopted some of the exploration and camping and foraging rules from Dolmenwood.

I use Goblin Punch's Death and Dismemberment rules as well, which, contrary to its name, are more survivable, though it results in downtime to heal injuries, often for weeks, and there are some severe results where limbs may be permanently injured, but those would also have outright killed an OSE character using the base game, so the player can decide how to proceed (dying, surviving but retiring, moving to the background as support when a new character steps forward, etc.)

 

[The Soloist]

Remember that BX adventures were created for groups of 6 to 8 players, plus henchmen. That is a lot of attacks per round and hit points. You have to cut down the size of the encounters accordingly if you have a smaller group. Using higher-level characters helps but they still don't have enough attacks per round.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Remember that BX adventures were created for groups of 6 to 8 players, plus henchmen. That is a lot of attacks per round and hit points. You have to cut down the size of the encounters accordingly if you have a smaller group. Using higher level characters help but they still don't have enough attacks per round.

One way or another there are 8 characters in play at a time. Hirelings filling the gaps.

 

[The Soloist]

My BX house rules:

• At 0 HP a character survives 2 rounds + Constitution bonus. If he is not healed, he dies.
• Thief skills all start at 50% + 2% per level. Except for Climb wall which is fine.
• Natural Healing: 2 HPs + Level + Con bonus after 6 hours of sleep.

 

[Golden Bee]

Max Payne D&D...intriguing.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

If you get the reference, you have good taste.

TLDR: 5E isn’t exactly wrong on survivablity.


My point:

Reading some Dragonlance and Drizzt novels and you never worried about Drizzt or Tanis etc dying to a rando goblin or trap (lets not get to far into Tanis' BS death but the point stands). These characters didn't start at 1, more like 3 (and they had awesome stats). But yeah Raistlin or Regis survived their first few adventures. OSE/BX Fighter, Elf, Thief, Cleric, Dwarf, Halfling, etc et etc did not.

You are right about never worrying about Drizzt or Tanis getting one-shotted by a rando, but that's novels. That's not games (Yes, DL and its game-before-the-books etc etc). The death of Sturm could be seen ten miles away - but the death that always seems to trip people up and stay with them ... is Flint. Yes, he's an old guy but he's been there forever. There's no reason to think he's going to slough off the mortal coil, and CERTAINLY you'd expect him to go in battle.

Unless you specifically give PCs plot armor like Raistlin has, for example, in all his pre-level 5 adventures, there's always the chance that someone buys it.