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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 9615133" data-attributes="member: 3586">Some of the things OSR people are reacting against... are quite visible in actual Old School products. "Modern" D&D didn't come from nowhere - and I can argue that a lot of the story-driven play that it typical of 5E Wizards adventures has its seeds in Gygax's Giant/Drow adventures. Some of it is cherry picking the stuff produced in the old days and saying it was all like that... when it really wasn't.There are certainly design precepts that current D&D adventures don't follow, and I really wish they would. For instance, I wish the middle section of Descent into Avernus was a lot more sandboxy than the mostly linear path it follows, with various devil strongholds the party would go between based on their choice and make deals with to become strong enough to deal with Zariel. OTOH, Curse of Strahd does do a lot of that. (And has some DMs struggling with it!)Does Dungeons of Drakkenheim give you old-school vibes? Looks like a 5E product to me. (Yes, it's not from Wizards. So?)The idea that modern play devolves into just rolling dice - witness "make a Perception check, then make a Disable Device check" - is not without merit. I certainly prefer tricks and traps that require the players to use their minds more than just commanding their hands to pick up dice. But the origin of that is 1975's Supplement 1, which introduced the Thief class to the game with its Remove Traps skill. What is that but dice-rolling?To add to this, you have the problem that a lot of original procedures weren't written down in official rulebooks. How did players deal with a locked chest before the Thief class came out? Did Gygax and Arneson just never include them?I certainly relate to the wish that characters were more at risk of death in combat. I don't want OD&D levels of low-level characters variability, but at present it's very hard for any 5E character to be hit hard enough to actually die. (I observe that 5E tends to be either TPKs or no character deaths, except in rare circumstances, since the rest of the group are good at returning "dying" characters to the fray). But this is a 4E-era change... since 3E characters were very likely to go from living to dead. Death at -10 hit points plus high damage codes (and criticals!) The state of modern D&D? It changes with each edition. Each knob in a different place. 2024 is not the same as 2014, though a lot of knobs are similarly placed.The state of OSR games? Each one different, knobs in different places.</blockquote>

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