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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9615382" data-attributes="member: 7045072">This is true - though I think it depends on what one defines as "Old School" - I'm of the "The OSR was a new approach to RPG design" gang though, not the "The OSR recovered the CORE MAGICAL TRUTH of D&D!" gang. Giants and Drow are especially interesting as they are I think the best examples of Gygax's early D&D design (not other peoples design with his edits and his name slapped on).  I've argued they are relentlessly designed as "commando films"  - where the party is meant to infiltrate and make war on a more powerful organized enemy force.  I think 5E tends towards "superhero" or "action hero" design ... following the trends in action movies.  I'm not trying to say that 5E somehow isn't proper fantasy D&D because the PCs are heroes with lots of "powers", rather that as a bit of game design history it'd be interesting to compare 5E advice, rules, and adventures  to earlier superhero games - maybe MERP, V&V, or Champions (all of which were pretty popular in the 80's).Not anywhere I've seen ... When I played in the 80's procedure was generally handed down to players by different referees and it was varied... I haven't found much on procedure or anything about chests in Strategic Review or Alarums & Excursions either.  If you really want to know I'd ask Lich VanWinkel who has a store of knowledge on esoteric bits of early RPG history.  My own thoughts are that procedure sort of grew up in communities and was largely the thing that defined their differences (that and goals).  So on the West Coast the D&D fandom tended to be more from the Sci-Fi and Fantasy literature space and wanted more narrative elements almost immediately.  They bent OD&D to that goal pretty quick.  In Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities it was wargamers - so the procedures were likely assumed to be those of 70's chit wargames.For locked Chests? I suspect they didn't really exist in the earliest games, or would require "knock" - though I assume this lasted about 2 sessions until someone found one and demanded the ability to pick it with a hairpin... Something I suspect there were a few ad hoc systems for at different tables.Death is rough in 5E - time to make a character is more then the 2 minutes it takes for an OD&D PC and there's a lot of effort to tie in characters to the adventure and setting (at least in Actual Play podcasts and WotC books) so I think survivability is key.  When I was running 5E I found one could up the lethality pretty easily by having intelligent foes kill (or threaten to kill) downed PCs ... and by limiting rests with random encounter chances ... but it felt off, against the spirit of the game, and made my players super adverse to combat in an unproductive way.  OD&D combat is deadly, but in both directions, so a good ambush or overpowering spell can end them without much HP loss. 5E combat less so, meaning players can't trick themselves into thinking they'll come out of a fight without a scratch.I do think though that 5E could do with more longterm effects to being serious injured or downed.  Like a cumulative -1 to rolls per time the PC has to make a death save roll in the session (healed by either more serious magic or a long rest?) and perhaps lasting injuries for some kinds of serious near death experiences. A colorful table would help here, even if most of the injuries were simply cosmetic or narrative in nature. E.G. You have an aversion to spiders now after nearly dying to the Great Webbeast of the Shrouded Pit... or Everyone recognizes the green stains of goblin blades on you extensive scars. For some of course mechanical effects, but for others just in game char development? It'd need limits of course, and I'm not sure if this is already a 5E community thing - but it might make injury and combat risk feel more sound without character death becoming more common?True - and also true that the OSR and now Post OSR have always been full of change and evolution as well.</blockquote>

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