OSR Why does OSR Design Draw You In?

[Celebrim]

Nostalgia.

I love capturing the vibe of the game back when I was a kid and everything about RPGs felt magical and cool. That's why I often find myself designing OSR style house rules and revisions and even scenarios for 1e AD&D... even though I have absolutely no intention of ever running a game using those mechanics again.

 

[Celebrim]

In contrast, more rules lite games like most OSR games default to "well, what makes sense," while having a real sense of peril.

I get it, but just like back in the 1980s, I find that "well, what makes sense" in practice involves playing to the referee or the table or the meta rather than to the fiction.

I had no problem whatsoever with scary dungeon crawls in 3e D&D and while I have famously or infamously got a lot of house rules for 3e, the game looks nothing like an OSR rules lite game run heavily by GM fiat and rulings, nor is the fact that my rules let you have 1st level characters with like 29 hit points (although 15-20 would be more typical) anything like having 1st level M-Us with two hit points and one spell.

I don't need to push down the players/PCs to a helpless lack of resources to challenge them. Green slime, swarms of scarab beetles, giant crayfish, and troglodyte cultists will handle that nicely.

 

[Retreater]

Oh neat, that's different for sure. Has she played Draw Steel yet?

She hasn't. I think she'd like it and she's interested based on what she's heard.
But I haven't been able to get it to the table yet. I'm not sure if I have the mental capacity to do so.