Every time I hear something like this, I want to push back that back in the day, everyone played very differently, different DMs, different emphasis, different styles, different variants, and different beliefs about what the 'by the book' rules actually were (often very different). Nevermind that, on top of that, nostalgia makes memory all the less dependable.
But, I realize that is wrong-headed of me. OSR is not how D&D was played once upon a time. It's a modern play style, like anything else popular today, just one that looks backwards for inspiration.
That said, 5e is the latest DM Empowerment edition - and also looks primarily backwards for inspiration, just not at all the same things - and you can make it OSR compliant, just like you can force balance upon it. You don't even have to change the mechanics that much, overtly (like, you don't need extensive written variants), just ignore or radically re-interpret them when they don't work for you. (we certainly did that back in the day! It's what EGG was talking about when he said "the secret is, you don''t really need the rules" [paraphrase, I don't remember the exact quotation]) Not every ruling needs to be a precedent to be written down and adhered to in perpetuity, each situation may be different.
Which is why every other edition of D&D suffers from the 5MWD - or the DM force needed to negate it.... or... well, quite enjoys the 5MWD and the "weird wizard show" EGG warned us about.It's subjective/stylistic at that point.
Of course, aside from being dismissive and maybe even "gatekeeping," the admonition to 'go play another game,' when D&D is the only game anyone outside the hobby anyone has ever heard of, so has all the vibrant, new players, and there may be no game that does precisely what you want, and even if there is, it may be so obscure there's no one to play it with, and, even if it's a past edition of D&D, it might not be legally supportable due to a highly restrictive GSL (OK, that last is just 4e, but you brought it up).
What's weird is that every time I hear something like this, I want to push back. The seminal documents in the OSR, A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha, almost exactly describe how my group has always played AD&D. From to 1979 on up to 1984 when I joined and on up until today. Nothing changed about how we played and yet we were playing "OSR" style AD&D...once the OSR came around, of course.
Absolutely. That's a thing a referee can do and as long as the table of players accepts it, it works. Trouble is, I've yet to find more than one or two players across the decade of playing 5E who actually want the game changed...at all. Players absolutely love how ridiculously unbalanced and lopsided 5E is. Players who enjoy that don't tend to be players who enjoy OSR-style play. A few do, sure. But they don't sit down to a 5E game with OSR in mind. They go play OSR games when they want that experience.
That age, there's still a few years before they're totally set in their ways.
lol. Yeah, everyone had different experiences back in the day. There wasn't anything close to a monolithic community with a consensus (like there arguably was for 3.x). There was what was written about the game in the books, and there was Dragon Magazine with columns like Out on a Limb...
Amusing, from my PoV, OSR games, like the TSR era games they immitate, are also imbalanced and lopsided, just in slightly different directions, with different details, from other modern but "player entitled" versions, like RaW uber alles 3e, or "too easy" 5e. 5e strongly reminds me of the D&D familiar from my experience of the TSR era, 1980-95 AD&D, which, from the grousing of older players insisting Arduin Grimoire was better, was decidedly more relaxed than in the 70s. Not just because the mechanics have their similarities - 5e more strongly resembles 3e, especially with Feats & MCing turned on - but because the rules are not so amenable to a RaW consensus, and it's ultimately all on the DM.
Every time I GM kids, especially new kids, they prefer less rules. They are super imaginative, and come up with great ideas rather then look at character sheets for powers. They prefer the sense of freedom to come up with ideas rather than feeling like they are tied to a character ability.
That's 100% true. If you want the players to do something, reward it. If you want players to not do something, reward the opposite...or at least something else. Once you stick instead of carrot, lines are drawn and people dig in and complain. Offer a carrot instead and they'll follow you anywhere.
Yeah. I'm nostalgic for those days. When people just played the game and had fun and didn't need to validate their preferences with groupthink or try to push their style on others. When just about everyone was cool with DIY'ing the game instead of only some people fiddling with things.
Yep. 5E is unbalanced in the players' favor and a lot of players love that. Especially wizard and other caster players. Cough. But OSR games are absolutely unbalanced, but in the referee's favor...and the players have to actually...gasp...think up ways to overcome the obstacles and challenges the referee drops in front of them. The thing I love about OSR games is the focus at least a bit more on player skill rather than character skills. I really love that "no, you figure it out" aspect and really cannot stand the "button smashing" of modern games.
I wish the players I've had thought that. They're stuck in that 3E mindset of RAW or nothing (even when they're brand new to D&D with 5E)...and of course their interpretation...which just happens to give them unlimited power...is supposed to be the right, true, and correct interpretation.
I'm not so nostalgic, I guess. I developed my DMing style back then, very improvisational, "secret is you don't need the rules," but I feel like I can adopt that style in almost any game, it's just, if the game is otherwise pretty easy to understand and works well, I better do it /well/ or the players will notice what I'm doing.
"Fortunately," that's rarely an issue.I don't even usually think of 'balance' that way - the definition of balance I use is all about player-facing choices. DMs don't figure into it, really.
...OK, there is encounter balance, which, like, the guideline CR doesn't' work well in 5e, and in the TSR era was just DM feel.... is that it?There's a big difference for us. I always disliked when the game would punt to the DM & player just sorta noodling things out with player knowledge. You stop playing your character when that happens, suddenly you're playing an imaginary version of yourself in SCA garb. If I wanted to RP myself in a wilderness or dungeon, I'd take up hiking or spelunking. I'm not, I'm sitting at a table, with a character sheet describing someone totally different from myself. There's a reason.
lol, latter-day Rules Lawyers!
Oh yeah, same. I came up with AD&D and B/X and a very set DIY and improv mindset of running and playing games. To the point where I'd rather have utterly minimalistic rules if any at all. My issue is the players constantly want to thump the book. I have zero interest in that.
I guess we're different in that. My stuff was almost always pointed at frameworks. Like trying to figure out how they designed classes or monsters, so see the math behind things, so I could rebuild whatever I wanted from that base math or framework. Never really worked with AD&D classes. The system for it they put out in Dragon didn't reproduce the core classes very well. But doing monsters was a lot easier and mattered a whole lot less. That's where "just make it up" really sings, the purely referee facing stuff.
Maybe I'm just saying referee vs player empowerment in different terms. But in my experience 5E isn't a referee empowerment game. The players seem to vehemently object to that very idea. At least all the players I've had. For them it's RAW or nothing. Unless of course the changes give them more power. Then they're acceptable. You see this in just about every single thread talking about edge cases, rules interpretations, referee rulings, etc.
Yeah, big difference. Without the player having to actively think of solutions, I don't see a point to playing. If it's all just there in black & white on the sheet and the player just presses a button, there's no point. You could just program a computer simulation with all the numbers and hit start. There's no point in having the players or the referee at that point. The whole job is shenanigans and improving reactions to those shenanigans.
I know tech in the standard definition, but I have no idea what you're referring to in an RPG context.
That's not what I got running 5e, but I stopped years ago. If 5e has developed a cult of RaW similar to 3e, well, that's great for 3e fans, I guess...
OK, maybe not that different. The player is, and should be, playing a game, the game offers lots of decisions to the player, that model things about the character in the imagined world - typically things that character can do, sometimes things the character 'is' or has happen to him for fate/genre/whatever reasons. The line I'm talking about is crossed when the character stops mattering, and the ability of the player is substituted.
OMG. "Tech" is what kids these days call, well,... [tries and deletes several phrasings because I don't want to be mean]... interpreting a rule to create wild consequences.... supposedly it's short for "technique" not "technicality"
