I think I have a generally positive impression of D&D 5.5, it certainly makes me feel excited for rolling a new character eventually.
Have been reading this blog as they study the rules of D&D as they were in 81 to find exactly what motivates play within that system, and it’s been fun to read.
But what’s more it’s also made AD&D sound kind of like a tense experience a la venturing into the Zone or playing a brutal tactics game. Compared to my experience with later editions of D&D and how unweildy the systems began to feel for my players more interested in story and roleplay, I think I would be much more wiling to experiment and learn the system if death was a real threat and success was hard fought and measured in gp. This is like the idea behind what people call OSR, right? I know nothing about that world.
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Yeah that’s pretty much OSR.
I think DnD realizes how powerful that is but doesn’t know how to wrangle its players into it. So they build other cool toys for the players to be fantasy superheroes instead.
Short answer: kind of.
“The OSR” is kind of a false idea because I don’t think there was anything like a united movement underneath a banner that had any sort of guiding principles other than a general concept of ‘retvrn’.
If there were motifs or commonalities across the various entities associated with “the OSR”, I would say they were:
- Movement back toward dungeon-delving as the primary verb of interaction
- Simplification of rule sets, especially in terms of skills (those often being eliminated entirely) and special abilities, and an emphasis on improv in combat especially
- Magic is weird and dangerous (this is something that I think is actually a bit of a back formation, magic in old-school role-playing was very dry and matter-of-fact, I think this is more of a reaction of the excessively capitalistic nature of modern big company TTRPGs, that’s a post for another day though)
- Acceptance of the basic mortality of characters, and a reaction against narrative as the defining mechanic of a ttrpg, rather than an output of play
- Being a questionable freeze peach advocate or at worst, a sex creep and/or a Nazi[1]
[1] - This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, although it’s far too common to not have a serious aspect to it. There were/are a ton of good folks associated with the OSR as well, Chris Kutalik is a Real One.
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Also worth noting that what this blog post is talking about is not AD&D, it’s Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set from 1981 (also usually known as ‘Moldvay’ because that’s who designed it, as opposed to the '77 ‘Holmes’ or '83 ‘Mentzer’). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a product split off some four years earlier.
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Yeah I just kind of autobrained the acronym.
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It’s really weird, compared with my experience with old timey D&D, the focus on gold as the primary mode of XP instead of combat XP comes from GMs who would allow you to leave the dungeon with loot and come back. Back in the day I never played it that way and gold brought back was pretty much just a bonus that depended on how much you could carry, and fighting monsters was not something you could avoid indefinitely because the rations would run out sooner or later and the monsters were made of meat.
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Ironically, the whole hardcore proceduralist playstyle of sticking to the text of basic/expert as written comes not from the OSR but from story-games and the forge.
This makes sense if you look at the history. B/X was ignored by the hobby until the mid 00s. Most retroclones focused on AD&D which was the ruleset that grognards knew, and which represented the popular playstyle of D&D from the 80s to the 90s. Many people wrongly believed that “basic dnd” just meant it was for beginners and that it wasn’t a fundamentally different game from advanced dnd.
The forge was a web forum full of navel gazing pretentious elitists obsessed with theorizing, but their biggest contribution to the hobby was to argue that “system matters”. At the time, rpg nerds defaulted to playing every game how the gm felt most comfortable running it, which often meant houseruling or ignoring large swathes of the rules. This made sense for people trained on AD&D, vampire, rifts, or shadowrun because the rules as written sucked and no one used the entire rulebooks. On story games, a spin off forum from the forge less interested in theory, people still treated the system as something that actually mattered as their main approach to indie game design. Some people (luke crane might have been the earliest) realized that b/x was not only still worth reading but worth playing and that if played exactly as written, presented a taut dungeoncrawling experience. Those early write ups inspired quite a few people to re-examine b/x, becmi, and the rules cyclopedia, as an alternative branch of dnd play
It would take a few more years of advocacy before osr authors started cloning b/x instead of adnd or a stripped down version of 3rd edition but I am glad they did.
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these folks started crawling out of the woodwork recently in response to D&D 2024 featuring… tacos and sushi in one piece of official art.
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I was there on the forge for most of the time it was around, and to be fair “system matters” was something we got from Greg Costikyan’s notes in Ghostbusters International. And it was a whole lot less navel gazey than most of the rpg design forums because there was a real emphasis on keeping play logs that the rpg.net forums or SA never bothered with
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I know, I was there too, I’m just being pejorative towards my own tastes
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I’m flashing back to Dragonsfoot, which at the time (2003ish) was the place for ‘old school’ RPGs and big on AD&D1e and 2e.
And weirdly had a big contingent of Savage Worlds players. Their archives from that era have been super useful for me tracking down older Savage Worlds PDFs that got pulled from the web.
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It hit me thinking about this that a key idea that’s supposedly very ‘old school’, the idea of magic being chaotic and mysterious unpredictable, while not totally unprecedented in games, was something I definitely saw advocated for in Sorcerer and Sword before any of the early retroclones were floating around. And you can’t get more Forge Era than Sorcerer.
It falls in line a lot with how Ron Edwards was always talking up games from the early 80s, and in fact, now seems to be predominantly focusing on those when I’ve dug up his current web presence. The last big RPG release of his I know was him literally just writing commentary on the Champions 2e rules.
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Spells failing in interesting or catastrophic ways is a big part of DCC and that always struck me as a maverick move for something so self admittedly backward facing. I was wondering where that was from.
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Yup, I think there’s definitely some precedence of it before that book (wild magic in AD&D2e for example, and I’m sure some issue of Dragon Magazine, some fantasy heartbreaker, or unofficial third party book had it earlier), but it wasn’t really a common feature or considered a core thing for D&D until waaaaay after it came out. Most of Gygax’s magic advice is entirely about how to control players who are using it too well.
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The first pass at the wild magic rules in second edition were like a sidebar in that book that stat-ed out characters from the Forgotten Realms novels. Seemed like a cool concept but the version they presented felt totally unusable. Not sure if they fixed that when they did the updated FR setting box.
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Nevermind, that was spellfire.
Wild magic zones were like a feature in those three city named adventures/books right?
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I think wild magic zones were a Time of Troubles thing and were a part of 2nd Edition FR. Are the three modules you’re thinking of the ones that told that story(which basically explained the changes from 1st to 2nd edition AD&D)?
Wild Magic’s fully formed entry into the game was with the Tome of Magic, which must have been at least a little bit later.
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Yeap, shadowdale, tantras, and Waterdeep. It was rare anyone actually ran a published adventure back when in our crowd but I think we did at least two of those.
I have tome of magic somewhere around here but for whatever reason I don’t remember I getting much use back when.
I read the novels these were based on as a kid. Never played the modules though.
Tome of Magic was pretty underwhelming. The new stuff for priests was probably more interesting than the mage stuff from what I recall. It does have a certain flavor that only a very specific period of 2e has though.
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