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🥳🫂👍🏿 What do you think is the most bare bones minimalist of the OSRs?

Honesty, I found 3.5 easier to run than 5e.

The new DnD is gross, that’s why I play OSR

It's all about flashy explosions and strange magic lights. I agree with the term "disneyfied". That combined with anime style and you have nothing that reminds me of the "good old days". Colors are much more harmless and it looks like you have a soft filter put over everything to take away edges and less defined. Dreamy. Boring.

I don’t care what you say, most of the new art is awesome. There’s a full page picture of the kids from the early ‘80’s cartoon, with a caption that lists their names. The caption includes Sheila. Sheila is not in the picture anywhere. This feels like a mistake until you remember that Sheila had the cloak of invisibility. 😂 Whoever captioned that picture is an absolute Chad. I don’t care what you people say…

Just use Hyperboria, and get them hooked by the PTSD.

It is called ROLE PLAYING!!!! Play a role!! You do not need bonuses, feats, skills, etc. Think through words and WHAT YOU ACTUALLY SAY!!! I ran mostly and played a little AD&D for 20 years. It was all we had and it was fine. It is fine. Modern players are just so so spoiled. My favorite edition of D&D is 3.5 because you can super hyper specialize but you SUCK at pretty much everything else. I have been a DM for 44 years. I have been a player for probally 20 percent of that time. Play and be grateful. In the old days there were no games a d no players and you hid the fact you played D&D. We were shunned, My family I learned after my parents died thought I REALLY was a SATAN worshiper. DMs were rare, valued, and, treasured. Players were thankful they found a game and were grateful they got to play. Anyone under 40 has no idea where this hobby came from and how much they owe to the 45+ players who suffered the slu gs and arrows for this new generation of entitled, self absorbed, attention hungry, self righteous, social worker, virtue signaling, GREEDY players!!! I want my bonuses. I want my powers. I want to kill dragons at 3rd level Why do the gods NOT fear me. These spoiled brats need to sit down and shut up. Here are your six possible races Here are your six to eight possible classes. Roll 3D6 six times here are your stats. You might start with 3, 2 , or 1 hot point. Know you can die at any moment. My generation played this for 20 years and loved it. So sit down and ACTUALLY Role-Play with the adults. Or Go back to the kiddies table and play D&D 5th edition super heroes and leave us adults alone. You are welcome to play IF you play Old School or go away. Period. Signed a 59 year old 44 year DM.

Have you looked at Castles and Crusades?

Nice recommend my guy!

This looks a very interesting game. Strange I have never heard of it! Looks good though.

Another great video, shameful! I'd really be interested to see you make a future video about your experience with playing RPGs back in the day.

coolio, different mechanics for osr especially adnd ish styles can get very confusing, which....is why i created my own, i feel is easier to follow, no special dice for anyone as everyone is human, and just trying not to die :)

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?" lol Seriously, it is a different game than it used to be. And the players today have different perspectives and expectations. But it seems to me it's still up to the DM to actually be in charge, and if that means disallowing anything, even if it's "official" material, that's their job. But modern D&D (the d20 system) is far more susceptible to abuse in ways the older versions never were, partly because Gygax had a loathing bordering on pathological fear of magic-users running wild. Perhaps he had a point.

Keith Parkinson was peak D&D art imo. Made the art that came before look like child’s play and all the art that’s come after has been cartoonish in comparison.

In my experience, OSR leans heavily on meticulous description from both players and GM in such a way that can lead to miscommunication at best and arguing at worst. For instance, if you told the GM you wanted to check the corridor ahead for traps, he would say "it looks fine". So you walk forward, and boulders fall on everyone. "You didn't say you wanted to check the ceiling", the GM says. The ceiling thing was a classic example. You could be playing an experienced elf used to the woods - if you didn't describe the settling of camp in a certain way, the GM would make you pay. The same goes for a rogue trying to sneak around, etc. I totally get the positive aspect of fostering description and creativity, but the overall practice lead to petty outsmarting and having to be on your toes. It places the GM and players as competitors instead of collaborators. TBF, pettyness is not exclusive to OSR. My point is that it offers little to avoid it, and indeed leads to it more often than not. The game was made by nerds (and I mean no offense by this) who enjoyed mental competition between everyone at the table, and as a result the game relied heavily on the participants instead of the characters in such a way that lacked verisimilitude and excluded a wide variety creative people who weren't nerdy in the same way. I find that later RPGs brought much needed balance and broadening of play style. And last, but not least, let me be fair once more and say I must presume none of the current OSR players are petty to play with and, quite the opposite, must be very enjoyable. It would have to be so if campaigns and tables are thriving. If people are having fun, then it is correct. Keep on, and may you have great experiences in the realm of roleplaying.

There's a reason WotC put out the 2024 Player's handbook first. Every table has one DM and three to five players or more. There's more players than DM's, and DND 5e caters to the players who want to keep enjoying D&D between sessions. OSR, AD&D, Shadowdark, Cairn, those games are more about the table. It kinda doesn't matter what your character's power level is, the DM is going to balance the game, so a plain AD&D combat can be just as fun. For me, as a player who likes to put effort into my game between sessions, I like the complexity of 5e.

No offense, but you sound bitter as hell, and unable to adapt to new things. You want the old way, and new people don't.

After playing pf2e for two years I decided to go back then 5e, then i started playing OSR games and I’m done with pf2e and 5e. Just a better way for me to run games.

I like OSR RPGs (among others), but in my opinion - being based on the "rulings over rules" motto - they tend to be less interesting from a mechanical perspective, meaning that there are fewer mechanically weighty decisions to make, leading to a less involved and more simplistic interactions between the player and the mechanical layer of the game. This kind of design is done on purpose, because the fun is supposed to originate from the players coming up with creative solutions to fictional problems rather than from mastering the rules in order to use them to their full extent to overcome the opposition in a formalized and mechanical way, like with more mechanically oriented RPG systems. Both paradigms are interesting and can lead to fun gameplay. That is, the same person can enjoy both type of experiences, but usually not at the same time. What I tend not to like so much are hybrid systems that do not know what they want to be or accomplish and try to appeal to both sides at the same time, leading to intermittent fun and a washed experience. That's why, for example, I find both OSR games/0e D&D and 4th Edition D&D much more interesting than the 2nd, 3rd and 5th Edtions. 0e and 4th editions are very different games, each specialized in its own niche. They are so focused that they both manage to deliver a great, if very different, experience and when you sit down to play one of those two games you know very well what you are getting into and what kind of fun you are going to get from the game.

I not agree on a point about traps in 5e. Even in the dmg it is suggested to not use an ability check if players have done clever thing to spot or disarm a trap. "You should allow a character to discover a trap without making an ability check if an action would clearly reveal the trap’s presence. For example, if a character lifts a rug that conceals a pressure plate, the character has found the trigger and no check is required.". So I think it more DM's thing to incorporate this in game. Btw thanks for the great video!

Thanks to the international postage, Shadowdark will set you back about £60 for a hard copy in the UK 😖 I do really like the system, but it has a few rules that don't quite "feel" right; like the mix between old and new school is slightly off at points.

As a 5E DM, high player damage doesn’t bother me because it’s the easiest thing to balance against. High level magic is much harder to balance since the only counter is usually more high level magic which is much harder to narratively justify using with certain monsters than just adding HP…

It's an open source 1981-era Basic/Expert retroclone. Core BX. If you want to scale it up to something like 1st Edition Advanced, use whatever supplementary downloads you want to add the desired level of complexity. Make it exactly the game you want, with only the add-ons you want, "À la carte".

I love reading from a physical book especially if there is a ribbon (the more the better) and if it is offset print! PS: I had a lot of problems reading PDFs from my computer or phone but I got a Kindle for my birthday and it has made reading PDFs so much better (it helps a lot with my backlog of games as well)

OSRIC pdf is free to download. It has more in common with AD&D than B/X or 0D&D.

I'm a huge fan of Basic Fantasy. Everyone should be. Even if you don't ultimately end up playing BF, the adventures are easily modifiable into any old school adjacent game you might be playing.

Calithena from Fight On! here....agreed, Basic Fantasy is a great game and a great budget choice for getting into the Grand Tradition of fantasy roleplaying. Nice review!

I’ve been trying to find a Swords and Wizardry game for a while, seems like they are a rarity.

For B/X OSE- Old School Essentials blows Basic Fantasy out of the water. BF is too basic for me. Played it and I just didnt dig it.

awesome stuff

🥳🫂👍🏿 Great recommendation - a little while back, someone copied the whole thing, stripped out the attribution and tried to sell it themselves - fortunately the art isn’t open license, so they were taken down for copyright infringement

Completely agree regarding BFRPG. It holds its own against much better known, and much higher priced, OSR games. If you want genuine old school adventuring, you can't go wrong with their catalogue. It could keep you going for years.

You forgot to say that the PDFs for all of these are free as well as the books being extraordinarily cheap! Good video 🎉

So many great FREE products. There is a free online reference document for adventurer Conquerer King too (SRD)

D&D 5e and D&D 2024 are not actually fun to play either, they are very slow and boring systems because combat takes absolutely forever. Old school is better, old school essentials is a good game, Shadow dark is probably even better than that, but the best of osr really has to be Dolmenwood. You should consider giving that a go, it's full of flavor, richness, and the rules are even more polished than old school essentials if you can believe that. It gives players slightly more options but retains the very fast speed of play

High lethality, high damage is fine as long as the group is good with it going both directions. This is a staple in games like Call of Cthulhu modern, or any similar game with automatic weapons. Whichever side goes first is quite likely to win before the other side reacts. The core of the game play then is avoiding being on the receiving end of massed fire. In 5e, this means your red dragon in its lair should be aiming to nab one of the PCs and drag it into the fire pool and then retreat, all before the PCs even know they are under attack. Ironically, this is _more_ OSR than a lot of retro clones, as many OSR games ended up with players random rolling a vorpal sword at level 2 or similar.

From an outsider to the OSR scene, but also someone who isn't a big fan of 5e and similar - my reason is much more simple: I'm not interested in what OSR is trying to do. From what I've seen (again, as an outsider) OSR is much more about improvisation and emergent storytelling, embracing and leaning into random turns of fate and facing it with your wits. That's not the experience I'm interested in having. Essentially, what I want is to be one of the main characters in a television show. And I don't mean that in the "I'm so awesome, look at me!" sense, I mean the whole deal. I want challenges, defeats, low points, triumphs, and (here's the key) a story that is actually about my character. Many DnD adventures and campaigns just seem to assume you can drop in whatever group of adventurers. But stories don't work like that. Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker weren't literal nobodies in the setting (even if they are first presented that way). Their story and the larger fight of good vs. evil is intimately tied together. Long and short, I want a crafted experience with a unique character that I enjoy playing. Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. But that also means sometimes people just don't care about the things you're into.

In OSR games your character develops as you play them, not only through the cool magical weapons and trinkets you find along the way but, also by role play instead of roll play. Also OSR games are flexible enough that if the player and DM work together you can create your own options for characters. This of course is for more veteran players & DM’s. BECMI actually has a lot of options for the fighter type characters, set spear,multiple attacks (up to 4), smash, parry, disarm. Also for human fighters, at 9th level they can decide to become Paladins, Knights, or Avengers. Couple these with the weapon mastery, which allows players to increase their skills with weapons (fighters up to 15 weapons, all other characters up to 10) then sprinkle in the general skills, which is well over 60 skills and you have a very customized character. But you need to understand, the more options you layer in, the slower the game plays. This is why newer RPG’s such as 5E, plays so slowly, especially combat, there are trade offs for everything you do in RPG’s as well as in life

Wow you're a real person with a face! I like 5e in BG3, but I hate WoTC so much I would never want to play or run it. I would try playing Pathfinder if someone invited me.

This is why our group left 5e. The inevitable imbalance between players pushed us to find other, more balanced choices.

I get it, you don't like 5E, I also not a fan of it, but the video is misrepresenting it and no, OSR is not better. OSR in my opinion just as bad as D&D is is, and you don't see me making nonsense videos to justify my preferences. If you enjoy OSR games, have fun doing that, but if you compare apples and oranges, and demonstrate that you have not even the slightest clue about game design, then it really just makes you look petty not the system you are criticising.

There is a reason it’s called ADVANCED Dungeons and Dragons (besides the lawsuit with Arneson). With that being said I completely understand and concur, even though I have been a player in a 3 year “by the book” AD&D 1st edition game. Despite all the weird rules, don’t get me started on initiative, it comes out as a rewarding experience!

Love this 🎉 both games are good, but 5e is very easy to take advantage of if you look to do it.

What are those frightening background noises in your videos? I listened to this one on an earphone, lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, and I had to keep myself from jumping up every time I heard a noise like that. Scary, ha ha. 😅

Ultimately, most all of them are useful, no matter which system you choose to run. Next up for me is GURPS!

That is a bit much. A boss encounter should make the players feel vulnerable but if you do that much damage in one turn then what's the point. The other players must feel useless and just like they are tagging along.

Did anyone actually read the spells involved? The combo involves a buff spell and an attack spell together, and for it to work the caster will need to get within 15 feet of the target. There are broken combos in D&D, but allowing an 11th level wizard the chance to blow an enemy to smithereens actually seems pretty balanced with the short range. It’s a ranged spell attack, so it’s disadvantage within 5’ and out of range at 20’. Besides, an Adult Red Dragon has AC 19. An 11th level wizard has between a +9 and +12 to hit, depending on DM generosity. They’re probably hitting a 19 about 70% of the time, so they’re actually averaging closer to 143 damage with the combo. That’s about 56% of the dragon’s hp. An 11th level OSE wizard does 11d6 with lightning bolt, which averages to 38.5 damage. The dragon saves 55% of the time, so that’s an average of 28 damage, over 62% of the OSE dragon’s HP, and the wizard can actually shoot a flying dragon with it, thanks to the 180’ range.

Nah it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to

Not Suprising DnD basically turns into Dragonball at high levels. People like Dragonball! but yeah, not fun to run lol

Old School Rules !!!