Upfront I’ll say that I love Old School Essentials and will continue to buy their products as I can because it’s is an amazing game. It served as the best re-introduction to D&D that I could have hoped for as well as the best introduction to D&D for my kids and I absolutely recommend trying it out.
OSE is gritty and dangerous but there’s a certain spartan…ness to it that I wanted to overcome. I didn’t want the super heroics of modern D&D but I wanted a bit more flair. I also realised pretty quickly into my new DM role that I loved making things up as I went along. Random tables for everything! It’s pretty easy to find random tables and I enjoy the surprise narrative creation that they bring. And so then I took it further and thought well OSE has ability checks for things, what if I get them to roll an ability check to see if they know something, it would have to be part of their characters background but general knowledge is a thing and there’s always a chance people know odd things so it would just need to be less likely they know something, so let’s make a table to adjust the roll for difficulty….and then I realised I was recreating portions of modern D&D. And then I also realised that all of this stuff is just a narrative aid for my style of game and it was already built-into modern D&D.
I bought the 5.5e rulebooks and did some reading and came to the conclusion that modern D&D characters are crazy powerful from level one. More reading and I found that 5e included “gritty realism” rest rules which required no change to port to 5.5e and made me happy. I found a few other rules modifications to make things more grounded, like exhausted spell casting, and I ended up finding the 2014 Basic Rules which are pretty feature complete and included all the races/species and sub-races/species I was looking for (5.5e has ability score modifiers tied to background not race/species and I disagree with this). And I don’t use anything other than the default race feats from the 2014 rules.
So with actually quite minimal effort, I have this half-way-ish point between OSE rules and modern D&D rules. I get some of the grit and danger as well as the flair of extra bits and fancy spells. And I’ll admit it freely, I could adapt OSE rules to include all of this with sufficient time but it proved to be way quicker to cut down rules than to create them.
OSE is still going to be a massive influence, although maybe I shouldn’t call this OSE. Maybe I should just call it what it is, old school D&D gaming. Anyway. OSE or old
School D&D gaming is still going to be a massive influence of the style and substance of my games. They’re still going to want to carry a 10’ pole, or get a hireling to do so. And one day when I run them through the original Tomb of Annihilation, characters a going to die, not because I in particular am doing something, that’s just the module (from everything I’ve read). My D&D game is going to be old school schlock wearing a fancy coat.
I think I need to summarise, because I’m not sure I achieved the article title. I’m switching because I want slightly more flair in my games, slightly more pizazz and jazz hands. But only some. And, after trying both ways, it turned out to be easier to tone down modern D&D than it was to raise OSE to the level I wanted.
No comments:
Post a Comment