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Finding the OSR

My recent background-watching videos covered the Old School Renaissance (‘OSR’), which looks to revive a lot of old-school D&D-style play.

I started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so a renaissance intrigued me.

Strange Premises

While I’ve not heard of some of the more egregious rules returning (thieves tracking 10% chance to ‘walk silently’, level-caps on everyone but humans), the games seem to preserve far more than they should of A,D&D, and the like, including Vancian magic, and classes.

Crappy rules aside, the main focus of these books and vloggers lies in the play-style of these games:

Low HP, meaning combat is lethal, meaning one should only fight as the last resort,
Players would often talk, or flee instead of fighting,
disarming traps through cunning, rather than rolls,
defining a character through backstory, rather than a load of special abilities
“the answer is not on your character sheet” (meaning, think of a solution yourself, rather than perusing your abilities),
making random encounters work well,
never balancing the encounters.

Nostalgia isn’t 20-20

I find the ideas laudable, but many of the OSR descriptions don’t match the old rules.

D&D did not, at any point, have ‘low HP’ as a motto or mechanic. Fighters rolled 1D10 per level to determine their HP, while wizards rolled 1D4, meaning that either one could end up with 1 HP at character creation. This means low HP showed up for low-level characters only, while a level 10 fighter would average 55 HP plus the Constitution Bonus.

The OSR talk about running away also doesn’t much gel with the fact that D&D had no rules for running away. ‘Normal’-sized creatures move at a set rate, while shorter races move at half this rate, and there ends the movement rules. A monster running after the players won’t force a check of any kind - they simply move forever, at a fixed rate.

Disarming traps fell to thieves, who had a percentage roll to spot the trap, and another to disarm it. If the disarming trap score was low enough, then a lowly thief with 10 HP might prefer to ask a fighter to step on the trap rather than attempt a roll.

Where the OSR crew talk about intelligent traps one can describe, and which players might toy with carefully, that’s not what I remember from the published adventures. The Temple of Chaos module had ten trapped stairs, leading to ten skill-checks for the thief. It had things like ‘secret poison arrow dart’, without any descriptions of how the hole which loosed those darts looked. The old modules really did assume the party thief would just roll a bunch of thief-checks while going up the steps.

Finally, I’ve heard notes on ‘the character isn’t meant to be scared of dragons, the player is - that’s why there are no “fear checks”’. But A,D&D does have fear checks, they’re simply listed next to the monsters. Dragons, for example, force a save vs. spell for anyone of a low enough level, and failure prompts the character to flee for 1D4 rounds.

Feats aren’t the Problem, Skills are

The addition of Feats complicated later D&D games, no doubt, but this seems to miss the major culprits. If anyone wanted to focus on cumbersome rules, they should target skills!

The number of Skill-points a character had in 3rd Ed. was equal to:

On top of this, humans receive either a Skill point or 1 HP per level (player’s choice), so there’s no way to see if a human has the correct number of Skill points for their level.

Someone making a 5th level thief simply selects three Feats, but working out the Skills will take a while longer.

Meanwhile, our A,D&D thief has a job at least as bad as working out skills - those thief abilities grant % scores. The system to grant a percentage score to skills, such as ‘detect noise: 30%, walk silently 18%’, went something like this:

1. Take 40 points.

2. Add 30 points per level.

3. Divide the points as required, with none receiving more than 30 points, plus 10 per level.

4. Apply racial modifiers with yet-another-fucking-chart.

At least the modern D&D editions managed to combine Skills and thief abilities into a single system!

Values

I really like the goals I hear from OSR bloggers. Traps should be interesting, and demand player interaction to disarm or bypass. Encounter tables - properly done - allow for interactive elements in stories. Players love well-done exploration. Stories shouldn’t have pre-set outcomes.

I could restate a lot of these ideas as just `it works when you do it well’, and the OSR seems to make good on that promise with excellent examples of how to do things well, and massive amounts of modules packed with interesting ideas.

I’ve had a go at some simplified OSR rules[a], based on making characters entirely out of Feats.

[a]