Sunday, August 30, 2020

Putting the I in the OSR


 
I love the OSR. I discovered it with James Maliszewski's Grognardia and Chris Gonnerman's Basic Fantasy at roughly the same time. It taught me to love Dungeons and Dragons and articulated to my frustration with DnD 3.X and 4E, especially after discovering Castles and Crusades.

Many of the OSR's core features were elements that I had considered bugs do too bad experiences.

I've been playing DnD 5E for over 8 years now. It is a good game and I like it, but I wouldn't mind a change of pace. My group is fairly flexible but they like 5E and we are all heavily invested in DnD Beyond. What I run into when I think of running an OSR game is that if it is not significantly different from 5E is it worth the learning curve to my players? While I prefer rulings and player involvement vs rules and class abilities am I merely creating extra challenges when we all get together to play?

I've been contemplating that for quite a bit and I feel like I found the answer.

It's Dungeon Crawl Classics. It is rooted in Appendix N but has a time-tested system that is fairly familiar, but it has significant permutations with its use of more types of dice and its mechanics for Clerics and Magic-Users. And in my mind, it is the answer to my internal debates. I don't know when I'll run it and I might run it as Mutant Crawl Classics or Dark Trails, but I plan to run it when a slot opens up and I'm pretty excited about it.



3 comments:

CWR said...

From one GM to another, the only thing I'd say going in, download the Crawler app: it speeds up table lookups tremendously.

It's a great game; good luck! I hope to read about your group's experience!

dkabq said...

I second that suggestion.

Cross Planes said...

Thank you both for those and I'll keep it in mind.

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