I finally did it! After years of reddit lurking, forum browsing, and blog stalking, I played my first ‘osr game’ a few weekends ago. (We’re ignoring a DCC game I played a month ago for reasons.)
Garycon XII was from March 26-29, a con I admit was completely off my radar. Until that is, the corona virus shut it down, leading to the con going free and virtual, leading to someone posting a helpful FYI on reddit. So I did what I always do when I contemplate going to a rpg con. I pored through the list of events searching for old-style gaming. Usually nothing really catches my eye and I skip the con. And even at the one tabletop con I have gone to (PAX Unplugged 2019), while I did get the chance to try out some interesting games (City of Mist, Bluebeard’s Bride, Pathfinder 2E), I wasn’t able to check out any of the limited old school options.
But here we had a free con with a focus on old-school gaming that I could experience from the quickly expiring comfort of my bedroom.
Garycon being what it is, there were a refreshingly large amount of options. I’ll have to consider attending in person one of these days. Some of my top choices were filled up unfortunately, but I settled on three that I could get into: Kendall’s Keep, a homebrew game in AD&D (THE AD&D! what a treat!), a dungeoncrawl that ended up not happening, and a city adventure in Swords & Wizardry. So two games in total.
Kendall’s Keep (AD&D)
My initial thoughts on this were, ‘it was okay’. Not in a bad way, the game was great fun. I guess what I mean is, it felt like playing d&d, which, I suppose, is how it should feel like. But for me, only having significant experience with 5e, ‘felt like playing d&d’ is equivalent to saying ‘felt like playing 5e.’
I was the youngest guy in the group by decades, playing with a bunch of OG d&d gamers, it was great. We were up until 4am, roaming the woods and killing trollocs with my thief pregen. The GM was good, there was less rolling and more rulings, and combats generally went quick-ish. There were a lot of small things different from the 5e I’m used to, but overall it didn’t feel too different from a 5e game (at low levels). For the record, between the two, I think I’d rather play ad&d (gotta keep my osr blog cred).
Swords & Wizardry
‘Hoo boy. Where do I even start with this one. Perhaps with the fact that we had between 7 and 10 players at varying times? No, let’s start with the system. In many way, the S&W rules were very reminiscent of the ad&d game I’d played before. And it’s definitely unfair that in S&W’s case I could read through the rulebook, while with ad&d I did not. But good gracious am I not a fan of the S&W rulebook. It leaves so many things unsaid, like how hitpoints are generated, and whether attribute rolls are a thing and how to do them. Like, I get it’s some sort of clone and most people coming to it will have the d&d background. But not everyone will. And if you’re not going to at least include the essential rules of how to make and use a character, what’s the point of making another d&d clone?
The game didn’t play much better. Even besides the number of players and constant mic feedback issues, I noticed something. Something that kinda ruins a lot of what (I perceived at least) the whole old school/osr/sword dream/insert your choice of language is trying to accomplish.
S&W doesn’t really spell out skills. But it DOES (like many d&d clones and the originals) give out special thief skills. And I noticed that, in the absence of clear rule guidance on how to handle this, and in the further absence of correct GM guidance, players will use the tools the game provides them. Namely, in the midst of my quixotic first osr experience I had players calling for skill rolls so often I thought I’d tripped and fell into a 5e Adventures League game. Rarely did anyone try to circumnavigate even the most telegraphed traps. Instead, for every hallway the three rogues rolled to find traps, then the three rogues rolled to disarm traps, then, failing that, they took the trap to the face. At one point, one of the players asked and I quote, ‘Can we get a combat soon?’ Not to belittle anyone’s style of fun. But maybe missing the point of sandboxy player-driven adventure-type games.
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So all of this got me thinking. And I’m going to save a lot of said thinking for another blog post, because this is already long enough. But I’ll end with the thought that… now that I’ve played one, the whole old-school clone thing has kind of lost its luster for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still all-in on OSR/dreamhack/whatever you call it gameplay. But if you look past the familiar rules (which won’t grab new players like me), I wonder how well the actual rules of old school clones and games exemplify the type of gameplay that spawned from them. More on this later.
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