Putting Thought into a Serious Effort at Old-School Essentials as Default Fantasy System

I've bounced around a lot on the idea of what fantasy system to roll with, and I am starting to think that I need to step back from D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2E, breathe a bit, and give Old-School Essentials an earnest try. Here's my reasoning, starting with the flaws in 5E and PF2E that I want to fix:

1. D&D 5E, which persists on Tuesdays, feels off in a way that I can't stop noticing. Sometimes I think its the bounded accuracy, other times its the "bag of hit points" monster design, which is less about whether they are bags of hit points and more about whether the group is optimized to hit hard and fast. The problem with easy healing remains, even with gritty rest rules in place. 

I'm not likely going to stop running 5E on Tuesdays, as my group has expressed a strong desire to continue with it, but I may bag it all down the road once the campaign is over. There is nothing 5E is doing which I don't see being more fun and interesting at least n 3.5. Tell that to my self in 2007, so they can have a heart attack at this declaration, but it's true....and I never thought I'd see the day, but I realize I prefer more mechanical nuance such as 3.5 offers than less.

2. Pathfinder 2E does offer more mechanical nuance, but it seems to me my players like it less. As GM for PF2E I have to be more mindful of the tight balance, which I realize is both significantly tighter than the bounded accuracy of 5E and actually tighter than the 3.5 design it is derived from. But combat in PF2E is a lot of fun, so I can't knock it....it just happens to have a lot of design implications that need to be considered when playing. I am getting fairly used to PF2E, though, and it is turning into my preferred contemporary choice for fantasy gaming despite my misgivings about its highly focused design on skills and other rules issues I have encountered or discussed in the past (such as organizational rules issues, lack of coherence in detecting and identifying magic rules, the weird way healing works, somehow both making it more and less accessible all at the same time, etc.). But the fact that combat is fun and monsters are interesting to fight really makes up for a lot of PF2E's other failings. 

3. Old-School Essentials is a distilled and concise restating of the classic B/X and AD&D rules of yore, with some modern bits thrown in for the sake of ease of access (such as providing for both descending and ascending AC). But it accomplishes a few things very specifically that are missing from the last 20 years of regular D&D (and Pathfinder to a lesser extent) that I would like to experience again. This includes:

1. It balances the simplicity of old school monster design with a speedier combat system; you won't see hit point bloat in OSE, and combat can be a bit scarier because it still supports creatures with a lot of "bite" and lethal effects. Healing is slower and rarer. This means there needs to be more strategy on the players' shoulders, and the GM can design encounters and modules with an air of verisimilitude rather than "what the encounter budget demands."

2. Magic items are rare rewards and part of the PC flavor....a good magic item can help define a character, rather than go into a bucket for auction after out-leveling it. 

3. The overall pace of play will be quicker and more efficient. There's a more rigid mechanical process in play which will help keep players who struggle with understanding the rules in check, but with enough complexity that the older and more savvy players won't feel bored. The fact that "rulings, not rules" is really important to OSR design will factor in more strongly.....the group I want to propose OSE to recently played Gamma World 1st edition and I think being able to adjudicate the mechanical questions with common sense on the fly was a big part of the fun in those game sessions, leading to interesting results that the simpler mechanical structure of the game did not seek to forbid. You could watch unexpected synergies at play, which was a lot of fun, rather than argue over specific stat block interpretations.

4. Although OSE does not have a detailed skill system it does have some AD&D-inspired skill table support for backgrounds. I am not at odds with this; as I have weathered over the years I think my desire for a common sense experience without skills will be fine, and I can house rule them in f I start to get irritated at their absence. The 5E skill system is swingy, the PF2E skill system counter-intuitive and too balanced, so using OSE with just a "what would you know based on your stats, class and level?" approach sounds okay to me at this point.

5. Finally, OSE is, like many simpler and OSR focused games, focused on interesting and experimental fantasy. You can do this with any game, yes, but some games actively support/encourage weird and interesting stuff more naturally (Cypher, for example). If you are even passingly familiar with the prodigious recent output of the OSR and OSE community specifically, its hard not to notice that the most creative and interesting stuff for use at the table is coming from this corner of the hobby, not the big giants.

Anyway....I am going to propose trying OSE for a while to my Saturday group after the latest Call of Cthulhu games closes out. We'll see! I'm hoping we can make this a grand experiment.