The Old-School Essentials game continues, now hitting session three. The group is in the thick of a pathcrawl style scenario (I won't mention which --yet--) and its a fun one I modded for my Enzada campaign setting. The first two sessions had been a dungeon crawl I used to get the group some extra XP, and I realize now it was ultimately not necessary or as fun for me. I can write 'em, but I don't really enjoy them anymore (well, I say that, but see below). The pathcrawl style is fun, though, with situational/exploratory events at each location making for some fun stuff.
The game almost feels like a family game (it sort of is!), as both my son and wife are playing, along with two long time friends who also have gamed for ages with me. One of our regulars is out due to work for a while, the other two regulars disappeared for a bit (on Saturday night, anyway), possibly due to work but also possible because they are not overly interested in OSE for various reasons. Still, a four person group is a nice size, especially on Roll20.
I wrangled with the XP process but have grown increasingly annoyed with it. In the Old Days of Yore, those dark times of the 80's in which I was forced to experience ages 9-19, I never actually used the GP metric for awarding XP. Part of the issue was that I subscribed to Ken St. Andre's sound logic, as expressed quite well in Tunnels & Trolls: gold is its own reward! XP is for things you do, not things you loot. Either way, I made sure that by session three they got enough XP for the things they did to merit hitting level 2 (though had the group's rogue not been killed last sessions he'd have leveled up at the end of session #2).
The dungeon thing is something else. I've run plenty of dungeons, but at a certain point I realized that most dungeons end up being filler. Sometimes they can be fun, sure. In fact, oddly enough I'd argue that dungeon crawling is exceedingly interesting in the versions of D&D that have the largest number of fiddly and specific rules about such. D&D 3rd edition is shockingly good at focusing on the dungeon crawl experience with lightning rod precision, so well perhaps that I find it less pleasant to do the dungeon crawl setting in any other system now as a result.
D&D 4th edition did something more subversive, though: it focused less on the dungeon crawl as a big process, and more on the dungeon crawl as a series of set pieces. The idea was to cut filler out, tighten the experience, and let the game dwell longer on the really good parts of the story, or where the action was. 4E had lots of issues, but this was not one of them; focusing on the good stuff was what I had done for decades already, and for a while at least I bought in to the ideas of how 4E did that in its map and minis-obsessed mechanics.
With D&D 5E, a return to form and also a return to large dungeon set pieces with lots of filler became more normal. But, D&D 5E combat can be more boring if you are not careful, as it makes hard-hitting monsters less impactful, and fights prolonged with too many hit points. I got sucked in to this trap a bit, too. But....I am working to get out of that mindset, and with the Tuesday night game I am running a campaign that is designed to focus only on the big set pieces, the interesting stuff, if you will, and cut out the doldrums.
With OSE, the module I am running does have the travel, the camping, the setting up watches....all of that. But its pathcrawl design makes it simultaneously methodical and interesting as you will find at least one really weird thing to figure out, explore, solve or ignore at your peril at each location. It's a fun approach, and melds the procedural elements of dungeon crawling/wilderness crawling with a format that tries to aim for the most bang for the buck at each location.
Anyway......I'm just happy to be finding some fun in it. I was worried for a while now that I was really burning out on D&D and fantasy in general, and I don't feel so much like it with these recent games. I am still tempted to suggest to the group that if they like the OSE game that the next one I run adopt the advanced rules, as those are just more comfortable to me since my early experience was primarily with AD&D, but honestly it's got me back to thinking about what other classic experiences I could revive soon....Tunnels & Trolls, for example!
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