Playing Old-School Essentials has been fun, but its very basic. Too many years of playing iterations of D&D with more granularity and choice have left me in a state where the older editions just don't work for me like I think they should, no matter how hard I try. It's not even that we're not having fun....it's just that, when all is said and done, OSE is a retread of territory I exhausted a long time ago, and when the current mini campaign ends I will wrap it and probably give the books to my son, who may or may not do something with them. I hope he does! He is new to the hobby, and OSE is an excellent introductory ruleset for him to explore with his friends.
Now, the weird disconnect I am having with OSE is that, for all practical purposes, this is just an amalgamation of AD&D, B/X D&D and maybe some original 0E mechanical elements mixed in with a more modern take on the OSR experience (letting stuff in like Drow that didn't appear until later books or editions, for example). So when I look through AD&D 1E and 2E I find myself more drawn to playing the game with those editions, and maybe less so with OSE. What gives? Is this really just a hardcore nostalgia dive for me?
AD&D 1E, despite how fascinating those books are, would have to be out. Too much of the terminology in the game, too many of the weird subsystems, were never actually deployed in the day, or we had to houserule to work around the Gygaxian-speak which our 10-14 year old brains couldn't wrap themselves around; we also leaned heavily on the B/X books when stumped for an interpretation of the rules, too. If I played it today, I would be tempted to start houseruling, a lot. I left AD&D 1E behind early on for other systems (Tunnels & Trolls, Runequest, Palladium Fantasy, Dragonquest), so no issue here for me to jump forward a bit.
AD&D 2E was the game I picked up in my first year of college in 1989, after my players, who had been good sports about playing Runequest III and Dragonquest convinced me to give it a shot. It was instantly a hit, and I loved how the game cleaned up and restructured everything so it made more sense, was more generally accessible. I went on to run AD&D almost exclusively for fantasy from '89 all the way to the arrival of 3rd edition in 2000.
For this reason I realize a lot of my nostalgia is tied to AD&D 2E, and that was by far a more complicated game with more depth and granularity than an OSR game like OSE has on offer. There were class kits, dozens, of sub-classes, elaborate proficiency mechanics, wizard schools, priest domains, optional priest subtype rules which I used constantly to emphasize the wide variation of priests of different gods, and enough humanoid and demi-human racial options that they ended up filling entire books later. And when the Player's Option content came out we embraced it all; the Player's Option books added more depth and options, while also making the game at times weirdly complicated. Enough so that, when D&D 3rd edition came out, it felt like the much-needed fresh restatement necessary to bring D&D under control. D&D 3rd of course later built up its own splatbook problem, but at least its core conceits in the mechanics were more consistent over time.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that my nostalgic affection for the old days is really complicated. I might do better to dig around and see if I can find the old Dragonquest or Avalon Hill edition of Runequest III for the proper nostalgia experience. I have the core three books to AD&D 2nd edition, but to really get that college-era nostalgia I need the Complete Handbook series for Fighters, Wizards, Clerics and Thieves at least, as all four books were so heavily used their covers fell off. Oh, and Tome of Magic, too....a lot of those spells and the Wild Mage were core to the gaming experience I had in 1989-1995.
But the truth is, one of the reasons I found running more D&D 3rd edition last year (along with re-collecting it) to be so viscerally satisfying is that it was the edition which codified all the things I liked about 2nd edition into a unified whole, and made it more comprehensive. It was ultimately a victim of playstyles (the rise of the min/maxer and the idea of build mastery) but taken as a ruleset aimed at a verisimilitude-laden experience, it worked exceedingly well (to a point).
After the OSE game ends I'll have to chat with the group about what they want to do next, but I am strongly inclined to propose running more D&D 3.5. It's got the precise mix of what I need, gaming-wise, for now. I can also enjoy D&D 5E, for which the problems are luckily not as big as its strengths.
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