Thursday, May 12, 2022

The Slow Burn: Wanting to play more Old-School Essentials....

When I wrapped my foray into Old-School Essentials RPG a month or two back, it was with a couple observations. One of those was that, at times, I felt like the game was hitting too low on the complexity bar for my tastes, but it was also admittedly a lot of fun and exceedingly easy to adjudicate. Realizing (somehow, after all these decades) that abilities like "Open Door" can just be reskinned as "athletics" and "listen to door" is just a Listen skill check....Detect Secret Door is just "Spot..." it was a bit of a surprise to me that I never considered that back in the day. Probably because, if you roll back to actual AD&D, the measurement and enforcing text in the rules gets wonkier and more specific. But for OSE--yeah, they are totally athletics, listen and spot. 

Anyway, after running more D&D 5E for a while (and having fun doing it), along with diving in to the latest hardcover release fo Pathfinder 2E (Book of the Dead), I find myself drawn back to the elegant simplicity of OSE. I want to run more of it, and preferably sooner than later. This is even in the face of my current other major obsession: Pathfinder Savage Worlds! PFSW is itself an amazing pairing.

Anyway, no idea what to make of this or where to go with it, but I feel now like my only real mistake with the idea of continuing the OSE game in space was simply not finding the best OSE resource to crib content from. I'm snagging a copy of Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells, for example, and also reconsidering if maybe I can use just the core rules of White Star and ignore the Galaxy edition. These could all be viable solutions. Heck, I can just crib from my Spelljammer books, which I'm already doing for 5E, although I concede my vision for the OSE in space game was to have actual technology and science-fantasy in the style of Starfinder, just without all the thousands of pages of excessive rules. 

Well, got plenty on my plate as it is, and my main game night (Saturday) is likely stuck doing D&D 5E for a good long time now. My Tuesday night group is aware of my interest in trying out Savage Pathfinder, though. As to where I fit more OSE in.....good question! But I keep thinking about it, so I need to do it.

1 comment:

  1. I've been running a fun 5E campaign for a bit now, but I'd like to get back to OSE at some point.

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