Increasing Appreciation for Old-School Essentials

 Laat night I managed to get our Friday group to start a classic B/X D&D campaign using a blend of the Erol Otus edition Basic and Expert rulebooks, with a few extra resources, including the BX Blackrazor Companion and Adventurer books, and some material (the skill sytem) from the D&D Cyclopedia. It was fun! I think we'll be playing this game for at least the length of the adventure I have set up, which has enough content for several sessions.

We did run into some interesting hiccups, though. I learned, for example, that the Basic and Expert books are awfully vague about things like: fighting in darkness, what blindness means mechanically, how darkness the spell works when used to cause blindness, and what those penalties look like. In looking through later editions (Mentzer era books, the D&D Cyclopedia, and then the OSE rules) it became clear that a creature with the blindness condition can't attack at all. If you're in the darkness area, does that mean you are considered blind? Also, if you are shooting into the darkness, what sort of cover penalty is that?

Little questions like this....as well as movement rules during combat, are a little difficult to parse out in the older B/X books. The clarifications get better in the later versions of the ruleset, and then the complexity magically starts to ramp up in the D&D Cyclopedia, which I noticed manages to take an inherently straight forward ruleset and make it more complex (but hey, that is supposed to be the definitive edition of the BECMI rules so that is to be expected). 

Where I found the best clarity, and developed a strong appreciation for what it is doing, is in the Old-School Essential rules. The deliberate clarity that the OSE rules focus on is excellent, and I suspect that the ease with which I could find answers to these questions (or at least guidance) is probably because the author's goal was to address exactly these issues of needed clarity. And the OSE rules succeed to great effect in this manner.

Moreover, it's been long enough since I last messed around with B/X D&D that reading through and running it again, then reading through OSE for comparison has really hammered home to me that the OSE rules are a shockingly exact translation of the classic rules in almost every possible way. There are little oddities; I notice an absence of electrum pieces, for example; and devil swine are recategorized as proper lycanthropes with associated traits in OSE, while their original counterparts were more like "lycanthrope adjacent," as examples. I am looking only at tbe B/X component of OSE, too; I am much more familiar with AD&D and so realize that the Advanced elements introduced in OSE are a bit more fluid in their reinterpretations of those rules elements, more a blend of B/X with AD&D elements wedded to them....which honestly is a bit closer to how I ran the game in the early eighties. 

Anway.... I let the group know that going forward I will be keeping the OSE rules handy for quick reference as they are just so much easier to find clarity in, and that PCs can be built from original rules or OSE rules and both are accepted in the game.