So over the last couple years this has been a gradual process that has built up for me, with opportunity to run Old-School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, Shadowdark and other sundry old school games and systems, even going back to 1st edition Gamma World for a campaign at one point. In 2026 my entire perspective on what I find fun has more or less snapped in the wake of D&D 5.5 and to a lesser degree Pathfinder 2E, which I happen to like, but it just pales in comparison to the more organic and satisfying engagement you can get with the OSR and actual original editions of these games.
Take, for example, Dungeon Crawl Classics which once long ago I would hold up as an example of just how interesting altenative takes to D&D could get, while lamenting that it nestled itself in the core conceits of a B/X era of D&D with race-as-class and minimal to no skill systems. For me, at least, and for a long time I was very invested in the more mechanically deep and rigorous sort of gaming experience you could get out of D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder 1E, and while I loved AD&D 2nd Edition (my primary game of choice in the 90's outside of GURPS) its messy application of endless splatbooks bade a return to that edition unwieldly and, well, unfun.
Well now these days Dungeon Crawl Classics looks like about as much game as I can (and want to) handle, and the notion of simplified classes such as you have in B/X has been renormalized thanks to Old-School Essentials in a way that doesn't feel weird, it instead feels liberating. When I run my mashup of OSE and B/X D&D it is a weirdly liberating experience, and strange things can happen on the fly, by design, or as part of the inherent randomness of the system that shadow just how mundane and uninteresting the current era of fantasy games are. D&D 5.5 is nothing if not boring and predictable. Pathfinder 2E is marvelous in its balance and rigor, and equally condemned for it.
Running Pathfinder on one day and OSE-B/X on another day is what I think is breaking me, and also what is fuelling my fascination with what DCC's goal is. When I am designing for Pathfinder I am looking for level appropriate items, not because those items make sense in the world but because they mantain the mechanical grace of the system. Combat is fun, and even a bit exciting at times as PF2E can generate more tension in battle fairly easily (unlike D&D 5.5 which kills tension wherever it sees it), but when I run the OSE-B/X game it is truly marvelous to watch the players actually strategize and consider alernative approaches to potential combat situations, think strategically and work to execute actual plans rather than synergize feats. The first time they got their asses almost handed to them by wights and then trolls and they decided it was time to camp in the woods for a while to recover was a special moment....no one ever stops to think about the need for recovery in modern editions of the game anymore, its been done away with in favor of video game combat pacing.
I still like Pathfinder, in so far as current modern game editions go, as it tries to at least make sure the game feels challenging....but designing scenarios for it means designing within the scope of the rules, not around them. For example, in my OSE game the players found some random loot which was on its face a sword +1, +3 vs. dragons. But in short order I decided it was actually a cursed blade, one which had a 5% cumulative chance for every foe slain with it that a dragon would hear the song of the elven maiden spirits trapped within, and come to immediately seek to destroy the blade's wielder.
I mean, you can do that in Pathfinder 2E, but it will probably break the system, require you spend time mechanically plotting out what the blade's properties are, havw to justify its existence to the one or more rules lawyers at the table demanding to know what level the blade is and if they can farm it for runes, and then wonder if the blade allows them to effectively summon level appropriate dragons for XP farming. More importantly, it is much easier to do something like this ad hoc in OSE than it is in Pathfinder.
Anyway....that is a lot of text to say "I will be writing more about OSE and DCC in the blog now!"
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