I'm Getting Old: Why I am finding Old-School Essentials more fun than Pathfinder 2E (and it's mostly not nostalgia)

 Actually, to be clear, I do enjoy Pathfinder 2E in the moment. But I had a real breaking point the other day when I was contrasting my PF2E campaign against the somewhat less frequent but more fun OSE campaign. The specific scenarios that arose were as follows:

1. I had worked out a number of planned encounters that would be ready for me to use when the time was right in the PF2E game. But this shined a light on the more RNG-friendly encounter system of OSE, where I actually had sections of the scenario that said, "This room has a random encounter from Table X in OSE" type stuff (or the B/X books specifically). The players invariably were having more fun with the decidedly less certain encounters in OSE due to the fact that the game system by design could flex with a measure of uncertainty and randomness that is hard to accomplish in PF2E. 

2. The second situation involved one of these "built but held until the time was right" encounters, a technique I use to have something ready but held for use when the situation/player choices call for it. This is a necessary technique in PF2E, which by design does not favor random encounters, encounters that fall outside of a certain balance range (which if you go too high or too low leads to tediously easy or insanely hard/lethal results), and the books themselves do not offer up randomized encounter or loot tables. 

Anyway, the prebuilt encounter was missing the loot...I had fogotten to figure it out, or misplaced it, and so I had to improvise on the fly, which is "technically doable" but its pretty obvious I think to the players I'm just trawling through the confusingly organized loot tables trying to find stuff, and also make sure that stuff is level-balanced, another issue with PF2E where handing out loot that's too powerful too soon or too weak too late leads to further power/performance issues for future encounters. It was a pain in the ass; in contrast, the treasure tables in OSE (B/X) make no assumptions about balance; its all about luck, and sometimes things go very well for the party, and other times they roll a cursed item, or maybe the monster hasn't accrued any treasure at all. It can swing both ways....and its deliberate by design. This is a much more interesting result because it means two different games in the same scenario can very wildly from one another.

3. I had some NPCs I wanted to design, and I figured I could build them in Pathbuilder 2 and then turn them into statblocks. This led to a moment where I was reminded of just how much I hate the nit-picky nonsense of feats, especially skill feats, in PF2E. There is no analog here in OSE; you get abilities by class, but not very many, and most of your character's "character," if you will, is determined by actual play, deeds, luck and cool stuff you might find or do. 

The two feats that broke me were (without recalling the exact names) one in which you remove a specific penalty against being attacked while climbing, and another where you can take a Step action into difficult terrain. The first one got me to thinking about how rarely a situation has cropped up in 3rd edition era games (and I consider PF2E to be a descendant of 3E era games) in which you can be attacked while scaling a cliff. Does it happen? Sure, but it is far less common given the predisposition of this era of D20 systems to favor maps and minis, which are notoriously difficult at representing verticality. 

The other feat, where you can "take a Step action into difficult terrain," made me actually mad and irritated at the game. First I had to figure out the Step action,* and realized its just PF2E Revised's 5-foot step from classic D20 terminology, probably now renamed because you can't just call it a 5 foot step anymore for some reason. Second was the realization that unless you have this feat, no one, regardless of their acrobatics or athletics skill, will ever be allowed to try for such an action by the RAW unless your GM is like me and actively disdains the skill feat system as nothing but annoying limiters. 

More to the point though, it got me to realizing just how many of the feat choices in character design in PF2E are just pedantic little "get out of jail" cards for gotcha rules. It shined a light on why a skill-based system like Basic Roleplaying or a non-skill-based system like OSE (or B/X if you use the optional skill system introduced in the Gazetteers) allow for a lot more storytelling flexibility because you aren't having to fight the rules every step of the way. This might not be a problem for some groups, if you don't have any players or GMs with a sense of rules mastery or rules-lawyerism in their mental perspective, but if you have even one rules lawyer at the table or just a sense that ignoring the rules detracts from the experience, then that can lead to PF2E being very bogged down in these little gotcha bits.

There have been other contrasts that broke me a bit. I tried working out some potent magic items in PF2E but realized the only way the game is mechanically comfortable with allowing such flex in items is through level scaled relics. OSE doesn't care; you can stick the Nine Lives Stealer from AD&D into a gang of level 1 PCs and consequences be damned. Can you do that in PF2E? Sure, but the Nine Lives Stealer is not going to be the cool sword you think it is, and if you ignore all the design expectations and just make it happen, its going to make one player in that group far more balance-wrecking for the rest of the party. 

There are things I like about PF2E, but the devil is in the details. My love for the game stems from the fact that it "feels" better to play in terms of dice, probabilities and threat/risk than D&D 5.5, but the game's fun factor dies by a thousand cuts for me when I realize how much of the game is dedicated to micromanagement, niggling exception rules, and artificial limiters designed to prevent players from doing stuff (not even cool stuff, just regular stuff) all so the mechanics can induce the illusion of choice through its labyrinthine feat system.

The problem I face is....I may be having issues with PF2E, but my players on that night do seem to enjoy it. Only one of them is in my OSE game (the rules lawyer, ironically! But he loves OSE as well and its got plenty of rules, too) and I don't know if I could convince them all to give OSE an earnest, permanent try.**

So all of that is why I say my fascination for OSE (and Shadowdark, and DCC) is not nostalgia driven. In fact if anything I keep entertaining the notion that deep down, in terms of complexity vs. ad hoc flexibility, D&D 3rd edition (and even Pathfinder 1E) managed to handle this better than PF2E. But those are dead systems, and hard to get a group into these days without being able to point to a virbant, living character creator (hmm, I think the original Pathbuilder may exist, though....) but also I just really love OSE's revival of B/X, even though I never really played B/X in the 80's, using it instead as a rules system cypher for interpreting and resolving Gygax's particularly confusing rules moments in AD&D instead. In a way, that works in its favor, as actually thinking about playing AD&D 1E straight up just sounds....unpleasant....to me, thus why I love how OSE's blend of B/X with advanced options "feels" like the game I used to play, even though its really just a sort of approximation of the zeitgeist of the era. 

Anyway.....just some thoughts! I'll bring up the idea of OSE to the group tonight. 

*So for reference I have been running PF2E games since it came out, including one game that ran from level 1 to 20, and yet seeing "Step" in text threw me for a loop; this is where the "I'm getting too old" part comes in, as in "Too old to remember all these dumb little rules." It also probably doesn't help that I run theater of the mind in PF2E as I am too old and tired anymore to drag many pounds of maps and minis around (and also too tired to spend hours designing VTT environments while listening to everyone try to talk at the same time on a single audio channel," so thus the old man yelling at clouds vibe at this moment. 

**I could probably convince them to move to Tales of the Valiant, though. My group is fairly in agreement that D&D 5.5 is now just too banal, unchallenging and simplistic for veteran players, but TotV manages to capture a sense of natural progression and improvement from what regularD&D 5E used to be, so this may be a good option. 

What Has Death Bat Been Up To? Resident Evil, Shadowdark, OneXPlayer 2 Air, and the PSP

 My posting rate has fallen off a cliff in recent months so I thought I'd put some general effort into it today....nothing big, just a "What have I been up to?" post. So, here it goes, one paragraph on each thing!

Resident Evil 

This is a great Zach Cregger movie, but maybe (imo) not a great Resident Evil movie. It is a good Survival Horror movie, though, and if they had called it Survival Horror The Movie I would have been 100% on board with it. Whether the film captures Resident Evil depends heavily on whether you consider the RE universe of the games to be relevant to the RE formula, and as it happens I think that by scrubbing the film of virtually any connective tissue to the games other than the feel and pacing of a survival horror experience, you are instead left with a perfectly okay horror film that does nothing for the RE franchise. As a campy, humorous Zach Cregger movie though its pretty fun. I would have preferred a cameo from Auntie from Weapons in this over a tepid and vague tie-in to a version of Umbrella Corp run by Gen Z scientists and ineffective middle managers.

Shadowdark

Although I had lamented the brevity of writing in Shadowdark, I have nonetheless been thinking a lot about how Shadowdark's inherent play style design meshes so much better with what I want out of an RPG these days. Pathfinder 2E, which I run weekly, is fun but I constantly feel like the laboriously rules-laden mechanical elements are always getting in the way. My players might disagree though, so I am now considering a return to Shadowdark maybe on a new weekend game. Note that I have not abandoned OSE by any stretch....I feel like OSE and Shadowdark are complimentary but different takes on the same essential experience, and I see intrinsic value in both systems' approaches.

OneXPlayer 2 Air

This lovely device arrived a few weeks ago, and it is a weird hybrid laptop/tablet/gaming handheld concept that OneXPlayer likes to push out a lot, along with their other more conventional handheld devices. I have never gotten a OneXPlayer device before so was keen to get this, and the price was tolerable. It's core is essentially identical to the MSI Claw 8 AI+ which is currently residing in my #1 preferred spot as my best handheld purchase from last year, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. So far though I've found its compact portability is absolutely best for treating it like a mini laptop, and its utility as a handheld gaming device is proportionate to my desire to hold the thing for longer bouts of gaming, which is honestly less fun than holding a smaller and more conventional handheld design. But its compact design has made it my preferred device for managing character sheets (e.g. Pathbuilder) and PDFs at the gaming table, and its performance with games is excellent, I just find pairing the controllers with a grip connector and playing on it like a gaming laptop is the preferred experience for me.

PSP

Yeah the PSP from like20+ years ago! I found one for cheap the other day (my original died and then exploded a long time ago due to battery issues I didn't realize would happen), and I am rekindling my collection of UMDs. It's a fun device! It is my new retro gaming vector for collecting, and I am having a lot of fun finding old favorites from two decades ago. 

Okay, that's it! That's what I've been up to, aside from running Pathfinder on Wednesdays and OSE on Fridays. More to come, I'll try to get back into the writing groove here...

 

A one Minute Initial Four Hours of Play Review of Marvel's Wolverine (PS5) - Actually A lot of Fun

I'm several hours in to it so maybe my views will change, but this is a pretty fun game, very much of an older school of design; Marvel's Wolverine would fit right in with any Xbox360 era or PS3 style game, fitting very much the mold of other linear action-adventure titles of that time. For contemporary gamers (and critics, apparently) this is their garlic and wolvesbane, but if you pine for an era when you did not have to traverse a vast open world map hunting endless fetch and find quests to no real purpose, this game is a solid gem. Despite assertions it has been idiot proofed --and as someone who loves walking simulators, which by the same definition are also idiot proofed-- I think the real problem is that the Wolverine game is mismatched with the audience that was expecting it. People who expected it to be like a Spider-Man title in the same video game universe will be shocked (assuming they read none of the promo material about this being a linear adventure) to learn it is not open world. Players who expected it to be a visceral soulslike-level of combat difficulty will probably also be disappointed, though I found the combat to be more satisfying so far than the Arkham Batman games' combat, which is not dissimilar. The first major boss in the game (I played way too late into last night beating him, fyi) is Omega Red, and the multi-stage battle requires figuring out his patterns and countering them, striking when the opening presents, and then relearning his patterns as the battle morphs. It was hard....arguably on a level of soulslite hard, but not so hard I was ready to ragequit and I appreciated that I, an Old Gamer, could get through this.

Much adieu has been made about the scent trails in the media. It's only had nominal appearance in the first few hours, but  expect it will appear more later on. So far it has contextually made sense, but I agree they could have found a way to make it less obtrusive. 

The storyline is great....but the Marvel Video Game Universe started with the Spider-Man titles is a different beast, and there's some weird stuff going on in the new game. Mr. Sinister in his guise as Nathaniel Essex is a major plot figure and initial ally of Logan, though I can sense the tides turning on it. The storytelling is great, though, so far. 

The game does have some problems, though. I have experienced two bugs, one annoying and one amusing. At one point you need to advance the story and Mystique needs to open a security door. In my first playthrough she simply didn't open the door, so I restarted the checkpoint and she showed up. Later I watched a enemy combatant merge into the ground although (unlike when some radscorpions did the same thing in Fallout New Vegas) when I tried hitting him he took the damage and "popped" back up out of the floor. Weird, no idea if the Spider-Man games have bugs like this.

Despite those two bugs, the game has so far been a blast. If the game shifts south at some point I will update and report! But right now I just wanted to get this out and suggest that the social media anger against this game is just a bunch of clickbait nonsense. If you like old school linear action adventure titles with some panache, check it out!

The Shifting Sands of Fantasy Gaming - OSE, DCC, and the Rise of Games that Are Better at D&D Than D&D Is

 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!"

The Steam Machine

So I have been absent a while but I have a good excuse! I have been super busy...oh, and I got a Steam Machine. Not just any machine, either: the 2TB version with Steam controller. Yes, that means an infinite number of PC master race guys who can build their own micro PC out of spare parts are agonized at my purchase.

My first comment on the Steam Machine after owning it for about a month now is that it makes gaming much easier by simply providing a very close facsimile to a console gaming experience, with the Valve touch. Having an extensive collection of Steam games in my library means I could immediately start testing it out, and I have tried out a lot of games on it now, and even finished a few. I sat for years on The Callisto Protocol, for example, and restarted that game in the "minimum security" mode (old dad with bad reflexes mode), and ploughed through the campaign over a weekend.

The main bugaboo I see about the Steam Machine online, besides proficient PC gamers who like to assemble their own machines arguing it has no merit on price, is the idea that Valve over-promised on its 4K resolution capabilities. I don't know if this is true or not; I didn't really expect it to be 4K ready for all games with the specs given at time of ordering, and the actual machine likes to default to 1920X1080 resolution, but I generally favor 2K resolution myself to optimize for performance even though my monitors are all 4K OLED beasts. I have pushed several games up to 2K resolution without needing to dampen down other stats and the net result is some great performance. On the other hand my eyes are old and tired, and in a couple cases I noticed that after playing a bit I'd go into a game's settings to mess around with it and realize some games would default to 720p resolution for no good reason. This thing runs most stuff just fine at 1080p or 2K resolution with plenty of high specs turned on.

My enjoyment of the Steam Machine is at least partially due to the new Steam Controller, which is now my preferred controller due to its comfortable design and the fact that virtually all games I have tried work just fine with it, no tweaking or modifying necessary. I love this controller, and I am keeping my preorder for a stand-alone so I can have two Steam Controllers hooked up for those rare couch co-op games out there.

Anyway, all the youtube videos on this that complain about the price to performance on the Steam Machine have been a wake up call to me that the target audience is not an enthusiast PC gamer who already has a beast of a machine and likes playing at his desk, and certainly not those guys who build their own machines. They are another market. Now, you may have other good hardware and maybe even a nice desktop (I do), and just enjoy technology for what it is; you might (like me) find the Steam Machine a cool device to get just to admire how tiny its form factor is relative to its output. If you are not the kind of gamer to run out and build your own machine then you are likely aware that despite the complaints about cost, if you go online there are a lot of much, much more expensive prebuilts out there these days due to the spike in RAM and GPU prices.....and if you want a machine in 2026, Steam Machine is a very competent gaming rig with a very nice Linux-based console polish. You could do a lot worse than to get this, and while yes you can probably find some cheaper gaming laptops out there with lower specs, or even an occasional low spec desktop, I would be surprised if those actually have competitive performance with what the Steam Machine has to offer. 

Another comparison that goes around is Steam Machine vs. PS5 Pro or Xbox Series X. I will only suggest that when you decide which one of these to go get, that you are electing to buy in to the gaming ecosystem of either Sony, Valve or Microsoft. If I had to pick the least anti-consumer of the three it is obviously Valve. Someone please be ready to cryo-freeze Gabe Newell! Yes, you can save some cash by buying an Xbox or a PS5, but I have both as well and I would take the Steam environment any day of the week over the other two. Long term savings include not having to pay into their passes to gain access to online play, as a good example....and if you want free games, you can go into the Linux desktop mode and use the Heroic Launcher to add storefronts like GOG and Epic, which loves to hand out free titles. If I had to suggest Xbox or PS5, I would lean to Xbox right now as having the better overall game pass option vs. PS5. You also still get the widest selection of games and the best overall pricing on the Steam storefront.

So what games have I tested and found run great on the Steam Machine so far? Well, games that ran well at 1080p and 2K resolution with medium or high settings, and older games maxed out, include: 

The Callisto Protocol (played and finished on the Steam Machine)

Beast of Reincarnation (I really like this game; at lower res it looked washed out, but I found it ran the game at 2K resolution on high just fine)

Stellar Blade (works great!)

Path of Exile II (really looks good and plays great on the Steam Machine)

Batman Arkham Knight (maxed out settings and resolution)

Wanted: Dead (ran at 1080p had fun, but a rather frustrating game even on easy mode)

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call (indie gem ran great on 1080p high)

Fallout 4 (ran great at 1080p and 2K, and despite having the anniversary pack I had no issues no matter what all the Steam reviewers claim)

Total Chaos (ran great, still can't quite grok the vibe of this game. Is it survival horror, or Doom-like with fewer useful pickups?)

AI Limit (ran great, but I good example of a nice looking low graphical stress game)

Atomfall (ran extremely well at medium-high settings and up to 2K)

Burnout Paradise Remastered (cranked up to max as this is not a demanding game)

Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (maxed out settings)

Hunted: The Demon's Forge (cranked up to 4K max settings looked great; I love this obscure game btw)

Steel Seed (ran great on 1080p high)

Diablo IV (ran great! Blizzard knows how to optimize for everything)

The Division 2 (ran well at 1080p, forgot to test at 2K)

Dirt 5 (ran great!)

Lost Souls Aside (surprisingly ran very well, enough that I played far enough along to start appreciating the game)

Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West (this ran exceptionally well!)

Crimson Desert (looked fine at 1080p but I think this is an example of a current gen game that benefits from more performant machines)

Routine (ran great!)

Prodeus (maxed out ran great!)

So how about games that did not run so well? Well I have only encountered a few, as follows:

Avowed - this game looked bad and ran with a lot of stuttering, and while I tweaked it a bit to where the framerate was decent it still looked washed out and unpleasant. The experience was subpar. In defense of the Steam Machine I have had issues with this game on my bigger rig with a 5070TI card as well.

STALKER 2 Heart of Chornobyl - weird artficating made the game unpleasant to look at.  It seemed to run fine, but nothing I tweaked in the settings got rid of the sparkly haze over half the screen.

Call of Duty Black Ops (original one) - would not run, although it claims to be machine ready.

So! Pretty good overall so far. A lot of the games I am currently playing run great on the Steam Machine, and others I have not yet tried on it seem to work well per the many Youtubers out there. Overall I have to say, if you find any of these criteria meet your needs, you may want to consider a Steam Machine purchase:

--do not want to build your own machine

--love the tiny form factor

--love a console-like experience while still being a real PC

--Would like a easy way to explore Linux on a machine designed for it

--Prefer the long term benefit of the more consumer-friendly and lower cost Steam ecosystem over console ecosystems

--have shopped around for other prebuilts and realized they are damned expensive no matter what the PC builder guys says

--happen to already have or want an excuse to build up a steam game collection

Then the Steam Machine might fit you well! For me? Solid A, I am loving this machine and will get (hopefully) years of play out of it before I need to upgrade. 

A Couple Notes on storage and expansion:

1. Expanding the memory onboard with the MicroSD slot is easy. If you are worried about running games from a MicroSD, or load times, don't; for whatever reason these things work great in the Linux/SteamOS environment. I did drop a Micro Express SD card into the Machine, though that might be overkill.

2. All information I have read suggests that adding memory to this thing or upgrading the SSD is a royal pain in the ass due to the compact design. I have also watched videos suggesting it is probably not worth it. Given how good the performance has been, I do not feel the need to upgrade. And since I got the 2 TB model I feel pretty well set with it.

3. I also plugged an external 1TB SSD I had handy into the back USB C port, and it also runs games from the SSD just fine. I used to use it with my main desktop anyway before I upgraded the internal M.2 drive in that one to a 2TB and 6TB model (thankfully over a year ago before this stuff skyrocketed in price).

4. I am currently using a plugged in mouse and keyboard with it but I tried it with bluetooth mouse and keyboard and it worked great.

Too much Text in RPGs vs. Not Enough Text

 In 2026 I finally realized that the tabletop RPG market appears to be heavily weighted in two directions: those games of enormous page count, laden with a density of information; and on the other side of this curve is a veritable mountain of tiny, often zine-shaped games filled with what can only be described as a strangely minimalist approach to content. 

I feel like there's probably a line to be drawn from how RPGs used to be, and how for many people the barrier of entry was finding the time and energy to read hundreds of pages of material to get familiar with a game or setting to run it, and today, where you have games like Mork Borg where 90% of the game experience is interpreting the surreal art and parsing out tiny nuggets of rule or setting data. 

The interesting question is maybe not whether minimalist game systems are a response to the older style of dense, text- heavy games, but rather: is the market for more "information lite" game systems and text actually a sign of changing times? Even dense tomes like the newest 5.5 edition of D&D are actually rather information light; these books use less of the page with a bigger font to convey less information per page; just look at the D&D 2014 race write-ups to the 2024 ancestries for a fine example. Or take the 2014 DMG, which is packed with stuff (both to its betterment and its failure) compared to the briefer and lighter 2024 DMG. 

There are plenty of games where word density and system or setting depth is important; just witness Pathfinder 2E for proof this is still a thing. Cyberpunk Red, Shadowrun 6th, Coriolis, Call of cthulhu, Mythras, etc....there are plenty of these sorts of games, the "old guard" if you will out there and in circulation.

But then we have some games where the line is crossed: Shadowdark is what got me thinking about this notion in the first place. I mean, Shadowdark is a minimalist spectacle where you get the Big Fat Rulebook experience with a torrent of supplemental material, but the actual result is a shockingly low word count, a system that appears to be allergic to exposition or setting depth, and a paucity of rules content that borders on a sort of weird art. 

I was going to argue that Old-School Essentials is more of a middle ground here, given it is a precise retelling of the original B/X D&D system, and it really is....but all that demonstrates is that the idea of "rules with lite content in presentation" was also a thing in the early eighties. Indeed, one need only remember the myriad titles of Fantasy Games Unlimited to remember that this is actually a very old concept. So if oneis trying to ascribe the current wave of minimalist RPGs exclusively to short attention spans of modern crowds, I think that is probably not true, because we had plenty of games like this back in the day. What is true now is that the density of informtion in current rulesets is even skimpier and more graphically dependent than the many old FGU games ever were, though.

On the other hand OSE is a great example of how even a famously simple ruleset that has been presented in a somewhat minimalist fashion (B/X D&D editions) later evolves into something much more dense and complex (D&D Rules Cyclopedia). Indeed, for fun just read through the original Basic Set (Otus edition) D&D book, then contrast it with the OSE book (which is probably of the same word count, but manages to organize the information much more efficiently) then contrast the two with the much more elaborate and denser combat rules section of the Rules Cyclopedia. Same game....but just now with more density and more use cases being documented. 

Lately I have been a bit torn about the fact that I definitely fall in to a more old school camp when it comes to how I like my rulesets, dense and thick with too much information, vs. the fact that a game like OSE is so wonderful in its concise get-to-the-point approach of design, and then Shadowdark, which I love because it is designed to reduce complexity that could get in the way of jumping right to the part where you play the game, but perhaps at the expense of making its rules tomes and supplements anything more than utilitarian outlines that feel like a Cliff's Notes edition of D&D. 

This means that....if you are still in a corner of the hobby where part of the experience is reading and figuring out these rulebooks and their systems, then a game like Shadowdark really doesn't offer much to you.

Ah well....I guess while I mull that conundrum over I shall just resume reading the latest batch of Mythras books I just got (a Fioraccita supplement, Mythic Venice, and several third party modules I found on drivethru that I finally took the plunge on). Mythras is unquestionably in the old school camp of "there is no such thing as too much information." 

Or maybe I will read through some of my Mothership books....despite being definitely part of the zine scene where the "rules lite, informtion lite" era of gaming has been flourishing lately, a nontrivial number of Mothership books are actually super information dense (albeit for scenario and setting content), but in a tricky way where it disguises this density through the medium of contemporary short-form module design. 

I guess the one thing I can say for sure is: there's definitely something for almost everyone out there!

The B-List Character Problem (Supergirl Review and Post-Mortem)

 I saw Supergirl last week, a bit late but it was a fun movie. Not a great movie, mind you; I haven't thought much more about it beyond the fact that it was a fun romp and managed to hit a fair number of good storytelling beats while still being a fairly traditional story. The graphic novel it is based off of had more nuance and was less "action-y" than the movie, of course. But overall not bad. Milly Alcock does a good take on Supergirl, Jason Momoa makes a much better Lobo than he did Aquaman, and the smaller scale and feel of the story makes it a fun sort of one-and-done adventure.

But! The film has done poorly at the box office, and it is easy to see why. For one thing, Supergirl has always been a B (maybe even C) tier lister in the DC roster of superheroes. Now sure, James Gunn has managed to take some seriously obscure characters from both DC and Marvel and elevate them, but those are usually characters working in an ensemble cast, or who collectively have a dynamic range going on. In Supergirl we have really only got three key characters (Supergirl, the young girl seeking revenge whose name escapes me, and the criminally under-utilized Lobo) and a villain so generally lame he is worthy of a Marvel casting. 

But that can't be the reason no one showed up to the movie, though. I think the reason is ultimately pretty basic: Supergirl is a B-tier character, one who is better used as a supporting cast for an A-lister like Superman. Her only other claim to fame is some TV show appearances and a 80's movie that is generally only looked upon fondly with very thick rose colored glasses. Her comic is never a hit, and often targeting the younger crowd in a way that only older comic writers and artists can fail to do so ("Hey, Kids," type Buscemi moment type stuff). DC does this a lot, in fact, and juggles between trying to produce hip anime-style feeling comics for the young crowd that generally doesn't read comics, and also pushing out comics for the aging fanbase doing geriatric callbacks to references from obscure fifties and sixties characters that no one but the most diehard obscure fans care about anymore. It's an ongoing DC problem. 

Still, even that can't fully explain the reason no one turned up. I have two more ideas on why this movie had no legs, and one of them is an unpleasant notion but I still think explains it:

First: The movie is dirty, dark and miserably brown and grey. It is a modern film with no vibrant color or life to it, and it feels like a deliberate style choice in the film's cinematography, which is a shame because Superman last year was a very colorful, vibrant and fun movie that felt like a comic book come to life. So people who saw the Supergirl trailer would notice this, and notice that it was advertising a dour, miserable and unhappy storyline in sharp contrast with the ambitiously fun and upbeat Superman film.

Second: Aside from Supergirl being a B-lister and the trailers advertising a darker take on a chaaracter that the comic books often depict as a teenage girl's superhero (just read some recent issues of her recent books), there's Milly Alcock herself. She is a good actress who portrays an angsty, stressed and unhappy character struggling to find her place in the DC universe, and this is conveyed in the advterising for the film. But she is also....and I feel bad even commenting on this....not the prettiest woman. She is hard-edged and has exactly the right face and demeanour for this character I feel, but she is not a "pretty" person by conventional pop culture blockbuster standards. For the generic large crowd of unwashed movie going masses I feel her presence and appearance is a hard sell. This is a shame because she really is good in the role, but when you contrast her with the way Supergirl is normally depicted in the comics, I'd suggest that the hard edge of Milly is not typical of this character's design, and that someone like Samara Weaving or Dakota Fanning would be more "popular" fits. And this sort of sucks, because I like Milly Alcock in the role, but I just don't feel like her style and appearance is something that the superficial masses could manage. And that also rather sucks, because I think it helps explain why a lot of people saw the poster or the trailer and just decided they can wait for streaming on this one.

There is also the fact that this movie is surprisingly violent for a character who in a lot of current comics is clearly marketed at a younger teen girl crowd. If I had a young daughter and took her to this movie I think it would be a serious shock if prior exposure to Supergirl was entirely based on TV and 80's film appearances, or the more juvenile comics currently out there. It's the same problem the Mandalorian and Grogu had, where you have some major carnage happening in a movie that has a happy golucky animatronic puppet as a main character in it.

Okay, rant off! I give Supergirl a solid B+ for the record and now look forward to the Clayface movie.

Odd Rulings That Become Rules (Mythras vs. BRP)

 I was recently weighing Mythras Imperative against Basic Roleplaying (spoiler - BRP wins by a modest margin, but I will convert a lot of Mythras stuff over to BRP) when I noticed this odd rule on skills, regarding situations where the PC can attempt the skill a second time: in essence (to paraphrase) the Mythras rules indicate you can do so at a increased step penalty, because per the writer of the rules (for I disagree that there is any universal agreement on what is stated here), the PC will be too shaken and off balance during the second attempt. They give two examples where this could happen: climbing and picking a lock.

I had to mull this over a bit in my head. Climbing I could imagine a scenario for being more difficult a second time after a first failure; you may be rattled, shaken by a near-fall event or even just fatigued from the first try. But lock picking? It's almost certain that after a first failure you will actually go in to it a second time even more certain of the action because you have already tried and failed a certain approach, which thus narrows your range of options down to more likely vectors of success. Many skills might fall into this category. 

A lot of what is written in Mythras has a semi-unspoken rule of "decide on what makes sense, realistically," and that could hold true here. But the very two examples given are such that I feel the rule could have been written to say, "If common sense says the second try will be harder, then make the difficulty harder. But if trying a second time is informed and improved by the first failure, then don't penalize it." And the two examples given would support such a notion, I feel. 

Anyway, it just struck me as odd.....the certainty of the author in the rule that a second try will always be at penalty due to the character being rattled by the first failure seems inherently contradictory to so many scenarios where that simply is the opposite of reality that I was surprised at the boldness with which the statement was made.

Just a thought! Sometimes maybe a specific notion on how something works may not be the ideal arbiter of a standard rule. This leans slightly into my main pet peeve about Mythras, which is that the specials in combat come as a happenstance after an attack, rather than being a goal of the attack. That, however, is perhaps a gripe for a different post!

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. 

EDIT: As an afterthought, I realize that had this rule been presented in a more, shall we say, "mechanics and ruleplay vs. reality-based rules and roleplay," then I would probably just accept it. So, for example, game systems like D&D and Pathfinder often have rules that have no functional basis in reality, but are grounded in the mechanical contrivances of the game system. It is possible this Mythras rule is intended to dissuade players from just trying over and over on a task....a rule attached to a stick with a soft, suishy rationale for the GM to lean on when the player argues with them over it. But that's technically not how its presented...it is trying to make the case that trying a task twice in a row increases the odds of failure, but that just doesn't mesh well with real life, which is what systems like Mythras are trying harder to emulate. So....yeah. Hmmm.

The B/X D&D Tipping Point

 I spent a fair amount of time accruing both Old-School Essentials books and Shadowdark books over the last couple years, and vascillating between which system I generally preferred. OSE because it is more of an emulator? Shadowdark because it is more of a focused modern experienced in retro sheep's clothing? OSE because it's got a blend of B/X D&D and AD&D mechanical elements, or Shadowdark which is brutally honest in its desire to focus on dungeon crawling and loot acquisition? OSE for its quaint retro-graphical aesthetic that suggests artists influenced by Erol Otus, or Shadowdark with its stark black.white/silver design ethos that reminds me of those full-page black and white splash images in the AD&D manuals?

Of course, in the midst of this I managed to almost completely rekindle my AD&D 1E collection, thanks to a lucky find at a game store out in Roswell. That alone was enough to get me mulling over pulling off a classic AD&D style campgin, but also somehow not quite as motivating as I might have imagined. There was a piece of the puzzle missing for me....and last month Wizard of the Coast finally completed that puzzle with a print on demand edition of the Basic D&D book, with the Erol Otus cover. They Expert set was already available, but hard to use that without the Basic set, you know? And finding halfway decent copies of either book for less than an arm and a leg on Ebay is hard to do these days.

So now I have the proper B/X D&D set, and this is what I was missing. While I did favor AD&D 1E back in the day for the more flexible character options, I actually consulted with the B/X rulesets, a lot....like, all the time, because when the DMG or PHB was proving to be inscrutible to my young gamer mind (this is specifically the time when I was around 10 years old to about 14) the B/X rules allowed for simple clarity. My favorite recollection on this was combat, starting with initiative and surprise. Clearly and simply explained in B/X, a sharp contrast from the nightmare exposition that Gygax laid like a trap for the unwary in the DMG. 

Sure, we noticed all the differences in the two systems, but back then chalked that up to being "here's the basic/expert version of the rules....there's the advanced version of the rules....mix and match until you get something that works and everyone understands." One thing I did not do back then was run either B/X or AD&D in pure form, at least not until I was high school age (around 15 and up) when I by that time was familiar with more complex systems, and began to study AD&D and B/X for what they were as unique games rather than complimentary sets. By that time I was playing Palladium Fantasy, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls and even eventually GURPS 1E with more regularity. In my fanzine publishing days I had a spurt of interest in treating B/X D&D similarly to T&T, concocting material for the game as written, including solo adventures. It was a fun exercise in working within the boundaries of a system rather than finding ways to break it. During this time and right up through my college years I continued to buy B/X (and later bECMI) sourcebooks and modules, even if I mostly used them with AD&D 2E by then.

Anyway, fast forward 35 or so years to the present, and my interest in B/X D&D is rekindled with the new print on demand edition. It's a compelling third contender in the arena where the young whippersnappers OSE and Shadowdark have been duking it out. For one thing, a lot of the material I have on my shelves aimed at either OSE, Labyrinth Lord or other B/X retroclones is pretty compatible with original B/X. For another thing, a shocking amount of classic B/X material has made its way back into POD, meaning I have also managed to begin restoring my collection of modules, including many I never managed to snag back in the day.

This is not an unusual thing for me; I have a habit of "rediscovering" B/X every few years and looking at it on its own merits, a sort of "what could have been" had I not dived into AD&D instead of B/X early on. My entire Pergerron, the River Kingdoms of Anansis campaign setting actually started as a creative exercise in desiging a campaign which assumed only the character options, magic and monsters of B/X and source books were available for the world design.* Now I am feeling that creative urge to do something new within the boundaries of B/X again....but this time I am older, have less time, and am growing more fussy with overly rules-laden systems which is leading me to appreciate the more streamlined qualities of B/X even more. We shall see! I have ideas.....I will likely post them as they come here. This new venture may or may not cannibalize from OSE and Shadowdark. 

*Technically the first shot of Pergerron started in Magic World, but then became the basis for the B/X iteration. Now Pergerron is a weird D&D 5E/Cthulhu hybrid mashup, so is distinctly its own thing.