Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part II)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

Considering the AD&D (1e) experience that comprehensive rules actually guided DM rulings, we can the second "Zen Moment" of player skill over character abilities. Common examples for player skill over character abilities are pouring water over a floor looking for hidden cracks, or a PC tapping the floor ahead with a 10-foot pole to trigger any pit traps are rather quaint, but sort of a sophomore effort. Our game had graduate-level dissertations taking on vague descriptions by Gygax and turning the volume way up as if around were no parents.

To the extent player skill enhanced play over character abilities that most often translated into players understanding the idiosyncrasies inherent in the comprehensive rules and applying those idiosyncrasies in different and interesting ways, such as:

• Using a water-breathing spell with a character's mouth and nose submerged into the opening of a waterskin to keep out poison gas.
• That light spells are not visible to creatures using infravision because the spells emit no heat.
• Using 1st level Cleric Sanctuary spells instead of invisibility (especially in cities) so that anyone attempting to strike or attack that character had to make a saving throw versus magic first.
• Permanent polymorph into imaginary, but beastly, humanoids with owl wings and gills under our arms.
• Many spells such as 3rd level spells fireball and lightning bolt scaled up by caster level so would come to do double, triple, or more damage still while occupying the original level spell slot. (This accounted a lot for 1e magic users getting so imbalanced at higher levels - picture a 9th level wizard with up to three 9 hit die fireballs every day - kaboom!
• Gygaxianisms such as "... the magic item gains +5 on saving throws against attack forms in its own mode" was the source of many considerations. Apart from Gygax only providing a couple examples of "mode," what about the list of saving throws, were the saves versus included on the ITEM SAVING THROW MATRIX (1e DMG pg. 80) the only saving throws where magic items get saves, or should it apply to any time an item must make a saving throw?

So this is not the sort of parochial knowledge that are often used as examples of "player skill," rather the supremely skillful 1e AD&D player had pedantic knowledge of the rules bending towards favorable outcomes for their character or the adventuring party.

Another area touted as player skill is resource management. Setting aside food and water rations (both old school D&D and 5th edition have rules for daily physiological needs of the PC), the main resources that require management are spells and the primarily spell subset of healing.

A big complaint from grognardlings I consort with are the rates of recovery from short and long rests. The argument goes that it is simply not realistic a short rest provides characters the essential approximation of cure wounds, while a long rest returns all hit points to the full maximum. A closer look at how we actually played 1e AD&D reveals an absurdity how adventuring parties managed their health through spells and rest.

Natural healing sans magic in 1e AD&D was absurdly time consuming. The original rules from the AD&D 1e DMG provided a mere 7 points per week, and after the SECOND week of healing a character could add their constitution bonus (if any). In our game we upped the number for natural healing to 1 plus the Con bonus, but even then it was a chore because a character must take total rest - no combat, spell casting, or similar activity. (It's kind that 5e provides an out for this, rather than ruining the entire rest 5e only adds a little more resting time after sleep interruptions that involved combat, spells, or similar.)

That meant adventuring parties had to rely on healing spells to keep their hit points up.

I kid you not, there were deadly dungeons where we would adventure for as little as 10 minutes (game time) before we would be looking for a secure place to shelter, rest, and recover spells and hit points. Before someone discovered rules defining sleep periods, we even had spell casters resting 2 or even 3 times per day to regain spells! 

As a result, is it any wonder folks were reluctant to play clerics? Basically clerics, other than turning undead, had to load up on cure wound spells, then bounce around during combat to help PCs to whom the dice were not being particularly kind. Medic!

5th edition deals with hit points in a way that avoids uncharacteristic pauses to sleep in the middle of dungeons (Did Conan take a nap exploring the Temple of Thulsa Doom?), and at the same time frees up cleric to be more than the fantasy doctor. Anyone who objects to this faster natural rejuvenation of hit points on the grounds of "realism" has probably blocked out the nappy times of yore, or had a DM who freely supplied healing potions, or probably never gamed a cleric.

This repetitive resting phenomena was not limited to divine casters either. On the offensive side once a high level wizard had gone through their 3rd and 4th level offensive spells they too were sent to time-out to sleep and get them back. Ha, that is why we often had elven mages. They could sort-of be aware during their meditation (not asleep) and were often counted in our old games as part of the watch.

Post Script: Death Saves! 

Our old parties used negative 10 + Con Attribute Bonus as the number of hit points below 0 at which a character dies. 

The "old-school" way our parties ran was that constitution somehow figured into when character death occurs. So I was initially dismayed that 5e did not look to Con as toughening a PC versus dying. This death save stuff made character death so rare. But in actuality character death was rare in our old games. When a PC dropped below zero and there were other living adventurers to fight, the critters often left alone dying heroes. 

Loosing a hit point per round when you often had as many as 13 or even 14 negative hit points to go before becoming croaked meant a lot of time to be saved by magic or binding wounds. Typically character death most often occurred due to massive damage, and 5e retains that. Con in 5e IS factored into character death as high Con provides extra hit points before 0 is reached.

(My recent personal favorites are death and dismemberment tables which are sort of like death saves and critical hits all at once and factors in the actual number of hit points below zero.)

Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part I)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

The Old School Renaissance movement found solid footing in D&D RPGs shortly after D&D 4th Edition was released in 2008. During that time Matthew Finch (OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry) wrote “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” based on 0e, the original edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Finch described the “Zen Moments” of Old School gaming generally as:

• First "Rulings, not Rules" - Letting game referee use common sense to decide what happens or a roll if there is some random element in what a player decides to do;
• Second "Player Skill, not Character Abilities" – A player doesn’t just rely on a character sheet and must use a player’s skill to tell the referee where to look, what to touch, or what a player character is saying or experimenting with in order to gain advantage; 
• Third "Heroic, not Superhero" - Emphasizing the heroic rather than the super-heroic in keeping the game on a human-sized scale becoming a feared or powerful character over time; and 
• Fourth "Forget 'Game Balance'"- That game balance is not important because the fantasy world, with all its perils, contradictions, and surprises is not a “game setting” which somehow always produces challenges of just the right difficulty for the party’s level of experience, The game is a story with dice growing out of the combined efforts of the referee and the players with both being just as surprised by the results.

Let's start with #1 “Rulings, not Rules” because, other than the initial several months of our intro to D&D through John Eric Holmes’ "Basic Set," our group played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Homes' Basic incorporated rules from OD&D, but was only set for character levels one through three for players to learn D&D concepts. The progression was for players to graduate to Gary Gygax's AD&D (1st Edition). Now the stated purpose Gygax's "Advanced" D&D and divorce from Dave Arneson was to make a rules-heavy system intended to cover any conceivable situation ostensibly to arbitrate disputes at tournaments. In practice that meant ...

We. Had. Rules. For. Everything.

Initially there was the modest-sized 126 page Players Handbook with rules on abilities, species, classes, alignment, hit points, languages, money, equipment, armor, weapons, hirelings, henchmen, time, distances, spells, encumbrance, movement, light, vision, surprise, traps, initiative, communication, combat, damage, falling, healing, obedience, morale, mapping, experience, morale, mapping, poison, psionics, and the Known Planes of Existence.

This was 1978 so no DM’s guide yet, so we supplemented our game with Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets (50 pages) rules for social level, city encounters, crimes/trials, advertising, esxchange rates, gems, beggars, binding wounds, guards, repartee, more poison, construction costs, item enchantment, resurrection results, swimming, sea monsters, melee tables, underwater encounter tables, rules on wishes and limited wishes, more on hirelings, income, civilization technology levels, population density, caves, lairs, ruins, prospecting, flora, fauna.

During late 1978 we added rules from the Arduin Grimoire Trilogy. 3 booklets of about 100 pages each (The Arduin Grimoire, Welcome to Skull Tower, and Runes of Doom) with additional playable species, classes, monsters, spells, and magic items. Tables for critical hits, fumbles, character's eyes, hair, weight & height, techno weapons, guilds, brawling, diseases, weather, and more.

We initially used the 3 Oe D&D supplements Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. However, these pamphlet booklets were superseded in 1979 by the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. 

Even though our game had already hard-wired much of our rules prior to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide that would persist for decades (in particular the insane way we figured "speed factor" prior to the DMG explanation), we did lock into the DMG's clarifications of spells and abilities in addition to rules on character aging, disease, encumbrance, loyalty, morale, acquisition and recovery of spells, airborne travel and combat, combat underwater, plane travel, vision, experience, climate, economics, languages, construction, spell research, divine intervention, random treasure, random encounters, and buying/selling magic items.

A ginormous aspect of our D&D game related to our explosion of rules is that we regularly rotated games refs. So our dependence on some sort of canon version of rules for just about everything was how we made the game fair. And, other than players who originally started with the OD&D booklets, AD&D 1e is a huge aspect of how more players experienced OSR before it became OSR.

Game designer Anthony Huso best describes the purpose of this type of Old School D&D in his article:  "Rules over Rulings: Consistency in DMing"

I respect the rules because they are the foundation of my game. They are agreed upon, even if a few of them are not perfect. They are predictable and therefore viewed as fair. Implementation and adherence is also consistent ... Shields are broken. Spell books are destroyed by fire. Characters perish in the wastes without water. And the rules do not care. The rules are unrelenting and therefore shoulder the blame when characters die ... Rules should be memorized whenever possible or allocated to handy screens. They should not be searched for during a game unless doing so is minimally intrusive. It is the DM’s burden to know the rules front and back and to hew closely to them. 

I have always ran a sandbox campaign. Characters could run in whatever direction they please and that ends up being how the details from any setting I'm using gets built. I was often and rightfully so accused of "making it up as I go along" but extremely rarely was I ever accused of not following the rules (ha, except the hour-long buzz kill argument over whether the rules for sword damage during subdual attacks also applied to regular attacks - that was a doozy!)

The rules were essentially comprehensive and our players trusted the rules probably mostly because everyone knew them front and back, including our home-brew interpretations (sorry Dr. John PhD), and the rules essentially appeared to cover most all aspects of the reality within the game.