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, races, 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 Guise 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, this is a huge aspect of probably most players experience of 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.

So with 5th Edition my first analysis is to how comprehensive they are - and indeed they seem fairly comprehensive. My second analysis is whether 5e fairly reflects game reality. And I do have some beef with that which is somewhat mitigated by some of the old AD&D "game reality" itself. I will leave that for Part II.