Question for Gray Beards of Veeky Forums

This post exemplifies what I just don't ~get~ about the OSR perspective, so maybe you can help me out.

I started with 3.0, migrated to 3.5 and then to Pathfinder and other 3.5 spinoffs. I have dabbled a bit in 2E, and have played some 4E. I have played other systems entirely, to include Dungeon World, Fate, Gone With the Blastwave, Paranoia, Shadowrun, and World of Darkness.

Back on topic of D&D, mechanically the combat system in 4E seems leagues ahead of anything prior. The classes seem far more balanced than in previous editions, and the rulebooks read cleanly—like actual reference books, with plain language to avoid ambiguity in the rules.

I'm sitting here reading your anecdote from Pathfinder and pouring over a 4E pdf and wondering exactly what in 4E keeps you from making the exact scenario you describe. This is where I don't follow the perspective of OSR logic. What in the books, the system, the assumptions, or whatever, keep you from making gritty scenarios?

To be clear, I'm not trying to throw shade in a single direction. There is also nothing in the 3.5-era which prevents a game session that more resembles collaborative storytelling and narrative-driven adventures. You have a book of rules in both systems, which give you more or less or different varieties of crunch that focus on different things. 4E goes out of its way to make the combat system balanced, and that is overall a good thing. There is always an effluence of "but!" followups to a statement like that, which all seem to boil down to "I don't see rules for anal circumference in 4E therefore 4E must not support characters having anuses."

Can you help me to grok this?

I can't speak to the other stuff, but the very tacticality of 4e takes away from improvisational nature of older D&D. In any decent OSR campaign, you're going to colorfully detail how your fighter strikes ("I slam my shield against his right arm, knocking his sword out of the way and leaving him open for a spear thrust beneath the sternum!"), and your DM is going to improvise modifiers and perhaps additional rolls on that basis. It's cinematic and organic, and the world feels very real when you can interact with it in such an unrestricted fashion.*

Doing that with 4e is a bit trickier because there's already some funky math going into your attacks (which are different power levels), so the DM lacks the consistently simple baseline to improvise from. Given this and your more diverse "packaged" options, people are more likely to just pick something off the list. Add to this the more board-oriented nature of 4e, where precise positioning matters more often, and 4e can end up feeling a bit war game-like.

*If you aren't descriptive and your DM doesn't apply modifiers and such, then combat in your game is going to royally suck.

Positioning has always been a thing in D&D, though? Gotta flank to get your Sneak Attack, for example. Bull rush, charge, spell effect areas, threatened squares, and so on all work off of positioning. As to description and flourish, you can do that—or not—in literally any system. You can make any system as crunchy or storygamey as you want it to be by just ignoring or inventing rules as desired. When you take for granted that you as a person (and your GM) have the option to just pick and choose what if anything to use from the books, as many people invariably do, then you're left with what remains: a less balanced or more balanced combat system; a rulebook where you have to hunt for ambiguously-worded rules or one where you don't.

I personally prefer the simplicity of RAW depicted in 4E, even though I and my group play exclusively Fate and Pathfinder right now—which diverge from that in different ways. It just seems to me like you could be just as descriptive and improvise just as many modifiers in 4E as you could in 2E, but that the inverse—reading the RAW and having a balanced, clear-cut answer to a rules question should you want that instead—is not true.

>Gotta flank to get your Sneak Attack, for example. Bull rush, charge, spell effect areas, threatened squares, and so on all work off of positioning.
3.x, which is what you seem to be documenting there, is more grid-oriented than OSR, where it's usually pretty easy to wing stuff.

You know that there aren't any RPG police that are going to kick down your door and burn your DM screen if you play D&D with fate points, right?

Like, the whole point of oldschool role play is that you tweak any system to your group.

Because there's no system that covers all typed of role play in all forms.

Ironically the game is too well balanced to create imbalanced scenarios that crucially the party can overcome.

OSR systems tend to have mechanics for this, critical hit and fumble tables are a good example as they allow a chance a weaker foe can defeat a stronger one. There's also ‘overpowered’ spells that can end encounters instantly.

4E removed those 'overpowered' spells and there’s no fumble tables or anything similiar. Instead players are front loaded with a list of combat powers, and a small, vague list of skills. Combat then becomes the defacto way to resolve an encounter. But when that encounter is too high of a level their powers don't work as the monster is usually too high to hard to even hit.

The only choices the party ends up having are fighting the combat or running away and since they can't fight all they can do is run away.

4E characters are powerful in that they begin with massive amounts of hitpoints and can self heal themselves at an alarming rate which makes challenging them as a DM difficult unless you slog them through 5 + combats sequentially. It’s difficult to make a single encounter deadly without putting the players in a situation they can’t overcome.

This lends itself to the design of intricate combat encounters which leads to a railroad.

I designed many of these, there were fire traps, crashing chandeliers, cool geometry ,etc.

Yet the prep for my most memorable encounter?

Forest Encounters:
93-94:Will O Wisp.

Player expectation of balance becomes an issue as well. I had a 4E player become angry with me because the zombie I was using had a powerful grab ability that wasn’t in the monster manual, to the point of showing me the zombie entry, amusingly I was running a published zombie from a module that did have that ability but the expectatiom was I should be running balanced monsters.

To summarise the design intrinsic in systems like 4E don’t allow gritty play and design in OSR systems do.

I actually really like the use of fate points in OSR inspired games. I think they give the players a little bit more control over wild swings in bad luck and balance and so feel less cheated.

Course there's no pleasing some players. I threw the BBEG at the PC's in the climax of a scenario in a tavern that resembled ' The Mist' and they decided to fight instead of fleeing and did slay her but the party Rogue died. I said he could use his fate points to return to life and he declined because 'that was lame.' I said fair enough it's his choice.

He then came to the group after the game and said he'd consulted with his other friends and the encounter was too unbalanced and I was a terrible gm etc. He threw such a hissy fit that I asked him to leave the group. Such is the damage the fetishising of balance has caused the RPG community.

The thing which I liked best about OSR is that the focus is more on adventuring than fighting. There's still a lot of rules for non-combat encounters in modern D&D, but it feels like there's a lot more focus on the combat ones. OSR at least felt more like it was about figuring out how not to die in a dangerous area, as opposed to fighting through multiple war zones.

When referring to combat balance above, I meant the balance of player classes to each other. There is nothing at all to prevent you from giving the party more or less challenging encounters but for the fear you express of overdoing it. This potentiality exists in any system and is overcome by experience as a GM.

You specifically mention the difficulty of challenging the party in 4E unless you string together a bunch of combats sequentially, and I cannot help but laugh at that. In previous editions you had the exact same problem, only it was called the 15 minute adventuring day; spellcasters nova their way through a few combats and then the whole party has to rest. And also in 3rd Ed, if you presented something to the party so challenging that the casters could not get rid of it with their best spell, then it was very feast-or-famine to the point that it was either way too easy or an unintentional TPK. You got around that (somewhat) in 3rd Ed by breaking the encounter into multiple creatures so that the action economy would be less one-sided, and this became such an accepted fact that it became the suggested norm in 4E.

Your anecdote about the zombie is just That Guy being a rules lawyer, which again occurs in any system. And that's the crux of my argument against people bashing 4E: most of the negativity described is simply omnipresent in gaming.

We are definitely talking about two different things and using the same word to do it. I am using "balance" to refer to player characters among themselves; i.e., can the single-class Punchy Guy be as useful as the single-class Caster Guy? 4E does that far better than its predecessors, where in 3.5 a 20th-level Fighter can add some extra damage to a swing and a 20th-level Wizard can stop time or create an entirely separate dimension to go hide in. You are talking about encounter balance, which is an artifact created in 3.0 and I guess made worse among the community in 4E. Basically as soon as 3.0 came up with Challenge Ratings or Encounter Ratings, you started having people who would screech to high heaven if they ever fought something outside the suggested range—nevermind that various monsters within the exact same CR had wildly divergent abilities and level of power.

These two usages of "balance" are both valid points to make, but they're not the same point and we seem to be talking past each other because we're each interpreting the other guy's meaning as our own. And this is why operating definitions are important!

BTW the solution to both of the "That Guy" scenarios presented is to not play with him, not to change systems or reject a system for fear that he will cause a stink. That Guy will ruin your game no matter what you do, so just don't include him. And if that causes the group as a whole to disband then remember that no gaming is better than bad gaming.

>Doing that with 4e is a bit trickier because there's already some funky math going into your attacks (which are different power levels), so the DM lacks the consistently simple baseline to improvise from.
I disagree entirely. Page 42 of DMG gives you guidelines for improvised moves.
In my long dead 4E game, PCs did entirely unplanned things like "I roll under the table and push it with both legs at the thugs" [parsed as small damage and push 1 effect for 3 closest bandits] or "I jump at the bug and stab him in one of the eyes" [parsed as normal damage and blindness until saved]

It's really about how forthcoming you are with improvisation. I used to say something like "You have your powers but can always give something else" a lot.

>But when that encounter is too high of a level their powers don't work as the monster is usually too high to hard to even hit.
That's why Elites and Solos are a thing. I used to re-make higher level monsters as lower level Elites/Solos quite a few times.
If I'm not mistaken, Elites work out fairly well when you decrease the level by about 4-5 and Solos for 8-10
Other way around also works, with standard monsters becoming minions or swarms, Elites turning into normals, etc

Also, inherent balance of 4E isn't supposed to be a constraint, it's supposed to be a tool. It allows you know well ahead of the time that this particular encounter is way too hard to fight through. Not that this knowledge should stop you, non-combat solutions are a thing, just make sure to give ample warning.

I think in my campaign (that didn't ran past Heroic, but that was a scheduling issue) I used encounters built with normal XP budget only about three times. Most of the time party got through by the skin of their teeth and there were few combats where at least someone didn't go down into Dying.
Now, in that campaign, 4E's slowness was a pretty dire factor, but the time spent was tense and exciting

>Player expectation of balance becomes an issue as well. I had a 4E player become angry with me because the zombie I was using had a powerful grab ability that wasn’t in the monster manual, to the point of showing me the zombie entry, amusingly I was running a published zombie from a module that did have that ability but the expectatiom was I should be running balanced monsters.
And fuck this guy. 4E makes a point of using multiple varieties of every single type of monster, so nothing stops you from brewing up a Zombie Grabber or something like that

BRB off to stat up a creature whose method of attack is to grab zombies.

...

I never understood why player classes needed to be balanced against one another. You're not playing video game style PVP and you're not strictly playing a competetive game so why do you need the strict balance ? All this resulted in with 4E was every class being essentially a bland carbon copy of the other within their MMO inspired roles.

The fifteen minute adventuring day is only a problen if you let players rest whenever they wish, this is resolved by the inclusion of wandering monsters which are actually an important balancing tool have been removed from a lot of games ironically because they're imbalanced.

That feast or famine gameplay I see as a feature not a bug as it's engaging and makes combat actually deadly affairs which therefore means the players wont always default to them.

Even in respect to CR appropriate encounters especially at low levels these can be deadly in older edition, in 4e they never will be so you can either string a bunch together and spend 6 hours playing tactical combat or you can not challenge the players but at least have a chance at some non-combat gameplay. In 5E I really like that low level monsters can pose a threat to even a high level player.

I understand you can employ similiar techniques in 4E like hexcrawling or wandering monsters (not that theres any guidelines in the books) but they simply don't work in the context of the extremely balanced and grindt mechanics of the game.

>I never understood why player classes needed to be balanced against one another. You're not playing video game style PVP and you're not strictly playing a competetive game so why do you need the strict balance ? All this resulted in with 4E was every class being essentially a bland carbon copy of the other within their MMO inspired roles.

Because DUELS, man! You telling me your party doesn't DUEL all the time? What are they, some kind of plebs?

When I ran 4e, I just used the MM3 monster math and made up literally everything.
>I never understood why player classes needed to be balanced against one another.
Because you never read the part of the book where it explains what the concept of levels represent, just like how most people do not read what alignments actually mean, or what hit points really are.
Don't worry, you are not alone in this, and it's easy to resolve all three.

Honestly, DUELS don't work particularly well in any DnD, including 4E

They work in terms of theatrics.
So long as you don't expect to work based on mechanics, they are a fun thing, but really, on 3.x had "math" that supported "proper duels" (which was complete shit anyway).

Only people with the same classes dueling need to be balanced then. A peasant fighting a knight will never be fair.

Because the fighter who has to do a bunch of math to determine whether he can reach and hit the target is also a person who deserves to be able to contribute and meaningfully effect the outcome of the combat; else, why bother having him there at all?

As someone who has 0 nostalgia, having come to the hobby at about the time 5e released, I think the appeal is mostly the intentionally limited scope. A lot of non-OSR games try to provide for the whole range of characters from 'chosen one, fights gods' to 'farmer whose pig got stolen by goblins', and allow the latter to progress towards the former.

I appreciate the more limited approach to character growth shown in a lot of OSR design; you might grow stronger, but won't change genre from 'muddy' to 'epic'.

But he does meaningfully contribute?

I've heard the overpowered casters weak martial meme over and over again online which leads me to believe it must be a problem somewhere but never have I witnessed it in any of my games. Granted the highest wr ever got was about 10 so maybe it's only an issue at aroynd level 15 or so ? but by that point you're demigod like anyway and the fighters should be clad in all sorts of magical equipment and most groups tend to play the lower levels anyway.

Generally when the casters did something awesome the party was happy to have the caster with them and for the rest of the time ( people do play spells as being a limited resource right?) Martial classes got to do what they do best and murder stuff.

I don't think I've ever seen a system I didn't feel compelled to tweak,
but OSR principles are more fun for people who don't find the following things fun:

>being handed out powers by God in exchange for 12,000 bandit scalps good job for getting to level 10
>everyone stuck filling out tax documents for 1-2 hours before you can even start playing
>rolling dice and consulting a reference to do literally anything is more fun right?
>no seriously, nobody actually does anything in rpg's anymore they just roll a die to answer questions
>let's figure out the optimal dps so we can reduce the amount of arithmetical operations i have to do before the quest is completed, so i can get a new item that further optimizes my dps

Yeah my games are more freeform which makes them faggy to some,
but I also emphasize having adventures and taking actions step by step,
which like every player I've ever had enjoys more than all the stuff we commonly associated with rpg's,
like figuring out god damn to hit bonuses and rolling against tables and whatever.

Many groups suffer from the 15-minute adventuring day as noted above, which means that spells are effectively NOT a limited resource. Casters nova in a few battles, then the whole party rests. By design what you say here is what's intended, but practice frequently diverges according to many online anecdotes. I have also personally never encountered it, because I have "random" encounters planned to occur even/especially if the party starts trying to rest far too frequently, and players who are fine with it.

This is why 5e is finally going to bury 3e, because it's not Vidya Gaem garbage like 4e and lets you just ROLEPLAY and have fun like ye olden days.

There's really no aspect of Olden D&D that you can't enjoy in 5th, and I say that as someone who started playing D&D in '84.

>because it's not Vidya Gaem garbage like 4e and lets you just ROLEPLAY and have fun like ye olden days.

How did 4e prevent you roleplaying? That's never been tied to rules. Heck, 4e had a better skill system for non-combat than 3.X ever had.

The issue is that the 15 minute day is kinda...normal...unless you are dungeon crawling. People don't tend to have 4+ random encounters every single day when traveling or when engaged in urban adventures.

It's the issue of having multiple classes work on different rates of recharge for abilities.

Same question

Right, which is something that 4E addresses.

>I appreciate the more limited approach to character growth shown in a lot of OSR design; you might grow stronger, but won't change genre from 'muddy' to 'epic'.

This point of yours is undermined by BECMI's progression of levels into rules for god-punching.

OSR systems
>are modular (no core mechanic)
>are semi-compatible with each other, like mutually intelligible dialects of a common language
>do not expect all dungeon masters to handle cases the same way every time
>do not use the same statistics for monsters and characters (monsters don't really need ability scores)
>do not have feats, because these options shackle players during adventures, even though it feels nice to "customize" as a sort of game within the game

That's really all that defines them as a group.

Warhammer 40k ( not the rpg , the actual miniature skirmish game ) doesn't prevent you from roleplaying. In fact my group often integrate narrative and roleplay into games . That said is it a particularly good Role Playing Game ?

Not really I'd say and in much the same way 4E's intense focus on tactical based combats was so overwhelming and time consuming that it overshadowed any roleplay , which became a side element.

Not to mention the huge amount of disassociated mechanics in the game , such as pretty much any martial daily power ( What explicit ingame reason exists that the martial move I've learned can only be done once a day and only reused after I sleep?) , which disconnect the players from their characters and any attempt at roleplay.

>Not really I'd say and in much the same way 4E's intense focus on tactical based combats was so overwhelming and time consuming that it overshadowed any roleplay , which became a side element.

Wait so...the fact that the game had a good combat system prevented roleplay?

>( What explicit ingame reason exists that the martial move I've learned can only be done once a day and only reused after I sleep?

Why can a 3.5 barbarian only rage a certain number of rounds a day that are complete disconnected from a fatigue system (Other than not being able to rage when already tired), or a 5e fighter get his double action 1/day?

>What explicit ingame reason exists that the martial move I've learned can only be done once a day and only reused after I sleep?

Why can a sorcerer still cast 4 more Fireballs, 6 more scorching rays and 8 burning hands but not a single 4th level spell after he's run out of 4th level slots?

>Why
Jack Vance

Sorcerers are not even Vancian in-fluff though. They have no need to memorize spells, they just draw on a pool of power.

Simple rule that I used in 3.5 was to work all casting like psionics: you have a number of Spell Points equal to the number of spell levels you would have in the RAW, where a 3rd-level spell slot is worth 3 points, a 5th-level is worth 5, etc., and you can use these to cast any sum of spells equal to your total. So if you had 2 3rd-level spells per day, 4 2nd-level spells per day, and 6 1st-level spells per day, you'd have a total of 20 spell-levels worth of casting that you could blow on 6 3rds and a 2 if you wanted.

Well again I ask is Warhammer 40k a good roleplaying game? It certainly has an incredibly well detailed rules for combat that ( in theory) attempt balance, you can use special characters and 'roleplay' them and your army by describing your attacks and even by your ingame decisions ( This guard unit is scared of Orks so will always move away from Ork units if able, this Eldar unit believe close combat is unsophisticated and only for brutes and will never declare a charge, even if it would be better to do so.) and it scales from small skirmishes to apocalyptic battles. I can even create a campaign map for my armies to move around and connect battles with a narrative and narrative based consequences. So is it a good RPG?

There's indeed a few examples in other systems of disassociated mechanics , infact XP in of itself is one , 4E however has such a high density of disassociated mechanics , with pretty much every ability of every class being disassociated not to mention the entire skill system as it depends on skill challenges , that it becomes really hard to roleplay in it as your characrer can't interact with abstract game mechanics.

Narrative play wasn't even a thing yet, everything was game and sim like Austerlitz and Avalon Hill. Nobody talked shit about elves, because then the DM would send dark elves at you in punishment for "not focusing on the game", which was about figuring out whether the hall had a pit trap or how any giants were in the next chamber.

When Dragonlance hit it big, some DMs thought they could publish their gameplay as books and make money, so they wanted backstories, BBEGs, edgey bastard-halfelf-vs-self conflicts. Some people felt that this pissed all over the game and shouldn't be allowed.

An example of standard play at the time is at www.peldor.com

You could actually ask the sorcerer that in the game world and he'd be able to reply that he draws his spells from a magical pool of power and particularly high level spells use so much of that that he has to reat before he can cast them again. Lesser spells do not use as much so he can cast them more often.

If you asked the 4E Rogue why he can only use his blinding daggers ability once per day he couldn't give an explanation that made sense. Hence the mechanics are disassociated whereas they are not for the sorcerer

>D&D can serve as a lingua franca which allows people to quickly and easily communicate.
Oh, god - no!

The secret is ambition, OP. OSR games make you start with a simple nobody and if you're smart and skillful, you can watch him grow powerful against all odds.

>If you asked the 4E Rogue why he can only use his blinding daggers ability once per day
"Because there wasn't a good opportunity, guv"

>OSR games make you start with a simple nobody and if you're smart and skillful, you can watch him grow powerful against all odds
That applies to any other D&D or D&D-alike equally

For some reason, you are expecting the rules of the GAME to be the rules of the SETTING.
Stop that, that is something silly that 3e tried to do and proceeded to trip on for the rest of it's life.
As for your 40k analogy, play the game before you talk about it. I've been playing it for... shit, 21 years, and it holds few of the benchmarks of rpgs even in the days where OSR type games were the fashion, and it's balance has ALWAYS been laughable (Eldar were king in every edition save 5th, Orks were never actually good, recent rules have thrown sense out of the window with LoWs fieldable in sub 1.5k games, titan-likes being an entire army in and off themselves that WILL WIN unless you outrageously list tailor).
4e has what I consider the benefit that the mechanics the players use are not hedged or tied into the setting the characters must interact in.
For example, every alignment based ability or action was hedged at least partly by player metaknowledge. How will a paladin, with their lack of planar knowledge that is the purview of alignments, understand their own aura of good, or the nuances of Detect Evil/Chaos/et al? However, in 4e (and 5e to a point), alignment is a description and an insetting force, but has no MECHANICAL bearing on the players, meaning that anything that deals with the cosmic force of alignments is entirely roleplay and setting based.
Your actual argument boils down to a disagreement with the transparency of the game mechanics and the change in tone, not any objective pitfalls in execution (of which there are several, albeit none of them are new to Hasbro).

Huh? So How does sleeping for 8 hours create one and only one more opportunity?

4E is not a simulationist game. Think of it as a fantasy TV show engine. You have a limit on daily/encounter use because you can't pull flashy moves outta your ass all the screen time, it get tiring. They also don't repeat because it would be boring.

Encounter powers are moves used to spice up your battle. Xena tosses her chacram and it takes out the exact enemy she wants.
Daily powers are impressive things your character does once an episode when most needed. It's Xena while surrounded grabbing some random pole and running on her enemies' faces.

I disagree here If the rules of an RPG are going to facilitate character roleplay then they need to include the rules for the setting itself , the physics of how the world works. If you don't know how far the average person can jump you have no idea if yoù can succeed or what a long jump looks like , if you don't have any way to interact with the likes of an alignment system in the setting then it's entirely arbitrary as all you're doing is describing stuff and describing stuff isn't really roleplaying. If I describe my creature attacking your as a Planeswalker in a game of Magic the Gathering, I'm not roleplaying.

I think a narrative story based system like Dread is a different genre of game to a traditional RPG where the mechanics are disassociated to the point you're just creating a story in broad strokes rather than deciding on specific actions your character makes in the game world and seeing the consequences as adjudicated by the rules.

>If you don't know how far the average person can jump you have no idea if yoù can succeed or what a long jump looks like
The fuck? Are you high?

>if you don't have any way to interact with the likes of an alignment system in the setting then it's entirely arbitrary
Alignment sucks balls and I'm for one was happy it didn't matter in 4E

>I think a narrative story based system [...] is a different genre of game to a traditional RPG
But does it have to be?
Also, is 4E really traditional?

Also, here's jump rules from 4E PHB:

>Long Jump: Part of a move action.
> Distance Jumped Horizontally: Make an Athlet-ics check and divide your check result by 10 (don’t round the result). This is the number of squares you can leap across. You land in the square determined by your result. If you end up over a pit or a chasm, you fall and lose the rest of your move action.
> Distance Cleared Vertically: T he vertical distance you clear is equal to one-quarter of the distance you jumped horizontally. If you could not clear the vertical distance of an obstacle along the way, you hit the obstacle, fall prone, and lose the rest of your move action.
> Running Start: I f you move at least 2 squares before making the jump, divide your check result by 5, not 10.
> Uses Movement: Count t he number of squares you jump as part of your move. If you run out of move-ment, you fall. You can end your first move in midair if you double move

Yes , nothing in 4E mattered , yes that's my point 4E wasn't a Rolepaying Game it was a scene based story game with an incredibly indepth tactical combat system that took most of the game time, which are oddly contradictory designs.

>I disagree here
You are already strolling into the land of opinion, and honestly, this conversation has been done to death, with you holding the eternally contrary position of 4e wasn't good because it was like *insert rpg I like in design goal*.
4e works when you remember it is a game and that mechanics are for PLAYERS, not characters.
Your comment about physics is asinine, as the rulebooks give examples of what is capable of what feats based on their ability scores and skills.
This is your last (you), and where this thread dies.

>Yes , nothing in 4E mattered
Again, are you high?

I've pretty much abandoned every edition as soon as the next arrived, but I do appreciate the "simplicity" of OSR.

The same idea draws me to Dungeon World and would make me interested in similar. There is something to be said for broad, fast moving games without a lot of rules getting in the way. This is one of the reasons I like the Fantasy Flight Star Wars and 3e Warhammer.

At the same time I like 4e D&D and GURPS, so different games for different groups.

Nah, more modern games tune down the challenge aspect.

It doesn't, not entirely anyway. In modern D&D you're encouraged to make fleshed out characters at the start of the game. In oldschool play fleshing someone who might or might not die but has a very good chance of the former isn't productive.

That's why it's called disassociated, yeah. You explained it through action movie genre analogy, not through the rules of the setting. Simulation, or rather, modeling of the reailty is part of traditional rpgs. Sometimes it's more abstract (D&D), sometimes less (GURPS). In this regard 4e takes more from storygames, yes.

Vancian magicians don't really memorize spells either. They literally put the complex formulas which are spells inside their head and your brain can only contain so much. They also didn't expend any slots, which is D&D-only construct. Just clarifying.

I don't think "fleshed out characters" and "nobodies" are mutually exclusive categories. The former applies more to personality and the latter to level of personal and social power

>the Orc fighter might 'hate elves' but in play this'll just be a spat between him and the elf archer during downtime or in non-serious situations because the moment enemies and the threats of characters lives are on the line everyone stops thinking of it like "I need to express my character in a way that might harm us but will make the scene interesting" and more "what's the best course of action from an objective, impartial standpoint?"

You know that people often compromise their beliefs when it's necessary for survival, right? I might not be fond of Scientologists, but that doesn't mean I'm going to risk my own life (or other things important to me) just to dick them over during a crisis situation.

It's like, if your distaste for elves really is the hill you want to die on, okay, but most people aren't willing to get themselves killed over that.

True, but even so, being a nobody in terms of everything is very explicit in OSR play. In some settings, say Eberron, you can be pretty influential at level 1 depending on your background. Also the emphasis on character development and such. But I agree, in that sense the general idea of advancement is the same.

I think there's a complaint to be made about vancian magic, but it's not that one. Having spells cast from different slots is actually great in terms of mechanics because it forces diversity (you can't just find one overpowered spell at whatever level and spam it until you run out of mana points) and you don't have to be ultra-careful balancing the different spell levels against each other (something you will never get perfectly right).

Also, what's a sorcerer? I thought we were talking old school.

Just read through the thread because it's relevant to my interests and I noticed something:

>4E however has such a high density of disassociated mechanics , with pretty much every ability of every class being disassociated not to mention the entire skill system as it depends on skill challenges , that it becomes really hard to roleplay in it as your characrer can't interact with abstract game mechanics.

>Your actual argument boils down to a disagreement with the transparency of the game mechanics and the change in tone, not any objective pitfalls in execution

This is where these two anons agreed without realising it.
From what I can tell, the complaint about 4e is the dissociative mechanics, or mechanics that are so abstracted they pull you from roleplay, or mechanics that are so obviously mechanics that they change the tone of the game from characters in a world to pieces in a game, or the transparency of the game mechanics and the change in tone.

Near as I can tell, 4e is a fine rpg and so were OSR games; just like a pick-up truck and a small sports car are both fine vehicles, but one is better for moving out of your apartment than the other.
You can't claim that the truck isn't better at hauling or that a sports car is completely useless for transporting stuff.
Best of all, you can actually drive both.

>Oh, god - no!
You don't think that one of the major advantages of OSR is that a lot of other people already have a good idea of what it's about and therefore can have an informed discussion on it? That's a huge deal.

>you can't just find one overpowered spell at whatever level and spam it until you run out of mana points

I've played 5e with an MP houserule, and that's not how it worked out at all. If we tried to do that (and we did try), then we were basically out of MP by the third fight and were kinda fucked for the rest of the day.

>It wasn't a roleplaying game, it was a story game.

...what?

I think you're missing my point. I'm saying the more spells that you can directly compare and choose between, the more powerful and less interesting you become. If there are a few spells that stand above the others in terms of power, you can then freely use those to the exclusion of ones that fall at the bottom end of the power spectrum. With vancian magic, you might be comparing 4 spells against each other at a given level, but with magic points, you could be comparing 20, and all it takes is a handful that outshine the rest to drastically reduce the number of different spells you cast on a regular basis, and to significantly increase your power. This is admittedly counteracted somewhat by always having the proper tool for the job, so that if you find a niche task you can pull off with a niche spell, you're ready for it. But this is a problem in and of itself, as the increase in versatility can significantly increase caster power.

Furthermore, magic points are more of a pain in the ass to keep track of, and actually increase the problem of caster uselessness after spell depletion. With vancian magic, this depletion is more tapered, with spell resources dwindling before they give out entirely. With magic points, it's more all at once.

Have you ever actually played with MP? My group used it for a little more than a year and we haven't seen any of the problems you're talking about.

And I find it's been easier to track. I just mark off tallies for each point spent, instead of juggling six different pools of spells per day.

I don't know about that. Across versions, most of the stuff is similar enough for discussion, except for the new monster list and rules that allow the new monsters as character races.

I'm old school and I don't feel that OSR really has any advantages, but rather that some of the new systems have even worse problems. The goal of the game is different now, but that doesn't mean OSR was "better". I believe there is still a lot of room for improvement in rules and fit-together.

>I just mark off tallies for each point spent, instead of juggling six different pools of spells per day.
But it isn't six pools so much as a list of spells you've memorized, and all you have to do is check them off as you use them.

>Like, the whole point of oldschool role play is that you tweak any system to your group.

That's the point of ALL ROLEPLAYING GAMES to a point though.

If we're just gonna say "lol rule 0" then there's no fucking discussion. There's nothing. Don't fucking tell me "oh but modern games DON'T ENCOURAGE RULE 0" yes they fucking do have you literally gone into any thread about a modern game there's plenty of discussion about how you tweak mechanics to do something.

Stop trying to give your dumb "RPG movement" credit for something literally all RPGs do. You wanna be Monte Cooke?

Hell, even outside of that? Scrolls are cheap to buy and make both, you can easily get wands out the ass, and so on and so forth.

There's spells to ensure a safe rest. It's a self-compounding problem.

Everybody seems to be basing their shit off 3.x and I'm not sure why, as this is supposed to be a thread about OSR. There's a lot less versatility in your spells in OSR, especially in the Basic line, you don't find nearly as much magic shit, and you may need to cast read magic to use a scroll, which limits their application. I'm not saying that there aren't issues with vancian magic (you don't know how long an adventure is going to be and if you misjudge your rate of spell usage, your character can become boring and somewhat useless, which affects the entire party's ability to successfully continue the adventure), but it seems like a lot of people here are making assumptions as to the way things work based on the severely broken 3.x system.

Some OSR modules noted that the DM should allow parties to camp in certain areas, or to leave for rest and recovery and return. And that upon the return, the monsters were supposed to have beefed up some of the defenses, because that was plausible. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief was a module that had notes for just that.

Yeah, if you're in a megadungeon there's no popping back to town to get that 15-minute adventuring day going. If it'll take you hours of fighting through hostile territory to get to the surface, sometimes you've got to go back to that secret room you found earlier, double check that there aren't any other exits, then jam the door shut with iron spikes and hope nothing that knows about the room comes along looking for intruders while you're resting.
If they do, hope that those spikes will keep them from busting the door open long enough for you to wake up, prepare for a .fight, and say your prayers.

Shit's tense, man.