I ran Temple of Elemental Evil back in the late '80s, and it was great. Fifteen years later, I got to play Temple of Elemental Evil on my computer, and that was even better. Other than updating ToEE to 3.5, the computer game adaptation was surprisingly faithful to the source material, and modders eventually upgraded the game in interesting ways. Also, the computer version handles all the tedious complexities of 3.5, like attacks of opportunity and spell durations.

Are you no longer an OSR fan?

No. Although there are lots of very talented, creative folks working in that space the whole thing is ultimately a negatively atavistic reaction to the advances in accessibility and diversity that D&D has made. Much of that whole OSR thing is a cover for some very bigoted, edgelordy, and elitist attitudes. I found myself rather routinely disappointed to find that creators and adherents to the OSR style were bigots, sexists, homophobes, and far right-leaning. I'm also about this weird Gygax/Arneson worship that goes on there. I do really love the Moldvay rules because that's what I grew up with but the game has changed for the better across the board and books like these, despite some flaws, really show how far the game has come. Ultimately, D&D in any edition can be played however you want and it doesn't require this kind of ubernerd devotion to antiquated rules.

I do still very much love and still play/run DCC and Mork Borg- to me those games not only represent what I think are the best qualities of OSR style but they also move it forward into a contemporarily valid context.

I fell really hard for OSR because I loved getting back to old school THAC0 D&D...but I also had an epiphany with it when trying to get two groups into playing OSR games. Both groups has started with 5e, and then here I come trying to get them to play a game like I played 30+ years ago. They -hated- it, and it killed both groups. I felt terrible.

But I'll tel you what my Tenple of Elemental Evil game, which I run using Goodman's -excellent- 5e conversion from their Original Adventures Reincarnated line, is as old school as can be. But with familiar, accessible rules.

Interesting. As a self-described OSR fan, I thought the negative parts were a very small minority of the scene and the major reason I like OSR is for the very simple and accessible rules. I'm sorry to hear you've had some bad experiences.

We ignored three quarters of the rules back when they were published.

I don't think OSR has anything to do with gatekeeping or far-right agendas for most people. I just prefer the way the game runs under Moldvay/OSE.

If one of my players says they want to search under the mantle for a hidden lever, they just find it if it's there. Great idea! No rolling an investigation check that everyone then wants to try until somebody succeeds. I got so sick of 5e's perception checks and investigation checks and on and on...

The other area where I prefer OSR is combat and the creativity you are afforded. Nothing is codified in the rules. You want to jump off of a flight of stairs unto the orc with your sword drawn? Go for it. If you hit you get double damage, but if you miss I'm going to rule you fumble your weapon and possibly hurt yourself. Nobody at the table is going to look up the page number for "jumping off staircases with your sword drawn" to prove you did it wrong because "rulings over rules" is the core value of the game.

I get that 5e has a sleek rules systems that you can use to resolve everything and that's great but I actually LOVE all the strange little mechanics found in 1e. It made the whole game seem so weird and arcane and rewarding to discover.

I don't know. There's no wrong way to have fun but don't deprive yourself of OSR just because OTHER people who use it are assholes. There's nothing stopping anybody from learning from the mistakes of the past and applying a more modern mindset to older games. I would imagine (hope) that's what most people in the community are doing.

I think it’s easy enough to enjoy OSR-style games and rules, while ignoring the OSR scene. It does seem to have a high degree of reprobates for whatever reason; maybe there’s just a lot of people who think everything was better 40 years ago. Games, social attitudes, whatever.

Although, if you like the style of games/rules, there’s better games out there than B/X. I’m not sure why anyone would get B/X today when there’s OSE or Labyrinth Lord — basically the same thing, but better written, better organized, and more consistent.

But unless I really needed to run modules with a certain amount of combatibility, I’d rather run Knave, or Maze Rats, or Errant. All the feel, but a little more interesting to me in terms of rules structure.

OSR scene

Who on Earth is role playing with strangers?

Sagrilarus wrote:

OSR scene

Who on Earth is role playing with strangers?

Exactly. And who cares what the strangers do that also play the same game you do? That's not your game!

Sagrilarus wrote:

OSR scene

Who on Earth is role playing with strangers?

Not me. My contact with the OSR scene has been:

- I need a new scenario for my group
- These OSR guys seem to have a similar vibe to what I am after
- Oh these OSR adventures are pretty cool
- Let’s go check out an OSR forum, maybe there’s some more cool ideas there
- WTF

The OSR blog world is pretty fun if you find some people who you relate to. I really like A Knight At The Opera and Lich Van Winkle, personally. It's when you venture into the OSR-specific web spaces that things get unpleasant quickly. It's not been so much right-wing wankery, but more a serious case of looking down on those normies who would stoop to playing 5e. By choice, even! It's a bigger problem in places that skew younger, like /r/osr. But it gets really exhausting.

There's also a reverential tone among some OSR spaces that I find pretty silly. You MUST use dungeon rounds. You MUST meticulously map every corner. You MUST make the game about resource management. You MUST utilize hirelings! You MUST teach your players about consequence and how tough life is, like a strict parent. It takes about ten minutes in the TTRPG hobby to realize that most things you MUST do actually aren't that necessary. But again, a lot of OSR spaces insist that if you aren't doing these things you must be some kind of lazy gamer who isn't worthy to play the really good stuff. It's so exhausting and so try-hard.

That's to say nothing of the surprisingly adult-oriented material the OSR community often produces. It's surprisingly hard to find kid-friendly stuff. I can only chalk this up to the influence of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. That game has gone out of vogue now, but its legacy stretches long.

All that said...I like a lot of OSR stuff. I'm running an OSE game at my son's school these days, and it's pretty fun. It's nice to have a game that just gets out of the way, especially with eight kids. I like that there's a preservationist component of the hobby that works to keep older styles of play in the conversation, and seeks to build off of them. I like that so much of the content is free. (Though a lot of that free content seems to be created with the mindset to be as minimalist as possible, often to the detriment of the module.)

I'm much more of a 5e type, but I really enjoy a lot of OSR stuff. But the community can be pretty exhausting sometimes, just as much as any other community on the internet.

No argument that there’s lots of ways to play D&D, and the only criteria for whether a particular style is valid, is whether it’s fun for your table.

BUT … I think there’s a more nuanced argument, which is that B/X and its derivatives assume a certain style of play, and if you lean into that style, the rules will support you. If you don’t, you’ll be fighting or ignoring the rules, and there might be better games out there that will give you what you’re after.

What the heck is B/X?

Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons.

1981 edition written by Moldvay and Cook. The Basic boxed set has an iconic magenta cover.

It's widely seen, among fans of old D&D, as the best iteration of the rules. It doesn't have the endless cruft of AD&D, or even the slightly restrained cruft of the 1983 Mentzer "BECMI" D&D (that's five boxes: Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortals) with the iconic Elmore cover. It's clear and consistent (for the most part).

Old School Essentials, Dark Dungeons, Labyrinth Lord, and Basic Fantasy are all restatements of B/X. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Mazes & Minotaurs, and countless others are all heavily inspired to the point of being mostly compatible.

I started with turquoise/white Basic box and soon switched to AD&D back in the day. But at one point, I got a look at the Basic set from the B/X releases, and even then I was impressed by the well-organized rulebook.

That’s the Holmes 1977 Basic D&D. I’ve never read it. Supposedly it is a mostly uninspired restatement of original white box D&D, with a few things from AD&D. It doesn’t get much love.

Y’all think too much. Use the rules that work, dump everything else.

D&D was invented by a wargame designer. It started life as a medieval tank combat game. You need to ignore all the parts that look like Tactics II.

At that point, judging one ruleset against another makes little sense.

The original B/X rules, as published in 1981, are probably the best-organized rulebooks TSR ever put out, for whatever that's worth. There are other candidates like the Rules Cyclopedia, but that ones just such a massive tome that I find it a little cumbersome as an all-in-one prospect.

But dysjunct is right, if you want to play B/X you are really better off just playing something like Old School Essentials or Labyrinth Lord. OSE is literally identical, and it's way easy to use at the table.

This is a very surprising review.

Tell me about it. I actually wasn’t going to even pay much attention to it. It sat in the floorboard of my Jeep unopened for days.

I don’t like Critical Role at all. I don’t like the way they play, the characters, any of it. The cartoon is fucking HORRIBLE. I’ve actually used Critical Role as a joke in DCC a few times…the town tries to hire a party to go into the old fort but the part is all extremely clean, stylish celebrity adventurers and way too expensive so they go with the grubby level 0 ne’er-do-wells (the PCs) instead.

And there’s the whole involvement with the Wendy’s thing, among other grievances.

But here’s the deal. That stupid show had brought more people to D&D than…almost anything else. But more importantly, the folks that are getting into it from that, this is their D&D. Not Uncle Charlie’s D&D that’s all based on 100 year old racist/sexist fantasy, but a D&D they reflects their interests, worldview, and influenced. This book made me realize how holding on to all of this Gygaxian bullshit, all of this infantile OSR insistence on atavism and a bullshit notion that somehow only old D&D is “pure”, is more hurtful than these voice actors playing the game their way and pushing the game out there for a new generation of players.

I’ve been really burned out lately on OSR attitudes and although there are very valid, very significant arguments against WOTC. It’s just ridiculous that these gatekeeping elitists want to keep the game from reaching out and becoming more than it was in 1981.

But yeah, I was really surprised at how much I loved this book. There are so many cool ideas and it’s pushing for more than the usual D&D adventure, draling with actual themes and offering a great combination of story beats,
Locations, and opportunities for it to go off the rails.

I think I take your point. I think it's fair to think of the OSR movement as a fundamentally reactionary movement. I don't think there's anything wrong with it being that way, in fact I would say overall I prefer the vibes of that sort of thing aesthetically and playwise on the whole, but it's certainly something to consider when you think about what its appeal really is. Anything that has arisen purely out of a sense of distaste and reaction to new interpretations or entrants into something has the chance to be coming from kind of a bad place, regardless of its other merits.

It's tricky. A good analog to this is in video games. By and large my own tastes hew pretty heavily towards traditional "hardcore" gamer sorts of entertainment, but it's pretty difficult not to see how some of the appeal of something like Dark Souls for a lot of people is in its reactionary elements to the expansion of gaming to a bigger audience and taking in more casual forms. e.g. the Git Gud discourse. That doesn't mean there isn't merit to those games or my taste is wrong, but it's easy to see how it can become a pretty small c conservative ideology to push hard on how old school gaming values are the best as a way to dismiss the fact that everyone now plays video games, only they take a completely different form with different values.

I’m about 20 years behind in my reading — is Critical Role associated with this particular product, and what does OSR stand for please?

LOL Sag you used to be with it but then they changed what it is.

This book is the setting for CR, which is a podcast and streaming show DMed by Matt Mercer, a big time voice actor (Leon Kennedy in RE4 is one of his bigger roles). It’s a group of voice actors and it’s a professional production. It’s huge.

As a setting it really isn’t that much different conceptually than Forgotten Realms or others but I think it is a better fit for the kind of D&D that is most popular today. It works better for highly personalized, almost superheroic characters with epic level storylines. Whereas Dungeon Crawl Classics for example is more suited to a bunch of broke scrubs looking to rob a dungeon.

OSR is Old School Renaissance. It’s a movement that seeks to take D&D back to chiefly its B/X days. There are multiple clones of B/X out there, most notably Old School Essentials (based almost entirely on Moldvay). These systems are just like what you played in the 80s and you can in fact run classic modules with these systems but there is also TONS of more recent content that aims to have that old school feel.

I love a lot of OSR material- there is some truly great work out there. Deep Carbon Observatory and Hot Springs Island in particular. Dungeon Crawl Classics is decidedly OSR flavored but it’s more D&D 3.5 than B/X.

The problem is that OSR has a lot of common problems that plague any kind of nostalgic, “good old days” drives. One is that there are quite a lot of bigots that don’t like to see diverse parties with more than just cishet white skinned characters. Another is that there is an IMO uncomfortable drive toward a sense of “purity”, that the only real D&D is OSR D&D and that leads to dogmatists gaslighting 5e players into thinking that what they are playing is actually terrible and not fun. There is a git gud mentality like Gary Sax mentioned, and a degree of gatekeeping. It’s also very much a “scene” with scene drama, scene hierarchies, and scene posing.

But there are lots of diverse, interesting, and innovative creators out there I. This sphere as well. The best work has a punky, artful quality. But then again, there are mountains and mountains of junk PDFs you can buy on DTRPG that are billed as OSR.

5e and content like this book get a lot of grief from the OSR because to be frank, there is a lot of immature, edgelordy “I don’t like it because it’s popular” sentiment out there, railing against the fact that D&D is for all intents and purposes a mainstream game here in 2022. It’s the whole I liked Band X before they were popular and now that my little sister likes them they suck thing.

To be clear there are valid reasons in the OSR community to tail against 5e. Abusive people, failing to address said abuse, failing to divest them game of negative stereotypes, the fact that it is a corporate IP.

Michael Barnes wrote: Matt Mercer, a big time voice actor (Leon Kennedy in RE4 is one of his bigger roles)

And of course, Jotaro Kujo from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Ha! I actually didn’t realize that!

Would you recommend this for someone that loathes 5e and Forgotten Realms?

I see the nice the shiny WotC books and always wonder if there is stuff I can pillage. I also find fault with a lot of OSR's conservative, almost reactionary approach in some areas but like the sandbox focus. My most successful campaigns have been sandboxes (pointcrawls or hexcrawls) and 5e seems to be the antithesis of that style.

Most OSR games are too crunchy for the way I prefer to run things (essentially a stripped down version of Knave, which I didn't know existed when I settled on my preferred format), but their intentional modularity and general lack of balance means I can take the parts I like and ignore the rest.

I've run a lot of different rpgs over the years. Sometimes a really crunchy and detailed set of rules (GURPS or D&D 3.5), and sometimes a barely-there set of rules (Amber diceless or Call of Cthulhu 1st). I skipped D&D 4th because it was a failed attempt to make a tabletop rpg for people who would rather play a console game. I skipped D&D 5th because I would rather run a superhero rpg or a fantasy rpg, not a superhero rpg dressed up in fantasy rpg clothes. It sounds like Call of the Netherdeep is a well-written 5th edition adventure, and I might buy it just for purposes of converting to some other system or even just to plunder some good ideas. No system or edition is necessarily better than another, but whatever you play should be enjoyable for both the DM and the players. Some players like a crunchy system that rewards their attention to detail, and some players prefer that the rules get out of the way of the story and role-playing.

Saw a post in my Facebook feed today: "Tiny Tina's Wonderland is such an awesome game. It's like 5e DnD but with guns."

I'm glad you mentioned music, Michael. This also calls to mind a lot of the insider/outsider arguments about music that largely just rotated on the "merits" of not being popular with other people. I know I spent a lot of time being heavily influenced by that attitude toward music in my youth. In retrospect, it's pretty distasteful.

Before I get around to buying Netherdeep, I still need to check out The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. I'm intrigued by the idea of a D&D campaign that doesn't require combat.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight sounds interesting, but if I don't want combat why would I use 5e? I feel like 5E is a KitchenAid mixer attached to the handle of a shovel. It technically can do combat and non-combat, but why wouldn't I just pick a system that I prefer for either end of the spectrum if the session/campaign skews one way.

The mixture is just unwieldy to me. I feel that 5e characters (by extension much of the gameplay) are both too complicated and too restrictive.

Okay, thank you for the explanation. It was exceptionally helpful. I knew what Critical Role was, I just didn't know why it was relevant. I had to look up B/X, but I found that pretty quickly.

. . . and for the record, that B/X shit is part of the NEW STUFF that sucks! THERE WAS NOTHING BROKEN WITH D&D PRIOR TO THAT!!!!! Let's get our boundary lines where they belong, thank you very much.

It’s also very much a “scene” with scene drama, scene hierarchies, and scene posing.

See, there are some things that the Internet just makes worse. Grab a set of rules, and play. Ignore the stuff that doesn't work for you, stop taking emotional stands over bullshit, because it just doesn't matter how someone else plays. Back in my day (cue crotchety accent) you couldn't find players, but when you did you just played the game, both rules-wise and attitude-wise, the way you all agreed on. We had a bucket of house rules on the story-telling part of the game that I still stand by to this day. I'd wager some of our homegrown storylines from the late 80s would go toe to toe with stuff coming out today.

For the record, I have a lot of 1st edition and 2nd edition, one 3rd edition book (that scared me off of it because it seemed so concerned with educating people on how to create an interesting character and role-play which I already knew how to do) and some 5th edition stuff on my shelf. One of my sons got into 5th edition big time and I haven't spent the time to read it in detail. But my observation from Storm King's Thunder is this -- fundamentally all of the material changes through the years fit into the "adjustments" category. The foundational concept is still there, it's just been modernized to be more appealing and frankly more saleable. More power to them. The rule changes are pretty minor. It's the same game with a much nicer fit and finish to it.

Funny you say that Sag because there is a whole subset of OSR folks that strictly about OD&D. As in, the original rules. Swords and Wizardry is specifically an OD&D clone.

ould you recommend this for someone that loathes 5e and Forgotten Realms?

I see the nice the shiny WotC books and always wonder if there is stuff I can pillage. I also find fault with a lot of OSR's conservative, almost reactionary approach in some areas but like the sandbox focus. My most successful campaigns have been sandboxes (pointcrawls or hexcrawls) and 5e seems to be the antithesis of that style.

Knave is BRILLIANT and it is one of the highlights of OSR. It’s so stripped down but…it’s still kind of all there. I’ve run quite a few one shots with it. Anything written for B/X works great with it. Stonehell Dungeon plus Knave is a goooood time.

I do really like B/X but I find I almost never play it now, and in fact it turned a couple of people I play with completely away from my groups. To be honest, I think DCC is much more fun and Mork Borg is more extra…while being minimalist like Knave. Those three systems are my OSR weapons of choice.

Witchlight is OK, I wasn’t super into it but it has some cool stuff in it. Like all of these books, pick and choose what you like. I am actively adding Wildemount stuff into my Temple of Elemental Evil game, which is ostensibly Greyhawk with a bunch of Forgotten Realms stuff built into it because it’s 5E. I’ve got some elements pulled from Kobold Press’ excellent Midgard setting as well, and I use their monster books frequently to keep from pulling the same old MM baddies out again and again.

Yeah, I don’t understand why folks don’t get that these books are not bibles. Hack this shit apart, take what you like and throw away the rest. I’ve pulled encounters and locations straight out of WOTC books and used them elsewhere. I never use spell components because I think it’s super lame. I demand that mat 1 is always a critical fail with outrageous consequences. And you know what you can run a completely OSR game with 5E. For pete’s sake they have put out two compilations of converted classic modules so you can run Tomb of Horrors and Saltmarsh if you want. And then there’s the Goodman stuff- you want to run B2, you can choose the original module and do it in B/X or whatever or you can play the 5E conversion. They are in the same book.

Too much import is placed on the edition/rules as written.

>>>Would you recommend this for someone that loathes 5e and Forgotten Realms?

It kind of depends on what you loath about it?

I’m finding this setting more interesting and dynamic and it also feels “next gen” for lack of a better term in how it by default presents a more diverse setting. It also feels modern in that it’s not drawing on decades of archaic D&D lore, it feels more in tune with modern fantasy references. For examples, JRPGs are a big influence rather than Conan.

But it also still has some core D&D elements- Vecna and Lloth are there for example- but it feels kind of remixed.

Michael Barnes wrote: >>>Would you recommend this for someone that loathes 5e and Forgotten Realms?

It kind of depends on what you loath about it?

I’m finding this setting more interesting and dynamic and it also feels “next gen” for lack of a better term in how it by default presents a more diverse setting. It also feels modern in that it’s not drawing on decades of archaic D&D lore, it feels more in tune with modern fantasy references. For examples, JRPGs are a big influence rather than Conan.

But it also still has some core D&D elements- Vecna and Lloth are there for example- but it feels kind of remixed.

For 5e, I dislike the backloaded character creation and restrictive class structure. I prefer a very loose class structure (I usually run with no classes) that isn't baked into the setting.

For FR, it's too kitchen-sink with no coherence at the macro level and not weird/fantastical enough. I tend to bounce off of the generic European-centered that was popular in the 80s and 90s. The weird blending of a bunch of fantasy civilizations at wildly different development levels sitting side by side and huge amounts of magic with no impact on society just doesn't work for me. DCC, Mork Borg and my stripped down rules are the three variations I like for fantasy and they all can handle weird and unbalanced well. Forbidden Realms is basically fantasy Rifts but even less coherent.

Michael Barnes wrote: Too much import is placed on the edition/rules as written.

Yes and no. Sure, a session of Dungeons and Dragons isn’t going to fall apart because you accidentally let a gagged sorcerer cast a spell with a verbal component, but if you don’t care about that, why are you playing a game with those rules?

Home brews and house rules made a lot more sense before the Internet, when you had three choices of systems, but now you can find the rules right for you. Want relationships and no combat? Monsterhearts. Like Star Wars? Here are rules by West End, Wizards, and Fantasy Flight. Horror? Dread. Metal Bands? Umlaut. Colonialism? Dog Eat Dog. Fantasy Mormons? Dogs in the Vineyard. Literally anything? Microscope.

You can calculate encumbrance, or you can tell a story with friends with the gauziest veneer of rules.The options are there. Probably on DriveThruRPG.

Oh wow: www.kickstarter.com/projects/midnight-to....projectdomino47.com

Shellhead wrote: Oh wow: www.kickstarter.com/projects/midnight-to....projectdomino47.com

Why 5e? I know its because it's popular, but from a playability standpoint, why that system? I cannot imagine that there isn't a better system for what appears to be a social encounter-heavy mystery. Even dueling would be better handled by a system that allows for more structured rules around 1-on-1 combat (like BRP/Mythras or AGE).

Is there a rules expansion in one of the WotC books that makes cinematic back and forth duels viable? Having the DM just wing it doesn't count because I can do that with whatever system I want.

I love the "system matters" discussions and totally agree.

I'm not up to date with all of the various current offerings, but there has to be something with descriptive stats a la In a Wicked Age that would work so much better.

barrowdown wrote: Why 5e? I know its because it's popular, but from a playability standpoint, why that system?

How many backers would they lose if it was designed for a less popular rpg system? How many would they gain?

With 5E it has a potential reach of an estimated 50 million players. With another system you are looking at a fraction of that. Like, 500 for an indie zine, maybe 5000 for a larger published system.

Shellhead wrote:

barrowdown wrote: Why 5e? I know its because it's popular, but from a playability standpoint, why that system?

How many backers would they lose if it was designed for a less popular rpg system? How many would they gain?

Good question. I have no idea and no real idea on how to figure that out, but maybe not that much if they are good at what they do?

ENworld Top KS List

Looking at ENWorld's list of top TTRPG KS's, there are 15 (I'm counting Mothership because it did make $1M, but the list is older) that have made over $1M, with ten being 5e. The other five feature two popular licenses (The One Ring and Avatar), two more are reboots/reprints of systems (technically three, but I already counted TOR as a license) leaving only Coyote & Crow as a new non-5e property.

I really want Coyote and Crow. It looks great.

Mothership blew up because it was the only SF horror game in town and it really filled a niche. It’s a good game, I’ve run some great sessions of it. But I gotta say, the Alien RPG kind of shunted it odd to the side.

And it is actually a great argument pro “system matters”. Even though it is Free League’s core system, it works really well with the psychological elements and it plays REALLY well as a one shot “cinematic” game because it handles PVP and has PCs with secret objectives/agendas.

I really don’t get with 5E how people can’t figure out how to make it more OSR…I mean, there are tons of great VERY OSR modules for it. Kobold Press’s Scarlet Citadel is practically an old school Gygaxian mega dungeon module. There are books like Glimmering Stones of The Ioun King and Colossus Wake that have some more indie and gonzo sorts of things going on. The excellent Dungeon Age series (PDF only on DTRPG) is all about the super minimal presentation and skill based play. There is even an OSR variant of 5E, Five Torches Deep, that specifically makes it play more like B/X.

I’ve not single time with 5E felt “this system can’t do this” or “this system doesn’t do this well” aside from the Vancian magic, which I’ve never liked. The reasons I haven’t is because I really took to heart that line that used to be in all RPG books “this is YOUR game”. 5E is -extraordinarily- flexible. With ther Jane Austen thing you could easily add some backgrounds or classes, “Debonair Suitor” for example, add abilities appropriate to the setting,, maybe even some new skills. All using the basic DC/D20 mechanism, which is practically universally applicable in The right rules context.

But on the flip side, it totally wouldn’t work in DCC because that system is designed for big, stupid heroic moments, unpredictable outcomes, and catastrophic failures

Michael Barnes wrote: I’ve not single time with 5E felt “this system can’t do this” or “this system doesn’t do this well” aside from the Vancian magic, which I’ve never liked. The reasons I haven’t is because I really took to heart that line that used to be in all RPG books “this is YOUR game”. 5E is -extraordinarily- flexible. With ther Jane Austen thing you could easily add some backgrounds or classes, “Debonair Suitor” for example, add abilities appropriate to the setting,, maybe even some new skills. All using the basic DC/D20 mechanism, which is practically universally applicable in The right rules context.

Herein lies the rub. Yes, roll a d20, add modifiers, check against difficulty is very easy adapt to any setting. You could run it in a Jane Austen setting to check whether you’ve properly perceived a suitor’s intentions or to snipe a queen alien with your laser rifle.

I just find it a profoundly uninteresting mechanic after playing things like Fiasco, especially regarding social elements. Why do I need to role to lie? Why can’t I just tell a plausible story?

I think a d20 system does better fit combat, but it still grinds everything to a halt as you’re constantly calculating damage and health. The handful of of role play podcasts I’ve listened to have always been at their least interesting when fights drag. And they always drag.

The difference, to me, between the super rules lite and the comparatively gritty of 5e is the difference between storytelling and improvising. There are all sorts of stories online of a player rolling a crit to kill the villain in their first encounter. It can be memorable, but it isn’t as satisfying as collaboratively building to something in Microscope. The trade off is storytelling requires more maturity. The players have to give and take and have to let someone else be the lead sometimes. Heavier rules give a structure to keep people from doing whatever they want whenever.

I'm a big fan of the Call of Cthulhu rpg, at least up until the 5th edition or so. But I didn't like the Delta Green material that I saw in issues of The Unspeakable Oath, primarily because I felt that the government conspiracy stuff was what eventually ruined the X-Files tv show. I also think that the Roaring 20s was a great setting for the rpg, because it was such a dynamic decade. There were still enough unmapped locations in the world to hide mythos activity, but significant technological advances offered very different adventures in cities. Hollywood was just getting started, Prohibition led to a large increase in organized crime, and Europe was still recovering from a major war. Jazz, art deco, women's suffrage, psychoanalysis, etc. By contrast, the modern world is too comfortably familiar, and the GM will need to thwart mobile phones in many situations.

I picked up some of the PDFs in a Humble Bundle. I haven't gotten very far into the player's book, but the flavor text is exceptionally good.

I have some very, very tangential relationship to Delta Green, as The Unspeakable Oath was originally being produced at Mizzou when I was going there, and I interviewed some of the people who worked on it for a journalism story. So I have a DG soft spot, as it were.

I always thought that if a Lovecraft story could be resolved with a Thompson submachine gun it was a failure as a story

That kind of stuff was always more Howards field, or the other ancillary mythos guys like Derleth. As much as I love "guns guns guns", when paired with cosmic horror it always falls short, at least in creating tension (Monster Hunter International is a lot of fun to read, tense and creepy it is not). I think I've read some DG stuff, might be confabulating it with Lumley, Stross, or someone like that.

Does this have a lot of occult artifacts or magic items? Things like the Laundry Files basilisk gun? That kind of stuff is always fun to read even if I don't play the game that comes along with it.

Ideally, guns would only work on cultists, but CofC adventure writers often throw a bone to the gun bunny players by making a variety of monsters at least partially vulnerable to gunfire. That's assuming that player characters successfully make their sanity checks when they see the monsters. In my personal experience, a lot of role-players are willing to try Call of Cthulhu, but some give up after one disappointing experience with guns. The people with the D&D mindset are looking for a dungeon crawl with guns, and they tend to go away bitter. Other players quickly learn that the key to a successful Call of Cthulhu adventure is to find out as much as possible before encountering a monster, and to run away from the monster after encountering it.

Delta Green has some artifacts, but they are always a Bad Idea. I think in one of the scenarios that has a random 2x4 with a mathematical equation carved into it. Some of the symbols look weird. The board constantly projects a 10G wall of force from the side that has the equation on it. Don’t walk between it and the wall. DG would love to figure out how it works; unfortunately the guy who figured out the equation was standing in the wrong place when he put the finishing symbol.

Generally I think DG is the only coherent way to run modern CoC. Between the internet and cellphones, everyone would know all about the mythos UNLESS you had an active conspiracy suppressing knowledge of it.

Shellhead wrote: I'm a big fan of the Call of Cthulhu rpg, at least up until the 5th edition or so. But I didn't like the Delta Green material that I saw in issues of The Unspeakable Oath, primarily because I felt that the government conspiracy stuff was what eventually ruined the X-Files tv show.

This is why I'm glad to see it's been sidelined in this new edition. But at the same time ...

Shellhead wrote: By contrast, the modern world is too comfortably familiar, and the GM will need to thwart mobile phones in many situations.

... the fact it's still presented as a secret government agency makes this much easier to deal with. That's not a comfortably familiar world for most players, especially with the secrets of the mythos, and the fact it needs to be contained makes mobiles and the internet as much of a liability as an asset.

It may be that the '20s are more familiar to US players than to me as a Brit. When running games in the '20s it's hard to remember that things like prohibition even happened, because it's not my history, let alone how it might impact the unfolding narrative.

jason10mm wrote: I always thought that if a Lovecraft story could be resolved with a Thompson submachine gun it was a failure as a story

I don't feel that's too much of a problem here. Despite the presence of automatic weapons, a lot of the entities that players encounter are too tough for them to shoot their way out. And there's a clear emphasis in the scenario design away from firefights and toward investigation and containment: it's hard to keep things quiet if you're going to have a mass shootout with an unspeakable entity from the nether dimensions.

I just think something like this could detach from Lovecraft in a dozen possible ways and get some clear air to run in. Is the IP so damn valuable that no one will do that?

It’s not just Lovecraft’s personal baggage. The genre has been so heavily worked . . . I don’t know. Maybe everyone still loves it in spite of the overuse and the racism.

I don't think many associate "Cthulhu mythos" with racism at all. How many folks consuming Arkham Horror have ever read Lovecraft? He has been so distilled as a free IP that I don't think there is a lot of value in trying to tie the current idea of his brand of cosmic horror with him specifically, especially since a lot of his more problematic issues can be easily excised or retconed or just smoothed over.

Every creator is problematic in some way, or will become so in time. Every creation is at least partially rooted in the culture and times of its birth and good or bad ideas come with it.

Just remember that Cthulhu hates all of us equally

I do agree that cosmic horror could use more fresh air. In time more stuff will enter public domain and make it easy to source from.