I follow a guy on Youtube whose channel goes by the name The Joy of Wargaming. I don't remember how I found him; probably when I was following--with both fascination and horror--the BROSR phenomena a year or so ago. One of his video series is about playing 2nd edition AD&D solo, and how to generate hex maps for exploration...and down the rabbit hole I went.
Like many others in this hobby, I have become interested in the older expressions of how these games were played, which is ironic since I used to actually play the old ways because I am, essentially, old. I remember being frustrated by AD&D's combat when I was young (say, back in the early 90s); it felt like chopping down a tree: hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, hit, hit, so I started to futz around with different systems and write my own game called 'Mike's Quest,' which was a combination of Chaosium's BRP--the only other system I knew-- and D&D. I never finished it; I do remember making spell cards, creating a combat system (by 'creating' I mean stealing the parts I liked best from BRP and AD&D), and writing a long hand version of the new rules (which I still have in a notebook downstairs). But then life happened: I graduated from college, joined the military, got married, and started playing 3rd edition in the late 90s and early aughts. We played as much as we could for a time, all of us balancing wives and children and jobs and geography, but it wasn't until 2019 that we picked it up again with any regularity. The fifth edition was all the rage, the online components of TTRPGs were (and are) astonishing, and we were off to the races. My struggles, experiences, and criticisms of this new (well, not so new anymore) edition of D&D are well documented. Summary: well-designed system, works great, I don't like the game.
So OSR I am. Come at me, bruh! As T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." Yesterday I spent several hours using an almost 50 year old book--The Dungeon Master's Guide-- to generate a random hex map, which I then colored in with Crayola colored pencils. I used the random encounter tables to populate the hexes, then the Dread Thinganomicon for some additional ideas. That's it. Two books, some dice (albeit some online dice), some pencils and a blank hex paper. I spent hours doing this, and I was astonished at how my imagination just kicked into high-gear. The story, or the setting, or the potentialites, whatever you want to call it, emerged from these simple tools, and now I have a mini-world that I am excited to continue to work on. "New does not mean best..." --Slipknot
I realized yesterday that I have been making my job as a DM and an adventure designer harder, not easier, by buying and reading so much stuff. And there is a lot of stuff: world books, source books, campaign settings, mini adventures, design books, modules, websites, podcasts, Youtube...the amount of material is a frigging raging river, and I have dived into it and swam, trying to keep my head above water, for almost six years. None of this is bad or wrong: I love this hobby, and there is so much new and shiny stuff to buy! (I am also at the point where I have the financial resources to buy, literally, whatever I want to, whenever I want to, ad infinitum). But in so doing--in the buying and the reading and the using--I have strangled my own imagination. One of the things Jeffro Johnson--a lead figure in the BROSR movement--said that has really stuck with me is this: you only need three books to play this game for the rest of your life: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. That's literally it.
Now, to be clear, I like modern mechanics like ascending armor class, advantage and disadvantage, luck points, critical hit and miss tables, etc. Those innovations make the game play better for sure, and I'll continue to use them at my table. But so much of the other stuff is just a distraction from the simplicity of the system (say, the Siege Engine in Castles&Crusades) and my imagination. So for my next trick, I am going to reduce the number of resources I have at hand; strip it down to core books and a few other things I like a lot (The Lazy DM's Companion, The Tome of Adventure Design) and see where it takes me.
What's old is new, my friends. Embrace the Old Gods!
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