2023 - August 24th. B/X v.s. 5th Edition
Relax 5th Edition players, this one isn't intended to pop the bubble of the little water fairy you say orbits the cranium of your sparkly Dragonborn on page 3, section D of your character description and background. I'm sure you've seen some action - or whatever.
This comic was inspired by a sojourn into Baldur's Gate III. My friends and I generally agree that the reason we do not play 5th Edition is how burdensome the ruleset feels. We play
OSE Classic Fantasy - a variation of B/X. This isn't some hipster vanity projection, the guys I play with are older than me and I'm old. So 20 years ago when we were playing 3rd Edition and got sick of charting out every encounter in addition to maintaining a ledger that made our taxes seem fun filled with various buffs and debuffs and the rounds they last etc. they all unanimously agreed it just wasn't a problem when they were kids. We started back at 2nd Edition and sure enough had a lot more fun. It didn't take long for our chief D&D expert Patrick to pull out his red and blue books and convince us "This is all you need." We've been pretty happy since.
I recall at the end of our 3.5 Edition experience, again when we tried 4th, and then again when we tried 5th, thinking "These rules feel like trying to put a video game on a table." I was on to something; Baldur's Gate III is pretty darn fun! In part, I realized, because the system can be fun when a computer is running everything and I'm just enjoying the results. Also Larian make brilliant RPGs, I frankly felt they were already making "D&D" games without the licensing. But that's not what inspired this comic. This comic is inspired by the completely different regard the game has for the player.
In B/X or any variation I have tried, the game simply does not care about the player. The world is as it is and the player deals with it. Sometimes the dice roll the player's way, often they do not. This brutality I think of as part of the Vancian Tradition (that is, the influence of Jack Vance - fantasy sadist. More on this in a future note) that informs early editions of the game and the missions written for them. It's pools of acid beneath a false floor in room two of the dungeon, because that's what the evil wizard would have done! And you are, after all, a trespasser and larcenist. Let's not split hairs.
In old school editions of D&D you are not a hero until you have done heroic things. In the more recent editions the ruleset seems built around facilitating the hero fantasy outright. You can afford to be a little cocky, a little brash, the game's looking out for you, giving you the benefit of the doubt. In B/X we're only going to die for our arrogance.
love,
jensen
