“An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity,”

  • Terry Davis, Creator of Temple OS.

This article more exists for the sake of completeness and a bit more perspective on my introduction to the OSR.

My conversion from the 5th edition D&D to Old school D&D was a long, yet remarkably simple one. It involved very little convincing and at the same time very hard fought internalization.

We forgo doing things which we objectively known are better or more efficient because we think the effort expended to make that change is costly. Never is it so costly as to make these changes not worth it, and much is the story of my conversion to the OSR mindset, and Linux, and hosting my own website.

My pursuit for learning the old ways of D&D came about when I realize at no point within the players handbook, or Dungeon Master’s Guide, that there had any guidance for running dungeon crawls or wilderness travel, there was some vague rules as to how much water and food you required, and how much time it took to go from pint A to B, but to an actual procedure there was no luck.

That was what set me on the path to find an answer, and one in which research had directed me to older editions of D&D. I ran across three books which I had absorbed slowly into my methodology, Basic Fantasy, Old School Essentials, and Dungeons & Dragons 1991 Rules Cyclopedia.

Through those texts I reversed and wrote a hexcrawl and dungeon crawl mechanic/procedures for 5th edition D&D, I might say it was pretty good.

To convince my players to the brilliance of this procedure, I created a small 6 room dungeon crawl, and even made them only play the 5th edition side kick classes, which mapped on very well to Magic-user, Fighter, and Thief from older editions.

It was a blast and a very successful session at that, only an hour and twenty minutes, ten of which had been spent on character creation, compared to the half an hour to an hour spent sometimes fiddling with writable pdfs and DND-beyond online character maker, were all now utterly supplanted by better, simpler methods!

I think my issue was that I couldn’t convince myself I had been doing it wrong, that I had been swindled by an incomplete system, not in the par-baked since a good retroclone is, where it leaves room for dungeon master adjudication. Unlike 5th edition, which is incomplete in the sense it lacks procedures and mechanics that hold up all modes of play, or empower the dungeon master to create things.

I eventually switched, to much groaning and mild annoyance of my play group, and I settled on Chris Gonnerman fantastic retroclone, Basic Fantasy!

While not a retroclone in the strictest sense, it retains the entire spirit and mechanics of B/X D&D very well, the two major departures from B/X is that it.

  1. separates class and race.
  2. has ascending armor class.

which in my opinion are quality of life improvements and features I come to expect even of faithful retroclones, but these are far from the only reasons I praise Chris Gonnerman’s work.

The main reason is simply that the game is free, in fact all the supplement content, community additions and adventures for the game all free, a pure labor of love for anyone wanting to get started in the OSR for cheap!

Compared to the price of other contemporary RPGs, which can have a cover price of 50 dollars; which is comparable to a AAA video game, Basic Fantasy has no such delusions of value, likewise the game can be bought at cost of print, which as of current is only 8.35 USD!

However the pdfs and all official Basic Fantasy content is free, making the barrier to entry into the old school practically non existent.

This is great from a DM perspective because generally it’s annoying when you’re the only person with a copy of the rules on hand, which typically leads to players only knowing the rules via osmosis by playing the game.

The richness of the community projects, and the usefulness and interesting discussions had on the forums, the free and will written adventures, it’s as pick up and play as almost any RPG I’ve ever seen, and easily the most accessible OSR game on the “market” right now.

My only major complaint is that in terms of the formatting of the book, certain information I’d like to be grouped together is not, such as Character saving throws and attack bonuses are not listed in the same place Hit Dice and level are, which in my opinion kind of annoying.

but that is a small complaint in the face of just how much value you get out of this book, I rank it above even Old school essentials, which is a masterpiece in and of itself.

For some final thought, one of my personal draws to this system; beyond it merely being the first retroclone I played, was that it is quite hackable, and considering it’s a free chassie to work off of, that makes ripe for any sort of homebrew one could devise.