Sleeper Hit OSRs to blow your mind in 2021 

It has had the helpful hand of people in meaningful numbers actually trying to play the game beyond Jolly and Dave’s Indiana coven, something I dearly wish Hackmaster 4 had gotten in its prime.

I think it may be a matter of a different calibration of audience expectations as far as pacing and verbal style, along with my own expectations for topic coherence and profundity/uniqueness of argument in a recorded video. I find it much easier to imagine walking into the lecture hall wearing a sport coat and a bow tie than to present myself as simultaneously elbowing in on Hank Green while appealing to an audience marinated in the prevailing style of DM help videos (which, frankly...come off as elementary school style stuff on many channels (to me))

Indeed I think its particular identity makes it a very attractive choice in a crowded marketplace of “Trad Fantasy” choices. I have a hunch/feeling that The dice engine and mechanical aspects of the game are different enough so that groups won’t fall into D&D habits as easily.

The Finch primer and its tone...and a certain stripe of minimalist thinking has ruled the roost of what can and can't be called "OSR" for a long time now, and I'm working on a dialogue to expand and reimagine the definition to include a swathe of vintage games and styles that have hitherto been outside the circle. Look for a new stream on that topic sometime later this week ~

Darkmaster is probably the game most apt to in-depth discussion at this moment, up to and including some world building streams. as far as ASSH, it doesn’t grab me either, so Much as it is a retroclone that beats all others in the retroclone game. In having its own soul and the author has his own passion he wants to realize at the table, it becomes more than simply reverent or traditionalist. It gets to introduce AD&D 1E as if it were a game of the 21st century...the prose speaks in our dialect and I can’t undersell that. There were just too many instances where I was seeing folks look at ASSH as something like Flame Princess, a peculiar game for peculiar tastes (it’s not, it’s just 1E without races). Like there is not enough meaningful reasons to tell 20 or 30 somethings to look at 1981 AD&D Rulebooks (or OSRIC which lacks voice) to play AD&D. Bandits Keep is in this column...I can’t say I see eye to eye with that guy much. My motivation with ASSH is not to say it’s anything “grabby,” as much as it is, “it might be foolish to overlook this agile and concise tool if one is already set upon playing AD&D.”

@@The_CGA that's a fair point. I'm actually looking for the original ad&d books because I appreciate the absurdity that is High Gygaxian, but I think I'm well within the minority in that camp. But a game having a strong voice, and identity is definitely a selling point, because as useful as something like OSRIC is it's very dry and not a fun couch read. As far as ad&d 2e goes I've only ever heard of For Gold and Glory as a retroclone for that, but I've no idea what it's going for, if anything, as a retroclone.

Against the Darkmaster is, I think, terrific. It brings the Rolemaster/MERP ideas up to date in an easy-to-play package combined with a couple of novel narrative elements. It's on my shortlist of things to run.

So, some honesty: Regarding Traveller, I have come to accept its 'chewed up people with nowhere left to go but space/nowhere was good enough for them but space' character creation. It is prejudiced to make unemployed/self-employed 38 year olds with only moderately checkered pasts. Honestly, it's both part of what makes Traveller unique, and also...just not something I really want any more of. Yes, in some ways that fits with the filmic image of Western protagonists as people trying to recover from trauma...but...yeah I think I'd prefer a 'generational game' that was more open to protagonists at different points in their life story to Traveller's second-career-is-best-career take. That's all preference speaking though. As far as a game about indigenous resistance, it's a MIGHTILY touchy subject and I think the way I'd go about it is to make the indigenous group...robots or aliens, or maybe 'afterlifers' as in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld. Or maybe "Martians" (possibly a 'lost colony' that receded from technology, now coming into contact with a 'second wave' hundreds of years later? I have a setting I work on off on that includes a group of that type, but I had never imagined focusing the game directly on their story. food for thought.

Ahh Yes lots of preparation in OBS with all the new transition facilities and thumbnail making and the like

There are ample twitches out of the fantasy genre to speak of. Kevin Crawford’s games are fine. They hold to the minimalist understanding of “what is OSR,” in their answers to how they construct their system. And of course then there’s the myriad of White Box games with scant mechanics departing from that basis, some of which are the work of RPG pundit that you name here. My statement on B/X lineage is more one of phylogeneny “what is this game’s parentage?” Games that claim parentage from white box and D&D that use a minimalist philosophy have prevailed in public zeitgeist of “what is OSR” in large part. In 2015 it was an uphill effort to argue a game using Runequest or Rolemaster as its bedrock could “truly be OSR.” Dungeon Crawl Classics, of course, is its own thing and has played a role in unraveling that assumption

Great example! I got tongue tied and forgot about Ganondorf and the Legend of Zelda, He-man well as Golden Compass/ Dark Materials as touchstones. It’s a kind of meta-genre that goes across many aesthetics

@@The_CGA I actually really want to run it when my time frees up a bit

Oh If hard copy is relevant, sure. PDFs have been my primary way of using RPGs for 10 years now. The fetishization of vintage materiel and the accompanying price spikes are indeed an unhealthy distortion, and I do think that’s a force that distorts mongoose’s pricing for new Traveller material (both PDF and print).

@@The_CGA I couldn't agree more. But for many it is still a factor.I for example like both. At the table or online i use a PDF, but for actually digesting a system I prefer a hard copy. As for Traveller: Oh yeah. Their pricing is weird. In many aspects. Their idea of pricing actually made me sit down a weekend in fantasy grounds to hack my own system, than buy their (for FG) overpriced content. (And then FG proceeded to break my build - but that is not here nor there).

If you need print instead of PDF, just hold off a bit. Jeff’s working on a new edition that should be heading to Kickstarter in June. From what I gathered from the stream, it’s mostly new art and some rules tweaks.

I hear ya I personally require someone to add something, bring something new, but when I hear about someone using OG AD&D and suffering through the “Gary voice” when there is an alternative was something I just couldn’t stand by for

For the most part, I’ve been underwhelmed by retro clones. That’s all they hope to be, so that’s all they are. ASSH feels fresh because of its ambitions, its voice is more vivacious than it is nostalgic or reverent. So even as it’s “the same” there’s a soul in it of more recent vintage that speaks in “game dialect” of a far more recent vintage.

@@The_CGA A cool idea would be to take the 2e chassis and combine it with a Birthright-inspired setting in a big ASSH size tome.

The start date for A&8 isn’t 1876, so much as “the idealized west” as a time period (IRL and in Films/literature) that the game will be compared against is from that year. “The idealized west” is typically situated about 10 years after the end of the civil war, and about 25 years after Florence Nightingale + Separate Spheres feminism begin to realize a culture shift in gender roles and assumed competence. Player pianos, weekly magazines, and dime novels signal the beginnings of mass culture. So aces and eights doesn’t *begin* in 1876, it just works out a different answer to how one arrives at “1876.”

As I mull upon this a bit more, and speaking from my own efforts to develop an alternate (but minimally fantastic) history game of the Naval Fiction Genre (1750-1812).... you're 'not wrong.' Hope to talk to you more on this topic at some point. The game takes the path of least resistance to show as little as possible of the experience Native Americans, Mexicans, and Enslaved peoples in those times. I have to admit I'm smitten by the quirky randomness of its shooting system and the parallel quirk to its specific character creation that narrows its scope. But that doesn't let it off the hook.

SBCS seem to be very space fantasy, emphasis fantasy by my impressions, but in a much more literate way than Starfinder. I’ll have a look at it but it doesn’t seem to be a “roll under” system in the conventional sense-the primary objection to Rolling under lies with bonuses and penalties and the arithmetic that comes with them (subtracting is harder than adding). If the target number is constant, one is simply counting successes, like in Shadowrun or 2d20 or any other dice pool system. It looks pretty cool, and has an open license that would allow settings to be sold in it, which is close to my heart. Despite appellations to “rules light simpleness” there’s enough design space within the system to describe characters and items in some depth. Feels and looks like “AD&D in space.” This stream has proven to hit upon a level of depth and topical appeal that squares with my audience’s taste. I’ll be looking to repeat the formula and SBCS is a welcome inclusion for a future flip-through.

@@The_CGA sweet, I look forward to finding out about more RPGs! My issue is the confusion between rolling under the target and rolling under your attribute. It seems that fumbles happen more often with this. I am happy to give subtraction a go, but I dislike that players have to give up lots, and often just to survive. I also miss "NAT 20" or "BOX CARS" I prefer when you don't have to look at your dice for a second to figure out the result, that's what I don't like about FFG Star Wars.

FFG Star Wars is the kind of system that is adding something of its own, like a third actor in the scene of GM and players. It is like Rolemaster or DCC or other games that generate unique stuff by looking at tables. The effort of those moments is also its reward, but that isn’t always something that everyone is on the same page about. Reading the dice goes quickly and is a part of the conversation of play-and the fiction-when everyone is excited to learn those answers from the Oracle together. Anyway, I have had a read over solar blades and cosmic spells. There are some innovative and fun things about it. However it has a strange desire to “have its cake and eat it too” when it comes to role-playing and “player skilll” Also it has fewer stats, the stats are more important than in B/X, and you still roll 3d6 for them. With fewer stats comes a much increased possibility that the system will creat outright bad characters. I’ve always enjoyed systems that have *more* 3d6 stats, as this tends to create a law of averages where a character is at least good at *something*. Oh, and it doesn’t use d8, d4, d12 as design space, inhabiting the white box realm of d6 and d3 for damage and the like. I don’t think it has any good reason to swear off the other dice and I saw several places where the mechanics might benefit. Personally, i am not a fan of asymmetry in old school games, I prefer NPCs to act in the same medium as PCs with similar character sheets. This aspect of the game felt...weird, like it was coming from apocalypse world’s corner. Just a matter of preference. A lot of good ideas in there and the world creation is great. The class abilities are slick and meaningful though I am not a lover of ability-centric classes like d20 modern had (tough hero, strong hero, smart hero, etc.) this kind of class system doubles down on the 4 stats by focusing characters on one of them, rather than adding breadth or nuance to the character’s style. In D&D a high DEX can make an interesting fighter, a more survivable wizard, or a talented rogue. Solar Blades reduces that and says the Agile guy is gonna want to be agile, DUH. And that feels...smooth...like sandpaper buffed away a design carved into wood. Just some opinions