Awesome post, as always. I think it is in the hands of OSRIC 3.0 to keep AD&D alive for the next generations, the original books won't help on that front. Newer generations simply won't deal with this amount of challenges when looking to engage with the hobby.
I think if someone made a derivative of 1e that's opinionated in all of the right ways (heh), that would be amazing.
For osric, I'm worried that
- They'll drop the weapons vs ac and speed factor information, leading to the weapons largely being pointlessly differentiated
- They'll lose a lot of compatibility as they change spell, monster, and item names to try to avoid lawsuits. When you rename beholders, the "fireball" spell, mind flayers, etc, then now I have to figure out what new name you used when I'm trying to look up module stats. This is exactly what happened with ACKs 2e and it's obnoxious.
Great post again, a real devotion to getting under the hood of the game.
As an AD&D player from the early 80s, I can add from reasonably recent personal experience (ran a game for over a year, ending last autumn), OSRIC has a few small, apparently random changes to AD&D. I have my original books, I told my players to download OSRIC and it seemed like every week someone would pick up a difference.
Most of them were minor enough not to worry about, but worth making sure everyone uses the same source or you might have even more things to work out!
My experience was that OSRIC changes/drops enough stuff that I gave up on it. I think the organization is better (except how the monsters are listed), and love that there's a SRD, but was frustrated by a lot of the omissions (item saving throw explanations, speed factor, weapons vs ac, etc) and just decided to grab a print on demand of the original books and use those instead
Awesome post, as always. I think it is in the hands of OSRIC 3.0 to keep AD&D alive for the next generations, the original books won't help on that front. Newer generations simply won't deal with this amount of challenges when looking to engage with the hobby.
I think if someone made a derivative of 1e that's opinionated in all of the right ways (heh), that would be amazing.
For osric, I'm worried that
- They'll drop the weapons vs ac and speed factor information, leading to the weapons largely being pointlessly differentiated
- They'll lose a lot of compatibility as they change spell, monster, and item names to try to avoid lawsuits. When you rename beholders, the "fireball" spell, mind flayers, etc, then now I have to figure out what new name you used when I'm trying to look up module stats. This is exactly what happened with ACKs 2e and it's obnoxious.
I was speaking with grodog (one of the original osric devs) about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/1hb2xxa/osric_missile_attack_initiative/m1f0hai/?context=3
Maybe I need to get off my butt and list out the trouble spots on the forums for them. Be the change I want to see!
Great post again, a real devotion to getting under the hood of the game.
As an AD&D player from the early 80s, I can add from reasonably recent personal experience (ran a game for over a year, ending last autumn), OSRIC has a few small, apparently random changes to AD&D. I have my original books, I told my players to download OSRIC and it seemed like every week someone would pick up a difference.
Most of them were minor enough not to worry about, but worth making sure everyone uses the same source or you might have even more things to work out!
Thanks!
My experience was that OSRIC changes/drops enough stuff that I gave up on it. I think the organization is better (except how the monsters are listed), and love that there's a SRD, but was frustrated by a lot of the omissions (item saving throw explanations, speed factor, weapons vs ac, etc) and just decided to grab a print on demand of the original books and use those instead