OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

I've ran 5E since it came out and rarely have I had "Oh 5E? Have room for another player?"

For the last 2 weeks I've been running B/X (via Labyrinth Lord) and each time we've played (once per week) I've had an older gamer come and ask "Oh are you playing Basic? Have room for 1 more?"

Brings a damn tear to my eye.

Not to say this means anything negative to 5E I'm sure if someone is at the store for D&D they probably already have a group. It's of course easier to find a 5E group than just wandering a game store. Just saying there are people out there wanting old school D&D.

And let me tell you, I've been enjoying the heck out of a B/X dungeon dive. Though I think the Thief needs help. Man do they suck at the start. Need to figure out how to make the Thief useful at level 1.

DarkCrisis said:

I've ran 5E since it came out and rarely have I had "Oh 5E? Have room for another player?"

For the last 2 weeks I've been running B/X (via Labyrinth Lord) and each time we've played (once per week) I've had an older gamer come and ask "Oh are you playing Basic? Have room for 1 more?"

Brings a damn tear to my eye.

Not to say this means anything negative to 5E I'm sure if someone is at the store for D&D they probably already have a group. It's of course easier to find a 5E group than just wandering a game store. Just saying there are people out there wanting old school D&D.

And let me tell you, I've been enjoying the heck out of a B/X dungeon dive. Though I think the Thief needs help. Man do they suck at the start. Need to figure out how to make the Thief useful at level 1.

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I like the Dolmenwood variant for Thief. All thief skills are roll under on a d6, and every thief skill starts at 6. The thief gets 4 points at level 1, and 2 points afterwards, to put in any skill they want.

So if they want, they can be really good (only fail on a 1 with a d6) at any one thief skill they would like. Or pretty good (50% success) at two skills.

TwoSix said:

I like the Dolmenwood variant for Thief. All thief skills are roll under on a d6, and every thief skill starts at 6. The thief gets 4 points at level 1, and 2 points afterwards, to put in any skill they want.

So if they want, they can be really good (only fail on a 1 with a d6) at any one thief skill they would like. Or pretty good (50% success) at two skills.

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OSE Carcass Crawler 1 has that variant for OSE also.

darjr said:

OSE Carcass Crawler 1 has that variant for OSE also.

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Yea, I've never liked OSR thieves in general, but that system is definitely tempting me.

TwoSix said:

Yea, I've never liked OSR thieves in general, but that system is definitely tempting me.

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My physical copy was just delivered too! Whoop!

B/X is my favorite version of official D&D. I haven’t looked into Labyrinth Lord. What changes do they make, if any?

DarkCrisis said:

And let me tell you, I've been enjoying the heck out of a B/X dungeon dive. Though I think the Thief needs help. Man do they suck at the start. Need to figure out how to make the Thief useful at level 1.

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Yeah. That’s a thing. There’s a lot of fixes out there. The already mentioned Dolmenwood is a great one.

I am a 5e player but had a great time with BECMI a while back with my pals and then younger son.

Man does it play FAST

Warpiglet-7 said:

Man does it play FAST

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It certainly can, depending on the group. If you get a full crew of overly-cautious players things can really drag. Drive ’em like you stole ’em.

DarkCrisis said:

Though I think the Thief needs help. Man do they suck at the start. Need to figure out how to make the Thief useful at level 1.

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Fun fact- the original thief concept (that Gygax, um, borrowed) was from Gary Switzer & Aero Games. In that version, the thief was based off of the Magic User, and had abilities based on a modified spell system that could be "used" without fail instead of spells.

Gygax took the concept and published the thief with percentile abilities in Great Plains Game Players Newsletter #9. Because of the whole leveling thing, and, arguably, the eternal hatred of Gygax*, the thief's abilities have been terrible in all the TSR versions of D&D.


*It is so weird to me that after destroying the class repeatedly at all opportunities, Gygax chose to write about ... Gord, the Rogue.

DarkCrisis said:

For the last 2 weeks I've been running B/X (via Labyrinth Lord) and each time we've played (once per week) I've had an older gamer come and ask "Oh are you playing Basic? Have room for 1 more?"

Brings a damn tear to my eye.

Click to expand...

I've been running games in shops for years, and before the pandemic, I never had any difficulty filling a table. If people see a group of gamers having fun, they want to join in, or at least learn more about it; most don't care too much beyond that. In my experience, only the chronically online care overmuch about which edition of D&D you're playing.

Post lockdown, there were a slow couple of years where it felt harder to start up a table of anything that wasn't 5e, but it was hardly impossible. And now things seem to be back to where they were before. If I set up a BECMI game at a local shop, people once again just rock up and ask to play.

DarkCrisis said:

And let me tell you, I've been enjoying the heck out of a B/X dungeon dive. Though I think the Thief needs help. Man do they suck at the start. Need to figure out how to make the Thief useful at level 1.

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Everyone kind of sucks at 1st level. At least a 1st level thief is an effective archer, which is more than you can say for a 1st level magic-user once they've used their spell. (And that goes doubly for a magic-user who didn't think to bring any oil or holy water to toss around.)

That said, I'm sure everyone has their own take on thieves. I base mine on d12 rolls, with Climb Walls starting out at 10-in-12 and everything else at 4-in-12.

Having thieves start out at the equivalent of 2-in-6 to their basic functions puts them on par with demihumans when it comes to things like hearing noise and finding traps (and it neatly sidesteps the weird hiccup where a very low-level thief might have a 10% or 15% chance to do certain things that anyone can do 1-in-6). But it doesn't ramp things up so high so quickly that you lose out on the reason those thief skills are supposed to fail more than they succeed at low levels in the first place (namely, that dungeons are supposed to be able to stand up to repeated delves from many different parties; they're an environment for sustained, long-term exploration, not a gauntlet of content meant to be blown through once and experienced in full by a single party).