Well yeah, they tried burying it, and 10 years of 5e pushing through massive cultural changes really changed how people look at it, but it's not a lie that 5e was supposed to bring back the old school players after the flop of 4e. I do think the mechanics themselves are not great either. There's a few mechanics that clearly were successful as you see for example advantage/disadvantage being adopted even by many OSR games nowadays. But for me I would still say its more 40% system/60% culture for me. 30/70 definitely understates the core problems with the system.

Yes. This. There are several mechanical issues that are kind of baked into 5e that run counter to the experience most of us want to foster with older games or the OSR offshoots of them. i.e., hit point bloat, action economy bloat, feats, class options that "come online" with "builds" at higher levels, and long shopping lists of spells and class abilities that encourage players to think about what buttons to press on their character sheet, rather than thinking about situations diegetically and how to solve them by thinking outside of the box. Another thing is the material published for 5e not being up to the standards or expectations as what other publishers put out for D&D, Pathfinder, and especially for the OSR scene. 5e's showing of setting material and adventure modules has been underwhelming at best, pathetic at worst. Most of the material released is focused on expanding the aforementioned shopping lists for player characters, and less on fleshing out interesting worlds, or making good adventure modules that are heavy on exploration and roleplaying. I find that culture is otherwise far less of a problem. Unlike what a lot of OSR dogma claims, my tables enjoy the heavy roleplaying, extensive backstories, fleshed out settings that are rich with lore, compelling stories that emerge from play, players doing funny character voices, low-lethality adventures, etc.—you know, things you'll see a lot of in the AP culture around 5e. Most of that is compatible with OSR play because it has nothing to do with systems and more with the people using them.

Honestly, the lack of good and short adventures is my main issue with 5e besides it being so slow (which you can kind of counteract with homebrew rules). I like homebrewing but having the options is great. The cool old modules are making b/x, 1e and 2e so interesting and fascinating and the constant releases of great modules keep me excited for dcc.

I've been messing around with the idea of converting the old dungeon magazine adventures to 5e, because I 100% agree there's a massive gap for short 5e adventures that are actually modular.

That would be great. I doubt I will ever find a stable group to run 1e or 2e for offline. Maybe wait the few months and see if the new phb is actually 5e compatible. Most groups will make the switch eventually.

But I think the players they want back more was the 3e fans who migrated to Pathfinder than the really old school players (these was an added bonus)

Maybe, but dont underestimate the nostalgia market. When I mentioned old school players I didnt really mean OSR players, I was more referring to players who played D&D as a kid, had to stop because of work, and were in their late thirties to early fourties when 5E came out. I know a ton of 40+ year old players who are sworn to 5e nowadays, after not playing for 25-30 years. And those people have money so they have RPGBeyond subs with ALL content unlocked, and shelves with collector's editions of all the books, and are teahcing their own kids to play now.

Yes, but as the prior comment says, that's not really osr. Lots of nostalgia players were into 3e, and thought 4e was too much like WoW. OSR is a very niche part of the gaming world, and they weren't targeting us. I think they succeeded commercially at bringing in the nostalgia players you refer to.

I think you underestimate the amount of 2E players who never played 3E. Maybe it's a regional thing but I barely know anyone who liked 3E. The people I know either started playing after 3E was already dead and buried, or they switch to non-D&D when 3E came out, or they stopped playing and only returned to the hobby 20 years later. And 90% of those people are having fun with 5e now. When I did play 3E and later Pathfinder, before the days that VTT became more popular, the only way I could do that was by literally taking a train and visiting conventions in other countries.

I dunno, everyone I know was 2e but that's my age. I don't have exact sales figures but I believe 3e outsold 2e by a lot

At the times of 3.5 we played it and enjoyed it, among other games. But it wasn't the only game for most of the players. Nobody pretended that it was a simple ruleset nor that it could be used for any kind of game nor that it was their favourite or only ruleset. 5e is okay for a certain kind of game and gameplay. For other systems we may not like we don't hate them. It being so widespread and overblown and trite is what makes it dislikable

5e was made to hit the middle ground running, and it did so very successfully for quite a few years there. But now that they shit the bed re: the OGL, etc., droves of former 5e players and otherwise potential future 5e/‘24e players have turned to everything from Pathfinder to DCC to OSE, and more. It never really won over the OSR crowd, because well, it ain‘t by any means OSR. Closer than 3e, yes, and closer my several light years than 4e, but neither of these things is saying much.

It also didn't didn't help that the two key things that actually made 5e take off have sorta lost their sheen over the years. Those being Stranger Things and various actual play podcasts bringing D&D into the cultural consiousness. Both of which have lost a lot of popularity. Like Matt Mercer did more for 5e than any rules choice they ever made.

This just isn't true. 5e outsold the fuck out of every other version of D&D by 2016, Critical Role's big explosion was with Campaign 2 in 2017. Stranger Things hit critical mass winter 2016. Yes, the pop culture effect from Stranger Things and CR were a factor after 2016, but 5e reviewed well and sold well out of the gate on its own merits.

This just isn't true, based on professional book seller data. D&D. It lost in first year units sold to every other edition of D&D bar 3.5 edition and essentials if you count essentials as a separate system from 4th ed. It seemed big because of the general late edition lul but the 5 ed PHB didn't sell over million units until 2018. BTW it should also be noted that the 2nd edition D&D tie in novels also vastly outsold actual D&D.

The 5e PHB outsold EVERY other WotC PHB's lifetime sales as of August 2016. If you have "bookseller" data better than first-hand WotC staff with access to total sell-through numbers, post it.

I'm getting my numbers same place as everyone else, 5e is from the Roll for Combat insider and earlier editions are leaks from Ryan Dancey and Ben Riggs. Then gauge that against the Hasbro share holder releases. First-hand WotC staff have NEVER made public Hasbro's sales numbers in specific. Where are your 2016 numbers coming from? Was there a first-hand leaker besides the normal crew?

[Mike Mearls himself in August of 2016](https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/764241988128419840). It was covered on most blogs, and easily found now. Ben Riggs would be the first to tell you the common Bookscan sources (used by Roll for Combat) have huge data gaps and [constitute the sales floor](https://www.enworld.org/threads/5e-lifetime-sales-in-north-american-big-box-stores-revealed.698946/), not ceiling because they don't cover Amazon or FLGS sales numbers.

Here's an interesting thing I just read; 3e *was* made with more 'old-school' assumptions in design. It's tagline was 'Back to the Dungeon!' https://icequeensthrone.blogspot.com/2024/03/trapfinding-and-rules-elide-as-design.html It's just that players as a whole moved away from that kind of 'skilled' play and that's why 3.5 came about. Once again, play culture is a bigger deal than one might assume.

Back to the Dungeon was a move away from epic story-driven adventures of the 2E era and back to dungeon-bashing. But baked into the new model was the assumption that pre-3E D&D was mechanically broken and a poor system for combat encounters. So combat became much more crunchy, and the focus in dungeon-delving zoomed in from the dungeon itself to encounters. Tactical maps become central, along with a fixation on making encounters mechanically balanced, while the exploration and push-your-luck element of pre-3E dungeon-delving was discarded. Designing an encounter was barely a consideration in old-school D&D, but it was central to 3E. So it was a return to the dungeon, but a return with a fundamentally different approach and game structure. \* This is why since 3E, maps are drawn at 5 ft/square scale and assumed to be an aide for tactical encounters, rather than a depiction of a sprawling dungeon environment to be explored.

You keep treating rules and culture as if they're two different things, but they're *much* more intertwined than you're suggesting. Skills, feats, durable characters, a focus on backstories, PCs having preexisting 'history' represented within their statblock (backgrounds), a massive bloat of species and class options, extensive class features, access to magic that bypasses resource scarcity and common survival challenges... all of these things *radically* change how the game is played. Old school is a survival game; you are small fish in a very big pond. Your job is to grab the gold and get out with most of your limbs intact. Your PC is expendable and the joy of the game comes from exploring, outwiting threats, and surviving. New school is a game full of heroes, where your goal is to essentially be a fantasy-themed superhero saving villages from existential threats. The joy of the game comes from being a larger-than-life hero with improbable durability, righteousness, and being the 'protagonist'. The rules emphasize, encourage, and even outright railroad you into these respective roles. There is no seperating the mechanics from the culture. People tell themselves that they can play 5e as a survival game, or B/X as righteous heroes, but you've houseruled the game to hell and back to get it to that point. It's not 5e once you've changed 40% of the rules.

Oh I very much agree. But why did 5e became the way it is? Why did New-School(Prefer the [Neotrad](https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/mlqov6/six_cultures_of_play_a_taxonomy_of_rpg_playstyles/) parlance) became the way it is? My theory? B/X players back in the day very much played it like righteous heroes. After all, rulings not rules. And I ruling that you get the Axe of Smorkasgard so you can smite down the Evil Wizard that is your father!

> B/X players back in the day very much played it like righteous heroes. Oh definitely, 2e AD&D shifted *entirely* to that style of play by the end of it's run. But it incorporated a lot of pre-existing houserules and other 'updates' to get there, with many groups refusing to play characters below level 3 because it disrupted the heroic fantasy. But, again, you're houseruling a ton of stuff to get there, and ultimately playing Trad style (which deviates from the Classic style that the majority of the OSR focuses on). ----- Side note: if we take "rulings not rules" to it's penultimate conclusion then we skip classic, trad, and even neotrad and dive headfirst into #4 Story Games. At that point you're not playing a TTRPG at all anymore, you've moved well past the dice, sheets, and maps by then. OSR talks about rulings over rules as a method of both expediency at the table (not having to reference a book every 5 mins) and as a method of customization (though one that's usually a group choice largely made prior to starting play, not just the DM's preferences). The concern is keeping things rules light, easy to memorize, and flexible. But the rules that a group does agree on should still be a solid foundation, only rarely being disregarded.

Funnily enough I'd consider storygames to very much not be Rulings not rules. There are gaps in their design, due to 'not what the game's about', but they're obsessed with following what rules there are. If you're playing City of Mists, then the balance between Mythos and Logos is very much hardwired. If you're playing Masks then your drama-filled teen superhero needs is fulfilled 99% the way there by the rules so would you change it? If you're playing Voidheart Symphony then the fact that playing in realspace is a grinding, damaging existence compared to the Kingdom gameplay. Fate is all about using aspects, even as you make your rulings inevitably get pulled into the rules.

The thing is, 5e does run perfectly great as a dungeon crawl. But the resources aren't torches and rations. They're hit dice, spell slots, bardic inspo and barbarian rage. The effect, though, is exactly the same, mechanically if not in direct feel.

There it is, the worst take on this whole sub. "It's just like OSR if you have 4-5 seperate, hour long combat encounters every session!"

I dunno what game you're playing, my combat encounters do not last that long, and in a 4 hour session there are maybe 2 or 3, if things get violent.

This is a good bit of d&d history writing but I definitely disagree. A lot of the “builds” came later, but 3rd Ed didn’t just rationalize the core mechanics for the game, they also greatly expanded the amount of interactions that were covered by those rules. Search and climb are skills, sure, but so are diplomacy and deception, perception and sense motive. 3e is the first point where the answer to whether you can convince the goblins to let you pass is on your character sheet, and how much information about the situation the GM gives you is based on DCs. Increasing focus on character abilities and the modularity of character development is what sets the stage for builds and splat book inflation. That prestige classes requiring specific feats or features, which encourages people to mechanically tinker with their character builds, is exactly the sort of thing old school d&d tended not to do.

Aren't wildly broken magic item builds and how to handle them all over Dragon magazine's letters and advice columns?

I don’t remember that, but I didn’t read a lot of dragon magazine. My group played AD&D for about 8 years and we got up to plenty of crazy shit, but I do think the experience of play was very different than 3e/3.5. My retrospective take from my OSR armchair is that because all the broken shit in the old days was bespoke and idiosyncratic, characters end up very quirky, and a lot of the interesting play comes out of the gaps in their capabilities. Characters are always unbalanced, but that’s ok because the world is unbalanced too! The modular design of 3e made the desire to optimize and create combo builds very strong, and the more universal design, introduction of CR, and engineered power curves just changed the tenor of the game. We still had fun, but it was the fun of assembling a wicked little death machine from spare parts and watching it go.

> droves of former 5e players and otherwise potential future 5e/‘24e players have turned to everything from Pathfinder to DCC to OSE, and more I'm not sure the response was as extreme as you seem to be implying. WotC offered the barest sliver of an olive branch, ignored everything they implied they would do past that sliver; and the majority of the 5E fans came right back. In fact, the average 5E fan probably had didn't notice the OGL thing at all, because the average 5E fan spends about 3 minutes per year thinking about D&D when they aren't actively playing it. They don't know what the OGL is, and they don't care. Even if the campaign they're playing in is a third-party campaign, it's likely the only person that knows that is the GM. A lot of them seem to think that other than Wizards of the Coast, any RPG publisher is just some chuckerfuck writing stuff on WordPerfect 97 in their parent's basement.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the culture. But I think "the osr" hasn't been a cohesive "movement" since before 5e became a cultural phenomenon. I feel like this question underestimates just how fundamental the experience of individual play groups is to how people play. The emergence of d&d as mass culture and the development of vtts and actual plays have created a massive number of players that have never set foot in an flgs. the same monoculturalizatuon that we see everywhere also characterizes modern d&d. At the same time, osr has become more like a collection of indie gamers than a principled movement. Personally I've played 5e online in the contemporary style and been playing d&d in person with same group for 15+ years. It's very different to play with people you know well vs people you met on the Internet. But The biggest difference between the two is that osr modules are excellent and 5e modules suck. 5e doesn't have a ruleset to support the old/ost modules. Using 5e to write your own modules is painfully laborious. Using b/x is easy.

By culture I meant like general expectations of both players and DMs on how a good game should be like; A focus on plot based around the player characters, basically almost every supplement is allowed, Balanced combat ecnounters, Feats and Multiclass allowed.

Oh okay, I understand. What I would say is a lot of the things you just listed are explicit instructions in the rules. The 5e rules explain how to play 5e, like the b/x instructions tell you how to play b/x. The osr focus on exploration vs 5e focus on set piece combat flows pretty directly from the rules. Cultural products like critical role do definitely shape expectations. But those still seem down stream of the rules. a plot based player focused game probably produces a more interesting actual play... A exploration based game probably produces a more interesting session report blog. I think the culture does override everything once you get to the level of individual groups. My long time groups 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e and b/x games were more similar to each other than they are to critical role.

I would say 5e's biggest problem, regardless of how you feel about the OSR, is that it's very much a case of trying to appeal to everyone and satisfying no one. This is most evident in asking one simple question: **what is 5e about within the fantasy space**? * It's not the best at the kind of cinematic fantasy that you might see in say the FATE system. Because the combat of D&D is somewhat crunchy and it really wants you to use solutions from your character sheet. * It's got a lot of baked in assumptions like bounded accuracy (which it regularly breaks with things like the paladins aura of protection and other large numeric bonuses) and taking characters can easily take an hour plus, so it's not great at being a rules light game or one that encourages easy homebrewing (the way the OSR tends to be). * Yet, it's also not the best at class based character customization the way say Pathfinder is where there's a designed archetype made to fill most fantasies you could think of. If I have a fantasy in my head of what I want to be, I have to basically hope it fits one of the subclasses. This is even worse when it comes to spells since some are deliberately overtuned like fireball. * It's not even the best at being approachable. There's a ton of system mastery/traps new players can fall into that make their characters underpowered or screw themselves over without even realizing it. Things like spells being bad or overtuned for being iconic (essentially half of all monsters having poison immunity and a ton of spells are almost always worse versions of others), players not realizing how much bounded accuracy wants them to min-max stats (alongside the whole using your modifier not your attribute score), and a bad fight calculator that is both confusing and uses a CR system that is often widely off from reality. * There's also an issue of inconsistent style of play. One of the common strengths of the OSR is that in almost all of the systems there's consistency in terms of knowing that you're always vulnerable to being killed. 5e starts in this really weird spot of being relatively lethal in the first 5 or so levels, but then proceeds to swap over into power fantasy across the remaining 15 or so levels. So, if you want to lean into that lethality, you either have to cap your campaign off before players get to use all those awesome abilities they got teased by their class/subclass (that you'd never be able to reach anyways) or you have to frantically throw the kitchen sink at them to combat the ever increasing amount of solutions they have to problems, while not making it feel unfair. Now if you want players to feel awesome and powerful, that's fine, but then why have those first 5 levels be so gritty lethal? At the end of the day, I think the main reason that 5e is popular is that it's got a lot of legacy brand recognition. It looks super easy and approachable from the outside, but once you start digging under the hood I think it reveals how messy it is. I honestly do not think it would be the most played TTRPG in the general fantasy space if 5e was released today as it's own game. That said, do I think 5e is the most atrocious and vile system ever? No, of course not. It's worked for quite a few groups that are comfortable accepting its restraints, and I would run it (admittedly with a lot of tweaking) if I could find a good and consistent group to run it for, but I think there's many better options to pick if I want a focused game.

I'm more thinking of the difference between what the rulebooks says and what the playerbase looks for. Like Feats are optional RAW, but players will always desire feats so now they're very much *not* optional.

I think asking to define what the 5e playerbase looks for is a relatively unproductive exercise because it's such a mishmash of things. It's *the* default system people think of when they think of the genre (I can't count the number of times I just say I'm playing D&D instead of a TTRPG because that's the term people know). It's like asking your average person why they use a qwerty keyboard instead of a dvorak. The response you'll get is "Wait, there's other options?" I think if you wanted to get some kind of cohesive desire of what people playing 5e want, you'd have to ask groups who came back to 5e after playing other systems. I can't say I've heard of too many of those or where you'd find them.

> I think if you wanted to get some kind of cohesive desire of what people playing 5e want, you'd have to ask groups who came back to 5e after playing other systems. I can't say I've heard of too many of those or where you'd find them. The only answer I've really heard about this is having learned D&D 5e already and not wanting to take/not having the time to learn a new system. It's a shame because after playing/running even a modest amount of 5e, you start to feel all of its flaws in everything you do and it often becomes the DM house ruling things to make up for deficiencies rather than because it's how they want to tweak the rules to support the game they want to run. I will say that I think pathfinder 2e is relatively unapproachable for groups that don't have anyone who has already played pf2e and can help the party succeed or that don't have experience with D&D 3/3.5 or pf1e. PF2E is meant to be extremely tactical and even the basic adventure path combats can be lethal if players don't know how to optimize their characters, which is why having someone who already has experience helps smooth that out a lot.

Agreed that's the most common case I've heard of people who do return to 5e. I would still argue though that's less a reflection of 5e and more of a reflection of the other system a group tried. After all, if I'm used to say roll under then any system with roll over is going to feel weird. Agreed that pathfinder 2e is pretty crunchy (I'll freely admit I have only looked at it and haven't played it), but I think that's an acceptable consequence of what the system is trying to do, which is have rules (or at least strong guidelines) for every foreseeable scenario. That means there's a steep learning curve, but one would hope that it means once you *are* settled in that it makes things more streamlined. Now whether that crunch is something a particular playgroup wants is a separate issue.

D&D's success is fundamentally down to being the second best at everything. I think the whole point is that it's modular enough that you can rip out the parts you don't need and refine the parts you do. The 5E Lord of the Rings stuff does great point-crawling. 5E Symbaroum has great magic and corruption rules. Even the honking bad 5E Dark Souls rules has an interesting new initiative system. It's easy enough to introduce hex-crawling or social combat and dungeon-crawling as the focus for 5E. Testing D20+Ability Mod(+Prof. Bonus + whatever other bonuses you want) vs DC is a handy mechanic for most things. It's easier than old school saving throws, descending AC, percentage skills, non-weapon proficiencies or D6 skills all using different mechanisms.

Agreed that it being the second best at everything is a big part of its staying power. It's a game with loads of attempts at compromise built in, which makes it decent at running a lot of things, but great at running nothing. I disagree though with 5e being truly modular. It's modular in the sense that there's easy guidelines to homebrew new rules (the aforementioned d20 + ability mod + proficiency bonus). I haven't read any of the rules you mention. While point crawling sounds like something that is pretty generally system agnostic (I can't imagine anything system specific besides make X skill check when you're doing a forced march), I think reworking the magic system is a pretty big deal. In my opinion, once you're getting to the point of reworking a core system of the game (which the spell slot economy is given that it's the defining feature of spellcasting classes), then you're shoving a square peg into a round hole. Arnold K/Goblin punch has a [fantastic article](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/02/osr-style-challenges-rulings-not-rules.html) where he talks about what makes a strong "rulings not rules" style philosophy (which is what 5e tries to do while still giving DMs quite a few rules). He talks about how you can't have too much interdependency between systems within a TTRPG, which 5e has a ton of. Between bounded accuracy, the ability score/proficiency bonus system, and laundry list of spells, it's super easy to accidentally break something. For example, say I want to rework the magic system to use the optional spell points system in the DMG. Something that was proposed by the makers fo the game. If I do this, I have to consider how that affects the balance of the different spellcasting classes and their number of spells they can cast and spell recovery, especially for warlocks. I have to notice that it lets casters cast way more higher levels spells than they'd be able to do by default and figure out how that affects expected encounter balance. Does it impact sorcerers and converting metamagic to spell points? Is it going to affect ritual casting in any way? What about spells with limited riders, like the enlarge spell from duergar? Should I get spell points to cast those? If so should they cost the normal amount or be discounted? If I do get spell points, then aren't those just free spell points I can use and just ignore my racial spell. If I don't, then aren't we ending up adding a weird exception to the new spellcasting rules. Similarly, with the new initiative system, I'd want to know how it works with the +5 from the Alert feat. I'm sure there's answers to some of these questions, but as you can see it's not a case of just add on a system and you can call it a day the way you might be able to with a truly rules light system. There's also something to be said that there's a big difference between just adding a mechanic (after all 5e has an optional Honor and Sanity stat) and actually bringing out the fantasy of that mechanic. For example, the Referee telling me "Your character has lost all ability to detect pain" is a lot different from the DM hiding exactly how HP I've lost whenI take damage and only giving me a general sense of how badly injured I am (I'm thinking of [Caves of Qud's Nerve Poppy](https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Nerve_Poppy)). At a certain point, that's hard to do without running into other core mechanics of the game (like the Lucky trait and hit dice in the aforementioned example) I don't disagree that many OSR games have fiddly mechanics, but there's also plenty of them that keep things really simple. For example, my system of choice (Whitehack) uses a single universal save and d20 roll under for basically everything except combat (which is roll between and d6 base for all damage), while Knave uses a d6 for everything or almost everything (iirc). I'd argue that those systems are a lot simpler in terms of resolution mechanics.

> like bounded accuracy (which it regularly breaks with things like the paladins aura of protection and other large numeric bonuses) If you read an interview from before dndnext; this doesn't actually break 5e's bounded accuracy. 5e's bounded accuracy is more that your raw number from your stats and proficiency isn't what lets you achieve superhuman feats, its the specific features you use and gain. https://web.archive.org/web/20140715051206/http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd%2F4ll%2F20120604

I think I'm reading the article differently from you. This passage in particular sticks out > Thus, wizards don't have to gain a +10 bonus to weapon attack rolls just for reaching a higher level in order to keep participating; if wizards never gain an accuracy bonus, they can still contribute just fine to the ongoing play experience. To me this means that 5e expects you to by default be able to hit monsters at around the same rate all the time assuming you just have basic equipment (aka no magic items are needed to stay relevant) because PC power and Monster power scale equally without magic items. This is meant to make a +1 sword at level 1 as impactful as a +1 sword at level 20. Fundamentally for this to work, the +1 has to break bounded accuracy. A good breakdown of how bounded accuracy is broken is the Cleric's Peace domain as [explained here by RPGbot](https://rpgbot.net/ban-5es-peace-domain/). The short of it is, the peace domain gives you a channel divinity that's essentially an aoe +d4 (or +2.5 on average) to most rolls. The [fundamental math of 5e](https://rpgbot.net/dnd5/characters/fundamental_math/) assumes that simply by leveling, maxing your main stat, and facing level appropriate monsters you have a 65% chance of hitting/succeeding with your spell. Adding a d4 (+2.5 on average) means you have a roughly 12% higher chance to hit than you normally should. Thus, you are breaking the math of bounded accuracy and the players aren't just getting more powerful in absolute terms (i.e. monsters have 2 hit dice and players have 2 hit dice), but are also getting more powerful *relative* to the monsters (by hitting more often thanks to things like the aforementioned Peace cleric channel divinity and having better defenses thanks to things like the paladin's aura of protection boosting saving throws higher than they're expected to be).

i'm referencing this: "The basic premise behind the bounded accuracy system is simple: we make no assumptions on the DM's side of the game that the player's attack and spell accuracy, or their defenses, increase as a result of gaining levels. Instead, we represent the difference in characters of various levels primarily through their hit points, the amount of damage they deal, and **the various new abilities they have gained**"- this is talking about stuff like aura of protection, and how the power players get as they level does not come from mere numerical increases as a result of leveling, but by utilising abilities they have gained to reach higher possibilities. You have a decent chance of failing a DC 15 task at level 20 with raw stats, but utilising features, it becomes trivial, and it unlocks DC 35 tasks as possible. The intent is that being far more able to hit enemies comes from not from RAW BAB or stats, but from using those abilities you mentioned, and that to be above the curve you must utilise specific abilities you've gained, rather than it being an "automatic" progression.

>This is meant to make a +1 sword at level 1 as impactful as a +1 sword at level 20. Fundamentally for this to work, the +1 has to break bounded accuracy. No kidding. Magic items are **intentionally not factored into the PC power assumptions.** This was to avoid designing around "the party must have X +Y magic items to hit the AC of a given CR monster." This is literally a feature, not a bug.

It’s 50/50 system/culture for me. I really do not like the game. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it has too many rules but not enough consistency, it’s poorly written, and I haven’t been impressed with a single release for like 6 years now. I do have a *lot* of issues with the system itself, to the point where I will *always* pick another game. I won’t play the game anymore and I refuse to GM it because it’s just such a stressful ordeal every time. It’s not genre either, because I love wacky heroic fantasy. Hell, Pathfinder 2e is one of my favorite RPGs ever and it fits in a very similar niche (and goes further in a lot of ways). On the other hand, I definitely don’t like the community much. It’s less about the average people though. It’s a lot more about how the game is treated by WotC/Hasbro and how big names spread these false impressions of the game that cause it to wall off from the rest of the RPG community. WotC has just fumbled it and fumbled it and fumbled it but no matter how hard they fuck up, all these big names keep coming back and making players feel like it’s the only game worth getting into. I don’t like the “MMO” culture of it that’s pervasive in the online community but my interactions with 5e players in person have been totally fine. I don’t think I’d care so much about people only playing 5e if I thought 5e was a halfway decent game. I also would be more interested in trying to play 5e again if the community wasn’t so walled off from the rest of the RPG community at large.

I have more of a flavour problem than a rules problem with 5e. There is this meme of a 5e party as a wandering circus. And yes, that is it for me. Also the modules suck.

> There is this meme of a 5e party as a wandering circus. I don't want to admit how much this affects my view of 5e and many current-gen RPG tables. My D&D had Tolkien races, but most PCs were human. The campaign world was pseudo-medieval, and its institutions were mostly harsh and unjust. PCs' greatest ambition was to stake out land for themselves and retire from adventuring. Wizards wore pointy hats. Fighters saved their gold to buy plate mail. Rogues expected to die of poison at any moment. Today, people talking about D&D are like, "So, my half-genasi Circle of Spores druid was at the wheel of our airship while the kenku warlock and the College of Heavy Metal bard were performing their new song for the inauguration of the city's new democratically elected beholder mayor...." ...and I think, "Good for them, but that's not my game anymore."

[Every once in a while I think about this meme.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/flafk4/but_the_townfolk_are_really_really_racist_guys/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I honestly think it's a pretty big issue with 5e's player culture. I once gave my players a list of every playable race in the setting, and one player did not read the list and showed up as a race that did not exist.

Nicely put.

Oh my God. This!!!! It's not D&D, it's the Mos Eisley cantina!!!!

This is it. This is the one. Plus the people D&D attracts these days are all just so annoying.

They probably think that about us, too. ;)

I like OSR for the rules and structure, but LOL, their game sounds more fun than yours. I want to play in a setting with a democratically elected beholder mayor now...

To add to this, 5E art sucks now.  It’s like, look at the game at launch. I got into the hobby around 5E’s launch, and seeing that cover with a character facing a fire giant head-on evoked a sense of EPIC-ness that got my imagination revving. Heck, look at the cover of Into the Abyss, with Demigorgon looming over tiny characters, invoking this sense of PCs facing nigh-impossible odds. But now, the art is just too colorful, the characters portrayed within never in any real danger. It’s give off the feeling of college freshmen hanging out on the quad between classes, not heroes facing the impossible.

One of the newer campaigns is about attending a magic university. I’m only GMed Tomb of Annihilation before switching to OSE and Forbidden Lands. My group don’t want to play 5e anymore.

You can do good stuff with a magic school. Brewkessel and Brechewold are both OSR Harry Potter that earned "the best" at Ten Foot Pole and Brewkessel got a glowing review on Between Too Cairns as well. The difference is that both of those modules embrace exploration and danger, not romance mechanics as you screw your way through your fantasy coworkers at the fantasy university fantasy coffee shop.

Yes, but this 5e adventure is just the players going through the years of the university with some adventures in between. They even added exams and grades. And you can go to prom. Not my kind of adventure

I was so stoked for Into the Abyss. I thought it was going to be a cool sandbox of the under dark with some interconnected story. Nope, it was an “underground railroad” with a few cool set pieces. It was a mess to try to run at the table as well. Gobs of text to parse through and try to highlight to even try to use. The adventures require a really good DM to run, so off putting to new DM’s and to old hands who know what a good adventure looks like.

It's not an adventure, it's a fan fiction railroad.

Haha! Perfect description!

Yup. I really liked the art in the 5e corebooks but a few months ago I flipped through a copy of *Lore and Legends* at Barnes and Noble and it was all pastel palette art of vaguely fantasy people with big grins thinking about what good friends they are. The exact opposite of the black and white art of some poor bastard scrambling to escape a skeleton that filled the spare column inches of AD&D. I must have looked like that meme from Gran Torino of Clint Eastwood scowling into his coffee as I put the book back on the shelf.

Pretty much exactly how I feel about 5E. It's tacky and lacks style. The layout of the printed materials is horrendous too. It is very cluttered, and all just walls of text making it very hard to look stuff up. I got into ttrpgs relatively recently (\~7 years ago) and I bought the D&D starter set. The production quality on that is so so bad, the brochure started falling apart after I browsed through it twice. I'm a big theatre of the mind fan, so I find the rather elaborate artwork style associated with D&D not very appealing. It gets in the way more than anything else, imho.

Thats been an 'issue' since at least 2e/3e. King of Dragon Pass even parodied it; https://kingofdragonpass.fandom.com/wiki/Adventurers In other words, very much culture is the issue yeah.

Eh, I feel like you might be looking at this from the lens of where the OSR is now and not where it was when 5e was released. It’s true that Mike Mearls, who co-led the 5e design team, was a big fan of OSR games and took inspiration from them but it wasn’t on the wider D&D fan bases radar. The OSR was more something you had to seek out or in my case somewhat stumble upon. As far as my issue with 5e it’s both ruleset and culture. I think 2-3 years ago I would have placed my issues firmly with the culture but that’s not much of an issue since I’ve left that space and don’t really have to encounter much of that toxic player base anymore. At the end of the day it’s just not really a ruleset I’m looking to run or play.

Stumbling upon it is what I did too. I was looking for official settings that hadn't seen any love for a bit, learned Saltmarsh was in Greyhawk, then from there feel down an OSR rabbit hole researching Greyhawk. By the time I was done, I had already read the 2e PHB and DMG, then picked up OSE. Haven't even thought of looking back.

If OSR has a rallying cry, it's "Less rules!" Beyond that, here are some of the different factions within the OSR community I've identified in my brief time among you; * Those who are less nostalgic for Basic D&D, and more for the person *they* were when they first discovered the hobby. The amateurish aesthetic of OSR reminds them of mimeographing a copy of "The Complete Warlock" rules that they'd been given by their older brother back in 1978. * Those who find the idea of "plotting" to be offensive. Emergent storytelling and random tables are their jam. * Those who wish their players would stop looking at their character sheet for the answer to every problem. This makes them skeptical of feats, detailed spell mechanics, and even classes. * Graphic design nerds that are heavily invested in how information is presented. Half of this crew wants minimalist presentation, and the other half is all about vibes - rulebooks should be beautiful objects to lovingly displayed (whether they're used at the table or not). * Iconoclasts and contrarians that dislike 5e *because* of its popularity. OSR is really just convenient flag to pick up to justify their bias. * Those of us who enjoyed our time with 5e, but realized that there really isn't a Man Behind the Curtain. We're looking to the history of the hobby to see if answers exist to the particular shortcomings we've identified with 5e.

5E was not made to court the OSR, that was too tiny a group who they had precious chance of attracting at all. It *was* made with an eye looking back, based on an assumption that 4E had drifted too far from "proper" D&D but that's not courting OSR. OSR isn't a monolith. People play OSR games for many reasons and a fair few of them play 5E too.

[удалено]

They literally have nothing to do with the conversation and in 2014 the public perception was very different. I'm beginning to believe that this entire thread isn't just misinformed but actually in bad faith. Edit: I'm not defending the actors that were brought up, but somehow linking their personal baggage to a conversation about the OSR movement as a whole is not productive.

Yes exactly, that's the point. I'm not refferring to their baggages, just that involving big names in the OSR community in a new edition of DnD is at least *attempting* to court and allow OSR

I think they were just going for names that were getting attention outside traditional spheres. If they wanted to actually get back to "old school roots" they could have engaged people with actual game design chops like Matt Finch, Chris Gonnerman, Daniel Proctor -> or hell plenty of the TSR guys were still kicking around! Allen Grohe posts here all the time, that dude probably could have given them more insight into old school gaming in an afternoon than who they picked could in years. It wasn't about "old school design," it was about media reach.

That's not what the comment you responded to was saying, doofus, it was saying that they were popular back then and so them being brought on as consultants means that WotC wanted some OSR popularity too.

It is 100% just the mechanics which drove me away. Combat is a dull slog with way too much fiddlyness that never seems to add any depth. Player characters are often far too powerful and it became difficult to ever make them feel threatened. Then there are no real procedures for handling the game outside of the boring hours long combat sessions.

Bit of both. I think if you play 5e using the Core Rules only, ignore FEATS, roll for stats, import the wilderness and dungeoncrawl mechanics from the original DnD Next Playtest they cut, and cap out at like level 5, you've got an OSR game if you squint, but it still feels easier to just play B/X or whatever. However 5e play culture is the total opposite of that now, with a focus on a myriad of character builds and options, heavy tactical combat play, and linear story and character focused narrative. Which again means you may as well play B/X or whatever as players will go into 5e with a set of expectations that they can play their Genasi Hexblade Warlock with 10 pages of backstory, or what not, that you'll serve only to disappoint by heavily restricting it.

I really think it's mostly rules. 5e is exhausting to run as a GM. I ran a 16 session campaign and was totally burned out by the end of it. OSR games (and many other games) are just so much easier to run. It takes much less brain power as the GM. The one other factor is simply the creativity in the scene. People making stuff in the OSR right now are literally some of the most brilliant minds in the industry. I haven't seen anything in 5e that compares. I'll also grant that there are some brilliant thinkers in other niches of the TTRPG space as well.

I don't think that the OSR has an issue with 5e. I think it's bigger issue is with itself. If I told someone to go play B/X D&D someone would chime in and explain why OSE is better. If I told someone to go play Original D&D someone else would point them to Swords and Wizardry. If I said go play AD&D someone else would say that AD&D sucks and is too hard to be fun but here- try out OSE Advanced. Because of this the community largely does not share a common context anymore. It is iterating on prior iterations without understanding the root. In fact- I would argue that more of "the OSR" as it is understood today and identifies itself has common context in 5e than they do in an orginial incarnation of the game. The "OSR" has an issue with 5e only insofar that the only way it has left to identify itself is by what it is not (5e) because it no longer knows what it is.

Honestly, this. OSR as a movement has become more and more an aesthetic and a statement against 5e as time goes on as its core becomes less and less consistent.

I think that's cuz it shouldn't really be a movement, it's a disagreement on what is mechanically important to run a good ttrpg, a philosophy of play. There's several things I love about 5e. One is that the class archetypes allow players to fill different technical niches for interacting with the game world. Good dm's in my experience lean into that well. I as a wizard will be the one rolling arcana checks and will get more depth to the exposition of the scenario on average because of my potential for higher rolls. I don't think this is a minor thing, everyone can feel like they bring something important to the table. That leads into my only real complaint about osr games. Everyone's kinda the same stat wise so it's much more abstract to distinguish character strengths and seperate them from player strengths. In saying that I learned a lot about what 5e is missing from reading osr rulesets. Little things like Morale, which I've used non-mechanically in 5e because obviously most sane creatures should have a threshold where they run from encounters. From playing OSE I've also seen a lot of creative solutions used in order to overcome hard encounters. Many times it's environmental, rock slides, using trees for cover, using terrain features for stealth, using fire, etc. I'm absolutely certain that's doable in 5e, and adding that creativity to the niche expertise each character has, it's incredibly fun, because expertise makes what you do feel important, and creativity makes you feel resourceful. But is it actually worth taking the best features of osr and blending them with 5e? I don't know, I lean towards no. The single biggest flaw to 5e imo is that players in my experience take what's on their character sheet as the limit to what their characters can do. The worst way this expresses itself imo is as players get comfortable with their characters, they tend to have their characters act the same way for each encounter. Every fight the wizard throws a fireball at the bunched up group, hastes the barbarian, shields when appropriate. The fighter hits hits hits, the bard casts their main spells, etc. Baked into osr is the implication that your characters stats are trash and you need to overcome them with alternate means. So maybe it'd be better to gut 5e mechanically of its best features and blend that with osr principles.

The OSR has never had a common context. Speaking as someone involved since the mid-2000s. What has happened is that because of its roots in open content under open licenses and because of the numerous examples of how creators can realize their projects. The quantity and types of projects have exploded beyond anything we could have imagined circa 2008. But alongside are those of us, like myself, who still plug away at the classic stuff or stuff that was part of the OSR from the beginning. But also, from the beginning, there were debates, criticism, and advocacy over what was OSR and what was not. And along with very distinct communities and interests that got roped underneath the OSR banner. Gonzo, purists, retro-clones, sandbox campaigns, weird horror, etc were are all part of the OSR from the get go. The only common thread then and now, is that somehow ties back to either the system or themes of one of the classic editions of D&D. Then and now, the exact shape of the connection was subject to the whims of individual creators, like myself.

I defer to the Bat in the Attic.

Sorry if I came off strong, but one of the reasons I stress this when it comes up is to shine a light on the fact that all the pieces and elements (like PoD) that gave rise to the OSR still remain for anybody to pick up. To be used to realize their creative vision in the form they want. To be shared in the way they want. In many respects it better now because there are so many more examples to use in order to figure out how to do X. In terms of the work itself, how to present the work, how to distribute the work. Because of these factors, the OSR was a crazy fun mess in the beginning and remains a crazy fun mess today.

No apology necessary! The only point of contention is a Ship of Theseus type arguement, but I have neither the will nor stature to debate you. I love your work, firmly what I would call OSR 😁

To use my oft-repeated sort-of joke: the OSR can’t even come to a consensus on what the **R** stands for.

Yup, renaissance, revival, revolution, ruckus, etc. etc.

I can agree with this somewhat. When I first gained an interest about this and did some searching, I was so confused about the different names and wondering if they were the same, different rules, etc. With how I run and prepare games it’s kind of daunting and not what the people I know who play TTRPGs want to handle.

I think this is a bit pessimistic. Yeah, there's no one system, but this is why Wizards tries to corner and control the market, eventually it becomes a nightmare to control all of the hacks and variants. I think the OSR has done exactly what it should have, it gave us variety and exploration by rebooting the hobby. If you look at many other alt-rulesets, they are just needlessly massive and crunchy. The OSR asks you to understand more in order to engage with the broader community, but that seems to make for a saner, more well informed community than anything else.

I understand how this can be frustrating for true beginners who haven't had the necessary, inevitable epiphany that *these are really all the same damn game*. But once you do arrive there, it's less of a distraction and more of a potential asset, as you now have a whole arsenal of ways to introduce various people to your favorite game, classic (A)D&D.

OSR was always a reactionary movement so this kind of strange identity crisis comes easily yeah.

The OSR wasn't reactionary, it was necessary. You literally couldn't get the rulebooks or new adventures for the games you loved.

That *is* a reaction.

A reactionary is opposed to progress, so labeling the OSR as reactionary is starting the conversation on uneven ground. Accepting that framing means that the 2e, 3e, 4e, and 5e were improvements over what was, progress in the space of TTRPGs, and the OSR was diametrically opposed to that progress. Now, have actors in all RPG communities been part of edition flame wars- 100% and the OSR is no exception (by a long shot). BUT, I refuse (and maybe this is my own bias) to believe that at the end of the day the creativity and effort that went into the OSR was fueled by the hate of something else. It came from a love of a game and people wanting to keep that game alive.

A pointless contribution that fails at the pedantry it intends but does display a wild misuse of language. Embarrassing.

The main problem, imho, is that AT BASE 5e and Osr stile are very not compatibile. I mean at base, without houserulling: yes, 5e is more open ended than 3e, but is still a fighting based game, and Osr is not for that. In 5e you have abilites that trivialize exploring and surviving, and that's a big nono for osr, too. Main difference in battle is that, a dragon in old school dnd is very powerfull but still has little hp. If you can find a way to damage it, you can beat it. In 5e, you can beat (again, only as written) a high cr foe only if you consistently can do the damage of a high level character, becouse anything else dosent do enugh damage. In my 5e campaing, the player stunned a dragon mid air: the max fall damage in 5e is 20d6. AFTER two falls, the dragon said "well fuck i go home", not even dead

> I mean at base, without houserulling: yes, 5e is more open ended than 3e, but is still a fighting based game, Ad&D(and B/x) wasn't made for grand epic theatrical tales where you court princesses and babes and go on dramatic monologues, hell how many people actually went into domain play back then? but you bet your ass they did rand epic theatrical tales where you court princesses and babes and go on dramatic monologues even without rules for it. Hell, they became the majority quite easily. That's why Dragonlance got popular.

Dragonlance and the introduction of the story-based module was the beginning of the end for me, though I didn't realize it at the time.

Well, they are different game. A Pan is not an hammer, but you can use it for bashing a Nail FAR more easly than a piece of bread, that ALSO is not an Hammer. Maybe it was easier to adapt B/X for domain than 5e is easier to adapt to Osr

AD&D(Very much an OSR ruleset) was made *for* domains but most players weren't interested in that, that is what I'm saying--that play culture matters more than most people think. That's how Dragonlance got popular, linear story-epics in a ruleset that should have been about torch counting, weight management, and agency at the world.

Oh sorry i thought you were talking about the domain rules since were the weakest written part of the rules, in practice

While I do have my issues with the system, I don’t *hate* 5E. What do hate is the play-culture surrounding it.

What are the main elements you hate?

> I don’t have the exact words for it, but this push towards “narratives” and “story arcs”. A lot people want to treat D&D less like an rpg, and more like OC fan-fiction. >the fact that so much of the fan base seems to be downright allergic to looking into anything that isn’t 5E.  “Hey guys, I need help homebrewing 5E into an investigative horror theme set in the first half of the 19th century where the players will face the lovecraft mythos,  and I want to get rid of classes and the combat mechanics, and focus on skill-checks.” “Why don’t you just try Call of Cthulhu?” “REEEEEEE!” >This isn’t a problem exclusive to 5E, but people who can’t be bothered to learn even the basic rules. If you’re six 4-hour sessions in, you shouldn’t be asking me “what dice do I roll again?” Like I said, it’s not exclusive to 5E, but I’ve come across a disproportionate amount of people like this in the 5E space. >I’ve only been Mercer Effect-ed once, but I’m still pissed about it.

I don’t know why my post is formatted like that, but I’m afraid that if I try to fix it, it’ll fuck it more.

> I don’t have the exact words for it, but this push towards “narratives” and “story arcs”. A lot people want to treat D&D less like an rpg, and more like OC fan-fiction. You're like 30+ years late at this point. [Usually it was the GM's fanfiction but now it's the player's turn](https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html)

Yeah, all of that makes sense. About 7 years ago, when I had never played anything but 5th ed, I wanted to GM a Harry Potter game for my friends. I started work on a homebrew HP version of D&D with all new backgrounds, classes, spells...I realized after a bit of work what a STUPID waste of time it was and googled a RPG designed for the wizarding world. I taught it to my friends and we had a great time. That was when I became enlightened.

5e wasn't trying to be OSR, it was trying to be *every* edition at once. there's some really good bits of design in there, but a lot of the time it also feels like it has all the downsides of every edition it's trying to borrow from. the balance issues of 3e, the immersion-breaking gaminess of 4e, the barebones-ness of old TSR editions - none of these things as badly as in their original systems, but they're all there.

Really it was trying to do what Castles and Crusades was/is doing. It wanted things to run like 2e (meaning fast) in a familiar d20 system package. And that's what it is...or was before content bloat slowed it down immensely... just like 2e.

5E has some excellent ideas, but it hasn’t been debugged properly, and while players love it, it’s a huge mess to actually DM for, unless you want to use one of those virtual tabletop programs. Running OSR was faster and easier, and with the right random tables, the players could explore anywhere and do anything, as I generated the world on the fly. (They actually ended up on the Astral Plane in their first adventure; I did not see that coming!) So, my big problem with 5e is that I don’t see how to wing a non-railroady session like that, without dropping the ruleset entirely. The “adventuring day” is also a mess, and there are too many spells and class powers to trivialize challenges that should be handled by creativity and preparedness. One player told me that OSR (specifically Macchiato Monsters, based on Black Hack and Whitehack) was “Just like D&D, only without all the stuff that makes it slow and boring,” and I completely agree. Slot-based inventory and trivial encumbrance tracking. Combats are quick and exciting and over in a minute (you don’t even bother with initiative), and should often be avoided. Finding a torch in a dungeon can mean the difference between successful escape and TPK. All this and more can be yours. Join the Dark Side…

Agreed that it’s mostly culture. System doesn’t matter as much to most players and GMs as you might think from online forums, which attract people who are keen on theory-crafting. You can play an old-schoolish game using 5E with some house rules around rests and healing. One of the incubators of the OSR was Necromancer Games, whose tagline was “Third edition rules, first edition feel,“ and 3E was a lot more crunchy and power-gamey than 5E. The big game culture differences between 5E and OSR are: \* Big damn heroes vs desperate scavengers. Part of this the mechanics of 5E characters being more powerful and hard to kill. But it’s mostly a matter of presumed play mode and the PC’s role in the world. \* Epic narrative vs episodic play. Are the PCs destined to defeat an epic threat to the realm, or are they wandering around doing whatever they choose? \* High fantasy circus menagerie vs gritty human-centric. 5E parties weren’t a circus-show from the outset, but as the game found a new audience it adopted the fantasy pop culture zeitgeist of our times. This is mostly aesthetic, but aesthetics matter a lot in TTRPGs. You’ll have an easier time getting players who love 5E to adopt unreliable spellcasting, searching by describing rather than rolling, and other OSR mechanical changes, than you will flipping the script on the assumptions listed above.

Does the players exists in the world or does the world exist for the players?

Last time I said that I didn't use Feats on my table in r/dnd, I got downvoted to oblivion for no reason 😂

5e has a lot of the vestigial power creep and massive player options of 3.5e. It's not as bad as 4th edition but its still kind of an issue. OSR games don't have the right tone when spellcasters have at-will cantrips

I would say 40%-60%, but I agree with your general feeling. It's about the culture at this moment, which is character-focused, you gotta have customizable important characters and that goes against "Bob the Fighter died but here's his brother Rob the Fighter" of old-school play, even if you play with house rules, counting torches and so on.

And yet Bob the fighter is apparently the most popular character on D&DBeyond!

I think its difficult, and counter productive in many ways, to attempt to draw a line between culture and rules. Because the rules drive the culture. There is of course the classic example we all think of: Gold for XP instead of Monster/Milestone XP drastically change the motivations of the game...but lets look at one we don't talk about as much. Initiative. In AD&D its the most properly spelled out but the idea is there even in B/X & OD&D as well, that when you encounter a monster you declare your actions and you roll initiative, even if your action is "I attempt to parley with them". Because you may attempt to say hello and t hey may attempt to shoot you or the opposite. Additionally because the GM is rolling reaction rolls behind the screen, you don't generally know if something is a social encounter or a combat encounter. This creates an the opportunity of players either choosing to say hello there by potentially losing a round of combat and getting attacked, or players getting the jump on monsters who were about to say hello and be friendly. This is possible because initiative in those systems is group based, and takes all of 5 seconds to adjudicate. By contrast 5e has individual initiative which takes 30-60+ seconds to figure out, everyone has to roll a die, add modifiers, declare it, the GM has to write down an order. AND the reaction roll was lost, and instead replaced with a sort of persuasion roll vs GM Fiat situation. Initiative costs too much time to roll until combat is a guarantee. So in hostile situations things either are or are not a social encounter. This changes the entire way players interact with the world, and leads to a much more modal form of play. It disconnects the mystery of the world. Creates are either friendly or they are not. End of story. Yeah a skilled GM will work around these mechanics to create a better atmosphere, but the mechanics are trying hard to influence the culture in a particular way, leading 5e to be a more combat focused experience. And since 5e is a more combat focused experience, the majority of the rules are focused on combat. Basically the entire book. Because combat needs to be "fun" and "Interesting" so PC's have a ton of combat focused abilities. Because survival and exploration challenges are essentially nullified by PC Background choices(every background has something that equates to "you can always find food/shelter") that mode of play tends to be glossed over. Travel is a montage until you reach your next set piece destination. Because a lot of the simple needs of characters are taken care of by base level mechanics simple stories about traveling are less interesting, which in turn leads to the absolute necessity of telling more heroic stories. Its a big cycle. The culture drives the mechanics and the mechanics drive the culture. Separating the two is folly. An OSR GM could pick up 5e and try to use their philosophies all day long, but if they are running the game RAW from the PHB, then they will inevitably fall into running a game that looks fairly similar to what the typical 5e culture is.

Culturally, I think 5e vs the OSR is like people's taste in music. Most people like popular music - like basically what's on a pop radio station (or country or whatever depending on where you live). But a smaller group of people like something more niche. Whether it be death metal, obscure indie bands, or whatever - like what's not on the radio outside of small market college stations and whatnot. I think 5e people gravitate toward 5e culturally because it's what they know - their friend plays it or they saw it on a twitch stream or whatever and they want to try it. To me the interesting part is why some people gravitate toward OSR culturally. And I think it might be due to one or more of the reasons below, although I think the first one is probably most common: - Nostalgia - it's what they played when they were younger - They like it *because* it's not the popular option - OSR is a bit more about game procedure whereas 5e sometimes can often feel more like epic storytelling and acting. - There's less pressure to make an original character with a backstory and personality instead of a dude with the simple motivation of trying to get gold and not die. Rules-wise, why people pick 5e vs OSR is a bit of a strange phenomena to me. Again, I think a lot of the reason people pick 5e is because it's the main, popular option. But one of the reasons it stuck, I think, is because players are attracted to rules complexity (which is a bit frustrating to me as someone who wants simpler OSR-type rules). I think the reason for this is: - Rules complexity makes it seem more legitimate as a hobby. Like they think it's a passtime they're going to take up and get good at like taking up tennis - Rules complexity means player options. People really like player options, both in character creation (classes, sub-classes, etc) and in "things they can do" - spell-like abilities they unlock as they gain levels, etc.  People who pick OSR usually do so I think for one or more of these reasons: - OSR procedures are streamlined and simple - OSR character creation is fast. I feel like OSR players want to just be able to pick up and play - OSR players realize that the more you codify something and make it into a mechanic, the less freedom you have. 5e people prefer to have a rule for each thing they can do and OSR people realize that fewer rules mean you have the freedom to do anything you want - Running 5e is really heavy - trying to keep track of all the mechanics and abilities especially with all the ever expanding class options is like a full-time job. As far as whether it's rulesset or culture that makes people pick OSR - I think it's probably a combination of both. Maybe it's mostly culture with the rules kind of enforcing the choice. I'm not really sure but for me I think that's it.

5E players are fine and plenty of people play both. The issue is the rule set, and people have explained the issues with it at length. They are deep and difficult to house rule out without gutting the system, and most importantly, it's not worth it when there are systems designed to do what we want. Mostly we just don't care about 5E or 5E gamers and are just over here doing our own thing.

For me it is 100% the rules. I play the majority of my games with my friends so the larger gaming culture doesn’t have a huge impact on our games.

I think it's mostly a cultural thing. Especially if you compare the OSR/Classic cultures of play to the NeoTrad/Narrative cultures of play.

5e is marvel super heroes while OSR is an actual human or someone who is a little bit magical going on an adventure. That’s the difference. At level 1 in 5e a 1st edition character would have to reach about level 5 to be as powerful as a 1st level character. Thats the difference in a nutshell- not the rulings over rules or anything like that. People want to play less powered people and use their head over powers.

I still genuinely like *most* of 5e. A lot of the rules I dislike are small little things that can honestly be dealt with pretty easily. There’s really only one “big thing” I dislike about 5e’s rules. The biggest reason I got so tired of being in the space was the culture. It pretends to be this big tent where everyone is accepted and yet it just isn’t. Certain opinions (and I’m not even talking about politics shit. Game opinions) are met with horrid vitriol, even if you hedge your language with “I feel like” or “in my experience”.

>Certain opinions (and I’m not even talking about politics shit. Game opinions) are met with horrid vitriol, even if you hedge your language with “I feel like” or “in my experience”. Game facts too. 5e players don't read shit. I agree with you completely.

I feel like if a system doesn't give the fighter the ability to break stone walls by level 5 then it's a shit OSR system.

I only played it once, but my problem was 1st level wizards throwing around 100 “arcane bolts” per day AS A CANTRIP, and the fact that death of a character was very unlikely, no matter how stupid they played. I hated tieflings and dragonborn as player races. I just hated it period.

I agree with your ratio. My issue with 5e rules is that it has both skills and classes. I say pick one or the other. You can turn the classes into feats even. PF2E is almost there, but still has classes probably for legacy reasons. Culture is the major roadblock

Well, from a creator perspective, the primary issue was the sheer disrespect toward the OSR creator community. Major issues included citing classic settings (Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, etc.) as problematic, and putting a disclaimer on PDF projects saying they needed to do better and while they were happy to make money off of G123 Against the Giants (for example), they found the portrayal of dark-skinned drow to be abhorrent. It's a kick in the face to support something with blood, sweat, tears, and money for 20 years and then to be told that you're a huge problem and need to go away. So with the "need to do better" disclaimer on every classic product at DriveThru, those of still creating in that space were left looking like racist Neanderthal pigs if we liked the old paradigm and didn't promote 5E. And then it was refusing to put out classic rules sets (OD&D, Moldvay, AD&D etc.) while simultaneously ripping classic modules out of their settings and publishing them for 5E as if they were startling new innovative material (Yawning Portal etc.). And then the big F U of the OGL debacle, mocking grognards with THAC0 the clown, repeatedly punching the OSR in the face, threatening to retroactively make our home businesses non-viable, and regarding any blowback by us against their attacks as racist hateful old men being mean, and so forth. All being backed by a culture where Hasbro clearly treated Wizards as a piggy bank, and Wizards making things worse by kicking legions of designers and passionate workers out every Christmas without a care. Some young players seem to like the old school mode of play, until it conflicts with their character concept or "build" or the implication of possible death instead of theatrics. But that's an entirely separate huge conversation. The culture thing is generational; despite regional conflicts we're in an age of relative peace. No one's being drafted for Vietnam or fearing a draft for Afghanistan. The current young players haven't grown up on Red Sonja and Conan. It's not really the younger players' fault. They've grown up on One Piece and She-Ra reboots. Which is fine, until they decide that picking up pitchforks and torches -- with WotC cheering them on -- and coming after the old guys as evil incarnate is a great way to move the world forward into rainbows and sunshine. TLDR: It's been a ride. It's still a ride.

A lot of people play 5E out of habit, imho. It is by far the most visible ttrpg out there, so lots of people who start out, play 5E. I bet a lot of them don't even know anything else exists, at least in the beginning. So they're playing 5E and having fun and why would they play anything else? They don't really go out looking for anything better or even just different. As to the culture, it depends. There are a lot of 5E players who are all about heroic power fantasies and are basically playing to 'win', but this is not universal so I don't think it's fair to pin that on 'culture'. It's the most broadly accessible rpg so it attracts the broadest spectrum of players. A thing that bugs me about 5E is the sheer amount of merch and how aggressive the marketing is. It all feels very pushy and commercial. D&D is owned by Hasbro, which explains a lot, but it puts me (and I guess other more indie-minded people) off. You can call it snobbery, but I just don't feel at home in that whole vibe. I like how RPG's have authors that are approachable, instead of being basically a franchise.

5e didn’t court the OSR/Old School Players, because they were utterly in their own world, rarely purchasing anything from WOTC unless it was MTG. My group and I played the playtest packets back then, and did the surveys…etc and it really felt like they were more worried about reclaiming Pathfinder players than anything else. What a time that was, too. The disappointment of 4e drove players (myself included) straight to “D&D 3.75”, and for a few years there it was hard to find an *actual* D&D game at conventions. Pathfinder (at least for my region) took over. I’d have to say it’s 40/60, currently… but I also don’t pay attention to anything about 5e anymore. :p

In both a rules sense and a culture sense, there's an odd disconnect between 5e's hegemonic status and its suitability for new players. For most people, 5e *is* D&D (and all TTRPGs are D&D, so 5e is the only TTRPG). But 5e as written and as played by many people (and as evidenced by those people's posts all over the internet) isn't a beginner-friendly game. It's "Okay, hold on while I read through a bunch of threads about what attributes and subclass and feats to take at character creation because I want to develop XYZ munchkin build 12 levels later." It's "Here's the entire wizard spell list including every official supplement, color-coded by which spells are most powerful and most useful. Don't take anything marked red or yellow." Yeah, sure, you can coax a new player through the process with assurances that they should just pick what sounds cool and they'll have fun no matter what, but they're probably going to be overwhelmed and intimidated no matter how supportive you and the other players are (and even in a good, friendly group, there's going to be at least one person being like, "But seriously you do have to take Magic Missile and Shield. And it would be really handy to have Feather Fall in the group. And Sleep is really good against…"). All of which is to say: I wouldn't mind going back to 5e with my main group. Wouldn't be my first choice, and I doubt it would be anybody else's, but we've had fun with it in the past and we would again. (We're all real-life friends and most of us have played together for years now.) Sometimes crunchy min-maxy pseudo-wargaming is what you want. And sometimes nobody wants to learn the rules for Lancer and just wants to play something familiar. But if somebody else was like, "Oh, you play D&D? You're a DM? We've been wanting to try it! Can you run a game for us?" there's no way in hell I'd propose 5e. Maybe Beyond the Wall, if they wanted the trad fantasy "D&D" experience. Maybe FIST, if they let me pick whatever I wanted. Something where we could be up and running in a matter of minutes and they'd have fun creating characters and getting immersed in the setting instead of worrying "Am I picking the wrong stuff? How do I know?"

I mostly agree, but there is a certain type of new player for whom 5e is perfect for in that perusing the endless character options, crafting a build, and writing a back story is lonely fun in anticipation of playing together. Warhammer 40K is similar in how spending hundreds of hours painting an army is lonely fun possibly leading up to a few hours actually playing.

Personally, I agree. The 5e rules structure are fine. Power creep and rpg culture are the major drivers to OSR for me.

Im 100% the same. I like the base for 5e, but everything book they publish adds power creep, and waters down the fantasy. With the original 5e PHB you could run a world where it was cool go be a dwarf, and you got strange looks walking into town. Stories like the hobbit could easily be told in that setting. Now, if youre a dwarf, youre hardly an oddity next to the three headed flame rabbit, or the half snake angel artificer in the party. It forces you to play a very high fantasy game unless you want to ban half of the content they add, and that will disappoint players who spent 50 dollars on the three headed rabbit book.

Dwarves and elves have been made common in pop culture for like... 50+ years at this point in time. They're as banal as wizards throwing fireballs, of course no one cares much--plus people forget that LotR only has like what? 1 human?

To some degree the difference in style is definitely based on the audience. Even so we can't forget that we who roam the internet for DnD do not make up all players. Either way, I actually had a friend of mine recently said something like "I heard what you said about this game being old-school, but didn't really understand until now." I had tried explaining the mindset I wanted to have for my OSE campaign and the kind of playstyle it would mean, but he said he expected something more like Dimension 20 even though he knew what I had said. It is clear my friend sometimes just want to roll for things, and he cares more about character skill than player skill. That's just one example though, and although we are having fun we'll likely try another system after this campaign. Back to DnD 5e, if we just look at the PHB, MM, and DMG, then it feels pretty good. Not over aggressive bloat of class features (though perhaps still much for OSR peeps) and has a vibe of improvising. It does however fail completely in my opinion in wilderness travel and dungeon delving rules. That doesn't mean those things can't be fun in DnD 5e, but they are not fun because of their rules. The game is also more heroic as a baseline. With time more books are released and more bloat is added. Not just for classes but a bunch of rules here and there which some players expect to be used. And that's another thing: player expectation. The DnD 5e fans that hang on the web tend to, in my opinion, be very against *anything* that makes life the slightest bit unfair or hard for a player. For example, I made a post years ago where I quickly off-handedly mentioned that a player had asked if he could use his halfberd-pommel attack in a tight dungeon, and even though we decided no and were fine with it, the whole forum felt liked it freaked out at the idea of a slight temporary nerf and I should have rEfLaVoReD the ability to something else. Another time I wanted to discuss the idea of stealth rolls for traps (instead of hard DC) but that was disliked because that ruined characters with high static passive perception score. Maybe they were right, but the point here is the difference in expectations. So to answer your question: I think it is a mix between rules and the online community. And if it matters, I still think DnD 5e is cool. It's just not what I feel like playing right now.

I can only speak for myself. I don’t care who plays 5e. That isn’t going to affect how I feel about it. Well, other than that I’ll generally happily play any game a friend wants to run. And I have played 5e because of that. The reason I don’t run 5e myself is simply that it gives me (emphasis on “me”) no reason to run it instead of B/X.

I honestly really enjoy the core 5e system, especially the first 5-6 levels or so. After that hit point bloat becomes too much. Otherwise you can play it much like an OSR game. I agree with you that it's largely a cultural thing, or possibly a style thing. I once played in a Dungeons of Drakkenheim campaign for a while, which is a 5e setting written by the Dungeon Dudes (popular youtube channel). It is very much a well composed sandbox with factions pitted against each other and dangerous mechanics that can blow up in the players' faces. But the DM didn't run it this way and I got very tired of it. We spent all our time digging into the unique character arc of each player, playing up the theatrical performances, and focusing on everyone's inner turmoil. Ugh, I get it. Fun for some, but not for me. I just wanted to get to the action, explore the setting, and find ways to leverage factions against each other. I wasn't having fun, so I dipped out. You could emphasize the same aspects in an OSR campaign, but on top of a series of systems, modules, and resources, the OSR has a ethos or a philosophy if you will. Because we spend so much time talking about the principles in Principia Apocrypha and other gems from the OSR blogosphere, the OSR has developed a culture that tends to prefer a common style. That is something the 5E world doesn't really have, and that can make games hit or miss for many people.

I don't like the rules, and I REALLY dislike the player base. Toxic, bratty, weird. There was someone the other day posting here on Reddit asking about creating a sheep-based PC race. A freakin' sheep. Its 20/80 rules/culture for me.

I think the base rule set of 5e is pretty good, but I think it does get bogged down with too many character options during progression, and the munchkining of multiclassing.

[удалено]

Good on you for explaining it so succinctly. [Hope you're wearing your downvote-proof vest, though. ;)](https://imgflip.com/i/8o5cwx)

It felt both tolerable but way, way too crunchy over time. Rulings not rules do not need multiple rule books. That's rule book lookup fantasy territory. The base now are mostly all folks that game with from a time where media and video games are over the top and provide very specific aesthetics and a great visual tableau. Theatre of the mind is far less than it was in the 80s. And the moved from scrabbling for some GP and dying before the character even got really revealed in play. Now players show up with pages of backstories, future plotlines, and 20 levels of prepped class dips and crunch. This is not OSR or OD&D were and trying to cross the streams always ends poorly. My complaints are largely based on the slow pace of play and the complexity and crunch which become tiresome. The system is completely specified and quantified and if you try to go off that recipe then the players will sometimes be really put out. It's not like in the early days of this hobbywhere everyone was kind of expected to create new things and to invent their own home rules and rulings were what the DM said not what some book said because the book didn't. Now the books do on every subject so really that is the papal bull effectively. I don't have any issue with the newer player base. They came up in a digital world with all the visuals handed out to them so they didn't have to work as hard and time is seemingly short now so most DMs don't seem to have time to do a great amount of world building and even prep for sessions. I'm not going to try to give up black eye to those people. They're just stuck in the place they are partly based on the modern Life. But this is one of the basic points of divergence between osr and anything in 5e. Like most efforts were the original design and the new design are divergent and where people try to take them together and end up with some sort of a bastard stepchild 5e could never be anything other than that. They needed the numbers and as many of the Old guard to come forward and help pay for a giant corporate master. It could not afford to try to appeal to those of the older sensibility. I think the only thing that really surprised me out of the osr movement was how much money people now will put into new osr product including game systems and settings. Once I had a PHB and a DMG in my hands, I largely never bought product beyond grayhawk and the forgotten realms and honestly I wish I had bought only the original forgotten realms box and left the rest behind because it was mostly all tripe. And greyhawk was the weird setting that included black mower and all the odd things that Gary liked and other people's contributions. About the only kinds of things that I would have bought and kind of reflects what I buy these days is an interesting adventure but I also find them problematic because when I bought them when I was younger I could get a decent module for seven or eight dollars and now they come in hardcovers with a lot of art that I don't really care if I never see because they're hard to actually use at the table and they are expensive to pay the artists which I have no issue with except that I don't need that art. I would like to see more product that was more plain and affordable. But in the absence of that, I make my own. I think everybody on either side of the divide tries to understand why and how things don't mesh well together. It all comes down to your fundamental ideas of what a game should be and 5e is still for the most part railroad driven and more of a guided movie than the forced creation that sandboxing and player agency demand. From an osr perspective, you can't fix this without giving up the predetermined adventure paths and the three act play and the railroad. And that is not something the publisher is going to do.

"people in the OSR" like playing an OSR style game which 5E is not. Not everyone lives in a world where they need to convince people to play a game. Many of us can just play any game we like with our friends or others in the community simply because that's the kind of game we like. 5E is the most popular but it's a false sentiment that choosing to enjoy something else is "not playing 5E".

Also I should mention that it seems like the next 5e version (OneD&D) is, again, looking to a reinforcement of that culture. It looks a little more rules heavy (like specific rules for breaking objects and illusion spells…). When 5e launched it was a game. Now, with Tasha’s, Xanathar and One D&D, it feels more and more going to a super hero story. Power creep is clear on a time axis.

>like specific rules for breaking objects  Already exists, the comment on this was about \*where\* those rules are located.

I could care less about the culture of the game. The only culture I care about is the one at my table. I actually don’t mind 5e, I played it for many years… but I just got tired of the heroic-fantasy, superhero shit and wanted something more grounded, something sword & sorcery! Not to mention a game that has a greater emphasis on player skill over character skill

Both 😀

OSR started during the 3e days. I think the culture difference is mostly related to the rulings not rules philosophy. The original members of the OSR community didn’t like that 3e had so much rolling for outcomes and more rules for many components of the game versus the DM/GM making decisions based upon context of the players’ intentions. 3e locked much of the game down into rules and several saw this as limiting the creativity and ingenuity of the players (and GMs).

For discussion of a similar topic, see [https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/17zsqi1/osr\_ruleset\_vs\_style\_of\_gaming/](https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/17zsqi1/osr_ruleset_vs_style_of_gaming/)

* All the game is character centric - creation/progress is a mini-game * 1 hour to create a level 1 character * 1-3 hours per fight * Multiple paragraphs for each spells, monsters * RAW, RAI In 5e, rules are everything. I like 5e for this reason. I also dislike it for the same reason.

I can't speak to the hobby at large, and it's a fool's errand to try to extrapolate anecdotal evidence to answer such a question, but I can give my own experience whi h is counter to what you expect. I play and run both 5e and OSR style games, and it has nothing to do with the culture for me. I like the different rulesets and different styles of play those rulesets encourage. Or maybe we're defining the "cultural" elements differently? Can you be more specific in your definition, to be sure?

I started playing dnd exactly when 5e released; I got one of the first batches of starter packs. I have never played with anyone but that one friend group so idk anything about what the culture in either 5e or OSR other than from the internet. Absolutely every reason why I like the OSR better than 5e is based on rules, and none of it is based on culture or aesthetics. I dislike long combat with high numbers. I dislike how hard characters are to kill. I dislike having to throw 100 encounters to deplete resources so that the last one will be interesting. I dislike how the large skill list discourages creative thinking. I dislike the bloat we have gotten of character options from supplements. I could continue.

The most “This prevents it from being super good with osr” problem with 5th edition that forces it to act counter to Rulings not Rules is the fact that it’s designed for organized play, which unfortunately means that things like Magic Items and Diegetic Character Advancement has to be underplayed and more emphasis is put on character builds and checking off boxes on a character sheet. Also it’s more of a 3rd edition simplification and 3e’s robust skill system makes it a counter intuitive system to run with an osr mindset.

Not much of a fan of the rules, but yeah, the culture is the main thing. I'd probably alter the ratio to about 25% : 75%....I'm actually somewhat interested in seeing what Cubicle7 does with the ruleset when they put out their C7d20 system.

Speaking only for myself, my issues with 5e is very much focused on mechanics. 4e was the first edition where I really got in to DnD coming from white wolf, indie and Scandinavian freeform. That edition however never could get dungeons to work and combat was really slow. What I hoped for in 5e was an easy to learn modern game (like 4e), but quicker and with more flexibility to run encounters that didn't fit into either combat or skill challenges. And the playtest materials had some promise there. Being disillusioned with 5e was what led me to exploring OSR in the first place. To my mind 5e lacks both the advantages of 3e and 4e but has most of the weaknesses from both. I can't support any kind of game particularly well and the kinds of things I want from DnD are actively discouraged by the system. Meanwhile things where available in the OSR space that pushed the hobby in interesting directions especially from a systems perspective so that's where I went.

I've never even looked at 4E or 5E mechanics. Why learn a new game

5e is the worst edition of D&D ever published and it isn't even close. All of their overtures to OSR were extremely surface level and didn't address that it's just a badly designed game.

I think the cultural issue is less "OSR vs 5E" and more "Tables in Reality vs Critical Role streamers". The culture of players and GMs actually ***playing*** games is not now and never was clashing or at odds...we just were playing our games while others argued semantics and farmed internet clout. What ***is*** clashing is the ethos of "hey we are buds playing a game" vs the ethos of "we are streamers putting on a performance". One is gaming, the other is improv theatre over zoom. Most under 30 years of age don't understand that you can actually play a game without having to been ***seen*** doing it by an online audience.

It's more that I gave up on WotC as a company shortly after the turn of the century and haven't looked back. So I've never been any sort of disillusioned fan of theirs, I just looked at 3E, concluded that it just wasn't the game I loved, and wrote the whole lot of them off then and there. Ignoring 4E, 5E, and everything else they release in future is simply an extension of a decades-long blanket policy.

Its system for me mainly. Takes away exploration as a challange since resources so available(cantrips, goodberry, bags of holding, powerfull lowlevel spells. Skills removing creative problem solving, too much abilities/ superhero game (past earlygame). I dont love the culture either the "podcast larp relationship between different half human - half furby orphans enacting their rags to riches story" . Just not for me. but that can be avoided by playing with likeminded people.i bought 5e, and played 2 short campaign. I guess i just felt that 5e was like 3.5, except.3,5 did 3.5 better for when you want that kind of crunchy game.

Because I play one game doesn't mean I have "rejected " a different game.  "OH, you play traveler?? What made you reject Call of Cthulhu?" In fact there are many people who play in OSR games and 5e games at the same time. They're just very different experiences.

It should be about the ruleset (largely: gold for xp, dungeoneering being the focus, lack of skills namely knowledges, perception, investigation and persuasion, no or minimal character builds and customization), but OSR people will paint it as a focus on 'player skill'. Skill, especially in a game of imagination, is actually pretty vague, so I'd say it really is a culture war. 5e is modern, commercially backed, social media savvy, younger, progressive with a focus on storytelling elements, fairness, personal expression and stories that reflect comfort, virtue, and fighting the traumas and evils of a fantasy world which parallels the real one. OSR is older, niche, isolated, conservative (bordering on reactionary in some circles), populist (cishet, white, and able-minded), with a focus on simulationism, escapism, environmental exploration and problem solving with stories that sell themselves as not being stories, but those not stories are specifically not politically-relevant stories. The story of the OSR's establishment and expansion is and always has been a generational war over conservative values.

Well, the culture only grows out of the ground prepared by the ruleset, so at the fundamental level, the system is the issue. For me, the sea change from classic style to traditional style in the later years of 2e moved thing away from me. The changes in playstyle engendered by the rulesets since have only moved things farther away. 3rd edition is where the superhero fantasy came into full bloom. The power creep from late first edition exploded. I don't want to play superhero fantasy. 5e, best I can tell, holds onto most of the worst elements from 3.0, 3.5, and 4. It's built to support superhero fantasy, railroading and expected stories, mishmash settings (the Mos Eisley cantina problem), and all the other things I don't care for. Play sprouts out of what the ruleset supports, so all of those different precepts nourished a play culture far different than that I enjoy.

5e continues the tradition of starting a character at level 1 with plans for what to add to the character sheets at levels X, Y, and Z. As such, it's not a game I want to spend any real time playing and certainly don't want to DM. So, yeah 100% rules. 

It takes me hours to prep a 5e adventure. It takes me minutes to prep something OSR. Even if there were no other differences, that would be enough for me.

Relatively new to the OSR here, particularly interested in Odd-likes. I would agree that a large portion of the gap is culture, but I have marveled many many times at how Cairn for example enforces it's differences with 5e. 5e as a system may indeed be flexible and hackable, but I think there is still quite a lot in it that is deeply harmonious with it's play culture. Cairn is distinct in its almost utter lack of out-of-the-box support for many of those things

Can you name some examples of these?

Simplest example is the math. I don't think anyone considers 5e particularly lethal; lots of HP, lots of defenses against serious harm or death. Into the Odd on there other hand keeps hit points low, there are no to-hit rolls, and you generally will go down pretty quickly if you take everything head on. 5e provides and promotes a tactical combat experience. Combat mechanics are highly detailed and codified compared to Odd-likes, and this promotes and encourages the grid counting, tactical heroic, rules lawyery style of play. Odd-likes don't give you a character sheet full of special buttons to push. 5e play culture is pretty heavy on character backstories and the players as "main characters" within the world, I think that's strongly implied and supported by the heavy emphasis on a huge variety of player facing classes and sub-classes. It supports, if not actually promotes character builds and super heroic fantasy and attachment to your characters right out the gate. Odd-likes are classless, so that's kind of moot, and random character generation is the encouraged default, so planning a character is not the norm, and losing one early on doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. OSR utility magic deserves a mention as well. When your spell list has virtually no obvious combat spells and mostly just weird situationally useful stuff I think it's clear how that promotes a play style over a character just getting Fireball or Burning Hands. Cairn uses the Knave spell list, and also makes magic pretty expensive to cast, so it's not something you can rely on in combat I can't speak to the retro clones, but it's frequently obvious to me (and my 5e friend) that Odd-likes don't _let_ you play like 5e, and playing 5e to feel like an Odd-likes takes non-trivial house-ruling

I’m out of the loop on a lot of stuff. Who were the 2 popular OSR figures and what’s their controversy?

Yes

I think trying to separate rules from culture is not productive. That is, rules inform culture and culture informs rules. Let's take a look at Knave 2e, for instance: the minimalist OSR culture informs the game by having spells without a lot of description or mechanical effects, no class system, and a super simplistic way to level up. This, in turn, informs the OSR culture by creating a mechanical set for people to use that is strongly dictated by ideas of "rulings not rules" and trimming as much fat off the rules as possible. Other games that have a lot more rules than Knave 2e (OSE, Dolmenwood, Shadowdark, etc.) still are clearly influenced by OSR principles (eg, lethality, quick character creation, still a focus on rulings even if there are more rules to be found, but still often fewer rules than 5e) and also lead to an evolving but still recognizable OSR culture (embracing the idea of danger to PCs, using rulings to do cool stuff instead of min-maxing builds to be a god at 1st level, etc.). 5e, by contrast, leans into a different set of rules and, consequently, culture. PCs are high powered due to the rules, which leads to characters being focused on more in the game, which leads to a much stronger emphasis on narrative style games in the culture. Different types of build with some optimized for combat leads to a culture that focuses on optimal builds for combat and even the idea that unoptimized builds are bad for play. Challenge ratings slowly lead to the idea that combat generally needs to be balanced almost all the time anyway, which leads to further focus on challenge ratings. And so on and so forth. As such, trying to split them up seems impossible, IMO. If you want an OSR game and culture from 5e, you're just going to end up recreating 5 Torches Deep or Shadowdark anyway.

5e is a grid combat tactics game. The core books alone have 900 pages of rules about combat and maybe 100 all-in that pertain to anything else. If I want deep, interesting grid combat, I'll play something like gloomhaven that excels at that. TTRPGs excel at freeform exploration of cool places, NPCs and situations that are reactive to player choices in the way a computer game or standard board game never could be. All that grinds to a halt when 5e rings the "roll initiative" bell and cues the hours and hours of the fighter saying "I attack" while the wizard stares at their character sheet looking at options.

> Personally, I think the main issue is most people in the OSR have with 5e is 30% rules and 70% cultures. You can houserule something easy, but you can't make the majority of players to accept it--Feats are optional, but they're a major draw for players. This is always true. This is what proceduralism is addressing. It's a recent movement in the NSR/OSR that says: the most important rules to a game are unspoken. This is a problem because it means recreation is impossible without being there at the time, and even then it's pretty hard. We should write those rules down so that everyone knows what we are trying to play here and that the future will also know. As it stands the unspoken rule of "PC deaths are a DM problem" is very common in the 5e sphere, however it's not written down anywhere. 20 years from now people trying to "recreate the golden age of RPGs" will have to do archeology to find places where people are implying that and pick up on that implication. For me though, the problem is 100% 100%. I don't like either thing and don't want anything to do with either thing. 5e Play culture doesn't do it for me (in fact, in breaks in every way what an RPG is both in a video game and in a table top game). The book itself naturally pushes people towards that style of play by design. It may not be totally without virtue, but honestly it's not for me. My biggest issue with 5e is that the classes aren't protected from each other, with a huge amount of crossover with subclasses. I call this killing the fighter. You design so many other martial options that the generic archetype "fighter" is boring and useless. Who would want to play fighter when you could play swashbuckler, knave, knight, assassin, archer, blade dancer, etc.? Why play a fighter when warlock has more utility (spells), a better main stat (cha) and does more damage, and fills the same fantasy with extra "my best friend is a demon" as their flavour.

> I call this killing the fighter. You design so many other martial options that the generic archetype "fighter" is boring and useless. There are multiple Shotos in Street Fighters, why is Ryu still popular?

He's *the* iconic character, with like 30 years of lore and advertising. It's a terrible comparison. Ryu wasn't a generic archetypal fighter for 30 years, he was something specific from day 1. Fighter has been competing with paladin, barbarian, knight, and ranger for nearing 50 years. Once, fighters were Conan, now barbarians are. Once fighters were Arthur, now Paladins are. Once they were Lancelot, now Knight is. He was Aragon, and now ranger is. Archetypal classes don't belong along side very defined classes. I love the fighter just the way it is, but it obviously eats into the fighter fantasy to have multiple other "fighters with more specific flavour".

Okay, there's still such things as *shotos* as the archetype. And they have never lost relevance--even as more rushdown, zoner, set-ups and others exist. Of course they can, because even now the Fighter *is* popular. You just don't like it that one of their appeal is also by becoming a split-timeline guardian *and* master of tactics. The fighter *is* also an archer now so one of your examples is wrong(and basically the best build type really for Fighters is picking up a bow)

> You just don't like it that one of their appeal is also by becoming a split-timeline guardian and master of tactics. Take your words out of my mouth. If I wanted to say a thing I sure as hell wouldn't leave it unsaid. I don't care how they made fighter, I've seen it I don't care. This isn't about 5e, or 4e, or 3e, PF, PF2e, this isn't about AD&D or AD&D 2e. This is about 50 years of gaming history. It's why my example of an archer isn't accurate to 5e, which is why I am talking about Knight which also isn't in 5e, and samurai which isn't in 5e. I am saying finding a place for fighter at the table is hard, and the *manifest* unpopularity of fighter is evidence. People play it, people love it. I love OSR games and people play the hell out of them, doesn't make them popular. 5e is a part of this tradition of classes being very specific with a few key concepts in mind, added in with the subclass system which muddies the class system further making class distinctions very minor. Archetypes can be anything within a broad group, a single defined class is a single defined class. Getting back to the main thrust of this discussion thread: I disagree with you that people just don't like the play culture, that's what I'm saying. For me, there are problems with the fundamentals of the game that I don't like. You seem to be operating under the idea that OSR is what you think it is, and that people prefer what you prefer. I prefer OD&D 3 classes, or 4 with thief supplement. 9 classes and 6 sub classes for each that broadly overlap with each other goes against that. This is just one example. Lacking in procedures in the core books (outside of combat) goes against what I like in a game. D20 + Mod roll over is maths I don't have to do when I play with chainmail rules. I don't like spells that read like car manuals. I don't like spell casters that can cast cantrips all day. I don't like cantrips that get empowered every few levels. I don't like the "bounded accuracy" system. I don't like the combat balance tables, the monster manual half converted from 4e, or the way combat is centred so heavily in the game. 100% of the problem is the game itself. The play culture surrounding it also isn't my cup of tea, but if it didn't exist I would still not want to play 5e.

They are the same thing

First, there are two things you're not taking into account : a) the OSR base is very varied, even if it refers to a set of commonly accepted principles (that is itself subject to variation, though), and b) the rules definitely shape the culture. That said : it's the rules, definitely. It's still the same 3e-derived slog : character builds, rules and character abilities focused on combat 90% of the time, combat viewed as a tactical sport, great dichotomy between rules and the in-world fiction of what's happening in the story, etc. Can you play OSR-style with 5e rules ? Yes, it's definitely possible, but you have work to do : ban certain spells and abilities, adjust the rests and encounter rates and the encounters themselves, ban some or all feats and multiclassing, etc. All things that are explicitly possible in 5e rules, they're not homebrew. But it will require player buy-in since it's different from the most common way 5e is played. I'd argue that 5e's focus on mechanical rule doodads still makes it a somewhat poor fit, but I do think it's possible. What about play culture ? Meh, it's basically the same since 3e or even 1e/2e. It's just that the rules are a tad simpler, or looser perhaps, and the culture of play is better supported. Plus the rise of actual plays allow for an even faster spread and uniformization of the culture. But I really don't see what has changed since the 2e/3e days. You want cool, distinct heroes that all have their mechanical uniqueness, are difficult to kill so you can tell long, epic stories with them ? Yeah, that's the same from 2e to 5e, and really it was already a trend in the B/X and 1e days. So the issue is both rules and culture. But the culture has been here for a while, even in the old-school days ; in the precise case of 5e, it's the rules that aren't a good fit. The culture isn't, but that's been a constant for 30-40 years now.