Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - AD&D 1e v OSE

 

OSR Lane Final

This one feels like a heavyweight championship all on its own. It's also a rematch, forty-odd years in the making, of the AD&D vs BECMI argument that split the gaming world in the early eighties. I was on the AD&D side then. I looked down my nose at Basic D&D because I already played Advanced D&D. The irony of where I've landed is not lost on me.

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AD&D 1e

AD&D 1e has a mini-game for almost everything. Figuring out the right set of rules for your table has always been part of the fun. THAC0 takes a lot of heat, but Weapon Speed Modifier and weapon type versus armor class were there too. Poison types, mining rates, construction costs: more options than you could keep in your head, and a specific pleasure in finding the combination that worked for your table.

That toybox is also a relationship. Decades of memories live inside those rules. Kreega Two-men-tall, the half-ogre fighter who rampaged through my Riverton Campaign. Maine, the spoon-flinging halfling thief from Hochheim, just concluded. Those characters ran on this chassis and couldn't have existed anywhere else.

AD&D rewards the kind of player who wants to go deep. The mini-games, the subsystems, the Dragon Magazine expansions: all of it is there for the table willing to dig.

I find myself looking back at AD&D the way you look at a place you grew up. The memories are vivid and the floorplan is still in my bones. I know where everything is, even the rooms I never used.

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OSE

OSE is slim, fast, and fun. The writing is clear and well organized, which is not something Gary Gygax was ever accused of. You can run from the page without translation, find what you need without hunting, and hand the book to a new player without apology.

The design choices compound over time. Customizable thief skill advancement from Carcass Crawler is exactly the kind of thoughtful addition that shows OSE isn't just a restatement of the old game. It's a refinement.

OSE is also the common language of OSR gaming right now. When the community writes adventures and supplements, this is the chassis they're writing to. That portability means everything you run in OSE connects to a living ecosystem of material.

I'm looking forward to rewriting some of my earlier campaign material into OSE. There are little gems waiting underneath the scaffolding, and I want to find them.

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The honest case for the loser

AD&D has a special place in my heart, and I find myself looking there for ideas more often than I expected. The mini-games, the subsystems, the sheer appetite the game had for everything: none of that goes away. If you want advanced play and don't mind the scaffolding, AD&D is still the answer. And if you're having fun and not hurting anyone, you're playing the right game the right way for you. That was true in 1979 and it's true now.

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The pick

OSE, and it comes down to where I am right now. Lighter systems, higher portability, and the promise of new memories crafted with friendlier rules. AD&D gave me Kreega and Maine and forty years of table. OSE is going to give me whatever comes next. The little gems that a little less scaffolding unveils are worth finding.

That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - AD&D v Shadowdark

 

AD&D 1e is the great-grandfather of everything else in the sweet sixteen: crunchy, sprawling, and alive in ways that modern players often miss entirely.

Shadowdark is modern D&D trimmed down, lightened up, and given a grimy old-school wash. It really hums at the table.

The oldest game in the bracket against the newest. One built the toybox. The other figured out how to ship it lighter.

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AD&D 1e

The system tries to do everything, and what it didn't cover out of the box arrived month after month in Dragon Magazine. It was an extraordinary time to start gaming. The fiddly bits accumulated into something you could grab and play with, keeping the parts that mattered to your table and leaving the rest in the book. Weapons versus armor class might never have come up at your table. Domain level play might have been the whole point. The game was different everywhere it landed.

The ease with which AD&D absorbed science fantasy still impresses me. Gamma World crossovers, technology rolls, figuring out how a laser pistol worked in a world of swords and spells. The game had an appetite for everything and the chassis to hold it.

Domain play remains one of the great unrealized promises of modern D&D. A high-level fighter attracting followers, building a castle, developing the land around it: that's a whole second game waiting inside the first one.

Wilheim the Paladin fell from grace consorting with the wrong companions. His god came to him in a dream and gave him a quest: take the foul cloak to the sea's teeth three days east, wash it in the water, burn it with wood carried from the ruined shrine. Bring one companion pure in heart and true. Wilheim chose Wulfgang, the guard dog. He fought goblins and a hagborn and barnacle-crusted skeletons rising from the waves. He burned the cloak. He heard his god's voice again that night. He rode home. That quest ran on the AD&D chassis and couldn't have happened anywhere else.

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Shadowdark

The roll to cast mechanic isn't unique to Shadowdark, but the implementation is good and the pressure it creates is real. Spellcasters make decisions differently when the spell might not come.

The old-school wink is there without being overwhelming. Play a goblin spellcaster. Feel the lethality accumulate. The OSR pressure is on, but delivered in a way a modern player can understand without feeling ambushed by save-versus-die.

That restraint is the game's real achievement. It knows what it is and doesn't oversell it.

Our opening sessions of Shadowdark went through the entire set of pre-gens in a couple of sessions. The lethality arrived fast and without apology. We started over with new characters and kept going. That willingness to start over, and the lightness that makes it feel fine rather than punishing, is Shadowdark working exactly as intended.

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The honest case for the loser

Shadowdark does something AD&D genuinely can't: it gets a modern player to the table fast, running old-school pressure, without a week of rules reading first. The pre-gen massacre in our opening sessions felt earned rather than arbitrary, and that's a harder trick to pull off than it looks. If you want to introduce someone to what OSR play actually feels like without handing them three hardcovers and a stack of Dragon magazines, Shadowdark is the answer.

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The pick

AD&D 1e, and thirty years of memories made it inevitable. Shadowdark is a better on-ramp. AD&D is a better destination. The toybox, the domain play, the appetite for everything from dungeon crawls to planar quests to Gamma World crossovers: all of it adds up to a game that shaped everything that came after it, including Shadowdark. Wilheim and Wulfgang walked to the sea's teeth and back on this chassis. That's not nothing. That's everything.