![]() You’ll notice the character sheet is pretty basic there aren’t any skills on there, and very few class features or racial bonuses. The most obvious rule change, and the thing that really got me interested in the first place, are the combat rules. ![]() More often than not when playing OSR RPGs, you’ll be unlearning habits you’ve picked up over years of play, rather than taking on tons of new rules. These give a great overview of how different something like OSE feels from modern games like 5E. Finch or Principia Apocrypha by Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin and David Perry. The first thing I’d recommend doing before playing, especially if you’ve only tried more modern fantasy RPGs, is to read something like the Old-School Primer by Matthew J. It may not have the huge flexibility of something like 5E to take you from a wizard school in one session to a vampire's castle in the next, but if you’re hankering after a good ol’ fashioned expedition with the promise of live, laugh, loot - OSE does it best. It has less of a focus on stories and more on interacting with a world, generally through wilderness exploration and dungeons. It’s more of a love letter to the original game than one that tries to replicate it word-for-word. OSE isn’t officially a D&D game itself - it just takes heavy inspiration from the rules and play of that era. Old-School Essentials is one of the growing number of tabletop RPGs in the Old-School Revival movement (or Old-School Renaissance, depending on who you ask), harping back to the classic Dungeons & Dragons play style of old. However, OSE has all the necessary updates to make it more easily digestible for playing today. So it was as much a surprise to me as anyone that I recently fell in love with what is effectively a clone of Dungeons & Dragons’ Basic/Expert sets, released in 1981. I love Dungeons and Dragons 5E I play in multiple games a week and would never change that. That is to say: I've been playing Old-School Essentials. I’ve spent my weekend exploring the strangest, but most interesting dungeon I’ve ever encountered and being thrilled by combat in a way I haven’t for a long while.
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