my sunday bx joint has been going pretty well, sterling by the standards of pickup OSE by the sounds of things. we've been super efficient and coordinated without anyone becoming the party leader or anything, though the wizard is the one with the floor when rolling initiative so we don't accidentally screw him out of spellcasting round-to-round

that's saying something because this is a party of five and BX has you operating in "turns" even when you're out of combat for the sake of time tracking. i'm not even the most inventive person there. oftentimes my role is putting Midge at the head of the marching order and saying "okay, Midge is advancing this far, that constitutes this much of her movement every ten turns, how would y'all like to screen for traps?" our current SOP is having the half orc (thank god he's back near max health after we spent a day at rest getting some fluids out of some slain giant geckos), poke around with a ten foot pole, and that works out while Midge provides light with a torch. eventually we got the SOP down of "listen at the door, check for traps" down to a science and we cleared as much dungeon in an hour last session as we did for four the two sessions prior.

i can see myself picking up and playing more OSE, and even piecing together my own stuff now I know the procedure when there's multiple people. this is one of those posts where my musings about taking what i got from playing RED and bridging it over to other rulesets paid off, cus RED was the ruleset that taught me turn etiquette and efficient die rolling on a vtt. turn etiquette and efficient die rolling is all OSE is. the rest is common sense and a stomach for risk, which i'm happy to have back.

despite all the disc-horse about the d20 kind of being fucked up as an engine due to its swingyness, sometimes you need that shot in the arm in case you get into a mindset where a 20% chance of failure is too much to risk. Midge's bastard-sword-and-free-hand combo in conjunction with plate has been doing excellent for the mix of utility, hardiness, and offence needed to get through first level play. last session we opened a secret door only to find a stirge nest and i got to take point, park midge at the chokepoint, and weather their unmodified hit bonus.

whether this was the best play or the stupidest one, i can't tell you. sure stirges don't do much damage and looking at the statline in the srd the gamemaster forgot to use their divebomb, neither as single hit die creatures can they survive a hit from Midge's high damage floor, but there was a hell of a lot of action economy my way and when a stirge DOES hit, it starts doing automatic damage that's hard to survive at first level. all i know is that the gm was rolling low and we got out of there unscathed. in another world, i can see Midge dying or being put out of commission as point guard.

But I can clearly see the world where I didn't position Midge into the breach and everyone's drowning in Stirges, everyone who is far far less suited to stand-to against an unmodified d20 when there was that much action economy. It's interesting food for thought. we earned our gems pilfered from their nest that day.

The funny thing about OSE and RED is that the morale rules makes combat pretty similar. if things aren't going well for Team Monster from the jump, they'll probably break and flee (this is a GM's adjudication in RED, but the same applies where if Team OPFOR can't accomplish their goals, it's your duty as gamemaster to have them fall back in the name of cutting their losses and keeping combat within the confines of thirty minutes). if things start to slide sideways from Team Monster after they can keep it together from the jump, they'll most likely flee. stirges have a surprisingly high morale at a 9, but they're so squishy it's trivial to get them making both their morale checks from casualties. that fight wasn't numberslam, though by OSR standards it's not a very advanced approach we took to it (hold the door as a chokepoint, give the party breathing room to concentrate their action economy downrange), so it makes me wonder if we could've been a little more careful or it would have always been in the hands of the RNG. dunno, but the contrast to my forays with interlock's d10 and very controlled success chances is both a healthy and reciprocal one