making a ttrpg that is inspired by OSRs is really making me appreciate them a lot more, but i've never actually played one. there's a lot of mechanics i think that turn off modern ttrpg players, especially from those that have only played 5e, even when i dont think the mechanics overall are too dissimilar.
i personally can't nail down any one specific reason for this, but having held a lot of these materials physically in my hands, i think the size of these books and the amount of rules for each situation definitely contributes to it. i'm a chronic GM because i actually sit and read through the majority of these materials, but even i can get bogged down in the weeds when there are pages upon pages of how to handle task difficulty and the myriad of different kind of rolls that need to be made.
dnd has some hefty books too, but the smallest book by far is the player's guide and god knows i have not even read that thing all the way through because a lot of people, myself included, learned how to play dnd by having someone else tear away the superfluous material and let me know what i need to specifically worry about as a player. this kind of approach to games isn't bad, it usually helps to have someone around that knows the rules of any game played to help facilitate that rules are happening correctly until it becomes second nature to everyone involved.
what worries me about that approach though is that some players might forget or miss out on certain mechanics that would actually be beneficial for them to use because they've viewed a game through the lens of someone else deciding what is important or not (or kindly, if they just forgot). i didn't know how big of a deal certain statuses in dnd for a long time because that table simply didn't play with them in the scenarios that were being run. it's not like the scenarios depended upon doing a stunning strike or something, but it could've added both a mechanical and narrative flair to that situation had i known i could stun something. it could've made the story we were telling much more interesting.
i think also looking at OSRs vs dnd is that we do need more Specific ttrpgs in the world, that OSRs are really good at being games about delving in dungeons and 5e exists to do... well whatever the fuck you want man! and to 5e's credit, it's mechanics can fit a bunch of scenarios on a simple d20 roll and some extra dice, but Quest does that specific thing even better where everything that needs to be rolled is just a d20 roll.
(thinking about it now, maybe that's why OSR games and older versions of dnd strike a chord with the particular group of people colloquially known as nerds because who else among us would want to sit and trawl through all these fuckin rules in order to play a game that amounts to sheets of paper and imagination.)
making a ttrpg is always trying to strike that balance between having a game that is Feasible to play just as much as it's fun to play. i hope that i'm getting there with this game, since i'm trying to be as specific as i can be while accommodating the extraneous in ways that are just discussions between the GM and the players. maybe i'll be more specific soon when i have a better idea of how this stuff plays out in person rather than just a bunch of ideas on paper.
Just using this as a vaulting off point for a tangent, because a line here awoken a question that has been dormant in me for awhile.
Huge tangent incoming.
i didn't know how big of a deal certain statuses in dnd for a long time because that table simply didn't play with them in the scenarios that were being run. it's not like the scenarios depended upon doing a stunning strike or something, but it could've added both a mechanical and narrative flair to that situation had i known i could stun something. it could've made the story we were telling much more interesting.
How do you make status effects more interesting in a game where Turn Order and Action Economy matter? I have never seen a PC happy to accept a status condition unless they were getting a bonus from it (Reckless Attack on Barbarians in 5e comes to mind, and that's not even a true Status). Things like damage over times like Poison and Burn is additional bookkeeping, and another spot to tick HP loss (I wonder how many HP of uncounted tick damage go uncounted each year lmao), and anything that messes with player actions seems to be grumbled with at best (things like Slow/Difficult Terrain), to outright hostility at worst (Stun).
Yes, I get it, "The character is their one character so having an action taken away sucks!". But it also feels like it limits design space too, from the GM perspective, if you have to worry about someone failing 2 saving throws against Stun and just tanking the mood of the table because they sulk that they didn't get to do anything for 20 minutes.
In narrative games, these things seem to be less of an issue. If I throw a swarm of skeletons at players in Dungeon World, each Skeleton doesn't get it's own action, they move as a gestalt in response to player actions and choices. In Technoir, I can have players feel pinned down by a gang of mobsters by applying a Fleeting adjective "Suppressed", so they have to navigate around that before they're in the clear, but it's only one thing, it's not removing it from each Source.
I think this whole thing is why in the verbal passing down of the games, stuff gets omitted. Someone at some point decided "This isn't fun" and just dropped it entirely.
What's funny is that my Lancer group doesn't have this problem. Because this is the first time I've run it, and they've played it, there's no handed down tradition. I tell them every action at their disposal, I have them saved in Foundry just a click away, so now we have a player built around ramming and grappling. Another is playing around with Heat mechanics, and another is becoming someone compiling reaction abilities.
But they're still annoyed when they become Stunned, or Impaired, or Knocked Prone, and so on. Just a hard thing to break I guess.
