The Nature GM

After ten years of playing Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, my tables are beginning to turn to the borrowed nostalgia of simpler times (not experienced by any of us) in tabletop games.

Now we, too, carry torches to illuminate the dark and tap at every tile with a ten foot pole. We have already had multiple discussions about what one can and cannot do while holding a torch, and observed that using a bow is certainly not one of them. Even as I type I am drafting a document of hireling costs at different levels of skill and expendability.

Would the heroes really hire an innocent peasant to risk getting slaughtered in a blade trap only so the heroes may live to loot another dungeon? You bet they will. And they will laugh about it.

I was drawn towards Old School Renaissance (ORS) systems for two very simple reasons:

• First, because Draw Steel is not yet published.
• Second, because influencers on YouTube influenced me to try them. Especially Bob World Builder and Professor DM of Dungeon Craft.

And after a handful of hours each of Dragonbane and Shadowdark, I have reached my own conclusion, a conclusion which flies in the face of the general consensus—

These systems are not, I repeat not, any faster or easier to plan for than Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. They do, however, play faster at the table. This can be both a good thing as well as a bad thing.

Join me now, brave game master, as we pull up pen drawings, grid maps, and wargame miniatures in the land of OSR. And watch where you step, because it is a bit of a brain dump.

The Experience So Far

My newest group, who is playing the Osterlands setting, started out playing Fifth Edition, and after the first session I moved them to Shadowdark. We have since played two, four-hour sessions in Shadowdark, and I have run out of content both times. These players are new to roleplaying games, and while they can tell there is a difference between Fifth Edition and Shadowdark, they think the difference is greater for me as the game master.

My long term group, who is playing in the Smoldering Islands setting for four years, met up in physical meat-space for a weekend to play Dragonbane. This system is, of course, very different from Fifth Edition, in a way that my players enjoyed even though the adventure that I had prepared was not terribly well-suited to that system.

Even though I have watched hours of content of people talking about Old School Renaissance games, I have never played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or even seen the red box starter set, and I only have a historian’s understanding of how these games were played back in the day.

Let me assure you, transitioning from Fifth Edition to OSR requires a paradigm shift that is not widely discussed. This is because the shift is implicit for folks who have been playing since the 70’s and 80’s, and because there is almost no agreement between any two tables about how the game “Dungeons & Dragons” is actually played. We all play a different game, which can make it quite challenging to talk about what we are shifting from when we move to an OSR system.

For my Fifth Edition games, we never tracked ammo, rations, water, rope, torches, or carrying because it was tedious to be concerned with these minute details when your character could blast off a fireball while flying through the air.

When you are basically an ordinary guy trained with a sword, as you are in Dragonbane, it matters if your pack contains two swords or one sword when one of them might break. It also matters if your backup weapon is something that you are not trained to use.

These differences between Fifth Edition and OSR systems are fairly obvious. There is a more dramatic shift that I cannot quite put my finger on, and it has something to do with what is “fun” in these respective systems.

In Fifth Edition, combat is slow. There are many options and multiple actions, and as written the risk is relatively low. I have learned to make combat more interesting by raising the stakes with scenario complications (e.g. save the princess before the dragon eats her) and by giving the monsters cool powers.

In Shadowdark and Dragonbane, combat is fast and deadly. For my players who are accustomed to a video game way of thinking, I have had to teach them that an encounter avoided is an encounter won. The interesting part of combat comes not from what cool move either the player characters or monsters will make, but from the possibility of sudden and irrevocable death. It does mean that combat can feel fairly repetitive if each character has only one attack and no reason to do anything other than attack.

In both cases, scenario complications make combat more interesting. The big difference is that Fifth Edition combat can become interesting with all the cool powers, and OSR systems by design lack those powers. The fun comes from the very limitations of your character, which requires you to think creatively.

How I Would Like It to Be

I do not understand traps. Or dungeons. Or wandering monster tables.

I have written elsewhere that I hate random encounter tables. I do; they are random; they break the verisimilitude of the game. And yet I also recognize that a trap or puzzle with no time pressure is merely a situation of press A to continue.

In my Dragonbane one-shot, I introduced a lost society of advanced technology, whose demon-augmented hydroelectric power station was overrun with monsters. Room after room of monster encounter was not terribly engaging, and the skill system for Dragonbane meant that half the time they tried to use a laser gun they found in the dungeon, they missed badly.

They did make use of the sparking wires, hole in the floor, and partially submerged floor, which I did appreciate.

In my Shadowdark game, the highlight moment so far was when the party found a Ring of Fish Command and used it to force a few piranhas to jump into the magical bowl of water, which they dropped and shattered while trying to carry it up a ladder. Why did any of this happen? Because it could. No other reason.

I included a demigod’s temple of traps in my long term Fifth Edition game, and while the players are interested in the concept of traps and the sheer number of spikes on the map I made for them, they do not, I think, feel terribly in danger.

I want dungeons that feel plausible in the context of the world they exist in, which have many elements to engage with and that feel dangerous to the party. I fail to see why such lofty aspirations make the games any simpler to prep for than a session of the comparatively sluggish Fifth Edition. In fast is is nearly worse to prep for my Shadowdark game because I know they will cruise through my content, and it takes an awful lot of content to fill four hours.

However, it is not all bad. As soon as we switched from Fifth Edition to Shadowdark, the number of player questions I answered per session easily halved. It is just an easier system.

Having fewer abilities is especially helpful to our player who is a non-native English speaker; her conversational English is excellent, but for some reason her teachers neglected to cover even essential phrases such as “shoot your bow” and “fire an arrow”. Her character sheet is dotted with notes in Korean to help with the phonetic pronunciation of more obscure terms.

This was a rambling way of saying that I find OSR games difficult to prep for because I have not yet gotten a feel for the pacing or what qualifies as a ‘good’ design.

What Happens Next

Dungeon rooms with random monsters are not terribly interesting. Factions of NPCs that have goals and personalities, however, are very interesting.

I need to get good at moderating the pace of a game with complex, meaningful challenges with many options on how to face them. Combat alone is not interesting, even if it is likely deadly. My players enjoy being faced with a dilemma and figuring out how to use their limited resources to solve it. Even if the dilemma is that they have stumbled upon a nest of grick eggs, and they must decide if they would rather face the mamma grick or the pirates they are hiding form.

The trouble is, it takes time and creativity to build complex scenarios. This is where I have doubts on the ease and speed of encounter prep. Perhaps I only need to lower my standards. Or use a pre-made module. Or take a break from more or less four years of constant game mastering. Which I am doing in one of my games, by the way.

I think I will revisit The Underclock by Goblin Punch, which is something I mentioned a while back and never personally tried. From rereading the introduction, they share many of my challenges with dungeon crawls.

Photos from the Dragonbane Game

Thank you for joining me down this winding path! I would love to hear thoughts from anyone else who has played these systems. Dragonbane as a system felt sort of unfinished to me. I might try Crown & Skull by Runehammer Games as a comparable alternative in the future.

Until then, keep exploring.

Post cover image by Bernhard Rohm.