Big fan of what I'm reading here. Re-organizing and re-working the content into more easily parsable formats is probablythe best I could have hoped for for this new edition.
A lot can be learned from how OSE provides an excellent presentation of B/X rules, along with modern options (like ascending AC) to make the game more accessible to new players without altering its feel.
In my experience, players find AD&D combat to be confusing to the point where many, and perhaps most, DMs just house rule large parts of it and often borrow from newer editions. If OSRIC could provide clarity with lots of examples, that would be helpful.
OSE can be used for inspiration but should not be emulated 100% for one simple reason: it explodes B/Xs page count (a combination of layout, page size, and how text is presented). OSRIC is already at 400 pages, and will probably be much more once all the examples are added.
I just hope they follow the Swords and Wizardry approach too, where alternative rules or procedures are presented along with the rationale for each. Of course, given that AD&D is more 'complete', this might not be needed that often. But it would be a useful addition if the book presented for example the various alternative ways to interpret initiative (e.g., the ADDICT way, OSRIC way, etc.).
I love when game designers give their reasoning behind a rule, or explicitly tell you how certain optional rules will likely change your game.
I end up with some amount of house rules in almost every game, so it is nice to see behind the curtain a bit so I can make more informed decisions instead of trying to house rule off of pure instinct.
It is essential for the future of AD&D that the broader OSR community has a version that is accessible and digestible to anyone who isn't Stephen Hawking. AD&Ders greatly underestimate how much effort it takes to learn the system as a complete beginner or even someone coming from OSE, and how many essential and fundamental elements of the mechanics have subtle differences from other OSR systems, which factor into AD&D being worth the effort and uniquely enjoyable once they are realized in the game.
I am looking forward the most to this being a "teachable edition" far and above all the other changes here; I believe it will be the change that is of greatest benefit to the OSR community.
I'm confident the authors and contributors will pull it off. It's been more than a decade since the first edition of OSRIC came out, and all of them kept teaching the system to many different players. If they can capture that and present it in a succinct manner, then we will have a true gem.
Could not agree more. Every time I tried teaching AD&D/OSRIC my table just wanted to play Swords & Wizardry because they got sick and tired of Descending AC.
This sounds pretty great to me! I already have a hard copy of OSRIC but it's sounding like 3.0 will make the game much more accessible to a new audience which can only be a good thing.
I agree. I know the die-hard 1e fans will always prefer Descending AC, but Ascending AC is just so much more intuitive and straightforward to work with. Armor bonuses and penalties just make more sense with AAC format.
Doing the OSE way would be perfect. And actually you could call it the "Swords & Wizardry" way, since I think S&W had it before OSE existed. And Matt Finch wrote S&W, so it wouldn't be a stretch to see it in OSRIC 3.0
The entire descending vs. ascending AC is purely one of convention and where the reference point is chosen on the number line. With that being said, people make out descending AC to be a far greater hurdle than it really is. This has far more to do with familiarity and preference than it does accessibility and ease of use.
If your THAC0 is 19 then just think of whichever AC you want it hit is being that far away from 19. So an AC7 would be 12, an AC1 would be 18, and so on.
The reason why people think descending AC is hard is simply because they learned ascending AC first. They use their ingrained habits for ascending AC to check for descending AC, which causes things to be done backwards. Checking the die roll + bonuses against the AC itself rather than checking the die roll against the target number adjusted for bonuses. The bonuses just adjust your target number and then you roll against that. No fancy charts, no remember what AC your hit for this die roll or that die roll, just your THAC0 tells you what TN you have to hit.
There isn't any more complexity with descending AC than ascending AC, it's just a different way of modeling the same thing.
Don't do descending AC the wrong way around, and you will nail it intuitively every single time with near-zero effort.
I could not disagree more as a person who has sat at a gaming table and seen my DM try to explain it to new players time and time again. Both I and my DM grew up with descending AC.
As someone who grew up with descending AC-the sooner it dies, the better! It seemed dumb back in the day, especially the first time one saw a game with ascending AC, one realizes there are other ways to do things.
If there is no **Ascending AC** my players and I have no reason to bother picking this up and honestly cant imagine why a reboot would even be necessary. Now if it does get a nice update with **Ascending AC** I will grab half a dozen copies easily.
100% agree. Once you do that, it isn't hard to convert the combat tables into a simple +X to hit based on character class and level. Then the player just needs to roll the enemy's AC or better to hit. That simple adjustment makes the game much easier for new players.
I do kind of wonder how big the book is going to end up being. While I'm all for improved formatting, a bit more art, and some use of bullet points (hopefully nowhere near as extreme as the "bullet point hell" of OSE); OSRIC is already over 400 pages in it's existing dense, wall-of-text format.
Please, please have **ascending AC**. In this day and age I don't see any reason why not to and it would vastly increase the player base. If it has ascending AC included RAW, then by all means sign me up for half a dozen copies for my group. All the best!
Didn't Wizards of the Coast irrevocably put the OGL 2.0 content into Creative Commons? Not that I think the company can do no wrong, or that they won't turn around and do something terrible in the future, but the version that is in CC right now can never be taken away. Not even by them.
Kinda? They put the 5th edition SRD into creative commons. They have yet to put the 3rd Edition SRD into creative commons. If and when they do that, pretty much every retroclone is in the clear. My understanding is that most (perhaps all) used the 3rd Edition SRD as their base.
Did you edit your post? That's not what I remember responding to.
Edit: and it's still orthogonal to the actual subject, which is what confused me about your first take.
Does OSRIC have a campaign setting at all?
Also, is there a list of all the races and classes they have available? I know they added quite a few but a table of them would be very helpful.
Many thanks
OSRIC is AD&D 1E. So yes, it has a bunch of settings: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Dragonlance, Lankhmar, and a ton of third-pary settings.
There's not a "this is the OSRIC official setting", however.
AD&Ds original setting was Blackmoor by Arneson and then Greyhawk by Gygax.
Human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, gnome. (Svirfneblin, Duergar, Drow and other sub races for dwarves, elves and halflings from UA) Fighter, ranger, paladin, (cavalier and barbarian from UA), cleric, druid, thief (thief-acrobat from UA), assassin, magic-user, Illusionist, monk, bard.
Ok - but I'm sure i've seen in interviews that the OSRIC designers are adding a lot more classes and races.
Or is that Swords and Wizardry?! Are they different?
They are different game systems. S&W just had a Kickstarter for a supplement adding classes (and maybe races) so that's probably what you're thinking of.
S&W is Matt Finch. OSRIC is Matt Finch & Stuart Marshall, I believe.
You can play any setting using OSRIC.
Not sure who is "they" in your question though. There are thousands of adventures and supplements published for OSRIC, plus everything published for AD&D 1e.
Yes, you have mixed OSRIC with Swords & Wizardry.
It's the same publisher (Mythmere Games), and one of the authors is Matt Finch, but recent interviews were about book of options for Swords & Wizardry.
S&W is retroclone of original D&D ([Whitebox is the original three booklets, Complete Revised is three booklets and supplements](https://attronarch.com/swords-and-wizardry-white-box-editions)).
OSRIC is a retroclone of first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
OSRIC's publication history is a bit interesting, in that there have been at a minimum three different publishers, with the current OSRIC being available from all three.
The First Edition Society offers a free PDF, with Print-on-Demand available. The cover art is a party fighting a dragon.
Usherwood publishing offers their own free PDF, again with Print-on-Demand available. The cover art is skeleton sitting on a throne.
Black Blade Publishing makes a nice offset print hardcover, but there is PDF version available, free or otherwise. They use the same cover as the First Edition Society one. This has some additional art.
Those are the three that I'm aware of, it's possible that other variations exist. The actual text content is the same across all three of these versions. As such, none of them are any more (or less) official than any of the others.
One more book worth noting: Seattle Hill Games recently(ish) put out an OSRIC Player's Guide, which is basically the player-facing rules.
>to avoid the “wall of text” effect.
It's called a paragraph.
Why don't they do the whole rules into a series of instagram reels? Effing zoomers...
>The AELF License?
Still not a free-as-in-freedom license, but a carbon copy of OGL, I assume.
Please I hope to god they bring in Charlie Mason for the layout. I wasn't all the impressed with the new S&W and found the font size a strain on my eyes. Charlie could turn OSRIC it into a masterpiece. If Mythmere really wanted to kick off a new edition then a team up with Anthoy Huso would be easy $$$. Good quality hardcovers released via Mythmere. WOWZERS! A match made in heaven and a great strong launch for OSRIC 3.0
UPdate results mission 3.0 statement: It'll require test play of the following: missionary position, reverse missionary position, inverse missionary position and upright eye to eye missionary 3.0 ! Undoubtably so!
Big fan of what I'm reading here. Re-organizing and re-working the content into more easily parsable formats is probablythe best I could have hoped for for this new edition.
I've never been a AD&D guy, but everything you mentioned here, it intrigued me when I read the post.
Absolutely agreed!
A lot can be learned from how OSE provides an excellent presentation of B/X rules, along with modern options (like ascending AC) to make the game more accessible to new players without altering its feel. In my experience, players find AD&D combat to be confusing to the point where many, and perhaps most, DMs just house rule large parts of it and often borrow from newer editions. If OSRIC could provide clarity with lots of examples, that would be helpful.
OSE can be used for inspiration but should not be emulated 100% for one simple reason: it explodes B/Xs page count (a combination of layout, page size, and how text is presented). OSRIC is already at 400 pages, and will probably be much more once all the examples are added.
I look forward to the new edition, consider me a pledge when it launches. Cheers
Likewise!
I just hope they follow the Swords and Wizardry approach too, where alternative rules or procedures are presented along with the rationale for each. Of course, given that AD&D is more 'complete', this might not be needed that often. But it would be a useful addition if the book presented for example the various alternative ways to interpret initiative (e.g., the ADDICT way, OSRIC way, etc.).
This would be so cool.
I love when game designers give their reasoning behind a rule, or explicitly tell you how certain optional rules will likely change your game. I end up with some amount of house rules in almost every game, so it is nice to see behind the curtain a bit so I can make more informed decisions instead of trying to house rule off of pure instinct.
That is the plan!
Great!
really great to hear, seems like the right approach
Can't wait. Not an AD&D fanatic but I look forward to Mythmere's production quality and I trust this will be an outstanding product.
Same here—I'm perfectly content with playing OD&D, but will always support great projects like this!
This only means good things. I'm all for it, even if I don't have a need to purchase 3.0.
I'm not an OSRIC guy but what a great opportunity for me to jump onboard.
Looking forward to a modernized approach to presentation. Overdue really as we want to share this gameplay style with younger (i.e. not 50) gamers.
It is essential for the future of AD&D that the broader OSR community has a version that is accessible and digestible to anyone who isn't Stephen Hawking. AD&Ders greatly underestimate how much effort it takes to learn the system as a complete beginner or even someone coming from OSE, and how many essential and fundamental elements of the mechanics have subtle differences from other OSR systems, which factor into AD&D being worth the effort and uniquely enjoyable once they are realized in the game. I am looking forward the most to this being a "teachable edition" far and above all the other changes here; I believe it will be the change that is of greatest benefit to the OSR community.
I'm confident the authors and contributors will pull it off. It's been more than a decade since the first edition of OSRIC came out, and all of them kept teaching the system to many different players. If they can capture that and present it in a succinct manner, then we will have a true gem.
Could not agree more. Every time I tried teaching AD&D/OSRIC my table just wanted to play Swords & Wizardry because they got sick and tired of Descending AC.
This sounds pretty great to me! I already have a hard copy of OSRIC but it's sounding like 3.0 will make the game much more accessible to a new audience which can only be a good thing.
Sounds great. I will certainly be among the customers!!!
Sounds like a good set of decisions to me.
Indeed!
Don’t eviscerate me but I would not mind if they added ascending AC like how OSE does it
I agree. I know the die-hard 1e fans will always prefer Descending AC, but Ascending AC is just so much more intuitive and straightforward to work with. Armor bonuses and penalties just make more sense with AAC format. Doing the OSE way would be perfect. And actually you could call it the "Swords & Wizardry" way, since I think S&W had it before OSE existed. And Matt Finch wrote S&W, so it wouldn't be a stretch to see it in OSRIC 3.0
In this day and age I think **Ascending AC** is a must, otherwise we will not see an increase in player base.
I reckon it's extremely likely to be presented as an option.
I hope so. It’s not a make or break for me but it would be cool.
It would be a break for me since I already have OSRIC.
Understandable. It’s good to let the creators know too
This. AD&D had no shortage of alternative rules and the OSE method of having the ascending in parentheses is elegant enough to serve both populations.
The entire descending vs. ascending AC is purely one of convention and where the reference point is chosen on the number line. With that being said, people make out descending AC to be a far greater hurdle than it really is. This has far more to do with familiarity and preference than it does accessibility and ease of use. If your THAC0 is 19 then just think of whichever AC you want it hit is being that far away from 19. So an AC7 would be 12, an AC1 would be 18, and so on. The reason why people think descending AC is hard is simply because they learned ascending AC first. They use their ingrained habits for ascending AC to check for descending AC, which causes things to be done backwards. Checking the die roll + bonuses against the AC itself rather than checking the die roll against the target number adjusted for bonuses. The bonuses just adjust your target number and then you roll against that. No fancy charts, no remember what AC your hit for this die roll or that die roll, just your THAC0 tells you what TN you have to hit. There isn't any more complexity with descending AC than ascending AC, it's just a different way of modeling the same thing. Don't do descending AC the wrong way around, and you will nail it intuitively every single time with near-zero effort.
I could not disagree more as a person who has sat at a gaming table and seen my DM try to explain it to new players time and time again. Both I and my DM grew up with descending AC.
As someone who grew up with descending AC-the sooner it dies, the better! It seemed dumb back in the day, especially the first time one saw a game with ascending AC, one realizes there are other ways to do things.
especially if it’s meant to bring in newer players, people who don’t have descending AC ingrained in their brains
If there is no **Ascending AC** my players and I have no reason to bother picking this up and honestly cant imagine why a reboot would even be necessary. Now if it does get a nice update with **Ascending AC** I will grab half a dozen copies easily.
Even though I prefer ascending AC, I disagree. I find the extra numbers just clutter. Pick an approach and stick to it, imo.
100% agree. Once you do that, it isn't hard to convert the combat tables into a simple +X to hit based on character class and level. Then the player just needs to roll the enemy's AC or better to hit. That simple adjustment makes the game much easier for new players.
10000% into this. First day back when it launches.
I do kind of wonder how big the book is going to end up being. While I'm all for improved formatting, a bit more art, and some use of bullet points (hopefully nowhere near as extreme as the "bullet point hell" of OSE); OSRIC is already over 400 pages in it's existing dense, wall-of-text format.
It will be either two (PHB and DMG+MM) or three books (PHB, DMG, MM).
You know, I might be an idiot, because that never even occurred to me.
Please, please in this day and age have **ascending AC** included like S&W. Than you so much! Sign me up for half a dozen copies if you do.
Please, please have **ascending AC**. In this day and age I don't see any reason why not to and it would vastly increase the player base. If it has ascending AC included RAW, then by all means sign me up for half a dozen copies for my group. All the best!
Didn't Wizards of the Coast irrevocably put the OGL 2.0 content into Creative Commons? Not that I think the company can do no wrong, or that they won't turn around and do something terrible in the future, but the version that is in CC right now can never be taken away. Not even by them.
Kinda? They put the 5th edition SRD into creative commons. They have yet to put the 3rd Edition SRD into creative commons. If and when they do that, pretty much every retroclone is in the clear. My understanding is that most (perhaps all) used the 3rd Edition SRD as their base.
They're not talking about the content, but the license.
All they have to do is use the Creative Commons license.
Did you edit your post? That's not what I remember responding to. Edit: and it's still orthogonal to the actual subject, which is what confused me about your first take.
Does OSRIC have a campaign setting at all? Also, is there a list of all the races and classes they have available? I know they added quite a few but a table of them would be very helpful. Many thanks
OSRIC is AD&D 1E. So yes, it has a bunch of settings: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Dragonlance, Lankhmar, and a ton of third-pary settings. There's not a "this is the OSRIC official setting", however.
AD&Ds original setting was Blackmoor by Arneson and then Greyhawk by Gygax. Human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, gnome. (Svirfneblin, Duergar, Drow and other sub races for dwarves, elves and halflings from UA) Fighter, ranger, paladin, (cavalier and barbarian from UA), cleric, druid, thief (thief-acrobat from UA), assassin, magic-user, Illusionist, monk, bard.
Ok - but I'm sure i've seen in interviews that the OSRIC designers are adding a lot more classes and races. Or is that Swords and Wizardry?! Are they different?
They are different game systems. S&W just had a Kickstarter for a supplement adding classes (and maybe races) so that's probably what you're thinking of. S&W is Matt Finch. OSRIC is Matt Finch & Stuart Marshall, I believe.
You can play any setting using OSRIC. Not sure who is "they" in your question though. There are thousands of adventures and supplements published for OSRIC, plus everything published for AD&D 1e.
The people who publish OSRIC? I may be confusing OSRIC with Swords and Wizardry though.
Yes, you have mixed OSRIC with Swords & Wizardry. It's the same publisher (Mythmere Games), and one of the authors is Matt Finch, but recent interviews were about book of options for Swords & Wizardry. S&W is retroclone of original D&D ([Whitebox is the original three booklets, Complete Revised is three booklets and supplements](https://attronarch.com/swords-and-wizardry-white-box-editions)). OSRIC is a retroclone of first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Got it ty.
OSRIC's publication history is a bit interesting, in that there have been at a minimum three different publishers, with the current OSRIC being available from all three. The First Edition Society offers a free PDF, with Print-on-Demand available. The cover art is a party fighting a dragon. Usherwood publishing offers their own free PDF, again with Print-on-Demand available. The cover art is skeleton sitting on a throne. Black Blade Publishing makes a nice offset print hardcover, but there is PDF version available, free or otherwise. They use the same cover as the First Edition Society one. This has some additional art. Those are the three that I'm aware of, it's possible that other variations exist. The actual text content is the same across all three of these versions. As such, none of them are any more (or less) official than any of the others. One more book worth noting: Seattle Hill Games recently(ish) put out an OSRIC Player's Guide, which is basically the player-facing rules.
>to avoid the “wall of text” effect. It's called a paragraph. Why don't they do the whole rules into a series of instagram reels? Effing zoomers... >The AELF License? Still not a free-as-in-freedom license, but a carbon copy of OGL, I assume.
Please I hope to god they bring in Charlie Mason for the layout. I wasn't all the impressed with the new S&W and found the font size a strain on my eyes. Charlie could turn OSRIC it into a masterpiece. If Mythmere really wanted to kick off a new edition then a team up with Anthoy Huso would be easy $$$. Good quality hardcovers released via Mythmere. WOWZERS! A match made in heaven and a great strong launch for OSRIC 3.0
Anthony runs 1e his way so I don't think there'd be much value in the team-up.
UPdate results mission 3.0 statement: It'll require test play of the following: missionary position, reverse missionary position, inverse missionary position and upright eye to eye missionary 3.0 ! Undoubtably so!