Mike Mearls does not understand B/X or OSE

 

I was merely enjoying a proper mountainous lunch of cheese, meat, bread, cheese, meat, beer, beerr cheese and meat with some bread on the side when upon scrolling the ol' timeline I happened upon the X account of a man named Mike Mearls, of some repute or disrepute. Please understand goin' forward that I'm not interested in commenting on his pre-pandemic reputational woes and curious associations with some people, but rather this completely horrific post he made about adding complexity to the best of the old 70's Dungeon Games, the basic/expert rules (and OSE).

I've been running OSE bi-weekly, with very few stops except for being sick or holidays that supercede the important Dungeon Game, and even though I stopped writing battle reports (they were too much work, and thusly, I renamed this blog), I can tell you we're at session 30~ and are taking a quick break, as the domain play stuff requires a lot more work and the players wanted to try some Mork and Borg, a simpler game with less procedure. The reason I tell you this, umgi, is because I don't really mind what type of DnD you play. I play various versions of the Dungeon Game, and this single-page-of-rules game is a good palette cleanser for the next chapter of the Kharmlund(now call Lunaralia) campaign, because we're full on into domain play going forward: leading armies, handling diplomacy, and finally - to my horror - leaving the starting hex as the spider-god worshipping half elf Ildaberd prepares to make good on his plan to march on the Capitals and claim the Empty Throne, becoming the 9th Khulmar and assuming control over the crumbling and in disarray Byzan Empire!

Uhh, what was I talking about? Oh right - Mike Mearls. Let's talk these tweets.

 

I'm already worried. Maneuvers. Continue Mike.

Ah.

These are horrible, horrible ideas for Basic/OSE. The mechanics themselves are fine - they are good mechanics for the kind of game that Mearls wants to play - which is not BOSE. Mike wants to play something more akin to 4e, or maybe Dungeon Crawl Classics, since he makes this baffling comment about the "chaos" of OSE/B/X:

So let's just make something clear - in terms of raw chaos, there's very little inside the intended play session of BX/OSE, it's just not there. Spells are largely deterministic, with set and specific outcomes (some spells have random tables, but this is not dungeon crawl classics or WFRP where random effects are rolled on a table frequently). Combat is very tightly ordered and despite my proscription against telling players stats of monsters, you can immediately tell, especially until level 5-6, exactly what an encounter is going to do, most of the time. Lots of low-level monsters are bugs, beasts, humanoids with no special abilities(maybe 1) and there's no chaos there outside of the normal play.

So, with adding "maneuvers" from more modern systems into BX: you can do it, but it defeats the point. With zero irony, just play something like 4e or maybe one of those RPG/Wargame hybrids(they are fucking awesome), since you don't really seem interested in playing a game without combat. I've run 30 sessions of this BOSE campaign, and it has happened that we've gone months without actually rolling initiative - the players commenting on how long it's been since they had to actually, uh, fight someone despite plundering tombs filled with monsters. How weird! 

So while I say you can do it - it completely misses the point: combat is not something you really want to get into in BOSE, and more importantly, the fighter is already fantastically equipped to handle it if you simply must fight dudes. They get the best saves, the most health, access to any weapon, any piece of armor (and with these two, the highest amount of magic items), and rapid level progression - the fighter may not be fancy, but he is reliable. The hank hill of adventuring parties. He might be boring, but he's the one that gets you out of scrapes.

That doesn't mean you should fight dudes, most people that survived the adventuring profession in the Dungeon Game didn't survive it if they simply chose to Engage The Enemy at every chance - that was how you died. It's video game shit to shrug at 30 goblins attacking you, something that should immediately cause you to shit your pants and run screaming in the opposite direction. In modern systems, you just activate your turnabouts while making sure you have enough verse tokens while spending your hope and luck and fate and valor and fortune while making sure you fear and doom and rage and bane and disadvantage doesn't go too high. In BOSE, killing 30 goblins is, "I knew there was a reason I didn't use those two sleep scrolls and you call kept screaming at me to use it on the minotaur well look who is laughing now assholes" and in modern games it's a warmup. I don't even mind these kinds of games and I have played them and I like them. However. In a game where the reaction roll, the light of a torch, and the caution of a player massively change how the game is played and how encounters go out. My players have toppled bandit kings, screeching hordes of skaven and more by learning how to speak to - then manipulate them. The Skaven are self-defeatingly paranoid and stupid? That's a weapon. The bandits are so gold and glory hungry they'll walk into an obvious trap? That's a weapon. It makes monsters so much more interesting in BOSE - it's also a big part of the roleplaying.

I see a lot of RPGs that get advertised that basically just try to make you play more like BOSE by forcing stuff that seems fairly obvious and comes out naturally into mechanics. They'll go "in THIS rpg, monsters are MORE than just stat blocks, they have LINKS in a CHAIN that you can BREAK to make them FRIEND or FOE and figuring that out requires you to use your abilities, like your SLEUTH tokens" or whatever. That stuff was already there. The fighter is capable of pulling off some crazy shit with just "attacking and defending", and I would know, I gm'd a section where a single fighter (with a magic sword and set of plate) held off a teeming horde of Skaven off, backing up every time and buying the party time to make it to the teleport out of the dungeon with their stolen magic items (of vital importance to the ratmen). As he finally broke and ran, he picked up the poisonous gas bomb he'd found in their lair as swarms of rusty spears cut him up, and nearly killed them, tossed it, and teleported out, killing almost all of them. All of that was just him doing cool shit, but mechanically it was just a basic attacking and movement set of rules. Maybe I could have made that more possible by adding in Steer The Narrative tokens that allowed him to use the Gas Bomb ability, but he'd had better watch out because that moves the party up the Ruin track and they'll need to spend a Repose to Clear Down their Ruin or the GM will be able to spend that to unlock a Hefty challenge (rated such because it can cause three Surges worth of damage), thankfully he was able to Jaunt out of there as the Door to the Maze of Adventure was met and the players could simply declare the dungeon cleared as they'd gotten enough Keys from using their Scrutiny spends.

And again, listen, I don't mind those things, and I'm not offended by the silly games that do them. I've played many of them over the last two years and I like them - but they're not BOSE. Because my players also defeated a bandit king obsessed with power by convincing him to put on a cursed diadem that enslaved them to the party by playing their cards right. They've been not so keen on pitched battles but used an old plague-afflicted stone to drop it into the enemy camp's water supply. They've managed to broker alliances with powerful, dangerous, violent people, all through trickery and other things. And that's the kind of stories B/X was built on. Conan didn't just charge in and start killing people. He was a smart guy. So building games where a guy can kill 30 goblins with stupid extra, pointless mechanics just aren't the 1970's Dungeon Game. They're something else - and so is whatever Mike is trying to turn BOSE into. You can play them if you want, but...my dude? That's not BOSE. That's something else. Just play 4e man. It's a great game, and it's honestly where you seem to want to be.