Appendix N is Required Reading

What kind of stories does D&D 5e want you to tell? Primarily, you have a strong sense of progression built in. Characters accumulate XP, thereby increasing their level and abilities. To keep up the challenge, they fight ever stronger threats. The increase in hit points and AC, healing abilities and even means of resurrection ensures that at least from a certain point on characters don't die, or at least don't die randomly. In short, the game supports stories about the same group of heroes fighting increasingly more serious threats until they probably come up against a world-ending threat or the campaign falls apart¹. You'll often hear the term heroic (or even super-heroic) thrown around to describe this playstyle.

If you make the foray into OSR type games, it's easy to assume the same will hold true. After all, you can still play as a "fighter" or wizard, um "magic user", and you've still got HP and AC and you're rolling D20s. Of course, it's not that simple. If you go into an OSR game with the same trad or neotrad assumptions, you'll quickly die to some monster or trap. You might be frustrated by the lack of abilities as you level up. In the worst case, you might assume that they just didn't figure out how to play D&D in a fun way until about 2000.

Learning to play

Most bigger RPG rulebooks have this "example of play" section in the beginning. As an experienced player/referee, I tend to skip over these. I haven't seen these sections a lot in OSR and adjacent games, I suspect because of a tendency to assume readers know what they are getting into. Let's be honest: What are the chances you're picking up an OSR-style game without any idea what an RPG is and what you're getting yourself into? Also, AD&D has what I consider a much more valuable resource for learning to play and referee: Appendix N.

What kind of stories does D&D 5e want to emulate? Notice the difference in phrasing I used here. If you look into what the designers of 5e have said in interviews, one of its major goals seems to be to emulate the feeling of playing D&D. This probably sounds a bit cynical, but it's a perfectly fine goal. You can absolutely design a game to make it easier to tell the type of story people tended to tell in an earlier edition. Why is fireball overpowered for its level? Because that's what people expect from this spell. However, this also means that if you want to get a better idea of how to structure play in D&D, your best bet is to look at how other people did it. Older editions didn't have this option because there was no established tradition of play yet. Instead, the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide includes a list of literature that inspired D&D in the aformentioned Appendix N. My belief is that the books listed there can help you better understand the game.

An Example - Combat as War

Let's look at an example: In modern D&D, combat is treated as a fair challenge. One of the reasons people may recommend Pathfinder 2e over D&D 5e is that the former has better rules for balancing combat. If you're in the OSR theory sphere, you may have come across the terms combat as war and combat as sport. I'm currently reading through Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Let me set the scene. Our heroes (well, heroes might be saying a bit too much) have arrived at the dungeon, but so have the mercenaries of their rival! They are outnumbered, six against two. However, they don't immediately go into open combat. By making noise, they pretend like they have reinforcements hidden in the forest. And it almost works! But then their rival arrives personally and tells his mercenaries to attack. So it's iniative, to use a D&D term? Yes, kind of. Fafhrd, the barbarian, takes on some enemies in open combat. But the Mourser instead takes to the trees and eliminates foes from the shadows.

In a more modern game, you might model this as a standard encounter. Sure, six against two might be a harder encounter, but certainly survivable. In an OSR game, open combat would almost certainly be deadly. It might only take one or two hits to kill one of the mercenaries - but the same holds true of the heroes. This kind of danger motivates players to seek alternative options: Tricking the enemies (as above), parley, stealth... The higher risk turns a regular combat into a tense, life or death situation. This story can teach you that combat isn't unbalanced to frustrate players, but to add tension and encourage creative problem solving.

Of course, you can read a ton of theory posts about aspects of OSR playstyles as well, but I think the literature from Appendix N can give you the same insights in a more visceral way. If you generally enjoy the lower-level, gritty aesthetic so prevalent in the OSR, I promise these books will give you something fun to stick into your game.

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