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From: Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc,rec.games.frp.dnd
Subject: Re: OSRIC 3.0 announced
Date: Thu, 16 May 2024 09:11:07 -0700
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On 5/16/2024 4:34 AM, Kyonshi wrote:
> Source: 
> https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=310619&sid=bc9df66ac8e684285312387ec9ff9e5d#p310619
> 
> 
> 
> Seems they are trying for an approach targeted at younger players that 
> have a 5e culture instead of going full old school this time. Which 
> might be a good approach, I think Old School Essentials had basically a 
> very similar approach.

Sounds good after reading the post there.  I'm all for a easier to 
understand version of 1e, even if I prefer different interpretations of 
some of the rules.

I hope they remove or move the section on NPCs ability scores as that 
caused problems for both me and others allowing/using OSRIC, as it 
wasn't clear that wasn't for characters that were NPCs.

What I'd really like to see is a real basic version of 5e, not the WotC 
version that is almost exactly the same, but has fewer races and 
classes.  The whole system is just so tied up together in knots it's 
very hard to extricate complexities with it.  It really needs a 
different basic system like Basic vs. AD&D had.


___________________________

Mythmere:
"
1) Simply maintaining OSRIC under the OGL is possible at this time, but 
in the long run I think it's a bit of a risk. WotC can probably cut off 
access to new users of the OGL at any time by "withdrawing the open 
offer". I don't think I'm giving WotC a roadmap here; they almost 
certainly are aware of this approach to the license. They wanted to do 
more than that to kill it quickly, but there's a much more reliable way 
to poison it over time, which is simply to withdraw the offer to "sign 
on" to the OGL. But after the massive backlash to their attempt to kill 
the license at one blow, they will have to wait a while before 
mentioning the OGL again. This potential future withdrawal of the offer 
would create a problem for anyone new who wanted to publish something 
for OSRIC, so it behooves us to move to a different license now, before 
the axe eventually comes down.

2) The ORC license has some problems with easy usability. I won't go 
into those because it's complicated and also because there's discussion 
about it in lots of other places. The AELF License, since it works in 
the same way as the OGL, is familiar enough that it can be adopted 
relatively easily by anyone familiar with the OGL.

3) OSRIC 3.0 is intended to be completely backward-compatible with OSRIC 
2.0, and it shouldn't require any "new versions" of adventures that have 
been published in the past. There might turn out to be minor glitches in 
terms of backward compatibility, but those will be the exception.

4) The reasons for coming out with a new version:

a) First, the license, as mentioned above.

b) Secondly, it's to meet the needs of a younger batch of gamers in a 
context where the PDFs of the original books are available from WotC 
(which wasn't the case when we originally published OSRIC 2.0). This 
means several different avenues of approach.

--- The writing style will use bullet points and other visual call-outs 
to avoid the "wall of text" effect. Even those of us raised in 
pre-internet days are starting to find the bullet-point arrangement 
preferable to a long block that doesn't visually separate and organize 
the more important elements of the text.

---We're going to include a VTT-friendly method of scale since so many 
people now game online.

---We're going to try to make this version what EOTB calls a "teaching 
edition," meaning lots of guidance for playing the game. The "how to 
play" information is in the original books to a degree, but it can be 
presented at the forefront and that's what anyone new to the whole OSR 
needs. Also, AD&D is simply more complex than other OSR games like B/X, 
so it needs to be presented in a step-by-step format that draws the 
learner into the process.


-- 
-Justisaur

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