Well, finally got to run a game of Labyrinth Lord with a group of old gamers and some of their kids and cousins.
I guess I look back at Old School gaming with rose colored glasses as the character creation compared to 5E was
a drudgery.
Without some kind of very nice preset character creation help built in like 5E has, the game can really be taxing on
your patience. Once everyone had their characters made we finally started to play.
Now mind you we were already a few hours late getting started. After playing the extremely smooth unified
mechanics of 5E (and my Back to the Dungeon RPG), I quickly realized that much of the old school systems are quite
clunky in comparison. We just had gotten used to how they work and wrapping our head around another system
can be hard.
Having used both 5E is pretty much an old school game (because of the design advice from RPG pundit) mixed with
some new school unified mechanics which just simply flows better. It's not totally lethal like B/X games but it can be
once you have ran out of dice for a short rest AND if you have used the exhaustion mechanics. After that, it becomes
quite hard on the players once those buffers are gone.
The unified mechanic is pretty much Superior to any and all of the old school methods of task resolution. Why?
Because system matters if it gets out of the way of the game! Roll a D20 instead of just pulling out the various dice
for checking on sometimes the same thing. Some abilities use a D6 while as a thief they use a % so after coming
from the B/X, 2E background from my early days of gaming, it seems 5E mechanics are a sweet spot. Very simply
it just is way smoother than the old stuff.
I am pretty sure that I will be shelving pretty much all my old school games and for my fantasy fix will just be playing
