If you have read any of the few first posts, you would see
evidence that I have my roots in pathfinder. In fact, my very first post is
also my most viewed, by a margin of more than 70 views. Why did I stop? Well,
the answer is just that I got writers block.
I was originally introduced to pathfinder by a friend, and
my first character was a paladin named Harlan Arvel. I never even played him. I was
pretty much immediately thrust the position of GM, because no one else wanted
to do it.
Needless to say, the first few games were awful. I tried
running a homebrew, but it just crashed and burned. After that I tried running
an AP, but I didn’t even have the time to prepare it. We found it so boring, in
fact, that we ended that one after the first session. I had spent hours a day
poring over various materials and homebrews from the game, and it ultimately
just burnt me out. Then one day, I decided to make a blog, in order to post a
homebrew class I had made, the Witch-Hunter, and show it to the world. It took
a few revisions to get it where it is, and still to this day it goes
un-playtested. That’s because my regular games stopped around that time.
After a long break from playing, I started reading content
from a few OSR blogs on the internet, it kind of pulled me in. So I tried to
start a new game, and I was able to get two of the players from my old one to
join. Needless to say, I had a lot longer to prepare for it, and it started out a
hell of a lot better than my last one. But why am I rambling on about
pathfinder when I’m supposed to be writing about D&D?
The Actual Point
Well, that would be because D&D freed me. When I first
learned about OD&D, I was under the impression that it was some kind of
less superior version of pathfinder because of how ‘old’ it was. I always
thought that with pathfinder, you had an infinite number of choices because you
could just homebrew anything you didn’t already have. And of course it had a ‘much
more’ sophisticated combat system. I really thought, that rules were better
than rulings, but I was wrong.
You see, with my discovery of OSR, I read through some of
the original D&D books; and I was surprised. You see, I am a man who enjoys
some verisimilitude, and OD&D had a lot more than I had thought. I actually
found that, in my opinion, the combat rules were much more sophisticated than
in pathfinder, not to mention how much more realistic they were! I mean, the
fact that anyone who knows how to fight would never let an enemy get behind
them of their own volition being
represented in the combat rules, made a lot of sense to me. Unless someone were
to sneak up behind you, you would turn your body in a way so as be facing any
enemies nearby, the other way for an enemy to get behind you was for a group of
them to surround you. I don’t think I can begin to provide how much this single
rule meant to me, it was basically the last straw that won me over.
This month marks the 45th year of D&D, that is something that truly deserves to be celebrated; and no
matter what edition you play, even among us in the OSR community, it’s just one
little child or grandchild to their shared mighty ancestor. If you still check this blog out from time to time for pathfinder, which I know happens occasionally based on traffic sources, I would encourage you to check out some of the stuff OSR presents, you may find it holds more merit than you think.
Anyway, what significance does D&D hold for you, Is it merely a
hobby, or something more? Let me know in the comments below.
Good reading your posst
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