I got the pdf version from the download above and I really appreciate the fact that it comes with a full complement of bookmarks, including an alphabetised list of bookmarks for every monster in the books monster manual. It's also nice that the book comes complete with it's own monster manual.
Its's a strange beast, since it's very rules light, and yet several of the rules it does have are needlessly convoluted, with a large array of tables to decide weather or not something hit, rather than simply saying 'OK, its got 15AV, so beat 15 on a D20 to hit'.
Here is how movement is calculated:
'Base movement rate divided by 3, times ten feet, is how far the character can move in one round.'
Why!? Why not, 'Your movement is 15 feet. You can move 15 feet.'
I get that a large part of this whole OSR thing is that it is a re-collection and re-organisation of the original D&D rules, so it partly exists for archival/historical purposes, and is quite nice to have in that regard. The book itself also states that if you don't like a rule, feel free to either not use it or change it. So fair enough I guess. My quest continues for the perfect OSR rules. I think the plan at this point is probably to look through Vengers 'The Islands of Purple Haunted Putrescence' and then see if I feel inspired to either use his 'Crimson Dragon D20 Revised' system, or if feel like modifying 'Swords and Wizardry' so that it's more to my liking, or if neither are working for me and I need to buy 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' and see if that does the job.
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |