Some Classic Fantasy OSR RPG Systems and the differences between them

[@ChrisGonnerman]

Hey, thanks for the kind words for Basic Fantasy RPG! Much appreciated!

[@paultice]

Hi Chris. I'm currently 10 sessions into running another Basic Fantasy campaign 😀 It's my favourite RPG bar none.

[@ChrisGonnerman]

@@paultice Excellent, glad you're enjoying it!

[@n.ludemann9199]

​@@ChrisGonnermanhey Chris, I just wanted to say my friends enjoy Iron Falcon very much. We ran it as a 50th anniversary game this year. Together with Blueholme it is my favorite game atm. Thank you very much, I appreciate your work, both lines are great.

[@soskoster]

OSE's layout is amazing. The idea that everything you should need being on two pages pressed him to write it in a fashion that makes it so easy to read and understand. I'm excited to see how his setting Dolmenwood comes out as it is a standalone system within.

[@BScalise97]

Can't go wrong with Basic Fantasy.

[@123iceboy]

I love basic fantasy, have created my own companion for my campaigns including some of my own rule adjustments like equipment slots I just love the customizability and the community behind it

[@ForeverGM91]

Swords & Wizardry (the new complete edition)is my go to for classic fantasy. It encourages you to hack the system and provides notes on how to implement some B/X rules or ever blueholmes rules. A lot of D&D is what you make of it and S&W makes that a great experience.

[@wilm3864]

You can get a stack of Basic Fantasy books for the price of only one book from WoTC.

[@rockhopper01]

Nice round-up! We went with Basic Fantasy for the low cost. It was cool to spend $25 and get copies that my players could keep.

[@quantus5875]

Agreed. Love the true OSR pricing philosophy that Basic Fantasy has. And it is an excellent game.

[@quantus5875]

What no mention of Castles & Crusades ?? 🙂You do get some great props for mentioning Basic Fantasy my #2, and I'm tied with Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LofTP) and Labyrinth Lord for my #3. Yes, Labyrinth Lord is a great one that for some reason doesn't as much mention as it deserves.

[@machfront]

Great overview! Born in 1974. Began playing in 1986. Today I far prefer WB:FMAG or real B/X (or OSE). I dig S&W Core but miss the thief class. Same with OD&D and S&W WhiteBox. WB:FMAG solved that and other issues for me. If I’d like a,b or c then B/X is always there for me! Heheh Outside of that, then other simple systems like RISUS or the original Fighting Fantasy rpg best done today by the excellent “Spellzard”! 😁 Oh! I cannot leave a comment without saying how wonderful and important Dan Proctor’s work with Labyrinth Lord and especially Chris’s work, and the outstanding community, has done for Basic Fantasy! Anyone in the world now could trip and fall down and find a great game no matter their age or experience!

[@weirdguy564]

I'll add a couple more games that are free. Mini-Six: Bare Bones. This is classic Star Wars D6 rules, but simplified a bit. It is also able to play any genre, but it includes a knock-off Star Wars setting along with Willow, '70's Cops and Robbers, Firefly, all with the serial numbers filed off. The other game is Pocket Fantasy. That is a SUPER rules lite game that fits in 4 pages, but I highly recommend getting the expanded class list to up the choice to 14 classes. It is a full game, despite it being so small, around 10 pages with the expansion material. Both are free.

[@mr7oclock346]

To me, Basic Fantasy wins out, because you can customize your printed copy as long as its for your own personal use. This works out for me, because of all of them homebrew rules I use

[@rolanejo8512]

Awesome video.Thank you for a great state of the OS-art. Your channel inspired my solo play and lead me further down the OSR land of the free.

[@rolanejo8512]

Whitebox + Whitebox Ómnibus is my Jam. Although my favorite setting is BECMI's Mystara.

[@BryanSpellman]

great rundown. Added two to my BUY LIST! first time viewer, subscribed! Awesome content, thank you!!!

[@StarkMaximum]

I like this video a lot. It's nice to go over all your different options and explain how one might be different from another. Like you said, once you get a couple of these, you really don't need too much more. Basic Fantasy is certainly my go-to, as it's cheap and complete and easy to parse, but as someone with no nostalgia for old DnD but a lot of curiosity, I am very intrigued by 2e and thus was drawn immediately to For Gold and Glory; another cheap option as the PDF is free. Oh, and I do have the full box set of OSE, because it looks super nice and fancy, makes for a nice "game in a box" feeling, and when the core box set came back in stock I panic-bought it because I was worried it would go out of stock again. Oh, and I have a copy of the White Box book, because it happened to be a cheap pick-up when I was buying Basic Fantasy. Along with Cairn. Maybe I'm not the best example. Do as I say, not as I do.

[@VMSelvaggio]

Thank you for going through all of these and making the lines a little more clear between them! Much appreciated for your video and work!

[@rkcpek]

I can practically smell the 'new book' scent of chemicals and fresh ink as you flip through the pages.

[@ChuckBarchuk]

BX will always be my favorite. Awesome video Paul.

[@paultice]

Cheers, buddy ☺

[@ChuckBarchuk]

Or...it might be S&W. :)

[@ChuckBarchuk]

I have the new revised version of S&W and it's glorious.

[@marccaron6008]

As a BX 1981 player, I went with OSE classic and advanced box sets. More expensive but the graphic design and text are excellent. My old BX books can now retire.

[@midnightgreen8319]

I didn't know Mcausland did the artwork for White box! I love his Mutant Epoch books, he has a super detailed vision of his setting. I will have to pick up Whitebox now. I love his style.

[@paultice]

His style is a lot more restrained in White Box for the medieval setting as you might imagine. Totally agree. His Mutant Epoch art is amazing and really captures how rich that setting is.

[@midnightgreen8319]

@@paultice the amount of work he has poured into that game is absolutely staggering. The Crossroads Region book is the most detailed setting book I've ever seen! Great video as always Sir!

[@dungeondumbo]

Mutant Epoch is incredible. William McAusland’s art for Whitebox is licenced not specifically made for that book.

[@xXarchitoXx]

I got a copy of the White Box. I like to be able to take my adventures with me but discovered i dont much like PDFs, theres something special about tangible books. This one's perfectly portable, has comprehensive but simple ruleset + i LOVE high contrast black and white ink drawings so the cover immediately got my attention. I use it solo with the basic GMA deck i printed out, it's lots of random fun. I was really wondering what are the differences between the white box and basic fantasy, thanks for the comparison. I definitely want to try out the latter at some point as well

[@xXarchitoXx]

Interestingly enough I was initially looking for GURPs books, but they're not freely available where I live (low availability = absolutely crazy prices) and then saw this lil thing and kinda fell in love with the simplicity

[@williamswargames]

Wow, thank you so much for this video! ❤ I decided to buy the old school essentials, and the white box - probably overkill, but I’d like some options. Thank you again for taking the time!

[@paultice]

Thank you for your great question ☺

[@midnightgreen8319]

I have the OSE Classic Players Tome and the Advanced Referee's Tome. So I have all the monsters and items but the Regular classes. It works out fairly well.

[@n.ludemann9199]

Among the Oe games, Iron Falcon by Chris Gonnerman is my favorite. Blueholme and Iron Falcon are my favorite rpgs atm.

[@retrodmray]

More great stuff, sir, and I couldn't agree more with your choices here indeed! 👍 😀

[@freddaniel5099]

Very nice video coverage of the basic OSR canon. Do you find any difficulty with any of them when running older modules or even those written recently for a particular flavor of OSR? I notice that cloned versions of some of the classic modules are offered often with a particular game system in mind. Basic Fantasy seems to have several of these available. Would they run equally well using Labyrinth Lord, etc. I wonder?

[@paultice]

I've not tried that yet, I intend to run In Search of Adventure with OSE next year, but I played in a friend's game of Castle Amber, he was using OSE, and I was using Labyrinth Lord (I didn't have OSE at the time) to keep track of my character's rules, and it all seemed to work really well.

[@ChrisGonnerman]

Classic BX modules run perfectly with BFRPG just by subtracting the AC values from 20. Higher level BECMI modules might be a bit tricky, as would AD&D 1E or 2E modules. BX modules should also work perfectly with Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry.

[@Perchpole]

Excellent video. Do any of these lend themselves (in particular) to solo play?

[@paultice]

Hi. I think they would all require the same amount of work to play solo really as they are all similarly comprehensive as RPG rules sets go, but they don't have the oracles that are always helpful for solo play. Having said that, there are some good solo rules available for free in the Basic Fantasy forums www.basicfantasy.org/forums/download/file.php?id=6219&sid=a3fc8fd2c4292f69b89a80bc4ae5e5fb

[@kurgon1976]

I went with Dungeon crawl classics, however if I were to go with an alt system I would just go Basic.

[@stevenkennedy4130]

PSA! Do yourselves a favor and just get the White Box book. The other ones are price prohibitive and not any better for that extra cash/money. Okay rant over... Thanks for the share!!

[@paulll47]

Great list although I think Lamentations of the Flame Princess deserved to be on the list, might not be everyone's cup of tea but the contributions it gave to the OSR movements are invaluable.

[@quantus5875]

Yes, LotFP doesn't show up much for some reason. It was popular when it first came out and is a fantastic game. I actually like the "feel" of LofTP.

[@VhaidraSaga]

💯

[@BunnyNiyori]

These are all equal save prices. I lean toward praising Basic Fantasy over the others. But, if you REALLY want to score, the current front runner for old school is Shadowdark. Not cheap at 80 bucks. And the entire pile of items in the video are not equal to Shadowdark. I have everything in the video.

[@burningphoneix]

Shadowdark is actually quite bad.

[@stevenkennedy4130]

He didn't talk about Blueholme either. A fine video none the less!