One thing that often trips up new players to OSR-style games is putting a lot of time and investment into a character who's probably going to die in his first fight (I'm just talking your standard orc, who can kill everyone in the party in 5 turns with around a 25% chance per character). Of course you can scale down the lethality and fudge rolls, but I can't, I like to play it the way it's written or I'd play something besides D&D.
It seems to me that the easiest way to deal with high death rates in typical dungeons (without having brilliant strategists for players) is to simply have a ton of pre-gens with no information but stats and class. OSR statistics are usually a fairly minor feature of character power (and all characters suck at L1), so just having a bunch of faceless Fighters and Magic Users should give someone the same practical control/advantage they would have rolling their own character. I know some people just like creating characters, but even in those cases it's not always practical if you want to keep an adventure going without everyone spending two weeks in town healing every other delve.
I can understand not wanting pregens for complex games like GURPS or Burning Wheel, but for most OSR games you're IRL exercising the same amount of agency over a randomly generated person I made as over one you made. Seems like an entirely practical solution to Dungeon Crawl Classic style adventuring. Actually, DCC characters are complicated enough to make it harder to do, but that's why they start out as level 0 nobodies.
Nov 16th, 2022, 01:21 PM
