Day 22nd: Baelsaniel, OSRIC 3.0

One more day, one more character completed! Mythmere Games has recently released the 3.0 version of their AD&D 1e retro-clone, OSRIC, less than a month ago for the player's guide and it looks like they published the GM guide just this Sunday. Having never interacted with that version of D&D at all, I decided to pull it up and roll a Fighter. Cracking it opened, I must admit, I'm really not too impressed with it or the original game if that's the clearer, more cleaned up version. I kept running into situation where they would start to define something like Rate of Attack, stop midway and then a search function would reveal that Rate of Attack is never mentioned anywhere in the book but that specific section that doesn't actually define it. I randomly found the info I needed for my level 1 fighter in the higher level feature of the Fighter, I should have known you always gotta see what level 7 guys get to make level 1 character. Especially since level 7 Fighter is only a level my character can ever reach because I rolled a 18 and put it in Strength. 
 

Art by Jonval-Art on ych.commish.com

I didn't feel like digging out my die to roll this Elf up, so I used a website that gave me disgustingly high stats, using the 4d6 drop low, assign as needed method of rolling stats. I gotta say, reading through the start of the book, I really get the impression the author tried GMing D&D 3e once, had a situation where the solution was knowing the genealogy of a royal house and prepared a big logic puzzle for the players to figure it out, only for someone pipping up with "I have Knowledge (History) and Knowledge (Noble), my character is also from this culture, wouldn't that be something I know?" and the GM is still salty over it 25 years later. I do like how multiclassing works for non-human, even though that's just to paper over the ridiculously low level cap they get for everything but Thief. Thieves of any races get unlimited levels, but that's more an insult than anything else. Thief 100% only exist to punish bad stat rolls that won't let you play any of the actual class. If you have a party with no Thief, I guarantee that whatever the GM improvises for you when you say you want to try to sneak around will be better than having a Thief with its 15% success rate. 15% is how good games lets you know to not bother trying something with that character and that's among the better success rate for the special rogue skills! Also, how are you telling me that "Feats that say you can do something are bad because it means you can't do it otherwise" when all those feats in 3.X are actually "You get a bonus or do not get this penalties when you do it" and this has a table saying you have 15% chance to move silently with no mention of what happens if you try to move silently as a non-rogue! By definition, you should be worse than someone without it, but how do you even get worse than that?

Anyway, here's the sheet, I don't feel like writing about this game anymore. Though, I will add that I forgot to save a correction before turning the pdf into an image, I shouldn't have the broad/bastard sword proficiency, I forgot that specialties makes you take proficiency twice. Gah, that reminds me of another complaint, the description of specializing implies that specializing is in a specific weapon, such as long sword instead of swords, written in a way that strongly implies that proficiency is more broad... except I found nothing clarifying that and the only attempts at maybe having weapon category is elves getting a bonus to Pull Bows, which I assume cover any bow but not crossbows? Ok, that's it, I gotta stop. Sorry if AD&D 1e is your favorite game.