by Brad » Tue Mar 15, 2011 3:23 pm
To be perfectly honest, I don't really see any reason to play OSRIC. If I want to play AD&D, I'll just pull out the books and play it. They're not that hard to find, and you can get a PHB off eBay for $5. OSRIC doesn't "fix" any of the issues that a lot of people have with AD&D, yet strips out all the flavor. LL + AEC isn't exactly AD&D, but it's typically how most people play and did play AD&D in the first place. LL seems to fix a lot of issues I had with B/X, yet retains all the good stuff, too. AEC adds the parts of AD&D that are the most fun. It took me a while to figure out (basically reading the first 50 issues of Dragon helped), but you've got to remember that AD&D itself as published is nothing more than a hodge-podge of houserules for OD&D. Even though it bears Gygax's name, he didn't write some of that stuff, he merely collected it and put it between two covers. OSRIC's intent, at least initially, was to duplicate these warts to enable publishing AD&D adventures, yet now they seem to have shifted to making it a more playable game. Again, why? I really don't understand the reason behind it. LL actually does something useful: combines B and X into a unified book. I don't even think OSRIC is a good reference because the slight differences make it nearly useless in a true AD&D game. Speaking from experience, when I tried to use OSRIC as a replacement for the PHB in a game I was running, I grew irritated.
YMMV, of course, and this is nothing more than an anti-OSRIC rant, but LL offers an actual game while OSRIC only appears to be an actual game. Further, LL does more in 140 pages than OSRIC does in 400. Perhaps most importantly, K&K has a lot more jackasses than the GG forums.