State of the OSR: so, what did I miss?

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For the sake of clarity Advanced OSE is not a faithful reaction of AD&D (the way Classic OSE is of 1981 BX D&D) and is neither targeted to not particularly appealing and suitable for people who are familiar with and like AD&D. It’s a bunch of AD&D-inspired content (races, classes, magic items, monsters) re-written to be fully compatible with BX D&D, so lower-powered and simplified with a lot of the quirky flavor and detail left out. Probably most significantly, while it adds new spells for the new classes (druid and illusionist) it does not add the magic-user and cleric spells from AD&D that are not in BX - so no burning hands, erase, find familiar, grease, identify, shocking grasp, spider climb, unseen servant, command, sanctuary, and literally hundreds of other spells (including all of the high level spells since Advanced OSE still tops out at 14th level, with a max of 6th level spells for magic-users and illusionists and 5th level for clerics and druids).

I acknowledge that there’s a market niche for this kind of game - basically “BX+,” probably something like the original Companion set might have been (before Frank Mentzer took things in a different direction) but it doesn’t speak to me at all and trying to play it would be a constant stream of frustration and annoyance for me.

It especially irks me because while OSRIC was good for it’s time, 15 years later it’s definitely showing its age - both in terms of its “enthusiastic amateur” presentation and all of the minor rules differences and omissions that were felt to be necessary at the time but not any more (if OSE Classic can reproduce the rules of BX D&D 100% faithfully there’s absolutely room for something closer to AD&D than OSRIC). Necrotic Gnome could have done a faithful recreation of AD&D, but decided instead to do something very different (and IMO worse).
 
[snip]. Necrotic Gnome could have done a faithful recreation of AD&D, but decided instead to do something very different (and IMO worse).
Erm . . . but who the hell would actually want a faithful recreation of AD&D?! It was only much later on that I realized that no one ever played AD&D (as it was actually written). We certainly didn't as teenagers. What we basically had on our hands was a mish-mash of B/X and the spells, class and magic items of AD&D.
 
Man, I honestly don't know if I could go back to 5e. I mean, I'm sure with a good group I'd have fun but my heart just wouldn't be in it. Looking back it can't decide if it wants to be an old-school heroic fantasy game like TSR-era (A)D&D or a superpowered dungeonpunk game like 3.5/PF/4e, and makes some really strange compromises as a result.
 
That's gross nerd talk.

(If you don't get the reference, you've missed one of the weirdest and most amusing side shows in the OSR scene this year.)
Stranger Things?
 
Stranger Things?
Ha. I wish. No, I'm talking about the #BrOSR. AD&D 1e purists with a penchant for Twitter trolling and insisting that they understand the game better than the people who were there when it was written.

EDIT: To be fair, they're not all bad, and they often make some good points about how the odder parts of the system actually fit really well with the whole.
 
Ha. I wish. No, I'm talking about the #BrOSR. AD&D 1e purists with a penchant for Twitter trolling and insisting that they understand the game better than the people who were there when it was written.
Well as someone who has played AD&D since it came out I can say with some confidence what they wrote and what we did looked very different. It didn't help that the order of publication basically forced you to play a Basic /AD&D mashup from the start. 1st came Holmes then MM then Players Handbook and then DMG. So given the combat tables didn't come out until over a year after the classes and 2byears after the monsters the game got off on a very wrong foot if you wanted consistent table play.
 
Well as someone who has played AD&D since it came out I can say with some confidence what they wrote and what we did looked very different. It didn't help that the order of publication basically forced you to play a Basic /AD&D mashup from the start. 1st came Holmes then MM then Players Handbook and then DMG. So given the combat tables didn't come out until over a year after the classes and 2byears after the monsters the game got off on a very wrong foot if you wanted consistent table play.
I can definitely see that. In addition, I suspect there are some features of Holmes Basic that were meant for inclusion in AD&D but were cut by the time the PHB and DMG came out. This is the only way I can make sense of Basic's using 10 second rounds instead of 1 minute rounds: it makers sense only if they were going to put this in AD&D but decided against it after Holmes was out.
 
Ha. I wish. No, I'm talking about the #BrOSR. AD&D 1e purists with a penchant for Twitter trolling and insisting that they understand the game better than the people who were there when it was written.

EDIT: To be fair, they're not all bad, and they often make some good points about how the odder parts of the system actually fit really well with the whole.
Dollars to donuts these are Johnny-come-lately wannabes who weren't there and are trying to recreate a past that never existed (outside of maybe some very small circles). I never met one person who used the unarmed rules (successfully). No one once referred to the Weapon vs. AC matrix, true to the book initiative with segments and weapons speeds and all of the rest were simple curiosities. Item saving throws were never used once to my recollection. I'm not saying that there wasn't some masochist out there somewhere that integrated the full corpus of oddities and special cases that existed in the DMG (not to mention rules introduced with the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide) but I never met one in the wild.
 
No one once referred to the Weapon vs. AC matrix,
I've considered using this to see how it goes. It wouldn't be too difficult to integrate into an OSR game like White Box — it's ultimately from the Greyhawk supplement after all — and the purpose is to emulate the different by-weapon target numbers in the Chainmail Man-to-Man table.

What would interest me more is just playing OD&D with Chainmail combat and seeing how that goes.
true to the book initiative with segments and weapons speeds
Initiative is 100% the rule I dread most if I ever tried to play AD&D 1e by-the-book. Even the BrOSR's defense of it is that the really complicated stuff don't come up that often.
 
I put a ton of work into Carcosa using OSE rules that I was to make into an open table online to circumvent FtF scheduling issues. It would have allowed me to invite my FtF players and cool Pubbers alike for a zero commitment game. Sadly, the wife straight out told me last week she doesn't like B/X and wants to go back to 5e. I'm still kinda reeling from that bomb and looking into the next best option, Into the Unknown.
Why doesn't she like B/X?

The reason I ask that even though I started using Swords & Wizardry over a decade ago I still ran the campaigns the same way I did as GURPS. So I mucked around and identified some key elements that I would need for mechanics to make that happen. One of those was that players had a good sense what they could do outside of combat and spellcasting. And could get better at those things. So from that I developed my skills system which I called abilities because any characters could them. Jettisoned the thief and made a series of what I Rogue classes (burglar, thug, merchant adventurer, montebank, etc.) that were better at abilites over spellcasting and combat.

Later players tried things in combat that I would handle using GURPS maneuvers like trip, disarm, etc. So I tried and kept a mechanic where you could declare something "bad" happening to a target as a result of a successful to-hit but the catch is that the target gets a save. At first this was instead of damage. But later I allowed damage to be dealt in some instances (like an attempt to knock out an opponent) if the target made their save. It just made more sense for certain things.

I am not saying my rules are the answer to the issues that your wife's objections. But I did write about how I came about this stuff and applying those principles to your situation you may come up with a way to use B/X that is fun for her.

I took the chapter out of my Majestic Fantasy RPG and made a free PDF out of it as people been asking me about it. It called When to make a Ruling. Hope you find it useful.
 
Necrotic Gnome could have done a faithful recreation of AD&D, but decided instead to do something very different (and IMO worse).

It was my experience in my neck of the woods, rural NW PA and a Division 2 sized university in western PA that most people played with AD&D stuff and B/X rules. OSE and Labyrinth Lord Advanced Fantasy cater to this sentiment. Which while may make it worse product for folks with your sentiments, makes it better for how most people use classic edition material.

And nobody I know of is making the claim that OSE Advanced is a clone of AD&D
 
I can definitely see that. In addition, I suspect there are some features of Holmes Basic that were meant for inclusion in AD&D but were cut by the time the PHB and DMG came out. This is the only way I can make sense of Basic's using 10 second rounds instead of 1 minute rounds: it makers sense only if they were going to put this in AD&D but decided against it after Holmes was out.
MM was designed around Holmes and by the time DMG came out the ACs were wrong if I remember right.
 
Erm . . . but who the hell would actually want a faithful recreation of AD&D?! It was only much later on that I realized that no one ever played AD&D (as it was actually written). We certainly didn't as teenagers. What we basically had on our hands was a mish-mash of B/X and the spells, class and magic items of AD&D.
We know from Ben Riggs that the 1E AD&D Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and DMG each sold over a million copies (about 1.6M for the PH, 1.3M for the DMG, and 1.2M for the MM), and the 2E AD&D core books all sold a bit more than half as well as their 1E counterparts (about a million for the 2E PH, 750K for the DMG, and 600K for the combined Monster books (Monstrous Compendium binder & Monstrous Manual book). That’s about 6.5M core books sold over a span of 20 years. I’m pretty sure at least some of those people actually did play the game.

Anecdotally I know of at least a couple hundred in my home town alone (people in my own game groups, people in other groups in my school, people at the game club, people who attended the two local cons). By contrast, I don’t know of a single person from that era (c. 1984-93) who either stuck with the Basic version for more than a few months (almost all of us owned it but once we’d “graduated up” to AD&D it forevermore sat on the shelf gathering dust) or made a conscious effort to mix and match the two. Maybe that approach was more common among older players who’d started in the 70s before the full set of AD&D books had been released, but we also know from Riggs’ numbers that those “legacy” players were outnumbered about 50:1 by those who started playing during the “boom” years of 1980-83, so while they’re over-represented among the professional rpg authors of the 90s and 00s (and, seemingly, among the cadre of fans still posting on forums) they’re a tiny fraction of the total market and fanbase in the 80s and 90s.
 
I think 2nd edition is more beloved in the real world than it is on forums as well. No proof, just a gut feeling.
Well I still like for "what I want AD&D to be" problem is I don't have much use for 'D&D' as a thing anymore.
 
It especially irks me because while OSRIC was good for it’s time, 15 years later it’s definitely showing its age - both in terms of its “enthusiastic amateur” presentation and all of the minor rules differences and omissions that were felt to be necessary at the time but not any more (if OSE Classic can reproduce the rules of BX D&D 100% faithfully there’s absolutely room for something closer to AD&D than OSRIC). Necrotic Gnome could have done a faithful recreation of AD&D, but decided instead to do something very different (and IMO worse).
You have the skills to fix this or know people that could fix this so encourage them.

I have been saying that the OSR belongs to those that do for years. If AD&D 1e is to be more prominent then it needs people who are willing to do the work. Gavin Norman was willing to do the work several times before he got it into its present form.

 
Dollars to donuts these are Johnny-come-lately wannabes who weren't there and are trying to recreate a past that never existed (outside of maybe some very small circles). I never met one person who used the unarmed rules (successfully). No one once referred to the Weapon vs. AC matrix, true to the book initiative with segments and weapons speeds and all of the rest were simple curiosities. Item saving throws were never used once to my recollection. I'm not saying that there wasn't some masochist out there somewhere that integrated the full corpus of oddities and special cases that existed in the DMG (not to mention rules introduced with the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide) but I never met one in the wild.
But doing all of that stuff is within the scope of AD&D - the rules, especially the ones covering complicated sub-cases, were modular for a reason. I also saw very few people who used most of those rules (and even fewer who used them regularly or consistently) but what I never saw was anyone who used the BX stat adjustments, or race-as-class, or didn’t give clerics spells at 1st level (and bonus spells for high wisdom) or fighters 10-sided hit dice, or used three-prong alignment, or plate mail that cost 60 GP instead of 400, or who counted no armor as AC 9 instead of 10 (or leather as 7 instead of 8) or who didn’t use different weapon damage depending on target size, or ROF 2 for bows and thrown daggers, or didn’t use the full spell lists, or didn’t use the attack, saving throw, and cleric vs undead tables from the DMG.

And I strongly suspect (but of course can’t say for certain because it literally never once happened in a decade+ of regular play) that if anyone had suggested doing any of those things “the Basic way” they’d have been laughed at and immediately shot down.
 
You have the skills to fix this or know people that could fix this so encourage them.

I have been saying that the OSR belongs to those that do for years. If AD&D 1e is to be more prominent then it needs people who are willing to do the work. Gavin Norman was willing to do the work several times before he got it into its present form.

OSRIC is and always will be given away for free in pdf and at-cost in print so there is not and never will be a budget for anything that can’t be done on a 100% volunteer basis, and the original creators of OSRIC have shown zero interest in changing that. The OSRIC 2.0 rulebook was a minor miracle because a ton of people (including me) stepped up to provide their time and services for free because we believed it was important. That lightning isn’t going to be caught in the bottle twice (especially since at least 2 of those people - Jim Kramer who did the layout and Jason Zavoda who did the indexes - are no longer living).
 
But doing all of that stuff is within the scope of AD&D - the rules, especially the ones covering complicated sub-cases, were modular for a reason.
People tried to point this out to the BrOSR, that Gygax never himself used all of these rules. Gary said so himself, Frank Mentzer said so, pretty much everyone who played with him the 70s and 80s has said so. The BrOSR just rejected their reality and substituted their own in which all of these people were either misunderstanding, misremembering, or played with him after he'd passed his prime.

Me, I just figure all the rules in AD&D that were truly important were written in capital letters. :grin:
 
As one of those people who played (briefly) with Gygax in the 80s I can confirm he didn’t use any of those complicated optional sub-case rules but did use AD&D for everything else - including not only everything listed in the prior post but also fighters getting extra attacks at high level, Thief backstab damage increasing by level, spell effects (variable ranges, AOEs and durations by level, magic missiles doing 1d4+1 damage, etc). AFAIK it never once occurred to anyone at the table in either session that the game we were playing was anything other than AD&D.
 
I put a ton of work into Carcosa using OSE rules that I was to make into an open table online to circumvent FtF scheduling issues. It would have allowed me to invite my FtF players and cool Pubbers alike for a zero commitment game. Sadly, the wife straight out told me last week she doesn't like B/X and wants to go back to 5e. I'm still kinda reeling from that bomb and looking into the next best option, Into the Unknown.
Have you considered a heavily disguised B/X? Esoteric Enterprises. Apes Victorious. A Ghastly Affair.

That kind of thing.
 
But doing all of that stuff is within the scope of AD&D - the rules, especially the ones covering complicated sub-cases, were modular for a reason. I also saw very few people who used most of those rules (and even fewer who used them regularly or consistently) but what I never saw was anyone who used the BX stat adjustments, or race-as-class, or didn’t give clerics spells at 1st level (and bonus spells for high wisdom) or fighters 10-sided hit dice, or used three-prong alignment, or plate mail that cost 60 GP instead of 400, or who counted no armor as AC 9 instead of 10 (or leather as 7 instead of 8) or who didn’t use different weapon damage depending on target size, or ROF 2 for bows and thrown daggers, or didn’t use the full spell lists, or didn’t use the attack, saving throw, and cleric vs undead tables from the DMG.

And I strongly suspect (but of course can’t say for certain because it literally never once happened in a decade+ of regular play) that if anyone had suggested doing any of those things “the Basic way” they’d have been laughed at and immediately shot down.
I never said that people played AD&D with 80% of the skeleton of Basic/Expert and 20% the addition of some AD&D trappings, but in practice most people did use the PHB for all of the player facing stuff that you mention, but the guts of combat resolution and a ton of rules laid out in the DMG were ignored or were straight rips from Basic/Expert. The older kids/college age guys who taught me to play when I was just a wee tot at 12 had been at it for quite some time and the DMG was verboten to read unless you were running a game. It wasn't until much later on when I picked up my own copy of the DMG to finally run a game myself that I realized how little of it had actually been implemented at the table. a few different target numbers here or some different stat bonuses there aren't really what I'm talking about; it's the actual conflict resolution mechanics and systems that were lifted from the earlier game(s) that so many of us in the mid-80s to early 90s grew up on without realizing it at the time -- if you asked anyone most would say, of course they played AD&D, but did they really?
 
Have you considered a heavily disguised B/X? Esoteric Enterprises. Apes Victorious. A Ghastly Affair.

That kind of thing.
Why doesn't she like B/X?

I like the way you guys think but Bunny's dissatisfaction with B/X goes down to the very bones of the system.
  • Characters are fragile
  • Glacially slow advancement
  • Only option for Fighters in combat is "I hit it with my weapon" or playing mother may I with the DM
  • Magic Users are walking, talking single charge magic items
Edit: I think it's a generational thing. She's 20 years younger than me. 5e took some really good lessons from video game development that appeal to younger people.
 
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I like the way you guys think but Bunny's dissatisfaction with B/X goes down to the very bones of the system.
  • Characters are fragile
  • Glacially slow advancement
  • Only option for Fighters in combat is "I hit it with my weapon" or playing mother may I with the DM
  • Magic Users are walking, talking single charge magic items
Edit: I think it's a generational thing. She's 20 years younger than me. 5e took some really good lessons from video game development that appeal to younger people.
I know it's not technically OSR, but Advanced Fighting Fantasy fixes all of those apart from maybe the Fighter options one.
 
I know it's not technically OSR, but Advanced Fighting Fantasy fixes all of those apart from maybe the Fighter options one.
It occurs to me that they're also all pretty easy to fix except that one, too: you can always hand out more hp, more xp, and more spells.

The fighter option one is harder because it sounds like what she's expecting is a list of predefined actions like in a video game. From an OSR perspective that's more limiting than the "mother may I" approach. A very different taste and perspective.
 
Is BrOSR a real thing or a facetious acronym referring to RPG Bros like Tech Bros?
 
OSRIC is and always will be given away for free in pdf and at-cost in print so there is not and never will be a budget for anything that can’t be done on a 100% volunteer basis, and the original creators of OSRIC have shown zero interest in changing that. The OSRIC 2.0 rulebook was a minor miracle because a ton of people (including me) stepped up to provide their time and services for free because we believed it was important. That lightning isn’t going to be caught in the bottle twice (especially since at least 2 of those people - Jim Kramer who did the layout and Jason Zavoda who did the indexes - are no longer living).
Sorry hear that about Jim Kramer I knew about Jason passing away.

My counterpoint is that nobody thought there would another successful close clone after Swords & Wizardry (multiple versions), Labyrinth Lord, and OSRIC jelled. But now we have Old School Essentials. Folks can find a lot of reasons to say why a project can't happen. I opt to point out the ways a project can happen as annoying as that may be at times.
 
For the sake of clarity Advanced OSE is not a faithful reaction of AD&D (the way Classic OSE is of 1981 BX D&D) and is neither targeted to not particularly appealing and suitable for people who are familiar with and like AD&D. It’s a bunch of AD&D-inspired content (races, classes, magic items, monsters) re-written to be fully compatible with BX D&D, so lower-powered and simplified with a lot of the quirky flavor and detail left out. Probably most significantly, while it adds new spells for the new classes (druid and illusionist) it does not add the magic-user and cleric spells from AD&D that are not in BX - so no burning hands, erase, find familiar, grease, identify, shocking grasp, spider climb, unseen servant, command, sanctuary, and literally hundreds of other spells (including all of the high level spells since Advanced OSE still tops out at 14th level, with a max of 6th level spells for magic-users and illusionists and 5th level for clerics and druids).

I acknowledge that there’s a market niche for this kind of game - basically “BX+,” probably something like the original Companion set might have been (before Frank Mentzer took things in a different direction) but it doesn’t speak to me at all and trying to play it would be a constant stream of frustration and annoyance for me.

It especially irks me because while OSRIC was good for it’s time, 15 years later it’s definitely showing its age - both in terms of its “enthusiastic amateur” presentation and all of the minor rules differences and omissions that were felt to be necessary at the time but not any more (if OSE Classic can reproduce the rules of BX D&D 100% faithfully there’s absolutely room for something closer to AD&D than OSRIC). Necrotic Gnome could have done a faithful recreation of AD&D, but decided instead to do something very different (and IMO worse).

I think a new version of OSRIC with new layout and art would be cool but the one stumbling block for a faithful retroclone would be what to do with the thoroughly confusing initiative rules. The endless threads of people 'explaining' their interpretation of int in AD&D in DF are headache-inducing and that's by people who are partisans for the ruleset!
 
OSRIC is and always will be given away for free in pdf and at-cost in print so there is not and never will be a budget for anything that can’t be done on a 100% volunteer basis, and the original creators of OSRIC have shown zero interest in changing that.
A big issue here is that OSRIC is not 100% open content. 2/3rd of the content is product identity sharable only under the OSRIC license. Chapter I to III covers Creating a Character, Spells, How to Play. That limits the pool of people who are authorized to work on OSRIC . I have been mentioning this problem for years. Until somebody makes a close clone that is as open as Old School Essentials, Labyrinth, or Swords & Wizardry, the AD&D slice of the classic D&D hobby is going to be hobbled.

But on the other to raise a counterpoint to the above there are 890 OSRIC related products on DriveThru, compared to Labyrinth Lord with 1,203, OSE with 352, and Swords & Wizardry with 1,008. So it may behind the two B/X Version and S&W but it not that far behind. Perhaps there isn't a AD&D problem at all.

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I think a new version of OSRIC with new layout and art would be cool but the one stumbling block for a faithful retroclone would be what to do with the thoroughly confusing initiative rules. The endless threads of people 'explaining' their interpretation of int in AD&D in DF are headache-inducing and that's by people who are partisans for the ruleset!
Well as outlined here there are two exclusive interpretations.

But the second take OSRIC or segment initiative is straight forward in my opinion.

Both sides roll 1d6 at the beginning of each round. The higher roll wins and that side has initiative. The number rolled by each side also determines the segment of the round on which the other side acts,
The most of AD&D initiative rules outlined in A.D.D.C.I.T only applies when there is a tie. If I knew the above in the early 80s I would not bothered to come up with my own way dealing with AD&D combat rounds. Which was based on the idea that you could a half-move and attack. And that players can sub in other actions for the half-move and/or the attack.
 
It occurs to me that they're also all pretty easy to fix except that one, too: you can always hand out more hp, more xp, and more spells.

The fighter option one is harder because it sounds like what she's expecting is a list of predefined actions like in a video game. From an OSR perspective that's more limiting than the "mother may I" approach. A very different taste and perspective.
With all due respect, a quick and easy fix isn't adequate to change core features of the system.

I realize it is bad form to defend modern game design in an OSR thread but hard coded actions are not necessarily limiting or bad. For example, in 5e any PC can attempt to disarm, grapple, shove, or knock down an opponent. That's not limiting in any way. In fact, those hard coded actions provide a solid base for fairly adjudicating improvised actions like leaping on a monster's back and stabbing the shit out of it.
 
I know it's not technically OSR, but Advanced Fighting Fantasy fixes all of those apart from maybe the Fighter options one.
Man, where was this 30 years ago? Anything having to do with the Titan setting would have been an auto-buy from me. Until I discovered Robert E Howard it was my favorite fantasy setting with old school Warhammer being a close second.
 
With all due respect, a quick and easy fix isn't adequate to change core features of the system.

I realize it is bad form to defend modern game design in an OSR thread but hard coded actions are not necessarily limiting or bad. For example, in 5e any PC can attempt to disarm, grapple, shove, or knock down an opponent. That's not limiting in any way. In fact, those hard coded actions provide a solid base for fairly adjudicating improvised actions like leaping on a monster's back and stabbing the shit out of it.
Ironically that's the one I think is easier to fix for several reasons.

Firstly B/X is unusual, even among old school games, for not having listed combat options in the way you require. I'm not saying play Flashing Blades necessarily, but there's a fair few games with the kind of hard coded actions you want listed, even if they describe them as guidelines.

Because of that, if you are playing a system without tactical options, it's very easy to just port them over and convert them to the system you're using. The only word of caution with doing so is that you need to keep an eye on fighters if you're using a class system. Without that, you risk the Fighter just being a bit better at something everyone else can do.
 
With all due respect, a quick and easy fix isn't adequate to change core features of the system.

I realize it is bad form to defend modern game design in an OSR thread but hard coded actions are not necessarily limiting or bad. For example, in 5e any PC can attempt to disarm, grapple, shove, or knock down an opponent. That's not limiting in any way. In fact, those hard coded actions provide a solid base for fairly adjudicating improvised actions like leaping on a monster's back and stabbing the shit out of it.
I've got zero affinity for 5e, but I get the sentiment. Sometimes you just want a rules set to support the kind of game you want to run without having to tinker and hack to get it there.
 
I want to be clear that I don't mind a lack of hard coded actions and am a huge fan of B/X. None of you guys need to sell me on the system, I love it and have many good things to say about it. That said, B/X and OSR gaming is undeniably an acquired taste.

Let's take one example- hard coded abilities. A first level 5e Fighter has Second Wind and often a combat feat ability that compliments his fighting style. Right out of the gate he can do something impactful and interesting that only his class can do other than "I hit it with my sword" without having to bargain with the DM. A level 1 Wizard can cast three 1st level spells a day plus cantrips so he doesn't spend the entire session with his thumb up his ass or trying to make himself useful. To someone who grew up bargaining with the DM to do anything other than basic attacks, it's no big deal. To a newer or younger gamer, it's like making them play one of those old timey video games with no save points.

To help explain the younger gamer's perspective, B/X is like the classic older video games that were punishingly difficult and lacked quality of life features that are standard issue in newer games. Even modern OSR games have this problem e.g. Dark Souls III delivers an amazing experience once you grok it but a lot of people are just going to bounce hard off of it and not take the time to push through the steep and punishing learning curve.
Because of that, if you are playing a system without tactical options, it's very easy to just port them over and convert them to the system you're using. The only word of caution with doing so is that you need to keep an eye on fighters if you're using a class system.
I like the way you think but I already use those 5e rules as a framework for adjudicating the same in B/X. Fighters being better at improvised combat actions is a feature not a flaw. In 5e I allow Fighters to always add their proficiency bonus to improvised attacks and actions in combat (normally this is not the case).
 
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As far as D&D goes, I quite like the 5E mechanics and feel at this core level it may be the best version of the game.

However I find the power creep pretty big from about Level 5 onwards, which I guess models 'heroic fantasy' rather than 'classic fantasy'.
My fix is just to give out XP very sparingly, to keep characters in the space I like the stories to run; although many 5E players will probably think that's stingy.

Another D20 OSR game I have which looks good for playing in this space is Low Fantasy Gaming.
I haven't run it yet, but the vibe is the kind of thing I think I would like.
 
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