After a few days of glances between White Box FMAG (3 LBBs + the Thief Class), and OSE Classic Fantasy (1981 B/X)....

Both books are nearly the same Height and Width; however, OSE is 3 Times as Thick.  More pages of detail, more situational rules, more items and pricing, more monsters, more spells, more magic items, more PC levels, etc. 

White Box leaves much more unwritten, for the DM that wants to make it his or her own.  OSE gives the DM more rules and content, to cover many more bases.  OSE is a bigger toolbox, with more tools in it to work with.  I respect both approaches.

If I understand OP question right, we're talking about Ose being the most successful and de facto reference of OSR. I cannot talk about America, but in Italy where I live IT IS. OSE is king.

The most important Italian rpg company distributes it and promote it fully at every convention. We also have Labyrinth Lord, Basic Rpg, DCC, la Marca del Este, White Box Fmag a couple Italian Osr games...but they don't really qualify by popularity.

Quote from: Murphy78 on August 21, 2022, 09:34:44 AM
If I understand OP question right, we're talking about Ose being the most successful and de facto reference of OSR. I cannot talk about America, but in Italy where I live IT IS. OSE is king.

The most important Italian rpg company distributes it and promote it fully at every convention. We also have Labyrinth Lord, Basic Rpg, DCC, la Marca del Este, White Box Fmag a couple Italian Osr games...but they don't really qualify by popularity.

If I can give an Italian perspective...here BX means nothing, because we've never seen or played it back in the days.
First rpg we saw in Italy was Becmi, between the end of the '80 and begin of the '90. The first four boxes were translated by the toy company that also licensed Monopoly and Risk: so D&D Becmi was everywhere (regular toy stores, supermarket on Christmas season etc). Becmi created the rpg market and was the single most popular rpg ever, here in Italy.

So, Ose has a lot of nostalgia boost here. You just have to promote it as "Back to the Red Box". I've seen videos of the Italian publisher promoting Ose, he was like: "Red Box-red box-redo box " while showing old Tsr B and X modules and how to play them with Ose. He also stressed how the two ribbons of the Ose Rulebook are red and blue, you know, "as a tribute to the Basic and Expert boxes".
So in Italy no other OSR game can topple Ose, for the moment.
Heck, even the Italian edition of White Box FMAG (a White Box retroclone) has in its backcover: "Before the Red Box, there was the White Box!". To promote White Box, you have to relate it somehow to the Red Box.

Quote from: Murphy78 on February 18, 2023, 06:29:40 AM

Quote from: Murphy78 on August 21, 2022, 09:34:44 AM
If I understand OP question right, we're talking about Ose being the most successful and de facto reference of OSR. I cannot talk about America, but in Italy where I live IT IS. OSE is king.

The most important Italian rpg company distributes it and promote it fully at every convention. We also have Labyrinth Lord, Basic Rpg, DCC, la Marca del Este, White Box Fmag a couple Italian Osr games...but they don't really qualify by popularity.

If I can give an Italian perspective...here BX means nothing, because we've never seen or played it back in the days.
First rpg we saw in Italy was Becmi, between the end of the '80 and begin of the '90. The first four boxes were translated by the toy company that also licensed Monopoly and Risk: so D&D Becmi was everywhere (regular toy stores, supermarket on Christmas season etc). Becmi created the rpg market and was the single most popular rpg ever, here in Italy.

So, Ose has a lot of nostalgia boost here. You just have to promote it as "Back to the Red Box". I've seen videos of the Italian publisher promoting Ose, he was like: "Red Box-red box-redo box " while showing old Tsr B and X modules and how to play them with Ose. He also stressed how the two ribbons of the Ose Rulebook are red and blue, you know, "as a tribute to the Basic and Expert boxes".
So in Italy no other OSR game can topple Ose, for the moment.
Heck, even the Italian edition of White Box FMAG (a White Box retroclone) has in its backcover: "Before the Red Box, there was the White Box!". To promote White Box, you have to relate it somehow to the Red Box.

That's some interesting context, from the market outside of North America. 

OSE could be a great introduction to OSR (the art is awesome, layout's amazing, and the rules of B/X are well organized and clarified) but I'm hesitant to call them the champs.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 18, 2023, 07:58:23 PM
OSE could be a great introduction to OSR (the art is awesome, layout's amazing, and the rules of B/X are well organized and clarified) but I'm hesitant to call them the champs.

OSE has certainly been having its day in the sun.  It's the hot ticket now.  Good for them.

But before OSE; I couldn't go on the internet without seeing something about Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  It was a hot commodity too, though I'm not too familiar with it?  It seems like it could be fun at the table.  Hot Redheads, what's not to like?

I've backed every OSE Kickstarter and have four copies of everything. Maybe three, I forget. I have all the B/X Essentials stuff multiple times over. I think my biggest issue with OSE is that the Advanced stuff isn't really that good or interesting. Advanced Labyrinth Lord does a better job of B/X-ifying AD&D stuff, honestly. And if you wanna play B/X, the original is more inspirational. If you wanna do BECMI, it fails (obviously), and you can get a POD of the Cyclopedia.

As a reference to B/X, it's the best thing ever made. As a stand-alone game...nahh

Well, the OSR as we've known it is gone anyhow.  Seems like pretty much everyone, including Gavin Norman, are scrubbing IP content and releasing new, sometimes significantly different, games.  And there's been a bit of disappointment over at the Necrotic Gnome site, as many folks are annoyed that the long-awaited Dolmenwood material is now going to be an entirely new game and not OSE or B/X.  He's claiming compatibility, but he also said he's jettisoning race as class because newbies "find it confusing." 

Whatever; I'm off the OSE train permanently now.  If I can just confine myself to not getting sucked in by too many new games, I should curtail my gaming expenses considerably as I'm not investing in any of these "scrubbed" rules sets.

I own several OSE books, both box sets and the rule tomes.

I loved how they integrated AD&D into the BX ruleset, so I made my own classes, races, spells, magic items, and of course, monsters for my homebrew setting

I used OSE as the base for my homebrew ruleset and thanks to LULU.com, I can give my players my version of it, so they don't have to jump from the OSE book to my printed-off house rules.   

Now it's all in one book!  Ok, 2 books, the Players Handbook, and the Spellbook, for my setting

Race as Class wasn't a thing in Ad&D so we also removed it in favor of old school ad&d multiclassing.

I've never understood why people want to 1e B/X.  It happened with Labyrinth Lord, it happened with OSE.  If B/X is so good, why does it need all the stuff from AD&D added in?

I like B/X, but for its differences from AD&D

Quote from: JeremyR on February 19, 2023, 03:12:43 AM
I've never understood why people want to 1e B/X.  It happened with Labyrinth Lord, it happened with OSE.  If B/X is so good, why does it need all the stuff from AD&D added in?

I like B/X, but for its differences from AD&D

Well, I think it was to emulate the way many of us actually played in the day.  We started with B/X and just bolted elements from AD&D onto it.  So in that sense, I think Labyrinth Lord Advanced does it "better" than OSE, but the latter gives you something different with the B/Xification of certain things like creating racial classes for gnomes, drow, half-orcs etc.  I kind of like both for different reasons.  But now it doesn't matter anyhow as those kinds of retroclones are apparently dead.

I think the acceptance and status of the OSR in Europe and Asia is a fascinating topic. We know there are thriving roleplaying communities in those areas, which both overlap and differ from here in the USA. Periodically I take notice of a French rpg that pops up, but I don't have any real idea of what is going on in these other countries. (I know even less about Latin America and Africa.)

Quote from: JeremyR on February 19, 2023, 03:12:43 AM
I've never understood why people want to 1e B/X.  It happened with Labyrinth Lord, it happened with OSE.  If B/X is so good, why does it need all the stuff from AD&D added in?

I like B/X, but for its differences from AD&D

Well, it has ADVANCED in the title, right? I started with BECMI and of course after I discovered AD&D existed I couldn't be caught playing anything less than whatever it was the older kids were using. But I couldn't afford the books, so I just borrowed a PHB from a high school kid, read it, then made my own RPG that was whatever it was I could remember from AD&D using BECMI as a base for stats, etc. That seems like the sort of stuff everyone did. The second RPG I ever got was TMNT and of course my homebrew now had all sorts of psionic abilities and mutations. When I finally got AD&D, I had already made about four thousand iterations of my own game, so really I only used the PHB for the spell lists until I was a senior in high school, then we got serious and played AD&D by the book, hardcore mode.

That said, I do appreciate the succinctness of B/X and its implied play style. It is more "magical", more whimsical, and definitely easier overall compared to AD&D. Race-as-class is honestly superior to race/class combo for certain types of games; a LOTR game is the prototype for what B/X can do without much effort. If you're more into the pulp origins of D&D, AD&D is a better choice, which makes Gygax's claim that they are totally different games much more valid than it appears on the surface. The Known World is like a fucked up steampunk thing with all sorts of weird stuff, but it's not pulp in my mind because it has a pretty positive outlook overall.

ANYWAY, yes, they are different games. The point of Advanced Labyrinth Lord is basically to play AD&D without all the stupid nonsense no one hardly ever uses anymore. I say stupid, but I do actually like the wargaming parts of AD&D, but in play it just slows stuff down. When I was a kid it seemed like we were badasses using all those rules, but now I just want to get to the point and overly complex stuff is best left to a SFB game.

I will confess—I bought the OSE books because the smaller black volumes are really cool. Another person in my group bought them after he saw mine. Stupid, yes, but a real thing,

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That said, I do appreciate the succinctness of B/X and its implied play style. It is more "magical", more whimsical, and definitely easier overall compared to AD&D. Race-as-class is honestly superior to race/class combo for certain types of games; a LOTR game is the prototype for what B/X can do without much effort. If you're more into the pulp origins of D&D, AD&D is a better choice, which makes Gygax's claim that they are totally different games much more valid than it appears on the surface. The Known World is like a fucked up steampunk thing with all sorts of weird stuff, but it's not pulp in my mind because it has a pretty positive outlook overall.

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Well said, and I feel exactly the same way.  For me, sometimes I want the streamlined simplicity and lighter tone of B/X.  My players tend to favor it.  We also really enjoy race as class and as a matter of fact, I rolled up the whole Fellowship of the Ring using B/X (OSE) rules, though we never played with them.

As for the Known World [Mystara], it is probably my all-time favorite campaign setting.  I just love the rich detail one gets with the gazetteers, even though it's just plain weird sometimes with Mongols, Native Americans, desert nomads, Vikings, Byzantines, and Venetian merchants existing alongside humanoid and demi-human kingdoms.  Even weirder is the fact that it basically lacks a high Medieval civilization, unless you count Karameikos, which is more Eastern European in flavor.  I even collected all the fan-made stuff from Vaults of Pandius, which is pretty good, and covers the northern realms around Norwold.  The only official Mystara product I never had was the "Champions of Mystara" boxed set, but now I'm contemplating it on ebay.