I was thinking of this as I read thru many of my gajillion OSR rulebooks.  I've bragged that I've never played official D&D before.   Some of the rules I like, mainly how the six ability scores work, but that's about it.  I blame having a system called Palladium Books for creating a fanboy that revelled in liking the "other" game more.  What teenager do you know doesn't like to be contrarian and refuses the most popular thing just because it's popular?

THAC0 and descending armor class made no sense.  Like, none.  That convinced me to stick with Palladium.  Even official D&D and most OSR have ditched it as well. 

Vancian magic is weird, as well as acquiring ludicrous amounts of hit points. 

But, and this may surprise people, but the least favorite bit of D&D/OSR rules are savings throws.  Yup.  That.  Yes, it's weird, maybe.  I just don't see their need.  Your abilities scores can cover this.

I think some OSR games exist purely to "fix" D&D to the author's preference and are just their house rules made into actual rules. More power to them I say. 

So what is your thing?

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 12, 2022, 06:43:15 PM
So what is your thing?

My biggest issue is the "zero to hero" aspect of leveling. Over just a year or two in-game, D&D characters go from being schlubs barely better than average minions to being world-changing powerhouses. That should really come across as incredibly weird to anyone in the game-world, like "Why the hell are we getting so powerful so quickly?" It really messes with my suspension of disbelief.

Characters gain experience in other games, but the difference is usually far less. An experienced Call of Cthulhu investigator can be much more competent, but they're still just regular humans and easily killed. Superhero PCs can gain a lot of power, but they already started out as superheroes.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Might (re)write my own clone.

This is what I want and don't get from B/X, but I find in modern D&D.

- Backgrounds
- Race separated from class.
- Critical hits.
- Streamlined saves.
- Unified XP.
- Streamlined skills (I like using 1d20, but you can use 1d6 etc.)
- Feats*.
- Weapon details (especially 3e/4e), without going overboard (AD&D).
- I like "metaclasses" from 2e (warrior includes fighters, paladins, etc.)
- The 4e warlord.
- Vancian Magic replaced by spell points or spell rolls.

I've been tackling each one of these aspects with my blog and books:

Feats:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/407233/Old-School-Feats-OSR?src=newest
Alternate Magic:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397412/Alternate-Magic-OSR
Spell points:
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2022/10/spell-points-for-bx-and-osr-systems.html
Critical hits:
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-simplest-critical-hit-table-osr-etc.html#comment-form

Might have been easier to just tone down 5e, but for some reason I find adding stuff to B/X much more enjoyable.

Palladium was my game of choice for many reasons, but the big one, by a country mile, was the diversity of settings.  I almost think of Palladium as one of the first truly universal systems.  Rifts, RoboTech, Heroes Unlimited, and Palladium Fantasy are my main four games. 

The core rules of combat using opposed D20 rolls of Strike vs Parry or Dodge, percentile skills, and armor as extra hit points was a good system.  Confusing at times, but a recent podcast with the writers enlighten us all a bit. It seems they wanted it that way.  The odd and sometimes contradictory rules are on purpose.  It is because the GM is there for a reason.  Use the rules, or other rules.  Just move on and don't sweat it. 

However, these days I'm happier with rules light stuff that don't have holes in the explanations.

A lot of my reasons to play it are now reasons I dislike D&D rules.  I think the only "savings throw" we roll on a regular basis were Horror Factor, which I think of more as a power that most creatures had, not an actual savings throw.

I'll second "zero to hero" with a grand helping of "Vancian Magic" and "ridiculously slow natural hit point recovery" (such that just about every group I ever played old D&D made someone play a pagan priest/cleric to actually recover at a reasonable rate) on top.

Taken in total the complaint could be boiled down to the system's utter inability to emulate the broader fantasy genre where protagonists grow, but not nearly so extremely, magic is almost never Vancian and priests are almost never a central member of the protagonists.

My least favorite bit of DnD rules?

Vancian magic.

After playing a slew of other TTRPGs, it is the Vancian magic I don't care for.

It could be done better and like others, I've made my own system to replace it.

These are all things that many OSR games fix.  I like Dungeons and Delvers Dice Pool for all the reasons it's not like D&D.

1.  No insane hit point bloat.  A warrior starts with 5 hit points, and maxes out with 8. 
2.  Very skills based.  Like D6 Star Wars, everyone has attribute + skill to do pretty much everything, including attacking.  In this game you have all the skills.  Many may only be 1D4 + 1D4 and roll a 5 is easy difficulty, but you have them.
3.  No savings throws.  Stuff like being poisoned is called a status effect and typically are negatives to skill rolls, of which attacking is a common one. 
4.  Armor doesn't raise your defense target number, what D&D calls Armor Class.  It's just 1-3 more hit points per fight.  In fact, you have three different defense numbers.  Parry, dodge, mind. 
5.  No Vancian magic.  Again, this games uses attribute + skill, in this case Intellect + Arcana skill.  Even non magic users have Arcana, but they just the use it to recognize magic, or "remember" lore about magic related stuff.  A wizard isn't OP as their damage is on par with warriors.  Archers may use up ammo a wizard doesn't bother with, but archers out damage them. 

It's my favorite fantasy game right now.

I don't like Descending Armor Class, Thaco, etc.

I don't like Psionics, but I can't tell you why.

I don't like Sorcerers, as Player Characters.  Sorcerers are too "super hero", for my medieval fantasy D&D taste.  The Wizard has to work for it.  The Warlock has to make a deal for it.  The Sorcerer was born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

Zero to Hero: Leveling out of adventure types. We used to have fun clearing the nearby critter infestation, but now we have to hunt monsters of the week for any meaningful gain. I do not like it when something that was a fun challenge stops being a challenge at all, nor do I like chasing the next boost whether it's item or level like I'm playing WoW and it's all about the numbers to get better numbers. It also makes for a strange world when leveling to super human demigod is that easy, but you never see other high level adventures existing organically.

Non unified mechanics: Roll on a table is a unified mechanic to me, but it is much harder to come up with a new, agreeable, table for something not coded into the game where as d20 + relevant stat mod + relevant skill if any + situational mod vs DC is easy to make up on the fly.

Primary Stat: Melee combatants hit with strength, ranged combatants hit with dexterity, caster hit with caster stat. How about DEX to hit and STR for damage and CON for multi attack due to fatigue.

Mixed High and Low Rolls: High damage roll good, high roll on roll under test bad. One or the other, and I don't care which, please.

Deterministic Magic: You always know how many uses/or tries to cast you have. I want some uncertainty, so magic feels like magic and not special ammunition.

Non relative weapons and armor: Weapon effectiveness is relative to an arbitrary standard instead of situational. Daggers may be least powerful edged weapon, but a dagger to the back, though the eye slit, or a sliced throat is terminal and easier done with a dagger than a claymore.

Mine would be secret doors and the n in 6 chance of detecting one. Roll to proceed. Fail? Don't proceed. I hack it by giving clues and letting the players reason it out. I use the n in 6 chance as a passive, sometimes.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on October 12, 2022, 06:43:15 PM
But, and this may surprise people, but the least favorite bit of D&D/OSR rules are savings throws.  Yup.  That.  Yes, it's weird, maybe.  I just don't see their need.  Your abilities scores can cover this.

I used to hate saves but now I like them. Think of them as ancillary ability scores. I also like the weird traditional saves over the more modern Fort, Reflex, and Will saves. The traditional save say something about the setting. Ability scores point from the character outward to the setting. Trad saves point from the setting to the character. The setting will try to kill you in these specific ways.

I can see that I'm going to be the odd one out again. 

- I like the main idea of Vancian magic but not its exact execution in B/X or AD&D 1E, and what I dislike about it generally gets worse with later editions--4E excluded for obvious reasons.

- I don't mind race as class terribly at first, but I don't think it translates well into the mid levels, unless you do what ACKS does with multiple racial classes, and that's not my favorite either.

- I'd rather have ascending AC, but it's not that big a deal to me either way.  I'll play whatever is in the rules I'm using and not bother to change it.

- My own D&D-like system has a unified XP track, but that was more for other reasons, listed below. 

- I like saving throws in D&D, even if every implementation of it, in just about every versions, seems a bit off to me.  B/X saves are the closest to what I like if you think about the five categories as something else.

- I like escalating hit points, zero to hero, and on and on, though maybe not the exact way they are done.

All that to say, what I dislike the most are where the fault lines are.  It's a lot of little things that were probably done for good reasons at the time, but the reasoning isn't always clear, and it doesn't translate well when you try to change it.  Early D&D is at once the easiest thing to modify ever--new classes, new spells, new equipment, etc, and also the hardest thing to modify ever, because things that seem arbitrary aren't, and vice versa.  Examples:

- Paladin too close in concept to the Cleric for my taste.
- Rangers with spells so they can heal so that they can be Aragon.
- The six ability scores seem like a weird mix to me, and I'm always working around it. Most of the problems with skills stem from the ability score choices.
- That weapon restrictions seem more arbitrary the more you add on.  (They kind of make sense in B/X.)
- Racial level limits that don't change when the game expands.
- Hit points scaling like crazy early then practically stopping.
- Many spells are off by a level.
- The level progression in general is whacked, and the variable XP charts are a reflection of that, not the cause. 

No one piece of that is all that big a deal.  If you liked everything but one or two of those, you'd house rule it and move on.  Which is what I more or less did for a long time, when I bothered.  When I run it, I can just play it as is, no house rules, and that's better than changing it, and then when the little things start to annoy too much, play something else. 

In my own system, I've touched almost everything, but the roots are recognizable in most cases. I've got a streamlined XP chart because I've completely tweaked the level progression and changed what "class" means in my version.  I've left the option for variable XP charts in the design, just haven't needed them yet.

Least favourite bit of pre-3e/OSR for me is having to look up saving throw tables with non-intuitive categories like "wand" being different from "spell". Conversely I really really like the Swords & Wizardry unified save number, which handily also gives me a unified task resolution mechanism by default.

My least favorite aspects of D&D5E currently are:

-Concentration.  Its too easy to remove a spell effect from play.  I've home ruled that any spell disrupted by concentration can only take place after the 2nd round the spell has been cast.  So at least the caster can have some effect in game.

-Counter spell.  Horribly implemented.  I use a DC15 + the spell level for an arcana check that the counter speller has to pass to counter spell the spell.  If they can't identify the spell and level, they can't counter.

-Dogpiling of skill roll buffs.  My God, WTF did WotC do to skill rolls?  Oh you need a guidance (1d4), here you go.  Oh you want a bardic inspiration (1d10) we'll throw that on too.  Oh fuck, you want bless (1d4), sure as fuck we'll give you that as well.  Oh, you got a druid circle of stars, he got Weal (1d6), we'll throw that too.  So, a player doing a medium task (d10) gets a bonus 2d8 + 1d10 + 1d6 average of +16 to their roles.  Thank you WotC for setting up this clusterfuck of bonuses, all pretty damn likely in a party with a party having a paladin, bard, druid.

-Paladin save aura.  Oh God, lets add that +5 to your saves as well.  It does have a 10' radius which does cluster the players, however that charisma bonus is going to give the players half damage more times than not for AE damage.  Honestly, I would have rather WotC put that on proficiency bonus use per long rest meaning you can use it for 1 minute per long rest per use of a proficiency point.  It will still be on, but not perma on.  Or if they changed it to damage reduction or bonus AC.  That +5 to saves most players push all points into charisma helps to trivialize spells with saving throws.  When I see a player doing that, I just look at the monsters and their spell line up is now on save half damage and move on for their damaging type spells and forget about their control spells.

For a lot of these that I used to dislike, I have come to appreciate them over time and actual use with comparison to other systems.

I think one of the last that still bugs me is critical hit on a 20. I am perfectly OK with some enemies being so AC'ed that they do not need Damage Reduction to convey Teflon status. It is useful for some Mythical-style puzzle-bosses, like video games Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver, or Greek Mythos like Medusa, Achilles, Talos, etc. Thankfully it is a trivially easy thing to houserule, and TSR D&D already gave optional methods to drop 20s crit and still somehow hit 'too high' AC puzzle bosses.

Least favorite? Thief abilities—specifically the low percentages. Bad design. Makes me wonder how many yes men stared at their feet and said nothing after Gary pitched it.