OSR-ifying 3.5?

[Marthinwurer]

So, out of my love for 3.5 and a growing love of OSR, I've been thinking about OSR-ifying 3.5.

The easy changes are in character creation, switching to 3d6 in order for stats, rolling for HP, and sticking to the classic 4 classes. I'm also planning on soft-capping power level via E6.

Slightly more complex are adding explicit rules for dungeon and wilderness exploration, but luckily the OD&D dungeon turns are an easy port, and The Alexandrian's excellent hexcrawl rules were originally for 3.5 and fit in splendidly.

Adding XP from treasure and decimating XP from combat reduces the incentive to fight.

The main sticky thing is stuff like searching and traps. OSR style is to use the player's knowledge to describe how to search for and disable them, while 3.5 style is to use character knowledge via bonuses to skill checks. Are changes required here, or are the rest of the changes to the game's systems and character creation enough to get that OSR feeling?

[Crake]

The main sticky thing is stuff like searching and traps. OSR style is to use the player's knowledge to describe how to search for and disable them, while 3.5 style is to use character knowledge via bonuses to skill checks. Are changes required here, or are the rest of the changes to the game's systems and character creation enough to get that OSR feeling?

Actually, 3.5 uses a combination of the two. You can, as a character, roll the dice and fiddle with the trap mechanisms to disable them, but the disable device skill has a whole section on disabling traps without rolling, and covers things like filling up the holes of an arrow trap, or jamming moving mechanisms with a crowbar

Edit: this appears to maybe be a d20srd thing, rather than a phb thing, though I’m afb at the moment, so the “other ways to disable a trap” section may be actually pulled from a legit source, i dont know

[InvisibleBison]

Edit: this appears to maybe be a d20srd thing, rather than a phb thing, though I’m afb at the moment, so the “other ways to disable a trap” section may be actually pulled from a legit source, i dont know

It's a sidebar on page 73 of the PHB.

[rel]

A good way to make 3.5 searching feel more oldschool is to divide it into searching for traps and searching for secret doors / compartments. And have it function on individual features and objects, but not a whole room. You can't find the secret cache in the desk without searching the desk specifically. Searching 'the room' as a whole isn't going to work. And detecting the trap on the secret cache requires searching it specifically for traps.

So the challenge is paying attention to the rooms descriptions and searching all the features rather than making sure your search bonus is arbitrarily large. And making sure you don't forget to search for traps when investigating a new feature.

Then, when a trap is found, describe it in detail. Not, 'you found a trap', but 'the lock has a spring loaded needle built into it'. Suddenly the PC's have options other than rolling disable device ranging from borrowing the fighters steel gauntlet before starting to pick the lock to using a long bit of wire to trigger the trap from a safe distance.

It also helps to make traps with effects other than HP damage, which can be fairly trivial to resolve. Or traps that operate slowly enough that the PC's can respond to them with something more than a simple saving throw.

Finally, lean into the fact that 3.5 characters can become really good at skill checks and give the PC's loads of information about what's coming up in the dungeons. PC rolls a knowledge check and you can tell them they know the area ahead is used by goblins, they keep pet wargs, and they like to use alchemical weapons.
Now the PC's have something they can make a tactical choice about instead of blindly kicking down the door and hoping for the best.

[Marthinwurer]

Thanks for the advice folks! I've also asked Justin Alexander on his discord server and he says that 3e works out of the box as an OSR system as long as you build similar scenarios and use logistics rules. I still like the 3d6 in order for the adventure in character creation, as well as the more explicit rules for exploration, and I'm planning on using both of them. I'm iffy on the rolling for HP. My prospective players are really unhappy about it, and I don't fully understand why it's used in OSR games besides increased lethality and more randomness in character generation. I think the increased lethality is to increase combat risk in general, but I don't know if that's essential to the OSR experience.

[NichG]

Well, with high lethality at low level and things like months of training downtime to advance in level, one of the old school experiences was that you had a stable of characters funneling resources to each-other, dying, getting replaced, etc, and so you got invested in preserving the lucky ones - the ones that rolled an 18 on a stat or got good HP rolls or somehow managed to qualify to be a paladin or whatever.

[rel]

Thanks for the advice folks! I've also asked Justin Alexander on his discord server and he says that 3e works out of the box as an OSR system as long as you build similar scenarios and use logistics rules. I still like the 3d6 in order for the adventure in character creation, as well as the more explicit rules for exploration, and I'm planning on using both of them. I'm iffy on the rolling for HP. My prospective players are really unhappy about it, and I don't fully understand why it's used in OSR games besides increased lethality and more randomness in character generation. I think the increased lethality is to increase combat risk in general, but I don't know if that's essential to the OSR experience.

The issue with high lethality in 3.5 is just how long it can take to make a new character.
If your character dies, it isn't 5 minutes to reroll and you're back in the action, with a new character conveniently liberated from a prison cell in the next dungeon room. It's at best, the better part of an hour to go through all the steps and ensure you have something, not just rules legal but actually functional.

Rolled stats can feed into this problem, since it's harder to build characters in advance if you have to roll stats then figure out what if anything you can actually play using them.
And rolled health can increase the likelihood of character death and potentially cripple a promising character with several poor rolls.

Which is not to say that you can't use one or both mechanics, it just has to be approached carefully.