Skills is a problem. Always has been. It's a problem to have them and a problem not to have them. Back in the day, I considered myself a skill-aficionado. The thought that not having skills could be a well-considered feature of a system didn't really occur to me. These days, I am between two stools of appreciating the advantages to not having skills and still liking skills for the way it helps to distinguish and characterise characters. And this is why I don't like 5e skills - they are too generic and basic. They don't actually say anything about the character. We have skills in my 5e group, but I can't see we've used them for much other than 'guess I can add +2 to that roll'. In other words, they might as well not be there. With that in mind, my baseline is a slight modification of the OSR standard: Anyone can more or less try anything. For my 5e OSR document, I edited out all skill references to take as my baseline. Sort of. Actually, ski...

First of all, in reply to some of the comments on my previous entry as to whether 5e hacks can be considered old-school or not and why I will continue to bill my little pocket project as OSR in my own mind - I like  Greyhawk Grognard's definition: "We play the old games, and the games that feel like the old games." 'nuff said. On to other matters: I guess I am going ahead with this. Yesterday, I took the 5e SRD, split it into six booklet documents. Then I stripped it of all the stuff that won't fit in with my "Redbox 5e" mix. Cosmology guff, classes beyond the four basic ones, all races save dwarf,elf, halfling, feats and skills.  3 for players: Book 1: Characters (45 pages) Book 2:  Playing the game (29 pages) Book 3:  Magic (112 pages) And another 3 for the DM: Book 4:  Running the Game (16 pages) Book 5:  Treasure (63 pages) Book 6:  Monsters (164 pages) Something like this if ever actually printed. Great for the act...

So, recently I've been pondering the right D&D system.  Since then, I've been leaning heavily towards 5th edition as the OSR engine of choice. Now, some of you may say "5th edition isn't OSR, man. It's got feats, and warlocks and dragonborn". And sure, it probably isn't. I am calling it the OSR engine of choice, because I delved into OSR games looking for a system designed on principles that the OSR champions: Simplicity, streamlined, easy to houserule, speed of play, limited amount of moving parts. Now, full blown 5e doesn't exactly meet those requirements, but the free version, Basic D&D 5e, does. The four classic races only, The four classic classes only, no feats. Few modifiers, easy and simple maths, few assumptions on equipment. Lovely really. Use one of the skill variants in the DMG for simpler and better skills and houserule in a stricter healing system and I'd say you have a lean, balanced and fast engine that can stand toe ...

Just scanning the Overview Chapter so far and I am already seeing stuff to strip mine for my own game. dis gun be good.