Quote from: Black Vulmea;624441Does the OSR have its Giants-series? Does it have its Tomb of Horrors? Its White Plume Mountain?

About the only module that really stands out to me as 'iconic as a TSR module' is ASE1, the OSR's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

Dude, Giants, Tomb and WPM are 'iconic', as you put it, because A, they were/are widely known, and B, they've been around for decades. In contrast, the entire OSR itself A, doesn't incorporate as many players as D&D in its heydays, and neither does it have the same mass media presence, and B, it hasn't been around for decades. You're making a pointless comparison.

Also, the thread is about "are OSR modules better than TSR ones"? Not "have they been around for longer?" or "do they have higher sales figures?" Neither of these are indicative of how good a product is.

(Case in point, ToH is suitable for the cruel, American-college-fraternity style hazing of new players and is a good source of "Remember that time we got really fucking wasted and John woke up next morning with a transvestite" type quasi-masochistic rite-of-passage recollections with your gaming bros, but as an actual adventure module for actual play in someone's actual campaign? Please.)

What doesn't seem to have happened yet is a real breakthrough into the gaming mainstream.  Us obsessive compulsive types on the internet are a pretty small percentage of the whole pie and most of us have written our own retroclone already.  What's really needed is a bit more of a concensus followed by a solid kickstarter that puts out a single base-line and is followed on by a magazine on par with Dragon and Dungeon that offers a centralized place for people to get their work published and advertise their products.

There's plenty of attempts of course and hopefully one of them will eventually break though.

A breakthrough product, that's what's needed.  Something that gives us a center again.  Yes 5e could be that but when I look at what's going on there I really doubt it.

When it comes to core rules, I'd say emphatically not. You've got a "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing going on there; whilst a particular OSR rules set might have particular houserules that appeal to the designer and, presumably, most of the advocates of that particular game, there's no denying that the bulk of the work was already done by Gygax, Arneson, Moldvay, Cook and Mentzer, and all the OSR rules sets are merely tweaking particular dials here and there (where their design decisions aren't constrained by sticking within the bounds of the OGL).

As far as supplements and adventures go, I think there's definitely products out there which are as powerful an aid as anything originally published by TSR - Vornheim springs to mind. On the other hand there's also a lot of lukewarm material and some downright crap - the sort of stuff which arises when you have people self-publishing and don't need to please an editor with any sort of standards in order to get their material out there.

So I think you can find OSR products which qualify as classics, but at the same time I think it would be hyperbole to say that the average standards of the OSR are better than the average standards of TSR at its peak (wherever you happen to identify that peak).

Quote from: RPGPundit;624431James Raggi has been quoted as saying that the OSR is now better than "TSR", which I take to mean he's saying that the stuff the OSR does now is better than the games and modules TSR put out in the real old-school days.

Do you agree?

I don't. The circumstances are different, the people are different, the products are aimed at different audiences, ipso facto... it's just different. Saying the OSR stuff is "better" can only be strictly subjective (e.g. what a particular individual likes best, finds the most useful in his own situation etc.) or some hubris on the part of this or that publisher tooting his own horn (Hi, James).

Nope

I still find myself and my gaming better served by revisiting TSR stuff. Most of the time.

Quote from: Premier;624455*some trash not worth repeating*

Dude, they're iconic because they were widely played and well-known among gamers. The comparison is not, which OSR modules reached the same number of gamers and the same longevity as TSR modules? but which OSR modules have a high level of name recognition and shared experience among OSR gamers?

Frex, ASE gets mentioned often when the subject of science fantasy comes up among OSR gamers. It's one of the better known modules and seems to be widely played among the folks playing pre-3e D&D and retroclones.

Is there a series of linked modules, like Giants, which get comparable buzz to ASE? Or particularly popular funhouse dungeons, like WPM, that get frequent mention?

It's not about numbers, dumbass; it's about shared experiences.

I have to wonder how the "OSR" would react to a series of linked modules like 'Giants', though.  Would they scream 'adventure path' and run for the hills?

The focus has been on dungeons, drop-in stuff, single site-based adventures, and the like.  Which is a shame in a way, as a trilogy of modules is always a neat thing to see.

Delver's releases are a sequence, aren't they?  I haven't read them.

They're 'better' for me personally... meaning, between the TSR stuff I've read and the OSR stuff I've read I generally prefer the OSR... but I could totally understand if someone else preferences went the other way round.
I'd make a stronger case for my getting a lot more out of the forums and blogosphere than I ever did magazines like Dragon... and not just because of volume.

Quote from: Premier;624455(Case in point, ToH is suitable for the cruel, American-college-fraternity style hazing of new players and is a good source of "Remember that time we got really fucking wasted and John woke up next morning with a transvestite" type quasi-masochistic rite-of-passage recollections with your gaming bros, but as an actual adventure module for actual play in someone's actual campaign? Please.)

If you want a real dungeon challenge with high level characters, that you're ready for multiple TPKs and just enjoy that kind of hardcore game experience, then ToH is stellar. It's also great to see what constitutes hardcore challenges in the game to not unknowingly emulate this kind of thing for rookie groups. It's a module I would recommend for anyone as part of a range of different models to use and build your own, with "here's a basic intro module, here's a big sandbox, here's this and that, and here's the hardcore made-to-be-a-PITA module." It is certainly not representative of the default game play, and shouldn't be construed as such, lest you want to be known as a rat bastard DM, but it's really great for what it is.

Your rant there... it's just you whining you don't like this kind of hardcore module, really. Which is cool and everything, if you hate that kind of stuff so be it, but it's not really an objective base to judge what's "good" and "not good", leaving alone the problem of what's "best".

Speaking of which, whatever's "good", "not good", "best" and "worse" needs some kind of frame of reference to be understandable. Good for what? For whom? In what context? Best how? For what purpose? Which kinds of DMs and players? That's the kind of thing one needs to define before going into these kinds of discussions (or reviews), I think.

I would like to see an "Adventure Trail" series of weird/lurid OSR modules.

Could someone track down that Raggi post from a year or two ago when he made the claim about the OSR being better than the TSR and post the link here? So that maybe we could find out what he meant and what his criteria were?

Quote from: ggroy;624436Did 2E AD&D produce any outstanding modules?

Night Below is highly lauded.

Quote from: Benoist;624487Speaking of which, whatever's "good", "not good", "best" and "worse" needs some kind of frame of reference to be understandable. Good for what? For whom? In what context? Best how? For what purpose? Which kinds of DMs and players? That's the kind of thing one needs to define before going into these kinds of discussions (or reviews), I think.

You've pulled this shit before B. Your other posts seem well put together and intelligent but then you go and trot this shit out again.

If everything is subjective then why talk about anything ever?

How about from now on when someone says "It's good" you agree to translate it as "I liked it" and then maybe follow up with "Why did you like it?" instead of "good has no meaning."

EDIT: Or we just all agree that Melan is the final arbiter of Good.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;624515Night Below is highly lauded.

Night below is amazing.

I think the claim is pretty arbitrary. When talking about D&D material I firmly believe in Sturgeon's Law.