Brief perspectives on rule density and 5e

15 Nov, 2025

I was recently reading Archbricks report on how they're bringing back early 5e to their table and it led me to another, older blogspost by Dwiz about how 5e was once considered OSR and, as someone who started engaging with online ttrpg discourse at around 2022, I was baffled! To someone who was playing mostly freeform until 2020 and learned what the OSR was about by reading games such as Into the Odd, Knave, DURF, and World of Dungeons, finding out how people were describing D&D's 200 plus page tomes with a lot of rules over rulings, character sheet buttons, and combat balancing in 2014 as something with OSR tendencies really reminded me of how nothing exists in a vaccum and how much play culture matters and changes in the ttrpg space.

I'm obviously not saying people weren't playing OSRly with their 5e books back then, but what I am saying is that I really should try reading 3.5e and 4e to try to understand how big the chasm really was between the rule density of those books and 5e. Like, what kind of monstrosity¹ are we talking about that makes a book with an index spanning four pages with five columns each (that sometimes point to another item in the index, not a page number) inspire a GM to run it in an OSR way? But to be fair, I also don't think games like Old School Essentials (B/X), with their tables of specific probabilities for lockpicking and THAC0 numbers, put me in a "rulings over rules" and "disregard combat balance" mindset. Nonetheless, I have seen a great amount of people online stating they switched from other rpgs to OSE because it's just so much lighter and easier to run, so perhaps there is a parallel to be made there.

The beauty of it all is that, even if I end up reading or playing 4e, can I really say I'd be able to experience the the contrast by playing 5e afterwards? I think it's impossible! The context has changed: people playing 4e today are probably not playing 4e the way they played it back then, people playing 5e today are SURELY not playing 5e the way they played it back then, and I am throughly incapable of playing or running any of those games rules-as-written. Not to mention that "how they were playing it back then" is a whole fallacy of its own, since every game, especially a widespread one such as D&D, is constantly being played by DMs and players that are bringing completely different play cultures to the table. Hell, my game of GMing Blades in the Dark was very different than the one I played in. Even heller, different tables play UNO differently, you know?

I think my main point is, I have been spending a long time these last years playing, reading, and reading about, ttrpgs - and I'm still constantly surprised by how much peoples' experiences are completely different from my own, especially regarding rule density.

anb

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#dnd #nsr #osr #ttrpg