All minimalist OSR games have a problem. The lightest you can make D&D and keep it D&D is roughly Microlite20 or Swords & Wizardry White Box. Any lighter and you're dropping bits of the experience along with game design. Specifically OSR minimalist games, like Electric Bastionland, can be interesting to read, but without mechanical complexity afforded a slightly heavier game, you fall well outside the experience. And this is often to the detriment of the game.
I came upon this realization reading Rogueland. It's an expansion and modification of Knave. It's first section is just a hex map. Exploration rules come WAY later, so it's placed at the forefront just to be sexy art. and I'll admit it is. I bought Rogueland because of the art. The sad thing is the game itself doesn't know what it's doing. Basically it's Knave, but the system is tweaked slightly and only in odd instances.
Now, I have this predisposition toward all OSR games that keep Wisdom as a stat, because Wisdom is the ultimate sacred cow/darling stat that needs to die. Step 1 to fixing any OSR game is dropping Wisdom if present. The reason is that it doesn't meaningfully differentiate itself from Intelligence, and never has, and was never intended to. Essentially the idea of stat balance was something that came later, and is a modern mentality (that is wrong, but that's another rant) that has infected the OSR with no opposition. Roughly 100% of the time a wisdom roll is actually a perception or awareness roll, neither of which it makes sense to be attributed to the prime stat of clerical types.
Minimalist games have odd omissions, for example Rogueland's Medic is a lemon career, because having high wisdom doesn't do much beyond rogue magic, which the Magician career does better anyway. Putting your high stat in Wisdom over Intelligence is just stupid, so really it should have been one stat. Ability bonuses oddly go to +4 with an average of +1. Con actually benefits more stuff then Strength, but still isn't great. Overall the game doesn't look play-tested, it looks eyeballed and "yeah that'll work"ed. And I know this because my eyeballs are better than most when it comes to game systems.
Minimalist games have trouble differentiating characters. A lot of them come down to basically backpack contents. While making my own minimalist game, I found myself flustered with the needs of minimalism vs the needs of PC investment. Essentially Searchers of the Unknown has less of some but more of this issue than other minimalist OSR games.
Minimalist games have actual no shit conversion problems. While DCC and even Labyrinth Lord have higher power levels and therefore require conversion of B/X modules to really work, minimalist games seem to have the opposite problem - nobody expects them to be played to the point of character advancement.
Minimalist games are sadly one-shot games, and by their very nature are not suited to campaign play. And because campaign play is an essential part of the D&D experience, I must rule that Minimalist OSR games are inferior to those with more meat on their bones.
I have spoken.
