While I have a lot of respect for the following games, there really is a worthy successor to D&D. A game that actually affirmed the existence of the OSR without wanting to be a part of it. A game that is Chad enough to not use the OGL before anyone else (yes there was a legal reason). Hackmaster 5E.
Contenders for the throne include Ambition & Avarice 2E, Dark Dungeons, Fantastic Heroes & Witchery, OSRIC, S&W Complete (2nd print), S&W White Box, Basic Fantasy, and Worlds Without Number. If your favorite OSR game wasn't on this list it wasn't worth being on this list go fuck yourself. But all these D&D-alikes pale in comparison to the king's champion: Hackmaster 5E. Why does it win?
Because it's exciting, takes risks, test boundaries, and burns sacred cows while maintaining traditionalism on a knife's edge and remaining recognizably D&D. The esoterica involved in it make BrOSR AD&D simps and chuckleheads who want to re-integrate Chainmail into OD&D bleed from their eyes mouth and anus upon viewing. Like Crawford's games, Hackmaster is invested in changing you, not the other way around. It's the ultimate RAW game, requiring weeks of careful study to even consider play. The combat is brilliant but has nickel and dime modifiers, the alignment system uses an honor subsystem to make it have actual mechanical importance, even training has a half-dozen variants and options for "going up a level".
While RPGs can be games you learn by doing, Hackmaster seems like a game you should graduate to. The game even has "advanced" rules within it. The implication being that no rules are optional, there are merely some rules you aren't good enough for yet. And this is a serious and real element that is true in some of Crawford's designs as well. Winging a game of Hackmaster is an insane prospect. It's better to dislodge all previous D&D esoterica from your mind and integrate Hackmaster into the void left, though considerable additional brainpower will be required. And not in an ACKS way. ACKS is about boring verisimilitude/simulationist poppycock for morons who don't get the point.
A game is not about simulating a world, that's what the GM is for. A game is about having game rules that make sense and are intelligible. Hackmaster has this. Simulationism is incidental. The rules themselves are meant to be fun and engaging, not merely functional and perfunctory. If that was the case Unisystem would have taken over the game space instead of Eden Studios dying a miserable slow death for the last two decades.
That's what's missing from a lot of OSRs now, a profound lack of playtesting, IE seeing what works in play and pushing toward that as the ideal. Hackmaster's mechanics are fun in a way that should be envied by all. It didn't start that way. 4E was just another relatively unplaytested mess like everything produced since WoD decided game systems didn't need to make sense or be worthwhile anymore in order to sell like hot cakes. Untold damage was done to the hobby because Anne Rice wrote some novels and Mark Rein*Hagen wanted to get some goth trim.
TO BE CONTINUED
