This is a game coming out, that almost certainly won't be as good as it's 2nd edition. It's hard to explain but I will start with the obvious:
People who absolutely and uncritically love everything about AD&D1E should not be writing OSRIC. I know for a fact one such person is. That alone means the game is going to suffer. Because AD&D isn't very good (gasp! shock! horror!). And the people who originally wrote OSRIC - Stuart Marshall and Matt Finch both had history and knew where the game fell on it's face. They purposefully discluded the psionics, the bard, and the weapon v armor AC table. This was a correct and just action made by intelligent designers, one of which was behind the only true and correct evolution of the Saving Throw (sorry Kevin Crawford and everyone else, the single save system is the best system). These designers may have left other things out due to page economics of the situation and a worry about copyright issues, and sure some of those things could be cleared up like how poisons work, but overall there is very little to actually include into OSRIC that won't weaken it and somebody who uncritically loves all of AD&D won't do it. Can't do it. Because frankly, they don't see it. They think the weapon vs armor ac table is sensible.
It isn't. It was intended to be applied to the system when all weapons did the same damage and all characters had the same kind of hit dice. Adding variable damage removes the purpose of this table entirely. Because a weapons effectiveness is now variably determined by how much damage it does. That's what the damage die is for. Similarly the avoidance or soaking of said damage is determined by hit dice size and amount. The inclusion of the weapon vs armor ac table was simply a mistake. One that most tables immediately ignored because it was senseless. Bad design by saint Gary Gygax. Because he was just a guy. Not a genius. He was a very lucky guy, and like most very lucky people who hit the lottery, he squandered it by trusting the wrong people to oversee it. Anyone can make that mistake. Anyone has made that mistake. I'm not calling him an idiot, just a regular man like anyone else.
Those who uncritically love AD&D and haven't looked beyond it in 45+ years are those who wrote the old-school fantasy heartbreakers of yore. A lack of understanding of design philosophy in general and starkly limited mindset on what a RPG is and could be. I'm not saying OSRIC should be anything more than an AD&D clone, I'm saying unless you know your shit, you'll never be able to selectively prune the bad shit present in this AD&D clone to produce a better AD&D via OSRIC. 2E made all of the correct big choices, they had best be kept or the new edition will run into the problems of being a shitty version of AD&D instead of the best, most honed version of AD&D. And if that's not the goal, then it should be.
EDIT 5/5/2025: It's just been announced that Matt Finch will helm OSRIC 3E. This is even worse news, considering what he's done to the Swords & Wizardry line. I may have tangentially talked about it at some point in the past but didn't devote an entire article to it. Long story short, the woke mind virus has him, and he modernized too close to the sun. Expect Races to be renamed Ancestries, and other dumb shit like that to come out of this. It will absolutely be a worse product than OSRIC 2.0.
How to make a better product? Take OSRIC 2.0 and clean up all inconsistencies (especially when it comes to monster stat blocks which barely changed between 1E and 2E D&D but some have completely different stats for OSRIC, like the Owlbear) and missing rules that are actually missed (poison, etc). Leave psionics, monks, bards, and the weapon vs armor AC table in the bit bucket. They are all detrimental to the D&D experience. Be better D&D than D&D. Because if you're just going to be the same then there's no reason to get it over AD&D which is readily available now. And your modernism will rightfully drive your intended audience away. There are no young people actually playing OSRIC. There are tourists, but they won't give you a good return over time. Tourists move on. They tour. And courting tourists instead of your core audience is idiotic. So don't be an idiot, Matt Finch. I hope I'm wrong but it's definitely the case that I'm not.
