Let’s get this out of the way: I think there are objective rights and wrongs to design, and by that I mean there are universal ways to make RPGs easier to play and run. I also happen to think a lot of RPGs aren’t designed very well; they take too much work, and are way more troublesome than they’re worth. I’ll give you a hint: if it rhymes with trad it’s more than it’s worth. A good game is easy to run at the table, with minimal prep work. I also don't think that OSE is a perfect game, nor do I think B/X is perfect.
See, here's how a lot of modern games work, particularly trad: the players show up and rely up on the GM to make every single narrative decision worth a damn. Even in something like PBTA, where collaboration is a lot stronger, the actual table experience of a GM is vastly more complicated than a player's. A player has really one thing to worry about: what the GM is doing and what the GM tells him. Everything else flows off of that for a player. This then means that the GM, if he is to provide the operative environment, has to make quite a few more decisions than even one player in the same amount of time. Without a good way to shuffle some of that mental load onto something or someone else most games essentially consign a GM to mental exhaustion. This is supposed to be a game, not me doing taxes thank you. In this situation you don't want to prep, and who could blame you! You're worn out from the session and needing to take a break. Having to prep after that's torture, just flat out.
So is it any wonder that Moldvay’s Basic/Expert (BX) is arguably the basis of the OSR, because of its easy of running? It certainly isn't to me, not after perusing this book for five minutes. Don’t believe me? Here’s what you do: draw a map and bookmark the random tables in the book. During the game every two character turns you roll 1d6: if you hit a 1(or higher if you think your players are being dumb) something happens. Roll on the random tables provided (or the ones you made up for fun) in the book after that, roll for the reaction of the mosnters, and go from there! You will be expending some energy, sure, but you will be using a hell of a lot less energy than you’d expect; you go from having to figure everything out to interpreting results. This is a huge difference in the mental and creative load. You can just go along with the procedures and not have to worry about where anything is going, because the game's job is to give you plot points to interpre. You go from playing the long game of a session to just focusing on the next task.
And OSE preserves these procedures exactly. Now, here's what I'm not saying: OSE ain't the only way to replicate such procedures. In fact, OSE's procedures are limited and narrow and if you don't want a dungeoncrawler turning to domain warfare and whatnot OSE won't work for you. That's okay. A game is a game because of its focus, not because it is so freaking large as to catch everyone and everything in its net.
Does that make 5e a game?
Do you really need me to answer that? Do you really me to bring up all the videos of people complaining about GM burnout and how hard it is to GM that mess of a game?
No?
Didn't think so.
Anyways, what I am saying is that, of all the things on the market, B/X is one of the ones with the most comprehensive support for both players and GM. It's not that I want everything to be B/X; I'm in the middle of designing several games, so obviously I think more can be added to the market. It's just that this is the space I think needs the most work: games that support and encourage, rather than demand and drain. There's a reason why Gygax could run games on an almost weekly basis, and it's because of the principles that are now encapsulated in OSE and a lot of the OSR. The fact that the OSR is arguably a commentary on B/X should say something about what this one game accomplished.
And we all should be learning from it.
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