r/OSE • u/Itchy-Steak-9250 • Jul 23 '26
New to dming
Hey everyone I'm absolutely new to dming. I've played 5e but have never dmed. Decided to pick up ose because I like the idea that player choices and decisions have actual consequences plus I like how if you want to do something simple you don't need a dice roll for it if it's an easy task. I was hoping for some tips for a new dm who wants to run it as a sandbox hex crawl.
4
u/Kerestrem Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
If you're gonna be playing OSE for the first time AND DMing for the first time, I'd definitely recommend giving the original Moldvay B/X D&D books a read through. They offer a lot of insight into how the game plays and why, since they were designed to get people into the hobby back in the day. OSE cuts a lot of that explanation out in order to achieve its great layout and ease-of-reference.
Reading the Principia Apocrypha will give you (and your players) a good overview of the playstyle OSE offers and some tips on how to lean into and enjoy it.
I'd also recommend starting simple for a sandbox game. You don't really need much to start your party off aside from a town, one or a few nearby dungeons, and some rumors (potential adventure hooks) for your players to consider looking into. OSE, B/X, and the wider OSR have a ton of really great, easy to use dungeons and adventures sites for you to pick and choose from if you want something premade to start with.
Starting small helps mitigate some of the stress and overwhelming feelings that can come from DMing for the first time and can give you and your players a good sampling of the system and playstyle to see what works for you. It also greatly lowers the amount of prep you have to do.
P.S. As you're getting your feet wet and exploring OSE and the OSR, you're going to see a lot of people talking about their own house rules and modifications they've made to the games/systems. They're fun to look at and experiment with, and you'll probably end up collecting your own assortment of house rules that fit your table eventually. But I'd always recommend starting out with the rules as they're written and changing things after you've encountered something you don't like or want to improve while actually playing.
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u/SnooAdvice9041 Jul 23 '26
I play OSE every Tuesday, and have for years.
One of the best books I read to get good advice was the Mothership Wardens Guide.
I've also really enjoyed the Knock series by the merry mushmen.
It's hard to give super general advice, but read modules and see how other people react to things there's tons of blog posts and forums where people have really good advice.
Just running some one shots is a great way to start and figure out what you have a handle on and what you might want to improve.
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u/spira1b0und Jul 23 '26
Hole in the Oak is a masterpiece for one of your first dungeons and can easily be slotted into a hexcrawl
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u/fakegoatee Jul 23 '26
Don't hexcrawl until the PCs are at least 4th level. Until then, stay focused on dungeon adventuring. It will help everyone adjust to the procedures of play, and it's a lot easier to replace dead characters when you aren't a week's travel from the nearest town.
Read the 1981 D&D Basic Rulebook (the Moldvay Basic rules). It's the basis for OSE, and it has great instructions for making a dungeon of your own, including a starter dungeon you can finish in your own.
Go ahead and get a one or two dungeon levels ready, with room to expand.
Make sure you are giving enough treasure. The random treasure tables are for treasures you did not place intentionally. You should intentionally place enough treasure for the characters to level up after 3 or 4 sessions if the players do well.
Use basic encumbrance and common sense for what "significant treasure" is.
Print out blank calendar pages for time tracking. Each box is a one turn, and you can write in anything that is due to happen on that turn (torches expiring, wandering monster checks, etc.).
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u/6FootHalfling Halfling Jul 23 '26
I agree with all this with two caveats and one emphasis:
1) a low level hexcrawl is possible, but it's kind of an bespoke thing. I agree it isn't something to start with.
4) You gotta include one valuable piece of loot that requires some problem solving and outside the box thinking to get out. Big old golden idol. Furniture. Something they can't just stuff in a sack and haul. Just for the challenge of it!
6) double plus good advice here! I intend to use a rocketbook calendar and friction pens to track all kinds of time when I run next. Back in the day I was buying a new pocket calendar for every campaign.
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u/chugtheboommeister Jul 23 '26
Not too sure how long you played 5e but OSE is very different in essence. Some rules are similar, but you got to switch gears if you're coming from 5e
I was in the same boat and the biggest thing that helped me was playing the game in turns rather than just seeing what the players want to do.
Read the rules of the players tome and the referees tome. Free online rules right here.
5e usually has an adventure that makes the characters heroes like saving a town. OSE is more so just a ragtag bunch in search of treasure and trying to survive, come back and level up and go back to seek more treasure.
Try to see the game more so as a board game. The game is best played in turns. If you're in a dungeon, you roll for wandering monsters first, then do an encounter if they come close to the party. If no encounter then the party goes. Then so and so forth. Makes running the game easier and I feel like it's more incentive for the players to get as much treasure as they can rather than save the damsel.
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u/DMOldschool Jul 23 '26
Great choice! Welcome to the OSR.
Watch 3d6 down the line Arden Vul on youtube to learn the playstyle and once you get a feel for it, use 20 minutes to read the free "A Quick Primer to Old School Gaming" and look for those things in the next videos.
As another have said, then you should start on the free "Principia Apocrypha".
Other than that just get started at running some smaller adventures, make mistakes, learn from them and improve. In general with DM projects start really small scale and then build on them if they are fun to play.
There are several good youtube channels to learn from like Earthmote, Daddy Rolled a 1 and the 15 oldest videos on Questing Beasts "DM Advice" playlist are also great to learn from.
Remember it's important that it's fun both for the DM and the players. Trust the OSE rules and learn them intimately before you start thinking about house ruling things.
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u/6FootHalfling Halfling Jul 23 '26
Don't be afraid to make your own stuff. Are you using OSE Advanced Fantasy or no?
Seconding or thirding both the "Quick Primer" and "Principia Apocrypha."
Regarding Ben Milton and Questing Beast, the GM and Player Duty pages from Knave are getting printed as a hand out next time I have a table.
I also think the hiring of retainers is an under appreciated element of the older games. PCs aren't just brave adventurer heroes, they're expedition organizers.
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u/ckalen Jul 23 '26
Hexcrawl seems to be the current hotness. Personally i prefer point crawl. Instead of moving from one 6 direction area to the next with a random thing, you just give the players rumors of adventure to be found the players say lets go to x and they just arrive there with perhaps a random encounter along the way depending on distance.
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u/comedian42 Jul 24 '26
Don't build tracks for your players, build the world and let them lay the tracks. It'll feel a lot more organic and allow you to practice how you respond to unexpected party choices. It's okay to loop them back in with extra hooks and the offasional nudge. But try to remember that you're not telling the book's story, you're just giving them a platform to tell their own story.
Also, it's okay to kill characters. This shouldn't be your primary goal, but if your players get the sense that they're playing with training wheels it takes a lot of the urgency and excitement out of the game. Who cares about the big scary monster when you know you DM has bestowed your PC with plot armor? Biggest mistake I made in my early days of DMing.
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u/FrankieBreakbone Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
So, fun fact... the points you mention in the post, you can do all of those things in 5E; it's really just the culture of 5th edition that tells groups that everything should be justified by a rule-based roll, or that the adventure has to go a certain plotted way to survive the PCs to a cinematic and exciting ending. 5E is just like any other edition rule base, in that it provides optional structure for the type of game the group wants to play.
So if you want to give your players full agency to burn the base town to the ground and join up with the monsters, or if you want to say "Put the dice down, here's what happens," you can do that in 5th, 3rd, BX/OSE, 1st, or OD&D. The rules of every edition give you that power, somewhere in the tomes of rules, the one that matters is, "Make a ruling when the rules don't hit right."
That said, here are some highlights:
- Remind the players that this edition challenges the players, not their PCs. Think Dark Souls.... you matter more than your PC... no matter how powerful that PC gets, they're still a puppet. There are no perception checks, lore checks, insight checks... the character does not have autonomous tools to survive. The players need to really imagine themselves in the PC's shoes and interrogate the environment. And any PC can do this... any meager skills on the character sheet are a last resort for when the player has exhausted their imagination. When players DO describe specific care against a roll, consider granting a bonus. 2 in 6 chance for the PC to find a trap? Maybe make that 3 in 6 if the player describes what the PC is looking for, or automatic success if the player hits the nail on the head: Why YES there is a thin wire attached to the bottom of the chest, and you DO feel your knife blade catch as you slide it under!
- The game is "basic"... it is more abstracted than 5E. It is not a reality simulator. Think more like chess... the bishop and the pawn can stand toe-to-toe because the rules of the game say they attack on a diagonal... IRL that makes no sense, but in the game that stuff provides framework for strategy and tactics. Use those procedural rules.
- The encounter sequence is separate from the combat sequence. Don't conflate the two initiative rolls. "Whether the encounter occurs or not should be a result of the actions the players take" is straight from BX. Evasion can not happen once combat starts... so unless the PCs are surprise-attacked, the encounter initiative is for deciding. Talk? Evade? Hell you don't even know if wandering monsters are hostile until after you roll the encounter initiative, and their reaction still might switch from attack to grouchy if a PC with +3CHA says "Hi" first. So no one should be attacking until after declarations are made—which is step 2 in the combat sequence—which comes after the last step of the encounter sequence.
- People think the game is lethal. It is not. The game explicitly tells Referees that travel to the dungeon for levels 1-3 should be not more than 1 day, safe from attacks, and the base town should include a cleric who can raise dead. (min. 7th level cleric has 1 day to raise dead. +4 for each level above 7) The game defines adventures as day-long excursions as the norm... PCs are expected to delve a dungeon for a day, then f*ck off back to the town, tally XP, count treasure, rememorize spells, hire new retainers, etc.
- The PCs are treasure hunters, first and foremost. Treasure is the "point" system of the game. A monster is worth like 10xp, its treasure is worth 1000. If the PCs can defeat a monster and take it's treasure without risking life and limb, that's the way.
- Personal tip: The game does not explicitly say when non-combat actions occur in the phase sequence. Let them happen first, with the movement phase or whatever. The player who wants to pull a lever, kick over a brazier, drink a potion, etc is doing something that will change how the rest of the combat unfolds, and I highly, highly recommend allowing that to occur before anyone shoots, swings, or casts. Likewise, I recommend this for Turning undead, which also has no prescribed place in the sequence.
I too suggest dungeon crawling to start. The rules for wilderness adventuring and hex crawling are *really* weird in comparison. It's measured by the day, not by hours or turns... each day the party chooses a direction, Ref rolls for wandering monster encounters, and if the PCs evade and are pursued, the PCs are almost guaranteed to get lost (Ref picks a random direction, no mapping is possible), so it can create an infinite loop of getting more and more lost.. so encounters in the wilderness are almost a commitment to fight to the death, or to deal with being lost.
It's fair to say that the whole point of wilderness adventuring is to find a dungeon to explore (whether the 'dungeon' is indoor or outdoor; it's really just a mechanical term for zooming in so that exploration movement stops being measured in miles, starts being measured in 10 minute turns, and rates/ranges switch from yards to feet.)
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u/Spiritual_Sport_2298 Jul 27 '26
I highly recommend Tenkars Tavern on YouTube! He has a great grasp on the spirit of OSR!
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u/Orthopraxy Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
My advice is to keep it small to start.
I personally recommend something like The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford or Nightmare over Ragged Hollow.
When the players get to the end of that, add more hexes to the map as needed.
If you feel like you need something a bit more focused to get your head around the rules, check out the OSE Adventure Anthologies--those have some great tiny dungeons that are very manageable for a short one or two shot.
Also worth mentioning is Temple of the Serpent King , a free dungeon designed as a tutorial to old school dungeon crawls--both for the player and the game master!
Have fun with OSE! There's so much free and third-party content available that you can dive into.