Solo OSR is boring

 The AD&D 1e DMG contains everything necessary to play the game solo. It is full of tables that can generate every aspect of the campaign, from the governmental form of a city down to the disposition of an individual NPC. However, it provides the barest guidelines on interacting with all that content, preferring to leave it to the discretion of the DM. A binary question-and-answer oracle could be used to fill in this gap. I find the term "GM emulator" to be a bit misleading, as they don't actually fulfill the function of the GM, which is to play the world in response.

  By the book, there's not a whole to do in OSR games beyond traveling into the unknown, encountering monsters or friendly NPCs, engaging in combat, and recovering loot to level up to recover more loot. They really do rely on the strength of the DM to make the game interesting.

When I play RPGs live, I play from the perspective of my character and focus from personal point of view. When I play solo, I feel more like an omnipresent narrator that watches other characters take action as I roll for them.

Why I chose AD&D 2e

 In running 1e I ran into a consistent set of problems in my games that I just wanted to remove. The Half-Orc race, the Assassin and Monk classes, the wild power level of the Paladin, and Psionics. There was a lot I liked about 1e, too, such as the existence of Paladins, Rangers, Druids, and Bards, the really technical nature of stats, it’s reckoning of time and combat, and the attention given to equipment and weapons. I was considering cutting and splicing it all together into my own shitbrew, but then I found a game that does just all of that already; and that is AD&D 2e.

2e is not perfect - it’s reckoning of the combat round and weapon speed factor is inferior to 1e, it jettisoned the weapon vs AC table in favor of a much simpler damage type chart, replaced the table of repeating 20’s with THAC0, made character creation for Magic-Users, Clerics and Thieves more complicated by essentially adding subclasses, and incorporated the infamous non-weapon proficiencies.

For NWPs, I straight up will not use them, as I hate skill systems in D&D’s rigid class based game. The M-U (now called Wizards) spell school choice and the Cleric sphere choice is not something I personally like but players like having more options and it adds a bit of flavor to the classes. The Thief class benefits greatly from the points system. It’s going to be very hard to let go of 1e’s extremely technical combat, so I probably won’t.  Other than that, everything else from 2e flows seamlessly from 1e, so I don’t anticipate any conversion issues.

I envision my 2e game as playing very differently from my 0e one. My OD&D game is all about free form actions and occasionally instant death, where every action is adjudicated by out-of-game logic, while my AD&D 2e game will be beholden to the dice mechanics and graven rules.

The Monstrous Compendium is actually really neat, too.

Heroquest reprint

 If nothing else, it’s cheaper than buying the miniatures and furniture separately, though I’ve already invested in half of that when I cobbled together the pieces for advanced Heroquest out of spare parts.  AHQ also has a solo mode and a set of rules for using the original Heroquest pieces, so I’m looking forward to using them with the reprint. I don’t hate the new art, I’m just glad it’s not a radical redesign, and the Barbarian still exists and is recognizable.

My biggest gripe with Greyhawk

 Most of all, I hate the stupid names. How the fuck are you supposed to pronounce Furyondy or Nyr Dyv? That’s not counting the places that are actual puns. Many of the places are named after people Gygax knew in real life, like Perrenland, the Duchy of Urnst, the Duchy of Geoff, or the County of Sunndi. These names add texture to the place, it’s true, but it also makes the setting feel very personal, full of in-jokes and self-referential humor, like it’s actually Gygax and his friends’ campaign, and not really a place for other players. Playing in Greyhawk feels like squatting in someone else’s home.

The actual playable content of Greyhawk, however, is pretty great. I highly recommend the 128 page box set over the 64 page folio, if only because the box set actually includes the original folio with no alterations as well. Only the crabbiest, highest self-aggrandizing grognard would recommend otherwise. The second booklet comes with actual, concrete game content in the form of weather statistics and random encounters, which make the prep just that much easier. Be warned though, as a Gary Gygax product it still requires a lot of prep.

The 2e and 3e eras of Greyhawk content are heavily focused on meta plot, so I tend to ignore them completely, but they do flesh out the world and mitigate the tongue-in-cheek aspects of it, so there’s that.