GLOG (as GLOG-osphere not Arnold's original GLOG) is the Pathfinder of OSR aka characters who have buttons you mash aka level gated abilities and Bonus: Why player enjoyment is not a useful metric of an aspect of a game

I don't know the origin of the this Batman panel

So, I’ve ran a lot of GLOG games and a lot of Pathfinder games. These systems do somethings well and somethings not well. I’ll start with Pathfinder because I ran it for almost 4 years.

Pathfinder

Pathfinder is a d20 system largely based on 3.5 with the goal of rolling BIG numbers through the stacking of bonuses. Characters posses abilities which they are allowed to use a number of times per day or more passive bonuses or abilities which may be always used. Rather than a referee calling for rolls, players declare rolls for something they want to do and the dice roll is king. Class abilities are buttons which players can press to do something. For example let’s looks at the Alchemist, Barbarian, and Gunslinger classes. The alchemist has a number of bombs he can make per day which deal damage based on his level. The barbarian can enter a rage for a number of rounds per day and then based on his level has a number of special abilities or passives due to raging. The gunslinger has a pool of “grit” points which may be expanded to cause certain effects. Each class has a central ability which it is built around and as the character level’s up it gains a new ability at each level. In my experience Pathfinder is good for games where the characters are superheroes, the abilities center the character into a gimmick. Many players while playing pathfinder begin to sink into patterns of “I use my X ability” creativity is constrained by the rules and the creation of abilities which limit others from doing them without that ability. In essence the character rules allow characters the permission to do a number of things per day and in doing so disallow other characters from doing so. Generally the abilities gained by characters improve with each level and allow them to do greater and greater feats in order to cause a greater change. These buttons discourage players from doing something they are bad at and they begin to think in terms of their characters usable abilities instead of what they as a player can do. Pathfinder wizards don’t attack in melee and fighters don’t try to outwit enemies. Each uses it’s set of tools to solve it’s problems instead of using lateral thinking. Pathfinder has dozens of classes and each has a dozen subclasses within it which each alter slight things of each class, but in my mind, don’t benefit the game as a whole and cause massive choice paralysis by making characters choose between literally hundreds of classes. The needlessly complex class system could be abridged into like 12? Classes without the system loosing anything. The vast majority of these classes are essentially the same thing with slightly different terms.

Pathfinder in summary: Enormously high number of Classes, most of which are copies of one another, which are accumulations of buttons to press that discourage lateral thinking.

Pathfinder classes are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Their abilities reinforce a specific play style, to press buttons given to you by the class in order to get what you want rather than by lateral thinking or just engaging with the game otherwise. A barbarian who does not rage in pathfinder will be a bad barbarian.

Before I get into the GLOG, I will link a previous post about too many classes here. To familiarize people with the core 5 classes of OSR. These classes are described by their functionality in resource management within the gameplay-loop.

Now one thing I don’t think I made clear at all was why having numerous versions of the same meta-class is a bad thing. So:

Firstly, the more classes you have the more time a player takes in choosing what class to play.
Secondly, the more time that you as a Referee spend making new classes is time you could spend making dungeons or generators for your game. It’s as masturbatory as world-building (more on this later).
Thirdly, constraints breed creativity which is especially useful for lateral thinking, a key hallmark of OSR play.

My statement is thus: You need the 5 OSR meta-classes to main the OSR gameplay-loop. If you add more classes than this you are hindering your player’s ability to play an OSR game by restricting the time they spend playing the game, restricting game-able content you make for your game, and limiting their player-skill development.

GLOG

Now to the GLOG, the GLOG is from the blog Goblinpunch which focuses on a roll under system for mechanic resolution, a template based class system, and a dice pool magic system. The class system is what makes the GLOG the pathfinder of OSR because it too is a “bloated heap of redundant classes which are mainly button pressing abilities”. Now the GLOG the number of so many classes comes from the massive number of GLOG classes out there, the vast majority of which are wizard schools. Now a stated goal of the GLOG was to not have passive abilities upon level up but to instead have new abilities open, and precisely this core design goal is what makes it so similar to Pathfinder. Each level-up plates are given more and more buttons to press during a game to the determinant of their player skill. A level 1 character vs a level 4 character is not different in their chances of success but instead in the number of buttons they get to press. The vast majority of the GLOG-opshere has classes which are designed around pressing buttons. This mimics the prescriptive classes of pathfinder.

Let’s use Basic as a reference for OSR games for a moment. In Basic the only level gated ability is the acquisition of spells. Other classes only improve their chances of success rather than more buttons to press. The vast majority of B/X classes have im prove by their passive abilities. The theif's skill can always be used, the fighter's attack ability is always increased, the cleric may always turn undead, and the demihuman/survival class always has good saves. But these are constant benefits which need not be "pressed in order to work" a thief doesn't need to press a button to hide in shadows because HE CAN ALWAYS DO SO. Passive abilities are descriptive rather than prescriptive, they describe what a class will naturally be best at over the course of a game. At this point you might be saying “But, there is button pressing already in OSR from the start, the magic suer casting spells!” However, vancian casting is not button pressing as it requires a character to prepare a spell PRIOR to it being cast. It is a passive ability to prepare buttons for the future not the presence of buttons to be pressed. The number of buttons pressable increasing in vancian casting only because the number of prepareable slots of a wizard increases. It is important to note that these buttons must be prepared for future use rather than pressed willy-nilly.

The GLOG’s distribution of buttons arises in gameplay. Each level characters get new buttons to press, and less and less reasons to engage in lateral thinking. Why would you use the player skill of lying to monsters when you have a 1/day of target monster must save vs. dying. Players start fixating on their abilities as they progress in level, in essence slowly becoming less and less OSR as time goes on. With each level the player gains a new tool and a diminished need for lateral thinking. If one was to remove the template system from GLOG it would no longer be GLOG and thus these templates are inherent to GLOG. If the GLOG had templates which were passive bonuses such as "may walk on the ceiling" this would greatly encourage lateral thinking, in contrast to "1/day this character may walk on the ceiling". This would introduce new avenues of lateral thinking rather than singular effects which can be achieved by the player pushing a button.

Useless World-building

Previously, I indicated that making many classes is not conducive to a referee. The vast majority of GLOG-osphere content are classes as opposed to dungeons or hex-crawls. It is fun to make classes and fun to worldbuild but it accomplishes terribly little and if anything hampers your games, because it minimizes the amount of content you create for your players.  Worldbuilding here is defined as the creation of content which is not player facing. Figuring out what made the dungeon to make dungeon fills is good, entertaining thoughts of how the names of the ancient people in the dungeon need to sound to be vaguely Mesopotamian, not so much. You might say that making a player class is entirely player facing, however unless the class is one of the 5 roles, it doesn't serve your players anything. I know of people who demand the insistence of having a Knight, Fighter, and Barbarian as mechanically separate, because the fluff (aesthetics) needs to match the crunch (mechanics) and they cannot separate the two. However, your players can do fine with the 5 core OSR meta-classes. If anything it'll force them to think about more serious ways to differentiate their characters. No OSR game benefits from having a Hot-Dog seller class.

Why your player's having fun is a terrible argument

Some people have mentioned that their players like playing multiple new classes and having fun. My response is that player happiness and "fun" is a non-objective and useless measurement. It bears no reflection on the inherent merit of an RPG and has to do with the social aspect of a game. A player can have fun with absolutely anything depending on why they play. Some play for the social scene of a game, others play for the escapism, others still to overcome challenges. You do not know why a player plays your game, and often the player themselves do not know why. An OSR game at it's core is about exploration, the discovery of the unknown by both the players and the referee. The fun which arises is a consequence of the exploration and not the goal of gameplay.

Fun is not a proof a of any merit, it is merely proof that spending 4 hours with you playing an RPG is not an awful experience.