What is Tonal Fidelity?

I've asked /osrg/ a few times what they mean when they say Tonal Fidelity to D&D as it was played in it's early years. The rare few times I'm not called FOE, I get told that it's playing it the way the people who created D&D wrote about how they played D&D in the 1970s. The problem with this answer is that it doesn't make any fucking sense. For everyone who said "characters are disposable avatars without personalities", there's Gary and Dave both giving advice on creating personalities beyond yourself, and the snippit from Keep on the Borderlands where it explicitly tells the referee to give the players time to just roleplay in the keep. For every person who says that D&D is just exploring until you find a dungeon then exploring the dungeon, there are reaction rolls that can lead to friendly interactions and roleplay. For every player who says early D&D shouldn't have an overarching plot , there the stories of Zygag, Iuz, and the other major villains of Greyhawk and Mystara.

In my estimation, Tonal Fidelity means "strokes my nostalgia boner". That's it, and I don't think I'm open to dissent on this topic anymore.

Anyway, 5E is not OSR. It's a failed attempt to bait OSR fans back into paying WotC for D&D books but being too afraid to commit and ending up with a disappointing jizz puddle in their shorts. A skilled referee can run 5E like an OSR and have something decent come out of it, but it's an uphill battle and not worth the effort when Basic Fantasy RPG, Labyrinth Lord, and Old School Essentials are free to download.

In my experience, there are usually two reasons why people want to do it. The first is to bait players who started with 5E into the OSR. The second reason is "I've been looking at these threads and it sounds like a really fun playstyle!"

If its the former, just bust out Basic Fantasy and use the expanded races. Run combat with individual initiative rules. It's a lot easier to do and requires less mental gymnastics to make work.

If it's because you think the playstyle is fun, get into an OSR game as a player and play the game before trying to run it. Also, if you're DMing a lot you need to spend some time as a player. Take it from a forever DM, going for years on end without being a player is actual pain.

However, if you're dead set on doing it, it can be done... poorly. Contrary to how many OSR bloggers present it, the best way to get 5E to play like OSR isn't to limit power levels, limit classes or races, or reduce how common magic is. If you didn't want those in your games you wouldn't be playing 5E. It's to focus on the parts of the game WotC left out.

This is all you need to do:

• Implement retainers. I like MCDM's retainer rules, and they might even work with a little tweaking for 4rry and 3.shit.
• Implement reaction rolls for every encounter.
• Learn the detailed exploration rules from the BX clone you find easiest to parse.
• Cut experience for combat in half, add experience for treasure successfully brought home.
• Encourage Player Character retirement around level 9-14.
• Run the game with an old school mindset; The world doesn't care about the player characters, but is relatively static. Anything interesting that happens is because the player characters go out to find it.