Just a small reminder that we all need to be more like our younger selves again. I recently ran two campaigns in the same style; both were 5e D&D, and I actively made encounters deadly and rewarded creative thinking, and both parties played at levels 1 to 2.
My adult players actively made judgments every session, saying they didn't like thinking about encounters and that having to come up with creative solutions took away from the idea they chose to have a high strength score or a stat they specialized in. They chose that, so that should be what their character is. When encounters got deadly, they brute-forced their way through monsters and only utilized what was on their character sheet. Except one player who actively ended up using his spells for more uses than what was said in the RAW.
With the kids I ran D&D for, everyone didn't entirely understand the rules, but knew enough, and everything written down was an opportunity to act. If I said they had a grappling hook, it was 100% going to be used for climbing something, or tying someone down. I threw a young dragon at them in a town and described it landing on the roof. The players actively tried to hide, cause dragons are scary, and then strategized to collapse the building so it would fall to the ground. I rolled falling damage, and to say the least, it was pretty effective. They won that fight, but only because they fought differently. Young players always want to hinder foes rather than do damage to them. It's always an attempt to blind or take out the wings. The whole campaign continued like this, and every player loved looking at their character sheet and just taking notes down on another paper of combos and chain actions to strategize before going into an encounter. None of them knew what OSR is; they just liked to be creative.
The moral of the story is: be imaginative and don't play by the rules. Adults make rules, and adulting can suck; be like a kid, break all the rules, with some logic, of course.
