Swords & Wizardry and Old School Essentials are two excellent games. They are nearly the same game, but S&W is a zero-edition game, offering a more authentic experience of the original 1974 game and a proto-AD&D game with some of the same features, albeit with far less complexity. Old School Essentials is reminiscent of the early 1980s D&D game, stripped down, simplified, and incredibly simple to run.
S&W has the core race options, but it does not encompass all of OSE's variety and character options. OSE is very 5E-like, especially in the Advanced version and Carcass Crawler zines, and you can have race-as-class Dragonborn and Tieflings running about. These are B/X-style designs, but the variety of character types is there. With S&W, you get the basic human, elf, and dwarf options, and a limited expansion in the options book, but the game does not go crazy in presenting every fantasy race under the sun.
If you want the variety of races that 5E has, and that modern-style world where you have a lot of options, go with Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy, and pick up the Carcass Crawler zines. This will provide you with the baseline options you are accustomed to, the standard mix that originated in D&D 4E, specifically in the Nerrath campaign setting.
I would use OSE to run a Nerrath game these days, and that says a lot about this game. This would be my first choice since it preserves a high level of character power compared to D&D 4E, where a magic user's fireball spell can vaporize almost every creature in the blast radius below 4 hit dice. This does not happen in any version of the game that Wizards made.
You do not have the "shooty cantrips" in this game that 4E had, but to counter that, I would be much more generous on supplying magic wands, rods, and staves to the party, in crafting, finding, and being able to trade or buy for them. If you want "shooty casters," then give them the tools to do that. Don't go crazy, and remember that finding other magic items the party can't use makes them tradable items, so a caster could trade an expended wand for a full one, with an extra item to pay for the charged-up wand. All it takes is you as a referee to toss an additional item or two in there for the trade, and even rare gems and valuable items work for this sort of bartering.
As an alternative, create things in the adventure that can recharge wands, staves, and rods when they are touched to them, such as ley lines, magic crystals, or divine fountains. Draining a magical power source like this will temporarily discharge it, and it will replenish over time. 5E will go out of its way to tell you these things are not possible, and that you must recharge magic items in a specific way by the rules. In old-school gaming, how you want things to work is how they work.
Many problems in 5E were created for the game so the designers could solve them. We had this all figured out back in the day. Don't be stingy on treasure, and give characters reasons to use gold. It is a simple fix, and casters do not need free, infinite-shot laser pistols in their fingers, as it makes magic too ordinary and commonplace. Also, since hit points are not scaled, magic missiles hit way harder in OSE than in 5E, and the spell gets lethal at higher levels.
Swords & Wizardry offers a set of options closer to the original game, including humans, dwarves, elves, half-elves, and halflings. The book of options only offers two more: gnomes and stygian. You do not get Drow, Tiefling, Dragonborn, or any of the other modern race choices. You could port them in from OSE, if you want, using the standalone race options, but we are comparing games here.
The only other central point is that S&W classes are more in-depth in terms of gaining new abilities as they level, whereas OSE classes tend to be flatter and more straightforward. This is the AD&D versus D&D split again, where the basic D&D type classes always were cleaner designs, and AD&D went into a deeper design for each.
If you are interested in having a variety of race and class options, OSE will be the best game for you. OSE is the best choice for those wanting a more modern set of options in a classic game wrapper.
If you want fewer race and class options, and each choice to have more to it, then S&W will be the game that makes you the happiest. S&W is the perfect "AD&D-lite" style of play, cutting closest to the source material while giving you deeper class options and abilities.
Personally? I would use Swords & Wizardry for Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms games. Either this or the equally excellent Adventures Dark & Deep game, but S&W will be the easier choice since it is closer to a rules-light game. If I am pulling out ADAD, I am committing to a year-long campaign or more. S&W will be better for faster play, lighter characters, and newer players.
Bother are great games that look at classic gaming through different lenses, yet provide nearly identical gameplay experiences.
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