Old School Renaissance

Yesterday in Dundee I had a fun catch up with Aniki and Luscan where we ended up (to no-one's surprise) discussing RPGs. One particular topic which came up was the OSR, a subset of Indie RPGs which I love, Aniki had never heard of and Luscan has, erm, limited appreciation for. So I thought I'd come in here and write an epic Luscan-style post explaining why these games are worth your attention.

So for those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the OSR is the Old School Renaissance, it's basically the tabletop RPG equivalent of retro games. When retro gaming was starting to become a thing it was indie developers making new 2D shooters and platformers, and from there it grew out to include all sorts of retro-themed pixel-art indie games, until now where indie games often use retro elements as just one of many elements in their design. OSR RPGs followed a similar path, starting off as re-writes of various editions of old TSR-era D&D and from there evolving into all sorts of other games based off of that core rules system.

So OSR games aren't just one thing, there are hundreds of them. There are some set in WW2, or in space, there is at least one set in hell. Some use a lifepath character generation system like Traveller, some drop the classic six stats. There are a few things they mostly have in common though.

• The arc of play should not be pre-determined. The GM doesn't know what is going to happen, there aren't pre-prepared plot twists and climaxes. The GM prepares a setting (possibly with the players' help, but usually not) and a situation and then and lets the PCs explore and interact with it. It's sandbox play. Crackdown, not Remember Me. If you are familiar with Apocalypse World you might recognise this as "play to see what happens".

• Challenge the players, and reward their ingenuity. The game world should be tough and challenges should be appropriate to the location and situation, not balanced for the current level of your PCs. The players should be encouraged to sneak around, do recon, lay traps, plan ambushes. Anything to get the upper hand. and this isn't just combat related. If they enter a dungeon and negotiate a deal with the inhabitants to work with them raiding the local Nobility strongholds then that's great! Give the players freedom and reward their ingenuity, but if they make a bad call, make them pay for it.

• Random tables! If all of the above sounds like a massive amount of work, it really isn't, because the games provide the tools to generate content as you need it. Need a town guard? a few dice will tell you their species, disposition and quirk. Need a village? Roll up it's size, current problems and quality of tavern. GMs can use these tools before the game to roll up all sorts of content the players might see, or just wait until you need it and roll it on the fly. Stars Without Number has a system where you roll one of each dice and each one tell you something about the planet your players just found (population/resources/government/trade/complication/etc). My favourite is a setting book called Yoon Suin: The Purple Land (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/144820/YoonSuin?term=yoon+suin) which is a 300 page book of random tables for generating a fantasy Nepal. Reading the book tells you very little, just hundreds of little snapshots of things in the world. As soon as you start using it though, the world comes to life, and it's different for every table.

• Rulings not Rules! OSR games are not heavy. Most commonly they resemble Basic D&D. Six stats, a Class, a few abilities and a couple combat scores. The idea is that this light-touch allows the players to do whatever they want rather than having to pick from a list of options on their character sheet. This also frees up the GM you make appropriate rulings for whichever situations occur without having to use a pre-written rule which doesn't quite fit. This can be a bit of work and requires trust and confidence but there is plenty of guidance in the better OSR games.

• No metagaming! Players don't get Drama Points or anything similar to choose when they succeed or to guide the story the way they want. GMs control the setting, players control their characters. It's basically a branch of traditional gaming.

That's basically it. I love it, I suspect you would too.

Aniki had never heard of

I'd heard the term and knew it was "Old School R[something]", I just had never had it explained to me.

My 'limited appreciation' for them isn't really due to a lack of knowledge. God knows I've tried to appreciate OSR but it is genuinely one of the most fuckawful, gatekeepy parts of the traditional games roleplaying scenes you can find. Disregarding the fuckawful, gatekeepy stuff, my issue with them is that there's a lot of 'yes, but no' in them and something rotten at the core of it.

ODnD isn't rules light, no matter how much people might like to claim otherwise. Sure, there books weren't as thick as they are now and the Reactionaries. OSR feels a lot like how people remember playing DnD rather than actual ODnD. I hadn't heard of 'rulings not rules' until OSR came around. Plus, the whole 'hexcrawls are great!' aspect of it wasn't a thing in oDnD either (unless you wanna break out Keep on the Borderlands or something. A big part of the OSR identity - that I've encountered thus far - is leaning hard on the idea that everything just happens and you don't plan, even though tons of other non-OSR games are the same way. This is so weird to me since a ton of the shit you see with the OSR logo is overly detailed modules.

No Metagaming is kind of a weird stance to take. Hitpoints are a meta-resource akin to Drama Points or whatever. - they're not (well, very rarely, if ever) a measure of 'how much meat is left on how much bone,' but they're allowed because they're in DnD. That new stuff - those Fate Points, Drama Points, Willpower Points can get tae because that's not what Gary would have wanted. You mention 'no metagaming' as if a) every other game has metagaming; b) it's impossible to metagame OSR stuff; c) preventing metagaming is easy but other designers don't do it for reasons.

The OSR games I've actually read have generally had a lot of modern simplifications and abstracted mechanics in them, and the resultant feel is that they're OSR not by virtue of design, but rather by position of author. It's all very…. tummyfeel.

Basically: race-as-class and the only races are True Scotsman and Not True Scotsman.

I do see where you are coming from with a lot of that. It's a real shame you got the gatekeeper side of things, there were a lot of vocal arseholes who liked to make sure everyone knew they were there. Google+ made it very easy for users to ignore and avoid them, which meant that those of us who weren't bigots and were trying to create new things could support each other and get on with that. Unfortunately that didn't stop the arseholes from giving the rest of us a bad name.

"How people remember playing D&D" is almost exactly right. I would tweak it to "running the games we wished we knew how to when we were teen-agers." Again, it's like retro videogames. Why play Robotron when you can play Geometry Wars?

There are some overly detailed modules for sure, mostly for the original retroclones from ten years ago which were trying to recreate AD&D (OSRIC) or oD&D (Swords & Wizardry) as closely as possible. Things have moved on from there I think.

HP aren't a metagame recourse like the others because the player can't choose to spend it for narrative effect. It's still an abstraction for sure, but it doesn't expand player agency. And I'm not trying to say that metagame systems or shared narrative control are bad, or that only OSR game don't have them, just that it's kind of an important part of OSR that these game don't have those features.

Like I said above, those five things are things that OSR games tend to have in common, I can think of an OSR game which breaks each rule. And I just read a Powered By The Apocalypse game which fits all of them. Like with any clasification system, is all overlapping Venn diagrams, I'm just trying to explain why I really like them and why I think you are missing out if you dismiss them all for the faults of a few of them. It would be like me saying I don't like World of Darkness because their Werewolfs are dumb. It might be true, but it's not exactly fair.

One other achievement of the scene is that because all of the game systems are mostly interchangable, it has freed up the indie designers to get really creative with their settings, so we have entire creepy Germanic forests to explore or a parallel Midlands where familiar towns are full of goblins and ogres. There's a Mobius inspired psychedelic Oregon Trail across a continent. A city of dreams where nightmare incursions form dungeons in cellars, alleys and abandoned buildings. An endless multiverse library. Massive mega-dungeons which are the undead bodies of enormous god-things. There's a weirder rewrite of Planescape and a setting which is the various dreams and memories of an enormous immortal crocodile. The creativity and imagination on offer is fantastic, and none of those are written by anyone problematic or gatekeepery. And yes, it does totally suck that I feel the need to say that.

As someone that's been playing and running World of Darkness for 15 years, I can avow that it is, in fact, very dumb and bad but I love it anyway, so.

I think we understand each other.

We've reached peak Soc with this thread.