OSR Is there room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers?

[Retreater]

I was like Dark Helmet always telling my Col. Sanders group to just go and stop preparing.

When we were searching for clues, treasure, or traps, it certainly called to mind "combing the desert."

 

[Mannahnin]

He also didn't use Reactions, Morale, wouldn't allow reasonable courses of action to succeed, listened in on our plans and had the enemies "magically adapt" to counter our plans. Traps could only be found and detected by thieves making successful rolls (we couldn't find them using procedure searches, logical ways to avoid them). Gave no treasure or magic items in nearly 9 months of play (we only got monster XP). It was not a good experience.

I'd say I can't believe you played that crap for 9 months, but I know group dynamics can be tricky things.

Everything you've listed there is directly opposite of standard or best practices for running OSE / B/X.

 

[Retreater]

I'd say I can't believe you played that crap for 9 months, but I know group dynamics can be tricky things.

Everything you've listed there is directly opposite of standard or best practices for running OSE / B/X.

Yeah. When you've got a passionate GM who really wants to run something, it's hard to speak up. In the dynamics, I'm usually the GM, and I can come across as a very set in my ways GM (so I'm not the best player). My complaints kind of looked like an attempt to wrest control from the GM.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Oh man, I had a GM that was horrible about the plans thing. As players we had a habit of overthinking things. I was like Dark Helmet always telling my Col. Sanders group to just go and stop preparing. One time it didnt go well so now they are once bitten twice shy and want to spend entire sessions going over plans. The GM then of course always has our plan fall apart at key moments that are rather suspicious. It got to the point Id ask the GM to leave the room while we planned our approach. He'd still screw us. Some GMs just like kicking their players in the junk.

I'd say this is the main reason OSR-style play fell out of favor in the first place: the quality of the dm is everything, and the books tell the dm to do whatever they want, ignore what they don't like, etc. Even d20-era games tended to treat changing the rules as something that should be thought out before diving in, gave (bad) guidance on appropriate challenges, etc. Indie games don't mess around: the whole appeal of PbtA is how bluntly is spells out the right way to gm a session. This is all a reaction to a real problem with older books.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Yeah we were looking into SWN for a sci fi system, my players were thinking it was neat right up until they got up to the HP values in the game's combat example, and then vetoed it HARD. They've heard about DCC's funnel and think the game would make for a novelty one shot, but wouldn't be something they'd want to engage in over the long term. I feel less strongly about it since I'm more inclined to align myself with the game's assumptions, especially before I've seen how it actually feels, but it feels more like something I'd be putting up with than something I'd actually value.

Meanwhile I'm reading Barrowmaze and slavering over the exploration, environmental storytelling, treasure hunting, and world-lore heavy play it espouses, and looking at how to redesign the incentives so that it can function in a game I'd like to play, one that doesn't ask my players to sporadically roll against death. Only thing is that the way random monsters are handled feel important, but also relies on a game with rules lite speed to not bog down super hard, so I need an alternative setup to 'punish' players for taking too many risks and making the dungeon feel dangerous and overwhelming.

I actually have some ideas, Victory Points as a fungible basis for subsystems are a truly wondrous addition, I'm wondering if I might be able to (theoretically, I'm tempted to actually run it, buts thats a commitment I'm not prepared to actually make) distill the consequences of things like bashing down walls, or searching for too long, into a consequence point system.

Consequence points could, in theory, advance a centralized 'danger level' of the area up and make encounters harder, or trigger a random encounter at a more controlled rate than the traditional dice roll by having it occur at predefined point values, OR even provide a list of 'bad stuff' the GM could spent the points on. Each design would have its own implications on the feel of the dungeon, and none would feel like a proper Labyrinth-Lord-or-similar-OSR-game run of the module (although there's a 5e version being sold by the author as well, so obviously there's play there anyway.)

I wonder if we might start to see more 'new' gamers (I started with 4e in 2010) turn to the OSR, but to adopt some of its practices, rather than to fully assimilate into its cultural expectations of what play should look like. There's already a big culture of that for DND 5e, in places like Youtube and the Alexandrian and such.

 

[kenada]

Yeah we were looking into SWN for a sci fi system, my players were thinking it was neat right up until they got up to the HP values in the game's combat example, and then vetoed it HARD. They've heard about DCC's funnel and think the game would make for a novelty one shot, but wouldn't be something they'd want to engage in over the long term. I feel less strongly about it since I'm more inclined to align myself with the game's assumptions, especially before I've seen how it actually feels, but it feels more like something I'd be putting up with than something I'd actually value.

FWIW, there are heroic character rules in SWN if the default gritty is too much. Anyway, SWN is full of system-neutral tools that can be used elsewhere even if the system is not one’s thing.

Meanwhile I'm reading Barrowmaze and slavering over the exploration, environmental storytelling, treasure hunting, and world-lore heavy play it espouses, and looking at how to redesign the incentives so that it can function in a game I'd like to play, one that doesn't ask my players to sporadically roll against death. Only thing is that the way random monsters are handled feel important, but also relies on a game with rules lite speed to not bog down super hard, so I need an alternative setup to 'punish' players for taking too many risks and making the dungeon feel dangerous and overwhelming.

I actually have some ideas, Victory Points as a fungible basis for subsystems are a truly wondrous addition, I'm wondering if I might be able to (theoretically, I'm tempted to actually run it, buts thats a commitment I'm not prepared to actually make) distill the consequences of things like bashing down walls, or searching for too long, into a consequence point system.

Consequence points could, in theory, advance a centralized 'danger level' of the area up and make encounters harder, or trigger a random encounter at a more controlled rate than the traditional dice roll by having it occur at predefined point values, OR even provide a list of 'bad stuff' the GM could spent the points on. Each design would have its own implications on the feel of the dungeon, and none would feel like a proper Labyrinth-Lord-or-similar-OSR-game run of the module (although there's a 5e version being sold by the author as well, so obviously there's play there anyway.)

That sounds similar to danger clocks in Blades in the Dark. Since Victory Points are pretty similar to progress clocks, that’s not too surprising. The way it works in BitD is that ticking the clock is a possible consequence for an action roll. You can also tick a clock as part of a devil’s bargain. There are some other things that BitD does that PF2 does not (such as letting characters resist consequences at the cost of stress), but I think what you propose should work pretty well.

I wonder if we might start to see more 'new' gamers (I started with 4e in 2010) turn to the OSR, but to adopt some of its practices, rather than to fully assimilate into its cultural expectations of what play should look like. There's already a big culture of that for DND 5e, in places like Youtube and the Alexandrian and such.

It’s possible. I started with 3e, but I borrowed ideas for years (more so from Grognardia than sites like the Alexandrian). I eventually came to realize that what I wanted to run was OSR, which is what prompted a Pathfinder group to try Old-School Essentials.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

FWIW, there are heroic character rules in SWN if the default gritty is too much. Anyway, SWN is full of system-neutral tools that can be used elsewhere even if the system is not one’s thing.


That sounds similar to danger clocks in Blades in the Dark. Since Victory Points are pretty similar to progress clocks, that’s not too surprising. The way it works in BitD is that ticking the clock is a possible consequence for an action roll. You can also tick a clock as part of a devil’s bargain. There are some other things that BitD does that PF2 does not (such as letting characters resist consequences at the cost of stress), but I think what you propose should work pretty well.


It’s possible. I started with 3e, but I borrowed ideas for years (more so from Grognardia than sites like the Alexandrian). I eventually came to realize that what I wanted to run was OSR, which is what prompted a Pathfinder group to try Old-School Essentials.

Your links have actually gotten me into Grognardia, I hadn't seen it mentioned before earlier posts of yours bringing it up.

I'm more decisively torn, in that I love character optimization, characters that are long for the world, and some of the power fantasy elements-- but I love the idea of sandboxes with mechanical procedures in place of trad sequential storytelling, environmental storytelling, treasure hunting, organic and authentically dangerous adventuring spaces, and the re-emphasis on adventurer slice of life and more personal stories that come with it. But that mostly comes from the scenario design, so its a matter of reconciling the incentives. So this leads me to combine them, and I have faith that they can be, and well.

I had actually bought Blades in the Dark a few weeks ago, potentially to run it and learn from it, I've definitely been enjoying the read.

Depending on what I do I should be able to get a few different vibes-- an overall danger level that makes encounters more active (as opposed to generating them) and harder would make the dungeon itself feel like a vast and terrible beast stirring as you disturb it, for instance. Whereas a build-and-spend format would give me the same effect as a conventional wandering monster, while limiting how often it can happen and leaving me with explicit control of the pacing to avoid scenarios where unlucky rolls devour session time completely into monotonous random encounters (which is a problem to solve, because speed of combat and combat-as-failure-state is an aspect of OSR that enables you to spam those normally) I could also use it to create different things for myself, like "Spend to increase encounter difficulty by a category" or "Aim an encounter of x difficulty at them" which I feel isn't out of ken for OSR, given Barrowmaze's suggestion that ignoring the breakable walls too often should cause the GM to arbitrarily generate a skeleton ambush-- which in turn sort of speaks to the whole tension of GM fiat vs. procedural impartiality that seems to exist in this community.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'll chalk it up to his running OSE with more a modern DM mindset. I don't think he was trying to do it wrong, but he also wouldn't listen to our feedback, which was the main failing.

That's not a modern mindset. It is the logical consequence of the values advocated by the Old School Primer when the DM isn't good. And part of the point of most of the various more modern mindsets is to get away from this sort of nonsense.

• Rulings not Rules was followed to the letter with the DM making rulings in place of reactions and morale rules.
• Player Skill not Character Abilities - IMO the only arguable point on this list. He didn't seem to have much time for character abilities...
• Heroic not Superhero - he was killed by a Random Act of Bear. A superhero would have coped.
• Forget game balance - part of the point of game balance is so Random Act of Bear doesn't kill people out of nowhere. And another part is that RPGs aren't balanced to a 50% win rate - they are balanced to where the designer thinks they are most fun. "Forget what the designer considers fun" is not good advice

To me this is obviously a failure mode of an old school mindset (and a good reason the old school fell out of popularity back in the day) just as much as wandering around watching the NPCs solve everything while you did fetch quests for them was a common failure mode of both White Wolf and 2e adventures, and being buried under a morass of rules and stopping to look everything up was a failure mode of 3.X.

One of the reasons I like a lot of the games I do is that they go out of their way to model good practice and when I look at the OSR there is a massive survivor bias. One of the reasons I want good practice modelled is that running a game of Stars Without Number is extremely different from running a game of Apocalypse World in many ways while in others they are closer than running a neo-trad Adventure Path is to either and if I try to run any one as if it was one of the others I expect a disaster. So I want each game to tell me how to run it - which is pretty much the opposite of both "Rulings not rules" and "Forget game balance".

And this ties back to the original question. "Is there room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers?" Of course. A sufficiently enthusiastic and charismatic person can bring people into e.g. stamp collecting. But the assumption that DMs are good and should be above the rules rather than people that have to be trained to be good and should be supported by the rules means that the scope is far more limited than it should be. And before someone points out 5e, 5e has a minor GM shortage and it also has Matt Mercer to demonstrate good DM in a specific style that works well with 5e at a level of popularity no other game matches.

 

[Democratus]

Check out Necrotic Gnome’s adventures for Old-School Essentials. Excellent keys (including adversary rosters on the maps for many of them), Jaquayed dungeons, and some pretty weird and interesting stuff. I converted Winter’s Daughter to PF2 for my group, and they loved it.

Agreed. A number of OSE adventures I have run (Winter's Daughter, Tomb of the Lizard Kings, Hole in the Oak) have been absolute revelations.

Their formatting and presentation (in particular how they handle the DM map) is beyond anything I've seen in WotC/Paizo publications. Tomb of the Lizard Kings is the single best module I've ever run - from a layout, organization, and information standpoint.

 

[Mannahnin]

Agreed. A number of OSE adventures I have run (Winter's Daughter, Tomb of the Lizard Kings, Hole in the Oak) have been absolute revelations.

Their formatting and presentation (in particular how they handle the DM map) is beyond anything I've seen in WotC/Paizo publications. Tomb of the Lizard Kings is the single best module I've ever run - from a layout, organization, and information standpoint.

Lizard Kings? Is there a new one? I'm only finding Tomb of the Lizard King as an 80s TSR module.