OSR A Historical Look at the OSR

[Greggy C]

I'm not sure if it nostalgia but when I DMd 1e/2e the combat was naughty word exciting and a lot faster (and with more people).

Didn't need 300 hit points, 5 actions and 20 skills to get there. I decided that when my BECMI set arrives I'm going to implement it on the simulator and see if I can quantity this "feeling" exactly.

 

[Hussar]

There is probably an overlap between people who take Viagra and play OSR too, not sure what your point is. People want to play OSR because of childhood nostalgia, simpler rules, not because they care about a few people on twitters pronouns.

if only that were true...

 

[Cadence]

Perhaps indirectly? But I think the article's author is correct that older games span a very wide range of play styles, and while I don't mind calling them all "old school" in that sense, I don't think they consistently share in, for example, the OSR principles of play as expressed by Finch. SOME may share in some of them, but I think he's completely right that "a so-called movement that can encompass D&D, Bunnies & Burrows, Traveller, and Teenagers From Outer Space [My insert: and Champions] is conceptually useless except in the broadest categorizational sense".

I was thinking Villains and Vigilantes just as I read your addition.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Or, put it another way. Whenever some social issue in the game comes up - be it gender issues, race, whatever, there is a very large overlap in the venn diagram of people that oppose the idea and play OSR games.

Mod Note:

Perhaps you fumbled your persuasion skill challenge roll.

If you meant a large percentage of the people opposing social changes in rpgs are OSR gamers, that’s one thing. It seems quite possible to come to that conclusion based on various stories that pop up.

If, OTOH, you meant a large percentage of OSR gamers are against social changes in rpgs, that’s much more problematic.

You might want to clarify if you meant the former. You might refrain from similar posts if you meant the latter.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's not a matter of owning the generic term "old school" (or having "old school" itself be any kind of value judgement); it's a matter of linguistic precision. The OSR was founded by old-school D&D players mostly interested in old-school D&D, with any interest in other old games being sporadic and largely incidental. Quite naturally, those original OSRites are not too terribly keen on the OSR "brand" being diluted.

Notice I did not say OSR; I said Old School.

(Though as I said, even the OSR begs the question of what's fundamentally different about what the D&D revivalists are doing and what people doing retroclones of other early out-of-print are doing, other than they did it first (and I'm not even sure that's true when talking about, say, FASERIP).)

I

Like the article said: barreling into an OSR discussion space and assuming everybody wants to talk about Champions is a bit like pestering a vintage Ford forum about vintage Chevys, because, hey, we're all fans of old cars here, right?

On the other hand, I've seen people who can't bother to look at the listed scope of a discussion space that uses "Old School" in its name (I'm particularly thinking of a specific FB group) and get soggy when Traveler and Gamma World are absolutely on topic (as is, in fact, a number of war games and the like from that period). Linguistic drift happens, and people who don't like that really need to get over it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The premise that spawned the thread — that a particular style of play can be harmful — isn’t particularly great. That’s not justifying or pardoning crappy OSR proponents. Edition warring crap is toxic nonsense regardless of who does it. It does seem particularly crappy when it’s the dominant style punching down.

You're quite right, though at least some of those people were modern indy games proponents (one in particular caught my eye), and I'm not sure calling them "the dominant style" is on target (5e people doing it? Absolutely).

You want to have a conversation about a particular system, and people are quick to chime in how 5e does things right in this way or that, or that those systems are broken some way. It doesn’t even have to be an OSR game. That’s basically the PF2 forum here in a nutshell over so many ridiculous threads.

Well, yeah. As I've noted, there's a certain majoritarian assumption that's very visible around here some times that is, frankly, incredibly tiresome.

I was disappointed that the fifth article seemed to gloss over that. I agree it’s not fair to paint the whole OSR that way, but I think it’s something one needs to acknowledge (even if obliquely).

Yeah. It tends to stand out to me, since even though I'm not a D&D OS type (I only stayed within the D&Dsphere a limited amount of time even back then, so a lot of what proponents of that style consider virtues are things I actively fled), I'm absolutely a creature of that time but some of the resistance to anything that smacks of modernity by some of them is pretty hard to take.

On the other hand, you and Sacrosanct (to pick a couple examples) shouldn't be expected to pay for their sins.

 

[Malmuria]

The premise that spawned the thread — that a particular style of play can be harmful — isn’t particularly great. That’s not justifying or pardoning crappy OSR proponents. Edition warring crap is toxic nonsense regardless of who does it. It does seem particularly crappy when it’s the dominant style punching down. You want to have a conversation about a particular system, and people are quick to chime in how 5e does things right in this way or that, or that those systems are broken some way. It doesn’t even have to be an OSR game. That’s basically the PF2 forum here in a nutshell over so many ridiculous threads.


I was disappointed that the fifth article seemed to gloss over that. I agree it’s not fair to paint the whole OSR that way, but I think it’s something one needs to acknowledge (even if obliquely).

They do acknowledge it, but in a dismissive way:

Today, new OSR spaces are regularly filtered around political and social stances, through a combination of deliberate exclusion of elements perceived as bad and departures based on an inability to coexist with people of different ideologies. For example, the major Discord and Facebook OSR groups are run by what are often labelled "zoomers" and "pink-hairs" (and with a focus almost entirely on nu-OSR). The old-school forums in return are the domain of "boomers" and "fascists". Ideas are filtered based on the beliefs and practices of their creators.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I'm a member of several OSR groups, some of them pretty large, that are very progressive. Most of the original creators from the TSR days are pretty progressive.

Please don't use broad brushes because Pundit and LaNasa are loud.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah... I appreciate that those posts have so many citations to things like blog and forum posts, but reading in between the lines the authors seems to want to constrain OSR to correspond to an evergreen AD&D 1e game (he indicates a split between the b/x/OSE rules lite segment of the OSR and the 1e players).

If there was a split between the "Evergreen AD&D 1e game" players and the "b/x/OSE rules light segment of the OSR" then I would say that the latter won considerably and has since become the default assumption. I'm not too familiar with that many 1e-based OSR games, but I could probably shoot out like a machine gun a list of all the B/X-based or influenced OSR games on the market. I suspect that the B/X Red Box was far more influential on the mass reach level than 1E D&D.

 

[Mezuka]

If there was a split between the "Evergreen AD&D 1e game" players and the "b/x/OSE rules light segment of the OSR" then I would say that the latter won considerably and has since become the default assumption. I'm not too familiar with that many 1e-based OSR games, but I could probably shoot out like a machine gun a list of all the B/X-based or influenced OSR games on the market. I suspect that the B/X Red Box was far more influential on the mass reach level than 1E D&D.

The split is in fact threefold. The forum ODD74 is for fans of the original game and possibly Holmes edition. The forum The Piazza is mostly for fans of BX / BECMI. Dragonsfoot is mostly for fans of AD&D 1e (and 2e).

I do agree that the vast majority of OSR retro-clones are B/X / BECMI based. AD&D does have OSRIC and Advanced Labyrinth Lord. But many OSR games are based on the three little white books of Original D&D that came in a small box.