D&D General Why is "OSR style" D&D Fun For You?

[Voadam]

Interesting. I wonder where the line between new OSR game and Old School Fantasy Heartbreaker is.

Pretty much 3e

Fantasy heartbreakers are pretty much making your version of D&D.

OSR is mostly making or building off something in a version of TSR D&D editions now that D&D has moved past those editions.

So Palladium was a heartbreaker as a variant of 1e D&D, the then current edition. If it was made from scratch now like Astonishing Swordsmen of Hyperborea or Delving Deeper it would be considered OSR.

 

[Reynard]

Pretty much 3e

Fantasy heartbreakers are pretty much making your version of D&D.

OSR is mostly making or building off something in a version of TSR D&D editions now that D&D has moved past those editions.

So Palladium was a heartbreaker as a variant of 1e D&D, the then current edition. If it was made from scratch now like Astonishing Swordsmen of Hyperborea or Delving Deeper it would be considered OSR.

So because there is a market for them, they get to be called "OSR" now instead of "my pet D&D." That's nice.

I don't have a stake in it, of course. I can pull out my B/X books if I want to play old school D&D. I generally don't. I am much more interested in how some designers try and emulate the myth of old school play with variations on design. Crawford's games are one interesting example, but so is Shadowdark and Mork Borg and 5 Torches Deep.

What I do find fascinating is how many younger folks are drawn to the OSR. If I look at OSR things on YouTube, it is mostly Millenials and even older GenZ making content, which is fascinating to me.

 

[JAMUMU]

So because there is a market for them, they get to be called "OSR" now instead of "my pet D&D." That's nice.

Been in the hobby forty years and I've missed the "my pet D&D" wave. Could you point me in the direction of "my pet D&D" products? I don't recall any games calling themselves that in a folk-movement type stylee that helped undermine the corporate hegemony for a hot minute, but then I've had numerous head injuries over the years and don't read so good anymore since the surgery.

 

[Reynard]

Been in the hobby forty years and I've missed the "my pet D&D" wave. Could you point me in the direction of "my pet D&D" products? I don't recall any games calling themselves that in a folk-movement type stylee that helped undermine the corporate hegemony for a hot minute, but then I've had numerous head injuries over the years and don't read so good anymore since the surgery.

I think the first one was Tunnels and Trolls.

I was being flip, but mostly about nomenclature. Calling one thing a "fantasy heartbreaker" and another "OSRfeels sort of silly. Of course, OSR games are by and large intentionally "D&D plus this thing" whereas the games that inspired the Fantasyheartbreaker post were not -- the creators of those term defining heartbreakers really didn't know game design had advanced. You still see shades of that in hobby design, of course. There's a weird genre of "PbtA heartbreakers" too where people who have only really been exposed to Dungeon World are suddenly reinventing all kinds of PbtA rules and play techniques that have existed in other PbtA games for years. This isn't a bad thing because sometimes these folks do invent an interesting new thing or new take on a thing. And I guess when folks are publishing zine sized or even one page games in PDF with very little investment, the term "heartbreaker" applies even less.

Anyway, I have wandered far afield.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So because there is a market for them, they get to be called "OSR" now instead of "my pet D&D." That's nice.

I don't have a stake in it, of course. I can pull out my B/X books if I want to play old school D&D. I generally don't. I am much more interested in how some designers try and emulate the myth of old school play with variations on design. Crawford's games are one interesting example, but so is Shadowdark and Mork Borg and 5 Torches Deep.

What I do find fascinating is how many younger folks are drawn to the OSR. If I look at OSR things on YouTube, it is mostly Millenials and even older GenZ making content, which is fascinating to me.

You know calling old school play a "myth" can be considered derogatory, right?

 

[JAMUMU]

I think the first one was Tunnels and Trolls.

I was being flip, but mostly about nomenclature. Calling one thing a "fantasy heartbreaker" and another "OSRfeels sort of silly. Of course, OSR games are by and large intentionally "D&D plus this thing" whereas the games that inspired the Fantasyheartbreaker post were not -- the creators of those term defining heartbreakers really didn't know game design had advanced. You still see shades of that in hobby design, of course. There's a weird genre of "PbtA heartbreakers" too where people who have only really been exposed to Dungeon World are suddenly reinventing all kinds of PbtA rules and play techniques that have existed in other PbtA games for years. This isn't a bad thing because sometimes these folks do invent an interesting new thing or new take on a thing. And I guess when folks are publishing zine sized or even one page games in PDF with very little investment, the term "heartbreaker" applies even less.

Anyway, I have wandered far afield.

Calling one thing a "fantasy heartbreaker" a generation or more ago, then calling the resurgence of that aesthetic an "OSR" decades later just seems like the natrual development of human things over time, to me, anthropologically, and stuff.

Also the heartbreakers were always trying to "add". For a lot of the OSR the vibe is to "take away".

 

[Oligopsony]

The classic fantasy heartbreakers - on Ron Edward’s’ original definition, which involved basically a “better” basement version of dnd, with at least one really neat idea, but with certainty that it could beat the original and little experience from the designer with other games - is really a sort of pre-internet phenomenon. You can find them archived in places, but they never constituted a movement or a challenge to corporate hegemony.

Contemporary OSR titles are certainly often heartbreaker-adjacent, in that they’re very often “here’s a codex of all my favorite houserules plus a few interesting ideas,” but with a bit more self-awareness and intentionality of design. “My pet D&D” is still pretty accurate for many of those titles, though!

(Not all; for instance, Mothership is a pretty clear example of an OSR game that isn’t a dnd variant except in the way all TTRPGs are.)

(As for acronyms, I always think of it as standing for “OSR-Style Roleplaying,” which is useless but doesn’t introduce any misconceptions.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

So why isn't Rolemaster OSR and just "Old School" (which was what I originally responded to with the question).

Well, for one thing, because its actually Rolemaster. By that I mean its a still published game with a through-line that is not an unrelated third party duplicating it. Its like RuneQuest being OS but not OSR, because its still its own thing (I bet someone could make an argument about Mythras though, but that gets complicated given Mythras was Runequest at one point).

 

[overgeeked]

the myth of old school play

Six pages of explanations and “it’s a myth”. Cool.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Early on, I almost exclusively saw "Old School Revival" and, later, "Old School Renaissance". Now I see all three of those terms. I'm not sure that there's a 100% accepted definition for any of them today.

When you have separate, but sometimes overlapping (and sometimes competing--ask some of these groups about "Sworddream" sometime) groups that talk about and define the subjects, that never happens. Its not just limited to OSR.