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

[Voadam]

If, on the other hand, it's just the general coopting of the phrase "old-school" that rankles, I sympathize, but I don't think there's any hope of changing the entrenched terminology at this point.

I think it is the other way around.

I think defining one style from the diverse old school styles of playing older D&D as "The OSR" is a mislabeling of how the term is generally used. People focused on different aspects and different styles then, and the OSR stuff today is hugely diverse and focuses on different aspects of stuff now. Most use OSR simply to mean old school generally or in some aspect and not a narrowly defined specific strand of old school aspects and styles.

Even something as basic as rules heavy versus rules light focus can be seen in AD&D versus B/X and paralleled in the OSR in OSRIC versus OSE. Both OSE and OSRIC are OSR. Frog God Games puts out lots of high level OD&D Swords and Wizardry module adventures where you can reasonably expect the PC magic users to have high charge wands for at will combat magic. Most consider Frog God S&W stuff OSR. There is Godbound, a Basic-based OSR game for playing Demigods from character creation. Most any aspects of old school stuff can be seen in the wide array of OSR stuff.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I don't see how mechanical diversity within the OSR (rules light vs. rules heavy, low-powered vs. high-powered) has all that much to do with its more solid, defining characteristics (sandbox exploration, impartial refereeing, pawn-stance RP, etc.).

 

[Guest 7042500]

For me the question is reversed.

I started playing OD&D. We bought the supplements, took some parts we liked, and ignored the rest, as we individually bashed the game to our tastes. AD&D 1st Ed. came along and we treated it the same; we bought the books, took out some parts we liked, and ignored the rest.

When 2nd Ed. came out, I glanced over it and decided it had nothing I needed.

When 3rd Ed came along, I didn't even look at it. I had a game I liked.

And the same for subsequent editions. I have a version of D&D I like, why look at another version? I don't need anything. I like what I have.

 

[Malmuria]

Relevant for this conversation

7 Maxims of the OSR

Back in the aughts and the 2010’s, a decade ago now, there was a movement in older RPGs that I was part of - the “ Old School Renaissance ” ...

alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, I've noted before that I, for the most part, didn't do anything but use the tables from the book when determining whether magic items were present and what general types they were back in the day (I might have had the sub-tables with some very odd things on it, but for the most part whether you were getting a magic item and whether it was a scroll or a weapon was pretty much by the book) and there were tons of magic items in play after a while.

So low magic item awards (which as noted, always would have on the whole hit fighters and thieves the hardest) may well have been a common style in certain circles back in the day, but if so it was because the books were being ignored, not because people were following them.

I'll freely cop to ignoring the treasure tables in the books. What put me off them almost on first reading was the way they handled coinage: that one type of monster would only ever (maybe) have x-number of electrum coins but no coins of any other type, while another monster would only ever have silver pieces, etc. This made no sense at all, and so I ignored those tables henceforth.

That said, my games tend to be pretty high-magic even by AD&D standards, in part because finding new toys is fun and in part because every now and then someone (or a whole party) will lose a big pile of magic in a meltdown after failing saves vs AoE damage.

 

[Lanefan]

One of the differences is that modern games let you construct a character, while games like AD&D and B/X had you literally rolling up a character. Once the dice had fallen, you had some choices to make, but the results of those die rolls had overwhelming influence on what you played. As time went on, more and more lenient, "construction" based alternatives appeared, from swapping two rolled stats all the way through point buy. And while there are certainly advantages to those systems, there is something about the direct simplicity of rolling 2d6 six times in order to find out what you get to play that is appealing.

Man, talk about Viking hat!

They're allowed to roll 3d6 these days, you know.

 

[TwoSix]

Man, talk about Viking hat!

They're allowed to roll 3d6 these days, you know.

Well, that’s just coddling them, those munchkins with their 13s.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'll freely cop to ignoring the treasure tables in the books. What put me off them almost on first reading was the way they handled coinage: that one type of monster would only ever (maybe) have x-number of electrum coins but no coins of any other type, while another monster would only ever have silver pieces, etc. This made no sense at all, and so I ignored those tables henceforth.

That said, my games tend to be pretty high-magic even by AD&D standards, in part because finding new toys is fun and in part because every now and then someone (or a whole party) will lose a big pile of magic in a meltdown after failing saves vs AoE damage.

There's nothing wrong with playing differently than the books tell you in any number of directions (I was playing on the West Coast in the late 70's after all, and plenty of what was done out here a lot would have looked weird as hell to most OD&D players); its just there does seem a pretty strong tendency to act like OD&D (and I'd guess AD&D) were a lot lower in magic items than seems supported by what the books of the time suggested, and that's true over and above anything about modules.

 

[Malmuria]

I was playing on the West Coast in the late 70's after all, and plenty of what was done out here a lot would have looked weird as hell to most OD&D players

Can you talk more about this? How was the west coast style in the 70s different and why do you think it ended up that way?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Can you talk more about this? How was the west coast style in the 70s different and why do you think it ended up that way?

Well, first let me qualify something out the gate.

I can't talk about everyone who ran/played D&D on the West Coast. There were all kinds of isolated groups, game clubs and probably things I don't know about.

But there was a big, broad swath of players who had some overlapping habits, and I can pretty well point at why: Science fiction and fantasy fandom.

The West Coast had a lot of interconnected fandom groups (some of whom were also wargamers or SCA folks) who had spread D&D through SF clubs (such as LASFS (the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and various others in the Bay Area or San Diego).

But the thing is, even though there were wargamers and SCAers intermixed, they still approached the game with kind of a SF and fantasy lens on the whole thing, and among other things this meant even when something was gritty, it was from a kind of "We're Gonna Be Big Damn Heroes" perspective, and that colored how a lot of things were approached; even when you saw henchmen, they were in small numbers and utility (managing mounts and the like). You still saw caution and such for some things, but--avoiding fights? Cooking the books to make them as uneven as possible? Haha, no.

And you'd see a lot of fictional elements creep in in people's games (in the sense of elements from specific works), and a lot of "all these games are sort of interconnected", and science fiction elements, and so on. I mean, during this period I wrote up a Bene Gesserit class, and it wouldn't have been thought particularly unusual out here (people might have looked at it and went "overpowered, dude".

I mean, if you want to look into an extreme, but in its way representative, case, dig up some of the old Arduin material. Dave Hargrave was over-the-top, but it was in degree, not kind.