OSR BrOSR

[Cordwainer Fish]

FFC also indicates that Constitution factored into how many spells you could cast.

Shades of GURPS, where spells are cast from the fatigue system, and a mage has to budget HT as well as IQ and spell skills when building.

(In the system from the first printing of GURPS Fantasy. If there are others, I do not want to know about them.)

 

[Mannahnin]

Shades of GURPS, where spells are cast from the fatigue system, and a mage has to budget HT as well as IQ and spell skills when building.

(In the system from the first printing of GURPS Fantasy. If there are others, I do not want to know about them.)

That's my recollection as well, from GURPS 3rd ed and GURPS Magic. And from my copy of SJG's Wizard, the grandfather game to GURPS.

Of course, the trope of magic physically exhausting the caster was well established before D&D.

 

[Bill Zebub]

And of course psionic points are completely different from  spell points!

Obviously. Because...magic.

 

[Gus L]

I don't think it's all that radical.

[...]

@Gus L, by any chance do you remember any particularly prominent discussions of 1:1 timekeeping from back in the OSR (I know we've been in the Post-OSR era for around 5 years by your reckoning)? I could swear that got plenty of airtime in the movement long before Jeffro showed up.

I don't remember a specific post or discussion, though I do remember talking about 1:1 time, likely based on the AD&D DMG advice on it, when Necropraxis was running his Pahvelorn campaign - we used basically 1:1 in that (by which I mean days between sessions counted as days in the game world), but dropped it pretty quickly really because it's not really meaningful except as a general sense of like "a weekish passes between expeditions - you can't camp in the dungeon and reroll your HP each session" except under really distinct circumstances.

I think 1:1 time only really matters if you're running a public open table campaign, maybe multiple referees or maybe a depressed recently fired insurance auditor who is running games 30 hours a week for multiple groups in the same world when he's not making shoes on the side... point being, to me it's an amusing idea, but not usable. I think there's a lot of that in the "BrOSR" and similar reactionary Post-OSR scenes. A few contortions and obsessions presented as the truth of how the game was played in the good old days ... but in reality it's all nostalgic projection. Nostalgia of course is fine until you use it to build a cult of personality or as the basis of a movement - and then it needs someone to blame for ruining the made up past your rworship.

Which I think sums up the BrOSR, and to a far lesser degree the OSR project. The OSR started as a backlash to 90's high trad style games - and to 3.5E, but it grew inconsistently. I think to the degree OSR (or POSR stuff) claims primacy because it replicates some aspect of an old game is the point where it goes to far. The OSR was always a novel twist on old rulesets viewed with new goals. I don't mean it's stated intent, but the reality of it, there's no consistent early play style and the closest one gets is Gygax TST "classic" or "tournament" style - which has never appealed to me because it's too much about rules lawyering and getting three points for casting invisibility on the halfling (to quote Slavelords scoring system). It's meta gaming mostly. Of course it postdates all the weird evolutions of the late 1970's and like AD&D represents Gygax's heel-turn.

I much prefer the Gygax of Blackmoor's introduction where he presents the possibility of everyone having their personal D&D and trading them around. D&D rules as a toolkit, not dogma.

 

[Staffan]

Shades of GURPS, where spells are cast from the fatigue system, and a mage has to budget HT as well as IQ and spell skills when building.

(In the system from the first printing of GURPS Fantasy. If there are others, I do not want to know about them.)

Though in OG GURPS, fatigue was based on ST instead of HT. So if you wanted to have lots of magic fuel, you'd better work those pecs.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The BrOSR is welcome to forge their own kingdom in the TTRPG world. They can have as much as they can seize and control.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Though in OG GURPS, fatigue was based on ST instead of HT. So if you wanted to have lots of magic fuel, you'd better work those pecs.

Well, I haven't gurped in a very long time.

 

[ad&d wilderness encounter]

i've seen some BrOSR people online, but they didn't seem to adhere to the principles listed in the article linked, save for their gatekeepiness.

 

[GothmogIV]

Unfortunately, people in every fandom can be total asshats. The anonymity of online conversations emboldens people to be complete jerks about...everything. One of the main reason I got off of Twitter (aside from the fact that Musk is a tool) was the bottomless malice in the TTRPG conversations I kept having pushed in front of my eyeballs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Unfortunately, people in every fandom can be total asshats. The anonymity of online conversations emboldens people to be complete jerks about...everything. One of the main reason I got off of Twitter (aside from the fact that Musk is a tool) was the bottomless malice in the TTRPG conversations I kept having pushed in front of my eyeballs.

The problem is this isn't just the usual generic jerkiness; its a particular set of really unpleasant views attached to some Old School gaming preferences that tend to occur in clusters, i.e. you'll find the same set of views as basically a gaming subculture (and I can't imagine it isn't annoying as can be to a lot of OSR proponents who are not in that particular group, because it becomes too easy to associate them together).