D&D General 5e D&D to OSR pipeline or circle?

[BRayne]

Hickman's problem is that he's attacking the wrong target. The Heroes of the Lance walked so that Critcal Role could run. He is the great grandfather of Mercer, not his opposite. The "embrace tradition" of his picture shouldn't have been Dragonlance, its Keep on the Borderlands.

Even more than that a few members of Critical Role have explicitly referenced Dragonlance as awakening their love of fantasy.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Even more than that a few members of Critical Role have explicitly referenced Dragonlance as awakening their love of fantasy.

Scanlan is the Tumblr version Tasslehoff.

 

[BRayne]

Scanlan is the Tumblr version Tasslehoff.

Unfortunately Sam Riegel is not one who would deign to have enjoyed fantasy in his youth. To my recollection it was mostly Liam O'Brien, Laura Bailey, and Matt Mercer who explicitly mentioned picking up Dragonlance book.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Dragonlance is the forerunner of the modern game, shifting the emphasis to story and character development. But it merely reflects what was going on in other RPGs (and White Dwarf magazine) at the same time. Gygax's view of the PCs as expendable pawns and the object of the game being to overcome metagame challenges was already an outlier. And even Gygax eventually realised that, as you can see in his late modules Dungeonland and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror.

 

[Aldarc]

If you're asking my opinion on Adventure Paths, you're not going to find a particularly high one. I run them out of sheer convenience and highly modify them to fit the players' characters (I also announce them in advance so players can tailor their characters to work with it).

But that's the problem of any module. I mean, Temple of Elemental Evil didn't care, nor did Keep on the Borderlands or Tomb of Horrors. That problem didn't start with APs, it started with B1.

In my experience, I could also say that the GM's story/adventure doesn't care about my character's backstory either, even when the GM says/promises at the beginning that it will. There is nothing innate or inherent about 5e D&D that will make your character's backstory magically matter to the adventure.

 

[EthanSental]

To get some data into this discussion, Questing Beast had a video on TTRPG Kickstarters a while ago


In it he looks at the last 10 years of KS and categorizes TTRPGs into OSR, 5e and 'rest' and says that for the last 5 years (with the last year being 2023) the OSR grew at a higher percentage rate than 5e did and in 2023 5e accounted for half of all TTRPG KS with the OSR getting 1/3 of the rest and everything else 2/3s

The video also links to his spreadsheets with the data

Including the scene category is misleading to the graph as the green is the growth with the yellow based on a true OSR game dropping from 2022 to 2023. Scene is his consideration of OSR inspired play and mentioned Mothership rpg a d100 sci fi game. So no, if looking at true OSR (Original yellow) is has not grown more than 5E kickstarters.

And yes since I think he has a vested interested and desire in seeing OSR grow since he has an OSR game Knave which would be in the yellow, his bias is showing by adding the green to the mix to show growth.

 

[mamba]

Including the scene category is misleading to the graph as the green is the growth with the yellow based on a true OSR game dropping from 2022 to 2023. Scene is his consideration of OSR inspired play and mentioned Mothership rpg a d100 sci fi game. So no, if looking at true OSR (Original yellow) is has not grown more than 5E kickstarters.

And yes since I think he has a vested interested and desire in seeing OSR grow since he has an OSR game Knave which would be in the yellow, his bias is showing by adding the green to the mix to show growth.

I am not sure where the line between Scene and Original is or which side Knave would fall on. OSE, Labyrinth Lord, etc are definitely Original, Knave I can see go either way

I summarized what he said so you do not have to watch the full video, and since Scene is very much included in the discussion in this thread, I see no problem with him showing / considering both.

 

[Aldarc]

The shared PC origins and adventure building of Flatland Games combined with Shadowdark's engine would be a killer app for me.

I'm generally turned off by randomized progression and magical mishaps, though I do like rolling for spells from my True20 days or even Fantasy AGE. However, I like how Flatland Games' system sequesters Cantrip, Spell, and Rituals into different classes. I remember, for example, the legally-distinct from Elric class was a Warrior/Mage hybrid that got cantrips and rituals but not spells. I thought that was a great fit for Elric and what we see him do. Or how the Grey Mouser Mage/Rogue class got spells but neither Cantrips nor Rituals.

Thinking about this combo a little more, @Whizbang Dustyboots, and I'm not sure that I could do this mix-up properly as my first instinct is inevitably to toss out D&D's six attributes in favor of four (as per, for example, Shadow of the Demon Lord).

 

[TwoSix]

Twenty years ago, if you were on Eric Noah's board and expressed that sentiment, you'd have been flayed and fed to displacer beasts. It was absolutely dogma that "avoid metagaming" was part of the advice given to player and DMs alike. Somewhere, the view changed, and I can't help but feel it has to do a lot with the notion of "smart play" and the idea that D&D is a dual of whits between players and DM.

Realistically, it was changing during the '80s as the "Hickman revolution", and a focus on playing through stories and more detailed characters took hold. I think it became the de facto assumption during the heavy trad '90s (although gamer communities are islands, especially pre-internet, and there have always been a ton of isolated enclaves), and the idea only started to get re-interrogated during the rise of the OSR in the early to mid '00s.

I still know plenty of players who are strongly opposed to any sort of "out-of-character" metagaming, simply because they aren't familiar with the concepts that we're discussing here that have become more prevalent over the past 15-20 years.

 

[TwoSix]

Yeah, that right there is the fundamental, inoperable division I can never reconcile. If the PC is just my avatar in the game, he's a toon (in the MMO sense) and will be treated as such. His name will be Tanks For The Memories and his personality is "ROFL". I can't get past the idea that playing a character isn't actually playing a character. I don't give names and backstories to the chess pieces when I play because the epic battle between two armies of knights, queens and kings aren't the important part, the ability to outthink and outmanoeuvre my opponents using my pieces is.

Maybe that's why I can't understand it: I can't accept that Remathilis is just my pawn piece in the game rather than an actual fictional character with his own life and story.

I mean, "why don't I like this style of play I don't like?" isn't really a question we can answer for you.

I do think the question you posed earlier, about why there isn't a strand of OSR development focused on evolving Hickman revolution story play with a more rules-light chassis, is an interesting one. My gut feeling would be simply because a lot of mainstream RPGs are still trad/story play oriented, and those kind of games also favor deeper and more complex character creation, which is a niche that games like 5e and PF2 already fill.