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As someone who was part of the OSR starter in in 2011 ... frankly there's a lot of jackasses using the label. The best of OSR design is exactly as you say, and this has carried on into many Post-OSR communities where people are just excited to make things and help others make things. There was...

Of course ... the right referee can make most anything work .... but that doesn't get to what I'm talking about here - 1) I think a high level of design complexity without clear instructions is both messy for old hands like us, and too nuanced/confusing for people who are new to the hobby. 2) A...

I think that's the core of it - but I wish people were comfortable acknowledging that it's just not the same game. 4E, 5E, and 1E D&D are designed to create different play experiences. If I was a big 5E player and a new edition comes out that wants to be a grid based tactics game for skirmish...

I think it goes well beyond aesthetics within game books - and often has a political aspect - the endless thread here about the Demon Type 5 looking less "cheesesnake" is an example ... but that's not the part that irks me. What I find frustrating is the way there's a conservatism about rules...

Rumors aren't about ensuring the party explores everything, they are about quickly providing opportunities/options to the party. A magic sword may or may not be interesting to your players, but if you are committed to running an open world that's their decision to make. It doesn't matter if...

This is true - though I think it depends on what one defines as "Old School" - I'm of the "The OSR was a new approach to RPG design" gang though, not the "The OSR recovered the CORE MAGICAL TRUTH of D&D!" gang. Giants and Drow are especially interesting as they are I think the best examples of...

This still reads to me like a misunderstanding of how OSR type games are played (or at least how I play them). 1st - The level two party can choose to go to level 8 (or a location that has level 8 type creatures), but if there's a "level 8 creature" (Say a mature red dragon) in a room on...

I don't love OSRsimulacrum's take on the totality of the OSR, and I'm not convinced by Lich Van Winkel's either, though both seem to be smart fellows and I consider Van Winkel a friend... I think any take on the OSR tends to focus too much on the part the author themselves is most familiar with...

It makes sense to me - but only in the context of play style. One of the difficulties in discussing "D&D", especially in a community like EN-World which skews towards newer editions, is the tendency to lump all the editions of D&D's together, when different editions clearly seem to encourage...

There are other concepts of balance in even the oldest systems, and many of these have made their way into OSR and Post-OSR design. The major one is "Level Based Balance". What this means here is that dungeon level (originally literally and often exactly) corresponds to PC level. So a level 1...

I'm not one to defend some of Gygax's more irksome advice or every design decision made in 1974 - 1985 ... but what you're focusing on it the worst aspects of early design ... and presumably if you're not over 60, kids playing D&D. I had those same experiences in the 1980's. 12 year olds aren't...

Seems like you've had some bad experiences with OSR play styles or dungeon crawls. You're providing a list of common complaints that people familiar with more modern games sometimes make about OSR style play or older editions. The issue is that to the degree these exist, the community that...

NSR is one fragment of the post-OSR. In as far as it's a style of design, it's not my own, but I respect what people are doing in the space, and I appreciate that the NSR community (because it's still more a community then a design style) are one of the various groups/scenes making claims to the...

The concept likely comes from the forum discourse around the release and creation of OSRIC. See this 2009 post at Grognardia discussing OSRIC's advice on combat mechanics and exploration. https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/10/primary-activity-in-adventures.html The actual phrase is harder to...

I would argue that this is most of the good modern location based/Post-OSR adventures. Especially those that focus on exploration (e.g. the Jaquays style of design) and those that offer distinctive or interesting settings. My own take on keying in this style is here...

It's popular in a variety of circles to entirely reject the "Combat is a Failstate" maxim, to deny it having any legitimacy. People do this for a variety of reasons that usually boil down to being unfamiliar and/or unhappy with the state of much Post-OSR and OSR design. To understand the Maxim...

So I have no idea what edition you are talking about. I don't think it really matters though. As a player, when you find yourself citing to rules minutia to argue against a referee's interpretation you're in the wrong, even if you are technically correct you're wrong. The referee defines the...

I do like the way that BECMI (Specifically "C" I think?) has various "prestige classes" and think it's a good way to manage things longer campaigns. The BECMI ones however strike me as fairly mechanically uninteresting. There's a lot of nice flavor there, but it's also pretty darn generic -...

I think this is the unfortunate side effect of the present epoch. One can't really stand on politeness, because even in this hobby there are people with extremely ugly views that they wish to make socially acceptable. It's unfortunate when creators we like or respect fall in with this kind of...

Greyhawk is such a strange book to me - the original LBB's read to me like a solid core for a system that has a lot of interlocking parts, and then along comes Greyhawk, and it's a bunch of ideas, some interesting and some no, that just kicks that all over to a degree. Fascinating example I...