OSR A Historical Look at the OSR

[GreyLord]

If it hasn't been posted already, this has been a great resourse-

D&D Retroclones

And still they missed one...

5e Old School.

Available on DMsGuild...

It would probably fall under the category of several various versions (as it replicates ways to play OD&D, BECMI, and AD&D but using the 5e core rulebooks, so those versions but with 5e rules).

 

[Nikosandros]

Man, what's a fella gotta do to make that list with their OSR game? I've got about 1000 copies sold since last fall of Chromatic Dungeons lol

I think that it is simply quite outdated. It doesn't mention OSE and Adventures in the East Mark is listed as being "in the working"

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Generally speaking, when we're discussing what are more or less equivalent to artistic or literary movements, we can accept that there's a difference between romantics and Romantics, so it would be fair to say there's probably a difference between the usage of old school and Old School. Interestingly, it also parallels such movements in other art forms in that each movement is primarily a reaction to frustrations with the previous movement--

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, and divisionist painting. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism[a][2][3] and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody.Modernism - Wikipedia[c][4] Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists also rejected religious belief.[5][d] A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating works of art.

Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, even though these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe.[1] Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics.[2] The Realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical.[1] It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[2] the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity.[3] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[4] education,[5] chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences.[6] It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.[7]

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe — especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature.[8][9] It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism[10] and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution, which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views,[39] and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.

All Blurbs from Wikipedia

The takeaway here is that each of these movements is reacting to and rejecting another movement in their construction of their own ideas (with post modernism rejecting the basic premises of modernism in turn), and it makes sense to think of RPGs which are cultural and artistic productions, as following a similar pattern. The appeal of the OSR as reaching back to simpler time that may have never existed is actually pretty in line with the ideals of the romantics and how they typified pre-enlightenment art-- but of course this doesn't invalidate the romantics either.

Its sort of an interesting idea, because you could even assert that the OSR, understood as an aesthetic movement, is trying to capture an idea that they once experienced but feel like has been lost in the movement that followed the old school. Another element of what's being discussed is the notion of whether that notion of "old school" is even really coherent or descriptive when there were games that were already leaning more narrative prior to what we usually think of as 'trad' and parallel to what we think of as 'old school' but when we discuss art and literature, we frequently discuss works that seem to precede the movement they seem to fit best, whether there's historical evidence for influence or not. But movements aren't all encompassing either, there are always people on the fringes who have different values than the zeitgeist (Gygax complaining about Dungeons and Beavers comes to mind, or the stuff coming out about Arneson that suggests he had what we would regard as a more modern sensibility in his gaming.)

I studied Literature in my undergrad years (prior to librarianship) and this all feels acutely familiar, but without the years of critical background clearly identifying (and fighting over) each movement, in place.

 

[Mannahnin]

I studied Literature in my undergrad years (prior to librarianship) and this all feels acutely familiar, but without the years of critical background clearly identifying (and fighting over) each movement, in place.

Good Post. Yeah, folks are really kind of just starting to dig into this kind of study, like in The Elusive Shift, which is apparently intended to be part of a series of books on RPG Theory from MIT Press.

 

[Aldarc]

The initial goal of the OSRIC was to get 1e AD&D back in print. I was in discussions with Matt and Stuart and the rest about whether and to what extent people were going to use what they were working on to make products that clashed with our sensibilities, and the conclusion was that people were going to definitely do that and that in the end, it wouldn't matter if we got 1e back in print so that the creators we knew would make product we liked would have the opportunity to do it with the rule system we liked.

I don't mean to speak for Matt, but my interpretation of the Old School Primer at the time was that he was introducing the "head space" to be in for people to appreciate the rule set he was selling - Swords & Wizardry. I didn't see it as a broad manifesto for old school gaming, but rather an introduction to the specific OD&D clone he had just published. I think that's pretty clear from the second paragraph of his Primer:

Personally, I think that if people want to make games conforming to the style laid out in Matt's primer, that's all good. For example, I'm really intrigued by Ultraviolet Grasslands and the faux-old school game Encounter Critical (which actually preceded OSCRIC, Matt's Primer and the OSR as a whole by a couple years) is one of my favorite things ever. But I don't think that was the original intent.

Mulling over something, particularly given what you say here. There is Matt Finch's "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming," which you see as a general primer about playing Swords & Wizardry, but now one of the most commonly referenced OSR primers is Ben Milton and Steven Lumpkin's "Principa Apocrypha." I'm curious if there is a shift in place here between OSR as playing old school D&D and OSR as a method or style of play.

Edit: At first glance, there seems to be a 10-year-gap between the former (2008) and the latter (2018).

 

[Jack Daniel]

Mulling over something, particularly given what you say here. There is Matt Finch's "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming," which you see as a general primer about playing Swords & Wizardry, but now one of the most commonly referenced OSR primers is Ben Milton and Steven Lumpkin's "Principa Apocrypha." I'm curious if there is a shift in place here between OSR as playing old school D&D and OSR as a method or style of play.

Oh, absolutely. Ben Milton is vocally in the camp that says "OSR" is principles, not mechanics, and he most definitely backs up his position with a robust œuvre of publications.

 

[rogueattorney]

Oh, absolutely. Ben Milton is vocally in the camp that says "OSR" is principles, not mechanics, and he most definitely backs up his position with a robust œuvre of publications.

Which just goes back to what I’ve been saying in this thread and was largely the entire point of the 5 part blog series that started this thread… The “OSR” of now is not the “OSR” of 13 years ago.

It’s largely different people making game product for different purposes. No need to look beyond Milton’s utter bafflement at so much of the 1e DMG in his “Read the DMG” series to know that he and the makers of OSRIC were coming from completely different places in making their games.

 

[Mannahnin]

Ben's clearly a good guy, and I like a lot of his work, but I do occasionally cringe when he misreads or misunderstands something because he's missing the context or making an assumption he shouldn't.

 

[overgeeked]

Alternatively, old school ended when the majority of players started focusing on playing one character per campaign and expecting that character to be the protagonist of an epic narrative. (Which appears to have happened at some point between 1975 and 1985.)

That shift took place between AD&D and AD&D 2E.

 

[MNblockhead]

That shift took place between AD&D and AD&D 2E.

Hmmm...I never played 2e, but in 1e, in the 80s, plenty of us had favorite characters that we kinda expected to continue living. Finding a temple to pay a bunch of gold to for a res was a thing in many 1e games at the time.

The big difference to me (not saying same is true for all), but in the 80s we would bring our characters from one DMs game to another. And most DMs were would just piece run a module or an adventure they prepared without any long story arcs. The whole adventure path wasn't a thing in the groups I played with.