OSR Does "Old School" in OSR only apply to D&D?

[Cruentus]

Personally, I don't believe something is old school unless it can quote Barney Miller.

Wojciehowicz: "The name is spelled how it sounds." Thanks. Now I feel old. And Abe Vigoda. Loved that show.

I don't consider too many other things "old school" other than DnD for the most part (thinking Battletech, WHFRP 1e (I always think WKRP when typing that). Pendragon, etc. They all just "are". DnD, as a player of 40+ years, I guess feels like it has changed the most between B/X and 5e compared to others, hence the "old school" moniker.

That being said, I'm really enjoying playing the old versions better than the new. (Less brain drain for my aging self).

 

[TwoSix]

OSR the movement began as a reaction against 3e mechanics and, to a lesser extent, the trad-style campaign shared by 3e, 2e, and late 1e. This OSR only makes sense in the context of D&D. Other games can be old, other games can be old-school, but only old-school D&D needed any kind of renaissance to pull it out of mothballs and get non-grognards playing it again. (Most other games don't change their mechanics so drastically between editions.) TSR D&D focused forums tended at this early stage to talk about D&D 95%–99% of the time, because that was the focus of the forum; and if other games were brought up, it was only ever because grognards tend to have fond memories of Tunnels & Trolls, The Fantasy Trip, Traveller, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Star Frontiers, Gangbusters, and so on. This was the OSR of Dragonsfoot and the K&K Alehouse.

OSR the play-style developed out of OSR the movement. It came about by examining Gygaxian D&D (AD&D 1e at first, but LBB OD&D and BXcetera OD&D supplanted it as Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord overtook OSRIC in popularity) and figuring out how the game was "originally" "supposed to" work — a combination of history, historical revisionism, ad hoc solutions, and innovations based on research and new experiences with these rulesets. In other words, the play-style comes from "what makes OD&D sing as a system," so it's deeply rooted in OD&D mechanics; but the principles that come out of that can nevertheless be applied to practically any other game system. This was the OSR of Philotomy's musings, the Finch primer, and blogs.

OSR the creative scene took off once a few things happened. Early on, retro-clones started to get adapted to genres other than dungeon fantasy. (Mutant Future is a good early example.) This, in combination with a play-style emerging that could stand apart from game mechanics, led to the creation of OSR-adjacent games with non-D&D mechanics, trying to either innovate away from D&D or to get at some purer ideal of OSR principles. This gave us "NuSR" and later "FKR" games, often very light, often very focused on that small-scale "OSR at the table" play-style (lethality, rulings-not-rules, heroic-not-superheroic, player agency, etc.) but just as often utterly ignoring large-scale campaign structure (character stables, alignment-as-player-faction, 1:1 STRICT TIME RECORDS, 1:20 ref to player ratio), with open tables and so-called "West Marches" hex crawls and hard-landscape immersive sim living somewhere in the middle. This is the OSR of Google+, the Principia Apocrypha, and Questing Beast.

The OSR begins with D&D, but it ends as a "culture of play" capable of standing alongside trad and storygame.

Fantastic summary. A+, no notes.

 

[borringman]

The amusing thing to me is that, being old (I don't recommend it, BTW), I played D&D back in the 1980s and I don't know what OSR is.

If you were born after the inventions of fire and the wheel and picked up an old PHB, you'll probably find it extremely limiting and idiosyncratic, and come up with a somewhat narrow impression of how it would've been played. Thing is, we didn't see it that way because it was basically THE tabletop RPG at the time. So whether you were looting labyrinths or spinning multi-generational epics, you were playing the same game -- not because it was good at one or the other, but because it was what was there.

So considering tables back then ran the gamut, the only thing in common being the system. . . I have a hard time defining "old school" beyond "you kind of just made D&D work for what you wanted to do". Which. . . I mean, isn't that basically how most people use D&D today?

 

[Mannahnin]

The amusing thing to me is that, being old (I don't recommend it, BTW), I played D&D back in the 1980s and I don't know what OSR is.

Did previous responses to the thread make any sense to you?

If you were born after the inventions of fire and the wheel and picked up an old PHB, you'll probably find it extremely limiting and idiosyncratic, and come up with a somewhat narrow impression of how it would've been played. Thing is, we didn't see it that way because it was basically THE tabletop RPG at the time. So whether you were looting labyrinths or spinning multi-generational epics, you were playing the same game -- not because it was good at one or the other, but because it was what was there.

So considering tables back then ran the gamut, the only thing in common being the system. . . I have a hard time defining "old school" beyond "you kind of just made D&D work for what you wanted to do". Which. . . I mean, isn't that basically how most people use D&D today?

Certainly some folks did that, but new games designed to work differently and handle different genres and styles of game started springing up almost immediately.

Tunnels & Trolls came out in 1975, offering a simpler and more unified mechanical framework for dungeon adventures. Chivalry & Sorcery came out in 1977 offering much more medieval and "realistic" fantasy gaming. 1977 also saw Traveller, not the first sci-fi RPG (1976's Metamorphosis Alpha was that), but the first to diverge strongly from D&D in mechanics and focus. '77 was also the publication date for Superhero: 2044, which amusingly had sprung from what WAS originally a D&D game where the characters entered a modern world, but that campaign birthed a whole new superhero RPG. RuneQuest (1978) similarly sprang from more simulationist combat house rules for D&D but turned into a whole different system, with percentile skills, no character levels, etc.

 

[Reynard]

Is it OSR if you play OD&D with Arms and Spell Law enabled (before they became their own game)?

 

[Mannahnin]

Is it OSR if you play OD&D with Arms and Spell Law enabled (before they became their own game)?

I think that's just Old School, unless your play is informed by Renaissance-era analysis and play design.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

It ain't what you play - it's how you play it.

 

[Gus L]

OSR the creative scene took off once a few things happened. Early on, retro-clones started to get adapted to genres other than dungeon fantasy. (Mutant Future is a good early example.) This, in combination with a play-style emerging that could stand apart from game mechanics, led to the creation of OSR-adjacent games with non-D&D mechanics, trying to either innovate away from D&D or to get at some purer ideal of OSR principles.

So I'd suggest that games like Mutant Future, Stars Without Number, and Into the Odd were OSR. The concept that a) departing from a fantasy setting b) departing from D&D mechanics or pre-1982 (choose whichever arbitrary date one likes prior to 3.5E) are both recent attempts eliminate a large part of the 2010 - 2020 OSR scene, and are based on definitions directly form 4chan. The entire "OSR-adjacent" concept is a post-OSR (as in post 2020) one not an OSR one.

This gave us "NuSR" and later "FKR" games, often very light, often very focused on that small-scale "OSR at the table" play-style (lethality, rulings-not-rules, heroic-not-superheroic, player agency, etc.) but just as often utterly ignoring large-scale campaign structure (character stables, alignment-as-player-faction, 1:1 STRICT TIME RECORDS, 1:20 ref to player ratio), with open tables and so-called "West Marches" hex crawls and hard-landscape immersive sim living somewhere in the middle. This is the OSR of Google+, the Principia Apocrypha, and Questing Beast.

I even more strongly object to the idea that G+ OSR is somehow "NuSR" - rejecting everything post 2010 or so as not OSR is a very big step that doesn't make a lot of sense, given the utter lack of size and spread of the OSR before this. I'd also point out that "NuSR "is a label used derogatorily to describe NSR or often simply people who play OSR style games but aren't either socially or politically conservative. I wouldn't use it unless I was trying to start fights. It's sort of like describing 5E as "princess play" - though I don't think Eero of Muster was aiming to insult anyone (much).

The OSR begins with D&D, but it ends as a "culture of play" capable of standing alongside trad and storygame.

Otherwise the post makes sense to me.

 

[Jack Daniel]

▯

 

[Gus L]

Are OSR. They are OSR.

I suspect that's one of the differences between our views - I see the OSR as something in the past tense. That is it was an art movement, and now we're moved on to the stage of people being inspired by it, responding to it, and even having nostalgia for it ... nostalgia for nostalgia - very through the lookingglass.

When I talk about ultralight games and things like Mothership I generally consider then the final wave of OSR design. If the first part (the forum OSR) is the construction of a playstyle in response to late 90's/early 00's RPGs using the artifacts of early generations of design (also making retroclones) and the second (G+/Blog era OSR) is the expansion/personalization/transformation of setting from the TSR norms (along with the mechanics of play as I personally tend to think that the OSR was a big part of normalizing online play) then ultralights, and more specifically auteur branded setting/system rulesets (often ultralight) as late OSR. For me largely out of convenance I mark the death of the OSR as a coherent scene and growing design movement at the death of G+, because after that one just has a variety of Post OSR scenes that are only marginally connected.

I used to avoid the "N(u)SR" label and argue against its use on those very grounds. I quit doing that when creators started self-applying it; that makes it "reclaimed" in my view.

I have not seen this, but then I only talk to a few people these days. Just slowly work on my stuff and run my games.

a run-of-the-mill subgenre that seems to both have currency in the community, and a certain degree of usefulness to both designers and players seeking after OSR games which are mechanically ultralight, aesthetically gonzo, or both.

I think ultralight and gonzo are fine there. I personally tend to avoid it.