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

[Mannahnin]

Same. That said, the letters in the OSR shouldn't be taken too literally. It's not just a revival of anything old school; it's a movement that was specifically created to make older versions of D&D available again (in retroclone form) and enable the printing of new material compatible with those old rules. It doesn't surprise me that people like more older games than D&D, but that's a parallel movement to the OSR, which was always about... specifically... D&D.

I'll disagree with you slightly there. Retroclones were born from the OSR, but it didn't come into being for them.

It was originally more a movement (mostly on forums) of re-examining and re-celebrating old school D&D, mostly AD&D 1E and OD&D, though B/X got super popular later. It was formed from a confluence of old schoolers who never left the TSR editions, and grown adults who had come back to the hobby around 3E, then decided they wanted to go back to the old school stuff. By around 2004 you got folks like T. Foster talking about it as a movement and first starting to put a name to it, and the retroclones started popping up in 2005. Yes, OSRIC was indeed originally meant to facilitate the publishing of new material for AD&D (which Dragonsfoot was already doing, but OSRIC was meant to put it on a more solid legal footing and facilitate people actually being able to sell modules, IIRC). As far back as I can remember, the forums (where the movement originated) always had sub-forums for other old school games, too, though they were ancillary and discussion centered on (A)D&D.

And it's worth observing, as I think it was you who said, we're in a post OSR stage. Movements that are themselves cadet branches of the OSR, or parallel developments to the OSR, etc. Those movements can't (coherently) use the exact same label as the OSR and claim to be the OSR.

And the NSR isn't a pejorative. Yochai Gal, or whatever his name is, is rather notoriously gatekeepery and exclusionary. But to his credit, he made a brave attempt to call Cairn an NSR game and to get the NSR label to stick. Because it—obviously—is a new thing that maybe sprang out of the OSR but which is clearly going in a new direction. Hence, it can't really be the OSR.

But there's a lot of resistance to that, so we end up with an incoherent state where people have to take the time to explain what they mean by OSR and which OSR they actually are referring to, because people are resistant to allowing new labels to take hold.

Whatever. Like I said; I don't know why this bothers me so much, because I don't even call myself an OSRian of any kind, really. I guess the inner taxonomist in me rebels at the quantum state of a workable definition for the label.

I getcha. It's actually @Gus L who (around here, at least) has mostly talked about us being in a post-OSR state now. He is a well-respected blogger and adventure designer who was super active in the OSR while it was in its most creative and energetic states. I'm a mere hanger-on and enthusiast who missed out on a bunch of it in part because I stuck to the blogs and forums during the Google+ years of the movement.

I do like the sub-labels, like NSR. I don't think they're pejorative at all, and I like having (slightly) more accurate names for things.

Whatever. Like I said; I don't know why this bothers me so much, because I don't even call myself an OSRian of any kind, really. I guess the inner taxonomist in me rebels at the quantum state of a workable definition for the label.

Yes, it's frustrating. And as D&D players of any stripe, the fervor for taxonomy has been indoctrinated into us from an early, impressionable age.

 

[Mannahnin]

There's a good argument there.

It gets more complicated with games that have gone through more thorough changes over time, though, or are otherwise extinct.

I agree. Which is one reason that I'd prefer not to try to exclude or gatekeep other old school games from the OSR, though that broadens the meaning even more. Although I do think the movement did center on D&D, and largely still does, for specific reasons other than D&D being the 800lb gorilla of the industry.

 

[Thomas Shey]

OSR is whatever I played back in the day, or exact retroclones of it.

So, Cepheus Engine (based on Classic Traveller), RetroQuest (based on RuneQuest), and OSE (based on B/X) are OSR games. DCC and LotFP, on the other hand, is not -- it bears little resemblance to the D&D I played back then.

I was under the impression Cepheus Engine was, in practice, a hybrid of Classic Traveler and Mongoose Traveler, or did they just use the SRD for the latter as a framework.

Which edition is RetroQuest based on (I'd guess 1e or 2e)?

We also played Hero System (Champions I / II / III, baby!) but that didn't need a retroclone since, for the most part, few players cared whether or not it was supported by the publisher.

There's a certain strain within that community about whether 4e is the best version, but that edition came in too late for a retroclone to be called 4e (and since you can still get it in PDF, there's not much point).

 

[RealAlHazred]

I was under the impression Cepheus Engine was, in practice, a hybrid of Classic Traveler and Mongoose Traveler, or did they just use the SRD for the latter as a framework.

They definitely used the MGT1 OGL as a framework, but it's primarily CT. I haven't done a thorough analysis, so I could easily be mistaken.

Which edition is RetroQuest based on (I'd guess 1e or 2e)?

I believe 2E. I see now that it was shut down by Chaosium, though, so I think its materials have disappeared.

There's a certain strain within that community about whether 4e is the best version, but that edition came in too late for a retroclone to be called 4e (and since you can still get it in PDF, there's not much point).

Hero System fans are used to long, long droughts in official releases, so I don't think it mattered. Plus, the nature of Hero is such that, from the basic book you can build just about anything you need. It requires homebrewing skill from the GM, so fans were already prepared for there not to be official material.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And the NSR isn't a pejorative. Yochai Gal, or whatever his name is, is rather notoriously gatekeepery and exclusionary.

Is he? He's grumpy as hell, for sure, but I haven't seen him try to gatekeep. I don't chase down everything he writes (I own Beyond the Pale, I think I've read everything he's had published in Knock and listened to all episodes of his podcast), but I've never gotten the impression that he thinks certain playstyles are wrong or invalid and has been vocal about expanding gaming to more people, not fewer.

 

[Desdichado]

I'll disagree with you slightly there. Retroclones were born from the OSR, but it didn't come into being for them.

It was originally more a movement (mostly on forums) of re-examining and re-celebrating old school D&D, mostly AD&D 1E and OD&D, though B/X got super popular later. It was formed from a confluence of old schoolers who never left the TSR editions, and grown adults who had come back to the hobby around 3E, then decided they wanted to go back to the old school stuff. By around 2004 you got folks like T. Foster talking about it as a movement and first starting to put a name to it, and the retroclones started popping up in 2005. Yes, OSRIC was indeed originally meant to facilitate the publishing of new material for AD&D (which Dragonsfoot was already doing, but OSRIC was meant to put it on a more solid legal footing and facilitate people actually being able to sell modules, IIRC). As far back as I can remember, the forums (where the movement originated) always had sub-forums for other old school games, too, though they were ancillary and discussion centered on (A)D&D.

Well, that's fair. The whole reason the retroclones came into being requires some context, after all; people who weren't happy with 3e, who were happy with older versions, but weren't happy with the market for the rules (i.e., they were hard to get and very expensive on ebay, or whatever). And there was stuff like Necromancer Games saying "1st edition feel" even before they made anything like 1st edition rules, and Castles & Crusades was kind of one of the first overtly old school D&D spin-offs to come out of the OGL. (Not OGL, but I guess Hackmaster predates even that.) I don't remember anyone talking about the OSR until the retroclines kicked in. They didn't come to being in a vacuum, but they were a kind of sea change in what was going on, and the proto-OSR really kind of became the OSR once OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord etc. came into being.

At least that was my perspective at the time. But I was more hanging around here watching it happen rather than at Dragonsfoot or whatever.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Well, that's fair. The whole reason the retroclones came into being requires some context, after all; people who weren't happy with 3e, who were happy with older versions, but weren't happy with the market for the rules (i.e., they were hard to get and very expensive on ebay, or whatever). And there was stuff like Necromancer Games saying "1st edition feel" even before they made anything like 1st edition rules, and Castles & Crusades was kind of one of the first overtly old school D&D spin-offs to come out of the OGL. (Not OGL, but I guess Hackmaster predates even that.) I don't remember anyone talking about the OSR until the retroclines kicked in. They didn't come to being in a vacuum, but they were a kind of sea change in what was going on, and the proto-OSR really kind of became the OSR once OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord etc. came into being.

At least that was my perspective at the time. But I was more hanging around here watching it happen rather than at Dragonsfoot or whatever.

I remember posting here when OSRIC came out and being kind of baffled by it. But in retrospect, it was definitely the moment the door was well and truly kicked open.

 

[Mannahnin]

Well, that's fair. The whole reason the retroclones came into being requires some context, after all; people who weren't happy with 3e, who were happy with older versions, but weren't happy with the market for the rules (i.e., they were hard to get and very expensive on ebay, or whatever).

Well, there were a couple of parts to that.

First was the desire to publish new stuff for sale (as opposed to just for free, like all the 1E AD&D stuff Dragonsfoot has been putting up for download since 1999), and wanting a legal framework to do that without putting "AD&D" on the cover and running afoul of trademark issues. OSRIC was designed to meet that need. You could put "For OSRIC" or "Compatible with OSRIC" on the cover and customers would know it was 1E compatible without using WotC's trademark.

There were indeed concerns about the shrinking availability of original old rulebooks on the secondary market (though good gods, back then at nowhere near the prices the collectors market has gotten to now). Some folks hit on retroclones as a good way to make fresh rulebooks affordably available. OSRIC also met that need for AD&D. OSRIC (2006) and Basic Fantasy RPG (2007) were the first two retro-clones, and BFRPG was and is a big standard bearer for "make the rules available cheap", still making the PDFs free and selling the physical books at cost, which is a super bargain. WotC had also licensed RPGNow to sell PDFs of a lot of the old books online, but then in 2009 they pulled those, and this reinforced the desire for retro-clones and motivated even more people to make them.

And there was stuff like Necromancer Games saying "1st edition feel" even before they made anything like 1st edition rules, and Castles & Crusades was kind of one of the first overtly old school D&D spin-offs to come out of the OGL. (Not OGL, but I guess Hackmaster predates even that.)

Yeah, Hackmaster got a special exception because TSR/WotC screwed up and reprinted Kenzer's Knights of the Dinner Table comic strips in a Dragon Magazine CD ROM compilation without having electronic republication rights. As part of the settlement negotiations Kenzer got the rights to do Hackmaster and to use the D&D brand on Kingdoms of Kalamar products for seven years.

Necromancer and Goodman Games were the two biggest brands I remember marketing "old school feel" with their 3rd ed/D20 products. If you remember, Dungeon Crawl Classics was originally the brand name for a whole line of dozens of dungeon bash-focused modules for 3rd edition, going back to 2003, before they made their own game in 2012.

Castles & Crusades predates OSRIC and BFRPG, coming out in 2004, and it's an interesting specimen. It's deliberately built on the 3rd ed OGL, using the unified d20 mechanics, but simplifying and trying to aim for the feel of AD&D.

I don't remember anyone talking about the OSR until the retroclines kicked in. They didn't come to being in a vacuum, but they were a kind of sea change in what was going on, and the proto-OSR really kind of became the OSR once OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord etc. came into being.

At least that was my perspective at the time. But I was more hanging around here watching it happen rather than at Dragonsfoot or whatever.

I think the retroclones gave it much more visibility and kicked off a new wave of popularity.

Before them, it was just discussions of old school stuff on forums. Just about concurrent with the retro-clones we also saw the blog explosion. Delta's D&D Hotspot popped up in early 2007 and Grognardia (one of the best known) almost exactly a year later.

Once retroclones starting being published, there were now physical books with new art for people to discuss and ogle over and spend money on. And this caught wider attention and grew the movement.

 

[Desdichado]

Once retroclones starting being published, there were now physical books with new art for people to discuss and ogle over and spend money on. And this caught wider attention and grew the movement.

It might just be semantics, but my recollection was that there wasn't really a movement until the retroclones. Sure, AD&D still had its fans, but all of the elements didn't really come together into a movement until the retroclones sparked it. Sure, sure; the elements were already there, but it took the retroclones for the OSR to become a movement, acquire a label, and actually be more than a few curmudgeonly (and proudly so) niche grognard forums talking about old games and how they were still using them. You're saying that there was already a movement that the retroclones hit like a steroid shot; I'm saying that there were elements that could be used to make a movement, but until the retroclones and the actual coining of the OSR label, there wasn't yet a movement. Maybe that's a to-mayto to-mahto thing, but it has some relevance, especially when talking about what the OSR actually is.

If (like me) you see the OSR as a movement specifically around reviving interest (and product) in old D&D games via the retroclones and the ability that the retroclones unlocked to produce modules, supplements, or whatever that was compatible with said old D&D games, then much of what people call the OSR today is clearly a spin-off, cadet branch or subsequent development in a totally different direction than the OSR and therefore deserves a different taxonomic label. The idea of the OSR encompassing some kind of revival of "hey, I liked playing Avalon Hill's James Bond and TSR's Top Secret in the 80s too; let's call that part of the movement while we're at it!" doesn't really make sense. Yeah, sure, I liked playing those games too, and I'd probably get a kick out of a reprint of the Dr. No or View to a Kill module—I could put the Duran Duran song on repeat while I read it, even!—what does that have to do with a movement that was specifically about getting old D&D stuff back in the spotlight again? I mean, I was just as sympathetic to the idea of new Star Frontiers stuff as I was new AD&D stuff but just because I thought Star Frontiers was pretty cool and I wouldn't mind playing a mini-campaign in it again (at which point, I'd probably be frustrated with the rules, but who knows?) doesn't mean that I'd ever consider it having much in common with a movement about AD&D.

I think a lot of the early OSR people, at least many who posted on the forums that I hung out on, had a bit of PTSD about feeling that their tastes were on the outs, and they often cultivated either preachy or otherwise abrasive posting styles. This generated a lot of "this stuff is in, this stuff is right out, this stuff isn't even a game; this is 'storygames' not an RPG" and other varieties of OneTrueWayism until that got kind of tedious and they either self-segregated to their own online hangouts of some sort, or just got tired of trying to be the prophet crying in the wilderness archetype, but in spite of the excesses of that ~2008-2012 or so era, there's still some value in having enough taxonomic discipline to say "this is the movement, and this other stuff might be just as cool, but it's not the movement, it's something else in parallel, or something else entirely, or an entirely new development that started happening as the movement matured enough to start having its own kids, etc.

Which, again, and I'll probably drop out at this point to avoid the temptation to become too repetitive or rambly; the OSR to me is about using old D&D rules, or reasonably close simulacrums of them. The OSR is also a playstyle that developed afterwards, that doesn't really resemble how we played in the 70s or 80s, but is still a reaction to the excesses of the trad style which had been ascendent for decades, and a lot of people were looking for something different. While there was some overlap between people who were into one of those OSRs with those who were in the other OSR, those are still two very different concepts, and there were plenty of people who didn't overlap, so they really probably deserve their own labels. I think the ship has sailed, and we won't get one that everyone can agree on, but the fact that you have to stop and clarify what you mean by OSR when you say it means that the label isn't very useful in actually describing anything, which is unfortunate. The idea that anyone who's a fan of any old game (for who knows what definition of old) is also part of the OSR just borders on confusing and incoherent. If that's part of the OSR, then what in the world is the OSR except a reaction against whatever is seen as mainstream and popular today. It's barely different from "indie" at that point, with the only exception that OSR people don't seem to have much truck with leftover Forge people.

Although who knows; how old is Burning Wheel or Dogs in the Vinyard these days? If being a fan of LBB Traveller makes you OSR, then why not being a fan of The Window?

 

[Gus L]

Is he? He's grumpy as hell, for sure, but I haven't seen him try to gatekeep ... I've never gotten the impression that he thinks certain playstyles are wrong or invalid and has been vocal about expanding gaming to more people, not fewer.

That has been my experience as well.

My suspicion is that Yochai, like myself and many others in the Post-OSR, doesn't like a small group of creators who hold extremist and bigoted political views. Most of them are also banned in many "OSR" spaces, and Yochai will ban people for intentionally and repeatedly promoting them. In response, certain figures who support such people and spaces where such views are common (such as 4Chan) like to denounce Yochai as "gatekeepy" or "exclusionary" while their friends, the confused, and useful idiots repeat this claim. Yochai is pretty chill, he just doesn't like bigots and doesn't want them in the community he runs.