RPG Evolution: Is the OSR Dead?

As kids who grew up with Dungeons & Dragons have gotten older, they've entered a new phase of gaming. These adult gamers now have enough influence as customers and game designers to return tabletop gaming to its roots. But if their efforts to bring back a past industry end up shaping the future of gaming, is it really Old School anymore?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

The Four Year Cycle​

To explain the popularity of the OSR, it's helpful to understand what changed about gamers: they grew up. In the early days of gaming, the time available to early role-players was much more limited, as Kenneth Hite explains:

Role-playing gamers traditionally enter the hobby around ages 12 or 13, before high school. They play until age 16 (dropping out with the availability of a car, and the concomitant expansion of available competing activities), re-enter the hobby in college (when mobility and choice are artificially constrained again) and drift out of it after graduation, marriage, childbirth, or other life changes. By this understanding, a typical gaming group lasts only four years at the most...

That cycle is no longer true. The "graduation, marriage, childbirth," etc. has its own duration, and once life settled in older gamers rediscovered the role-playing games they loved. Their limited time made them crave games they knew, the ones they grew up with. Mike Mearls, Senior Manager of Dungeons & Dragons Research and Design, outlined the dilemma facing today's gamers on a PAX East Panel:

I believe that's what's really happening to tabletop roleplaying, is that it used to be a hobby of not playing the game you want to play. And there are so many games now that you can play to fill all those hours of gaming, you can actually game now, and that what's happening is that RPGs needed that time, we, a GM or DM needed that time to create the adventure or create a campaign, a player needed that time to create a character, allocate skill ranks and come up with a background, and come up, you know, write out your three-page essay on who your character was before the campaign. That time is getting devoured, that time essentially I think is gone, that you could play stuff that lets you then eventually play a game or you can just play a game. And people are just playing games now.

This nostalgia fueled the creation of many imitators, some successful, some not -- and the brand owners of D&D had a sometimes contentious relationship with their fans, as well shall see.

Love D&D, but Don't LOVE D&D​

Budding game designers have always tinkered with the games of the past. Throughout the 90s, a lot of energy went into improving Dungeons & Dragons without really breaking fully away from it. Ron Edwards called them "fantasy heartbreakers," which he described as:

...truly impressive in terms of the drive, commitment, and personal joy that's evident in both their existence and in their details - yet they are also teeth-grindingly frustrating, in that, like their counterparts from the late 70s, they represent but a single creative step from their source: old-style D&D. And unlike those other games, as such, they were doomed from the start.

One of the reasons "fantasy heartbreakers" existed was because there was no legal means for aspiring game designers to easily launch their own variants. Frank Mentzer, the father of the BECMI version of D&D, explained to me in an interview:

In the Bad Old Days, TSR filed a lot legal actions against fans who tried to publish things that, in the opinion of TSR's lawyers, infringed on their property. But in 2000, WotC created the "Open Game License" (OGL), which changed all that. If another company published an adventure for the D&D game and simply included that License (a one-page thing), they didn't get sued. Wizards didn't have to beat up their fans to appease the lawyers!

Eventually, the tide turned as gamers became less interested in improving on D&D and more in recapturing the elements of the game they enjoyed. They also had a back catalog of content they wanted to play again, so compatibility was paramount. The proliferation of older gamers and the Open Game License (OGL) primed the market for a gaming renaissance. What, exactly, that renaissance constitutes is open to interpretation.

What's OSR Anyway?​

Shannon Appelcline defined the OSR in Designers & Dragons:

The OSR in OSRIC stands for “Old School Reference.” The grassroots movement that it generated also uses the abbreviation OSR, but with a different meaning: usually “Old School Renaissance,” but maybe “Old School Revival.” Some people also say that OSR can mean “Open Source Rules,” since that was the initial intent of OSRIC — though this idea has faded in recent years.

Mentzer defined OSR a little more broadly:

Whether the "R" in OSR is Renaissance, Revival, Resurgence, or something else, the "OSR" is simply a Re-appreciation of the simplicity of the original games.

Whatever the definition, the sheer number of OSR-style products in the early aughts meant it was more than a passing fad. Eventually, the OSR became so powerful that it began shaping how designers thought about game design, most specifically the latest incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. Mentzer explained what changed when I interviewed him:

The evolution and changes in the D&D game have often increased what we designers call 'granularity' -- the level of detail at which you handle combat and other events. But when it's more granular, it takes more time to resolve all those details, and that means a slower game. This is neither right nor wrong, but is definitely a Style. If a player learns a 'newschool' game and is happy with it, great; I'm absolutely in favor of ANY game that we play face-to-face, in contrast to the online or computer game experience. If that player is then introduced to a less-granular game with faster play, he or she may incline toward it, and often that way points toward Old School.

The OGL would provide designers a means of expressing all of these play styles and more.

Enter the OGL​

Ryan Dancey, VP at Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) leading Dungeons & Dragons at the time, launched the OGL with the intent of ensuring D&D would live on in perpetuity. Citing the Theory of Network Externalities, Dancey envisioned a license that would bolster sales of the main Dungeons & Dragons rule books by encouraging more players to play ANY role-playing game. Dancey called this the Skaff effect, named after game designer Skaff Elias:

All marketing and sales activity in a hobby gaming genre eventually contributes to the overall success of the market share leader in that genre.

Using the OGL, WOTC's efforts opened the way for game companies to take on the risky costs of creating adventures, while supporting the sales of the three core rule books that made up Dungeons & Dragons: the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. By opening the license to small developers, the gaming scene exploded, with more content than ever before. In addition to the sales benefits to WOTC, Dancey also hoped that the OGL would encourage innovation:

The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive -- someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.

This allowed some interesting divergent paths for fantasy role-playing, but perhaps not in the way Dancey expected. Chad Perrin explains:

The result was growing troubles in the implicit partnership between WotC and the publishers that produced competing works. In an effort to differentiate their products from the WotC products that were eating into their markets, some of these publishers (e.g. Crafty Games and Green Ronin Publishing) started producing their own variations on the d20 System for fantasy RPGs, diluting the core game market for WotC in an attempt to remain solvent in the face of an invasion of the niches WotC had created for them by WotC itself.

The advent of the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons was a turning point for the OGL, fragmenting fans of the game. Perrin divided them into three groups:

One was the old school, "grognard" market that preferred D&D editions prior to 3E, often the older the better; another was the d20 System market, a mix of people who started with 3E and liked it there and those who passed through two, three, even four or so major D&D product line upheavals and found 3E the best so far in a steady improvement lifecycle; and the 4E gamers, who found its tactical complexity and balance superior to anything that came before and prioritized that higher than other aspects of the D&D game that had previously been at least equal partners with the tactical aspects since the original D&D emerged from the Chainmail miniatures game in the '70s.

The "grognard" market would go on to strongly influence future games by tailoring the OGL to recreate the kind of games they enjoyed as kids. Mearls explains what he thinks went right and wrong:

In the end, it failed to achieve the same type of success as open source software. In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software.

The OSR wasn't about "rapid, constant improvement in the quality of rules" but rather what rules they could remove to mimic the feel of earlier editions. The OSR ended up looking more backward than forward. That doesn't take away from the remarkable innovation that the OGL engendered. Marty Walser credits Dancey and the OGL for the OSR's success:

Without Ryan Dancey, it is uncertain whether the OSR (Old School Revival) movement would still exist... Or at the very least, it would look nothing like it does today. Ryan Dancey made it possible for all of us to play D&D compatible games until eternity, because regardless of what happens to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game will forever live on.

Making Peace With the Past​

One of the ongoing challenges that TSR faced was the fragmentation of its player base between different settings and different editions, as described by Allen Rausch:

The many settings also contributed to something called "Brand Dilution." The original Dungeons & Dragons brand stood for something. You knew essentially what you were getting when you bought a D&D product. All of these new settings began to play havoc with the rule sets and philosophy of the game. As the settings grew more popular, they began to diverge from one another, advancing along their chosen philosophical paths, essentially becoming their own separate games. In not too many years, players had stopped identifying themselves as D&D players and were instead identifying themselves by the setting they played in.

With the advent of the Internet, publishers no longer had control over the obsolescence of a game -- games could live on forever in digital format. WOTC's acquisition of TSR and the D&D brand paved the way for new editions, but it also inherited TSR's baggage. WOTC was faced with a choice: continue waging TSR's battle against the proliferation of D&D clones or embrace them.

The OGL, modeled after open software design, was a key part of how content was shared on the Internet. But the OGL didn't work out that way, as Mearls explains:

There was a time when I pictured an active community of designers, all grinding away on D&D to make it better. I think that happened, but only in a fragmentary manner. Some people wanted levels gone, others wanted hit points fixed (with "fixed" defined differently for each group). At the end of the day, most people wanted books of monsters, character options, and adventures. Products either stuck with the baseline or created a new baseline for a fragment of the original audience to then stick to.

It took some time, but eventually the open-design thinking seeped into the development of the Fifth Edition of D&D -- undoubtedly influenced by the fact that Mearls' gaming cred was grounded in dozens of OGL-powered products. He explained in an interview:

I think that if we do our jobs right, that fragmentation will give way to a shared language like you saw with the SRD and the games it helped spawn. In terms of game designers, I think that, again, if we do this right they’ll have a nice starting point to tinker with in creating their own ideas.

WOTC helped fuel the OSR by re-releasing the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set and reprinting the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tomes. It was a sea change for the D&D brand. WOTC recognized that there was a market for older products and even supported them by releasing older editions of D&D in PDF format. Steve Wieck, COO of OneBookShelf, Inc., shared with me in an interview:

We have been in constant dialogue with Wizards every year since we opened our virtual doors. Granted that from 2009 to 2011 there wasn’t a lot of dialogue to have, but as the next edition was announced and Wizards has geared up support for all prior editions, we started having constructive dialogue with the team at Wizards last year. It was a jaw-dropper for me when Wizards let us know that they had already collected hundreds upon hundreds of classic titles and had them all re-digitized at high resolution. Wizards had not been idle on the digital product front.

Since WOTC's embrace of its digital back catalog, there have been many OSR variants, each encompassing a different style and edition of past versions of D&D. One of the more popular is OSRIC, as Appelcline explained:

Today most people mark the release of OSRIC (2006) as the start of the grassroots OSR movement. This was the first actual retroclone; it tried to specifically recreate a past game system (AD&D) rather than just recreating its feel — as Castles & Crusades had. In addition, OSRIC wasn’t a commercial release. It was instead a free download that was mainly intended to give publishers a legal basis for publishing AD&D modules.

OSRIC was just the beginning. Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord Games streamlines the OGL rules so they are more in the spirit of the Original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. HackMaster by Kenzer and Company continued a series of compatible rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Mentzer explains how the OGL helped the proliferation:

That gave rise to various reincarnations of the original games -- OD&D, Holmes, Moldvay, BECMI, 1st and 2nd edition Advanced, and others (oft called 'clones', though they're not really) -- and now every fan can publish legally, just by including that OGL (and following its rules of course). Before those 'clones', you had to pay out $100 or more to get those out-of-print rules, but now these reincarnations are available for far more reasonable prices, and are sometimes even free.

Appelcline adds to the OSR list:

The most successful retroclones have probably been: OSRIC (2006), a recreation of AD&D; and Labyrinth Lord (2007), a retroclone for Tom Moldvay’s original Basic D&D. However, there are numerous other retroclones on the market, all published by small companies and sometimes even given away for free. Among the more prominent are: Dark Dungeons (2010), a D&D Rules Cyclopedia clone; Mutant Future (2008), a Labyrinth Lord variant intended to recreate Gamma World play; and Swords & Wizardry (2008), an OD&D clone.

D&D Returns to its Roots...Again​

The success of the OSR has been unprecedented. In fact, it's so popular that Appelcline argues it's not even a movement anymore:

Beginning in 2012, some fans have suggested that the OSR is dead — not because it’s faded out, but because it’s succeeded. Fans on blogs have become companies publishing print products, while larger publishers like Goodman Games have proven very successful with their own OSR releases. Even Wizards of the Coast seems to be moving toward the OSR with its AD&D-like D&D Next and with releases of classic PDFs on Dungeon Masters Guild -.

The announcement of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons had a conciliatory tone that focused on bringing fans of all editions back into the fold. Robert Schwalb, a designer on the development team, shared how they plan to accomplish a grand unification:

Our primary goal is to produce a rules set that speaks to every incarnation of D&D. So if you are a diehard BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia enthusiast or have embraced 4th edition, loved 2nd edition, 3rd edition, or never moved on from 1st edition, we’re creating this game for you. Imagine a game where you can play the version of D&D you love best. And then imagine everyone plays at the same table, in the same adventure. We aim to make a universal game system that lets you play the game in whatever way, whatever style, with whatever focus you want, whether you want to kick down doors and kill monsters, engage in high intrigue, intense roleplaying, or simply to immerse yourself in a shared world. We’re creating a game where the mechanics can be as complex or as light as you want them. We’re creating the game you want to play.

Just how much the Fifth Edition was influenced by the OSR was answered in Mike Mearls' Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit:

...It’s really about getting back to the core roots of RPGs, and seeing how things changed for both the better and worse over 40 years. There are a lot of assumptions that became embedded in RPG design that have been unchallenged. Looking back and really studying RPGs – both new and old – helped give us a sense of what we had to keep and what prior elements of the game needed to be re-emphasized...The concept behind the OSR – lighter rules, more flexibility, leaning on the DM as referee – were important. We learned a lot playing each edition of D&D and understanding the strengths and weaknesses each brought to the table. Similar to the OSR, I think indie games bring lighter rules via focus and an emphasis on storytelling to the table that we learned a lot from. While a traditional RPG like D&D by necessity has a much broader focus than traditional indie games, there’s a lot to learn there in being clear and giving people a good, starting goal or framework to work within. For OSR stuff, we drew directly on older editions of D&D.

OSR-style games currently capture over 9 percent of the RPG market according to ENWorld's Hot Role-playing Games. If you consider the Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons to be part of that movement, it's nearly 70 percent of the entire RPG market.

The OSR has gone mainstream. If the OSR stands for Old School Renaissance, it seems the Renaissance is over: D&D, in all of its previous editions, is now how most of us play our role-playing games.

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=4937]That where hex and counter games excel and why they have a niche today although it may be small.

By 'dead', I mean reduced to a small and somewhat obscure niche. Of course, almost nothing ever truly goes away so long as some version of it stays in print somewhere. There are probably groups still playing games using something like HG Wells 'Little Wars' rules or a close approximation and having a blast. And you are right that the internet makes staying in print much easier.

But while dead is probably not the right metaphor, something can be marginalized to the point that it no longer has any great influence even within the gamer subculture. The Civilization series is probably one of the last influences of the hex and counter paper games with wide exposure.

The result proved to be highly influential and extrapolated to be a whole philosophy of playing RPGs with lite mechanics. Which proved to be popular in it's own right only for the OSR but for games like FATE, D&D 5e, and others. And of course people being people, many took it to be a accurate view of how RPGs were played back in the day. Which as you pointed out is a myth given that games like Space Opera, Chivalry and Sorcery, Dragonquest, etc all had their own following. AD&D has considerably more mechanics and details than it's OD&D progenitor.

I've previously advanced in other threads the theory that all rules lite systems inherently marginalize themselves.

While it may be a true statement to say the heart of OSR is to play the older systems themselves, the question anyone would immediately ask is, "Why would you do that?" In some cases I agree the answer that they are "old" or "original" is enough answer to explain, but I think there is more to it than that.

And I suppose in fairness I should come forward with my biases and felt I could find fault with almost every sentence of Finch's "Old School Primer". I felt as if I was dealing with a Spanish mercenary asking me to accept his word as a Spaniard, and that I needed to inform him I'd known too many Spaniards.

 

[robconley]

By 'dead', I mean reduced to a small and somewhat obscure niche. Of course, almost nothing ever truly goes away so long as some version of it stays in print somewhere. There are probably groups still playing games using something like HG Wells 'Little Wars' rules or a close approximation and having a blast. And you are right that the internet makes staying in print much easier.

But while dead is probably not the right metaphor, something can be marginalized to the point that it no longer has any great influence even within the gamer subculture. The Civilization series is probably one of the last influences of the hex and counter paper games with wide exposure.

I feel that being influential and getting new material made are two different outcomes. The former is a kin to a random dice roll either it happens or doesn't and you really can't "make" it happen as it is ultimately a question of taste which is fickle. The best you can do is to make sure what you do is of the best quality you make it so if it happens you are in a position to take advantage of it.

The latter, I think is the important outcome on whether a niche is successful or not. If the niche become just large enough or organized enough to see the production of new material as good or better quality as what came before then it is a success in my book regardless of actual size.

Hex and Counter wargames have figured out how to do the latter so new games are being produced to the present day.

The OSR has the done the same for older edition of D&D and other RPGs and served as a model for renaissances for other older games which is an added bonus in my book.

Unlike Hex and Counter wargames, OSR has some influence through a fortuitous combination of circumstances. So publisher, like myself and others, can take advantage of that to get more sale and do more projects than we could otherwise. But even if it never happened, the nature of technology and internet would be meant that much that would have been produced for the OSR still would have been released anyway. The barrier to publishing is that low and is down to the point where it just a matter of talent and the amount of time the people in the project are willing to spend.

While it may be a true statement to say the heart of OSR is to play the older systems themselves, the question anyone would immediately ask is, "Why would you do that?" In some cases I agree the answer that they are "old" or "original" is enough answer to explain, but I think there is more to it than that.

It a matter of taste, and thus any theory is only good for looking back and understanding why something happened. It is useless for prediction. We know from the past that for any written project that good writing, good editing, good art, good layout, and good physical presentation are indicators of a successful project. But there have been successful works that violated one or more of that. There been works that had all of the proceeding and failed. When you stack it up it amounts to "who the knows why anything succeeds". Andy Weir, the author of the Martian, slaps what amounts to a bunch of well edited, well researched blog posts about a highly technical fictional story of astronaut stranded on Mars using just the physic and situation we know about today, and produces a mega hit. Who would figure that?

In hindsight what fueled the OSR was several things

1) OD&D, B/X, and AD&D 1st have the largest group of fans out of all RPGs prior to 1990. So even the OSR publishers exceeded in only attracting a few percentage points of older gamers that still a huge audience compared to other classic RPGs.
2) The Internet makes finding stuff easy
3) By subtracting a few mechanics the d20 SRD is pretty close to how classic D&D works. With some work that is in the capability of a determined individual or group it can be used to make a near clone of a target edition. Thanks to the OGL the result can be published without fear of a lawsuit.
4) The classic edition are great games in of themselves which allowed them to attract new gamers which allowed the OSR to be more than a nostalgic flash in the pan.

For my part after I read OSRIC, I knew that classic D&D was here to stay. My experience with open source software development told me that once somebody figure how to make something open and it was popular at one point it was enough to keep it going as a viable community producing new content. So I threw my hat in the ring and came out with my own stuff.

And I suppose in fairness I should come forward with my biases and felt I could find fault with almost every sentence of Finch's "Old School Primer". I felt as if I was dealing with a Spanish mercenary asking me to accept his word as a Spaniard, and that I needed to inform him I'd known too many Spaniards.

Matt's Primer has two major things about it.

1) It is a instruction manual for running older games that don't have the mechanics of newer games like skills.
2) It is a snarky attack on games with newer mechanics.

I could have lived without #2 but #1 provided highly useful to me and other folks I know who have read. Some of them like the snarky attitude and some didn't. I liked Matt's primer because it made me as comfortable with running OD&D, Fate, and other lite RPG as the games I usually run which were games like GURPS, Hero System, and Harnmaster.

So is your objection really about the attitude or do you feel it fails to effectively instruct somebody how to run older games as a referee.

If it former, sure I can see that. If it is the latter I have to disagree.

Rob Conley
Bat in the Attic Games.

 

[Mallus]

Anyone who thinks OSR-identified products are "backwards-looking" should really check out Vorheim, A Red and Pleasant Land, Yoon-Suin, and Deep Carbon Observatory (hint: the things that aren't old-school system hacks/revisions).

I mean, they should check them out if they're interested in seeing how wrong that opinion is.

I've got something called "Fires on the Velvet Horizon" on order from Lulu. It's by the people who did Deep Carbon. It looks nothing short of revolutionary -- and nothing like the current 5e materials.

Another hint: you can innovate in ways unrelated to mechanics. Or at least less related.

edit: I didn't like whatever version of Finch's Old School Primer I read, either. I let it color my opinion of the whole phenomenon... and in retrospect I shouldn't have done that.

 

[Lanefan]

The RPGs themselves have died off more slowly, because the computer still can't create the dynamic world of a good DM's imagination. But they are clearly on the way out. It's been noticeable for the last 10 years or more that no one wants to be a DM anymore. Being a good DM inevitably means enjoying spending 10 or 20 hours a week not playing the game you want to play so that the content and game will be there to play. There really is no way around it. But for at least the last 10 years people have been trying to create RPGs that at least in theory don't need a DM to spend time not playing the game. They've promoted the fantasy that all this content can just create itself during play and it will be the same thing, or that the game is little more than a series of tactical scenarios which you can buy a book of and play and that will be an RPG. They've promoted 'fast prep' and 'no prep' and 'no myth' and all of those were just variations of saying, "You don't need a DM; all you need is a referee and some rules." And I think the problem is ultimately that nothing like the worlds that the DMs wanted to play in and create and animate actually existed in the 1970's and 1980's, so that if you wanted such a world to play in and explore you just had to do it yourself.

I think you're being a bit too pessimistic here, [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] - I don't think the RPGs are dying off at all. Sure there's a cyclical aspect to it - the mid-90's were a low point, for example, and the early '00's a high - but I think overall things are chugging along just fine.

Something else that hasn't changed much over the years is finding enough DMs. That was an issue back in the '80's and it's still an issue now...in some places. Some gaming groups and-or communities have always been blessed with more DMs than they know what to do with; others have always had to put up with whoever was willing to do it as it's all they had, and for many (like mine) it's a mix.

And the short-to-mid term future for old-school gaming looks pretty bright in one respect: all those who were high-school or college age in the late '70's and early '80's are now more or less approaching retirement age, meaning they'll (in theory) have a lot more time to - you guessed it - play D&D if they want to! And the version they'll most likely gravitate to is the version they are or were familiar with, or something close.

Lan-"what the new editions are useful for is generating good ideas to adapt into old-edition games"-efan

 

[Benji]

the mid-90's were a low point, for example

Man I miss gaming in the mid-90's. It was a time & place of some seriously epic games played by some people who never laboured under the idea that nerd was cool or ever needed to be. I have never had so many arguments about star trek or vampires since the end of that decade.

Actually the vampires thing is a lie. During the early 2010's 'VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE' became a game group chant.

 

[Celebrim]

For my part after I read OSRIC, I knew that classic D&D was here to stay. My experience with open source software development told me that once somebody figure how to make something open and it was popular at one point it was enough to keep it going as a viable community producing new content. So I threw my hat in the ring and came out with my own stuff.

And good luck to you. It sounds like fun. Hopefully the community stays large enough that the content has at least some commercial value, and isn't reduced to a community solely supported by ongoing labors of love.

Matt's Primer has two major things about it.

1) It is a instruction manual for running older games that don't have the mechanics of newer games like skills.
2) It is a snarky attack on games with newer mechanics.

...So is your objection really about the attitude or do you feel it fails to effectively instruct somebody how to run older games as a referee.

Well, feel free to disagree but when I said just about every sentence rung false to me, I meant it. The big problem with being an 'old school primer' for me is that it is so obviously a modern document, shaped by modern attitudes and sensibilities, and with no apparent clarity regarding either how people thought about and played the game then, or how people have romanticized older games, or how he appears to be appropriating 'old school' for a particular very modern agenda. Most of all, he fails to address whether his document as a whole represents very practical advice, or the limits of how gameable this advice would be if it is applied. So much of the advice is crap that sounds good in theory but which in play doesn't really work. And to a certain extent some of that comes through even in his examples of play, where if you really get into the scenario he describes, you realize that it doesn't sound particularly fun and satisfying and in fact doesn't even sound like the players playing in the 'old school' way are having much fun.

I mean sure, we'd expect the straw man modern GM's game to sound boring and dysfunctional, but he makes his preferred style of play sound at least as bad!

I could pick pretty much any sentence from the rant as an example, but since it is very long, I'll just confine myself to one:

Also: these games aren’t simulations of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence, would do when faced with certain challenges.

I'm not sure that many people playing the game at the time would have conceded that was true. Certainly no one I knew would have conceded that at the time. In hindsight someone might say, "Well, as a simulation of what a of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence would do, they weren't very successful.", and that criticism was leveled against them at the time and various proposals were made and even certain alternate RPGs were made to remedy that. But I don't recall anyone conceding that we should just ignore that aspect of the game because D&D wasn't about that, or that to the extent that they really believed it was a problem, that it wasn't a valid criticism to make. People argued over whether it was a problem that needed a rules solution, but they didn't think that being a real character from a fantasy story wasn't part of the point. No one would have conceded that in 0e you weren't roleplaying a character of a particular culture or race, and that that wasn't what the game was about. For one thing, no one treated NPCs as if they weren't supposed to be character's of a particular culture or race that reacted to the PC's as if they weren't of a particular culture and race.

And no one conceded that the game was about 'keeping your character alive' to the extent that what ever you did to keep the character alive was appropriate. If they had have conceded that, they wouldn't have invented alignment to be a marker of how you'd behave 'in character'. To say that the game isn't, "a simulation of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence, would do when faced with certain challenges.", would be to suggest that in old school play no one was particularly concerned about being in character, playing your character, and acting in character or that a DM wouldn't have penalized a player with higher training costs or whatever for poor play whose character had very low intelligence but was consistently played with the greatest degree of cunning and insight. It was well know that the game didn't seem to have a way to deal with the problem, but I don't remember anyone at the time conceding it wasn't a problem.



Compare and contrast real old school play with the example of play from the 1e DMG with what's on offer in the 'Old School Primer'. There are some similarities but there are some noticeable differences. Moreover, for additional perspective, note that the 1e DMG example of play is almost exactly reproduced in 3e and that version has at least as much in common with approach as this so called 'old school primer'.

Honestly, it's not a very good primer on how to play old school. It's a provocative proposal to think about older games in a very modern indy gamer sort of way that I'm not convinced works very well. Even when it has something recognizable from period play, like how to find something behind a moose head, it doesn't strike me as very deep thinking about the problem.

For example, this post is almost a year ahead of the old school manifesto: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...itions/page2&p=3396542&viewfull=1#post3396542

But where I'm struggling with find a balance here, for someone that claims to have found a one true way, there is a clear lack of explaining or questioning whether pixel bitching the moose head necessarily represents a fun game. A poster named Rothe two posts later brings up one of the several problems with the 'fun' factor in the moose head example, but we could chase that rabbit very far down the hole.

 

[robconley]

Well, feel free to disagree but when I said just about every sentence rung false to me, I meant it. The big problem with being an 'old school primer' for me is that it is so obviously a modern document, shaped by modern attitudes and sensibilities, and with no apparent clarity regarding either how people thought about and played the game then, or how people have romanticized older games, or how he appears to be appropriating 'old school' for a particular very modern agenda.

I appreciate your response but right here in this paragraph shows that you are missing the point of the Old School Primer. Now understand I am not saying you should like it any better as it does have a snarky attitude towards modern gaming.

The point you are missing it not meant to be a description of how people played back in the day. Yes it some of it is drawn some from first person accounts based on talking from a variety of people who were involved.

The problem he is trying to address is this

If you want to try a one-shot session of 0e using the free Swords & Wizardry rules, just printing the rules and starting to play as you normally do will produce a completely pathetic gaming session – you’ll decide that 0e is just missing all kinds of important rules

I seen this attitude among gamers in my local towards older rules and even modern lite system. That the lack of rules is a deficiency that has to be corrected by more rules. No where in the document Matt claims that this was how people played back in the day. Only that this is a practical way to play older games.

Most of all, he fails to address whether his document as a whole represents very practical advice, or the limits of how gameable this advice would be if it is applied. So much of the advice is crap that sounds good in theory but which in play doesn't really work.

I do disagree with this mostly because Matt goes to pains to explain that it is general advice that by its very nature it meant to be worked out by the referee and his group over time.

The main problem with the primer is that it's approach relies on the talent and experience of the referee of the campaign. The better you are at improvising and adjudicating, more real world experience you have as a person the better able you are able to use the elements of the primer. The reality is that novices need something that is a bit more step by step to help up the learning curve.

I will say Matt tone towards modern mechanics is really over the top and sometimes insulting to fans of modern mechanics. And that color many people perception of the document.

And to a certain extent some of that comes through even in his examples of play, where if you really get into the scenario he describes, you realize that it doesn't sound particularly fun and satisfying and in fact doesn't even sound like the players playing in the 'old school' way are having much fun.

Well there is a reason why modern games are designed the way they are. For example character customization handled through mechanics is a feature that player desire a lot and been a constant since the beginning of the hobby.

Part of what of makes the OSR is exploring alternatives that were dropped in the first decade of the hobby. For example much of my work was writing about sandbox campaigns and hexcrawl formatted setting.

I'm not sure that many people playing the game at the time would have conceded that was true.

Well Gygax in the Greyhawk campaign and Arneson in Blackmoor campaign handled players picking locks, opening traps, charming the ladies (or guys). We have first hand accounts of players doing pretty much what more modern players do with systems that have explicit skills, talents, feats, etc. We have the rules they used and there not a lot of mechanics that explictly handle this stuff. So the question is, how did they handle it? So they were asked and as it turned it they all handled differently but what was common among them is that they came up with ruling based on their personal experience and common sense. Of course that differed between them so what they actually did varied alot.

So Matt and other took what we were told, took his own personal experience, and wrote a primer for the present on how to use the older games despite not having skills, feats, talent, or mechanics like modern games.

 

[delericho]

In the end, it failed to achieve the same type of success as open source software. In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software. (Mearls)

I'm not sure that's it, or at least, I don't think it's just that. One of the issues is that RPGs just don't cycle through generations as rapidly as software - whereas typical software may well update by a full version each year (and many sub-versions within that time), RPGs tend to publish their rules and then remain static for several years, perhaps patched once or twice with errata, and maybe with a half-edition after 2-3 years, but generally staying constant.

This meant that any advancements generally weren't seen in D&D during the life of 3.Xe, which meant that they were automatically limited in exposure. Couple that with WotC's reluctance to bring any third-party material into their books (IIRC, only MM2, Unearthed Arcana, and a couple of Dragon articles ever did this), and the promise of constant improvement was probably doomed.

 

[talien]

I'm not sure that's it, or at least, I don't think it's just that. One of the issues is that RPGs just don't cycle through generations as rapidly as software - whereas typical software may well update by a full version each year (and many sub-versions within that time), RPGs tend to publish their rules and then remain static for several years, perhaps patched once or twice with errata, and maybe with a half-edition after 2-3 years, but generally staying constant.

This meant that any advancements generally weren't seen in D&D during the life of 3.Xe, which meant that they were automatically limited in exposure. Couple that with WotC's reluctance to bring any third-party material into their books (IIRC, only MM2, Unearthed Arcana, and a couple of Dragon articles ever did this), and the promise of constant improvement was probably doomed.

The thing that stood out for me the most researching this article was that the OGL was meant to "refine" a game system that there wasn't necessarily a business interest for small companies to refine. It took a big company (Paizo) to take on the massive task of adding to 3.5 in a comprehensive way. Mearls' statements sum that up nicely -- the assumption that somehow all publishers were all on board with "making D&D better" (whatever that means) was flawed to begin with. What the OGL did give designers the flexibility to do is make the game THEY wanted.

So in some respect the OGL did achieve its goal, but not how it was intended. We have the game we want, we can publish as much as we want, and I would argue there's now so much material in print for every edition (concluding WOTC's back catalog and the new OSR systems that are compatible) that we can play these games in perpetuity.

I do wonder when we "have our fill" and what comes next though. After a certain point, we're going to have every form of OSR system covered from many angles.

 

[tenkar]

The OSR today is less about new / cloned / houseruled rulesets and more about products that can be used with those rulesets. Until 5e offers an open license of sorts the OSR will stand apart.

As there will probably never be any sort of open license for 5e...