OSR Is there room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers?

[Sacrosanct]

Earlier there was a comment about “Everything grognards hate is good for new gamers.” Impudent comment aside, it got me thinking. Back in the early 80s, the game had a meteoric growth rate, so it seems that the old school style of play (being current at the time) did very well in bringing in new players. Now, 5e seems to also be doing a great job bringing in new players.

Has our community changed that much that not only is there no room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers, but it’s actively harmful to bringing them in as that comment implies?

On one hand, I think there are elements of OSR games which might not have aged well as originally presented, but on the other, I still believe a game like B/X could be an excellent tool to being in new players. We seem to think that only the most recent edition should be used to bring in new gamers, and I don’t think I subscribe to that.

Thoughts?

 

[toucanbuzz]

My take on old school vs. new school is that in the old days (the golden days, whatever you want to call it), characters died a lot more. It was a "badge of honor" if your character survived to 20th level. Stories and legends were weaved more for how your character died than what dungeon they overcame. Mechanically, old-school characters were fragile relative to 5E. My theory is grognards like myself feel 5E cheapens that experience since characters are not so fragile and at higher levels look more like Marvel superheroes.

Having played DCC ("dungeon crawl classics"), there's absolutely a market for old school 3d6 ability scores, "you're going to die a lot" games, at lower levels when you don't have hundreds of hours invested in the character.

Looking at the patterns of TSR, eventually gamers will get tired of the same old stuff and something dramatically different will move the market. It's not outside the realm of possibility that old-school gaming comes back as a simpler way to do things (albeit not necessarily mechanically balanced or fair).

 

[Mark Hope]

In the last two years, I've run B/X and AD&D games for new players, all of whom are still gaming with me. One went on to start his own group, which in turn spawned a third group, so my experience is that older editions can definitely bring in plenty of new players.

That said, I don't know that my games count as OSR - apart from a few years spent with 3e, I never stopped running TSR-era D&D. But I do know that older editions are not per se a barrier to entry for new players.

 

[Minigiant]

There is room for new gamers in OSR.

But like said many times, OSR has to now explain and pitch its rules, worlds, and ideas. Everyone is not coming from the same background and genres of fantasy. OSR is known for its weak explanation of "why" and this hurts buy-in.

 

[pogre]

A game master who is enthusiastic about their favorite system and is patient with new players can always bring new players into the fold.

 

[MichaelSomething]

But D&D can already do OSR style play perfectly fine!!

 

[Jack Daniel]

When I run a public game, it's red box D&D. So any new players I introduce to D&D (and pre-plague, it was certainly a good number of them) learn the old-school game. How many of them go on to play 5e? Most of them, I'd wager, given the way I would hear them talk excitedly about the characters they created for other campaigns. But they also keep coming back to my table, and some of them turn around and learn to DM the system too (and I actually recommend Basic Fantasy RPG when they're learning, just because the books are so cheap and easy to get ahold of). The point is, it's not really one or the other. My table, at least, is turning out new players who play both.

OD&D and 5e cater to different desires, and it's not a matter of challenge vs. power fantasy, not really. From what I've seen, it's the difference between exploring a mysterious and dangerous environment while having few tools other than your wits to contend with what you find (think Myst plus monsters & death-traps) and creating a highly customizable OC that you get to take through a compelling story. These are two related but fundamentally separate hobbies, and understanding them that way carries, I think, a great deal of explanatory power concerning their appeal.

“Everything grognards hate is good for new gamers.”

Yikes. Whoever said that probably doesn't know how much grognards hate it when complex game mechanics get in the way of simple, try-anything, interrogation-and-response style play.

 

[Ancalagon]

Part of the OSR world is very young and diverse, and wildly creative.

For example, look up the GLOG. It's an almost D&D system (you can use it to run low levels B/x adventures and it will work fine), designed for low level/low power characters, quick character creation, and extremely easy to design classes. You can be a fighter, a wizard or a thief, sure, but you could also be a cannoneer, a monkey dad, a gun priest.

Probably the best ruleset (there are many versions): OSR: GLOG-based Homebrew v.2: Many Rats on Sticks Edition

 

[TerraDave]

B/X D&D brought in so many players, and of course you could run it with them now. As they say, with the right DM...

I would run it as it often was back then, in a way for more forgiving to new players and generally looser and more rules (and roles) as guidelines then definitive requirements. This is where the modern OSR approach may differ.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Earlier there was a comment about “Everything grognards hate is good for new gamers.” Impudent comment aside, it got me thinking. Back in the early 80s, the game had a meteoric growth rate, so it seems that the old school style of play (being current at the time) did very well in bringing in new players. Now, 5e seems to also be doing a great job bringing in new players.

Has our community changed that much that not only is there no room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers, but it’s actively harmful to bringing them in as that comment implies?

A key difference between now and the early 1980s is the state and role of video games. Old school D&D with its focus on dungeon exploration and its comparative minimising of the connection between characters and the world to me aspires to be one of a huge range of CRPGs. There is a massive demand for that sort of thing - but in 1983, if you didn't have an Apple II and Ultima almost every RPG I can think of was almost purely text based - meaning that for visualisation a map and minis was outright superior. The 1983 boom was at a specific place in time.

By 1986 things had changed. The old days were over. Gygax had been forced out of TSR. The Dragonlance Saga was dominating D&D. And more importantly what a cRPG (and computer action adventure game) was had changed drastically with two 1986 games being the start of a sea change; Dragon Warriors/Dragonquest and the original The Legend of Zelda demonstrating that you could have approachable exploration heavy cRPGs with interaction with NPCs.

I'm going to say directly that the original 1986 Legend of Zelda is a better game of dungeon exploration than all but the very best old school games and if we skip forward a decade The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time's Water Temple is a meatier exploration dungeon almost than is possible within the realms of tabletop play. And it's far faster and more responsive with it. Skip forward another decade and World of Warcraft has team exploration and dungeon mastery in dungeons more fully realised than any DM can manage.

Can players be brought in by either (a) good communities or (b) a pitch like "It's WoW but just with good people, no griefers, and where you can do things the programmers never thought of" by someone they consider a friend? Yes. A good DM is still an excellent tool for bringing in new gamers no matter what the game system or style. People still get together to play Monopoly or Risk with friends and those are games that are not just surpassed by other media, but actively bad games because people are more important.

It's not only the OSR that struggles this way compared to their heyday. Adventure Paths are always going to struggle as The Story of Cloud Strife, the Story of Sora, The Story of Commander Shepherd, the Story of Geralt of Rivia, the Story of Aloy, the Story of Joker, or the Story of Zagreus (to name a few examples) are going to be both more detailed and better targeted than an adventure path and we've basically seen the back of the "realistic" RPG designed to cover every possible combination, with e.g. Hitman 3 or Breath of the Wild able to cope with interactions far better while handling everything in real time.

Which is why modern RPGs tend to focus on PC-PC interactions (which is a central feature of Critical Role of course), worlds the PCs are a part of and get to flesh out rather than getting Isikai'd there, and other places where tabletop RPGs still have a significant advantage over CRPGs. And it's these sorts of things that may have been referred to as things good for modern gamers that grognards hate.