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

[Minigiant]

Which are you saying is which? Because I'd have called the modern era of RPGs more about clarity and ability to think on your feet while not holding fixed plans.

And I consider both 4e and Apocalypse World to be excellent teachers of how to GM their style.

I'm talking about DM skill.

It's is more important to be clear as a DM in the old school as 90% of the rules are in their head.

Whereas new school tells the DM to know the rules and explain any changes ahead of time.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I'm talking about DM skill.

It's is more important to be clear as a DM in the old school as 90% of the rules are in their head.

Whereas new school tells the DM to know the rules and explain any changes ahead of time.

The 1e DMG literally gives this same advice.

 

[Minigiant]

All those things, video games, cartoons, etc existed when 1e did, so I don't think the correlation is there that you think is. 1e didn't have to hard sell itself to be popular because we also had the Atari and then nintendo, or because Akira, transformers, or thundercats also existed

Akira, transformer, and Silver hawks is not the same as Avatar the Last Airbender, Overwatch, and the MCU.

Pretending the tropes of the 80s are the same as the ones as the 10s is not how you bring in new players.

Especially when OSR relies more on everyone having the same imagination base than Modern games. Modern D&D tells you all these rules because it knew players are coming from all kinds of directions in imagination and has to lock them down to the same ideas.

That's, to me, is the main difference between OS and NS.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Both of the games I mentioned prominently bill themselves as OSR, but you're saying there's a purity test they fail? Interesting.

Interesting that you took my description of a fundamentally continuous phenomenon and imposed a pass–fail binary on the idea. Maybe this explanation from a similar conversation over on r/osr will get the point across more clearly.

What about a game like MORK BORG? Pretty separated from the TSR era ruleset, but certainly has the "spirit" and gameplay of the OSR, I would say.

I'm not sure that I agree. What few rules Mörk Borg has seem pretty clearly derived from Basic D&D. Though I will positively contend that it's a perfect example of the difference between OSR and old-school.

I haven't read the thread so may be repeating things others have said, but I think you have to differentiate between OSR games (including older versions of D&D) and "old school themes." I have no issue with people playing the former, but I just don't think there's a lot of reason for new people to play anything other than the most recent edition of D&D. I'm not talking about the relatively rare case of a kid being introduced to D&D by his uncle, who runs BECMI. But I think the vast majority (say, 99%) of new players will naturally--and wisely--gravitate to the newest version of the game.

Now this, I do not understand. Would you also argue that 99% of new players are better off playing 5th edition D&D than, say, RuneQuest or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or d6 Fantasy?

As someone who started brand new to ttrpgs 6 months ago, as DM for players also brand new to the concept, I’ll say that the vast majority of new players expect to create a unique character and explore a mysterious and dangerous environment during their compelling story. They want and expect both. Why not?

It's a matter of emphasis. Not every game is out to focus on all of those elements to the same degree. Some RPGs cater to the desire to customize every little aspect of your original character, and some are perfectly content to let the character be an empty vessel for the player to inhabit, with little to no mechanical customization.

Though it's not at all the same thing, one could draw a rough analogy with the distinction between a first-person Western CRPG with a heavily customized player character who has zero game-determined personality (everything about the character is left up to the player's imagination) vs. an old-fashioned JRPG with little to no mechanical customization but everything about the character (and the plot) predetermined by the game.

The point is, it's okay for a given RPG not to be all things to all players.

I find OSR advocates weirdly obsessed with rules, systems, and the like and fractured into dozens of games all attempting to do the same thing only better or different. Which is a strange obsession for people favoring a rules-lite game. I’m new enough to ttrpgs that I’m not heavily invested in any particular game, and very attracted to rules light ideas but super put off by the OSR fixation on being difficult, random encounters, encumbrance, limited character options, and other “boring“ minutia.

As has oft been said by many an OSR advocate, "OSR ≠ rules-lite." The desire for rules-lite games is part of it, but not the whole deal—just like B/X is the Rosetta Stone "darling system" of the OSR but not the whole deal. If one takes AD&D 1st edition as an example of another game still popular with OSR gamers, it's less important that the game be rules-lite than that it has relatively few player-facing rules. But the concern for rules and systems is perfectly understandable, given the OSR's strong "do-it-yourself" ethic: it positions the DM not just as a facilitator, referee, and world-builder, but also necessarily as a game designer with authority and capability equal to that of Gary Gygax or anybody else.

As to the "minutia": different strokes. I wouldn't want to play a game where encumbrance or ammunition got hand-waved, because it would kill the verisimilitude for me. Random encounters have a perfectly cogent raison d'être in older D&D (they're there to keep the players moving through the dungeon quickly, tax their resources, keep the tension high, and they detract nothing from the game because combat doesn't eat much play-time at all). And as for difficulty… this gets so badly exaggerated IMO. Early D&D is no more the proverbial "meat-grinding fantasy Vietnam" than 5e is a cakewalk through Candy Land. It's just that early D&D isn't concerned with balancing single encounters so much as whole environments: the unit of play in early D&D isn't the encounter, it's the dungeon level (and the game is more about logistics and strategizing your exploration than it is about per-battle combat tactics). Different focus.

 

[Campbell]

I like OSR games, but I am no minimalist. I vastly prefer something like The Nightmares Underneath, Worlds Without Number, Old School Essentials, or Worlds Without Number to the Black Hack or World of Dungeons. I like OSR games because I like the rules that are there. Not because I have a desire for less rules.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Akira, transformer, and Silver hawks is not the same as Avatar the Last Airbender, Overwatch, and the MCU.

Pretending the tropes of the 80s are the same as the ones as the 10s is not how you bring in new players.

Especially when OSR relies more on everyone having the same imagination base than Modern games. Modern D&D tells you all these rules because it knew players are coming from all kinds of directions in imagination and has to lock them down to the same ideas.

That's, to me, is the main difference between OS and NS.

Marvel existed before D&D. So that seems an odd argument to make. There was just as much media of fantastical and super hero fantasy in the 80s as there is now. Only the technology for special effects has changed, which doesn't really impact cartoons or comics at all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Interesting that you took my description of a fundamentally continuous phenomenon and imposed a pass–fail binary on the idea. Maybe this explanation from a similar conversation over on r/osr will get the point across more clearly.

Not really. I read it. It has a small number of upvotes compared to the channel population, and significant disagreement in the post. Also, he's using standard deviations in a terrible way that doesn't make much sense (starting with the assumption of a normal distribution for OSR-ness, which is an odd starting assumption for which I have no idea what the population looks like to begin with). It seems like it's a fun litmus test that excludes games like Torchbearer, which gets right to the heart of a number of OSR play agendas.

Honestly, any analysis of a game movement that doesn't look at play agendas but instead compares to an extant set of rules as a guidepost is inherently bogus.

 

[Minigiant]

Marvel existed before D&D. So that seems an odd argument to make. There was just as much media of fantastical and super hero fantasy in the 80s as there is now. Only the technology for special effects has changed, which doesn't really impact cartoons or comics at all.

The point is they werent as mainstream back and the separation of fantasy books, scifi book, comics, movies, and the rest was more solid. The ideas influencing D&D were fewer.

So you won't have people attempting to metalbend every trap. A DM or Book designer would have to sell players to play this game without the concepts from all these new sources.

 

[Mannahnin]

Or just include concepts from more recent sources in your new game or campaign.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The point is they werent as mainstream back and the separation of fantasy books, scifi book, comics, movies, and the rest was more solid. The ideas influencing D&D were fewer.

So you won't have people attempting to metalbend every trap. A DM or Book designer would have to sell players to play this game without the concepts from all these new sources.

I mean ... no?

I've seen the phrase, "I don't want X in my fantasy," more today than I ever did back then. D&D was so much more profoundly weird than people realize. I am going to do a deep dive on this in one of my overwrought WALL OF VOODOO... um, WALL OF TEXT posts next week, but-
Rules for explicitly having characters go between systems (Gamma World and Boot Hill to D&D and so on).
Modules with science fiction.
Modules based on Alice and Wonderland.
The weird remix that was the original monster manual, that included everything from Indian folklore to Japanese toys.

Sure, things have changed since the 70s (I WOULD HOPE SO!), but no understanding how truly weird stuff was back then is its own type of error.