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

[Fanaelialae]

I would argue that implicitly, core 5e assumes that combats are an entertaining romp for your players, where they can feel like they're challenged (without actually being challenged) while they show off their cool abilities. You absolutely can change that assumption, but it takes work and it doesn't make it not the assumption.

Death can certainly happen in 5e, completely out of the blue and without mercy. Happened recently to a roughly 5th level cleric of mine when he was crit by a flail snail and taken to his negative max HP. That doesn't fit with CaP.

I hold that 5e, by default, is on the easy end of CaS. Just because a game isn't ultra-lethal doesn't make it CaP. Bad tactics or even just bad luck can (and have) resulted in character deaths and TPKs.

 

[kenada]

None of what you said helped me understand further. Either you lose me with jargon, or you are just further describing games I have ran or played in. Combat as war is not IMO unique to OSR. And the only times I may have fudged rolls as DM is if I realized I made a mistake on my end. Either mathematically or just misinterpreted how a monster/NPC ability actually works.

The trad/neo-trad stuff comes from this article, but the jargon’s not particularly important. Think Dragonlance. There’s a story to be told and experienced, and that’s the point. OSR-style play tends to be more about stories that emerge from play. You can do an adventure module, but the ones that work best with OSR play are ones that provide a situation or a location rather than try to tell a story.

I have never had a problem promoting a cool and fun story, while also offing player characters. People die in fiction all the time.

Characters die in fiction because the author wrote it that way. In the “modern” style, characters aren’t expected to die randomly. You’ll see this framed in discussions like how characters should only die if they make mistakes, or how it’s bad GMing not to fudge to prevent an ignoble death.

As a practical example, consider the session summary from a few pages ago. In essence, some choices were made, a character got into trouble, and that character died. From an OSR perspective, that character made choices, opted not to retreat, and died. Actions had consequences. From a “modern” one, that character was being punished for exploring.

I’ve had this happen at my table. I was running Kingmaker, and one of the PCs died during the fight with the Stag Lord at the end of the first module (“Stolen Lands”). The player insisted on being allowed to bring back a similar PC because paying for a raise dead was punishing the party. From his perspective, he didn’t make any mistakes. He was just doing what his character does, so his character’s death was undeserved.

I guess then, part of the confusion, is this forced dichotomy I see presented. That Modern must be this, while OSR must be that. Perhaps these things are as cut and dry as we like to think?

It’s possible or even probable that you’re doing something that is pretty similar to OSR. The value of recognizing a style is not in forcing people into little buckets but in understanding what we find valuable when we play and how the style can inform that and show us other games we might enjoy.

For me, I was quite please to find names for “trad” and “OC/neo-trad” because it gave a name to styles that either clash with how I tend to play or that I wouldn’t enjoy. I’d describe what I do as OSR-adjacent because I’m won’t restrict myself to just TSR-era games (I was running a sandbox in PF2 up until recently), but stuff like the Principia Apocrypha resonates with me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Death can certainly happen in 5e, completely out of the blue and without mercy. Happened recently to a roughly 5th level cleric of mine when he was crit by a flail snail and taken to his negative max HP. That doesn't fit with CaP.

I hold that 5e, by default, is on the easy end of CaS. Just because a game isn't ultra-lethal doesn't make it CaP. Bad tactics or even just bad luck can (and have) resulted in character deaths and TPKs.

And just because the rules allow for character death doesn't make it CaS (let alone CaW). The chances of what happened to the cleric in your story are exceedingly small. In the vast, vast majority of cases, characters that drop to 0 come back up very quickly, or are at least stabilized, by the many ways in the rules for help to be rendered, and the amount of time required to actually die. The party is most often set up to win (and handily by the rules in most cases) and if they're not, there almost always a narrative reason. That's not inherently a bad thing if that's the game you're going for, but it is how the big dog of RPGs plays, and other ways are fun too.

 

[Fanaelialae]

And just because the rules allow for character death doesn't make it CaS (let alone CaW). The chances of what happened to the cleric in your story are exceedingly small. In the vast, vast majority of cases, characters that drop to 0 come back up very quickly, or are at least stabilized, by the many ways in the rules for help to be rendered, and the amount of time required to actually die. The party is most often set up to win (and handily by the rules in most cases) and if they're not, there almost always a narrative reason. That's not inherently a bad thing if that's the game you're going for, but it is how the big dog of RPGs plays, and other ways are fun too.

By that logic Stars Without Number is a CaP game provided you have a bio psychic in the party (which isn't any different from having a cleric). That doesn't pass the smell test for me.

You're right that a game allowing for death doesn't make it CaS. However, I think that a game that allows pointless, random death isn't CaP. 5e totally allows for pointless, random death (speaking from personal experience here).

 

[Malmuria]

Perhaps the more central issue is whether the scenario is linear or not. In a linear scenario, especially a pre-written adventure path, the gm might not know what to do when the players 'fail' - either a single important skill roll or an entire combat. Moreover, death during a random encounter in such a scenario just feels truly random, rather than as evidence of a living, breathing world.

In a sandbox scenario, the obverse is true. A 'failed' encounter (combat or otherwise) has knock-on effects that change the world (e.g., the dungeon patrol is now on high alert); same with success. Unbalanced random encounters (' a dragon files overhead') do make the world feel more alive, whereas if every combat just-so-happens to be perfectly balanced to your level and abilities, it feels gamey and boring.

Justin Alexander made this point recently on twitter in a response to a Matt Colville video.

I'm not sure to what degree particular rule sets favor a particular play culture.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

But there's room for both styles of RPG, right? You can have games where the diversity is built into the world, and anybody can be anything. And you can also have focused games, like Pendragon, where the story you're telling is specific to a region or a time period. You don't have to like both kinds of games, you don't have to financially support both kinds of games, but you should respect that there are people who do enjoy one or the other (or both) and allow them to do so.

I'm trying to see in where I wrote that I was stating otherwise.

I specifically stated that "I" avoided those games. Not once did I state that they were invalid play styles or that they shouldn't exist.

If I did? please point to it? Thanks. Or at least read the post that I was responding to get some context before you bring the strawman attack? Thanks.

 

[Minigiant]

I would ask: why wouldn’t there be?

Are new players really a monolithic group?

boardgames are popular now and it seems rather than crowding older games out, newer games create more options.

I find that Half of OSR thinks all new players are the same and doesn't sell to them nor cater to them.

And the other half sees that new players can come from various angles and attempts to slice them off a piece.

 

[Campbell]

In general I think all this thinking about what new players want or need as if they were some monolith is not really helpful. I think it's best to just make the most accessible possible version of the sort of game you are striving to make.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's really weird to watch Combat as Performance spring into being as a back-handed insult to people who don't like high lethality and then come into serious analytical usage over the course of like three pages.

 

[kenada]

It's really weird to watch Combat as Performance spring into being as a back-handed insult to people who don't like high lethality and then come into serious analytical usage over the course of like three pages.

As I tried to explain the difference between “OSR” and “modern”, it struck me that there was an approach to combat other than the usual ones (combat as war, combat as sport). I did some searching, found nothing, and picked a name that seemed fitting. What would you propose? I don’t think pretending that it’s not its own thing does it any service. If it’s something distinct, it deserves to be recognized as such and discussed accordingly.