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

[Retreater]

So, assuming you folks do OSR AD&D, why? What’s your path and POV?

I GM Swords and Wizardry. It's sort of a combination of AD&D and white box D&D. (There are assassins but no half orcs.) The rules PDF is free if you'd like to have a look. There's a lot of support material if you like that sort of thing (adventures, setting books, etc.)
So I started running it for a few reasons. The group I was GMing (in 5e) would regularly let the rules get in the way of their fun. We also started playing on a VTT, which was slowing down the gameplay. Then also, I wanted to start writing a big OSR adventure for publication, and they were interested in playtesting.
What initially interested me in OSR was Pathfinder. It just became too rules heavy for my taste. I tried in vain to get my group (back then) into Castles & Crusades, but they were "Pathfinder for Life" (in fact some of them are only now considering 5e).
But where am I with the OSR now? I'm running two 5e games, one PF2 game, and playing in an Old School Essentials game. I'll go back to OSR when everyone is ready.
There's not a "best system" to me. It depends on what the group wants at the time.

 

[kenada]

So, assuming you folks do OSR AD&D, why? What’s your path and POV?

I came about things kind of backwards. I can’t say I’ve ever been particularly interested in story arc play. My first D&D was 3e, but the group occasionally confused things with 2e, and the campaign was a more old-school style where we’d roll up characters in an establish homebrew setting rather than go play through some particular story. Consequently, I more or less missed the shift to story arc play (à la Dragonlance). However, I’d say my conscious shift to embracing OSR-style play got going when started reading Grognardia. I found the stories of Dwimmermount fascinating, and I was intrigued by the discussions of various old-school editions of D&D.

That influenced how I GM a game, but we didn’t switch to an actual OSR system until very recently — last winter. We gave Old-School Essentials a shot. We used the advanced fantasy genre rules because I wanted the extra options for my players, but what I really wanted was separate race and class (because my setting is not humanocentric). Alas, it didn’t work out. OSE went too far in direction my players weren’t as interested in going. However, we pivoted to Worlds Without Number, which I’d describe as OSR-adjacent if not OSR. WWN uses B/X as a chassis, but it does its own thing in many places.

As for why, I think that comes down to the style of play one prefers. Like I said earlier, I never got into story arc play. It’s just not something that resonates with me. I prefer Story Now or the Right to Dream. Let’s make characters and see what happens (whether that’s telling their stories through play or doing things and seeing what the consequences are). I can do what I want in newer systems, but they tend to make a lot of assumptions about what you intend to do, which can get in the way. There are also issues of system aesthetics.

I don’t see value in having unified mechanics for the sake of having unified mechanics. I don’t think it simplifies the game. Instead of having a player-known chance of succeeding, you go through a bunch of steps to derive a value (3e), or the GM decides on one that’s appropriate for the challenge (post-3e, but also 3e). You either communicate that to the players, or they get to roll and wait on the answer. It slows down the game, and the progression treadmill functionally negates any growth the characters have experienced. I also don’t like the extra burden of having to design around difficulty classes and skills. I’d rather just write down what something is and let a solution emerge during play.

DCs aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. WWN does feature roll against difficulty for skill checks, but the way it treats skills is very different from the way that non-OSR games tend to treat them. Skills are just for exceptional circumstances (you should never have a PC roll where it could make them look incompetent at their role in life), and most ad hoc DCs should be 8. Assuming that PCs are competent strikes me as a very OSR approach to skills. One of the complaints you frequently see is that a skill system reduces the options PCs have for solving a problem because now they are constrained by mechanics, but WWN tries to keep that from getting in the way. There’s more of my thought son WWN over in the thread in the general forum here.

 

[Retreater]

My first D&D was 3e, but the group occasionally confused things with 2e, and the campaign was a more old-school style where we’d roll up characters in an establish homebrew setting rather than go play through some particular story. Consequently, I more or less missed the shift to story arc play (à la Dragonlance).

That's different than how I started with 2e. My 2e was extremely story-driven. I'd either re-write books as D&D adventures or structure my campaign like novels.
I think the reason for this was my education system. In school we learned how to write stories, but not really cooperative storytelling (and certainly not adventure design).
For me, it was the transition to 3rd edition that got us playing more "typical" D&D. The rules codification presented a standard of play. I started getting more published adventures (because the time spent with the rules increased greatly). It began to feel more like a simulation and game than a story. I continue to feel that to this day with WotC D&D. (Though it's better today than 20 years ago.)

 

[transmission89]

I came about things kind of backwards. I can’t say I’ve ever been particularly interested in story arc play. My first D&D was 3e, but the group occasionally confused things with 2e, and the campaign was a more old-school style where we’d roll up characters in an establish homebrew setting rather than go play through some particular story. Consequently, I more or less missed the shift to story arc play (à la Dragonlance). However, I’d say my conscious shift to embracing OSR-style play got going when started reading Grognardia. I found the stories of Dwimmermount fascinating, and I was intrigued by the discussions of various old-school editions of D&D.

That influenced how I GM a game, but we didn’t switch to an actual OSR system until very recently — last winter. We gave Old-School Essentials a shot. We used the advanced fantasy genre rules because I wanted the extra options for my players, but what I really wanted was separate race and class (because my setting is not humanocentric). Alas, it didn’t work out. OSE went too far in direction my players weren’t as interested in going. However, we pivoted to Worlds Without Number, which I’d describe as OSR-adjacent if not OSR. WWN uses B/X as a chassis, but it does its own thing in many places.

As for why, I think that comes down to the style of play one prefers. Like I said earlier, I never got into story arc play. It’s just not something that resonates with me. I prefer Story Now or the Right to Dream. Let’s make characters and see what happens (whether that’s telling their stories through play or doing things and seeing what the consequences are). I can do what I want in newer systems, but they tend to make a lot of assumptions about what you intend to do, which can get in the way. There are also issues of system aesthetics.

I don’t see value in having unified mechanics for the sake of having unified mechanics. I don’t think it simplifies the game. Instead of having a player-known chance of succeeding, you go through a bunch of steps to derive a value (3e), or the GM decides on one that’s appropriate for the challenge (post-3e, but also 3e). You either communicate that to the players, or they get to roll and wait on the answer. It slows down the game, and the progression treadmill functionally negates any growth the characters have experienced. I also don’t like the extra burden of having to design around difficulty classes and skills. I’d rather just write down what something is and let a solution emerge during play.

DCs aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. WWN does feature roll against difficulty for skill checks, but the way it treats skills is very different from the way that non-OSR games tend to treat them. Skills are just for exceptional circumstances (you should never have a PC roll where it could make them look incompetent at their role in life), and most ad hoc DCs should be 8. Assuming that PCs are competent strikes me as a very OSR approach to skills. One of the complaints you frequently see is that a skill system reduces the options PCs have for solving a problem because now they are constrained by mechanics, but WWN tries to keep that from getting in the way. There’s more of my thought son WWN over in the thread in the general forum here.

Ohh. What didn’t work out OSE wise for your group?!

 

[haakon1]

For me, I love the optional content. It clicked for me that I don’t have to use books x,y and z, I can just use certain elements from them. They aren’t to be eaten whole, they are a buffet of ideas you pick and choose from.

That’s a key concept, treating Non-Core books as optional and picking only specific rules from the rest.

My 3.5e is “pure Core”, except I use one Unearthed Arcana optional rule (Divine or Arcane Classes stack for Caster Level), support both PHB Ranger & a heavily modified Ranger with Favored Terrain (from PF1) and no spellcasting but extra feats, and allow players to pick Feats from the Netbook of Feats with approval. Oh, and the monsters as PC’s rules for combining class levels and monsters (I forget the name of the book) is “in”, but obscure & rarely used (1 NPC out of 18 party members in two active campaign).

 

[haakon1]

I also don’t like the extra burden of having to design around difficulty classes and skills. I’d rather just write down what something is and let a solution emerge during play.

For what it’s worth, I don’t “design around” Player skills or capabilities in running 3.5e. Yesterday, a party of 7 PC’s level 4-5, with their Minotaur friend, fought 6 Gargoyles. I knew it penciled out to “Very Difficult“, and I also knew there are only two magic weapons in the party. It was a tough fight, but my still fledgling players learned that the spell “Magic Weapon”, the Feat “Create Magic Arms & Armor”, etc. are important. And they won, barely.

Most of the time, I run old school style modules as written, converting rules from B/X, 1e, 2e, PF1, or 5e as needed. In this case, I added the encounter because it fit the place, I thought, and my players had asked for a tough fight.

 

[kenada]

That's different than how I started with 2e. My 2e was extremely story-driven. I'd either re-write books as D&D adventures or structure my campaign like novels.
I think the reason for this was my education system. In school we learned how to write stories, but not really cooperative storytelling (and certainly not adventure design).
For me, it was the transition to 3rd edition that got us playing more "typical" D&D. The rules codification presented a standard of play. I started getting more published adventures (because the time spent with the rules increased greatly). It began to feel more like a simulation and game than a story. I continue to feel that to this day with WotC D&D. (Though it's better today than 20 years ago.)

Thinking back on it, I think it was their homebrew setting that kept them in that “old-school” mode of play. Many of the people in that group had been playing since the ’80s (if not the beginning). They also did fantasy miniatures battles in that setting (called Falmurth) with other people, which had also been happening for a while. From what I understand, well after I left, they eventually started doing more adventure paths and stuff like that. What I remember from my time is that most of our play was setting up for the fights in the dungeon, we’d kick in the door, and then smash the monsters. It was a fairly large group (8~12 players), so anything else wasn’t really feasible. Any kind of narrative development was driven by one of the players, which in retrospect was functionally similar to a caller.

When I started doing my own thing, I decided I didn’t want just to have kick-in-the-door play. I was lazy, so the very first campaign I ran was almost entirely improvised. A story manifested out of it, which I built riffing off of things players would say. I also liked subverting things like alignment because my first group had a policy of only good characters, which they “enforced” by having the paladin checking for evil and killing any who were evil. That group also regarded CN as crazy (e.g., you have a random chance of jumping off any bridge you cross). A lot of my first campaign was rejecting that particular style. I took a break for a while after that campaign, and my particular group did a lot of different things (nWoD, Dogs in the Vineyard, Unknown Armies, Exalted). I think I started running again in ’05 or ’06. It was just before the release of 4e, and the player culture was way different.

I ran some adventures and did an aborted adventure path in 4e, but Pathfinder is really got into those. However, that’s also when I started reading Grognardia, which was very influential on how I approached things. At the time, I described my campaign as quasi-old-school. That Kingmaker game was the only AP we finished. I was down on it at the time, but it was definitely the best AP we played. We tried others after that, but eventually I decided I wanted to do my own thing. That began a sequence of various shorter campaigns and finally arriving at a true sandbox because my players kept saying they wanted an exploration-based game.

By that point, I’d been stealing ideas from B/X and OSE because of the Alexandrian’s articles on dungeon crawls. I’d been operating under a belief that my group wouldn’t like OSE, which is why I never pitched it. I was right in a way. My players did bounce of OSE, though it was not for the reasons I thought. I expected it would be system aesthetics, but I think it was more about how weak characters felt and how comparatively lacking their abilities were. However, that failure did open the door to trying WWN, which practically seems designed for my group. It has awesome GM tools and is easy to run, but it also has 3e-style character customization and action economy. There is a tactical element, but it’s really only concerned about using your actions smartly (e.g., taking advantage of snap attacks or swarm attacks) rather than shifting your position around the board and taking advantage of synergies (like 4e of PF2).

 

[kenada]

Ohh. What didn’t work out OSE wise for your group?!

I posted a bit about it in April in my OSE thread, but I don’t think that’s entirely it. They definitely didn’t like having to retreat, or how the combat went down, but I suspect they just weren’t all that interested in the system, and they were going along with it to keep their GM happy. I had dismissed it as an aesthetic preference, but I think my players like having customization and tactics, but not too much. Pathfinder 2e was a step too far. They just couldn’t keep up with its tactical expectations. You can shift those around a bit, but I burnt out on the system and didn’t want to bother with it anymore.

It was a random conversation here that prompted me to take a closer look into WWN, which I had initially dismissed because it added modifiers to skill checks and rolled against target difficulties. My reaction on our Slack when I started reading it: “Motherf——! World Without Number uses an XP system that’s basically the goals thing I used to use. ” The goals-based XP system I used in previous campaigns is something my players really liked. As I read through the way it handled customization and its action economy, WWN struck me as a game almost designed for my group. It would give them what they wanted (but not be too harsh in its expectations), and it would be easy on the GM to run while also giving me great tools for running a sandbox.

I pitched a one-shot later that day for early May, which I did with trepidation. I had assumed that trying a new system so soon after switching would not go over well, but I got an almost immediate and positive response. No one had even read WWN yet! People were just taking it on faith that it would be more to their tastes when I said it would be. After they did start reading it, they liked what they saw. We’ll see how that enthusiasm holds once I finish setting creation. It’s technically a retcon rather than a reboot, but things are ending up being fairly different (both geographically and politically). However, I did try to retain the things they’d said they liked, and I think this will result in a much more robust sandbox (while being easier on me).

 

[transmission89]

Thinking back on it, I think it was their homebrew setting that kept them in that “old-school” mode of play. Many of the people in that group had been playing since the ’80s (if not the beginning). They also did fantasy miniatures battles in that setting (called Falmurth) with other people, which had also been happening for a while. From what I understand, well after I left, they eventually started doing more adventure paths and stuff like that. What I remember from my time is that most of our play was setting up for the fights in the dungeon, we’d kick in the door, and then smash the monsters. It was a fairly large group (8~12 players), so anything else wasn’t really feasible. Any kind of narrative development was driven by one of the players, which in retrospect was functionally similar to a caller.

When I started doing my own thing, I decided I didn’t want just to have kick-in-the-door play. I was lazy, so the very first campaign I ran was almost entirely improvised. A story manifested out of it, which I built riffing off of things players would say. I also liked subverting things like alignment because my first group had a policy of only good characters, which they “enforced” by having the paladin checking for evil and killing any who were evil. That group also regarded CN as crazy (e.g., you have a random chance of jumping off any bridge you cross). A lot of my first campaign was rejecting that particular style. I took a break for a while after that campaign, and my particular group did a lot of different things (nWoD, Dogs in the Vineyard, Unknown Armies, Exalted). I think I started running again in ’05 or ’06. It was just before the release of 4e, and the player culture was way different.

I ran some adventures and did an aborted adventure path in 4e, but Pathfinder is really got into those. However, that’s also when I started reading Grognardia, which was very influential on how I approached things. At the time, I described my campaign as quasi-old-school. That Kingmaker game was the only AP we finished. I was down on it at the time, but it was definitely the best AP we played. We tried others after that, but eventually I decided I wanted to do my own thing. That began a sequence of various shorter campaigns and finally arriving at a true sandbox because my players kept saying they wanted an exploration-based game.

By that point, I’d been stealing ideas from B/X and OSE because of the Alexandrian’s articles on dungeon crawls. I’d been operating under a belief that my group wouldn’t like OSE, which is why I never pitched it. I was right in a way. My players did bounce of OSE, though it was not for the reasons I thought. I expected it would be system aesthetics, but I think it was more about how weak characters felt and how comparatively lacking their abilities were. However, that failure did open the door to trying WWN, which practically seems designed for my group. It has awesome GM tools and is easy to run, but it also has 3e-style character customization and action economy. There is a tactical element, but it’s really only concerned about using your actions smartly (e.g., taking advantage of snap attacks or swarm attacks) rather than shifting your position around the board and taking advantage of synergies (like 4e of PF2).

Why did the feel their abilities were lacking? You’ve always advocated well around the principles of old school improv over prescribed abilities. We’re your group not able to get into that mindset?

EDIT, nvm, you answered whilst I was posting.

 

[transmission89]

I posted a bit about it in April in my OSE thread, but I don’t think that’s entirely it. They definitely didn’t like having to retreat, or how the combat went down, but I suspect they just weren’t all that interested in the system, and they were going along with it to keep their GM happy. I had dismissed it as an aesthetic preference, but I think my players like having customization and tactics, but not too much. Pathfinder 2e was a step too far. They just couldn’t keep up with its tactical expectations. You can shift those around a bit, but I burnt out on the system and didn’t want to bother with it anymore.

It was a random conversation here that prompted me to take a closer look into WWN, which I had initially dismissed because it added modifiers to skill checks and rolled against target difficulties. My reaction on our Slack when I started reading it: “Motherf——! World Without Number uses an XP system that’s basically the goals thing I used to use. ” The goals-based XP system I used in previous campaigns is something my players really liked. As I read through the way it handled customization and its action economy, WWN struck me as a game almost designed for my group. It would give them what they wanted (but not be too harsh in its expectations), and it would be easy on the GM to run while also giving me great tools for running a sandbox.

I pitched a one-shot later that day for early May, which I did with trepidation. I had assumed that trying a new system so soon after switching would not go over well, but I got an almost immediate and positive response. No one had even read WWN yet! People were just taking it on faith that it would be more to their tastes when I said it would be. After they did start reading it, they liked what they saw. We’ll see how that enthusiasm holds once I finish setting creation. It’s technically a retcon rather than a reboot, but things are ending up being fairly different (both geographically and politically). However, I did try to retain the things they’d said they liked, and I think this will result in a much more robust sandbox (while being easier on me).

Yeah, that’s fair, not every edition is for everyone.

Im a bit harsher with my group in that I’ll only run what I want to play. They are free not to play or step up and DM themselves. As a whole, they’ve been pretty cool, I’ve lost a few players that couldn’t let go of 5e, but picked up a few more anyway, so it’s not really a loss for me. Those players aren’t playing at all at the moment whereas myself and my group are enjoying our game.