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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rob Kuntz" data-source="post: 8278935" data-attributes="member: 7015759">First I will state that I do not accept being grouped in the OSR mindset. I will  clarify this statement below.  I have stated this as far back to its foundation when vociferous voices within the community were attempting to lump designers and adherents of certain historical RPG lineages (thus on the OSR side or NOT on OSR side) into an undefined and, IMO, undefinable and disjointed group (sussed mostly by historical publications bearing their names, etc. or by merely raising one's hand and assenting). Now for my clarifications.  I am a game designer.  Period.  Full stop. Designers design games.  They adhere to philosophies in order to do so and they often challenge said philosophies, amend them and sometimes throw them out.  If they do not, they are not true designers.Thus, the philosophy that the OSR espouses is very narrow and self-limiting for one paramount reason alone:  That there is no one single pin-pointed or lasting game philosophy other than as noted in OD&D as making the game your own, change the rules, throw them out, invent new ones, etc. etc.  This philosophy has been perverted from its original expression by Gygax, Arneson and myself, into a concrete SCHOOL which is of itself a contradiction to the game's original elasticity in design and that was handed over to each individual DM for them to do as they wished with it.  Like many other human "movements" of this type it finally devolved from individual desires and unique expressions thereof to a collective calcification based upon statistical returns and tacit agreement of what it was as a singular group ideal (quite the opposite, by 180 degrees, of what it had born as).As there is no one true way to engage the original philosophy there can be no codification of what it is as a politicized movement, which I am afraid is what the current OSR suffers under.Note that this same philosophy is paramount and is reflected in every RPG to this very moment as a route from its past to present.  If it had not existed in the form as I claim it to be, as Gygax and Arneson claimed that it was, there would have been no further editions of D&D to present.  The crux is:  Fantasy is unlimited and so should be the systems that are created to express its infinite access points and scope.D&D has continued to evolve, but in the vast majority of cases I do not feel that the OSR has evolved.  There are vast panoramas of fantasy to be discovered but yet the object apparently remains to repeat what is known rather than evolving the system to continue to pull back the curtain to reveal the unknown.  This should be a cautionary tale for all designers and for all companies, small or large, pushing calcified positions as schools of thought normally do.This is not heresy, by the way.  It is a designer's view upon what he's been tasked with designing:   engaging the design for the resulting expression of Fantasy.</blockquote>

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