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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8281158" data-attributes="member: 70468">The trad/neo-trad stuff comes from <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html" target="_blank">this article</a>, 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.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 <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/is-there-room-in-modern-gaming-for-the-osr-to-bring-in-new-gamers.680045/post-8279188" target="_blank">session summary</a> 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.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 <a href="https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html" target="_blank">Principia Apocrypha</a> resonates with me.</blockquote>

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