So I recently returned from a seminar on "How to make Youtube clickbait titles for fun & profit." And I have to tell you ... AWESOME! They told me about the seventeen tricks that I didn't know for making amazing titles ... and I DID NOT BELIEVE THE FIFTH ONE!!!
Anyway, I wanted to discuss the Old School Renaissance, or as the kewl kids call it, OSR. We often see it referred to it in passing here, but it's not often the subject of a full discussion started with a misleading and clickbait-y title. As always, I am here to serve! And by serve, I mean it in the same sense as the twenty-fourth episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone. Mmmmmm.... long pork.
I am easily distracted. So the OSR... as I will be detailing later in this essay, there are many aspects of it that I appreciate, but with a giant caveat- because at its core, I believe that the OSR is built on a throne of lies. And to understand why requires unpacking a fair amount- about how we understand history in general, how we understand OSR, and what the specific use of OSR is (assumedly unknowingly) doing to our perception of history, and why that matters. Which is ... yeah, a lot. So I hope you'll sit back, relax, and immediately start typing your angry opinion which you know to be true before reading all the words I am writing!
A. Home is where you heart is, so your real home is in your chest.
Look, I come not to bury OSR, but to praise it! Wait. Hold on. Does that not have the same meaning I think it does? I wish someone had told me that before I used it as my go-to for eulogies. I may have a lot of apologies to make. Ahem.
I do want to start this by providing a few bona fides and disclaimers that will be necessary- especially as I know that there are people that may be coming into this essay without knowing my posting history. I have a great familiarity and love for the TTRPGs of the 1970s and 1980s, and have written way too many essays and comments about them- and each of those comments and essays has way too many words. I truly love older rulesets, and have run modified versions of AD&D (1e) for more decades that I care to admit, and have played all of the older TSR rulesets. I also love indie games and run them often, including narrative games. Finally, I am a big proponent of FKR, and regularly create one-shots and play them.
Next, I have written about (and thought about, although if you've read my essays before, you know that they aren't synonymous) the issue of rules and rulings in current play and in the past. Perhaps most importantly for purposes of this essay, I have not only done a lot of my own research on how games were played in the 1970s, I have also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. Or, alternatively, I regularly consult scholarship on the subject. If you'd like to learn more about some of the issues I am going to discuss here, then I will suggest that you read a book (you know it's coming) called The Elusive Shift. But you probably won't.
All of this throat clearing is to say this- I am not writing this essay to say that OSR is bad because I am a reflexive love of 5e, or a hater of older rulesets or styles of play. Far from it. In fact, I am not even going to say that OSR is bad. Instead, this is about the specific issues I have with the way that OSR is presented, and why I have those issues.
B. Those who study history learn from the past in order to make new mistakes.
In order to get into the specifics of the issue I have with OSR, it is first necessary to tackle a much bigger subject. HISTORY. Like, all of it. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil ... dang it. This is what happens when you learn history from popular culture. But "all of history" is too big a topic, so let's provide an example-
You've been invited to a '60s party. So you put on your best hippie outfit, and channel your inner flower power vibe. You've got the look down perfectly. And you're feeling good about that, right? Now imagine as you're about to walk into that party, and BAMF you are suddenly transported to 1961 ... and Amarillo, Texas. You should be fine because, after all, you're already dressed for the 1960s! Right! Right? Right.....
Wrong. I hope I don't have to Snarfsplain this to you, but the popular image that took root of "the 1960s" is not what the 1960s were like. Hippies weren't a nationally recognized thing until 1967, and even then, it was very much a minority subculture. It was incredibly influential, and had massive influence into the 1970s (and arguably continuing until today) but it wasn't the 1960sˆ. Using "hippies" as a shorthand for the 1960s is simply a shortcut that became entrenched in culture that obscures more than it reveals.
If that doesn't work for you, think about music. Many people associate the "1970s" with disco, and the "1990s" with grunge. In both cases, thinking about it for more than a half-second reveals that neither is very accurate. The 1970s was a time of rock (from Led Zeppelin to the Eagles to Fleetwood Mac to Pink Floyd), Soul (Stevie Wonder) to the emergence of piano-playing stars (Elton John and Billy Joel) to what we now call Yacht Rock to the greatest band to ever exist, the Starland Vocal Band. Disco was MASSIVELY popular for three years at the end of the 1970s, but wasn't "the 1970s." As for the 1990s, grunge as a major musical influence in popular culture lasted from the end of 1991 to maybe 1996.
I already know that people are going to argue with me in the comments (Grunge isn't dead! I am still listening to it!!!11!!!) ... but I am providing this illustrative examples to bring you to the truth- actual history is messy and complicated, and trying to reduce the actual history to something that is simple and easy to understand ... well, at best, it flattens the complexity and nuances of what was actually happening. At worst, it turns the actual history into a caricature that can be employed to support an argument.
C. God makes problems just to see what you can stand just before you do as the devil pleases.
If you've made it this far, you probably have two questions. First, what terrible thing did you do in a past life that put you here? But second- "Um, what is OSR, anyway?" And to that I answer ... "That is a great question!" Yeah. So here's the thing- I can't really tell you. I did a lot of research for this, and a fair amount of the research for this required that I read a lot of manifestos. SO. MANY. MANIFESTOS. One thing I can tell you about OSR is that the people involved love manifestos. There may have been a five-year plan in there as well, but it was lost amidst the manifestos. And the problem I kept coming across is that ... a lot of the manifestos had contrary advice. One manifesto talked about how balance was for losers, another than balance was awesome (I am paraphrasing). And so on. With that said, for illustrative purposes, I am going to use the opening from Principia Apocrypha -
(underlining and bolded added by me for emphasis). I am going to start with this- I rather like a lot of what is in Principia Apocrypha, including the fact that it does not call itself a manifesto. If you want to play that style of game, I think that this is a nice way of putting forth principles for that, especially for people who have no familiarity with that style. But (and this is a bigger but than Sir Mix-a-lot can imagine) ...it also happens to illustrate the exact problem I have with OSR with the sentence that I emphasized.
The 1970s were an incredibly creative and turbulent time in the RPG community. For example- three major groups in the early years of playing were the "wargamer crowd" (the people who were wargaming hobbyists before D&D and migrated over), the "Science Fiction crowd" (the people who were into Science Fiction, which was inclusive of fantasy at the time, and were early adopters), and the "college crowd" (since D&D and Tolkien were spreading like wildfire on college campuses). Due to the lack of the internet for communication and ... questionable rulesets ... the amount of creativity and the variety of different ways to play the game were everywhere. Put another way- for every example of "back in the day, they played it this way," you will find another example of "no, they actually played it that way." But let's use some common examples-
1. Metagaming. Gygaxian skilled play was the default that many people assumed, which meant that player knowledge, not character knowledge, was paramount. And yet, it was common to see exhortations in the rules for the DM not to let players know things, and, further, large contingents of players played it more as a roleplaying game - playing "in character" - than they did as a test of their own skill.
2. Lethality. On the one hand, you had the famous MIT meat grinder dungeon. On the other hand, in 1976, you already had Tim Kask writing in the foreword to Gods, Demigods, and Heroes that they were tired of "Monty Hall" campaigns and 40+ level characters.
3. Following the rules/Rules Complexity. Sure, some tables followed (or tried to follow) the rules, but not even Gygax followed his own rules. All rules were, to a greater or lesser extent, optional. And rule complexity went all the way from people (usually the wargaming crowd) crufting on rules until it was more esoteric than The Battle for North Africa to people (the SciFi crowd) stripping away rules until it was closer to LARP.
4. Dice? While the first publication of a diceless game wasn't until the '90s, reports of diceless resolution for D&D go back to the mid '70s.
5. Randomized and using tables? It would be trivial to point to the explosion of modules, or ... Gygax's own use of modules (that were later published), but while it is certainly accurate that some tables generated random elements on the fly- that was far from the norm.
I could keep going on ... but I hope I don't have to. Instead, before moving to the next section, I will leave you with the following thought puzzle to illustrate the issue-
Imagine it's 2076. You are relieved, because I'm likely dead and you don't have to keep reading these long and pointless essays. But more importantly, there's a movement. And with the movement, there are manifestos... so many manifestos. And they say, "Welcome to the New School Renaissance! We're going to tell you how everyone played in 2026, so you can play exactly the same way." You might have questions- after all, 5e isn't played like Ten Candles isn't played like Blades in the Dark ... but even if it was just 5e ... how accurate is that? Moreover, I'd argue that even confining ourselves to D&D, because the game had just started, because the rules were so ... special... back then, and because there was no way to communicate like we have with the internet to standardize, it was a lot more varied.
But why does this matter?
D. For someone half as smart, you'd be a work of art.
So this is where I get into the important distinction, and why my clickbait-y title ... actually expressed my true feelings. I love a lot of the things that OSR is doing. As someone who loves the older rule sets, I like that they are looking back at the older rules. I like that they are trying to understand why, for example, "gold for XP" affects the style of play. I like that they are incorporating FKR elements, and they are making new games with older sensibilities but more modern rules. LIKE LIKE LIKE! Heck, I also like that they are contributing to, and pushing back on, the lethality debate.
I don't like all the manifestos, but ... I get it. They are trying to be avant garde. To push a movement. To stand athwart the current trends of the RPG world, and shout, "I have manifesto explaining that the world doesn't warp to the party, mmmmkay!" But I don't like that they are claiming the authority of the past to do so.
That's the distinction, for me. See, I love the old games. But I know two things- first, that the games were actually played (second-order design) in so many amazing, wonderful, and various ways that are not reflected in OSR. Second? Gygax did not come down from Mt. Arneson with a bunch of tablets (and each tablet had 100 tables), fully formed to perfection, to teach us the one true way to game.
What OSR is doing is simply claiming a patchwork of styles, some of which were common in the '70s, and some of them ... not so much, but using the authority of an imagined past to add legitimacy to the current project. Which is a profoundly reactionary project. Not just because it misrepresents what the past was like- in both its glory and its messiness, but also because it tends to get mixed in with other elements that aren't present in the gameplay, or the time, but were added in later. I do not wish to tar OSR with a broad brush, but while doing research for this I noticed a ... certain trend... that I can only say seemed to add in the 1980s moral gloss of the RPGs for no reason. Let's just say that the '70s were different than the '80s.
That's ... really the point, isn't it? OSR isn't a re-discovery of how people actually played back then. There are people still playing today who started in the 1970s. Some of them play high lethality, and some of the low lethality. Instead, it's an argument as to how to have fun while playing, and should be made as such.
Anyway, I wanted to discuss the Old School Renaissance, or as the kewl kids call it, OSR. We often see it referred to it in passing here, but it's not often the subject of a full discussion started with a misleading and clickbait-y title. As always, I am here to serve! And by serve, I mean it in the same sense as the twenty-fourth episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone. Mmmmmm.... long pork.
I am easily distracted. So the OSR... as I will be detailing later in this essay, there are many aspects of it that I appreciate, but with a giant caveat- because at its core, I believe that the OSR is built on a throne of lies. And to understand why requires unpacking a fair amount- about how we understand history in general, how we understand OSR, and what the specific use of OSR is (assumedly unknowingly) doing to our perception of history, and why that matters. Which is ... yeah, a lot. So I hope you'll sit back, relax, and immediately start typing your angry opinion which you know to be true before reading all the words I am writing!
A. Home is where you heart is, so your real home is in your chest.
Look, I come not to bury OSR, but to praise it! Wait. Hold on. Does that not have the same meaning I think it does? I wish someone had told me that before I used it as my go-to for eulogies. I may have a lot of apologies to make. Ahem.
I do want to start this by providing a few bona fides and disclaimers that will be necessary- especially as I know that there are people that may be coming into this essay without knowing my posting history. I have a great familiarity and love for the TTRPGs of the 1970s and 1980s, and have written way too many essays and comments about them- and each of those comments and essays has way too many words. I truly love older rulesets, and have run modified versions of AD&D (1e) for more decades that I care to admit, and have played all of the older TSR rulesets. I also love indie games and run them often, including narrative games. Finally, I am a big proponent of FKR, and regularly create one-shots and play them.
Next, I have written about (and thought about, although if you've read my essays before, you know that they aren't synonymous) the issue of rules and rulings in current play and in the past. Perhaps most importantly for purposes of this essay, I have not only done a lot of my own research on how games were played in the 1970s, I have also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. Or, alternatively, I regularly consult scholarship on the subject. If you'd like to learn more about some of the issues I am going to discuss here, then I will suggest that you read a book (you know it's coming) called The Elusive Shift. But you probably won't.
All of this throat clearing is to say this- I am not writing this essay to say that OSR is bad because I am a reflexive love of 5e, or a hater of older rulesets or styles of play. Far from it. In fact, I am not even going to say that OSR is bad. Instead, this is about the specific issues I have with the way that OSR is presented, and why I have those issues.
B. Those who study history learn from the past in order to make new mistakes.
In order to get into the specifics of the issue I have with OSR, it is first necessary to tackle a much bigger subject. HISTORY. Like, all of it. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil ... dang it. This is what happens when you learn history from popular culture. But "all of history" is too big a topic, so let's provide an example-
You've been invited to a '60s party. So you put on your best hippie outfit, and channel your inner flower power vibe. You've got the look down perfectly. And you're feeling good about that, right? Now imagine as you're about to walk into that party, and BAMF you are suddenly transported to 1961 ... and Amarillo, Texas. You should be fine because, after all, you're already dressed for the 1960s! Right! Right? Right.....
Wrong. I hope I don't have to Snarfsplain this to you, but the popular image that took root of "the 1960s" is not what the 1960s were like. Hippies weren't a nationally recognized thing until 1967, and even then, it was very much a minority subculture. It was incredibly influential, and had massive influence into the 1970s (and arguably continuing until today) but it wasn't the 1960sˆ. Using "hippies" as a shorthand for the 1960s is simply a shortcut that became entrenched in culture that obscures more than it reveals.
If that doesn't work for you, think about music. Many people associate the "1970s" with disco, and the "1990s" with grunge. In both cases, thinking about it for more than a half-second reveals that neither is very accurate. The 1970s was a time of rock (from Led Zeppelin to the Eagles to Fleetwood Mac to Pink Floyd), Soul (Stevie Wonder) to the emergence of piano-playing stars (Elton John and Billy Joel) to what we now call Yacht Rock to the greatest band to ever exist, the Starland Vocal Band. Disco was MASSIVELY popular for three years at the end of the 1970s, but wasn't "the 1970s." As for the 1990s, grunge as a major musical influence in popular culture lasted from the end of 1991 to maybe 1996.
I already know that people are going to argue with me in the comments (Grunge isn't dead! I am still listening to it!!!11!!!) ... but I am providing this illustrative examples to bring you to the truth- actual history is messy and complicated, and trying to reduce the actual history to something that is simple and easy to understand ... well, at best, it flattens the complexity and nuances of what was actually happening. At worst, it turns the actual history into a caricature that can be employed to support an argument.
C. God makes problems just to see what you can stand just before you do as the devil pleases.
If you've made it this far, you probably have two questions. First, what terrible thing did you do in a past life that put you here? But second- "Um, what is OSR, anyway?" And to that I answer ... "That is a great question!" Yeah. So here's the thing- I can't really tell you. I did a lot of research for this, and a fair amount of the research for this required that I read a lot of manifestos. SO. MANY. MANIFESTOS. One thing I can tell you about OSR is that the people involved love manifestos. There may have been a five-year plan in there as well, but it was lost amidst the manifestos. And the problem I kept coming across is that ... a lot of the manifestos had contrary advice. One manifesto talked about how balance was for losers, another than balance was awesome (I am paraphrasing). And so on. With that said, for illustrative purposes, I am going to use the opening from Principia Apocrypha -
What is Old School Style Play?
A concise definition is quite difficult and subjective, but I like how Ben Milton characterizes it here:These elements were present in the early years of the hobby.
(underlining and bolded added by me for emphasis). I am going to start with this- I rather like a lot of what is in Principia Apocrypha, including the fact that it does not call itself a manifesto. If you want to play that style of game, I think that this is a nice way of putting forth principles for that, especially for people who have no familiarity with that style. But (and this is a bigger but than Sir Mix-a-lot can imagine) ...it also happens to illustrate the exact problem I have with OSR with the sentence that I emphasized.
The 1970s were an incredibly creative and turbulent time in the RPG community. For example- three major groups in the early years of playing were the "wargamer crowd" (the people who were wargaming hobbyists before D&D and migrated over), the "Science Fiction crowd" (the people who were into Science Fiction, which was inclusive of fantasy at the time, and were early adopters), and the "college crowd" (since D&D and Tolkien were spreading like wildfire on college campuses). Due to the lack of the internet for communication and ... questionable rulesets ... the amount of creativity and the variety of different ways to play the game were everywhere. Put another way- for every example of "back in the day, they played it this way," you will find another example of "no, they actually played it that way." But let's use some common examples-
1. Metagaming. Gygaxian skilled play was the default that many people assumed, which meant that player knowledge, not character knowledge, was paramount. And yet, it was common to see exhortations in the rules for the DM not to let players know things, and, further, large contingents of players played it more as a roleplaying game - playing "in character" - than they did as a test of their own skill.
2. Lethality. On the one hand, you had the famous MIT meat grinder dungeon. On the other hand, in 1976, you already had Tim Kask writing in the foreword to Gods, Demigods, and Heroes that they were tired of "Monty Hall" campaigns and 40+ level characters.
3. Following the rules/Rules Complexity. Sure, some tables followed (or tried to follow) the rules, but not even Gygax followed his own rules. All rules were, to a greater or lesser extent, optional. And rule complexity went all the way from people (usually the wargaming crowd) crufting on rules until it was more esoteric than The Battle for North Africa to people (the SciFi crowd) stripping away rules until it was closer to LARP.
4. Dice? While the first publication of a diceless game wasn't until the '90s, reports of diceless resolution for D&D go back to the mid '70s.
5. Randomized and using tables? It would be trivial to point to the explosion of modules, or ... Gygax's own use of modules (that were later published), but while it is certainly accurate that some tables generated random elements on the fly- that was far from the norm.
I could keep going on ... but I hope I don't have to. Instead, before moving to the next section, I will leave you with the following thought puzzle to illustrate the issue-
Imagine it's 2076. You are relieved, because I'm likely dead and you don't have to keep reading these long and pointless essays. But more importantly, there's a movement. And with the movement, there are manifestos... so many manifestos. And they say, "Welcome to the New School Renaissance! We're going to tell you how everyone played in 2026, so you can play exactly the same way." You might have questions- after all, 5e isn't played like Ten Candles isn't played like Blades in the Dark ... but even if it was just 5e ... how accurate is that? Moreover, I'd argue that even confining ourselves to D&D, because the game had just started, because the rules were so ... special... back then, and because there was no way to communicate like we have with the internet to standardize, it was a lot more varied.
But why does this matter?
D. For someone half as smart, you'd be a work of art.
So this is where I get into the important distinction, and why my clickbait-y title ... actually expressed my true feelings. I love a lot of the things that OSR is doing. As someone who loves the older rule sets, I like that they are looking back at the older rules. I like that they are trying to understand why, for example, "gold for XP" affects the style of play. I like that they are incorporating FKR elements, and they are making new games with older sensibilities but more modern rules. LIKE LIKE LIKE! Heck, I also like that they are contributing to, and pushing back on, the lethality debate.
I don't like all the manifestos, but ... I get it. They are trying to be avant garde. To push a movement. To stand athwart the current trends of the RPG world, and shout, "I have manifesto explaining that the world doesn't warp to the party, mmmmkay!" But I don't like that they are claiming the authority of the past to do so.
That's the distinction, for me. See, I love the old games. But I know two things- first, that the games were actually played (second-order design) in so many amazing, wonderful, and various ways that are not reflected in OSR. Second? Gygax did not come down from Mt. Arneson with a bunch of tablets (and each tablet had 100 tables), fully formed to perfection, to teach us the one true way to game.
What OSR is doing is simply claiming a patchwork of styles, some of which were common in the '70s, and some of them ... not so much, but using the authority of an imagined past to add legitimacy to the current project. Which is a profoundly reactionary project. Not just because it misrepresents what the past was like- in both its glory and its messiness, but also because it tends to get mixed in with other elements that aren't present in the gameplay, or the time, but were added in later. I do not wish to tar OSR with a broad brush, but while doing research for this I noticed a ... certain trend... that I can only say seemed to add in the 1980s moral gloss of the RPGs for no reason. Let's just say that the '70s were different than the '80s.
That's ... really the point, isn't it? OSR isn't a re-discovery of how people actually played back then. There are people still playing today who started in the 1970s. Some of them play high lethality, and some of the low lethality. Instead, it's an argument as to how to have fun while playing, and should be made as such.
