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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9406918" data-attributes="member: 7045072">The Old School Baroque designation is Marica's, I don't necessarily buy it fully, even though I count many of these designers friends and have been involved in a lot of the discussion of "Proceduralism".  I see some similarity in their work, but I'm not sure it's fully a unified design trend.  What I see is less an "OSB" trend and more a response to the "death" of the OSR. Wait a second before you get defensive. I don't mean you can't play OSR games.With the 2020's, and even more with the end of G+ the idea of the OSR as a singular scene or movement becomes an increasingly absurd proposition.  We already have the "professionalization" of the late OSR, which I arbitrarily mark at around 2017 with the release of Hot Springs Island or Maze of the Blue Medusa, but which is perhaps better characterized by a slew of single creator ultralight systems like Knave, Maze Rats, and ITO. Then even that shatters and a bunch of opposed or at least distinct scenes arise forming a sort of Post-OSR.  It's very much solidified by 2021 or so.The thing about the ultralights is that part of how they are so light is that they assume the players will have a basis of procedural/play style knowledge. This knowledge being the "OSR" play style - which of course is up for debate itself, especially now as a lot of revisionists are spending time trying to recontextualize it as "D&D before 1980", "AD&D RAW" or "No weird stuff" and such.So for ultralights, and I think even more by things like the FKR scene, they work great if everyone is on the same page with expectations and play style ... but they often fail when you just hand them to people who have different play styles and expectations. Without a supportive and semi-unified scene ultra-lights really have this issue.  Think of it as the difference between B/X and OSE. If you read Moldvay, 1/2 of the Basic book is examples, samples and instructions. OSE is just very clean mechanics. It's hard to play Moldvay as if it's a stereotypical 5E campaign (set-piece combats strung together by referee directed narrative) and not think maybe you're not doing it right.  Not so with OSE - there's no examples of play or samples so the newcomer often does what they know, and if that's coming from 5E the game can feel like boring, high-lethality version of 5E with too brutal a set of skill challenges.In 2011 - 2018 or so you could easily go to an existent OSR community and play games, get the basic ideas of how play worked and then just move forward... not so easy in 2024 because instead of a few entry points into a basically unified scene one has a mess of smaller Post-OSR scenes.  Games like Cairn manage alright because they have communities built around them ... but for a lot of people's ultralights there wasn't really one, so proceduralism becomes a way of teaching new players again, and its necessary because it's harder to find good answers or examples of the intended play style.</blockquote>

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