As kids who grew up with
Dungeons & Dragons have gotten older,
they've entered a new phase of gaming. These adult gamers now have enough influence as customers and game designers to return tabletop gaming to its roots. But if their efforts to bring back a past industry end up shaping the future of gaming, is it really Old School anymore?
The Four Year Cycle
To explain the popularity of the OSR, it's helpful to understand what changed about gamers: they grew up. In the early days of gaming, the time available to early role-players was much more limited, as
Kenneth Hite explains:
Role-playing gamers traditionally enter the hobby around ages 12 or 13, before high school. They play until age 16 (dropping out with the availability of a car, and the concomitant expansion of available competing activities), re-enter the hobby in college (when mobility and choice are artificially constrained again) and drift out of it after graduation, marriage, childbirth, or other life changes. By this understanding, a typical gaming group lasts only four years at the most...
That cycle is no longer true. The "graduation, marriage, childbirth," etc. has its own duration, and once life settled in older gamers rediscovered the role-playing games they loved. Their limited time made them crave games they knew, the ones they grew up with. Mike Mearls, Senior Manager of
Dungeons & Dragons Research and Design,
outlined the dilemma facing today's gamers on a PAX East Panel:
I believe that's what's really happening to tabletop roleplaying, is that it used to be a hobby of not playing the game you want to play. And there are so many games now that you can play to fill all those hours of gaming, you can actually game now, and that what's happening is that RPGs needed that time, we, a GM or DM needed that time to create the adventure or create a campaign, a player needed that time to create a character, allocate skill ranks and come up with a background, and come up, you know, write out your three-page essay on who your character was before the campaign. That time is getting devoured, that time essentially I think is gone, that you could play stuff that lets you then eventually play a game or you can just play a game. And people are just playing games now.
This nostalgia fueled the creation of many imitators, some successful, some not -- and the brand owners of D&D had a sometimes contentious relationship with their fans, as well shall see.
Love D&D, but Don't LOVE D&D
Budding game designers have always tinkered with the games of the past. Throughout the 90s, a lot of energy went into improving
Dungeons & Dragons without really breaking fully away from it. Ron Edwards called them "fantasy heartbreakers,"
which he described as:
...truly impressive in terms of the drive, commitment, and personal joy that's evident in both their existence and in their details - yet they are also teeth-grindingly frustrating, in that, like their counterparts from the late 70s, they represent but a single creative step from their source: old-style D&D. And unlike those other games, as such, they were doomed from the start.
One of the reasons "fantasy heartbreakers" existed was because there was no legal means for aspiring game designers to easily launch their own variants. Frank Mentzer,
the father of the BECMI version of D&D, explained to me in an interview:
In the Bad Old Days, TSR filed a lot legal actions against fans who tried to publish things that, in the opinion of TSR's lawyers, infringed on their property. But in 2000, WotC created the "Open Game License" (OGL), which changed all that. If another company published an adventure for the D&D game and simply included that License (a one-page thing), they didn't get sued. Wizards didn't have to beat up their fans to appease the lawyers!
Eventually, the tide turned as gamers became less interested in improving on D&D and more in recapturing the elements of the game they enjoyed. They also had a back catalog of content they wanted to play again, so compatibility was paramount. The proliferation of older gamers and the Open Game License (OGL) primed the market for a gaming renaissance. What, exactly, that renaissance constitutes is open to interpretation.
What's OSR Anyway?
Shannon Appelcline defined the OSR in
Designers & Dragons:
The OSR in OSRIC stands for “Old School Reference.” The grassroots movement that it generated also uses the abbreviation OSR, but with a different meaning: usually “Old School Renaissance,” but maybe “Old School Revival.” Some people also say that OSR can mean “Open Source Rules,” since that was the initial intent of OSRIC — though this idea has faded in recent years.
Mentzer defined OSR a little more broadly:
Whether the "R" in OSR is Renaissance, Revival, Resurgence, or something else, the "OSR" is simply a Re-appreciation of the simplicity of the original games.
Whatever the definition, the sheer number of OSR-style products in the early aughts meant it was more than a passing fad. Eventually, the OSR became so powerful that it began shaping how designers thought about game design, most specifically the latest incarnation of
Dungeons & Dragons. Mentzer explained what changed when I interviewed him:
The evolution and changes in the D&D game have often increased what we designers call 'granularity' -- the level of detail at which you handle combat and other events. But when it's more granular, it takes more time to resolve all those details, and that means a slower game. This is neither right nor wrong, but is definitely a Style. If a player learns a 'newschool' game and is happy with it, great; I'm absolutely in favor of ANY game that we play face-to-face, in contrast to the online or computer game experience. If that player is then introduced to a less-granular game with faster play, he or she may incline toward it, and often that way points toward Old School.
The OGL would provide designers a means of expressing all of these play styles and more.
Enter the OGL
Ryan Dancey, VP at Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) leading
Dungeons & Dragons at the time, launched the OGL with the intent of ensuring
D&D would live on in perpetuity. Citing the
Theory of Network Externalities, Dancey envisioned a license that would bolster sales of the main
Dungeons & Dragons rule books by encouraging more players to play ANY role-playing game. Dancey called this the Skaff effect,
named after game designer Skaff Elias:
All marketing and sales activity in a hobby gaming genre eventually contributes to the overall success of the market share leader in that genre.
Using the OGL, WOTC's efforts opened the way for game companies to take on the risky costs of creating adventures, while supporting the sales of the three core rule books that made up
Dungeons & Dragons: the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. By opening the license to small developers, the gaming scene exploded, with more content than ever before. In addition to the sales benefits to WOTC, Dancey also hoped that the OGL would encourage innovation:
The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive -- someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.
This allowed some interesting divergent paths for fantasy role-playing, but perhaps not in the way Dancey expected.
Chad Perrin explains:
The result was growing troubles in the implicit partnership between WotC and the publishers that produced competing works. In an effort to differentiate their products from the WotC products that were eating into their markets, some of these publishers (e.g. Crafty Games and Green Ronin Publishing) started producing their own variations on the d20 System for fantasy RPGs, diluting the core game market for WotC in an attempt to remain solvent in the face of an invasion of the niches WotC had created for them by WotC itself.
The advent of the Fourth Edition of
Dungeons & Dragons was a turning point for the OGL, fragmenting fans of the game. Perrin divided them into three groups:
One was the old school, "grognard" market that preferred D&D editions prior to 3E, often the older the better; another was the d20 System market, a mix of people who started with 3E and liked it there and those who passed through two, three, even four or so major D&D product line upheavals and found 3E the best so far in a steady improvement lifecycle; and the 4E gamers, who found its tactical complexity and balance superior to anything that came before and prioritized that higher than other aspects of the D&D game that had previously been at least equal partners with the tactical aspects since the original D&D emerged from the Chainmail miniatures game in the '70s.
The "grognard" market would go on to strongly influence future games by tailoring the OGL to recreate the kind of games they enjoyed as kids. Mearls
explains what he thinks went right and wrong:
In the end, it failed to achieve the same type of success as open source software. In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software.
The OSR wasn't about "rapid, constant improvement in the quality of rules" but rather what rules they could remove to mimic the feel of earlier editions. The OSR ended up looking more backward than forward. That doesn't take away from the remarkable innovation that the OGL engendered. Marty Walser
credits Dancey and the OGL for the OSR's success:
Without Ryan Dancey, it is uncertain whether the OSR (Old School Revival) movement would still exist... Or at the very least, it would look nothing like it does today. Ryan Dancey made it possible for all of us to play D&D compatible games until eternity, because regardless of what happens to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game will forever live on.
Making Peace With the Past
One of the ongoing challenges that TSR faced was the fragmentation of its player base between different settings and different editions,
as described by Allen Rausch:
The many settings also contributed to something called "Brand Dilution." The original Dungeons & Dragons brand stood for something. You knew essentially what you were getting when you bought a D&D product. All of these new settings began to play havoc with the rule sets and philosophy of the game. As the settings grew more popular, they began to diverge from one another, advancing along their chosen philosophical paths, essentially becoming their own separate games. In not too many years, players had stopped identifying themselves as D&D players and were instead identifying themselves by the setting they played in.
With the advent of the Internet, publishers no longer had control over the obsolescence of a game -- games could live on forever in digital format. WOTC's acquisition of TSR and the D&D brand paved the way for new editions, but it also inherited TSR's baggage. WOTC was faced with a choice: continue waging TSR's battle against the proliferation of D&D clones or embrace them.
The OGL, modeled after open software design, was a key part of how content was shared on the Internet. But the OGL didn't work out that way,
as Mearls explains:
There was a time when I pictured an active community of designers, all grinding away on D&D to make it better. I think that happened, but only in a fragmentary manner. Some people wanted levels gone, others wanted hit points fixed (with "fixed" defined differently for each group). At the end of the day, most people wanted books of monsters, character options, and adventures. Products either stuck with the baseline or created a new baseline for a fragment of the original audience to then stick to.
It took some time, but eventually the open-design thinking seeped into the development of the Fifth Edition of D&D -- undoubtedly influenced by the fact that Mearls' gaming cred was grounded in dozens of OGL-powered products. He explained in an interview:
I think that if we do our jobs right, that fragmentation will give way to a shared language like you saw with the SRD and the games it helped spawn. In terms of game designers, I think that, again, if we do this right they’ll have a nice starting point to tinker with in creating their own ideas.
WOTC helped fuel the OSR by re-releasing the
original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set and
reprinting the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tomes. It was a sea change for the D&D brand. WOTC recognized that there was a market for older products and even supported them by
releasing older editions of D&D in PDF format. Steve Wieck, COO of OneBookShelf, Inc., shared with me in an interview:
We have been in constant dialogue with Wizards every year since we opened our virtual doors. Granted that from 2009 to 2011 there wasn’t a lot of dialogue to have, but as the next edition was announced and Wizards has geared up support for all prior editions, we started having constructive dialogue with the team at Wizards last year. It was a jaw-dropper for me when Wizards let us know that they had already collected hundreds upon hundreds of classic titles and had them all re-digitized at high resolution. Wizards had not been idle on the digital product front.
Since WOTC's embrace of its digital back catalog, there have been many OSR variants, each encompassing a different style and edition of past versions of D&D. One of the more popular is OSRIC, as Appelcline explained:
Today most people mark the release of OSRIC (2006) as the start of the grassroots OSR movement. This was the first actual retroclone; it tried to specifically recreate a past game system (AD&D) rather than just recreating its feel — as Castles & Crusades had. In addition, OSRIC wasn’t a commercial release. It was instead a free download that was mainly intended to give publishers a legal basis for publishing AD&D modules.
OSRIC was just the beginning.
Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord Games streamlines the OGL rules so they are more in the spirit of the Original
Dungeons & Dragons boxed set.
HackMaster by Kenzer and Company continued a series of compatible rules for
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Mentzer explains how the OGL helped the proliferation:
That gave rise to various reincarnations of the original games -- OD&D, Holmes, Moldvay, BECMI, 1st and 2nd edition Advanced, and others (oft called 'clones', though they're not really) -- and now every fan can publish legally, just by including that OGL (and following its rules of course). Before those 'clones', you had to pay out $100 or more to get those out-of-print rules, but now these reincarnations are available for far more reasonable prices, and are sometimes even free.
Appelcline adds to the OSR list:
The most successful retroclones have probably been: OSRIC (2006), a recreation of AD&D; and Labyrinth Lord (2007), a retroclone for Tom Moldvay’s original Basic D&D. However, there are numerous other retroclones on the market, all published by small companies and sometimes even given away for free. Among the more prominent are: Dark Dungeons (2010), a D&D Rules Cyclopedia clone; Mutant Future (2008), a Labyrinth Lord variant intended to recreate Gamma World play; and Swords & Wizardry (2008), an OD&D clone.
D&D Returns to its Roots...Again
The success of the OSR has been unprecedented. In fact, it's so popular that Appelcline argues it's not even a movement anymore:
Beginning in 2012, some fans have suggested that the OSR is dead — not because it’s faded out, but because it’s succeeded. Fans on blogs have become companies publishing print products, while larger publishers like Goodman Games have proven very successful with their own OSR releases. Even Wizards of the Coast seems to be moving toward the OSR with its AD&D-like D&D Next and with releases of classic PDFs on
Dungeon Masters Guild -.
The announcement of Fifth Edition
Dungeons & Dragons had a conciliatory tone that focused on bringing fans of all editions back into the fold. Robert Schwalb, a designer on the development team,
shared how they plan to accomplish a grand unification:
Our primary goal is to produce a rules set that speaks to every incarnation of D&D. So if you are a diehard BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia enthusiast or have embraced 4th edition, loved 2nd edition, 3rd edition, or never moved on from 1st edition, we’re creating this game for you. Imagine a game where you can play the version of D&D you love best. And then imagine everyone plays at the same table, in the same adventure. We aim to make a universal game system that lets you play the game in whatever way, whatever style, with whatever focus you want, whether you want to kick down doors and kill monsters, engage in high intrigue, intense roleplaying, or simply to immerse yourself in a shared world. We’re creating a game where the mechanics can be as complex or as light as you want them. We’re creating the game you want to play.
Just how much the Fifth Edition was influenced by the OSR was answered in
Mike Mearls' Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit:
...It’s really about getting back to the core roots of RPGs, and seeing how things changed for both the better and worse over 40 years. There are a lot of assumptions that became embedded in RPG design that have been unchallenged. Looking back and really studying RPGs – both new and old – helped give us a sense of what we had to keep and what prior elements of the game needed to be re-emphasized...The concept behind the OSR – lighter rules, more flexibility, leaning on the DM as referee – were important. We learned a lot playing each edition of D&D and understanding the strengths and weaknesses each brought to the table. Similar to the OSR, I think indie games bring lighter rules via focus and an emphasis on storytelling to the table that we learned a lot from. While a traditional RPG like D&D by necessity has a much broader focus than traditional indie games, there’s a lot to learn there in being clear and giving people a good, starting goal or framework to work within. For OSR stuff, we drew directly on older editions of D&D.
OSR-style games currently capture over 9 percent of the RPG market
according to ENWorld's Hot Role-playing Games. If you consider the Fifth Edition of
Dungeons & Dragons to be part of that movement, it's nearly 70 percent of the entire RPG market.
The OSR has gone mainstream. If the OSR stands for Old School Renaissance, it seems the Renaissance is over: D&D, in all of its previous editions, is now how most of us play our role-playing games.
Any good designer is constantly looking at other games, both new and old. This isn't exclusive to 5E, nor was WotC's 5E influence exclusive to OSR or narrowly focused on OSR. The design team had been playing a very diverse set of games over that design cycle (usually playing each fairly briefly) and their team has design experience with a number of systems and approaches. 
