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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 7680832" data-attributes="member: 5636">[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] Circa 1980 Hex and Counter were in the midst of a boom as big a tabletop roleplaying as you correctly pointed out it collapsed since. In my opinion it got hit harder than tabletop roleplaying by the changes in the market and technology. However today it is far from dead. Again thanks to the internet it have revived into a small niche hobby that uses both physical products and virtual tabletops like Aide de Camp and Vassal to the play older games and newer games.It is highly unlikely that it will ever be THE board game the way it was circa 1980 as the euro-games are far more suited to causal gamers. And thanks to clever game design many euro-games have the same depth of play as the hex and counter games. However euro-games are not simulations of the situations they depict. That where hex and counter games excel and why they have a niche today although it may be small.Now if this was the 1980/early 90s then the fact that hex and counter games make for good simulations would not be enough even to sustain a small niche. Because the cost of reaching the fans would be too high. However the Internet changes all that allowing niche hobbies like hex and counter wargame to flourish enough to keep it alive. Now the internet is still too young to see what happens to niches after a generation or two. So you may be right. However given how low the barriers to communication is I don't think any hobby will die out to the point where there no community surrounding it.You are right that it is a myth that games of the 70s and 80s were all simple to play and easy to prep. Where you are wrong is that the OSR was founded on that. The OSR was founded to play, publish and promote classic editions of D&D. Anything else depends on the group or individual you are talking about.What you are referring too is the influence of Matt Finch's a Quick Primer to Old School Gaming which can be gotten for free here. <a href="http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf</a>The super condensed version of what Matt was trying to explain was how you pick a lock or disarm a trap using the OD&D core books. For those of you who don't know there is no thief class or skill in the original three booklets of OD&D. The thief and it's attendant skills got added in the Greyhawk supplement.If you read OD&D core booklets you will see they had locks and traps so how was it dealt with? The primer is a combination of his own insights, talking to people who played back in the day, and more than a little jabbing at modern mechanics all in order to explain how to play OD&D, and other classic editions that were mechanics lite.The result proved to be highly influential and extrapolated to be a whole philosophy of playing RPGs with lite mechanics. Which proved to be popular in it's own right only for the OSR but for games like FATE, D&D 5e, and others. And of course people being people, many took it to be a accurate view of how RPGs were played back in the day. Which as you pointed out is a myth given that games like Space Opera, Chivalry and Sorcery, Dragonquest, etc all had their own following. AD&D has considerably more mechanics and details than it's OD&D progenitor.But remember the primary purpose of the primer was to give people practical and useful advice on how to run various classic editions. To get people to play those editions, not something that feel like those edition, not something that had the same themes like dungeon crawling, but the actual games themselves.And that what the heart of the OSR is about playing the actual games themselves.Now there is another foundation of the OSR and that is Open Gaming. The default for tabletop roleplaying regardless of era or rule system to kitbash whatever you want to make the campaign you want to play. In my experience this far more common than playing the rules as written mostly due the fact that just about all RPGs come off as toolkits when you read them.Classic D&D was no different so when you combine that natural tendency of RPGs with Open Gaming the result is the kaleidoscope of the OSR we have today. So while the heart of the OSR is the revival of play of the classic edition, it is just the heart of a very large galaxy of related games that are not even all of the fantasy genre. Anything that can be done with classic D&D mechanics is being done somewhere in the OSR today. From the simple to the complex.This a far more accurate picture of the OSR then your post or the original article. What it doesn't do is simplify it because the OSR can't be simplified. If you say the OSR is about lite mechanics then you need to qualify it with which segment are you talking about? You are certainly not talking about me and my adventure and supplements which are not lite by any measure. Nor about Blood & Treasure, Adventure Dark & Deep, or Adventurer, Conqueror, King none of which would be considered as a lite RPG. Now granted none of us are at the level of Hero System or GURPS complexity either and occupy a middle ground. Any point about the OSR other than the fact it revolves around classic editions of D&D has to be qualified with specifics.Rob ConleyBat in the Attic Games</blockquote>

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