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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7680868" data-attributes="member: 85555">Interesting topic. Obviously one that raises a lot of passions. I am not someone who is purely into OSR but it has had a big impact on how I approach the game. For me, I think it was very much an outgrowth of some of my frustrations with how adventures and adventure design was being talked about in the early to mid 2000s. I started in '86, and pretty much soaked up the trends as they came. So my earliest adventures were dungeon-centric, followed by a mix in the 90s as the emphasis shifted to more story focused gaming. With 3E it seems like the encounter very much became the focus of adventure design. By 2005 or so I was getting a bit weary of running the kinds of adventures I kept seeing in Dragon or online. For no real reason whatsoever I bought a used copy of the 1E DMG, which I hadn't read in ages and probably never read all that closely since I cut my teeth on 2E. While I was never huge on dungeons, the focus on exploration and non-linear campaigns really sparked something in me.  I think my chief frustration with how campaigns were going prior to that was I always knew where they were going and my players kind of wanted things to be that way. There really wasn't much to surprise me as the GM. An approach built more around random encounters and hex crawls was, in part,what I needed to make my games more exciting. I also started experimenting more with power groups and situational style adventures, as well as investigations. I became aware of the OSR itself as a concept when my business partner brought a game over called LotFP. What was cool about it, to us at least, was the ethos of play it espoused was real easy to wrap your head around (whether one agreed with James Raggi's play style or not, he offered a fairly straightforward blueprint for running long term campaigns) and that he took D&D but shaped it into his own thing. People had done stuff like this before but LotFP was the first I really took a close look at the OSR and seemed to be branching in a creative direction of its own. Since then I've found that a lot of the most valuable, gamble content available online for me personally has come from the OSR. Keep in mind I don't even really run D&D much any more. Once in a while I play, but I have my own systems that I use for my campaigns (and they are the furthest thing from d20). But the approaches and the ideas I find in the OSR are some of the more useful to make my campaigns come alive. I draw from other sources as well. My campaigns are not straight forward dungeon crawl or pure sandbox, they are a mix of a lot of structures and influences. I definitely consider the OSR a vital area of the hobby.</blockquote>

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