NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8624222" data-attributes="member: 6801252">So, I think that one way that GNS breaks down, is not only that people and games can be good at multiple things, but that the different areas can actually support each other directly. So like, in the case of OSR, the gamism and simulation actually support each other-- the whole point is for the game to be a fun, playable, simulation where the act of making the statistically defined elements interact is enjoyable and engaging, even while they're intended to represent things. The act of sitting down and saying 'ok, I am going to represent being an elf with these particular statistics and abilities, because that'll help it feel like an elf' and the enjoyable game play of applying those things to the actual game, your elf being better and worse at certain things and making you play around that-- its the gamism and the simulationism supporting each other, and if you accept that each of those elements is designed to tell a story through its game play and the intentionality of how it interacts with other elements in the simulation, you've brought in narrative too.I grew up alongside and participated in the roots of the OC movement (in so far as the article discusses its origins as being freeform messageboard roleplaying) to me, the emphasis of it seems to be player and character empowerment-- e.g. instead of rolling up a character whose abilities and identity you have little control over or regard for, you get to spend a lot of energy on them as a form of creative expression. That's literally what "my OC" refers to, "My Original Character" as opposed to say, the canon characters of that world, or someone else's Original Character. If you look at that loop you outlined for OSR, it breaks down in two places for the OC movement-- OSR generally prioritizes easy character creation, and high lethality, which gives characters a more expendable feel, it can be more punishing to put that kind of investment in them, and the systems don't give you a lot of means of investing that time into them; you can always invest time in your character's story and personality, but you don't have a lot of widgets to customize them with, and reflect different parts of them-- certainly not at low level where the lethality is highest, instead the model is theoretically about starting with nothing, and building up something, its building a legacy, an identity, over the course of the game, rather than starting out with one.But, and this is something I've been playing a lot with the space of, the actual losing of a character, and the frequency with which it occurs and the corresponding speed, isn't necessarily load bearing for all that is appealing about OSR, it just so happens to be co-morbid with them. You can run a simulative sandbox that engenders the kind of feeling you and I are after, without having to deploy save or die mechanics, and rapidly moving through the loop you mentioned, because the two things are kind of orthagonal. You can have death exist as a vegetable mechanic (meaning, a mechanic that isn't always fun in and of itself, but supports other aspects of the fun), while still reducing its negative impact on OC character investment-- resurrection magic, undead character options that allow characters to be rebuilt after accepting the death, deals that apply negative consequences in exchange for character retention, creatures that knock players out and either capture them or deposit them elsewhere instead of killing them, and simply game mechanics that make players tough enough to have an opportunity to identify failure and respond with retreat and other failure-mitigation strategies all allow you to mitigate the undesirable consequences of failure, while still engaging with a lot of the problem solving, simulative, success-or-failure-depends-on-you elements we like about OSR. It just means changing the consequences of failure.We do the OSR style sandbox, simulation and treasure hunting game in Pathfinder 2e-- it empowers the players to be robust and therefore invest attention and detail in their characters, characters who die could elect to come back as a ghost using the Ghost archetype, or use resurrection magic, and simply be tough enough to take opportunities to run when necessary. This creates a dynamic where I can have my OSR style simulation, sandboxing, and problem solving, without death hanging over my player's heads like a total albatross.In video games, we actually watched this play out in the development of the rogue-lite genre out of the rogue-like genre, essentially rogue and its direct derivatives were fun, but too brutal, so its successor genre actually designed around the idea of mitigating the undesirable consequences of failure, while still retaining it's willingness to let the player fail. They even give players consolation prizes for failure that make the next run different, or more interesting-- the OSR and the games it is derived from toy with this, in the form of dice rolls possibly resulting in being able to uses classes like the Paladin, that have statistically unlikely entry requirements, that require multiple 'tries' across multiple characters to get a chance to play.Its just a matter of identifying what you really want out of the culture of play that has appeal.</blockquote>

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