OSR What does OSR mean to you? What do you value most in an OSR game?

[overgeeked]

What defines an OSR game for you?

To me, the OSR is about playing with or emulating the rules and the feel of RPGs from the beginning of the hobby until about 1999, give or take. It's not limited to D&D, but, like always in this tiny industry, D&D vastly overshadows everything.

And more importantly:
What do you personally look for when you play one? What aspects do you value the most?

Is it the minimal rules? The high lethality? The focus on player skill over character abilities? The open-ended exploration? The impartial GM? Or maybe it’s the aesthetics and tone?

All of the above, honestly. Without any of those elements it just wouldn't feel like an OSR game. The already mentioned "rulings not rules" is also a big part of it. While it does typically go hand-in-hand with minimal rules, it's not quite the same.

You can have strict minimalist rules that you are expected to follow to the letter or you can have minimalist rules that are less restrictive and open. That latter is where rulings not rules comes in. The game expects you to make things up and tailor the mechanics to your table rather than impose a specific set of rules for everything or a weird notion of universal play for everyone who plays that game.

Also curious to hear thoughts on games that feel OSR in spirit even if they don’t use classic mechanics.

Basically the whole of the NSR. Mork Borg, Pirate Borg, and a hundred more besides. Also check out Shadowdark. It uses 5E D&D mechanics but tailors the experience to be decidedly old school.

 

[Desdichado]

The OSR is, essentially, three big patterns on a scatterplot that kinda overlap sometimes, but are clearly recognized as different clusters:

1) those who believe that the OSR is based on recreating old rules, or at least creating similar rules to old D&D. This movement is centered on retroclones and rather modestly modified versions of retroclones.

2) people who believe that the OSR is a playstyle manifesto, a neo-retro reimagining of some oldish-feeling ideal of play. Some of this is pretty legit, and the OSR playstyle is certainly a valid playstyle even if it isn't exactly as old-fashioned as some like to paint it as, but the fact that people in this camp can end up championing games that bear little resemblance at all to D&D certainly rubs the people in the other cluster the wrong way, and they wonder why they want to claim the label if they're really interesting in doing other games entirely.

3) the kumbaya big-tenters who don't understand why the other two groups can't just get along, and the OSR is whatever you want it to be, and if you think that you're OSR, you are, even if you're actually playing some Forgey game or something else that's no relation to D&D at all.

Given that I don't identify as any strain of OSR, but I'm sympathetic to some of the goals of each of the patterns on the scatter plot, I find these kinds of discussions interesting and even entertaining without really have a horse in the race. But if someone were to ask me what I thought, I'd say that the first group is what I'd prefer to call the OSR, the second group I'd prefer to call the NSR, and the third group needs to let it go.

 

[Sacrosanct]

My opinion is much of what has already been said, so for purposes of confirmation bias...

1. OSR is a clone of the older game, not the games themselves, that stress:

• rulings over rules (not to be conflated with rules-lite, as a rules heavy game like 1e is still very much come up with your own rulings
• more of a zero to hero model for PCs, rather than hero at the start (which is related to higher lethality)
• player skill over PC skill. Related to this is the difference between a player saying they want to so something, and them looking at their character sheet to see if they have the skill for it before declaring.
• The PC "story" isn't an elaborate backstory you spent an hour on before playing, it's the adventures themselves they go on from that point.
• No defined setting and/or generic homebrew setting. Also, plug and play adventures

 

[Gus L]

Hashing out what the OSR is or isn't is an impossible task. Personally I've been involved in the OSR and now Post OSR since maybe 2011 (at least that's when I started blogging). Personally I don't take a rules based approach to defining the OSR.

I see the OSR as a RPG scene that started somewhere in the 2000's, maybe 2007 with the first edition of OSRIC ... and remained a largely cohesive community until roughly 2021 with the demise of G+. The key here is a space or group of interconnected spaces: forums, conventions, blogs, social media platforms and such, where people all shared ideas on what is generally called the "OSR" - even if they didn't always (or frequently) agree. Exactly like a music, painting or other art scene.

At this point though I consider the OSR as an active scene "dead" based on the idea that there are various groups who either claim the name or the inspiration of the OSR and don't communicate with each other much, and are even adversarial. The OSR scene has broken up into child scenes, and so while it's possible to still say something is "OSR" or to play in an "OSR style" it's not really possible to be part of it anymore. Like despite being a dungeon crawl designed for Basic/Expert D&D (or OSE) rules, my Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier isn't really an OSR adventure - because it was published after the death of the OSR, and not a product of overall and active scene influence. It is instead Post-OSR or POSR, if a fairly stolid variety of POSR. I personally define my play and design style as "Dungeon Crawling" meaning it's focused on the "Procedural Exploration of a Fantastical Space" (where each capitalized letter is a term of art/subject to a definition.

In keeping with this view, and because of the contention around and among various adversarial stakeholders in the idea of the OSR ... including the use of the term ... I think it's increasingly difficult to discuss or define the OSR. More and more of what I see said about the OSR seems to be itself a nostalgic idealization of the OSR scene (much like the OSR was at least partially a nostalgic idealization of early RPG play). This means that for me OSR maxims like "Rulings over Rules" become themselves increasingly contentious and debated where previously they had generally agreed (at least among the OSR) core meanings. I try not to use them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

1) The 70s and 80s games are not OSR. When I play D&D BX, I don't consider myself playing an OSR game. I'm playing the original games.

2) When I play a retro-clone or a simulacrum of the original 70-80s game, then I'm playing an OSR game. Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lords, Dark Dungeons and the BX versions of Gammaworld, Gangbusters, Star Wars, etc, go here.

I was thinking about this earlier, and I'm going to disagree with this as well.

B/X and OSE use the same rules, as do AD&D and OSRIC. The substantive differences in each pair are how the information is organized. I don't think we can say "well, this was poorly organized, so it's a different game than the one that's better organized."

I'm not sure this is a scene/movement/genre/whatever it is that has clear boundaries.

 

[Jack Daniel]

B/X and OSE use the same rules, as do AD&D and OSRIC. The substantive differences in each pair are how the information is organized. I don't think we can say "well, this was poorly organized, so it's a different game than the one that's better organized."

Agreed. Calling B/X and OSE different games is a bit like calling seven-card stud a "different game" between two different editions of Hoyle's.

 

[MNblockhead]

For me, when looking at games to sign up for at a convention, I've always understood OSR to be shorthand for a retroclone that plays like OD&D but with the rules cleaned up and modernized a bit. In my experience that has mostly been the case. The one exception is Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I love and consider inspired by old OD&D play, but don't consider to be OSR in the retroclone sense. I like retroclones of OD&D for the fast character creation, more satisfying exploration based more on player creativity than on stats and rules, and it brings PC death back into the game, which is easier to take because rolling up a new PC is so quick. I find OSR retroclones to be great for one shots and convention play.

For my long campaigns, I prefer crunchier systems (I'm currently running Warhammer Fantasy 4e), but a session with an OD&D retroclone can be a breath of fresh air, or at least a nice palate cleanser.