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

[Aldarc]

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:

• No defined setting and/or generic homebrew setting. Also, plug and play adventures

Does that mean Dolmenwood is not OSR? Or what about Shadowdark with its Western Reaches? Or Worlds Without Number and its Latter Earth setting?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

To start, a D20 class/level based fantasy game descended from Dungeons and Dragons. I play a lot of games that occasionally get tagged as OSR like Call of Cthulhu or Dragonbane, and they match a lot of the traits of OSR games, but I think it's really just the D&D descended ones that count. But it's not just the rules, it's also a playstyle that focuses on relatively low powered adventurers, dungeon crawling, and emergent narrative rather than tightly scripted storyline. While it has rules, the gaming style has a high level of reliance on player description of action rather than rolling for a skill.

What about a game like Mothership? It's a modern game, but it otherwise checks every one of those boxes, including explicitly not having any skill for hiding, because the designer has said he wants players to have to explain how their characters are hiding from the inevitable space monsters and the GM has to make a ruling on whether it would work, rather than rolling a die.

Many, maybe most, Mothership adventures are essentially space dungeon crawls, and one of the first-party adventures is a mega-dungeon, although it's an android factory controlled by a sinister AI, rather than the lower levels of a ruined castle.

Can a game that otherwise does everything OSR, but which isn't a direct descendent of TSR's D&D, be OSR?

 

[AlexofBarbaria]

On the vibe/tone side, one key aspect of the OSR for me is the rediscovery of 1e’s Appendix N and how naturally weird fiction/sword & sorcery fits as the fantasy backdrop to the dungeon crawl.

It was wild to read stories like Tower of the Elephant or The Tale of Satampra Zeiros. There are fantasy stories about amoral treasure hunters delving dark dungeons? And they're good?!

I don't see rules-lightness or mechanical jank as critically important to the OSR feel, so to me the most anti-OSR thing about 3e is its weird embrace of self-referentiality. 2e is bland but in an endearing way, like Silver Age comics. The real stuff is still there, it's just under a layer of bubble wrap. 3e's "dungeonpunk" aesthetic feels wholly artificial and soulless.

I used to assume this soullessness came from an "IP is everything" directive from the business side but apparently 3e PHB designer Jonathan Tweet thinks it was good for the game to reject inspiration from history and mythology D&D 3.x - 3E and the Feel of D&D

Personally, one part of the process I enjoyed was describing the world of D&D in its own terms, rather than referring to real-world history and mythology.
...
In 2nd Ed, the rules referred to history and to historical legends to describe the game... But by the time we were working on 3rd Ed, D&D had had such a big impact on fantasy that we basically used D&D as its own source.
...
Descriptions of weapons in 2E referred to historical precedents, such as whether a weapon was use in the European Renaissance or in Egypt... We dropped the historical references, such as the Lucerne hammer, and gave dwarves the dwarven warax. And if the dwarven warax isn’t cool enough, how would you like a double sword or maybe a spiked chain?
...
We were fortunate that by 2000 D&D had such a strong legacy that it could stand on its own without reference to Earth history or mythology.

 

[Mannahnin]

On the vibe/tone side, one key aspect of the OSR for me is the rediscovery of 1e’s Appendix N and how naturally weird fiction/sword & sorcery fits as the fantasy backdrop to the dungeon crawl.

It was wild to read stories like Tower of the Elephant or The Tale of Satampra Zeiros. There are fantasy stories about amoral treasure hunters delving dark dungeons? And they're good?!

I wasn't shocked by it, as I had grown up with John Carter not too many years after LotR and Prydain, but absolutely. Wild and great.

I don't see rules-lightness or mechanical jank as critically important to the OSR feel, so to me the most anti-OSR thing about 3e is its weird embrace of self-referentiality. 2e is bland but in an endearing way, like Silver Age comics. The real stuff is still there, it's just under a layer of bubble wrap. 3e's "dungeonpunk" aesthetic feels wholly artificial and soulless.

I used to assume this soullessness came from an "IP is everything" directive from the business side but apparently 3e PHB designer Jonathan Tweet thinks it was good for the game to reject inspiration from history and mythology D&D 3.x - 3E and the Feel of D&D

Oof. Yeah, Dan from Wandering DMs hits on this periodically and I completely agree. The self-referentiality of D&D often sucks, and yeah, I think a degree of soullessness is part of it. While I dug 3.x at the time, those fantasy weapons immediately jumped out at me as silly and dumb. I think they're an example of WotC indulging that worst aspect of corporate IP-tending/focusing.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Does that mean Dolmenwood is not OSR? Or what about Shadowdark with its Western Reaches? Or Worlds Without Number and its Latter Earth setting?

Let me clarify. No required setting and more use of a homebrew setting among players. That is, players created their own world and adventures. The core game treated a setting like an afterthought and not core to the actual game itself.

 

[Aldarc]

Let me clarify. No required setting and more use of a homebrew setting among players. That is, players created their own world and adventures. The core game treated a setting like an afterthought and not core to the actual game itself.

I appreciate your clarifications. There still may be cases like Dolmenwood, which is practically its own stand-alone game with its own setting, where my question may still apply, but I have a better sense of where you care coming from.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Oof. Yeah, Dan from Wandering DMs hits on this periodically and I completely agree. The self-referentiality of D&D often sucks, and yeah, I think a degree of soullessness is part of it. While I dug 3.x at the time, those fantasy weapons immediately jumped out at me as silly and dumb. I think they're an example of WotC indulging that worst aspect of corporate IP-tending/focusing.

I don't know if it was IP building so much as a design tendency that I think even homebrewers can fall into: Building stuff because of interesting mechanics, not because of the fiction is interesting.

We see a lot of this in WotC D&D with "well, we don't have enough attacks using X energy type or we need to offer players the chance to shine if they chose Y playstyle." It's not an inherently bad idea, but it requires good fiction to go with it.

When there's not, you get the silly stuff from the 3E monster books, where a monster will have 12 templates slapped on it and they call it a day. Compare to what @Nixlord has been doing recently, with templated 5E monsters, but they're combinations that make sense in the fiction and tend to be compelling creatures in their own right, even if (as I suspect) the initial impulse was first "what can we do with this 3E-style template and 5E monsters?"

You even see this some in the OSR space, where third party creators (typically lesser lights, in my experience) put out monster books that consist largely of "what if standard monsters, but undead" or "what if standard monsters, but dragons?"

 

[Mannahnin]

I don't know if it was IP building so much as a design tendency that I think even homebrewers can fall into: Building stuff because of interesting mechanics, not because of the fiction is interesting.

We see a lot of this in WotC D&D with "well, we don't have enough attacks using X energy type or we need to offer players the chance to shine if they chose Y playstyle." It's not an inherently bad idea, but it requires good fiction to go with it.

I agree that "fill in the blank spots" design is often lame and thoughtless. And can negatively impact the game even beyond being boring. For example I think it was a contributory factor to why Clerics got famously OP in 3.x, where we saw them suddenly get all sorts of new offensive spells and abilities. The limits to what kind of things their spells could do (relative to an M-U) were a big part of their balance in their original design.

IP vs. real world, I agree that it's a lot better if the fiction is interesting, but the trend I was talking about was more about D&D becoming increasingly disconnected both from real world mythology and from non-D&D source fiction. When we have such external sources to reference and ground our game in, to me it feels more real and satisfying. When the game starts to eat its own tale and build on concepts which originate purely in the game itself, it seems less substantial.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

IP vs. real world, I agree that it's a lot better if the fiction is interesting, but the trend I was talking about was more about D&D becoming increasingly disconnected both from real world mythology and from non-D&D source fiction. When we have such external sources to reference and ground our game in, to me it feels more real and satisfying. When the game starts to eat its own tale and build on concepts which originate purely in the game itself, it seems less substantial.

I think the two things are connected, but on your more broad point, I definitely agree that there definitely needs to be more inputs than getting ever more fractal with their own lore. It's like AI learning off of AI -- eventually you get weird slop almost no one enjoys.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree that "fill in the blank spots" design is often lame and thoughtless. And can negatively impact the game even beyond being boring. For example I think it was a contributory factor to why Clerics got famously OP in 3.x, where we saw them suddenly get all sorts of new offensive spells and abilities. The limits to what kind of things their spells could do (relative to an M-U) were a big part of their balance in their original design.

IP vs. real world, I agree that it's a lot better if the fiction is interesting, but the trend I was talking about was more about D&D becoming increasingly disconnected both from real world mythology and from non-D&D source fiction. When we have such external sources to reference and ground our game in, to me it feels more real and satisfying. When the game starts to eat its own tale and build on concepts which originate purely in the game itself, it seems less substantial.

Agreed. A significant part of my decision not to move on with official D&D was their movement away from historical and mythological concepts.