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.