What makes an Old School Renaissance FEEL like an OSR game?

[Quickleaf]

It's likely a continuum rather than an either-or.

I actually was thinking of it as two independent sliders, one for Story Game and one for OSR Game that a designer could move in either direction independently of each other. A continuum suggests a trade-off I'm not sure necessarily exists.

So something like Dungeon World might be an example of what it looks like when the sliders are pretty closely aligned (e.g. Story Game =, OSR Game =).

Whereas something like Old School Hack would be (Story Game -, OSR Game +).

 

[nnms]

I actually was thinking of it as two independent sliders, one for Story Game and one for OSR Game that a designer could move in either direction independently of each other. A continuum suggests a trade-off I'm not sure necessarily exists.

I definitely think a trade-off does exist. Once you turn up the concentration on story creation to the point where the decisions the players make in terms of exploration of situation no longer matter, you're leaving the feel of OSR. It'll be true that the players will be making important contributions and decisions that produce the story itself, but they'll be being made on different criteria than exploration of the situation and description.

 

[nnms]

Specifically, this seems to break down into:

Director Stance, Author Stance, Pilot Stance, and Immersive Stance.

I think stance is a complete red herring. The proposed stances muddle together a wide variety of separate phenomenon into arbitrary categories that only ever describe actual play of an OSR game by accident. Like a stopped clock being right twice a day.

A lot of games straddle the lines between these

As they are muddled combinations of what aspects different participants have authority over, what aspects are being explored through play and what different people are trying to experience in their game, we shouldn't be surprised that what game participants do straddles the lines. Games and players straddle these categories because they are failures to categorize.

For example, in the many of the earliest games in the hobby, you'll find absolutely nothing about in-character vs out-of-character knowledge. No one is ever abjured to not act in a certain way because of what their characters would or wouldn't know or do until much later. The common use of stances in talking about RPG theory is more about people playing games from the 1990s and having it fail to deliver what they thought it should and has nothing to do with the games of the late 70s and early 80s. The only other categorization system that would be worse in talking about OSR play would be creative agenda.

 

[jacksonmalloy]

I think stance is a complete red herring. The proposed stances muddle together a wide variety of separate phenomenon into arbitrary categories that only ever describe actual play of an OSR game by accident. Like a stopped clock being right twice a day.



As they are muddled combinations of what aspects different participants have authority over, what aspects are being explored through play and what different people are trying to experience in their game, we shouldn't be surprised that what game participants do straddles the lines. Games and players straddle these categories because they are failures to categorize.

For example, in the many of the earliest games in the hobby, you'll find absolutely nothing about in-character vs out-of-character knowledge. No one is ever abjured to not act in a certain way because of what their characters would or wouldn't know or do until much later. The common use of stances in talking about RPG theory is more about people playing games from the 1990s and having it fail to deliver what they thought it should and has nothing to do with the games of the late 70s and early 80s. The only other categorization system that would be worse in talking about OSR play would be creative agenda.

Err. Okay. I know nothing about the 'RPG Theory' version of the conversation you seem to be railing against. I was just trying to figure out how to describe one of the things I tended to notice - that in at least my early experience, the idea was that you are your character, rather than that you are controlling your character, or that your concentration was on the story with the character being secondary. I threw out a couple ideas and comparisons to illustrate the point.

I'm sorry you didn't find them useful. Consider it withdrawn.

 

[nnms]

I was just trying to figure out how to describe one of the things I tended to notice - that in at least my early experience, the idea was that you are your character, rather than that you are controlling your character, or that your concentration was on the story with the character being secondary. I threw out a couple ideas and comparisons to illustrate the point.

I'm sorry, but I found the idea that you spontaneously came up with four categories of stance that happened to be exact same categories with almost identical names to an existing body of work to be very, very suspect. i couldn't tell if it was a subtle troll, intentional plagiarism, or someone taking an idea they got from somewhere else and innocently forgetting where they got it from.

So I dealt with what I saw as shortcomings in the more well developed form of those ideas.

OSR games do indeed ask their participants to approach things from certain points of view. The four stances are combinations of different arrangements of priorities, responsibilities, authority and constraint. None of them represent what OSR games ask of their players. You could take pieces of these stances and cobble them together into an OSR stance, but none of them represent the play of early RPGs. And we shouldn't be surprised by that given that the theory work done at the Forge was in response to unsatisfying play of the 1990s.

Whenever you come across a person who's really into Story Games and Forge Theory and they get into an OSR game, they find it just works. And they have a blast. And none of their work that came from fixing the broken promises of 90s RPGs about story is needed whatsoever.

Some of the early members of the OSR movement were motivated by the need to respond to the idea that the early games of the hobby were somehow inferior or less functional than later games. The whole OSR movement is largely one of recapturing an approach to play that works, has always worked, and is not supplanted by later games just because the edition number on the cover is higher and the publication date is later.

 

[jacksonmalloy]

OSR games do indeed ask their participants to approach things from certain points of view

You could take pieces of these stances and cobble them together into an OSR stance, but none of them represent the play of early RPGs.

Okay. So then what do you think is the "point of view" (since you don't like the word "stance") that you think that OSR games ask of the player?

Whenever you come across a person who's really into Story Games and Forge Theory and they get into an OSR game, they find it just works. And they have a blast.

What is "it"? What does it look like? what is actually happening? And in why does it "just work." I feel like you're defending the subject matter against scrutiny or arguing that classifying it in other contexts is inaccurate, but I'm not any closer to actually understanding what "it" is.

The whole OSR movement is largely one of recapturing an approach to play that works, has always worked, and is not supplanted by later games just because the edition number on the cover is higher and the publication date is later.

I'm still unclear as to what "that approach" is, if one were to try to explain it to someone who hasn't actually experienced it.

 

[Celebrim]

First, let me say this is a great thread.

Second, let me say that I think that it's a false dichotomy. There is no such thing as "old school" or "new school", and that all the people who invented the concepts are really saying is, "It feels me to me like how D&D was ran by my DM back when I was younger than it does like the D&D as it is ran by my DM now." Or even more to the point, "I approach the game more like I approache the game back then, than I approach the game when presented with rules for 3.X"

Or in other words, they really don't understand Celebrim's Second Law of RPGs:

"How you think about a system, how you prepare to play it, and how you approach the game is more important than the system itself."

By altering the system, they are altering for themselves, how they think about the game and how they feel about it. But they aren't actually changing the game. They are changing themselves. They've simply created a system that they (mostly) won't ruin by playing in a way that they don't enjoy and attributing to that the specifics of the system. In my opinion, it's a sort of willful blindness.

I've been playing since like 1981. When I wasn't the DM, I was almost invariably the thief. Now, back in 1984 (let's say), which of the scenarios described in the first Zen of primer (the one about rulings instead of rules) described play around my thief searching for a pit trap? The answer is: neither one. Because even back in 1984 both approaches were supported by play. I could (and did) probe ahead with a 10' pole. And I could (and did) roll against my 'find traps' check to try to determine if my probing with the pole had missed the trap (or vica versa). Moreover, many DMs did require I specify rather exactly what I was looking at when making a 'find traps' roll, so that to a certain extent to do one I had to do the other. This was never an 'either/or' world; it was a 'both/and' world right from the start.

And let's not overlook the willful blindness involved in distinguishing between 'rules' and 'rulings' in the first place. Just because a 'ruling' isn't part of the book, isn't formalized, and isn't written down doesn't mean it isn't a rule. Creating rules on the fly and off the cuff is still creating rules. Common Law is still law. The real difference so far as I can tell between 'rulings' and 'rules' is how the player makiing that distinction approaches the game. He's giving himself permission to play in a less hidebound, less metagamey, less rules lawyerish way by conceding that in this new game it won't be appropriate. But you could make those concessions as part of your approach to the game without changing the system.

This attempt to separate what in my opinion was never separate in the first place is a I think a hallmark of the retro-clones and OSR games. It's not actually recreating games as they actually were, so much as at best recreating games as you wanted them to be or were for you then but not are for you now because you changed or your group changed.

Take the division between Heroic/Superheroic. Again, it wasn't either/or, it was both/and. I had characters that started out as weaklings evolve into the mightiest beings on the planet. That was fully 'old school'. I maintain still that in terms of relative power, the game I played with PC's that were the absolute mightiest in terms of their influence, power, and security was a 1e game. Someone mentioned old school as 'single digit hit points with double digit damage', and yes that is 'old school'. But so was having an 18 con, and being a 10th level fighter or barbarian or cavelier with higher hit points than anything in the game that wasn't a unique extraplanar ruler, moving around in a world where 3d6 damage from a foe was truly extreme and even 16HD monsters (the highest value on the table) needed a natural 16 or better to hit your AC. That was old school too. Old school always supported 'zero to hero' and beyond if you wanted to take it there, and new systems fully support staying in a low level sweet spot if you want to keep them there. I'm 240 hours into my current 3e campaign and the PCs are 6th level. Top that OSR.

Personally I have a hard time going back to OSR style rule sets because I actually remember play as it actually was and I left it not because I didn't like the goals, but becase I remember the problems that highly ambigous and overly situational rules had obtaining those goals. Everyone was always tinkering with the rules back then precisely because the rules were failing so often, and the bodies of Common Law were becoming huge, unwieldy, and cumbersome.

Personally, I don't feel 3e plays all that differently to 1e, except that it is smoother, easier to run, and involves fewer rules arguments.

But that's almost entirely because of the way I think about the game. I fully understand that if you think about it differently, you get different results.

 

[Celebrim]

Okay. So then what do you think is the "point of view" (since you don't like the word "stance") that you think that OSR games ask of the player?

Ok, read my post above.

Now, my answer is that you - and the FORGE people particularly - are trying to create either/or out of a both/and situation.

The correct answer to your question IMO is "It doesn't."

If there is a set of hallmarks of 'old school' play, then one of them is the freedom of an individual and a group to freely adopt the creative agenda and stance of their choosing in play, and to freely change back and forth between different stances and agendas while in play. This is something FORGE specifically denies is possible when it declares 'system matters' and that a particular system can only fulfill one agenda and one agenda of play at a time.

I'm still unclear as to what "that approach" is, if one were to try to explain it to someone who hasn't actually experienced it.

I can only talk about my approaches. Someone would be right to say, "What are you talking about? My old school play didn't look anything like that at all?"

 

[Blankbeard]

For example, in the many of the earliest games in the hobby, you'll find absolutely nothing about in-character vs out-of-character knowledge. No one is ever abjured to not act in a certain way because of what their characters would or wouldn't know or do until much later.

I cut this statement out for specificity. I don't think that it's correct. OD&D was written to the DM with players who bought the books assumed to be in existing campaigns. So there would be no need to admonish players not to use information their characters didn't know - The players didn't know anything relevant. AD&D in the preface to the DMG says it is for the eyes of the DM only. Character knowledge was controlled by restricting player knowledge.

Holmes seems different in that it advises all players to read the entire rulebook (except the sample adventure) and then decide who will be the DM. Since Basic was intended as an introduction for new roleplayers, this is probably not a statement about character knowledge. In any case, the Moldvay revision on page 60 of the DM's book has a perfectly clear statement: "A player should not allow his character to act on information that character has no way of knowing." The existence of this statement is both proof that people were doing exactly that and that it was not considered a correct mode of play.

I have little information on non-D&D role playing games in the first decade. MERP certainly didn't assume that characters knew all that players did but I'm not sure that's early enough to be "old-school." Star Frontiers didn't either.

I don't think that the authors of early D&D anticipated that players would want to own their own books or that the books would be read when play wasn't practical. Once these two things became clear, you have the 1981 clear, modern statement of separation of player and character knowledge.

Some of the statements I found while checking this out are interesting in their own right. The Runequest authors seemed to have viewed Runequest as an improvement over D&D because it allowed the character to attempt anything. Since this is often stated as a key characteristic of early play, it's interesting to see that at least some didn't view the earliest game that way.

 

[howandwhy99]

Old school play uses the campaign world like a game where players can strive to accomplish their objectives. The world actually is full of eldritch secrets with varieties of in magical traditions. Also deities and religions, battles and wars. Sneaking and stealing and saving the day are actually performed. You can't hold back or the world will run right over you. You need to pay keen attention to the details and "lean into" the game and let it press upon you as you feel out the world. Playing better matters. And learning how to work together with the fellow players in order to achieve anything in the GM's system means becoming a highly functioning team of gamers who know how to cooperate. I remember in college as players were so attuned to each other they didn't need to tell their what they were going to do. Everyone knew and the strategies played themselves out like a finely timed dance. While it old school play isn't about making up a world, usually the DM does most of this, it is about discovering that world, a world as game content usable and playable as much or more than any videogame.