OSR Why B/X?

[GreyLord]

And this is simultaneously a strawman and a shift of goalposts. oD&D, B/X, and 1e were written to be dungeon exploration games where you gained XP by obtaining loot. This is how Gygax played the game, how Gygax wrote the game, and Gygax taught the game - but Gygax's writing was not always clear. You could play them as adventure path games. Meanwhile 2e is written to be an adventure path or worldbuilding game that you could play as a mercenary dungeon adventure game.

2e, far from being a cleaned up game was when the actual Old School style that Gygax played, wrote, and taught was explicitly forced into the back seat. And the OSR is explicitly about going back to the old school Lake Geneva style.

Pretending that 2e was unchanged is an outright attempt to erase old school play.

What in the WORLD!?

Absolutely NOT...This isn't actually right at all.

OD&D was NOT written to be a dungeon exploration game only. Heck...Outdoor Survival being pushed in the Original Booklets (not quite as strongly as Chainmail, but there was enough of it) should tell you all there is to know about that right there!

You think Cthulhu and Elric were "DUNGEON FOCUSED" adventuring inspirations? You think Jack Vance is a Dungeon ONLY inspiration? You think the Lord of the Rings is a "Dungeon Only" inspiration?

Heck, even us wargamers knew that it wasn't just a "Dungeon Exploration" item.

Even if you stick with what Gygax wrote...his Gord the Rogue was hardly a "Dungeon Exploration" extrapolation of D&D at all!!!

So...you're little realm of the earth played it as strictly Dungeon exploration...but don't try to say that's the ONLY way people played it back then...because it was obviously and most definately NOT that way.

Heck, my first adventure WAS in a dungeon, but before we entered that dungeon it was entering the sewers in order to try to get into a city. There was far more than just the Dungeon part. That's why there was the Dungeon Board game...and then there was D&D.

No it didn't. It represented the triumph of encounter based play over dungeon adventures. It was a change in philosophy from the old school to what was and is still the default.

OD&D in many ways was far different than what AD&D 1e was by the early 80s (which if I had to guess, is about when you came in?

OD&D was the wild west. Anything and everything went on. Half the fun was seeing what you could do with it and what you could create. You had those who played Dragons and advanced their Dragons in wealth and power. You had those who played court intrigues and others who played games where Rangers and Druidic forces roamed the Earth (and then entered these ideas in magazines). There was NO real set way of playing at first. You had a TON of outside and overland adventures, just like you had a ton of Dungeon adventures as well.

By the early 80s (maybe late 70s, I think Holmes probably had far more to do with this inspiration than the original AD&D, though perhaps the Solo RPG generators in the DMG may have had something to do with it as well) you DID have a contingent that were focused far more strongly on the Dungeon element. You saw the Dungeon element strongly in competitions (such as the D&D tournaments) and competition modules. This probably gave way to the thing YOU are thinking about, which is the focus on the Dungeon Exploration elements of D&D.

Yes, they were there and they WERE strong. They were played by a LARGE number of Gamers in the early 80s, but that's not really how it was at first, at least when I started (I was not the FIRST, but I did start pretty early on. Funny thing, I actually didn't even own a set of the rules when I started playing and didn't even understand the rules, it was all dependent on the DM).

Oh, indeed. It was however not an old school thing. It was new. It is now Trad - and is what is used in 5e. The Old School looks back past that to the playstyle that this supplanted and that you are attempting to erase.

What supplanted?

If OSR is trying to only replicate the Dungeon Exploration Experience or focus, it sounds like it's ONLY trying to replicate one form of playing of the early to late 80s gamestyle. Forget Greyhawk, forget Blackmoor...those may have well as never existed as they were different playstyles.

WotC style of gameplay is ALSO extremely Different than what 2e gamestyles were. Even if you go with the story rewards idea, that is far different than the idea to kill everything for XP.

IF 2e was such a grand departure as you claim, then OSR would have existed when 2e came out. IT didn't.

It started when 3e came out and that's when it built up steam.

Or they do. And you simply don't understand the explicit intent of the OSR and are instead trying to erase the Old School style for what came to dominate afterwards.

No, I don't think OSR covers what you claim it is. OSR, from what I understand was originally in relation to 3e's wide departure from TSR D&D. 3e was no longer really backwards compatible and thus you couldn't really play the same rules as you could previously. Many people were upset about this and wanted a return to the rules of the TSR era games. This started with a focus on 1e style gaming and B/X and BECMI (One humorous thing I relate to others is at first S&W when I first read one of it's first releases was more akin to BECMI than OD&D. I wrote what was probably a rather rude email/letter to them back then about that. Now days it's basically has it's OD&D version if I've heard correctly though).

One of the first pioneers of this was OSRIC...which is grand. It doesn't try to define HOW you game, it only presents the rules in a fashion where you can basically play 1e (though originally I think it was written so people could continue to write 1e adventures) with the rules as you once could.

OSR was about replicating rules and rule sets so people could play with them and see the beauty of them. NOT to try to say that one gamestyle was better than another in regards to whether you were going to play it as a Dungeon Crawl or an overland adventure.

This is a pure strawman. The OSR and Old School in general digs right back to the Lake Geneva playstyle and things consistent with that.

Believe it or not Wilderness was part of the dungeon experience. Partly because of the Test Your Luck nature.

I have no idea what you mean by this.

Well that's pretty obvious. I'm not into it either, but mostly because I find the politics and frequently the aesthetics highly unpleasant. That doesn't mean I don't respect the design.

Because Gygax was a great developer but not a very good designer. And because they can focus on and draw out the parts of the design that are interesting and were displaced and forced into the back seat by 2e.

Okay...those could be fighting words. I'll let you know Gygax was actually a GREAT game designer. Perhaps one of the greatest of that generation. I do have sympathies for Arneson, but I am solidly a Gygax fan.

I'll leave it at that because more than that could draw us into an argument which is not fit for this site.

It's not just about the games - but the way they were played. The way you are trying to deprecate if not outright erase.

I'm not trying to erase anything. I am trying to clear up what is obviously some confusion about how we actually played AD&D, how it was played, and how things were about back in the day.

It is VERY common to see people try to ascribe their style of play as what everyone played or how everyone played. That's extremely common.

There are things that we could agree upon very much so (such as Hickman starting something that has changed the way the game is viewed into an evolution of how the game is seen today with Adventure paths and things of that nature).

However, saying that 2e is not Old School seems to go contrary to every bit of actual evidence I've seen. I've seen conjectures on this in the thread, but nothing actually substantial.

The BIGGEST proof of it though, to me, is the reaction to 3e and OSR itself. OSR came about BECAUSE of the reaction of Old school gamers to it.

If 2e had been that great of a departure from 1e, OSR would have started THEN rather than later.

 

[GreyLord]

We know that at best 2E sold about 1/3 of what 1E sold.

They had already lost a great deal of the players by that point. Look at it this way.

If you were in grade 6 in 1980 (AFTER AD&D had come out, so these are not the early adapters or early players), by 1989 you would have already graduated.

81-84 were probably the biggest years of AD&D from a cultural standpoint. It was all down hill after that. In the 80s I could get D&D at most department stores and toy stores out there. By the late 80s that was starting to die off.

That was D&D in general. People move on. That's how it goes sometimes.

 

[GreyLord]

This is one of the areas where AD&D assumes you've already got OD&D and don't need that same material duplicated.

Same reason that AD&D doesn't include the more playable movement by hex rules for outdoor exploration from OD&D, only the more granular movement by mile. And the same reason that OD&D has the basic parts of the naval combat rules, and AD&D only has the more advanced expansions thereof.

My view of AD&D is probably going to be unpopular as well. AD&D was not a drastic change from OD&D. I mean, if you went straight from the LBBs only to the AD&D core, it would be drastically shocking, but if you look at it from the viewpoint of those who got all the supplements and magazine articles and such, it wasn't that massive of a shock.

AD&D basically gathered all the various additions and made a greatest hits volume...and then Gygax added some more stuff on top of that which were not vital to the core gameplay (much of the various stuff that is non-necessary to play, but interesting to use in the DMG for example). AD&D is basically OD&D and all it's additional material gathered up into one spot.

I DID see that they tried to codify stuff a lot more strongly with a stronger hand (and iron hand?) with AD&D, especially at the conventions and official playing of it. That is probably the biggest change in how AD&D was approached than OD&D.

That's more of a cultural way of doing things rather than rules though. I suppose in a way, that could be similar to what 2e did for 1e, and what people are trying to summate. Their area had a cultural difference in how 2e (and especially probably 90s 2e with all the extra rules and other things that were added as it progressed as a game) played vs. how 1e played. It was more a cultural thing than a rules thing in many instances...at least when dealing with core rules.

Even that wasn't as strict as the rulings got under 3.X (IN MY OPINION...stating this because for this, it really is MY opinion of the matter) and later 4e.

 

[Sacrosanct]

We know that at best 2E sold about 1/3 of what 1E sold.

Nothing to do with rejection of 2e by 1e fans. More to do with the rising popularity of Vampire/werewolf (which was what most new players of RPGs were into), MtG, and people growing older and having less time to game.

I can only speak for myself, but I never saw any edition warring of 2e either. Not just in my area, but I joined the army right after and spent six years overseas with a huge revolving door of gamers going in and out. No one did edition warring. Only the odd complaint how TSR capitulated by getting rid of demons half orcs and assassins.

Nearly every player I knew and saw during those years (including myself) adapted 2e rules we liked (like thief skill progression) and kept playing 1e. Which makes sense, because Zeb Cook came right out and said 2e was meant to be backwards compatible. 2e didn’t see a lot of adventure modules. It was all about campaign settings. You had to keep playing 1e modules if you wanted the short adventure. So it absolutely makes sense to say a 2e playstyle would be similar to a 1e one. The adventures were the same.

I’d also strongly caution assuming how Gary played by the 1e books. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who played with Gary regularly all admit he played with his own house rules. As does Tim Kask. And pretty much everyone else.

 

[Parmandur]

2e didn’t see a lot of adventure modules. It was all about campaign settings. You had to keep playing 1e modules if you wanted the short adventure.

Well, thanks quite accurate: there were a literally ton of short modules released in the 2E era, from my researches. They didn't get great market penetration, and haven'tseemed to sge as well as 1E sandbox style modules, but they were there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Nothing to do with rejection of 2e by 1e fans. More to do with the rising popularity of Vampire/werewolf (which was what most new players of RPGs were into), MtG, and people growing older and having less time to game.

I can only speak for myself, but I never saw any edition warring of 2e either. Not just in my area, but I joined the army right after and spent six years overseas with a huge revolving door of gamers going in and out. No one did edition warring. Only the odd complaint how TSR capitulated by getting rid of demons half orcs and assassins.

Nearly every player I knew and saw during those years (including myself) adapted 2e rules we liked (like thief skill progression) and kept playing 1e. Which makes sense, because Zeb Cook came right out and said 2e was meant to be backwards compatible. 2e didn’t see a lot of adventure modules. It was all about campaign settings. You had to keep playing 1e modules if you wanted the short adventure. So it absolutely makes sense to say a 2e playstyle would be similar to a 1e one. The adventures were the same.

I’d also strongly caution assuming how Gary played by the 1e books. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who played with Gary regularly all admit he played with his own house rules. As does Tim Kask. And pretty much everyone else.

The 2e names never bothered me, because they were the same creatures and the same game, I still had the old compatible books, and I liked the cute explanations they used for why only the Clueless called them demons and devils.

Seriously, 2e was the golden age of gaming for me. Tons of cool, creative content for the game I was already playing.

 

[Iosue]

I mean, rhe difference is the widespread adoption of the Internet. I'm sure rhere was plenty of hostility around 2E, but it was localized and not networked. For 3E, it was all over the web, all the time.

For what it’s worth, Usenet was a thing in the 90s. And in my time on rec.games.frp.misc and rec.games.frp.dnd, there just wasn’t much edition warring. At worst, 1e folks might have been disdainful of TSR’s capitulation to the Angry Mothers from Heck, to which 2e folks would just respond, “Cool, fair enough.” The game was enough the same that no one cared about the fine differences. Ditto, FWIW, for the AD&D players vs the D&D players.

Besides, we didn’t have the wherewithal to fight each other. We had to band together against the smug Vampire players and, even worse, those diceless heathens.

 

[Willie the Duck]

My experience was that plenty of 1e players didn't like 2e (didn't get what was wrong with 1e, or how 2e improved things), but mostly that meant that they just didn't buy it. I think there was more of a notion of having everything you needed for a game already and less of a notion that the company discontinuing* the thing you loved as some kind of sleight. *And there were so many near-mint-condition copies of 1e material in FLGS used bins that the threat of not being able to replace worn-out books may have seemed remote at the time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My experience was that plenty of 1e players didn't like 2e (didn't get what was wrong with 1e, or how 2e improved things), but mostly that meant that they just didn't buy it. I think there was more of a notion of having everything you needed for a game already and less of a notion that the company discontinuing* the thing you loved as some kind of sleight.

No, that came later with TSR's successor.

 

[Mannahnin]

My experience was that plenty of 1e players didn't like 2e (didn't get what was wrong with 1e, or how 2e improved things), but mostly that meant that they just didn't buy it. I think there was more of a notion of having everything you needed for a game already and less of a notion that the company discontinuing* the thing you loved as some kind of sleight. *And there were so many near-mint-condition copies of 1e material in FLGS used bins that the threat of not being able to replace worn-out books may have seemed remote at the time.

Exactly correct. There was a lot of that. Though there were some that were genuinely angry about TSR "watering down the game" by removing demons and devils (really just renaming) and the assassin and half orcs and so forth, kowtowing to what Jim Ward famously called the Angry Mothers From Heck.