OSR Why does OSR Design Draw You In?

[Celebrim]

Nostalgia.

I love capturing the vibe of the game back when I was a kid and everything about RPGs felt magical and cool. That's why I often find myself designing OSR style house rules and revisions and even scenarios for 1e AD&D... even though I have absolutely no intention of ever running a game using those mechanics again.

 

[Celebrim]

In contrast, more rules lite games like most OSR games default to "well, what makes sense," while having a real sense of peril.

I get it, but just like back in the 1980s, I find that "well, what makes sense" in practice involves playing to the referee or the table or the meta rather than to the fiction.

I had no problem whatsoever with scary dungeon crawls in 3e D&D and while I have famously or infamously got a lot of house rules for 3e, the game looks nothing like an OSR rules lite game run heavily by GM fiat and rulings, nor is the fact that my rules let you have 1st level characters with like 29 hit points (although 15-20 would be more typical) anything like having 1st level M-Us with two hit points and one spell.

I don't need to push down the players/PCs to a helpless lack of resources to challenge them. Green slime, swarms of scarab beetles, giant crayfish, and troglodyte cultists will handle that nicely.

 

[Retreater]

Oh neat, that's different for sure. Has she played Draw Steel yet?

She hasn't. I think she'd like it and she's interested based on what she's heard.
But I haven't been able to get it to the table yet. I'm not sure if I have the mental capacity to do so.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I get it, but just like back in the 1980s, I find that "well, what makes sense" in practice involves playing to the referee or the table or the meta rather than to the fiction.

I'm sorry about your tables.

I had no problem whatsoever with scary dungeon crawls in 3e D&D and while I have famously or infamously got a lot of house rules for 3e, the game looks nothing like an OSR rules lite game run heavily by GM fiat and rulings, nor is the fact that my rules let you have 1st level characters with like 29 hit points (although 15-20 would be more typical) anything like having 1st level M-Us with two hit points and one spell.

I don't need to push down the players/PCs to a helpless lack of resources to challenge them. Green slime, swarms of scarab beetles, giant crayfish, and troglodyte cultists will handle that nicely.

I was not speaking on your behalf, only on @GothmogIV's, as I said.

As per the thread title, I was posting about why OSR draws me in.

 

[Fenris-77]

There's something nice about dungeons in particular. They are nice self-contained spaces with hard boundaries to hold neat stuff to encounter. Plus with a myuthic underworld approach, common to many OSR systems, you can get wild and strange without much in the way of external logic. IDK, itæs fun. More generally, I like the simplicity and elegance of a good OSR system for design work, they allow me to focus on the moving diegetic parts without having to crunch too many numbers.