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derkastellan · 4 years

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Old School vs Truth

The “Old School Revolution” (OSR for short) is a niche within the wider role-playing ecosystem that has attracted my attention over the years. By now, it has diversified into people experimenting more with rules, but right now I want to look at the origins because frankly that is so much easier and is also something I have the most beef with.

Without mincing too many words the OSR seems to be about emulating the play experience of the versions of Dungeons & Dragons that were around during the Gygax era, so mostly Classic D&D (Original Edition or Oe, 0e), Basic D&D (Basic/Expert mostly), and Advanced D&D (AD&D 1st Edition or 1e). Most of this was done by writing retro-clones which either emulated the original rules, stream-lined and cleaned up the original rules, or versions that added popular house rules. The strongest contenders were Swords & Wizardry (based off of Oe mostly), Labyrinth Lord (based off of Basic mostly), and OSRIC (based of 1e).

It’s interesting that OSRIC basically became the least used of these systems. This doesn’t mean there are no people playing 1e, though. For example Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is a 1e-based ruleset that seems to go strong. Also Labyrinth Lord incorporated the Advanced Edition Companion.

All of these games benefit from the basic compatibility provided by the D&D stat block. While details may differ on how to do such things as saving throws or attack rolls, in general monsters and other trappings can be shared with these games with minimal hassle - or used from the original game materials from the 70s and 80s. After all, the purpose of a retro-clone was in part to play a game that is out-of-print. (And to clean up rough edges of which there were plenty.)

“Virtues”

Having spent a few years browsing or participating on OSR boards, groups, forums - whatever was at the time an appropriate social medium - I came across various arguments in favor of old school play.

There were claims that old school gaming is...

Fostering emergent story.

More creativity-driven on the GM side because it is less defined. “Rulings not rules.”

More problem-solving-driven on the player side.

Inviting GMs to tinker with the system and getting into a do-it-yourself culture.

Overall more challenging than later games (mostly iterations of D&D).

I think it’s also perfectly fair to say that a lot of people are attracted to OSR because either of nostalgia, like I was. I see an old adventure book with black line art and I can get giddy. But somehow the OSR always wanted to rationalize an emotional response into something that is of presumably higher virtue. You may like or dislike various editions of D&D for various reasons. The question is whether you make a high horse of it to talk down from.

The list above is basically the “best of” of rationalized boasting about why older is better. The amount of claims that “D&D used to be more challenging” or “D&D has been dumbed down” and the endless amount of “war stories” from playing classic modules were truly legion.

One could easily rephrase this list to a critique of something else and not be far off, I think:

Modern-day D&D...

Is more story-oriented or “railroady.”

Defined the GM’s job very narrowly and the rules claim to cover everything.

Diminished problem-solving on the player side.

Encouraged GMs more to be consumers than producers.

Is less challenging.

And in fact, this is the variation you will find more often expressed in the player base. It has a bit of “old man shaking his cane” at all those people playing mostly 4e or 5e D&D.

It is also, if you ask me, partially true. It depends on how you select your data.

You may find decades-old grudges against Dragonlance as the TSR setting that introduced rail-roady gameplay into D&D more heavily. And with the advent of unified rules the mindset of “I roll a die to succeed” has become more prevalent in both many GMs and players heads. In fact, many players come from very different backgrounds now, having cut their teeth on video games and MMORPGs.

But here’s the thing. Nothing requires you to run a 5e game as rail-roady, roll-driven, or less challenging. And while I can see how it encourages a certain mindset, style of play, and attitude, there’s plenty of systems around that one might chose instead. The world is larger than D&D, even though it ends up cornering so much of the US market for itself.

Wild times

I have no doubt that uninspired modern modules exist aplenty, providing unchallenging diversion to players. (The deluge of material for 5e is mind-boggling even when considering 3e flooding the market with 3rd party product.)

But this already started from the days of AD&D 1e, with people clamoring for TSR to release stuff to run. And in fact, people in the OSR cite such modules also as their influences, with a very few standing out. And in fact a lot don’t stand out so much! The Greyhawk setting has probably around a hundred modules associated with it (though some or many may be set anywhere).

B2: Keep on the Borderlands was released in 1979. Tomb of Horrors in 1978. Within 4 years after the original game’s first release the idea of a game module as consumable product takes shape for TSR. Before that it took TSR about 2 years to publish “supplements” which added rules and general game stuff - as opposed to “adventures.”

The very first players had nothing to guide them by - no true introduction to running the game, for example. The first introduction as to how to play and run the game would be left to later products, like Basic D&D. So the first players pieced together what they could from a jamble of rules, thing they had heard, etc.

How vague are we talking about? If my index search doesn’t betray me, only one of the three books contained in the original boxed set contains the concept of “caller” (without explaining it) and an example of an actual gameplay conversation between caller (on behalf of players) and referee. From this and the rules you had to deduce how the game is played. (The role of caller appears in other products but the Players Handbook of 1e finally casts it as the leader of a party, requiring “obedience” or the party is penalized for their confused actions.)

So, for many years people basically had only the vaguest hunch of how to play the game at all. It would be a bold claim to say people had a strong idea of how D&D was meant to play unless they made it to a convention and played with people who had in turn played with original players. Or read about that in a zine.

Gygax tried to make the game more uniform and defined in AD&D 1e, which in turn also curbs the most free-flowing aspects of the game and drives it towards “weapon speed factors” and a detailed list of armaments.

The “advanced” in AD&D certainly stands for more detailed. It also stands for the end of a free-wheeling era and aims to be definitive and unifying. It goes from “you could do it like this” (even suggesting other games as part of the game) to “this is how it is done”.

“Rulings not rules” was necessary during this time as the rules were incomplete, haphazardly organized, lacked uniformity (yes, this includes AD&D 1e), and relied on the GM to fill the gap. AD&D 1e partially fills this gap but in my opinion is lacking a coherent design. It is more like an “opinionated, polished, and edited” version of the original game. It is one possible thing that could have evolved from the original soup and canonizing Gygax vision of the game.

So within a few years of the first D&D release into the wild we move from “rulings not rules” to “my rules, not your rulings.” Except for the areas like social interaction where D&D left it vague, probably for its benefit in the longer run.

It was a creative time... a time of problem-solving and challenge!

But what did players do before that? Now here we have mostly accounts of people chosing to involve themselves with the OSR in the sense of a wider audience, shaping a legend of how play was, leading to the claims I listed above.

I have heard numerous claims, in one case in person, of how this was a time where smart people devised ways to assure winning by avoiding combat or dice-rolling altogether because it was so damn risky. And this is how it was meant to be played. One played carefully, probing floors for traps with 10 foot poles, always on the lookout what GM (and module) might throw at you, and this is how you won the infamous Tomb of Horrors.

It has a sense of e-sports athletes, doesn’t it? Because Tomb of Horrors was a tournament module you could test your gaming mettle against. Depending on who you ask it is a great challenge or a screwjob.

Now, there are good examples of disabling traps that I do like from these accounts. Freezing traps or pouring concrete into a mechanism - good stuff. Some solutions were decidedly cool. This is certainly the response some players had to the game. They adopted a gameplay driven by cautiousness, avoiding rolls, bringing hirelings and henchmen, and otherwise minimizing risk and optimizing chances.

Reading around the internet I found other accounts - like people saying that characters used to die a lot and having a 2nd level elf was special. Running away is also mentioned as a valuable reaction to encounters. Of course, breaking the enemy’s morale also played a role, not running all encounters to the very end.

My bet is, however, that many people house-ruled D&D to be more heroic before D&D canonized step by step with 2e and later editions. My bet would be that people not only awarded more hit points, they might also fiddle with tables, the rules for dying, etc. And why shouldn’t they? If it was desirable to modify the game, why not modify that? If D&D was a means of having fun, people probably modified it to have more fun which was probably not had by dying a lot, no matter what certain GMs or Bill Webb or whoever claim.

My suspicion is that most experimenting and problem-solving went into puzzles and tricks, and occasionally traps, especially if they resembled puzzles and tricks more. And I see no true difference here today - if you provide players with something complex that they have to figure out, a lot of them will pool their problem-solving skills and try to reason it out and some will mash buttons or smash it. What has changed is that detecting traps became a lot more passive. (And traps have always been a divisive topic - how to run them well, what makes a good trap, and what outcomes are appropriate traps vs death traps, considerations of fairness, etc.)

In general, the challenge argument hinges on very few things. Part of it is that players had so few hit points on the lower levels, their survival was constantly at stake even from small challenges. On higher levels, save-or-die effects could easily kill the PC just the same. Sudden death was certainly possible enough. In other words, being vulnerable, often crazily and unrealistically vulnerable, was part of the game. A level 1 wizard might have less hit points than a cat and might be killed by one.

These don’t stem however from design, and came about at best unconsciously. If these are virtues they were at best acquired at random, not planned or designed for. They were at best happy - or depending on whom you ask, unhappy - accidents.

Dungeons & Dungeons

Looking at the material published for the OSR you notice a lot of dungeon crawls. Draw a dungeon, run a dungeon. I wonder what real story is supposed to “emerge” here? How I tricked that troll out of a magic sword? How we snatched the dragon hoard without fighting the damn thing?

The whole thing about “we evaded combat” and “not everything is scaled to your level” or “we did some pretty inventive things to disarm traps” tells a story of its own. The game itself was mostly about monsters, traps, and dungeons. Beyond that, any degree of freedom you might feel you had can frankly be had in most other RPGs with a willing and capable GM.

I have no doubt that a lot of interesting things went down in Dave Arneson’s games when everything was new and he had to adjudicate the game on the fly, stuff ideas in, make up systems, etc. It was less of a game in a codified sense and more of an experience. That must have also been born from this new sense of freedom of discovering the story angle of your avatars, and since they had all their own interests and turfs and stakes their adventures likely often had some ingrained motivation D&D often lacked.

Evaporating marketplace

This aversion to “stories” is interesting. When you see what is published inthe OSR ecosystem, it quickly went away from plain dungeon modules to more exotic affairs. Weird set-pieces, playing to a heavy metal vibe, gonzo adventuring - I know several series of publications that thrive on that. And how about Sword & Wizardry? Half of the stuff published for it is also published for 5e. I think you will find nothing in there upsetting to “modern” sensibilities and yet it comes also for an old school system. Are we more alike than “they” think?

None of the actual retro-clones are truly thriving. They are multiplying, but who is publishing adventure modules for them? Fewer than you think. Labyrinth Lord had a pretty humdrum Kickstarter to get a new edition out, OSRIC is probably best considered dead, Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is selling as much a setting as a system, and Swords & Wizardry is also not brimming with new stuff. Look at the DriveThruRPG page of stuff for the S&W rules and you find that the section ordered by “Popularity” has barely seen any change - because no new major stuff got published for it. Labyrinth Lord in turn sees mostly publications for the compatible Dark Places & Demogorgons. Settings sell, retro-clones fail. Funny that. Games like the Black Hack stole most of the OSR’s thunder depending on how you want to see it, all these games like Polyhedral Dungeon that want to innovate the rules a bit, and encourage actual “hacking” instead of polishing slightly the “same ol’.”

So, unless we assume all of these happy OSR GMs homebrew, the OSR has largely failed as a marketplace. The ones succeeding to attract attention are the more gimmicky ones, the weird of LotFP, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and various module and adventure series heading into more gonzo, weird, and surreal directions. And some of the weird and surreal authors are leaving the OSR behind, like Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City or Electric Bastionland, having clear old school roots but playing them out their own way. Even seemingly successful publishers like Hydra Cooperative branch out into also providing their material to DCC. Both the Troll Lords and Frog God Games cater to the 5e crowd. Material palatable to more flexible old schoolers seeps into Dungeon World, the Year Zero engine, and other lightweight or even narrative systems. The OSR might not be dead, but it is not really expanding, nor is it getting stuff into stores unless you count the weird, gonzo offshoots.

Or let’s say, it’s not expanding the original OSR sphere. The old school’s influence is felt everywhere, including 5e itself. An old school vibe has reached far and wide in the RPG community, but left the OSR community behind. Unless you think that the Black Hack and other new systems are the inheritors of the OSR, that this next generation OSR will actually continue to thrive. I actually hope so. It might end up being less preachy.

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derkastellan · 7 years

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Musings: A look at the OSR - Part II: Love the presentation, come to hate the rules

There’s countless people out there who cut their teeth on Classic Dungeons & Dragons (”little brown books” plus supplements, OD&D, Oe, 0e), Basic D&D (Holmes Basic, B/X, BECMI) or Advanced D&D (1e). And a lot of present day OSR games emulate these, for example OSRIC (1e), Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (1e), Swords & Wizardry (0e), Labyrinth Lord (Basic), BLUEHOLME (Holmes Basic), and so on. Some of these were specifically written to provide reference game systems to write for to retain compatibility with earlier editions of D&D without having to reference the D&D name or out-of-print products. Especially Labyrinth Lord. The basic releases of Swords and Wizardry integrate either only the original White Box, or also Supplement 1, or all supplements released for 0e. But these games also have been polished, unified, cleaned up, and updated a bit. S&W features support for ascending armor class, a feature introduced to D&D no sooner than 3rd edition. These games stay true to their preferred editions in most ways, while also providing a bit more streamlined experience than you might expect from 0e (where you had to construct your own game out of all released material and home rules) or Basic (where material was distributed across boxes and level-limited, and some material got never published before another, contradicting new line was released).

What they have in common is that they are labors of love of a devoted fanbase who enjoy D&D gameplay, consider D&D their favorite game or even only game of choice, and who devote significant time to playing it, writing for it, and refining it.

The art is often a callback to earlier editions. I feel right at home with black-and-white line art. It gives me a cozy feeling and evokes the fantastic for me. The rules... not so.

The capabilities of D&D characters don’t seem so fantastic in earlier editions, there’s a long, arduous grind to go up in level, and not much is gained. Magic gear is where it’s at. What can a mid-level S&W Complete Fighter do? He can multi-attack mobs of pitiful monsters, is harder to hit if dextrous, is the only one who gets strength boni, can hit better, and has more hit points. He eventually gets to have a stronghold. If you look for a reason why there’s such a variety of magical swords back in the day, look no further.

This is not truly a surprise. The D&D character as we know it evolved out of Dave Arneson’s wargaming group. Arneson wasn’t a great rules writer or editor, but his group pioneered advancing by level because they moved away from one-shot encounters with meaningless pawns to keeping continuity for their chosen avatars. Frankly, players didn’t like seeing them dying, so they were given increased capability to increase survivability. (Don’t expect any Gygax fanboy-ing from me, I pretty much think Arneson invented the actual game and Gygax wrote the first ruleset for it. I’m not happy with all the “Gygax this” or “Gygax that” which - to me - seems to be endemic in the American player base. If I have to “worship” an individual “hero” or “titan” over everybody else, Arneson would be my pick. But frankly, I would rather not. I respect both and their legacy.)

And early D&D reflects this legacy in that characters are more capable than their fantasy wargame antecedents, but not very fantastic or awesome, really. I personally am just fine with the short time 5th edition let’s pass between level 1 and level 3 and the range of capabilities a 5e character can have. If somebody tells me they needed 10 years or more to get to level X and that is the right pace and was still an accomplishment, I gag a little. Because time is getting scarce, players are not necessarily easy to find, and there’s precious few opting for a punishing game. I love many things about the older editions but I consider a lot of it “a work in progress.” I appreciate the “use it as you want and extend it, it’s your game” culture ideals of 0e which seemed to come to lessen with 1e... a lot. I do appreciate the raw creativity of building fantastic worlds for the first time, no matter how eclectic, slapped together, improvised. But I tried to run games that are true to what some people believe to be the punishing ideal of gaming, and players ran for the hills.

You could blame computer games and their ever-evolving power fantasies. But many people have come forward and shown that computer games in turn owe the idea to an extent also to D&D. The chickens have simply come home to roost. History cannot be dialed back. And it shows. And why shouldn’t it? D&D was often a power trip in the first place. It just got “trippier” over the years.

Now, I’m not saying that you could not run a fantastic game with these rulesets and materials out of the box. You can. But it will depend on your charisma, inventiveness, and sheer skill as GM to actually sell these games today to new players. It can work, of course, and it can be great fun. I’m not denying that. But I’m not so sure why I should try to sell that in the first place?

Compatibility with old material is a great plus. There’s tons of existing material out there, especially starting with 1st edition or AD&D. But frankly, I hate AD&D. I have it standing on my shelf and I feel like it’s not a good ruleset. AD&D2 has it beat in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of Gary Gygax, rules designer. Gary Gygax the creator of adventures and evocative prose... that’s a different thing. Frankly, I am not a fan of where 1e tried to wander - into this semi-simulationist territory. I can do very well with a game that understands that it is merely a game and that complexity needs a well-defined pay-off.

In fact, in comparison the 1st edition Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide are both examples of lots of mini-rule-systems thrown together. Whatever Gygax could think of he foisted his own rule-systems on. And they lack in coherency. A lot. You also cannot play the game without the DMG - because even the actual to-hit matrices of player characters are hidden in that tome. I tried to like this game. I really did. It’s a disaster. People keep singing its praises but I’m not sure you can put these three books - including the Monster Manual, of course - into the hands of most 20-year-olds with an interest in roleplaying and expect them to like this stuff and starting to play. The legend of 1e lives on because the players who started with 1e (or spent a long time with it) live on.

None of those specific games I mentioned truly dare to transcend the original rulesets. Fixes. Unification attempts. It’s all in there. But there’s also “d100 for this” and “d20 for that” and “roll high for this” and “roll low for that”. That persists. Action resolution is a mixed bag of separate rule systems and little engines. It’s a replication of the rules more than anything else.

I find it funny because one of the OSR mantras is “Rulings, not rules.” Placing authority in the hand of the GM to rule individual situations from deliberating this instance (or set of instances) instead of relying on a fixed set of rules. But these games come with rules! They are just... messy, unnecessarily complex in some cases, underdefined in others, lack design or coherence. So, GM help yourself! No wonder there’s so many fantasy heartbreakers out there... People love playing D&D, but it’s hard to ignore there’s some - or many - things in there that need fixing! So they fixed and released and fixed and released.

And so did the owners of the D&D trademarks and copyrights. The game changed. Monster-killing became more important. But it’s not like many players already hadn’t thought that most of the time. It comes with a book full of monsters, after all. Player character capabilities increased. Rules were streamlined, unified. Not all for the better. I don’t exactly prefer Pathfinder’s heap of feats and 4e’s oodles of class powers to 1e or 2e or Basic. But I recognize that these newer games come with more deeply unified engines.

How powerful a unified engine truly is can be seen in games like Dungeon Crawl Classics (which has a streamlined 3e under its hood, then grafted lots of tables on it) and... 5e. I like 5e. I’m really glad this edition came out because I like both the old school and new rules. And 5e came somewhere in between, if not perfectly then at least it tried. Because all the “d100 here” vs “d6 here” and “d20 high here” and “d20 low here” and their endless variations... I can’t be bothered with. Not truly. Not for long.

Because I love the old school feel. Not the rules. I suspect something like the Black Hack is more up my alley than 1e. I know Dungeon World definitely is. I have tried. I keep buying OSR material. But I don’t really get warm with the rules. I don’t feel “converted.” The rules of old D&D were a worthy first try. The game once was meant to evolve with the needs of the GM and the players. Instead the rules... stuck. At least for some. I personally see that as one of the unluckiest inversions. I think it was never meant to be.

And I’m happy every time somebody makes a new riff on D&D without simply going back. Kevin Crawford’s “Scarlet Heroes” is foremost on my mind. Moving towards elegance, simplicity, honoring the spirit of the game.

(to be continued)

#osr #oldschool #rpg #roleplaying

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