I've recently discovered the Principia Apocrypha document, which is a "new" version of the Old School Primer, written by someone else. I don't know him, but he heavily quotes two other people, one of whom I I do know, or at least, I've watched a lot of his videos on YouTube. This is Ben Milton, the Questing Beast, and author of Maze Rats and Knave, two old school rules-lite games. Milton seems like an unlikely champion for the OSR. He's a relatively new guy to the hobby. He wasn't even alive during the heyday of the old school phase of D&D that the OSR is attempting to recreate. I don't know if he's ever said exactly how old he is, but he looks like a Gen Y kind of guy, who's childhood and youth would have spanned the 80s and 90s. He might even be an older Millennial. Anyway, he's clearly younger than me and older than my oldest son. :shrug:
Perhaps its exactly this facet about him that makes him an ideal person to discuss the OSR; an enthusiastic supporter who comes at it as (initially) an outsider, without all of the barnacles and mossy growths that us hoarier, older guys accumulated due to too much exposure over too many years; he was able to cut right to the chase and see through the cruft to understand what about the OSR is actually appealing. Spoiler alert, it isn't really anything specific about the mechanics or details of the setting. That whole kind of thing has been excised from the discussion, and it's much more about the playstyle. (The exception is a somewhat off-handed reference to the gold = XP model.)
This shifts the discussion along the paradigm a bit from the Matt Finch document, which had too many overly specific things about what to do and how to do it, to one that focuses more on "the whole point of the OSR is do things your own way." Or at least one of the whole points. As the document itself, the single biggest guiding principle is: Your table is YOUR table. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks you should do, even the game's designers; only you can decide what is best for your game (plural you in this case, probably). The game itself can only provide tools and suggestions, not hard and fast rules.
I've "fisked" some of the OSR themed "this is old school" type documents in the past before, and found mostly broad areas of disagreement about the implementation, even if I agreed with the higher level principles. (See here and here and here, for instance.) When I read this Principia Apocrypha, on the other hand, I could quibble with a few minor details where I'd mumble a little bit that I'm not really interested in that, but otherwise, there's nothing really substantive to which I can disagree. At all.
So when I say that I'm not old school but I am old fashioned, this is what I mean; I enjoy the way the games were assumed to have been run (minus the dungeoneering idea, which I never bought into. But even that wasn't necessarily assumed in old school, although obviously most people did it that way) but I disliked the systems and rules. This document redefines the OSR as more focused on the former and not really at all on the latter. If that's really true, then I suppose I'm kind of an OSRian too, although an unusual one who prefers a rule-set that's not really based on the iconic B/X or other early iteration of the game. Which I would have put as a hard-stop qualifying factor to be considered OSR previously.
Maybe this is inevitable. It was one thing when the OSR was attempting mostly just to clone the rules and clean up a few minor issues with them. I'd still suggest that an awful lot of the movement is still devoted exactly to that. I think a lot has happened in the years since OSRIC first was released which kicked off this whole concept, but current generation cloning seems to have settled (I'd suggest) most strongly on Old School Essentials as the go-to clone; the "perfect" iteration of the B/X rules, or whatever. The other thing that's happened outside of the cloning, however, is the proliferation of "OSR Heartbreakers"; games that are loosely old school in their mechanics, but which attempt to actually do something different; kind of offer an alternative to simply playing cloned old D&D.
Because honestly; if all I really wanted was to play B/X into infinity, it's not like it's hard to pick up B/X. About five or six years ago (or maybe more. The years fly by sometimes.) I spent $20 to get my "B/X package" as pdfs. $5 each for the Basic and Expert sets, and then another $5 each for Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread, the modules that were originally packaged with the games. Most of the rest of the old content is pretty readily available too. I could literally play for the rest of my life with content that's already available. And I can houserule a few things like ability score generation, or ascending AC without having to buy anything. Even if I wanted a system that did that for me, Labyrinth Lord was free for years. Old School Essentials may beat all of these options when it comes to presentation and organization, but it's still the same game (mostly) at the end of the day.
Where the OSR got interesting was in the cottage industry, indie-game-like DIY aesthetic of people creating fantasy heartbreakers that did something different, but shamelessly didn't care that they were fantasy heartbreakers. They weren't really about offering new systems as much as they were about doing something different with tone, feel, style, or something else. I mean, I know the label is often used pejoratively, but from a purely objective sense, is Lamentations of the Flame Princess any different than a fantasy heartbreaker? And does it fail to be cool because it is? In fact, the notion of the OGL allowing people to riff off of the rules without having to reinvent them every time is a major part of the reason the OSR is successful, because the focus can be elsewhere. That said, most of these "OSR heartbreakers" do, in fact, do something different with the rules, and this is where the current indie-game scene is starting to mingle somewhat with the OSR. Does anyone really think that Whitehack or Blackhack or Neoclassical Geek Revival play like B/X anymore at some point? In many ways yes... but in many ways very prominently and drastically no.
My own tastes are more towards games that are even more different; although very distinct from d20/3e, that's the actual baseline for m20, for instance. But what if being OSR isn't really about the rules as much as it has been in the past? What if, as Milton says, being old school is about: "The more of the following a campaign has, the more old school it is: high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system (usually XP for treasure), a disregard for "encounter balance", and the use of random tables to generate world elements that surprise both players and referees. Also, a strong do-it-yourself attitude and a willingness to share your work and use the creativity of others in your game."
If that's true, then I'm pretty old school. I'm not 100% aligned with everything he lists there, but that's still a pretty decent summary of how I like games to be. I tend to find in general the less the OSR is self-congratulatory and snide towards modern games and gamers, and the less that they try to encode specific system elements into the definition, the more I agree with them. As the voice of the OSR has changed, matured and moved somewhat over the years, I'm definitely mellowed in my opposition to them, because I was always sympathetic to a lot of what they were doing, but I hated their implementation. Have we now arrived at the point where the OSR is defined in such a way that what I'm doing qualifies?
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