OSR mechanics vs OSR play paradigm

Because I've been really into reading games lately, including a bunch of the Microlite games, a re-read (or at least skim) of ShadowDark, a read of my recently downloaded pdf version of Knave 2e, a glance, at least, at various retroclones, including picking up some new retroclones that I hadn't yet (Dark Dungeons, Delving Deeper, Simulacrum Beta) not to mention re-reading a few posts on Grognardia and Simulacrum blogs, and watching a few youtube videos about differing OSR games, I've got a few thoughts. None of these are unique; many of them occurred to me years ago, and many of them have occurred to other commentators too; they're hardly unique or super insightful. But, because I use my blog more as a personal journal than as anything else, well, here it is.

1) The OSR claims to be emulating the 70s and earliest 80s style of gaming. This isn't really true. That is, it certainly has revived an old style of gaming, but there was no more one style of gaming during most of the 70s and earliest 80s than there is now. AD&D, first published in 1978, clearly represented a very different style than OD&D or BD&D did, and when Moldvay and Cook edited the 1981 B/X game, it seems to have been a very deliberate attempt to stake out a different style of play. What most OSRians consider the OSR style of play could probably be described as "tournament style play, except played casually and non-competitively with just your home group." I think this style of play was actually considerably more rare even back in ye olde days than most OSRians imagine rather than some kind of standard or default. Even if people did play more like this than they do now, they didn't do so deliberately, but rather because to some degree the game suggested as much. Once people started deliberately coming up with playstyles, almost immediately they started pulling, in most regards, towards "modern" gaming conventions. Which, of course, date back to the 70s so they're hardly really very modern.

This isn't meant to be a slam on the OSR style of play, merely to point out that the OSR style of play is, in most respects, a modern reaction to the gaming environment as it had become when the OSR started rather than really a real recreation of what gamers were doing in the 70s. If OSRians see this as a slight, that indicates—and I think this is true for some of them at least—that they are trying to establish some kind of moral superiority through seniority. OSR playstyle isn't superior, unless you happen to prefer it, but it doesn't have to be either. Playstyles don't have superiority, just alignment to greater or lesser extent with the taste of any given gamer or group. You shouldn't have to feel obligated to explain, validate, or justify your playstyle. If you like it and it works for you, that's all that matters. If you want to talk about why you like it, that's great too, but it's probably best to do so without trying to subconsciously establish some kind of superiority to your preferred style.

2) As the Simulacrum guy points out, the OSR actually means two things, and most OSRians hew to them both to at least some degree, but some of the confusion about what is and isn't OSR is based on not acknowledging how much the two are both used to define it. In other words, people who focus on the second element and ignore the first and call it OSR are not really OSR; they're OSR adjacent, maybe, or OSR friendly. These two elements are: 

a) Rules that have a high degree of fidelity (i.e. retroclones, or near retro-clones that attempt to do something specifically but subtly different) to an older version of the game; usually one that predates the big playstyle changes in the game, so OD&D, BD&D, B/X, AD&D 1e, maybe BECMI and dubiously AD&D "1.5" or anything more recent. I know that there are also retroclones of RC and 2e, and some retroclones that are hybrids of all kinds of variations and gallimaufries with old school elements, regardless of exact provenance. It's not clear to me exactly where the line is, or should be maybe, between a rule set that is sufficiently "retro" to be an OSR game, or where it's "OSR Adjacent" because it's doing something else that's not really OSRian anymore. For instance, I just read my Knave 2e pdf, or at least skimmed it (it has too many tables to think that I'd literally sit down and read it cover to cover) and the mechanics are really not very old school, or super closely aligned with old D&D, so it's hard to think of it as an OSR game. Maybe OSR adjacent. But it describes itself explicitly as an OSR game, because although the rules are not very closely related to D&D really, or at least not any more closely than any number of other non-D&D games, it does hew very closely to the OSR playstyle, see below.

b) OSR playstyle. Ben Milton himself, author of Knave, is kind of an OSR philosopher of sorts, but his definition clearly focuses more on playstyle than on rules, whereas Keith Hann, the OSR Simulacrum guy, focuses much more on the mechanics and correctly notes that "old school" play style is something that developed as a modern reaction to where gaming was, and how "old school" it really is, i.e., how much it actually resembled gaming in the 70s and 80s, is dubious (to be fair, Milton mentions the same thing in at least one interview that I've seen him in.) Milton's famous comment which has been at least somewhat oft-repeated by OSR fans, suggests that old school games, or OSR games, will tend to have high lethality, lots of random tables, gold for XP, no plot, focus on exploration—especially dungeons, but also open world hexcrawling, etc. But even a game that focuses on all of these old school playstyle elements yet bears only a passing resemblance to the rules of D&D probably shouldn't be called OSR either.

The true OSR really needs to focus on both. It doesn't need 100% strict fidelity to either, but the more it rejects or pulls away from either, the less OSR it is. And again, that isn't a problem unless you identify emotionally with being OSR, or if you're trying to use OSR as a marketing gimmick. I'm personally very comfortable claiming that I differ from the OSR, and while I'm sympathetic to some of their goals, I have little interest in playing a true OSR-like game.

On the two axes of the OSR, I'd say that I'm more sympathetic to the mechanics than to the playstyle. I'm happy with my backing of the Knave 2e kickstarter because I like the tables that it comes with. But it's heavily focused on the OSR playstyle, which I have little interest in, and it makes a lot of mechanical changes that I think are either unnecessary or at least uninteresting. On the other hand, I don't really care much about rules. Maybe that's why I actually kind of like the rules light OSR mechanical chasis, with some deliberate modifications to excise some of the overt D&D-isms and to accomplish something specific.

For example, Dark Fantasy X is more like an OSR game, in most respects, than Knave 2e, at least mechanically. Some of where it differs from the OSR standard is actually the same, or at least similar to how Knave 2e differs. But I pretty comprehensively reject the OSR paradigm of how the game should be run and what it should be about.

3) Some of the OSR adjacent or even NSR people were on to the right idea, in that there's a lot to be gained from not rejecting offhand OSR type mechanics or elements of their playstyle, but there's equally a lot to be gained by not rejecting offhand anything that has been common in the industry after 1983, or which wasn't built on a strict OSR foundation. There actually have been a lot of good ideas in the world of RPG design over the last 40 some odd years, just like there have been a lot of bad ones, and a lot of the 40-50 year old ideas that go back to the beginning of the hobby aren't necessarily great just because they may have been there first. That doesn't mean I'm sympathetic to any particular or specific OSR adjacent or NSR idea, but rather that philosophically they're on the right track to not be dogmatic, to pursue a coherent and cohesive vision for how they like to play, and then look for elements throughout the entirety of the hobby (or even from elsewhere) that facilitate that vision. If that vision is anything other than "ritualistically recreating what we imagine the first RPGs were like" then at least some deviation from the old games' rules is necessary. Even the most faithful OSR clones will at least offer ascending armor class as an option, for instance. Most of them do more than that. Simulacrum, for instance, has as a stated goal to facilitate older module play with smaller parties than the original expectation that they were written for, with groups of 6-10 characters. To give just one example. 

I find that in general I'm much more sympathetic to the OSR from a mechanical perspective, and remain as unsympathetic to the OSR playstyle as I did when some elements of it were commonplace, i.e., in the early 80s. While I've changed a few things, such as the way magic works, some pruning of the spell and monster lists, etc. simply because I never liked the way they were done in D&D, the majority of the minor changes I did were either to support my setting, or to support a specific tone or mood goal for the game I'm planning on running. I tend to have similar tone and mood goals for many games that I've run, but Elemental Fantasy X, for instance, will be different, and may well be mechanically closer to a D&D-like baseline, including having D&D-like classes, at least, and D&D-like races. Or at least some of them.

Anyway, here's a few additional Hero Forge updates; existing models that were updated with new assets and the new face customizer. 

Gnumus Silusus, a friendly grayman from Lomar who has mercantile interests in Southumbria. He prefers to spend most of his time in Barrowmere, loves the weather, the culture, the food, and the friendly people. However, his attempts to dress in Barrowmere hillman fashion borders on the tragic.

Guarg Dreghu, the cult leader who makes the Chersky Pirates so dangerous.

One of the major villains of the setting... although don't expect to see him in the first season, a la Shadows Over Garenport. He'll make his appearance in Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes at the earliest.