I was busier than I thought. My son called and talked for about an hour. I made dinner. Then my wife got home earlier than I thought. Etc. Anyway, I didn't draw the map. I did make a youtube video. I'll include it below. I didn't make a second one, or lay any groundwork for it. I did get distracted by somebody else's video that was another one of those smug, preachy RAW or die videos. I find that in general, RAW enthusiasts are smug, arrogant spergs with major trust issues. While I kinda see their point, when you get into the weeds for even a moment with them, you quickly realize that you don't want to play with these people.
Not only that, most of their arguments for their playstyle, and against yours are just-so stories and strawman arguments created from a baseline of assumptions that are flat out wrong or irrelevant. The video I watched asked rhetorically several times, "are you even in the hobby?" The play culture that would lead to these RAW spergs is, however, sufficiently different that I'm not sure that it's fair to call it the same hobby, even though it's based on (allegedly) the same games.
Anyway, here's a pretty big copy/paste from a blog post that describes the playstyles, more or less, in question. RAW spergs tend to congregate towards classic, with some overlap with the OSR (although based on the description below, you'd think that the OSR was the opposite of it. I imagine that some of the RAW sperging is a direct reaction to trends in the OSR, honestly). Most gamers are more in the trad camp or at least variations on it (it's not really described super well in this essay, or super accurately, more like. Probably because the guy writing it isn't part of that culture, and therefore has misconceptions about it), and they see the concerns of the RAW spergs are irrelevant and kind of bizarre, like they're not even aware of what the point of the game is. It's like they're making the argument that because hitting a defenseless player in football is called "unnecessary roughness" and is a personal foul, fifteen yard penalty, therefore you have to use all of the encumbrance rules as written in D&D.
I'm not going to specifically rebut the video I watched; in fact, I couldn't even make it all the way through; after 15 minutes of about 25 in total, I was bored and irritated by it and quit. For some reason, the concept stuck with me, though. I may make my own video on the topic, without necessarily more than off-hand reference to the Basic Expert's video.
Anyway, here's a description of the three relevant play styles (out of six identified in the post, but I don't think most of the other ones identified have a lot of cachet or relevance to the hobby still; they're kinda weird fringe activities, or regional specialties rather than playstyles that are actually commonplace. And below that, my video.
1) Classic
Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly". This is explicit in the AD&D 1e DMG's advice to dungeon masters, but recurs in a number of other places, perhaps most obviously in tournament modules, especially the R-series put out by the RPGA in its first three years of operation, which emphasize periodic resets between sections of the adventure to create a "fair" experience for players as they cycle around from tournament table to tournament table playing the sections.
The focus on challenge-based play means lots of overland adventure and sprawling labyrinths and it recycles the same notation to describe towns, which are also treated as sites of challenge. At some point, PCs become powerful enough to command domains, and this opens up the scope of challenges further, by allowing mass hordes to engage in wargame-style clashes. The point of playing the game in classic play is not to tell a story (tho' it's fine if you do), but rather the focus of play is coping with challenges and threats that smoothly escalate in scope and power as the PCs rise in level. The idea of longer campaigns with slow but steady progression in PC power interrupted only by the occasional death is a game play ideal for classic culture.
This comes into being sometime between 1976-1977, when Gygax shifts from his early idea that OD&D is a "non-game" into trying to stabilize the play experience. It starts with him denouncing "Dungeons and Beavers" and other deviations from his own style in the April 1976 Strategic Review, but this turns into a larger shift in TSR's publishing schedule from 1977 onwards. Specifically, they begin providing concrete play examples - sample dungeons and scenarios, including modules - and specific advice about proper play procedures and values to consumers.
This shift begins with the publication of Holmes Basic (1977) and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1977), before eventually culminating in AD&D (1977-1979) and the Mentzer-written BECMI (1983-1986) line. Judges Guild, the RPGA, Dragon Magazine, and even other publishers (e.g. Mayfair Games) get on board with this and spread Classic norms around before Gygax and Mentzer leave TSR in late 1985 / early 1986. Judges Guild loses its license to print D&D material in 1985, and the RPGA's tournaments have shifted away from classic play by about 1983. Most of the other creators at TSR have shifted to "trad" (see below) by the mid-1980s, and so the institutional support for this style starts dries up, even tho' people continue to run and play in "classic" games.
Classic is revived in the early 2000s when the holdouts who've continued to play in that style use the internet to come together on forums like Dragonsfoot, Knights and Knaves Alehouse, and others, and this revival is part of what motivates OSRIC (2006) to be released.
One weird quirk of history is that people who were trying to revive classic in the early 2000s are often lumped into the OSR, despite the two groups really having distinct norms and values. Some of the confusion is because a few key notable individuals (e.g. Matt Finch) actually did shift from being classic revivalists to being early founders of the OSR. Because both groups are interested in challenge-based play, even if they have different takes on challenge's meaning, there are moment of productive overlap and interaction (and also lots of silly disputes and sneering; such is life).
This intermingling of people from different play cultures who initially appear to be part of the same movement but turn out to be interested in different things is pretty common - story games and Nordic LARP go through a similar intermingling before they split off into different things (more on that in a sec). Ed. Not really; I cut that part as irrelevant to this discussion. And Nordic LARP is pretty irrelevant as near as I can tell altogether. Other than this essay, I never see anyone anywhere talk about it at all. It might as well not exist. It actually might well not exist for all I know.
2) Trad (short for "traditional")
Its own adherents and advocates call it "trad", but we shouldn't think of it as the oldest way of roleplaying (it is not). Trad is not what Gary and co. did (that's "classic"), but rather is the reaction to what they were doing.
Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM's. If you ever hear people complain about (or exalt!) games that feel like going through a fantasy novel, that's trad. Trad prizes gaming that produces experiences comparable to other media, like movies, novels, television, myths, etc., and its values often encourage adapting techniques from those media. Ed. Not exactly. Narratives are not a required feature of trad, although many bad trad games do indeed feature railroady narratives. Good trad GMs will tell you to be as wary about overscripting and overplanning as any other style of GM will, because it's a bad thing to do irrespective of style. I will admit, however, that inexperienced trad style GMs are probably more prone to falling into this fallacy than those who prefer some other style mentioned here, where exploration/sandbox is often held out as an ideal instead.
Trad emerges in the late 1970s, with an early intellectually hub in the Dungeons and Beavers crew at Caltech, but also in Tracy and Laura Hickman's gaming circle in Utah. The defining incident for Tracy was evidently running into a vampire in a dungeon and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (the Night Verse series) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of "roleplaying". Ed. I've said this before, but I'll say it again; if not Hickman, than someone else would have done it. The zeitgeist was inevitable, because trad is what most of the people in the hobby, especially those who weren't midwifed through wargaming or boardgames actually wanted the games to be more like. There was a ton of pent up demand for trad-like products. I don't want to slight Hickman's achievements, but he was in the right place at the right time, and if not him, then someone else would have stumbled onto more or less the same formula. There were already modules that were previewing it before he wrote Ravenloft for example. Like this very post says below, Chaosium was heading there. WFRP was heading there. Everyone was heading there. It was inevitable that once Gygax's hold on the strategy was loosened that his insistence on promoting his favorite style would be replaced by the juggernaut in the zeitgeist that was just waiting to happen.
Trad gets its first major publication articulating its vision of play outside of TSR in Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu (1981), which tells readers that the goal of play is to create an experience like a horror story, and provides specific advice (the "onion layer" model) for creating that. The values of trad crystallize as a major and distinct culture of play in D&D with the Ravenloft (1983) and Dragonlance (1984) modules written by Hickman. TSR published Ravenloft in response to Call of Cthulhu's critical and commercial success, and then won a fistful of awards and sold tons of copies themselves.
Within a few years, the idea of "roleplaying, not rollplaying" and the importance of a Dungeon Master creating an elaborate, emotionally-satisfying narrative had taken over. I think probably the ability to import terms and ideas from other art forms probably helped a great deal as well, since understanding trad could be done by anyone who'd gone through a few humanities classes in university. Ed. Or anyone who'd ever watched a movie, a TV show or read a book. But again, "emotionally satisfying narrative" is a red herring. That's not what trad values, or at least its certainly not the main emphasis of the style. But the very gamist exploration, loot, power-up loop was almost immediately seen as shallow and unsatisfying to a large chunk of gamers, and it became apparent fairly quickly that by "large chunk" I actually mean "clear majority." Classic gaming can fairly easily and in some ways better be replicated by computer games, even video games of the era were pretty good at it; Gauntlet, Capcom's D&D games, etc. The thing about trad is that it recognized what ttprgs offered that no other medium of entertainment did, and focused on it. It's not just a glorified boardgame or wargame. It's not just a slightly interactive novel or storytelling experience. It's a completely new medium with its own entire strengths and weaknesses, and a good trad game leans into that in a way that Classic in many ways did not. It's not at all shocking to me that it quickly became the biggest style, the only one that was catered to in official products, the only one that was really presented to players, and by far still the most popular today. I sometimes call my own style paleo-trad, in contrast to the neo-trad that he also describes in this article (not quoted here); it's trad, but tempered by my old-fashionedness about the game in some ways. The railroads, the GM NPCs, the "my special character" twee protectiveness of players around their characters, and just the whole pretentious theater kids arrogance of later trad products, like White Wolf's were pretty big turn-offs to me. But here, he kind of describes trad as if that's what all trad is like. He describes trad as bad trad and doesn't acknowledge the existence of good trad. He might well be a RAW sperg himself, although maybe I'm reaching by reading that much between the lines.
Trad is the hegemonic culture of play from at least the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it's still a fairly common style of play. Ed. There are other new style sthat have come up since the early 2000s, but it's wishful thinking to claim that trad isn't still a hegemonic culture and the most common in gaming. It's still "the default" for most gamers, except maybe some edges of the newer younger Millennial and Gen-Z gamers who are running bakeries and soap operas with their characters, or exploring the OC/Neo-trad sphere in online gaming.
5) The OSR ("Old School Renaissance / Revival")
Yes, it's this late in this chronological listing. And yes, the OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition.
The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play.
An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.
The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions using what S. John Ross would call "ephemeral resources" and "invisible rulebooks", and that the OSR calls "playing the world" and "player skill", respectively. Basically, by not being bound by the rules, you can play with a wider space of resources that contribute to framing differences in PC agency in potentially very precise and finely graded ways, and this allows you to throw a wider variety of challenges at players for them to overcome. I could write an entire post on just what random tables are meant to do, but they tie into the variance in agency and introduce surprise and unpredictability, ensuring that agency does vary over time.
I tend to date the start of the OSR from shortly after the publication of OSRIC (2006), which blew open the ability to use the OGL to republish the mechanics of old, pre-3.x D&D. With this new option, you had people who mainly wanted to revive AD&D 1e as a living game, and people who wanted to use old rule-sets as a springboard for their own creations. 2007 brought Labyrinth Lord, and the avalanche followed thereafter. The early OSR had Grognardia to provide it with a reconstructed vision of the past to position itself as the inheritors of, it had distinct intellectual developments like "Melan diagrams" of dungeons and Chris Kutalik's pointcrawls, and I would say it spent the time between 2006 and roughly 2012 forming its norms into a relatively self-consistent body of ideas about proper play.
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