OSR Identity

Someone is wrong on the internet! I don't know why this bugs me, but it does. There's no reason for it to bug me. Pretty much everyone in the OSR understands that there are two camps, the OSR OSR and the NSR, is often what they're called. The idea that any mechanics can be OSR if the assumed playstyle is OSR, although that's sometimes poorly defined, is stupid beyond all reason. And on top of everything else, I don't identify at all as belonging to the OSR movement, or even liking the OSR playstyle. 

And yet; I'm sympathetic to the OSR movement in some ways, I'm cognizant of my history with D&D and the place it has in the hobby, and I want to see the OSR succeed without being dragged down by the toxic energy that often seems to accompany the NSR (largely due to Yochai Gal, Israeli designer of Cairn, and gate-keeper and woke secret police. To be fair to him, however, he recognizes that what he (and others) are doing is pretty different than what the OSR had been before he started doing it, and he made a brave enough effort to get the NSR label to really stick, before accepting the inevitable that he was going to be lumped in with the OSR whether he liked it or not, so he'd just have to always caveat which OSR he was a part of.

[T]he 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.

Well, that's the OSR playstyle, more or less, and I suppose any game that utilizes that playstyle at the table can be called OSR if you go by that definition. That's how games like Cairn or Knave or Morg Borg or Dragonbane or ShadowDark can be called OSR. Because of principles! (Apparently Groucho Marx once said "Those are my principles... and if you don't like them, I have others.") But as noted above, the OSR was not originally about a playstyle at all, although it no doubt was correlated to what has lately been called the "classic playstyle" and in many ways rejected the dominant trad playstyle. The OSR was about getting the old rules that some people greatly preferred (along with the implicit necessities that those rules had on playing the actual game, i.e., greater risk of character death, much lower powered, non-superhero like PCs, etc.) The OSR was created to 1) create the retro-clones and get them out there, and 2) produce new material compatible with the retro-clones and by the transitive property of the retro-clones being compatible with the old rules, the new material was essentially about being compatible with the old rules too. But by and large, people played those rules using the same playstyle preferences that they used to play any other rules, regardless of what they were.

As the OSR developed, many younger gamers actually discovered that there was something to those old rules that the new rules didn't offer, and became fans. But it started getting all of these BS principles added to it, and people started talking more and more about the "correct" way to play, and thus the OSR playstyle was born. But this was a new and unusual development, and nowhere in the past did the rules dictate your playstyle, really. Certainly some rules may have encouraged some playstyles. This is obvious from my many years of playing 3e, and realizing that the complicated, careful and cautious tactical combat game was meant to be a feature, not a bug—its just that my playstyle was in conflict with it. And even today, plenty of people reject that idea of the OSR playstyle while using OSR rules. I just read a post on r/osr that was talking about how a guy was using the Rules Cyclopedia rules to run Pathfinder Adventure path campaigns, in spite of their clearly "more trad than trad" pedigrees. It's not clear to me exactly how he does so, as he called his games a "sandbox" and I've read plenty of Pathfinder Adventure Path campaigns, and only one of them can even generously be called a sandbox (although it seems to be the most popular one, maybe). But he's not even using retro-clones, he's literally just using old rules. (That's another development in the OSR; once WotC realized that they could make easy money doing nothing but adding pdf or POD copies of old products on their online stores, they did so. There's no reason for the retro-clones anymore, except that the retro-clones are often better written, better organized, and fixed a few minor problems that the old games stubbornly didn't recognize or fix when they were in print the first time around.) The OSR is all about playing old D&D, and less about any purported playstyle. Therefore, a parallel movement that prioritizes the so-called OSR playstyle and doesn't even have any interest in old D&D rules would seem to be the opposite of the OSR.

The NSR is a strange and unpleasant collection of individuals that arose from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess fandom, beginning with Troika and Into the Odd, but has now been expanded to encompass all manner of derivative remixes. The defining characteristic of the NSR is that they don't really have an interest in DnD and thus are disqualified from being OSR, yet claim to abide by OSR principles. Although there are certainly exceptions, and plenty of well-intentioned newcomers in their ranks, they are most famous for their aggressive gatekeeping and deplatforming strategies, paranoia, infighting and the toxicity of their communities.

NSR games tend to be extremely rules light, involve inexplicable remixes of already extant rules-light games, have limited long term potential, and are characterized by a short lifespan.

Now, granted, the sometimes OSR-labeled games I mentioned earlier; Cairn, Knave, ShadowDark, etc. are, by all accounts, good games. They're reasonably popular, (especially ShadowDark) and deservedly so. People who like OSR games may well like these games, and for similar reasons; the games work well with the playstyle that they prefer. In many cases, they are more tightly wound with the playstyle than any version of D&D ever was. But the taxonomist in me just rebels at the idea that something (b) that is a mirror image of something else (a) can also be called (a). But maybe its inevitable. I'm also irritated by the idea that revisionist Westerns, "anti-Westerns" are, in fact, Westerns. But most people consider them such, even when they recognize the differences between westerns and anti-westerns. Less well recognized but exactly parallel are the sword & sorcery of guys like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber contrasted with the anti-S&S of Michael Moorcock, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Even Gary Gygax himself doesn't seem to have cottoned on to the difference, or perhaps he actually preferred anti-S&S to real S&S. But again, people call both the thing and the anti-thing the thing. So the anti-OSR, or the NSR, is probably going to be called the OSR, even though it actually stands completely in contrast to what the OSR is. I doubt that it's going to go any other way. And why do I care? I don't even identify with the OSR. I really have no dog in that fight, no horse in that race. I reject the OSR—any version of the OSR—because I have little interest in playing old D&D rules, and even less in playing the "OSR playstyle." The many words that I've written about what exactly the OSR is comes from the perspective of a spergy taxonomic-minded outsider.

In any case, on r/osr, I found this recent poll, which I think is interesting. Clearly, as I said, it's a losing battle to call the NSR something other than the OSR, or separate it in the minds of most. It's the single biggest plurality. That said, I think splitting the other three into three is kind of dubious, and if you combine them, which is probably the best bet, given that all of those rules sets are broadly compatible and interchangeable, that is significantly larger than the NSR.

And like I said, the NSR isn't bad in terms of quality. It's just not OSR; it's something other than the OSR. It's a mirror image, in many respects, of the OSR. If those games were published in the early 80s, they'd be considered fantasy heartbreakers, or just very different games altogether, no more similar to D&D than RuneQuest is, or Tunnels & Trolls. If you consider the two branches of the OSR to be "playing the clones or old rules with new material" vs. playing the NSR, then the clones are at 382 to NSR 248. It's almost exactly a 2:1 ratio; the clones are two thirds of the community, the "neoclones" are a third. It's a significant plurality, but it's not where the community "is", so to speak. 

And, of course, I'm outside of the community altogether, but I'm not so far away from it that I don't wander into town to see what's going on quite a bit.

For instance, I also just ordered an "omnibus" POD of B/X. I bought the B and X games (plus the modules that originally came with them) back in 2013, I think, when WotC first made them available for sale. $5 each, so between the two rules sets and the 2 modules, $20. Just as a collector. I've searched them occasionally just for the heckuvit, but I haven't read them all the way through, nor am I likely to. But when I found that someone had made Lulu printable pdfs that combined them into a single book, I couldn't resist ordering a copy for myself. Much more convenient to use than my pdfs most of the time, and much prettier too. Much nicer looking even than the original staple-bound books would have been, for that matter. I think I may have printed the whole thing out from my printer and work and put them in a 3-ring binder at one point, but if so, I have no idea where that ended up.