A Historical Look at the OSR

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
@PrinceofNothing I am struck by your recent blog posts and this at a core level. Not surface mind.


I wanted to discuss this as it alo... well I don't want to categorize, organize, seperate and stifle discussion.

Go!
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
@Palindromedary : Nice job with the article. Very insightful and well articulated. It sure stirred things up over at K&KA. Are you posting there as "Albigensian"?

Also, I couldn't connect this paragraph to the ones above it
The right wing of the OSR tends to congregate with the above two, with the exception of the newer "hacks" like Knave.
What are "the above two"?

Also I loved this:
"rules-light" became incorrectly applied as a supposed sacred tenet of the OSR as a whole by 2013. That this supposed tenet would invalidate AD&D 1st edition, a game that could hardly be called light in most cases and also the pre-eminent old-school edition, only speaks to how divorced from old-school origins those that popularized this principle were. This non-existent generalized tenet was in turn adopted as a justification for increasingly thin rulesets that left out more and more of the central old-school gameplay loop in the name of reducing complexity and page count, a zebra's tail wagging the dog.
 
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Palindromedary

*eyeroll*
Did you write this? I enjoyed it. How did the research happen? Web scraping?
I wrote it. Pretty much as soon as I got into the OSR I decided to write my own game, not really because of any issues per se but because I've been tinkering since I was a kid for whatever game I get into. But I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing, so I needed to research; being a historian, research comes natural and I quite enjoy it. Also, being older, forums are my preferred way of interaction online. So I naturally looked for forums first, started at the beginning of Dragonsfoot's General Discussion and Simulacrum subforums (skipping the C&C threads, but even seeing the vast sea of them and then their dying out almost overnight once Labyrinth Lord came out was quite telling), and just started reading. After a year or two I felt I had things reasonably down, but the more I thought I figured out, the more I also noticed that no one could seem to agree on what the OSR was and how things were supposed to work, which was weird because I thought it was pretty damn clear, having read what I'd read.

It was one thing to try and define the OSR, and all the articles I found pretty much started and stopped there, with a heavy emphasis on preference first and methodology second, which is ass-backwards if you want accuracy. But for me the interesting question wasn't "what is it?" (because again, what it was supposed to be is really obvious) but "how do you start with something so niche and completely clear-cut and end up with the hopeless everyman mess that exists now?" It was only when I realized that only old people read forums and even blogs anymore that I understood: that Dragonsfoot or K&K are completely unknown, might as well not even exist, as far as most of the OSR is concerned. The understanding that there was a knowledge chain and it had become broken led to a lot of the articulation on the social media bits in the article, especially the Telephone/Chinese Whispers aspect of it.

The other big thing I think was the understanding that Finch's Primer had been a Pandora's Box in terms of game design, releasing a host of easily memable and mantra'd principles onto the world and inadvertently setting loose the idea that principles might be all you need. If you read OSR spaces, you constantly see these cute little phrases that are supposed to embody the OSR (combat as fail state, rules-light, combat as sport vs war, the aesthetics of ruin, the mythical underworld, player agency, etc etc). They're valuable, but should be treated as starting points, backed by specific context; instead they're just sort of parroted as answers in and of themselves and applied to all sorts of games. I'm just realizing as I explain this here that I should edit some of this into the article...

The research was mostly me remembering certain forum threads I'd read, or knowing where to look for them: Dragonsfoot and K&K both have pretty good search engines, thankfully, and the Wayback Machine preserved almost everything I wanted that was shutdown. And once I realized I was going to do the series, I started saving appropriate screenshots. Most of what I've used isn't linked anywhere: I picked it myself out of a sea of threads, so anyone doing further digging might come across other good candidates for inclusion (or notable oversights on my part).

@Palindromedary : Nice job with the article. Very insightful and well articulated. It sure stirred things up over at K&KA. Are you posting there as "Albigensian"?
Yep, that's me there. I don't post much on the forums, but I read them all the time. I don't get the feeling too much was stirred up though, other than DD / Silvey getting angry that I didn't give him the credit he feels he deserves. But I didn't want to get into that kind of discussion as a newcomer over there vs a very longstanding regular because no one appreciates a new guy rolling up to an established space and making a mess, and I'm not sure what I'd say about it in any case other than "I didn't see any evidence that you created the OSR". Maybe I'll find it later or someone will chime in in support of him, in which case I'll edit it in like I've done a lot of other bits thus far, but it seems a pretty singular opinion, not shared by anyone else that I've noticed.

Also, I couldn't connect this paragraph to the ones above it

What are "the above two"?
I fixed this: thanks for pointing it out (it should have been "the above two subgroups"). And thanks for the kind words.
 
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Beek Gwenders

*eyeroll*
@Palindromedary

Great contribution, I don’t follow all of the blogs, but this is the most significant (and interesting) series of blog posts for 2021 IMO. Good work. I hope word of this gets spread wide and far.

I understand your point about not getting too engaged with DD over at K&K, especially if you’re relatively new to the forum. I don’t think DD can claim what he’s claiming, even if he was the first person to start doing ‘OSR-ish’ stuff online back in the pre-forum days, this sort of thing is rarely brought about by just one guy; I’m not claiming any first-hand knowledge, but it’s pretty likely there were others thinking and acting independently along the same lines back in the early 2000s.
 

PrinceofNothing

High Executarch
Staff member
@PrinceofNothing I am struck by your recent blog posts and this at a core level. Not surface mind.


I wanted to discuss this as it alo... well I don't want to categorize, organize, seperate and stifle discussion.

Go!
It would help if you give me an angle. I'll just throw up some thoughts and start from there?


Deny passive entertainment. Demand to be engaged, enriched, and fulfilled by your hobbies and by the people you choose to associate with.

Reject convenience for convenience’s sake. It is all good and well to do things for yourself faster and better. It is no good to hand the doing over to somebody or something else so you are no longer putting in the effort at all. Know the difference and what it means to your life.


If there is a kinship or an overlap between me and James this must be one of the points of overlap. A sort of revulsion for the banality of modern life and in particular, modern (corporate) entertainment, which turns people into beasts of burden.

Fuck that. Fuck that. This hobby is ours. These other types can come and play and we’ll welcome them with open arms and show them the way if they ask, but to dictate fast-food mentality in my imaginative tools… that means war.

Again, there is a reason that for such a long time, James Raggi was king in this little scene. These ideas are not new. It is a simple fact that any subculture that seeks to survive must define itself and by doing so, define and set its boundaries. Everyone wants different levels of engagements and it is also true that the most fanatical will always be outnumbered. Higher standards must be fought for and maintained, lower standards for more casual entry are easy, a slippery slope, financially attractive but ultimately poisonous. This constant struggle between Yin and Yang, between depth and access, is never ending. People don't like edition warring but people will cry out in anguish if you proclaim the virtues of your favorite game, showing you that this is a lie. Co-existence is temporary, and periodically, there will and must be war.

“Tyranny of fun” nails it – role-playing companies, in their doomed efforts in ignoring the anomalous nature of role-playing’s mainstream popularity of the 80s, target the type of people that aren’t well-suited for role-playing to buy their products. Because lets face it… it takes a certain something odd to be a real role-player. “Nerd” and “geek” and such are not terms of endearment, they are insults, but they do prove the point that we’re not normal everyday types. Now being different (or even abnormal) isn’t a negative thing – don’t confuse it with the mythical catpissman or lawncrapper – as it doesn’t preclude us from having a job, friends, and girlfriends (before we complain that I’m being sexist by assuming most gamers are male… first, fucking duh, of course we are - look at the source material, and second, what gamer girl ever had a problem finding a social group to fit into?). But pretending we’re normal and just anyone can pick up this hobby and enjoy it, without making wholesale changes to it, is simply nonsense.

This is why I respect James, despite many mistakes, despite Lotfp going under by its own hand. The guy is one hundred fucking percent real, anti-normy, anti-gentrification, anti-popular.

The point isn’t to make role-playing some sort of masochistic experience where it’s all suffering and death and pain and failure. The point is, if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more. And I think it’s telling that so many people reject this idea. Assigning value to in-game success seems to be something embarrassing to a lot of people, like a RPG is just supposed to be some interchangeable entertainment option to play with friends alongside a console system or Scrabble or watching a movie, with no worth or value in and of itself. I’ve already given my thoughts on this. Nothing beyond the barest essentials of life (food and water) has inherent meaning. Meaning is given to things and experiences by people. And assigning meaning to role-playing is not something to be ashamed of! It is a social game that strengthens social bonds, it exercises the imagination and encourages reading and knowledge and it is not a passive experience and nothing in the experience is just handed to you.

Probably the money quote. There is a contradiction in some of what James preaches (particularly his quixotic quest against a Satanic panic movement that has already been vanquished) but this is very true.

Some will try to say that “Each edition of D&D is based on the common fantasy tropes of the time it was released.” That’s just ignorant bullshit. Dungeons and Dragons was built on classic archetypes (with some game elements added on) and literature that was decades, in some cases almost a century, old by the time Dungeons and Dragons came around. It was built to be timeless, not timely. And some of the more important influences, say Leiber and Lovecraft, certainly didn’t feature success as a common theme. And it certainly wasn’t all honor and glory, what with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Conan and Cugel being thieves (and worse as far as Conan is concerned). Yet the focus wasn’t limited – there was still the influence of Tolkien and Poul Anderson and Lord Dunsany for the more positive, and even dreamier sides of fantasy. You could do it all with Dungeons and Dragons, back in the day. Nothing was excluded. And this is what Dungeons and Dragons was, focused through rules that sprung out of the wargaming culture.

Also true. D&D has something quitessential, and subsequent editions, even 2e, which should be praised for trying to expand its boundaries, ultimately ended up hitting upon a nebulous but apparent truth: That DnD cannot be altered or mutated infinetely, that at some point it is no longer recognizably DnD. DnD is SOMETHING and is about something.

And this isn't directed at the stupid or the willfully ignorant. It's not even directed at those that know what they are talking about, know their history, explored their options, and decided the new stuff is better for them. No. Their minds are made up. The purpose of standing up and making noise is for the silent crowd that watches from the sidelines. We need to make sure our game isn't defined by people who don't like it, we have to be visible and make noise so these people see the earlier versions of the game are being played and are perfectly viable options for them. We have to make sure they know there is a history and a legacy and a depth to this hobby which can be explored. That there is life in this hobby beyond the shiny new release, which is to be given up once the trademark overlords decide it has outlived its usefulness and decides to create an even shinier, newer release. The silent crowd should always be reminded that the "industry" can never dictate the possibilities at their game table. If we manage to enlighten those actively dancing in the shadows, then yay, but that's not really the point.

So go home, casual players, and take your “fun” with you. For those of you who gain enjoyment from a more involved experience, or at least the attempt at such… welcome. There is much to gain, from everything you ever do on this planet, by digging deeper, discovering traditions, and realizing there is a way that things can, and perhaps even should, be done that often do not coincide with the ways that give the easiest and quickest pleasure.


Words that are as relevant today, as they were 10 years ago. Damn near brings a tear to my eye.
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
I did not want to tempt the ghost Gabor post before its time but you quoted that part XD.

I also had the hobby as circles read that you got to.

Yeah, the commonality is this rage vs casuals (this is the word James uses and I love how Jeff calls him on it). I would call it passion.

The comparison I draw is you discussing artpunk and James discussing fun. They feel very connected, waves against time slowly homogeneous.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I have no love for the direction LotFP went, but Raggi is perceptive in his dissection of "entertainment", "otherness" and how they pertain to D&D.

More importantly, Palindo's article gets to the heart of why my passion for the blog-o-sphere has dwindled. To my eyes, there is OD&D and AD&D and then everything else...and I have no interest in all the rest. I have become convinced that each iteration (starting with B/X) lost something of the core in an attempt to catered to the populists center. That's not to say we can't still share ideas of good play across editions, but for the most part all I really need (or am looking for) are tips on handling specifics (in AD&D), adventure concepts to pinch, and more time to homebrew content. Icing on the cake is also being able to share a passion and excitement for the game I love with other devotees, on-line or in person.

And, of course, some small slice of time in this world to actually play D&D is pretty swell too.

Artpunk or nu-OSR...story games...whatever --- they are all strangers to me. I got burned with Silent Titans, realizing that art-book had no relation to D&D and was a complete waste of my money. Blue Medusa was a similar revelation in that I recognized I could never make it work at my table. I've not in "the marketplace" any more. I'm done consuming except in very special cases. I bought No-Art Punk because it was a worthy cause, not because I thought I'd be using the content, even though it was well above average. I'm an (A)D&D maker, not a consumer.
 

PrinceofNothing

High Executarch
Staff member
I have no love for the direction LotFP went, but Raggi is perceptive in his dissection of "entertainment", "otherness" and how they pertain to D&D.

[...]

Artpunk or nu-OSR...story games...whatever --- they are all strangers to me. I got burned with Silent Titans, realizing that art-book had no relation to D&D and was a complete waste of my money. Blue Medusa was a similar revelation in that I recognized I could never make it work at my table. I've not in "the marketplace" any more. I'm done consuming except in very special cases. I bought No-Art Punk because it was a worthy cause, not because I thought I'd be using the content, even though it was well above average. I'm an (A)D&D maker, not a consumer.
Artpunk is not equivalent to storygames, but it is not equivalent to OSR either. In my now (in the name of peace and light, expurgated) essay I went into my disscetion of PS's defenition of it and noted that for the most part, it barely covers fundamental aspects of what oldschool play is about. It is primarily an aesthetic movement and as such its focus is on layout, aesthetics and creativity. It doesn't greatly care about the rules, self-selecting for rules-lite games because it is easier to deal with, and it is agnostic about both Dragonsfoot and Appendix N. I postulated that the current trend of Artpunk material: Troika and Mork Borg junk, is terrible probably as a result of this. Any vestigial OSR assumptions have been expurgated and the result is a movement that is not a movement. There is no consensus of what Nu-OSR is supposed to be about, besides be pretty and creative and some lingering OSR assumptions like Random Tables, so that is what you get. But that is also ONLY what you get.

You are old and experienced. You don't need my stuff. But new players are interested in the game and will still want examples. I'm on a discord with a bunch of new players and you can tell they are just getting into the OSR. Why not give them a radiant example and say: This is what it is about! And every so often, why not treat your players to something special and run other good stuff? Let it inspire you, says Prince.

And thank you for buying No Artpunk :)
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
So starting with B X? Interested in more on the Squeen.

Nitpicking I know but quite the hot take
 

Two orcs

Officially better than you, according to PoN
Impressive historical work, from my own perspective (reading a ton of blogs around 2012) it looks completely correct.
 

Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
B X has the procedures which mark it as very old school. I don't see that in the other versions you mentioned

Who does not love procedures

WHAT SAY YOU SQUEEN

ALSO HAPPY NEW YEARS NERDS,
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
@Osrnoob (and all of you's) Happy New Year too.

Later this week I'll pick at B/X a bit more if you like. I know it's a favorite of many, so I'll try to be kind. In short, I remember it coming out and it felt like a step backwards. It was clearly adolescent-facing, where-as OD&D and AD&D was speaking more to adult war-gamers-geeks-turned-into-RPGers. I would say it was the first half-step towards rules-light...and it felt to me (at the time, a teenager playing OD&D with boys 3-4 years older than me) like a retreat. It discarded (or incidentally lost) much of the game's mystique. That innocent "wrong turn" is why it has taken almost three decades to collectively remember, among other things, The Campaign as fundamental to rewarding advanced play. Also, I attribute the over-fixation on level-advancement to B/X as well....because in B/X there really were no other obvious player goals.

To me, Holmes Basic tried to organize OD&D, whereas AD&D tied to fix it.

B/X was just a repeat/extension of Holmes, but sided more towards rules-light simplicity---by-passing AD&D through omission rather than leading to it in the way that Holmes Basic did.

It's not just me. K&KA limits discussions up though AD&D too. Living through it first-hand, it was a pretty blatant break in tone from TSR---distancing itself from "Classic" culture in an attempt to entice a more mainstream audience. As a result, my B/X books (and module X1) are pristine out-of-the-box because I was never tempted to use them despite playing regularly for almost the next decade after their release.

My two-cents.
 
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Osrnoob

Should be playing D&D instead
Thanks! Hit us, no need to be nice, dig innnn!

Do you consider the procedures in B/X (I think where they were first codified) to be part of the step back?

Many folks discuss the procedures as being what old school is vs new school. Dungeon and wilderness procedures, sea all that. Newer editions don't have that and people mark it as part of the old vs new definition
 
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