EOTB
So ... slow work day? Every day?
Can you provide an example of a definition that includes everything?
The state of Post-OSR content
- Thread starter Yora
- Start date
Pseudoephedrine
Should be playing D&D instead
It turns out people whose highest aesthetic inspirations are to immerse themselves in the emotions and thoughts of fictional characters as intensely and persistently as possible are, uh, perhaps a touch prone to rumination.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Of course. I jest.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Someone wake me up when we get to this part. Sounds a hoot.
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Two orcs
Officially better than you, according to PoN
The nordic tabletop scene has like the LARP scene been dominated by the concept of immersion since the 90's. Reading about the OSR in 2012 it was a fresh concept for me (though I had previously, by accident, run a fantasy campaign with OSR principles in a Hârn clone) but it was hard to get a campaign off the ground because the style was so foreign to my friends. I recently tallied our weeky sessions and realized the current campaign is at session 103 (they recently found their first weapon with a better than +1 bonus, but this is more a testament to the ineptitude of my players than stingy treasure hoards).
Pseudoephedrine
Should be playing D&D instead
Yup! You're absolutely right. The "Turku school" dates back to around 1996-1997 in Finland, and is mostly about tabletop games, not LARPs at all. It's acknowledged (on the Nordic LARP wiki) as the intellectual precursor to what became called "Nordic LARP" (and even it probably has unwritten / untransmitted precursors). The people who would create this culture seem to have been playing stuff like the Dark Eye, Harn, Praedor (the Turkus in Finland), and Vampire during the 1990s.
We know that storygames come out of the failure of Ron Edwards' Vampire campaign to manage his ludonarrative dissonance (when you get past all the stupid shit in the Brain Damage essay, this is what it boils down to). I'd need to read more before firmly standing behind this, but it feels like there are suggestions that a lot of people in Finland and Scandinavia in the 1990s felt that the only way to resolve Vampire's failure to create a satisfying narrative was to delve more deeply into immersion, now prioritised over narrative development, and with a few steps in the middle, that's how we got Nordic LARP.
We know that storygames come out of the failure of Ron Edwards' Vampire campaign to manage his ludonarrative dissonance (when you get past all the stupid shit in the Brain Damage essay, this is what it boils down to). I'd need to read more before firmly standing behind this, but it feels like there are suggestions that a lot of people in Finland and Scandinavia in the 1990s felt that the only way to resolve Vampire's failure to create a satisfying narrative was to delve more deeply into immersion, now prioritised over narrative development, and with a few steps in the middle, that's how we got Nordic LARP.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
[Russian spam-bot posts above deleted]
While certainty the most intelligent arguments made thus far in this thread, I believe the magic of our sanctuary's defensive shielding is fading.
(BTW, What idiotic Russian hack-ware thinks posting the same thing multiple times in a row is helpful? Apparently, even the Russians are suffering from the same plague of "incompetent-morons-have-left-the-medical-field-and-moved-to-the-tech-industry-to-writing-web-code" that the Western world is currently getting pummeled by. Honestly, not one web-site's on-line forms aren't broken in some diabolical way these days---and all the human-operators have been fired, so there's no way to straight it out....just talk to robots and go in circles. I am convinced 50 years from now the historians will refer to our modern times as The Age of Bad Software or perhaps The Great Automation Implosion.)
While certainty the most intelligent arguments made thus far in this thread, I believe the magic of our sanctuary's defensive shielding is fading.
(BTW, What idiotic Russian hack-ware thinks posting the same thing multiple times in a row is helpful? Apparently, even the Russians are suffering from the same plague of "incompetent-morons-have-left-the-medical-field-and-moved-to-the-tech-industry-to-writing-web-code" that the Western world is currently getting pummeled by. Honestly, not one web-site's on-line forms aren't broken in some diabolical way these days---and all the human-operators have been fired, so there's no way to straight it out....just talk to robots and go in circles. I am convinced 50 years from now the historians will refer to our modern times as The Age of Bad Software or perhaps The Great Automation Implosion.)
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squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
To whit (channeling Heinlein's Future History):
Good morning, class. We will now study the time when society's reach for technological solutions vastly exceeded it grasp. The majority of mankind was unequipped by temperament and social-conditioning to meet the demands for programming automation---while simultaneously that very same automation was replacing the need for an unskilled labor force. This "Catch-22" resulted in the twin calamities of The Age of Bad Software (e.g. a workforce attempting to do tasks for which it was unsuited) and also The Greatest Depression, in which the pressures of globalization and corporate misconceptions about the limits of technology resulted in automation replacing unskilled labor in all simple tasks. This massive disconnect eventually replaced the optimism of the first decade of the 21st century with the moribund belief that everything was "totally screwed" and that "basic infrastructure could not be trusted or sorted out". This cultural malaise was later labeled FUBAR-ism---which we studied last week.
Many solutions were attempted, including paying citizens of the wealthier countries a stipend to "do nothing" --- but this just fueled the nascent opioid crisis to biblical proportions and resulted in the invention of innumerable "Role Playing Games" (and a vast cottage industry dedicated to categorizing and studying them). Other signs-of-the-times were: the on-line-gossipist career-path, Preemptive Cancel-Culture, Artist Deflation, Personal-Truths Mythologies, navel-gazing "Self Discovery" sports added to the venerable Olympic Games (prior to cancellation)...along with other symptoms of general identity-confusion---none of which would have occurred without an epidemic of leisure time.
Of course, you are all well aware of what happened next. Faced with the dilemma that humanity was by-and-large ill-suited to manage it's own technology, the Necromancers of Silicon Valley unleashed upon the world mankind's greatest existential threat since the Atomic Bomb --- Artificial Intelligence. The thinking behind the rise of AI was simple: let the computers program each-other because most humans are inherently ill-suited for the task. As you all well know, the result was nearly catastrophic...and we will focus on that more in our next unit, The Machine Age: Excessing Humanity and WWIII.
Ironically, the solution to The Age of Bad Software's problems was simple and obvious in hindsight---put people back to work doing what they do best: interacting with each other directly**. It is a demonstrable fact that when one human being aids another, both feel rewarded by the experience. This simultaneously solved the problem of isolationism and depression of the masses (e.g. reducing drug-addition, suicides, noxious RPG's, etc.) and freed the world's tech-savy minority to concentrate on solving mankind's most pressing problems---those associated with a world population that had been doubling exponentially since the Green Revolution of the mid-to-late 20th century.
This fundamental truth regarding the relationship between humanity and technology is best codified in our modern Universal Bill of Human Rights, the so-called "Zeroth Law", which states:
"No man, woman or child may be compelled---through force, coercion, economic necessity, or mere expedience---to interact with a robot against their will."
**Addendum: the license-to-post requirement on the NextNet (unlike it's precursor, the chaotic Internet) was also influential in helping to calm the froth of non-technical chatter and outrageous social behavior, by re-channeling the majority of non-essential interpersonal communication to a more evolutionary stable conduit: direct, face-to-face, encounters in social venues and the home.
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To continue on the prior topic, I think the reason why it is difficult for me and others to grok the idea of there being no centralized form of rpg culture prior to the plot- and versimilitude- focused traditional school of roleplaying as founded by DragonLance and Ravenloft might have something to do with the way modules are presented in the intervening period of circa 1977 to 1983. I understand viewing a hobby only in terms of the output it produces has its limitations (there is a huge disparity between WoD modules and how the game was supposed to be played for example), but I don't think you can make a module for a system without illustrating some core assumptions about how it was meant to be played.
If I compare some submitted adventures from early White Dwarf Magazine (say, up until issue 40), the Dungeoneer compendium, The Beholder or even David Hargrave's mutant crossbreed Arduin, there is a great deal of variation in how the implied world of DnD is implemented, yes, but at the same time there are commonalities that are exhibited by these seemingly disparate sources that would all but dissapear from published material as time went on and do seem to represent a common frame of reference. The great, sprawling, nonlinear labyrinths with their plethora of secret doors switches and multiple means of egress and exit were practically an endangered species by the time Dungeon Magazine came around, the minimal keying so beloved of our OSR, which may as well have been enforced by space constraints or printing costs as anything, gradually gave way to the tyranny of boxed text and the pay-by-the-word and the content of these dungeons became gradually more homogenous, thematically coherent, and boring. The reason Bryce suffers the tortures of the damned in his Dungeon Magazine crawl (which came later) is that AD&D does eventually seem to have enforced a sort of homogeneity on the adventures being submitted there and people diverging from the material as written or coming up with their own effects becomes rare in a certain very dark period.
You see also that the idea of atmosphere or a plot does exist in works like Halls of Tizun Thane (WD 18) or Role Aids Beastmaker Mountain (1982?) or the GDQ series but that this is usually a backdrop or implied, and the central idea of what an adventure is supposed to be is still very focused on providing an area filled with treasure, wonder and danger for the Player Characters to explore and to gain xp thereby.
And if you compare modules written in the OSR with modules written then, you will find a much greater deal of commonality between the style, subject matter and implicit assumptions then when you compare it with any other group.
I don't think this does anything to disprove PE's claims regarding the absence of a dominant gamer culture prior to 1977 (it is a completely seperate argument in fact, since all the publications are after the stated date), but it should provide sufficient reference material and a framework of argumentation to gently smother any challenges to the epistemological firmament of the OSR as being based solely on hot air and neckbeard wishful thinking.
If I compare some submitted adventures from early White Dwarf Magazine (say, up until issue 40), the Dungeoneer compendium, The Beholder or even David Hargrave's mutant crossbreed Arduin, there is a great deal of variation in how the implied world of DnD is implemented, yes, but at the same time there are commonalities that are exhibited by these seemingly disparate sources that would all but dissapear from published material as time went on and do seem to represent a common frame of reference. The great, sprawling, nonlinear labyrinths with their plethora of secret doors switches and multiple means of egress and exit were practically an endangered species by the time Dungeon Magazine came around, the minimal keying so beloved of our OSR, which may as well have been enforced by space constraints or printing costs as anything, gradually gave way to the tyranny of boxed text and the pay-by-the-word and the content of these dungeons became gradually more homogenous, thematically coherent, and boring. The reason Bryce suffers the tortures of the damned in his Dungeon Magazine crawl (which came later) is that AD&D does eventually seem to have enforced a sort of homogeneity on the adventures being submitted there and people diverging from the material as written or coming up with their own effects becomes rare in a certain very dark period.
You see also that the idea of atmosphere or a plot does exist in works like Halls of Tizun Thane (WD 18) or Role Aids Beastmaker Mountain (1982?) or the GDQ series but that this is usually a backdrop or implied, and the central idea of what an adventure is supposed to be is still very focused on providing an area filled with treasure, wonder and danger for the Player Characters to explore and to gain xp thereby.
And if you compare modules written in the OSR with modules written then, you will find a much greater deal of commonality between the style, subject matter and implicit assumptions then when you compare it with any other group.
I don't think this does anything to disprove PE's claims regarding the absence of a dominant gamer culture prior to 1977 (it is a completely seperate argument in fact, since all the publications are after the stated date), but it should provide sufficient reference material and a framework of argumentation to gently smother any challenges to the epistemological firmament of the OSR as being based solely on hot air and neckbeard wishful thinking.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
I don't think anyone, even LVW, is arguing that. I think the argument is that many voices (or at least loud voices that give the impression there are many voices) in the OSR used to suggest there was a dominant sold school gamer culture that they were harkening back to. For one thing, the tag "Old School" implies a certain homogeneity to those elder playstyles; it does not lend itself to recognizing a number of parallel playstyles that existed at the same time as the Old School, many of which might have been granted the same tag if their players had thought of it first.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
I just can't get over the mental hurtle that the Hickman/Dragonlance/Ravenloft style-of-play was undoubtedly a massive change from the style that preceded it. D&D became D&D-lite at that point---to quote @TerribleSorcery's excellent reference of an article on the the life-cycle of (music) subcultures, in his Knock! review. (To be fair, I'm sure that transformation repeated with each generation's "D&D" as popularity waxed and waned.)
You can't have a change without something (consistent) that came before. The definition of (sub)culture remains completely nebulous and subjective as far as I can tell. So far I haven't heard of anything quantitative to use as a litmus test.
That's why that Geek's, MOPs and Sociopaths article fits D&D (and many other things) in a more satisfying way. It's an easily observable and gradual transition driven by the pressure of numbers of individuals and the roles they fill. It's much easier to swallow for me than this elusive culture/proto-culture dividing line. It is also less dismissive of the vibrant, creative, origins-period too---which is much more defining than what-come-later, as the New Thing mainstreams and losses it's unique identity.
Rather than try to point to the crest of the popularity curve and say "that defines it", I'd point to that that same point and say "that's when it was absorbed into the mainstream culture"...and at some point before then, it became a more palatable version of itself: "The New Thing-lite".
Like the "Geeks" in the article who bugger off because the thing they loved has been twisted, I and many of the the pre-1979 D&D Geeks walked away from the hobby during the DL/R period for the reasons stated. It was no longer the niche subculture it had been, and was in the process of being transformed and commercialized by "Sociopaths" for broader appeal.
You can't have a change without something (consistent) that came before. The definition of (sub)culture remains completely nebulous and subjective as far as I can tell. So far I haven't heard of anything quantitative to use as a litmus test.
That's why that Geek's, MOPs and Sociopaths article fits D&D (and many other things) in a more satisfying way. It's an easily observable and gradual transition driven by the pressure of numbers of individuals and the roles they fill. It's much easier to swallow for me than this elusive culture/proto-culture dividing line. It is also less dismissive of the vibrant, creative, origins-period too---which is much more defining than what-come-later, as the New Thing mainstreams and losses it's unique identity.
Rather than try to point to the crest of the popularity curve and say "that defines it", I'd point to that that same point and say "that's when it was absorbed into the mainstream culture"...and at some point before then, it became a more palatable version of itself: "The New Thing-lite".
Like the "Geeks" in the article who bugger off because the thing they loved has been twisted, I and many of the the pre-1979 D&D Geeks walked away from the hobby during the DL/R period for the reasons stated. It was no longer the niche subculture it had been, and was in the process of being transformed and commercialized by "Sociopaths" for broader appeal.
I can't unpack this EOTB --- would you elaborate?
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DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
No, it became D&D appropriated, which is exactly your problem. I've noticed you have this weird ownership claim over early D&D - for some reason believing that because you played it in its infancy, you feel that you owned it, and seeing all these people play it a different way is somehow stripping you of this ownership and pissing on your lawn. It's a common criticism against the OSR - the whole "gatekeeper" accusation. I get it... it's the same backlash that the whole geek-chic zeitgeist faced when "normies" started buying up all the Harley Quinn Funko Pops and muscling their Michael Bay movies into ComiCon - there's a pride that comes with undergoing the hardship of an underground experience. You seem to believe that because other people can just walk into the hobby, that it's somehow "impure" or "lite" (aka not "real" D&D). I wonder what tabletop wargamers thought of proto-D&D, and if they had similar derisions/marginalizations ("What do you mean you only play one unit? What the hell kind of wargaming is that?!")
The biggest evidence that you hold this belief is found in this statement:
See, objectively, that's a pretty fucking stupid reason to walk away from a hobby you love... simply because some other people in some other place do it differently than what you do with your isolated group. Are you planning to ditch your charcoal drawing too because paint is a thing that exists? To me this reeks not of "newbies ruined the game" but rather "you're playing with my toys all wrong, so I'm packing up and going home". It's supremely childish, is what I'm saying here.
Yes you can: it's called "new", and despite the watering-down of the term for prolific marketing purposes, it's supposed to mean that there was nothing similar preceding it. Something new is a change. Man, if I had a nickel for every Boomer on the internet who doesn't understand this...
Two orcs
Officially better than you, according to PoN
The problem as I have encountered it is players are often prejudiced against the old playstyles so it's hard to sell them on it even when you know they would enjoy it more. I pitched the old playstyle to my players for years before they tried it out and then they were hooked. Now they have the same problem running games for their own groups. If you can't play the type of game you like, quitting is the only mature and self respecting response!
DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
Yeah, but there's a big difference between quitting your current playgroup to find another that jives with your style, and quitting the entire hobby because new material is bringing in new playstyles.
I mean, unless your existing group is somehow being brainwashed to abandon its existing style, where's the problem exactly?
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
I should clarify: by "quit" I mean stopped buying/disconnected from all "new" product. Our group played in isolation until late 1989.
And yes, I am owning to a certain degree of gate-keeping mentality/bias...something that goes far beyond just D&D subculture. I do not mind new folks discovering something I love---and getting excited about it...that's wonderful---but I admit when that adoption comes with "baggage" (in the form of the need to change it) then I get a bit disquieted. Sure "things evolve", but that doesn't always mean what others like is what you will like. If you've already rejected mainstream culture and attached yourself to a niche sub-culture---then implicitly there is something about mainstream tastes that doesn't suit you.
I think I was only about 11 years old when---after seeing what happened to the obscure Byrne/Claremont X-men comic book explode in popularity---that I started telling my friends that the worst thing that can happen to something is for it to become popular. Seriously. 11.
I always THOUGHT it was the greed of the "Sociopaths" (as labeled in the article) that were to blame---prostituting every New Thing to extract more money/social-status from the MOPs. They immediately reach for common tropes that are proven mainstream sellers (e.g. Sex, Rock 'n Roll, More Sugar, etc) and shovel that into everything. Pretty soon the beautiful thing that was so fresh, dynamic, different and yet pure---starts to look exactly like everything else on TV.
I hate seeing that. Maybe that's why I get nervous as soon as the MOPs arrive. I sense the impending "death" or perversion.
But now I'm not so sure that greed is the whole story.
I am realizing my love is for OD&D/AD&D is as a complete package, and while I don't deny that What-Was-Done-To-It did indeed stoke the fires of it's popularity---and that many Geeks who arrived later have their own beloved memory of What-D&D-Is---to me it's just not the thing I loved. If the term D&D-lite offends, then think D&D-different. And what it changed into (e.g. Hickman-style, plus all the subsequent styles) is just not something I enjoy.
How do you explain to someone, "I see that you like that---but it clashes..."? You can't put the same ingredients into every dish and have it retain it's unique flavor. How do you explain that to a hundred people? A thousand? Gygax lost that battle. Apparently all subcultures eventually lose.
All the stuff I rail against ("candy-classes" etc.) are symptomatic of the changes the hobby saw, that (to me) robbed it of it's core-appeal. Whether or not it later developed some "new essence" (e.g. DL/R story-games, post-trad, video-game combat, etc)---I don't know, I jumped off of that crazy train when I saw it was leaving the countryside I called home.
I thought the OSR was about the road back...if that's true, I'm all for it---if not, then it's just another flavor of "D&D-lite" to me, and not what I'm personally looking for---i.e. Gygax's Lightning in a Bottle. Sometimes I think it might be because he and I are a couple of boring mid-westerners with similar sensibilities and that's why the OD&D/AD&D Kool-Aid satisfies. Dunno.
There no accounting for taste, right?
And yes, I am owning to a certain degree of gate-keeping mentality/bias...something that goes far beyond just D&D subculture. I do not mind new folks discovering something I love---and getting excited about it...that's wonderful---but I admit when that adoption comes with "baggage" (in the form of the need to change it) then I get a bit disquieted. Sure "things evolve", but that doesn't always mean what others like is what you will like. If you've already rejected mainstream culture and attached yourself to a niche sub-culture---then implicitly there is something about mainstream tastes that doesn't suit you.
I think I was only about 11 years old when---after seeing what happened to the obscure Byrne/Claremont X-men comic book explode in popularity---that I started telling my friends that the worst thing that can happen to something is for it to become popular. Seriously. 11.
I always THOUGHT it was the greed of the "Sociopaths" (as labeled in the article) that were to blame---prostituting every New Thing to extract more money/social-status from the MOPs. They immediately reach for common tropes that are proven mainstream sellers (e.g. Sex, Rock 'n Roll, More Sugar, etc) and shovel that into everything. Pretty soon the beautiful thing that was so fresh, dynamic, different and yet pure---starts to look exactly like everything else on TV.
I hate seeing that. Maybe that's why I get nervous as soon as the MOPs arrive. I sense the impending "death" or perversion.
But now I'm not so sure that greed is the whole story.
I am realizing my love is for OD&D/AD&D is as a complete package, and while I don't deny that What-Was-Done-To-It did indeed stoke the fires of it's popularity---and that many Geeks who arrived later have their own beloved memory of What-D&D-Is---to me it's just not the thing I loved. If the term D&D-lite offends, then think D&D-different. And what it changed into (e.g. Hickman-style, plus all the subsequent styles) is just not something I enjoy.
How do you explain to someone, "I see that you like that---but it clashes..."? You can't put the same ingredients into every dish and have it retain it's unique flavor. How do you explain that to a hundred people? A thousand? Gygax lost that battle. Apparently all subcultures eventually lose.
All the stuff I rail against ("candy-classes" etc.) are symptomatic of the changes the hobby saw, that (to me) robbed it of it's core-appeal. Whether or not it later developed some "new essence" (e.g. DL/R story-games, post-trad, video-game combat, etc)---I don't know, I jumped off of that crazy train when I saw it was leaving the countryside I called home.
I thought the OSR was about the road back...if that's true, I'm all for it---if not, then it's just another flavor of "D&D-lite" to me, and not what I'm personally looking for---i.e. Gygax's Lightning in a Bottle. Sometimes I think it might be because he and I are a couple of boring mid-westerners with similar sensibilities and that's why the OD&D/AD&D Kool-Aid satisfies. Dunno.
There no accounting for taste, right?
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