The state of Post-OSR content

[EOTB]

Everything will be what it will be. For a time I was irked by both the Hickman effect in the 80s, and then again with the similar dynamic that happened to the OSR after the first non-clones started coming out. But I'm at peace with the overall dynamic because what drove both was product. The reason 1979 doesn't happen is because 1979 is glacially slow-cooked DIY. Not OSR DIY, which simply means "not using book widgets". But real, wide-bottomed, not-easily-packaged-for-sale DIY. The future goes to those who show up, and people who understand 1979 D&D are paradoxically the ones with the least amount of hobby time to create a flood of product as opposed to those who play D&D-as-module-episodes. 1979 D&D as a RPG school of thought has produced the least amount of product of all the schools of thought by a gulf of a margin.

There's a reason Gygax was perplexed when people wanted adventure modules for sale. The game as envisioned was like a big woven bolt of cloth. It's not easy to snippet that and really capture it; early mods were all qualified as "tourney adventures" for a reason.

There's a lot of stuff working against 1979 D&D ever becoming dominant in actual play hours clocked, but the fatal one is the change in culture. Wargaming and early D&D were born in a time when it was common to have a dominant hobby that took up a big chunk of your free rec time. Now that's atomized into keeping up with dozens of forms of entertainment, primarily the effort-free consumption of others' content. Gygax spent dozens of hours per week on his campaign, and flat-out says to expect that sort of time investment. By the time the 80s rolled around that culture was already dead for the cable TV generation.

 

[squeen]

Well said (both). Nice to have you back Heretic.

 

[The Heretic]

I feel the need to be fair to the Hickmans. The railroad that was Dragonlance was annoying, and the innovations they brought to the railroad ended up being detrimental, but they did come up with some very imaginative stuff.

As mentioned elsewhere, Pharaoh was a blast. Sure it had a 'plot' of sorts, but so did GDQ, eh? There was a lot of freedom for the PCs. In fact the only thing railroad-y about it was the intro hook (which was practically the same thing as the intro to G1). They did a terrible job conveying how it was supposed to be plotted. I ran a friend through it in junior high---he had the next two modules in the series but not this one---and when he let out the big bad (the Efreeti Padashah that's supposed to drive the 'plot' of the series), I let him kill the big bad. He had a triumphant laugh over that. There was nothing in the module that told you that the PCs had to go here to this side dungeon to open this bottle to release the efreeti. I had no clue (the Desert of Desolation mega-module, on the other hand, turned this into a railroad; you were given the quest for the star gems up front and the very first one happened to be sealing the bottle that held the padishah. but I digress). The dungeon in the pyramid itself was well done. Even now if I DM for certain friends they'll have one of two reactions to being enveloped in mist. If it's outdoors, they'll ask "we're not ending up in castle amber again, are we?". If it's an indoor maze they start panicking and saying "Fucking-A, we're not in that goddamned pyramid again, are we?".

Ravenloft was fun too. As a dungeon the castle is lacking (few monsters, few traps, lots of empty rooms). But as a complex dungeon with lots of twists and turns and ways to get from here to there, it was great. And the insert with the map and the drawings of the castle...it's a masterpiece.

Even the Dragonlance modules had some cool stuff in them. DL 8 Dragons of War had this awesome "Tower of the High Clerist" to rival Castle Ravenloft. It also included a fun sort of sandbox/pseudo-hex crawl. The floating tomb on the cover of DL4 (the dungeon itself was kind of lame), the sandbox of DL6, the leading of the refugees in DL3, there was great stuff. Interesting situations. Unfortunately it was packaged in a railroad. Well, worse than a railroad. "We have this railroad for you and look! We even built the train for you! And at this point the train is going to split in half, and these cars have to go this way and these cars go that way!"

And let's not forget that the Forgotten Realms played just as big of a piece in the creation of the trad nightmare. As a campaign setting it had interesting ideas. Ed Greenwood can be an interesting world designer. But it gave them a setting to place novel after novel in perpetuam.

(and Ed Greenwood was HORRIBLE at writing dungeons)

 

[The Heretic]

There's a reason Gygax was perplexed when people wanted adventure modules for sale. The game as envisioned was like a big woven bolt of cloth. It's not easy to snippet that and really capture it; early mods were all qualified as "tourney adventures" for a reason.

It's funny because the designers of 3rd edition had the inverse of this problem. They thought the OGL was going to lead to a renaissance of adventure modules. Instead it lead to a glut of splat books. Then again, by this time dungeon design was a mess. It was in its Edgar Allen Poe days. It wouldn't be until OSR until Hemingway popped in to make sleek dungeons again. I can't think of any good modules from 3e, except for a handful of high quality Dungeon* modules.

* Even Bryce saw the appeal to Elfwhisper and Totentanz in issue #90 of Dungeon.

 

[Guy Fullerton]

It's funny because the designers of 3rd edition had the inverse of this problem. They thought the OGL was going to lead to a renaissance of adventure modules. Instead it lead to a glut of splat books.

This mis-characterizes things. I might find some contemporaneous links later.

It’s true WotC hoped the module load would be carried by other companies, but it was also clear WotC understood the breadth of product enabled by the SRD + OGL. They said as much on their OGL and/or SRD FAQs of the time.

The splat book possibility surprised no one; selling to everybody (instead of just DMs) was one of the reasons why WotC wanted less to do with modules.

The glut did surprise people, but wasn’t so much a consequence of splat books, as it was a consequence of that era’s distribution chain/model in conjunction, plus more companies trying to get a piece of that pie, plus low quality shovelware (causing the consumer base to become less eager), plus the 3.5 edition announcement (causing distribution, stores, and customers all to stop buying what was already lined up in the channel).

 

[squeen]

Wargaming and early D&D were born in a time when it was common to have a dominant hobby that took up a big chunk of your free rec time. Now that's atomized into keeping up with dozens of forms of entertainment, primarily the effort-free consumption of others' content. Gygax spent dozens of hours per week on his campaign, and flat-out says to expect that sort of time investment. By the time the 80s rolled around that culture was already dead for the cable TV generation.

Yeah EOTB. More resonance.

I vividly recall standing on the street corner in front of my house with a few friends, maybe all of 10-years old, literally saying---thank goodness D&D came along, we were SO bored.

Within a few years, computer games with dial-up modem Bulletin Boards, game consoles,...but before 1979, there was whole neighborhood hide-and-seek, playing catch, comic books, swing-sets, a handful of hard-to-come-by scifi/fantasy novels, and D&D.

Even now though, when there is a glut of media to consume, it's still the DIY culture of D&D that pulls me in. Looking forward, with the kids grown, I want something creative to occupy my free time (when I eventually get some!) and particularly something that connects me to people and breaks away from the Digital Drug. Honestly, most of what's streaming today is so darn shoddy and boring. I'd rather play soccer if my body ain't broke (and there's no bat plague).

Harking back to Heretic's music analogy, early D&D was the Velvet Underground---all jangley with rough edges. It's like Brian Eno said, maybe only 30,000 people bought their first album...but all of them started their own bands.

You looked at what Gygax's TSR was putting out from their little hobby-press and thought, "Hey! I can do something as good as that!".

Funny thing was, almost nobody really could. Something keeps getting lost in translation between your basement and the bookstore. You cut out a piece of that woven bolt of cloth and it's just a rag.

 

[The Heretic]

This mis-characterizes things. I might find some contemporaneous links later.

It’s true WotC hoped the module load would be carried by other companies, but it was also clear WotC understood the breadth of product enabled by the SRD + OGL. They said as much on their OGL and/or SRD FAQs of the time.

The splat book possibility surprised no one; selling to everybody (instead of just DMs) was one of the reasons why WotC wanted less to do with modules.

The glut did surprise people, but wasn’t so much a consequence of splat books, as it was a consequence of that era’s distribution chain/model in conjunction, plus more companies trying to get a piece of that pie, plus low quality shovelware (causing the consumer base to become less eager), plus the 3.5 edition announcement (causing distribution, stores, and customers all to stop buying what was already lined up in the channel).

Interesting, I'd like to see your links. I got my information from an article I read several years ago. I can't remember where I saw it or I'd dig it up. It might've been an interview with Monte Cook or one of the other 3e designers.

The glut was terrible. There were a few companies that did things well, like Green Ronin, but most of the other major companies like Mongoose and Fantasy Flight games released a lot of crap.

(I wonder if any of it would sell, I have few to get rid of)

 

[EOTB]

They thought the OGL was going to lead to a renaissance of adventure modules. Instead it lead to a glut of splat books.

The talent quotient for writing rules is much lower than writing adventures. It always amazes me how many people on various D&D forums/social media say they haven't written an adventure in decades, or even played. But they still rules-tinker for several hours a week.

It reminds me of tweet storm I saw a while ago (non-D&D related) where the person was discussing how, now, when people talk about bike riding, they're much more likely to be talking about a book about bike riding they'd read, or bikes as products, or even the history of bike riding. Everything except...the bike rides they themselves had taken, and the practical knowledge about the act of riding bikes gained from that personal experience.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

Beyond TSR, Call of Cthulhu came out in 1981, with Shadows of Yog Sothoth, its first module coming out in 1982. CoC is very explicit in its second edition (1983 - the earliest version I have read but from what I understand essentially identical textually to the 1st ed. other than another editing pass) that the Keeper is essentially conducting a horror story with the players as protagonists and proposes the "onion skin" model of information organisation and presentation as a way of accomplishing that, contrasting it with traditional FRP play and organisation of information. CoC was hugely commercially and artistically successful, tho' I tend to think its position as a horror game (and non-TSR game) meant that it wasn't quite as important to the crystallisation of trad as Ravenloft, which despite having horror elements was still pitched as a fantasy module for the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game.

SoYS (I'm sure at least one of you is chuckling at that) is actually seven scenarios that form a single campaign. The scenarios are very different from one another, but one point of interest is that in at least two of them you can see early attempts at what would become normal elements of "trad" modules - lots of boxed text, an abstraction of geographic space, lots of detailed information mainly for the DM to read and ponder rather than use directly, etc. The collection of both these proto-trad works alongside scenarios that look more like dungeons or overland journeys updated for the 1920s setting is really interesting to me.

Of the two proto-trad scenarios, one of them - the Coven at Cannich - was written by John Scott Clegg, who you may recall as the Dungeon Master in 1978 whose stray dungeon vampire provoked Tracy Hickman down the the path of writing the Nightverse scenarios and then Ravenloft and Dragonlance. The other, the Worm that Walks, was written by Sandy Petersen himself (its main sin truly is an excessively long interaction with an effectively unkillable NPC staged through boxed text).

This article, which I have a lot of criticisms of to be clear, suggests that TSR was worried about a sudden loss of market share to CoC in 1981-1982 and this drove them to agree to publish the Ravenloft module hoping to capture some of the interest in horror gaming that CoC was stirring up.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

This sounds like lack of dogma is the missing piece. Whereas "trad" did have dogma? From TSR and the Hickmans, or elsewhere? Where?

Lots of different sources! That's one of the things that made trad so hegemonic. You had publishers, creators, fans, critics, etc. all coming together to normalise this set of values and practices across the course of 20 years (and really, there are still lots of trad adherents who form an old guard even in 5e discussions). In terms of _why_ it became a dogma, I think a combination of early critical and commercial success for trad products like CoC and Ravenloft encouraged the production of more product resembling them, while what had previously merely been a disorganised group of fans with broadly similar interests were energised and emboldened by this critical and commercial success to more vocally advance their ideas, denigrate their opponents, and reinforce one another's positions in various public fora (magazines, conventions, etc.) as well as in home games.

I would argue the proto-culture had dogma: the 3 AD&D books

I don't think the 3 AD&D books can be the dogma of a culture that we're presuming existed well before their publication (esp. the 1979 publication of the DMG, which I consider the most important for our argument). If such a culture did have a dogma, it would need it in place well-prior to that. Similarly, the first module is 1978. I think the best candidate for a purveyor of dogma is probably Strategic Review / the Dragon, since that leaves only a proto-cultural period of 1971-1975, ending just a year after OD&D released.

Squeen, without wanting to insult you, I feel like I am doing most of the work here building your case for you. You've mentioned Monty Haul several times but I'm the one who suggested it as a promising possibility and suggested that it need supplementation with other examples - which are yet to be provided. Similarly, you mention the Dragon in passing but then focus on AD&D 1e which simply can't have regulated anything before its publication. As a third point, you keep on insisting on a cultural transition or shift or some sort of split between the older gamers playing OD&D and the younger crowd who played Basic (I believe you that such a split existed). If they did not form a single culture of play in your view, I think that actually supports the idea of a disunited early hobby without a dogma or hegemonic culture of play.

I'm starting to suspect AD&D was not so much an attempt to discipline OD&D culture as some suggest, but to propagate it to all the rash (Monty Haul) new-comers. (...and make some $$ too, no doubt).

So I agree that Gygax was trying to propagate his style of play via AD&D (and yes, make some bank). But if he wasn't disciplining anyone, then that would support the idea that there was no dogma.

To dip into the history of the early Christian Church again, I think it's a useful analogy to understand people like Gygax and Arneson as like Tertullian, Origen, Clement, and the other church fathers writing before the ecumenical councils of the 4th century. They're very influential but a shared understanding (of Christian theological and catechistic positions in the case of the Church fathers) had not yet coalesced to make their works able to be a dogma. Their work provoked the development of such a shared understanding, one which both draws on parts of their work and critically rejects other parts.

The Heretic mentioned earlier that he thought their ideas were "overwritten", you concurred with that, and I basically do as well. I do think the AD&D 1e DMG and various modules (presented as tournament modules that could be played in public fora like GenCon) were attempts to constitute a culture and spread a specific set of ideas about gaming that Gary hoped would be the dominant / hegemonic culture of play. At the same time, I think that attempt was unsuccessful, and that instead of that, trad showed up, quickly established critical and commercial success that led to it being the hegemonic culture of play and its adherents basically spent the 1980s and 1990s (and really, a great deal of the 2000s) shitting on various forms of D&D as "rollplaying".

 

[The1True]

partially because both sides use the same terms in different ways

This is the part I would most like to understand. Could you clarify?

 

[The1True]

So I agree that Gygax was trying to propagate his style of play via AD&D (and yes, make some bank). But if he wasn't disciplining anyone, then that would support the idea that there was no dogma.

Wasn't that the reason for his split with Arneson? Sounds like we need a term for the pre-orthodoxy culture/non-culture.

 

[The1True]

Uh oh, looks like squeen has finally infiltrated the millennial conspiracy ring and uncovered the secret truth about our global push to make people view a musty old game from the '70s in a slightly different light. Pack it up boys, our cover's blown!

@squeen, this was (especially for DP) pretty gentle and valid criticism. This isn't a schoolyard circle-kicking, we're all getting along (pretty amazingly) here.

DP brother, maybe resist the urge to poke the Squeen?...

 

[squeen]

Squeen, without wanting to insult you, I feel like I am doing most of the work here building your case for you. You've mentioned Monty Haul several times but I'm the one who suggested it as a promising possibility and suggested that it need supplementation with other examples - which are yet to be provided. Similarly, you mention the Dragon in passing but then focus on AD&D 1e which simply can't have regulated anything before its publication. As a third point, you keep on insisting on a cultural transition or shift or some sort of split between the older gamers playing OD&D and the younger crowd who played Basic (I believe you that such a split existed). If they did not form a single culture of play in your view, I think that actually supports the idea of a disunited early hobby without a dogma or hegemonic culture of play.

I am not insulted! And yes, these is clearly your notions I've been batting around. The first I've been hearing of it.

Moreover I understand how, to you, the division of what-qualifies-as-culture is clear. But I also detect a perceptual bias. You started with trad, so it seem that much more "complete" and "real" to you. You play down the size of the audience as a discriminator, but repeatedly use that as proof. It does feel like you are applying a double standard at each and every check-point. Please, don't tell me every single trad game-table was homogeneous in it's play and thinking. If so, then robotically following the rules (because you have no wiggle-room) does not a culture make!

And I do believe the AD&D books can be viewed as much a codification of existing dogma as any ecumenical councils. Just because because not every single pre-1979 D&D player was playing the "OD&D way", certainly there was a critical mass---or else we wouldn't have had an early OSR trying to reclaim it. From your world-view the DL/R salesmen gathered order out of chaos---where as before this "trad-centric" narrative shift, they just pissed all over the existing play-style and brought in a bunch of foreign players (with a different, more pa$$ive culture) to their system to cement it.

Po-TAY-to, po-TA-to.

As Prince said, it's been a very good discussion. I don't think I personally have anything further to add, and I sense I am out-gunned here on many levels. We do tend to believe what we want to believe, and filter or discount evidence to the contrary. If your definitions support "trad-as-first-real-culture", and that floats your boat (and other who came to the hobby then), that's fine. For obvious reasons, it doesn't sit well with my sensibilities---but I'm also sure the debate is insignificant. I initially bristled at what I saw as history being rewritten, 1984 style (Orwell, not Hickmann), but now I'm resigned to it.

If OD&D-style must be re-branded OSR-style, and those same pre-1979 sensibilities magically coalesce into a "culture" only after 2006 because the next generation requires it's fingers in the pie for legitimacy, so be it---they can continue to believe a world didn't exist before they were conscious, just a "proto-world". What matter to me is the style I enjoy playing, and passing that on to my family and friends. It was never really well-crafted for mass consumption---takes too much time and skull-sweat (and to its adherents that was always a point of pride, not a flaw). Its non-culture will likely fade* (or be erased)---overwhelmed by the population bulge in the second wave.

(* except for the Secret Cabal. shhh!).

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

This is the part I would most like to understand. Could you clarify?

Sure, here's one example:

For trad, a "railroad" is a failure state where the DM's creative production has gotten so extensive and rigid that PCs' agency is discouraged or blocked off except when it mirrors what the DM has anticipated and determined to be "correct" (within the context of creating a "good" story).

A "railroad" for a neo-trad group is where the DM "imposes" their story and interests over the backgrounds and interests of the PCs to create the campaign instead of deriving it from the PCs' backgrounds and interests. (No, really)

I was surprised when I started reading Reddit's 5e discussions a few years ago, and kept on running across people - mainly newer players from what I could tell from contextual clues - using "railroad" with the latter sense. At first I thought they were just mistaken about what they meant, and then I realised that this was just the way a certain section of roleplayers used the term. Both groups use "railroad" as a pejorative, but for totally different things.

 

[squeen]

I think is see a middle ground...

If, in a vacuum, you make the statement:

"The Dragonlance/Ravenloft style-of-play represents the traditional game, and was first true D&D culture."​

​

then everyone who was playing the game long before DL/R's arrival, and who saw that new style as a total non-starter---ignoring it and TSR's product-shift while merrily continuing to play the style of D&D they had for the past several years---they will think "WTF are you saying? That is total nonsense!"

However, if you present your list thusly (as I believe you originally did):

"Here is a list of the dominate D&D cultures currently on the internet (in chronology order of appearance)."​

​

and leave it at that, then I imagine you aren't likely to get much push-back (except from weirdo like me who pick at terminology).

 

[The1True]

A "railroad" for a neo-trad group is where the DM "imposes" their story and interests over the backgrounds and interests of the PCs to create the campaign instead of deriving it from the PCs' backgrounds and interests. (No, really)

I have never encountered this sense of the term. Quite interesting. My kneejerk response is to want to correct that change in meaning wherever and whenever possible...

 

[squeen]

A "railroad" for a neo-trad group is where the DM "imposes" their story and interests over the backgrounds and interests of the PCs to create the campaign instead of deriving it from the PCs' backgrounds and interests. (No, really)

And so, the cycle is now complete---the backstory has conquered all! The players have become the DM. All wishes are granted at roll-up.

Looks like our old friend Monty once again sits upon his golden throne!

Predictable.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

Wasn't that the reason for his split with Arneson? Sounds like we need a term for the pre-orthodoxy culture/non-culture.

The "early church"

More seriously, the name I've applied to each group has been an autonym so far, with the exception that what I call "neo-trad" is called "OC RP" or "OC RPGs" by its adherents (I am in the process of trying to adopt this term but can't quite bring myself to use it consistently yet) except when they mistakenly think of themselves as "trad". On Reddit and other online fora, if you make a post saying you're looking for an "OC RP 5e game" you can consistently summon people with the OC RP norms as players.

While it's not decisive over whether there is an early culture or proto-culture in itself, I have not yet identified a shared autonym that people in the early days of the hobby used for themselves other than "roleplayers", "hobbyists", and other similarly general terms. That's why, while I mentioned a "challenge crawl" idea possibly at work during that time, I wouldn't call the style "challenge crawls".

I think is see a middle ground...

If, in a vacuum, you make the statement:

"The Dragonlance/Ravenloft style-of-play represents the traditional game, and was first true D&D culture." ​

​

So I would deny the first half of that except for very limited senses of "traditional", and avoid using a term like "true" in the second half. I think Dragonlance / Ravenloft represent a culture of play (from which styles derive) that originates early in the hobby, and that dominates the hobby for 16+ years. This culture calls itself "trad" / "traditional" and positions itself as the "traditional" way to play in contrast to other styles. I call them "trad" because it's their autonym, but I agree that their positioning of themselves as "traditional" is very much a bunch of myth-making. To emphasise the difference between using the autonym and and actually agreeing that they are the "traditional" form of roleplaying, I use the short form "trad".

However, if you present your list thusly (as I believe you originally did):

"Here is a list of the dominate D&D cultures currently on the internet (in chronology order of appearance)."​

​

and leave it at that, then I imagine you aren't likely to get much push-back (except from weirdo like me who pick at terminology).

I think these cultures go beyond the internet and seem to be the majority of existing cultures within the hobby. As I said, I'm open to the existence of others, both historical and newly formed, but if people want to argue for their existence, I've provided my criteria for what I think counts as a crystallised culture and all I ask is that they demonstrate how the culture-idea they're advocating for meets them.

To correct something you said above, I didn't base my sense of "what a culture was" on trad originally, but on storygames and the OSR, both of whom are much more explicit about being reactions within the subculture to other bodies of norms (to trad and to trad/storygames, respectively). When I first began thinking about this a few years ago, I started off with a tripartite distinction between OSR / Storygames / everything else and it was delving into the latter that caused me to run into "trad" and "Nordic LARP" and the then unnamed "OC RPG" / "neo-trad" style.

 

[The1True]

All wishes are granted at roll-up.

Oversimplification.
Just out of curiosity, are you intentionally baiting the new edition crowd now? That's fine as long as it stirs meaningful/spirited debate, but it's unfair to then turn around and claim martyrdom when they all pile on top of you...