Thoughts on OSR

-

Most outside the OSR give it some side-eye. Those inside ask "What the hell is water?" and keep playing. I've been borderline obsessed with this play style for a while now, and it's not abating. Not that I don't have reservations... but there's something to it I'd like to explain.


Appeal of OSR:

  • genuinely risky. No matter the stage of the game, if you want to progress at a reasonable rate, you have to get into, what has been for me, heart pounding situations. 
  • Tactical gameplay. In a (currently hiatus'ed) Nightwick Abbey megadungeon game, I have been thinking throughout the hiatus of the tactically best way to combat some regular old goblins. Because they're being annoying goblins, and it takes some genuine brain racking.
  • Free-form. I don't know that I'm all about my old "immersive gaming" play after becoming so fond of straight up OSR games. But there's still a strong rules-lite feel to most OSR stuff I am fond of. Your tactical gameplay opens up into tactical infinity.

Things to like about OSR:

  • genuinely good game design. Most every mechanic and procedure really encourages the core gameplay goals (gambling via exploration).
  • Very open setting. You can play OSR in most settings (though not for every gameplay goal); obviously fantasy, but also science fiction settings, modern day. The setting is also open because you are dungeon delving: you can put all sorts of stuff in the dungeon that is non-constraining setting-wise. Crystal golems in sci-fi? Guess it's sci-fantasy and you just didn't find out yet.
  • Easy to design/run/play. There's so much on OSR design on blogs, you can find an answer to most questions. You just need a rules cheat sheet & some common sense to run it. You need less than that to play, just an inventive streak in challenges.

A handcrafted meme for you. Pass it on to your kids, it'll be more relevant then.

 Things to object to in OSR:

  • Killing things. You can avoid it at each individual encounter, but overall you're not going to get as far without killing things.
  • Money/wealth-centric play. It feels like an expansive enterprise, marching across a hexcrawl or dungeon. There are alternatives, but they loosen the tight loop of game design. It can remind one too much of similar bad bits of history.
  • Bad roots. I think this is the least concern, despite being the most voiced point. Gygax & co. should be known for their faults, but their game design is tight in a way that isn't ruined by rules surgery (race-as-class is easily obviated by changing the names & allowing cosmetic race and a class, which is what I usually do). I dunno. I think there shouldn't be much OSR guilt, because as many have noticed, OSR is revisionist of how the 70's/80's games were actually played. So we can revise out the bad.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thinking Small: The Fictional World has a Surprising Amount of Detail

-
Probably a year or two ago I read a blog post from outside the DnD-sphere, Reality has a surprising amount of detail . It stuck with me all this time, and eventually the little worm in my brain that this post spawned crawled and ate its way through my neatly compartmentalized mind into my DnD brain. I haven't reread the article since my first reading, but the title is what really stuck with me. The worm has digested this idea, and the result is a little nugget of an idea I want to expand upon here. The blog post talks first about how constructing a set of wooden steps, in a precise manner, is actually quite difficult. Figuring out how the pieces of wood should be cut, fit together, and secured take some planning and precision. This is all to make stairs that simply fit together. Bearing weight is another manner. The OSR is all about having a "realistic" world - one that operates on consistent internal logic, even with fantastical elements. That means if you really wanted ...
Read more

Empty Rooms Should be Just That and the 5 Room Dungeon

-
Just a quick explanation of an OSR dungeon design principle for those unfamiliar. This is maybe not a well-touted idea, but I've been brewing on this idea lately. Of course, this is all centered around how I want to play, run... etc... Take with coarse grained salt if you think your goals are different. If you've got a dungeon, you should have some empty rooms that don't.... do anything. As in, there is nothing 'to do' in the room. I have been brewing this idea based on what Luke Gearing said in his interview on the "Into the Megadungeon" podcast. I'll just rehash what Luke conveyed in my listening: Empty rooms provide a place to rest (my words) Empty rooms give space to a dungeon so that you don't die at every turn Empty rooms are tactically important for managing encounters, especially in conjunction with loops   Luke gave an easy example of how to utilize empty rooms: You pass through some empty rooms, and eventually encounter a big room with a ...
Read more

Thinking Small Adventures

-
 I want to explain a philosophy for adventure design I have developed on, I hope: thinking small. Honey I Shrunk the Adventure! Many good adventures give lots of play out of small packages. This is not a new idea. The 3 hex campaign start and 5 room dungeon are known for giving creativity via constraints (a well-touted idea). Brevity in the adventure text is also a much-loved and effective way to give creativity through vagueries. I see these as a part of a core rule of thumb: do more with less. I think this is a great design philosophy. I would like to push it a bit further, and to a potentially new aspect of the rule of thumb, that deserves just as much attention. Before, I have written a  scenario premise , which you can get a whole session out of (in most cases), and I've mentioned before having a cool idea . I want to propose a design philosophy: have the core danger of a setting fit into a single coherent description, and a summary of an adventure location fit into a par...
Read more