# Is the OSR Dead?



## delericho (Sep 14, 2015)

Per Betteridge's Law of headlines, "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

The OSR isn't dead. It's somewhat muted because, yes, 5e has adopted some old-school influences and so has attracted some of the OSR adherents. And also because 5e generates so much discussion that everything else (including Pathfinder) is seeming more muted by comparison.

But according to your own statistics, there are still 9% of conversations about OSR games, games like LotFP are still by all accounts selling very well, and I daresay there's an awful lot of people who didn't feel the need to change their game with 3e, didn't change it with 4e, and haven't changed it with 5e but who also don't feel any great need to evangelise. The problem there being that if they're quiet, there's no real way for us to tell how many of them there are.


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## TrippyHippy (Sep 14, 2015)

OSR isn't dead. 5E is evidence that OSR has won!


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## Morrus (Sep 14, 2015)

talien said:


> OSR-style games currently capture over 9 percent of the RPG market according to ENWorld's Hot Role-playing Games. If you consider the Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons to be part of that movement, it's nearly 70 percent of the entire RPG market.




Just a note - EN World's tracker doesn't show market share. It only shows a sample of discussions across a range of websites/forums/blogs.  For market share you need to look elsewhere (although the best public info is the ICv2 data, and that's obviously not much use in this case).



TrippyHippy said:


> OSR isn't dead. 5E is evidence that OSR has won!




That's exactly what the article says!

I'm not sure I agree entirely, because I don't think it was a conflict. At least, certainly not one like the Edition Wars of a few years ago. I think there was a broad taste for some older style influences, especially after the changes inherent in 4E, and the OSR helped bring that about.  But I don't feel that was an awful lot of resistance to the idea - most people seemed on board with it.

As talien says, there's also a demographic factor. Added to the cycles described, there's now the additional demographic of 40 year olds with fond memories of their teens (I'm one of them). That demographic was much, much smaller back when 3E came out 16 years ago.  So the OSR fits in well with a lot of folks - it seems natural that D&D would follow that pattern.


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## estar (Sep 14, 2015)

"The OSR wasn't about "rapid, constant improvement in the quality of rules" but rather what rules they could remove to mimic the feel of earlier editions. The OSR ended up looking more backward than forward."

So if you are playing chess, publishing chess, and promoting chess you are looking backwards? The heart of OSR has been is always been about playing older games and making new material for those game.In a Very similar to a chess club, bridge club or any number of groups or organization devoted to a popular game.

And actually the OSR had and I quote "rapid, constant improvement in the quality of rules", some of the OSR rulesets are better presented, and better organized than the rules they are cloning. For example Swords & Wizardry White Box, Delving Deeper, etc compared to the original 3 books of OD&D. OSRIC was presented as a full rulebook in its 2nd edition (edition in the sense of a book edition) instead of the publisher's reference of its 1st edition because people found it useful as a quick reference to AD&D during play.

The idea of progress in the design of RPGs is a false one. What happens is that RPGs and games diversify. Over time people come up with new mechanics that later designer can use or combine to create other new games. But is Settler's of Catan is "better" than Chess? Is Chess better than Dominion? No it all about personal preference and taste. Tabletop Games are not like software dependent on the state of technology at a particular time to make it happen. Chess is as fun or not as it was in 1300 AD. OD&D is as fun (or not) as it was in 1974. 

What does improve are ways of presenting the game and it's concepts. It reasonable to look at OD&D of 1974 and say "Yeah it's presentation makes it difficult to learn." And look at Delving Deeper or White Box and say "Yup it's OD&D but way easier to learn." 

In the case of OSRIC "Yeah I like Gygax advice and commentary but there are times when I just want more concise to look up rules and items." 

Last it wasn't the release of the reprints that made the OSR victorious. It's victory as such was already cemented by 2010 when it COLLECTIVE volume of products and sales reached that of a typical 2nd tier RPG publishers. 

While there are no hard numbers for sales other than what we shared from time to time while blogging Hoard and Horde (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LUFmadXbg67pp9dEu_KsLc2-2Gf-0t5mVOvzetAqdFw/edit#gid=0) is a good reference for D&D related OSR products up to April of 2012. If you tally the numbers things really start to kick off around 2008 and accelerate from there. 

The reprints along with it's influence on 5e were just icing on the cake. While appreciated by fans of the OSR the reprints were not an important part of why it succeeded.

On the other hand the OGL and the d20 SRD were instrumental in the success of the OSR. Because if you omit feats, skills, and other newer mechanics what was left was a hop and a skip from being an older edition of D&D.

Rob Conley
Bat in the Attic Games


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## Chimpy (Sep 14, 2015)

I think it's easy for people to get "stuck in the past". Perhaps they like an old version of a game, and don't even consider the merits of a newer version. That's fine for them and they should pursue what they enjoy, but I think it the realm of tabletop RPGs, being open minded about new products is a good perspective to have.


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## Celebrim (Sep 14, 2015)

There certainly is an aspect of 1970's and 1980's gaming that was not playing the game you wanted to play.  It does have an aspect in RPGs, but you can see it more clearly in other sorts of table top gaming.

Almost no one plays traditional hex wargames any more, and certainly no one is being added to the hobby faster than the grognards die out.  Hex wargames died back in the 1990's, when computer versions allowed you to actually focus on playing them when it was convenient for you, with as detailed of rules as you wanted, on as large of a map as you wanted, while doing the book keeping for you, for a fraction of the cost.

Likewise, there were a number of turn based games that were quite popular once upon a time that simply don't have the prominence they once had because there are now video games that give you the visceral experience those games were trying to capture through their elaborate rules.  Star Fleet Battles let you play an intense space combat game - at a glacial real time pace.  As a kid, I desperately wanted to find someone to play Car Wars with.  As an adult, I look at the complex rules for sliding and drifting and all the rest, and I think, "I'm never going to play this unless it's on a computer."   There was a time when Battletech had as prominent of a place among gamers as D&D did.   But as early as the early 90's, Battletech MU*'s started beating pen and paper RPGs at their own game, and now, if you want to play Battletech you'll almost certainly play some sort of fast paced complex computer version of the reality that Battletech was trying to simulate with its pen and paper rules.

The RPGs themselves have died off more slowly, because the computer still can't create the dynamic world of a good DM's imagination.  But they are clearly on the way out.  It's been noticeable for the last 10 years or more that no one wants to be a DM anymore.  Being a good DM inevitably means enjoying spending 10 or 20 hours a week not playing the game you want to play so that the content and game will be there to play.  There really is no way around it.  But for at least the last 10 years people have been trying to create RPGs that at least in theory don't need a DM to spend time not playing the game.  They've promoted the fantasy that all this content can just create itself during play and it will be the same thing, or that the game is little more than a series of tactical scenarios which you can buy a book of and play and that will be an RPG.   They've promoted 'fast prep' and 'no prep' and 'no myth' and all of those were just variations of saying, "You don't need a DM; all you need is a referee and some rules."   And I think the problem is ultimately that nothing like the worlds that the DMs wanted to play in and create and animate actually existed in the 1970's and 1980's, so that if you wanted such a world to play in and explore you just had to do it yourself.  

OSR I think was built on what I consider a myth - that back in those 70's and 80's the rules were simple and game prep was easy and so you didn't have to spend much time prepping in order to have a really good time.  And I think that myth was largely a myth of players back in the 70's or 80's, because DM I think remember how much time they were putting into prep.  The sad truth is that nostalgia aside, the one sheet dungeon (to say nothing of the map) is no longer going to intrigue for long.   By 1990, that sort of entirely dungeon centric, plotless, 'old school' play we were doing as 12 year olds just didn't satisfy.  Partly that was because if that was all you cared for, computers had already started doing a pretty good job of providing dungeon exploration as a solo experience.  Partly that was because there is only so many hours of kicking down doors and pointless exploration that satisfies.

And now, that same geek can just play Skyrim or Witcher III or something, and a goodly portion of them that create for its own sake and enjoy it probably are spending their time writing mods as a way of making Skyrim or any number of other fantasy engines more personal rather than creating homebrew game worlds.   

I think Mearls is somewhat wrong to suggest that the problem is that players don't want to spend their time creating characters, when they could just play Skyrim or Witcher III.  It isn't the lack of players willing to make an investment that is the problem.  For one thing, the investment time in creating characters a cRPG isn't necessarily much less that of D&D.  People spend at least as much time pouring over their Path of Exile builds as they do their D&D characters.  I think it is true that D&D and ilk are less and less the only thing going for a person who wants to be a player, so that they can play D&D or Skyrim and enjoy the experience.  But I don't think that it is true that those players wouldn't or don't want to play a PnP RPG because those RPGs are no longer seen as fun or no longer offer something that you can't get from a solo or small group experience in a computer.   I think that something like Skyrim is simply more accessible because its a lot easier to print another copy of Skyrim than it is to make a good DM.  I think that there are vastly fewer PnP RPG games being played than people would like to play simply because of the effort that goes into running a game, that most players are now lacking a DM.


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## National Acrobat (Sep 14, 2015)

Chimpy said:


> I think it's easy for people to get "stuck in the past". Perhaps they like an old version of a game, and don't even consider the merits of a newer version. That's fine for them and they should pursue what they enjoy, but I think it the realm of tabletop RPGs, being open minded about new products is a good perspective to have.




I think this is true up to a point. However, there are people who know what they like, and are quite happy with it. My group prefers and generally plays Pathfinder. However, there are times when we want to play 1e ADnD and we do. All of us are near 50, and still have all of our original books, and there are a few of us who play so infrequently, that it's more enjoyable for them to play the version they know and love. 

That's the good thing about RPGs. Just because it's not being made anymore, you still have the old books. You can play what you want.


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## estar (Sep 14, 2015)

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] 

Circa 1980 Hex and Counter were in the midst of a boom as big a tabletop roleplaying as you correctly pointed out it collapsed since. In my opinion it got hit harder than tabletop roleplaying by the changes in the market and technology. However today it is far from dead. Again thanks to the internet it have revived into a small niche hobby that uses both physical products and virtual tabletops like Aide de Camp and Vassal to the play older games and newer games.

It is highly unlikely that it will ever be THE board game the way it was circa 1980 as the euro-games are far more suited to causal gamers. And thanks to clever game design many euro-games have the same depth of play as the hex and counter games. However euro-games are not simulations of the situations they depict. That where hex and counter games excel and why they have a niche today although it may be small.

Now if this was the 1980/early 90s then the fact that hex and counter games make for good simulations would not be enough even to sustain a small niche. Because the cost of reaching the fans would be too high. However the Internet changes all that allowing niche hobbies like hex and counter wargame to flourish enough to keep it alive. 

Now the internet is still too young to see what happens to niches after a generation or two. So you may be right. However given how low the barriers to communication is I don't think any hobby will die out to the point where there no community surrounding it.

You are right that it is a myth that games of the 70s and 80s were all simple to play and easy to prep. Where you are wrong is that the OSR was founded on that. The OSR was founded to play, publish and promote classic editions of D&D. Anything else depends on the group or individual you are talking about.

What you are referring too is the influence of Matt Finch's a Quick Primer to Old School Gaming which can be gotten for free here. http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf

The super condensed version of what Matt was trying to explain was how you pick a lock or disarm a trap using the OD&D core books. For those of you who don't know there is no thief class or skill in the original three booklets of OD&D. The thief and it's attendant skills got added in the Greyhawk supplement.

If you read OD&D core booklets you will see they had locks and traps so how was it dealt with? The primer is a combination of his own insights, talking to people who played back in the day, and more than a little jabbing at modern mechanics all in order to explain how to play OD&D, and other classic editions that were mechanics lite.

The result proved to be highly influential and extrapolated to be a whole philosophy of playing RPGs with lite mechanics. Which proved to be popular in it's own right only for the OSR but for games like FATE, D&D 5e, and others. And of course people being people, many took it to be a accurate view of how RPGs were played back in the day. Which as you pointed out is a myth given that games like Space Opera, Chivalry and Sorcery, Dragonquest, etc all had their own following. AD&D has considerably more mechanics and details than it's OD&D progenitor.

But remember the primary purpose of the primer was to give people practical and useful advice on how to run various classic editions. To get people to play those editions, not something that feel like those edition, not something that had the same themes like dungeon crawling, but the actual games themselves.

And that what the heart of the OSR is about playing the actual games themselves.

Now there is another foundation of the OSR and that is Open Gaming. The default for tabletop roleplaying regardless of era or rule system to kitbash whatever you want to make the campaign you want to play. In my experience this far more common than playing the rules as written mostly due the fact that just about all RPGs come off as toolkits when you read them.

Classic D&D was no different so when you combine that natural tendency of RPGs with Open Gaming the result is the kaleidoscope of the OSR we have today. So while the heart of the OSR is the revival of play of the classic edition, it is just the heart of a very large galaxy of related games that are not even all of the fantasy genre. Anything that can be done with classic D&D mechanics is being done somewhere in the OSR today. From the simple to the complex.

This a far more accurate picture of the OSR then your post or the original article. What it doesn't do is simplify it because the OSR can't be simplified. If you say the OSR is about lite mechanics then you need to qualify it with which segment are you talking about? You are certainly not talking about me and my adventure and supplements which are not lite by any measure. Nor about Blood & Treasure, Adventure Dark & Deep, or Adventurer, Conqueror, King none of which would be considered as a lite RPG. Now granted none of us are at the level of Hero System or GURPS complexity either and occupy a middle ground. Any point about the OSR other than the fact it revolves around classic editions of D&D has to be qualified with specifics.

Rob Conley
Bat in the Attic Games


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## Shadow Demon (Sep 14, 2015)

estar said:


> @_*Celebrim*_
> And that what the heart of the OSR is about playing the actual games themselves.




I agree with your overall assessment but the above quoted part is no longer true. The heart of the OSR from the beginning until now is about creating new adventures that are compatible with classic 20th century D&D game (circa 1974-1999)

Because of WOTC's changing stance on previous D&D editions and the rise of dndclassics.com, new players who didn't play these originally can now legally obtain them without searching for that Internet scanned copy. I expect to see 0e make an appearance soon.

Instead, the retroclone becomes addenum to the original ruleset. They are just names to use as placeholders because you can't print "Compatible with AD&D" on the cover. It is a true rarity to find anyone who would play these retroclones exactly as written just as it was rare to play AD&D exactly as it was written. (2e was the easiest to actually do so). Each of these retroclones has the author's own built in biases which you can either take or leave. Personally, in IMHO,  I have found the actual retroclone rulesets have diminished in value over time.

The OSR has given new adventures for this 20th century era as an alternative to creating your own. This is the OSR's greatest continuing value. It's greatest achievement is making WOTC realize this market segment is still important part of RPG demographic which is why the current incantation of D&D exists.


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## Celebrim (Sep 14, 2015)

estar said:


> [MENTION=4937]That where hex and counter games excel and why they have a niche today although it may be small.




By 'dead', I mean reduced to a small and somewhat obscure niche.  Of course, almost nothing ever truly goes away so long as some version of it stays in print somewhere.  There are probably groups still playing games using something like HG Wells 'Little Wars' rules or a close approximation and having a blast.  And you are right that the internet makes staying in print much easier.

But while dead is probably not the right metaphor, something can be marginalized to the point that it no longer has any great influence even within the gamer subculture.  The Civilization series is probably one of the last influences of the hex and counter paper games with wide exposure.



> The result proved to be highly influential and extrapolated to be a whole philosophy of playing RPGs with lite mechanics. Which proved to be popular in it's own right only for the OSR but for games like FATE, D&D 5e, and others. And of course people being people, many took it to be a accurate view of how RPGs were played back in the day. Which as you pointed out is a myth given that games like Space Opera, Chivalry and Sorcery, Dragonquest, etc all had their own following. AD&D has considerably more mechanics and details than it's OD&D progenitor.




I've previously advanced in other threads the theory that all rules lite systems inherently marginalize themselves.

While it may be a true statement to say the heart of OSR is to play the older systems themselves, the question anyone would immediately ask is, "Why would you do that?"  In some cases I agree the answer that they are "old" or "original" is enough answer to explain, but I think there is more to it than that.

And I suppose in fairness I should come forward with my biases and felt I could find fault with almost every sentence of Finch's "Old School Primer".    I felt as if I was dealing with a Spanish mercenary asking me to accept his word as a Spaniard, and that I needed to inform him I'd known too many Spaniards.


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## estar (Sep 14, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> By 'dead', I mean reduced to a small and somewhat obscure niche.  Of course, almost nothing ever truly goes away so long as some version of it stays in print somewhere.  There are probably groups still playing games using something like HG Wells 'Little Wars' rules or a close approximation and having a blast.  And you are right that the internet makes staying in print much easier.
> 
> But while dead is probably not the right metaphor, something can be marginalized to the point that it no longer has any great influence even within the gamer subculture.  The Civilization series is probably one of the last influences of the hex and counter paper games with wide exposure.




I feel that being influential and getting new material made are two different outcomes. The former is a kin to a random dice roll either it happens or doesn't and you really can't "make" it happen as it is ultimately a question of taste which is fickle. The best you can do is to make sure what you do is of the best quality you make it so if it happens you are in a position to take advantage of it. 

The latter, I think is the important outcome on whether a niche is successful or not. If the niche become just large enough or organized enough to see the production of new material as good or better quality as what came before then it is a success in my book regardless of actual size. 

Hex and Counter wargames have figured out how to do the latter so new games are being produced to the present day. 

The OSR has the done the same for older edition of D&D and other RPGs and served as a model for renaissances for other older games which is an added bonus in my book.

Unlike Hex and Counter wargames, OSR has some influence through a fortuitous combination of circumstances. So publisher, like myself and others, can take advantage of that to get more sale and do more projects than we could otherwise. But even if it never happened, the nature of technology and internet would be meant that much that would have been produced for the OSR still would have been released anyway. The barrier to publishing is that low and is down to the point where it just a matter of talent and the amount of time the people in the project are willing to spend.  




Celebrim said:


> While it may be a true statement to say the heart of OSR is to play the older systems themselves, the question anyone would immediately ask is, "Why would you do that?"  In some cases I agree the answer that they are "old" or "original" is enough answer to explain, but I think there is more to it than that.




It a matter of taste, and thus any theory is only good for looking back and understanding why something happened. It is useless for prediction. We know from the past that for any written project that good writing, good editing, good art, good layout, and good physical presentation are indicators of a successful project. But there have been successful works that violated one or more of that. There been works that had all of the proceeding and failed. When you stack it up it amounts to "who the  knows why anything succeeds". Andy Weir, the author of the Martian, slaps what amounts to a bunch of well edited, well researched blog posts about a highly technical fictional story of astronaut stranded on Mars using just the physic and situation we know about today, and produces a mega hit. Who would figure that?

In hindsight what fueled the OSR was several things

1) OD&D, B/X, and AD&D 1st have the largest group of fans out of all RPGs prior to 1990. So even the OSR publishers exceeded in only attracting a few percentage points of older gamers that still a huge audience compared to other classic RPGs.
2) The Internet makes finding stuff easy
3) By subtracting a few mechanics the d20 SRD is pretty close to how classic D&D works. With some work that is in the capability of a determined individual or group it can be used to make a near clone of a target edition. Thanks to the OGL the result can be published without fear of a lawsuit.
4) The classic edition are great games in of themselves which allowed them to attract new gamers which allowed the OSR to be more than a nostalgic flash in the pan.

For my part after I read OSRIC, I knew that classic D&D was here to stay. My experience with open source software development told me that once somebody figure how to make something open and it was popular at one point it was enough to keep it going as a viable community producing new content. So I threw my hat in the ring and came out with my own stuff.




Celebrim said:


> And I suppose in fairness I should come forward with my biases and felt I could find fault with almost every sentence of Finch's "Old School Primer".    I felt as if I was dealing with a Spanish mercenary asking me to accept his word as a Spaniard, and that I needed to inform him I'd known too many Spaniards.




Matt's Primer has two major things about it.

1) It is a instruction manual for running older games that don't have the mechanics of newer games like skills.
2) It is a snarky attack on games with newer mechanics.

I could have lived without #2 but #1 provided highly useful to me and other folks I know who have read. Some of them like the snarky attitude and some didn't. I liked Matt's primer because it made me as comfortable with running OD&D, Fate, and other lite RPG as the games I usually run which were games like GURPS, Hero System, and Harnmaster.

So is your objection really about the attitude or do you feel it fails to effectively instruct somebody how to run older games as a referee.

If it former, sure I can see that. If it is the latter I have to disagree. 

Rob Conley
Bat in the Attic Games.


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## Mallus (Sep 14, 2015)

Anyone who thinks OSR-identified products are "backwards-looking" should really check out Vorheim, A Red and Pleasant Land, Yoon-Suin, and Deep Carbon Observatory (hint: the things that _aren't_ old-school system hacks/revisions).

I mean, they should check them out if they're interested in seeing how wrong that opinion is.

I've got something called "Fires on the Velvet Horizon" on order from Lulu. It's by the people who did Deep Carbon. It looks nothing short of revolutionary -- and nothing like the current 5e materials.

Another hint: you can innovate in ways unrelated to mechanics. Or at least less related.

edit: I didn't like whatever version of Finch's Old School Primer I read, either. I let it color my opinion of the whole phenomenon... and in retrospect I shouldn't have done that.


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## Lanefan (Sep 14, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> The RPGs themselves have died off more slowly, because the computer still can't create the dynamic world of a good DM's imagination.  But they are clearly on the way out.  It's been noticeable for the last 10 years or more that no one wants to be a DM anymore.  Being a good DM inevitably means enjoying spending 10 or 20 hours a week not playing the game you want to play so that the content and game will be there to play.  There really is no way around it.  But for at least the last 10 years people have been trying to create RPGs that at least in theory don't need a DM to spend time not playing the game.  They've promoted the fantasy that all this content can just create itself during play and it will be the same thing, or that the game is little more than a series of tactical scenarios which you can buy a book of and play and that will be an RPG.   They've promoted 'fast prep' and 'no prep' and 'no myth' and all of those were just variations of saying, "You don't need a DM; all you need is a referee and some rules."   And I think the problem is ultimately that nothing like the worlds that the DMs wanted to play in and create and animate actually existed in the 1970's and 1980's, so that if you wanted such a world to play in and explore you just had to do it yourself.



I think you're being a bit too pessimistic here, [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] - I don't think the RPGs are dying off at all.  Sure there's a cyclical aspect to it - the mid-90's were a low point, for example, and the early '00's a high - but I think overall things are chugging along just fine.

Something else that hasn't changed much over the years is finding enough DMs.  That was an issue back in the '80's and it's still an issue now...in some places.  Some gaming groups and-or communities have always been blessed with more DMs than they know what to do with; others have always had to put up with whoever was willing to do it as it's all they had, and for many (like mine) it's a mix.

And the short-to-mid term future for old-school gaming looks pretty bright in one respect: all those who were high-school or college age in the late '70's and early '80's are now more or less approaching retirement age, meaning they'll (in theory) have a lot more time to - you guessed it - play D&D if they want to!  And the version they'll most likely gravitate to is the version they are or were familiar with, or something close.

Lan-"what the new editions are useful for is generating good ideas to adapt into old-edition games"-efan


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## Benji (Sep 14, 2015)

Lanefan said:


> the mid-90's were a low point, for example




Man I miss gaming in the mid-90's. It was a time & place of some seriously epic games played by some people who never laboured under the idea that nerd was cool or ever needed to be. I have never had so many arguments about star trek or vampires since the end of that decade.

Actually the vampires thing is a lie. During the early 2010's 'VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE' became a game group chant.


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## Celebrim (Sep 14, 2015)

estar said:


> For my part after I read OSRIC, I knew that classic D&D was here to stay. My experience with open source software development told me that once somebody figure how to make something open and it was popular at one point it was enough to keep it going as a viable community producing new content. So I threw my hat in the ring and came out with my own stuff.




And good luck to you.  It sounds like fun.  Hopefully the community stays large enough that the content has at least some commercial value, and isn't reduced to a community solely supported by ongoing labors of love.



> Matt's Primer has two major things about it.
> 
> 1) It is a instruction manual for running older games that don't have the mechanics of newer games like skills.
> 2) It is a snarky attack on games with newer mechanics.
> ...




Well, feel free to disagree but when I said just about every sentence rung false to me, I meant it.  The big problem with being an 'old school primer' for me is that it is so obviously a modern document, shaped by modern attitudes and sensibilities, and with no apparent clarity regarding either how people thought about and played the game then, or how people have romanticized older games, or how he appears to be appropriating 'old school' for a particular very modern agenda.  Most of all, he fails to address whether his document as a whole represents very practical advice, or the limits of how gameable this advice would be if it is applied.   So much of the advice is crap that sounds good in theory but which in play doesn't really work.   And to a certain extent some of that comes through even in his examples of play, where if you really get into the scenario he describes, you realize that it doesn't sound particularly fun and satisfying and in fact _doesn't even sound like the players playing in the 'old school' way are having much fun_.   

I mean sure, we'd expect the straw man modern GM's game to sound boring and dysfunctional, but he makes his preferred style of play sound at least as bad!

I could pick pretty much any sentence from the rant as an example, but since it is very long, I'll just confine myself to one:



> Also: these games aren’t simulations of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence, would do when faced with certain challenges.




I'm not sure that many people playing the game at the time would have conceded that was true.  Certainly no one I knew would have conceded that at the time.  In hindsight someone might say, "Well, as a simulation of what a of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence would do, they weren't very successful.", and that criticism was leveled against them at the time and various proposals were made and even certain alternate RPGs were made to remedy that.  But I don't recall anyone conceding that we should just ignore that aspect of the game because D&D wasn't about that, or that to the extent that they really believed it was a problem, that it wasn't a valid criticism to make.  People argued over whether it was a problem that needed a rules solution, but they didn't think that being a real character from a fantasy story wasn't part of the point.  No one would have conceded that in 0e you weren't roleplaying a character of a particular culture or race, and that that wasn't what the game was about.  For one thing, no one treated NPCs as if they weren't supposed to be character's of a particular culture or race that reacted to the PC's as if they weren't of a particular culture and race.  

And no one conceded that the game was about 'keeping your character alive' to the extent that what ever you did to keep the character alive was appropriate.  If they had have conceded that, they wouldn't have invented alignment to be a marker of how you'd behave 'in character'.  To say that the game isn't, "a simulation of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence, would do when faced with certain challenges.", would be to suggest that in old school play no one was particularly concerned about being in character, playing your character, and acting in character or that a DM wouldn't have penalized a player with higher training costs or whatever for poor play whose character had very low intelligence but was consistently played with the greatest degree of cunning and insight.  It was well know that the game didn't seem to have a way to deal with the problem, but I don't remember anyone at the time conceding it wasn't a problem.



Compare and contrast real old school play with the example of play from the 1e DMG with what's on offer in the 'Old School Primer'.  There are some similarities but there are some noticeable differences.   Moreover, for additional perspective, note that the 1e DMG example of play is almost exactly reproduced in 3e and that version has at least as much in common with approach as this so called 'old school primer'.

Honestly, it's not a very good primer on how to play old school.  It's a provocative proposal to think about older games in a very modern indy gamer sort of way that I'm not convinced works very well.   Even when it has something recognizable from period play, like how to find something behind a moose head, it doesn't strike me as very deep thinking about the problem. 

For example, this post is almost a year ahead of the old school manifesto: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...itions/page2&p=3396542&viewfull=1#post3396542

But where I'm struggling with find a balance here, for someone that claims to have found a one true way, there is a clear lack of explaining or questioning whether pixel bitching the moose head necessarily represents a fun game.   A poster named Rothe two posts later brings up one of the several problems with the 'fun' factor in the moose head example, but we could chase that rabbit very far down the hole.


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## estar (Sep 14, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Well, feel free to disagree but when I said just about every sentence rung false to me, I meant it.  The big problem with being an 'old school primer' for me is that it is so obviously a modern document, shaped by modern attitudes and sensibilities, and with no apparent clarity regarding either how people thought about and played the game then, or how people have romanticized older games, or how he appears to be appropriating 'old school' for a particular very modern agenda.




I appreciate your response but right here in this paragraph shows that you are missing the point of the Old School Primer. Now understand I am not saying you should like it any better as it does have a snarky attitude towards modern gaming. 

The point you are missing it not meant to be a description of how people played back in the day. Yes it some of it is drawn some from first person accounts based on talking from a variety of people who were involved. 

The problem he is trying to address is this



> If you want to try a one-shot session of 0e using the free Swords & Wizardry rules, just printing the rules and starting to play as you normally do will produce a completely pathetic gaming session – you’ll decide that 0e is just missing all kinds of important rules




I seen this attitude among gamers in my local towards older rules and even modern lite system. That the lack of rules is a deficiency that has to be corrected by more rules. No where in the document Matt claims that this was how people played back in the day. Only that this is a practical way to play older games. 




Celebrim said:


> Most of all, he fails to address whether his document as a whole represents very practical advice, or the limits of how gameable this advice would be if it is applied.   So much of the advice is crap that sounds good in theory but which in play doesn't really work.




I do disagree with this mostly because Matt goes to pains to explain that it is general advice that by its very nature it meant to be worked out by the referee and his group over time. 

The main problem with the primer is that it's approach relies on the talent and experience of the referee of the campaign. The better you are at improvising and adjudicating, more real world experience you have as a person the better able you are able to use the elements of the primer. The reality is that novices need something that is a bit more step by step to help up the learning curve.

I will say Matt tone towards modern mechanics is really over the top and sometimes insulting to fans of modern mechanics. And that color many people perception of the document.




Celebrim said:


> And to a certain extent some of that comes through even in his examples of play, where if you really get into the scenario he describes, you realize that it doesn't sound particularly fun and satisfying and in fact _doesn't even sound like the players playing in the 'old school' way are having much fun_.




Well there is a reason why modern games are designed the way they are. For example character customization handled through mechanics is a feature that player desire a lot and been a constant since the beginning of the hobby.    

Part of what of makes the OSR is exploring alternatives that were dropped in the first decade of the hobby. For example much of my work was writing about sandbox campaigns and hexcrawl formatted setting.




Celebrim said:


> I'm not sure that many people playing the game at the time would have conceded that was true.




Well Gygax in the Greyhawk campaign and Arneson in Blackmoor campaign handled players picking locks, opening traps, charming the ladies (or guys). We have first hand accounts of players doing pretty much what more modern players do with systems that have explicit skills, talents, feats, etc. We have the rules they used and there not a lot of mechanics that explictly handle this stuff. So the question is, how did they handle it? So they were asked and as it turned it they all handled differently but what was common among them is that they came up with ruling based on their personal experience and common sense. Of course that differed between them so what they actually did varied alot.

So Matt and other took what we were told, took his own personal experience, and wrote a primer for the present on how to use the older games despite not having skills, feats, talent, or mechanics like modern games.


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## delericho (Sep 14, 2015)

talien said:


> In the end, it failed to achieve the same type of success as open source software. In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software. (Mearls)




I'm not sure that's it, or at least, I don't think it's _just_ that. One of the issues is that RPGs just don't cycle through generations as rapidly as software - whereas typical software may well update by a full version each year (and many sub-versions within that time), RPGs tend to publish their rules and then remain static for several years, perhaps patched once or twice with errata, and maybe with a half-edition after 2-3 years, but generally staying constant.

This meant that any advancements generally weren't seen _in D&D_ during the life of 3.Xe, which meant that they were automatically limited in exposure. Couple that with WotC's reluctance to bring any third-party material into their books (IIRC, only MM2, Unearthed Arcana, and a couple of Dragon articles ever did this), and the promise of constant improvement was probably doomed.


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## talien (Sep 14, 2015)

delericho said:


> I'm not sure that's it, or at least, I don't think it's _just_ that. One of the issues is that RPGs just don't cycle through generations as rapidly as software - whereas typical software may well update by a full version each year (and many sub-versions within that time), RPGs tend to publish their rules and then remain static for several years, perhaps patched once or twice with errata, and maybe with a half-edition after 2-3 years, but generally staying constant.
> 
> This meant that any advancements generally weren't seen _in D&D_ during the life of 3.Xe, which meant that they were automatically limited in exposure. Couple that with WotC's reluctance to bring any third-party material into their books (IIRC, only MM2, Unearthed Arcana, and a couple of Dragon articles ever did this), and the promise of constant improvement was probably doomed.




The thing that stood out for me the most researching this article was that the OGL was meant to "refine" a game system that there wasn't necessarily a business interest for small companies to refine. It took a big company (Paizo) to take on the massive task of adding to 3.5 in a comprehensive way. Mearls' statements sum that up nicely -- the assumption that somehow all publishers were all on board with "making D&D better" (whatever that means) was flawed to begin with. What the OGL did give designers the flexibility to do is make the game THEY wanted.

So in some respect the OGL did achieve its goal, but not how it was intended.  We have the game we want, we can publish as much as we want, and I would argue there's now so much material in print for every edition (concluding WOTC's back catalog and the new OSR systems that are compatible) that we can play these games in perpetuity.  

I do wonder when we "have our fill" and what comes next though.  After a certain point, we're going to have every form of OSR system covered from many angles.


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## tenkar (Sep 14, 2015)

The OSR today is less about new / cloned / houseruled rulesets and more about products that can be used with those rulesets. Until 5e offers an open license of sorts the OSR will stand apart.

As there will probably never be any sort of open license for 5e...


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## Greyhawk Grognard (Sep 14, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> By 1990, that sort of entirely dungeon centric, plotless, 'old school' play we were doing as 12 year olds just didn't satisfy.  Partly that was because if that was all you cared for, computers had already started doing a pretty good job of providing dungeon exploration as a solo experience.  Partly that was because there is only so many hours of kicking down doors and pointless exploration that satisfies.




For you perhaps, but your experiences aren't everyone's. There are thousands of people for whom a dungeon-centric exploration game is precisely what they expect and enjoy. Look no further than the success of OSR products like Dwimmermount, Stonehell, the Hobby Shop Dungeon (which recently raised more than $100k on Kickstarter for a single level), and my own Castle of the Mad Archmage (which recently saw the addition of its first expansion module). And I'd be willing to bet that a 5E version of Undermountain would sell like gangbusters.


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## Alphastream (Sep 14, 2015)

I really enjoyed reading this article, but I disagree strongly with the idea that OSR was anything sizeable or the idea that it influenced 5E in any significant way. The market share for OSR is tiny. A lot of it is free, none of the companies are anywhere close to being mid-tier companies in the hobby, and our hobby is already one where the top two companies are just incomparably larger than anyone else. Even the companies that feel like solid mid-tier companies are very small in comparison. An average 4E splatbook sold better than most present-day mid-tier companies' success stories. There isn't a market reason to compell D&D to swing this way. 

Any company looks at its past product line as it creates new editions. You can find this being discussed by developers for Shadowrun, for Star Wars, you name it. D&D has always looked at its past - any number of Dragon magazine articles capture that, as well as tons of interviews over the ages. And 4E obviously diverged in its approach to gameplay (I've been a big fan of every edition of D&D). D&D 5E did a great job of reclaiming its exciting gameplay, while retaining many of 3E and 4E's advances. And, it brought in additional advances. 5E isn't 2E or 1E or any E. No player is going to look at my Moldvay copy and say it looks just like 5E, because it doesn't. Tons of players wanted the next edition of D&D after 4E to have this kind of gameplay change, and the vast overwhelming number of those gamers aren't OSR gamers (myself included).


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## Greyhawk Grognard (Sep 14, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> A lot of it is free, none of the companies are anywhere close to being mid-tier companies in the hobby, and our hobby is already one where the top two companies are just incomparably larger than anyone else. Even the companies that feel like solid mid-tier companies are very small in comparison.




Well, there's Goodman Games, Troll Lord Games, and Kenzer. Those would seem to be solid mid-tier companies. If your sole point of comparison is Wizards and Paizo (and maybe Fantasy Flight), then sure, everyone else is going to look smaller by comparison. But that goes for non-OSR publishers like Monte Cook Games, Atlas Games, and all the others just as equally. It's not a point about the insignificance of the OSR so much as it is a point about the huge domination of the RPG market by two or three publishers, OSR or not.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 14, 2015)

Interesting topic. Obviously one that raises a lot of passions. 

I am not someone who is purely into OSR but it has had a big impact on how I approach the game. For me, I think it was very much an outgrowth of some of my frustrations with how adventures and adventure design was being talked about in the early to mid 2000s. I started in '86, and pretty much soaked up the trends as they came. So my earliest adventures were dungeon-centric, followed by a mix in the 90s as the emphasis shifted to more story focused gaming. With 3E it seems like the encounter very much became the focus of adventure design. By 2005 or so I was getting a bit weary of running the kinds of adventures I kept seeing in Dragon or online. For no real reason whatsoever I bought a used copy of the 1E DMG, which I hadn't read in ages and probably never read all that closely since I cut my teeth on 2E. While I was never huge on dungeons, the focus on exploration and non-linear campaigns really sparked something in me.  I think my chief frustration with how campaigns were going prior to that was I always knew where they were going and my players kind of wanted things to be that way. There really wasn't much to surprise me as the GM. An approach built more around random encounters and hex crawls was, in part,what I needed to make my games more exciting. I also started experimenting more with power groups and situational style adventures, as well as investigations. I became aware of the OSR itself as a concept when my business partner brought a game over called LotFP. What was cool about it, to us at least, was the ethos of play it espoused was real easy to wrap your head around (whether one agreed with James Raggi's play style or not, he offered a fairly straightforward blueprint for running long term campaigns) and that he took D&D but shaped it into his own thing. People had done stuff like this before but LotFP was the first I really took a close look at the OSR and seemed to be branching in a creative direction of its own. 

Since then I've found that a lot of the most valuable, gamble content available online for me personally has come from the OSR. Keep in mind I don't even really run D&D much any more. Once in a while I play, but I have my own systems that I use for my campaigns (and they are the furthest thing from d20). But the approaches and the ideas I find in the OSR are some of the more useful to make my campaigns come alive. I draw from other sources as well. My campaigns are not straight forward dungeon crawl or pure sandbox, they are a mix of a lot of structures and influences. I definitely consider the OSR a vital area of the hobby.


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## estar (Sep 14, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> I really enjoyed reading this article, but I disagree strongly with the idea that OSR was anything sizeable or the idea that it influenced 5E in any significant way. The market share for OSR is tiny. A lot of it is free, none of the companies are anywhere close to being mid-tier companies in the hobby, and our hobby is already one where the top two companies are just incomparably larger than anyone else. Even the companies that feel like solid mid-tier companies are very small in comparison. An average 4E splatbook sold better than most present-day mid-tier companies' success stories. There isn't a market reason to compell D&D to swing this way.




Unlike other RPGs the doesn't need a single company to be a mid-tier publisher however like Joseph Block pointed out we do indeed have several mid-tier companies as part of the OSR. The default for RPGs is to kit-bash so it enough that we have a bunch of publishers targeting a family of mechanics, classic D&D editions, that are very similar. Even if you exclude Goodman Games, and Troll Lords that still amounts to the sales enjoyed by a mid-tier publisher with a far more diverse range of products available than any single publisher has.



Alphastream said:


> Any company looks at its past product line as it creates new editions. You can find this being discussed by developers for Shadowrun, for Star Wars, you name it. D&D has always looked at its past - any number of Dragon magazine articles capture that, as well as tons of interviews over the ages. And 4E obviously diverged in its approach to gameplay (I've been a big fan of every edition of D&D). D&D 5E did a great job of reclaiming its exciting gameplay, while retaining many of 3E and 4E's advances. And, it brought in additional advances. 5E isn't 2E or 1E or any E. No player is going to look at my Moldvay copy and say it looks just like 5E, because it doesn't. Tons of players wanted the next edition of D&D after 4E to have this kind of gameplay change, and the vast overwhelming number of those gamers aren't OSR gamers (myself included).




In the past the choice was either use the latest edition if you wanted more material or just stick with a older edition that has a dwindling edition. Thanks the d20 SRD being under the OGL consumers have a choice. The overwhelming majority went to Paizo and demolished D&D 4e, other went on to make retro-clones, adventures, and supplements. Allowing a bunch of folks, including myself to make some money and a few others, like James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, to actually making a living at it.

If that not a success I don't know what is.

If the criteria is that we regained AD&D 1st or BECMI's former market share, well... we failed. It would be nice but nobody seriously thought that would happen. What everybody in the OSR was shooting for was to get a thriving niche market and hobby around older editions in that we exceeded beyond our expectations. 

As for OSR's influence on 5e, well you can argue about that with Mike Mearls. Certainty it was enough to make the reprints a worthwhile project. 

As for the future, the OSR will continue to grow and develop as old publishers drop out and new publisher drop in. Each with their own interest and take on what to do with the classic editions. The classic editions will remain the foundation because the various retro-clones are under the OGL. Available for anybody to whatever they think best with them.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Sep 15, 2015)

I just started a 1E game on Saturday.  If it's dead it's a surprise to me.

NO VERSION OF D&D RULES HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE.   People need to stop acting as if there is one.


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## Remathilis (Sep 15, 2015)

I think one thing that helped the OSR movement is that, for the most part, the clones are FREE. LL, S&W, BFRPG, OSRIC, even Pathfinder (via PRD) are all free somewhere on the web. Free + nostalgia is a powerful drug; it only takes one "remember when..." to download it. I'm sure if the rules had remained hard to come by (such as only via the 2012-13 reprints or DnDClassics pdfs) the effect of the OSR movement would have been much smaller. 

As it stands, nearly every edition of D&D but fourth is available somewhere for free, legally. Even 5e has the basic document. A group is never more than an internet search from 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, Pathfinder, or 5e. That, probably more than any gaming ideology is what fueled the OSR movement.


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## Nylanfs (Sep 15, 2015)

One thing that didn't help "refine" D&D was that WotC (other than the little bit of material that was in UA) never truly was invested in using anyone elses's OGC to incorporate into D&D. Once the core OGL believers left (or were fired &/or laid off) from WotC they turned their back on it completely.


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## Alphastream (Sep 15, 2015)

Greyhawk Grognard said:


> Well, there's Goodman Games, Troll Lord Games, and Kenzer. Those would seem to be solid mid-tier companies. If your sole point of comparison is Wizards and Paizo (and maybe Fantasy Flight), then sure, everyone else is going to look smaller by comparison. But that goes for non-OSR publishers like Monte Cook Games, Atlas Games, and all the others just as equally. It's not a point about the insignificance of the OSR so much as it is a point about the huge domination of the RPG market by two or three publishers, OSR or not.




I'm not sure if we are disagreeing about anything? That huge market disparity is exactly why I don't buy into the article's premise that OSR was a big influence on 5E. There isn't a business reason to emulate a "movement" of that small a size. Realistically, the idea of wanting to adjust the gameplay to a spot thar resonates with OSR's fan base isn't because of OSR, but because of the good qualities of that spot. That gameplay works well, so you try to return to it while still having the cool tactical angles, the 4E innovations like at-will powers, the new innovations like Advantage/Disadvantage, etc. It's about the well, not one group that drank from it.


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## Lanefan (Sep 15, 2015)

Remathilis said:


> I think one thing that helped the OSR movement is that, for the most part, the clones are FREE. LL, S&W, BFRPG, OSRIC, even Pathfinder (via PRD) are all free somewhere on the web. Free + nostalgia is a powerful drug; it only takes one "remember when..." to download it. I'm sure if the rules had remained hard to come by (such as only via the 2012-13 reprints or DnDClassics pdfs) the effect of the OSR movement would have been much smaller.
> 
> As it stands, nearly every edition of D&D but fourth is available somewhere for free, legally. Even 5e has the basic document. A group is never more than an internet search from 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, Pathfinder, or 5e. That, probably more than any gaming ideology is what fueled the OSR movement.



This is a good point.

When talking about "market share" we need to define what we mean.  Are we talking about share of total dollar value of sales, or share of total number of players.

Overall, in part due to what Remathilis notes above, the average spend of an OSR player or DM is going to be considerably less* than that of a modern-edition player or DM.  So while OSR might not have much market share in terms of sheer dollars I'd still say it has a pretty good share of the player base.

* - my credit card would beg to differ after what I did to it at GenCon this year.

Lanefan


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## Alphastream (Sep 15, 2015)

estar said:


> If the criteria is that we regained AD&D 1st or BECMI's former market share, well... we failed. It would be nice but nobody seriously thought that would happen. What everybody in the OSR was shooting for was to get a thriving niche market and hobby around older editions in that we exceeded beyond our expectations.
> 
> As for OSR's influence on 5e, well you can argue about that with Mike Mearls. Certainty it was enough to make the reprints a worthwhile project.



Any company that is happy with what it creates and its business is successful. No issue there. 

I think the reprints had to do with the sense among a very large part of the fan base (far larger than the OSR portion of the fan base) that WotC had decided to only look forward. The editions had become largely incompatible, in that the average person couldn't see how to use older edition with the newer editions. It wasn't just rules... it was the gameplay and the way parts fit together to create the experience. It even extended to settings (Spellplague, anyone?) That sense that the company only looked forward and didn't look back was clearly received by WotC and became an important part of their design. Releasing the old material was probably all about that. I doubt the reprints sold very well by WotC's standard, but it was probably great marketing.


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## Jhaelen (Sep 15, 2015)

I'm not a fan of anything 'Old-School', well, okay, I still prefer CRT TVs/monitors to LCD flatscreens. But for my RPG's I vastly prefer 'modern' systems over older systems, generally. The art of designing RPGs has been a long learning process, and I consider learning from past mistakes crucial. Looking at some of the D&D 1e rules and adventure modules gives me fits. That I once felt they were great just shows how much I learned since (and in actual fact I didn't like much of it back then either, proven by binders full of house-rules and adventures I've written myself). I know that OSR fans will reject the notion, but I remain convinced, the big majority just suffers from nostalgia.


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## Morrus (Sep 15, 2015)

Man in the Funny Hat said:


> I just started a 1E game on Saturday.  If it's dead it's a surprise to me.
> 
> NO VERSION OF D&D RULES HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE.   People need to stop acting as if there is one.




Didn't read the article, huh?


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## Zak S (Sep 15, 2015)

talien said:


> The OSR ended up looking more backward than forward.




Whoever thinks this hasn't been paying attention.

The OSR is home to the most forward-looking stuff in gaming, without breaking a sweat: Yoon-Suin, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, and Deep Carbon Obseratory all do brand new things.

And indie designers form outside the OSR like Kenneth Hite have done some of their best tuff (Qelong f'rinstance) on OSR properties.

This article seems painfully underinformed about what's going on in the scene.


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## estar (Sep 15, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> I'm not sure if we are disagreeing about anything? That huge market disparity is exactly why I don't buy into the article's premise that OSR was a big influence on 5E. There isn't a business reason to emulate a "movement" of that small a size. Realistically, the idea of wanting to adjust the gameplay to a spot thar resonates with OSR's fan base isn't because of OSR, but because of the good qualities of that spot. That gameplay works well, so you try to return to it while still having the cool tactical angles, the 4E innovations like at-will powers, the new innovations like Advantage/Disadvantage, etc. It's about the well, not one group that drank from it.




Aside from the fact Mearls said that the OSR was an influence (among other things), there actually a very good reason, to differentiate D&D 5e from Pathfinder. Wizards could have made 5e a 3.75 and try to go head to head with Paizo. But they decided they needed to do something different and one thing that is different is to go lite.

Why go lite? Because while the OSR collectively is a 2nd-tier publishers there are a bunch of other 2nd-tier publishers who have put out successfully lite-RPGs most notably Fate. Fate, OSR, Savage World and other lite RPGs had a lot of buzz and talk surrounding them. So Mearls (he blogged about this) and his team started running campaigns with OD&D and other edition with lighter mechanics. Further reinforcing this decision is the design of euro-games and collectible card game which use simple mechanics that give rise to complex play. 

After they decided that D&D 5e was to be lite. They looked at what others did and cherry-picked what they liked from Fate, the OSR, and other games and kept what they felt fit from 3e and 4e. So naturally the OSR had a influence because among other things it made a lot of use of lite mechanics. But then Fate and other lite RPGs had an influence as well.


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## Bedrockgames (Sep 15, 2015)

Jhaelen said:


> I'm not a fan of anything 'Old-School', well, okay, I still prefer CRT TVs/monitors to LCD flatscreens. But for my RPG's I vastly prefer 'modern' systems over older systems, generally. The art of designing RPGs has been a long learning process, and I consider learning from past mistakes crucial. Looking at some of the D&D 1e rules and adventure modules gives me fits. That I once felt they were great just shows how much I learned since (and in actual fact I didn't like much of it back then either, proven by binders full of house-rules and adventures I've written myself). I know that OSR fans will reject the notion, but I remain convinced, the big majority just suffers from nostalgia.




The OSR is more than juts rehashing older editions of D&D though. There are a lot of games outside clones that take inspiration from the OSR movement. I think even things like Dungeon World are arguably influenced by some of the back to basics of the OSR. If you check out Story-games.com for example there are a bunch of threads that are obviously inspired by things going on in the OSR community. 

OSR isn't just about mechanics alone and it isn't about not inventing anything new. I would maybe compare it more to the grunge explosion in the 90s. Personally not a fan of that music but what it looked like they were doing wasn't just going back and rehashing 60s - early 70s style rock, they were ignoring a lot of the aesthetics that emerged form the late 70s through the 80s, and using a lot of the earlier sound as a starting point for building something new. I think that is kind of how the OSR is now. There are people playing nothing but OD&D, but there are also people doing innovative things.


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## Celebrim (Sep 15, 2015)

estar said:


> I appreciate your response but right here in this paragraph shows that you are missing the point of the Old School Primer.




The point of the document is explained in the first two paragraphs explicitly.  I'm sure by stating a different point than what the document actually states, and by applying various generous interpretations of what he really meant as opposed to what he said, you can make the whole thing seem more reasonable, but the document itself says, "These are areas where your most basic assumptions about gaming probably need to be reversed, *if you want to experience what real 0e playing is all about.*" (emphasis added)



> The point you are missing it not meant to be a description of how people played back in the day. Yes it some of it is drawn some from first person accounts based on talking from a variety of people who were involved.




I hope you can see how one might be confused by then by calling it "old school primer", talking to old school GMs, and telling you that this is what "real" old school play is all about.  I agree that it isn't a description of how people played.  Nor it is a description of what the rules intended.  But the document doesn't make clear that it is describing a new way to play old games, and contradicts such a description implicitly and explicitly.



> I seen this attitude among gamers in my local towards older rules and even modern lite system. That the lack of rules is a deficiency that has to be corrected by more rules.




Let me be honest with you; there isn't any difference between a rule and a ruling except that the later might not yet be written down.  One is a statutory rule and the other is a common or judicial rule, but they are both equally rules.  So the real irony here is that Zen #1, contradictorily indicates that the solution to the lack of rules is.... more rules.   The idea that the rules need continual rulings is the attitude of patching the rules with more rules.

The fact that the document isn't even reflective on what it is saying and advocating for is to me pretty darn damning.  A discussion of how running a game based on statutory or 'constitutional' rules versus a game run primarily by common law or judicial rules differs, and the advantages and drawbacks of both might be interesting, but the document doesn't go there and instead blindly rushes off into snarky territory without actually realizing what the consequences of what it is advocating for actually are - almost as if the person writing the document has only theoretical and not practical experience with the two approaches.



> No where in the document Matt claims that this was how people played back in the day. Only that this is a practical way to play older games.




The actual word he uses is "real", and not "practical".  In point of fact those, what he outlines is neither real nor practical.  I know, because I've played these games extensively, used 'rulings' more than 'rules' at times, and then spent years or even decades on multiple occasions trying to reconcile my common law or house rules with the rules.



> I will say Matt tone towards modern mechanics is really over the top and sometimes insulting to fans of modern mechanics. And that color many people perception of the document.




You keep acting like the only problem here is the tone taken toward modern mechanics.  But the problem is the tone taken toward older games and even the tone taken toward the game he's weirdly advocating for.  His examples of play are rude and argumentative, with players continually challenging the DM and the DM responding with, "I'm the DM."  Now it is certainly true that old school play generally accepted that the DM was above the rules and had authority over the rules as opposed to be the servant of the rules and bound by them, but that doesn't mean that groups generally expected the DM to ignore the rules or rule by fiat.  Nor does it mean that skilled DMs weren't expected to be fair, reasonable, and predictable.  The DM was expected to fill in all the gaps and judge whenever interpretation was required, to toss out rules that were senseless, and smith up solutions to new problems.  They weren't expected to arbitrarily decide that a '2' was a bad enough roll so the PC just fell down, or that a '20' was a good enough roll that got another attack.  I played with more than a half-dozen groups back in the day, and none played like that.  That's not even functional way to play within the framework of 0e's generally gamist aspirations.  Players need reasonable expectations regarding what may happen when they propose to do something.  I need to know whether if I try to attack something, and I roll a '4' whether my sword is going to randomly break or go skittering out of my hands just because the DM thought it would be cool.   

Incidentally, there is nothing 'old school' about that approach.  That approach is actually very new school Indy gaming techniques of upping the stakes that someone is pretending is the "real" approach 0e gaming.   And the document is just dripping with "say yes and roll the dice", "rule of cool", "no myth", and lots of other modern concepts and its trying to pretend that this very new way of playing is someone exactly the same as the old forgotten "real" way of playing.   At best, that's viewing the past through distorted glasses that makes me want to ask, "Were you actually playing back then?  I know this is about 0e, but did you play more than a few times in the '70s?  Did you play through the '80s?  Are you actually a reliable authority on how to play these games?"  Or did you maybe just talk to a few old school DMs, color what they said through biases and perspectives informed by your exposure to modern gaming ideas, and write a document about the one true way of gaming that was "forgotten" and which you wanted to write about in the first place irrespective of how the original games were intended to be played or were actually played in fact?



> Part of what of makes the OSR is exploring alternatives that were dropped in the first decade of the hobby. For example much of my work was writing about sandbox campaigns and hexcrawl formatted setting.




Err... sandbox campaigns and even hexcrawls never really went away.  They were deemphasized in published material because the cost of printing such settings is relatively high, and frankly the demand is pretty low because most DMs that want to run a sandbox want to run their own sandbox.  But for a good example of a setting that has succeeded because it ultimately supports a sandbox style, see the Forgotten Realms, which other than its sand box overview of 'what's out there' to give a frame work to a DM's creation, is a relatively uninspired setting with dull and poorly written modules that most people complain about - even the ones that played them.   But the sandbox aspect, keeps people coming back, because you can go anywhere and the material gives an outline and framework for the DM to paint and fill in the details.



> So the question is, how did they handle it? So they were asked and as it turned it they all handled differently but what was common among them is that they came up with ruling based on their personal experience and common sense. Of course that differed between them so what they actually did varied a lot.




In other words, they made up rules.  Or maybe more to the point, they invented new processes of play, some of which may have involved explicit rules and some of which may have been simply adjudication, and then those processes of play became standardized at the table into a body of common law and conventional rulings which players understood and relied on in order to offer up propositions.  Once the process of play became formalized, once they had in mind, "If I behave this way, then these are the likely outcomes", then the players could begin to approach those situations in directed goal-oriented manner.  The alternative is a sort of Gonzo referring style typified by what was advocated by Paranoia with the intention of being humorous.  But the "Primer" document is so unreflective that it's hard to tell if it is actually advocating for Gonzo referring as being the "real" way to play 0e, or if it just completely fails to understand that rulings are rules and take on the character of rules once they consistently shape the process of play.

I wouldn't mind being in a conversation about how GMing 0e and 1e evolved, and about how processes of play evolved, and about how rulings matured and became more elegant and more supportive of mature play.  That process of evolving play informed the design of later editions, and some times we found our solutions had unanticipated problems that required further reflection.   Because that's the process I experienced DMing D&D across multiple editions of play for decades.   But I've got no interest is someone hammering a one true way to play a game that in my opinion isn't even the intended way to play the game, bears little or no reflection on how I saw older GMs with roots in 0e run their games (and who in turn mentored me as a young would be DM), and appears to be unreflected upon self-contradictory nonsense half the time.


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## Umbran (Sep 15, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> I've previously advanced in other threads the theory that all rules lite systems inherently marginalize themselves.




How could you tell, given that the *entire hobby* is marginal to begin with?  The activity of sitting around a table with a bunch of people with dice and Cheetos, pretending to be elves, is itself marginal.  I am not sure you need any more than that, network externalities, and a little statistical variation to describe how games wind up in the market.  D&D is as far from the margins as it is by being first, and having been pretty decent.  Pathfinder does it, in essence (and I mean this as no insult) by being D&D.  There have been periods when another game has risen up a bit, but overall, if it isn't D&D, it is marginal.

I can see the argument that a rules-light system is commercially limited by the fact that it can't sell rules supplements.  And without a string of supplements raising your profile on shelves or keeping you in people's minds with announcements of new releases.

On the other hand, rules-heavy games marginalize themselves by being a pain in the neck, slow to run, and generally expensive with all the supplements.  Only a small subset of players really want to play with and wade through a system that is too complicated.


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## Zak S (Sep 15, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> ...I disagree strongly with the idea that OSR was anything sizeable or the idea that it influenced 5E in any significant way.




You might wanna take a closer look at where things like advantage/disadvantage, bounded accuracy and that d100 trinket table came from.


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## Zak S (Sep 15, 2015)

Also, the demonological obsession with the Matt Finch's Old School Primer makes no sense: much of the OSR (as represented by the people who put out the best-selling OSR products) have no special attachment to that document.

Y'know why we're called OSR? We started blogging and someone else decided to call us that.


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## Celebrim (Sep 15, 2015)

Umbran said:


> How could you tell, given that the *entire hobby* is marginal to begin with?




Because 'rules lite' approaches tend to be marginal even within the hobby.  Crunchy high granular systems overall have dominated what people are actually playing, thinking about, or at least buying - AD&D, Top Secret, Shadowrun, GURPS, CoC, HERO, MERPS, RIFTS, RoleMaster, etc.   They were what was on the shelf.  And even those systems that started out somewhat rules lite (if not necessarily intentionally) tend to evolve into increasingly baroque rules heavy systems if they are successful in the market place (0D&D, V:tM, etc.).  I'm trying to think what the lightest enduring rules sets/games might be and maybe WoD, BECMI, Deadlands, and Star Wars D6 might be the lower bounds, and those fall into what we might generously call 'rules medium'.  We can tell because of what we are playing, even if in the larger universe what we are playing even at its most successful is pretty marginal. 



> I can see the argument that a rules-light system is commercially limited by the fact that it can't sell rules supplements.  And without a string of supplements raising your profile on shelves or keeping you in people's minds with announcements of new releases.




Among other things, exactly that.  

Some of the more notably successful rules light systems are notable for being based around free games, suggesting that not selling your rules lite system might be a way around the problem.



> On the other hand, rules-heavy games marginalize themselves by being a pain in the neck, slow to run, and generally expensive with all the supplements.  Only a small subset of players really want to play with and wade through a system that is too complicated.




Sure.  And systems that have gone the too complicated route have largely died along the way, mostly 20 years or so ago as the promises of 'realism' as a solution to any game problem experienced with early versions of the rules turned out to be false.   I don't know how much you remember of the era, but there was a period where all the problems with the D&D rule set tended to be blamed on its lack of realism, and the big selling point of a rules set generally wasn't "this is easier to use" but that it was "more realistic".   But while its true that fetishized realism produced systems that ultimately aren't played much any more, that doesn't mean that the systems that are still played are on the "rule lite" end of the spectrum.


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## Zak S (Sep 15, 2015)

Sometimes innovation catches on.

Whether or not "most gamers" want any kind of specific system, most influential designers seem to want to dial back on the crunchfest of recent years.

We're gonna get games like that and people will like them or they won't--only time will tell.


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## gamerprinter (Sep 15, 2015)

Interesting article. Unlike most, being one of those older gamers (having played D&D since 1977), I have little nostalgia for Old School. While I was happy with each edition as each existed, they were good at the time, but with the advance of editions and the creation of new mechanics, more player options I have been content with the new direction taken, without a desire to go back to the way things used to be. I didn't become a content creator, author, publisher until the advent of Pathfinder RPG, and have embraced using PF to base all my design and setting development. Not only do I not need to look backward, I am just as content at not looking at 5e - it in no way attracts me away from Pathfinder. So while I wish success for every RPG publishing venture, including 5e, I do not need to be part of every edition nor every game. For the time being I will remain a creator of PF based design.


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## Alphastream (Sep 15, 2015)

Zak S said:


> You might wanna take a closer look at where things like advantage/disadvantage, bounded accuracy and that d100 trinket table came from.



In a game of "where things came from" we will end up back at D&D (or war games).  Any good designer is constantly looking at other games, both new and old. This isn't exclusive to 5E, nor was WotC's 5E influence exclusive to OSR or narrowly focused on OSR. The design team had been playing a very diverse set of games over that design cycle (usually playing each fairly briefly) and their team has design experience with a number of systems and approaches.   

WotC hasn't always been focused on other games or even on their own, and that brief period was to their detriment. There appeared to be a time during the mid 3E era to early 4E era where it seemed as if the WotC staff did not know their product or the industry very well. Interviews with designers showed them to not understand their game very well mechanically, how it actually played at the table, or how the gameplay was percieved by fans. This was also around the time that WotC had stepped back from organized play... which meant they lost the opportunity to see how the game was being played by thousands of players. It really hurt their ability to connect with fans. I credit Greg Bilsland, Mike Mearls, and Trevor Kidd for the change, though others could also have been responsible (Chris Tulach surely supported this). WotC made a really huge transition to where they are today: obviously playing a ton of different RPGs, playing their own RPG constantly, and seeing it played in a number of ways by a diverse number of players. I think that change to better understand the fan base and what the industry offers was a huge part of the success of 5E. It isn't about seeing that a particular game has a mechanic to steal, but rather observing the gameplay fun games create and wanting to have that same gameplay benefit. And, seeing accurately how your game plays so that you can make good adjustements. The playtest process was a good example of this. They had some early approaches that felt a lot more like 1E, but they didn't play well in various ways, which led to good changes. That look inward was just as critical to the process. And the overall goal of achieving the gameplay they wanted was far greater than any external influence. The article really does that a disservice, to the point of just being an incorrect assessment.


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## Celebrim (Sep 15, 2015)

Zak S said:


> We're gonna get games like that and people will like them or they won't--only time will tell.




I think as a practical matter it is more a matter of what gamers will buy than what gamers will like.  

A good example is the current D&D adventure format, which almost everyone seems to dislike and consider less than perfectly suitable for running an adventure.  But I'd guess that the market wouldn't bear the additional cost of publishing the adventure in the most suitable sort of format, so WotC has to publish what they can sell, which is a compromise between the needs of the customers and the needs of the publisher.  

As a publisher, you have basically two choices - print crunch or print fluff.  Crunch is basically the engineering.  Fluff is basically the art.  The engineering isn't easy, but it's a lot easier than the art.  Geeks are easy to get excited about rules systems, but rules systems are basically a dime a dozen.  Rules systems aren't purely objective, but they are easier to objectively evaluate than a story.  Printing art carries risk, and the pay back - if ever - is more long term.

Maybe we are reaching a point where our rules technology is getting sufficiently refined that the best way to make money won't be to continue reinventing the rules wheel, and instead the big seller will more and more be what you can do with the technology.  Maybe will see rules innovation settle down a bit and see more interactive fiction and world building as the big selling points of a product line.   Paizo is an example of a company where I don't think rules is primarily what gives them a market advantage.  I think their core advantage is that they tell stories with their rules in a way that captures more people's imaginations than anyone else in the market.  One of the biggest mistakes Wotc made with the D&D brand is I think spending too much time rehashing the valuable intellectual property made back in D&D's golden age and not taking the risk of making new content.  Contrast this with what they are doing with their MtG brand, which lacked a lot of IP back in its heyday but which they've consistently been spending money to create fluff - and it's not even an interactive fiction game.

One thing I think really defines OSR is actually fluff over crunch, which I think is an observation that runs counter to what may be your first intuition.  I consider OSR to be more of an Indy gaming movement than a retro-gaming movement, though no doubt there is a group that is in it for the nostalgia.  Early Indy gaming was focused I think incorrectly on some of the same false idols that plagued what is now 'mainstream' gaming back when it was new, and that is namely the fetishization of system with ideas like 'system matters'.   While I don't disagree that system matters some, it's always seemed like there was this idea that if you just adopted the right rules, the story would happen and it would be awesome - as if story was something that could be produced mechanically and without some sort of artistic understanding and skill.

But you can hardly get more 'crunch doesn't really matter' than suggesting, "You know, we could stop focusing on getting the rules right, use rules so basic that practically every gamer's brain is steeped in them to some degree, and just play this with stripped down 1970's technology and if we tell a good story, it would be fun."  Of course, I think we are still struggling with this new medium to figure out what telling a good story really means and is like, but it would be nice to see that worked on as diligently as we work on rules.

I think the chief difficulty I see is that RPGs tend be vastly more influential than they are profitable.  RPGs tend to inspire artists to go and create works of art in different more popular and accessible mediums, but they don't usually accrue benefits to the RPG designers themselves.  I mean, I think you can draw a straight line between Vampire: The Masquerade and Twilight, and I'd be really surprised to find Meyer didn't have at least some exposure to VtM PnP or LARP games, but it's Stephenie Meyer that gets the main reward of that and not say Mark Rein-Hagen.  That sort of thing happens a lot, both directly and indirectly.  Video games show enormous influence from PnP RPGs, but its the more accessible medium that by and large gets the acclaim.  There are any number of novels and novelists that show direct influence from D&D, whether it's Feist's Riftwar Saga, or Moon's 'The Deed of Paksenarrion' or just the general gamification of fantasy that shows up in works by author's like Brian Sanderson or Jim Butcher (speaking of VtM influences).   James S. A. Corey are more famous for their novels than the gaming work that inspired them.  Is Anthony Huso's work as a novelist better or more important than his work as a DM or a game creator, or is it just that it is a lot more accessible - even to another gamer?


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## Alphastream (Sep 15, 2015)

estar said:


> Aside from the fact Mearls said that the OSR was an influence (among other things), there actually a very good reason, to differentiate D&D 5e from Pathfinder. Wizards could have made 5e a 3.75 and try to go head to head with Paizo. But they decided they needed to do something different and one thing that is different is to go lite.




WotC has never tried to differentiate D&D from Pathfinder. It isn't remotely a goal. WotC's focus is on entertainment overall - competing with movies, video games, etc. instead of any one publisher. There isn't enough money in the industry, even if you put D&D and Pathfinder together (if your goal is profit, employees with great salaries, etc.). The key is to look elsewhere. That's why we saw Paizo take a risk on their MMO, why WotC has the new storyline approach where one RPG release is the central hub designed to launch more profitable media properties. 



estar said:


> Why go lite? Because while the OSR collectively is a 2nd-tier publishers there are a bunch of other 2nd-tier publishers who have put out successfully lite-RPGs most notably Fate. Fate, OSR, Savage World and other lite RPGs had a lot of buzz and talk surrounding them. So Mearls (he blogged about this) and his team started running campaigns with OD&D and other edition with lighter mechanics. Further reinforcing this decision is the design of euro-games and collectible card game which use simple mechanics that give rise to complex play.



They still have very little market reach, even added together. The buzz they generate is tiny, even within a small industry. Your average RPG player barely knows -pick game X- exists. The actual active player base is tiny. The ability to launch other more profitable ventures is nonexistant. I'm not saying I don't love these games, I do! I love playing all sorts of mid and small RPGs. But, they lack the market to be influential for D&D. Even the ones that feel so huge, like Numenera or Shadowrun or FATE have a very small active player base when you really get down to it. The numbers don't come anywhere close to, say, the number of gamers that played 4E every Wednesday in stores across the US alone. And, again, WotC's focus isn't "oh crap, some RPG is popular, we need to adjust!" Not at all.

What is true is that a lot of today's new games are fun. And the kind of fun they have can be similar. Story rich, fast, easy to learn (some of them), encourage something about your character to impact the game, etc. Those concepts aren't unique to story games or OSR or any one game or game type, but they have influenced 5E, for sure. It just isn't fair to make the claims the article made.


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## Alphastream (Sep 15, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> A good example is the current D&D adventure format, which almost everyone seems to dislike and consider less than perfectly suitable for running an adventure.  But I'd guess that the market wouldn't bear the additional cost of publishing the adventure in the most suitable sort of format, so WotC has to publish what they can sell, which is a compromise between the needs of the customers and the needs of the publisher.




The current format is a fairly big change from the previous format. In part this is an attempt to provide the adventure as more of a sandbox that encourages the DM to tweak. I think the most consistent criticism is that the DM has to do a lot of prep with the current adventures... often the start isn't even the start! We will surely see adjustments to the approach over time. One thing to keep in mind is that the licensees were all at work long before the adventures released. Right now, WotC is working 2-3 stories ahead and planning 4-5 ahead. This means that the licensees and freelancers are only now starting to write with a firm understanding of how the game plays and what the best approaches are for ease of use and fun play.

The cost and size... I would be surprised to see those remain the same. 5E needed some meaty experiences to get people playing. It has that now. It won't need a continual slew of huge long adventures, though we may see a few more before they change approaches. The current D&D survey includes a question asking how far we have played through the different adventures, which should help them gauge that.

I also suspect the format has a lot to do with the story bibles WotC uses to delineate the season's story. That bible has a lot of information and begs that third party designer to really use a lot of it and create complexity not for the experience, but for the capture of the story's detail. (I worked from the Tyranny of Dragons story bible, which was very cool. In my effort I ended up trying to do a lot with the story bible only to find that most of the secrets had become common knowledge by the time my adventure released.)


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## Zak S (Sep 15, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> One thing I think really defines OSR is actually fluff over crunch, which I think is an observation that runs counter to what may be your first intuition.




Fluff vs crunch is not a meaningful distinction in most RPGs, especially D&D. It's a wargaming/cardgaming distinction

In D&D there should be monsters that are more dangerous if you're wearing blue, for example.


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## estar (Sep 15, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> WotC has never tried to differentiate D&D from Pathfinder. It isn't remotely a goal. WotC's focus is on entertainment overall - competing with movies, video games, etc. instead of any one publisher. There isn't enough money in the industry, even if you put D&D and Pathfinder together (if your goal is profit, employees with great salaries, etc.). The key is to look elsewhere. That's why we saw Paizo take a risk on their MMO, why WotC has the new storyline approach where one RPG release is the central hub designed to launch more profitable media properties.





Sorry but that doesn't wash. The fact they decided on a brand strategy is not perninant to the design they chose for a new addition. If it was that insignificant then they were fools in investing any R&D dollars  and and just used 3.5 which they already owned and do the new adventures using that system.

But they did invest the money the result was a system distinctly different from 3.5 in terms of complexity.






Alphastream said:


> They still have very little market reach, even added together. The buzz they generate is tiny, even within a small industry.




Yet Mike Mearls said the OSR was one of the main influence (among others). The head guys is contradicting you. 



Alphastream said:


> And, again, WotC's focus isn't "oh crap, some RPG is popular, we need to adjust!" Not at all.




The only reason we are standing here is because 4e got hammered by Pathfinder. This caused the whole strategy behind D&D to be revamped. They needed to have a RPG because market is at the heart of what D&D is. It would like trying to turn Monopoly into a multimedia brand without printing Monopoly games. People would laugh because Monopoloy is first and foremost a boardgame.

They would also laugh if the new strategy came out and D&D lagged badly in the market. So they needed to design a new edition that had a shot at being the #1 RPG again. The strategy they opted for wasn't a 3.75 but something that had lighter mechanic that drew on past edition, and current trends in the industry among them the OSR, Fate, and others.


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## pemerton (Sep 16, 2015)

In what sense is Fate a "lite" game?


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## Greyhawk Grognard (Sep 16, 2015)

I disagree with the idea that the OSR is about "rules lite" games in general, and have argued against that idea for years. 1E is most definitely "old school" and it is far from "rules lite". The OSR is about the DIY ethos, and what 1E does that matches that ethos so well is its modularity. You can swap out the entire combat system with something else and the rest can keep on working just fine. More recent RPGs don't have that ability (due in part to the prevalence of "universal mechanics"), and therefore fight against the game master indulging in that sort of tinkering. That's what the OSR does. It allows, nay, encourages, tinkering.


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Greyhawk Grognard said:


> The OSR is about the DIY ethos...




I put it to you (generic, the broad collection, rather than you, GG specifically) that the OSR is not about any *one* thing.  It is folks of several different desires, all flying under one banner.  It is not actually a single, coherent movement, but is instead folks with several different goals who were all served by some of the same activities.

This can make discussions about the OSR, and with people who are proponents of the OSR, a little frustrating, as some folks claim it is about one thing, and others claim it is about something else - sometimes rather at odds with each other.


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## Henry (Sep 16, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> In a game of "where things came from" we will end up back at D&D (or war games).  Any good designer is constantly looking at other games, both new and old. This isn't exclusive to 5E, nor was WotC's 5E influence exclusive to OSR or narrowly focused on OSR. The design team had been playing a very diverse set of games over that design cycle (usually playing each fairly briefly) and their team has design experience with a number of systems and approaches.




Neither Zak nor estar said that Wotc was narrowly or eclusively focused on OSR ; you claimed OSR had "no significant influence" on 5e and they offered counterpoints to refute it, none of which claimed "exclusive focus". But significant, I do assert. One of the other things Mearls' team did when designing 5e was to play ALL editions of D&D in an effort to analyze both good and bad ideas from each. I don't believe that was just out of the blue. OSR, and its adherents, were I believe part of that decision, and hence significant. The list of consultants in the PHB credits were a testament to the role that OSR designers (and plenty of others, don't mistake me) played in 5e's release. Not "insignifcant".


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## Umbran (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> Because 'rules lite' approaches tend to be marginal even within the hobby.




Eh.  I think you'll find it hard to find cites to support that.



> Crunchy high granular systems overall have dominated what people are actually playing, thinking about, or at least buying - AD&D, Top Secret, Shadowrun, GURPS, CoC, HERO, MERPS, RIFTS, RoleMaster, etc.




Again, cites are going to be hard to come by to compare them, historically.

But, maybe we have different ideas of what constitutes "marginal"

Right now, if we look at Morrus' "Hot Roleplaying Games" page, and look at the combined list, of the top 5 games, 4 of them are effectively D&D - 5th edition, 3.x, Pathfinder, and OSR.  The only non-D&D in the top 5 is WoD.

ONLY ONE game - 5th edition, is getting double-digits percentage of buzz - 5e.  Everything outside the top 5 is *under 3%* of discussion.

So, your "dominated" looks a lot like "difference of questionable statistical relevance" to me.  There dominant game - D&D.  Everything else is marginal, and the differences in interest between them are in the tenths of percentage points.  To claim that some are marginal and others dominant within that narrow band of level of interest seems... of questionable merit.


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## dd.stevenson (Sep 16, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> I disagree strongly with the ... idea that it [the OSR] influenced 5E in any significant way.




Do you consider your opinion to be at odds with this Mearls interview from last year?



> *Do you feel the OSR Movement influenced you in a way as you designed this new edition?*
> 
> I don’t really think it was a direct influence as in that’s what people are doing with that, so let’s follow that [OSR Movement]. I think it’s more, from my own experience, I think a lot of the Old School Gaming has arisen in a very similar way to how Indie RPGs arose. Because Indie RPGs are like we have an RPG rules and a setting, and your setting is about this and that, but your mechanics aren’t backing that up. So I’ll make up an example, because I don’t want to name a game that some people might really be into. So let’s take a cyberpunk game, and it’s all about the tension between humanity and technology, and you can have a lot of fun writing about it, but then your game mechanics are like a generic system. So on one hand you say your game is about this [cyberpunk], but I don’t see any rules for actually bringing that into play.
> 
> ...


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## S'mon (Sep 16, 2015)

With the dearth of official support product for 5e, I find that I turn mostly to OSR material, along with some 3e-era OGL material. So I guess the OGL has finally succeeded in supporting play of "official D&D"  - with 5e WoTC retain rights over the published ruleset (no 5e SRD) but the OGL means tons of material that can support it. This didn't really work with 4e because 4e was too different from other versions of D&D, but 5e can be used with OSR, 3e, and Pathfinder material just fine.


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## mflayermonk (Sep 16, 2015)

At my last convention I played 4 OSR slots. We are looking at fantasy, but Sci Fi OSR is doing very well out there.


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## mflayermonk (Sep 16, 2015)

As a side note I would like to mention that 31 years ago, in 1984, I paid $12 for the Monster Manual.
You know how much a 31-year old Monster Manual sells for today? $13.
Its amazon best seller rank is 76k-thats really good for a book printed 31 years ago.


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## S'mon (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> The RPGs themselves have died off more slowly, because the computer still can't create the dynamic world of a good DM's imagination.  But they are clearly on the way out.  It's been noticeable for the last 10 years or more that no one wants to be a DM anymore.  Being a good DM inevitably means enjoying spending 10 or 20 hours a week not playing the game you want to play so that the content and game will be there to play.  There really is no way around it.  But for at least the last 10 years people have been trying to create RPGs that at least in theory don't need a DM to spend time not playing the game.  They've promoted the fantasy that all this content can just create itself during play and it will be the same thing, or that the game is little more than a series of tactical scenarios which you can buy a book of and play and that will be an RPG.   They've promoted 'fast prep' and 'no prep' and 'no myth' and all of those were just variations of saying, "You don't need a DM; all you need is a referee and some rules."   And I think the problem is ultimately that nothing like the worlds that the DMs wanted to play in and create and animate actually existed in the 1970's and 1980's, so that if you wanted such a world to play in and explore you just had to do it yourself.




I disagree pretty strongly, my Classic D&D and 5e D&D games require minimal prep to 
run weekly games. I can run a good OSR or Classic scenario with max 30 minutes' prep, often less, as long as the material I'm using is clearly presented (ie not Paizo or most WotC stuff). 
A lot of this is dungeon exploration using simple keys as found in Classic and OSR adventures, which a computer could simulate, but a computer can't do in the in-depth NPC roleplay accompanying the exploration and combat, and my players seem happy. No way am I spending 10-20 hours
 in prep for a game - admittedly that is what the Paizo AP I'm also running seems to 
expect, but IMO that is a flaw with Paizo's design approach not with me. Even my 25th level 4e game only 
needs 2-3 hours' prep for a session, mostly stat-blocking.


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## estar (Sep 16, 2015)

Umbran said:


> I put it to you (generic, the broad collection, rather than you, GG specifically) that the OSR is not about any *one* thing.  It is folks of several different desires, all flying under one banner.  It is not actually a single, coherent movement, but is instead folks with several different goals who were all served by some of the same activities.




Yes but.. there are some general traits, not many but they are there. The first is that the core is about playing, promoting, and playing classic editions of D&D. Yes other games are part of the OSR and yes there is a larger old school renaissance going on that encompasses RPGs made before 1990 or so. However 90% of the people using OSR (all caps) has had some involvement with a classic edition of D&D. 

The DiY ethos that the Greyhawk Grognard talks is a dominant theme due to the OSR genesis on the Internet as a result of people interacting on forums and blogs. That it took advantage early on of Print on Demand technology to release physical products. 

The OGL and open gaming is also a dominant theme due to it use by the major retro-clones. Of the three generalities this is perhaps the least common trait. 

SO I am comfortable with saying that the OSR for the most is about classic D&D mechanics, a DiY ethos, and Open Gaming. That the most important is the first. And that the two latter are what people do in order to play, promote, or publish.

Now about the use of Old School Renaissance. A lot of people get in a huff when somebody says that the OSR is about classic D&D. Putting labels aside nobody can dispute that there is a relatively large hobby niche devoted to playing, publishing, and promoting classic editions of D&D. By relatively large I mean at least equal to the audience of any other 2nd-tier RPG in the hobby. This is borne about both by antedotes, what we know of OSR sales, and by a few pieces of hard data like the Roll20 reports. We don't know exact numbers but we have a good sense of where classic D&D ranks in popularity.

The problem is that some really object the use of Old School as part of the label to refer the group playing, publishing, and promoting classic D&D. The negative view is that by doing so the claim is being made that classic D&D is the only old school out there. 

Compounding this problem is the there are some who play, promote, and publish for classic editions of D&D and vigorously reject being labeled as part of the OSR. Some of them view the OSR as a bunch of poser, some view the OSR as being unethical for using older content, while others resist being labeled on general principle. 

The reality is that OSR is a organic terms that caught traction because enough people liked it to refere to what they were doing with classic D&D. Despite the efforts of some, people involved in the OSR are not one-dimensional caricatures and have other interest. Because of this it is accurate to say that the OSR consist of people playing, publishing, and promoting classic editions of D&D along with whatever other games that interest them.

Which is why even the hard core fans of Gygaxian D&D (OD&D, AD&D 1st) on Knights and Knaves have sub forums devoted to Traveller and Chaosium games. Far more typical is Dan Proctor and in his involvement in both Gobliniod Games and Pacesetter Games. A recent example is James Spahn with both White Box (a OD&D clone) and White Star (a sci-fi RPG using classic D&D mechanics). Mutant Future is an example from a earlier time of the OSR's development.

So the OSR has diversified but there still remains the core of enthusiasts that play, promote, and publish for classic D&D.

I use OSR because I find it useful to refer to what I do. I appeals to me because it eludes back to the initials of TSR. But if it drops out of use and ceases to be useful, I will go back to using those who play, promote, and publish for classic edition of D&D.





Umbran said:


> This can make discussions about the OSR, and with people who are proponents of the OSR, a little frustrating, as some folks claim it is about one thing, and others claim it is about something else - sometimes rather at odds with each other.




Yes when it comes to play style, genre, tone, and setting the OSR is all over the place. Some think it is about Dungeon Crawling then people like me release Scourge of Demon Wolf which I been told reads like something for Ars Magica along with other roleplaying heavy games. Then there is the fantasy horror of Raggi's Lamentation of the Flame Princess, or the vibe that Zak S infuses Vornheim and a Red and Pleasant Land with. With other products like Spears at Dawn, the Nod setting, it just goes on and on in all of its diversity.

Your are right, and Greyhawk Grognard, the reality that the OSR is comprised of both of your view s and more.

Rob Conley
Bat in the Attic Games.


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## estar (Sep 16, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> I think as a practical matter it is more a matter of what gamers will buy than what gamers will like.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Mark CMG (Sep 16, 2015)

mflayermonk said:


> As a side note I would like to mention that 31 years ago, in 1984, I paid $12 for the Monster Manual.
> You know how much a 31-year old Monster Manual sells for today? $13.
> Its amazon best seller rank is 76k-thats really good for a book printed 31 years ago.





And amazing that so many of them can be found in good or better condition.


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## delericho (Sep 16, 2015)

estar said:


> I am not sure what you mean by the "The most suitable sort of format" but I will take a guess is that it is likely what I been calling the Tournament style adventure consisting of...




Actually, I think he's referring specifically to the single big hardback book format WotC have been using, where an adventure presented as several booklets and poster maps in a boxed set would be easier to run. Problem is that that boxed set would significantly increase the cost (and incur 20% VAT in the UK - books are exempt), meaning it wouldn't sell.

But I might be wrong, of course.


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## howandwhy99 (Sep 17, 2015)

Actual D&D is at the heart and soul of what it means to play and design a game. Players decipher a pattern to achieve objectives within it. Game designers craft or copy from reality a pattern for others to play. 

Until DMs wake up and realize they aren't refereeing a game without a patterned campaign map hidden behind the game screen, there's no hope for D&D to advance out of last millennia.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Sep 17, 2015)

Morrus said:


> Didn't read the article, huh?



Sure I did.  I wasn't referring to the article.  I was referring to responses to the article.


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## mrm1138 (Sep 17, 2015)

Upon reading the headline, my first thought was, "Gee, I hope not! I just dropped some cash for hardcover versions of Swords & Wizardry White Box and White Star!"

I only just played my first OSR games—the very two mentioned above—a few months ago at a convention, and I was blown away by how free-wheeling and fun they were.

Anyway, I hope the author is correct in saying that the OSR movement has been more or less assimilated into the mainstream of RPGs. There was the obvious desire for D&D to go back to basics, and there is definitely a community who believes that 5e does OSR fairly well. (They refer to it as O5R.)


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## S'mon (Sep 17, 2015)

mrm1138 said:


> There was the obvious desire for D&D to go back to basics, and there is definitely a community who believes that 5e does OSR fairly well. (They refer to it as O5R.)




I guess I must be running O5R. I was more shocked when I returned to ENW recently and saw people were treating 5e like 3e! :-O
From what I see the key difference is whether you allow multiclassing; multiclassing lets you 
build PCs 3e-style, otherwise it runs much like other editions. If you don't use the CR-balancing 
encounter build system it runs much like pre-3e.


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## Nikosandros (Sep 17, 2015)

Zak S said:


> Also, the demonological obsession with the Matt Finch's Old School Primer makes no sense: much of the OSR (as represented by the people who put out the best-selling OSR products) have no special attachment to that document.
> 
> Y'know why we're called OSR? We started blogging and someone else decided to call us that.



Indeed. I love AD&D (possibly my favorite edition) and I disagree almost completely with the Old School Primer.


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## Uchawi (Sep 18, 2015)

Is the OSR dead? No. Is the OSR an indication of future games? Maybe, if a new player is introduced through the hobby with it. Then there are the established players that have weathered the storm through thick and thin as D&D has changed throughout the years. I am in the group, and while 5E whispers to the past, it does not do much to speak of the future. I want the game to evolve, and 5E has to many rules in place that are there just because that is the way it was done in the past. That is fine. But I see it as developing a product with your head in the sand.

I can never replace my experiences with previous editions, but at the same time, I am not going to spend a lot of time trying to recreate it. I would rather experience something new.


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## arjomanes (Sep 19, 2015)

Mallus said:


> Anyone who thinks OSR-identified products are "backwards-looking" should really check out Vorheim, A Red and Pleasant Land, Yoon-Suin, and Deep Carbon Observatory (hint: the things that _aren't_ old-school system hacks/revisions).
> 
> I mean, they should check them out if they're interested in seeing how wrong that opinion is.
> 
> ...




Red and Pleasant Land and Vornheim are both amazing books. I'll have to check out those other ones you mentioned.


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## dungeon crawler (Sep 20, 2015)

In answer to the question I say no! The OSR tracts at the conventions I attend are growing in the number of games offered, the number of New OSR G.M's and the number of new young players at my tables.  5 e is a decent game I run it for my FLGS. There are so many old school style games on the market that every genre can boast at least one. I would not call that dead or dying.


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## Morrus (Sep 20, 2015)

dungeon crawler said:


> In answer to the question I say no! The OSR tracts at the conventions I attend are growing in the number of games offered, the number of New OSR G.M's and the number of new young players at my tables.  5 e is a decent game I run it for my FLGS. There are so many old school style games on the market that every genre can boast at least one. I would not call that dead or dying.




Didn't read the article either, eh?


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## dungeon crawler (Sep 21, 2015)

Morrus said:


> Didn't read the article either, eh?




I did and answered the question posed by the title.


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## Morrus (Sep 21, 2015)

dungeon crawler said:


> I did and answered the question posed by the title.




Nah, the question in the title is contextualized by the article. Reading the article indicates that the question being asked is actually whether the term needs to be updated to reflect that the OSR now strongly influences modern games.  Nothing to do whatsoever with the number of games being sold or played.


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## Greg Benage (Sep 21, 2015)

I don't think the OSR is dead, I don't think old-school D&D is "mainstream" (whatever that might mean for what is itself a very niche hobby) and I don't think 5e is especially old school. I do think it's a turn back _toward_ the old school from 3 and 4, but it doesn't even try to get there. 5e does heroic fantasy very well, and that's probably a good thing because heroic fantasy, in my opinion, has been the mainstream of D&D since the mid-80s. If you look at the published adventures for 5e, Wizards has doubled-down and raised the emphasis on heroic fantasy to a new level. I think that's shrewd, because it's what most D&D players want and it's what 5e does best.

But old-school D&D wasn't heroic fantasy. I don't know what to call it, exactly: "Tomb-Robber-and-Treasure-Hunter Fantasy" isn't really a thing. The core game experience wasn't about becoming a hero and saving the world, it was about exploring an extremely dangerous wilderness and/or underworld and winning fame and fortune. The classic rules supported that style of play extremely well. The 5e rules and the expectations they create push back against it more than a little.

Bottom line: If I'm going to play in a heroic fantasy campaign, I hope it's 5e. If I have an opportunity to play (or especially DM) an old-school D&D campaign, I hope it's B/X. I certainly do not agree that "old school" is the way "most of us" play our D&D. If anything, today's mainstream D&D is the Platonic ideal of the new-school, post-Dragonlance heroic fantasy mode of play.


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## Celebrim (Sep 21, 2015)

Greg Benage said:


> But old-school D&D wasn't heroic fantasy. I don't know what to call it, exactly: "Tomb-Robber-and-Treasure-Hunter Fantasy" isn't really a thing. The core game experience wasn't about becoming a hero and saving the world, it was about exploring an extremely dangerous wilderness and/or underworld and winning fame and fortune.




I think these things overlap quite often in early play.  Because if GDQ isn't going to be counted as "old-school D&D", then I'm not sure what is.


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## Greg Benage (Sep 21, 2015)

Celebrim said:


> I think these things overlap quite often in early play.  Because if GDQ isn't going to be counted as "old-school D&D", then I'm not sure what is.




I think the movement toward heroic fantasy was happening in actual play (and Dragon) before it even showed up in published adventures. Perhaps GDQ's "save the kingdom or you'll be executed" is best seen as a transitional product.


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## Alphastream (Sep 21, 2015)

dd.stevenson said:


> Do you consider your opinion to be at odds with this Mearls interview from last year?






> Attributed to Mike Mearls: I don’t really think it was a direct influence as in that’s what people are doing with that, so let’s follow that






> Attributed to Mike Mearls: And so I think where some of that philosophy [OSR Movement] definitely played a role, because I think in tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of these movements arise because I think it’s a reaction to the way things [games] evolve.




Are those the quotes you are all talking about? Geez. The first one is pretty clear - not a direct influence as a reaction to a market trend or what people are playing. The second quote is funny, because someone added "OSR Movement" to the quote! What he's saying is the same thing I'm saying - The philosophy of what makes gameplay fun is common. When 5E was being created, they drew from the same well. Because, duh, they looked at their own game's past. 

The article claims there is a direct influence and claims 5E was a reaction to, somehow, OSR's market. Those claims aren't true.


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## dd.stevenson (Sep 22, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> Are those the quotes you are all talking about? Geez.



Those, and the AMA, are the only mearls quotes on the subject of OSR influence that I'm aware of, and this is a thread that wouldn't be harmed by a few solid citations. To be crystal clear, that was my first post in this thread and I don't know what other posters were referring to.



Alphastream said:


> When 5E was being created, they drew from the same well. Because, duh, they looked at their own game's past.



Do you have any particular reason why I (or anyone) should agree with you on that? Because, I look at who they were consulting with, and the fact that mearls says they looked at older editions of D&D "for OSR stuff", and what mearls was posting to OSR blogs during that period, and I look at the feel of the resulting game, and I can't see a single reason in the world to believe that the OSR didn't influence their view on D&D's past.



Alphastream said:


> The article claims there is a direct influence and claims 5E was a reaction to, somehow, OSR's market. Those claims aren't true.



If you were to replace "aren't true" with "aren't adequately explored or supported" I would probably agree.


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## Zak S (Sep 22, 2015)

There's a hair being split here:

Alphastream refers to an "OSR market" which indeed is a tiny thing which probably influences nobody selling hundreds of thousands of books.

On the other hand "OSR writers"--actual people whose work is termed "OSR", either definitely influenced 5e or else Mearls is lying and the 5e book is full of coincedences.


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## S'mon (Sep 22, 2015)

Greg Benage said:


> But old-school D&D wasn't heroic fantasy. I don't know what to call it, exactly: "Tomb-Robber-and-Treasure-Hunter Fantasy" isn't really a thing. The core game experience wasn't about becoming a hero and saving the world, it was about exploring an extremely dangerous wilderness and/or underworld and winning fame and fortune. The classic rules supported that style of play extremely well. The 5e rules and the expectations they create push back against it more than a little.




Maybe it's because I tweaked the rules in my 5e campaign a bit, and my player group are
 grognards, but I find the 5e system supports "adventurous treasure hunters" very well. My Wilderlands 5e campaign bears very little resemblance to the 'heroic adventure path' play of the 5e 
published campaigns or most Pathfinder APs, and 5e seems to support this play style well; 4e did not and 3e/PF isn't great at it either, but 5e seems fine.


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## cavesalamander (Sep 22, 2015)

S'mon said:


> Maybe it's because I tweaked the rules in my 5e campaign a bit, and my player group are
> grognards, but I find the 5e system supports "adventurous treasure hunters" very well. My Wilderlands 5e campaign bears very little resemblance to the 'heroic adventure path' play of the 5e
> published campaigns or most Pathfinder APs, and 5e seems to support this play style well; 4e did not and 3e/PF isn't great at it either, but 5e seems fine.




I'd like to follow up with this thought here, but that's a subject for another thread.


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## Greg Benage (Sep 22, 2015)

S'mon said:


> Maybe it's because I tweaked the rules in my 5e campaign a bit, and my player group are
> grognards, but I find the 5e system supports "adventurous treasure hunters" very well. My Wilderlands 5e campaign bears very little resemblance to the 'heroic adventure path' play of the 5e
> published campaigns or most Pathfinder APs, and 5e seems to support this play style well; 4e did not and 3e/PF isn't great at it either, but 5e seems fine.




I think it's not bad, but it's not as good as B/X. I could do it with the Basic Rules and the following house rules:

* Remove backgrounds (at least the crunch).
* Use the no-skills optional rules from the DMG.
* Remove feats and ASIs.
* Look for a way to simplify/eliminate some class abilities.
* Allow multiclassing, I guess, but implement a maximum level gap to eliminate dips.
* Use some combination of optional and house rules to revise short/long rests to emphasize resource management.
* Use the slow natural healing optional rule.
* Do something with cantrips. Not sure what. Think about ritual spells.
* House rule the whole experience system and slow advancement rate.
* Do something to simplify/streamline monsters. Kinda tough when even kobolds have special abilities.

Of course, at that point, I'm not really playing 5e. Alternatively, I could just use B/X more-or-less out of the box. I just feel like 5e is really good for a more "develop at start" heroic fantasy campaign where the expectation is that you spend some time creating (or "building") a fairly detailed character, with robust mechanical support for that, and with the expectation that he will be (barring misfortune) one of the heroes of this epic story. And B/X is really good for a "develop in play" old-school campaign where a PC is created in five minutes and often dead in less than five. The expectation is that the survivors may develop into heroes in the course of play.

All that mechanical weight in 5e that is important to support "hero building" is just excess baggage for an old-school game. Likewise, all those character skills and abilities actually detract from a play style that emphasizes player skill and experience and uses "ruling over rules" to resolve outcomes. In short (too late), I want characters who are defined by what they do in the game and not how they're built mechanically before the game begins. And it's the same with monsters, really. I can run kobolds who are nasty in packs without mechanical special abilities to define them. I don't need the expansive stat blocks this produces.

Again, 5e is good. I like it a lot. I'll happily play it in a campaign that plays to its strengths and lets it show its stuff. I just don't think that kind of campaign is "old school."


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## S'mon (Sep 22, 2015)

Greg Benage said:


> I think it's not bad, but it's not as good as B/X. I could do it with the Basic Rules and the following house rules:
> 
> * Remove backgrounds (at least the crunch).
> * Use the no-skills optional rules from the DMG.
> ...




Well, I do some of the things you suggest, eg use the optional Slow Healing rule, eliminate Background mechanical effects, effectively remove skills. I don't know why you think allowing multiclassing is desirable though. Mechanical heft? Hmm, here are the pregens I provided my players:

Human Fighter Level 1
AC 18     Speed 30'
Hit Points: 12 Healing Dice: 1 (d10+2)
STR 16 (+3) DEX 14 (+2) CON 15 (+2) INT 9 (-1) WIS 11 (+0) CHA 13 (+1)
Proficency Bonus: +2      Saves: STR +4, CON +4
SA: Duelist: +2 dmg with single one-handed weapon. Second Wind (bonus action): restore 1d10+1 hp, must rest to use again.
Background: Soldier
Equipment: chainmail, shield, longsword, light x-bow and 20 bolts, explorer's pack, red sash, dagger, bone dice, clothes, 10gp.
Attacks
Longsword ATT +5 dam 1d8+5
Light X-bow ATT +4 dam 1d8+2 rng 80'/320'

Human Rogue Level 1
AC 14   Speed 30'
Hit Points 10 Healing Dice 1 (d8+2)
STR 11 (+0) DEX 16 (+3) CON 14 (+2) INT 13 (+1) WIS 9 (-1) CHA 15 (+2)
Proficiency Bonus +2 Saves: DEX +5 INT +3
SA: Expertise - Persuasion (+6), Stealth (+7); Sneak Attack +1d6 1/turn; Thieves' Cant
Background: Charlatan
Equipment: 2 shortswords, burglar's pack, leather armour, two daggers, thieves' tools, fine clothes, disguise kit, set of sharped (marked) playing cards, belt pouch with 15gp
Attacks
2 Shortswords ATT +5 dam 1d6+3 & 1d6 (+1d6 sneak attack)
Thrown dagger ATT +5 dam 1d4+3 (+1d6 sneak attack) rng 20'/60'

Altanian Barbarian Level 1
AC 15   Speed 30'
Hit Points 14 Healing Dice 1 (d12+2)
STR 16 (+3) DEX 16 (+3) CON 14 (+2) INT 8 (-1) WIS 14 (+2) CHA 10 (0)
Proficiency Bonus: +2 Saves: STR +5 CON +4
SA: Rage bonus action 2/day, Unarmoured defence. Survival +6
Background: Outlander
Equipment: Greatsword, 2 hand axes, 4 javelins, hunting trap, hyena pelt, loincloth, belt & money pouch, explorer's pack, 10gp.
Attacks
Greatsword ATT +5 dam 2d6+3 (+5 raging)
Hand axes, melee ATT +5 dam 1d6+3(5), bonus action extra attack dam 1d6+0(2)
Javelins, thrown ATT +5 dam 1d6+3

Not vastly more complicated than the PCs in my BECM campaign:

Alexandra Vorloi, Armiger of House Vorloi, Lawful
Fighter-1 AC 18 (plate & shield) Hit Points 10 
Sword ATT +1 dam 1d8+1
STR 15 (+1) INT 12 (+0) WIS 12 (+0) DEX 14 (+1) CON 16 (+2) CHA 13 (+1)
XP: 700/2000

Bramble Hairy-Heals of the Five Shires, Lawful
Halfling-1 AC 15 (chainmail & shield) Hit Points 7
Shortsword ATT +0 dam 1d6, Sling +0 dam 1d4
STR 12 (+0) INT 14 (+1) WIS 13 (+1) DEX 11 (+0) CON 13 (+1) CHA 12 (+0)
XP: 700/2000

Ace Plz (Ruyven Kishida) of the Calarii Elves, Lawful
Elf-1 AC 14 (leather) Hit Points 7
2-handed Sword ATT +1 dam 1d10+1, Longbow ATT +2 dam 1d6
STR 13 (+1) INT 11 (+0) WIS 15 (+1) DEX 16 (+2) CON 13 (+1) CHA 16 (+2)
Spell Book: Read Magic Charm Person Magic Missile Sleep Light
XP: 700/4000

Yakov Dmitrov, Black Sheep of House Dmitrov, Neutral
Magic-User 1 AC 11 (unarmoured) Hit Points 4
STR 8 (-1) INT 11 (+0) WIS 16 (+2) DEX 13 (+1) CON 10 (+0) CHA 15 (+1)
Spell Book: Read Magic Charm Person Magic Missile Sleep Light
XP: 700/2500

Worship Karameikos of Rugalov, Lawful (Neutral tendency)
Cleric-3 AC 18 Hit Points 13
STR 14 (+1) INT 16 (+2) WIS 16 (+2) DEX 11 (+0) CON 6 (-1) CHA 13 (+1)
Age 14. Betrothed to Peace Dmitrov (age 15) M9 1019 AC.
E: Platemail & Shield, Holy Symbol of Law. Baron William's +1 ring of protection.
Silver 'stone' mace: ATT +1 dam 1d6+1
+1 Spear "The Spear of Rothgar" ATT +2 dam 1d6+2
SA: Turn Undead: T: Skeleton, Zombie. 7+: Ghoul 
Spells/day: 2 1st
XP: 3000/6000

Claudia Morrigan
Thief-1 AC 15 hit points 4
ST 13 (+1) IN 10 (+0) WI 7 (-1) DE 18 (+3) CO 11 (+0) CH 14 (+1)
E: Thieves' Tools, Leather armour
2-handed sword ATT +1 dam 1d10+1, Short bow ATT +3 dam 1d6
XP 450/1200


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## Greg Benage (Sep 22, 2015)

S'mon said:


> Well, I do some of the things you suggest, eg use the optional Slow Healing rule, eliminate Background mechanical effects, effectively remove skills. I don't know why you think allowing multiclassing is desirable though. Mechanical heft?




Yeah, looks like you did a lot of it. Did you just remove cantrips altogether? As for MCing, I'd be happy to remove it, too -- how do your Halfling and Elf classes work? Did you also remove feats and ASIs? 

Anyway, swap out the XP system and similarly take a knife to the monster rules, and in my opinion, you'll have a pretty old-school D&D (that doesn't look much like what most people think of as "5e"). I certainly like your approach, but it still seems a lot easier to just start with B/X in the first place.


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## S'mon (Sep 22, 2015)

Greg Benage said:


> Yeah, looks like you did a lot of it. Did you just remove cantrips altogether? As for MCing, I'd be happy to remove it, too -- how do your Halfling and Elf classes work? Did you also remove feats and ASIs?




No feats at 1st level, I said players with rulebooks could take them at higher level, none have.

The later characters there such as the Elf are from my BECM Classic D&D game, compare them to the 5e Rogue Barbarian & Fighter pregen stats at the top.
5e PCs do grow in complexity but at start they're very simple.


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## Alphastream (Sep 24, 2015)

The claim about market is just wrong - there isn't enough market size there to be the underpinning for an edition's goals. As to influence, fair enough. The article's claims are not supported.


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## Landifarne (Oct 4, 2015)

Alphastream said:


> The claim about market is just wrong - there isn't enough market size there to be the underpinning for an edition's goals. As to influence, fair enough. The article's claims are not supported.




Completely agree with this. How many people are running Old School games in the US...20,000? Multiply that by two or three and you get the player base.

How many copies of 5E have sold?


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## Lanefan (Oct 4, 2015)

Landifarne said:


> Completely agree with this. How many people are running Old School games in the US...20,000? Multiply that by two or three and you get the player base.
> 
> How many copies of 5E have sold?



Not a really good comparison.  Better to ask how many people are running 5e games, and go from there.

And I speak from personal experience: I've bought the 5e core books, starter box, and some other bits; but I'm still running old school modified 1e.

Lanefan


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## Alphastream (Oct 6, 2015)

Lanefan said:


> Not a really good comparison.  Better to ask how many people are running 5e games, and go from there.



Just from organized play alone, the top RPGs blow away other RPGs and unsupported editions. There are thousands playing D&D 5E in stores across the US on Wednesdays alone, then the thousands playing at stores on weekends, the thousands playing at conventions... and this doesn't count all the home campaigns, the online play, the other store game nights, etc. As an example, in Portland we have a single store with about 50 people playing Encounters on Wednesdays. We have I think 7 other stores running the program as well. When I travel around the US for work, I usually have a choice of 2-4 stores where I can play Encounters, with each running 2-5 tables of play... all just on Wednesdays.

I love D&D's current edition, but I also love other RPGs and I'm a fan of diverse approaches to RPGs. I truly wish that our hobby strongly supported (and paid well for) the other RPGs and editions. From my discussions with various people in the RPG industry, I think the numbers of actual play for many RPGs and RPG segments are shockingly small.


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