That’s right. It was in Further Afield. That is one of the best supplemental books I ever bought. Not just for Beyond the Wall… but for any OSR game
Five hard questions about OSR play
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I forwarded this thread to Sandra of https://idiomdrottning.org aka 2097 and she asked me to forward her reply here in turn, since she doesn’t have an account!
All that follows below is from her.
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(1) When people say that in an OSR game, we make decisions from the point
of view of our characters, do they mean what our characters would do, or
what would be in our characters’ best interests?
This is an ongoing debate in our own group as well as within the
community.
What happened was that three consecutive parties stepped in the same
party-killing trap. And I was like “What’s going on?” and they were like
“But our new characters don’t know that the trap is there.”
This was a few years ago. It’s still a point of reference for when we
talk about this in the group.
Since then, something they’ve started doing is to sometimes sort of
nudge their character decisions towards a better outcome. For example,
and this is an example from Tuesday’s game this week, the player knows
very well that there are (at least) two rooms with water and one room
with wine, and the location of those rooms. But the character is a
kinda newish replacement character. The party hadn’t been annihilated so
the player had his character was asking another player’s character “Are
there any rooms with water up on level 2?” hoping to as quickly and
relatively painlessly as possible “square the knowledge” between what he
knew and what his character knew. (Unfortunately the player he asked is
kind of a ditz and they didn’t remember any of the water rooms.)
That’s something I’ve observed as a consistent theme. The players want
to ask quickly as possible “square the knowledge” between what the
player knows and the character knows.
So the rule I’ve cooked up is this.
The degree to which they can do this vs the dungeon, vs the world, vs
the challenge, is completely up to them. Challenge isn’t the sole point
of our game but if there is a challenge aspect to the game, it becomes
ridiculous to not then let players learn from their mistakes.
Similar to Rogue style video games (like Fatal Labyrinth) where the only
thing you can bring with you from run to run is your own knowledge and
experience.
I understand the tension between the two poles: defeating the challenge,
and staying true to the character. My friend Jonatan Kilhamn once said
“I want to win. But I want to win as the character.” I let the players
choose freely from moment to moment how they want to resolve that
tension when it comes to the challenge vs the world.
However.
When it comes to pvp situations, I’ve put my foot down. Here is another
example.
A character is sneaking around in the forest trying to stealth on the
party’s camp. He out-rolls their perception stats. But “Mr Meta” in the
camp who just flubbed the perception says “But I still feel that
something is going on. I want to look again more carefully” and I go “no
way, Mr Meta!” (I don’t want to single out any one player, this is
something that they’ve all done from time to time.) It’s the drive to as
quickly as possible square character knowledge and player knowledge
that’s at play again.
And the rule I have is: metagaming vs the world is allowed but not
mandatory. It’s a long axis with many possible points of compromise and
you can decide where you land on it from moment to moment. Metagaming vs
each other is not allowed.
(2) To what degree is an OSR GM responsible for pacing, and what tools are
they allowed to use in service of that end?
The DM needs to be much more hands off wrt pacing.
The playgroup needs to be in charge. Let them take their time and learn
to be patient.
And, you can’t “cut”. The players want to be with their characters 24/7.
That said, there is a very powerful tool that the DM has available:
the saliency time zoom principle.
Let things take the time needed to answer the questions we need to
continue playing, but no more.
I.e. time passes quickly af when nothing happens. Fast-forwarding is
different from cutting.
Please feel free to say “And a week passes, scratch rations please” or
“It’s about thirty miles there, roll three encounter checks please” or
“and you take the entire day to search the rooms. In one of the rooms
you hear an unusual sound when tapping the wall, what do you do?”
(continued)
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(3) To what degree can OSR games handle player-authored material without
losing integrity of setting? Does player-authored material threaten any
other aspects of OSR play?
Authoring material is fundamentally a different mode and mindset than
running/exploring the material. This goes for GM as well as PC.
In other words, there is a severe split between creation mode (character
creation or world creation) and actually playing/running the game.
Do not mix these “hats” at the same time.
Add in player authored material at creation time.
During Prep:
In my group, we haven’t yet hit the ceiling of what proportion of the
material can be player authored but, on the other hand, we have been
very careful with this. A temple here, a cult there, a family here, a
bounty hunter there… We’re playing in a continent level sandbox and a
the players have added like less than a hundred people to that
continent and that’s been fine.
It’s important to
- do this during prep and not during play, and
- don’t let the resolution of any challenge be player authored. Just
the presence of elements.
(4) To what degree can OSR games handle situations/characters/etc created
specifically to target individual PCs and their interests without losing
integrity of setting?
As you (the asker) probably have realized, which is why you’re asking
the question, is that altering the game world after seeing the
characters somehow threatens the integrity of the game. I’ve called this
the “No paper after seeing rock” principle in the past.
“No paper after seeing rock” (or “Paper→Rock” for short) is one possible
solution to the “chasm width” problem. The chasm width problem is
something that arose in GURPS.
GURPS has a very very complicated formula for how far characters can
jump. They need to carefully invest points at character creation time to
influence variables in that formula.
On the GM side, the GM can just make up whatever width of chasm they
want. It’s 5 feet? It’s 15 feet? It’s 30 feet? It’s 2 feet? Up to you.
And what I thought as I pondered this is… isn’t this kinda dumb?
Because obviously good game design will lead to chasms jumpable some
non-zero amount of time and unjumpable some non-zero amount of time.
(Let’s for the sake of argument say that the perfect number is ⅔ of
chasms are jumpable.) Because if they’re jumpable 100% or 0% of the
time, why even have the jumping distance formula? Why not just say “You
can jump all chasms” or “You can’t jump any chasm”?
(By the way, this is generally a complexity-reducing principle that, for
example, Cthulhu Dark applies brilliantly. CD doesn’t need monster stats
because, in it, monsters will always kill you if you fight them. For the
purps of our particular game (whether it’s 2097e or whatever OSR game
you have at hand), we usually do want a little more nuance than that.)
But deciding on chasm width arbitrarily after seeing the player
characters is equally pointless. Because why should I dump points into
being good at jumping if no matter how many points I dump in there, I’ll
be able to jump around ⅔ of chasms?
So, two solutions.
One is to have a generative aspect of chasm widths, or, well, of
challenge content in general. I.e. the chance of you jumping a
particular chasm is generated by the rules. This is the route chosen by
many post-90s challenge games like Three Sixteen (can you jump a given
chasm? Well, just roll NFA) or D&D 4e with its encounter budget system.
The other is the OSR way. The brilliant solution that is the whole
raison d’être for OSR play: when you have sufficiently salient prep, you
can arbitrate a multitude of unique situations fairly. I.e. if you have
written down a chasm width, if you have committed to it before ever
seeing the characters, you have the answer right then and there. You
just know the chasm width because you have already committed to a chasm
width.
And thus: Paper→Rock.
Obviously examining the PCs too closely means that you are seeing “rock”
and can’t with good conscience create challenge elements (i.e. “select
paper”).
So there is a workaround and that is to temporally displace any custom
content. For example you (as GM) have created a PC-specific nemesis,
maybe from the same cleric order as the PC or whatever. Do not “serve it
up” as an encounter. (That’s a good OSR principle generally: never
“serve up” encounters. Let encounters emerge from how the players are
bouncing around in the big old pinball petri dish called the game
world.) Instead add the nemesis to your encounter tables. You never know
when it’s going to get rolled. This workaround has a ceiling. I’d say at
around… maybe 10, 15 percent? If you keep rolling up a bunch of custom
contents the world is going to start looking like it’s just a paper
world created for the characters and the integrity of the game world
itself takes a big toll.
This ties in to the second problem. Aesthetically. PC-specific content
clashes with the idea of player-created characters exploring a very real
place. I know we talked to bits on Story Games about how in Burning
Wheel the challenge content is tailored to challenge specific “beliefs”
and how awesome that is and… after experimenting with this stuff a
bit…
it’s not so awesome. There is something magical in entering the UNKNOWN.
Idk. So, aesthetically, I’d say the ceiling is lower than 10%. It’s
something I want to be very careful about adding.
(5) If OSR games offer total freedom, why are they almost always about
murderhobos wandering around and smashing pots in search of rupees?
That hasn’t been my experience. We’ve had games about family and loss
and desire and broken relationships and mended relationships and
politics and and…
But.
OSR material is meant to be easily mashed up and recombined. Having a
standard setup and milieu especially when it comes to goals and modus
operandi is very useful in that regard.
Also, what makes OSR work compared to the typical “90s game” is the
porte-monstre-trésor array. Places, problems, goals. And, agential
search of goals rather than reactively answering the batphone.
For those two reasons, rupees is a fine goal.
It’s one that my particular play group usually have a hard time getting
invested in which means that we usually go for other macguffins.
Stopping murderers or ending evil soul sucking machines or exerting
political influence or exploring the unknown.
(Also they want money to buy diamonds to use as components for spells
because spells are cool and/or they want to Raise their loved ones or
their old fave chars.)
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It’s great to see Sandra here, even if it’s “second-hand”!
When I run OSR games I constantly ask questions to the player characters and build on their answers. The game sessions still feel very OSR in their gameplay.
One of the more memorable OSR game I ran was a short dungeon about teenage adventurers coming back to dungeon delve in their now abandoned childhood orphanage. I ran the game in a OSR fashion, tracking resources, traps, random encounters, etc. But I also probed the character for memories and flash backs each time they entered a room and found stuff. By the end we really had a good idea of who these characters were and the game became more and more emotionally engaging. We were all moved after the final room encounter, I may have cried a bit. The game ended with taking mementos as loot (worth XP).
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I think at the end of the day it doesn’t actually matter to “OSR” games WHO builds the world. “Traditionally” it would be the GM, during the dark hours of the night, writing page after page to put in their three ring binder of campaign notes. Whatever, tradition. The game works equally well and feels the same if the players invent the duchies and the towns and the major NPCs or whatever. But it still needs to happen in the background. Not during “play” or at least, not during what people think of as “play”. I think you could literally use Microscope to create a world and then run an OSR game in it with the very people who created it. I don’t see any conflicts there. It’s not how it’s “usually done” but that doesn’t matter.
I think the key tenets that need to be in place are:
- GM as impartial referee
- The game world as persistent and ‘real’ – NO ONE really has the power to change what has been set down as “fact”
- Player skill over character skill
Aaaaand… that’s probably fundamentally it. There are some other things that are USUALLY part of it – getting loot out of dungeons, high lethality combat, etc. But I think driving at the core of the matter gives you the three bullet points above. And none of those three bullet points care who makes up the world. Though it does care who draws the map for the dungeon.
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Can you elaborate on “the game world as persistent and ‘real’” a bit? I’m starting an OSR/pbta hybrid soon, and I think this is the one bit I’ll struggle with as we play our campaign.
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Could you expand on this? I’m assuming you aren’t saying that what @Evlyn_M did was incorrect since she is “constantly ask[ing]… questions and build[ing] on the… answers” which means it’s happening throughout a session?
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I mean I think doing the standard DW fronts and grim portents thing pretty much does the trick, no? The world and it’s inhabitants should do their own things and progress as if the characters didn’t exist outside of what the characters actually do. Factions’ machinations should progress as time passes unless the PCs intercede, etc.
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I was mostly thinking of “Traditional play” at that point; Doing it during play with people who are ok with that is fine, but unusual.
I think the only real core tenet that OSR insists upon in terms of “players shall not make up this content” is the actual specifics of the dungeon – I don’t think it’s possible to have a player-skill game where the players can decide where the traps are, after all.
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As for “the game world is persistent and real” – I feel like OSR play hinges pretty strongly on the idea that the no one, the GM or the players, can “tamper” with the game world. The “ideal” is the proverbial Gigantic Three Ring Binder Where Everything Is Written Down And Therefore True (Or at least, the module for the dungeon, or whathaveyou.).
I probably could have phrased it better – it’s the idea that “prep is binding” and the GM can’t change the world on the fly.
To be honest, this is one of the things that I struggle with the most about OSR ideals – it simply doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. How, I ask myself, is something that is written in a binder any more real or binding than something the GM thought about during the session? But in discussions with various people (Including Sandra, above) it’s become very clear to me that for some people the sanctity of prep is of utmost importance.
This ties back to the “GM as impartial referee” thing, I believe.
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The reason Evelyn’s wonderful orphanage concept works in an OSR context is that the history that the players were creating is not relevant in game terms. It adds to the atmosphere but doesn’t affect the tactics the players might use while Dungeoneering.
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It sounds like the difference about tampering with the world is that, in PbtA, nothing’s “real” until it is said and established during the game session (with the players present). In OSR tradition, it’s “real” when the GM writes it down in their notes during prep (and thus could be shown to players if somebody questions it).
At least, that’s how I’ve been viewing it myself, and I think that might be what @Airk is saying.
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You nailed it. Thank you!
I mean sure… But it doesn’t exist for the player characters until they experience it in the game session either. And are we 100% certain that no Old School GM changes anything once they have written it down in the big book? What if they are running a published module? Are they allowed to change things on the fly? (If not it seems like they are going to have a hard time not railroading their players when they zig when they expected them to zag.)
I kind of just keep coming back to the fact that in the end: it’s your table. As long as you and your players are getting what they want out of the sessions who the heck cares whether anyone is following any specific tenants?
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Firstly, the GM shouldn’t be expecting the players to zag. The GM should have the situation prepared so that whatever the players choose to do, the GM can accommodate them. Obviously you can’t prepare for everything, so in the event that there players step outside of the prep the GM should impartially generate something appropriate. This is where random generators come in. It’s like wandering monster tables, it isn’t practical to track the movements of a dozen monsters which the PCs might encounter, so you abstract it with a dice roll instead. Books like Yoon Suin or the d30 Sandbox Companion scale that up to basically everything you might need.
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I don’t think we need any of these ‘design principles’ to be 100%. I think it’s best to keep the moniker ‘OSR’ out of it because it’s pretty unclear what it meant back in G+ days and the idea that GURPS, Black Hack, 1981 Moldvay, and Dungeon World are all part of the same design space is too large a tent to be useful. To me OSR was a scene, and is now a brand. To others it has different meanings.
We don’t need to litigate those meanings (subjective most likely) is we instead talk about “The design principles of pre-90’s exploration based ttrpgs”. There will still be outliers, but it’s likely easier to find them, there distinct meanings in this more neutral, less contentious descriptive label.
In my experience, for pre-90’s exploration focused ttrpgs there is a design principle of preferring that adventure creation is preparation - especially as it relates to physical and spatial issues. The adventure location is mapped prior to play. Even if procedural generation is used (and it is … as early as B1 ‘Search for the Unknown’ or the AD&D DMG - arguably
Booklet 3 Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) it’s either meant to be prep (B1) or to simulate the unknowable (random encounters).
This emphasis is tied to issues of diagetic ‘fairness’ but maybe more because the GM is going to be busy arbitrating player schemes “You can’t jump a chasm … but can you pole vault it?” and making setting design decisions “How does Dragon the Greedy react to a bribery attempt involving a gilt painted wooden statue?”
On the fly content creation requires focus, GMing in general does, and your arbitration and general description effoets will get less of your focus when you are trying to decide the shape of the rooms off the next corridor or the how the geoup of urban hoodlums you just created relate to thectown in general. Having setting ideas and maps written down or random generative tables prepared is a good solution to this.
Relatedly, because of an emphasis on simulation, or at least a principle disfavoring simple mechanical solutions (e.g. even a best result on an acrobatics skill or such to leap the giant chasm will fail - unless combined with a fictional element and plan - like vaulting with a pole), the GM is expected to add to written/prepared work during play. To what extent the GM does this is somewhat individual - but rarely impacts the core of an adventure and it tales GM time.
Lastly, without pre defined information and detail It’s harder for players to use fiction positioning to deal with obstacles. The better the details are described or known the better the player can engage them.
“You find a locked door” - How do I engage with this? How good a lock, how strong a door? As a player I’m limited to using a mechanical solution “I pick the lock” or “I force the door”. Alternatively I can interrogate the GM, ask about the door, It’s materials and complexity.
“You find a rusted steel door, locked with a new padlock on a thick steel chain” Now I have detail, and as a player can evaluate - that door sounds impossible to force, but maybe the lock or chain? Could tension and torsion pop the chain more easily? It’s a new lock, it’s in use, who has a key? If I can pick that lock I could relock this door, creating a safe area, especially if I use my own lock?"
Obviously this is super simple, but when the GM is expected to create these details on the fly it’s helpful to have a basic idea of a location, its inhabitants and important first. It doesn’t only save GM attention for play, but it makes providing details easier as the GM knows what context they need to be coherent.
I guess this is a long-wonded way of saying that design principles exist to help ensure that your players are having fun - they’re best practices that make running the game easier.
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@shane, of course nobody can claim that every OSR GM will run things that way, completely faithful to pre-committed material. Rather, the claim is this:
If we as a table agree to treat the pre-committed material as true and sacrosanct, we gain a strong foundation on which to play a game where the players’ choices feel concrete and real.
And this lets us experience facing a challenge, or pursuing a goal, as meaningful in a whole new way: we were able to do it because we were able to do it, not because someone else at the table thought it would be awesome, or make for a good story.
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The answers the players gave me influenced the gameplay. Like if a player tried to open the kitchen door I could have asked: “when you were younger where did Sally used to hide the kitchen’s key?” Answer: “In a box under her bed with her favorite knife.” When they check under the bed I tell them that they key is in the box with a knife and a lucky coin that glow in the dark. Or I can ask what was Timmy afraid of after bed time? And use the answer a few rooms later. This don’t break how the players interact with the dungeon’s environment. I use the pre written dungeon as a canvas to paint on while we play. I really love GMing OSR like this as it keep me engaged as the GM.
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