What is TosK? I cannot seem to fine the game this is referring to.
OSR and the New GM
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Yep, what @calris said: Skerples’ tutorial dungeon, which is also available from Skerples’ blog with links to playtests and other intro materials.
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this makes me think of a couple of things. First, a lot of the OSR and currently fashionable gaming systems clearly are pitched to an audience of readers that are already gamers. I was looking to buy an introductory system for a young nephew who lives far away, but none of the modern day games really felt like it was something that a brand new newbie in middle or high school could simply take off the shelf and run it by themselves and expect to have the experience the writer of the game expects. The only exception I found was Ryuutama, which just so happened to be perfect for my nephew.
I wonder if some of this is likely due to the current generation of writers who probably never had to experience a situation like that when they were starting the hobby. The were either introduced to it by someone else, or, just as likely, “figured it out” on their own, so why can’t anyone do the same these days?
I am trying to approach a game I hope to have ready for playtesting soon that takes this approach in account in the presentation of rules. It is a game after all, so some step by step instructions would be helpful, like any board game or Euro game. If it is disruptive to the material, have a one-page supplement or primer that explains this.
I also wonder if the rise of this lack of step by step instructions is in parallel to the drift from original Old School stuff from it’s wargaming roots into the more narrative style we expect (if not pure story-game style outright.) This often means doing away with, say, an initiative system. Yes, critics of initiative (like me to be fair!) will say it “takes one out of the game,” but it does have the benefit of crafting a framework for the discussion/story as it is being built. Veteran GMs have no problem balancing the flow of player interaction, but beginning GMs would find it a very clear structure to guide them.
Anyone else find these things to be true?
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I don’t think this is just an OSR problem, I think it’s a ttrpg problem. We have a lot of (and I use this term lovingly) Linux users; they’re so invested in the systems they are completely incapable of grokking how a newcomer would approach them. Unfortunately, I also think it would be a burden for every game to give its own nuanced idea of what an RPG is. What we need more of are intro and learning RPGs. Stuff that easily facilitates one shots or games that can efficiently scale up complexity as the players become more skilled. Sort of like how in videogames you don’t access or use all the mechanics immediately, they are instead drip fed to coincide with the PC’s development.
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Thanks for responding! What aspects of Ryuutama made it perfect for your nephew? What did it do differently from the other games that you reviewed? What specific supports did it provide for the beginner?
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On the contrary: I would separate the systems from didactics - which in turn I would place on YouTube:
U no OSR?
Here, watch the author playing it!
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I found Ryuutama perfect for my nephew for a variety of reasons— but primarily in that the writing feels feels suitable for younger readers (he is 14) and it’s originally a Japanese game with this aesthetic in art, setting, tone, etc. and, yes, he is a Japanophile. I would have preferred a game that did not use specialty dice, and this system uses D4 to D20, but this was a compromise when it clicked so many other boxes.
I’ll stick to the OP about the GM, and what Ryuutama does is that it treats the GM as a special class of character — the Ryuujin (dragons). In a very capsule summary, the goal of a GM-slash-Ryuujin character is to cultivate stories to “feed” the world. So, in creating and running adventures, it’s like “leveling up” your Ryuujin. There are even character classes of sorts, so Green Ryuujin specialize in travel stories or something (I forget exactly which class is which.) And everything is pretty much laid out with step by step instructions, so despite there being many fiddly bits, you can easily see how it all flows together with clear expectations on how to run a game.
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Long time Linux user here. I first started learning Linux in 1997 and by 2005 it had become my platform of choice, both personally and for work in a variety of technical capacities, from sysadmin to automation-focused software tester. The question of being beginner friendly has always been with us, and I think the Linux perspective on it tracks more closely to old-school hacker culture. My first computer had no hard drive and only 256K of RAM. It was luxurious for having 2 floppy drives for faster loading of software from a stack of disks. Doing anything with those early PCs required a certain level of engagement with the technical side of computing. The commercialization of personal computers required great efforts to make the bar of entry lower and we all know where this has lead us: amazingly powerful computers that fit in a pocket and which very few understand from a technical perspective. Some Linux distros cater to the casual user. My preferred distros cater to me, the technical user. Arch has a terrific set of documentation, but the people supporting it are… well. They’re not known for being newbie friendly. Love their documentation. Don’t love their community.
I think this relates to our concepts of support for new GMs. From what I’ve read so far, what I’ve seen has been some mix of the following in materials for new GMs:
- Fluff and color text intended to set tone and engage the imagination
- Discrete HOWTO steps for approaching some specific situations
- Outlines describing various phases of the game
- Mechanical references; i.e. the rules
- Conceptual discussions which give elements of GMing a theoretical framework
What I haven’t seen a lot of is a successful balance of all of these in traditional RPGs. But what’s successful for me may be different from what’s successful for most people. I personally gain a lot more out of conceptually focused discussions. I benefit where rules are seen to be a concise statement of a larger concept, and when this is illustrated by relatively detailed examples. This is really different from a rules-focus with supporting examples. Rules often seem very arbitrary to me. But if they are demonstrated as being a sort of logical shorthand for a larger concern, then that begins to make sense and become something I feel comfortable working with.
I will say that Chris McDowall’s blog posts seem to hit a sweet spot for me. They’re focused on concepts rather than rules exposition or outlining. I also have noticed that he talks quite a lot about wanting his game to be something a new player can quickly sit down and play, as well as turning around start running their own games. He’s talked about reaching casual players and not just hard-core RPG devotees, and maybe his take on this is keeping the rules light, and focusing on concepts? I dunno. I’m also not sure, yet, how much they’ll prepare me for specific types of adventure structures. What’s unique about a dungeon crawl vs a hex-crawl vs a mystery/puzzle adventure, for example.
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Cool, thanks for describing the system. If you’ve seen my response to @Radmad, where would you place Ryuutama’s instructions? Would you say they’re more rules exposition or conceptual? Do they focus more on “how” or “why”? I seem to find that a “why” focus is what I need, with just enough “how” to give it some practical feet.
I forgot to address this part, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. When I play board games with my family, I always reach for the original vanilla version of the board game. The expansions add too much to take in at once, and really they seem oriented towards adding variety and depth once the base system has gotten a little too familiar. Would this kind of thing work in RPGs? Is anyone actually already doing something like this? Some discussion of progression from basics to the full RPG experience could be really interesting and helpful to folks starting out.
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I think Ryuutama does have much of what you are seeking. At least enough to make it worth your purchase. Because it is a work in translation, it’s original audience was targeting a culture that did not have pen and paper games at all, so it does not have any conscious or unconscious assumptions about player culture, and the rules have a balance of all the fluff/flavor, how tos, flow of play, and examples that one would need.
Now, as far as “conceptual discussions” I don’t think it has any of that, at least not in a meta-commentary way where the designer has to, I dunno, break a 4th wall of a sort to explain why a rule is meant to go a certain way or why D6s were chosen over D20s. However, the rules or even the adventure itself is presented in the “theoretical framework” of the game-world’s narrative. The GM character has special abilities, like “benedictions”, that do narratively meta things to the story, for example.
This is def easier to do in a board game. TTRPGs have traditionally wanted to do this with character levels tho, haven’t they? Especially magic users. And the Cortex system (at least, the Marvel Heroic game) used “unlockables” in their character progression rules. I was playing around with doing this on a system level, with my first game being BattleStreets, then the next BattleLands, and then BattleWorlds, but the first step would be finishing the damn thing LOL
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I think this can be daunting to new players in it’s own way, because if you focus too much on fiction over mechanics a player is going to feel like there is no structure to lean on when they have questions on how to run the game. I think what should be emphasized is transparency. Mechanics should have a clear statement of why they work the way they do. If a game has random stat roll, it should explain that it’s because the stats of the PC matter less than the cleverness of the player running them, or whatever reason you chose.
I think you hit the nail on the head for what I was getting at. “Read the man pages” always ring out to me in the same way “git gud” does to a lot of people. I understand that personal investment and go-getter attitude is how you teach a man to fish, but if you create an environment in which nobody is actually teaching, then no one is going to bother learning.
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I’m not really suggesting a discussion of why the specific set of dice was chosen, though that might be an interesting discussion, as that’s not something that would actually help in running a game. I mean more like these posts by the Into the Odd designer—two of which were posted by @JasonT earlier, and the 3rd of which was referenced in one of the others:
- http://www.bastionland.com/2016/01/choices-and-consequences-pick-or-push.html
- http://www.bastionland.com/2017/01/a-procedure-for-play.html
- http://www.bastionland.com/2018/09/the-ici-doctrine-information-choice.html
Now, these are blog posts, and not material from the rules book, but they are the kind of GM-focused discussion which I find extremely helpful. It gets into how to do my job as a GM beyond just addressing how to manage the rules in play.
Yeah, they definitely do this with characters. D&D5e, at least, has a very specific model of having to learn additional mechanical things nearly every time you level your character. I’m really not a huge fan of this model of character development, which seems very deeply motivated by large power ups.
It seems like it should be approachable in terms of… forgive me here… GM pedagogy, where you abstract over deeper details for an early primer on how to run a basic dungeon, then iterate over those concepts in broadening and deepening passes. I think most rule sets focus on giving the bare essentials for running, and maybe point to some of the more common complications to add on later.
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Right, which is why I am not sure how much Into the Odd material will help me figure out how to approach specific adventure structures. But it definitely will help me in thinking about presenting the world to the players. I am very much after both/and.
I agree about transparency as I think providing context for and a sort of orientation to the material—it helps me understand why. And as I’ve mentioned, “why” is a huge part of how I learn. When I begin tearing something apart to understand it, I’m going to start with “how”, but when I’ve finished and have my list of “how” elements, they aren’t going to mean much to me unless they’ve given me some insight into “why”. I can build a model of “why” based on reflection on “how”, but this is a very long path and requires a lot of holding things in tension until I see if they pan out. If the materials can orient me with the author’s notion of “why”, then at least I can see how they tried to answer that with their “how” elements. This is probably all too much for a basic rules set, but it helps me understand a system as opposed to just trying to reproduce specific parts of it. It’s like understanding the flow of an entire piece of music vs understanding the specific intervals or chord progressions of a specific section.
RTFM, mofo. I mean… I get it. As a technical user, if I’ve put the necessary information out there, I really don’t want to be bothered with answering the same hand-holding questions over and over again. But there are pertinent questions to be asked: are the folks asking questions actually lazy (i.e. haven’t even tried to find the answer), are they just not oriented to the environment (i.e. don’t know where to look, or how to go about finding what they need), or is the material that’s out there simply daunting and over their heads? Teaching people how to find information and how to answer their own questions is terrific if, and only if, you provide them a starting point that doesn’t scare them off. The worst pattern, one which is very common, is expecting everyone to be able to answer their own questions from documentation which already require a significant degree of technical maturity.
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It’s interesting to see how much crossover there is between the communities and philosophies discussed here. There has long been a thread of “OSR means Open Source Roleplaying,” and to some extent that lives on in the “DIY D&D” ethos. But, as noted in this thread, it also lives on in “the source code IS the documentation” and “RTFM” mindsets. (And having been a Linux user for 20+ years, there’s an appeal to me here too.)
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This is why they created Basic D&D originally. Then. They kept expanding on the rules which made things confusing
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Oh, that’s really interesting. I’m personally oriented towards FOSS both pragmatically and ideologically, but am not a fundamentalist zealot. I have to live in this world and I earn my paycheck working on proprietary systems, and I have a distinct dislike for anyone selling me the one true way. (I remember an interaction with someone who was basically implying that I’m morally weak for using VMWare or VirtualBox instead of KVM. I’ve used KVM. It’s not what I reach for when I need quick & dirty vms.)
I’ve seen reference to “DIY D&D” but it’s not something I’m familiar with except that there seems to be some relationship with OSR. And my notion of OSR is entirely pragmatic. I see the “OSR” labels on things that have appealed to me. But I also see a whole other aspect of OSR which I find repugnant, and of which I want no part. I assume this is one of the reasons why there are so many discussions about finding a different label to use.
The folks who preach “the source code is the documentation” probably aren’t forced to read the source code I have to read on a regular basis. I track with several of their arguments, but the reality I’ve experienced in the industry leaves me thankful for any trail of documentation and clues I can find. Must be nice to only work on elegant, small-batch, artisanally crafted code bases.
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Yup! I think there’s a lot of good discussion happening here and elsewhere about this sort of “GM on-ramp”: “here is how you run a basic dungeon crawl that presents fun and interesting choices” in a way that is readable, enjoyable, and understandable.
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The online community—and OSR generally—is completely new to me. I spent the first part of the year trodding down the D&D5e path and getting frustrated. It really felt like a dead end for me. Then I spent the 2nd part of the year exploring PbtA and I’ve learned a lot of great stuff. But if I want even a chance of running face to face games it’s going to have to be D&D adjacent. I may even have to take OSR and PbtA sort of ideas and see how I can make use of them in a 5e context, because there’s a very real chance that the folks I know will only ever play whatever the current version of D&D is. Alas.
Anyway, if you run across other GM on-ramp discussions, I’d be happy for links, either here or private message or whatever.
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