I’m sorry, I know that reference begs a link…I couldn’t find what I wanted. Here’s a pretty good explanation:
RE: ‘Stars Without Number’ you can get a free version which I think may have those GM chapters in it…it’s worth a look.
OSR and the New GM
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I will say that in other discussion frames, like the one Adam Kobel uses frequently, that design gaps usually imply that “this game isn’t about X” if there are no rules for it. I wouldn’t want to go on record as saying that an emphasis on Rules As Written is bad.
For me it does start to get bad when the volume of rules exceeds a certain level. People’s tolerance will vary. Just like with the orthodoxy thing.
Some folks are going to be pumped that there’s a new book with new rules in it with the brand name on the cover. To me that implies an obligation to buy, then learn in order to run. I don’t get that often but it rankles me.
Rules do tell you what the game is about, and if you follow Adam’s thinking…breaking them or not using them means you are not “playing the game” as intended. At best it’s a Hack, and the longer you deviate, the more likely you are to find yourself in design or re-design territory.
That’s a value statement of a kind and is positioned. I mostly agree with it in theory. In practice, the DIY folks constantly hack and redesign, and they (maybe?) maintain a similar rules frame as a way of keeping relative position to the other hackers and designers they interact and share with?
They often share for free, and they do seem to use their designs as … statements of philosophy. This is something that I believe they share with indie and story design communities even if the way they go about it and the language they use might be different.
Even if it’s hard to get folks who identify as any of the three to agree to what perceive are their similarities. =)
This is a fun talk. Please forgive me if my sick day allowed me to push my enthusiasm into responding to everybody. I’m very engaged by the talk.
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Adam was one of my first steps away from D&D5e. I discovered Dungeon World when looking to run a game for my kids and having decided 5e wasn’t the way I wanted to do it. Then I started dipping into some of his videos. I don’t watch many videos of people discussing things—I’m more of a reader—but I’ve enjoyed watching bits and pieces of games he’s running to get a feel for games I’m reading about. It’s helped me connect what I’m reading with how it’s actually used performatively.
And he was one of the first people I heard say something along the lines that the majority of D&D5e’s mechanics support combat—that’s it’s focus. At the time I’d just been playing for a couple months and everyone around me was talking about D&D and stories and how D&D is flexible enough to do anything you wanted it to do, and his take on it was quite a different thing. That was kind of the beginning of my exploring other games to see what they handled and how they went about it.
I also remember hearing him talk about Dungeon World playbooks, and how they have a list of names to choose from. D&D provides lists of names for inspiration but explicitly tells you that you can make something up if you want. DW, on the other hand, tells you to pick from the list. Adam went on to say something about it being a conscious choice not to put it in the rules that you can do something different because he and Sage wanted players to discover for themselves: “Hey, I can do better than these names.” He referred to that moment as being the player’s first little hack on DW, a sort of introduction to game hacking.
It makes sense to me that beyond a certain threshold the sheer volume of the existing rules suggest that there should be a rule for everything, even if there isn’t. D&D5e’s core books make a point of saying that there are vague spots and that this shouldn’t be seen as a lack, but as room for interpretation and rulings. But effectively, what I’ve seen is more that the level of detail provided encourages people to stay inside the books, rather than drifting beyond them. I tend towards loosey goosey. Except when I don’t. There’s a balance, and I’m pretty sure my particular balance isn’t consistent or well reasoned.
No forgiveness needed! I’m pleased as punch that my first forum thread has gone beyond 60 posts. I didn’t expect it!
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An important distinction that I just realized I and others have been failing to make is how do rules versus content fit into this? (Rules being modular mechanics that apply to anything; HP and movement, Content being things that exist as a collection of rules plus flavor/lore/descriptions that anchor the fiction in the players mind; monster stats, dungeon maps, NPCs)
I think there is a lot of valid talk about how hacking and houseruling things can be valuable in order to tailor the experience towards your own playgroup, but I think some people here (including me) have been lumping content together with rules when talking about the encompassing power of non-OSR games like DnD. Would you consider a class rules or content? What about skills? There is a lot of nebulous matter, but to avoid getting lost in pedantic weeds, my impression would be that OSR games tend to have fiction first content while more mechanistic games have mechanics first content. OSR style content is heavy on implying the use for its content by describing what kind of reactions it will have with PCs while more DnD centric content remains narratively agnostic in favor of being rules complete. The former is far more creatively enticing and allows for a generous amount of GM and player input in shaping its actual interaction with the rules while the latter is more mechanically defined but free in how it can be narratively used.
A little disjointed from the current discussion. This is just a quick brainstorm I wrote up before jumping in bed. I’d be interested to see how others agree/disagree with it.
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I don’t feel like I’m in a good position to comment on this, but that does resonate with me. I, personally, tend to find mechanics-first less appealing.
I do feel like a major strategy in OSR play is to stay as far away from the deadly combat mechanics as you can, and that usually means employing tons of fictional positioning of varying types.
Talking to or bribing monsters and evil folk, describing HOW you’re looking for that trap, talking through your ambush extensively, fleeing while cutting loose one of your coin purses…all in hopes of keeping away from death.
In a system where GP = XP not fighting, is going to be high up on the list of priorities. Canny players will eventually see the system gaps and move into them looking for negotiations, and less deadly “wins” … So in those ways the system rewards “diegetic” or fiction first in some big cases. I can’t tell if I support your statement or not yet though…I thought by the time I was done typing I’d know. Hmm.
I’m still brewing a thought about some of the stuff you posed last night about where the cutoff between content and system are also.
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I was just explaining to someone today that I don’t know what I think of things until I start writing about them. For me, writing is part of working through things. Sounds like you might be a bit similar?
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I think in old school theory circles “fiction forward” usually gets called “emergent”.
I also want to agree with this analysis, but I suspect there’s something a bit more involved. In modern trad games the feeling I have with rules heavy moments is that the game wants you to be doing them. 5E D&D wants players in combat, planning tactics and figuring thier mechanical best moves, and it’s not even bad in this way. OD&D has mechanics because you need something to randomly and quickly adjudicate the most serious and tragic moments - the places a GM might feel bad about just deciding.
I guess as a maxim I’d say classic play uses mechanics to adjudicate character risk, while contempory trad play uses them to highlight character power. Not sure if that holds up.
I want to also be clear that I’m not judging these design principles. I remember loving Champions as a kid, precisely because when I invested the majority of my build points in raw STR my pseudo Hulk could toss around battleships and roll 36d6 from a punch. Not the most effective design, but when I landed a haymaker it was thrilling - it felt super heroic to be the character that got to roll all the d6’s in the room.
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I think that the most effective perspective on OSR gaming is to see it as a game which is fundamentally about confronting challenge.
There are obstacles, dangers, and rewards to be won. The GM is the ‘referee’, whose job it is to adjudicate as fairly as possible, allowing the players to engage their wits and their luck in order to face these challenges and try to win/overcome. Mechanical consequences like death and Experience Points act as the “score” of the game, lending particular weight to certain outcomes.
While this oversimplifies some aspects of OSR play, I think it’s a really useful focusing tool, and thinking about the game in these terms helps understand and modulate everything about your play. Start to look at the game in terms of challenges and a referee that adjudicates their resolution as fairly as possible, and so many other aspects fall into place. This simple metric allows you to cut through all kinds of typical dilemmas and challenges, and to uncover some really great fundamental principles about this style of game. My OSR play (both as referee and as player) has improved by an order of magnitude after I started considering it in these terms.
I just started a thread about a really fantastic “bare-bones” examples of fun OSR play, which I will link to here - it illustrates a lot basic concepts as well as the basic joy of this style of play in a really clear and entertaining way. You can see how much sheer weight the victories and defeats the players face carry when there are challenges which can be legitimately faced and resolved, without anyone pulling their punches. It’s something that’s very rare in other styles of play.
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Another important consideration for OSR-style play is that the GM’s role as referee means that your engagement with the game is far more passive than in most other RPGs.
You’re not responsible for creating drama, dictating pacing, or engaging and exciting the players. Your job is to present the material fairly and to adjudicate outcomes - not to create excitement at the table. You can enjoy hamming it up and being a personality as much or as little as you like, but the part that will make you a successful OSR has little to do with the “performance” of the game as entertainment. Far more important is to be able to adjudicate outcomes fairly so as to enable the players to meet challenges and tests their skills, wits, and luck against them.
It’s not uncommon for the GM to sit in silence with the party draws up a plan of their next escapade, for example, and it’s entirely good and correct to expect the players to be the ones driving the action forward. In many ways, it’s much more passive role than GMing other styles of RPG play, and it’s OK to embrace that - the challenge of adjudication and being a good referee should be your focus. I’ve seen tremendously effective OSR GMs who are fairly quiet, do little description, and never act out NPCs, for example. You don’t have to take that approach, but it’s available to you: when you run a game in this style, be prepared to sit back and ask “what do you do?” a whole lot.
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This is a fascinating observation, since I just today ran into someone asserting that Blades in the Dark was “Boring to GM” and recommending Dungeon Crawl Classics (Which by my understanding is at least somewhat “OSR”). It gives me a little bit of cognitive dissonance – I wonder what tasks that person finds interesting as a GM.
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When someone uses a loaded term like “boring”, it’s pretty hard to know what they actually mean without getting into it in some more detail. One GM might get excitement out of careful and detailed world-building, or portraying NPCs, or playing around with monster design, while another might find excitement in sitting quietly and observing the antics of the players. Perhaps this person really enjoys the highly random nature of some of DCC’s rules, for instance (they can generate some pretty wild outcomes under the right conditions!), or perhaps they really enjoy the material in the modules they’re running. Hard to say without more detail!
For instance, I would find running a very heavily GM-led railroaded game pretty boring, because I’m almost never going to be surprised by what the players are bringing to the table: the outcomes of the story at play are all pretty much in my hands. But another person might love that style of play, because they get to talk pretty much all the time, and therefore are constantly engaged. Boredom and interests are very personal and subjective things!
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