The pleasures of being an OSR DM?

[trademark]

Pleasures of the OSR: Secrecy and Discovery

Mazirian’s Garden is an OSR blog and the author just began a new series theorising about that play style. The author is very enthusiastic about story games (and also spends time on this forum as per the blogpost) so the exercise seems to be inherently positive and exploratory.

The author describes the pleasure of player discovery (as opposed to character discovery) being the primary pleasure of the OSR style of gaming. I think this does make sense for players but the attempt at explaining why this is pleasurable for DMs doesn’t quite make sense to me. Would those who have some experience with DMing OSR games be willing to chime in on what specific pleasures that style brings?

(first post, still learning, please be kind)

[Lu.Quade]

The DM is one of the players too right!? I think often the GM is finding things out at the same as the other players (in both storygames and OSR) especially when it comes to rolling and tables and stuff like that. So that player discovery includes the GM when a table generates something that the GM would never have come up with on their own. Just my initial thoughts

[BrianAshford]

That’s certainly one of the reasons why I enjoy GMing so much.

[William_Nichols]

First: Welcome aboard!

I’m going to mostly listen in, as I want to understand OSR stuff and usually don’t. In pbta games, I for sure see discovery that is also invention so … yeah, listening.

[DavidMorrison]

Apologies if this is a slight tangent to the original ask (I am not an OSR DM or player so can’t speak to that specifically ) but I do take some issues with the breakdown of player vs. character discovery in the article, and how this applies specifically to playing and running storygames, which I think probably also applies at least in part to OSR games.

To take Lovecraftesque as the first example. When you get over the turn-by-turn switch in role, Lovecraftesque actually has a very traditional GM role. The narrator describes the world and what happens, the witness only gets to describe their own thoughts, words and actions. (The watchers essentially have some delegated authority from the GM to colour and influence the world, but not directly control it). In any one scene, there is as much player discovery as there is in any traditional RPG. Everything of consequence that happens in the world is the purview of that Watcher. And, specifically, they are required by the rules of the game to narrate the scene towards their current Conclusion about the story. (The fact that their Conclusion may change in future rounds, or be proven incorrect at the end of the game, doesn’t I feel undermine that it is being played as fact in each scene).

Leading on to PbtA games. Once again, I think every GMed PbtA game I’ve read basically gives the GM control over the world and its inhabitants, with a couple of exceptions: Moves that give players specific rights to add details to the world, and a “devolve decision making” principle/GM move (I forget which ) which basically says “ask your player(s) what happens”. I think there’s sometimes a bit of a (wilful?) misconception among people that don’t play storygames that as a PbtA GM all you do is sit there like an oracle waiting for a failed player move to give you the opportunity to improvise something on the spot. When actually, they actually explicitly ask you to think about the world, treat it as a real place, and say what honesty demands. I always have ideas about what NPCs may be working towards. And it’s not about controlling the narration about those schemes. But just seeing if a player’s action brings them into contact with it, or gives me an opportunity to bring it to their notice. And sure, if player actions render a particular “plotline” nonsensical, I might abandon it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to begin with. It was a secret waiting to be discovered.

When it comes to the GM as player (GMs are definitely players y’all ) as @Lu.Quade mentioned above, there is also absolutely a sense of player discovery as GM as well. (Both in storygames and trad games and I would very much wager OSR too) Because, you never know exactly how your players are going to react to any situation, what they’re going to do. And when they do something you had never considered and there’s that moment of “Oh my god, that was fucking awesome!” I think that’s one of the purest expressions of player discovery I feel . And yeah, it can also be cool when a roll in PbtA unexpectedly succeeds or fails and swerves a scene in a direction you weren’t expecting, and you also get that moment of discovery. But it’s for real the choices the players make that always hit that spot for me as a GM!

I hope that wasn’t too rambly/ranty, and I am super interested to see how people with more OSR experience feel about it.

[jasonlutes]

My favorite thing about being and OSR-adjacent GM (PbtA engine running inside an old-school campaign chassis) is all of the emergent aspects of sandbox play. When I run a campaign the world is established collaboratively, but then session-to-session it’s up to me to flesh out the details and maintain the world’s integrity according to what the players have established. I love building out the setting to accommodate whatever decisions the players make, by randomly generating a bunch of stuff and then figuring out how to make sense of it all in context.

I also enjoy the pace of old-school play in contrast to the movie and TV emulation that so many RPGs strive for these days. Resource management and following the PCs exploits day-by-day leads to a very different kind of immersion, one very particular to the medium of tabletop roleplaying. I loved that feeling in 1978 when I started playing OD&D, and I’ve loved rediscovering it and introducing it to new players over the past 5-6 years.

[trademark]

I agree that the fun that the GM has when rolling in a table is similar to the fun players have when discovering facets of a dungeon.

And yes, I definitely feel like the GM is a player but my own personal trajectory with these games has been towards more GM-full/GM-less games because I feel a bit overburdened with the default GM-Player dynamic.

[trademark]

Thanks so much for the serious response! I agree with what you’re saying about Lovecraftesque but I think Mazirian/author of the blogpost is distinguishing between facts made up in the game and facts that existed before the game. Otherwise Jason’s Paint the Scene moments in We Hunt The Keepers would count as discovery. I think his use of the word discovery rests on the idea of verisimilitude and (as Tom of FoaBD puts it) the idea of OSR as “fantasy nonfiction”.

I phrased this question as one about OSR GMing because I think I understand the pleasures of storygames GMing? On an intuitive level, telling stories with other people makes sense to me as “fun” but “revealing secrets” doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I imagined OSR games to be about problem solving and shenanigans and that makes sense from a player POV. But the DM’s fun is a bit harder to pin down for me.

[Johnstone]

I think Ben’s post does a pretty good job explaining things, but to elaborate a bit on the fun of being an old school GM:

I like being able to reveal all the cool the prepared stuff to the players. Yes, discovering this stuff as a player is fun, but also knowing what is there on the map and then when the players go there, you get to show it to them, is also fun. And just because you’ve made the map and made dungeons (or picked ones by other people that you like) and placed them on the map, that doesn’t mean you know what is going to happen. The players still make choices (and rolls) and there are still random tables to provide the uncertainty. But enjoying this role requires you enjoy setting an impartial stage for the players and give up on discovering the setting. If you’re not into that, this is probably not the kind of DMing for you.

Being a DM and rolling on a random table, and being a player discovering a pre-designed map that the DM reveals, are absolutely NOT the same kind of fun. As a player, knowing the thing we are exploring is not improvised, has already been made and will not be changed by the DM on the fly, is an important part of the game and is not something the DM of that game can experience. We can all have fun with random tables on top of that, sure. And you can run a game with a blank hex map and a stack of random tables and just generate the setting as you go (and that might still be considered OSR or old school) and that can be super fun, but it is still not the same experience as exploring a prepared map.

So if you are going to DM a prepared map, you have to enjoy the reveal. That’s pretty much core to the job. A few other enjoyable aspects I can think of:

It is much easier to contextualize random encounters when you know the full setting. Something generated on the fly does not have the same potential for cohesiveness as a pre-designed setting does (unless you are playing a character-focused game that is not about exploration/discovery). It is harder to connect a random encounter to a larger map, situation, regional power struggle, etc. if that thing does not exist yet.

When you are improvising stuff (setting, situation) for players, it can feel bad when it flops. You have an agenda to make things exciting, or genre-appropriate, or connected to the players’ characters, and if the players are bored for a while and your material falls flat, it can sometimes feel like wasted time. But if a prepared section of a dungeon is kind of boring, it’s not so bad. You get to run it impartially, and players still get the feeling that they accomplished some exploration. And now they have the knowledge of this section and they can use it as a resource later on. Then again, if your players don’t feel like exploration on its own, for its own sake, is a fun thing to accomplish, maybe this is not the right style of game for them.

And finally, even though you don’t get the same experience of discovery, you get a thing that the players don’t. When they start tearing it up and wrecking things and making waves, if you have made a large, interconnected setting, you get to see the players affect parts of it that they don’t even know about yet. Sometimes this is bad for the PCs, sometimes really good, and the players don’t even know what the repercussions of their actions are going to be, but you do. And you get to think about them, and contextualize them, and then reveal them just like any other part of the setting.

[trademark]

Hello! Thanks so much for you answer. It was super useful. The OSR definitely understand itself very well because the kinds of books that have come out are always fun things to explore as players. And often fun to read as a DM. (Your books included!)

I was struck by your point about how being an impartial DM running an impartial setting allows you to ignore the “mainstream” compunction to be in charge of the player’s fun. I think in this regard storygames and the OSR are both a response to some of the less enjoyable traditions of DnD.

[Johnstone]

No worries (also, glad you are getting some use out of my stuff!).

I think being “in charge of the players’ fun” is a part of it, but not all of it. In Apocalypse World, your agenda includes “Make their lives not boring” and if you ask Vincent about it, he’ll clarify that he means not boring TO YOU the MC, he doesn’t mean “exciting for the other players.” Because the central focus of the game is the PCs and the dramatic moments of their lives, the rules point towards that – you zoom in on things that either the MC or the player thinks are exciting or interesting about a character, and both MC and player have the tools to get to those moments, so it’s not all on the MC. Whereas, when the central focus is instead “this secret map being revealed to the players,” and everyone’s on board with that, then as long as that happens, it’s all good. So on the one hand, yes the players maybe didn’t get to one of the more exciting rooms of your dungeon, but also they don’t get mad you when you don’t add some random encounters just because you think the game might be getting boring, either for you or for them.

(I think you are right that games these days are better at focusing on one main thing and getting the whole play group on the same page about that, instead of trying to fit everyone in and giving the DM the job of making them all work together.)

I should also say this isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, either. It’s a continuum, or a thing that can be true for parts of the game but not all of it. Since Jason Lutes posted a reply already, I’ll use his current Freebooters game as an example. I haven’t finished Episode 2 yet, but so far, he’s working with a drawn map that has fixed points on it that the party travels between, but the players have spent most of their time dealing with random encounters, and they invent a LOT of the setting details through character history and knowledge.

Wilderness exploration in D&D has always been more like that – fixed points are where the prepared dungeons are, and between them, the random tables dominate play (although published games of the last century almost never encouraged large amounts of player authorship of the setting). Even in way-old campaigns, people moved easily between the prepared dungeon and the randomly-generated wilderness. And with all the tools we have these days, you can move from that style to one more focused on the characters, and then back again, if you want to, as long as you’re clear on what you want to accomplish and how to tweak your rules to get it (I’ve run old school D&D using straight up Apocalypse World rules and while a few parts were weak, it didn’t fall apart at all).

[shane]

I wonder if you (@Johnstone) or @jasonlutes might be so kind as to point us to a link to those game?

[YakovPettersson]

I’m not going to lie - being an OSR GM is frustrating at times. Your job is to establish an objective physical space with comprehensible dimensions. You are the referee between player and imagination. That’s a difficult task, and why so much of OSR is about modules and adventures, as well as a focus on accessibility and information theory.

BUT I will say, as a former GM of mostly story games, I have so much more confidence as a GM when I play OSR, because the game world exists outside of me and its nature is “out of my control”, so to speak. It is no I who decides what is fair, the game does. That might just be an illusion (I still control the game world, of course), but it is extremely helpful. Yeah, it’s true a PbtA game doesn’t mean just “making stuff up” arbitrarily, but the ground of the game world is shakier.

What I find the most pleasurable as an OSR GM though, it is the portrayal of the world as a living, separate entity, with challenges that unknown to me. I don’t know how the players will cross the gigantic pit of thorny live vines, nor do I need them to cross it at all. My players find their own challenges, and I arbitrate what would happen. I have the adequate tools, in the game system or module, to make that challenge interesting and grounded in the logic of a non-existent place. There are no blanks in my map, and where there is uncertainty, there is a procedure to create such a certainty that exists outside of my own biases.

You might find similar joy in games like Blades in the Dark with its Factions and Clocks and the various tables, but I think BitD is a much more grounded game than what is most often called a “story game”.

[Johnstone]

Oh, sure. Here is session 2 on the Lampblack and Brimstone blog (go back on the timeline for sessions 1 and zero): https://lampblack-and-brimstone.com/2019/04/tales-from-the-sodden-reach-session-ii/

[jasonlutes]

Yes! Freebooters on the Frontier is a game I am writing, so I’m just leery of self-promotion. The current playtest docs can be found here, and session zero of the campaign I am currently running can be found here.

EDIT: Whoops, sorry, responding straight from email and did not see that Johnstone had already linked to the game. Thank you, Mr. Metzger.

[wiegraf]

I like bringing coherence to all the disparate elements of the game. Pre-written game elements, dice, tables, the players’ backstories and desires…it’s a great creative thinking exercise and all the more enjoyable because it’s driven by player actions! I also like doing prep in OSR games. Making up some cool tables and seeing how they happen to come up in play is a fun exercise in going from conception to realization without too much “forcing it.”