What's your OSR?

#43

I’m not sure what “my OSR” is right now. I feel utterly alienated from what I think of as “the OSR”, but I’m not sure what or whom that leaves me with. Maybe Sword*Dream?

Let me stipulate that I know there is no “the” anything, that every group contains multiple factions competing to be the ones who get to offer the more official definition. But my impression of which faction is currently “winning” leaves me wanting absolutely no part of the OSR right now.

I don’t want to participate in a debate about whether Gygax or Arenson was better and/or more important, nor about which surviving friend, family member, or original player is the most legitimate inheritor of their glory.

I don’t want to play a game written by a self-described “supervillain” fascist, nor do I want to listen to people who’ll tell me that I ought to ignore the author’s fascism, or that “reaching across the aisle” to shake hands with fascists is the correct way to have a properly “civil discourse”. I don’t want to be told that any attempts to depict real-world diversity in a gameworld is an unwarranted intrusion of “politics into gaming”, nor do I want to listen to the self-described champions of “free speech” whose primary action in supposed-defense of this freedom is trying to silence anyone who criticizes them.

I’m not interested in talking about how much fun it is to play games by an artist who harassed dozens of people online and still managed to have an online persona that was less bad than the truth about his offline behavior. I’m not interested in trying to preserve the legacy of the publisher who gave that artist his biggest platform before, and who continues to flirt with supporting him even today. I get no enjoyment talking to people who still seem to be repeating the artist’s pet ideas and theories, or who appear to me to be trying to carry on his vision for the OSR even in his absence.

Those, to me eye, are the biggest or most vocal or currently most successful of the factions claiming to represent the OSR.

One thing all this has done is massively increased my interest in people and games that fall outside those three groups. Finding time to learn and play them has been a challenge. But I’d rather do something new and different (even if the people doing it are also calling themselves OSR) than continue with what’s gone before.

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#44

Labels and identity are important for creating a philosophy/group to engage with. Maybe it would be prudent to create a separation from what OSR represents right now, something like “Classic Revival” or “New Players Old Games” to rally around both as a more welcoming title (I get what “OSR” is trying to evoke but hey, that’s loaded language for a lot of people) and as an escape avenue for people who like OSR principles but not OSR people.

#45

This is effectively what SWORD DREAM is. See for example this post.

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#46

Love the evocative name, completely disagree with the ethos being proposed. I don’t think it’s bad philosophy, but if you want to create a movement meant to separate and allow others to move on from OSR, you can’t pitch the baby out with the bathwater (although a more appropriate analogy from what I read is the author wants to trash bathtubs altogether). Yes, there is inherent danger in creating ingroup/outgroup mentality when you create a “community”, but it’s a little self defeating to say “here’s this new movement, nobody runs it, don’t brand it, don’t exclude people from it”. That’s not a movement, that’s just a label you can give people you approve of.

I don’t want to sound like I’m harshing the vibes, I really like the actual genre SWORD DREAMS espouses, but I don’t think aggressively resisting community is the way to actually make it stick.

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#47

I’m with you 100% Anne, though that might not be good company, and it’s very disheartening seeing something one has given time and creative energy to sort of rot away - though I suppose one could say that about my country and profession currently as well.

I’m not sure what the post-OSR looks like, or if one even needs it. It’d be nice to feel a kinship and community, and it’d be nice to offer up a project or two to one. At the same time I can play my campaign around my kitchen table and discover how 5E just won’t quite work without the YDIS lads and all the other citizens of the internet raising my gorge. Wandering about the ruins one notices a same sort of loneliness in most of the former “OSR” scenes and places: fracture, disconnection and a dying away of mutuality. So I don’t think it’s just you or I feeling a sense of exile - I think the worst people of the OSR are feeling scattered as well.

One of the things that made 2011 - 2015 old-school blogging and online play good was the way that creators shared and built off each other while cheering one another’s projects without taking things too seriously. So much now is about publishing and locking down specifics and ideas under one’s name and brand. Every 2 page mini-game gets published and every little hack is another game.

I don’t know how the frission and guarded nature of the current classic game space can be remedied, while making it welcoming for people who aren’t middle-aged white guys, but if you want to figure it out I will cheer you on even if I’m too curmudgeonly to build any sort of community myself.

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#48

I think people are too quick to cede something they helped build. The OSR is a lot of things and a lot of people. Everyone people are complaining about now were also loud and active from what feels like the early days of the scene. I think you can choose to shrug your shoulders and move somewhere else—which to be fair is totally valid. Sometimes you don’t want to bother with reforming anything. Or you don’t want to be adjacent to stupid people. Who has time for that? But! You can also be loud and try and make space for the people you like. Which has been my tack this whole time. Why give up the thing you like to fucking Pundit or whomever else?

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#49

To be fair, was not asking about the politics of OSR, which many of us outside publishing no little about. As such, I think it would be nice to consider this thread not a loaded question, which is what the forum requests.

On a side note, if @jasoncordova is using the term OSR all over his Fear of Black Dragon podcast. I don’t think the acronym is fully political.

#50

I understand what you mean about missing the feeling of there being a “community” or “scene” that one could belong to. As @technoskald mentions, Sword Dream might offer one such place, but at the moment it feels more like “a thing I have heard of” than “a thing I am participating in.” Then again, that might be as simple as writing an “I am in Sword Dream now” post on my blog.

I think there is still quite a bit of free sharing going on. Maybe less than the time you’re thinking of? Most of the pdfs on most of the Itch.io “jams” I’ve seen have been free or pwyw, they’re just being hosted on itch.io rather than being hosted directly on anyone’s blog.

In terms of running the kind of resource-focused, exploration-focused games you’re interested in, I can tell that 5e isn’t perfect, but it seems like not so far off either. The exhaustion and rest mechanics, in particular, seem like additions to 5e that actually facilitate resource management during exploration.

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#51

Just diving in real quick to say I don’t get into conversations like this. They always end badly for me!

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#52

  1. I completely agree with @diyanddragons re: what I don’t want to see in my gaming spaces.

  2. I think that @Gus.L is correct re the scattered feeling that’s hitting almost all the OSR spaces, with a few exceptions (that unfortunately tend towards the spaces I’m least interested in).

  3. I don’t think that the situation is hopeless for creating spaces and scenes discussing our particular blends of trad gaming, though. The SWORD DREAM discussion is still pretty early, but there are people latching on and working in those spaces - including new people who haven’t been part of the scene before! (And as Anne notes, many of those jams are 100% creative interchange and open documents for people.)

I also see existing non-shitty creators gearing up to continue to make good stuff. Melsonian Arts Council is going strong – I think Troika and Luka’s SEACAT are going to be pretty solid breakout systems – and there are new folks coming in and taking their first steps into the design space.

The commercial aspect is still there, but there continue to be pushes back against that, community creation events, and the like.

Shit’s wobbly, and there’s lots of work to be done, but I think there’s still some hope.*

*Of course, this feeling fluctuates. Talk to me in a week and I might be “fuck it burn it all down,” ngl.

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#53

Totally fair! I was just pointing out that the label OSR was not originally and is not to most gamers new to the hobby or OSR, considered political. My example is that you use the acronym frequently, so it at least is often used without the context of toxic right wing associates. You have no argument from me that associating with a creep and his ilk is unpleasant. I just think the term is more broad. Apparently, I missed the period in gaming when OSR became associated with extreme right-wing politics.

#54

My experience with SWORDDREAM was that it’s its own thing, seemingly devoted to rules lite experimentation and with some anti-D&D bias. I support its efforts, but it is not a place I feel comfortable, and I don’t want to intrude on someone else’s thing.

All in all I am likely just nostalgic, at my age the nostalgia comes pretty easily. It is also likely that I am just not part of the more community minded TTRPG places.

Now 5E I can talk about at length (after running it for 6months). It can be bent towards the playstyle I like, location based, exploration and resource management … but … it pushes back. Fiercely. The sharp power curve is hard to wrestle with and the combat in it is designed to increase in complexity and importance with level. Worse the combat is weighted towards discrete encounters and isn’t very ‘swingy’, making it hard to get through a combat without the PCs being worn down and in need of retreat/rest.

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#55

I’ve been very on the fence about “Voice” vs “Exit” as responses to developments I don’t like within the OSR. As @Humza_K says above, ask me again in a week and I might have a different answer. But lately every new development in OSR-land pushes me more toward “Exit”.

I mean, I’m not leaving my blog, or quitting Gauntlet (in fact I’m glad I joined), and I’m still interested in “old school style” rules and adventures, but I think recently my ambivalence toward “the OSR” has turned to rejection, and at the moment, I’m not sure what it would take for me to go back.

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#56

@diyanddragons
What’s at least a little funny, for me. Is that MY OSR is…and will continue to be people like you.

Along the way, I met these amazing peoples. The “scene” for me will always be these unique people good and bad.

But my memory of it … my story about it will be of the time I’ve spent reading your blog posts or interacting with you in various spots. Camaraderie like playing games with Gus & Ram, or HOURS and HOURS of listening to Jason while driving or mowing or washing dishes. Or that time that Stewart made a Rainbow OSR logo.

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