Why don't many OSR games have mechanics for non-combat?

#1

I’m a fan of OSR-style games that are light on rules (like Into the Odd, for example). I find it quite strange, though, that however much they incentivise players to avoid combat where possible (i.e. low HP) they don’t choose to fill their pages with rules on things other than hitting things and damaging them.

I mean, creatures and NPCs are generally defined largely in terms of their AC, HD, etc. But then they’re also kind of saying “probably best not to fight things if you can help it”. But why don’t more games therefore have at least as many rules/stats, if not more, for exploring a navigating a wilderness or reading an ancient tome?

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#2

While an obvious reason might be the D&D dungeoncrawling legacy (what if, for example, the OSR descended from Traveller instead?), I’d also say this: maybe these rules are in fact there but not where we’d expect them. When I look at a module like A Pound of Flesh, the Ultraviolet Grasslands or the weird microclasses of Electric Bastionland I see a lot of non-combat game/“rules”-design.

I think where OSR-style content definitely still underserves is where rules would strain or question the concept of an adventure game (relationships, emotional needs, daily life, the internal, slow and observational modes,…).

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#3

I guess I’m going to disagree a bit. But first you are right. There are definitely a lot rules around combat in D&D and its descendants, probably because D&D itself comes from table top wargaming tradition where combat was the point of the game.


^^ I’ll be referencing this document

Now the part where I disagree. In a game like B/X D&D (sorry I’m not as familiar with into the odd) there are pretty extensive rules for exploration which involve tracking light, encumbrance, and time. There’s an entire page in that doc above that is strictly dealing with doors (e.g. different types of doors, how likely your to hear something listening at a door etc). I will note though that a lot of folks to don’t bother to read or use these rules necessarily which I think is interesting in its own right.

But it seems like Julian has the heart of it, OSR games generally assume a prewritten module (anything from a published module to something you scribbled in a notebook) and that’s where the core of the adventuring rules come from. Lots OSR of games will have hex crawling procedures, but it’s the modules that will actually have the hex key and random encounter table.

Essentially I think these games prefer to use predetermined world facts like “reading the tome on the alter in room 5 will cause the reader to be possessed by the demon Borklap” rather than having a general procedure for reading ancient tomes.

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#4

Another perspective that I think is prevalent is that the games devote pages to creating rules for difficult to adjudicate scenarios, and that all other scenarios should be handled primarily through roleplaying with the GM acting as referee and making rulings on the outcome without needing to consult a specific set of rules. A GM might not know how a level 1 group would fair against 3 orc skeletons and a fireball throwing goblin so there are plenty of rules to make sure this situation is handled fairly. A tense negotiation between a fireball throwing goblin and a level 1 group is seen as easier to handle and preferable to handle through roleplaying and GM rulings. This is essentially fictional positioning. While it can be beneficial to codify these sorts of things and include rules on them (especially when bringing in people new to a style of roleplaying for example), I think many OSR creators defer to the GM and the OSR culture / community instead. Which is valid as well since many OSR GM’s will already have their own ways of handling these non-combat scenarios.

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#5

All good justifications. What do you think, though, about the notion that players are drawn to interact with mechanics and that this can mean that play gravitates to parts of a system which are crunchy?

Also, I can influence my success in combat in predictable ways through gear selection (e.g, buy a weapon with a higher damage die), but if I buy a ten foot pole I don’t have that same level of prediction of success in, say, navigating a dungeon. Is this difference significant? What if it was flipped and a sword just provided options for solving problems and had no clear mechanical benefit, and the pole had a die you roll that says whether you can get over a pit (a spear has a die for this, but it’s not as high a die as the ten foot pole, say).

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#6

I can’t speak to games published in the last couple of years with ultra-light rue systems (perhaps they aren’t designed for resource based dungeoneering?), but classic games such as 1974 D&D (OD&D), 1979 AD&D and 1981 Moldvay Basic D&D also have relatively lean rules for key dungeoneering elements. I suspect this comes from the core distinctions between classic games and more contemporary ones.

In classic games rules exist largely to provide mechanics for bad, potentially lethal situations or ones whose results are difficult to judge: combat, ingesting poison, falling. The GM is supposed to ajudicate the results of less unknowable or deadly actions or put in place house rules. Note how rules in classic games are esoteric - there’s no unified mechanic that sets a standard for how everything in the game world is resolved - which suggests that novel challenges requiring mechanical resolution can be determined with novel methods. Likewise there’s several underutilized and seemingly duplicative sorts of metrics on a classic D&D character sheet: Stats, stat bonuses, saving throws, level, HP, AC - all of which can offer metrics for judging relative success or failure, and all of which can be attacked by challenges. Yet there aren’t rules for role play or negotiation beyond reaction rolls, morale and some suggestion the CHR matters - because the individual GM is to decide how a given negotiation works. What the goals and natures of NPC are for example. Esoteric rules leave gaps and openings, because they aren’t totalizing, they focus on specific areas where the GM and players are expected to have trouble deciding how to resolve a challenge because either it’s far from lived experience (magic), it’s hard to judge (combat) or the stakes are high enough for a negative result to degrade trust in the GM (saving v. lethal poison).

This isn’t to say that classic games mechanics for dungeoneering are great - some basics likes timekeeping and encumbrance are quite complex and/or time consuming and others like light aren’t very well elaborated on (there’s no real rules for what to do when you run out of light sources). This lack or over-complexity may be part of what drove contemporary trad games deeper into tactical combat and adventure paths, simply because those rules were clearer and easier to elaborate on. In more contemporary classic derived games there is some movement to revitalize the exploration/dungeoneering aspect of the game.

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#7

That’s a very good point, and I know what you are talking about when you say players sometimes gravitate to the crunchy bits of the system. Honestly it’s a very reasonable way of engaging with a game.

I don’t think you are asking for advice or anything, but there are some techniques I use to emphasize exploration over combat, and more importantly to promote engaging with the fiction over engaging with the mechanics.

  1. I don’t explain the combat rules until the characters engage in their first melee.
  2. I only use game mechanics if the players don’t give enough detail to adjudicate the action without them.

So for an example of number 2 the base chance of successfully searching an area for an adventurer in b/x rules is 1 in 6 per turn. This is ridiculously low. However if the character engages with features of the room and gives a full description of what they are doing like “I go up to all the tapestries on the wall and tear them down”, they will immediately find the secret door if it makes sense based on the fiction (and by this I mean the map shows there’s a door there). The base probabilities in these games are often harsh so you can actually make engaging with the fiction directly and avoiding the mechanics it’s own reward.

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#8

Nice. I think I do pretty much the same in fact.

EDIT: And it certainly helps me to see that I’m not alone in this approach!

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#9

OSR is many things to many people. One view would be that OSR is about dangerous dungeon exploration which is combat heavy. In this case you wouldn’t need other systems. Another would be that it’s about in-system combat mechanics and in-real-life out of box thinking and problem solving. Again - little need for non-combat systems.

There are probably other interpretations what would essentially boil down to “no need”. But personally it always irked me that some retro systems have attributes with little mechanics supporting them. :wink: So I see where you’re coming from. But at the same time I’m not sure I would want OSR system to be heavy on a political drama. I mean, sure, why not, but that would go beyond my definition of OSR which, again, once again boils down to “what’s OSR” and there’s no single answer to that.

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#10

Very cool thoughts. I’m pretty new to analysing OSR (not new to playing OSR-like games though) so this kind of conversation is really interesting and instructive to me.

It’s clear that a lot of OSR rule systems have been coming out of recent years and the vast majority seem to continue to promote a heavy emphasis on combat whether they intend to or not. There’s an interesting kind of dichotomy to me. We say “try to avoid fights because you’ll probably die” and also “here are some special and fun mechanics for fighting”. I guess I just find it weird that this seems so prevalent; are we going to see a backlash or evolution of this sort of design do you think?

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#11

For what it’s worth, my favourite OSR-style games don’t promote as heavy an emphasis on combat or offer “special and fun mechanics for fighting”. (I’m thinking of games like Into the Odd, for example.)

It’s nevertheless true that the “magnetic” effect of rules-in-existence is strong. Very, very few OSR-style games are entirely combat-free, for instance; the very existence of combat-oriented classes, hit points, and similar features promote an unexamined focus on combat. I could see someone using something more like the Cthulhu Dark rules to run a dungeon crawl module, though, and it wouldn’t be all that different from more typical OSR play.

I like your suggestion or implication that we might see an even further evolution of OSR-style play away from D&D’s wargame roots, and that could be an interesting thing to see. Would someone make a game that’s more like the computer game Myst in style, for instance, despite coming from an OSR background or aesthetic? Why not?

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#12

This seems to be exactly what already happened to “Old School” games. i.e. the games that OSR is based on not OSR games themselves. People noticed that RPG’s were dedicating all this space to combat and that was what the games ended up focusing on even though they might say they are about something else, and so we started getting story games and the types of games that grew out of the forge where the games were laser focused on providing rules for everything that the game was about.

The OSR came after all of that happened and from my perspective a lot of OSR was saying “Yes, old games did only have rules for combat but that’s good actually. That leaves the rest of the game space open for player creativity and gm judgement”. So from what I can tell we’ve already had the backlash and the evolution and modern OSR contains both games that take the stance I just mentioned and those that Paul_T describes and then there’s also things like Dungeon World which take the trappings of old school D&D but in a more story game focus.

But maybe history will repeat itself and there will be a big movement within the OSR community that echoes the movement that occurred in the roleplaying community against those original old school game design styles. I haven’t totally followed it but maybe there’s an element of this in the Sword Dream movement?

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#13

Hmm that’s a cool question. It’s been a looong time since I played Myst, from what I remember you a basically exploring a location and solving puzzle to get to the other parts of the location?

I like that game but it’s also a solo experience, so if I sit there for 30 minutes noodling on a particular puzzle no one is going to get frustrated or bored. But if someone’s just sitting watching me think about a puzzle like that… well there just doesn’t seem to be enough at stake to make that interesting.

Questions of life and death are pretty compelling, if you take that out of an exploration game I’m not so sure where the tension is. You could say that in the Myst game the tension can be over whether or not they get to see that part of the location, but that seems wasteful. The nice thing about dungeon delving is you can assume the players will be able to make it to the bottom eventually, and the stakes question becomes at what cost?

I probably just feel this way because I’m set in my ways. I’m sure there can be costs to adventuring other than the death of individuals… But I don’t really know what it looks like. There has to be some tension which keeps you from just careening from place other than the possibility of pit traps under the carpet.

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#14

In the same way that combat is assumed by combat mechanics, I would say that life and death results are assumed by…life mechanics! Whatever the character’s gauge for function/nonfunctional is will be the metric by which we assume that character is assaulted. Sanity if Cthulhu games, Morale in war-themed games, timers for…time-base events, you get it.

We could make an OSR game about navigating the “labyrinth” of a relationship, with a meter tracking how strong the two character’s bond is, the assumption being that failure in challenges deals “damage” to their love. We must then narratively position “damaging” states as events in which the characters fail to communicate instead of them getting stabbed.

Getting my head out of the clouds, there are also plenty of pass/fail states for things other than a character’s life. Having equipment getting lost or destroyed. Failing to recover treasure. Getting maimed, cursed, or mutated. The simpler or more binary the life/death states are, the more implied freedom (and creative demand) you have to come up with rulings for everything that’s not life or death.

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#15

I could see someone using something more like the Cthulhu Dark rules to run a dungeon crawl module, though, and it wouldn’t be all that different from more typical OSR play.

This is more or less the concept behind Trophy Gold.

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#16

A few years ago when I was thinking about how to apply the dungeon crawl paradigm (boiled down to something like the probably overly broad “a team of specialists navigating a dangerous environment in search of something valuable with an emphasis on resource management”) to other things than dungeons (haunted houses, burning buildings, Hell, someone’s dreams, etc), navigating a rocky relationship was one thing that struck my fancy. So at least there’s two of us who’s thought of that!

Going back to the more classic dungeon setting, you could also focus on the economic aspects. Equipment costs money, recovering from injuries from traps and falls costs money, hiring assistants costs money, and if the value of what you bring out doesn’t match what you’re paying you’ll be out of the game even if you’re not dead dead. (Darkest Dungeon has some of this, even if the emphasis there is much more on combat.)

Also, things can be plenty deadly without combat if you go heavily into traps.

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#17

Oh absolutely!

You just touched on, I think, one of the things that I makes me a little sad when I read many OSR rule-sets: a lack of good death mechanics. Specifically, many games, in trying to stay true to some little games that went before, have you drop dead at 0 HP (or maybe -2). I think this misses all sorts of interesting ways to make death and serious injury more of a challenge that players can engage with. For examples of interesting ways to build mechanics around this to make things less sudden and final (but still punishing) we can look at games like Into the Odd (now you are grinding down an ability score and rolling to avoid critical wounds) and the house rules proposed on the Last Gasp blog (‘grit’ and ‘flesh’ points), or Dungeon World’s Last Breath move.

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#18

This is the premise behind the Torchbearer RPG. While I have issues with some of the way that game works, it does seem to better address the espoused (or just implied) intent and drive behind the OSR ‘movement’ than many OD&D-derived OSR games do.

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#19

Torchbearer is one of those games where it does something I’m interested in but seems to do it in a way that makes it difficult for me to get into it. I think I have it somewhere in my pdf collection but I’ve nevered managed to get through it.

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#20

I find that games with differing mechanics, but the trappof OSR games can have better resolution systems for other types of activety than combat. For example, I run GURPS Dungeon Fantasy/DFRPG, which has simple to complex systems for handling social, knowledge based, and non- combat physical skills in addition to the ubiquitous combat skills, all using a base mechanic. Role playing through interactions grants a bonus to the dice,which are still used for arbitration.