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| Well? They ain't gonna roll themselves. - (Source, no affiliation) |
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Howdy, Farmhands.
I am a newcomer to NSR/POSR game design. I spent the majority of the early 2020's being staunchly and loudly against anything even slightly resembling an elfgame! For all intents and purposes, I "don't go here." Being new to a community slash movement slash corpse that's been fractured into multiple sub-branches of design for about as long as it's exiswted means that I have a lot to catch up on. A barrier I keep bumping into is how much of the OSR's Wisdom is shared in maxims.
Maybe you've heard a couple. "Just Use Bears." That's a fun one. "Combat is a Fail-State" I see a lot of discussion that ends once that puppy gets thrown in the ring. Neat one or two sentence phrases that are repeated both as a symbol of belonging between two members of the same in-group, and admonishment for anyone who strays too far from the perceived ideal path. Once upon a time, grand discourses were held in which specific topics were chewed upon at length and eventually required a short-hand to quickly express the longer nuance that nobody had time to keep repeating. That nuance has long been lost, leaving behind a quick and witty one-liner, ripe for misinterpretation and argument.
(As I understand it, the early OSR began primarily as a reactionary movement; most of those maxims not only represented the nuance of the conclusions those great luminaries came to in their grand halls of debate, but also the unspoken existing play styles or mechanics they were reacting to in the first place. That's a whole separate blog post from someone more knowledgeable than me, so I digress.)
With this loss of nuance comes the particular thing I'm pissed off about today - The inaccurate assumption that OSR games don't want players to roll dice. (It's in bold so that people who are skimming past the introductory paragraphs can find my thesis statement easier, hello to those people) It's not difficult for me to understand where the assumption comes from. One of the old maxims I've been taught by my OSR elders reads, "Dice can fail, Good plans don't roll," after all. There is a heavy focus on finding ways outside of rolling against a stat to solve problems, usually with things like "Player Ingenuity" or "Role Playing, not Roll Playing." Maxims within Maxims. Maxims all the way down. OSR games, on the average, would prefer players use the resources available to them to avoid relying on their stats to succeed at a challenge. This is not the same as Never rolling, and here's my personal opinion as to how these statements co-exist.
OSR style play culture places a heavy emphasis on problem solving, using inventory and the fictional environment to achieve your goals. Saying "I roll my Stat" and expecting that to clear up the is counter to the ethos of the movement (if not the original 'problem' that maxims were coined to solve.) A player is expected to use the information at hand and avoid relying on Game Mechanics, except as a method of resolution. "Good Plans Don't Roll" implies that Rolling the dice is to be avoided, if only you're clever enough. In a vacuum, that's as good as saying "If you roll the dice, you've failed." directly to a player's face. If they're asked to roll, then surely their plan was bad, right?
But this design choice, this play style does not exist in a vacuum! OSR and really, any elfgame derivative that's been made since Dungeons and Dragons first made it big, were developed in the shadow of and in conversation with D&D. The genre of the thing heavily affects how and why the mechanics within are intended to be called upon. I posit that Dungeon crawling for treasure or glory doesn't lend itself to only ever having good plans! In most instances, the players are explicitly in the dungeon to be tempted into taking risks! A cautious adventurer lives to fight another day, but also doesn't go home with the shiny that was juuuuuust on the other edge of an out of the way spike pit. The mechanics of the game reward clever problem solving by avoiding the dice; but the dice are still there to resolve the possibly-still-sorta-clever-but-mostly-STUPID plans. It's a gamble, a literal roll of the dice, and it's what the players of one's medieval fantasy loot-motivated resource management game should arguably be there for.
This concept is pushed even further in games of the Into The Odd branch, where stat checks are removed entirely for auto-hit damage and Saves, wherein the Roll is not to gain permission for an action to succeed, but a chance to avoid an incoming consequence. But I do think it holds true for most games that find themselves comfortable under the OSR umbrella. Skipping dice rolls for permission for actions that have little to no risk to the players then acts not as a limiter, but a time saving effort to focus on the moments where fate is interesting and the results, good or bad, directly correlated to the players willingly sticking their character's necks out for the chance at something nice.
Until Next Time,
Farmer Gadda
Further Reading-
All Dead Generations: 7 Maxims of the OSR
