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Free will is great, isn't it?
Howdy, Farmhands!
My blog is very young. While I've been posting various ttrpg design hot takes for years, it wasn't until mid 2024 that I started to produce long-form essays and found that I really enjoyed the experience. Trying to get your entire thought out in a limited format is a good exercise, but some posts just need the extra word count to properly convey their merit. The unfortunate side effect of this switch being that I can no longer assume my audience has passively absorbed my opinions over years of Poasting, and thus a lot of terms I consider fundamental to my understanding of games are new and inscrutable to my readers.
Basically, my discord server politely but firmly asked me to pause and explain what the fuck I'm talking about, please.
So here we are, with the start of a series I'm calling ' Gadda's Blog Crash Course.' While these posts exist to educate my handful of weirdos, they aren't meant to be the definitive word on anything. This is TTRPGS As Explained By Gadda, and I have my own biases and incorrect assumptions as does anyone. I strongly urge anyone with different experiences than I to comment or blog their own additions or rejections of my posts, if only to deepen the pool my readers draw from.
Today's topic seems simple on the surface, but is actually quite deep.
"What is the OSR?"
To put it VERY simply, skipping decades of nuance to get to the core of things- "OSR" or "Old School Revival" is a genre of game that focuses on the trends and experiences people remember from the original years of Dungeons and Dragons. The term began in the year 2000, as a reactionary movement in response to the release of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. The play-style generally focuses on purposefully risking your character's well being for the chance of acquiring goods that will increase their chances of survival during future risks, with a game master remaining as neutral and impartial as possible, neither helping nor hindering the player in their quest to overcome those risks and acquire those goods.
Nothing I say after this point will be nearly as simple.
As time has gone on, and both Dungeons and Dragons as a game and the very online spaces people use to discuss it and it's history have gone through drastic changes, the target and purpose of "The OSR" as a community has changed, splintered, and become incredibly muddled. This is because different people like different things, you see. And also because people dislike people who like different things than themselves. Thus, the term "OSR" has evolved in separate corners of the internet to refer to multiple movements, overlapping play-styles, and as shorthand for an out-group of DnD role-players who aren't currently interested in the ongoing thing WOTC is printing.
To be completely fair to anyone who's confused about any of this- you're not wrong, it is fucking confusing! It's confusing to be IN the in-group that gets this sort of thing, and Homestuck levels of unbearable to parse for anyone outside it! Because there is no actual authority of what is or is not part of the movement, anyone can argue that they've involved, even if their actual circle is leagues removed from whatever older folks believe to be core to their hobby. This leads to some of the absolute worst offenders of online shitheads retreating to "OSR" as some sort of safe zone where they can regurgitate their unacceptable beliefs about sex, gender, and race unchallenged, having been driving away from the current generation of Dungeons and Dragons by a younger, more open minded audience. For many, "OSR" is a dog whistle; whatever takes on it's name is going to be gross and regressive, and is only attended by Bad People.
I will take this moment to assure the reader that this is not my personal experience, and the vast majority of OSR players I engage with are Trans Commie Furries and the straight folks they've befriended along the way. I do want to stress that this hobby has a bright spot.
It is not hard to imagine a movement based on returning to a previous state of a game already rife with colonial and racial subtext (or hell, just Text) to be a haven for regressive politics and hateful ideology. The original DnD is notorious for pushing disgusting stereotypes, and the earliest years of The OSR was primarily about continuing to support that existing game. HOWEVER, I would be a massive dick if I pretended the worst of the worst was the entirety of the hobby during those original years. While is it historical record that many of the game's authors were shitty people with shitty opinions that bled into their work, DnD was a hobby filled with all kinds of people from every walk of life. Many were just as critical of the game's output at the time it was new as there are now that it's flaws have been well documented, discussed, and ultimately ignored by it's publisher. There are a number of individuals interested in an old school style of play who experienced a very different kind of Dungeons and Dragons than is usually spoken about online.
"So... again, What is the OSR???"
OSR is a form of role-playing not dissimilar to it's evolutionary predecessor, Dungeons and Dragons, where you go on medieval fantasy adventures with a Game Master and 1 or more Players. However, it focuses on high risk scenarios and a neutral authority who describes the situations characters are placed in and details the results of said character's choices without favoring or purposefully hindering the player. Different tables and groups and corners of the internet will argue for more specific descriptions, and will continue to argue and debate and add and remove points until the end of time.
"...Okay then, What is the OSR to YOU???"
A number of individuals have attempted to write encompassing descriptions of the hobby, most of which are still pointed to for newcomers to get a quick overview of what to expect. As the hobby and it's corner evolve, new descriptions and summaries are needed. The list of positive attributes I associate with OSR games is very close to Ben Milton's 2019 attempt to coin a separate name from the baggage of "OSR", though it wasn't able to replace the term in common usage:
Adventure Game: The term “Adventure” does a lot of heavy lifting for a single word, and covers the vast majority of what I enjoy.
- It implies authentic peril and the possibility of loss.
- It implies strangeness, travel, the unexpected, and the confusing.
- It implies variety and an episodic structure, a picaresque rather than a novel.
- It implies cleverness, ingenuity, and cunning rather than a bloody slog.
- It implies characters like Conan, Luke Skywalker, Elric, Hellboy or Fafrd.
- It’s short, simple, and isn’t obscure. Episodic-high-stakes-open-ended-lateral-problem-solving-fantasy-game might be more accurate, but good luck with that catching on.
- It evokes (in my head) a game that’s simple, unpretentious, and focused on fun at the table.
However, the post that I repeatedly link to, is W.F. Smith's Posters, Posers, and POSR(s), which includes the argument that the current batch of OSR games in line with the online diy-dnd blogging scene largely is it's own beast, with a lineage connecting to the original OSR but without a direct through-line. It's also a significantly better historical guide through the OSR than the one I've made above, if only because he's very good at linking to other people who have posted further reading.
This "blogosphere" of people posting and debating and creating answers to problems for others to maybe make use of is the backbone of the OSR as I experience it. There is no need to adhere to a specific vision of a lost playstyle, nor the necessity of keeping your math compatible with a game written by shitty people with shitty ideas. There are carried on elements of those products, for sure, but only after they have been inspected, dissected, and deemed worthy of carrying on. And just as the very term "OSR" itself evolved in different pockets of the internet, so too have different camps around specific mechanics and vibes formed as different people judge these smaller elements of a larger experience and find them worth keeping or something to discard.
This, then, is the "OSR" that I enjoy- not a dogged defiance of time, digging it's heels in to remain in a space that was outdated before the 90's finished rolling through; but a culture of investigation, discussion, and recycling of the historical record of play by people who like pretending to be elves. There have been games that come out of this culture that affirm the principles of those original works, joss them entirely, or even invent new frameworks to emulate the vibes.
I just wish we could all agree on a different name for SEO purposes.
Until Next Time,
Farmer Gadda
