OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

[Gus L]

Torchbearer came out when, 2013, 2014? OSR blog discourse on encumbrance and resource management goes quite a bit further back than that.

Sure - but this is around the time I at least started seeing more attention paid to specific encumbrance for supply items. Prior to this most often the idea that the referee could simply make rulings about the realistic size the miscellaneous adventuring material were the most common. Encumbrance discussion with mostly around heavy treasures and combat gear.

 

[TwoSix]

You are explicitly saying "all of this stuff was OSR and all of that stuff is something different."

I fundamentally disagree.

It's possible for both "crocodiles originated in the Mezozoic Era" and "The Mezozoic Era ended 65 million years ago" to both be true.

The fact that crocodiles are still around doesn't make the Mezozoic Era less over.

 

[Gus L]

I'm not upset at anything. I just disagree with your thesis.

That's fine.

The issue is that your argument to refute it is that my goal in making this distinction is sadness or a sense of loss over something and that this invalidates the my thesis. It's either an ad hominine or a straw man, I don't care which really, but it's not an actual argument against the claim I'm making regarding the fracturing of the OSR and its evolution into several increasingly distinct progeny.

 

[Jack Daniel]

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[Gus L]

My recollection differs from yours. I can't remember a time when approaching the dungeon as a lateral thinking puzzle, including an emphasis on mundane equipment as a limited resource, wasn't a perennial topic in the blogging scene.

Note James isn't talking about specific encumbrance for items - he's discussing the dungeon as a puzzle solved by item use, and yes - this is part of the long term set of OSR interests and ideas.

What I'm pointing out is that the use of a Miscellaneous Equipment "80 cn" catch all vs. slot or specific coin encumbrance (which is theoretically possible in AD&D, but not much remarked on) for supply items - which is I think a later concerns.

This is sensible really. If you are in a 10 hour play marathon of the Lake Geneva 1978 variety, it's important to have a mess of torches and whatever - more then you can carry with most slot/and specific weight for item systems. Prior to online play longer sessions were the dominant form of OSR play.

My suspicion is that supply as a clock or risk in itself (i.e. running out of torches) largely becomes an OSR concern in 2013 - 2014 right around the increasing focus on individual online campaigns (often mega-dungeons ones like Nightwick, Pahvelorn etc) with an expedition style of play. The 2-4 hour session requires a smaller "pack" of supplies for them to be meaningful and these games tended to be lower level dungeon crawls (because of attrition both in PCs and players - most were at least semi-open table, but few were as open to bringing characters from other games as during the prior "consta-con" style of play).

 

[Gus L]

What the heck - I edit and it reposts...

So I'll add a thought on Nostalgia.

I think the OSR was significantly about nostalgia, but it's useful to think about nostalgia a bit more then good or bad.

Nostalgia isn't just a deadly disease effecting pre-20th century soldiers ... it's a really sound individual psychological coping mechanism to present difficulty, alienation, sadness and such. Think about better times in the past and you can imagine a better time in the future etc.

It becomes an issue when its part of a larger political strategy - aka what Boym called "restorative nostalgia". That is telling folks that they have lost their happy past and they can restore it (if they do what you want usually). Of course Heraclitus' river, you can never go home again etc. This gets ugly because the person promising to restore the idealized nostalgic whatever can't... so they almost always blame someone. The nostalgic movement turns on the allegedly cause of the rupture with the idealized time or obstacle to its return. It gets worse after that, because even if that group is attacked ... let's say "excised from the polity" ... the idealized nostalgic time doesn't come back. A new scapegoat must be found. It can't last and its destructive, but because nostalgia is good, and because people hate admitting they got tricked the cycle goes on and on.

Ok the OSR and nostalgia. Yeah a lot of people in Gen X want to play old games cause that's what they had fun with as a kid. A lot of younger people want to play games out of a vision that these games are somehow from a better time or more authentic. that's nostalgia. It doesn't have to be bad, because we need not tie it to a claim that we're out to restore anything. It can simply be a warm and reflective thing. That is "reflective nostalgia" allowing one to personally or as a group enjoy the experience while acknowledging that it is a different thing then the past but feels good in a similar way, one can analyze it and have fun with it rather then deifying it with the justification that everything about the past thing was great (because it's idealized).

Anyway I like being nostalgic about playing B2 in summer vacation a basement in 1985. I don't need to define that as the way I want to play B2 now or demand that B2 will transport me to the emotional wellbeing of the happy parts of my childhood. I can also decide to use ascending AC while I do it, or wonder why the guys in the keep want me to kill their seemingly chill neighbors.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The issue is that your argument to refute it is that my goal in making this distinction is sadness or a sense of loss over something and that this invalidates the my thesis. It's either an ad hominine or a straw man, I don't care which really, but it's not an actual argument against the claim I'm making regarding the fracturing of the OSR and its evolution into several increasingly distinct progeny.

No, I made an actual argument -- the OSR isn't dead, it's just changed, as evinced by all of the major OSR games and supplements I listed that occurred after what you called the death of the movement.

Your argument appears to be that the OSR is inextricably tied to Google+ and that whatever came next, since it didn't come out of the central nexus of G+ for discussion, is therefore something else.

Modern day OSR discourse takes place in a variety of places. I don't think there's any objective way to show whether it's better or worse. I think it's definitely different. Your opinion seems to be that this discourse and the products it discusses is, by definition, post-OSR.

We can certainly agree that it's post-G+ (one of the few things that can be objectively agreed upon here, since it's about a concrete fact, rather than opinions).

 

[Jack Daniel]

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[Gus L]

Yeah, see the whole "80 cn misc. gear" thing from Moldvay? That's a thing that, prior to the appearance of Old-School (née B/X) Essentials circa 2018, could be called TSR D&D's best-kept secret. It seems to have gone totally under the radar in OSR circles prior. The impression I get from OSR blogs and forums is that most folks glossed over its existence in Moldvay Basic entirely and didn't even know about it until relatively recently.

Not least because it's not in BECMI, it's not in Holmes, and to my knowledge, it's not in AD&D or 3LBB either.

It's in the LBBs at least.

I don't have my copies here - but I'm pretty sure it's the standard way older editions handled supplies. That was the irony I was trying to point out.

Now did people use it? Not that I could really say. In 198X we mostly didn't give a damn about encumbrance.

 

[Gus L]

No, I made an actual argument -- the OSR isn't dead, it's just changed

[....]

Your argument appears to be that the OSR is inextricably tied to Google+ and that whatever came next, since it didn't come out of the central nexus of G+ for discussion, is therefore something else.

Sigh. Your "argument" got lost under the personal attacks. I mention G+ as a useful date. The changes go deeper then that. The question is and I think should be "At what point do these changes create different scenes/movements/genres etc?" If everything is OSR, it's a meaningless term.

I think I've made my point, I don't think it's controversial or even especially hard to understand. I also know that there are people who will never agree, who will insist that in 20 years when they are playing a 5e retro-clone that it's OSR, because that's how fandom works. Have a great night.