aramis erak
Legend
I have - several smaller D&D forums, and the Traveller boards, there are OSR advocates of C&C and Cepheus Engine. One of the earlier voices in the OSR movement, Jeffr0, is how I came to be aware of a number of games that aren't just a limp rehash of BX with one or two minor changes.But are they still OSR?
Why? Or why not?
i think in the end it comes down to what people play and make that they refer to as OSR.
I've never really seen anyone call their non-retroclone games OSR, and in most discussions I've seen about OSR, people only talk about D&D retroclones.
Is there any kind of interaction or collaboration between say D&D retroplayers and Traveller players? I've never seen any intermingling or ideas crossing over.
I'm not a member of the OSR movement, but I've followed it from its early days of GORE and OSRIC, with a morbid fascination.
And I strongly suspect most people using so-called "OSR games" are instead missing the point the OSR was about - Rules as a fallback, story first, and since the rules don't come into play often, when they do, they don't need to be pretty nor deep, just to answer a few questions and get the story moving again. The point of BX in that was that BX was a framework for the few things where narrative alone wasn't a good method. And a handful of ratings to inspire a character; random gen to prevent replaying the same dude.
That's very different from what I and my friends got from BX back in the day... The way we played was essentially a press-your-luck dungeon penetration wargame, using maps and theater of the mind most of the time, to do no easy access to minis nor money to buy them.
Were there groups playing the OSR way back in the 70's and 80's? Yep. But I never knew of any until the 2000's.
I was, sort of, in a way, OSR adjacent in the 90's. But I realized also in that era that some of the areas in what would be advocated for as the "Old School Style" was not covering areas I wanted.
And hence my curiosity at the OSR movement - the movement itself seems on zombie mode; the ideas that they bloggers were pushing being less and less relevant... the one group I've seen doing OSE was, aside from multiple characters each, doing very traditional "I attack with my Axe"/"Roll to hit" and using attribute rolls for many things outside combat. (I don't recall if OSE actually has att checks in the rules. But the guys playing had the books on the table and were doing d20 rolls on attributes...)