What makes a game OSR?

[aramis erak]

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 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.

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...)

 

[aramis erak]

It's not nostalgia for a lot of people. There are plenty of people in the OSR who were not alive when the original games were made and regularly played, so there was no nostalgia. There's also plenty of people who did not adopt the new stuff when it came out. They stuck with the old stuff, so there was no nostalgia. Like my D&D group. We played AD&D. 2E came out and we kept playing AD&D. 3E came out and we kept playing AD&D. 3.5 came out and we kept on playing AD&D. You can't recapture something when you never had it in the first place and you don't need to recapture something you never lost.

Just because you still have something doesn't mean it's not nosgtalgia that keeps you using it. Nor does it mean that continued use is purely nostalgic.

Have a deep nostalgia about my bass recorder and banjo. That I still own and play it doesn't make it less so. I'm certain, after I sell my banjo, I'll miss it. But I can't play it well, and can't play it nearly as well as I used to, and my hands are getting worse... when I do break it out, it's purely for nostalgia reasons - despite it being about 30m away at the moment. Keeping it to now has been mostly emotional, not practical. Practical, I'd have sold it off in 2016... when I ceased needing it for work. Similarly my Violin and Viola.

And also my collection of Classic Traveller dead tree. I'll never be using the books again, but I can't let go of them; I do happen to have them all in PDF, too, and those I have used - but not to run CT. And my love of MegaTraveller? well... that's gone away, too. I ran it earlier this year. None of us are missing it. (Well, maybe my wife is.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No.
Several OSR games are built upon other engines - GORE is CoC, Cepheus Engine and 6 Stat are based upon Classic Traveller. Mutant Future is actually based upon Gamma World. 4C system is based upon TSR's Marvel Super Heroes.

While the D&D derived section are the most visible, the OSR fanbase has included in their discussions a number of games that are not D&D mechanics. The most visible of those is the very much lauded Castles and Crusades.

And then, we get the OSR playstyle but new rules games like Mork Börg and Neoclassical Greek Revival...

Yeah, a large portion of the OSR community is fairly obsessed with FASERIP, the Marvel Super Heroes system.

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah, a large portion of the OSR community is fairly obsessed with FASERIP, the Marvel Super Heroes system.

And 4c, its clone.
And its Conan version. And that one's clone, ZeFRS.

 

[John Dallman]

OSR-Style Roleplay involves common agreement over intent (with everyone agreeing that imagined events will unfold according to in-world logic) authority (with players controlling their characters’ actions, and the GM controlling the rest, and also making judgment calls about the unfolding of events) and interfacing (focusing on particular physical places, objects, and actions). This leads to a distinct style of play that is good for creative problem-solving and immersion, . . .

I'd call that simply "traditional role-playing games." I'm one of the people who never moved to a later D&D than AD&D1e, although I've played a fair number of other systems, and nowadays, mostly play GURPS.

while eschewing some otherwise popular tools to ensure that challenges will be balanced, dramatic questions resolved in a satisfying way, or characters are a vehicle for self-expression.

Are the tools for "ensuring challenges will be balanced" things like Challenge Rating, expected wealth by level, and the like? My experience with those has been that they're rather prescriptive about the style and content of games. I find this confines the game to cliches, and would rather rely on GM skill.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by either of:

dramatic questions resolved in a satisfying way, or characters are a vehicle for self-expression.

Could you (or anyone) provide examples?
The things I'm more interested in are having some effect on the game world, "making history in it", and in the characters developing as people: understanding each other and themselves, and in growing into being better people, at least by their own standards.

 

[Oligopsony]

I'd call that simply "traditional role-playing games." I'm one of the people who never moved to a later D&D than AD&D1e, although I've played a fair number of other systems, and nowadays, mostly play GURPS.

Are the tools for "ensuring challenges will be balanced" things like Challenge Rating, expected wealth by level, and the like? My experience with those has been that they're rather prescriptive about the style and content of games. I find this confines the game to cliches, and would rather rely on GM skill.

They are, but of course OSR principles are (by definition) prescriptive as well, and all approaches benefit from GM skill. So at that level of abstraction there’s not much difference: challenge rating is a tool to make one style of GMing more manageable, while morale and reaction rolls and hazard dice are a different set of tools to make a different style manageable.

And while again skill matters in any approach, it really is helpful to have tools that function even when you’re not bringing your A-game, whether because you’re a novice or just tired. And a basic Necropraxis hazard die Just Works for its intended use case in the same way (I’m told) 4e encounter math post-Monster Vault does.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by either of:

Could you (or anyone) provide examples?
The things I'm more interested in are having some effect on the game world, "making history in it", and in the characters developing as people: understanding each other and themselves, and in growing into being better people, at least by their own standards.

Let’s say your PC has been growing in understanding of himself and the people around them, but is riven by internal conflict. His son is dying of an otherwise incurable illness, but the villain he just defeated has an artifact that when the right ritual is performed at the right place (some evil temple blah blah blah) will spare someone’s life but suck away the souls of ten random innocents around the world. He’s heading towards the temple, telling himself that it’s to destroy the thing and its fell idols and that of course he would never be seduced by the false promises of evil to save his son, you can’t trust them, but in the back of his mind he knows that it probably will work, and he’s not sure what choice he’ll make when he gets there. It’s killing him, he knows he’ll regret it either way - either choice will be terrible for him but delicious for the audience, adding up to a really interesting dramatic situation and its resolution.

There’s a hostile encounter on the way there, and an opponent lays what would be a killing blow. Does the GM fudge (there, or maybe slightly earlier in the causal chain) in order to get to a much more interesting resolution than “ganked in a random encounter,” or protect the causal integrity of the world? Which choice is a violation of the implicit social contract at the table? Obviously depends on the table (and at a lot of tables there may be undiscussed disagreements here, or the difference secretly split with illusionism), but the tradeoff is real.

 

[John Dallman]

There’s a hostile encounter on the way there, and an opponent lays what would be a killing blow. Does the GM fudge (there, or maybe slightly earlier in the causal chain) in order to get to a much more interesting resolution than “ganked in a random encounter,” or protect the causal integrity of the world? Which choice is a violation of the implicit social contract at the table? Obviously depends on the table (and at a lot of tables there may be undiscussed disagreements here, or the difference secretly split with illusionism), but the tradeoff is real.

If I was running this, I doubt I'd have bothered with the hostile encounter at all. I'd more likely - in the abstract, rather than with the knowledge of the precise circumstances that comes from running prior events - have found a way to show him the goodness of innocents. But if there was a reason for the hostile encounter and the dice fell that way, then yes, it would happen. Because that maintains the game world's integrity.

 

[bloodtide]

I think the Three of:

rulings over rules
player skill
zero to hero player progression

Lists the bare basics of most OSR games.

An OSR game, and most classic games for that matter were:

*Simple, Basic and Straightforward: what i said on the page was it. There were no "questions".

*Rules Lite: A lot of games only filled a couple pages, not counting art.

*If it was not in the rules, the DM would just make it up: Well, really back in Ye Olden Days there was no other choice

*Randomness: The big one here is a lot of classic games had a lot of tables and tables to roll on for a lot of things. And a lot of DMs made their own tables. And in the 21st century you can find websites and blogs of tables

*Unbalanced: The idea of "Balance" was not even a thing.

*Mixing: Is that a robot on a fantasy world? A wizard on a space station? Conan killing demons with an M-16? That's classic game play right there.

 

[Sacrosanct]

rulings over rules
player skill
zero to hero player progression

I think the Three of:

rulings over rules
player skill
zero to hero player progression

I guess one could say you agree with me Cntl-C/V is much faster

 

[aramis erak]

What I've seen, and what I'd consider OSR, the key elements are:

1. Relatively simple rules that
   1. are usually a subset of the contents of the books in use, not the RAW
   2. are usually pretty bland, mechanically ‡
   3. there is an expectation of the GM being very descriptive.
2. Rulings not Rules -- some to the point of saying "If you can't remember it, don't bother looking it up."‡
3. Setting trumps rules †‡
4. interpersonal interaction is usually purely roleplay, no mechanics ‡
5. Random Character gen
6. Short time character gen - if your character dies, under 15 rolls and then 10 min for shoppy store.

While I do respect the ideals, they're not for me.
I like "Rules as framework for texturing the world." And rules that are mechanically doing interesting things. And I really like using skill or attribute checks to prevent dump-statting Charisma...

My favorite pre-1980 game? Nope, not T&T! It's

Spoiler

Starsips & Spacemen

. I at one point tried to make a d20 conversion, and discovered quickly I didn't like the changes I would need. I had permission from Dr. Kanterman; my playtest sessions sucked so bad we switched to the original. I'm not a great designer... but one of my games wound up on the RPG trove's pirated stuff site.

----
† I prefer mechanics to be or to evoke the setting, so this is directly antithetical to my psychological needs
‡ These are why I am not a fan of the OSR movement.