What if "OSR" meant something different? 

Very thoughtful. I’ve always had issue with that attitude that there was less IC immersion in OSR. This runs directly counter to the examples of play in Moldvay (Morgan Ironwolf), Mentzer (the legendary solo adventure) and the original DMGs example of play (the abandoned monastery) I think Gary and co meant their fame to be “story mode”, but because of mechanical issues, the culture of a soulless dungeon crawl emerged.

This is actually something I've been chewing over for a while now. I think the principle difference between the OSR and newer game systems is how much of a *game* it is. 5e DnD presents and reinforces its structure as a story-telling tool more than a game; death is infrequent, success is expected, magic items take a backseat to powers, players are presented with a plethora of options that make backstory almost as important, if not more so, than the adventure they're moving towards. It's (worryingly, I think) maybe a step or two away from Let's Pretend... Or sitting at a table anchored to three or four other people acting out fan fiction about their character at worst. So, what's the OSR? A game with a narrative, as opposed to the new school which is a narrative with the pretense of a game.

By the way: I would love to see an in depth CGA response to the Finch manifesto at some point! Absolutely.

What a brilliant, thoughtful video! Well done.

The heroic vs superheroic thing kind of makes me chuckle because there are superhero old school games. Villains and Vigilantes, Marvel Superheros ect... I don't think I disagreed with any of your points in this video.

These mostly resonate with me (although I’m less enthusiastic about randomness playing too big a roll in character creation, and I think randomness in environment is appropriate for some games more than others) so I’m wondering if you’re at all versed in the FKR movement. You did say the magic word, “Kriegspiel” at one point, but otherwise I don’t remember you ever mentioning it. While this doesn’t match the tenants of FKR one-to-one, it’s not incompatible, and I find it a hell of a lot more interesting and inviting than both the culture around more “modern” games and the prevailing OSR attitudes. I myself am only a little bit involved with it because the relevant communities seem to mostly be on Discord which I find difficult to keep up with.

I am very interested in the type of "old school" you talk about. My greatest issue is i want to run (and play) in this type of game, but most of these old school rule systems (especially modules) seem to built around large "parties." My stage in life makes most of my gaming one on one or maybe tops three players. Any suggestions on a rule system or just general play advice for getting that emergent story and resource management style with a much smaller party. Also the whole "balanced" combat or combat as war vs sport I think is important, but I would like more guidelines on fitting into that range, I find its difficult to get encounters that are not either super easy or tpk. Thanks for the great video!

I made the "get treasure" vs "kill the bad guy" comment. It's reductive, but it captures a part of the change.

With regards to player skill vs. character abilities being in tension with immersive roleplaying, I'd say this is half true. To my mind immersive roleplaying involves both playing a character (who's particular capabilities and outlook is divergent with the player's) and playing in a simulated environment. The player skill vs. character abilities principle is in tension with inhabiting a character, but can aid one's sense of immersion in the simulated environment. This indicates to me that the OSR (from the Finchian perspective at least) is not incoherent in it's approach to immersive roleplay, but that it's aligned toward focus on settings rather than characters. More dungeon-centered than hero-centered.

An 8th level hero in OD&D is literally called a Superhero!

I have to laugh about IC play. I play every game from an IC perspective because that's how I like to play and I hope players try and enjoy their table the way they like to play regardless of the "game" they are playing; however, the rest of the table benefits from most players sharing a certain style. I've been away for 11 months and would love to have contributed to this conversation at the time with a response vlog. Fantastic video.

OSR has to be D20 save rolls and index card character sheets. Maybe combat result tables can be thrown into the mix.

A kind of interesting question, how would one design a, completely original, OSR game? Like not using a specific system as it's base but making a game ground up that would fit in amongst the 70s-early90s tabletops?

To me, part of the OSR experience is embracing the wargaming origins of the game. I played a lot of D&D in the eighties, but it wasn't until i started playing wargames that i came to appreciate much of the early D&D rules. Also, because of the danger and more severe consequences to characters, players tended to have more characters in their roster and kept track of a longer broader campaign rather than a narrow story focused on only a few characters. One character might be out of action for weeks, recuperating, researching, training, etc. while another is adventuring. I think players tended to use more hirelings and henchmen in adventures than in modern adventures. It was not unusual for us to have 10 or 12 characters in a party at a time, yet only 4 or 5 players.

Traveller and Rolemaster as OSR? You sold me. The idea that the OSR obsession with chest-thumping, difficulty as a fetish and the idea (like an isekai anime) of starting out as a nobody but playing the game so you can become BATMAN as really pretty childish and hostile to the idea of immersion in a rich secondary world. Yeah sold here too. Honestly I wish there was a third setting. Not zero to hero, not superhero to god, but like what the manifesto you read calls "dwarf simulation". That sounds great to me. Just be THAT guy and see where his story goes. I was always frustrated by the 2e approach to Dark Sun and Ravenloft because there was this explicit assumption that the world is screwed up, but you're a Hero--and you're expected to change it into a land of rainbows and gumdrops--where I just like the idea of a setting where finding water and a little food to eat was the equivalent of treasure. Survival was the quest. Of your three points I most love the idea of OSR being guided by an invitation to randomness, to let the dice and tables be a doorway to interesting things happening. Just across the board that sounds great to me. Open-endedness I'm less inclined to say has gone anywhere. I'd argue regardless of edition the adventure modules have been closed ened: go here, do this. If you leave the path you're punished, or at least you're on your own. Sandbox play, just out in the world getting into trouble (which seems like where entropy seems to draw most games run by less experienced folks) has been with us all along--but whether it's embraced as what you should be doing, or panicked at as something to fix has always been an issue, in OSR and newer games alike. Symmetry between PCs and NPCs has occurred system to system throughout the ages--but feels most strongly like what D&D was like in the 3rd edition/Pathfinder era. Statblocks for everything. Make sure everything runs right. Do all the math. I don't know that games have ever been made better for having the GM roll for every NPC trying to do every thing. Mostly I feel like it's a quick trip to the GM burning out their processor trying to track 100 different NPCs in a big battle and the players having to sit around watching the GM roll dice and mumble to himself about stuff that has nothing to do with them for 20 minutes every round. So I don't know how much I love that particular element--or really how much I feel like that's old school (70s-80s) as much as premodern (2000s). But yeah, on the whole, what you're saying, that we need a new more inclusive and broader definition of the OSR--I love that! I think it may take some more philosophical tacking down to figure out exactly what it is we're wanting to go back to--but I do feel like it has something to do with more human scale, self-directed stories with more openness to randomness and less controlled encounter based environments where we're just exploring these crazy worlds and anything could happen.

Nice question! 🌈

Sorry I missed this when you were live.

Love the long format discussions/essays. Keep up the good work dude, enjoy my RU-vid Premium shmeckles.

20:30 This speaks to the issue of roleplaying "Game". A game assumes a zero-sum outcome. Everything is equal and all players have a chance to "win" the scenario or game. Roleplaying is not a traditional game, in that one player is a GM/DM and has advantages of information the other "players" do not. The roleplaying game is less a game in that regard BUT the combat portion of the rules can be clearly a "game".

The OSR is IMO fundamentally neutral on the question of immersive improvisational method-acting. You can play old-school RPGs and really get into character… or you can treat your character as an empty pawn on the tabletop. That question of "stance" has no bearing really on whether the game is old-school. That said, I do think that the Finch Primer, and by extension the Principia Apocrypha and most OSR theory-craft, miss the mark; and not just because they say "player skill, not character ability" about a game with magic items and Vancian spells; or "rulings, not rules" of a game where you find traps and secret doors by rolling 1 or 2 on 1d6; or "forget game balance" in a game where you encounter 1 HD monsters on dungeon level 1, 2 HD monsters on dungeon level 2, etc. It's a question of campaign structure. The OSR began as a reaction to what was, at the time, the pinnacle of "trad" gaming, the 3rd edition of D&D. The movement's early movers and shakers tried to look back to the 1970s, to bring back the early game the way D&D and AD&D existed during their first editions. And instead, what exploded out the movement? What lessons were learned? The OSR succeeded in reviving early 1980s D&D, making "B/X" the de facto core system, and in doing so it promoted a kind of "neo old-school" play style that focuses on lethality and challenge and player agency and open-endedness… but also a campaign structure that is fundamentally "proto-trad." By this, I mean: kids who learned D&D on the Holmes or Moldvay Basic Set, playing D&D around their kitchen table with three friends? That's what inevitably leads to games where everyone has something to lose. Players with "precious" characters whose death would mean the death of a campaign. DMs with "precious" plots that require behind-the-screen railroading techniques like dice-fudging and the quantum ogre. The game becoming "a story about this cast of characters" is something that quite naturally arises from small, fixed playing groups. And that's how you go (in incremental steps) from 1e to 2e to 3e to where the mainstream of the hobby is now. But the OSR theorists and bloggers mostly whiffed on the lynchpin that makes the *old* old-school play-style really work. (And by this, I mean the way Gygax et al. played in the 1970s, which is not to discount the fact that even in the 70s, there were *lots* of different play-styles already, including the heavy emphasis on DM-created plotlines and in-character play-acting in the West Coast/Arduin scene.) A really old-school game is half a wargame, which is to say, the campaign structure requires a club environment. Lots of players, maybe even multiple DMs, and the players running lots of characters, all of which exist in a single persistent campaign milieu. Something a bit like the so-called "West Marches" structure, but a better description I've heard is the "massively multiplayer offline RPG." When you have that feature in place, everything about old-school D&D makes sense. Random character generation, easy character death, characters not being permitted to share spells or magic items, the emphasis on building towards a stronghold and a private army. The ethic of players treating the campaign milieu as a real place (rather than just a backdrop for encounters), and also the emphasis on clever solutions to offbeat challenges in play; the ethic of the DM not altering the milieu (or fudging the dice) on a whim so as to abrogate player agency. Gygax's infamous "STRICT TIME RECORDS!" All of it flows from a presumption of a large and inconsistent player-base (and players all having a selection of characters to draw from on a per-adventure basis) within a single campaign.

So in summary... 26:06 So with "Inviting Fortune" in OSR, you're really talking about Chaos (or as Nick Larocco said, "The fickle hands of fate") been a core part of gameplay, instead of the curated 'story' experience. 28:09 "Opening to Open-endedness". So adapting to the situation within the adventure, instead of the dictates of the story. Or having your characters face additional narrative complexity to achieve their goals 33:34 "Symmetry Remains" Where all actors within the game (PCs & NPCs) live within the same game logic (or mechanics). I'm not been too worried about OSR or what defines OSR. Many of the OSR elements you've talked about touch on the facets of gameplay I enjoy. Firstly, Dice are the fickle hands of fate. Secondly, there is consistency in the world through Symmetry, where the players are just a part. And not the glorious heroes who'll transform the world through their sheer existence. And thirdly, player choice is critical to surviving the situations you find yourself in - to research enough about your enemy to overcome them - to manage your resources & gear to delve into the dungeon, but more importantly, walk out of it. - to be tricky enough deceive your opponents with a cunning plan - if faced with an overwhelming situation, you learn to get out of there. * The above points about player choice, help you live the adventure because your consequences matter. This is an emergent thing you learn through the experience of play. However, if you remove the consequences, you also remove risks, the challenge, and some of the drama. And the game loses something because of that

The game Against the Darkmaster is an OSR game of MERP/Rolemaster. I see OSR as being more than D&D. To me, it's any rpg made today that's a reimplementation of an older game that's at least 15 years old and the original publisher has stopped making releases for.

Original Style Revolution?

It might just be me, but you sound kinda quiet on the video.

Suffice it to say, you say suffice it to say a lot. Interesting video though.

OSR = TSR era D&D retroclones. if you want something else, just call it something else. Personally i really dislike the idea of luck points or fate points or whatever. i don't like "meta mechanics" like that, that don't model anything that's "real" to the game world.

How can "OSR" mean something "different" when it has no meaning to begin with? OSR to some is all the fake TSR D&D "retro-clones". Fantasy Heartbreakers comprised of some random person's house rules. To some it is 3e D&D like Pathfinder. To others it is heavy focus on wargame elements. To more still it is just going back and paying older editions of D&D and other games from the 80s and has nothing to do with any new products on the market. Other people will say it is various other things not mentioned above. So before you can ask what if "it" was different, you have to have someone, anyone, actually define what OSR is to begin with, because if you ask 100 people, you will get 102 different answers to "What is the OSR?"