My wife is already in bed, but I’m still up. All is quiet and I want to post this before I go to bed, too. We both got our booster shots today and my arm hurts and I’m tired.
I was reading part four of an Old School Renaissance (OSR) history blog post and I think it’s time to finally retire the “Old School” tag from my blog. 😆
This final part is dedicated to explaining how this very concrete base fragmented into the increasingly incoherent movement we see today, a movement frequently having nothing to do with or even in direct contradiction of what it began as. – A Historical Look at the OSR — Part V
A Historical Look at the OSR — Part V
I know some people have argued this point for a long time, but perhaps I just needed to read a blog post to see the absurdity of it. I mean, my house rules of B/X D&D still exist, and I still use them – but I don’t think there is much of a point to draw a line between somewhere when I am clearly all over the place.
One way to verify this is that I like reading the “RPG Planet” and do not follow the separate subsection of the “Old School RPG Planet”. It’s basically a favor to people who feel strongly about the Old School label, people who still believe the distinction has merit, and now that I have read that blog post, I’m starting to think that the distinction does not have merit when it comes to me. It might still have merit for others, but I think the blog post nicely illustrates what an uphill the fight for the correct interpretation is going to be. This is not a struggle I care about, for sure…
I really should ask more people to join the RPG Planet – including its Indie and Old School subsections. Like I said, the distinction might still make sense to some people, even if I think it is no longer relevant to me.
I think Melan is right… – 2019-08-08 OSR as a scene is dead
2019-08-08 OSR as a scene is dead
#RPG #Old School
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I’ve never been active on the community, I guess; but I still read blogs. What I have stopped is listening podcasts, and that was before the pandemic. I got a bit bored of some folk talking about the OSR and the community (and the occasional drama).
– jjm 2021-12-18 08:52 UTC
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Yeah, me too. In my case there was simply a lot of socializing, rambling, banter, call ins, reply shows and all that – and I always had other podcasts I was super interested in waiting for me, so currently I effectively only listen to Judd Karlmann’s podcast, Daydreaming about Dragons. (See 2021-07-27 Podcasts I listen to, and note that I haven’t listened to Actual Play in a while.)
2021-07-27 Podcasts I listen to
– Alex 2021-12-18 10:19 UTC
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Thinking about the “old school” label some more: I think that back in the days I defended the label because the people who opposed it didn’t want to be categorised as this or that, and I argued that nobody was categorising anybody. Instead, the “old school” label was something for people to self-identify with. But like punk, goth, and all the other labels, I guess it got watered down until it only has a very vague meaning these days. How weird.
– Alex 2021-12-20 12:30 UTC
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Nice take by Tedankhamen:
To me, the OSR was three things: … An anti corporate movement … It was a DIY creative movement … It was a diverse and inclusive movement – Farewell OSR, Welcome NSR!
Not sure about diversity, but I definitely agree with the rest! (Now that I’ve spent some time on Mastodon I guess I’m starting to appreciate how little I know about the potential diversity we could be having instead!)
– Alex 2021-12-20 16:03 UTC
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I thought it was an interesting post, but also seems weirdly biased. “What the OSR was is easy to define: it was simply a rebirth of interest in old-school Dungeons & Dragons, specifically as its original designers intended it to be played.” We were both there, and this certainly isn’t true! It feels like things moved quite quickly from the point was to play AD&D1e again to everything else that follows, and what follows is more interesting!
– Ramanan 2021-12-22 19:48 UTC
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Yeah, you’re right. It was like reading a point of view that didn’t entirely match my own. I also was never really on the K&K or Dragonsfoot forums, and I wrote very little on the OD&D forum (I only went there for Fight On! magazine, as far as I remember), and I didn’t know or play OSRIC. I was not connected to that earlier group, so who knows. Did we steal the Renaissance from them?
I was fascinated by Labyrinth Lord, and ran Palace of the Silver Princess for some people in 2008, i.e. using an original module and something resembling original rules, a retro-clone of D&D.
Today we spent a few hours playing through the orange-cover Palace of the Silver Princess available for free from Pandius using the Labyrinth Lord rules. These rules are a “retro-clone game system” designed to take us “back to the basics of old-school fantasy gaming”. The rules are dedicated to Tom Moldvay, author of the Basic Set. – 2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
I see that in 2008 Philotomy Jurament was listing retro-clones and other games (two in the list are qualified with “not really a clone”):
BFRPG – not really a clone. Mostly like Classic, but more of a mix (separate class/race, d20-style AC, etc) ��� C&C – not really a clone, more like a via media between TSR D&D and WotC D&D, favoring TSR D&D, IMO. Or like the “AD&D 3rd Edition” that never was. – 2008-06-28 Retro-clones - explain?
2008-06-28 Retro-clones - explain?
I guess this matches what the Simulacrum blog post is saying:
By mid-2008 the big four initial retroclones had been released: BFRPG, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords & Wizardry. By this point you were already hearing grumbles that there were too many clones … – A Historical Look at the OSR — Part V
A Historical Look at the OSR — Part V
Just a few months later I was already saying that I wanted to play something other than a retro-clone:
But if I want to play something along the lines of Quick Primer for Old School Gaming by Matthew Finch I think I’ll stick to M20. Simple, rational rules – I don’t need weird lookup tables and crazy details for old school gaming. – 2008-07-30 Old School
Ah, little did I know! 😆
So you could say that in that short time between giving the Palace of the Silver Princess a try in April 2008 and my blog post in July 2008, I had already made that pivot away from just retro clones, and other people had noticed this as well. Things did move quite quickly, I agree.
– Alex 2021-12-22 20:51 UTC
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I see Rob Conley also wrote about the OSR back in September. I guess I missed a lot of posts in 2021. 😅
The result is that the OSR is confusing kaleidoscope of many voices doing their own things. Which is a good thing in my book as this ensure that your voice will be heard if you have the interest and time. Plus thanks to digital technology it only take a few hundred folks interested in particular take to keep it going. – Concerning the OSR, Everything is All Right
Concerning the OSR, Everything is All Right
That DIY spirit was always something I liked about the OSR – although I liked it better when the stuff people created ended up in blog posts and not in fancy books.
– Alex 2021-12-24 16:05 UTC
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@traversefantasy writes:
Each proclamation of the OSR’s death relies upon a particular definition of the OSR. When the OSR “died” in 2012, it was because the community had attained the level of success it had always strove for; the old school was finally revived. When the OSR “died” in 2019, it was because a significant platform was deleted from the internet, and because of abuses which had rocked the community to its core. Yet it was only a death to those who looked at the ruin afterward and saw all that had been forgotten since, with no one to restore it to yet some other dubious past state; at the same time, most of the people who were there were just dispersed elsewhere, still doing their own thing on odd corners of the internet. – The OSR Should Die
And later:
If the OSR isn’t really old-school, what is it? Does it have to do with diegetic interactions with the game-world? Does it have to do with turn-based procedural play? Does it have to do with providing players a challenge, in absence of a teleological narrative which often dictates other play styles? All of the above? These questions, besides being more interesting, are a more honest way of interrogating and cultivating the play style(s) (*which already exists but can be inaccessible*) than trying to find or invent a basis in the past. – The OSR Should Die: An Addendum
The OSR Should Die: An Addendum
And Richard:
I find it a useful category more than a constricting one: if a game or group describes itself as OSR then it gives me some loose ideas about what it’s interested in – a certain sort of “fantasy non-fiction,” where problems will kill you unless you try to anticipate their particular challenges, where you’re not here for “writer’s room” play or some pre-written fiction so much as the range of possibilities for how a situation could evolve exclusively through having PCs interact with it. Where things are probably more or less compatible with B/X DnD. As a writer, I think my constellation of interests are more likely to find an audience among OSR players than other well-known categories. – Have you tried ANT? A response to Marcia’s “OSR is Dead” post
Have you tried ANT? A response to Marcia’s “OSR is Dead” post
Just the super valuable list of annotated blog links by @traversefantasy:
This is a list of blog posts that I consider to be essential to the theoretical development of the OSR play style. The original listing covered posts from 2007-2019 … This page includes posts from after early 2019, up to now. – Keystones
– Alex 2022-06-10 08:09 UTC