I'm curious as to which types of games mechanics players like that are associated specificially with OSR/OSE style games.   I've only got a couple of very short D&D 2e games under my belt from my teenage years back in the early 90s so I definitely don't have a knowledge base in that regard beyond the superficial things like THAC0, racial character classes/restrictions, random stat generation, lots of random tables, and a lack of get out of jail free death mechanics.   

The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering adding some optional rules to a ttrpg to allow a more OSR style gameplay style.   What specific game mechanics do you love in the OSR ecosystem and why?

Quote from: RNGm on March 17, 2024, 04:15:11 PM
I'm curious as to which types of games mechanics players like that are associated specificially with OSR/OSE style games.   I've only got a couple of very short D&D 2e games under my belt from my teenage years back in the early 90s so I definitely don't have a knowledge base in that regard beyond the superficial things like THAC0, racial character classes/restrictions, random stat generation, lots of random tables, and a lack of get out of jail free death mechanics.   

The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering adding some optional rules to a ttrpg to allow a more OSR style gameplay style.   What specific game mechanics do you love in the OSR ecosystem and why?

I would say that the main focus of the OSR is not the addition of mechanics, but, rather, the lack of certain types of mechanics.

1) Avoid mechanics that circumvent game play. A diplomacy roll to avoid talking to an NPC or a Search roll to avoid describing how the character is searching an object. Whatever can be resolved through player/GM interaction should be.

2) Avoid disassociated mechanics. That means the player choices should have a 1:1 match with a corresponding character choice. So a magical potion that provides a bonus is good, but some sort of "Inspiration" or hero point that the player has to decide to spend is not.

3) Make sure that the player's goals and the character's goals coincide. Avoid mechanics that force a player to have his character lose in order for the player to earn some point that will help the player down the line. To me, this is the main way that games break immersion: forcing the player to make his/her character perform an action that the player doesn't want, just because the game system rewards that particular action.

Thanks and that's a good general point that I hadn't considered myself and good to reiterate.

Rolling a d20 under an ability score is something I don't see often outside of OSR games. Also having xin6 checks for things regardless of level or abilities, like having a 1in6 chance to hear something on the other side of a door or the like, and the only way to get better rolls for it is to be and elf or something. Racial level caps also. Whole side initiative rerolled every round.

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on March 19, 2024, 02:07:40 AM
Rolling a d20 under an ability score is something I don't see often outside of OSR games. Also having xin6 checks for things regardless of level or abilities, like having a 1in6 chance to hear something on the other side of a door or the like, and the only way to get better rolls for it is to be and elf or something. Racial level caps also. Whole side initiative rerolled every round.

Interesting.  I had a 5e DM who would do that when we'd ask him a question he didn't expect or plan for and I always wondered why he did that.  Was that also a 2nd edition thing?

Quote from: RNGm on March 19, 2024, 12:18:27 PM

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on March 19, 2024, 02:07:40 AM
Rolling a d20 under an ability score is something I don't see often outside of OSR games. Also having xin6 checks for things regardless of level or abilities, like having a 1in6 chance to hear something on the other side of a door or the like, and the only way to get better rolls for it is to be and elf or something. Racial level caps also. Whole side initiative rerolled every round.

Interesting.  I had a 5e DM who would do that when we'd ask him a question he didn't expect or plan for and I always wondered why he did that.  Was that also a 2nd edition thing?

In our homebrew, for random questions that the GM is willing to set to chance, we roll percentile die. If player meets or beats GM's roll, the question is answered in favor of the player.

Quote from: RNGm on March 19, 2024, 12:18:27 PM
Was that also a 2nd edition thing?

Pretty sure rolling under ability score dates back to OD&D days, but I'm pretty sure it persisted up to second. I know 3rd got rid of it, because 3rd changed how ability score modifiers worked, and unified the system to basically always roll a d20 equal or over a target number.

I definitely don't recall it being a part of 3/3.5 as that's when I came into D&D hardcore.  In 2e, I only played a couple of one on one games with my equally clueless friend who was GMing that went so bad we just went back to just buying the occasiona book instead.

Assuming that we're extending the definition of OSR beyond "games based on BX/BECMI/AD&D", the thing that I most associate with the movement is an emphasis on what I'll call "procedural gameplay".

On the player side, this is clearest when it comes to "crawling" systems. That is, dungeoncrawl, hexcrawl or pointcrawl procedures, as opposed to the trend in newer games of handling exploration and travel purely through narration. But you also see that trend in things like camping procedures, random encounters (via the procedure of encounter roll -> encounter distance -> surprise roll -> reaction roll) and some domain management rules. This is the change which has been the most awkward for me since I started running OSR  and OSR-adjacent games. I've tried running crawling rules RAW, but the player reaction is poor and they end up feeling like a waste of time, so we often land on simplified versions.

On the GM-side, you see the procedural focus with the emphasis a lot of OSR products have on procedural systems for generating areas, dungeons, monsters, etc. These I've used sparingly, but with a good deal more success.

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2024, 08:46:52 PM
Assuming that we're extending the definition of OSR beyond "games based on BX/BECMI/AD&D", the thing that I most associate with the movement is an emphasis on what I'll call "procedural gameplay".

On the player side, this is clearest when it comes to "crawling" systems. That is, dungeoncrawl, hexcrawl or pointcrawl procedures, as opposed to the trend in newer games of handling exploration and travel purely through narration. But you also see that trend in things like camping procedures, random encounters (via the procedure of encounter roll -> encounter distance -> surprise roll -> reaction roll) and some domain management rules. This is the change which has been the most awkward for me since I started running OSR  and OSR-adjacent games. I've tried running crawling rules RAW, but the player reaction is poor and they end up feeling like a waste of time, so we often land on simplified versions.

On the GM-side, you see the procedural focus with the emphasis a lot of OSR products have on procedural systems for generating areas, dungeons, monsters, etc. These I've used sparingly, but with a good deal more success.

Thanks.  I don't know if you're familiar with them but, assuming you are, would you consider the hex crawl exploration and survival/encounter rules from more modern games like Forbidden Lands to be OSR-like by their nature?  While I don't recall seeing dungeon generating rules, I didn't run the game and only experienced it from the player side so I can't necessarily exclude their existence. 

Quote from: RNGm on March 19, 2024, 10:34:49 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2024, 08:46:52 PM
Assuming that we're extending the definition of OSR beyond "games based on BX/BECMI/AD&D", the thing that I most associate with the movement is an emphasis on what I'll call "procedural gameplay".

On the player side, this is clearest when it comes to "crawling" systems. That is, dungeoncrawl, hexcrawl or pointcrawl procedures, as opposed to the trend in newer games of handling exploration and travel purely through narration. But you also see that trend in things like camping procedures, random encounters (via the procedure of encounter roll -> encounter distance -> surprise roll -> reaction roll) and some domain management rules. This is the change which has been the most awkward for me since I started running OSR  and OSR-adjacent games. I've tried running crawling rules RAW, but the player reaction is poor and they end up feeling like a waste of time, so we often land on simplified versions.

On the GM-side, you see the procedural focus with the emphasis a lot of OSR products have on procedural systems for generating areas, dungeons, monsters, etc. These I've used sparingly, but with a good deal more success.

Thanks.  I don't know if you're familiar with them but, assuming you are, would you consider the hex crawl exploration and survival/encounter rules from more modern games like Forbidden Lands to be OSR-like by their nature?  While I don't recall seeing dungeon generating rules, I didn't run the game and only experienced it from the player side so I can't necessarily exclude their existence.

I'm loosely familiar with Forbidden Lands, and yeah, I would consider it quite OSR-like in it's outlook. It also includes stronghold and hireling rules which are another common OSR feature that is usually absent from "new school" games. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it was intentionally an effort to port the OSR game style into the year-zero engine.

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2024, 11:24:24 PM
I wouldn't be surprised to hear it was intentionally an effort to port the OSR game style into the year-zero engine.

I've heard that the 5e book Ghosts of Saltmarsh was supposed to be a bit of that too, adapting some old adventures to work in 5e. Not sure how well they managed to make that come across.

Quote from: RNGm on March 19, 2024, 10:34:49 PM

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2024, 08:46:52 PM
Assuming that we're extending the definition of OSR beyond "games based on BX/BECMI/AD&D", the thing that I most associate with the movement is an emphasis on what I'll call "procedural gameplay".

On the player side, this is clearest when it comes to "crawling" systems. That is, dungeoncrawl, hexcrawl or pointcrawl procedures, as opposed to the trend in newer games of handling exploration and travel purely through narration. But you also see that trend in things like camping procedures, random encounters (via the procedure of encounter roll -> encounter distance -> surprise roll -> reaction roll) and some domain management rules. This is the change which has been the most awkward for me since I started running OSR  and OSR-adjacent games. I've tried running crawling rules RAW, but the player reaction is poor and they end up feeling like a waste of time, so we often land on simplified versions.

On the GM-side, you see the procedural focus with the emphasis a lot of OSR products have on procedural systems for generating areas, dungeons, monsters, etc. These I've used sparingly, but with a good deal more success.

Thanks.  I don't know if you're familiar with them but, assuming you are, would you consider the hex crawl exploration and survival/encounter rules from more modern games like Forbidden Lands to be OSR-like by their nature?  While I don't recall seeing dungeon generating rules, I didn't run the game and only experienced it from the player side so I can't necessarily exclude their existence.

OK, one piece of general advice on this topic.  First, you need to take everything you read from folks here with a grain of salt.  For an OSR-based website, ironically you have folks here who love the OSR (and therefore attribute everything they enjoy in RPGs to OSR-style gameplay), and folks who hate the OSR (and therefore attribute everything they hate in RPGs to OSR-style gameplay).  So, you'll get very distorted perceptions from both sides.  One commonality among the haters, though, is that they tended to come to D&D/OSR later.  They played the older editions after their prime, with folks that hadn't moved on to newer editions or as a kind of nostalgia trip, not when the games were green.  So often they are telling you how they think old D&D was played, because they weren't there to know.

I have played D&D since the early 80s (so I never played OD&D in its heyday).  But I did play Basic and AD&D in their prime, and I can tell you that anyone who says OSR is somehow "procedural" or mechanical in nature has no clue what they are talking about.  That's not how we played.  "Rulings over rules" is how we played.

What gets people in trouble is they look at AD&D and say, "Damn!  There's a lot of rules in this game!"  So people must have needed lots of rules in play.  No, we didn't.  In fact, the entire concept of "RAW" (rules as written) is a D&D 3e concept (it may have been coined earlier, but it wasn't a prevailing concern or mentality until 3e).  No one (not even St. Gary of the Holy Dice) played AD&D using all the rules.  No one!  The rules were there for cases where the DM needed methods to adjudicate a contentious, important, or complicated situation.  No one bothered even looking up rules for situations that were common sense.  (This changed in later editions, like 3e, because the designers wanted to "reign in" the "power" of the DMs... but this isn't the place for that discussion).

I'll give you two examples that might illustrate what I'm talking about.  Let's say your party was in a dungeon.  Unless the dungeon trip was a spur-of-the-moment decision of the group that caught the DM unprepared, we didn't roll up the dungeon at the table.  The dungeon was designed beforehand, with monsters, treasures, traps, storylines, and challenges already determined.  So your party was leaving a room and heading down a tunnel towards the next room.  The tunnel went 20', made a right-angled turn to the left, then went another 50' to a door.  The party declares it is moving slowly down the corridor, looking for traps.  An important feature of AD&D/OSR games is time (it determines resource use, chance of wandering monsters, etc.).  You could look up in the rules the party's average movement speed, etc., to get an exact timing, but we wouldn't have.  70' of careful movement might have taken 1 turn (ten minutes) or 2 turns depending on the terrain, so being a blank hallway, the GM would just call it 1 turn and move on.  The GM might decide that this is a good spot for an encounter, or they might roll for an encounter.  Let's say they roll for an encounter and get one.  They now can either roll on a random table or decide, based on what the location is, what monsters are encountered.  The next room is cultists' quarters, so the DM decides that the encounter will be a group of cultists.  They decide it's a small group, so they can pick five or six as the number, or they can roll 2d6.  How far away are the cultists?  Well, the turn in the tunnel is the most logical place for the players to become aware of the cultists, so, when the PCs turn the corner, the cultists are 20' away.  The encounter begins.  Note that, while the DM needed to make certain decisions in order to run the encounter, none of them were necessitated or proscribed by the "rules."  The decisions answer the basic questions the players need to know in order to make decisions.  Who are they?  How many?  How far away?  All of this can be generated by the DM (as would happen narratively) or can be rolled if the DM wanted more randomness.  This is not "procedural" outside of the need for certain information that would be needed in any game.

Scenario two has the party moving across country.  They are moving overland between two towns.  The DM notices that they will pass near a Hill Giant encampment, and decides they will encounter a Hill Giant hunting.  The DM needs to know how far away the party spots the giant, and he feels that it is something which could have a wide range of outcomes, plus it will determine how easily the party can retreat.  So, he goes to the rules and finds a chart to roll on.  He rolls low, so the giant is within 40' when the players spot it.  Had he rolled high, the DM could have had the giant walking and the PCs see the trees swaying in the distance.  Since he rolled low, maybe the giant is lying in wait while hunting and the PCs stumbled along.  Now the giant decides to ambush the PCs, so roll for surprise. 

I don't see how this second encounter is "procedural" at all.  And it easily reflects the way the game was actually played in my groups in the 80s.  We used rules when we needed an adjudication, or when the outcome was really random.  So I think that evaluation of what is "OSR" has more to do with respondent bias than it does the actual way the game was played back then...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on March 20, 2024, 08:24:17 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 19, 2024, 08:46:52 PM
Assuming that we're extending the definition of OSR beyond "games based on BX/BECMI/AD&D", the thing that I most associate with the movement is an emphasis on what I'll call "procedural gameplay".

On the player side, this is clearest when it comes to "crawling" systems. That is, dungeoncrawl, hexcrawl or pointcrawl procedures, as opposed to the trend in newer games of handling exploration and travel purely through narration. But you also see that trend in things like camping procedures, random encounters (via the procedure of encounter roll -> encounter distance -> surprise roll -> reaction roll) and some domain management rules. This is the change which has been the most awkward for me since I started running OSR  and OSR-adjacent games. I've tried running crawling rules RAW, but the player reaction is poor and they end up feeling like a waste of time, so we often land on simplified versions.

On the GM-side, you see the procedural focus with the emphasis a lot of OSR products have on procedural systems for generating areas, dungeons, monsters, etc. These I've used sparingly, but with a good deal more success.

OK, one piece of general advice on this topic.  First, you need to take everything you read from folks here with a grain of salt.  For an OSR-based website, ironically you have folks here who love the OSR (and therefore attribute everything they enjoy in RPGs to OSR-style gameplay), and folks who hate the OSR (and therefore attribute everything they hate in RPGs to OSR-style gameplay).  So, you'll get very distorted perceptions from both sides.  One commonality among the haters, though, is that they tended to come to D&D/OSR later.  They played the older editions after their prime, with folks that hadn't moved on to newer editions or as a kind of nostalgia trip, not when the games were green.  So often they are telling you how they think old D&D was played, because they weren't there to know.

I have played D&D since the early 80s (so I never played OD&D in its heyday).  But I did play Basic and AD&D in their prime, and I can tell you that anyone who says OSR is somehow "procedural" or mechanical in nature has no clue what they are talking about.  That's not how we played.  "Rulings over rules" is how we played.

What gets people in trouble is they look at AD&D and say, "Damn!  There's a lot of rules in this game!"  So people must have needed lots of rules in play.  No, we didn't.  In fact, the entire concept of "RAW" (rules as written) is a D&D 3e concept (it may have been coined earlier, but it wasn't a prevailing concern or mentality until 3e).  No one (not even St. Gary of the Holy Dice) played AD&D using all the rules.  No one!  The rules were there for cases where the DM needed methods to adjudicate a contentious, important, or complicated situation.  No one bothered even looking up rules for situations that were common sense.  (This changed in later editions, like 3e, because the designers wanted to "reign in" the "power" of the DMs... but this isn't the place for that discussion).

The funny thing to me is that's exactly how we played third edition in the year 2001. In fact, I suspect it's how anyone will gravitate towards playing the game if they pick up the books and figure it out for themselves. What has possibly changed in the last ten to fifteen years is that new players now are more likely to be taking in of lots of internet GM advice, starting with blogs, but really booming with the rise of YouTube in the teens. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised if most people who pick up 5e and learn it for themselves still end up playing this way. Even the 3e/3.5 power-leveling, balance focused, "build" emphasis attitude was largely a product of forums in the mid 00s. People I knew who just got the books and read them never played like that, and detested players who did.

You mentioned that a person browsing around here will get misinformation from both sides of the pro and anti OSR divide, and I agree. Personally I'm not strongly in favor of or against OSR games on their own. I've run and played several, and probably will again, but I do have some things about D&D which I dislike and which are every bit as present in the old editions as they are in the new. One of the biggest categories of misinformation which I think you get from OSR true believers is a lot of post hoc mythmaking about how the game was played back in the day. Some of this certainly comes from newcomers who like you say, read the rulebooks and assume that the game must have been played exactly as laid out. But without wishing to call anyone out, I suspect an equal amount of it comes from people who may have played back in the 80s, but have inaccurate memories. They may have played differently from most people even back then, but a fair few people seem to have let steady diet of what is essentially OSR propaganda color their memories. It's noticeable that if you listen to stories from people who played back in the 80s, but didn't keep playing the old editions, either because they moved on to other games or because they stopped playing entirely, it sounds like they played a lot more like the way you describe above. 

Quote from: Eirikrautha on March 20, 2024, 08:24:17 AM
I'll give you two examples that might illustrate what I'm talking about.  Let's say your party was in a dungeon.  Unless the dungeon trip was a spur-of-the-moment decision of the group that caught the DM unprepared, we didn't roll up the dungeon at the table.  The dungeon was designed beforehand, with monsters, treasures, traps, storylines, and challenges already determined.  So your party was leaving a room and heading down a tunnel towards the next room.  The tunnel went 20', made a right-angled turn to the left, then went another 50' to a door.  The party declares it is moving slowly down the corridor, looking for traps.  An important feature of AD&D/OSR games is time (it determines resource use, chance of wandering monsters, etc.).  You could look up in the rules the party's average movement speed, etc., to get an exact timing, but we wouldn't have.  70' of careful movement might have taken 1 turn (ten minutes) or 2 turns depending on the terrain, so being a blank hallway, the GM would just call it 1 turn and move on.  The GM might decide that this is a good spot for an encounter, or they might roll for an encounter.  Let's say they roll for an encounter and get one.  They now can either roll on a random table or decide, based on what the location is, what monsters are encountered.  The next room is cultists' quarters, so the DM decides that the encounter will be a group of cultists.  They decide it's a small group, so they can pick five or six as the number, or they can roll 2d6.  How far away are the cultists?  Well, the turn in the tunnel is the most logical place for the players to become aware of the cultists, so, when the PCs turn the corner, the cultists are 20' away.  The encounter begins.  Note that, while the DM needed to make certain decisions in order to run the encounter, none of them were necessitated or proscribed by the "rules."  The decisions answer the basic questions the players need to know in order to make decisions.  Who are they?  How many?  How far away?  All of this can be generated by the DM (as would happen narratively) or can be rolled if the DM wanted more randomness.  This is not "procedural" outside of the need for certain information that would be needed in any game.

Scenario two has the party moving across country.  They are moving overland between two towns.  The DM notices that they will pass near a Hill Giant encampment, and decides they will encounter a Hill Giant hunting.  The DM needs to know how far away the party spots the giant, and he feels that it is something which could have a wide range of outcomes, plus it will determine how easily the party can retreat.  So, he goes to the rules and finds a chart to roll on.  He rolls low, so the giant is within 40' when the players spot it.  Had he rolled high, the DM could have had the giant walking and the PCs see the trees swaying in the distance.  Since he rolled low, maybe the giant is lying in wait while hunting and the PCs stumbled along.  Now the giant decides to ambush the PCs, so roll for surprise. 

I don't see how this second encounter is "procedural" at all.  And it easily reflects the way the game was actually played in my groups in the 80s.  We used rules when we needed an adjudication, or when the outcome was really random.  So I think that evaluation of what is "OSR" has more to do with respondent bias than it does the actual way the game was played back then...

I want to clarify that the question was about "what mechanics scream OSR to you", not what playstyle. Like I said above, I don't think the OSR playstyle as it is actually practiced is that far off of the majority playstyle that's always been in D&D. It's also probably worth saying that I take "OSR" in this context to mean products published in more recent years under the OSR umbrella: that is, OSR games more than the original games they're based on.

All I mean by "procedural" is that OSR rulebooks will often supply a system of successive rolls to resolve things which newer games are likely to encourage doing through a single roll or by handwaving or GM fiat. Travel, exploration and stronghold/domain management are, I think it's fair to say, the most conspicuous examples of that. Those things will sometimes exist in non-OSR D&D-like games, but they tend to be de-emphasized and/or run on simplified rules. Where there are more involved versions of them, they tend to be in third party supplements written by people who are taking influence from the OSR and back-engineering it into the newer systems. Hardly universal, but certainly a trend.

If I gave the impression I was opining on what makes something Trve OSR, I certainly didn't mean to. That is a question which is almost entirely fruitless, and if I thought that was what the thread was about, I wouldn't have posted.

I appreciate both the detailed answers.  While I was specifically asking for game mechanics, I was explicitly doing so under the guise that I wanted to allow a more OSRish gameplay as an option so I open for suggestions on both fronts.