Quote from: danbuter;673932OSR games are based upon pre-3e D&D.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;673870Opinions vary, but along with these, I'd add:
* mature themed, sort of like a S&S vibe as far as the artwork (if applicable) goes.
* zero to hero character progression
* absence of special snowflake syndrome (no, not every class has to be equally powerful in every aspect of the game as every other class)
* living world that doesn't revolve around the players.  I.e., it's not the DMs job to adjust encounters in the world to make sure they are all level appropriate.  If the level 1 PCs insist on going into the ogre infested mountains, they are going to find ogres.  Not weaklings until they reach an appropriate level to challenge ogres.
* a system that easily allows the GM to tweak or modify the rules

I will point that while these observation are true of a large number of OSR gamers perhaps even a majority. They are not universally true. The ONLY thing common throughout the OSR (all caps) is the use of a classic edition of D&D or one of its close variants.

For example the last point

* a system that easily allows the GM to tweak or modify the rules

It not applicable to OSRIC which is designed to enable publication of support material for AD&D and to PRESERVE it. It has a lot of product identity context sprinkled throughout the book and the licensing is deliberately is setup to make it difficult to make a variant OSRIC.

This is in contrast to Swords & Wizardry which is well organized and well formatted to serve as the core of somebody's custom version of classic D&D.

My own Majestic Wilderlands supports  Game of Thrones style of campaigns where the adventure comes from the conflicts between politics, religion, and culture rather than focusing on dungeon crawls.

There is weird fantasy, gonzo fantasy out there in the OSR and every mix inbetween of just about any style you may have read about in gaming. There are rules light variants and rules heavy variants and so on.

In the end all one can say what in common that everything is tied back to the use of a classic edition of D&D. Everything depends on who or what group you are talking about.

As for why it is a glorious mess is quite simply is the open gaming license and the hobbyist culture it spawned. Castles & Crusades opened the door a crack and OSRIC kicked it wide open.  Everything else followed as people did their own thing their own way.

What is the OSR?

It what YOU make it to be.

So don't just talk about it do something. Play it, promote it, or publish it doesn't matter as the OSR is owned by those who DO.

Quote from: TristramEvans;673991The osr started with Mazes & minotaurs and Encounter Critical, and ended once everyone started thinking it was all just about D&D because they lived in their little D&D bubble.

Those games are built on the old D&D system...

Quote from: Daztur;674001For me at least a good acid test is "can you use that system to run an old published adventure as-is without doing conversion work before hand." Stuff like AC ascending vs. descending is fine since that's easy to convert on the fly but anything that makes it hard to do that puts it beyond the OSR (or at least the D&D OSR) for me.

It wouldn't work for me.  I can convert just about anything to just about anything else.  I have played old school modules in just about every system I have ever used.

Quote from: TristramEvans;673991The osr started with Mazes & minotaurs and Encounter Critical, and ended once everyone started thinking it was all just about D&D because they lived in their little D&D bubble.

Do you have google searches or links to back this?

Because all I find is the use of OSR referring to the revival of classic D&D that started with OSRIC.

And OSRIC was a reaction to Castles & Crusades not being AD&D reborn.

Maze & Minotaur and Encounter Critical are appreciated by many associated with the OSR (like Jeff Rients) but those were standalone projects.

The OSR began with games like Castles & Crusades, Basic Fantasy, and OSRIC.

Folks don't have to take my word for it you can look at links from my blog here or sort the Hoard and Hordes spreadsheet by date.

Quote from: danbuter;674047Those games are built on the old D&D system...

In the same way that all old school games were, up to and including Warhammer 1st Edition. There were some experiments that laid the groundwork for 'modern games, like MSH & 007, but D&D's mold was followed pretty closely for the first ten years of the hobby post-white box. Doesn't mean the game needs to be 1) a copy of D&D's implied pulp fantasy setting, nor anymore specifically a pseudo-clone of D&D than C&S 1e.

Sorry, but I dont agree with you there Tristram.

D&D, Runequest and Traveller are radically different games not only in mechanical bits but also on spirit (which could be said to be the consequences that flow from those mechanical bits, really). So, I dont think the "D&D mold" was followed by its subsequent games. Like, at all. In fact, I think subsequent games tried more to separate from that mold purposefuly than to be faithful to it.

What lead us back to my first point:

The late 70s/ early 80s were extremely diverse in playing styles. Trying to picture it as a "monostyle" sounds obtuse to me. Its like trying to picture the 90s as the Age of Melodrama, when in fact this trend was totally insular to the Vampire crowd and not shared on the lightlest with the crowds of Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Over the Edge, CP2020, Paranoia, Unknown Armies, Deadlands, Battletech, etc, etc.

Quote from: silva;674093The late 70s/ early 80s were extremely diverse in playing styles.

Having gamed back then I would say this was accurate. The big changes from my viewpoint were the Campaign Arc which really got going with Dragonlance. And the emphasis on dramatic roleplaying that Vampire tried to do.

Quote from: silva;674093Its like trying to picture the 90s as the Age of Melodrama, when in fact this trend was totally insular to the Vampire crowd and ...

Most of the vampire campaigns I ran across were run like Monsters with superpowers rather than as melodramas as the books suggested.

Old school games had varying characteristics and multiple playstyles were the norm. Playstyles were not so connected to system as the era of the consumer based gamer hadn't fully blossomed. Tables playing the same published products were doing different things with them.

Its easier to pick out "new school" elements than it is to try and pin down everything old school.

If the game involves GNS and you aren't talking about vitamin supplements, you might be new school.

If your gamebook refers to scenes, you might be new school.

If you can't fit your character on a sheet of notebook paper, you might be new school.

If character death occurs so infrequently that you don't quite know how to handle it, you might be new school.

If common sense is detrimental to your success due to rules, you might
be new school.

I've been in a weekly Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign for about the last five years. It's a British game made in 1986, it has skills but no classes or levels, it isn't zero to hero, it can be quite deadly if you're not careful. It has a mostly unified mechanic, and what actually makes sense is more important than what the rules state. It's old school as far as I'm concerned.

Quote from: silva;674023Corrected for you.

Calling this "TSR-era D&D renaissance" ( = what the OSR really is) an "old school renaissance" is a disservice to the bazillion other games that came out in the 70s and early 80s whose playstyle has absolutely nothing to do with D&D, like Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Champions, Harn, En Garde!, MERP, TMNT, Twilight 2000, Villains & Vigilantes, Ghostbusters, Bunnies and Burrows, etc.

Its like in the future someone coin the term "Golden Age Renaissance" (or GAR) to nostalgicaly refer to the 90s as that period where games really was about storytelling and "Roleplaying over Rollplaying" and LARPs and all that.... when in fact there was only ONE game that did that (Vampire), while there was tons of others that never shared this playstyle, like Shadowrun, Deadlands, Amber, Over the Edge, Earthdawn, Unknown Armies, CP2020, Everway, Heroquest, Tribe 8, etc.

So, whats actually moronic is calling this TSR-era D&D Renaissance as Old-School Renaissance.

There are two problems with this.

First: the popular, well-remembered games from the 70s and 80s - Runequest, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Champions - are still around, in editions that are much closer to their original incarnations than 3.x D&D or 4e D&D or D&D Next is to any TSR D&D. If Traveller New Era had become the official and only Traveller for the last 20 years, then you might have an OSR-type game that mimics Classic Traveller and another that mimics MegaTraveller, and so on. But you've got Mongoose Traveller and Traveller5. Likewise, Runequest has had two editions of MRQ, Legend, and Runequest 6. Call of Cthulhu is going into its 7th edition, but the 6th had been only incrementally updated from the early days. Champions and HERO have been around. The point is, for most games that were reasonably popular, there's no room for an OSR for them, because they are still around and recognizable.

Second: D&D and AD&D were bigger than every single game you mentioned, combined. Probably bigger than each by an order of magnitude or more. In an OSR that is maybe several thousand people large, there actually are people who like other games. The games that lots of us like are the ones I mentioned in my first point. The rest are liked by, maybe, one percent of the OSR. So if someone made, say, an En Garde! clone targeted at the OSR - maybe they could expect a couple dozen sales.

Third: there are attempts at clones of non-D&D games, such as Mutant Future which is Metamorphosis Alpha / Gamma World, or ZeFRS which is TSR Conan, and talk of doing ones like Boot Hill. The thing is, non-TSR games don't get a lot of attention because they're either supported, not popular enough, or licensed.

What this means is that the D&D-centrism of the OSR is not accidental, it's pretty much what is inevitable when you have a community around older games, and all the other popular older games are still supported.

And seriously, Bunnies & Burrows? Moronic.

Quote from: silva;674093Sorry, but I dont agree with you there Tristram.

D&D, Runequest and Traveller are radically different games not only in mechanical bits but also on spirit (which could be said to be the consequences that flow from those mechanical bits, really). So, I dont think the "D&D mold" was followed by its subsequent games. Like, at all. In fact, I think subsequent games tried more to separate from that mold purposefuly than to be faithful to it.

What lead us back to my first point:

The late 70s/ early 80s were extremely diverse in playing styles. Trying to picture it as a "monostyle" sounds obtuse to me. Its like trying to picture the 90s as the Age of Melodrama, when in fact this trend was totally insular to the Vampire crowd and not shared on the lightlest with the crowds of Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Over the Edge, CP2020, Paranoia, Unknown Armies, Deadlands, Battletech, etc, etc.

I think we're saying the same thing in different ways. When I used the phrase 'only in the same way...' that was an indication that I didn't think the games had anything to do with D&D besides sharing a paradigm of early gaming, wherein common features like the six-attribute block, random roll charge, and GM as referee/judge with rulings vs rules inherentlyassumed, not that I think C&S is any more a D&D clone than any other RPG. I would say EC bears as little resemblence to D&D as Traveller, whereas Mazes&Minotaurs is a pre-osric system that takes a format from D&D but is a game into itself rather than aD&D pseudo-clone or hybrid as was suggested.

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;673816. . . I thought the terms interchangeable . . .

They're not.

Quote from: estar;674032It not applicable to OSRIC which is designed to enable publication of support material for AD&D and to PRESERVE it. It has a lot of product identity context sprinkled throughout the book and the licensing is deliberately is setup to make it difficult to make a variant OSRIC.

It makes it more difficult to legally PUBLISH a variant, but it makes it no harder for the GM to modify the rules for his game than it was for a GM to do so for AD&D itself.

I think an OSR game needs to be easy for the GM to modify for his campaign without having to worry that his change to combat effectiveness is going to have some unforeseen effect on the amount of water a character needs to drink (or some other apparently unrelated things) because the rules are so tightly interwoven that any change is likely to have side-effects in apparently unrelated areas of the game because the rules are so tightly interwoven. (1e vs 3.x, for example).

An OSR game is a game based directly on the rules-systems of old-school RPGs, usually D&D.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;674625They're not.

"OSR vs osr" is what I think is what actually is going on as well.

Good writing on that one. :hatsoff: