The old Star Wars d6 adventures advocated cut scenes to make the game feel more movie-like, but I always viscerally disliked the idea without really knowing why. Now I understand it's because it goes against you-are-there immersion. I think these days I'd be less opposed to them for a deliberately cinematic game, but the point still stands - they take the players away from identification with their player character by changing the perspective to one the PC could not have.

Quote from: S'mon;836351The old Star Wars d6 adventures advocated cut scenes to make the game feel more movie-like, but I always viscerally disliked the idea without really knowing why. Now I understand it's because it goes against you-are-there immersion. I think these days I'd be less opposed to them for a deliberately cinematic game, but the point still stands - they take the players away from identification with their player character by changing the perspective to one the PC could not have.

That's the only game Ive experienced with cut scenes. When I ran it, I left out them out for that as well. It doesn't make the game any more "Star Wars" or fun by having them.

Quote from: Simlasa;836232I saw it as a revolt against relying so much on commercial products... against money-grubbing splat treadmills and isolationist 'brand loyalty' that tried to dictate/homogenize how we played... against lock-step adopting new editions and what ever changes the blessed designer-gods decided to make... against high-end graphics that bamboozle folks into thinking "Oh, I couldn't do that!"... against thinking that a system needs to cover every possible contingency or else it's not complete.

That was my take on the OSR and what caught my interest. That the RPG hobby could look back to it's low-fi, garage band roots and dwell amongst the blogs and zines and enthusiastic hobbyists... rather than waiting like calves for the next 'official' drip from the corporate teat.
I never thought it had to do with any specific mechanics or system... just a return to a more DIY mindset.

That aspect is groovy, and arose because (1) WotC wasn't publishing old-style material and (2) the OGL opened a more legally safe method for others to do so -- even to make 'clones' much as reverse-engineered BIOS led to clones and industry standard architecture from the IBM PC.

Obviously, though,  there are lots of people associating o.s. with some kinds of rules and approaches to play. In that regard, it's quite D&D-centric.

At Knights & Knaves Alehouse, I saw someone say that character skills are not o.s.. In that context, it was coherent. Never mind that games contemporary with or older than the PHB -- including some for which K&KA had dedicated forums -- featured skill rules. The site was explicitly dedicated to "Gygaxian D&D," and more specifically to 1st ed. AD&D pre-UA. So, it had a defined "school" (however ideosyncratic) as a basis.

More often, the game is played by assessing other games (however old or new) in terms of how much a certain demographic of D&D fans likes them, with rationales then drawn from comparison with D&D.

Quote from: Phillip;836392That aspect is groovy...

I've never much cared about the specific taxonomy of what is/isn't 'OSR'... I was just stating what drew me to the materials that claimed that for themselves... why I started taking an interest in D&D-likes after years of avoiding... despising.... class/level systems.
I've never played Dogs In The Vineyard but I'd like to try it. If it can be approached/played with that OSR attitude then that would matter more to me than how many dice we rolled to create characters or whether or not it has rules for skills.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;836296Stars Without Number and Mutant Future are regarded as an OSR games and they have very little to do with D&D.

Mutant Future is a spinoff of Labyrinth Lord, which is about as faithful a clone of D&D (1981) as you'll see. I'd say it has more to do with D&D than its Gamma World inspiration did.

Quote from: Simlasa;836398I've never much cared about the specific taxonomy of what is/isn't 'OSR'... I was just stating what drew me to the materials that claimed that for themselves... why I started taking an interest in D&D-likes after years of avoiding... despising.... class/level systems.
I've never played Dogs In The Vineyard but I'd like to try it. If it can be approached/played with that OSR attitude then that would matter more to me than how many dice we rolled to create characters or whether or not it has rules for skills.

Well, what is "that OSR attitude to play"?  If you mean the sorts of things commonly cited, then the design intent of DitV may be a lot more at variance than that of WotC's editions of D&D.

There's a distinction here among what one can do with a text, what the authors encourage one to do with it, and what the prevailing gamer culture around it holds as customary or 'proper'.

Like I said, I've never played DitV so I don't know how it plays... or if it supports various modes of play.
I'm thinking the 'OSR attitude' I'm fond of would be inclined to ignore the author's intent if the players wanted to take a game in a different direction. I know plenty of folks fawned over Gary Gygax back in the day but I was in the crowd that thought the man was delusional if he thought he could control how folks were playing.

I agree with those who say that the indie scene, of which DitV was a prime example, is much more generally about fighting "the man" than the OSR is. That is, the OSR has a pretty specific "the man" it fought against, and beat. The indie-forge people were fighting against a notion of consumerism that they'd pretty much built up themselves.

If the OSR attitude is just to ignore author intent and creatively ignore, misunderstand, and patch the rules-as-written, then...pretty much any game is compatible with OSR, isn't it?

As written, the game violates exploderwizard's 3, 4, and arguably 1 and 5.

Quote from: Arminius;836424If the OSR attitude is just to ignore author intent and creatively ignore, misunderstand, and patch the rules-as-written, then...pretty much any game is compatible with OSR, isn't it?

The OSR attitude is to misunderstand the rules? That's an odd statement.

Quote from: Arminius;836424As written, the game violates exploderwizard's 3, 4, and arguably 1 and 5.

OD&D and BX D&D both explicitly support 3&4, it's only AD&D that undermines the principle. Plot driven adventures as a concept didn't properly arrive until 1984 with Dragonlance, so I don't follow that point. #1 is built into the core attitude of the game.

Quote from: Arminius;836424I agree with those who say that the indie scene, of which DitV was a prime example, is much more generally about fighting "the man" than the OSR is. That is, the OSR has a pretty specific "the man" it fought against, and beat. The indie-forge people were fighting against a notion of consumerism that they'd pretty much built up themselves.

If the OSR attitude is just to ignore author intent and creatively ignore, misunderstand, and patch the rules-as-written, then...pretty much any game is compatible with OSR, isn't it?

As written, the game violates exploderwizard's 3, 4, and arguably 1 and 5.

Adopting whatever the ref at hand likes for her/his campaign is -- with a certain starting framework -- what most people I've played with consider "just D&D".  Starting with something else may be harder, more of a fight against the grain.

Champions, for instance, comes to mind as something that really shines with different focuses than old D&D and similar games. It has a very different feel unless you toss a great deal of what makes Hero System what it is. To me, it would be easier to graft bits from it into D&D than to go the other way.

JoeNutall--

Creatively misunderstand.

For better or worse, and sometimes not by their own fault, people take RPG rules and infer a projected intent. This then informs a loosey-goosey approach to rules that ultimately makes the game their own (if they like it & stick with it). Result: multiple groups absolutely convinced they're playing "the right way", but none of them the same way at all.

For the rest, perhaps you thought I was referring to D&D when I wrote "the game"? I was talking about DitV.

Quote from: Phillip;836431Adopting whatever the ref at hand likes for her/his campaign is -- with a certain starting framework -- what most people I've played with consider "just D&D".  Starting with something else may be harder, more of a fight against the grain.

Yes. I wasn't too clear in my earlier post but what I meant was that DitV is perfectly compatible with "old school" and with "OSR" (if one cares to distinguish those two) provided

• In the case of "old school", you ignore the primacy ascribed to the rules text by the Forge-indie scene out of which DitV appeared, and the suspicion with which "drift" is viewed in that scene.
• In the case of "OSR", you also ignore a lot of the specific rules and GMing guidelines (which, in the indie scene, were considered integral to the rules).

Quote from: Arminius;836432For the rest, perhaps you thought I was referring to D&D when I wrote "the game"? I was talking about DitV.

I did - and ironically we were discussing misunderstanding!

Quote from: Arminius;836435Yes. I wasn't too clear in my earlier post but what I meant was that DitV is perfectly compatible with "old school" and with "OSR" (if one cares to distinguish those two)

My understanding is that the Forge games like Ditv were designed to directly contradict old school play, based upon the premise that old school play was fundamentally flawed and no-one playing it actually enjoyed the game. Or something like that - the arguments on the subject got rather heated and long winded! It's now (oddly) Ron Edward's argument that he invented the OSR, something he fought to bring an end to. Something along the lines of thinking that there weren't any independent RPG products before his Indie RPG movement.

The OSR was rallying against both this point of view, and the "modern version of your game is better" view, and playing the game that people wanted to.

Ahem, it might help if I also mentioned that my grandmother would be a bus provided she had wheels.

Yeah, Edwards is absurd.