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The thread where I ask a stupid question: Just What is "OSR"?

Started by Nexus, January 27, 2016, 09:32:43 PM

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Nexus

January 27, 2016, 09:32:43 PM
The subject says it all.
Remember when Illinois Nazis where a joke in the Blue Brothers movie?

Democracy, meh? (538)

 "The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn't even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it."

TrippyHippy

#2
January 27, 2016, 09:51:29 PM
Yes, it is. Just.
I pretended that a picture of a toddler was representative of the Muslim Migrant population to Europe and then lied about a Private Message I sent to Pundit when I was admonished for it.  (Edited by Admin)

Nexus

#3
January 27, 2016, 09:56:27 PM
Aw crap!

Just what is "OSR?"
Remember when Illinois Nazis where a joke in the Blue Brothers movie?

Democracy, meh? (538)

 "The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn't even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it."

Chivalric

#4
January 27, 2016, 10:16:46 PM
It usually means old school revival or old school renaissance and it's just a catch all term for blogs, books, gamers, communities, rules or whatever that have to do with an interest in older games, usually some form of early D&D and often the very earliest approaches to play.

flyingmice

#5
January 27, 2016, 10:22:27 PM
Originally Sane Republic. It's a group of RPG makers and their clients who have declared themselves independent of both mainstream RPGs and Story Games, declaring also that nothing after 1985 ever happened, and the best thing to play SF, Horror, Westerns, and Urban Fantasy is D&D. In fact the only game is D&D. Specifically one certain version of D&D. The only question is which version...

;D
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GameDaddy

#6
January 27, 2016, 10:59:41 PM Last Edit: January 27, 2016, 11:05:06 PM by GameDaddy
Quote from: flyingmice;875789Originally Sane Republic. It's a group of RPG makers and their clients who have declared themselves independent of both mainstream RPGs and Story Games, declaring also that nothing after 1985 ever happened, and the best thing to play SF, Horror, Westerns, and Urban Fantasy is D&D. In fact the only game is D&D. Specifically one certain version of D&D. The only question is which version...

;D

Huh? ...not just D&D...

OSR also include these games and variants of the following;

Tunnels & Trolls, Warlock, Empire of the Petal Throne, Runequest, TfT and/or early GURPS, MERP, Chivalry & Sorcery, Arduin Grimoire, Bushido, Aftermath, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Twilight 2000, The Morrow Project, Traveller, Top Secret, Rolemaster, James Bond 007, Boot Hill,Villains and Vigilantes, Bunnies & Burrows, Star Frontiers, Harn, Space Opera, Champions, and... RIFTS Palladium FRP.
Blackmoor grew from a single Castle to include, first, several adjacent Castles (with the forces of Evil lying just off the edge of the world to an entire Northern Province of the Castle and Crusade Society's Great Kingdom.

~ Dave Arneson

Gronan of Simmerya

#7
January 28, 2016, 12:22:03 AM
Oscillating Sausage Receptors
You should go to GaryCon.  Period.

The rules can\'t cure stupid, and the rules can\'t cure asshole.

TrippyHippy

#8
January 28, 2016, 12:52:35 AM
Quote from: Nexus;875786Aw crap!

Just what is "OSR?"

Nah. "Just is "OSR"?" is a stupider question.

"Just what is "OSR"?" is relatively sensible.
I pretended that a picture of a toddler was representative of the Muslim Migrant population to Europe and then lied about a Private Message I sent to Pundit when I was admonished for it.  (Edited by Admin)

Christopher Brady

#9
January 28, 2016, 12:54:12 AM
It's a cute label that uses this nostalgic memory of 'how the game was meant to be played', the game in question is D&D (as all products using the OSR label are variants based on older versions of it.)  It makes a base assumption that everyone 'back in the day' played the game the same way, and that way will always be the right way.

Which is frankly a load of bollocks.
"And now, my friends, a Dragon\'s toast!  To life\'s little blessings:  wars, plagues and all forms of evil.  Their presence keeps us alert --- and their absence makes us grateful." -T.A. Barron[/SIZE]

Ravenswing

#10
January 28, 2016, 01:31:17 AM
Old School: That which was standard practice (or what I thought to be "standard practice," or how people at my school gaming club played, anyway) when I discovered the hobby.

New School: Any way of doing things I encountered starting about 9-18 months later, most of which is crap.

Ancient History: Anything people did before I discovered the hobby, of which I will only begrudgingly acknowledge the existence if someone flashes me a publication date, most of which is crap.
This was a cool site, until it became an echo chamber for whiners screeching about how the "Evul SJWs are TAKING OVAH!!!" every time any RPG book included a non-"traditional" NPC or concept, or their MAGA peeners got in a twist. You're in luck, drama queens: the Taliban is hiring.

Philotomy Jurament

#11
January 28, 2016, 01:34:46 AM
It stands for "OSR Said Recursively."

If you're too close to it you end up on Federal watch lists.
The problem is not that power corrupts, but that the corruptible are irresistibly drawn to the pursuit of power. Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.

Ravenswing

#12
January 28, 2016, 01:41:39 AM
I've also got a follow-up post from five years ago, which I think in some way explains the attraction of "old school" --

* * * * * * *

Scene: me, Laurey, Marilyn and Jon jammed into Jon's dorm room on Orchard Hill. We were players in Jon's startup Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, ordering delivery from the Whole Wheat Pizza Factory. That very first weekend, I was up at UMass visiting (Laurey, Mal and I were high school classmates), and we played three consecutive days and nights, not less than ten hours each day. My first character sheet -- which I still have, nearly forty years on -- was on a large, blue file card, scribbled in pencil. Printed character sheets didn't exist yet, and the ones that came out a couple years down the road were laid out on a typewriter and run on a mimeograph machine, more often than not.

Weren't no published adventures -- Jon had scribbled his notes on loose leaf paper. I was the first GM in the group to use and paint minis, and that was two years down the road. For the most part, people in our gaming circles were "D&D GMs" by courtesy, since damn near every one had a VD&D homebrew that was wildly divergent from every other homebrew. Nonetheless, these were the days of the multiverse, and people would hop from campaign to campaign with the same characters, no matter how divergent the homebrews.  Somehow it all worked.

Weren't no Internet, and instead of the give-and-take of RPG forums, which can attract hundreds of posts to a topic in an afternoon, you had the APAzines ... mimeoed and stenciled booklets eagerly hoarded, with comment turnaround time measured in months. The industry leader, Alarums & Excursions, never had a circulation of more than a few hundred. But where else could you hear the words of the Hargraves, Sapienzas, Perrins, Staffords, Blacows, Golds and other Secret Masters of the genre, and have them interact with you?

I am a much better GM, now. I use a vastly superior game system. I have the benefit of decades of learning about my genre and tech level. I have resources unimaginable in the 70s -- desktop publishing, word processing, online clipart. I have many years of investment in gamebooks, minis, props. I don't need to guess, I can pull up the Wikipedia article in seconds. I have a personal library I would have killed to possess back then; books on medieval technology, folklore, herblore, they're by my left elbow as I type this post. I can hit my game system's proprietary forum and get no worse than a same day opinion from a senior editor should I have any questions. Most importantly, the hobby has four decades of experience -- what works, what doesn't.

But I do look back at times, wistfully, back to when Laurey and Mal and I were all nineteen, and stayed up all night playing this wonderful game.  I remember the warm fanboy glow I felt when Dave Hargrave called me a smart cookie, in print yet.  I smile thinking of cat-loving Christine shrieking "Kill it!  Kill it!" when the party encountered a cat, because she'd just heard about Arduin's kill kittens and was convinced this was one.  I remember the elation when I killed a mofo dragon, solo, when all the rest of the party was WIA, because I tossed the greatest dice roll of my entire career (RM open ended roll, finishing around 450).

To paraphrase Hal Moore, we were gamers once, and young.
This was a cool site, until it became an echo chamber for whiners screeching about how the "Evul SJWs are TAKING OVAH!!!" every time any RPG book included a non-"traditional" NPC or concept, or their MAGA peeners got in a twist. You're in luck, drama queens: the Taliban is hiring.

Simlasa

#13
January 28, 2016, 03:01:56 AM
Whatever it was it's been torn apart by wolves and the pieces scattered on the wind.

Opaopajr

#14
January 28, 2016, 03:08:39 AM
Quote from: Simlasa;875831Whatever it was it's been torn apart by wolves and the pieces scattered on the wind.

For it was just... in an unjust world. :pundit:
Just make your fuckin\' guy and roll the dice, you pricks. Focus on what\'s interesting, not what gives you the biggest randomly generated virtual penis.  -- J Arcane
 
You know, people keep comparing non-TSR D&D to deck-building in Magic: the Gathering. But maybe it\'s more like Katamari Damacy. You keep sticking shit on your characters until they are big enough to be a star.
-- talysman
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