Quote from: J Arcane;753571Dude, 3e is STILL spawning a submarket of derivatives via the OGL.

How do you think the OSR can even exist?

I think 4e blowing goats was a big part of it.  Or at a minimum it was VERY different from what OSR stuff offered and thus not a competitor.

5e is going after the OSRs niche directly.  It seems more of a threat, unless they open it up and share the pie.

Quote from: mcbobbo;753576I think 4e blowing goats was a big part of it.  Or at a minimum it was VERY different from what OSR stuff offered and thus not a competitor.

5e is going after the OSRs niche directly.  It seems more of a threat, unless they open it up and share the pie.

I agree. I, and a lot of other people, were totally fired up and ready to roll with 4E but, for various reasons, it just didn't connect with much of its intended audience. The 'aiming point' of 5E is centered on a part of the market that is bigger, more generically into 'lite' table top gaming, and at least casually interested in OSR type games. Setting aside the couple dozen zealots out there, I think their strategy will work. They'll certainly get my business, unless they somehow failed to understand the basic structure of accessible, playable versions of D&D.

Quote from: Haffrung;753479However, I've always doubted how much the OSR is an active play movement. It seems more of a design club along the lines of the Forge. Like-minded people exploring certain game sensibilities, publishing vanity press RPGs, and downloading and talking about them among themselves. There has to be tremendous overlap between owners of Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, ACKS, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. I also suspect most copies of those games are played once or twice, or not played as all - which is true of all indie RPGs.

Labyrinth Lord and DCC get played a fair bit at the London D&D Meetup, not exactly a hotbed of Indie hipsters - those guys congregate at the aptly named London Indie Games Meetup* instead. My impression is that because D&D is a very playable game, the games based on it are likewise very playable, and do get played. If I include online chatroom sessions then I've run 50 or so sessions of OSR games (LL & OSRIC) over the past few years, and about the same number of actual 1e AD&D and BX - not that it's particularly easy to tell sometimes whether I'm using '1e' or 'OSRIC'; in my current OSRIC campaign I'm pretty sure all the players are just using their knowledge of 1e and have never opened the OSRIC pdf, never mind hardcopy.

So, anyway, my impression is that you are right about Indie nar games, they get played only occasionally, as one-shots, but wrong about D&D clones; unsurprisingly they get played just the same as D&D.

*London Indie Games Meetup meets once a month. London D&D Meetup meets four times a week.

Quote from: The Butcher;753529I don't have hard data and I don't think anyone does. But if I had to guess I'd say DCC is probably the most successful stand-alone non-clone game to come out of the OSR. I'd say it's probably older editions and their clones (OSRIC, LL, S&W) > DCC and/or LotFP > ACKS, AS&SH, Mutant Future, SWN, Crypts & Things, Hulks & Horrors and others, God only knows in what order.

As for whether the OSR will still be a Big Thing. Well, I'm not so much skeptical of the idea that current OSR fans will adopt 5e, I just don't believe that the people who currently support the OSR will cease to do so with 5e, even if they buy into 5e. Unless maybe WotC puts out adventures that can compete with offerings as varied as Dyson's Delves, Stonehell, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Carcosa, Jim Raggi's Grand Guignol takes on "rocks fall, everyone dies" and the DCC modules.



The TL;DR version of what I've just posted. Scooped.

Considering the fact that DCC has gone into a second printing (not counting alternate covers,) the numerous modules Goodman has published for the game and the fact that it's the only OSR (or OSRish) game to have cracked the ICv2 list and yeah, I think it's doing just fine.

Quote from: tzunder;753554.
So maybe OSR will become an adventure style rather than a rules movement, which in many ways was secondary, if the talk of "style" over "rules" was/is valid.

It's funny, but one of the incubators of the OSR was the Necromancer Games forum. And their motto was "3rd Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel". So I could see a publisher picking up the "5th Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel" mantle. But if WotC publishes 5E modules that have a 1st Edition Feel, will there be any need to?

Sure, some OSR enthusiasts despise WotC as the corporate boss-man and want to be indie just for the sake of being indie. And they tend to drive the online tone. But  I don't think more casual old-school gamers really care if the old-school dungeon they play is published by WotC or Goodman Games or Frog God Games. And WotC adventures are far more accessible. They also foster the shared experience that underlies the Paizo community. So if WotC publishes quality old-school adventures to support 5E, about the only distinctions left for the OSR will the indie vibe and free shared material.

Quote from: J Arcane;753508... whatever the hell happens to come out of Redmond this month..

Redmond? I'm guessing you mean Renton.

Quote from: K Peterson;753616Redmond? I'm guessing you mean Renton.

Who can keep all those suburbs straight anyway?

Quote from: Haffrung;753608It's funny, but one of the incubators of the OSR was the Necromancer Games forum. And their motto was "3rd Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel". So I could see a publisher picking up the "5th Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel" mantle. But if WotC publishes 5E modules that have a 1st Edition Feel, will there be any need to?

Sure, some OSR enthusiasts despise WotC as the corporate boss-man and want to be indie just for the sake of being indie. And they tend to drive the online tone. But  I don't think more casual old-school gamers really care if the old-school dungeon they play is published by WotC or Goodman Games or Frog God Games. And WotC adventures are far more accessible. They also foster the shared experience that underlies the Paizo community. So if WotC publishes quality old-school adventures to support 5E, about the only distinctions left for the OSR will the indie vibe and free shared material.

I'm willing to look at 5E modules if I happen to see any that aren't storyline driven. I don't bother much with Paizo adventures for much the same reason.

Quote from: Spinachcat;753337You're right. AD&D 1e isn't rules light compared to a plethora of rules light games currently in existence, many of which have only one page of rules. You can run whole campaigns from the free Exalted Quickstart or free Trinity Quickstart and they have 1/20th of the rules of AD&D.

However, when talking with people in the OSR regarding actual play, what's interesting is that very few of us use AD&D's rules, but instead play a version that is much more akin to Basic D&D with AD&D bits. What bits we use fluxes from DM to DM, so that's why you see different stuff emphasized in different retroclones.

Even the OSR designers who are making "new" OSR games aren't going particularly "rules light" and certainly cranking out a lot more than one page rules.

Pretty much.  It's why when you ask folks for a comprehensive definition of "OSR," you're likely to get a number of differing answers, mostly boiling down to one or more of Warthur's laundry list.  "Simple rules" just doesn't cut it -- the hobby has always had simple rulesets, and a good number of them.

Just my own two cents.

There has been no indication that 5E will be OGL, but plenty that it will be backwards compatable with an earlier version of D&D (and thus retroclones). So why couldn't an adventure published by a third party say  on its cover "(S&W or LL) compatable product that can also be used with the basic version of the world's most famous RPG".

You were wondering if this could cause the OSR to flounder? It has the potential to cause it to flourish.

EDIT: Ah Hell, scooped.

Here's the thing to me.

There's an image of the OSR community as just a bunch of derivatives, pumping out barely distinct clone after barely distinct clone, and one generic adventure after another.

And the thing is, this is "true."

But it's also true of literally every other market too. This is not some unique failing of the OSR, this is what markets DO.

There are DOZENS of superhero games out right now. Especially since the Marvel movies took off, there's been a huge boom in superhero games, settings, and products. DTRPG is running a sale right now where every week they offer discounts on a different game line, and they could probably keep doing that from now until Avengers 3 comes out and not run out of material.

No one game, not even THE game, is going to stop that. DC and Marvel both couldn't stop that. Two names that should've carried every bit as much weight as anyone else on the market, and they flopped.

D&D is not going to magically make the market behave differently. If anything, it is D&D that is going to have to distinguish itself in order to survive, to prove that anyone needs it and not the nearly unlimited options that exist.

Basic seems to be part of it. They seem to be banking on the brand and the market penetration it brings for the rest. They want to be different by being the game that everyone has heard of, those vaunted 'externalities,' while potentially making it easier to get back to playing that game.

I dunno if it'll work. Just don't, not saying that to cast doubt, I'm saying I literally do not know.

What I do know is that they are not going to magically make the existing market not exist by doing that.

The market doesn't exist for you, it exists as a property of human nature, and will continue to do so on those grounds so long as the barrier to entry to the market remains near-zero. There are still going to be eleventy-billion superhero games, or D&D clones, or pretentious games about ennui, or incomprehensible fantasy settings written by ex-folklore professors, and on and on.

Because people are going to keep making them, because they want to, and there's nothing stopping them, and nothing stopping them from trying to sell a few of them in the process.

D&D won't kill the OSR anymore than Marvel killed the superhero game.

One of the most useful things the OSR does is encouraging groups to "do a Rutger Hauer" and put a knife in the rules.

OSR isn't about "simple" so much as "simple enough". It's avoiding unneeded complexity. Forget the talk on genre emulation and dewy-eyed nostalgia; the real value in going back to the start is to discover the first principles on which the game was founded. From that point on you can choose or reject the various iterations and forks.

Of course the way it achieves this is by example and showing that 1e AD&D and DCC and LotFP and BECMI (and DW, and Torchbearer...) can be credible alternatives to the current D&D depending on what you want to do. But helping players make that cost-benefit analysis is the best thing it does, IMHO.

The question is, how will 5e fit into this? Will it marginalise this decision making process? How can it? The best thing 5e D&D can do to grab OSR market share is clearly position itself so players can make that decision. Otherwise it will rely on existing D&D fans "upgrading" and newcomers being ignorant of the alternatives. I don't see it reducing the OSR.

As for the drive towards simplicity -- the value of OSR games is the framework they provide beyond the rules (value that also exists in D&D, etc.). So when you point to GURPS UL or FUDGE or USR and say "if OSR really wanted simple they'd be playing XXX" it doesn't account for the additional overhead required to rebuild that framework (e.g. equipment lists in GURPS UL to make it feel "D&D-ish"). All that really says is the "ultra simple" demographic is not the OSR demographic.

Quote from: P&P;753366The attitude to 5e here is really puzzling to me.  I don't get why anyone cares what game other people play.  I don't mind what you play, I only mind what I play.

I guess if I was selling my game for money instead of giving it away*, I might feel differently.

* Thanks to the RPGPundit for inventing the idea of a free .pdf rulebook, by the way.  Well done that man!

Making the new edition of D&D a basic-core system with add-ons was what I argued for in all my time as a Consultant; and I honestly don't know if I was the one to first suggest an actual basic set of rules or not, but I definitely argued for it from the moment the suggestion first emerged.  
However, to clear up, I was NOT the one who suggested they be on PDF, or who suggested they be free.  Only that they be the CORE rules system, rather than a forgettable optional mod never to be used again.

RPGPundit

Quote from: P&P;753366* Thanks to the RPGPundit for inventing the idea of a free .pdf rulebook, by the way.  Well done that man!

:rotfl:

Quote from: RPGPundit;753782Making the new edition of D&D a basic-core system with add-ons was what I argued for in all my time as a Consultant; and I honestly don't know if I was the one to first suggest an actual basic set of rules or not, but I definitely argued for it from the moment the suggestion first emerged.  
However, to clear up, I was NOT the one who suggested they be on PDF, or who suggested they be free.  Only that they be the CORE rules system, rather than a forgettable optional mod never to be used again.

RPGPundit

And you deserve full credit for that.  Full credit.  In fact, why not start an onanistic thread about it?