I think part of the issue is that the "OSR" approach has some good, and some bad. Rulings over rules, for example, is good, IMHO infinitely better than having two dozen "skills" that describe what their use cases are. The high lethality I think is a double-edged sword. Having character lives meaningless is IMHO bad, and doesn't at all gel with the literary sources of D&D (e.g. pulp sword-and-sorcery novels), but characters who are virtually demigods is the opposite end of that spectrum and equally as bad.

Similarly, the "wing it" sandbox/hexcrawl approach is IMHO incredibly lame and you might as well just play a videogam at that point, but the completely linear "Here are 13 adventures that you will play in order" adventure path is equally bad.

It's my view, and why I don't use "OSR" but "Classic Gaming" to describe my approach, there's a middle point where you get the best of everything: PCs should be a solid cut above the average dirt farmer who picked up a sword, but not superheroes. They are lucky enough to not be randomly killed (in D&D terms this means at least not permanently) by a stray arrow, but not invincible like Conan where he rarely, if ever, faces any challenge that's remotely close to being equal to him; they are the protagonists but not necessarily the main characters. There should be adventure hooks such as the PCs being hired to perform a task or finding a treasure map and deciding ("forced", although a bad term, is apt here since you are playing a game at the end of the day, and IMHO if players constantly ignore plot hooks they're just being assholes) to explore it, but the world shouldn't be static and there should also be rumors/quest boards/events/etc. that can provide direction (in other words, the default should be "The DM comes up with an adventure hook and the players, knowing that's the adventure hook, accept the bait" but it's perfectly reasonable that the players might mention at the end of one session how they want to investigate some rumor, which the DM then fleshes out; the end result is the same, but the players are driving this instead of being presented a "job").

The biggest problem I have is that modern gamers feel the old-school games are too much of a step back, and are reluctant to "go backwards" to things like THAC0, race limitations for class and (especially) levels, lack of "kewl powers" (which I like "kewl powers" too but I also don't NEED them).

Yours is an awesome post, Eirikrautha! I thought I would highlight my favorite part:

Quote from: Eirikrautha on December 14, 2024, 08:19:56 PMWe would come up with some crazy idea ("I'm going to shoot an arrow at the rope holding up the candle-chandelier and try and drop it on the bunch of them!") and the DM would set a probability, either using some system that made sense ("That's like hitting AC 1, roll to hit" or "Roll under your Dex, with a plus five penalty for the size of the rope") or using a raw probability ("You've got a 15% chance of hitting that, roll percentiles").  The fiction drove the roll.

Springboarding off of this, instead of just having a general chance of success now we have character "builds" where a clever player can stack all sorts of bonuses together so that some dice rolls essentially become irrelevant since they are automatically successful. To me, that's not "fun" but a lot of my players seem to enjoy building characters which are designed to be gamebreakers. The craft of designing a character to beat the rules appears to be what modern players see as "role playing," as opposed to actually playing a role.

The virtue of focusing on "Rulings not rules" is not that it enables the use of rule-lite system. But rather is creates a process where the resulting system is better suited for how you and your group think how things ought to be handled. And better suited for the setting of the campaign.

When using "Rulings not rules" Referees and the group are not pulling random rulings out of their asses. There is a metric against which a ruling is weighed. That metric is "How things ought to be given the premise of the campaign." That premise is a mix of genre and setting conventions.

This is especially obvious when you stick with the same base system across multiple campaigns using the same setting. It rarely thought of in this way but when you look at a given referee and their campaigns it leaps out at me. Given time the resulting system turns out to be something of medium complexity.

And incidently it also mirrors partially the process that gamers of the late 60s and early 70s had  undergo in order to run a wargaming scenario or campaign. There wasn't a ready source of published rules so they had to do primary research, then combine that about what they knew of mechanics and probabilities and come up with a series of ruling to run things. The more ambitious would take the time to write it up formally and publish the result.

The OSR by encouraging "ruling not rules" that ethos and ramps it up across hundred of creative types and thousands of gamers.

Quote from: finarvyn on December 15, 2024, 09:58:37 AMYours is an awesome post, Eirikrautha! I thought I would highlight my favorite part:

Quote from: Eirikrautha on December 14, 2024, 08:19:56 PMWe would come up with some crazy idea ("I'm going to shoot an arrow at the rope holding up the candle-chandelier and try and drop it on the bunch of them!") and the DM would set a probability, either using some system that made sense ("That's like hitting AC 1, roll to hit" or "Roll under your Dex, with a plus five penalty for the size of the rope") or using a raw probability ("You've got a 15% chance of hitting that, roll percentiles").  The fiction drove the roll.

Springboarding off of this, instead of just having a general chance of success now we have character "builds" where a clever player can stack all sorts of bonuses together so that some dice rolls essentially become irrelevant since they are automatically successful. To me, that's not "fun" but a lot of my players seem to enjoy building characters which are designed to be gamebreakers. The craft of designing a character to beat the rules appears to be what modern players see as "role playing," as opposed to actually playing a role.

That is the "ultimate build" crap, that I don't like about modern D&D.  It's the direct opposite, of early D&D.

Quote from: finarvyn on December 15, 2024, 09:58:37 AMYours is an awesome post, Eirikrautha! I thought I would highlight my favorite part:

Quote from: Eirikrautha on December 14, 2024, 08:19:56 PMWe would come up with some crazy idea ("I'm going to shoot an arrow at the rope holding up the candle-chandelier and try and drop it on the bunch of them!") and the DM would set a probability, either using some system that made sense ("That's like hitting AC 1, roll to hit" or "Roll under your Dex, with a plus five penalty for the size of the rope") or using a raw probability ("You've got a 15% chance of hitting that, roll percentiles").  The fiction drove the roll.

Springboarding off of this, instead of just having a general chance of success now we have character "builds" where a clever player can stack all sorts of bonuses together so that some dice rolls essentially become irrelevant since they are automatically successful. To me, that's not "fun" but a lot of my players seem to enjoy building characters which are designed to be gamebreakers. The craft of designing a character to beat the rules appears to be what modern players see as "role playing," as opposed to actually playing a role.

Indeed. Which is why I long ago called this orthogonal engagement with TTRPGs (see my signature echoing others' same lament) a solo mini-game. It also explains why players and corporations became more dismissive of the fiction's setting. If the setting's contextual teeth takes a backseat to the RAW mechanical override then why bother paying attention to the powerless?

I think it's both, it only depends on the people. Some of them are clearly coming there for nostalgia and the fact that some OOP product suddenly became available; other discovered that there was something else beyond the global trend of the successive DnD editions which added options over options and rules over rules to keep a market alive.
And, in the middle of this, some guys created some pearls that are genuinely better than the original.

Quote from: colombus1592 on December 24, 2024, 11:37:18 AMAnd, in the middle of this, some guys created some pearls that are genuinely better than the original.

This has been the thing that draws me to it the most, is sometimes you get these great games that tap into the nostalgia vein, but are simply ... better games.

It's good because it's genuinely competitive. Big ttrpg publishers are still recycling IPs from the 80s without change. Nothing original made since then has been able to establish a niche. A huge part of this is copyright. SRDs allow indie devs to piggyback on past work, on fads and compatibility with related works. If you have to work from scratch each time, then it's a lot harder. There's a huge hole in the market for non-fantasy that postdates the 80s. Copyright holders try to "protect" their intellectual property by locking it away, but this only makes everything less creative as time goes on.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 15, 2024, 08:50:29 AMThe biggest problem I have is that modern gamers feel the old-school games are too much of a step back, and are reluctant to "go backwards" to things like THAC0, race limitations for class and (especially) levels, lack of "kewl powers" (which I like "kewl powers" too but I also don't NEED them).

This is why Nu-School OSR-Style games like Shadow Dark have hit big.

They generally deliver on the "old-School" gaming style, but have less quirky system bits like THACO: i.e. Like  a suit of +2 Chainmail that reduces your AC, but makes your to-hit number go up...

Yes, yes, math so basic. But more straightforward is easier for the normies.

Shadow Dark could also just have been a rules hack supplement for OSE-B/X. But people like complete games.

It will be interesting to see if the "OSR style" gradually evolves away from recognizable AD&D-B/X variants, into more ground-up re-imagining of "old school" games in the style of ShadowDark.

The blogosphere OSR in its heyday really had something going on. Good theory posts about the structure of game play, dungeons, and sessions. Good original ideas for spells and monsters. I haven't seen an equivalent body of good and useful theory for modern D&D, and only flashes of it for games like Savage Worlds. Traveller does have some, but that's an exception that proves the rule since Trav is OSR without the R, it never got away from its roots and had to rediscover them like D&D did.

Just playing old games for the sake of playing old games is no better or worse than new games though. I've certainly encountered railroads, GMPCs, and "I'm just playing my character" in TSR D&D.

I'll say it.  I don't like AD&D 1e or 2e.  I think it's a janky, disorganized, overly complicated mess of ad-hoc systems all bolted on to each other.  I think it placed way too much of an emphasis on tournament play which I didn't like then and have no desire to do now.  I played a lot of AD&D back in the day but as soon as 3e came out I dropped it like a hot rock and I haven't looked back.  If I were going to go back to an older edition, it wouldn't be either one of those.  It would be something like the Rules Cyclopedia.  I would sooner run 4e than AD&D and I'm not a big fan of 4e.  I have no interest in an OSR game that seeks to emulate AD&D either.  I would rather runfor something like Dark Fantasy Basic.       

It all depends on what you're trying to do.

I have friends for whom the real "game" of D&D is building the perfect character. The session is just the test of how good their build is. The OSR probably isn't for them.

I have friends who really like coming up with a character concept and then using the rules to quantify that character. The OSR may not be for them.

Personally, I like to explore worlds, encounter challenging situations, and deal with them creatively, with the mechanics serving to make that endeavor truly a challenge because the dice are outside of everyone's hands. The OSR is for me.

If any nostalgia is involved, it must be borrowed nostalgia for a lot of people (myself included) who literally weren't born when the original games were first published and played - but still enjoy the OSR style of game.

Quote from: mekhawretch on January 03, 2025, 08:34:52 AMIf any nostalgia is involved, it must be borrowed nostalgia for a lot of people (myself included) who literally weren't born when the original games were first published and played - but still enjoy the OSR style of game.

My first introduction to the rpg sphere; was 1E AD&D, during the mid 2E era.  The only thing that matters nostalgia wise to me, is looking back on that experience during that time period.  How that felt.  How every decision mattered.  There were consequences.

But any of the early editions, could have created that experience, with that playstyle.

I would love to see OSR movements for other TSR games and other genres. Postapoc, planetary romance, urban fantasy, space opera, paranormal alien conspiracy technothriller...