Quote from: Zalman on May 27, 2024, 06:55:25 AMWell, it tells us at least one thing: that the author of the game is concerned with whether or not their game fits into a category. Which itself might be enough information.

It's information.  It's not particularly useful information.  It's completely useless if I am trying to determine whether this product labeled OSR will be of any real use in the OSRIC game I am running or not.  This is the sort of thing that people looking at a product labeled OSR actually need to know.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on May 26, 2024, 09:44:09 PMPathetic

I was 50/50 on whether you were going to just repeat my closer or go with "I know you are, but what am I?"

Thank you for answering that.

Ah, projection... making claims and assigning malicious motives to others... just like the woke. Thank you for proving my point.

As for me, I have accomplished my purpose; others are now remarking on the various ridiculous aspects of OSR as a movement/scene and it's uselessness as a search term when the only relevant gatekeeper (DriveThru) lets any retroclone of an older game use the search term.

People are asking questions. Good questions. Why can't a ruleset use dice pools or point buy attributes and be OSR so long as the old modules can still be used with those rulesets? Why must it only refer to D&D and not use some other term for that compatibility?

So, having said my piece and gotten some talking started, I can depart. I might come back if the the topic drifts enough that I feel there's something different worth adding, but for now I'll leave you the last word since clearly you need it so badly.

Thank you again for proving you're exactly who I thought you were.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 27, 2024, 07:17:55 AMIt's information.  It's not particularly useful information.  It's completely useless if I am trying to determine whether this product labeled OSR will be of any real use in the OSRIC game I am running or not.  This is the sort of thing that people looking at a product labeled OSR actually need to know.

OSR as a term has always been useless in that regard. And those who try to rely on it as a marketing term are not getting any benefits (or downside for that matter) from doing that. Instead, from day one, is about specifics, whether it is gonzo, weird fantasy, gygaxian D&D, megadungeons, sandbox campaigns, Stars Without Number, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lords, Black Hack, Mork Borg, Shadow Dark, Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, and so on.

If you look at those who have been successful, their marketing focuses on their brand or the specific theme like the author of the OP does with "authentic medieval or as I do with sandbox campaigns and hexcrawl formatted settings.

Where OSR is useful is in conversations like this one. Where it acts as a shorthand in place of writing "the group of hobbyists and publishers using the themes and mechanics of the classic editions of dungeons and dragons". Since I use the themes and mechanics of the classic editions, I often use OSR in conversations about my stuff. But I don't rely on using it as part of my marketing.

So the reason for this complexity and these nuances is because the the OSR as a whole is founded on a simple idea, that you can take the open content of the d20 SRD omit the newer mechanics and the result is but a hop and a skip from a particular classic edition.

Because this started out with open content it meant folks taking advantage of this advantage can pursue whatever creative itch they want. Some chose to hold close to a particular edition and make retro-clone. Some used them to focus on a particular theme like gonzo, weird fantasy, or gygaxian D&D.

A lot of folks saw the classic editions as obsolete and broken. Along with certain styles of campaigns and adventure types like the Adventure Path had the attention of the larger hobby. But over time the modest success of those publishing and sharing material based on the mechanics and themes of classic D&D or OSR showed otherwise.

Unlike other RPGs whose IP were controlled with a iron grip by an individual or company, newcomers didn't have to seek the permission of existing OSR publisher to realize their own creative agenda. So, over time, the quantity and types of products published within the OSR continued to grow.

Along with that came more experience in the legal issues surrounding the use of classic edition mechanics. This resulted in an expanding number of related but sufficiently different RPGs being released by those interested in classic editions themes and mechanics. Folks like Kevin Crawford repurposed some of the classic edition mechanics into very different RPGs like Stars without Numbers.

The end result is a kaleidoscope of works under the OSR umbrella. There aren't two types of OSR; instead, there are a multitude of OSRs, each reflecting the creative quirks of the author or authors involved. The Pundit YouTube video just reflects his own bias in the quest to market his works and should be ignored. Except if you like the Pundit's stuff then pay attention to what he likes and recommends.

Or in your case go over to Dragonsfoot or Knights and Knaves where many of the folks who worked on OSRIC hang out and see what they recommend.

This is the real solution. Contact or read up the authors you like and see what their recommendations are for the stuff you like. Do not try to figure out who and what is operating under what label. I get that a lot of folks find this confusing or irritating but that just how this niche of the hobby works.

I do find it amusing the folks who have no problem navigating the RPG/Storygame divide (or the rules-light/crunchy divide) are suddenly baffled by the term "OSR."  It's not like there is a hard and fast line between any of these terms (heck, you could argue the line between wargame and RPG gets pretty close, too... looking at you, Mechwarrior/Battletech).  People bitching about the use of OSR somehow manage to figure all the other terms and separations out.  It is, as estar points out, partly a case of personal preference.  MSH might not be a "story" game to me, even with its use of karma, while BitD might.  It's all in where you (as an individual) draw the line.

I will say that I find the more restrictive interpretations of the term more useful, at least in terms of categorization.  But, I don't select games to preview because they are labeled "OSR," any more than I avoid other games because of what they are labeled.  Having "OSR" as an indicator of general compatibility with an early version of D&D conveys the most information, so I prefer that definition.  That hasn't stopped me from checking out (and liking) Kevin Crawford's stuff.  I'm working on my own game with some OSR sensibilities, but, as it is a dice pool game, I'd never market it as OSR.  You'd get customers who would feel misled, even though I think it's closer to the feel of the way D&D played in the eighties than an abomination like D&D 4e (hat tip to Chris).

So, yeah, I think that most of the complaining on here is based around people who don't like the OSR and adjacent games trying to either sabotage the term or trying broaden it to coopt it.  So, who cares what they think... they don't play OSR games anyway...

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 26, 2024, 08:44:26 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 26, 2024, 03:53:18 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 25, 2024, 02:25:23 PM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on May 25, 2024, 02:01:04 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 25, 2024, 10:48:07 AMPeople can't even agree on what the "R" means. Pundit is now trying to claim it as two separate types, but there's way more than just Revival and Renaissance; I've heard everything from Rules to Revolution also used as the R.

I still think "Ruckus" is the most accurate descriptor I've ever heard applied.

You're NOT wrong.

I largely think of it as a solution in search of a problem; an attempt to create a marketing niche for something better served by more strict comparability notices. "Compatible with B/X" or "works with Traveler" or "Compatible with the first advanced edition of the world's most popular RPG" are all more useful than the term OSR has ever been.

Spoken like someone who is angry that 2nd and 3rd wave OSR products exist and are hugely successful.

Uh huh. You go right on believing what your ego needs to; that your products are relevant enough for me to give the slightest thought to.

You can't hate something you don't even think about most days and when you do it's only because someone else brought it up and is pretending they're some defining voice of a movement instead of someone who flexes the definition of OSR every bit as much to suit their needs.

Ex. Invisible College is marketed as an OSR-ruleset, but is a modern world setting with significant rules differences from D&D... you can't just plug-and-play it into a B/X or AD&D campaign. It's not compatible out of the box. But you market it as OSR anyway.

So if even the guy who wants the term to be taken seriously doesn't treat the term seriously, why should anyone else?

That's a boldfaced lie. First, the OSR can cover a vast variety of genres, that's not relevant to the definition of whether a game is OSR or not. The core rules of Invisible College are the OSR rules. It has the six stats, saving throws, armor class, hit points, the core combat system, classes, levels, etc.

You can literally take the magic system of the Invisible College, the most different part of the game to standard D&D, remove the D&D spell system and replace it as a magic system for whatever other OSR product you are using.

As far as relevance, here you are, on MY website, on MY thread, talking about MY games, which number more DTRPG bestsellers than most other game designers, and at a time when I've just had the top selling RPG on DTRPG for a solid month.
On the other hand, I have no clue who you are. And no one else does either.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 26, 2024, 12:32:33 PMNever mind that their OneTrueWayist bullshit looks nothing like how I saw D&D actually played back in the day by the 12-15 year olds who actually played it. Random rolls only? Please. Outside of the retard who practically drove me from the hobby the norm in my area was arrange 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 in whatever order you wanted and get max hit points and gold. If you got spells just put up to your limit for the level into your spellbook. Done.

Was "your area" the Special Olympics? Because in every place I gamed in the original era of TSR D&D, what you describe was the exclusive realm of the local autistic retards who were never invited to anyone's table, and would in some of said places have gotten a savage beating just for suggesting that kind of powergamer nonsense.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 26, 2024, 04:41:54 PMI'd prefer to have OSR just mean "based on TSR-era D&D". Much broader and the definition stops being useful. Much narrower, and it risks throttling innovation rather than encouraging it.

I think Pundit and others might have actually shot themselves in the foot by framing the OSR as a movement or scene, setting itself in opposition to other gaming scenes, rather than as just a rules framework. A movement/scene carries with it a certain social cachet which inevitably encourages entryists to try and widen the definition in order to fit themselves in and reap the social or commercial benefits.

I think Tenbones had the right idea above. Let "old school gaming" be the scene, and OSR be the rules framework, and try to keep the two distinct in usage. That way classic Runequest or whatever players can say they like old school gaming, but not OSR games, and everyone knows what they mean.

There is obviously issues with the defining of OSR, in that it will lead to attempted entryism, for sure. That's the downside of making a defined design movement, you have to fight to keep it from being subverted.

But the downside of not doing so is that you have no definition at all, and then "OSR" would be claimed on the one hand by people who want to demand that we play nothing but remakes of "Keep on the borderlands" forever (which would quickly make the OSR utterly useless and irrelevant), or on the other hand by people claiming that their point-buy dice-pool story-points RPG is "OSR" because they FEEL like it is, which would mean that OSR would mean nothing at all.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on May 26, 2024, 04:53:28 PM

QuoteThe reason why the core mechanics are so important is compatibility. Compatibility is a central feature of the OSR's success; where you can take any two OSR books, by different authors, even in different genres, and you can with the absolute minimum of effort plug stuff from one book into the other totally different book.

If people get to start claiming their D6 dicepool game is OSR, that compatibility is lost

Sure, but that's the thing, I can still easily imagine a d6 dice pool OSR game based on B/X D&D and which is entirely compatible with TSR era modules and content with maybe some mild on the fly tweaks needed to be made by GMs.

Even your RPGs are not 1-to-1 TSR Equivalents, they handle a number of procedures different, I cannot for example drop any TSR-era class into lion & dragon and accept it to run perfectly smoothly, it would work I guess but the way they level and progress and the scale of that would be entirely off with the rest of the game, they'd have different saves, magic, etc.

so again I find this argument poppycock.

You are doing a motte and bailey argument here. You're saying that because my games have a single-value Saving Throw roll (with individual bonuses to save vs types of challenges) instead of "Save vs paralysis/poison/wands/dragon breath/spells" that means its the same as someone making a dice pool game where the absolute core mechanics would work NOTHING like D&D does.
If instead of rolling D20s to hit, with modifiers from combat bonus and ability score modifiers you had a variable dice pool that counted successes, you would have to massively revise everything to make some TSR module (or LotFP, ACKS or whatever) fit. Whereas with just about anything from L&D or my other games you would just have to pick whether you wanted my version of the rule or the other version.
It's not in any way the same.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 26, 2024, 06:50:38 PMI'm not much into early D&D anymore, but I prefer the more narrow, useful version of OSR that assumes it is both old school in spirit and compatible mechanically with those games. Narrow definitions are useful to people inside and out.  When I describe my preferred game as old school in spirit but not compatible mechanically (i.e. not OSR but near it in spirit) then that says something fairly clear. 

What that statement would say to me is that you either chose to publish a book that won't call itself OSR and therefore likely sell less, or that you will call it OSR and therefore engage in what is essentially deceptive advertising.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 26, 2024, 08:44:05 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on May 26, 2024, 03:34:59 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 26, 2024, 12:32:33 PMI don't play them. I don't run them. I don't see any offerings for them on the boards at my FLGS or their associated website.

I don't think about the OSR at all on my own. It only enters my brain when someone else brings it up and when they do I mostly just laugh to myself because it's invariably someone trying to make OneTrueWayist claims about a term practically defined by having no one with enough authority to define it.

I don't hate or love the OSR in the same way I don't hate or love what's living in the Deep Ocean. I do broadly get annoyed by OneTrueWayism, particularly when it insists on throwing away people who might agree with all of the problems in the modern RPG scene (that the Woke are intent on dividing and conquering and driving those who don't abide their insanity out entirely), but because they don't like random-stat generation or similar OSR-isms get decried as Woke puppets who want to destroy the hobby.

If you don't play what they say is the OSR way you're a garbage person who shouldn't even be in the hobby.

Never mind that their OneTrueWayist bullshit looks nothing like how I saw D&D actually played back in the day by the 12-15 year olds who actually played it. Random rolls only? Please. Outside of the retard who practically drove me from the hobby the norm in my area was arrange 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 in whatever order you wanted and get max hit points and gold. If you got spells just put up to your limit for the level into your spellbook. Done.

That's because it was fun and you didn't have to waste any time making a new PC or have to worry about fudged dice or rolling multiple sets until you got something you wanted; put your six numbers in the order you wanted, pick a race/class (AD&D1e was the norm in these parts when I actually played), figure out your class stuff... back in the game.

Anyway, there's a whole chunk of players out there who, at least online, feel pretty homeless because we're not welcome at other places for not being Woke and aren't welcome here because we have no interest in bowing down to the self-proclaimed OSR high priests.

It's not healthy to hate though; hate is poison for the soul; which is why I just don't think of the OSR unless it's brought up here. Then I bring up the ridiculousness of the people who treat it as anything more than a marketing gimmick and get on with my day.

And most of the reason it is ridiculous is, again, OSR OneTrueWayists who lump anyone who doesn't worship their idol as belonging to the same group who are defined by their undying devotion to The Revolution and hatred for all that lives/exists... even as they insist on pushing their own Old School Revolution and hating on and ostracizing the unbelievers.

That's a whole lot of words to say "Yep, guilty as charged."

Thank goodness we have someone who doesn't like or play OSR games here to police the language we use to talk about them...

Show me where it says you have to like or play something to be able to comment... or are you going to stop shitting all over, say, 4E every time something from it comes up?

You're so far up your own ass you don't actually see you've just become the mirror image of the Woke; hating on anything that doesn't align with your worldview and assigning malign motives to any who disagree.

Which, again, is why the OSR as a movement/scene is and will always be ridiculous. The movement/scene is everything it professes to hate.

No one would feel this way if it was just being treated as a ruleset. People can like or dislike rulesets for a wide variety of valid reasons, but when you make something a movement, then you need your gatekeeping and exclusion and any who dissent can't have different preferences... they're actually having BadWrongFun if they don't embrace the movement... just like the Woke from the other direction.

Pathetic.

The only "gatekeeping" in the OSR is trying to actually stop hucksters from calling their products OSR when they are not.

And posting in a thread that is about an internal discussion about the definition of the OSR when you don't play OSR games and have stated that you hate the OSR and its game is very likely to be in the margins of thread-derailment, unless the thread was about why people hate the OSR, which this thread is not.
When we're discussing the definition of what the OSR is, to come onto the thread mainly to say that you despise the OSR is not a productive contribution.

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on May 27, 2024, 12:54:07 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 26, 2024, 03:47:59 AMBecause point-buy leads to extreme min-maxing and "charbuild optimization", which turns out to be contrary to compatibiilty. Having randomly-rolled ability scores, and not being able to "purchase" skills or feat to taste, means that compatibility is maintained.

How does min-maxing and optimization break OSR compatibility? OSR games have never been finely balanced like the 4e style wargames. Having a character with optimized stats isn't going to break the game any more than rolling an extraordinarily strong character would. I agree that it breaks with the spirit of OSR to some degree, but I don't see where it breaks mechanical compatibility.

It alters the nature of the OSR design, where virtually all OSR games assume random generation. It could depend of course, on just how extreme the point-buy structure goes, if you have say a relatively simple system of basic skills that you assign not at random but by dividing a number of points among those skills, it would still be at odds with most of the OSR products but could likely be accommodated. But if the point-buy mechanic included ability scores, which would thus generate either a wide variety of average ability scores or an extreme of unusually high and unusually low min-maxing of ability scores, that has an effect on all the other mechanics of the game. Likewise if point-buy special abilities ("benefits & drawbacks", feats, or whatever) were introduced in a game in a way that it has actual significance to the gameplay (ie. you couldn't just say "we won't use these"), that would be extremely likely to damage compatibility.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 27, 2024, 01:01:00 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 26, 2024, 03:49:22 AM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on May 25, 2024, 10:31:21 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on May 25, 2024, 09:59:54 AMI can't speak for the OP but I don't think point buy (or skills, or feats, or combat maneuvers) is in any way incompatible to the OSR.

When I say "compatibility with TSR" I do not mean theoretically, I'm actually running classic TSR modules and I don't want to do much conversion during the game. I also use old school monster manuals and encounter tables. This all despite of not running any TSR game (I use my own retroclone, Dark Fantasy Basic).

Of course, there are few "hard lines", since TSR contains many variations: roll high, roll low, 1d20, 2d6, 1d100, additional abilities (comeliness), race as class or separated, sci-fi aspects and entire games, NWP, WP, etc.

But the more conversion you need the farther you are.

Here is a curious example from Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/1d06tya/can_anyone_weigh_in_on_whether_our_game_is_osr_or/

Old school is comprised of more than just older TSR games. A tweaked clone of Traveler qualifies as old school IMHO.

Old School, definitely. OSR, no. OSR is based on D&D. As I pointed out, Traveller has its own third-party old-school movement these days, and that's great. But it is its own separate thing.

Why?

I know you feel obligated to repeat this often, but what benefit is there in isolating the OSR from any other game system that came out during that time? Why does it have to be D&D based only? is this some kind of One True Wayism for you? I ask, because this honestly looks like you are trying to protect some kind of marketing brand recognition you find in the acronym OSR.

In my video I already pointed out that for the OSR to mean anything actually concrete it has to be understood as a design school. That's what the OSR has really been at least since the release of LotFP (while before that it was just a reproduction of old editions and some new modules for those old editions). In order to be a design school, it has to have a framework, and that framework has to be the rules (any other framework, like genre or aesthetics would almost immediately be watered down into meaninglessness).
So you have say "the OSR is a box, within which you can be as creative as you like, but if you break outside the landmarks of that box, it is not OSR". That box is the D&D rules. You could have another box that is The Traveller Rules, or the Fantasy Trip rules, or T&T rules, or whatever. But you can't just say "that box is any old school game" or you do not in fact have a real framework.

It's like you're asking "why can't you say that impressionism is part of neo-classicism"? It's not a question of some kind of judgment, or claiming you can't appreciate both, it's just saying that the rules to create one are different from the rules to create the other.   

Quote from: Zalman on May 27, 2024, 06:55:25 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 27, 2024, 05:47:38 AMIf it refers to one of several different, not compatible games that fall under the nebulous category of old school games, then it utterly fails to fulfill its basic function.  It doesn't actually tell me anything about the product it is being used to describe.

Well, it tells us at least one thing: that the author of the game is concerned with whether or not their game fits into a category. Which itself might be enough information.

There's a huge difference between an author who wants to make sure that his game is considered within a category and therefore makes a game that actually fits in the standards of that category, and an author who wants his game to make more money and therefore falsely claims that his product is in a popular category that would sell better.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 27, 2024, 07:33:25 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on May 26, 2024, 09:44:09 PMPathetic

I was 50/50 on whether you were going to just repeat my closer or go with "I know you are, but what am I?"

Thank you for answering that.

Ah, projection... making claims and assigning malicious motives to others... just like the woke. Thank you for proving my point.

As for me, I have accomplished my purpose; others are now remarking on the various ridiculous aspects of OSR as a movement/scene and it's uselessness as a search term when the only relevant gatekeeper (DriveThru) lets any retroclone of an older game use the search term.

People are asking questions. Good questions. Why can't a ruleset use dice pools or point buy attributes and be OSR so long as the old modules can still be used with those rulesets? Why must it only refer to D&D and not use some other term for that compatibility?

So, having said my piece and gotten some talking started, I can depart. I might come back if the the topic drifts enough that I feel there's something different worth adding, but for now I'll leave you the last word since clearly you need it so badly.

Thank you again for proving you're exactly who I thought you were.

No, I don't think you can come back to this thread actually, since you've basically admitted to thread derailing. If you post again in this thread, or ANY thread on the subject of the OSR (unless its a thread explicitly about hating on the OSR) you will be banned.

Quote from: tenbones on May 26, 2024, 12:35:28 PMSo there should be a new marketing term - OSG (Old School Game) which comprises all non-d20 based games from that era?

I like that the discussion about WHAT the OSR is continues to happen, because it will finally crystalize, whether it means its "just" a marketing term or, finally, into a mutually understood term that encompasses a specific ruleset. It used to make my teeth itch when people would lump d6, FASERIP, and other old school games into the OSR as if they're trying to protect those systems from "modernity".

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 26, 2024, 03:49:22 AM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on May 25, 2024, 10:31:21 AMOld school is comprised of more than just older TSR games. A tweaked clone of Traveler qualifies as old school IMHO.

Old School, definitely. OSR, no. OSR is based on D&D. As I pointed out, Traveller has its own third-party old-school movement these days, and that's great. But it is its own separate thing.

The core issue here is games like Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Marvel Superheroes, Paranoia, James Bond 007, and Toon have very little in common with each other or with BX D&D - except that they're all from over 40 years ago.

I feel it doesn't make sense to call any of them "modern" or "new school" since they're over 40 years old. But lumping them together under "old school" would mean that the term is largely meaningless.

I think it makes more sense to describe games in terms of design features rather than old/new.