The OSR is teaching me how to cook.

2025-06-12

The OSR wants you to realize the ownership you have over the games you play and provide you with the tools and ideas to adjust it to taste. But the scene does have its own taste and opinions.

HOW THE OSR REACHED MY EARS

This post mostly serves to provide some background as to where my ideas going forward will come from and to share my journey with D&D.

I wanted to find out what this scene was all about. As a proud twenty something zoomer D&D has been ubiquitous with Fifth Edition. Third Edition was the game talked about online as the one where you could build godlike characters and nothing about editions older than that was ever mentioned.

I ended up trying to run the game a few times and none of the games really got off the ground as I couldn't get a feel for how to DM it. My experiences as a player had many of the common experiences and I could not figure out what the issue was. The game always sounded like something I would love.

Can't really speak on the effect of actual plays as I never could get through a fifth edition actual play but the Film Reroll (GURPS) and Pretending to be People (Delta Green) exposed me to a game play style with a lot less mechanical inertia. The first session that ever really worked for me was running Friday the 13th using GURPS with my players playing the roles of the movie's characters.

• Pre-Made Characters lead to no character creation friction
• we rarely rolled for anything especially before Jason showed up and spent a lot of time in character developing relationships with each other
• a simple roll under a number system led to me not having to decide if a roll hit a vague DC.

According to reddit maybe delta green is a common bridge towards the osr

My interest in the world of darkness setting lead to a werewolf campaign but I bounced off of it pretty fast as I found it difficult to prep for at that stage in my DM career.

Earlier last year(?) twitter dot com's algorithm started showing me TTRPG posts and as a discourse addict they ended up serving me some hallmark discussions

• do rules elide?
• Does system matter?
• play other games. (5e24 OGL scandal)

November 2024 I wanted to delete the app but still have a way to interact with other hobbyists so I reached out to some of the creators I followed to see if they knew any forums where people talked about TTRPGs and one of them pointed me to the Prismatic Wasteland Discord.

OSR NSR POSR DIY D&D DIY ELFGAME

so many blogs

do I read them as they come out? do I just follow all the blogs they link to? oh god there are too many blog posts in my rss feed

Then someone links me to the Traverse Fantasy blog and her post, The OSR Should Die was exactly what I needed.

I went through and read each of the blogs she links to gain a baseline understanding of this space. A joke regarding one of my favorite content creators helped me realize that the OSR was teaching me how to cook.

WHAT IS MY TASTE?

I tried to figure out what I liked about TTRPGs but I found it a lot easier to think about what I do not enjoy.

• Long and complicated character creation. (imo GURPS only worked for me when you create the characters for the players.)
• Long and complicated combat.
• Combat focused progression and creating balanced encounters.
• Complicated Character abilities that require reading what they do every time they get used.
• Too many character abilities leading to deliberation as to what to use when presented with a situation.
• Shopping.

WHAT DO I ENJOY?

• DG not having classes and the skills reflecting their background or training before the game begins.
• During Werewolf play presenting the players with situations where combat was not the best option and seeing how they choose to tackle it.
• Rich community resources / scenarios (DG).

WHAT IS THEIR TASTE?

It seems to be that the OSR developed in the way that it did because its rules are the conditions under which a specific play-style emerged. Although you very much can apply OSR principles to any TTRPG.

It could be because the first OSR game I ever played was Mousritter or because ODDlikes deal with many things I do and do not like but that is the system / family of games that currently have my attention.

Actually playing the game showed me things I did not know could be enjoyable.

• An actually usable inventory abstraction that leads to more player choices.
• Useful GM advice that can be easily applied to the games being run.
• Getting rid of skills and assuming basic competency.

blog review

The blog posts I read seemed to fall into two different categories

1. What the rules are and what they do as a result.
2. Applying the resulting principles to your games

What the rules are and what they do

• The lethality of old school dungeons and dragons informs us that the system does not facilitate a heroic fantasy type of game. Instead player character death moves the focus to the adventuring party as a whole and how it changes as members die and new ones join. It encourages players to work as a team. (Gus L, 2013)
  • This also shifts combat (as well as all risky plans which are decided by a roll) to a last ditch effort some even call it a fail state. (Natalie, 2012)
• XP for Loot encourages world building since the players spending the gold have a material impact on the game world. Either directly through the funding of settlements or even as they trade expensive artifacts these transactions give an opportunity to the game world to react to what the players do. (Gus L, 2013)
  • When coming from more modern dungeons and dragons systems the shift to XP for Loot also changes the game play loops and goals. The importance of an encounter or situation shifts to getting out with as much treasure as possible as opposed to trying to fight everything. (Macy, 2012)
• The minimal use of modifiers are not only there to make the game simpler or more "rules-light" but they serve to minimize the importance of the character sheet and your rolled stats. This allows the choices the players make to have more impact than just being dictated by which ever stat you have the biggest bonus in. Stats still have a degree of importance but their application is left to be defined by the DM which encourages creative application. (Cone, 2007)
• The quickness of character creation allows characters to be made together as a group instead of homework before the session. This helps everyone be invested in each others characters. (Johann, 2012)
  • quick character creations means the characters come out pretty much bare bone so they can be fully developed through play. Instead of coming in with a multi-page backstory that backstory will be generated as a result of play and be much more memorable. (Gus L, 2013)
• Across all editions of D&D there are a lot of rules for combat. In the case with old school games:

  "The main function of the combat rules, instead, is to make combat deadly, in a way that's fairly adjudication agnostic. If the DM is doing her job right, she's going to kill your character sometimes, and you're going to know that you deserved it. It needs fairly detailed combat rules because it's relatively difficult to adjudicate combat compared to most of what you do in D&D, and relatively important compared to most of what you do in D&D that it be adjudicated "correctly," or at least in a fairly neutral way." (Natalie, 2012)

  • Combat rules help players understand the stakes of their choices since they understand how deadly getting into a fight is
  • Having a lot of rules for something does not necessarily mean the game is about that thing instead those rules are there to help the DM "run the simulation" for that aspect of the game compared to say a social encounter where the DM might have a better understanding if an argument is persuasive for a specific NPC
• The character stats in old school D&D, its clones, and its re-imaginings

  "D&D-style games traditionally have 6 ability scores, but those 6 scores actually represent 8 different abilities. Those 8 abilities, in turn, are simply the combination of three different dichotomies - physical vs mental,  force vs grace, and attack vs defend." (Anne, 2019)

  • If we think about stats that some games choose to leave out say wisdom, intelligence, and sometimes charisma it might inform us as to what the game designer chose to have the game simulate vs what they leave for the GM to adjudicate.
    • ie: player skill in looking for traps, persuasion check vs thinking of a persuasive argument
• The inclusion of inventory / encumbrance rules informs us that the game designers want players to think about what they are bringing with them on an adventure
  • Worrying about where your things are is a staple of pulp (Jack, 2012)
  • Making items useful and 'balancing' them by making them difficult to carry (Cone, 2007)
  • Resource management has a high cognitive load so these systems should aim to minimize complexity so they're actually usable.(Anne, 2018)

This interpretation of then rules tells us what the POSR finds important. It wants to give the players the opportunity to make meaningful choices as much as possible. It want those choices to have weight and consequences especially when they lead to violence. It want to let the players creativity and problem solving to have more impact than their characters stats. It also wants the players to interact and affect the world they're playing in, mainly through spending the gold they are being motivated to collect. It also wants to position teamwork at the front of the game through both quick group character creation and through the fragility of the player characters.

Think it'll be a waste to go through the rest of blog posts like I did above but they give you procedures or advice that revolve around the principles derived from the rules above such as telegraphing danger so an informed decision can be made, how to get the most out of an encounter die to give taking time weight, and what to have ready for a session.

Finishing thoughts

It is probably easy to take those principles and say that they are not DIY ELFGAME specific. They very well could be the principles of any decent TTRPG.

Towards the OSR not existing, it does exist as a style of play that differs from other broad categories that exist in the space. Although any DM could apply these principles to any game, the lethality of DIY DND stands out more than any other rule. Although there are many people who have created systems to make DIY D&D less lethal, reading about how embracing lethality has the effect of shifting the story away from your specific exceptional blorbo and instead towards this ship of Theseus of a party and how the game world reacts to it. I might be reaching with this but there seems to be something about a style of play that reduces the importance of what character starts with and instead focuses on what you do with what you have and the real risk you put yourself through to do it.

Experience with other games not mentioned here: a very fun Urban Shadows game which has gotten through its first mini arc. Showed me I love faction play. World Wizard showed me how much fun collaborative world building is. Dogs in the Vineyard demonstrated levels of escalation. I really enjoyed seeing how far players are willing to escalate. Very useful to make it clear what level you are escalating to.

Regarding random death not being fun: I don't think death is ever random. If an unlucky arrow or trap kills you there is the fact that your character put himself in danger because his goal was worth that much to him.