My dumb labels are better than your dumb labels

Even though the OSR as a living movement is largely stagnant, there's more folks being attracted to it than ever before. A consequence of that has been a shift in how people discuss and label things. I'm not trying to talk trash about Johnny-come-latelies or anything. It's exciting to have so much interest in this playstyle. But I think it's fair to say that they bring a bit of an outsider perspective that's lacking the context of where and how this play culture was born and developed.

I think that, even to this day, the first thing you learn about the OSR is that nobody knows what "OSR" means. But honestly, there arose a pretty solid framework relatively early on that I think made discussion a lot easier.

The early OSR was dominated by the "Revivalists," folks mostly just playing TSR editions of D&D or perhaps retroclones (and sometimes paraclones) of those editions. OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, etc. These folks were a lot more devoted to the TSR adventures like Keep on the Borderlands and are the most likely to put up a spirited defense of THAC0.

At some point there was a shift towards the "Renaissance," folks applying iterative design to old-school ideas to create new and innovative games. Largely the same playstyle, but oftentimes more slick and smooth and maybe easier to read and teach. GLOG, The Black Hack, Maze Rats, Into the Odd, ICRPG, etc.

There's arguably a third interpretation, the OSR as "Revolution." Rather than describing an abstract philosophy towards gaming, this refers to OSR as a social phenomenon. Get a movement going, write everything down for posterity, get a name, brand your products with the term (and maybe a cool OSR logo?), actively campaign for ENnie awards, try to influence name-brand D&D. With this came some embarrassing drama, cults of personality, and a splintering into countless subfactions. In truth, the "Revolution" isn't really a third interpretation, but rather a separate axis that those involved in the OSR had widely varying levels of interest in.

All of that seems to still make perfect sense to me. If anything, I seem to recall a general feeling that the Renaissance crowd was definitely where the OSR's momentum was found, whereas the Revivalists were being retroactively characterized as merely a continuation of something that had already long existed (what would now be called "Classical").

Skip ahead 10+ years and now I see a bunch of AD&D fanboys hijacking the term, claiming that the Revivalists are the only true OSR, while others instead retroactively apply terms like "NSR" onto everything that came out of the Renaissance crowd (despite them predating it by many years). I can't imagine how incomprehensible a lot of the old blogosphere must be to anyone coming into the conversation now, especially when they keep seeing the term "new school" frequently being used to refer to games like D&D 4E and Pathfinder.

It would almost be like if I coined a new term to refer to a new movement of games, "Powered by the Armageddon" or just "PbtA" for short, completely unrelated to Powered by the Apocalypse, and it somehow caught on, and started even being retroactively applied to games made 5+ years ago. Wouldn't that make talking about RPGs and reading old threads super annoying?

Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

-Dwiz

Slush Pile

All the cool bloggers are into slushposting. I think it was started by Dan over at Throne of Salt? He occasionally does this thing where he takes all the unfinished posts in his drafts folder and just throws them together into a big messy post as a way of cleaning up. Personally, I hate admitting defeat. Some of my most-viewed posts of all time spent 6+ months in my drafts folder, slowly cultivating a rich and nutritious wordcount like a fine cheese.

But my drafts folder has 70+ unfinished posts in it right now and even I have to admit that a lot of this is garbage. So I'm gritting my teeth and dumping some of those un-ripened thoughts here for the curious to read. Think of it as a low-quality follow-up to my Potpourri post. I doubt many people will be interested in this, but maybe it'll give me peace of mind.

Here are five abandoned ideas that I have deemed unworthy of a blog post, but still worth sharing for my true fans. I'm going to mimic the format recently used by Prismatic Wasteland, where I moreso describe the post rather than actually write some brief version of it. Where I have some text worth salvaging, I'll also quote it.

Ten Years (Part 3)

You've heard the good, the messy, and the annoying. But here in our grand finale? These are the real reasons I haven't run a 5E game in years. The stuff that makes me sometimes not even want to be a player anymore. To the game's credit, none of these things really bothered me for quite a few years. It took a lot of experience with the game before these issues started really getting to me. I'm sure if I played any game long enough, there'd be some aspect of it that would eventually annoy me this much.

All the criticisms I have in this post fall under two umbrellas: magic and combat.

Ten Years (Part 2)

As you know, I quite like D&D 5E. Hopefully I was able to illuminate some of its positive qualities that you may have overlooked. But let's be honest. This is the moment you've all been waiting for. The bad parts. A lot of people bounce off of 5E at first or they fall out of love with it after a while. But you want to know what a person who's spent a full decade playing it has to complain about. What are the most agonizing parts of this game after all this time?

Well, like before, I have to split them up into a few categories. Because "what makes D&D bad" is not just a long list, but a nuanced one.

My (Moderately Tested) Theory of Fear

This post collects a lot of miscellaneous observations and advice, some from other thinkers and some from myself. It's all basic-level. There's plenty of stuff out there far more advanced than this. This is not written with any particular game system in mind, and it includes a mix of game master advice and game designer advice.

Here's the fundamental problem of this topic: most of the time, preserving the players' agency is paramount. But fear complicates this priority. Fear is an involuntary mental state, but it can shape your behavior in profound ways. No heroic adventurer would choose to be afraid when faced with peril.

Ideally, you trust the players to roleplay their characters' emotions on their own. "If it seems like your character would be afraid of this, then try to play them like they're afraid." And if everyone is participating in good faith, they'll try their best. But unlike other emotions, authentically roleplaying fear is much easier said than done.

There are a number of ways to help resolve this problem. Different games and playstyles offer their own answers. Some of them contradictory, some of them mix well. Here's the stuff that makes sense to me based off of all my experience. I'm splitting this into three sections: 1) Player Fear, 2) Mechanical Fear, and 3) The Overlap.

Ten Years (Part 1)

You've probably noticed me blogging a lot more about 5E lately. And if you've read any of that, you'll know I that I have pretty complicated feelings towards it.

It's still my main group's main game. We've been together since early 2017 and have played multiple 5E campaigns together, including one that went all the way to level 20. But I was also playing it from the day it first released, including a few long-term campaigns and a whole lotta one-shots. I wouldn't even know how to begin calculating a modest estimate of the time I've spent with it. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours.

I myself haven't run a session in 5E in years, though. I've just been too interested in exploring different possibilities. It's how I started in the hobby, and it was inevitable I'd return to that instinct.

I may never end up playing a newer version of D&D ever again. So I thought it might be fitting to write my big retrospective on this game. I hope the amount of experience I have, coupled with my experiences across the rest of the RPG world, gives my perspective some value. At least, more value than 99% of the discourse out there about 5E.

In the Mouth of Madness

"Go on in, it's okay. You can see him."

The Dungeon Master was frozen at the door. He was nervous for what he'd find on the other side. But that was his player in there. His friend. After a moment's hesitation, he stepped inside. Just ahead, there were the bars of a secure cell visible. He could hear the Rogue's voice. He was saying something, something unclear. The nurse saw that the Dungeon Master was unsure, and so she stepped inside with him.

"Rogue, you have a visitor. Your Dungeon Master has come to see you."

The Dungeon Master crept further and saw through the cell bars. On the other side was the Rogue. He was pale and trembling. His arms were bound and his surroundings were padded. Their eyes met, but there was no recognition in the Rogue's gaze. He just continued muttering.

"It doesn't even give the length. Not in feet, not in meters, not in squares, nothing."

"The length of what, Rogue?" asked the Dungeon Master.

"Why are those words capitalized? Why are so many words capitalized?"

It was no use. He wasn't talking to them at all. He wasn't in the same room as them, in the same world as them. The Dungeon Master choked. It was too difficult for him to see. His friend of so many years, now a total stranger. The Rogue had changed.