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