"Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot."
His review is very positive, and reception to the review has likewise been very positive. Yay! But also, he's gotten a bit of shit for this snippet near the beginning:
I'm not here to dunk on Quinns. But this moment inspired me to write about something that's been percolating in my mind for the last year or so, as I feel like I've heard similar sentiments more and more frequently. He's just the unlucky voice in the chorus who's easiest to direct these feelings at.
(But seriously, Quinns. Expensive? That's one of your complaints about the OSR? Cairn is literally free)
My personal OSR
I've claimed in the past that I'm not really an OSR purist. I'll gladly depart from its conventions if there's something that captures my interests elsewhere. But there's a closely-related phrase that, for a long time, was treated as synonymous with OSR: DIY D&D
I think the only useful way to understand the OSR is in the context of how and where and why it was born. In the early 2000's, WotC had scooped up D&D and was building a tabletop gaming empire. The hobby was dominated by shiny, crunchy, 300-page rulebooks published by big companies. D&D itself was more commercial than ever. A constant stream of new content to buy, ruthless accessorizing in the form of miniature-based combat, and (most infamously) the audacity to ask their player base to drop $90 on a brand new "3.5" version of the game just 3 years after they'd spent that same amount on the 3.0 core rulebooks. And with the advent of 4E, all of that was only about to get worse.
Yes, the OSR was a call to return to older playstyles and mechanics. But it was just as much a call to take RPGs back. "D&D belongs to us, not a corporation." You can't tell me how I have to play. We forgot so easily that this hobby is and has always been free. RPG books are an optional expense. Something you may choose to spend money on if you think you'd benefit from a designer's input on your game. But they're never "necessary" to roleplay.
The DIY ethic has a long history in countless subcultures, from crafting to fashion to music and more. The OSR didn't introduce it to RPGs, either. On the contrary, RPGs as a medium were a product of a DIY-crazed subculture of wargamers, and are arguably simply the natural extension of the most thriving DIY community in the world: children, who've always played pretend and made up ways to keep themselves entertained using only their imaginations.
Since the founding of the hobby, the DIY community is almost always where the most interesting stuff is happening at any moment. And in the 2000s and 2010s, the OSR was leading the pack. That was the corner of the movement where I spent my first, like, 5 years in. At time of writing, "DIY" is still the second-most used tag on this very blog. That's my OSR.
And I think that's the key to understanding the generic old-school fantasy heartbreaker.
Your personal OSR
Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, Beyond the Wall, Block Dodge Parry, Break!!, Cairn, CINCO, Dolmenwood, Dungeon Crawl Classics, DURF, Errant, Five Torches Deep, Forbidden Lands, GLOG, His Majesty the Worm, Index Card RPG, Into the Odd, Knave, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Low Fantasy Gaming, Mausritter, Maze Rats, Mörk Borg, Old-School Essentials, Shadowdark, Swords & Wizardry, The Black Hack, The Black Sword Hack, Tunnel Goons, Whitehack...
What's the point, amirite?
I totally understand why someone would look at this and be skeptical. But I'd like to propose a different way of looking at these games.
Rather than considering each of these systems separately, as a standalone game that you're choosing between, it almost makes more sense to think of the OSR itself as one game. And part of that game is picking and choosing each piece of the system you prefer.
In a way, the best OSR game has always been "the one you make yourself." A beautiful Ship of Theseus, assembled from a veritable fleet of vessels we all share and build on together. "Fantasy heartbreaker" is the system.
Quinns is far from the first person to make the mistake of viewing these games as being in competition with one another. Trust me, the OSR market is not a zero-sum game. Even though I insist that this hobby is free, the fact is that old school gamers fucking love buying books. There's plenty of market share to go around.
And yes, the OSR might be prone to constant infighting, it's true. But it's almost always for reasons of petty social melodrama bullshit, easily ignorable by the average gamer. From a design and commerce standpoint, there is an extremely refreshing culture of collaboration driving the old school scene.
This may sound hyperbolic, but Ben Milton's decision to release Knave 1E under the Creative Commons literally changed my life. Before that, I occasionally dabbled in 5E homebrew, and never in a million years would I have thought I'd be getting into game design. But that short, simple ruleset, available as an easy-to-edit Word doc, inviting me to change as much as I wanted and encouraging me to share the results with the world, inspired me like no other game ever has. The whole point of Knave was to be a DIY fountain of youth, and dozens of games resulted from it.
The closest I'll ever get to arguing the OSR is dead
Despite the very pretty picture I just painted, I do feel like the DIY ethic has declined in recent years. The OSR scene is now dominated by lushly produced tomes and boxed sets. The kind of product that says "this is the complete package, your final destination."
Of course, I know these designers well enough to know that they don't believe that. They all continue to support the spirit of collaboration, hungrily cannibalizing each others' previous work and then eagerly promoting each others' upcoming work. But breaking in is harder than it used to be.
I once joked that zines used to be the primary medium of DIY culture, until Prismatic Wasteland made a lavish, full-color 60 page adventure on cardstock and called it a "zine." I said it tongue-in-cheek, but like, it's kinda true!
Back in the day, you could legitimately just post a doc of your B/X houserules on your blog (or maybe a black and white PDF optimized for home printing if you were feeling fancy) and it would have a serious shot at taking off. Not so, anymore. I was fully ready to tinker with encumbrance mechanics and whip up some random tables til the cows come home. But now I'm faced with my Achilles' heel: quality.
It's discouraging for amateurs these days, I tell ya. The bar has raised.
Stupid, sexy worm
If you're reading this, I sure hope you've heard of the GLOG. Arnold K's "Goblin Laws of Gaming" is, to me, the platonic ideal of DIY RPGs. It's hard to imagine now, but one of the most innovative and important systems of the last decade has only ever existed in the form of PDFs and blog posts. And it gained a serious following! Tons of people played or continue to play the GLOG, and many of them will tell you it's the best OSR game out there.
And honestly, I have a hard time believing that something like the GLOG could ever happen again.
Finally, my point
I don't expect this sort of thing to appeal to Quintin Smith or most other RPG hobbyists. They like a nice, shiny finished product. Quinns is obviously a good critic, but in my opinion, his particular lens is very biased towards appreciating surface-level elements, of gobbling up the tasty flavor of a game. Me? Give me an ashcan PDF or .txt file or whatever you got, that's good enough for me.
I'm also not firmly declaring this as the only RPG experience I enjoy. On the contrary, if you've read my series on Capsule Games, you know I love a tightly-designed complete package. I, too, think Mythic Bastionland is nothing short of genius, and is taken to a whole 'nother level by its polish.
And of course, there's plenty of mythmaking in this post. The truth is that the OSR has always had games aspiring to be your "final destination," a complete package that needs no hacking. For 13 years, Dungeon Crawl Classics has probably made 90% of its sales purely on the allure of that epic tome and its bananas triple-digit page count of elaborate spells. You're not going to port that into your heartbreaker, so get comfy and embrace the DCC, warts and all. Mythic Bastionland belongs to a worthy tradition, too.
My goal in this post is merely to defend the honor of an old friend: the venerable generic fantasy heartbreaker. To those who never understood the appeal, I hope now you can maybe see what others see in them. Even if these sorts of games aren't for you, you shouldn't just write them off as same-y, uninspired slop. Because as enticing as it is to sink your teeth into a juicy game dripping with flavor and original ideas, there's also something just as compelling about jumping into the kitchen yourself.
-Dwiz
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