What Is The OSR, or How Discourse Would Be Better If You Tried Googling It

RPG discourse gets a bad rap sometimes. The main allegation from weary participants is that it’s painfully cyclical and, ever since The Elusive Shift, it's been de rigeur to point out that some of these debates are literally as old as the hobby. (For the record, I love a good debate as much as anybody else. I, too, routinely try to prove that I am Worthy Of Love Respect by arranging words in the correct order.) But the cyclical nature of the discourse is partly a function of how waves of new people constantly enter the hobby’s social spaces, usually after wrestling with the same set of contradictory design impulses in D&D that prompt the same questions in the minds of every previous cohort. 

Which isn’t to say those conversations can’t be less annoying. One obvious improvement is for participants to recognize that different people have different tastes. The other way would be if people occasionally used the search function of the internet to look things up. I try to demonstrate the former on Rascal Reading Club, but it’s less obvious to show what the latter looks like in an article. So, when my colleague Khee Hoon asked what the OSR was in the work Discord server, I challenged them to look it up. I didn’t give them any pointers, just that Google probably had everything they needed to know. It could’ve been any topic but this was the one that came up and I was just so confident that, despite some version of this question popping up all the time, this assignment was going to be a slam dunk. Now, was I right? 

Here’s what Khee Hoon came back with:

A persistent object tends to make an appearance when I tried to wade into the quagmire that is Old School Renaissance (OSR) games: the ten foot pole. It is, as I eventually discovered, a tool that exemplifies the focus on practical, even creative ways of resolving challenges in these games. Rather than relying on powerful spells and skills, the nifty ten foot pole lets the hero overcome a variety of challenges — be it disarming a trap, inspecting a suspiciously noxious puddle of goo, or crossing a broken bridge — with minimal fuss. Whatever the gulf is between yourself and the next stash of loot, the humble ten foot pole has your back.

The pole also marks the beginning of my excursion into the depths of the internet to learn more about OSR games, but it’s also a question that I realise has no easy answers (and reading the Wikipedia entry can feel like an exercise in academia; it never quite explains what OSR games are). If you are equally curious yet unenlightened, OSR games are tabletop RPGs inspired by the earliest years of Dungeons & Dragons from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Dicebreaker has a really easy-to-digest primer on the basics of OSR games, but the very, very short of it is that the third edition of D&D, when released in 2000, didn’t quite appeal to old-school veterans. The third edition had too many rules for combat that they felt hamstrung the whole experience. Then, there was the increasing focus on tactics and building out your characters and not so much on roleplaying. 

Consider that the original D&D was essentially about exploring dungeons, becoming stinking rich, and then delving through even more dangerous dungeons in search of even more perilous adventures. The loop was simple, but it also carved out more room for player creativity and agency than the third edition. A few creators then decided to recreate these old-school rules with the use of newly minted Open Game License, the most well-known being the Old School Reference and Index Compendium (OSRIC). These games are known as retro-clones, and a cottage industry of OSR games was thus born. Boom.

But also… not really. The core tenets of OSR games, at least from what I can glean, is a greater focus on roleplaying and interactivity rather than the tactical, and they are typically light on rules and extremely lethal. The consensus on what constitutes an OSR game, however, is apparently a thorny conversation. With more creators becoming aware of the OSR scene every year, more games that add a different spin to the system were gradually introduced: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, for instance, is inspired by the original D&D but uses its own unique system. This understanding has become so fragmented that some would consider OSR games to be set strictly within the fantasy genre of humans, dwarves, elves, and halfings. Others might only consider a game to be part of the OSR movement when they are compatible with D&D modules from the TSR era — before Wizards of the Coast bought the game right from the defunct publisher.

But I could be wrong. After all, these are most likely superficial impressions, given that I’ve only spent a few hours reading from impassioned players on Blogger sites and forums like Dragonsfoot. In other words, I’m eager to gingerly prod a ten foot pole into this movement. 

That’s written without any feedback, to be clear. I think it’s pretty good! I really like the use of the ten-foot pole as an image (it’s a classic symbol for the problem-solving part of the game for a reason) as well as the gesture that the debate does get thorny. But here’s the thing: any subject can get thorny! With enough detail, there’s little that remains simple. For example, fish. This isn’t a test of whether perfection is in reach, but whether functional understanding is. There’s also lots of detail you can add, including the focus on sandbox play and information design, but again, there’s always more detail you can add. Khee Hoon does mention that the OSR can be “extremely lethal”, which is debateable… and that debate did happen with at least one blogger finding a pretty fruitful line of inquiry. (And the video linked in that blog is a good example of something that could’ve benefited from more research.)

There's nothing wrong with being wrong, especially if it comes from lack of access, but there's something wrong from being confident that ignorance can't be improved upon.

The big picture for me is that, to some extent, it’s not just a problem of institutional memory (or lack thereof) but also the lack of engaging with it. A lot of the hobby is actually written down. It can be researched and referenced reasonably easily. While I’m not advocating a return to passive-aggressively linking people to letmegooglethatforyou.com (does that reference still work?), we should start recognizing that a lot of the hobby’s most discussed questions are already pretty well-documented. So next time, teach a discourser where to fish, show them where they can learn more, point them towards the games or blogs that lay the facts out. If they don’t want to read, they probably don’t want to learn.