OSR v. osr: A Reply to Erik Tenkar

Yesterday, Erik Tenkar posed the question, how inclusive is the OSR? Is it specific to D&D, or is it a tent under which all 'old school games' - and there's a slippery phrase in itself - should be covered?

I normally steer clear of these discussions here as they don't really pertain to RBE - Backswords & Bucklers is really the only OSR game to receive regular mention - but it's something that I've addressed a number of times on different discussion forums, so please forgive me for indulging in a bit of meta today.

For my part, I make a distinction - and by no means does everyone agree with that distinction - between the O[ld] S[school] R[enaissance], which is publishing retro-clones of pre-3e D&D and associated adventure modules, settings, and supplements, and an o[ld] s[chool] r[enaissance], which is a general renewal of interest in playing games from roughly the first decade of the roleplaying game hobby.

The OSR began as an effort to get new 1e AD&D modules on gaming store shelves by using the d20 SRD to create a cloned 1e rulebook - OSRIC - that publishers could reference instead of AD&D, allowing them to skirt copyright issues. With hundreds of products released since OSRIC became available, returning beer money and pride of accomplishment to their creators, it proved to more successful at what it set out to do than I think most of the gamers who put it together imagined.

Soon, gamers decided to clone the other editions, for a mix of reasons - sometimes they simply liked the other TSR-era versions of D&D better, sometimes as a vanity thing, in my experience. Soon there were clones for just about all of the different versions of the D&D rules published by TSR - most prominently Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord - yet most of them weren't 'true' clones, in that the author's editorial voice was present to one degree or another, from everything to rules interpretations to adding house rules.

This is where I think it starts to get confusing for some people, I think. That inclusion of editorial voice led some gamers down the same path taken with Tékumel and Arduin, of making what was essentially campaign-specific versions of D&D. It was this 'wave' of the OSR that produced titles like AS&SH, ACKS, and LotFP as well as Carcosa.

Finally, there were those who decided to take the original rules and concepts in different directions - the OSR equivalent of Marvel's 'What If?' series - and thus they released 'clones' like Stars Without Number for sci-fi space adventures, Mutant Futures for post-apocalypse campaigns, and Flying Swordsmen for wuxia martial arts adventures.

One of the important features of all of these games is that, because they draw from the same root stock - D&D, and more specifically some variant of the SRD - they are often highly interchangeable with one another.

That, in a nutshell, is what the capital-O, capital-S, capital-R OSR is about.

At the same time this was occurring, and with some degree of mutual feedback and support, other gamers were noticing older games were still just as playable and just as fun as the stuff they could readily find on gaming-store shelves. Games like TFT and Chivalry & Sorcery popped up in discussion on rpg forums, as did Boot Hill or Champions, and with the help of second-hand retailers and eBay, they started finding their way into gamers' hands, and onto their tables, once again.

A few games never really went away. Fans of original, 'classic' Traveller were quietly humming along for years; their reprints were still available, supported by a ton of fan-created content that Marc Miller didn't attempt to stamp out the way TSR did. Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon received new editions, but remained close to their roots. GURPS was always there. Closer to home, Flashing Blades remained in print and En Garde and Maelstrom were republished, the latter with a new companion volume as well as adventures and supplements.

The presence of these games in online discussions began to grow. Awareness of availability went up. This was an old-school renaissance of a different sort, less publishing oriented and not fixated on D&D, but rather on digging up and playing older roleplaying games, discovering that once the dust was cleared away, they still held their shine. This lower case-o, lower case-s, lower case-r osr is also producing some clones of its own, like Legends of the Ancient World and Heroes & Other Worlds for TFT, FASERIP for MSH, and Classified for the James Bond RPG, but these are not OSR, which is a publishing effort specific to TSR-era D&D.

There are edge cases, as in all things. Is Castles & Crusades the first OSR retro-clone? Some say yes, others - including me - no. Is DCCRPG OSR? I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but I know it's been argued both ways as well.

If I understand him correctly, Erik seems to argue that the OSR is the tent under which all these games fit. I think it's the other way 'round - that the OSR, the family of games with a shared D&D heritage, are part of a larger renaissance of interest in older roleplaying games. The OSR tends to get the most attention - or sucks the air out of the room, depending on your perspective - by virtue of the fact that it's derived from the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game™, but we cannot forget the games that kept chug-chug-chugging along through the long White Wolf and Whizbros night to those which enjoyed a true renaissance after being long forgotten by all but a handful of stalwart fans.

I suppose where I most disagree with Erik is that 'all roleplaying games are D&D.' I certainly won't argue that's the perception from many outside the hobby; I don't know that there's any advantage to us accepting or adopting that label for ourselves, when it tends to maginalise the broad range of subjects, genres, and games of which the hobby is actually comprised. Erik argues that D&D is to roleplaying games what Xerox is to photocopying or Kleenex is to tissue. I believe that's self-diminishing. I would say that D&D is more like what poker is to card games: arguably the best known and probably the most visible, but nothing like the only game in town.

S is for Serendipity

Serendipity is digging a hole to plant a tree and finding a chest of pirate silver. Serendipity is buying a used book and finding a near-mint Honus Wagner baseball card stuck between the pages.

As the Nineties wound down, and Wizards of the Coast was preparing to release the third(-ish) edition of Dungeons and Dragons, a manager named Ryan Dancey proposed that Whizbros release the new edition under an open gaming license.

We make more revenue and more profit from our core rulebooks than any other part of our product lines. In a sense, every other RPG product we sell other than the core rulebooks is a giant, self-financing marketing program to drive sales of those core books. At an extreme view, you could say that the core >book< of the PHB is the focus of all this activity, and in fact, the PHB is the #1 best selling, and most profitable RPG product Wizards of the Coast makes year in and year out. The logical conclusion says that reducing the "cost" to other people to publishing and supporting the core D&D game to zero should eventually drive support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market, create customer resistance to the introduction of new systems, and the result of all that "support" redirected to the D&D game will be to steadily increase the number of people who play D&D, thus driving sales of the core books. This is a feedback cycle -- the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is. The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive -- someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.

Ryan Dancey overcame objections from others at Whizbros, and 3e Dungeons and Dragons was released with an open license, allowing other developers to write original products using the core rules as set out in the system reference document, in accordance with the terms of the license.

A 'boom' followed the release of 3e D&D - here was an unprecedented opportunity to commercially publish supplements, settings, and adventures for the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game. As years passed, however, sales dropped and Whizbros decided it was time for a new edition of the game. This new edition, 4e D&D, would not be released under the open game license like the previous edition and half-edition, 3.5 D&D, however, but rather under a new license.

Meanwhile, the Open Game License remained in effect. It was still possible to publish materials for 3e D&D, and when many gamers expressed reservations about the early releases of 4e rules, one gaming publisher, Paizo, elected not to make the jump to the new edition, instead continuing support for their own house version of the 3.5 game, released under the OGL, called Pathfinder. This, arguably, drove an even deeper wedge between those who liked the new edition of D&D and those who wanted to stay with the current, third(-ish) iteration of the game.

But before 4e and Pathfinder arrived on the scene, there was another twist to the tale.

A segment of D&D gamers still played even earlier, out-of-print editions of D&D. Some were 3e and d20 gamers dissatisfied with the rules, while others simply never stopped playing the older games in the first place. These gamers still enjoyed the experience which playing original, basic, 1e and 2e D&D provide.

What they didn't have was a supply of new material.

Enter OSRIC.

Released in 2006, OSRIC - the Old School Reference and Index Compilation - was ". . . intended to reproduce underlying rules used in the late 1970s to early 1980s, granting publishers a common base for the creation of new "first edition-style" products." It allowed game desigers, for the first time in many years, to legally sell new adventures and other materials for out-of-print versions of D&D.

So while 3e and 4e battled for their share of the roleplaying pie, another branch of gamers appeared, growing at right angles to the 3e/4e axis. Dubbed the Old School Renaissance, these gamers-slash-designers produced not only new adventures et al for the older editions, but also new approaches to gaming using the early rules, from thirty-one flavors of D&D to games in different genres like the post-apocalyptic Mutant Future, sci-fi Stars Without Number, and wuxia Flying Swordsmen.

One of my favorite products to come out of the OSR is Backswords and Bucklers, "[i]nspired by works such as Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana and Sir Walter Scott’s Kennilworth," a game I plan to talk about in more detail in coming months.

When I think about the history of D&D over the past decade or so, I'm struck by how the saga of the OGL played out. By some measures Pathfinder came to outsell 4e D&D, something which I expect wasn't in the plan outlined by Ryan Dancey* more than a decade ago. I believe the rise of the OSR from the OGL was even more improbable, with roots-gamers enjoying new commercially published products for their favorite games and the exploration of new genres using old rules.

Serendipity can be a beautiful thing.

* According to Justin Alexander, that was, in fact, part of the plan from the start.

Crouching Fighter, Hidden Wizard

This looks very cool.