Two things happened concurrently to me that have ended up being about the same thing, how I feel about OSR play:

I’m prepping Mythic Bastionland, to run for the first time (hopefully on channel) and it occurs to me that the game has rules for combat – and not much else. Outside of combat, there are lots of procedures – for the hexcrawl, for the omens, for task resolution – but even Saves aren’t really skill checks. It occurs to me that many of my favourite games have combat rules and very little else (Marvel Heroic, Feng Shui, 13th Age….) – and maybe Mythic Bastionland is like this.

I’m listening to Between Two Cairns and the hosts talk about how OSR play is an entirely different schema of play to D&D5e play, just like story-games are, and we should maybe be more up-front about it – as they analyse a blog post from Sam Sorensen about his Three-Question Taxonomy. It makes me think I might have run Mork Borg wrong, even though I (and my players) seemed to have a good time, and wonder if it matters. I’ve run Pirate Borg on YouTube with a player-authored montage in it – was that a mistake?

And thinking about  the two together, maybe I actually do like OSR play. I just haven’t realised it yet.

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First up, let’s be clear – in the past, I’ve been pretty sure of myself that OSR play isn’t for me. Nostalgia is a seductive liar, I think the quote goes, and I don’t even think folks played like that back in the day. Maybe I don’t have the right nostalgia – I started playing firmly in the AD&D2e days, where adventures were meant to be epic railroaded story-fests (there’s some analysis to be done looking at this era and Critical Role, I reckon). But even if it was, my gaming today is 1000% better than it was when I was a teenager; isn’t everyone’s?

So let’s look at what I like and don’t like about the OSR play style. Note this is all personal preference, each to their own, etc – don’t come at me. I’ll start with what I don’t like, in an attempt to end on a positive note.

I Don’t Like Meaningless Character Death

I’m fine with death being on the cards, and player character jeopardy is necessary for a certain type of game; I run some games where it’s all but guaranteed. But I can’t stomach taking 4 hp from a random goblin and dropping dead. That’s just silly. I’ll make an exception for DCC funnels when I’ve got 3 more victims, sorry, characters to carry on the legacy, but stories of repeated TPKs in OSR games sound to me like when heavy drinkers describe their nights out to teetotallers. I can’t understand what’s enjoyable about it, and in fact I’d find it quite unpleasant.

Let my characters die in a noble battle against a meaningful foe, or in some hideous death-trap; not in a 10 foot pit. “Ha ha you’re dead”-play may or may not be an OSR feature, but I hear people talk about it after games (while I roll my eyes) too much for me to believe it’s not a feature of this kind of play.

I Don’t Like Puzzles

Or, I don’t like not solving puzzles. I like solving them, and I enjoy discovery and exploration and all that good stuff – who doesn’t? But puzzle solving has two big problems for me – firstly, it takes everyone out of character – not just out of author stance, but out of director stance, and into – I don’t know – crossword stance (?) to try and work out what’s happening. This isn’t just an OSR problem for me – Call of Cthulhu (except when clues are properly hefted at me) has the same issue. A lot of OSR stuff seems to have some quite impenetrable stuff in it, and a few times I’ve played it’s presented with the Second Policeman Problem.

The Second Policeman Problem is what happens when you get to the end of a Call of Cthulhu adventure and the GM tells you (despite your protestations) what you missed. And you asked the policeman about the murders, but you didn’t ask the second policeman, who would have told you more about them. See also, you didn’t search the study twice, didn’t check both bodies, didn’t pull the green lever while wearing the yellow hat. It’s a tiresome trope that incentivises boring play, and I’ll have none of it.

I Don’t Like Avoiding Peril

You’ve heard the tag line – about Runequest, usually, in fairness to the OSR – “Combat is brutal and deadly, so you’ll want to avoid it if you can!” – then why are there all these cool rules for it then? I’m a fighter, and I’ve got a sword, so I want to use it, please – if you’ve got lots of combat rules, the game should feature lots of exciting combat. Similarly, I don’t want to check for traps every three paces, and debate whether to go into a room or turn around at every juncture.

Admittedly, maybe this is a system issue – some of the rules for camping/resting and procedural hexcrawling look fun to me, and encourage this sort of risk/reward peril balancing which I think I’d fine engaging – but I’ve had too many game experiences when the balance falls down to “avoid peril,” and I can’t abide it; I’ll push you into the room with the goblins myself if I have to.

OK, maybe the OSR isn’t for me. But then on the flip side, here’s what I do like –

I Like Dungeons

To be fair, everything’s a dungeon really, but map-based play is great. Having a bounded area to explore is really an ideal set-up for me, and I like that exploration bit of what’s in the next room, do we turn left, finding out what happened diagetically, all that good stuff. I can absolutely see that the OSR is streets ahead of D&D5e in adventure module design (many games are to be fair). When I occasionally run D&D for random board game cafe-goers, I’ll usually adapt an OSR dungeon – the cutting edge of adventure writing really is the OSR.

I like Procedural Play

Look, I made my convention name running Mouse Guard, one of the most procedural games imaginable – literally “this is a mission” procedural. I love to see mini-systems, for hexcrawling, making camp, and all the stuff that gets handwaved too often in other games. I also think procedural play is bigger than just that – PBTA Moves are procedural play, 13th Age Montages are procedural play; “Describe a Feng Shui fight scene by listing cool things the players can do” is procedural. 

I also like procedural prep, which might be why Mythic Bastionland is blowing my mind so much at the moment; and I’ve been running Stay Frosty a lot where procedural random events occupy the majority of the game.

I Like Random Characters

This may be a feature of running lots of convention one-shots and having to make sets of 6 pregens, but I’d generate random characters for everything if I could. I like the idea of adventurers as hapless turnip farmers who’ve just picked up a sword, and while chargen is overrated generally, I often really like it in OSR. Yesterday I sort-of-rolled up 4 Mythic Bastionland PCs (well, the players gave me their rolls and I parsed them onto a character keeper) and 5 Trophy Dark (admittedly, not OSR) adventurers, and it was the best kind of lonely fun. I wish more trad games could make chargen as much fun as Cairn, for instance. I really do.

So, do I actually like the OSR? Or do I, like most gamers I suspect, contain multitudes? I’d really like to experience some authentic OSR play to make sense of it – if anyone wants to step forward and offer me some, I’d be very grateful, and I’m sure I can return the favour. Just don’t kill me with a random goblin arrow!