OSR & TROS

In terms of role-playing preferences, I've always been in kind of a weird position. There's always been a weird undercurrent of animosity between the different camps of the role-playing community. Within the indie/nar/forge/story-game crowd there are certain elements that have a tendency to look down on D&D in any form as an unsophisticated and unsatisfying experience. This sentiment is often extended to the OSR movement, which can be seen as a nostalgia-fueled leap backwards in gaming. In turn, the certain elements of the OSR crowd have a tendency to look at the story-games people as elitist hipsters trying to pass off their game experiences off as high art.

This isn't universally true of all parties on each side — how often is anything universally true of a group of broad group of people? — but I've gotten in debates with people on both sides about the legitimacy of the other as a valid game choice. This brings me back to the first sentence: I've always been in a weird position between the two communities, with one foot on each side. I enjoy both kinds of games quite a bit, as they offer very different experiences that appeal to me for different reasons. The more I've thought about it, though, the more I've realized they have in common.

Intentional, Focused Design

The hallmark of both movements was a dissatisfaction with some element of the hobby that was so widespread as to spark the creation of new games meant to answer a specific question. For the forge/nar/story-games movement, it was largely a dissatisfaction with games on the market in terms of creating the kind of stories that people wanted to tell. For OSR, it was largely a reaction to the introduction of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons that made a whole lot of people realize that the current official version of the game was no longer giving them the kind of experience they wanted to have. In both cases, this dissatisfaction lead to intense critique, analysis, and eventually the cultivation of a body of design philosophy.

DIY and the Indie Explosion

In both cases, fierce forum debates quickly became blog posts and ultimately an explosion of games designed to embody various elements of the design philosophy. The primary focus on both ends was on a specific way in which the game was meant to be played in order to deliver a very particular kind of experience. Both scenes have flourishing online communities where people are constantly churning out games and hacks and other content. Both scenes are to this day dominated by independent publishers, many of whom have turned their passions into a legitimate business. 

As I chewed on this subject, I realized that if I went a bit deeper I could actually draw far more parallels in my own journey through this. My gateway drug into the narrative scene was a now largely forgotten game called The Riddle of Steel. It was a formative game for me, in that it not only introduced me to a whole new way of playing, but ultimately changed how I played everything after that. The parallels between TROS and the OSR are striking, even beyond their amusingly similar abbreviation.

Red-Handed Pulp

The Riddle of Steel is a reference to the classic Conan the Barbarian movie, from 1982. Both TROS and the OSR ultimately take their origin from early pulp Sword & Sorcery as filtered through popular culture. Amusingly, both also then sort of obscure the human-centric and exotic pulp quality to do a Tolkienesq medieval fantasy with elves and dwarves.

Modular Mechanics

Like the overwhelming majority of OSR games, TROS had no single unifying mechanic. Instead, it had a handful of different self-contained systems the game leaned on for different situations. Much like with OSR games, this both told you rather explicitly the arenas in which the game wanted to focus but it also gave you a ton of room to add, remove, and tinker with the guts of the things. Almost as soon as the game was out, people began to customize and hack it to suit their campaigns much in the same way as even today people hack their OSR system of choice to customize it for whatever they are doing.

Gameable Gaps

Many OSR enthusiasts will argue that the lack of rules for certain situations is a feature, rather than a bug. TROS benefits from a similar gap in its rules set. While it features a rudimentary skill system, it was obvious that combat and sorcery were what the game was really interested in. Everything else was a simple test and you moved on. It gave the GM quite a bit of leeway and in practice I found playing TROS to have a lot in common with my memories of playing AD&D: you basically ignored the book most of the time until someone got in a fight or cast a spell, with the thief-type character usually being the one to do nearly all of the task-resolution kind of rolls.

Player Choices, Player Skill

Much like the OSR, TROS was not a game you could by any means just "roll play" your way through. TROS has one of the highest player-skill curves of any game I've played. You, the player, have to become very good at both engaging with the system to get XP (Spiritual Attributes, in this case) but the combat and magic mechanics require a huge amount of system mastery to play. What's awesome about this, though, is that the system mastery here means "picking strategies and making interesting choices in play" rather than something like 3.pf where system mastery means "knowing how to build your character in order to get the most amount of bonuses."

This, more than anything, is probably why I was so attracted to TROS back when.  The idea that you would win because of your choices rather than having the highest numbers or the biggest sword or whatever was enthralling. It gave me a taste for something that I've been chasing ever since.

Player-Driven Play

This may not be true for all of the OSR, but it is generally true for the parts of it I enjoy. I love sandboxes, huge, sprawling dungeons, and anything that lets the players have a significant say in the strategies and engagements they will attempt. Even if you've all agreed to the premise "we're going dungeon-delving" the gold-for-xp nature of so much OSR tends to mean that players are in charge of their own advancement. The OSR assumptions of balance mean that the players have to pick and choose their battles and are making decisions that ultimately puts their success and failure in their own hands. Contrast this with later D&D (or other games) where you are often a participant in a pre-written story and are rewarded for hitting milestones within that story.

TROS did this in a way that no other game I'd encountered had, with the PC's Spiritual Attributes making them masters of their own destiny in a massively compelling way.  The two camps take massively different approaches, but both games ultimately empower the players to make decisions that matter and let them drive the game onward in a compelling way. 

In hindsight, it's not surprising to me at all why Sword & Scoundrel inherited as much TROS DNA as it did or why we retained what we did after all of these revisions. By the same token, it's not surprising that I'm gravitating towards OSR even as I work on the former. In a lot of ways, they are the answer to the same kinds of desires taken in two different directions.

Waxing on Gaming Autobiographica

I first started playing RPGs by hacking together a functional game out of just what I could glean from the AD&D1e DMG. I later moved into Alternity, Cyberpunk, and then I was all over the place. Back then, I played games the way most people did—or maybe still do—without a hell of a lot of thought about design, "creative agendas" or any of that.

My big shift came when I discovered The Riddle of Steel. It was in many ways, unlike anything I'd ever seen. It completely challenged my ideas of what role-playing was or could be, how games should be run. The combat system was like nothing I'd ever seen. I had already been a major history nerd, but it was through TROS that I'd developed a love of HEMA and all that was entailed. I was too late to the party to be around when The Forge was kicking hornet's nests, but damned if I didn't pursue The Riddle.

The next big shift came for me in discovering Burning Wheel. This was nowhere near the paradigm shift that TROS was, but it was perhaps the clearest demonstration I've ever had of the idea that "system matters." In both my own Burning Wheel experiments and those I've watched/listened to (I have a weird fascination with actual play recordings) I've gained a huge appreciation for how the system influences and informs play.

At that point in my life, I don't think you would've been able to convince me to play D&D if you paid me. My few attempts to experiment with it again were... painful. My experiences with 3.x and pathfinder were abysmal. When 4th edition came out, I couldn't even finish my read of the player's handbook. Striker? Defender? Controller? Ugh. I couldn't get past the terminology. In my mind, it immediately left me thinking about MMOs. Would we be drawing aggro and baiting spawn points next? This is without touching that the game designated which classes were "leaders" of the party (we'll decide who leads our party among ourselves, thank you). Making this impression even worse, I watched Chris Perkins DM a 4e game on youtube. It was a four-hour session which took place entirely on a battle map. It started with the party in the dungeon with some exposition to put them there, followed by three or four combats interspersed with a couple skill challenges. Read: someone had to throw some dice at something. It took them four hours to run four fights. I wouldn't be playing 4th edition. (Later, I did actually come to appreciate it as a kind of combat-based dungeon crawling board game, I just wouldn't want to run it as a D&D game.)

The next weird step in my gaming evolution was encountering the practically unheard of Chronica Feudalis. This was a system I found so interesting and hackable that it actually prompted me to start blogging about it. The original blog those took place on has long-since been abandoned, though I've migrated several of the most interesting posts here. Oddly enough, one of which is in my "Popular nonsense" stuff on the sidebar, making it my number 2 most all-time viewed post. I guess someone out there has heard of this stuff after all.

What struck me most about CF was just how flexible it actually was. The structure of the wounds and maneuvers system gave me nearly as cinematic and bloody combat as I was getting from TROS (or, by this time, Song of Steel -- the game that would eventually be rebranded as Band of Bastards). Was it meant to be used in such a bloody faction? I have no idea, but some of the most bloody and cinematic combats I've ever played were in a hacked version of Chronica Feudalis.

Perhaps the most radical departure for me in this was just how simple it actually was, by comparison. How quickly it played and how little effort as a GM it took to run. I can safely blame Higgins for introducing the game to me. I had previously been playing a great deal of Savage Worlds specifically because it was relatively simple for players to wrap their head around. When I'd argued for SW to be a relatively rules-light game (how naive I was!) Higgins scoffed and rightly put me in my place. He may have been nicer than that, but I certainly remember there was scoffing.

This is when I bumped into the OSR movement for the first time. I had already had a lot of fond memories of AD&D as a kid. For whatever reason, I never really mentally categorized those experience into the same box as my encounters with 3.5 or 4e D&D. They seemed like completely different kinds of games. It wasn't until I started getting into the OSR scene that I understood why.  They were  fundamentally different types of games. Whatever one might say about indie games and The Forge, the whole culture will get you thinking about how games are designed and played, even if you disagree with their conclusions.

I was hooked pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it was my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, or that the games so openly embraced a lot of things that I'd sort of lost sight of from in
Somewhere between my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, and an open embrace of a lot of things I'd lost sight of somewhere along the way. Likely, all of the above.

I have to really credit the OSR scene for bringing a lot of balance back to my gaming tastes. There's a lot of people out there who like to try to pit indie/nar/forge types as being in one camp and OSR as being two opposite and non-overlapping things, each vying to be the One True Way and the other being badwrongfun. I've gained a lot from both communities and I greatly enjoy both kinds of games. They provide radically different experiences, and in a lot of ways follow the same "system matters" ethos. In a curious way, they even both seem to be a response to the same thing - dissatisfaction with "Adventure path" (read: railroad) style of GMing and systems that are bad at what they are supposed to be doing.

I actually had a reason for going into all of this besides my own nostalgia. I have a handful of topics that have been digging at me for a while now, but I thought they could use some context before I began. Unfortunately, this post is far too long already. So those will wait until next time.