How to Improve Old-School Gaming
The OSR is Cringe, So What is Next?
In a previous post, I discussed how the OSR is no longer a fun place. It’s a rather dour post. Although my experience in the OSR was initially very positive, it quickly turned me off to it and the people under that banner and label. Does this mean I think all gaming or “old-school” gaming is a lost cause? No.
As I pointed out in that post, the OSR doesn’t have a real direction beyond “remake BX again.” This has quickly run out of novelty. The OSR, as I pointed out, also generally has terrible people. Of course, not everyone there is, but a lot of the ones with influence are just insufferable individuals obsessed with status and vague victory conditions in a culture war. Ideally, for them, these conditions involve them being important in whatever shape the hobby takes in the future.
But the OSR is terminally sick. The old-school way needs a future worthy of its legacy. This is especially true with 6e D&D coming out, which I foresee will turn many people off. Some will abandon the hobby altogether; some will seek other places. Given my general experience in the OSR, I would not wish them to leave one area of the hobby and have it be frustrating.
I won’t be like others and prop myself up as some king of some small hobby area. I suggest a call for us to improve, and I hope to lay that out here. I complained in the last post, so I feel it is fitting to offer solutions here for the problems I see. I don’t want to be a complainer only.
Stop Promoting Rule Zero to New Game Masters
One of the biggest hindrances to selling old-school games to new people and thus expanding the hobby is Rule Zero. This is offensive for many to hear, but many must tear down their idols to rule zero. It’s a graven image—a false god… Okay, this is all an exaggeration. But I will say that Rule Zero doesn’t mean what it meant in 1974 today—at least from what I see. Part of the problem, in general in the hobby, is that Rule Zero is pushed onto new referees. This is just terrible advice.
Generally, the arguments for this are, “Don’t slow down the game to look up a rule.” No, that’s terrible advice. If you are a new game master, the players at the table generally know this, too. It might be a new game system for all of you. Time to look up a rule is spent as a group learning to master the game of choice. Rule zero, as it was intended, is high-level game mastering. You rule zero when you have mastered the rules, know them inside and out, and can thus use that knowledge to adjudicate things outside the rules. Telling new players to “make something up” is essentially game design. These new GMs are new to game mastering, and thus, actual game design is completely foreign to them.
The Prussian army used wargames or “Kriegsspiel” games to train army officers. The focus was on high simulationism to give military officers real training. This was a complicated wargame that eventually evolved into the “Free Kriegsspiel” variety of games. General Julius von Verdy du Vernois, in 1876, looking at the criticisms of Lieutenant Wilhelm Jacob Meckel three years prior about the complexity of the rules, promoted the idea of umpires throwing out all rules and adjudicating as they see fit. The key to the General’s suggestion to throw out rules and rely on the umpire was that the umpire was expected to be highly experienced in war games and actual warfare. Actual battlefield experience. This meant that the umpires in these games, relying on what we would call rule zero, were highly trained and experienced military men in real warfare and wargames. The general assumption in rule zero here was that the umpire was an expert training military officers for war.
So, if that is the original meaning and origin of rule zero, you can see how telling absolute neophytes to use it is like telling them to do a slam dunk even though they have never touched a basketball before.
Instead of encouraging new refs to never learn the rules, we should encourage them to study them rigorously. This improves the hobby by making more rule experts. So now, when a new hobbyist asks a question about a rule, instead of being spammed with reasons to ignore a rule in question, telling them about some lame homebrew, or telling them to make something up, true discourse about games can occur, and real mastery within the hobby can be had. So yes. Please halt your game to look up a rule. Get it right if you can the first time, and you will remember it going forward. This is part of skill mastery. Skill mastery means a proper application of Rule Zero, which also means a greater knowledge base in game design if that indeed becomes a goal of the individual. The sky is the limit.
Stop Encouraging Political Activism in the Hobby
I know many in the OSR think they are apolitical. This is true of both sides: the woke progressive and the side against this. Both of you suck at this point. For a while, the progressive side was completely insufferable with pushing safety tools, comparing orcs to black people (but they are Mexican now for some reason), and just generally being insufferable morons.
As I pointed out in the previous post, the anti-woke side has its own issues. We now have people who don’t even play 5e or buy it from WotC, who provide a running commentary on games they don’t care about or play anymore. Why? because it generates views and clicks.
They have to complain about games they don’t play anymore because they are the same kinds of people above who push rule zero. They have nothing of substance to contribute to the discourse on running games because the only content they can create is, “Just make something up, ya dummy.” You can only make so many videos, tweets, or blog posts on “just ignore the rules and make something up” before the content gets stale.
Thus, the culture war is all they have to offer for an evergreen landscape of “content.”
Stop encouraging this. If you don’t play 5e anymore and don’t play WotC games anymore, stop worrying about what WotC is doing. If you don’t play progressive games, stop worrying about what dumb, moronic, lower than room temp IQ thing a company like Evil Hat says.
And the same is true for the progressive side. We all know you have no intention of playing an old-school game under old-school conventions. Stop complaining about bioessentialism and just play your games quietly in your area. None of us have to be looking each other’s way here.
The point of the hobby is escapism and fun. I don’t want to see real-world junk or lecturing from any side in my escapism. Stop reminding me during fun time that the world is full of morons.
Also, if you are a creator, you may think you are apolitical because you don’t insert politics into your games… Or at least you claim not to. Meanwhile, you post nonstop about current events and politics on social media platforms. This doesn’t count. You may not put politics in your games, but if you constantly spout about the Middle East, COVID-19, presidential races, and so forth, you are being political. People follow you for game content, not your armchair political views. I realized this. My gaming opinions are controversial enough, apparently. I don’t need to wade into my political views on top of that, and neither do you. At the very least, if you cannot help yourself, drop the pretense of being apolitical at least. Stop pretending you are just neutral when you are not. Many of you are not smart enough to understand alignment, but it’s real. At least try to roleplay life honestly in the alignment you profess.
Concluding Thoughts
I don’t expect either side to play by the rules I laid out. Most of these people hate playing RAW to begin with! Again, I’m just trying to offer ways we can fix the hobby. I foresee that 6e is not going to do so hot. It will be popular for a few months, and everyone will forget about it. This means a contraction in the hobby is due, and the OSR is the next big thing, and it’s honestly just as creatively bankrupt as the 5e sphere at this point. But if we want to be old school, we have to read and understand old school. We must be willing to know the rules and use them effectively in our games to run killer campaigns people remember. Make cool stuff. Provide awesome and helpful insight into older rulesets and even new ones too. Don’t be an insufferable person to be around. These are all things that should be easy for all of us to do.
I think a lot of DMs have a kind of innate fear of the idea of game mastery, because it leads to things like "rules lawyers" and "munchkins" and "murder hobos." You know, all those buzzwords that DMs have been using for decades to describe players whom they can't utterly control. "I must use Rule Zero to stop the munchkins and power gamers," they would say. A skilled, clever, and well-versed DM gets a good laugh at these things, because he knows that the rules--the rules as they're written--contain all the answers, and more.
What about Dolmenwood? It uses B/X as a base for a game engaging with a different set of inspirations. It leans into Eurocentric folk tales and fairy stories.
From what I can tell, the method is the same but the direction taken is different. That creates a different feel and experience at the table.