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Mors Rattus posted:In fairness, this exact thing happened to Apocalypse World, too. Yeah, but AW was new tech (six years ago). Even if most of the games that followed were mediocre at best, it was something to get excited about. Roll a d20 and compare it to a number is literally the oldest mechanic in RPGs.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:27
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The original purpose of the OSR, that is people producing retroclones like OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, and Labyrinth Lord (and variations like Mutant Future) was to give people a platform to make new content for old rulesets that they liked. And maybe modify them, of course. So the thing I really dislike about the OSR is all the also-ran games that are literally just somebody taking OSRIC, cutting out the rules they don't use, adding their house rules, and publishing it online as a new, complete game. I can take my old copy of Vampire 2nd edition, cross out the rules I never used, and write my house rules in the margins, but that's not worth publishing as Vampyre: Le Bal Masqué. There's plenty of room for more old-school adventure modules and supplements, but vanishingly little for core games unless you're doing something radically different. That tends to defeat the purpose of using the OSR label, because then you're probably either just repeating the history of game design by publishing something with a bit more complexity that resembles a game from the early 80s, or you've wrapped around so that you're operating in the same design space as "story games," like Torchbearer and Dungeon World. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 17:27
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Yeah, Crawford's stuff is some of the best in category because Black Streams: Solo Heroes -> Scarlet Heroes -> Exemplars and Eidolons is a great way to let you run, say, Keep on the Borderlands with just one other player, and then Red Tide and Spears of the Dawn are tasteful and tactful treatments of non-Eurocentric settings, and Godbound looks good by dint of competing with Exalted. But Silent Legions could have just as easily been written in any other system, and something like half of what Crawford writes are system-agnostic random plot generators anyway. Mors Rattus posted:In fairness, this exact thing happened to Apocalypse World, too. Oh, I have no doubt, but it was the first time I saw that process happening in real-time since I joined the hobby, and it was rather off-putting to a degree.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, the language we use has changed a lot in 10 years and is only changing faster. I wouldn't focus too hard on the "brain damage" line. Except he compared the "damage" to child molestation, too, went to lengths to say this wasn't really a huge stretch of an analogy, and when confronted by people he supposedly respected enough that their criticism gave him pause, he gave it some thought and then responded "nah, I'm right." That's the end of the thread on the Forge.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:52
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Mors Rattus posted:In fairness, this exact thing happened to Apocalypse World, too. There are definitely a bunch of weird (and not particularly functional) basic reskins of AW and a slew of crappy PbtA games (especially the early ones) but there's also a good number of examples of people taking the conceptual bones of the system and reworking it extensively for different genres. Fellowship, Monsterhearts, Blades in the Dark, and several others are clearly descended from AW but aren't just AW with a coat of paint slapped one. The proportion of Black Hack hacks that were exactly that was much greater. No attempt to recontextualize or innovate off the core ruleset, just slap on a poorly thought out subsystem and an inch deep weird setting idea and call it good. That's really the frustrating bit about OSR. Even if you strictly compare it to shared rulesets like FATE or PbtA, the percentages are way worse for OSR. There are certainly lazy FATE adaptations, but for every one of those you have someone at least attempting to leverage it for something different, even if it doesn't always work out. PbtA is even more skewed towards successes and ambitious failures, as opposed to dull copying. If you compare OSR to storygames as a whole, there's just no contest. As a design space the OSR community has continually disappointed me. The Renaissance part is fine - I disagree a bit with ARBco in that I think there is something very valuable about re-examining the old games. A lot of them were made with really different base assumptions when you compare them to modern games. In fact I'm going to steal his analogy.  The Model T is a good comparison here. It looks like a modern car, but it was designed before standardized controls. So instead of an accelerator and a brake pedal and a shifter, you have a throttle lever on the steering wheel, three pedals on the floor (clutch, brake, reverse), and a floor lever that is for neutral, second gear, and emergency brake. And the Model T is downright boring compared to other early automobiles, in regards to control arrangements, engine design and placement, even power source.A lot of old RPGs are like that - even the ones that look kind of normal have some weird rear end ideas and design decisions buried in them. And others are really off the wall from from a modern viewpoint. Some of those ideas are out and out bad (a steering wheel mounted throttle) but some are just different (a reverse pedal) and had things gone a little differently, would have become normal. That latter stuff could be fertile soil for new games. It's sort of what-if RPG design. As game design advanced, it sloughed off a lot of things that flat out didn't work, but it also set aside some really interesting ideas in the name of standardization. Not that the standardization was all bad. In a lot of cases, it wouldn't have mattered which direction they picked, they just needed to pick something. To me, mining old games for the good ideas that missed the cut has real appeal to it. I just wish the OSR actually did that. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 17:53
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Apocalypse World and AD&D have this in common: Plenty of people have reused its rules for other games before they even finished reading them.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:56
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Comrade Gorbash posted:A lot of old RPGs are like that - even the ones that look kind of normal have some weird rear end ideas and design decisions buried in them. And others are really off the wall from from a modern viewpoint. Some of those ideas are out and out bad (a steering wheel mounted throttle) but some are just different (a reverse pedal) and had things gone a little differently, would have become normal. That latter stuff could be fertile soil for new games. One game I'd like to mention in this regard is Darkest Dungeons. Dark Dungeons and Darker Dungeons were retroclones of the Rules Cyclopedia, but the third game in the series married the 3rd Edition D&D skill system, with Rolemaster's combat chopped down into a d20 scale rather than a d100 and with a set initiative order rather than having to deal with percentages and turn segments. So you get a skill list that isn't as insane as Rolemaster Standard System/Fantasy Roleplaying, and a combat system that captures Rolemaster's exploding dice, parrying, hitChance+damage in a single roll and crazy crits, but without having to add and subtract three or more two-digit numbers together or damage charts that take up entire sheets of A4 paper. Halloween Jack posted:The original purpose of the OSR, that is people producing retroclones like OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, and Labyrinth Lord (and variations like Mutant Future) was to give people a platform to make new content for old rulesets that they liked. And maybe modify them, of course. In this regard, an OSR for games like Phoenix Command and Twilight 2000 would be really great as far as all the low-intensity conflicts that have cropped up since the 80s that are just begging for modules, sourcebooks and campaigns to be written about them. Afghanistan, the Green Zone, Metavira, Srebrenica, Libya, Arstotzka, Syria, the Ukraine, Spec Ops The Line, and on and on.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:10
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I'll be honest, the RPG community on Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq or Georgia seems like a recipe for complete and utter awful and insulting writing. E: hell, even with the best intentions, writing a game about literally ongoing wars seems kind of wrong.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:14
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That Old Tree posted:Except he compared the "damage" to child molestation, too, went to lengths to say this wasn't really a huge stretch of an analogy, and when confronted by people he supposedly respected enough that their criticism gave him pause, he gave it some thought and then responded "nah, I'm right." That's the end of the thread on the Forge. Ah, obviously it's been too goddamn long since I read that stuff. Don't tell people at Gen Con, tho, I'm trying to sell a bunch of Sorcerer books.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:18
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Halloween Jack posted:Apocalypse World and AD&D have this in common: Plenty of people have reused its rules for other games before they even finished reading them. Oh god this. I've encountered so many groups over the years that houseruled AD&D without actually reading the entire book so they have a rule for something that was already in the drat book and actually implemented better RAW. gradenko_2000 posted:
I would totally do some of those if I had any idea about how the modern military works, preferably married to a less insanely crunchy ruleset though, like just take Twilight 2000 and dumb it down a little instead of going full on Phoenix Command.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:19
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I wouldn't agree that AW or Fate have a smaller percentage of dreck. I can only think of a couple games that did anything new instead of just reproducing AW but with rethemed moves/playbooks and a few bolted on systems for a different genre. Off the top of my head: Monsterhearts (introduced the idea that a playbook is a minigame), Fellowship (codified that the players make the world, not the MC), and maaaybe games like Masks that layer "face" moves over a "class" playbook. I'm not saying that the other games suck or anything. I'm just saying that they meet the definition you used for the OSR: they are just remixes of Apocalypse World instead of breaking new ground.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:20
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Also speaking of Twilight 2000, you can get a giant bundle of first edition PDFs for like 40 bucks. I have no idea if that's a complete product line, but it's definitely everything you would need to run a game (minus dice and a couple of weirdos, of course).
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Aug 3, 2016 18:24
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Sort of.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:34
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Zurui posted:I wouldn't agree that AW or Fate have a smaller percentage of dreck. I can only think of a couple games that did anything new instead of just reproducing AW but with rethemed moves/playbooks and a few bolted on systems for a different genre. Off the top of my head: Monsterhearts (introduced the idea that a playbook is a minigame), Fellowship (codified that the players make the world, not the MC), and maaaybe games like Masks that layer "face" moves over a "class" playbook. Don't forget World Wide Wrestling and Night Witches (which honestly isn't good but at least trying something new). It's that latter that really stands out - there have been some ambitious PbtA descended games that failed, but at least they tried. And yeah, there's a lot of crappy, half-assed PbtA hacks out there, but I feel pretty comfortable saying there's a lot more crappy half-assed OSR "hacks" and a lot fewer games that are bad because they were overly ambitious. Hell, even Urban Shadows (to stay on topic) really played with ideas like factions and favors. Ultimately it's that the PbtA descended stuff has a lot more diamonds in the rough, and there are clear reasons for that. And OSR isn't just comparing itself to PbtA - it's set up next to storygames in general.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:The other half of the OSR, which is making "restatements" of the old D&D versions to begin with, has been obsoleted by WOTC finally putting all the old editions back as official PDFs again. The most I will grant is that the official PDFs were only very recently (as in this year) completed, and that there's maybe some utility to Labyrinth Lord if you really want it in print. moths posted:The OSR has been obviated by digital editions, reprints, and eBay. It seems really weird to me that cults and cliques are trying to recapture the "feel" of something that's currently readily available. Eh, I'd honestly play Swords & Wizardry over base OD&D any day of the week. The advantage of retroclones is that they're akin to fan patches and mods, fixing up bugs and glitches of the older stuff.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:45
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Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:45
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Lightning Lord posted:Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:48
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Lightning Lord posted:Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached. It's a little different from OSR games designed for unexamined D&D assumptions from the ground up.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:50
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ImpactVector posted:A lot of that is unrelated setting/game Kickstarters that added "Fate support" as a stretch goal without knowing much about Fate just to try and ride their coattails. I don't know, there's still a lot of bad Fate shovelware. There's just too many Fate games that are doing anything interesting for them to get any attention.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:59
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Don't forget World Wide Wrestling and Night Witches (which honestly isn't good but at least trying something new). It's that latter that really stands out - there have been some ambitious PbtA descended games that failed, but at least they tried. And yeah, there's a lot of crappy, half-assed PbtA hacks out there, but I feel pretty comfortable saying there's a lot more crappy half-assed OSR "hacks" and a lot fewer games that are bad because they were overly ambitious. Hell, even Urban Shadows (to stay on topic) really played with ideas like factions and favors. I like Night Witches for what it is but I wouldn't say that is breaks any significant new ground. It has the day moves and night moves (lol Bob Seger) but other than that it's just derivative. It has a Defy Danger-type move and a background/class system and a stress track. I haven't read WWW but I hear it's good. Urban Shadows' factions feel tacked-on to me and the Favors are kinda just Bonds mixed with Strings. Both Night Witches and Urban Shadows needed at least one more pass over the moves and mechanics to really make it shine. I don't mean to get down on all PbtA games - they're usually quite fun if you enjoy the genre but they are rarely inspirational as games. Lightning Lord posted:Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached. Fate is especially bad for this because it requires virtually zero mechanical work. It's so ridiculously easy to design a game that looks like it works even though you have a dubious understanding of how the game works. Just like PbtA I wish for a game that does something greater with FATE instead of just mimicking it.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:07
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There's a reason why Fred Hicks wrote a post asking people not to convert to Fate just because it's popular(ish).
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Aug 3, 2016 19:08
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If you pay attention to the new Fate releases on DTRPG, you get a pretty steady stream of horseshit. Plus the Fate Patreon stuff, which is usually pretty okay.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:This very nicely sums up my overall feelings as well; I lived through the era that most OSR games are emulating, so while I can appreciate them on one level or another, I run into a mental block of "but I did this already years ago". There actually is still some of those weird things coming out in the OSR, but they're generally adventures. Like, I've seen a few like "you come across a space ship with a time machine and may have to fight dinosaurs" as well as "you go to mars and re-enact John Carter." But, yeah, don't see too many rules systems themselves going for that. Anyhoo, shovelware is shovelware and it happens. Like, you can't really avoid that. I mean, I wouldn't blame any one game or design philosophy or whatever, it's more of just people not putting in the effort.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:54
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If there's more OSR shovelware than Fate or PbtA shovelware, that may only be because way more people have been serious Advanced and/or Basic D&D players.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:59
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Halloween Jack posted:The original purpose of the OSR, that is people producing retroclones like OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, and Labyrinth Lord (and variations like Mutant Future) was to give people a platform to make new content for old rulesets that they liked. And maybe modify them, of course. I wonder at what specific point OSR stopped being about publishing new stuff for old systems without copyright hassles and instead transformed into various distorted instances of Gygaxian fundamentalism. Halloween Jack posted:So the thing I really dislike about the OSR is all the also-ran games that are literally just somebody taking OSRIC, cutting out the rules they don't use, adding their house rules, and publishing it online as a new, complete game. I can take my old copy of Vampire 2nd edition, cross out the rules I never used, and write my house rules in the margins, but that's not worth publishing as Vampyre: Le Bal Masqué. Yeah, also this. I've lost count of the number of retroclones that boil down to some variation of "(A)D&D, but with percentile skills/ascending AC/magic points/crit tables/sanity rules/whatever".
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Aug 3, 2016 21:09
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The really weird thing is that a lot of the worst ones just crib feat-like abilities and skills from 3e, which Gygax disliked and the OSR generally doesn't favour. I have a lot of appreciation for Darker Dungeons, because Rules Cyclopedia D&D with ascending AC and BAB is great! Not so much a fan of Darkest Dungeons, because dispensing with a 3e-style skill system is one of the things about old D&D that appeals to me.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:16
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Also, if I ever see one more strained, D&D-style alliterated name for an OSR title (Glaives & Gnolls! Caves & Cultists! Fedoras & Flumphs!), it'll be a hundred years too soon.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:30
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Comrade Koba posted:Also, if I ever see one more strained, D&D-style alliterated name for an OSR title (Glaives & Gnolls! Caves & Cultists! Fedoras & Flumphs!), it'll be a hundred years too soon. Dimwits & Derivatives
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Aug 3, 2016 21:32
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Someone should do a TG Contest where you have to make an RPG based on a title (or concept) someone else gives you.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:In this regard, an OSR for games like Phoenix Command and Twilight 2000 would be really great as far as all the low-intensity conflicts that have cropped up since the 80s that are just begging for modules, sourcebooks and campaigns to be written about them. Afghanistan, the Green Zone, Metavira, Srebrenica, Libya, Arstotzka, Syria, the Ukraine, Spec Ops The Line, and on and on. This year is the 30th anniversary for the release of Phoenix Command Combat System. I have a naive dream of getting my PCCS retroclone out before the end of the year. /shameless self advertisement
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Aug 3, 2016 21:48
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Comrade Koba posted:Also, if I ever see one more strained, D&D-style alliterated name for an OSR title (Glaives & Gnolls! Caves & Cultists! Fedoras & Flumphs!), it'll be a hundred years too soon.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:52
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Comrade Koba posted:Also, if I ever see one more strained, D&D-style alliterated name for an OSR title (Glaives & Gnolls! Caves & Cultists! Fedoras & Flumphs!), it'll be a hundred years too soon. This here is the epitome of cargo cult design.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:58
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Comrade Koba posted:I wonder at what specific point OSR stopped being about publishing new stuff for old systems without copyright hassles and instead transformed into various distorted instances of Gygaxian fundamentalism. That's what I've never quite understood about the more generic OSR stuff. As was mentioned, you can now get all the original stuff in pdf, and most of it is dirt cheap. Not that most OSR games try to sell themselves at huge costs, but for a lot of those generic retroclones it'd still be cheaper to get the original and google "houserules" for a page or so of fixes. If you're including late AD&D/2nd edition you've even got some production values in the layout.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:58
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Covok posted:There actually is still some of those weird things coming out in the OSR, but they're generally adventures. Like, I've seen a few like "you come across a space ship with a time machine and may have to fight dinosaurs" as well as "you go to mars and re-enact John Carter." But, yeah, don't see too many rules systems themselves going for that. I read that as John Cena, which would own.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:27
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Libertad! posted:Eh, I'd honestly play Swords & Wizardry over base OD&D any day of the week. The advantage of retroclones is that they're akin to fan patches and mods, fixing up bugs and glitches of the older stuff. Was working on a longer post, but yeah, this is where I get the most value out of retroclones. Swords & Wizardry and Darker Dungeons are far easier to read and use than OD&D and to a lesser extent the Rules Cyclopedia. As for the rest of the OSR... I really enjoy some of the adventures people are publishing these days and ignore the variant rules systems. DCC being the exception, but I don't really think of it as a retroclone or an OSR game. The OSR vs Storygames narrative is as useless/amusing to me as listening to people debate the superiority of their favored bands and musical genres, so I don't pay attention to it.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:32
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I enjoy OSR stuff, but the whole exercise in figuring out that community for me ended up being an exercise in deciding which layout I liked best, since the majority of it is basically interchangeable. ACKS is the only one I ended up with in print, because I like Autarch's treatment of the material, especially their expanded kingdom management rules, and (AFAIK) they aren't toxic people. Other than that I just steal liberally from Kevin Crawford, his sandbox stuff is incredibly well done. I do wish there was more weird stuff out there. The last really fun setting/adventure thing I looked at was probably Slumbering Ursine Dunes.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:49
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FMguru posted:That, itself, is pretty authentically old school - tons of games of that era aped D&D's "Ampersand & Alliteration" title style (Tunnels & Trolls, Chivalry & Sorcery, Bunnies & Burrows, etc.) Yup, sure is. It was dumb in the 80's, and it's still dumb now. EDIT: And speaking of dumb, this...thing showed up as an SA ad as I was browsing the TG subforum. I guess it could be a subtle joke, but knowing the internet it probably isn't. 
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Aug 3, 2016 23:10
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Swagger Dagger posted:I enjoy OSR stuff, but the whole exercise in figuring out that community for me ended up being an exercise in deciding which layout I liked best, since the majority of it is basically interchangeable. ACKS is the only one I ended up with in print, because I like Autarch's treatment of the material, especially their expanded kingdom management rules, and (AFAIK) they aren't toxic people. Other than that I just steal liberally from Kevin Crawford, his sandbox stuff is incredibly well done. IIRC, there was some controversy about the ACKS people. Anyhoo, I feel it is worth noting not all of the OSR is just retroclones. Like, it is a little unfair to paint them that way. Sure, a lot of the OSR is retroclones, but some people do take odd spins with the concept like Kevin Crawford or DCC. I don't know if "old tech" is the proper term or not (I prefer "retro tech" to refer to OSR stuff), but it is at least interesting as a person who came into this hobby in 2013 to see people try to make new things out of retro tech. A lot of it can come off as legacy, but the adventurous stuff that pilfers ideas from little know early games or modern games can be interesting.
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Aug 3, 2016 23:21
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The OSR. Obsessing about the 70's. Recreating the 80s. Obsessive Seventies Recreation I kid. I really got into the OSR stuff when Grognardia was still going and enjoyed playing old games for a while. After his flameout and the realization that the blogosphere is mostly filled with angry luddites, I reevaluated my life and realized I have just as much fun playing a game I don't have to fudge constantly as I do playing one built on the frame of the RPG Model T. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 23:25
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Speaking of which, has the Grognardia dude ever shown his face since disappearing in the middle of writing his megadungeon thing?
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