The term “Old School Renaissance” has come to encompass a large number of games.

Some of them have quite different design intents and are different gaming experiences. This is confusing for people inside of the OSR let alone those on the outside looking in.

It was very clear what an OSR game was when I first became aware of the OSR.

In the last 10 years, the definition of an OSR game have become vague and confusing.
I’ll light a torch and illuminate the room a little.

Where I pitch my tent.

I started playing AD&D in 1987. I took a break from gaming in 1998.

It was something I didn’t have time for. I was going to school full time, working a late night job, and barely sleeping to get my homework done. Life happened. I got married. My wife got pregnant. We moved halfway across the country. I didn’t have time to come back to gaming for a while.

In 2009, D&D came up in a conversation with an acquaintance. We decided it would be great to play again and formed a group. I ran AD&D. We played twice a month for several years. During that time, I started poking around on the internet. I figured I couldn’t be the only person playing AD&D and there must be others. There were. I found Dragonsfoot and through it, I found OSRIC and the OSR.

Since 2009, I’ve gone to some conventions where I was fortunate to play games and discuss them with old timers who worked at TSR or knew Gary. I was able to talk to people who were around when the “old school” was just “school.” I asked a lot of questions and paid close attention to how they ran games and their thoughts on the olden times. These experiences inform my thinking about the subject of this post.

The OSR of 2009 is very different from the OSR of 2022.

I have thoughts.

In 2022, Old School Renaissance and “old school” are not necessarily the same thing.

I’ve seen several variations of the same question pop up on Reddit lately. Paraphrased, the question is…

“Can you recommend an OSR game that plays like a game with contemporary design intentions?”

Am I the only person who sees the contradiction in this?

I got to thinking about this topic when most of the responses were game recommendations and not confusion and incredulity.

If a game uses some old school concepts but plays like a contemporary game then is it really old school?

The answer to that question seems self evident.

Originally, the OSR was about classic Dungeons & Dragons

The early OSR was not about using the some of the mechanics of original D&D to create new games with vastly different design intents and outcomes.

The OSR, at that time, was retro-clones and games that were largely compatible with the original game.

That doesn’t mean the OSR didn’t recognize there were other “old” games like Metamorphosis Alpha, or Tunnels and Trolls. The OSR of 2006 wasn’t trying to make adventures and supplements for those games.

The movement would have been more correctly called “The Old School D&D Renaissance” but with the OGL and concerns about being sued for copyright infringement, it was just called “Old School Renaissance.”

The OSR from 2006 to about 2011 was almost entirely about the early editions of “the world’s most popular role-playing game.”

If you want to understand how we got to where we are at now, I recommend this post.

http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html

How I define “old school.”

I use a simple heuristic to determine whether I think something is “old school” or not.

If I can use a rule set published in 2022 to run Keep on the Borderlands with little to no modification, its “old school.”

If I can run an adventure published in 2022 using Basic/Expert D&D with little to no modification, it’s “old school.”

You can run the Against the Giants adventure module with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Adventurer Conqueror King, or Swords & Wizardry.

You can run Death Frost Doom, Dwarrowdeep, or Winter’s Daughter using Moldvay B/X, BECMI, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

It is that simple. If the old thing is compatible with the new thing, it’s “old school.”

Where it gets fuzzy.

I have written that Old School is a Mindset, not a Rule-set. I used to believe that whole-heartedly.

I recant. I have sacrificed a fine bull in atonement.

Old School is both mindset and ruleset.

What rules you play by is just as important as important as how you play them.

Some games are inspired by the same pop-culture references that inspired Gary and Dave. These games are played in a style that I would call “old school.” The rules, however, diverge in very important ways.

I don’t think a game is old school when it lacks an attack roll (Into the Odd) or calls for a DC10 check to see a trap door that is obvious if you pick up the rug (many DCC adventures).

Rolling to see if you hit and the DM ruling that routine tasks are accomplished without a die roll are integral to classic fantasy adventure gaming.

You can call a piece of textured plant protein a “hamburger” but that’s just marketing bullshit. If it’s not beef, it’s not a hamburger even if it sort of looks like and kind of tastes like one.

Games with mechanisms that diverge significantly from old school mechanisms might look like old school games, kinda sorta feel like old school games but are not old school games.

I’m not telling you that you should play strictly old school, or must play strictly old school to benefit from methods of play or concepts that originated in the original fantasy adventure gaming hobby.

I’m merely stating that they are different things.

I am describing what I think is old school and asserting that if a game has mechanisms, play methods, or aesthetics that diverge from the original game(s) in a significant way, then that makes it not old school. 

Whether or not a game is an OSR game has become a different matter.

In 2022, there are games that their publishers and fans consider to be “OSR” but you can’t use them to play Keep on the Borderlands without significant alterations to the module.

They use the OSR mindset and playstyle as has been discussed (argued over) since 2006 but they replace or remove certain mechanisms, have a different aesthetic, or exist outside the classic sword & sorcery (heroic fantasy) genre that are part of the old school gaming experience.

To me, those games might be “OSR” but they aren’t “old school.”

Because the common usage of the term OSR has come to encompass those games, there are OSR games that may not exactly be “old school.” 

You’ll have to make your own determination based on your own criteria.

What is an OSR game?

It depends on who you ask.

A lot of games with an OSR stamp on them are games with very simple rule sets, that encourage GMs to make a ruling instead of looking up a rule, and have wizards and people with swords going on adventures.

They are certainly inspired by “old school” games but so were a lot of games published in the 70’s like Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, En Garde! and Traveler. Those other games are often discussed in the OSR but they are not the games that the early OSR publishers were cloning.

What is an OSR game today? I don’t have an answer that would not exclude at least some games that someone considers OSR. The target seems to be moving all the time.

I am NOT saying those OSR inspired games suck.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a game that inspired by the old school but diverges in some relevant way.

They are different games for people who want something different. If they didn’t want something different then they wouldn’t have made a different game. If the game produces the experience a particular group of people want then it works.

It seems like gamers have attached status to the “OSR” label as if it means “Genuine,” “Grade A,” or “Certified.”

To me, old school is just old school. It’s like saying, “This is made of wood and that is made of iron.”

It’s not a value or quality judgement. When the term “old school” is used to mean what it means, it’s just a description of what the game contains and does not contain.

There a lot of cool games that are “old school” inspired, have a lot in common with “old school” games, are played in the play style of “old school” games but are not “old school” Dungeons & Dragons.

They are good games and their innovations and creativity should be celebrated. I own a bunch of them. That doesn’t make them “old school” games.

The Cleveland disc jockey, Alan Freed, noticed some of the dance music of the early 50’s was a sort of swing jazz, mixed with blues and country music and played with electric guitars with the amplifier set to produce distortion. It wasn’t swing. It wasn’t blues, exactly. It had elements of those things but it was different. He started calling it Rock n’ Roll. The term caught on.

In 1968, Black Sabbath was formed to play blues rock. A form of rock which was very popular in the north of England in the late 60’s. Ozzy, Tommy Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler made some creative choices that created a new version of rock we call “heavy metal.” That wasn’t what they were trying to do, but that’s what they did.

I think some of these games are similar in the sense that they come from OSR gaming and combine them with more contemporary design concepts. Nobody has come up with a catchy name for them yet so we keep calling them OSR games.

In conclusion… I have no idea.

Does all this mean the OSR is dead or completely meaningless as term as some commentators insist?

No. The OSR is still going. It is as strong as it ever was. Just confused and confusing.

OSR has become a catch all term for any game that uses mechanics, the playstyle, and DIY approach of early D&D.

Games and adventures that borrow some of the old school concepts and a few mechanics but diverge in salient ways are being labeled as OSR games. Whether I, or anyone else likes that, disagrees with, or is upset by that label, it is being used in that way.

There is nothing to prevent gamers from categorizing a game as an OSR game even if it can clearly be shown that it is not “old school.”

I’m not going to waste my time evaluating every game and every adventure on DTRPG to decide if it is OSR or not.

Until someone can identify what makes them different and come up with a catchy label that will sell books, they will still be categorized as OSR games.