02-20-2021, 03:08 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Old School Renaissance?
Of late I've been hearing about something called Old School Revival or Renaissance. Does anyone here know about this stuff?
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Per Ardua Per Astra! Ancora Imparo |
02-20-2021, 03:20 PM | #2 |
Aluminated
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: East of the moon, west of the stars, close to buses and shopping
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
That wiki page isn't a bad introduction. It's a movement of mostly older gamers which uses older--like, pre-AD&D--editions of D&D and similar very early RPGs as inspiration. There are a number of OSR products on the market produced in deliberate emulation of those old games in structure, content, and appearance. Relatively rules light ("Rulings rather than rules" is a common motto), mostly about killing things and taking their stuff rather than more complex plots, but on purpose this time rather than operating in the framework of pioneering an entirely new genre of gaming in the 70s when none of us really knew what we were doing. It strikes me as being somewhere between nostalgia and an attempt to create what us older gamers now like to think we could have experienced back then.
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I've been making pointlessly shiny things, and I've got some gaming-related stuff as well as 3d printing designs. Buy my Warehouse 23 stuff, dammit! |
02-20-2021, 03:35 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
Try Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming for a better summary of the intent.
Note that this "movement" is more than a decade old, and has had plenty of time to turn on itself, schism into factions, and re-define itself. There are as many versions as there are writers, many of them contradictory. Note, also, that as a gamer who lived through the era (started playing in 1976), I sometimes find my recollections at odds with the features that OSR advocates ascribe to it. |
02-20-2021, 03:47 PM | #4 |
Aluminated
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: East of the moon, west of the stars, close to buses and shopping
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
As a gamer of similar vintage (I started no later than '78, no earlier than '77), I concur.
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I've been making pointlessly shiny things, and I've got some gaming-related stuff as well as 3d printing designs. Buy my Warehouse 23 stuff, dammit! |
02-20-2021, 08:25 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
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I believe Castles & Crusades counts as OSR. It was certainly very like 1e in rules terms. I made the mistake of playing a Fighter in a short C&C camapign and it was incredibly boring (just like 1e). I've had fun playing fighters in 2e games even in recent years. If you end up in some OSR game I recommend that everyone play Magic-users. Casting spells and comically trying to avoid losing your single digit's worth of HP are the only fun to be had. I miss lots of things from 40 years ago but game rule sets aren't one of them.
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Fred Brackin |
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02-20-2021, 09:27 PM | #6 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
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Unfortunately, the OSR is also full of fundamentalism, historical revisionism, sock puppets, and internal political bickering. Blood-feuds erupt over whether Arneson or Gygax (or someone else) gets the credit for inventing D&D or RPGs. Propaganda gets published and criticism gets suppressed. If you engage in the OSR, do it purely as a consumer of their gaming products, not as a designer or forum participant! |
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02-20-2021, 10:59 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Saint Louis or thereabouts
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
Essentially, the kids who play Dark Souls have discovered tabletop games. They like it brutal and don't want to ride on the DM railroad.
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Professional soldiers are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs. - from Murphy's Laws of Combat |
02-23-2021, 02:00 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Ottawa
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
I consider myself an OSR fan but didn't actually start playing RPGs until '88. By then we pretty much only played long story driven campaigns.... or at least aspired to. Our characters never died or even really came close.
These days I've been really enjoying going back and "playing old-school proper" using the good old D&D Rules Cycplodedia. I also use the amazing (free) Basic Fantasy RPG book which is a new system which pretty closely copies B/X D&D without the ascending AC. For us, OSR style play is just a more light hearted way of playing which can be quite enjoyable and has honestly re-kindled my love for fantasy RPGs. The things we like about OSR styleplay is the simplicity of character creation, the deadliness of play and the ability to rely on random tables to generate most of the hexcrawl/dungoen crawl on the fly. But I must agree that D&D is (and has always been) an inferior game compared to GURPS. I've always said GURPS does every other game better than they do. And it's been proven once again for us, as of late we've been playing old-school style dungeon crawl campaigns using GURPS and it's been a blast. We do not bother with Dungeon Fantasy. That';s WAY to overpowered for "level 1 characters". Instead we roll up our PCs using 3d6 in a couple mins. Everyone runs 1-4 characters at any one time because characters die. A lot. And it's hilarious the situations these poor peasants find themselves in. And the best part is thanks to GURPS, as the PCs progress they actually become interesting fleshed out people with amazing variety. Not just another lame 9th level human fighter as in the true old days of OSR. I do not miss the lack of customization in the old systems. Here's some video demonstration of our play style: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...1C1qiJTXTp4KL1 |
02-23-2021, 08:30 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Kentucky
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
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02-24-2021, 04:54 AM | #10 | |
I do stuff and things.
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Old School Renaissance?
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Thanks! I've also got something planned for Mothership that I've been working on in my spare time. Some info here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../posts/3109849 Mörk Borg is insanely fun. I love how the system just gets out of the way.
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Battlegrip.com, my blog about toys. |
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