OSR=KOB

I recently read Matt Finch’s “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming,” which is maybe the first thing that’s ever made me think I might understand what the “Old School Renaissance” is, does, and/or stands for. Finch describes four “Zen moments” of old-school gaming, which I’d describe more as principal components, but I think it’s the first two that are most interesting—“Rulings, Not Rules”:

I believe that the defining characteristic of an old school system is that it’s improvisational, played mostly with Rulings, not Rules.

… and “Player Skill, Not Character Abilities”:

“So, how do you know if your character can do something? You tell the Referee what you want to try. Most Referees will give you an idea of the probabilities, and most will also entertain a reasonable discussion about whether their first guess at a probability is fair.”

And these two ideas are obviously closely related, so the DM’s ruling on the difficulty of noticing something depends more on how you (the player) narrate your exploration of the scene (“player skill”) than it does on your character having a high Wisdom and being proficient in Perception (“character abilities”). (It’s worth noting that the assignment of a DC in 3/4/5E is usually a ruling, rarely a rule, and can be fully responsive to player actions as well as ambient circumstances, although the convention in 5E is to grant advantage for ingenuity rather than modify the DC. But this doesn’t especially nullify Finch’s point that rolls can short-circuit narration, which I think is broadly correct.)

So far, so good. But it’s interesting to me in that the OSR seems to be strongly associated with “old school” dungeon crawls—and Finch has some very perceptive defenses of things like treasure-based experience and random encounters in this context—whereas the “rules-light” system I’m most familiar with is Kids On Bikes, most famous for its plasticity in completely non-dungeon-like contexts such as noir (Mentopolis), wizard school (Misfits & Magic), and ‘80s action movie mashups (Never Stop Blowing Up).

Now this is very much a long way of saying “I’m an AD&D 2E baby who got back into TTRPGs thirty years later because of my parasocial one-way bromance with Brennan Lee Mulligan,” and I’m ready to own that. But I do think there’s something unexamined in Finch’s statement “there’s really only one underlying characteristic that defines an old-school system (a fairly open-ended, simple set of rules)”—because Kids On Bikes isn’t an OSR system, as far as I can tell, and it’s not because there are too many rules. If OSR is what Finch says it is, it’s not just because there are few rules, it’s also because of what those rules are about.

I mentioned random encounters and treasure-based experience—Kids On Bikes doesn’t provide any mechanical advantages for accumulating wealth, or indeed any means of “leveling up” at all. Relative to pre-3E D&D, it subtracted a whole system right there! But treasure-based experience supports the OSR vibe because it rewards treasure acquisition, which encourages players to go into dungeons, because that’s where the treasure is. (Why doesn’t it encourage bank robberies? Because getting tougher and more lethal—the effect of accumulating experience—supports crawling more difficult dungeons in a way it doesn’t particularly support robbing more difficult banks… at least in a system that, by stipulation, doesn’t have articulated rule systems relating your character level to a set of skills that support bank-robbing abilities.)

None of this is bad! It’s good for folks to be able to play the kind of game they like, and I think Finch’s rules vs. rulings framework is a useful way to think about the evolution of D&D and the satisfactions offered by different editions. But whatever the OSR is, a sparse ruleset doesn’t seem sufficient to delimit it; and I can’t help but think it’s telling that there’s this impulse to delimit it mechanically, when what’s really being sought is, as far as I can tell, a vibe.

What’s being told, I’m still working out, but it feels like a reluctance to cop to wanting more of what you used to have just because you liked it. Finch allows that people should be let to like things, but his pro-old-school arguments are phrased in terms that gesture at a broader superiority of experience: combats that are quicker, more exciting, and less monotonous, play less encumbered by needless complexity, narrations that are richer and more demanding. Which are all features you might reasonably expect from a rules-light system, but which don’t lead with any particular directness to the old-school dungeon crawl. And maybe from the other side, it’s striking how “old-school” gaming identifies itself so closely with the art styles prevalent in older versions of D&D—or at least that’s what you see in Finch’s primer, Dungeon Crawl Classics, &c. If the point is the mechanics not the vibe, why is the vibe always the same?

One more point about the buried politics of “player skill, not character abilities.” Finch resists the idea, but it seems pretty unexceptionable that this forces a closer identification of player and character: Players who are more persuasive will be more successful at persuasion even if their characters have low Charisma, &c. And of course this is somewhat true irrespective of the system you’re in; characters will always partake of their players’ personalities to some degree, even in ways the player doesn’t intend. But the more you lean on this particular construal of “player skill” (i.e., outcomes are determined by the actions you narrate, not the dice), the more the character’s accomplishments are constrained by the player’s strengths and weaknesses.

Molly Ostertag and Brennan Lee Mulligan have a discussion of TTRPGs that’s worth watching in its entirety, but in particular around the 20-minute mark they talk about the appeal of D&D to the queer community, and Ostertag points out its utility for folks who are questioning: They can make characters who are different from their current presentation of themselves and closer to a self they’ve been imagining, and see how it feels to spend a while in those shoes. The conversation then expands to other reasons you might want to have a character different from you: Maybe you want to try on confidence, or athleticism, or perceptiveness. To do this, you need the scaffolding of rules that support your character in realizing those attributes even when you don’t possess them yourself. Not everyone is seeking these kinds of counterfactuals about their identity from their TTRPG of choice… but they’re seeking some kind of counterfactual, generally having to do with power and excitement and self-efficacy and so on. Again, the difference isn’t really “no rule is better than a rule most of the time”; the difference is in the kind of experiences your rules support.

I’m poking holes in some of Finch’s arguments because they’re interesting to think about, but overall I think his primer is insightful and there’s a lot to agree with. I’ve seen some of the frustrations he articulates arise at my own table, where a young player playing a druid went from a thrill at being able to change into a “baby owlbear” (brown bear stat block, owlbear appearance) to disappointment and boredom because they didn’t have many fun options in combat. Some of that’s on me, I could have paid better attention and given her some ideas for mixing it up, like grappling or maybe an Intimidation check with advantage for ursinity. But if the group had been following a norm of improvisational, free-form combat rather than the more by-the-book tactical combat that falls naturally out of 5E, I wouldn’t have had to.

I’m thinking hard about getting serious about running Kids On Bikes or a variant sometime soon, just to see how it feels. But don’t hold your breath on it being a dungeon crawl. (A Court of Kids and Bikes, on the other hand…)

Currently reading: Animal Pound, by Tom King, Peter Gross, and Tamra Bonvillain.