Post-OSR Adventure Gaming with the Interactionist Set

So Zak fell, and G+ died, and people seem to have scattered and sorted. It's time to reflect on the adventure gaming movement known as "OSR" now that at least one heir contender to the title has popped up (see also this).

I have been following this movement for 9 years, both in the sense of interest and in the sense of dedication. But it took the splitup to see the fault lines that had always been there. Here's my analysis.

In the first place, the OSR was a reaction against 30 years of D&D development. Technically you could care about other games and be OSR, but in practice D&D was the big kahuna, the starting point for so many people's experiences, the touchstone often returned to, the market-share leader to watch.

Starting in 2008 or so with the release of 4th edition, people started to chafe at it it. And then in a kind of dance of the veils, they stripped away the previous layers of development, questioning each edition back to the Original books.

Fourth Edition: Away with the carefully balanced tactical game with roleplaying cut scenes, the blurring of class abilities.

Third Edition:  Away with the unified mechanic, the scaling treadmill, the bewildering character options and optimization, the rules that cover every circumstance in talmudic detail.

Second Edition: Away with even the tamest instances of all-class skill rolls, the slight tweaks to character kits and class specialization. (This was an easy veil to strip off, very lightweight.)

AD&D: Away with the late-era developments of plotlined modules, the crufty mechanics that nobody used anyway, the fancy spells and character classes.

Not everybody took that last step, but most of the "old school" took as role models either Original D&D or the Basic offshoot. But why? If game design is progress, why go backwards?

The different answers to this question, in hindsight, can reveal the eventual fractures in the movement.

• Because nostalgia. Some people (concentrated in places like Dragonsfoot, Grognardia, and Knights & Knaves) just wanted to experience, or re-experience, the old rules, the old adventure tropes and clichés. Where they had an intellectual position, it was cultural conservatism -- the wisdom of the ages may seem irrational, but there is probably a good reason for it, and we should really strive hard to find the hidden brightside of things like descending AC or racial level limits. That position always struck me as silly. We are talking about game rules that aren't even 50 years old and have never gone a single human generation without substantial and multiple revisions. It's like going all-out G. K. Chesterton in defense of the original box design for Corn Flakes.

• Because idiosyncrasy. Some people (most egregiously, Alexis of the Tao of D&D) wanted to strip the old mechanics back down to their roots in order to build their own layer of heartbreaker complication from the ground up. That impulse itself is very old-school, rooted in the hoary traditions of Arduin, Arms Law, and dozens of other bolt-ons. Implicitly, this: "Increasing simulationist complication and character options isn't a bad thing, but I'd rather just have them my way, thank you."

• Because edginess. Some people (for example Raggi, McKinney) realized that stripping away the history of D&D also meant rolling back the layers of accommodation to prevailing social tastes: squeamishness over Satanism in the 80's and 90's, egalitarianism in gender and otherwise, but most importantly the "nice" style of gaming in which characters started with a lot already invested and it was hard to get killed for good. This left room to embrace all kinds of pulp-magazine nastiness: rape, slaves, body horror, morally blurred characters, meaningless character death, "nega-dungeon" effects that wreck the whole campaign world.

• Because interaction. The most esoteric development, but also the one I find most appealing, was to realize that after stripping away all the conventions of play, you are left with a space beyond rules, traditions, and railroads. You are free to emphasize creative improvisation, interaction between GM and players, and to design situations and systems that make the most of this. Philotomy's Musings and Finch's Primer, for example, put this forth as a play aesthetic, but there are also those who have made it into a design aesthetic -- often known as the "artpunk" or "DIY" movement.  

I don't think too many people saw this at the time, but this Interactionist school was actually a fourth goal, not covered by Ron Edwards' Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist scheme that dominated discussion about RPGs in the 2000 decade. Significantly, it is the Interactionist perspective that has made it into the DNA of D&D's fifth edition, rather than anything else that Zak or Pundit could have given it as consultants. The game now realizes that exploration and social interaction are co-equal pillars with combat; that the rules should be loose enough for GMs to improvise mechanics; that players have a hand in building the setting.

But while today's D&D has Interactionist DNA, it is not a fully interactionist game, and certainly the official adventure material looks staidly conventional when compared to artpunk's open play and creative flourishes. At its best the DIY movement has given us: Borgesian monsters posing problems that go beyond combat; weird magic systems with flavor and creative effects; adventures that map out strange societies and oddball challenges.

Can we really still call it "Old School" or is it more like a "Never-Was" school? Certainly if anyone back in the 80's was playing or writing like this, I never heard about them. As the antithesis of nostalgia, Interactionist gaming uses the blank space around the stripping-down of the World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game to fill with its own peculiar objectives and ideas. That's what I like the best; that's my banner, right there.

Monte's Numenera Kickstarter

Speaking of science fantasy and "OSR is dead/has won" proclamations, here's what Monte Cook is up to these days. Best concentration of info is in this series of posts.

Science fantasy: The Numenera game is Earth, one billion years hence, and that could mean anything. Clearly, this is an adventure game, not an exercise in the manipulation of sixth-dimensional solids; so there are people and peopleoids around, barbarians in the ruins, challenges best overcome by short-range violence, stuff indistinguishable from magic. Monte name-drops Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock, but the focus on artifacts and ruins has me thinking also of Empire of the Petal Throne - down to the acute accent on the "e" in the Numenera logo, with its echo of the similarly accented Tékumel.

OSR has won: Remember 3rd edition D&D monster stat blocks? Monte was one of the designers, but now he gives a public recantation, and promises simple systems that ease GM improvisation and rulings. There are a few implementations of Old School talking points: resource management (though of personal stats, not equipment and henchmen), the three Fantasy Trip stats that everyone seems to keep re-discovering, experience for discovery.

Story games have won: Numenera also boasts a heavy infusion of story/indie/Forge concepts - character definition by natural-language terms, for one, but most importantly a system of challenges and forfeits between player and GM. Experience points are given for going with the flow of a plot or accepting a difficult development, and can be spent to refuse such a thing. There are a lot of precedents for this. Here, the ability to bend reality and shape the narrative reminds me most of the challenge-and-forfeit system in James Wallis' highly enjoyable proto-indie-game Baron Munchausen.

What's my reaction? Science fantasy is cool, I guess, but details are sparse. The key concept seems to be nanotechnology, which is not the most exciting revelation*; remember midichlorians? There's more promise in the visual sketches of the world, where mysterious shrouded figures lurch in shadow beside gargantuan, misshapen dray animals. Explicitly influenced by the likes of Moebius, this hints at a welcome change from the every-strap-and-armor-spike esthetic in mainstream fantasy gaming art.

As for the story-old school hybrid, the tradeoffs are pretty clear. Gone is the illusion of a pervasive and coherent world that a skilled, authoritative GM can provide. The players are more aware of the fictional nature of the world, of their role as co-authors, their characters' roles as puppets. If the DM informs you that wild apes have descended from the roof, and you spend an XP to make that not happen, can you still erase that image from your mind? I see more advantage into having XP spent to make something equally awesome happen in your favor (the apes are taxidermic decoys, put there just to frighten us!) No doubt this set of rules and their use will be the most controversial aspect of the system.

Anyway, the kickstarter is successful enough that Numenera will evidently be a game to be reckoned with in 2013.

*Exception made for gray goo apocalypses like Wil McCarthy's Bloom.

Beyond Generation Wars

"The problem with this new generation is that they grew up on computer games that hand everything to them. They don't have the gumption for old-school play!"

This is a common enough sentiment, but I had to question it recently after reading this article by David Wong. Granted, he admits to "pushing 40," but most of the computer games he mentions are hits from the past 10 years. And some of his criteria for a great moment in computer game play seem lifted straight from the Old School roleplaying ethos. Such as:

• "When you feel truly powerful for the first time:" Means that you have to spend some time paying your dues, hiding and skulking and killing rats with a stick. Power is earned, not granted from the start.
• "The first time you see an awe-inspiring enemy." Means that you have to face things you're not sure you'll survive.
• "The first time you see the universe running without you." Right on. To continue: "Here's a quick way to separate good fantasy stories from bad: The good ones leave you feeling like the universe continues whether or not the camera is there to see it." 

These are all ideas behind old-school naturalism: the world is not composed of carefully measured, player-centric combats and artificial puzzles. You are let into a world where things can overpower you, where there are problems not puzzles, and you have to use all your guile, stealth and good judgment to survive. The computer gaming examples Wong gives here would also make great experiences in tabletop gaming - for example, running from the dragon only to have it fight the giant.

But here's my suspicion: there hasn't really been a change with the generations. Maybe there's less tolerance for pointless grinding at the tabletop because of the ready availability of electronic timewasters. But running a naturalistic world always has taken insight and a certain amount of grit when faced with the players' desire to win. Steering clear of pointless reward and pointless sadism as a DM - and of the self-consciousness that you might be indulging in one or the other - has never been easy. It's also not easy as a player to stick with such a campaign, even though it ultimately brings deep rewards.

You can see from the fulminations of Gygax in the AD&D books that many of his contemporaries ran overly easy "Monty Haul" campaigns. Dice fudging is openly discussed. Clearly, not all old-time players had the Old School mentality. And evidently, a minority of roleplayers today embrace it.

This way has never been mass-market - which is why Mike Mearls feels the need to surround his old-school advice in D&D Next with a slew of padded safety mechanisms. That's OK; those of us who care know how to unbolt the training wheels.

When to Role, When to Rule and When to Roll

One point, left dangling from my recent series, I'd like to address: When should a DM use an analog mode of task resolution based on player descriptions of actions in role and your rulings on them, and when should he or she use a digital mode, rolling dice against set skills and difficulties?

There's a great benefit to seeing the physical environment of an adventure for what it is, rather than an abstract map dotted with "trap" and "secret" symbols. A lot of task resolutions then become simple. Is there a naked, unworked stone corridor? Then any tripwires or pressure plates or door seams will be evident to anyone with two good eyes, even in flickering torchlight, when proceeding forward at the glacial pace of dungeon exploration. I mean, try not noticing everything there is to notice while taking a minute or more to examine a 12' stretch of corridor, 1st Edition AD&D style.

What if the task is more difficult? Say there's a gossamer-thin tripwire spun by dark elves, or a seam of uncanny dwarven construction. Say there's a complicated bas-relief that could be hiding any number of buttons or holes, or a cracked floor with any number of outlines possible. For these, I would say that a long and close inspection would reveal the hidden feature. In player terms, they would have to give me a detailed description of what they are doing, and repeat that each time they are doing it.

Player attention, in other words, is a resource, drained by repetition and boredom. But forget what I said about trying to model this with limits on character attention. It's a player thing, not character. And player things, too, are analog.

If you want to reach the heights of immersion and intellectual challenge that come from an analog game, you have to trust your players to respect their time and enjoyment. You have to trust them not to abuse your system by giving long descriptions of detailed searches  at all times. If you're playing with dopey kids or grown-up asshats or hyper-task-focused fun-murderers, use a more rules- and dice-bound system - please!

You also have to resolve not to let them cheat their way into this resource, using crappy min-maxer crutches like the standing-order instruction sheet (see under "excel spreadsheet" anecdote there).This is just one of those times where you have to know what your group is like. Don't assume the worst right away. But don't think that the right system can substitute for mutual consent to have fun. Good players will fret about the possibility that an asshat could ruin the game, or even the possibility that they could be that asshat. But they won't actually do it.

Eventually, the environment will channel their attention. They'll zoom along a blank corridor or room in real time, because they know that any danger there will be spotted by their cautious in-game progress. They'll stop and check out mosaic floors, complex sculptures or patterns ... if they're wise. Your naturalistic, analog signaling of opportunities for complication will guide their attention. "Dwarven craftsmanship" or "illusionist's castle", of course, should spur them to new and temporary heights of paranoia.

Now, when do you roll? Yes, my game has a "notice detail" skill. And I use it for the same purpose as saving throws in James M's classic analysis. It gives players a digital chance when their analog skills don't quite meet the challenge. Even if you're running down a corridor, you might notice the tripwire that your slow advance would make obvious. Even if you're just standing next to a bookcase casting idle eyes on it, you might notice the odd jointwork that sends you looking for an opening device.

There's one caution, though: I haven't yet had players get up to the point where their skill in notice detail becomes near-automatic. In my system a rogue could get there by level 4, though at the cost of everything else roguely. With more even development they're likely to max out the Notice skill around level 8.

I'm not sure whether the greater chance of success at those heights is a just reward for sticking it through, or a blow to the fun in analog gaming. Perhaps the balancing factor is this: At higher levels, you're more likely to face complex, brain-challenging mechanisms and effects, so that the challenge is not whether you see them, but what you do once you see them.

Iron God: The Pit, the Pole and the Point Dwarf

This post has spoilers for Black Blade's Tomb of the Iron God adventure module. But not any spoilers for my players who have marched through most of it. So be forewarned and see you on the other side of the cut.

OSR Contradiction 2: Player Skill vs. Minimal Dungeons

Does OSR mean an Old School Regurgitation of everything that was played, printed and xeroxed in the olden days of the adventure gaming hobby? Or an Old School Refinement, taking the best products and learning from them, and looking past the rules as written to mine the reminiscences of the founding roleplayers and see exactly how they had fun?

Geomorph by Fighting Fantasist

Certainly, if you look at almost all old school modules you'll see two things that had rules associated with them: pits and secret doors. Especially in the early days, these rules were rough and ready, betraying the miniatures origins of the game: roll a d6 and fall in on a 1 or 2, roll a d6 and detect the door on a 1. Because there were rules, and character features that improved the odds, it was seen as necessary to include pits and secret doors in any dungeon worth its salt. Leaving them out would be like leaving sand traps and water hazards off a gold course.

Many, many games were played with this mechanistic, 8-bit digital method. Many more would be played using the more sophisticated rules that interacted with character skills and eventually turned into Spot checks. What almost nobody was doing was the "player skill" method that's seized the Old School mantle. Next to no space in Dragon magazine was dedicated to elaborate analog mechanical trap descriptions in the manner of Courtney's Hack & Slash blog. What you saw instead was rules, charts, tables.

So does your Old School Reenactment involve tooling around a graph paper funhouse just rolling for pits and doors? And if your Old School Rejuvenation involves tapping ahead with a pole, what effect does that have? Is the pit lid heavy or light? Might it tip open or echo with a tap? These are questions that need analog solutions, immediately bypassing the "roll 1 or 2" crudity of the Old School Rules.

Tomb of the Iron God is the dungeon we have been playing in since January. It's by Matt Finch, who also authored the 95 Theses of player skill, the Quick Primer. By the Primer, using player skill for pits and secret doors requires analog descriptions of their mechanisms. But in the module, recreating the more usual form of Old School play (or perhaps just out of reflex), you have oodles of un-detailed pit traps and secret doors. Bam! Contradiction. Yes, the module notes tell you to ad-lib ... and ad-lib I did. But I would have appreciated being tossed at least a bone or two for such frequent, important, and eventually unexplained features of the catacombs.

Next time ... my solutions and the players', an in-play review.

OSR Contradiction 1: Play vs. Fiction

Attempts to enforce purity in the Old School Ratatouille are doomed to fail. Why?  Because in its glorious diversity it's fallen into at least two contradictions that I've become aware of writing recent posts. These contradictions are not fatal, except perhaps to an exaggerated sense of traditional gaming orthodoxy, but they bear mentioning.

Contradiction 1 relates to something I noticed a while back: Old-style D&D combat (any kind of D&D combat for that matter) bears little resemblance to the give and take of pulp fantasy combat. OK, so it's not the most original observation that D&D combat is not realistic. But it's remarkable that even the general style of play of high-level D&D heroes is at odds with the cautious, life-or-death approach taken by even the greatest heroes of early 20th century fantasy literature.

But also, as Aaron Steele recently remarked, "One of the unique features of Dungeons and Dragons is the idea of the ADVENTURING PARTY." The vaunted pulp fantasy influences can't really account for this confluence of archetypes that quickly settled in a foursquare formation. Fafhrd and the Mouser, the Eternal Champion and his sidekicks are duos cut from essentially the same cloth. The Fellowship of the Ring may have contributed the "fantasy races," elf-dwarf ribbing and all, but their mission is completely different and they're missing a few key players.

I've personally rejected the neo-Old School arguments to drop thieves ("Hey, everyone's a thief") or cleric-types ("Hey, no room for goody-goodies in Hyboria"). Only recently have I realized why.

In the first place, even taking both measures at once will bring you no closer to your Weird Tales utopia; you'll look in vain for all those pulp adventure stories featuring the sword-wielding barbarian and his wizard buddy. Drop the wizard PCs, and you'll have a true pulp adventure game (resembling perhaps Searchers of the Unknown). But it won't be D&D, or even T&T.

In the second place, the four classes are classics because they set up instant character conflicts within the party, but on a tame enough level that the party can still work together. To illustrate:

Silhouettes by Telecanter & myself

The fighter-wizard axis is the classic Kirk-Spock, Aubrey-Maturin, Narcissus-Goldmund alliance of opposites. Not all fighters and magic-users fit the stereotypes, of course. But the classes as developed in fantasy gaming tend to bear out the roles by making the wizard the combat-weak master of powerful but limited resources, and the fighter the more durable frontline figure.

The cleric-thief axis sets up moral debates and conflicts, encouraged by the altruistic nature of the cleric's gifts, and the acquisitive, loner nature of the thief's methods. I've had to express these in two ways because different play groups work differently with them. Some see the conflict as between the thief and the party (the labels in parentheses), others as seeing it as between the party and the rest of the world.

The moral axis may not work sometimes. It lets clerics and paladins be asshats by insisting on moral action detrimental to the party, and thieves and assassins be asshats by insisting on selfish action detrimental to the party. Things work out best, perhaps, when the thief advocates for the selfish and immediate interests of the party (as opposed to robbing sleeping companions) while the cleric advocates for the long-term moral interests of the party (as opposed to telling the truth to the Dark Lord's guards).

Perhaps these problems with the moral axis, or its suggestion that there is more than the looter ethos, leads some to reject its classes completely. I can't ... because that's not D&D. Despite all those problems, and implementation problems that persisted for twenty years, thieves and clerics nevertheless stuck around. I just don't see it as a positive to insist that the long-lived and very resilient party structure of the game is some sort of tumor that has to be excised to reach purity.

Contradiction 2 is coming up, and it leads in to my review and play guide for Tomb of the Iron God.

Old School As A Gamut Of Emotions

What's the essence of Old School style GMing? noisms thinks it's in being a dispassionate, deistic god who lets the world have its own reality. Telecanter weighs in with a comment: it's all about letting the players have fun.

I don't think it's about control, or fun. Simply put, it is to run the game so that the players can have a chance of feeling as wide a range of emotions as possible, vicariously through their PCs. Not just pleasure or mild challenge, but grief, anger, remorse, fear, side-splitting laughter. On a higher level, this experience translates into more than just the fun of completing an easy crossword puzzle, and evolves into the deeper enjoyment of engagement with serious literature or drama.

The autonomous world then becomes a necessary adjunct to this goal.

• Sometimes it hands the players the fruits of their actions - pride, remorse, satisfaction.
• Sometimes fate throws undeserved misfortune their way, whether they can see it coming - fear - or have to pick up the pieces afterwards - sorrow.
• Sometimes they get more than they deserve - joy! 
• Sometimes the world gives enemies - anger, hate - and other times allies - gratitude, respect, concern. 
• Sometimes the universe lets them know just how enormous it is - opening up the twin feelings of awe and terror. 
• Sometimes it's the people underfoot who get to them - pity, compassion, contempt.
• And it's only against the serious backdrop of all these concerns that the true release of world-shaking laughter can come ... not the continual, gassy snickering that some hope to engineer through a relentless parade of ridiculous characters and cheap puns.

If you are fudging things or setting them up in the first place to make the game's outcomes fall within a certain range of cautious success, you are denying your players these experiences. If the players suspect that you are fudging things, you are denying them even the stage-managed satisfactions you intend for them to enjoy. If the world is not autonomous, it cannot inspire these emotions.

But also, the players must keep their feelings within the world in order to have the higher-level enjoyment that comes from experiencing even painful feelings as "theatrical emotions" or rasa (see here for an explanation of the Hindu concept). They must be mature enough to respect the separation of the world from the person of the Game Master.

If their grief is aimed at the dice, their anger at the GM's rules or interpretation, their gratitude at the module designer, then they are missing the point. Equally so, it is the GM's responsibility to demonstrate that all his or her choices are made out of necessity, drawing on the logic of the rules system and the logic of the imaginary world.

That, I think, is what distinguishes the old school GM from the balance-gamer who is trying to keep everything fair and manageable, and from the rail-greasing story-gamer who is denying the emotions that come from confronting meaninglessness or exerting true agency within the world.

The old school systems allow these heights and depths, but - like a psychedelic drug - can also go horribly wrong if not experienced in the right company. This is why they are and always will be an underground phenomenon.

Back in My Day We Didn't Have These Fancy Megadungeons

The sight of the recently released 300 room Barrowmaze being docked points on Grognardia for not being big enough to be a true megadungeon - I guess that makes it more of a what? Macrodungeon? Kilodungeon? - reminds me that we didn't even know what the hell a megadungeon was in 1982. There were no commercially available examples of the art, and only a few oblique references to Castle Greyhawk in the Dungeon Master's Guide.

To us, megadungeons were boring. In the absence of any guidance from TSR, our DM started us off with three levels of what, in hindsight, was inspired by the only available megadungeon examples at the time: PC dungeon games such as Wizardry or Bard's Tale, which we also played avidly. In other words, a monster motel punctuated by traps.

By the time we reached third level of this dungeon, we were clamoring for a more "mature" experience, more similar to the published modules we were starting to read. Adventures with a plot and a climax and in different parts of the world map. Nobody we knew was running a megadungeon, and even less so through the story-obsessed 80's and 90's. When Undermountain came out, it seemed more of a curio than a model for emulation. Impressive, certainly, but would you actually want to nail your campaign down in one place for years at a time?

Really, what we're doing under the banner of the Old School Renaissance is much cooler than 99% of our actual old school experiences with D&D. Essentially, we are finally appreciating and spreading the practices of the close Gygax/Arneson circle that never made it out to the masses in any published product. Megadungeons are part of that, and the only pity is that the necessary catalyst seemed to be the passing of the founders of the game.

4E D&D Is The Oldest-School Old-School Game Out There

If you recognize that roleplaying games started when wargamers started personalizing rigid sets of wargame rules, refereeing acts of guile and subterfuge as preludes to Napoleonic battles ...

If you also open your eyes a little and notice that some players are not just using the tightly regimented episodic skirmish combat rules of D&D 4th Edition out of the book, but doing roleplaying "cut scenes" to shape the direction of the campaign around them ...

Then "let's drop some roleplaying around this set of wargame rules" is the oldest school play mode around.

In the OSR ...

Players ... railroad DM!

Meme by Arkhein.

Comment if you want an explanation!