East Coast OSR Meetup

This meetup is for people who are interested in "tabletop roleplaying games" (TTRPGs), both complete beginners looking to start with an easy-to-learn ruleset and for experienced players who have become a bit bored with the most common games like D&D 5th edition and Pathfinder. Instead, we'll be playing indie games associated with the "Old-School Renaissance" (OSR) that try to recapture the creativity and looser play-style of the first generation of RPGs in the 1970s-80s.

Since OSR games are a niche hobby and it's often hard to find players at your local gaming club or game store, we'll be playing online via Zoom or Discord which enables us to tap into a much larger pool of potential players. Although I've named this meetup the "East Coast OSR Meetup", we're open to interested people anywhere & everywhere!

FYI, fans of old-school RPGs are called "grognards", so that's the official term for our group's members. The term comes from the wargaming world, which in turn borrowed it from the name Napoleon used for his veteran troops - grognard means "grumbler" in French.

UNDERSTANDING THE "OLD-SCHOOL RENAISSANCE" IN ROLE-PLAYING GAMES:

The Old-School Renaissance (OSR) began in the mid-2000s when players who missed the simple & free-wheeling playstyle of early Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s-80s wanted an alternative to the complexity of D&D 3rd Edition. Because the original rulebooks were out-of-print but posting copies of them online would've been considered copyright infringement, designers took advantage of the Open Game License (OGL) that allowed 3rd-party D&D supplements to create "retroclones"—new rulebooks that kept most of the original D&D game mechanics but made them easier to follow and fixed some inconsistencies. Gradually, some game designers began to mix & match rules from old-school D&D and modern d20 systems, leading to interesting "hacks" and attempts to mimic genres other than traditional fantasy.

A lot of the OSR community's discussions happened on Google+ from 2011 until it closed in 2019, fracturing the movement and leading to a diaspora into various Facebook groups, Reddit threads & Substack blogs. However, the Covid pandemic in 2020 was an unexpected boon for the OSR and indie games in general, since it pushed a lot of gamers to learn how to use teleconferencing apps like Zoom and Discord as well as "virtual tabletops" (VTTs) like Roll20, Foundry, and Owlbear Rodeo to play online. With the rise in online play, OSR-style RPGs are popular enough now that creators are regularly able to crowdfund new games on Kickstarter and sell them on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io instead of vying for shelf space at the local game shop. Today, two decades after it started, the OSR movement is best characterized as a loose group of gamers that prefer RPGs that vary widely in their style & setting but still follow a set of "old-school" design principles that prioritize simple & easy-to-understand rules, sandbox settings that allow lots of player agency, and an emphasis on tough tactical challenges rather than power fantasies.

For a quick overview of what OSR games are like, check out this 11-minute video from Ben Milton's Questing Beast Youtube channel. If you want to learn a bit more, read Matthew Finch's "Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming" or Ben Milton, Steve Pumpkin & David Perry's more in-depth discussion of OSR game design principles in the "Principia Apocrypha" .

There's several core principals that set the OSR games apart from more mainstream RPGs:

1. RULINGS NOT RULES: OSR games tend to be "rules light" as opposed to "crunchy", i.e. they have simple rules that don't require much math to determine the success or failure of an action rather than complex rules that require lots of number crunching. This makes them easier to learn for beginners and quicker to run for experienced players. Character's explicit skills & abilities are also simpler and this is why OSR gamers often say "the answer isn't on your character sheet" and instead promote the idea of "tactical infinity", i.e. characters can attempt any tactic to solve a problem, subject to the adjudication of the GM. While OSR games may give characters a "background" that gives them a bonus on skill checks related to their former profession, they tend to lack detailed skill systems and just assume PCs have general competence in a wide range of adventuring-related activities. Since there's not an exhaustive list of your character's skills, on-the-spot rulings from the Game Master (GM) based on his/her intuitive understanding of how the game world works (a.k.a. the "invisible rulebook") are favored for resolving situations not specifically covered in the rule books.
2. ROLEPLAYING NOT ROLL-PLAYING: The OSR's focus on roleplaying over dice rolling is meant to preserve the players' sense of immersion by forcing them to interact with aspects of the game's simulated world directly rather than through the abstraction of special abilities defined by the rules of a specific RPG. For example, this means that instead of merely saying "I check for traps" or "I try to bluff my way past the guard" and then rolling dice to see if your Find/Remove Traps or Bluff ability succeeds, the player must describe HOW they check for traps or WHAT they say to the guard. This is why OSR gamers often say "play the world not the rules" (similar to how story-gamers say "fiction first"), and it's why they tend to look down upon D&D 5E's play style which they refer to as "pushing buttons on your character sheet". It's also why OSR game designers avoid "disassociated mechanics", i.e. character abilities without any in-world explanation of how/why they work. The OSR's emphasis on tactical roleplaying is why many OSR gamers will talk about the importance of "player skill over character skill", i.e. even if your character has a low score in the attribute related to whatever you're trying to do, your odds of success will often depend more (or entirely) on your tactics than a die roll against a character's stat. This explains why many of the hazards and obstacles in old-school dungeons are essentially "lateral thinking puzzles" that must be solved by the players directly, and why many OSR games include some of old-school D&D's weirder magic items (e.g. portable hole, immovable rod, sovereign glue, decanter of endless water) that don't have any obvious combat ability but can be incredibly useful given some ingenuity.
3. HEROIC NOT SUPERHEROIC: Starting characters in OSR games are often quite weak & ill-equipped, so success typically means surviving and gradually becoming more skilled & getting better equipment over time - perhaps eventually owning a stronghold & attracting followers if you reach a high level. A preference for more down-to-earth heroes means OSR games consciously avoid the "power creep" and optimized "character builds" that's common in later editions of D&D. While OSR characters are "heroic" in the sense of being able to perform a wide variety of adventuring-related tasks (as noted in Point #1 above), they aren't invulnerable since heroism requires taking real risks. Stats are often generated by rolling 3d6 down the line which often results in a mediocre character with only one above average ability and at least one stat that's pitifully low. Hit points in OSR games are often lower (and sometimes capped), resting only slowly restores hit points, and magic healing potions are often rare or non-existent. Characters in OSR games typically die when they hit zero hit points or have to roll on a "death & dismemberment table" to see what wounds/scars they suffer rather than merely falling unconscious as in later editions of D&D. Lastly, OSR games often emphasize the importance of mundane equipment (e.g. torches/lanterns, flint & steel, rope & grappling hook, ten foot pole, hammer & spikes, crowbar, etc.) and "encumberance" rules only allow PCs to carry a fixed amount of gear which forces tradeoffs & resource management. These limitations are unlike later editions of D&D where characters often have a plethora of magic weapons, wands, rings, cloaks, etc., as well as magic items like a "bag of holding" that allow an unlimited amount of gear. The tendency to have more average stats, lower hit points, and limited equipment means OSR characters tend to be "everyman heroes" who gradually rise from obscurity rather than "chosen one" heroes who were destined for greatness - or as Matt Finch puts it: "To make a comic-book analogy, characters don’t become Superman; they become Batman. And they don’t start as Batman – Batman is the pinnacle."
4. LETHALITY NOT GAME BALANCE:  Unlike later editions of D&D, in old-school play the random encounter tables weren't adjusted so that the "Challenge Rating" (CR) of monsters the PCs encounter assure they have a decent shot at beating them. In old-school D&D, the only thing players knew was that encounters tended to get more dangerous the further you ventured into the wilderness or the deeper you went in a dungeon. Many old-school "meat grinder dungeons" mimicked early video games where "trial & error gameplay" was required - i.e. often it wasn't possible to know in advance what hazards lurk where or how to solve or defeat them, so some of the first or second set of adventurers going in were often cannon fodder. These days, in OSR games, GMs tend to telegraph the level of danger by allowing characters to gather rumors from locals who can warn them about certain areas, or by allowing characters to spot the tracks of a powerful monster lurking nearby or notice the remains of the last adventurer that triggered a trap. This offers the players a chance to avoid high-level threats they probably couldn't survive or come up with a clever plan to ambush a monster or avoid a trap rather than try to deal with it head on. This is what OSR gamers mean when they talk about "combat as war" vs "combat as sport", i.e. a sport encourages you to "fight fair" whereas wars are won by stacking the odds in your favor. Also, since many OSR games award experience for recovering treasure not killing monsters, OSR gamers will often say "combat is a fail state" - i.e. if you just want to loot the dungeon, it makes more sense to use stealth to bypass enemies, negotiate when you can, or just run away instead of fighting. If/when your character dies, you'll be expected to laugh it off and create a new character or take over an NPC nearby. The higher lethality of OSR games also helps avert "main character syndrome" (i.e. pretending the story revolves around your character & hogging the spotlight), and it also means players don't typically make as much upfront investment in their character's backstory, since it's viewed as a waste of time if they die in their 1st or 2nd adventure.
5. SANDBOXES NOT RAILROADS: OSR games place less emphasis on character arcs & predefined endings, and a greater emphasis on allowing the GM and players to collaboratively generate "emergent narratives" from a mix of interesting maps, setting guides filled with lore, random tables, as well as player choices. Blogger Justin Alexander has summarized the advice for GMs running sandbox adventures as "Don't prep plots, prep situations" by seeding rumors in town that can lead to quests and having goal-directed villains who act on their own schedule regardless of the players. The lack of a pre-existing adventure plot in OSR games is a reversal of the trend that began with 2nd edition AD&D where boxed adventures were designed to fit player actions into an exciting narrative that required "railroading" - i.e. constraining players to a predetermined path. The OSR's prohibition on railroading means that "illusionism" (i.e. GMs offering false choices to the players) is strongly frowned upon, and so a fork in the road should not lead the players to the same pre-planned encounter no matter which direction they choose (a.k.a. the "quantum ogre") merely because that's easier for the GM. It's worth noting that D&D's early designers hit upon the idea of underground "dungeons" as a way to provide environments where the PCs' options were more limited & manageable for GMs than wilderness exploration which allows movement in any direction. However, to avoid turning dungeons into "railroaded" adventures, most OSR game designer favor non-linear dungeons with multiple entrances, looping & branching paths, secret passages, trapdoors, and different levels.
6. TIME IS TRACKED NOT HAND-WAVED: OSR games tend to put a heavy emphasis on resource management, and one of the most important resources is time. This harks back to a passage in the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide where Gary Gygax wrote in all caps: “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” In combat, GMs will sometimes use a "countdown timer" to force players to quickly decide on a course of action or lose their turn. And even outside of combat, the GM keeps track of turns in the dungeon and days in the wilderness, because this determines the frequency of wandering-monster checks, as well as the depletion of torches & rations. These factors put time pressure on every action the PCs make and create a tradeoff between moving quickly and being careful**.** Some OSR GMs use "1:1 timekeeping", where each real-world day equals a day in the game world which keeps multiple groups synchronized in a shared setting. It also encourages players to end their game sessions back at the safety of a town, since typically you don't have enough rations to survive for a week or more in the wilderness - and you often can't last more than 24 hours in the dungeon since you can't safely sleep. Some GMs will rule that characters left in the wilderness (or worse yet, a dungeon) at the end of a session must roll to see if they make it home safely — or meet misfortune along the way. Between adventures, when the characters are back in town, time continues to flow and days or weeks often pass as characters heal, train, research spells, craft items, carouse in the taverns, etc. These downtime activities are often resolved with a simple roll to determine their result rather than through extensive roleplay, but the time they take it still tracked. That means there's a tradeoff between doing things in town and adventuring, so if a character is still busy doing something in town when the next session begins, the player might have to use a different character instead. The passage of time is also important for higher-level PCs with strongholds or guilds to manage, since they face periodic upkeep costs, as well as wages for their servants & retainers.
7. PICK-UP GAMES NOT EPIC CAMPAIGNS: Rather than expecting a small group of regular players to commit to multiple sessions that are part of an overarching campaign, tabletop RPGs in the 1970s-80s often assumed a large group of irregular players and several DMs (often in high school & college gaming clubs) who'd drop in whenever they had some free time. The 1st edition D&D rulebook famously said that "four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign", but this assumed a dozen or more players wouldn't show up on the same day. Instead, a rotating cast of players explored the same "persistent world" in different sessions in a way that resembled a tabletop version of "massive multiplayer online" (MMO) games like "World of Warcraft" that would come several decades later. To facilitate this style of play, old-school D&D often used an "open table" format where anyone who wanted to play was welcome. You didn't have to commit to a campaign that would span several sessions and required regular attendance. Instead, each session was a self-contained adventure (usually a dungeon crawl) with the players starting & ending the session at a nearby "safe" town where they could rest, heal & resupply. This play method faded by the late 1980s but was revived in 2007 by the game designer Ben Robbins whose blog went viral for its descriptions of a series of open-ended wilderness hexcrawl adventures based in a setting known as the "West Marches".

Keep in mind that not all OSR games adhere to all 7 principles, aside from the first one (i.e. rules-light), but as long as they adhere to most of these principles most of the time, they're still reasonably classified as OSR games.

Although it's not listed among the OSR game design principles, another common feature of OSR games is that many of them draw inspiration from the pulp fantasy authors listed in "Appendix N" of the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide (e.g. Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock). Their works tend to fit into the fantasy subgenre known as "sword & sorcery" and feature more adult themes & moral ambiguity than the more kid-friendly & light-hearted "high fantasy" stories of J.R.R. Tolkien that influences modern D&D.

OSR games also tend to have more focus on old-school "dungeon crawls" -- i.e. exploring a maze-like environment while battling monsters, avoiding traps, and looting treasure -- which was deemphasized in most adventures from D&D's 2nd & later editions. The strategies necessary to survive the dangers of old-school dungeons are almost a "lost art" among modern role-players and requires a bit of a learning curve.

There's a variety of other aspects of old-school D&D that faded from prominence over time that have been featured in many OSR games, for example: lightly-sketched or "anti-canon" settings, rules for wilderness survival & "hexcrawl" exploration, the use of battlemaps & miniatures to make movement & positioning more tactical (as opposed to the more abstract "theater of the mind" approach), designating one player as a "caller" to speak for the entire group and one as a "mapper" to draw their own dungeon maps, a focus on mundane adventuring gear, encumbrance rules & resource tracking, the use of hirelings & henchmen, player strongholds & domain play at higher levels, mass combat rules derived from wargaming, XP for treasure, training to level up, racial classes & level caps for demi-humans, different XP requirements for leveling & different rates of power/skill increase for each class when they level up (leading to "linear fighters, quadratic wizards"), greater importance of character alignment, lawful & chaotic factions locked in a cosmic struggle, more focus on learning languages to communicate with NPCs, and reaction rolls & morale rolls that determined NPC behavior. OSR games have also popularized things like "carousing rules" and "0-level funnel/gauntlet sessions" that only existed in some early D&D groups as interesting house rules.

Note that rather than sticking with one particular OSR ruleset, we'll play-test several of them so our members can get a sense of their advantages and shortcomings. OSR-related games can be loosely categorized into several general categories:

• (1) "Classic" OSR Games (a.k.a. "Retro-clones" or "First-Wave OSR") repackage & streamline the rules of early editions of D&D without changing much. These old-school D&D editions include the White Box (a.k.a. Original D&D), Holmes' Basic D&D, Moldvay & Cook's Basic/Expert D&D (a.k.a. "B/X" or "Red Box"), Mentzer's Basic/Expert/ Companion/Master/Immortal set (a.k.a. "BECMI" or "Blue Box" - later compiled in the Rules Cyclopedia), 1st Edition AD&D, and - arguably - 2nd Edition AD&D. Prominent examples include Swords & Wizardry (OD&D clone), Blueholme (Basic clone), Mazes & Perils (Basic clone), Old School Essentials (B/X clone), Basic Fantasy (B/X clone), Labyrinth Lord (B/X clone), Dark Dungeons (BECMI clone), OSRIC (1st Edition clone), and For Gold & Glory (2nd Edition clone).
  (2) "OSR-Adjacent" Games (a.k.a. "Near-Clones" or "Second-Wave OSR") mix old-school D&D rules with some modern game mechanics like D&D 3rd Edition's universal d20 mechanics, ascending armor class, difficulty class for skill checks, and simplified saving throws, as well as unique rules for things like spell failure & tracking inventory (e.g. Castles & Crusades, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Whitehack, The Black Hack, GLOG, Macchiato Monsters, Crypts & Things, Adventurer Conqueror King System). Newer games that combine OSR principles with innovations from D&D 5th Edition like advantage/ disadvantage on die rolls and action/ luck points that can modify die rolls are sometimes referred to as "O5R" (e.g. Shadowdark, Five Torches Deep, Low Fantasy Gaming, Into the Unknown, Deathbringer).
• NOTE: Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a near-clone of B/X D&D, but its weird settings, adventurers that mix fantasy & cosmic horror, and eye-catching artwork paved the way for the NSR/Artpunk games that came later.
• (3) "New School Revolution" (NSR/NuSR, a.k.a. Artpunk or Third-Wave OSR) games often combine rules-light OSR design principles with some unique game mechanics that are fairly different from both old-school D&D & later editions. Some of them stick with a traditional fantasy setting (e.g. Cairn, Knave, Errant, Dragonbane), while other NSR games include elements of gothic horror, steampunk, sword & planet, space opera, post-apocalyptic survival, etc, in a way that alters or abandons the standard fantasy tropes (e.g. Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Troika, Mork Borg, Pirate Borg, Stars Without Number, Worlds Without Number, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Mothership, Mausritter). The tendency for some NSR game books to use unique fonts & layouts and surreal artwork to help convey the game's mood has led to the moniker "Artpunk".
• (4) OSR/Story Game Hybrids (a.k.a. Post-OSR): Story Games, a.k.a. Storytelling RPGs or Narrative-Driven RPGs, have very different game mechanics than D&D and are often considered an RPG genre distinct from OSR/D&D "adventure games" because of several conflicts in their design principles - most notably handing players some of the narrative powers usually reserved for GMs. Also, they often eschew D&D's d20 mechanics in favor of 2d6, 3d6, or d6 dice pools, as well as the concept of "partial success". Notable examples of story games include Ars Magica, World of Darkness, FATE, Apocalypse World, Numenera, Burning Wheel, Mutant Year Zero, and Blades in the Dark. However, some newer RPGs have taken the "engine" (i.e. game mechanics) from story-game systems and incorporated some OSR design principles like making PCs less powerful, increasing lethality & using random tables (e.g. Barbarians of Lemuria, World of Dungeons, Torchbearer, Vagabonds of Dyfed, Beyond the Wall, Nightmares Underneath, Forbidden Lands, Vaesen, Vampyre Hack, Freebooters on the Frontier, Into the Dark). These sorts of RPGs could now be considered a "fourth-wave" of OSR games or perhaps the start of "Post-OSR" games.
• (5) Non-D&D Retroclones & Remixes: Recently, some game designers have hit upon the idea of making rules-light retroclones & revisions of RPGs other than early D&D; for example, Against the Dark Master (based on Middle Earth Role-Playing), Gold&Glory (based on Savage Worlds), Cepheus Engine (based on Traveller), Zweihander (based on Warhammer FRP), Warlock! (based on Fighting Fantasy), Mutants & Marvels (based on Marvel Super Heroes), Magic World (based on Elric!/BRP), OpenQuest & SimpleQuest (based on BRP/RuneQuest). Although Troika is usually classified among the NSR/Artpunk games, it technically fits in here as well, since its rules are based on Fighting Fantasy.
• (6) "Ultralight" & "Free Kriegsspiel Revival" (FKR): Ultralight games take the OSR minimalist principles of "rulings not rules" and "roleplaying not roll-playing" to the extreme and keep the mechanics very simple (e.g. Tiny Dungeon, Flexspiel, Risus, Freeform Universal, FUDGE Lite, Primeval2D6, Mydwandr). FKR games go a step further and typically dispense with die rolls & rely entirely on GM fiat to adjudicate the outcome of player actions (e.g. Barons of Braunstein, Any Planet Is Earth, Messerspiel, Revenant's Hack, Shadows in Eriador, Running With Swords, Landshut Rules, Old Freestyle Revival). The FKR method got some interest recently due to the 2019 documentary film "Secrets of Blackmoor", although a few diceless RPGs like the Amber Diceless RPG, Active Exploits and Nobilis existed in the 1990s & early 2000s.
• OSR Settings: In addition to these different OSR game systems, there's a variety of OSR settings, most of which are system-agnostic while others are system-specific but fairly easy to convert. Some people play in older fantasy settings like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, Fritz Leiber's Nehwon, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, or Michael Moorcock's Young Kingdoms. Those nostalgic for B/X & 1st Edition AD&D often use settings from early D&D adventures like Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Mystara, The Wilderlands of High Fantasy, City-State of the Invincible Overlord, and - for the sci-fi fans - Metamorphosis Alpha & Gamma World. NSR fans sometimes play in the weird 2nd edition AD&D settings like Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Planescape which have adventures that are easy to convert to most OSR systems. Some newer settings created specifically for OSR/NSR-style games include notable examples like Dolmenwood, The Midderlands, Wulfwald, The Lastlands, Dwimmermount, Cha'Alt, B'reshit, Yoon-Suin, Qelong, The Gardens of Ynn, The Stygian Library, Vornheim, the Red & Pleasant Land, and the Great Virginia Disastrum. For a longer list of settings, see the blog posts at Uncanny Ramblings and Blessings of the Dice Gods.
• => After checking out several of these game systems & settings, we can figure out how to combine the best parts with our own house rules. Luckily, unlike many TTRPGs, the OSR-ish games tend to have a small set of core rules that can fit on a one-page "cheat sheet", so it's easy to learn a different system and start playing 5-10 minutes later. Many games offer a "quick-start" version of their core rulebook for free online, so startup cost isn't a barrier. (Note: Click on the name of the OSR games above and you can download their rules for free.)