East Coast OSR Roleplaying Games 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 (an off-shoot of D&D 3rd edition). Instead, we'll be playing indie games associated with the "Old-School Renaissance/Revival" (OSR) that try to recapture the looser play-style from the first generation of RPGs in the 1970s-80s while streamlining and altering the rules a bit (or a lot) to make the game easier to play & more fun.

FYI, fans of these 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 real-world term Napoleon used for his veteran troops - grognard means "grumbler" in French.

For a quick overview of what the "Old-School Renaissance/Revival" (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 modern TTRPGs:

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 racial & class abilities are also simpler and this is why OSR gamers often say "the answer isn't on your character sheet". Since there's not an exhaustive list of your character's skills & abilities, on-the-spot rulings from the Game Master (GM) based on his/her intuitive understanding of how the game world works are favored for resolving situations not specifically covered in the rule books. GMs must also prevent anything that seems to them like a game-breaking abuse of the rules. Instead, players are encouraged to try creative tactics and let the GM rule on their plausibility. The focus on GM rulings requires a higher level of trust from players, and this is why OSR gamers tend to discourage player attempts at "rules lawyering" and refer back to "Rule Zero" - i.e. the game master can override published game rules for any reason.
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. This means instead of merely saying "I check for traps" or "I use Bluff on the guard" and then rolling dice to see if your Find/Remove Traps or Bluff attempt 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" as opposed to "pushing buttons on your character sheet", and story game RPGs have a similar principle called "fiction first". This means what game designer Justin Alexander calls "disassociated mechanics" (i.e. character abilities without any in-world explanation of how/why they work) don't typically exist in OSR games. This also explains why many OSR gamers will talk about the importance of "player skill over character skill", i.e. with enough ingenuity on the player's part (e.g. taking your time, using your equipment judiciously, getting into an advantageous position, combining the efforts of several PCs), you may be able to boost your character's base chance of success or even get an automatic success. (For example, when there's little or no time pressure and a few failures wouldn't be disastrous, you can figure an automatic success at a skill check with something like Pathfinder's "Take 10" and "Take 20" rules.) It's important to note that while OSR games may give characters a "background" that gives them advantage 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. Thus, most OSR games allow any PC to attempt many mundane activities related to dungeon crawling & wilderness exploration (provided they have the right equipment) even if their base chance of success is lower than a skilled specialist like a thief or ranger - i.e. all characters can try to be stealthy, listen at doors, bash open a locked door/chest, find/trigger a trap with a ten-foot pole, climb a wall with a rope & grappling hook, look for unaccounted spaces in their dungeon map to deduce where secret rooms might be, knock on walls to search for secret panels, bind wounds with bandages, use flint & steel to light a torch/campfire, hunt for wild game, swim, ride a horse, construct a raft to cross a river, navigate with a map & compass, etc.
3. Heroic not Superheroic: While OSR characters are "heroic" in the sense of being able to perform a wide variety of adventuring-related tasks (as noted above), they aren't invulnerable since heroism requires taking real risks. Hit points are often lower (and sometimes capped), resting only slowly restores hit points, healing magic is more rare and there's no "healing surges" that make characters regenerate like Wolverine, and characters typically die when they hit zero hit points rather than merely falling unconscious as in later editions of D&D. Also, any sort of massive damage - e.g. falling into lava or from a hundred foot cliff - typically kills you with no save. Success in OSR games typically means surviving and gradually becoming more skilled, not gaining so many magic items that you're almost decorated with them (a.k.a. the "Christmas tree effect") or having umpteen feats & special abilities like in D&D 5E. OSR games consciously avoid the "power creep" that's plagued later editions of D&D, although you can find complaints about "power gamers" and "munchkins" even back in the 1st edition days.
4. Lethality not Game Balance:  Unlike later editions of D&D, in old-school play the random encounter tables aren't adjusted so that the "Challenge Rating" (CR) of monsters the PCs encounter are what they have a decent shot at beating. At best, in OSR games, some GMs will have encounters get more dangerous the further you go from a settlement or the deeper you go in a dungeon, or they will telegraph the level of danger in an area by allowing players to hear rumors or encounter tracks or kills of a powerful monster in an area so they can try to avoid it. This is what OSR gamers mean when they talk about "combat as war" vs "combat as sport" and it's why they often say "combat is a fail state" - i.e. the party may often need to hide, negotiate, or run away instead of fighting. The higher lethality makes OSR games more challenging than D&D 5E and more like a computer RPG where it's understood that several tough fights will result in a "total party kill" (TPK) the first time and this will require reloading from your last save point - although in a tabletop game, this means rolling up new characters to continue the quest. The higher lethality of OSR games helps avert "main character syndrome" (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. (If/when your character dies, you'll be expected to laugh it off and create a new character or take over an NPC nearby.)
5. Sandboxes not Railroads: There is less emphasis on character arcs & predefined endings, and a greater emphasis on generating "emergent narratives" from a mix of interesting maps, setting guides filled with lore, random tables, and player choices. (Story Games have a similar principle: "Play to find out what happens".) This is a reversal of the trend that began with 2nd edition AD&D where boxed adventures were designed to fit player actions into a pre-existing narrative. (This is why OSR gamers sometimes say "Dragonlance ruined everything" since it was the success of the original Dragonlance adventures and tie-in novels that changed the direction of D&D away from the earlier DIY ethic.) It's worth noting that D&D's early designer hit upon the idea of underground "dungeons" as a way to provide environments that were more manageable for GMs than wilderness exploration which allows movement in any direction. However, to avoid turning dungeons into "railroaded" adventures, most OSR gamers favor non-linear dungeons with multiple entrances/exits, looping/branching paths, secret passages, trapdoors, and different levels like those of legendary D&D game designer Jennell Jacquays.
6. 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 often assumed a large group of irregular players and several DMs (often in 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 all the players wouldn't show up on the same day. As OSR game designer Ben Milton has explained, interlinked groups of players explored the same world in different sessions in a way that resembled a tabletop version of MMOs (massively multiplayer online 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 town where they could rest, heal & resupply. However, over multiple sessions, a rotating cast of characters could gradually explore the same "mega-dungeon", returning again & again to progress through different rooms & levels, evading traps, battling monsters & collecting treasure. This play method faded by the late 1980s but was revived in 2007 by the game designer Ben Robbins who touted his open-ended "West Marches" adventures on his blog, which focused on exploring the wilderness around a frontier town instead of a dungeon crawl. As Robbins explained, when all adventures begin & end at a home base location, this makes it easier to accomodate irregular players by explaining how/why new characters are joining the party (i.e. they met the other characters in town) and what happened to the characters whose player didn't show up (i.e. they stayed in town).

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 5 categories:

• (1) "Classic OSR Games" (a.k.a. "retro-clones") repackage & streamline the rules of early editions of D&D like the White Box, B/X, BECMI or 1st Edition AD&D without changing much (e.g. OSRIC, Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry).
  (2) "OSR-Adjacent Games (a.k.a. "near-clones") mix original D&D rules with some modern game mechanics you wouldn't see in old-school D&D like armor as damage reduction, non-Vancian magic (i.e. no daily spell slots), advantage/ disadvantage on die rolls, or action/ luck points that can modify die rolls (e.g. Dungeon Crawl Classics, Castles & Crusades, Whitehack, The Black Hack, Worlds Without Number, GLOG, Beyond the Wall). Games that combine OSR principles with innovations from D&D 5th Edition (e.g. Shadowdark, Five Torches Deep, Into the Unknown) are sometimes referred to as "O5R". Thematically, some of these games stick with the standard "high/epic fantasy" familiar from D&D, while other aim for fantasy genres like "low/pulp fantasy", "sword & sorcery" or "grimdark" that have a darker & grittier vibe.
  (3) "New School Revolution" (NSR or NuSR, a.k.a Post-OSR) games often combine rules-light OSR design principles with some unique game mechanics that are very different from original D&D (e.g. Cairn, Knave). Thematically, some 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 familiar from D&D (e.g. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Into the Odd, Troika, Mork Borg, Stars Without Number). The tendency for many NSR game books to use unique fonts & layouts and surreal/extreme artwork to help convey the game's mood or atmosphere has led to the moniker "Artpunk".
• (4) Rules-Light Story Games: Story Games, a.k.a. Storytelling 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 conflicts in their design principles. Notable examples of story games include "Ars Magica", "World of Darkness", "FATE", "Apocalypse World", "Burning Wheel" and "Blades in the Dark". However, some newer "rules-light" story games now incorporate enough elements from the OSR they could be considered a subtype or offshoot of the NSR games (e.g. Barbarians of Lemuria, World of Dungeons, Torchbearer, Vagabonds of Dyfed, Beyond the Wall, Nightmares Underneath, Vampyre Hack, Freebooters on the Frontier, Into the Dark).
• (5) "Free Kriegsspiel Revival" (FKR) takes its name from the German military's wargames (Kriegsspiel) in the 19th century where they eventually decided the rules had become too complex and jettisoned them in favor of having experienced officers act as referees who used their best judgment to make rulings on whether a cadet's tactic succeeded or failed. Thus, FKR 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). In some cases, FKR games 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, Old Freestyle Revival). The FKR method got some interest recently due to the 2019 documentary film "Secrets of Blackmoor", although a few RPGs like the Amber Diceless RPG existed in the 1990s.
  => After checking out several of these game systems, 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.)

Since OSR games are a niche hobby and it's often hard to find players, we'll be playing online via Zoom which enables us to tap into a much larger pool of potential players. I'm opening this group up to interested people anywhere & everywhere!