Myths of the Early OSR 1: origins and anti-storytelling sentiment

I remain fascinated by the recent gaming movement called OSR, "Old-School Revival" or "Old-School Renaissance," which developed during the long period during which I was not playing role-playing games. This is another entry about it, the first of a short series.

A small amount of investigation reveals that it is a gaming movement with its roots earlier than I had initially guessed, in the year 2000, but it is not two decades old. It really took off as a "movement" in 2008.

Here I am writing about the early OSR, as it says in the title. By early I mean most of its life so far, up until the year 2018 or so. It is pretty clear that the OSR has finally split into mutually antipathetic cliques, embodied in different internet fora, and no single characterization will hold for all of them. The split was evidently a long time in coming, but for now it means that self-identified OSR participants will offer increasingly contradictory statements of what the movement means.

Economic roots in 2000

The OSR was possible only because of two factors that occurred in 2000. The first factor was the release of Third-Edition of D&D by Wizards of the Coast. This edition marked a break in mechanics and presentation od D&D from the earlier editions, and some players balked at this. The second factor was the Open Game License (OGL), which allowed creators to publish their own D&D content for earlier rule sets.

Granting license to publish to the people that wanted to keep playing D&D with older rule sets fostered a new community with boundaries set by older styles of D&D and its own economy of game products. As James Maliszewski, one of the formulators of the "old school" ideal, stated in a discussion on his Grognardia blog on 11 Jan 2009, "The OGL really did let the genie out of the bottle in a way no previous edition ever had. The explosion of the old school movement wouldn't have been possible without it." Notice that it's not yet "OSR." It's "old school movement," lower case.

The Old School Revival was an economic side-effect of two marketing decisions in the year 2000 by Wizards of the Coast intended to revive their ailing D&D property. It really worked, because when I stopped playing before these things happened, D&D was among the least popular games among the dozens of gamers I knew. I knew a lot of gamers, and not one of them played D&D in the '90s. I do recall meeting up with a group of players I had played with before, about the year 2001, when I was visiting home, and one of them was speaking with excitement about a new edition of D&D (the 3rd), but the rest of us had very low interest in it. Perhaps coincidentally, this one new D&D fan among us was distinctly the most politically conservative of the group.

Old-School became a "movement" and "renaissance" circa 2008

The OSR was increasingly characterized as a movement of reaction against the "modern," specifically at first "modern games," and a return to an imagined ideal original type.

The sense of a separate, exciting movement seems to have crystallized and spread in the year 2008. By that time, there were two new "retroclones" of early D&D rules. OSRIC, a rewrite of first-edition AD&D, came out in 2006, and Labyrinth Lord, a revision of the 1981 Basic Set by Moldvay, came out in 2007.

In 2008, Matt Finch, one of the co-authors of OSRIC, released his now-standard pamphlet "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming." The same year, James Maliszewski began his highly influential Grognardia blog, the entries of which were a veritable manifesto for "old-school" role-playing games and praise of its virtues.

At the outset, these authors were promoting a way to play that was better and was original, and that contrasted with the "modern."

As Finch wrote in his "Quick Primer," "Playing an old-style game is very different from modern games where rules cover many specific situations."

The same year, Maliszewski wrote, "The truth is that old school play is not somehow underdeveloped or inchoate 'modern' gaming. Rather, it's a totally different perspective on what an RPG is and how it should be played. But most importantly it's fun."

Both authors, at about the same time, described a gap between the style of play between "old school" versus "modern" games.

A new fanzine entitled Fight On! A fanzine for the old-school renaissance appeared in Spring 2008, with a contribution by Maliszewski. Here we have the "old-school renaissance" in the earliest instance that I have found (and with the correct use of the hyphen when "old school" is an attribute).

Immediately, it was cool to be "old-school." It meant credibility and experience. Old-School gamers were veterans with knowledge. They knew better. Take, for example, the boast of The Hydra's Grotto (6 Oct 2008):

Sandbox is OLD SCHOOL. Really old school, if you thought you were old school, you probably were not if you sort of feel bad when a player character dies (DM or player).

[Note: This is funny because the term "sandbox" was imported from video games of the late '90s. Open-ended games had co-existed with linear adventures and hybrid types since the beginnings of the hobby.]

For a gamer like this one, you were old-school or you were not, in or out. There were already gatekeepers pointing out "old-school" posers like this in 2008. Think you are really old-school? Think again!

A forgotten early response to the new "old school"

The gaming blogger "The Alexandrian" commented on 9 March 2009 about what he saw as a spurious new "meme" that distinguished "old school" from "new school" gaming. This clearly indicates that the concept was new and that the Old School was not yet perceived as a genuine movement. It was just something bouncing around the internet.

In this entry, Alexandrian here demonstrates the degree of "complete, unmitigated bullshit" in the "rules not rulings" ethos of the "old school" as illustrated by Finch.

Like the idea that the sandbox setting was original, so the idea that GM fiat (DM rulings) was "original" is not entirely true. The Alexandrian was right about this.

Nevertheless, the Old School took shape through the careful selection of certain early features of role-playing games, while quietly omitting many others.

The OSR was a reaction to "modern gaming." What was modern gaming?

Implicitly, two types of modern games were rejected.

The first, and the original, target of "Old-School" gaming was D&D from its third edition onward. WotC was the culprit, as it had left old editions behind along with their treasured play practices. Awkwardly, WotC was also the source of prosperity for the OSR participants who benefited financially from a hitherto unprecedented policy of open licensing. OSR entrepreneurs bit the hand that fed them and that became part of the brand.

Simultaneously with the WotC's revival of D&D and the OGL, a group of game theorists at an internet forum called the Forge were offering analysis and sometimes heated arguments about how role-playing games worked and how they should work. These thinkers were antipathetic towards old forms of D&D, seeking to create ideally satisfying games in place of the old ones (like early D&D) that did not satisfy them.

The Forge theorists were experimenting with ideas that had been fostered and published by game designers who appeared on the scene in the late '80s and especially in the '90s. The ideas of these designers, evocative but very often half-baked, were intended to develop the rapport between role-playing games and storytelling, the latter understood in a romanticized way as an ancient, eternal, fundamentally wholesome and profound human art. Their experiments were intended to foster game mechanics that facilitated story-telling and a more mature and psychologically fulfilling kind of game. I do not know of any personal connections between the Forge internet thinkers and these '90s game designers, but one of the latter, Jonathan Tweet was the lead designer of the Third Edition of D&D. He had designed Over the Edge and Everway after co-designing Ars Magica, all experimental in their time and aimed explicitly at storytelling. The point here is that there was something in common between the Forge theorists and the emergent sentiment that games could be story-telling vehicles, on the one hand, and the new edition of D&D on the other.

The OSR developed in reaction to these two related trends: new, different forms of D&D and games explicitly aimed at "story-telling." That was "modern." The corrective was to get back to "games," not to allow "storytelling" pretenses.

As many will remember, the very popular Vampire game and its other modern occult super-powered monster spin-off games had a system its designers called the Storyteller system from 1991 onward, revised as the Storytelling system in 2004. This is the kind of thing OSR gamers had in mind when they said "We are not telling stories, we are playing games!"

Myth of the Early OSR #1: RPGs were not originally storytelling vehicles

As it took shape with the self-conscious feeling of a movement, OSR participants fostered several myths about their way of gaming. One of them was that the OSR represented the original play-style, and that play-style was a game. Role-playing games, especially D&D, were not storytelling.

The Fall 2008 issue of Fight On! (#3) began with a commemoration of Bob Bledsaw (1942-2008), including a quote from him that had appeared on a message board at Necromancer games in 2002. (This was one of the first companies to publish OGL products. Their slogan said, "Third Edition games, First edition feel.") The magazine cites this from Bledsaw along with his commemoration:

I never viewed myself as a storyteller to guide the gamers through a preconceived adventure. I tried to maintain the suspension of disbelief by permitting the gamers complete freedom of action.

This is easy to decode. Bledsaw didn't like the storyteller idea. He liked "sandboxes." Freedom of action means DM fiat rather than complex rules.

Bledsaw was a conservative gamer if there ever was one. He ran the only company to receive a license to produce products for D&D way back when Gygax was in charge of it, Judges Guild. This company had its own magazine, which ran from time to time, called Pegasus. The fourteenth issue came out after a fifteen-year hiatus in the summer of 1999, long before the "old school" was a thing, but Bledsaw printed his own editorial rant on page 5 against "storytelling games." His obvious targets were games like Ars Magica and Vampire. It is worth quoting a long passage of it.

Somewhere along the line, some people seem to have become ashamed of playing games. RPG rule sets began to deny their identity as games. They became Interactive Literature, Sagas,  Improvisational Drama. Game masters became Directors, Storytellers, and a dozen other euphemisms for a proud title. Players, no longer comfortable playing, were now Actors, Personae, and more. Anything, it seems, to disguise the fact that we grown-ups were playing a game. People might laugh!

The interesting thing is, of course, that nobody usually laughs at adults who watch other people playing games. Instead, they are supported and supplied by a multi-billion-dollar industry—professional sports. Why is it more respectable to watch someone else play a game than to do it yourself?

It's time to take back our games!

We don't have to be Storyguides or Actors, acting out roles in a Saga. We don't have to feel guilty that we are not analyzing our deepest psyches, expanding our inner selves, exploring alternative modes of thought, or whatever other buzzwords are hot this week. We don't need to stress about how much authenticity we're putting into our portrayal of a character who does not, and cannot, exist in reality. Never mind the theater, the psychodrama, the shared fiction. This stuff is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be entertaining. It's supposed to be stress-relieving, not stress-inducing.

I am no psychologist, but it sure sounds as if Bledsaw was made to feel extremely uncomfortable at the prospect of exploring his psyche through a game, or that his playing might have the effect of teaching him about himself. The argument overall is silly enough to need little comment. Bledsaw obviously had little idea about why game designers had adopted terms like storytelling and directing. I played games like that when they first came out, and nobody playing them was embarrassed to play games. Players I knew and I were excited by the possibilities of games that explicitly recognized the psychological potential of RPGs, but we were unimpressed by their (in)ability to realize that more than we already did without these new games.

What Bledsaw's words show, though, is that some aging role-playing game entrepreneurs were unhappy that the industry had left them behind. They wanted to take their games back from those who seemed to have taken them away.

Of course, nobody took games away from Bledsaw or anybody else. If he could not produce an issue of Pegasus for fifteen years, it was not the fault of White Wolf Games. Important here, though, is that this is the kind of attitude that fed the OSR. It was there already in 1999, resenting the popularity of other games and an influx of new players that came with it, including a bunch of women.

Actually, the earliest role-playing games were used as storytelling games.

As many have remarked, when D&D was released in 1974, it was introduced not as a role-playing game (the term would not be applied to the new game genre until 1976), but as a "fantastic medieval wargame" "playable with miniatures." Sometimes this observation elicits the remark that this proves it was intended as a game, not some kind of storytelling drama engine.

But it is well established that Gygax and Arneson both expected players to act out roles. They just did not have the vocabulary for it in 1974.

It is also well documented that the first big group of D&D players besides wargamers consisted of sci-fi and fantasy fans. These players, like Ken St. Andre, took the concept of D&D in new directions. They soon outnumbered the wargamers.

The testimony of early gamers is very clear if we just look for it, instead of relying on the selective memory of a Bledsaw or even a Maliszewski.

Let's look at what gamers were saying in 1977 just before J. Eric Holmes' Basic D&D set came out, when all players had was OD&D, Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, En Garde, and Metamorphosis Alpha.

Lewis Pulsipher is a game theorist and he has never ceased to have interesting things to say about games. In 1977, he provided the first of a series of articles to White Dwarf magazine on how to run D&D. In White Dwarf #1 (1977) he wrote,

D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel, i.e. direct escapism through abandonment of oneself to the flow of  play as opposed to the gamer's indirect escapism

He goes on to say,

Gary Gygax has made it clear that D&D is a wargame, though the majority of players do not use it as such.

This is an extraordinary testimony. By Pulsipher's reckoning at the time, in 1977, most players were using D&D as a role-playing game and to tell stories like fantasy novels, not as a "game."

About the same time, in 1977, Bostonian DM Glen Blacow wrote in his Jagdmeister zine (#1, in the Lords of Chaos APA #3), an article called "A Note on the Philosophy of Dungeons." There he distinguished different kinds of DMs and dungeons. One of the distinctions he draws is relevant here:

There are "role-playing" vs. "skilled" games...

Blacow goes on to say that he considers D&D to be a game of skill, but he clearly recognized that a lot of people were playing D&D for the role-playing experience in 1977.

In his zine The Flaming Hourglass #2 (likewise in Lords of Chaos APA #3), Wayne Shaw wrote,

To explain why I run the game the way I do, it is necessary to look at the basic reasons. I play Dungeons and Dragons as an exercise in creative story telling, not, note, as a war game.

After the testimonies of Pulsipher and Blacow, this is not a surprise. You could not have a clearer testimony to OD&D as a creative storytelling game.

Dan Pierson was a DM who began playing D&D in San Francisco but had moved to Washington, DC. He wrote in his zine As the River Flows #1,

In particular I am sick… of dungeons in limbo. I want characters to exist and interact in a real environment 100% of the time. This continuous, played out existance [sic] is one of the two main points of my current project, Harshmel Ruins/Valley of the Maur.

This concept has been receiving a lot of verbal resistance and occasional threats of boycott from my local group of player/DM’s. Never the less I am forging ahead; both because I belive [sic] that this approach will produce a better game and because my limbo dungeon, Terrizon Arcades, usually bores me. If this experiment doesn’t work I will probably cease active DMing.

Here was a DM who was desperate to make story sense of his dungeon. He wanted a world with context and story, not just dungeon expeditions, which bored him.

The OD&D storytellers were numerous. Their existence in the 1970s is not convenient to this myth of the early OSR.

Dave Arneson was interviewed not long before his death in 2009 about what he thought was most important in games. Did Arneson say rules? A good DM? Rulings? No.

Question: "What is at the heart of a good game?"

Arneson: "As far as I am concerned it is the story. It can make or break a game quite easily."

Story and game have always coexisted. The idea sometimes offered that storytelling in role-playing games was not the original idea is as anti-old-school as it gets.

[More entries to come]