Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

Since awakening from my long, gameless slumber, I have discovered that gamers have come to differentiate two tribes among themselves that did not exist in the time before: OSR gamers and Story Game gamers. It seems that this distinction developed on the internet over the last fifteen years. For those of you who have participated in this development, the present musing will seem out of touch. That is the point of it. What you have done is strange to me. In earlier musings , I remarked about a spurious history that has developed concerning the OSR scene. “Old-School” is a retro-clad innovation, not a true return to the old. OSR games are often presented as a revival of the one true authentic Original Game, but they aren’t. Story Games are, by contrast, seen as edgy and innovative , introducing deep stuff that will just blow your mind ! It took me a while just to understand the name “Story Games,” and even to realize it was its own thing, because old-time role-playing g...

When I left role-playing games long ago, in the ‘90s, the future of experience points seemed to be simply as a reward for lively role-playing. It included successful achievement of in-story goals, but it increasingly meant actually playing your character in the choices you made and even in how you acted. Players were rewarded for characterizing their characters. That was the direction of character design in role-playing games back then. Exhortations to get into character appeared already in Basic D&D and the first edition of AD&D, but it became a part of game mechanics. Some games soon built in personality-based traits, often in the form of disadvantage traits that reward players with a trade-off for taking them. (This is the route of GURPS , following the early superhero game Champions .) If your character had a bad temper or felt compelled to save children—officially, on your characters sheet—then acting those characteristics out rewarded you with more experience points. That...