Friday 27 January 2023

On Structural Conservatism and Substantive Revolution - the OSR and the 'Coincidence of Opposites'

It's very interesting to me that criticisms of the OSR have tended to focus on its purportedly almost paleoconservative desire to return to a past golden age that has long since sadly faded. To its critics, the 'movement' seems to comprise only fifty- and sixty-something neckbeards who pine for their youthful glory days and see newcomers as johnny-come-lately entryists bent on perverting their beautiful game.

It's strange critique, founded on must surely be wilful ignorance, because while it is undoubtedly true that the OSR was always mechanically conservative in its approach to a style of play, it was anything but conservative in the substance of the types of campaign it gave rise to. 

(Here, of course, I should make clear that I am not in this entry talking about political conservatism, but 'small "c" conservatism' in the general sense of opposing change or commitment to tradition.) 

When one thinks of cornerstone releases of the early-mid OSR era, one thinks, for example, of:

  • Deep Carbon Observatory and Veins of the Earth
  • Death Frost Doom
  • Carcosa
  • Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Misty Isles of the Eld
  • Vornheim, A Red and Pleasant Land, Maze of the Blue Medusa (like it or not, we all know Zak Smith's stuff was of vast formative importance and influence)
  • Qelong
  • Hubris
  • Bastion
  • Kabuki Kaiser's stuff
  • &c
And one also thinks of the many famous blogged-about but not released settings of that era, such as:

And one then is led to ask: does this seem like a particularly conservative movement to you? It doesn't to me. If anything, it seems like one of the most creative things to have ever happened to RPGs - a veritable cultural outpouring that utterly revolutionised certainly fantasy role playing and probably the entire hobby. 

People who decry the OSR for being 'stuck in the past', in other words, are either disingenuous or spectacularly ill-informed.

I recently happened to listen to Iain McGilchrist delivering a public lecture on ''The Coincidence of Opposites'. In it, McGilchrist gives an hour-long precis of what might be called the philosophy of opposition, identifying a recurring theme in myth, religion, science and philosophy of opposites being both necessary and coeval, rather than mutually exclusionary. This would appear to be the case here, where an insistence on staying true to a particular method or play structure coincided with an extraordinary proliferation of new ideas that continues to wash over us to this day. I have written before about the importance to creativity of imposing limitspurposive constraintcreative constraint and creativity through constraint (that last post being from 2010!); this seems to be another example, in which the general principle is evidenced at a higher level of abstraction.

The other side of the coin would here be the link between mechanical creativity and substantive conservatism and I think there is something to that - it's interesting that while the implied or explicit default settings of D&D 3rd edition, 4th edition and 5th edition do have their fresh elements, they are much more committed to a form of mainstream high fantasy which doesn't demonstrate all that much in the way of creativity. This is despite them being, of course, mechanically quite innovative. 

Is it just that human beings, even very creative human beings, only have a certain capacity for creativity, which they must ration out between substance and form? Answers on a postcard.

[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]

35 comments:

  1. I'm still bummed out that Scott deleted each of his blogs. I had a backup in Google Reader until that product got axed.

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  2. Well, speaking as someone who *is* small-c conservative, I do see the OSR as effectively paleoconservative, a necessary corrective to the fact that literally the entire RPG field had been going off in wrong and bad (i.e., unplayable) directions for literally decades. RuneQuest doesn't even work right! We really did need a strong dose of Atticism to revert to what was good and functional. I don't see the subsequent explosion of creativity on correct principles as in any way opposed to that; rather I see the conservatism as the necessary precondition of it. Nor do I think that it's a case of the sum of creativity being constant: the new rules are simply too convoluted and specific to be receptive to creativity – because they're bad and wrong, based on false principles.

    That being said, of course, the opponents of the OSR are absolutely disingenuous and don't care about the above at all. They're bitter puritans by and large, convinced that it was their birthright to be shocking and avant-garde and furious to find that in fact, they are uncreative corporate captures and the actual creative avant-garde is a group of people who for the most part ignore their small-minded pieties entirely. It's hard to guess from outside which is worse of pipping someone else to the post or disregarding his Grundyism, but we know from experience that neither is particularly fondly embraced by the broad mass of men.

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    1. 'The new rules are simply too convoluted and specific to be receptive to creativity' - I certainly find this, but it might just be because we're old and can't be bothered.

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    2. Well, now, see... that whole age thing is kinda starting to play a part in things for sure... dammit.

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    3. I'm an OSR gamer at heart, but I've defo logged more time with newer systems. Convoluted and specific rules can lead to different kinds of creativity, from min-maxing nonsense to emergent oddness, both in terms of PC creation and at the table.

      I much prefer the freedom, flexibility and speed of a "simpler" system, but I know gamers who live for the crunch.

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    4. I wasn't old when 3e came out. I fought it for *years*, so, although of course my personal experience isn't a universal, I can truthfully say that for me, at least, those rules were too convoluted to allow any real creativity, certainly not the way something like LBB OD&D does.

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    5. Comments like the one above are the exact reason that "[t]o its critics, the 'movement' seems to comprise only fifty- and sixty-something neckbeards who pine for their youthful glory days and see newcomers as johnny-come-lately entryists bent on perverting their beautiful game."

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  3. Interesting too that the criticisms of being stuck on old systems tends to forget that said systems gave rise to some extremely evocative settings that are hard pressed to be matched by today's systems - I'm thinking of EPT and Arduin in particular. Those same criticized early systems also seem to have encouraged quite a great deal of theme-crossover and mixing genres than I see happening now in current systems.

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  4. It always seemed to me that when 4th edition came out, a good number of people went "screw all this, lets go back to play AD&D". Who mixed with people who had been playing it the whole time.

    It was only years later that some people said "lets get really weird with B/X?"

    While the second group got its start from the first, the two seem to be quite different phenomenons.Might be a dragonsfoot thing, but I don'tn have the impression that the AD&D traditionalists have much interest in B/X experimentation.

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    1. You could be right about that, but I don't know if I would call Dragonsfoot (or Knights and Knaves Alehouse, if that's still a thing) part of the OSR. Most of the people on those sites have been there playing AD&D for decades. There's no 'renaissance' involved - they're just keeping on keeping on.

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  5. The list is fairly comprehensive, the only glaring omissions Stonehell, Yoon-suin, ASE1 and Barrowmaze, perhaps NOD or Fight On! magazine.

    It is an interesting consideration that if you follow many of these trendsetters, the material they make today has little to do with oldschool D&D. Periodic contractions and self-examinations are necessary for the vitality of the hobby. After all, that is how the OSR got started.

    To break free of the addiction to novelty, the corruption of the industry, the petty battles for status, to appreciate things for their essential beauty, that to me is the OSR.

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    1. Yes to NOD - forgot about that. I wouldn't presume to include by own book in there but I suppose at least one can say it isn't particularly conservative aesthetically or in substance!

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  6. You're right: the OSR is one of the most creative things to happen in RPGs, ever. Mostly the players who have gotten into it are younger than you and I--and you and I were once "munchkins," very young newcomers to a hobby populated by an older generation who played in radically different ways to each other from the moment they sat at the table.

    There is a historical claim in the name "old school," though. That is how it has consistently been understood by proponents and critics alike. You can still easily find claims that "this is the original way the game was (intended to be) played." That historical claim is false, and records demonstrate it. The past of the OSR is an imagined and idealized past that almost all of its participants never experienced directly. Reading old D&D editions--which vary from iteration to iteration, anyway--doesn't tell us how people actually played (no more than reading Yoon-Suin tells us how people use it). The early statements about play style and early play reports do tell us that. They very frequently were not what people today think of as "old school." OSR thinkers write off very early variations in play or more usually just ignore them, if they even ever heard of them. It's inconvenient for the *idea* of the OSR. And that's a shame, because it distracts from the awesome creativity that you are rightly celebrating with your post here.

    Those who criticize the OSR for "its purportedly almost paleoconservative desire to return to a past golden age" also get it wrong, if they think that there was such a golden age. That golden age is an invention. There is no point in criticizing how people enjoy themselves. There is a point in correcting false statements about history.

    I'd say that both sides are "spectacularly ill-informed," to borrow your expression.

    The retroclones started with the OGL. (The whole OSR has been a beneficiary of WotC.) When HackMaster came out in 2001, it was in the guise of a kitschy joke. Within a few years, people got sincere about it. In 2008 the term OSR was coined in earnest. The blogs, G+, these have all played a role. These things weren't old. It's a fact that the OSR is new. Its proponents have undermined their own amazingly cool efforts to rationalize and rediscover carefully selected old rules (smoothing over others) by their erroneous claims to special historical authenticity. It didn't have to be about conservatism at all, but gamers stepped into a snare of politicization of their own making when they went that route.

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    1. In this case I tried to make clear I'm not talking about political conservatism or politicisation - I just mean 'conservative' in the non-political sense as commitment to an existing way of doing things. In this sense the OSR was always going to be conservative because how could it not have been?

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    2. I understand the distinctions you were making in kinds of conservatism. That said, it appears that the one attracts the other. I think you ask a good question, though: Would it have been possible to revive old D&D rules without being aesthetically conservative, in the sense you intend? My answer is yes. Not only possible, but that's how it has been. It's like Pre-Raphaelite painting: something new inspired by something old, but definitely new, a product of its time. I would not say that the OSR is aesthetically conservative visually in the presentation of many of the works you cite. What the OSR became was not an existing way of doing things in the years before. Until 2001 and still longer, "old-school role-playing" was synonymous with "hack-and-slash," "munchkinism," and "power-gamer" play. The OSR soon evolved to be almost the mirror image of that. The brilliance of the OSR was not in insisting on reaction rolls, for example, but in novel interpretations and rationales to rules that had fallen into desuetude. It could have been called the New School with the same effect, a New School of novel interpretation of early rules. It could have been called all kinds of things... but the illusion that this was the Original One Thing Revived took over because it was rhetorically advantageous to promote the new play-style as original and RPGs as intended, or rather I'd say it just felt better for gamers who played with rules looked down on to claim "We're the last of the originals." That's not just aesthetic conservatism. Anyway, you're right to point out the creativity, which makes the point that it's a movement of novelty.

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    3. I think we're talking at cross purposes. My contention is that the OSR is mechanically or structurally conservative, i.e. in its approach to the rules. I think aesthetically and substantively it is anything but. So I'm not sure ultimately we disagree - I think you might be making the same point in a different way.

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    4. You're right again: both of my comments agreed with you. But, stubborn me, I still have quibbles about the conservatism alleged even of the rules. I'll stop here with the acknowledgement that we agree basically--OSR is/was anything but conservative aesthetically and substantively (though I'd go further)--and that further discussion, enjoyable as that might be, would require a different medium.

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  7. The McGilchrist lecture is from The Matter With Things, which I’ve been slowly reading every day for the last thirteen months (currently on about p. 1000). I cannot recommend it enough—revelatory. You and Patrick would find enough raw material there for a year of blogposts.

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  8. Lots to think about in this post. The commercial pressure directing creativity for both mainstream and OSR materials can't be ignored though.

    I'd guess that once the earliest "weird" OSR stuff demonstrated there was a hungry market for that, there was (maybe) a pressure for products to lean into the gonzo? That's not a criticism, and maybe it was the excuse creators needed to really push themselves? It's not hard to imagine a parallel world where OSR creators instead leant into a more the thematically "conservative" fantasy space of Dunsany, Howard, real world history etc.

    On the other side, there's obviously commercial pressure for mainstream products to be recognisable PG-rated "fantasy", with your Tolkienesque elves and dwarves etc. Their creators' creativity is constrained by the guys in marketing.

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    1. Yes, there's definitely an 'audience capture' phenomenon going on with the OSR and its tone. That's something worth considering in more depth, in fact.

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  9. I feel you're fighting a strawman that doesn't deserve to be fought.

    I hardly see critiques of OSR mere nostalgia or small "c" conservatism anywhere outside of completely ignorant outsider perspectives like that recent PBS article.

    If anything, OSR has by now acquired a reputation of affected, mannered weirdness and nonconformity which can in itself be a form of stagnant decadence, and might be due for a renaissance soon.

    I also think you're not doing justice to the potential of 3E, 4E, and 5E for inspiring the sort of weirdness associated with OSR, in that you seem to be comparing the corporate consumer product settings of the newer editions to the essentially personal, DIY creations associated with the OSR. In the early 2000s when the done thing was to create material for 3E instead of for B/X, there was plenty of creative, personal, DIY 3E material.

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    1. You're right about 3rd edition and the SRD. But remember that the OSR was really a reaction against 4th edition, which I remember being a lot more prescriptive about the setting and style of play.

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  10. At its core, old-school gaming is a preservation and cultivation project that explores the classics, builds on the classics, and - where it diverges from the trends that defined the 1980s and 1990s - makes a conscious decision to focus on the distinct features of the classics. For instance, a lot of old stuff was poorly made, experimental in an impractical way, or led away from old D&D towards other game styles. The first two may be old but not classics. We like City State of The Invincible Overlord (Judges Guild), not City State of The Invincible Overlord (Mayfair Games). The last one's fine (although the Hickman Manifesto is certainly not), just irrelevant for old-school gaming. The best Call of Cthulhu scenario will not help you run a good hex-crawl, but Wilderlands of High Fantasy will.

    Now, a lot of what now transpires under the "OSR" label has no meaningful connection to the classics. That does not mean these ideas are bad; there are excellent games that are not old-school at all. However, we can also see how the game of telephone that takes place from original texts to clone games (which tend to preserve the rules faithfully but the embedded design advice only weakly) to games based on the clone games (which then lose a lot of actually functional, useful design features they still had), and even further, can dilute a strong formula into meaninglessness. You can get to a point where the understanding and ethos of the original works are gone or perverted, and the connection to the past is severed. A lot of the resulting products are filled with self-inflicted problems which could have been easily avoided with a single reading of the 1e DMG (or Holmes/Moldvay, or even Philotomy's Musings, which is like the "Commentaries" to OD&D's original work).

    It is thus important to treat the classics as we should do elsewhere: to identify what is good, to periodically return to this source and immerse ourselves in it for newfound inspiration, to pass it on to new generations who show a genuine interest in an interesting gaming tradition, and to use the wisdom of the ages (and not the foolishness that also existed at the same time) for new and interesting purposes.

    There is no preservation without a living tradition. Nor is there one without an element of safeguarding.

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    1. I don't disagree with your assessment of the clones. There's just no need for them, really.

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    2. "which tend to preserve the rules faithfully but the embedded design advice only weakly"
      Yes, precisely.
      Mike

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  11. I find it interesting that you selected examples of campaign settings instead of rules to highlight the difference. I don't know if I've seen anyone explore the campaign setting side of the OSR before.

    Perhaps, after the flood of evocative 2E settings, it wasn't that people disliked 3.5 and Pathfinder so much as WotC putting just about everything into the dull and painfully vanilla Forgotten Realms .

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    1. I also think it's the nature of exploring and being inspired by the original editions. They were toolkits so that DMs could implement their settings and tune the rules to the setting.

      IMO, it wasn't until Gary tried to codify D&D into a more rules-driven endeavor, and baked in the assumed setting of Greyhawk, that I think things started to slowly turn towards rules-focused editions. I believe that 3x and beyond is the perfect example of settings fitting the rules, and not vice versa.

      Which is a shame, IMO.

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    2. Yes, I think there is definintely an element of truth to that assessment, Anonymous. It was like D&D was being put back inside a box.

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    3. Except that 3e is not an example of setting fitting the rules, it's an example of them clashing. %)) Especially clear now that we can look at the setting they used for 3e playtesting. And this also manifested as they found it necessary to open a concurs for a new setting fitting 3e rules, which resulted in publishing of Eberron. But they were to cowardly to make it their default setting. I personally think that if they started with the fact that their new system IS different and is aimed for a different style of play (and so needs either heavy modding or some transitory campaigns showing the worlds changing a-la Fate of Istus) the backlash leading to OSR formation and other people just migrating to other systems (like myself) would be much lesser.
      Mike

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  12. While creativity through/despite constraint IS a very valid concept and I've read many authors who noted that in various forms, in this particular instance I personally see a serious problem:
    RPGs are an intristically sincretic genre where The Medium Is The Message. The form either works for its substance, or it clashes with it - sometimes to miserable results. We certainly see it in new DD editions - where more high-blown, comics- and anime-inspired mechanics clash with old conventions of "generic fantasy world is Middle Ages with magic". I didn't read that many OSR works but it seems to me that they also often suffer from a similar problem of old-style mechanics clashing with the authors' ideas of what should be in their world(s). Similar problem occurred also with the creation of Savage Worlds with their attempt at a simple, generic and fast-play system instead of their previous Deadlands aimed at working well in its particular genre...
    Mike

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  13. I've been convinced for years now that OSR is not one thing but at least two things.
    There are the AD&D traditionalists who just keep playing AD&D 1st edition like they always have and never stopped.
    And then there's the B/X creatives who looked at 30 year old rules to see what elements might be useful to create completely new content.
    There was some overlap early on when the creatives were looking at what the traditionalists were doing to learn from it, but then very quickly went their separate ways.
    I think most of the confusion and disagreement about what OSR is or was comes from treating these two different groups as if they were the same thing.

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  14. I think that, for Gen Y and Z OSR and OSR-adjacent/liking crowds (at least in my limited experience) there's a lot of people who were burnt out by the bad content of more recent editions and the fact they can often be terrible games when it come to teaching what does and doesn't work with GMing. Simply put, its the realization of an idea very foreign in my generation and beyond, raised on the idea of 'constant progress'.

    The idea that an anterior method, concept or way of doing things might have had a point/be better suited to one's needs.

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  15. It seems to me that the idea of continuity, that the OSR today is the same OSR of 2016, 2012 or 2008 is a dubious claim to hang these ideas off.

    What was goal of the old forum grogs trying recreate AD&D? It certainly doesn’t look the same as the goal of G+ bloggers in 2013. Likewise it doesn’t seem remotely correct to point at people today who want setting and design copied from AD&D and say these are the same goals as Logan writing Corpatheum in 2015.

    When someone calls the OSR conservative or Conservative they are talking about sub groups and tendencies within a sprawling, frequently incoherent movement or scene that’s fractured even more in the past few years.

    It makes no sense at this point to say what the OSR is or make broad claims about what it was because it was never one thing, and this post feels like a selective reference to one part to defend another part of the OSR or more the post OSR from fairly well established claims.

    Is there a reactionary or paleo-conservative (aesthetically and mechanically) strain of game design that calls itself OSR. Hell yeah, read the comments here, it’s not hiding. Is there a creative and progressive one as well, yup, look at your cites. Are they and have they ever been the same thing even when or if they both have used the label OSR? Obviously not.

    That’s at best ignorance and a logic error.

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