I recently watched an interesting YouTube video in which Ben Milton and somebody I have not heard of before called Daði discuss, among other things, OSR lethality:
This apparently stems from another video which Daði, a 5e DM, made, in which he put forward some claims about OSR lethality and how it can lead to player disengagement. The thesis (which has some validity to it) is that high levels of PC turnover can make the entire exercise seem throwaway, and that also - I think this is just implied - there is a phoneybaloney 'I'm really tough because I play a form of elfgame in which characters die a lot' element to the OSR player base that gets very tiresome very quickly.
In this conversation, Ben makes the useful claim that in the early levels (really just level 1) an OSR dungeon expedition is like a heist - the PCs are so fragile they are just trying to get in, get some treasure, and get out again. I had never heard of things put that way before, but it's really an excellent word for describing what an OSR campaign feels like at the table; the 'lived experience' of play at level 1 is, more or less, exactly that.
Ben goes on to point out, however, that as soon as PCs in an OSR game gain levels they become a lot less fragile. And the game indeed very rapidly moves through the gears. Being a murderhobo in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam is a very short phase. Once a PC is 4th level the campaign looks very different.
I think Milton is here hitting on a very important point which OSR enthusiasts tend to undersell. The reason why I like playing OSR D&D is not really because I'm METAL and like PCs dying. (Though I do really like the element of jeopardy that is present during the D&D-as-heist period of a campaign.) It is rather that, if anything, it gives the players a sense of achievement which games which presume plot-immunity cannot match. The feeling of having successfully navigated a level 1 PC to level 4 or so is truly satisfying because it is genuinely difficult and nothing is guaranteed. And this, if anything, I would suggest forges a greater and more geniune sense of connectedness to a PC than those generated by a more 'silver age' 5e playstyle.
That is, the central proposition - that 'your character doesn't matter' in an OSR game whereas it does in a 5e one - is, I think, based on a flawed premise that perhaps results from people not playing OSR campaigns of sufficient length. I have never found that characters 'don't matter' in OSR games. Rather, I have found that they start off by not mattering very much, but quickly become important by dint of how much energy and time and thought has been dedicated to trying to make sure they survive. They come to matter a great deal, and that is what the process of low-level play is really all about.
There is a tendency, in other words, to slightly oversell the difference between people who like playing 'mainstream' D&D and those who prefer the OSR playstyle. No doubt there are important differences and we could, if we wanted to, spend a long time listing them all if it hadn't already been done to death in 2008. But the emphasis on the importance of character is not, I think, one of them. OSR players love their PCs too (once you get past the 'my veins are as cold as ice and I care nothing for your special snowflake character' shtick). It is just that the relationship between player and PC is forged during play rather than during the process of generating the character.
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