Is there a point to making your RPG system OSR anymore if you want it to be successful? It's a quick and easy way to have a basic framework for your game, and focus on unique mechanics. But it also means people take your game less seriously in terms of its design. So is there a point? Even for a game that has a major OSR mechanic at its core, like gold-for-XP? Such a game would inherently be partially OSR, but for something like an urban decay cyberpunk game that might focus on what is effectively dungeon crawling and wealth-based advancement, or a pirate focused BX clone, is it worth sticking to the BX D&D framework to make a successful system? Example: Shadowdark, which was mostly successful for its marketing, but also because it was OSR D&D and this familiar even to 5e players.
>>97003333Shadowdark is OSR? I thought that it's just a 5e SRD dumbdown. And shouldn't OSR products be compatible with each other and B/X?/Because Shadowdark certainly isn't.
I dunno man, i have no interest in OSR in general. From where i sit its just a nostalgic circlejerk for a bunch of rules-lite systems glorifying archaic pieces of game design that were better forgotten. What does a new OSR game offer in 2026? You're tracing most of the bones so you're functionally identical to your dozens of sister systems, and you were never going to be complex enough to differentiate yourself anywayYou frame the question in the abstract as if the game is a hypothetical product rather than an existing project with some predefined purpose, so the answer seems clear. Market saturation devalues OSR as a genre unless you have too little time or skill to make anything else
>>97003333It is a relic of a time that is no longer. Just play the original games.
>>97003333I truly hate how OSR has somehow become a synonym for babby's fist indie RPG. It hasn't gone as bad as PbtA but it's getting there. Some of you pests slap STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA on anything and call it OSR.
>>97003333I don't buy/pirate anything that's labelled with "OSR" or advertised as such, there's already an abundance of free retroclones (eg: labyrinth lord, osric) if you need better formatting of old materials or you're just retardly bothered by piracy of the original old d&d editions.
>>97003333Don't make stuff to be successful, make it because it's what you want to make>but I want to make money wasGet a real job. This is a hobby.
>>97003333Yes. Many GMs use pre-written adventures, and OSR compatible systems have a huge catalogue of adventures available that require little to no modification to run.
>>97003333I find it funny how your average "trVe and trVditional" OSR system has less structure and more "GM, may I?" than the most rainbow-colored PbtA game.
>>97003333No, it reached the point where it's an anti-marketing for your game. Want for it to be ignored? Tell people it's OSR, nu-OSR or whatever-OSR
>>97003531>somehow becomePlot twist: it never became, because it started as such. The whole point was to peddle your "revolutionary" idea of re-editing some old-ass game and adding your homebrew fixes to it, then boasting how unique and special it is to bolster sales.It was always a grift.
>>97003333>Even for a game that has a major OSR mechanic at its core, like gold-for-XP? Such a game would inherently be partially OSR... and then people wonder why nobody takes OSR seriously for past what? 7 years? 8?
>>97003531Well it's also classes, hit dice, saving throws, etc that tend to mark it as OSR. Plus gold for XP. Which is a mechanic I want to use as it actually fits. But is it worth making it an OSR game? Will it help or hurt the games chances of success?
if garbage like mork borg and shadowdark is considered OSR (and by all accounts the mainstream movement does claim both) then no it's a useless term and mostly just consists of contrarians who hate modern d&d but also don't actually like old d&d either. They have an imagined ideal of what "good" d&d used to be like in their heads that's not actually based on any concrete reality, which is why you'll see people praise gygax as a visionary and genius before turning around and spitting on shit he literally wrote like Expedition to Barrier Peak for not being "real" D&D because it's got pulpy sci-fi elements and isn't mudcore nonsense. You'll have people say WOTC are the devil and responsible for all the awful "freakshit" in modern d&d who then turn around and say Council of Wyrms and Birthright aren't real D&D either despite being 90's TSR.Artificers and guns are steampunk are gay fake bullshit and not real D&D please ignore the original Greyhawk supplement having rules for the Arquebus because there's no retarded divine conspiracy among the gods to make gunpowder chemically inert there like the Forgotten Realms (yes this is the canon explanation for no guns, you need magic smoke powder instead which is strictly controlled by those with a monopoly on its production)."People who prefer 1e and 2e over 3rd/4th/5th edition D&d" still exist as a group but "OSR" has nothing to do with them.
>>97003531The entire OSR market literally just exists so retards and grifters can sell their oc donut steel not-d&d Heartbreakers, which have existed nearly as long as d&d has as a concept, except this time it's an appeal to history and OLD GOOD NEW BAD as a reason you should buy one guy's janky piece of shit Great Value version of the game instead of all the dozens of other reasons people have marketed Heartbreakers since the 80s.Same shit different name
>>97003333A lot of what gets passed off a "OSR" like not rolling the fucking dice all the time or just having the GM come up with a rational, fair way of resolving things not explicitly covered by the rules, aren't really all that unique and are only considered "old school" because the people rediscovering this shit haven't read any rulebook in full, almost never read the GM/DMG sections of anything they own, and at best, have only every skimmed the player-facing sections while learning everything else from podcasts and streams.So when they hear OSR faux-grogs repeating stuff like>If your player proposes a clever solution, just go with that instead of leaving it up to the diceor>only roll dice when the chance of failure is narratively interesting It's treated like a revelation. An unbelievable paradigm shift in TTRPG thinking. They only ever knew RPGs as 5e, where they constantly roll the dice as much as possible and go nuts for a NAT FUCKING 20 and optimized builds where you rate characters in terms of DPS and how badly they break the action economy. Even though you can find those exact rulings in every edition of D&D and the majority of all RPGs on the market.
>>97006266You're right, but people rolling for literally everything has been a problem since DnD 3.5e where people ignored that there was a take 10 or take 20 mechanic a lot of the time.
>>970065673.5 was the start of the build-tism and NAT FUCKING 20 interpretation of D&D. So much of what passes for D&D humor today was just recycled from 3.5's memes from 20 years ago.
>>97003945/thread
>>97006891nat 20 is very famously not an automatic success in 3.5 which has plenty of shit with sky high DCs including epic level skills like walking on a cloud like a wuxia character with a +100 bonus. MUH NATTY TWENTY!!!! is popularized via critical role and shit like stranger things and other """actual"" plays. 3.5 is the edition where a natty 20 isn't even a guaranteed critical hit, you have threat ranges and critical confirmation so it's completely possible to roll a 20 and do normal damage because you didn't confirm
>>97006266>It's treated like a revelation.>only considered "old school" becauseYeah have you spoken to anyone who plays TTRPGs in the last 5-10 years? Have you looked in any RPG thread here lately?It's a foreign concept to the majority of players, if you don't play that way you are in a tiny minority.
>>97006915/tg/ was making jokes about nat 20s letting players do impossible, ridiculous things back in 2007 because so many people had convinced each other that nat 20 meant you always succeeded and got special outcomes.
>>97003333>But it also means people take your game less seriously in terms of its design.Does it? Why does it mean that?
>>97007005Yeah unfortunately this board is literally to blame for AAAAAYYYYYY NAAAATTY TWAAAAAATTY! Stories like Los Tiburon and Sir Bearington are the direct source of that shit.
It's funny how in every thread about or even mentioning the OSR there are 1-2 anons just malding their asses off to an inexplicable extent, seething out of all proportion about games they presumably don't even play.
>>97003531>It hasn't gone as bad as PbtAEvery PbtA game actually used PbtA rules though and mostly stuck to the spirit of the thing.OSR is much loser, like yeah you can argue they're all in the OSR spirit but it often seems like an excuse for indie games to just not bother writing a full ruleset, which to me is different from the PBTA situation which was more just trend chasing.
>>97003417>rules-lite systemsNeither AD&D nor any edition of Basic nor C&C are in any way "rules-lite" systems and they were at the heart of the OSR and still are so where you are sitting is in the dark on the seat of ignorance.
>>97010379When people say "rules lite" and "OSR" in the same sentence, what they actually mean is Mork Borg and Mork Borg spin-offs. Morklikes, if you will.
>>97003333You're a fucking retard
>>97004148Name one
>>97010887NTA but Mork Borg kinda meets that criteria. There's also the Primer for OSR from a number of years back that pushes this whole "Mother May I" style of play where players must read the DM's mind and interpret the exact way to phrase a question so as to instantly solve every puzzle, unlike those ridiculous unwashed heathens who roll dice and have rules for playing their systems of choice.https://archive.org/details/a-quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming/A%20Quick%20Primer%20for%20Old%20School%20Gaming/
>>97007694>Does it? Why does it mean that?Because you're basing your game off an existing game, like babbys first homebrew is a DND ripoff, but now it has a cool acronym to make it seem more sophisticated.
>>97004277>it never became, because it started as such.This. Dungeon Crawl Classics used to call itself OSR in the beginning.Captcha: GAYTH
>>97003370Shadowdark is! Converting can be fun and simple with Shadowdark's fun mechanics invoking the old school style with some of the updated and newer mechanics of today.
>>97010814Bad example, Mork Borg is just as "rules-lite" as B/X is. the better example is UVG, ItO based games or the dozens of "this is my OD&D clone that is 100% compatible with TSR material but it has only 2 stats, all the rules fit on a business card and if you read the first letter of every line it spells out 'TRANS LIVES MATTER'" systems out there
>>97011503If you have to convert shit then it isn't compatible.
It was always some unholy mixture of marketing ploy and social club for geezers whose dicks no longer work and zoomers larping as aforementioned geezers. Some aspects of OSR gameplay are very valuable and worth reading up on but "movement" as a whole is a bowel kind. As in, producing shit.
>>97012234You have to do minor conversions between all OSR systems. They're not 1:1 exact copies, all have minor differences that need to be accounted for, like differences in how certain spells work or how encumbrance or initiative works.That said, Shadowdark does need more conversion than some other OSR systems, since it does things like use the d20 system for most resolutions, but everything OSR is still compatible with it.It's an OSR game, but even its designer would prefer it being called "OSR-like" because she wanted to distance herself from a worrying trend within OSR of people trying to define it under increasingly strict standards while doing things like using it as a proxy-political battleground. Ultimately though, the "NuSR/NSR/OSR-lite/OSR-like/OSR-adjacent" designation is relatively recent and something of an arbitrary designation, and most games would simply have been called OSR without any further qualifications before the OSR community started to become the lamest and nerdiest battleground imaginable.
>>97011503AI shill post.
>>97011417Even the guy who makes DCC doesn't think it's osr.
>>97003333I love this cat like you wouldn’t believe
>>97016615We're at a point where OSR has become a politicized tag that many people no longer want to associate their games with. It's largely thanks to guys trying to co-opt the movement, and pushing labels like "NuSR" and "Commercial OSR" so that their idea of OSR would become the "true OSR". This has made OSR creators who don't conform to that style just saying "You don't want people to think we're associated with each other? Funny, that's exactly the same thing we want."
>>97017251Right?He's adorable!
>>97017251He looks very polite
>>97017298So... you're saying the split of the OSR is bad, but also it's not bad?
>>97017251>>97017315>>97017390He has a posh British accent
>>97017421No he’s French.
>>97017398Kinda. The guys who tried to gatekeep what the OSR is were basically just being dumb assholes, but if it all just comes down to them wanting to have the OSR label while they simultaneously kill any value it has, it becomes more reasonable to just let them have it.
>>97017496You seem like a seething nigger, ngl.
>>97017657I'm not the creators who decided to distance themselves, I'm just explaining their reasoning. I personally just keep calling OSR games OSR games and don't worry about anyone trying to subdivide them.
>>97003333Being labeled OSR immediately cripples your system to a minority subset of an already small market. Being made after 2010 further divides potential buyers because at least half of OSRfags are old and do not like anything new, even if it's trying to be old school. You must then compete with dozens of other systems that have probably done your exact ideas.Might make yourself a few bucks if it's all digital or you find a herd of like-minded whales, but the odds are heavily against you and there's better things to spend your time on if you want money, even if you restrict yourself to traditional games.
>>97003333>Is there a point to making your RPG system OSR anymore if you want it to be successful?If you can make enough market hype for sure, helped mork borg and shadowdark. If its just shovelware you're not going to social media blitz and otherwise suck up to a den of fuckhead parasites that are the indi rpg scene its not worth it. Make what you care about or go full market whore. But if you're only in it for the money, its medium retarded to try it with ttrpgs. Sell drugs or something.
>>97017421>>97017456He is a noble soul who fights for the right and the good against the monsters demons of this world.He is better than our petty nations....more pure.
>>97003333>3333mreow, checked
>Is there a point to making your RPG system OSR anymore if you want it to be successful?Does the 317th "Me too, but with Gimmick!" trend chaser tossed onto the bandwagon usually end up as a major success story?
>>97006198>arquebus is steampunkStop.
The OSR was never about making ‘RPG systems’, it was meant to immortalize the already perfected RPG system and introduce new content designed for it. People need to produce modules and dungeons instead. Gary Gygax was able to make a living off of game design because his competition was Candyland and Monopoly. Now video games exist, so the only reason to play TTRPG is to play TRVE D&D.
>>97012430Seems like every anon saying 'no one will buy your OSR system' is missing this. I got into OSR and bought a system because I wanted to easily run some of the best adventures/modules ever made, old and new. I imagine that marketing your rpg as a whole new product with limited extra material and incompatible with any previously written stuff is much more difficult.
>>97021167>The OSR was never about making ‘RPG systems’,That's revisionist history.
>>97023333You're talking to a notorious troll.
>>97003333Wow, that's a good kitty!
>>97017251He's great, better than most. A plucky hero we don't deserve.
>>97003333Some of the dumbest and worst DMs out there still run and buy modules anon, so I'm sure there's value in attaching some fuddy duddy tag onto your game that totally exists.
