this is actually about my perception of the primary difference between B/Xish games and Storygames
It’s no small secret I dislike the label OSR, and not just because
of loud fascist shit-fucks. Old School Renaissance describes
basically none of why I like those games. Simplicity, modularity,
broad cross compatibility, none of that really sprung from the
bloated minds of Gygax, et al.
In fact, I find
Gygax to be a thoroughly mediocre game designer, but that’s not
really the point of this.
(Also there’s I
reason I turned comments off on this blog, and a big part of that is
because I like writing vaguely B/Xish rpg content sometimes. That
draws a shitty crowd. Full stop. Before somebody decides to tell me
they’ve had a very different OSR experience, I don’t fucking
care. People who shout “OSR!” the loudest [and lets be real Gary
Gygax stans] tend to be right wing assholes of the worst types.)
Anyway, the thing I
actually love most of all about OSRish games is that most every
design choice grants primacy to the imagined physical space. Even the
“rulings not rules” folkways of the scene support that. The
freedom of action it gives you as a player, to know that you’re
gonna get reasonable outcomes from manipulating the imagined
environment. That’s the ticket.
(The creativity this
encourages still astounds me; there was this dance battle with the
orc tribes in the Caves of Chaos, and it was just sublime, omgolly.
Fucking rad af. I get to be in that campaign tomorrow, yay! Long way
from the caves though… well those caves.)
From my limited
experience with story games, it seems like rather than physicality,
specific narrative structures (often genre tropes) are granted
primacy in all aspects of design. That’s not bad; I just don’t
like it.
It kinda ties into
how I don’t really like Monsterhearts (as a system)* for exactly
the same reason I entirely dislike 3.x/Pathfinder. In both games, the
only way to affect your roll is to know the system. System Mastery is
the only Player Skill that’s rewarded. Meh…
I want to pretend to be a fuckup in an imagined space, thing that get in the way of this, I don't like.
I want to pretend to be a fuckup in an imagined space, thing that get in the way of this, I don't like.
So I’d much rather
play Labyrinth Lord so I can be the smol, pink, and evil pegasus,
that I need to be.
*I positively adore
the particular campaign I’m in, and I do like the XP system.
However, until I finally grokked the system well enough, I basically
hated making a die roll. The way information is presented in that
book is very difficult for me to parse, and parsing that system is
super necessary.
In contrast, some of
the best players I’ve played with got no fucking clue how Hit Dice
or THAC0 or any that shit works. Yet, they can tell me their plan,
and I can let them know what die to roll. Creative problem solving is
the name of the game, and granted heavy bonuses by me and other
(subjectively) good GMs.
