There and Back Again: My Circular Role-playing Journey

I’ve talked about my personal history with the ‘Old School Renaissance’ or ‘Old School Revival’ (OSR) in the past at this blog (e.g., see this post from 2022). But some reflection on the games that I’ve been playing in recent years has prompted me to scribble some further thoughts. (My apologies for being a bit self-indulgent here …)

[Saruman by Angus McBride]

It’s been an interesting journey. I was ‘floating around’ at various role-playing games fora during the early days of the OSR over two decades ago. Disappointment with 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons – and nostalgia for my early days of gaming – led me to dig out (and in some cases repurchase) my old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, Rules Cyclopaedia D&D, and other out-of-print RPG books. I was excited – and later disappointed – by Castles & Crusades in its early days. (I wrote positive reviews at RPG.net of both the C&C box set and Players’ Handbook, but eventually came to find the atrocious editing by Troll Lord Games intolerable.)  

I started this blog in 2009 in order to post some rules ideas for Swords & Wizardry (S&W). Some of my ‘swords and sorcery’ house rules for S&W appeared in early issues of Fight On! and Knockspell. Eventually, many of those rules were incorporated into Crypts and Things. So I guess that I contributed – albeit in a small way – to the creation of OSR “stuff,” at least early on. 

But I haven’t really been that engaged with the OSR for about a decade now. I still follow it to some extent. I mean, I have Dolmenwood and Shadowdark, as well as the more recent versions of S&W, and a few other things. I’ve backed the forthcoming ‘3rd edition’ of OSRIC (the original “retro-clone,” in this case of 1980 AD&D). While I regret some of my purchases, overall I find that there are still interesting things being produced. But I don’t really use any OSR (by which I mean here ‘TSR D&D-derived’) systems anymore, and haven’t for years. They just don’t appeal to me that much these days. I think that, given my tastes, there are superior alternatives available. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I sort of thought the same thing about AD&D/D&D around 1985.

Almost all my gaming these days involve either Mythras or Against the Darkmaster (but sometimes my groups will play ‘one shots’ of other things, e.g., Mothership or Delta Green, and I’d like to run some Dragonbane someday). I find these systems more satisfying overall than any version of D&D (TSR, OSR, 3e, 5e, whatever). I guess I’m not a ‘rules lite’ person after all. In retrospect, I think that I thought that about myself only because I found running 3e D&D to be such a tedious chore. 

Of course, both Mythras and Against the Darkmaster are descendants of other ‘old school’ systems: Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (Runequest, Stormbringer, and the like) in the case of Mythras, and Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle-earth Roleplaying (itself a simplified version of 2nd edition Rolemaster), in the case of Against the Darkmaster. So, I guess they're kind of ‘OSR’ systems as well (but not if we adhere to the “OSR = derived from TSR AD&D/D&D” definition). 

I can’t help but be struck by the extent to which my personal gaming history has repeated itself: dissatisfaction with AD&D/D&D led me to move to Middle-earth Roleplaying (MERP) and Basic Roleplaying (BRP), including Call of Cthulhu, Hawkmoon, and Stormbringer, in the mid-late 1980s. And about three decades later the same thing happened with OSR D&D and 5e D&D. Hopefully I've learned my lesson and won’t go through this cycle again.

As an aside, one thing that makes me think of the old MERP campaign modules as "old school" in nature is that – whatever their other faults – they were effectively “sandboxes” (as I explain here). They described a number of locations, some in detail, and provided advice for GMs on how to provide "hooks" for players. There were a few “adventure modules” for MERP – books with 3 adventures (usually aimed at levels, 1, 3, and 5) – but even those were pretty loose for the most part (generally they provided a setting and a situation), not “railroad” adventures. So, after my first several years with AD&D, a lot of my GMing involved using and running Middle-earth “sandbox” campaigns, although of course that term was not used in those days (at least to my knowledge). Indeed, I vividly recall comparing my MERP modules to TSR's Dragonlance series around 1986 or 1987, and noting how little room for improvisation or player freedom the latter allowed.

Anyhow, to the extent I was still involved in the hobby during the 1990s, the games I followed were those that came out earlier, especially MERP and Stormbringer (the latter revised and renamed Elric! during that decade). I remember visiting gaming stores in the 1990s and being a bit baffled and even put off by all the “goth” stuff. I never got into Vampire and the like (just as I never got into the Magic craze.) When D&D 3e came out, I was excited by it because it seemed to “improve” D&D by including certain things from other systems that I liked (e.g., skills). In play, though, I came to loathe the system after two year-long campaigns, and so was primed for the OSR when it happened.

Of course, had I been sensible, I would’ve just kept playing MERP, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and similar older games – and just ignored the hype around 3e D&D and the “d20” universe in the early 2000s. These days, for the most part, I’m happy to stick with my “d100” games, Mythras and Against the Darkmaster. Wisdom, I hope, comes with age.

Combat should be interesting

Combat obviously is an important element in most fantasy role-playing games. At its best, it’s exciting and dramatic. After all, the protagonists’ lives are at risk! And surprising things can happen – either because of chance (the rolls of the dice) or because of players’ inventiveness (or even inspiration on the part of the Game Master in the midst of a session). 

In the two campaigns that I currently am running – both using the Against the Darkmaster (VsD) system, one set in Middle-earth, the other in my home setting of Ukrasia – I rarely have more than one combat in any given session. Thanks to its “critical hits” system, combat in VsD can easily become quite deadly or debilitating, so players tend to avoid it when possible. Hence, two or more sessions (if not more) typically will pass between combats. I like this kind of pacing, as it ensures that when combat does take place, it is noteworthy and memorable.  

The two games that I play the most these days – VsD and Mythras – both have involved and colourful combat systems. While VsD has vivid critical hits, fumbles, and the like, Mythras has hit locations and exciting “special effects” (previously called “combat manoeuvres”) that allow for a wide range of tactical options, including defensive ones. They definitely are not “rules light” systems! 

Almost two decades ago (!), when I finally realized that I disliked 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, I thought that that was because I disliked “rules heavy” FRPGs. But that wasn’t really the case. I’ve always liked certain “rules heavy” – or at least “rules medium” – systems, like Middle-earth Roleplaying and Stormbringer. What I disliked was how tedious the rules for 3e D&D were – both in terms of prep work and its combat system. Running and playing 3e D&D involved a lot of work – and there was very little pay-off for that, as combats in 3e were frequent but usually quite boring. For the most part, characters and their opponents were “blocks of hit points” that would be chipped away during combats that involved a lot of rather flavourless options (and ubiquitous, bland “attacks of opportunity”). 

The problem isn’t nearly as bad in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. But it’s still there: the game assumes that combat is common (which the DM can ignore, of course) and that it rarely threatens the lives of the characters (thanks to all their abilities, inflated hit points, “death saves,” and the like). (Yes, there are options to make the game more “gritty” and deadly hidden in the Dungeon Master's Guide, but the default mode is very much “fantasy superheroes,” wherein player characters rarely face serious risks.) Combat in 5e D&D is pretty dull in my experience – at least when compared to the alternatives with which I am familiar, such as Mythras and VsD.

So what my recent 5e D&D campaign taught me was that what I dislike are “rules heavy” or “rules medium” systems in which combat is insipid and (usually) not that risky (at least to the characters). I had to work hard to ensure that at least some of the combats in my campaign were novel. In contrast, no such work is needed for Mythras or VsD, given the intrinsic qualities of those combat systems. Even an encounter with some “vanilla” bandits or orcs can be risky and interesting.

That said, sometimes one doesn’t want to engage in a lot of book-keeping when running a game. That’s certainly fine. This is where older (TSR era) editions of D&D and AD&D shine (at least when one isn’t using all the rules outlined by Gary Gyax in the AD&D rules – which almost no one ever did or does). In old school D&D (and associated “retro-clones” like Swords and Wizardry, OSRIC, and Crypts & Things), combat is fast. So while it lacks the colourfulness and tactical depth of other systems, at least it rarely takes more than 20 minutes to resolve (unlike even trivial combats in 3e or 5e D&D). And of course, combat can be more deadly in older versions of D&D, given the lower hit points of characters, the absence of “death saves,” the relative rarity of healing spells, etc.

In short, my view is that combat should be either interesting or fast. One of my gripes with 5th edition D&D is that combat typically is neither (although sometimes it can be), at least in comparison to the other FRPGs that I play.  

Reflection on the Old School Renaissance

There’s a very interesting and detailed “historical look” at the Old School Renaissance (OSR) at the blog “Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design.” It’s quite long and consists of five posts: part 1 (the 1^st edition-era AD&D adventure modules, and developments away from “old school” style play), part 2 (post-Gygaxian rules developments in AD&D), part 3 (second edition AD&D), part 4 (3^rd edition D&D and the early OSR), and part 5 (the OSR over the past decade or so). I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of D&D and the OSR (but unless you have a free afternoon, you probably will not be able to read all five posts in a single sitting).

 

I was somewhat engaged in the OSR in its “early years” (this blog is on the list of “pivotal early OSR blogs” in part 5 of the “historical look”). I even have a post at Dragonsfoot in what I believe is the first thread in which the term “Old School Renaissance” was used (coined – appropriately enough – by an anonymous poster). (However, T. Foster referred to the “Old School Revival” in an amazingly prescient post a year earlier [2004].)

 

After a decade away from D&D (and relatively little in the way of other RPG activity during that time, despite frequent visits to gaming shops), 3^rd edition lured me back in 2001. But by 2004 I had DM’ed two campaigns with 3^rd edition D&D and had come to find it rather tedious. Once the characters reached 6^th or 7^th level (which took about 10-11 months in my groups, as I was deliberately giving out “stingy” rewards in order to keep things sane) the game simply became a joyless chore. My experiences did not match the fun I remembered having during the 1980s. (I also was a fan of Middle-earth Roleplaying back in the day – indeed, as much of a fan as I was of AD&D. But MERP had gone away with ICE’s loss of the Middle-earth license in 1999, and Rolemaster had evolved into a rules-heavy behemoth in its “Standard System” edition. Of course, I could’ve played MERP again anyway. But I did not consider that option at the time.)

 

So, disillusioned with 3e, I began looking for something different...

 

I was an early Castles and Crusades enthusiast, especially when it promised to be a vehicle for the publication of Gary Gygax’s Castle Zagyg (a version of his original Castle Greyhawk mega-dungeon). That project proceeded quite slowly, alas, and only saw one release directly related to the mythical dungeon: Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works (co-authored by Jeffrey Talanian). Then Gygax shuffled off this mortal coil, at which time the entire project ended. (I still have that box set, which I believe is now quite valuable, along with the other CZ-related products – all carefully packed in a box in storage somewhere. For an excellent, comprehensive review of The Upper Works, see this one by Grodog.) But I eventually drifted away from C&C. One reason was the end of Castle Zagyg. Another, entirely independent of the system itself, was the terrible editing by Troll Lord Games. While Upper Works was fine, almost everything else I read from them (including the core rulebook) was simply too badly edited for me to enjoy.

 

During this same period, fortunately, I also had dusted off and reacquainted myself with 1^st edition AD&D, B/X D&D, the Rules Cyclopedia D&D, and the like. I played in some online (play-by-post) 1e AD&D games (in a Greyhawk one as a cleric of Trithereon). Unlike C&C, this interest in AD&D and D&D persisted. Then came along OSRIC (the 1e AD&D clone), Labyrinth Lord (the B/X D&D clone), Swords & Wizardry (the 0e D&D clone), the fanzines, and so forth. The OSR was well underway – and I signed on.

 

This blog started out as a place for me to talk about old school D&D/AD&D-based games, including especially Swords & Wizardry. I contributed articles to Knockspell and Fight On! back in the day. Having reread many of R. E. Howard’s “Conan” and “Kull” stories in the years immediately before I started this blog, I was interested in house-ruling S&W in order to play some “swords and sorcery” flavoured games. (Those house-rules remain available here; many were later incorporated into Crypts and Things.) I eventually became interested again in more “conventional” modes of play, including especially 1^st edition AD&D, and made a minor contribution back in 2013 to the OSRIC supplement Dangerous Dungeons (“background professions”). I also ran a brief AD&D campaign around that time (2013-14).

 

But I’ve drifted away from active participation in the “OSR scene” in recent years. I never was active on Google+. I sporadically followed what was happening through forums and blogs. But in terms of actual gaming, I have spent more time playing Mythras, Call of Cthulhu, Adventures in Middle-earth, and the like, over the past seven years or so.

 

However, I never abandoned my interest in “old school” Dungeons and Dragons. So I found part 5 of the “historical look” quite informative. It filled me in on what has been happening over the past several years. In a nutshell: it’s largely been fragmentation, decadence, and degeneracy.* I guess not paying attention was beneficial – at least for my mental health. (Unsurprisingly, the pre-OSR, old “old school” communities seem to be carrying on just fine.)

 

 * I should add some caveats to this generalization. An exception seems to be Old School Essentials, which is both quite recent and very much a "clone" of B/X D&D (even more so than Labyrinth Lord was). It seems to be enjoying quite a bit of success. Swords & Wizardry continues to be quite popular (indeed, I received the most recent "box set" edition last year). Crypts and Things continues to enjoy support. And material for AD&D/OSRIC continues to be created, including free material at Dragonsfoot (which of course started before the "OSR"). [Note added 14:35 ET 20 January 2022]