what, exactly, makes a game OSR?
It's basically first edition D&D, with a pinch of smug elitism
Old school games tend to be run by "Judges" as opposed to "narrators".
Also, encounters tend to be more lethal, and quests are usually more quest driven, rather than story or "objective" driven.
There is a bit more ambiguity in the rules, and room to dispute certain things like skillchecks and the exact effects of combat or criticals.
There also happen to be more tables used during play.
OSR games aren't better. They're just different. I've enjoyed every tabletop game I've played to one degree or another, but the systems I've had the most fun with are old d20 based homebrews where characters usually have to fight for each magic item and spell they obtain.
>Source: An old grognard.
Old school D&D rules, New Weird fantasy setting.
old men
>>44337403
Back in my day sonny, your DM would hand you a piece of paper and map y'er own damn dungeon map. And it took fifteen gaming sessions just to clear the dungeon. Then, on the last floor, each player would have to sacrifice six characters and an army of hirelings just to kill one beholder. And that would set off a trap that made the whole dungeon collapse on you unless you answered some obscure riddle stolen out of a cheap paperback fantasy novel... AND WE LLLLOVED IT!
Now put another log in the hearth boy, m'feet err getting cold.
>>44337508
Was this before or after you fought in half a dozen wars while taking a break from impregnating everyone in south america?
Most people in the /osr/ general threads that pop up from time to time seem to agree that old school gaming is essentially defined by a style of play instead of a specific ruleset or theme.
Essentially; instead of characters having a list of skills with which they can interact in the world, they simply roleplay it for the most part. Instead of having a huge amount of feats or skills to describe combat attacks, players can just describe them. Tend to be tied with high legality dungeon crawling and hex-maps.
It was only after I looked this stuff up did I realize that I had actually been doing a lot of /osr/ shit before I even knew what it meant, so I ended up quite liking the genre. Now I just need to start learning how to run it and run my own game.
boredom
>>44337533
Yes.
Bad, outdated mechanics.
Fun.
>>44337728
>implying
>>44336402
OSR means Old School Renaissance.
Basically you take old school roleplaying games, and you make them new again by tiddling with it in modern ways.
>>44339308
"To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time."
>>44339308
Not OP, but thanks for posting this. It's very insightful and invigorating.
