State of the OSR

Today I watched/heard a podcast/video featuring a panel discussion on the OSR. It made me reflect on my TTRPG journey, and I decided to write a bit about it. Here’s the podcast/video by the way:

Where I come from

It started in 2008, when I first played Vampire: The Masquerade (VTM) 3rd Edition. We played a full chronicle, and I couldn’t believe how long I had been alive without knowing about TTRPGs. Immediately it felt like something made just for me. I was in love, and enjoyed it immensely.

After we finished the first part of our adventure (some 10-ish sessions if I remember correctly) we made plans to continue with a second chronicle; but as so commonly happens, it fizzled out after the first session. I was left heartbroken and starved. I tried to play with other friends, but it never quite worked out.

So years went by. My life changed dramatically. I dropped out of law school. I became a Spanish teacher. I left my country with the love of my life. We got married. And every now and then, when something would bring it back to the front of my memory, I’d treasure those moments of play… the freedom I felt, the collaborative storytelling, the rolling of the dice…

It wasn’t until late 2021 that I “woke up from my torpor”. By chance, on YouTube, I found a live playthrough of VTM: LA by Night. I was SO hooked. And I quickly noticed that the way they were playing was different from what I remembered. Not just the over-the-top acting and costumes, but the rules themselves.

Turns out they were using the “V5” (5th edition) ruleset. Of course, in over a decade, things had moved on. I devoured the series and, in the meantime, started reading the new books.¹

In 2022, I managed to convince a couple of friends and colleagues to join me for a one-shot session. And it went about as well as you might expect for someone with no experience as a “Storyteller” with a bunch of players who weren’t all that invested in the game.

Clearly, I needed to find a more like-minded group. So I started looking. And well… I realised the VTM fandom wasn’t quite my scene. I wasn’t after enacting a vampiric fantasy of cringy sexy horror. Maybe I was unlucky; the fandom must be bigger and more varied than what I found. But I couldn’t find my corner of it.

Pivot to DnD

I pivoted to Dungeons & Dragons (DnD). Found a Facebook group for TTRPG players in the city where I live and started looking for people. There I found a nice group, most of them in their early 20s, very keen to play, but only online. I tried. I really tried. It just felt too much like a video game and nothing like what I was actually after.

I kept searching. And that turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Because the people I found next have become part of my chosen family. We were around the same age, had quite similar values and interests, and the way we work together as a group feels just right. I got lucky as fuck.

It went so well that in about a year, we started a second, parallel campaign where I got to be the Dungeon Master (DM). And because of how I’m wired, that threw me into a deep rabbit hole of videos, podcasts, books, and eventually blogs about the craft of DMing.

Discovering the OSR

As a new DM I felt overwhelmed by the rules. Fortunately, the DM of the first campaign was a player in this one, so he filled in the gaps for me. But something still nagged at me. Why did game prep sometimes felt like a chore? Why was I spending more time with the game away from the table than at it?

And then I watched this video. I was looking for inspiration for my pirate campaign and oh boy, this review of Pirate Borg opened my eyes. It could all be so much simpler! I kept watching the Deficient Master’s channel. Soon the algorithm surfaced other creators in a similar vein — Ben Milton from Questing Beast, for one. And by then it finally clicked: there was a whole community of people and a whole catalogue of games built around a very clear set of principles. Principles rooted in the nostalgia of playing classic games, in a desire to spend more time at the table, in the wish to experience fantasy worlds not from the perspective of a medieval superhero,² but from that of a more fragile, more mortal adventurer.

That community was the “OSR”. Old-School {Renaissance; Revival; Revolution}… even the fact that the “true” meaning of the “R” is contested appeals to me. But in a nutshell, it’s just what I described: a nostalgic vibe you bring to your games, one that sometimes translates into the adoption of older mechanics, and more often into a certain philosophy about what play is for.

Where I am now

Extrapolating from my experience in tech, I can see a clear parallel. Modern DnD reminds me of Windows, and Hasbro + Wizards of the Coast of Microsoft. Bloated. Corporate. Increasingly hostile to the community that built it — the 2023 OGL debacle, where WotC tried to quietly revoke the open licence that had enabled third-party publishing for two decades, felt exactly like a platform vendor deciding to close off its ecosystem once the network effects were locked in.

The OSR, by contrast, reminds me of Free and Open Source Software. Most OSR games are released as cheap or free PDFs, often under Creative Commons or similarly permissive licences. The rules are meant to be hacked: fork them, gut them, throw in something extra weird, publish the result as a zine and sell it for next to nothing at a convention. The whole culture is built around the assumption that the game belongs to the people playing it. Small publishers, solo designers, anonymous bloggers passing around house rules. In my opinion, it has the same texture as a healthy open-source project, the same distributed, bottom-up energy.

There’s a digital sovereignty angle too. OSR play tends to be low-infrastructure by nature. A few booklets, some dice, a sheet of paper. You don’t need a platform. You don’t need an account. The game can’t be discontinued, the servers can’t go down, the licence can’t be revoked. The text just sits there, yours, forever. That’s not an accident. It reflects the same instinct that draws people to self-hosting and libre software: a suspicion of dependency, and a preference for tools you actually own.

I won’t deny there’s great content for DnD out there, and I’ll continue to play it. But it’s not my style for running games. I’ve come to think of my role more as a Referee, in the OSR tradition, rather than a DM or Storyteller. If I want to tell a story, I can write a novel.

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Soon we’ll start a new campaign with me as the Referee. The campaign will use Wonderland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting and Old School Essentials rules. For the first time I’ll be approaching the whole thing from an OSR perspective from the very beginning. I’m so excited.