OSR Does "Old School" in OSR only apply to D&D?

This came up an another forum so I thought I would ask EN World:

When discussing the OSR movement, does it only apply to games that emulate early D&D? Or do other early games such as Traveller or Metamorphosis Alpha also qualify as "Old School" especially as it relates to talking about OSR games?

It does for me. Yea. I think generally too. But the focus does seem to be on D&D.

I think they do. Just yesterday I saw a thing going around about OSR is more about figuring out the rules, coming up with stuff that suits your tables, and so on, and nothing with an actual specific game. I don't think we see clones of those because they aren't in the OGL or SRD.

Generally yes. I think personally that old school and OSR can also refer to a style of play and design but if you say OSR and don’t mean D&D or game based on the D&D d20 system, you ought to qualify it (and you might receive pushback)

Sacrosanct said:

I think they do. Just yesterday I saw a thing going around about OSR is more about figuring out the rules, coming up with stuff that suits your tables, and so on, and nothing with an actual specific game. I don't think we see clones of those because they aren't in the OGL or SRD.

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I've seen Traveller rules clones, specifically to build a fantasy game, and Rune Quest etc.

I'll grant you that it isn't as big a player base or focus or near as many clones.

If Metamorphosis Alpha doesn't count as OSR, then I have some serious questions about the label.

A good rule of thumb is if both Joseph Goodman and Ben Milton get excited about it, it's OSR.

Old school applies to any number of RPGs in the D&D style from the classic era (ie pre 1990s). So simple it is!

Reynard said:

When discussing the OSR movement, does it only apply to games that emulate early D&D? Or do other early games such as Traveller or Metamorphosis Alpha also qualify as "Old School" especially as it relates to talking about OSR games?

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This is a popular argument these days - I think it's the result of a few things, none of them good.

First, the OSR as a living scene or movement is done. There is no central place where OSR ideas are discussed and instead a large number of splinter communities have formed. It's like other art movements in this way - you can still enjoy OSR things, but the movement itself is done, everything now inspired by it is a product of one or another "Post-OSR" scenes. There are several of these, and many of them don't like each other. Many also claim to be the real OSR. None are.

Second, the most reactionary (often politically as well as intellectually) of these Post OSR movements, based on 4chan and a few blogs that use a lot of slurs and complain about how everything else isn't OSR, tend to claim that only D&D or even only AD&D are proper OSR games. This is historical revisionism, because at the time it was going strong the OSR was open to both playing and iterating from a lot of older games especially Traveller, Boot Hill, Palladium (RIFTS/TMNT) and Gamma World come to mind.

Third, people, usually wanting to try something new after 5E, look into the OSR and often stumble about because the wreckage of the OSR is hard to navigate. They both see that all the larger name "OSR" (many are actually Post OSR) games are D&D clones and that some loudly proclaiming themselves OSR say the movement is entirely about playing games old D&D (or games very closely modelled on it). This issue is compounded by the assumption that many from the contemporary trad scene (5E/PF2 etc) bring to RPGs that playing by the book is essential. Couple RAW enthusiasm with revisionists defining the OSR purely as a nostalgia and playing through TSR adventures using 1970's and 1980's tools and you have the current state of part of the post OSR.

It isn't a good part, and while it can be fun to play old games and old adventures exactly as they were written (not as they were played obviously - that can't be done, especially if one has already been playing Pathfinder for six months), it has very little to do with an OSR that I think most of us who were once involved in it would recognize. In it's heyday on G+ the OSR often used B/X as a sort of lingua franca for running games in multiple and varied referee designed settings - but plenty of other games were played. Certainly they were discussed and borrowed from. Not only old games either, but story games, and the contemporary editions of the 2000's and 2010's.

I agree 90%+ with Gus.

I do believe that the OSR scene historically began with D&D, over a roughly 6-7 year period starting with WotC relaxing/rescinding TSR's extremely fan-hostile internet policies around 1997, which allowed for sites like Dragonsfoot to spring up. Dragonsfoot was and remains a huge haven for 1E AD&D enthusiasts, though it supports discussion of other non-WotC games and editions.

The OSR became a movement, IMO, in response to 3E, which brought a lot of lapsed players back, but then was different enough to create a population of folks who decided they wanted to go back and re-examine and play the older TSR editions, which better fit their nostalgia and the play styles they remembered. Forums like Dragonsfoot full of folks who never left AD&D or OD&D became resources for the returners.

The term Old School Renaissance (or Revival) finally got coined for this scene around 2005 or 2006, right around or just before OSRIC (the first retroclone) was published. OSRIC was published originally as a convenient reference tool and device to publish new adventures for, at times when it was unclear whether publishing adventures (even for free) labeled as being for AD&D would fly, and at times when WotC wasn't selling PDFs or POD AD&D books like they are today, so OSRIC was meant to ensure that the rules were perpetually available.

Other games like Traveller or Call of Cthulhu are 100% Old School, but whether they are part of the renaissance or revival is a bit ambiguous and depends on what you mean by that, as many of them never went out of print and remained in continual support from their publishers.

That being said, folks who play or played games from the 70s or 80s and continued gaming into the new millenium are/were (IME) rarely exclusive to D&D. Most of us played lots of other games as well, so (for example) places like Dragonsfoot have sub-forums for non-D&D games, and those have always been welcome topics of discussion, even when WotC editions have been verboten.

I think one difference is that while some folks are reacting to either WOTC's business practices or modern D&D gameplay changes, lots of older games don't have that baggage.

If I want to play Call of Cthulhu, well, whether I use 1E or 6E, there isn't much difference. Modern RQ is basically RQ 2E. And the Traveller experience isn't too different whether I'm playing Mongoose 2E or LBB (though some folks prefer the slimness of the originals). WFRP 4E is more rules-heavy than 1E, but Cubicle7 have really leaned into the original game (and focused heavily on the old Enemy Within adventures). All of these are 'old-school' games, but it seems silly to call them Renaissance games as they have stayed similar for most of their lives (no, we are not going to talk about WFRP 3E...).