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OSR
and The Lack of Freedom in the RPG Hobby
I haven’t played or really thought about RPGs in ten years. Why my interest has returned doesn’t matter but someone pointed out my current ‘introduction’ to the hobby is atypical. Less introduction, more re-introduction.
Does this give me extra insight? Maybe. It should mean I have a different viewpoint on things than most; a combination of experience and freshness.
I had a pretty normal introduction to RPGs in my teens, at least for the 90s. I hung around weirdos playing Vampire the Masquerade who would tell me things like the old doll in the corner of their living room was actually possessed!!! And to represent themselves accurately in GURPS would take 160 points!!! I just played games with them, drank booze and smoked weed. Teenage stuff. They were good people.
When I went to university things opened up a little. I joined the university gaming society and was exposed to a wider variety of weirdo.
Along with the wider variety of weirdo there was also a wider variety of opinions. Strongly held opinions, that people argued about deeply, and heaven forbid you express the wrong opinion. Why was it the wrong opinion? Well, that’ll involve a Masters degree in gamer history.
I naturally settled into my own particular group of weirdos. We were annoyed by the ‘politics’ of it all but just as much a part of it. After a few years we fell into a rhythm knowing who was who, what our outlook on things was and what our preferences were. Despite thinking this was related to the fundamentals of gaming itself this was often based on other people simply being disagreeable wankers, at least to us.
The big takeaway from my ten year absence from gaming is not much has changed, at least from a quick glance. People are still establishing their preferences based on ‘identity’ and associations with identity, and not the actual hobby. Or at least fast judgments are made.
Any freedom within the hobby is immediately curtailed by your choice in game potentially aligning you to a ‘type’ of person. To an ‘identity.’ This is obviously bullshit to anyone with two braincells and not caught up in any ideological battle, at least at the pure game level.
But now I’m talking about these identities and these ideologies, so I’m becoming part of the problem. Let’s bring it back to actual games and my group’s issue, which, essentially, was we felt bound by the ideologies we thought were essential to hobby. We were bound to ideas of what the hobby was with no real perspective on what it was. Due to our influences we hadn’t seen or comprehended the hobby’s scope.
What we should have done is ignored these ideas and found our own way; we should have found the freedom in RPGs.
My group played a campaign for many years based on what we thought RPGs were. I didn’t enjoy the campaign partly because the game was shite — me playing because these people were my friends — and because I thought I didn’t enjoy combat heavy RPGs akin to the ‘Old School’ RPGs like D&D.
When we were playing this campaign the OSR wasn’t really a thing. It certainly wasn’t as known and to the fore as it is now. But if it was...
We probably would have dismissed it on ideological grounds.
After ten years away from the hobby I’ve both matured as a person and separated myself enough not to be caught in the debates that are happening. I have no stake in them. They are not my issues. And as I've said I have matured, and grown. Maybe that's all it is?
This has helped me realise that an OSR style game is what my group should have started playing fifteen-ish years ago, had it been a thing or had we known about them. We were trying to hold onto what was the style we knew at the time; the thematic, high level theory, meaningful philosophical choice style we were immersed in, while the players wanted the wargame, combat heavy style game. A strange level of cognitive dissonance was going on.
I don’t care about any debate between the two styles, and they definitely can exist within the same game, I just didn’t want combat heavy games at the time due to what I had been exposed to with other players. Had the system we played actually been grounded in those types of rules — combat — perhaps I would have enjoyed it. Had the system been appropriate to the style the other players wanted to play it would have been better all around.
There seems to be a lot of talk, that I’m seeing, about people needing to know the history of RPGs and this history is the original and only correct way to play. I disagree. The old D&D style games are not the only way to play. There is no correct way to play (there obviously is, but I’m not getting into that.)
Knowledge of the history of RPGs shouldn’t be to ‘honour’ them. It shouldn’t be about paying respect to your ancestors and the trailblazers making space for you. They’re old grey people. Who cares about them? What going back to the roots of the game does, and would have allowed my group, would have been for us to develop our own style, our own takes on the game, and naturally evolve a position on the hobby that worked for us.
Whatever you say about the first RPGs they had a pretty simple philosophy in their origins, at the very beginning. What we have in RPGs now is an evolution based on variations and personal preferences of people who came from those origins and who were allowed to develop those variations and preferences.
My group was dumped into all this thirty-ish years later. We were taking what other people had learned and said in good faith and as truth. Unfortunately what those people were saying was never a truth, it was merely a truth to them. It was their preference. This was never made clear. Assumed understanding from what others were saying had been passed down, and passed down, and few that I knew were ever given the freedom to — or the knowledge they could — develop their own thought. I appreciate the irony of this happening among mainly university students.
What I am doing now is looking at OSR books. I’m trying to get a group together. I do, of course, actually want to play an OSR style game, but I think it’ll also benefit me in stripping back RPGs to their starting point, to their original philosophy and allow me to develop my own thoughts and preferences organically.
Freedom in anything isn’t about laws, or fighting the man. It’s not freedom to be a wanker outside the hobby, actually hating people for the nature of who they are. Freedom isn’t freedom from people calling you a cunt. Freedom is personal. It’s the opportunity to take things back, to get away from assholes screaming blue murder about irrelevances, and it’s the freedom to develop yourself, your thoughts and your opinion to the point where you truly know what your preferences are, free from others. Freedom is knowing yourself. Freedom is being given the space to get to know yourself. And if you’re not given the space to take the space.
I intend to know myself when it comes to RPGs. To do that I’m going back to the roots.
OSR, here I come!