East Coast OSR Roleplaying Games Meetup

This meetup is for people who are interested in "tabletop roleplaying games" (TTRPGs), both complete beginners looking to start with an easy-to-learn ruleset and for experienced players who have become a bit bored with the most common games like D&D 5th edition and Pathfinder (an off-shoot of D&D 3rd edition). Instead, we'll be playing TTRPGs associated with the "Old-School Renaissance/Revival" (OSR) that try to recapture the looser play-style from the first generation of RPGs in the 1970s-80s while streamlining and altering the rules a bit (or a lot) to make the game easier to play & more fun.

For a quick overview of what the "Old-School Renaissance/Revival" (OSR) games are like, check out this 11-minute video from Ben Milton's Questing Beast Youtube channel or if you want to learn a bit more, read Matthew Finch's "Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming".

There's several principals that set the OSR games apart from more modern TTRPGs:

1. Rulings not Rules: Game mechanics are minimalist & there's not an exhaustive list of your characters skills & abilities. On-the-spot rulings from the game master are favored for resolving situations not specifically covered in the rule books, and for preventing anything that seems like a game-breaking abuse of the rules. This is why OSR gamers often say "the answer isn't on your character sheet". It's also why they discourage attempts at "rules lawyering" while referring back to "Rule Zero" - i.e. the game master can override published game rules for any reason.
2. Roleplaying not Roll-playing: The point of minimalist game mechanics is to avoid the break in story immersion that comes with constantly having to roll dice, calculate bonuses & penalties, and discuss stats. For example, instead of merely saying "I check for traps" or "I try to bluff my way past the guard" and then rolling dice to see if your Find Traps or Bluff attempt succeeds, OSR games force the player to describe HOW they check for traps or WHAT they say to the guard. This is why OSR gamers often say "play the world not the rules". This means any character can attempt any mundane activity even if their base chance is lower than a specialist (i.e. all characters can try to hide in shadows, disarm a trap, climb a wall, listen at doors, check for secret passages, bind wounds, start a fire, follow tracks, calm a wild animal, give an inspiring speech, etc.), and it means the "disassociated mechanics" (i.e. character abilities without any in-world explanation of how/why they work) we see in later editions of D&D don't exist in OSR games. This explains why many OSR gamers will talk about the importance of "player skill over character skill", i.e. with enough ingenuity on the player's part (e.g. taking your time, using your equipment judiciously, getting into an advantageous position, combining the efforts of several PCs), you may be able to boost your character's base chance of success or even be able to solve a problem without rolling the dice.
3. Heroic not Superheroic: Success lies in surviving and gradually becoming more skilled, not gaining tons of magic items or umpteen feats & special abilities. OSR games consciously avoid the "power creep" that's plagued later editions of D&D, although you can find complaints about "power gamers" even back in the 1st edition days.
4. Lethality not Game Balance: Characters' hit points are often lower, healing magic is often rare or non-existent, and characters can & will meet more powerful opponents. Unlike later editions of D&D, in old-school play the random encounter tables aren't adjusted so that the type of monsters the PCs encounter are what they have a decent shot at beating. This is what OSR gamers mean when they talk about "combat as war" vs "combat as sport" and it's why they often say "combat is a fail state" - i.e. the party may often need to hide, negotiate, or run away instead of fighting. If/when your character dies, you'll be expected to laugh it off and create a new character or take over an NPC nearby.
5. Sandboxes not Railroads: There is less emphasis on character arcs & predefined endings, and a greater emphasis on generating "emergent narratives" from a mix of interesting maps, setting guides filled with lore, random tables, and player choices. This is a reversal of the trend that began with 2nd edition AD&D where boxed adventures were designed to fit player actions into a pre-existing narrative. This is why OSR gamers sometimes say "Dragonlance ruined everything" since it was the success of the original Dragonlance adventures and tie-in novels that changed the direction of D&D away from the earlier DIY ethic.
6. Pick-Up Games not Epic Campaigns: Rather than expecting a small group of regular players to commit to multiple sessions that are part of an overarching campaign, tabletop RPGs in the 1970s often assumed a large group of irregular players and several DMs (often in college gaming clubs) who'd drop in whenever they had some free time. The 1st edition D&D rulebook famously said that "four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign", but this assumed all the players wouldn't all show up on the same day. As OSR game designer Ben Milton has explained, the net result of these interlinked groups of players exploring the same world in different sessions was like a tabletop version of MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) like "World of Warcraft" that would come several decades later. To facilitate this style of play, old-school D&D often used an "open table" format where anyone who wanted to play was welcome. You didn't have to commit to a campaign that would span several sessions and required regular attendance. Instead, each session was a self-contained adventure (usually a dungeon crawl) with the players starting & ending the session at a nearby town where they could rest, heal & resupply. However, over multiple sessions, a rotating cast of characters could gradually explore the same "mega-dungeon", returning again & again to progress through different rooms & levels, evading traps, battling monsters & collecting treasure. This play method faded by the late 1980s but was revived in 2007 by the game designer Ben Robbins who touted his open-ended "West Marches" adventures on his blog, which focused on exploring the wilderness around a frontier town instead of a dungeon crawl. As Robbins explained, when all adventures begin & end at a home base location, this makes it easier to accomodate irregular players by explaining how/why new characters are joining the party (i.e. they met the other characters in town) and what happened to the characters whose player didn't show up (i.e. they stayed in town).

There's several more aspects of old-school RPGs that we may incorporate into our games:

• LOW MAGIC / LOW FANTASY: Thematically, our adventures will probably lean more towards grittier sub-genres of fantasy like low fantasy, sword & sorcery and sword & planet - often with a dash of "dying earth" or eldritch horror - which reflect the sources of inspiration found in early D&D's "Appendix N". This means most adventures will revolve around survival and practical, smaller-scale goals rather than saving the world or ascending to godhood. Player characters in these settings may be limited to humans, with other humanoid races being either absent or grotesque/otherworldly & seldom encountered (perhaps only NPCs). These fantasy sub-genres tend to be "low-magic" which means magic items will probably be rare & unique, and magic spells may often be dangerous to the caster's heath or sanity. Think Robert E. Howard's "Conan" stories and Fritz Lieber's "Fafhrd & Grey Mouser" tales rather than the high/epic fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy where the heroes are on a mission to defeat the forces of darkness, or the "high magic" fantasy settings of modern D&D where almost every town has a shop that sells magic items and a temple that offers healing & resurrection.
• MORAL COMPLEXITY & DARKER THEMES: As befits the grittier fantasy sub-genres we're drawing upon for inspiration in our games, there won't be any attempt to interject a conservative Christian allegory like C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" or the progressive social messages you'll find in modern fantasy adaptations like Amazon's "Rings of Power" and "Wheel of Time" series. Instead, the world's morality will often be ambiguous, with differences in character temperaments, allegiance to different guilds or factions, or the cosmic forces of law & chaos replacing the traditional good-vs-evil alignment. This moral complexity treats players as adults, which was the intended audience of original D&D before the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s forced D&D 2nd edition to be toned down for kids & younger teens (e.g. removing nudity, gore, devils/demons, half-orcs, assassins). This also vibes with the darker fantasy themes popularized in recent years by HBO's series "Game of Thrones" and "House of the Dragon". Moral complexity gives us an opportunity to explore the motivations of "monstrous" races and "barbaric" cultures in a more nuanced way, whereas D&D 5th Edition has been riven by debates over "inherently evil races" like orcs due to its simplistic good-vs-evil framing. And since we're starting with the assumption that many games will include darker themes similar to an R-rated movie, we won't be including any of the "safety tools" that have been implemented with D&D 5th edition to protect players from "traumatic" content.
• "ACTOR STANCE" INSTEAD OF "PAWN STANCE": This comes from an analysis of RPG play styles called "Stance Theory" and ties in with the "role-playing not roll-playing" principle above. When rolling dice is deemphasized, the game's focus shifts to inhabiting your character's perspective and roleplaying them in a dramatic way like an actor would as opposed to using them instrumentally to "win the game" without any consideration of the character's background or motivation, i.e. like a chess player uses their pawns. "Actor stance" sometimes means not taking the optimal strategy or even "losing the game" (but helping the narrative) by fleeing in fear, getting captured, losing an important item, or dying tragically. This also means "meta-gaming" - i.e. acting on knowledge the player has that their character would not have - is strongly discouraged.
• LOW-LEVEL PLAY VARIANTS: If players are okay with extra high lethality, we may experiment with "funnel sessions" (a.k.a. "running the gauntlet") where each player starts play with several 0-level commoners who are thrust into an adventure (e.g. some farmers whose village is raided by goblins, sailors who wash up on a mysterious island, miners who stumble upon subterranean ruins). The idea is players will keep the handful that survive as their 1st-level characters, and they've got a great backstory. Conversely, a less-lethal idea for 1st-level characters is to assume that fighters start as a knight's squire, clerics start as a temple's acolytes, wizards start as a sorcerer's apprentice, thieves start as a street urchin who wants to join the thieves' guild, etc. Initially, their superiors will assign them some tasks that involve in-town adventures, e.g. "kill ten rats in the tavern's cellar", "fetch quests", murder mysteries or exploring a haunted house. Then they become independent adventurers around 3rd-4th level, at which point it makes more sense for them leave town and risk the higher danger of escort quests, wilderness exploration & dungeon crawls.
• XP VARIANTS: Many OSR games follow early D&D rules and give experience points (XP) for finding treasure rather than slaying monsters which motivates characters to play in a stealthier & more strategic manner. We may or may not experiment with this, since most players enjoy combat. It also makes narrative sense that characters would get better at fighting, spell-casting, stealth, etc, by practicing those skills regardless of how much loot it got them. However, we will look for various ways to reward players for tactics that don't involve combat so we avoid having PCs devolve into stereotypical "murder hobos" whose only motive is killing monsters for XP.
• CHARACTER EXPENSES: Some OSR games have revived the rule that PCs must pay for training to level up, which helps explain where they spent all that treasure they found on their last adventure - along with taxes & tithes. However, a more fun method of draining the PC's coffers are the "carousing rules" from various OSR games that reward players in various ways (e.g. XP, Luck, Status) for blowing their money on drinking, gambling, etc., instead of always spending it wisely on more gear. This can also generate lots of plot hooks for urban adventures.
• REAL-TIME PLAY: We may experiment with what's called "playing in real time" or "1:1 timekeeping". To facilitate a string of pick-up games with a rotating cast of characters that all take place in the same world (as described in Point #6 above), old-school D&D often had time pass in the campaign world at the same speed as our world. In between sessions, it was assumed characters could accomplish various tasks back at their base of operations like resting/healing, training with their weapons, learning new skills, researching a new spell, crafting items, etc. But it also meant wilderness areas you'd already cleared could repopulate with monsters or bandits, and a dungeon's treasure might get looted by another group while you were back in town. Similarly, while you're off adventuring, your base of operations could be raided and all your accumulated treasure could be plundered. This sort of dynamic game world also means quest-giving NPCs wouldn't wait forever for you to complete the task they gave you, and villains won't wait forever for you to come & try to stop their master plan. These are some of the reasons why D&D's creator Gary Gygax emphasized to GMs that "strict time records must be kept".
• DOMAIN PLAY, HIRELINGS/FOLLOWERS & MASS COMBAT: Old-School D&D often had PCs employing hirelings and henchmen at lower levels, and allowed higher-level characters to attract followers, build a stronghold (e.g. castle, temple, wizard tower, guild house), and begin "domain play" - i.e. ruling a geographic area & fighting against or allying with neighboring factions - which connected D&D with its roots in wargaming. Our games will mostly focus on low-to-mid-level adventures that precede epic-level domain play, but we're open to letting PCs hire NPC hirelings and/or staging massive battles using various OSR "mass combat" rules. I'm also open to allowing players to take over running some of the world's major NPCs in the way the OSR blogger Jeffro Johnson has promoted as "patron play", since this lightens the load for GMs.
• ANTI-CANON VS ESTABLISHED SETTINGS: While many OSR games tend to use lightly-sketched or undefined "anti-canon" settings that are filled in by using a mix of random tables, player ideas and GM fiat, we may also set adventures in established fantasy settings from novels, movies & RPGs that are already fleshed out with great locations, interesting NPCs, and lots of lore.
• HEXCRAWLS VS POINTCRAWLS VS THEATER OF MIND: Although some OSR gamers have revived hex maps and detailed rules for overland travel & exploration (a.k.a. hexcrawls), these can sometimes be cumbersome in online play. So when traveling between locations is more important than exploration, we may use a "pointcrawl" method where notable locations are shown as points on the map connected by lines indicating possible paths, or we may use the "theater of the mind" method where movement & distances are even more abstracted into something like "3 days travel over rough terrain". For OSR games with highly strategic combat where tracking the PC's positioning & movement matters, we may use a "virtual tabletop" that simulates the miniatures & grid that old-school games used to employ for determining battle lines. However, for OSR games that have a more narrative approach to combat (i.e. like the description of a fight scene you'd read in a fantasy novel), we'll use the theater-of-mind approach.
• A.I. ASSISTANCE: Since we're assuming the vast majority of GMs and players aren't experienced fantasy writers or method actors but still aspire to improve their roleplaying skills, we encourage the use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. They can help generate evocative descriptions of scenes, flesh out NPCs & special items on the fly, help players improvise dramatic dialogue, and make descriptions of combat more cinematic. (Some OSR gamers disdain AI since it didn't even exist in the early days of gaming, but we're using it as training wheels until our natural creative abilities improve. AI chatbots are especially helpful for GMs who want to run a player-driven sandbox adventure, since this requires constant improvisation as players make unforeseen choices.)
• OSR RULESETS: Rather than sticking with one particular OSR ruleset, we'll play-test several of them so our members can get a sense of their advantages and shortcomings. OSR-related games can be loosely categorized into 4 categories:
  (1) "Classic OSR" generally refers to "retro-clones" that repackage & streamline the rules of early editions of D&D like the White Box, B/X, BECMI or 1st Edition AD&D without changing too much (e.g. OSRIC, Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord).
  (2) "OSR-adjacent" games mix original D&D rules with some modern game mechanics you wouldn't see in old-school D&D like armor as damage reduction, non-Vancian magic (i.e. no daily spell slots), advantage/disadvantage on die rolls, and/or action/luck points that can modify die rolls (e.g. Castles & Crusades, Whitehack, The Black Hack, Shadowdark, Worlds Without Number).
  (3) "New School Revolution" (NSR or NuSR) games combine rules-light OSR design principles with some unique game mechanics that are very different from original D&D (e.g. Dungeon World, Cairn) and/or include horror & science fiction elements in a way that alters or abandons the standard fantasy elements familiar from original D&D (e.g. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Into the Odd, Troika).
• (4) "Free Kriegspiel Revival" (FKR) games take the OSR minimalist principles of "rulings not rules" and "roleplaying not roll-playing" to the extreme and keep the die rolls very simple or dispense with die rolls & rely entirely on GM fiat to adjudicate the outcome of player actions (e.g. Tiny Dungeon, Barons of Braunstein, Amber Diceless RPG, Any Planet Is Earth, Old Freestyle Revival).
  After checking out several of these game systems, we can figure out how to combine the best parts with our own house rules. Luckily, unlike many TTRPGs, the OSR & NSR games tend to have a small set of core rules that can fit on a one-page "cheat sheet", so it's easy to learn a different system and start playing 5-10 minutes later. Many games offer a "quick-start" version of their core rulebook for free online, so startup cost isn't a barrier. (Note: Click on the name of the OSR games above and you can download their rules for free.)
• NON-GAMING SESSIONS: Since OSR games tend to attract players interested in game design, we may occasionally host meetups on GM techniques, the merits of different game mechanics & house rules, tips on roleplaying drawn from improv & voice acting, world building methods from the top fantasy authors, ways to make medieval combat feel more realistic from practitioners of Historic European Martial Arts (HEMA), etc.

Since OSR games are a niche hobby and it's often hard to find players, we'll be playing online via Zoom which enables us to tap into a much larger pool of potential players. I'm opening this group up to interested people anywhere & everywhere!