The Good Parts of Old School RPGs.

What do I enjoy most about old school rpgs? It's the mapcrawling procedures.

There's this idea in some rpg design circles that stuff isn't real until it happens at the table—in other words, it doesn't really exist until you introduce it to the group's shared imagined space. But with old school mapcrawling games, that isn't really true. The map IS real, even when only the DM knows what's on it. That map that you the players discover gradually, that the DM reveals to you in play, is the same as it was before you knew what was on it. The true main responsibility of the old school DM is to make sure that map stays real.

This produces a different experience from a game where the setting you are exploring is created by improv. You can have a sense of exploration with improv, but you're not really discovering something, you're creating it. When the DM keeps the map secret from you, and maintains the integrity of its contents, the feeling that you get is one of interacting with a place that is real, that exists beyond both the decisions of your characters and the narrative arcs of their deeds, beyond even the sense of narrative that players try to impose on the game. This can be anti-climactic. It can even be boring for some people. If what you want out of rpg is to experience the dramatic arc of an action movie, a mapcrawl is going to fall short. But it's great if you want the feeling of discovering something with substance, exploring it, and finding out how it works. That, to me, is the heart of old school games.

This happens at the organization level, in procedures. Players need to be committed to exploring the map, the DM needs to be committed to managing it and revealing it. You need to know how much you can explore at a time, what the dangers are, how the map reacts, how much can be discovered, what sorts of tactical options are allowed. And there needs to be opportunities for interactions beyond just the dangers and the rewards. But these things can all be expressed in terms of step-by-step procedures and attitudes the participants should adopt. They're independent of what dice you roll and what stats you make your characters out of.

When it comes to the resolution mechanics of old school and osr games, I can pretty much take 'em or leave 'em. The trend in osr games toward being primarily rules lite systems over refining and exploring the mapcrawling process isn't something I'm excited about at all, really. Some ideas are clever, sure, but I don't think any of them are vital to having a good map-focused experience. I've run games in the old school style using only the rules from Apocalypse World and the only thing that I felt was really lacking was that read a sitch didn't work very well as a mechanism for finding secret doors.

But it doesn't seem like the massive variety in rpg rules these days has ever been fully applied to mapcrawling procedures. Of course, old rules from the 80s aren't the only option anymore, but even so. It feels like a underdeveloped area of game design to me, and I would like more of it. I don't think anybody's likely to listen to me, so maybe if I want something I'll have to write it myself. Which I should probably do instead of writing this.

Fuck the OSR

 In my experience, the OSR is kind of two parts. One part is about nostalgia and how it was in the old days, and that part tends to attract a lot of reactionary bigots and creeps. It isn't all bad, and for the most part I've found it easy to ignore the jerks, but then again, I'm also not that interested in recapturing the 70s.

The other part of the OSR is the progressive, weird, and generally more inclusive scene that wants to take the old rules and make something radically new with them. The problem with this part of the OSR is that it also decided to support one dude's massive campaign of harassment. It might be a little reductive to say that everyone in that part of the OSR either a) supported harassment guy, b) stayed friends with people who supported him, or c) left, but it sure felt like that sometimes.

Granted, there were plenty of people who got fed up with his harassment and stopped supporting him before 2019. Those people showed me they don't support harassment. And that's great. I'm still on good terms with some of those people, as individuals.

But there were also plenty of prominent people in the OSR (as well as prominent rpg companies outside the OSR) who continued to support him in spite of everything he did, all the way up until the rape allegations happened. And then they apologized for getting caught supporting a rapist and walked away like that was the end of it. Those people told me, loud and clear, that they will support a guy harassing me out of this hobby, as long as he's not a rapist.

And what I haven't seen in the two years since then is a whole lot of accountability for that. If someone supported harassment before, I have to assume they would do so again, unless I see proof that they have changed and they know better now (and are committed to doing better now). For the most part, that hasn't happened, or at least not where I've seen it. Instead, every contact I have with the OSR includes someone who refused to stop supporting a harasser. Every OSR forums space. Every list of OSR recommendations. Every OSR person's friends list. Every photo I see of my own book if it's not alone.

And that is why I'm not all that interested in the OSR as a scene, or a community, anymore.

And it's not like these and other problems don't exist elsewhere in rpg communities, but trying to be part of the online OSR scene was the most miserable for me. At least in the indie/storygames scene, public bad behaviour seems to lead to serious consequences a lot quicker, even if some fairly serious issues stay private.

Anyway, I'm not looking to start any fights over this. I prefer to deal with this stuff by just leaving, or putting as much distance as I can between myself and people who are a problem for me. That includes pulling away from people who stay close to problem people, whether they know about the problems or not.

This is just an explanation of why you might not see me getting involved in things with other people.

A New Blog

 So, this is new. Probably the best time for me to get onto blogger was a decade ago (or even earlier). Oh well, might as well see what happens here now.

Red Box Vancouver was a public D&D campaign that existed from 2009 to around 2015 or thereabouts, and sort of continued for a few years after that in private campaigns. I'm not the one who created it, but I was the main person in charge for most of its run. I used the name for publishing when I started making books, mostly because it was right there.

But that game's been all over and done with for a while now. I mostly just play in games when other people invite me, and I haven't really organized a game myself in years (although I may have to start again after the pandemic, just so I can play this fucking Dune board game). It might have been a good idea to swap it out for a new name a while ago, but the next best time is now.

So I'm gonna be Chthonstone Games from now on.

This is a blog for tabletop role-playing game design. Presumably I'll focus a lot on old school mapcrawling, as well as the trad end of indie games (PbtA, FitD, etc). I might get into some comparisons between the game design styles and cultures of the two scenes, but let's not get our hopes up too quickly. I'm assuming this will be a space for long-form content that I would have posted on a forum (when I had ones I liked posting on), that I don't really want to put on twitter directly, but who knows what could happen.