Another Shot at Theorizing the OSR
Some interesting conversation recently around the “nature” of the OSR. This topic waxes and wanes, and will probably never really be settled, but for what it’s worth (almost nothing) I’d like to share a thought that occured to me as I was reading Brendan’s post on the topic.
Like Richard, I have my attachments to the term OSR. I’m not convinced by Marcia’s positioning of that attachment along the axis of an originary myth, accurate or otherwise. As Brendan notes in the post linked above, such originary claims can be made after the fact. In other words, they might more accurately be interpreted as speech or textual acts that mediate an ongoing social formation, rather than telling its history.
F**k-You Design
I want to talk about a long-standing tendency that’s been bothering me in OSR-inflected design spaces.
Doing the Impossible
Lately I've been riding the bandwagon of interest in FKR-inspired design. I'm especially intrigued by diegetic advancement. This is a concept that holds a lot of promise in terms of replacing my least favourite legacy system: XP. However, I'm not convinced diegetic advancement has quite arrived in terms of implementation.
My only take on AC
I can't believe I'm even writing about ascending/descending AC. Blame Marcia, who's doing some fascinating work with the old Chainmail tables.
D&D Theology in The Raven Tower
Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower is a short fantasy novel told from the perspective of a demigod. Like all her other novels, it is a deft and thoughtful exploration of a way of being fundamentally different from our own. More relevant to this blog, it is also a compelling account of how deities (and their clerics) in your standard D&D setting might work.
Ideating City Adventures, or 12 Ruinations of Pumpai
Social Procedures in Practice: A report
GM Anxiety and the West Marches
It should be no secret to anyone who's been following what I do lately that I think of GMing as craft. What I mean by that is enough for its own blog post (and also a podcast).
A lot of the talk about the social dynamics of GMing focus on power imbalances, and the outsized influence and control a GM can exert. I agree to an extent, but for reasons that also lie outside the scope of this post, I believe that this imbalance is not as necessarily or intrinsically problematic as some would contend. I also think it can make for a very rich game, and affords qualities of play that cannot be readily achieved through more balanced distributions of narrative control. Again, though, that's another post.
There is also a flipside to the social power arguments that I find absent, or at least underexplored, which is the vulnerability and social pressure attached to GMing. Admittedly, more balanced power dynamics offset this. However, proceeding from the assumption that assymmetry can be desirable, I find a more robust engagement with the subject lacking. These matter have become pronounced of late in my experiences running my home game, which has recently transitioned to a West Marches-style format. In this post I'm going to identify what I consider some significant blind spots in the ways we tend to talk about running this kind of game, especially when it comes to its experiential dimensions. Moving forward, I'll be devoting some thought to how I've been managing these issues in my campaign of late.
Social Procedures
I've been running OSE a bunch lately and decided it might be helpful for my players if there's a codified version of the way I run social encounters for them to consult.* Since I wrote them up anyway, I thought I'd share them here. Link immediately below, brief design notes after the jump.
Text to Table episode 2: Nate Lumpkin -- Statting Gods and Dating Goblins
The second episode of my podcast is online! Go listen to it!
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