Old School Evolution

For January 2019, I've created a little one-page game for Tam's OMGAM project.  It is an "OSR" game, and I when I first pitched the idea I had joked that I would make a game each month, parodying the evolution of RPG styles over the decades.

I never really planned on doing that of course, but I do plan to keep making monthly games for this project.

This particular game started as a list of stats that you could "roll under" to do things.  It doesn't specify a number of characters per player, so you could run it "troupe style" if you wanted.  It doesn't specify any hitpoints or combat rules, or really much of anything.  If you wanted to have characters fight, they'd make opposed rolls and the results could be discussed by the Table and adjudicated by the Ref.

It is designed to really revel in the "Rulings not Rules" mantra from the OSR.  This isn't really a good or bad thing, it is just a thing, and it has advantages and disadvantages like anything else.

"Rulings" are great with light systems.  They are great for rapid game-play, not being limited to what was written in a book, not being bound by whatever artificial constraints were presented in the limited page-count of the original published text by the limited imaginations of the original authors.  Great for letting your table and your players take something, run with it, and really make it your own.

But, as others have pointed out, it is bad for consistency.  As the Ref makes rulings to decide how things work, players expect those things to work consistently in the future.  They expect future rulings to flow logically from previous ones.  They expect a predictable world; even a fictitious world should obey consistent internal logic to produce predictable results, otherwise players experience inconsistent results and can no longer predict the outcomes of their actions.  And they stop having fun.

Being able to predict outcomes is pretty important.  It is why young children like to watch the same animated films repeatedly.  The human brain is a little pattern recognition engine, and it likes to know what is going to happen next based on prior experience.

When a game expands to the scale that simple "rulings" can no longer deliver a predictable experience, then the whole thing falls apart.

When I was a teenager, we had giant binders that collated our rulings and hose rules into a single reference.  It was like our own ever growing Magna Carta of Dungeons and Dragons.  We had basically made our own game, from the foundation that the original publisher had given us.  And this is the ultimate draw of "Rulings" -- it lets every play group be their own game designers.

And that was always a big draw for me: the idea that we would take the outline of a game, and then gin up our own thing with it.  There are limits though.

Thirty years later, I don't want to make a whole binder of home-brew material.  I don't even own a Trapper Keeper anymore.  These days, I want something that sits in the middle ground.  Something that presents a logical framework, that enables rulings to be consistent but does not require a lot of book keeping.  Rather than a Magna Carta full of specific legislation, I want some broad guidelines that will let us paint in a consistent style.

And so I think that I'll be writing a few expansions for this little OSRdF thing.  It isn't super serious, but I'll explore some of the shapes that games can take through iterative development.