On OSR Games and why i love them
There's something about old school tabletop roleplaying games that I really really enjoy.
All cards on the table: I play all kinds of games. My good friend and editor of this blog here can tell you that I am a Pathfinder Second Edition evangelist lol. And I also play in some very fun Vampire: the Masquerade V5 chronicles GM’d by the same editor.
But my obsession for some time now has been old school games! (be it in style or actually old)
It started with me watching a youtube video. I used to watch a lot of D&D related videos, advice and what not, to improve what I did at the table.
I got intrigued by it! I kept looking for more content about this style of play and seeing more and more similarities on how I already run my games.
The focus on exploration, on player ingenuity, and in rulings built organically at the table with the players spoke to me, as did this more lethal approach to the game. The characters are heroes, of course, and they have special abilities, but that doesn't make them invincible.
I read the Questing Beast blog, I got into the Greyhawk setting, and read blogs related to it. The blogs and community around the setting were the best part; that sense of a living, breathing community of people around these settings and games they loved also drew me in.
This same curiosity, and the talks I saw in the spaces for OSR games, drove me to start reading them. Starting with the New Big Ones™ and the Old Classics™, the more I read, the more I was drawn to this style of play, and more bits and pieces got adapted to our current games. And eventually I got the chance to play one of them.
The first Proper OSR game we ran was Mausritter A sword and whiskers game, It was a blast! The brave adventuring mice almost died battling fierce crickets, and character creation of a whole party took under 40 minutes. It was amazing. My main gaming group was open to trying new games of this style, and I had just the thing in store for a while.
SURPRISE: THIS WAS A POST ABOUT FMC ALL ALONG. FMC (Fantastic Medieval Campaigns) is a game that has been my white whale since I started digging into the OSR. I was there in the trenches of (the now dead) twitter when Marcia published the game and it was love at first read. My poor friends just heard me talk about this game for hours every time we hung out, and I tried to make them read it many, many times. It took time, and the Mausritter game session, but I got them to try it, and it is now the most frequent game we play.
So why this game, out of all the games in the OSR? Why is an OD&D Clone the game I play the most? Why not OSE, the most popular and more supported one, why not OSRIC, a game loved by most of the AD&D crew and the Greyhawk community, why not The White Box or Shadowrun? Why FMC?
Because i like it, that's the very simple explanation lol. No, but seriously, it’s because of how simple and straightforward it is. It manages to keep the balance of those little brown booklets that started the madness that is TTRPGs, and make it an actually legible game.
Following something that Matt Colville said in his latest video, OD&D wasn't a game at that time, it was more of an add-on to an expansion to the game. It was meant to be played with a board game that almost nobody owned, and still, people's imaginations were sparked by those little brown booklets, and in every table a game got developed out of those confusing and poorly explained rules.
Every table did things differently, yet all of them were playing D&D, and that was exactly what I wanted out of this game. Marcia's version of the rules is way less confusing to read and way easier to understand, but those rules are still so barebones and so vague that I feel they create the perfect ecosystem to making a truly personalized game for every table, a framework to make our own dragon game in a way that we like, and is fast and fun to play.
We have been running a mostly monthly game of FMC for some time. College, work and life get in the way sometimes, but we always try to make time to play. A session can take as little as two hours, but because of the way this game is structured, a lot can happen in that short time. It is interesting to see my players adapt to this new game and this new playstyle. We keep coming up with rulings on the fly, and adapting them in the time between games.
So if my objective is to make FMC "my own", why don't I just make my own game? Well, that's the goal over time, of course. Like every amateur overachiever "game designer", I want to take my rulings and my framework, polish it, and make my own game. But I learned that making your own game means taking a lot of active design choices. How many ability scores? Do I want this game to have skills? What type of dice to use? All that jazz… and if I'm honest with you, dear reader, I don't feel like making those choices at this point in time. I feel far more comfortable working from the framework of this beautiful work of love, and adapting it to our needs.
So I'm looking forward to continuing to play this game, and engaging with the OSR communities that I love. Reading new blog posts, new games, speaking to folks and making new friends. This year, I would like to start a Game Club with my super cool editor to share our love of TTRPG and those games with folk in la ciudad de la furia But I'm also looking forward to playing with new people online, maybe finally making that open table or West Marches game I always wanted to have, running FMC. So if you are interested in that, hit me up :3
Thank you for reading and happy gaming!