On the front page of the blog I've got what amounts to the raison d’être of this blog, “talking about OSR and traditional games”. The arguments about what OSR games should be is big issue of discussion, there’s not even a good agreement what the acronym expands to – is it R for Renaissance or even for Revolution?
I might get into that in the future, but better minds have tried to fathom out the various histories and traditions within that field.
But much to my surprise, the “traditional” part needs some explanations, too, which is what I’m trying to do here in this first post, before I get into actual nuts and bolts (I promise, there won’t be that many meta discussions here).
Let’s start with what I was working for the last few years, from famed designer S. John Ross’ RPG Lexicon:
Traditional Roleplaying Game: The once-standard form of tabletop RPG, where each player plays (makes decisions for/as, and to some extent portrays) a character, and the Game Master shoulders the rest (including portraying and determining everything about the remainder of the gameworld, and providing the sensory input for the PCs).
As with many bits and parts of RPG theory, this seems to be in reaction to the rise of the so-called story games in the early 2000s. So in other words, it’s trying to define the vast majority of games that existed before the rise of something new. With the dividing line being on how collaborative the players work on creating the experience (often a more narrative story).
If one accepts that this is a good device to separate past and contemporary role-playing games into (mostly) two camps, this seems like a good definition. It’s surprisingly not a too common term, as you mostly find story games being a fixed terminology, to name something that sticks out, with the rest being just the “normal” baseline. A role-playing game, y’ know? This mirrors a lot of other groupings, where it’s much easier to call out something new or “other”.
I think this is one of the reason why it was easy to re-purpose the term. In discussions in various internet fora and social media sites (e.g. Mastodon), I encountered more and more people having a different definition of “trad”, now not used to differentiate from story games, but from what they considered the OSR style.
If there’s no prior source, this probably stems from the Retired Adventurer blog post Six Cultures of Play:
Trad (short for “traditional”)
Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM’s.
The latter part is in alignment with Ross’s definition, and there’s even a link to his glossary. The new–and slightly confusing–part is at the very beginning, adding an explicit goal to this, one that might even turn “trad” into something it was set out to contrast against: a narrative story-game.
I won’t go too far into the rest of the post, which seemingly creates a few terms out of the ether. Never mind the whole “culture” aspect, which creates borders where none are–in this writer’s opinion, you could easily define a handful of traits and then the cultures would dissolve in how much these are present, with almost an unavoidable mixture being present in each of them.
But it’s been a successful essay, and at least in my particular bubble, this definition of “trad” has stuck–I also hear “classic” play a bit, gladly nobody seems to be using the “OC Play” terminology, which seems like something a fan fiction forum would do. Sometimes it’s expanded to encompass all the games between whatever counts as original D&D and story games, but quite commonly you find the notion that whatever the author calls OSR is not trad.
In the end, I restrict my ceterum censeo’s to Mastodon discussions, and have decided to just include both kinds of games explicitly here. I’ve been through the fire and flames of the online discussions about what’s really “Simulationism” or “Gamism”, and have no real wish to repeat this.
Hot take
I kinda-sorta believe that a lot of this theory wouldn’t exist if the people involved would play more. It's mostly game masters talking about what they would do and justifying their past and future actions. You rarely hear anything about this from the people who are in their campaigns, whether it’s new college students or greybeards that run their own homebrew world since Phil Collins still had hair.
So having gotten that out of the way, let’s start some actual good content blogging!