I write a short paragraph about every NPC that has a name. OK the 10 stevedores do not have descriptions. If they are wroth naming they are worth a minute of detail.
I was speaking of Nowhere nowhen PCs because of GM abuse. “Oh you have a Mother? Not any more, the Evil King killed her for…reasons.”
It’s not necessary to write a novel, but a few words on whence my PC comes But some background gives me a grounding to develop the character.
OSR = Dungeon Crawl Classics, for example?
I tried it, multiple times in fact, with absolutely no luck by any of my in-person group wanting to get past the initial trial of making 3-5 characters and piecemeal-ing the survivors into a party. By the end of the run it was so brutal that they already felt burnt out from their losses. Overall, I think it’s nostalgia that keeps it going, but I don’t know past our generation whether or not it’ll continue long-term as the industry continues to evolve.
Not even the developer calls DCC an OSR game, but I have to give props to Goodman Games. Their Dungeon Crawl adventures in the early 3rd edition days helped keep the interest going for “old-school” style of play even when hardly anyone was doing old school rules.
@Talmek if you want a concise and well-researched article on what is and isn’t OSR check this out.
To my mind OSR represents a counter to the Indie Revolution that sprang up with the argument that the former style of play (D&D) was flawed in a variety of ways and that the solution is so-called “Story Games”. Their marketing strategy pissed off a lot of traditional players who didn’t like to be told that they were experiencing “BadWrongFun”, and so the OSR sprang up to basically tell the Indie Revolution that their products were garbage and a fierce marketing war broke out between the two factions. Now it seems Story Games didn’t really take off as a concept except among a certain group of Story Gamers in the hobby, and so the war petered out, thank goodness. OSR remains and is beloved by many, and ignored by the rest. Most people it seems are glued to WotC one way or the other, and 5e is the new king of the hill for the majority of players.
As for me, I feel like the Tom Bombadil of the hobby. I created my own homebrew version named Elthos back in 1978 and have been playing it happily with my friends ever since. I have no need or wish to use other systems as mine already does all that I want and need it to. I’ve had a consistant bi-weekly game for decades. In recent years (since 2009) I started doing prose actual play writeups of our game sessions (Elthos RPG: Elthos RPG Actual Play Stories). The stories cover two of the worlds I created with Elthos (the goal of which is to make world building for my games as easy as possible), one being the World of Elthos, and the other being a Cosmic Sci-Fi Fantasy named “The Way of All Flesh”. Both have been a lot of fun.
Some people have told me that my Elthos system fits into the OSR. Others say that it doesn’t. I don’t think there’s a definitive definition of OSR by which one could determine that one way or the other. A lot of people think OSR is one thing, while others who are equally vested in the OSR think it’s something else.
Overall, I think OSR games sound like fun, and I know there’s a lot of people who enjoy them, but like the OP pointed out, most people are doing 5e and that’s the 800 lbs gorilla of the hobby, and so OSR is alive and well, but not a dominant force in the world of RPGs from what I can see.
Likewise I use a system I call MD&D. It does what I want.
Definition? Old School “That which is not forbidden is permitted.” Wherein New School typified by Lizards is “That which is not permitted is forbidden.” D&D 3 is very much a “No” system. I prefer “Yes” systems, the default answer to any question is yes. Wherein my experience with 3E is the default is No.
… find a way to develop material for TSR-era D&D. Nothing more and nothing less. It’s what the Google+ was for and it still means this on the older forums like Dragonsfoot and Odd74.
Reddit/OSR and DTRPG push the canard that OSR is “whatever you want it to mean” the former because being precise feels discriminatory and icky and the latter because it benefits their bottom line. The rest of the world knows what it is. A way to make TSR D&D stuff.