The Pathology of Tabletop RPGs Part 1: You're Playing D&D Wrong

Or, why the OSR is superior

Series Introduction: RPGs and the Nerd Ghetto

Why aren’t tabletop RPGs more popular than they are?

Dungeons and Dragons seems to be popular enough at first glance. It’s doing some Googleable hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. Movies, tie-ins, video games, all that bullshit. You don’t need me to recite a bunch of figures we’ll both immediately forget.

But storytelling is a fundamental human tendency. Every society in human history has contained storytellers— many of them professional— and the ability to tell some sort of story is a prerequisite for participation in social life.

Viewed through a narrow lens, Dungeons and Dragons is a game, like Monopoly or Candyland; viewed more expansively, it’s the first non-technological breakthrough in the structure of storytelling since the development of the novel.

At its core, Dungeons and Dragons is randomness-mediated collaborative storytelling. Casting aside the statistics and the character classes and the swords and sorcery, the game is a form of improvisation in which a narrator tells a story, the audience members are each assigned a character to control, and conflicts between the participants regarding story outcomes are decided by rolling dice.

Frankly, it’s remarkable that such a fundamental structure was developed so late in the history of our species; the components of Dungeons and Dragons— dice and writing implements— have been available for thousands of years, yet it wasn’t until the 1970s that the artform emerged. There are a few theories as to why it took so long which I find credible:

• Dirt-cheap writing implements and stationary were necessary to make consistency between sessions practical

• It wasn’t until recently that a mass-market of adolescents had sufficient leisure time to devote to such elaborate games

• Projecting player identities onto a fictional “secondary world” requires a level of media-literacy which wasn’t achieved until mass media was developed; Tolkien broke the first ground here.

  • This is the theory I favor— that D&D requires you to care about stories that are patently untrue, a condition which broke suspension of disbelief until audiences grew canny enough to accept a story without a plausible frame. That’s why fairy-tales take pains to establish that they take place “in a faraway land”, and why early fantasy fiction like Dracula and Frankenstein involved elaborate plausibility-generating mechanisms like letters and diaries.

Whatever the cause, the elements which gave rise to Dungeons and Dragons are circulating ever-more-freely in society, as the explosive growth and legitimation of fantasy and science fiction storytelling indicate.

And yet, for all of this, D&D remains the preserve of arch-nerds. D&D products grow more popular all the time— novels, video games, movies, toys, what have you; but the actual game which gave rise to the franchise, the fundamental human activity of sitting around with friends telling stories, has lagged far behind.

D&D’s 5th edition, marked a high point, to be sure, a huge influx of new players; but even these numbers are paltry in comparison to the medium’s potential. And it is a medium; as such, tabletop RPGs shouldn’t be measured against individual franchises— “Pokemon”, “Magic: The Gathering”— they should be measured against other mediums— “trading cards” “video games”. Until RPGs subsume that kind of footprint, I think it’s fair to say that the hobby is in poor health.

I have developed a theory which explains the ghettoization of role playing games into a nerd hobby, and I’ll be unrolling this theory across three posts:

1. You’re Playing D&D Wrong, or, Why the OSR is Superior

2. How Nerd Pathology Constrains Dungeons and Dragons

3. Storytelling Games Could (Probably) Kill D&D

This first post will be dedicated to an exploration of the original sin of Dungeons and Dragons: the conflict between player choice and narrative coherence, and how the mechanics of the game exacerbate that conflict.

You’re Playing D&D Wrong, or, Why the OSR is Superior

What D&D Is and How It Works

While Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs, as distinct from role playing video games) form an expansive tent, their tentpole, the game which defines them in the zeitgeist, is Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D is a form of collaborative storytelling in which any number of players (usually 3-5) control characters in a fictional scenario constructed by a referee, the Dungeon Master. The players control only the actions of their player characters, avatars they create to participate in the game world. In D&D, these characters are basically always warriors of some kind— swordsmen, wizards, assassins, what have you. The DM controls every aspect of the game’s world outside of the player characters, including non-player characters and the physical environment.

Dungeons and Dragons follows a strict procedure of play, a procedure which is often left implicit in rulebooks and manuals such that players are left to infer it on their own. It follows these steps:

1. The Dungeon Master describes the physical environment the players find themselves in

   1. You’re standing in a stone prison cell. One wall is composed of iron bars. The room has a table and a bed. A guard stands watch outside, facing away from you.

2. The players tell the DM what they’d like their characters to do.

   1. I try to reach through the bars and choke the guard

3. If the thing they’re trying to do is accounted for by the game’s rules, the DM explains the rules and the players roll dice and consult their character’s statistics to determine if they succeed or fail

   1. Alright, that’s an opposed strength check, with advantage because you surprise him. Roll a d20 plus your strength score.

4. If the thing they’re trying to do isn’t covered by the game’s rules, the DM can decide their success or failure however he wishes

   1. No, the guard is standing too far away. You stretch your arms, but you can’t reach him.

5. Once the player’s actions have been resolved, the cycle repeats with the DM describing how the physical environment around the players has changed.

   1. Success. The guard falls to the ground unconscious, and you notice a keyring attached to his belt.

This is the fundamental procedure of D&D. Other procedures can be interjected to simulate specific scenarios (for instance, using graph paper and tokens to represent a battlefield positions in place of ambiguous narration) but the core technology of the storytelling adheres to this format.

D&D’s Original Sin

The D&D procedure introduces a fundamental tension into the process of storytelling— the players and the DM are both competing for control of the story. Put another way, the animating tension of Dungeons and Dragons is the tension between narrative coherence and player choice.

The object of the Dungeon Master is to create a compelling world for the players to engage with, a world which produces dramatic outcomes which draw their attention and investment (“narrative coherence”). The object of the players is to ensure that their characters succeed in achieving their goals, to manifest their characters’ desires within the game world (“player choice”).

There are two routes to resolving this tension: simulation, and narrative. The story of the nerd-ghettoization of TTRPGs is the story of the transition of D&D from the former to the latter approach.

The remainder of this post will outline this story in three ways— first, by giving a historical overview of D&D’s transformation; second, by giving an high-level analysis of how D&D’s most fundamental mechanics impact storytelling; and third, by countering common arguments which have arisen in defense of narrative-forward D&D by recourse to notion of cognitive load.

D&D’s Mechanical History: A Thumbnail Sketch

Luckily, we don’t need a rambling, longwinded history of D&D to understand what’s at stake here. We just need to separate the history of the game into three essential phases: Early D&D, Modern D&D, and the Old School Revival.

Early D&D comprises the phase from the game’s creation from its invention in the early 1970s to its mainstream breakout in the 1980s.

During this time, much of the procedure of Dungeons and Dragons was left implicit in the game’s manuals and published materials, up to and including the five-step cycle I outlined above. Instead of these conventions being formalized in the gamebooks, they were transmitted piecemeal, either person-to-person via the giant games of 50+ players organized by D&D’s creators, or via opinion columns and asides buried in magazines.

The core of D&D at this phase was a simulationist approach to storytelling. Every pertinent aspect of the adventure being described was subject to established, written procedure. Parties of player characters advanced through dungeon hallways at a set pace of so many feet per round; every set number of rounds, a roll was conducted on the random monster table, and the party would be ambushed. If the party did sufficient damage to the monsters, the DM would roll a morale check, and the monsters would flee. Rolls were conducted studiously and rarely fudged; if players died to an unlucky blow, if they ventured too deep into the dungeons and got in over their heads, that was tough luck. Players were encouraged to come to sessions prepared with multiple characters premade, as they couldn’t expect their low-level heroes to survive.

The “active” role of the Dungeon Master was twofold. Firstly, to fill in the gaps in the rules with purpose-built systems designed on the fly and codified in writing (“The manual doesn’t a mechanism for inventing new magic spells, so this is how you can do it.”) Secondly, to employ the procedures for generating dungeons and the fantasy worlds surrounding them, filling these empty structures with thematically rich content.

This was how play proceeded in the games directly attached to founding figures like Gary Gygax. They followed a style of play which would later be termed “West Marches”, in which a pool of 20 to 60 potential players would supply 4 or 5 participants at a time. PCs would venture forth into the wilds from safe settlements at the beginning of the session, and elaborate timekeeping techniques would be employed to ensure consistency and logical coherence from game to game. Any combination of players could drop into or out of a session with minimal fuss, and parties were free to choose their destination and goals at will from an expansive world map.

However, the structure of this style of play was communicated exceedingly poorly in the game’s written materials. Gygax and Arneson developed the game iteratively within a tightly-knit culture of war simulation enthusiasts, and frequently worked with implicit understandings which they failed to convey in the game’s manuals. (See Gygax’s insistence in Dragon Magazine that properly maintaining your setting’s calendar was the sine qua non of effective DMing, a stance which baffled the wider community of disconnected players.)

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As the game’s popularity increased in the early 1980s, the game’s “culture of play”, the implicit assumptions which DMs brought to the table, began to diverge from the game’s mechanical roots. This trend reached critical mass with the publication of Ravenloft, a D&D module by fantasy authors Tracey and Laura Hickman, which would establish the foundations of modern D&D.

A module, in D&D, is a book containing a pre-made adventure for Dungeon Masters to present to players. They had been a staple of the game since near the beginning, a means of generating revenue and fast-tracking DMs into the hobby by lowering the barrier to entry.

What set Ravenloft apart from prior modules was that where previous modules laid out locations in space— maps with keys describing the contents of rooms or buildings— this module combined maps of space with events in time. The gloomy kingdom of vampire Count Stradh von Zarovich was described in maps, as with a standard module, but the DM was additionally presented with a comprehensive sequence of events which the party would be led through— they would enter the kingdom via this road in particular, where they’d be ambushed by this many wolves, who would flee after this many had been killed, followed by a foreboding appearance by Stradh, who would fly away before the party had a chance to fight him.

Ravenloft reflected a fundamentally different style of play from traditional D&D, a style of play in which the Dungeon Master’s job was not referee, but narrator. It included a plethora of tips and tricks designed to manipulate the party into taking the correct actions at the correct times, tricks which would be expanded into a more coherent ethos in Hickman’s follow-up (with writing partner Margaret Weiss), Dragonlance.

Ravenloft sold like gangbusters, and Dragonlance was even bigger, incorporating as it did fantasy novel tie-ins. This financial success would fundamentally alter the culture of the game, and modules would increasingly be printed in this mode. Curated tours in time displaced open sandboxes in space as the basic structure of adventure. This created a problem: how can DMs keep their players on the rails they’ve laid out for them?

The answer which D&D developed to this question would constrain the development of its 2nd edition, and would reach it’s full zenith in the 3rd: by making combat more complicated, players could be distracted by close-ended encounters, and would be less tempted to throw the module or DM’s artfully constructed narrative off-track.

I will lay out the exact logic of this process later— it’s important— but for now all that we need to establish is that mechanics for combat increasingly became the primary focus of Dungeons and Dragons, the subject which subsumed the largest quantity of text within the rules and which took up the largest amount of players’ time and attention. This combat focus is the cornerstone of modern D&D, and has dominated not only this game but the TTRPG medium up to the present day.

This change coincided with D&D’s propulsion into the mainstream, and most people— players and onlookers both— understand the TTRPG hobby through this lens. RPGs are games where you roll dice in order to kill monsters. The problem-solving and exploratory elements of the game receded far, far into the background. A Dungeons and Dragons rulebook was a complex, math-heavy amalgamation of calculations describing various ways of killing monsters; character classes ballooned from a handful of primary roles (fighter, wizard, cleric, thief) to dozens of purpose-built archetypes. You might be a monk who punches monsters with his flurry of blows ability, or a bard who helps his party land attacks with his inspire courage ability. At each level-up, you’d be presented with a wide range of decisions about which dice you wanted to roll in order to kill monsters, questions with complex and debatable answers.

The storytelling element of the game didn’t vanish utterly; rather, it became the preserve of the Dungeon Master. Procedures for making decisions were gradually dropped as arbitrary or inauthentic. As players were sucked deeper and deeper into combat, DMs had more and more authority to dictate the course of events through the complex hoodwinking strategies pioneered in Ravenloft. Each session of D&D was a bespoke, handcrafted gift from the DM to their players.

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In the early 2000s, with the release of D&D’s ponderous, math-heavy 3rd edition, an insurgency of bloggers and forum posters developed a counterrevolutionary movement called the Old School Revival. The notion of the movement was simple— to reverse-engineer the structures and procedures of Dungeons and Dragons’ early years, prior to Ravenloft, in order to create a version of the game better aligned with its fundamental technologies.

Thousands and thousands of back-and-forth conversations of blogs and forum posts distilled a more-or-less agreed upon framework for distinguishing old-school D&D from modern D&D, a set of rules and conventions which have informed my above description of the hobby’s early days.

The purpose of the OSR was self-avowedly never to displace modern D&D; but as the principles of the movement were codified and began making their way into commercial products and bespoke game systems, it is undeniable that parts of the OSR entered into competition with D&D; for the finite cash and attention of TTRPG players, if not for anything so grandiose as the soul of the hobby.

The results of this competition were mixed. The OSR did manage to carve out a more-or-less profitable niche as an “advanced” form of the game, a landing zone for players experienced with but dissatisfied by modern D&D. Furthermore, the publishers of D&D were somewhat reactive to their arguments, and attempted with the 4th and 5th editions of the game to hybridize old-school and modern play (or claimed they did).

But the essential reversal of DM role from referee to narrator has never been undone within D&D proper, and no competitor from the OSR has managed to either poach a significant fraction of D&D players or attract a robust audience of new players. If this vision for the OSR is accepted— though, to be clear, most OSR pundits would deny that such goals were ever worthwhile— then the movement has been something of a failure.

In summary, the history of D&D’s relationship to the medium’s original sin spans three eras:

1. A simulationist origin

2. A narrativist present

3. A failed simulationist insurgency

However, to really understand the dynamics at play we need to turn from a discussion of history to a more abstract analysis of how RPGs work.

Simulation vs. Narrative

The core difference between old-school and contemporary D&D is whether the role of the DM is to reinforce or undermine the simulation constructed by the rules of the game.

The easiest way to understand the difference is to sketch out a test-case.

Imagine you’re DMing, and the players are embroiled in a climactic fight with the evil dragon which has been terrorizing the kingdom for the last six months of play. After a grueling hour of dice-rolling battle, the dragon scores a lucky critical hit with its fire breath and will burn 3/4 four PCs to cinders, killing them instantly.

What is the DM’s responsibility in such a situation?

In old-school D&D, the DM’s duty is to impartially uphold the rules of the simulation. A dragon is a powerful foe, one of the biggest threats in the Monster Manual. This dragon in particular fears the party, as they’ve been spoiling his plans across months of sessions. Logically, he would use his most powerful attack; if, so doing, he gets lucky and wipes the party out, so be it. The dice are to be rolled in plain view, and to fudge numbers, manipulate stats, or compel the dragon to go easy on the party would permanently undercut the mechanical reality of what a dragon is in the game’s simulation. Therefore, the PCs must die, and the survivors will be left to flee while the players grumble and pull out their spare character sheets to start anew.

However, D&D stories are high-stakes affairs. When you’ve been sinking months and months into the story of a single character, solving their problems and walking around in their skin, it’s natural to get attached. Players are liable to be upset if they’re dealt a raw deal at the hands of the dice, and a certain amount of fudging is appreciated as a matter of course.

Modern-school DMing is the ultimate outgrowth of this mindset, the product of 40 years of refinement in that direction. This understandable solicitude for player’s feelings has operated dialectically upon the mechanics of the game across editions, and the result has been the transformation of DM from impartial arbiter to entertainer.

To kill the party by a quirk of chance would be considered very bad DMing in such a culture. A DM facing such a dilemma would be advised to take one of two alternate paths:

• Constructing the dragon’s stats and the party’s faceoff with him ahead of time to ensure that the party is certain or near-certain to win

• Fudging the numbers and manipulating events in order to prevent the party from dying, either by having the dragon avoid its strongest attacks, or by misrepresenting the contents of the dice rolls

The DM starts from an understandable position, but left unchecked, their sympathy fundamentally transforms the game. They shift from referee to narrator, and so doing have invisibly shifted their goals.

Adventure as Location vs Adventure as Story

The outgrowth of this shift is the transformation I outlined in my overview of Ravenloft above. Once the DM allows himself to undermine the game’s simulation to achieve a desired outcome, the temptation to redispose the entire game however he sees fit becomes undeniable.

This manifests significantly in the construction of adventures as stories (arranged in time) as opposed to locations (arranged in space).

An old-school DM (or module designer; the argument is identical in either case) constructs an adventure by building a dungeon. The dungeon is a place- literally, a map- laid out spatially. Within this dungeon, situations are laid out and frozen in time until the players encounter them.

A skilled DM will do this by designing stalemates that the players can intervene in— “The Necromancer’s Army and the Goblin Gang are competing for control of the docks at Nighttown.” A less competent DM will do this by setting up situations which always begin just as the players approach them— “Jerem the hunter has been caught in a goblin snare and hangs upside down from a tree.” In either case, the situation begins in response to the players choosing to wander into it.

However, if a DM understands their role to be narrator and not referee, this schema presents obvious means of improvement. Superimposed over this disposition of situations in space, it can be tempting to create sequences of events in time.

For instance, perhaps the DM wants to make Jerem the Hunter’s situation a little more dynamic. Rather than simply hanging from a tree, he’s hanging from a tree over a spiked pit, and the rope is fraying.

So far, we haven’t diverged from the standards of Old School design. As long as Jerem starts slipping only after the players arrive, then his situation is still, functionally, at an impasse.

But lets say that the players are on a quest to find the Eye of Zanthar deep in the heart of the forest, and Jerem holds the only clue to its location. Now the players have to save Jerem. Worried that the party might not be able to think of a solution, the DM adds another NPC, Stella, who is caught in another snare on the side of the clearing. As the players enter the area, Stella shouts “Quick, push that boulder into the pit!”

Now the situation with Jerem has a problem, a solution, and a purpose. It’s essential that players resolve it in order to find the important treasure at the heart of the dungeon. It ceases to be a question of if the party will encounter and rescue Jerem, but of when; in that case, it becomes just as easy to think of Jerem’s situation as a location on a timeline, as to think of it as a location on a map.

Perhaps the DM still constructs a map, but, growing attached to a few dramatic moments like the Jerem situation, he wants to ensure that the players are certain to experience them. He creates a crumb-trail of situations which stand between the players and the treasure: they have to hear Jerem’s secret to open the temple, and then they have to find the emerald icon to disable the spear trap, and then they have to figure out which path to take in the maze— Jerem can help them here if they get stuck— and pretty soon what began as a location has transformed into series of events which the party can deviate from to explore some pointless rooms. To keep it straight in his head, he writes down a timeline of events which the party needs to complete one after another, and he can be confident that they will succeed in completing them because, if they fail at any step, he’ll fudge the numbers or make something up on the fly to save things.

The quest is a great success, and players enjoy how smoothly the twists and turns unfurl. Whenever players head off the scripted path, they’re disappointed by the lack of attention which has been invested in these areas, so they gradually stop experimenting with exploration, and learn to keep an eye out for the DM’s plot hooks instead— voices screaming “help”, fighting in the distance, landmarks NPCs have told them to look for. The DM picks up on this, and stops making maps altogether, in favor of stitching together a list of vignettes and prodding the party along between them. We’ve moved from a map, to a timeline.

In this thought experiment, we’ve taken the fundamental shift embodied in the loss of the DM-as-referee mindset, and charted a plausible course by which this transformation yields modern adventure design. By over-emphasizing their duty to entertain players with exciting setpieces, DMs are tempted to fudge the rules and rob players of their autonomy and ability to contribute to the game’s story. Rather than players constructing a story by wandering into disconnected situations and resolving them how they see fit, they instead proceed one stop at a time on a train ride through a place that doesn’t exist.

Of course, players are liable to muck this up.

How DMs Railroad

The players wander down a forest trail; “Help, help!” they hear a voice shout, “I’m falling into a spike pit!”

“Oldest trick in the book,” the Ranger reckons, “Gnolls are trying to lure us into an ambush with voice mimicry. I don’t have much HP left, let’s just ignore them.”

Now the DM is in a hell of a pickle. The party has to rescue Jerem, or they’ll never find a way into the forest temple, and the whole quest will grind to a halt. What is he to do?

Well, the party hasn’t seen Jerem yet. Perhaps a couple hours down the road, he stumbles out of a bush to meet them, upset that they failed to save him, with a harrowing tale of how he swung back and forth to fling himself free from the pit. Or perhaps it isn’t Jerem swinging above the pit at all— it’s Fabio, who can die without issue; Jerem is sitting on a rock right outside the temple’s entrance (the next clearing they enter at random) with a “Ho there adventurers! Let me show you how to enter the temple!” No matter what technique is employed, the outcome is that the party no longer has any say in Jerem’s life or death.

This process of suspended consequences is referred to as railroading, and it’s a staple of modern D&D. The techniques for it are manifold— “plot hooks” which present player characters with a compelling personal interest in the narrative, the “quantum ogres” technique by which important encounters always happen to take place at the next location players choose to visit, etc.— but the goal is always the same: to artfully massage the party into going where you’d like them to go and doing what you’d like them to do.

Railroading can be done with greater or lesser “skill”— more or less invisibly— and can be performed in the DM’s capacity as adventure designer (“I’m going to write my notes such that they will walk into these locations in this order no matter what direction they go”) or live at the table (“Shit, they were supposed to go West there. Well, I guess the bandit keep is to the North of the falls now.”) In either case, the transfer of narrative control from players to DM is the goal.

A well-seasoned modernist DM, alert to the anxieties and insecurities animating their poor players’ hearts, will disguise his railroading so artfully that the players never even realize they aren’t making real decisions. A normal DM will slip up, however, and this will prompt natural resentment.

“I thought we were playing a collaborative storytelling game,” the players might object, “but you’re the only one with any say in what happens!”

Since the mid-1980s, the design of Dungeons and Dragons has been pathologically bent on distracting players from this feeling.

Combat is a Mind-Prison

The greatest tool in the modernist DM’s railroading arsenal isn’t their tool at all; it’s a gift handed to them by the designers of the game.

The vast majority of Dungeons and Dragons’ printed rules and procedures, since the 2nd edition, have been dedicated to combat.

Combat is the central pillar of modern tabletop RPG gaming, just as exploration was/is the central pillar of the old school.

This is ideal for train-conductor DMs, because combat is a narrative event with a limited number of outcomes.

1. The party kills the enemy

2. The enemy kills the party

3. The party flees

4. The enemy flees

5. The party surrenders

6. The enemy surrenders

What’s more, a DM who is willing to fudge the rules can easily eliminate most of these options.

• He can manipulate stats and the outcomes of dice rolls at the table to ensure that the enemy doesn’t kill the party.

• He can prevent enemies from fleeing or surrendering by claiming they simply don’t want to do so.

• He can prevent enemies from accepting the party’s surrender, forcing them to fight on.

Given that players are only liable to flee if they’re losing, it’s absolutely trivial for a sufficiently dishonest DM to construct combat encounters which players always win by killing the enemy.

So long as players are sufficiently distracted via the mathematical expression involved in how they conduct fights— what class they’re playing as (fighter, paladin, wizard etc.), what abilities they use (sundering blow, fireball, force-palm, etc.), what weapons they use (bow, sword, nunchuk, etc.), what targets they aim at (the goblin on the left, the goblin on the right, etc.) and all the other minutiae of the system— the fact that what actually happens in every fight is both entirely the same and entirely beyond their control doesn’t bother them so much.

This is, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the DM, what modern Dungeons and Dragons actually is. The players listen to the Dungeon Master tell a story for a while, nodding and playing along; they take a break to play a math-heavy board game which it is impossible for them to lose; then they go back to listening to the DM’s story.

Proceduralism

Old school and old school revival D&D resolve the essential conflict between narrative coherence and player choice by pushing as hard in the direction of player choice as possible.

The means by which OSR games do this are twofold:

1. The substitution of locations and situations for timelines and events

2. Heavy use of procedures in place of DM decision-making

We’ve already talked about location-based adventure design, but the advantages of procedure-based play remain to be elucidated.

The bedrock understanding of OSR DMing is that the DM is a referee, not a storyteller. This process is continually reinforced by the DM’s willing surrender of his own discretion to procedures. Procedures in this instance are just defined as processes for generating outcomes without subjective input. For example:

• Monsters appear as a result of random dice rolls on the Wandering Monster table, rather than only appearing in hand-constructed set pieces.

• Rolls are conducted live in front of the players, so that DMs can’t fudge outcomes. (Some OSR game systems have the DM reveal enemy HP values to the players, to double down on this.)

• Players level up by obtaining treasure (often rolled on a random treasure table) rather than by killing monsters that the DM directly controls. This opens up opportunities for players to outmaneuver and avoid monsters, rather than having to fight.

• The DM’s role as dungeon-designer is generally conducted procedurally. The DM begins with a general idea for a dungeon, but lays out most of it by rolling on random tables.

  • These procedures often extend to generating maps of territories as well, with rules for climate, for weather, for populating settlements, for generating characters, you name it.

• Dungeon maps are taken as-written. The DM never alters what’s on the map, and adheres to a hierarchy of authority: Game Rules, Dungeon Map, Random Rolls, and at the bottom, His Own Discretion

• Player characters are always located in a layered stack of discrete locations: a mapped-out room in a dungeon, a grid square on a map of the kingdom. These locations always remain in the same place relative to each other, and players can move between them at will.

• Actions the players take require fixed, definite amounts of time, and time is tracked accurately by the DM.

The function of these procedures is to shift control of the narrative off of the DM and onto a fixed structure which players can come to understand and predict. Once players are able to predict the outcome of their actions, they can make intentional, in-character decisions which meaningfully impact the course of the story whether the DM approves of them or not. They are the DMs partners in authoring the narrative, rather than his audience.

The OSR is a Better Fit for the TTRPG Medium

OSR and modern D&D are two diametrically opposed solutions to the tension at the heart of D&D, and as I hope I have established, I believe that the old-school approach is the objectively better philosophy of game design. I believe that the old-school method is the correct way to play D&D, and that the modern method is wrong. If you play D&D the modern way, I’d like you to stop.

My core argument is simple, and others have made it before— the advantage of Tabletop RPGs over other mediums is that they are collaborative. This is their distinguishing feature. Where other forms of storytelling constitute a one-way transmission of content from storyteller to audience, RPGs allow the audience to participate in the construction of the narrative.

All of the other elements of Dungeons and Dragons are better achieved through other mediums. Statistics-based combat can be more fully explored in video games, where the math can be handled automatically, or in wargames, where the game’s balance isn’t interrupted by considerations of narrative. One-way narrative can be better explored in literally any other expressive medium, from novel-writing to filmmaking to poetry. Playacting and embodying a role can be better achieved through actual acting, in which a purely receptive audience examines and validates your performance of a role.

The OSR approach to D&D reinforces the strengths of the game’s medium while minimizing its weaknesses; modern D&D exaggerates the latter and undermines the former. These are considerations which countless other bloggers have reiterated in one form or another over the years; but I have two other arguments in favor of the OSR, novel arguments which I believe both reinforce the superiority of OSR play, and point the way towards an explanation of why TTRPGs have been so mistreated and abused in the first place.

Modern Dungeon-Mastering is Rude

Imagine, for a moment, that your friend invited you over to his house every weekend to read you the rough drafts of his work-in-progress fantasy novel. He wasn’t looking for much in the way of input regarding the events of the novel— he might take a suggestion every now and again, and spin it into something important, but he wasn’t interested in any thorough-going critique.

Is he doing you a favor with these visits, or are you doing him a favor?

Let’s double down on the analogy: let’s say he tells you that he wants your help as coauthor of his novel. You tell him what you want the characters to do, and then he may or may not incorporate it into the story. If you give any suggestions he dislikes, he’ll ignore them.

After you’ve been at this for awhile, you begin to find it boring. In order to assuage you, he says that you can play him at Monopoly while he reads, so that you’ve got something to do that will occupy you while you listen. After a few sessions, you realize that he has weighted all the Monopoly dice in your favor, and makes intentional blunders so that you always beat him.

Is his behavior reasonable?

A major missing element of OSR discourse is that Dungeons and Dragons is a social interaction, and social interactions involve give and take. As it is commonly practiced, modern D&D is a phenomenally rude social interaction. It’s presented as a collaborative storytelling experience, but one collaborator has final say over all of the events of the story; it’s presented as a game that can be lost or won by skill, but the Dungeon Master can alter the rules of the game as he sees fit to ensure the outcome he desires.

Stripped of the knowledge that this is “simply how things are done”, D&D is a very rude social interaction— bordering on unhealthy!

I’m going to put a pin in this for now, but keep this point in mind until my next post: judged by the standards of other social interactions, D&D breaks a lot of implicit rules.

Modern Dungeon Mastering is Exceedingly Difficult

The Dungeon Master shortage was one of the defining narratives of D&D’s 5th edition, and the conditions which gave rise to it are an essential but overlooked component to the superiority of OSR play.

Much ink has been spilled over the years arguing that OSR is more fun for players; the less frequent but much more essential argument is that it’s more fun for DMs.

DMs, for reasons I’ll dive deeply into in the next post in this series, are predisposed to assume that more freedom of their own discretion is an unalloyed good. They think they want the ability to calculate out the course of their game to the nearest micrometer. For many, the idea of relinquishing responsibility for any element of the proceedings would strike them as a personal failure.

Aesthetic enjoyment may be subjective, but the human brain is a computer of finite capacity embedded in a physical interface of remarkable interpersonal homogeneity. Holding too much information in your brain is stressful, and doing so for hours is unpleasant. I refer to this unpleasantness as cognitive load.

The OSR’s emphasis on procedures makes DMing much, much easier. In modern D&D, every single event which occurs during a game represents a decision the DM has to make.

• Should some monsters attack them here?

• Which ones?

• Should Yoric’s sword strike land, or should I fudge the numbers to keep the fight going?

• How can I tie this new NPC into Susan’s character’s backstory? She’s starting to look bored

• Can I give them this magic item now? What if it trivializes that fight later on?

The DM saturates his brain with as much information as it can hold, and uses that information to custom-fit a story to the preferences of his friends, as told by their reactions and expressions. The game is a process of interrogation, attempting to drag players by the ears into enjoyment while at the same time maintaining as much coherence as possible between the game’s rules, the lore of the gameworld, and the drama of the story.

By contrast, the OSR DM spends much of his time simply unfurling the consequences of decisions which have been made ahead of time— either by himself during his dungeon-generation phase, or by the game’s designers. His active role mostly involves “putting spin on the ball”, filling in gaps between procedural results with interesting flavor and ensuring that the player’s interactions with the hodgepodge of rules behave self consistently.

By any standard, this is a much easier task. A modern train-conductor DM who fails to properly scrutinize the expressions of his players, to think about the hidden intent behind their actions, and to mix his pre-made story live will be left with unhappy, discontented players. It’s not uncommon for modern games to devolve into arguments about DM rulings, for players to “murderhobo” their way out of carefully-orchestrated plots or “munchkin” their way into outsized combat prowess for their level.

By dividing responsibility for the course of the game more evenly between players and DM, OSR games more equitably divide responsibility for the game’s enjoyment.

This is a process you can witness firsthand if you ever DM modern-D&D players in their first OSR game. You might drop them in a town marketplace, say; they will ask if anything significant jumps out at them, and you reply with a list of shops and stalls. They walk into the first shop on the list, and ask the blacksmith if he has any problems he needs help with. You check your notes— the blacksmith doesn’t have any quests or clues, he just sells weapons, so you have the blacksmith try to sell them some weapons. The party already has weapons, and they don’t want any. Now what do they do?

For the first couple of hours, it isn’t uncommon for railroad-traumatized players to be enormously frustrated by OSR play. They see their role as a passive, receptive one, and will keep their heads low, focused on whatever you put before them. Often, they’ll be so dedicated to this understanding of how to play the game that you’ll have to break them out of it with a meta conversation:

• Guys, what do you want to do? What do your characters want to do? The blacksmith is just a blacksmith, he sells swords. If we’re going to get anywhere today, you’re going to need to set some goals for yourselves, and work out how to achieve them.

Once players get more adjusted to this freedom, they tend to enjoy it. But just as critically, a player-led process of DMing takes an enormous weight of the DMs shoulders. In a modern game, if the players decide to spend an hour poking around under the blacksmith’s floorboards, the DM is supposed to invent a Lich to hide there; in an OSR game, if the players manage to bore themselves in a world where they can go anywhere and do anything, it’s their own damn fault.

If OSR RPGs Are So Much Better, Why Aren’t They Winning?

As we established in our account of RPG history, the OSR failed to displace Dungeons and Dragons proper. If the advantages of the OSR were purely subjective— if the OSR just represents a way you “can” play D&D— then this is no great mystery. Different people have different tastes.

But I have alleged objective advantages to OSR play, advantages which I feel make the game a better fit for everyone. How is it possible, in an open marketplace of ideas (evidenced by the success of the OSR in carving out a niche), that consumers have consistently chosen a worse, less fun, more limiting style of game for 40+ years?

Well, I have elucidated three advantages of old school play over modern play:

1. It’s a better fit for the TTRPG medium, because it emphasizes that medium’s unique feature of collaboration between audience and storyteller.

2. It’s less rude when judged by the standards of normal social interactions, because it involves more back-and-forth and true gamesmanship

3. It’s less unpleasant for DMs because proceduralism alleviates the cognitive load involved in catering to players

I stand by these advantages; I will go so far as to claim that it’s not the OSR which is wrong about D&D, but the players of D&D who are wrong about the OSR.

I lay the market’s inefficiency at the feet of a certain type of person, bearing a certain type of mental pathology. A socially awkward type of person who doesn’t mind being rude to his friends; a hubristic type of person who doesn’t care about the fitness of his game to its medium; a masochistic type of person, who enjoys modern D&D because it is unpleasant!

The problem with D&D, I contend, is the nerd; and the next post in this series will be dedicated to making this case.