Were We Really Looking for "Crunch"?

I found out about a post on B/X Blackrazor (via Dennis Laffey ): Why “Light Games” Suck. JB’s post started a minor cross-blog discussion about who likes “rules lite” and who doesn’t. I don’t deny JB the right to like the games he likes and dislike the games he dislikes. I’m pretty turned off by the current endless retreads of the “rules lite dungeon crawl” concept, although there were a couple rules lite games I played and liked (TOON, InSpectres.)

But that’s not what I want to address. Especially since that’s not even the main point of JB’s post.

The Quest for Crunch

JB’s main point is that the current OSR is obsessed with creating rules lite dungeon crawls, when many of the prospective players, both now and Back in the Day, are actually searching for more rules, not less. D&D players like crunch, because that’s what we were all looking for when D&D first became a phenomenon. Here’s a highly-edited series of quotes that introduces that point:

See, Back In The Day (that’s the 1980s for me but, presumably, the late 70s also) Dungeons & Dragons was a game for NERDS […] SO…Dungeons & Dragons was totally our jam. Here was a game that appealed to our interest in all the fantasy literature we enjoyed reading […] AND required a high degree of intelligence to parse and make sense of […] But here’s the thing, Youngsters: “light rules” was ZERO part of the appeal of these games. We WANTED our rules “crunchy.” The more crunch, the better!

(Be sure to check out JB’s original post for comparison. I’m leaving a lot out.)

But this rubs me the wrong way. Superficially, that might resemble my own experience: I learned to play D&D from a friend back in either late 1975 or early 1976, and part of the appeal was the fantasy lit inspiration behind it. I consumed more D&D, getting AD&D as it was published, trying out other games like The Fantasy Trip that got into the nitty gritty of tactics, getting enamored with the ridiculous detail of Rolemaster and Fantasy Wargaming.

But was I really looking for a rules-heavy game? Was anyone?

Details, Details…

See, I think JB is seeing his own past D&D experiences through the lens of decades of experiences. When I look back at my own experiences and ask “How did I really feel about D&D and more rules back then, ignoring all the things I thought about and argued about and discovered later?” I think I really didn’t know what I wanted. How could I? It was all new. RPGs didn’t exist before. They were nothing like the board and card games most of us started with, and unless you played wargames, which wasn’t that well-known a hobby itself, you didn’t have any point of comparison.

Even the RPGs designers had no clue. No one had designed fantasy RPGs before, so they had no clue what would be good design and what would be bad. So they just made supplements and advanced editions and clones and other games that were “D&D, but in space/post-apocalyptic Earth/some other genre setting”.

And we were eating up these rules additions not because we wanted more rules, but because we were either curious or hypnotized. “Wait, you can add extra detail to magic with a complicated system of astrological correspondences? You can add tables and tables of weapon-specific combat results, instead of sticking with a binary hit-or-miss system? You can add a potion miscibility table to see if your alchemical experiment explodes? I want to check that out!”

I never heard the terms “rules lite” and “crunch” back in the day. They came along in the '90s, maybe the late '80s at the earliest, after people had been playing a while, trying out rules supplements, experimenting with new ideas, until they realized what they wanted. Some people wanted more improv and a lot less rules and that led to Tunnels and Trolls, TOON and eventually to “rules lite” games. Some wanted more options for character creation and a toolkit approach and you got Hero System and GURPS. Some wanted more realism and you got Fantasy Wargaming, Hârn, Guns Guns Guns, and books with real physics formulas.

A Different Kind of Crunch

And there’s also the issue that “crunch” is hard to define because it’s not really just one thing. I think deep down JB knows this, because he gives several examples of RPG complexity. Here’s my own breakdown.

• Background Detail: Some RPG supplements didn’t add any rules at all, but just described elaborate fantasy worlds in detail. Whether or not the game used was “crunchy” or “rules lite” was irrelevant.
• Options Detail: These are the books of new spells, the ever-increasing lists of character classes and fantastic races, the equipment lists, new features like skills systems for games that didn’t have them, feats, or psionics. Some of these had additional rules, some didn’t.
• Tactical Detail: Expanding conflict resolution systems beyond the binary approach-or-retreat, attack-or-defend, hit-or-miss approach. Players get several combat or magic options, any of which could be “good”, and different chains of actions could be amazingly good or amazingly bad, if you can just figure out the best choices for the current situation.
• Structural Detail: Not the rules for simulating specific tasks or resolving conflicts, but the rules surrounding those rules, that provide a framework for when to do each thing.
• Intellectual Challenge: At least, that’s how I interpret JB’s comment about how D&D “required a high degree of intelligence to parse and make sense of”, or his admonition that “it is complexity that gives a game its richness and provides a more robust experience.” Sometimes, people want the joy of figuring out something tough.
• Realism: Making sure that chances of dying from falling, drowning, or being hacked to pieces matches the real world probabilities. Or just adding a wider variety of possible outcomes to a critical hit table. A lot of “crunch” comes from wanting a game to be more “accurate”.

All RPG materials back in the day dabbled in at least a couple of these at the same time, and we all tried them out, eventually learning through trial and error what our own preferences were. Me, I think I lean more towards what Dennis Laffey said about structure. I think that’s the most important for me. I don’t necessarily need to have every rule for every remote possibility worked out beforehand; I just want to know how reuse existing rules to make up a new procedure when I need one, plus that framework that tells me how to run the game. To a lesser extent, I also want tactical detail, but not to an extreme. Even though D&D came from a gaming tradition, I actually don’t treat it like a game, and I’m not interested in being a hardcore gamer.

I struggle sometimes with my blog posts because I begin to question whether I’d actually use some of the ideas I’m spitballing in posts. I still toy around with options details like new character classes and races, or with realism, or even with just figuring out if there’s a creative way to add some feature to D&D. But I suppose what I’m really doing is working out structures that make those suggestions possible.

If you want to call that “crunch”, so be it. But I sometimes think of my approach as being “rules lite”.

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OSR Splinter Faction

There have been a couple posts lately debating whether or not the OSR is dead (because reasons.) I will only link to this one at The 3 Toadstools, not only because I agree with the basic point, but also because it links to several other posts, so I don't have to do it myself.

One of the things people on both sides say is that the OSR is splintered. But I'm going to ask: Is it, really?

The core OSR experience is to revive old school D&D and some of its practices. Few people who were involved with that have stopped playing old school games. They are doing what they always did. Are they a unified community? Well, no, but they never were. There were always some people who didn't talk to each other. Hell, I left Dragonsfoot more or less because of a handful of people who dominated those forums and made the conversations unpleasant, one example being when they started insulting Isaac Bonewits after he died, because ... they were good Christians, I guess? That was one year after I started this blog.

So there's really no more splintering than there was at the beginning. What may be confusing people is that there's a whole extra set of people that weren't part of the OSR back then. These are the people who think of the OSR as being edgy, DIY, light mechanics RPGs. They aren't really interested in old school D&D at all. We could debate whether they are really OSR, but the point is: there are at least twice as many people who identify as (or are linked to) the OSR as there were originally, and there is a sharp divide in their interests.

It's not because one faction has split away from the other. It's because a new faction has joined.

Perhaps it's a bad alliance. Perhaps the two factions will never get along. But the point is, the OSR has expanded as a result, not splintered.

Excerpt: General RPG Usability Notes

Just a quick check... this is an excerpt from the introduction to a book I'm working on:

undead-test1

It's a summary of terms and conventions I will be using that, with any luck, will be broadly applicable to many old school RPGs, with only minor tweaking needed for any particular system. I'm aiming to be clear and concise, but: Is this clear enough? Is it concise enough, or too concise? Can people actually use it to adapt OD&D-compatible game material to games on the outer fringes of the OSR?

Edit to Add: I'm trying out condensed versions of some paragraphs, including the description of the basic stats, which now read like this:

Dice -- How hard a monster is to kill, and how dangerous it is in combat, written as dice + points, for example 1 + 1. 

Armor -- Protection against damage, labelled as Light Armor (equivalent to leather or padding,) Medium Armor, Heavy Armor, and No Armor. 

Move -- How far a monster can travel on its turn and how fast it is in combat. Ordinary humans have Move 12 normally, Move 6 when loaded, and Move 3 when overloaded. 

Damage -- How deadly each attack is. Like Dice, this is written as dice+points, for example 1 + 1, possibly with a type, such as “fire” or “ice”.

Primer Rage

So, there’s something I’m sure many of you have seen, either on RPG forums, blogs, or G+/Facebook communities: rage against Matt Finch’s Quick Primer of Old School Gaming. Every time the primer is mentioned, and even some times when it isn’t, someone pops in to say how much they hate it and hate Matt Finch and think he’s a horrible person for telling them you have to play games his way or else.

A good portion of this can be assumed to be hyperbole and attention-seeking, but some people seem to be legitimately unhappy with the primer. And I think I’ve finally figured out why.

The reasons normally given are:
1. that Matt is portraying modern editions of D&D as bad ways of playing the game,
2. that old school play is the only correct way of playing the game, and
3. that only the original three booklets, no supplements, are old school, and everything after that is modern.

This was hammered home in a forum argument I’m currently sucked into, where someone literally said

The popular and previously discussed Primer excludes 2e from it’s definition of what’s “old school”, and arguably excludes everything but OD&D sans supplements.

But I thought, “Wait a minute. Does Matt Finch say that?” I disagree with some minor points in the primer, but I’ve always thought it was fairly laid back. Many of you probably thought the same thing. Does he actually exclude everything except 0e without any supplements?”

Here’s how the primer begins:

This booklet is an introduction to “old school” gaming, designed especially for anyone who started playing fantasy role-playing games after, say, the year 2000 – but it’s also for longer-time players who have slowly shifted over to modern styles of role- playing over the years.

So, right off the bat, he’s making a distinction between games presumably published after the year 2000 and those that weren’t.

He goes on:

If you want to try a one-shot session of 0e using the free Swords & Wizardry rules, just printing the rules and starting to play as you normally do will produce a completely pathetic gaming session – you’ll decide that 0e is just missing all kinds of important rules. What makes 0e different from later games isn’t the rules themselves, it’s how they’re used.

“Pathetic”, here, isn’t a judgment on modern play styles. He’s saying that 0e is expecting you to do something that isn’t written down in the rules, and if you don’t, you will probably be disappointed. The primer is literally an attempt to write that stuff down.

No where in those paragraphs does Matt say “0e is the only old school game”. He’s only claiming that 0e is an old-style game, not the old-style game. He never even says that you can’t play modern games in an old-style way, although for practical reasons, you probably can’t. People would object.

And what about other TSR-era versions of D&D?

I’ve done the searches. I can’t find that he ever mentions any of them. He doesn’t say “AD&D”, “1e”, or “2e”. He doesn’t mention the supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc.) by name. He doesn’t even seem to refer to any of these indirectly, or tell you that you can’t use supplements.

He literally names 3e and 4e as “modern” and not “old school” games. He mentions them in a couple places as the kind of games modern gamers might be used to. Again, he never tells you whether you can play those editions in other ways. All he ever talks about is how many people play those games, in contrast to the way people played 0e.

He does give some examples of old style vs. modern style play, which have received some criticism. I’m not going to go into that here, but instead will just point out this quote before the first example:

Note: The modern-style GM in these examples is a pretty boring guy when it comes to adding flavor into his game. This isn’t done to make modern-style gaming look bad: we assume most people reading this booklet regularly play modern-style games and know that they aren’t this boring. It’s done to highlight when and how rules are used in modern gaming, as opposed to when and how they aren’t used in oldstyle gaming. So the modern-style GM talks his way through all the rules he’s using, which isn’t how a good modern-style GM usually runs his game.

(Emphasis added.)

So Matt is telling people these examples are not the way people actually talk when playing these games, but are deliberately designed to emphasize which rules are being used. And none of the three criticisms listed above are supported by a careful reading of the primer.

But I said I think I know why people came to the opposite conclusion. Some people think that if the rules don’t say you can do something, you are forbidden from doing it. Those people are also reading the primer that way. If the primer doesn’t say 1e is old school, then 1e must not be old school, according to Matt Finch. If the primer says playing 0e in a modern style leads to a “pathetic gaming session”, then it is calling the modern style “pathetic”. If the primer says modern games tend to add skills or classes for disarming traps, then any game with a disarm trap skill must be modern. If the primer tells you “rulings, not rules”, then it’s telling you any game with rules is wrong.

And so on. It’s all based on an overly literal interpretation of the primer.

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