Over the past few years, I’ve found myself drifting out of love with the OSR. Which is quite sad to me as this thing, this community, this milieu was, around a decade ago now, the thing that really got me back into tabletop gaming after falling out of the hobby in the mid 2010s for a couple of years. It was originally the reason that I wanted to share my thoughts (however sparsely I have done that) with the internet about this hobby. I find myself these days having returned with some amount of nostalgia to 3rd Edition, to Runequest, and to the post-old school crunchy trad games that filled my youth. As I have been putting Blademaster! through its paces, I consistently find myself drifting back to this trad, crunchy, simulationist design all over the place. So, why is that? While there are a bunch of reasons, three stand out above the others.
1.) Rulings, Not Rules
The by now very familiar mantra of the OSR: Rulings, Not Rules. According to Matt Finch this quirk of OSR gaming is its defining feature. To my estimation he is broadly correct and for a while I quite enjoyed this way of modus operandi. It was freeing, especially in comparison to the way that the culture surrounding trad games (particularly the first edition of Pathfinder) trains you to run games. Those games can suffer from a sort of dictatorship of the players. Now, this isn’t a game design problem. It is very much a play culture problem. You could run these games with a more OSRish mindset and they work quite well when you establish the boundary of who is the one at the table with the authority to adjudicate rules disputes. In this way, the OSR has had a positive spillover influence throughout the hobby.
So why don’t I like this mantra anymore? Well, I sort of still do. It’s useful. The thing is that after doing a lot of running and design work with the same core group of people you realize something. When I come up with a ruling it really is only a ruling the first time. After that, I write it down, it goes into the rules document, and it becomes a rule. I tried not doing that, just sorting through the vibes of every situation. Players despise that. I don’t blame them. Consistency is a good thing. We are playing a game after all. It becomes difficult to take actions if the way something works changes every time it happens.
So, am I really using rulings instead of rules? No, I’m writing my rules through play. This is fine. That is after all why I’m designing in the first place, but why wouldn’t I just put those “rulings” into the rulebook instead of making each Referee figure it all out on their own when they play the game I’m selling them. After all why buy a product that you have to make half of yourself.
2.) The NSR and Semantic Drift
I often find myself feeling like what the term “OSR” means as flown past me over time. Don’t mistake me, I am a very late comer to the whole concept myself. I’m only 30 years old. I only really became familiar with the OSR around 2016. For the first half a decade, I was basically only a lurker. I read blogs voraciously, devouring their contents like manna. My earliest experiences in this hobby had been with AD&D, in a smokey basement while listening to Sabbath & smoking weed. The OSR was to tabletop gaming what hardcore was to music around that time. A return to form. A recovery. An archaeology project but also a milieu with many talented people in it who had been around since the beginning or at the very least that I could learn a lot from.
In the few years after I became aware of the OSR, B/X gained in popularity over AD&D. This was especially pushed along by the release of OSE in 2019. Around the same time Ben Milton released Knave and Yochai Gal released Cairn. While Into The Odd had been out for a while, the popularity of the “NSR” really took off with the release of these two games and Electric Bastionland. I will here define “NSR” as “tabletop games that seek to replicate a specific idea of what old-school dungeoncrawling feels like with sharp mechanical deviations from actual old-school games” to be charitable. At this point, in 2026, there has been a veritable explosion of popular NSR games.
This is where what has happened to the OSR often feels exactly like what has happened to punk and metal. It became trendy, a ton of people came into the space from outside, and now the people who liked what the thing originally was have been pushed to the outside. This is unfortunately the natural lifecycle of outsider spaces under the capitalist culture industry. There isn’t a whole lot to be done except for us outsiders to continue to migrate into new spaces like frontier lichens on fresh laid basalt flows.
I could also go into here the drift that occurred in terminology after The Retired Adventurer’s frankly quite odd and underdeveloped article “Six Cultures of Play” but Pariedolia has already done a much better job than I can addressing it in his much better post “Broken RPG Theory“.
3.) Politics (and Surprise A Bit of Bigotry Too)
Look, I didn’t wanna talk about it either. We all know the line, “The OSR is so full of chuds you should by the newest book from Wizards of the Coast.” This isn’t that sort of article. By and large, most people I have encountered in this space are wonderful people. For every chud I have come across, there are dozens of queer and queer positive people. Most OSR spaces are pretty well moderated these days. I also do not think that chuds don’t exist in other communities or other sides of the hobby. They definitely do.
While certain groups with vested interests in painting the OSR in a bad light exaggerate the problem, there is something about Old-School Gaming that does draw chuds like moths to flames. Yes, they exist in other side of the hobby but they exist here more than than elsewhere still. Being a trans woman in a space that has such a density of transphobes, misogynists, and general right-wingers can be quite tiring. I’m even quite lucky, I’ve never been subjected to the harassment campaigns, doxxing, or assaults that some other trans women in this space have been. So at least to some extent, there is a bigotry problem in this space.
Where There’s Still Love
Now I’ve spent eleven-hundred words complaining, you might be wondering “Ælfwynn, do you actually enjoy anything about the OSR still?”. Well curious reader, the answer to that question is, surprisingly, Yes! Quite a bit actually. Most specifically, something that I will take with me to my grave that I learned from existing within OSR spaces and especially from Justin Alexander’s series Game Structures is a deep and abiding love of procedures. Be it the dungeon turn or segmenting the day for investigative games (something I have been playing around with and sort of stole from Free League’s Blade Runner RPG), I am of the opinion that a formalized structure for how the game part of your roleplaying games play out improves every game.
Funnily enough this strong belief is actually the catalyst that I think kickstarted the drift of my theorizing on the hobby away from the OSR that I have been attempting to diagnose in this article. In the course of actual play, I have found myself formalizing a lot of these structures further than anything one could comfortably call OSR in my opinion. As I approach the end of the process of designing, playtesting, and editing Blademaster! I have tenatively started calling this mix of simulationist crunch and gameist proceduralism “deep simulationism”. I have a lot of thoughts on what this means to me that I have been struggling to write but hope to share eventually.
So here this leaves us, half still in love and half out of it. An awkward place to remain for sure but wiser as to why at least. It’s a complicated tale. In one part, I have simply grown apart from my former love. In another part, she has grown apart from me. Despite this, I still treasure what I have learned from the time I spent in that love and I will probably never stop playing old-school games after all of this.
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