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My name is Richard Sharpe, but I go by "Stripe" on the Internet. Currently, I'm in my late 30's and live on a small horse ranch in the rural Midwest.
When I was a child in the late-1980's and early-1990's, my mother instilled in me her enjoyment of the fantasy and sci-fi literary and cinematic genres. I absolutely loved Labyrinth and Willow.
Dungeons & Dragons comic book advertisements back in those days featured the Red Box (BECMI) edition, and it looked totally radical. I desperately wanted to play, though I wasn't sure what exactly D&D even entailed. Problem was, the winds of one of those Satanic Panics were blowing around. My parents refused to purchase any D&D products. They were both educators and artists—open-minded people—but my mother was and still is a good Christian. The preacher man said D&D was the devil, so that was that. No D&D for me!
Thankfully, the Evil One was still able to dig his black claws into my heart and brain by inspiring the insidious board games HeroQuest (1989) and Dragon Strike (1993). By then, the Panic had settled and the two-years-old Black Box was to follow. At long last, full-fledged D&D!
My players and I weren't impressed.
Wait, what?! After all those years of yearning for D&D and when we finally get to play, we weren't into it?
Multiple reasons caused us to retreat from D&D and return to a mixture of imagination, HeroQuest, and Dragon Strike. Chiefly among them, I was a terrible DM.
In my defense, I was a fifth grader. Plus, I had never even seen a table-top role-playing game session played before. Somehow, I thought the way we played Dragon Strike wasn't, like, "good enough" for D&D.
Little did I know, the way we played HeroQuest and Dragon Strike was a paragon of Old School Renaissance (OSR) game play, if there is such a thing. We didn't give a damn about rules. We imagined the Hell out of everything! It was one step above plain ol' make believe. Ah, childhood.
Still, I wanted to play D&D.
After some advice from the guy behind the counter at a Waldenbooks in the nearby shopping mall, I sweet-talked my grandmother into buying me the AD&D 2nd Ed. Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monstrous Manual. We were ready to rock.
I improved as a DM and we all had a good time playing D&D regularly. We played on the kitchen table. We played on the floor. We played in the basement and in the attic. Hell, we even played outside. We could play for an hour or a whole weekend almost non-stop.
One would think the Satanic Panic would have blown over by then, and indeed it had mostly faded from memory. But, in the eigth grade, one of my players had a "crazy cat lady" for a mother. She was one of those creepy nut-job Christians—nothing like my mother—full of hate rather than love. She smelled weird and looked like a pallid-white version of the Wicked Witch of the West. I am not exaggerating. Today, I consider her a child abuser.
She found out her son was playing D&D, which was literally synonymous with worshiping the devil to her. I guess she thought, like, ritual sacrifices and stuff was part of playing D&D.
Here's the big problem. While I was fairly popular—I lifted weights, played football and had a girlfriend—her son was not. School can be a rough time for some, especially poor, unpopular kids, like her son. I didn't hang out with him at school—I was a secret nerd. So, when that evil hag forbade him from playing D&D, what she really did was destroy his entire social life.
I was more than just "the DM," I was that group's "leader," if you will. I had to do something.
So, I pulled out another Waldenbooks purchase and dusted it off: the GURPS Basic Set, Third Edition Revised. I know, in the role-playing community, GURPS is either intensely hated or passionately loved, but never mind all that; the only thing that mattered was that GURPS wasn't D&D, therefore, it wasn't the devil, right?
I went over to his house without him even being there and plead my case to her directly. I told her had seen the light! No more D&D for us good Christian boys! GURPS was about space ships and laser guns, not magic and demons.
I offered to play a session with the whole gang right there in her kitchen and she was welcome to watch, free to jump in if we did or said anything . . . unholy, or whatever. One condition: she had to turn the TV volume down. It was always blaring hymns and we couldn't concentrate (or talk over it) with it so loud.
Begrudgingly, she allowed it. After an hour of of play, she was ready to have us out of her kitchen.
We kept playing for a while before we did what most groups do and went our separate ways as we grew into adulthood. (He became a lawyer, by the way.)
Through the decades since then, I never did switch back to D&D. I tried Third Edition when it was first released, and later Pathfinder, but D20 wasn't for me. Too much like a video game. Worse, players seemed more interested in optimizing character sheets and learning the rules rather than imagining the game world and adventures in it. It seemed like the "better" the rules became, the more players focused on them.
That's how I've managed to play table-top role-playing games for more than 25 years, but have almost no experience with D&D.
Why did I come back to D&D?
Well, actually, I didn't. I came back to OSR. OSR isn't a rules set; it's a philosophy, a philosophy shared by a table-top RPG community.
Like I say, most people either love, hate, or don't know anything about GURPS. Most common are those who don't know anything about it. GURPS is so obtuse and so complex that new players are doing well just to get the basics down in the first few sessions. Instead of concentrating on the rules, new players concentrate on the game. That's great!
As I said, I found that as players learn the rules, they become more focused on them. As they become more focused on the rules, they become less focused on the game.
Pretty soon, players don't imagine a new character first, then build him/her, they instead first pick what traits they want out of the book before hammering out the character's background and description to fit their compilation of rules.
After more than 25 years of running GURPS games, I learned one thing was almost inevitable: the better a new player became at using the rules, the worse they became as a player.
I was perplexed. Why did this happen over and over again?
I knew a lack of imagination—or more accurately, imagination being replaced by rules—was at the heart of the problem. What made my childhood games so much better than my games of late? Do children just "imagine better," or was there something more to the issue?
Enter OSR, or rather, my awareness of OSR's existence about a year ago. The more I read about it, the more I realized OSR was an exercise in how not to let rules get in the way of fun and imagination. The rules really can be the devil, in a way!
OSR, to me, primarily means "Imagine the Hell out of it."
That's by no means a complete definition, though! This isn't free-form role-play. There are rules and there is structure to the game. So, it's one thing to say, "Just use your imagination," but quite another to actually run a good game with that as a motto.
The way the GM runs the game must support and cultivate a style of play where rules are as far from the center of attention as possible. If rolling dice to compare with numbers on a character sheet, or checking rules in the book is the best way to accomplish the adventure's goal, then of course that's what players are going to do.
However, I'm by no means qualified to give a fellow Dungeon Master advice or offer some sort of standard definition of OSR. Thankfully, there are far wiser people who have already done a much better job than I could ever do to explain what OSR game play entails. There is a trove of information on the Web. Here are just a few links:
https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html
http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/matthew-finch/quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming/ebook/product-3159558.html
http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/02/osr-style-challenges-rulings-not-rules.html
Where do I go from here?
Well, I haven't ran a serious game since leaving GURPS. I've been having fun actually playing for once! No stress! No preparation! All I do is show up! Responsibility for the group's entertainment doesn't rest squarely on my shoulders! I don't have to deal with a tiny minority of players who whine, complain, or even throw childish tantrums!
I'm definitely a "forever GM," so it has been great learning experience.
I've found games in various flavors of D&D on OSR Discord channels. It's been a blast so far and I look forward to each session.
I also look forward to learning more about the OSR community and philosophy. Eventually, my desire to create will drive me to run an OSR-style game in the near future. I've been taking notes for almost a year now. Soon, I'll reprise my role as DM and call for players. My learning process will then begin anew from the other side of the table!
Thank you very much for your interest in my humble OSR blog and for reading this post!
Until next time!
— Sharpe
