The NSR and definitions

Choose your alignment — which quadrant(s) do you care about defining?

I.

We had yet another debate on labels and definitions today. I’m sick of everything I write in these conversations getting lost, so I’m dumping it all in a blog post. Everything from here on out is directly taken from messages I wrote on the Discord, with some links added here and there.

II.

I think Retired Adventurer had it right when he called them "cultures of play." The OSR, the NSR, they aren't movements — people have such a terrible sense these days of what it means for a group of people to be organized. They are cultures, in the sense that designer Greg Costikyan uses the word.

In Uncertainty, Costikyan defines culture as "the transmission of knowledge within a group" and explains that, while some animals have simple forms of culture, "humans have culture on steroids, because language allows us to transmit knowledge far more effectively."

He writes, "In a sense, 'game' is merely the term we apply to a particular kind of play: play that has gone beyond the simple, and has been complexified and reified by human culture."

And isn't that what all the different ttrpg communities are doing? We aren't dealing with organized committees that vote on what counts as "OSR" or "NSR" or what-have-you.

We're dealing with the transmission of complex knowledge. It's obscure and specialized knowledge and it's a little silly if you take a step back and look at it, but we all eat this stuff up.

And we transform it, we all do. It's a giant game of telephone. It changes as it encounters more minds and as the world outside us changes. And it changes really fast.

So, I guess I think the impulse to try and nail down a "Berlin interpretation" of the NSR is just wrong-headed. It's a moving target, and it lives in the brains of hundreds if not thousands of people at this point.

III.

In any case I have no expectation that I will care about dungeons or any of the common OSR or NSR principles a decade from now. I fully expect to move on to other styles of play.

What I don't expect to move on from is the attitude that there is no "wrong way" to play an RPG; that studying the history of the hobby is the best defense against all manner of distortions and misunderstandings; and that there's something to learn from everywhere and everyone.

That's what the community is about, to me. That's all I really care about.

IV.

For some reason there has been renewed discussion recently of what I view as the old definition the NSR — the “weird setting, OSR-esque, not a retroclone” stuff. I guess because of the pandatheist post? I’ll say it as many times as I have to: I couldn’t care less about that stuff. To me the community is all about the “learn from everywhere and everyone” approach, without proclaiming a “one true way” to play an RPG.

V.

We have all those styles-of-play channels because we talked about all those things on a frequent basis before we decided “hey it might make sense to make channels for these.”

We didn’t set out to make a community about learning from everywhere and everyone. I think that’s just what happened, because the nature of having a lot of Yochai’s friends from story game communities and a lot of people from OSR communities meant “oh, hey, we have a lot more in common than we think we do.” And that attitude just spread out to encompass everything. It seems to me like that’s a unique thing, in the RPG landscape.

And I also maintain that we couldn’t have done it without the historical perspective provided by Lich Van Winkle, but that’s a whole other story.