Why do I keep coming back to the OSR?

The map of the planes presented in 5E’s core books.

I.

I’ve written about how I drifted into the OSR before. To quote a previous post, “I was frustrated with what I saw as a low signal-to-noise ratio in D&D 5E's implied setting. In particular, I never much liked that morality was baked into the physics of the world (what with alignment and the Planescape cosmology), and I hated feeling like I had to have a place on my world map for every godd*mn player-race in the book.”

In retrospect, I think these surface-level frustrations were symptoms of a deeper conflict between my aesthetic sensibilities and those of modern D&D. (The thing about aesthetic sensibilities is that they’re subconscious, which makes it difficult for artists to understand the real reasons behind their creative decisions. This post is essentially about me making my subconscious process a little more conscious.)

II.

Part of this comes out of my more recent attempt to prep a game for Quest. I was really excited when Quest went free-to-play, and I had a moment where I thought I was going to return to running a more heroic, 5E-style game. But that idea quickly collapsed when I tried to actually prepare that game and the prep ran straight up against my aesthetic sensibilities.

In particular, the idea collapsed when I tried to prepare the campaign’s villain.

The modern-D&D style assumes villains. So much of 5E, mechanically, is about fighting monsters. So many 5E adventures are saving the material plane from the evil machinations of villains from or influenced by the evil planes. So much of Matt Colville’s style is about keeping “the bad guys” present and acting upon “the heroes” — Matt did a whole video on that just recently.

But when I try to write a scenario where a handful of heroes are tasked with saving the world or the kingdom from a villainous plot… something in me rebels against that.

III.

I usually keep my politics separate from how I talk about my RPG hobby online, but it’s hard to talk about this without talking about Marxism and socialism have influenced me (although I don’t think you have to be a Marxist or a socialist to appreciate the points I’m making here).

The gist of Marxism is that, while the productive forces of society advance at an exponential rate, the superstructure of society (i.e., its government and laws) catches up in fits and starts that we call revolutions. There is no good and evil, only progressive and reactionary class forces — that is, forces that have an interest in revolution and forces that have an interest in maintaining society as it is.

This is the understanding of human history that I have, not just on an intellectual level, but on a subconscious, artistic level. If I try to write a story about heroes saving the world from villains — especially in the fantasy genre, which is so much about taking inspiration from real history — I will feel creatively unsatisfied unless (a) the villains represent a reactionary class force and (b) the heroes represent a progressive class force.

I struggle to believe in a world that can be threatened by a handful of villains or saved by a handful of heroes. History is made by the struggle of entire social classes, not just individuals.

IV.

Sidebar: I think the weakness of The Lord of the Rings is that the war between Mordor and the rest of Middle-Earth is less a revolutionary war and more a war of national defense. Does the nationalism of pre-modern epic poetry really have a place in the modern world?

V.

I could try to create a fantasy game where the players are leaders of a revolution, but that’s far from the fantasy adventure genre I got hooked on. Instead, I avoid the problem altogether. I design and run and play OSR dungeoncrawlers where there are no heroes and there are no villains — where the interests at stake aren’t the fate of the world so much as the enrichment of a few power-hungry adventurers.

That’s fundamentally why I work with OSR systems and approaches and not with modern D&D. I wonder how many people have ended up in the OSR for similar reasons, perhaps without consciously understanding why.