The OSR and the struggle for power

I.

The unstated assumption at the core of the OSR is that the PCs are engaged in a struggle for power; or, to put it another way, the players' goal is to dominate the fictional setting in which the game takes place.

I think this is fairly obvious to people at the micro-level; players understand that moment-to-moment dungeon-crawling is about killing monsters, taking their stuff, and in that sense "taking power" over the dungeon.

But the macro-level, faction play, also depends on the assumption that PCs are struggling for power. We stack up factions in opposition to each other so that PCs can tip the balance one way or the other and hope to come out on top of the new social situation that results.

You can dress up the struggle for power in nicer clothes — the PCs want power to help the innocent townsfolk, or they need money to pay off a colossal debt — but, at the bottom, you’re still indulging in the same power fantasy.

II.

In the early, massively-multiplayer days of Blackmoor and Greyhawk, the players' struggle for power over the fictional world was a lot more explicit.

PCs who gained enough gold and experience to each domain-level play would build a castle, and the player would become the Dungeon Master of that castle's dungeon, so that any low-level PCs who wanted to raid that dungeon would have to play with that DM.

The ultimate goal of the game was quite literally to become a "Master" of the fictional world.

III.

People tend to think of "OSR-style problems" in terms of individual encounters, but the faction play layer of the game is the glue that binds all of those micro-problems together into a complete, coherent macro-problem that players can approach from any angle.

You could challenge the bugbear in a direct fight, or you could try to turn his goblin minions against him. You could take over the besieged city by leading the people in a revolution against the corrupt mayor, or you could help the enemy army break through the city's walls.

This is the sense of "tactical infinity" and player freedom that draws people to TTRPGs. Board games and video games can't simulate conversations and negotiations with characters who have complex motivations, or at least not at the same level of fidelity a human Game Master can.

But when we say "player freedom," we have to ask: freedom to do what? And the answer, when it comes to faction play, is the freedom to manipulate others' motivations to serve your own interests.

IV.

There's something compelling about this kind of power fantasy on paper. I think the exciting thing is when you can read or listen to a story about someone else's game and how they took power over the world in a creative way that no one would have expected.

There's a reason that some of the first and most famous stories to come out of Greyhawk and other early D&D games are the ones where the players used some trick to skip to the bottom of the dungeon or pulled from the Deck of Many Things and gained thousands of experience points by sheer luck.

I suppose it's just a more elaborate version of what most games are about. You play chess because you want to be the very best at chess. You become an Olympic athlete because you want the gold medal and the world record. You want people to tell stories about the work you put in and the clever routes you found to unexpected success.

And the thing is, I understand chess and Olympic sports because playing them has beneficial side-effects: they encourage us to push our mental and physical limits and celebrate the heights of what humanity can achieve.

I'm just not sure what beneficial side-effects OSR D&D has beyond hanging out with friends and generating silly anecdotes about that time you persuaded the goblins to rebel against the bugbear. And maybe that's okay! Maybe that's all OSR D&D needs to be.

I guess it's only my own fault that, for a few years now, I've been under the illusion that it could be more.

V.

Attentive readers will probably notice that I've been writing about my problems with OSR D&D and different reasons I want to break away from it for at least a few months now, if not longer.

In my first post, I wrote that I was moving on from D&D and investigating new styles of play because "the fantasy genre is more or less diametrically opposed to both my political views and what I want my art to be about."

Later in March, I wrote about how dungeons had started to feel samey and boring to me, and more about how I was starting to be interested in story games with a broader variety of scenarios.

In June, I wrote about how Animal Well had inspired me to think about dungeons and my problems with different PC motivations for exploring them, and about how maybe if I want to have fun with this sort of game I just need to take it less seriously.

I have been thinking a lot about how, if my main goal is to encourage my friends to express themselves and make art with me, designing story games is probably a better framework for that.

If I'm still writing about these same issues over and over, it's because I'm having a hard time killing old habits. I don't know how to stop myself from contemplating D&D and how to make it work for me. My thinking drifts back to dungeons and hexcrawls whether I want it to or not.

I think if I want to keep enjoying my time in this hobby, I have to either start designing story games, find a way to accept that dungeon games are just silly fun and not an outlet for my broader creative ambitions, or both.