I read with a mixture of amusement, sympathy, and fascination Jim Rossignol’s blog about playing Mothership, and how he and his table had a good time, but also didn’t quite get it. I had these reactions because I had been there. My history with RPGs is when I was much younger I played AD&D 2e, Shadowrun, and some White Wolf stuff, then I moved onto other interests, and didn’t think about tabletop RPGs for decades until 2020 when I started playing story games like Spire, Blades in the Dark with friends over Discord, a much needed bit of social entertainment during that awful year. When I was introduced to OSR play in a game of Knave, I didn’t get it, and bristled at a lot of the OSR ethos. But after marinating in the OSR blogosphere for long enough something eventually clicked for me, my brain was rewired, and it became my favorite way to run/play RPGs.

There is a great amount of discussion about the change in perspective needed to go from playing 5E to playing in the OSR style, but I’ve seen less talk about making the leap to go from story to OSR games. So lets see if we can’t provide a bit more guidance to anyone from that world that is OSR-curious.

The Fear of a Black Dragon podcast demonstrates that it is certainly possible to use story game rules to run OSR modules, and more power to your table if that’s how you like to play, but for my purposes I am going to assume an interest in running a rules engine in the OSR lineage.

The two play styles differ in both means and goals, and yet they share one common goal: “Play to find out what happens”. Both game styles eschew the sort of narrative railroading that was all too common when I was first exposed to roleplaying games. In nearly all other aspects though the play styles part ways. They differ in the type of game being played, the relationship between the GM and players, the method of GMing, and the purpose of rolling dice.

The Type of Game Being Played

The biggest and most complex adjustment is understanding the type of game you’re playing. The story game engine is a set of rules to empower collaborative storytelling. There is room for that in the OSR, but it isn’t the emphasis. Story games give players a character archetype/template, and some tools that allow them to put their own unique spin on it. In OSR play characters typically have much less detail because the point isn’t to see how the players express themselves in a given scenario, but is instead about overcoming challenges and adversity. If story games are like Disco Elysium and have a fail forward philosophy, OSR games are more like immersive sims (System Shock, Dishonored, etc.) where you are plopped into a complex environment, and it is up to you to puzzle it out, and see how you can take advantage of your surroundings. For exploration to be interesting, there have to be good details about the environment which is why adventure modules have an outsized importance for the OSR compared to other tabletop RPGs.

Questions ruffled play. “So none of my skills are actually useful anywhere in this scenario?” Nope.

The problem with player skills in OSR games, the reason why the thief class is so maligned in the OSR blogopshere, is being able to roll the dice to bypass a challenge robs the players of the opportunity to overcome the challenge diagetically. It’s more satisfying to discover a hidden trap because as a player you were keyed into something off about the GM’s description of a room then from a successful perception check. So in Mothership skills are mostly there to provide some flavor, and to occasionally provide a minor bonus to stat checks. The design goal here is to make sure players aren’t typecast too tightly. You’re here to do some problem solving, not be the guy that chills out until a particular skill is needed. Ideally, this keeps the whole table engaged throughout play, rather than waiting for a particular time to shine. Jim acknowledges all this when accepting the philosophy behind the lack of a stealth roll, but the table still gets tripped up:

The same sort of reasoning must apply, perhaps even more to social stuff than to stealth. Talk it out at the table! Just do the role-playing part.

And dutifully we did so. My players like to create friction, tension, drama, and they played that out in characterful clashes, betrayals, discussions, conversations. Yet through it all they were nevertheless able to reason that we also did this in other games while applying the dramatic denouement of a roll to top out the process. Actions, rules, and abilities that other games had provided were both a prompt for what to do (by giving you a good chance of pulling it off) and a spice to heat things up by being offbeat, weird, or personal in a way that wasn’t down to fear or guns. In Mothership there’s nothing other than awkwardly applying a save to make a roll anything that isn’t fear, guns, or your limited range of skills. There just weren’t any good avenues for the resolution of those particular struggles. For example: two characters wanted to contest each other. We had to ad hoc a way. It felt wrong.

There’s a lot to unpack here! One significant misunderstanding is that OSR play isn’t trying to prompt players into roleplaying. Players do that naturally. So from that perspective it follows that you don’t need actions, rules, rolls, and abilities to facilitate that. It will just come in the natural course of play. The other thing though is the adjustment to this challenge based play. Whereas story games often include some resolution mechanic to handle inter-party conflict, you almost never see rules for this in OSR games because the social convention is the party is trying to work together to overcome a challenging environment that is trying to kill them. Inter-party squabbling decreases your odds of survival, so it’s better if everyone gets along for the common good. An OSR game is about the joys of camaraderie in overcoming difficult odds.

The other misunderstood aspect is the purpose of those sanity/fear saves. OSR games need time pressure to function properly. If you have all the time in the world, eventually you will solve the puzzle perfectly. In classic D&D play you have random encounters and need torches to explore the dark environs, and over time you will run out of torches, which will likely be fatal, and you will get overwhelmed by random threats. Fear and sanity checks serve a similar purpose in that the risk to the character increases over time. The players shouldn’t need to create their own drama, the drama is in making their way through a hazardous environment, and deciding when they need to cut loose before its too late.

The Method of GMing

The role of the GM, and how they conduct play is quite different in the two play styles. In story games a GM needs to be a good improviser to facilitate play, and so it typically involves doing prep with a light touch. Since it is a collaborative approach with the table, you really just need to have a solid enough initial scenario, and see where things go from there. By contrast, many OSR games use blorb principles, which is more prep heavy, and avoids improvising when possible. I don’t have to much to add here, I think the blorb principles post is brilliant, and a short read, so go ahead and check it out! Not all OSR play adheres to it, but it broadly articulates a style of play that is frequently adopted in the OSR and can cause friction for people coming from story games.

The Relationship Between the GM and the Players

A common piece of GM advice in story games is to “be a fan of the players”. In the OSR a GM is a neutral arbiter. Not an antagonist trying to thwart the players, but a facilitator of a challenge as laid out in the prep work. The GM needs to be even-handed and fair for the challenge to work. Stacking the odds in the players favor, or trying to “defeat them” interferes with the experience of overcoming the challenge. This also means players have less agency compared to in story games like in Blades in the Dark where on a successful roll you get to improvise a solution to a conflict. The GM has much more control over the world, and so having that credible neutrality is crucial. Dice only get rolled if you decide for a roll, instead of because a player makes a move, and that move needs to be interpreted. You have to describe things fairly. There will be situations that aren’t covered in the rules, so you sometimes have to make something up. You try to get player buy-in when that happens because there is no worse feeling than to feel something arbitrarily bad happen to you. This is different from the story game relationship where what the rules do is carve out particular spaces for the GM and the players to make their respective moves, and give them wide latitude in what is possible with those moves.

The Purpose of Rolling Dice

In story games dice enable play, and in OSR games dice are a device to determine an outcome. This is most obvious in the perennial question from GMs new to story games about how to interpret a mixed success. Whereas in traditional roleplaying games a die roll is used to resolve a binary “do you succeed at the task or not?”, in story games these rolls are a creative prompt. Depending on the roll, you fail, partially succeed, or totally succeed. But it is now up to someone to decide what failure looks like, what success looks like, or what partial success looks like. And failure generally should never simply be, “well, nothing happens”, but instead means that dramatic tension should be ratcheted up in some way. Dice are a tool for letting events unfold in unexpected ways.

OSR play hews more closely to traditional play in this regard. You roll to determine an outcome. Since OSR is about overcoming a challenge, it doesn’t have the same type of fail-forward philosophy as story games. For something to be a challenge, you have to accept the possibility that the party could experience a hard failure, isn’t able to progress, and will either get wiped out, or retreat from the adventure site without much to show for it. As such, dice rolls are interpreted much more narrowly, the application of risk and danger. The creative play in OSR happens in between dice rolls. Because of the level of control afforded to the GM in an OSR game, there is less need to rely on dice for creative prompting.

An Aside on Androids

Jim also discusses how vague androids are in the game setting. It is worth mentioning he is in very good company here, and this isn’t a difference in play culture at work here. Lots of people feel this way. If I was running Mothership, I’d be tempted to remove androids as a player character option because they are underexplained on details players will actually need to care about. In a lot of cases hand waving away how things work in a sci-fi world is fine, but in this particular case more detail would be beneficial to play.

Final Thoughts

The famous Renaissance painting the Ambassadors with its anamorphosis technique

One interesting aspect I find of running roleplaying games is that teaching new players how to play a game is typically straight forward, but getting someone that is used to a different style of play to try a different kind of game has a lot of pitfalls that are difficult to avoid. They require different habits, ways of thinking, and relationships. Until you are able to shift your perspective a game can feel incomplete or lacking. But like the Ambassadors, upon changing your perspective suddenly the meaning of everything can come into focus. But unlike the Ambassadors, where all that is needed is to change your position relative to the painting, getting there with RPGs takes more work. In the case of the OSR, most of us working in this space have internalized over a decade of blog posts at this point. Resources like Knock! help in consolidating that information, but it is still a lot to take in. Sometimes it just takes time. And sometimes it just might not be what you are looking for. But with any luck I hope I elucidated where some of these tensions in play style might emerge, why these differences exist, and help better understand why these systems might or might not work for your table. With any luck, you will find the magic and the highs.