When I was first exposed to the OSR, I thought one of the cool things about it was that the rulesystems were all fairly interchangable since they were all based off of some early version of D&D. Even games so streamlined they cut down to the bone like Into the Odd and Knave could be run with minimal interventions from the GM. Great, I thought, we no longer have to figure out what game we want to play, as a GM I can just say, “hey, here’s an adventure I like to run”, and we go for it.

The actual reality is not this simple.

Typical conversations in my gaming group:

“It’d be cool if the next game we ran was Shadowdark”

“I want to get back into Mork Borg!”

“It’s frustrating that we haven’t played Errant”

This is not unique to my group. If you look at the OSR subreddit, there are regular threads about which OSR system is “the best”, or “Thinking of switching to OSE, Labrynth Lord, Cairn (etc.)” To me, the best OSR system out there is the one you are using to get games to the table. But this is not a typical attitude. I see three reasons for this:

  1. The impact of influencers & hype. We’re all suceptible to the idea that we could buy something that is new & improved.
  2. Most people playing roleplaying games are players.
  3. We’re all chasing a certain type of unanticipated serendipity.

The first point is such a typical experience under capitalism, hardly exclusive to RPGs, that it doesn’t warrant additional discussion. It’s the second thing that I find interesting. Typically, a RPG session is going to have one GM, and multiple players. And the players are only going to be familiar with the core ruleset (maybe). It’s the GM that is exposed to the adventure content. For the players, that stuff is more opaque. So for players the more exciting thing is going to be, hey, here’s this new way to play roleplaying games. From the player’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether an adventure is from a zine or something the GM cooked up.

It’s not just players that get excited about new RPGs though. Despite the GM being the one that will end up having to do a lot of homework to play a new game, are also just as suceptible to the allure of thinking a new game will be better. And while you can probably guess (correctly) from everything stated here that I think people tend to overvalue the importance of systems, it’s not as if they’re unimportant. You could play a game where anytime something uncertain happened, you flipped a coin to determine the outcome. Easy enough to run, doesn’t seem that interesting though. But add some different polyhedral dice, and suddenly you’re dealing with probability systems that can be gamed. There’s more at interest here now. A system should help facilitate play. It steps in where needed, and gets out of the way where it would be burdensome. And sometimes the dice rolls do something magic, something you couldn’t have planned out in an adventure or your prep work. And I suspect that is the high a lot of GMs are chasing at the prospect of a new system.

So this is why it’s 2025, and designers still develop new games that retread the same grounds. And yet the work the OSR community puts into adventure modules is one of its great strengths, and I think that lack of visibility is why we don’t see even more players in this corner of the RPG sphere. So this becomes the question: what do we need to do to help make sure writers of high quality adventures get due attention?