It's the OSR and NSR post!
This is not what I had planned for this week, but Tim B. decided to make a poll and I love polls. It was about "is this game NSR or OSR or neither", which means it was about meaningless taxonomy and I love meaningless taxonomy. And, if there is one thing that I like more than polls and meaningless taxonomy, it's talking to an invisible audience about things I think - and the things I'm thinking about right now are the criteria I've used to determine my meaningless taxonomy in that poll.
First things first, I wasn't here when people invented the OSR. I also wasn't here when people invented the NSR. I became aware of ttrpg discourse and terminology around what, 2023? So I think that both a) my opinion might not be super representative and b) some people might be interested in this perspective1. So let me unfurl what I've picked up about these acronyms these last few years.
OSR stands for Old School Renaissance, and it's basically a bunch of people who wanted to play D&D like peeps played it back in the day, even though peeps played D&D in a lot of different ways back in the day. Back in the day generally refers to the times before the 2000s.
The OSR is not-so-loosely defined by some documents with principles. Instead of linking to them directly, I'll link to this lovely post by Gus L. in which they go over the supposed "maxims" of the OSR. It's a good read.
NSR stands for New School Revolution and is a category of games named by Pandatheist and also a blog by Yochai Gal and also also a Discord server for talking about ttrpgs. From what I've gathered, it came mostly from creating something like the OSR, but with less elitism2 and less D&D vibes.
A lot of people call self-identified OSR things NSR, and vice-versa. This tends to cause arguments, but it doesn't really matter much in the grander scheme of things. Not even to the people that started them, sometimes.
Some people tried coming up with terms such as PostOSR, POSR and NuSR, but I don't think they caught on. I think they were supposed to mean the same as NSR...?
I'm not sure what exactly is going on right now on OSR spaces, since the spaces I frequent mostly call themselves NSR. However, as far as I can tell, the OSR is still rather focused on the things mentioned in item 2 (which is not a problem at all), while the NSR has become more of a community instead of a game label, that interacts with all kinds of games, cultures and playstyles (which is also not a problem at all).
With all that out of the way, here's how I was looking at Tim B.'s funny poll3:
- If the game was released before the 2000s, it can't be NSR or OSR. You can play it in an OSR or NSR way, but if we're attributing the label to the game, that's a no-no.
- If the game not centered around D&D aesthetics4, then it can't be OSR.
- If the game deviates enough from D&D aesthetically or mechanically, it can be NSR.
Hopefully that leaves gaps and doesn't clear anything up!
anb
Hi, thanks for being interested in this perspective. You're pretty, have a great day :)↩
Also zero tolerance for bigots, racists and transphobes. I fucking love the NSR.↩
I'm not going to share the poll. Not that I think I have enough audience outside the NSR server to skew its results (or enough audience at all), but you can just go into the server and check it out for yourself, if it's still up.↩
Swords, horse, that guy... You know the drill.↩