Clean Up on Aisle 5

I consider OD&D, Holmes, Mentzer, and AD&D 1E and 2e (the core rules at least) to be cross-compatible, at least to the point of merely requiring some eyeballing of certain stats. If you pick up an adventure written for any one of them, you're good to go using it for any of the others.

Can we agree on that much?

So now, the simulacra. I consider Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC faithful to their sources, and I consider Castles & Crusades, Basic Fantasy RPG, Swords & Wizardry, and Spellcraft & Swordplay to be interpretational - certainly based in the spirit, but not in the form, of their source material.

That approach has led to some difficulties. I'm interested in publishing, but I'm not interested in doing so for any particular simulacrum. Everything I do is for the overall D&D (70s and 80s incarnations, anyway) umbrella, using the simulacra as my vehicle. In researching how to best do that, I've come across this.

Something's gone wrong. This was inevitable, because any sort of Greater Gaming Council to establish what is or is not a faithful and orthodox restatement of the rules would be mocked and have no authority anyway. Trusting that the individuals creating these things would come to a consensus in presentation would be foolish, since a belief in older D&D is itself a sign that an individual isn't concerned with a greater consensus in the first place. These are ground-up, individual (or small conclave) efforts. But these scattershot results absolutely kill what I want out of the "Old School Renaissance" and I fear will kill overall unity within the scene as it grows and inevitably fragments in the future.

You see, I don't care about the OSR or what you're doing when I sit down and play with my group, just like you don't care about my way of doing things when you sit down to play with your group. We have our individual styles and in a lot of ways that's the whole point. But when I say, "I play Dungeons and Dragons," that used to mean something. Yes, there was variation, sometimes a lot of it, even when it was just a different guy from the group running that week, but the baseline was there and it was understood. Even with the "Basic" versions and AD&D, it was understood.

TSR took that away (Spelljammer and Dark Sun and Planescape, as cool as each may or may not have been, eroded the baseline D&D assumptions in ways that Greyhawk and the Realms and even Dragonlance never did), and WOTC crushed it dead. Now when I say "I play Dungeons and Dragons," all bets are off as to what the listener will interpret that to mean.

But with the differences between the different clones, and the efforts of some to not just use them to play or share ideas, but to publish and attempt to regain some of the actual standing that these games once had as living games (the original purpose of OSRIC, remember), and how some conflict between being faithful and being interpretational, is going to cause problems, and hardly creates a clear definition of anything. I fear it's an internecine edition war waiting to happen (it's already happened a bit, if you remember C&C vs OSRIC a couple years back, but for some reason C&C doesn't get counted as part of this movement), and all that's going to take is one of these things getting popular out there in the real world. This whole "OSR" or traditional gaming scene, or what have you, is a long-term failure if it doesn't get people interested and playing who are independent of the community as it stands (as in, not caring who wrote what, not reading the blogs, not buying a single one of our supplements, not joining the boards, etc).

I'm not so sure this thing has been positioned to be self-sustainable outside of creator contact, and I think that's a problem. Those "TSR Gary" editorials were a bit heavy-handed in speaking about how people played at home (and exaggerating minor edition differences), but I just now re-read those editorials and find myself in agreement with the underlying point of having that base "official" line. Not as a mandate declaring how the game should be played or influencing how things are done at any individual table, but providing a common vernacular, a common point between the people and their wild house rules. It is one reason why I respect OSRIC as a body of work: the focus always seemed to be on preserving the 1e game (as it was and is played, not so much how it was originally presented), not in the individual writer's ideas or servicing a community. They really didn't monkey around with 1e when making OSRIC, did they?

If people are interested in creating compatibility solutions (and obviously they are, or that thread I linked above wouldn't exist and wouldn't have publishers participating in it), the answer is not in an after-the-fact publishing Rosetta Stone (that seems likely to deface publications with excessive and confusing statistical notations or bog down in legal footnotes that nobody but the original rules-writers will care about), but a summit of the creators to sit down and work out some mechanical standards to be applied within their own rules. For a movement that's adopted "rulings, not rules" as something of a mantra, you sure do have to pay awfully close attention to each specific simulacrum's rules if you want to put something non-partisan out there.

At this point it's probably easier to just eschew the OGL and publish for Dungeons and Dragons by name than it is to actually publish something that would be compatible with the Dungeons and Dragons OGL-enabled restatements, if you're not interested in throwing your hat in with any particular version.

And we don't even have the Holmes, Mentzer, straight-0e, or (gulp) 2e simulacra out there yet. How messy is this going to get?