Deadly, Not Frustrating: Keeping OSR TTRPGs Fun & Fair
A common reason I hear for folks being turned off from OSR games is their perceived or real deadliness. Most folks getting into the TTRPG hobby these days are the children of Matt Mercer, and following Critical Role as their primary example, so it’s natural they're sold on the idea that TTRPGs are supposed to be a long interactive story with traditional structure, and deep and satisfying character arcs.
When they hear about OSR games and start to understand their deadliness, they get to thinking: “How can I get invested into the story of a character if they die so frequently? This sounds terrible”.
I'm not going to try to tell them that they're wrong, that would be ridiculous, their fun is as legitimate as anyone’s. But I do want to see if I can open a new door for them.
So that got me to thinking, can the OSR come meet this new generation of players in the middle, to make sure that the game is not frustrating and remains a fair and enjoyable experience for them?
Of course it can. I have thoughts on the matter.
How Players Can stay alive in the OSR
My first suggestion is to the players
From the perspective of an OSR player looking in, games like 5e prescribe your characters a set of abilities and optimised choices. The gameplay focuses on providing balanced encounters, and the rules come with a plethora of elements (open Death Save rolls) and abilities (Healing Word) to ensure that player death is highly improbable. The designers want you to buy their long, and event driven story campaigns, and those can easily fall apart narratively if characters start dying.
Contrasting this, the OSR swings the opposite way. Generally speaking any notion of balance or pre-game solutionising is thrown out the window, and cheap ranged spells that you can fire off to heal people and get them back on their feet whilst still performing your main action are typically non existent. These games tend to lean more towards sandbox style play, which means that character death doesn’t have to be woven awkwardly into some pre existing story, because there is no pre existing story.
So the first thing you have to do as a new OSR player is adjust your playstyle. The answer to whatever encounter is in front of you is not on your character sheet. Instead the onus is now on you to use your personal ingenuity to try to shift the dynamics of whatever threat is in front of you, to push the odds in your favour before you engage.
What do I mean? I mean pay close attention to the descriptions given out by the GM, ask questions, fully engage your imagination and start dreaming up wild solutions, ask questions, make a point of being an active participant in the games narrative - ask more questions! Seriously, ask your GM about the situation to gain better understanding, suggest possible additional elements in the world that you can use to form part of your solution.
A good GM should be gratefully receptive to this - they should be rooting for you after all, and when you ask questions it gives the GM opportunity to fill in the gaps of your knowledge!
Of course, it should go without saying - if all else fails, be prepared to run away and fight another day.
Best GM practices To Ensure a Fair Game
Telegraph danger
Be liberal with information, even meta information about the dangers ahead. This will avoid those foul tasting “gotcha moments”. Remember, you are the player character’s eyes and ears in this world, it is unfair to expect the players themselves to be able to act in their best interest if they are unaware of of things that their characters would be very aware of.
For example, everyone in town knows about the dangers of the swamp at night, so the townsfolk stay clear. When you are explaining this to the players, why not show them the swamp random encounter table so they understand exactly what can happen? It would be common knowledge that the swamp was full of giant crocodiles and that there are ghostly lights in the water that try to lure you into peril. Also, lets not forget about the rumours of a nasty old lady who sets traps and kidnaps lost folks too.
Kill your darlings
You know that encounter that you think is going to be epic and you've been really looking forward to bringing it to the table? You need to be able to take joy in allowing the players to come up with ways to circumvent it entirely. Encourage this line of thinking, and when you sense that they’re trying to do this, make sure you equip your players with everything they would know in order to complete their strategy.
The best way to stay alive in the OSR is to play smart. Smart players don’t pick fights when the odds are against them, instead they find another way. Let them, that’s your side of the deal.
Also, keep that encounter on the back burner. The players may have circumvented it this time, but there’s probably going to be another opportunity to recycle it later on. Of course, you should let them avoid it again if they can!
Mothership: Telegraph monster attacks
I wrote a piece a couple of months back. Ostensibly it was about Mothership combat, but there’s this nifty GM style that the game promotes which really helps. Applied more generally to the OSR, it would look like this:
When a combat encounter is potentially devastating, at the start of every round of that combat, tell the players quite openly what the monster is going to attempt to do.
Firstly, this removes any gotcha’s, which is a good thing. Secondly, this creates an exciting feeling of existential dread and panic in the players, knowing what fate lays just ahead of them. Thirdly, it gives the players opportunity to play smart and change the future. Circumvent it, dodge it, whatever verb you like :)
Honestly, this lands a hell of a lot better than the anti climax of just smashing your players into dust out of nowhere.
GOZR: Death or Debasement
Did you catch my piece on GOZR perchance? It’s another OSR game, but it has a rather clever rule. JV West calls it “Death or Debasement”, and when your character would die, you as a player get to make a choice:
Death. You can accept that the character has died and get a bonus to the stats of your next character.
Debasement. You can say that your character survived on 1HP, however his stats have been permanently degraded in some way that does not break verisimilitude.
It’s cool, because as a player, only you know if you’re ready to draw a line under a characters career or not, and this empowers you to do so. However, it’s not a free pass, taking a hit to stats is a narratively satisfying major setback. Possibly even more so than death would be.
If I was to port this to something like Shadowdark, I might say that the consequence for Debasement is that you drop a level. That feels good to me, but you could go with all sorts, so figure it out with your players.
Conclusion
Alrighty, that’ll do pig. Let me know if I’ve managed to convince you. Also, lemme know if you think of anything else I’ve missed. If it’s good, I’ll add it to this article.
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