KNOCK!-off #1.4

"I don’t like blogs. They're pompous, self-indulgent,
and irritating... and no one reads them."

Further research has yielded a reddit post on r/OSR that actually provides an excellent link tree for the various contributions to KNOCK! #1, so just go look at that instead of my section headers. 

NAMING MY GAME by Ben Milton

What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

- (Stolen by Shakespeare from Team Rocket, if you didn't know)

There's a certain prestige that comes with popularizing the term by which we call a category or phenomena, and everyone is going to have an opinion on why their answer is best. I recently read a good chunk of Brian Murphy's Flame and Crimson: A history of sword-and-sorcery wherein the first six or so pages of chapter 5 are dedicated to the witherto's and whyfor's of naming of the literary subgenre. There were many arguments offered as to why it came about and it was all very researched on the part of the author, but as a reader, it frankly did little to keep me engaged.

As long as we all generally know what we're talking about, we can call it whatever. It may even help to wait for the dust to settle before declaring it as anything definitive. Spoiler alert: KNOCK! editors may very well be in the same boat; Marcia B's the OSR Should Die is featured in K!5 with an affirmative editor's note.

EXPOSE YOUR PREP by Chris McDowall

Alright, Chris cooked with this one. This piece is a few crisp bullet points of what to show your players for being good, attentive noodles, and I agree with practically all of it.

EXPOSE THE MAP - I hate having to draw rooms as they are discovered, and I detest the idea of trusting a player to accurately draw it out as described. There are some online tools that help with this, but that defeats the reason for having the maps conveniently drawn out for you by many modules ahead of time. I am very lazy when it comes to giving my players eye candy because I am quite busy as it is doing my NPC voices and answering the same question several times when it comes to descriptions. If the players are emotionally dependent on a grid (or NPC portrait for that matter), let them have it. They'll come crawling back to you anyway to learn what each of the rooms actually look like.

EXPOSE THE NPCS - My subtle cue for whether or not I want my players to engage further with an NPC to learn their motives, abilities, relationships, etc. is doing a voice for them. I make it distinct from my normal speaking tone so that they are clued into the fact that I am putting extra effort into this particular character. My NPCs also generally stray into George Lucas dialogue territory so nothing gets lost in translation. The more they talk, the more I rat out to the players. I'll be damned before I let anyone roll an Insight check (or equivalent) to figure out if someone is lying to them.

EXPOSE THE FUTURE - Communicate consequences. It's out of your hands after that.

EXPOSE THE TABLES - I had never thought about this one before, honestly. It may actually be even more fun to let the players roll on it since they already see the odds (and they have no one to blame but themselves). Now, this may only apply to tables that serve as resource taxes as opposed to storytelling ones (see previous post on Bryce Lynch's thoughts on random tables) as to not over-divulge, but I think the point is still salient for communicating the likelihood of any given encounter.

EXPOSE THE MECHANICS - While the advice is specifically tied to one of Chris' games, it is still entirely applicable to other... adventure games. The purpose of the flexible rule structures in old-school systems is to cater towards the eventuality that both the players and GM will stray into uncharted rule-waters. As such, your players may feel strongly about the perceived fairness or applicability of your rulings, so if you are genuinely just making stuff up, might as well be honest about it. If you've given it some thought about how to rule it, demonstrate to the players that you made an honest attempt to gameify the process.

ENCOURAGE SCHEMING by Chris McDowall

"PLOTS FOR THE PLOT GOD! SCHEMES FOR THE SCHEME THRONE!" as the kids say.

Chris enumerates some flavorful examples of how to enable the players to create a plan to solve a problem aside from brute forcing their way through it; players need time, tools, and reliable information to make the decisions required to solve a problem.

Granted, I believe I heard this from Ben Milton at some point, but something that is unspoken here is the fact that the way you would solve a problem isn't the way the players might try to do the same. Relinquish the pride you have in your clearly superior intellect for a moment and explain the consequences to players should their version of the plan fail, but assume that there is still a solid chance of it succeeding if they make an attempt to account for a wide number of variables. It's even alright for you to create problems that you wouldn't even know how to start solving yourself and letting players surprise you with an answer. Affording PCs the opportunity to be cool and tell a good story is more or less the point of the experience, right?

Why Setting HIGH STAKES Matters by Sean McCoy

Sean delineates a perception issue that I have been trying to highlight as a throughline in my writing this whole time: the players are accountable for the type of game they want to experience. Attachment to characters is earned as opposed to given, and fail states (including death) ensure that consequences for that attachment is genuine.

If the basis of stories is conflict/resolution and TTRPGS are a medium to try more or less anything in the pursuit of telling a story, it is both cheap and purposeless to handwave away additional ramifications arising from decisions made in its telling. Let stuff that happens matter, because otherwise the "happening" doesn't. The power and allure of these games diminish in the absence of repercussions. There is a difference between challenging/inviting someone to participate in the story and making them straight up uncomfortable, but to truly live vicariously through our hallucinated avatars, we must accept their mortal foibles and capabilities in equal measure.

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I got all of those responses to my gygaxian-democratized table of d20 Pixie Tribes, and it doesn't get accepted to KNOCK! itself, I'll publish it here with credits.

The Children Yearn for the Old-School: Friendslop Games as an Extension of OSR Game Design

Screenshot from an upcoming co-op horror game,
YAPYAP. I'm excited for this one.

I have a small cadre of friends that meets on Wednesdays over Discord, ostensibly to play whatever TTRPG suits our fancy (currently Star Borg), but also to play video games if someone doesn't show or if no one is prepped. What I find interesting about the latter activity is that it typically feels like a natural extension of the first most of the time. We play games like Phasmophobia, R.E.P.O, PEAK, and Lethal Company, mostly because they are easy to pick up and encourage us to work together instead of against one another. However, I think the why actually runs a little deeper than that.

Perhaps because I drifted into the OSR rather than being steeped in it for many years, I can't help but notice that these community-styled "friendslop" games offer a deliberate experience that is similar in many ways to their analogue counterparts. The core gameplay loop is effectively the same, and how players engage with it is conceptually identical. Setting aside ever-popular shooters, MOBAs, and MMOs, I think the increased visibility of this genre points to a broader convergence of design priorities rather than a simple trend: a shared interest in player-driven problem solving, improvisation, and social play that the Old-School style has emphasized for decades.

Some of the subheadings below are lifted straight from the preface of TMM published adventures such as Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow and The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh, but they stem conceptually from foundational OSR texts like the Principia Apocrypha. The intent here is not to claim direct influence, but to show how similar assumptions about play recur across media.

Decision making as the core player experience

When you join a lobby of Lethal Company, your crew selects a moon to visit in order to recover items, with the option to purchase supplies from a terminal beforehand. Once you have arrived, there is no set path to reach the target facility, and there are multiple entrances. Someone can also stay aboard the ship to monitor player positions, identify hostiles, or open doors.

At each of these stages, there are a plethora of interesting decisions to make. Do we buy everyone flashlights, or save our money for better gear later? Should we go in through the front, or try the back door first? Do we need more people inside to help carry loot, or can someone stay on the ship to guide us?

While there are clear objectives in this style of game like overcoming a discrete obstacle or recovering a certain amount of loot, how players approach the problem is intentionally vague, informed by group decision making and available resources. There is practically no difference between this method and old-school dungeon crawling. If gold is equal to XP, players must gear up and devise a plan to recover as much as possible while still getting out alive. In both cases, player skill is expressed through judgment, coordination, and "the gear they carry" (Ben Milton, Knave 2e) rather than mechanical optimization.

Open, dynamic environments / Absence The opacity of 'game balance'

Procedural or randomized generation is a favorite feature of many of these games, making them more interesting to replay and presenting a fresh challenge on each run. The unpredictability and variety of environments make them engaging in a way that scratches the itch of improvised strategy. In PEAK, for example, there are expected aspects of each biome, but it cannot be predicted which biomes will appear on a given run, nor what quantity or quality of supplies will be found along the way. Players are forced to operate with imperfect information, reinforcing decision-centric play while making the world feel genuinely dangerous.

The game may become more difficult as players progress, much in the same way that classic dungeons become more perilous as PCs descend to deeper levels, but very few interactions (if any) are scripted to occur in a fixed way. While these systems like spawn rates or behaviors are certainly tuned under the hood, danger is not calibrated to player capability at that moment; obstacles and enemies do not meaningfully "scale." They are capable of dealing out setbacks and death regardless of when they are encountered, but they also can be defeated by prudent assessment and recall. Areas are not gated by level requirements, but a lack of resources, information, or imagination can still prevent ill-prepared players from accessing them. This attitude of “sure, you can try that, it just might not go well” aligns closely with how OSR systems expect adventuring parties to engage with the group hallucination.

Quick character creation

Gather a group, establish a plan, grab the basics, and head into the adventure zone. Am I describing Shadowdark or R.E.P.O.? Both, really. There are no opening cutscenes or elaborate backstories to sit through. You might change the color of your shirt or the combination of simple starting equipment you bring, but getting into the game itself is a cinch.

As with many OSR systems, the stories that matter are not written beforehand. They emerge through play, while the party is in the dungeon, reacting to threats, making bad decisions, and occasionally surviving them. Character is revealed through action, not exposition or explicit lore.

The golden rule of play

Regardless of the title or medium, the point of "friendslop" is to spend time with people and enjoy a shared experience together. The fact that this experience is mediated through digital assets rather than a collective imagination does not cheapen the memories produced through play. These games largely reject leaderboards, KDA ratios, and other forms of external validation in favor of moments that are meaningful primarily or even entirely to the people present.

When asked why these games feel different from a AAA battle royale or a certain heavily authored RPG sold across multiple console generations, you can bet that players will give answers that mirror those of tabletop gamers, especially those operating in the OSR tradition. The appeal lies not in spectacle or progression, but in shared problem solving and the stories that emerge from it.

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Much in the same way that dialogue between literature and TTRPGs is ongoing, games across media are constantly iterating on one another’s ideas, consciously or not. Developers are strengthened by broadening their horizons and translating successful principles across formats. Whatever overlap already exists between OSR design and indie co-op darlings, that overlap is not accidental. Both come from a desire for flexible, player-driven experiences that respect time, intelligence, and social play; in my opinion, this Venn diagram becoming a circle shows that this style of play has enduring, meaningful qualities... and I want to see more. At their best, both OSR games and their digital cousins are not about power fantasies, but about shepherding funny little guys through hostile spaces and seeing what stories get shaken loose.