All For the State of the OSR

The real tragedy of the Old School Renaissance isn't outdated math, fragile character sheets, or clunky armor class rules. I don't think it actually has any of those things, I just think most modern people are dumb.

It’s the walling off of the mind.

The OSR took the historic provincialism of the D&D mindset and turned it up to 11. It transformed a specific, local play style—tactical adventure-wargaming with a pulp aesthetic squeezed between turns—into a totalizing worldview. It didn't just preserve an old game; it built a fortress, pulled up the drawbridge, and declared that everything outside the moat was fraudulent... while sneaking out to take ideas from the outside and hoping we wouldn't notice.

Don't worry, we did.

The Myth of Pure Emulation

You can see this insularity most clearly in how the movement talks about Appendix N. There is an orthodox claim that OSR mechanics represent the pure, distilled essence of classic Sword & Sorcery fiction. But they don't. At best, they ape it. They make the right noises, wave around Howard and Leiber, and pretend that rolling up a 6-down-the-line fighter somehow captures the wild, dynamic flexibility of Conan.

Conan isn't a "Class." He doesn't gain experience as a fighter and then dual class into rogue. His capabilities aren't hardcoded into a rigid progression table, and anyone who thinks so has never read Conan.

Which I have. All of it. Twice.

Same with Solomon Kane. 

And Kull. Boy there really ain't anything for Kull in the OSR on a mechanical level.

So don't try that shit here, thanks.

The play experience of B/X doesn't feel like a Robert E. Howard or L. Sprague de Camp story, but a man-to-man tactical wargame derived from Chainmail, with just enough literary duct tape and blind hope connecting the bits to hold the vague shape of a narrative... which it is. And if you're lucky, the clone actually knows what it is and, thusly, does it well.

Most of them don't.

Why can't the OSR acknowledge this? Because insularity demands total self-sufficiency. To admit that the legion of B/X clones is a great tactical skirmish engine but a terrible literary emulator would mean admitting that there's other design languages at all, never mind that they may do the emulation better. And inside a walled garden, that kind of admission is heresy.

Yes, I just accused the entirety of the OSR of just being 4e, but not as honest.

The Antique Hammer

We saw this exact same intellectual paralysis during the early 2000s d20 explosion under the OGL. Designers back then had one hammer—the d20 engine—and suddenly every genre, setting, and emotion in existence had to be forced to act like a nail.

The OSR didn't break away from that insular logic. It simply picked up an antique hammer and demanded that all of TTRPG design stop evolving and start acting like a nail from 1974. And, again, I don't have issue with that antique hammer. I started teaching Chainmail to my kids, and they love it! I'm learning it and having a blast. I'm working up the courage to DM a 1e game. This isn't coming from a place of hatred, in the slightest. I think there's plenty to learn from the antique hammer, have said so publicly, and will continue to say so.

But when you refuse to look outside the canon, you miss better tools entirely. Look at the Hunt roll from Trophy Gold: it's literally a player-driven variant of the encounter check in all old-school games, but infinitely smoother, infinitely better, and much faster. I've been enjoying using old-school encounter rolls, don't get me wrong, but the loss of the Hunt roll is starting to grate. That. Tech. Is. Better. And it's not a question.

Similarly, games like Burning Wheel literally take the player-driven ideal of the OSR and actually make it central. Torchbearer, despite being clunkier, evolves ideas like character knowledge being a weapon, Town as a place of help and risk, and pushes them better than anything I've ever seen in the OSR. 

Tooting mine own horn a second, Crescendo pushes player agency against Judge authority in ways actually addictive to OSR sensibilities: Hitting the Books, a bibliomancy that references everyone's journals and pushes it to the Judge to consolidate into one new meaning, is the apotheosis of the random encounter roll.

And there's tons of other examples. I'll say it: PBTA rolls are also random encounters evolved, and they can be used better.

But because they don't share the old-school lineage, these things (and more!) are routinely dismissed under the generic umbrella of "story games." It’s an intellectual shortcut—a way to discard ideas without having to engage with them... until they need something, at which point it's a natural evolution, as opposed to finding a good idea

Everything Within the State

This is where provincialism turns into dogma. The movement took the insular tendencies of the traditional D&D ecosystem and made a virtue out of its vices, echoing the totalizing slogan of 20th-century statism: 

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

Replace "the State" with "the D&D Engine," and you have the modern OSR echo chamber. 

If a design concept doesn't originate within early edition mechanics, or if it isn't put into that framework (the rest of the world calls this stealing, but the way), it doesn't count. If an insight comes from outside the walled garden, it is ignored or derided until it is put inside the walled garden, with nary an acknowledgment that someone else did it first, and may do it better even now.

The frustrating part is that the actual games are fine when stripped of the propaganda, including those little bits pilfered without humility.

The problem arises when someone looks across the table and claims that OSR is the purest manifestation of roleplaying, or that it holds an exclusive hotline to critical design truth. At that point, you aren't talking about game mechanics anymore. You are watching someone defend the borders of an isolated intellectual state.

OSR is a great engine for generating a very specific, procedural, tactical experience. But the moment its advocates pretend it is the sole metric for true roleplaying, they aren't engaging with game design—they're just worshipping the walls of their own fortress.

And Then the BROSR

Let's get this out of the way: I have multiple tools from the BROSR in Crescendo, and they work like a charm. 1:1 time works. Scheming between sessions works. "Always on" works. I have multiple videos and posts proving they do. SEEN and GOSS work, although I need to modify them more for Crescendo. I showed my work, continue to show my work, and have no issue with saying "Yeah, their stuff is cool and I did what any good designer does: steal and be proud of it!" Hell, in my credits section, I openly credit the BROSR, particularly SeriousDM and BDubs1776. I did this in part because I took ideas they had and used them, and do think they deserve the credit for it... and also because the BROSR howls so loudly about having their influence being "hidden from the TTRPG space" that I just wanted to nip that shit, right in the bud.

Y'all got good ideas.

But.

The BROSR are the worst offenders of old-school insularity, while using tech that others evolved, by far.

Taking other ideas is is fine! Game design and innovation usually take earlier ideas and find new uses for them. But there isn't a single idea of theirs that hasn't been done in the storygame space previously. Their genius isn't raw invention, but in finding the same principles that literally anyone outside the old school space was starting to develop it and using it to great effect.

They deserve that credit. I happily give it.

Here’s the Short Version, Stripped of the Fortress Rhetoric

The old-school rules are a sharp, specific tool. Use them. Steal from them. Teach them to your kids. I do.

But stop pretending the tool is the only legitimate language of roleplaying, or that everything outside the 1974–1983 canon is either derivative trash or secret OSR waiting to be properly baptized. The moment you treat one historical playstyle as the sole metric of authenticity, you stop designing and start policing borders.

The best ideas in the broader hobby—player-driven procedures, sharper resource pressure, actual literary flexibility—don’t care about your lineage. They work whether or not they share a bloodline with Chainmail. Refusing to look at them doesn’t preserve purity. It just guarantees you’ll keep rediscovering the same wheels and calling the reinvention “natural evolution.”

OSR doesn’t need to be the State. It just needs to stop acting like one. The games will be fine. The walls were never load-bearing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Elephant in the Room: “Of Course I Did It. I'm Me.”

I will never forget when I found the black-haired girl, in the real world in of November 2020, and realized holy shit it's her. I stared down, at my phone. I screamed. I threw the phone. Sat down. My head swam as I sat down and looked at the floor. And then considered checking myself into a funny farm. I thought about it long and hard. I decided not to, because who was going to take care of our kids? Maria would have to work.  The kids would be wondering what the heck happened, and I would never be able to explain that. And how do you explain to a spouse that you checked yourself into a psych ward because you recognized someone from a dream???

So. That was off the table. Whatever was going on, I had to figure it out.

Boy, lucky me!

So, I sat down and examined what I was feeling. It wasn't "I think I know this person." It was "I know this person. I know her, and I have never seen her before in my... oh shit." The response was a combination of recognition, shock and utter fear. I couldn't find any wishful thinking anywhere in my response. I couldn't find anything that was trying to make this person more meaningful to me. If anything, the opposite was there. I am Maria's, thank you very fucking much. That is something that has been a part of me since seven years old. It is not going to change, for so many reasons.

So... what the hell was I feeling? What was this? Who was she?

And why did it feel like she was in trouble? Oh goody, how ridiculous is that? I sneered, ignored it. But the feeling kept going, until I thought it was going to drive me actually crazy. So, I did the one thing I could: I prayed for her. It was all I had. No ethical contact was possible, or even desirable. There was either praying for her, and feeling like I was as at least doing something, or there was just.. sitting in this overwhelming  push to pray for her. It was like someone had opened up my brain and began a constant download of this need to pray for her.

But it never got so overwhelming that I couldn't ask: why me?

Like, seriously, why me? 

Why was I feeling this? 

I had not the privilege for doubt, which is one of the most insanely painful  things you can imagine. I wanted to doubt, and couldn't. It made absolutely no sense, but it was happening, and there was nothing I could do but pray for this stranger and hang on for dear life. I could feel I was burning a trail, somehow, with every last bit of me on fire to keep this person supported.  I felt like I was in a continuum of flame, with a river I couldn't understand extending before and behind me indefinitely.

So late 2020 through 2025 gave me absolutely no time for answers.

2026, and suddenly the overwhelming push stopped. Poof. Gone. Along with all memory of that river of fire. It was like someone reached down, plucked me out of this fiery existence, and dumped me back on dry (and cool) ground.

And then let me be.

I have had enough spiritual experiences in my life to not be terribly surprised that the memory of the experience left. The Spirit, when He stops doing a particular thing, takes it from you, and that's it. You knew what you needed to know, and now that you don't need to know it, it's gone.

But the question remained.

Why me?

This was a question that burned me in me all of 2026, up until... a few days ago.

At the top and center of all Orthodox churches hangs the Pantorcrator: Christ the Judge. He holds the closed book of judgement, the one where you find out if you treated the least fortunate like Christ. It's closed, because no one will know how they did until the end.

I have a habit of looking dead in the eyes of the one that hangs above us as I go up to communion. During that time, ever since I knew who the black-haired (now) woman is, I have felt the urge to pray for her. It's a brief moment of wishing that, whatever I get from communing, she gets it too.

For the past five years I have looked up, into the eyes of the Just Judge, and slowly, over the course of the five years, a question began to form in my mind, in the form of a Silent, Still, Quiet, Voice.

Why you?

The Voice became quieter and more forceful with time. Each time, there was some variation of "I don't know, but I'm doing it anyway. If it's wrong... please forgive me. I don't know what else to do." The sense was always that the answer I gave was honest, but it was incomplete. But as the question got more and more forceful, so did my honest response: "I don't know, but You won't take this from me, so I am going to do it!" And that, again, felt honest. It was the best I could do, and that was enough, for right then and there, but it wasn't right.

The night before liturgy, I lay day next to Maria. And in that moment, I felt the familiar twinge of overwhelming attraction I've always felt for her. Over the last ten years, since remembering being abused as a child, I have had a difficult time with the reality of my pull towards Maria, for reasons that shouldn't take much to suss out.

But this night, I lay next to her, and I knew. Knew. That the pull was simply because we existed. It had no moral component to it. It was a symptom of something that was simply us. We existed, and we belonged together, and it was my peculiarity that I needed her as much as I always have. Twelve years in, and I'm practically like a teenager around Maria, even now.

And for the first time in ten years it felt okay that that was how it was. Smiling, I stroked my wife's shoulder in affection, and went to sleep. I just was what I was.

The next day, as I went to communion, I felt the tug to pray for the black-haired girl. I did. I looked up, like I always did.

Why you? 

And this time I looked into the eyes of the Almighty and said, with a calm tremble:

“Because You made me to do it. This is who I AM. I could do nothing else. Of course I did it. I'm me. Thank you."

Yes, I capitalized it on purpose, for in that moment there was a feeling that something far larger and incomprehensible joined me for those two words.

For one second the One Beyond Defining met a little micro/macrocosm.  Two voices spoke. And the voices were joined. And were one.

Why me? Because what was needed was precisely what I did. It happened because, faced with someone that good and pure-hearted, it wouldn't even seriously occur to me to take what wasn't mine. I was content. I am Maria's. Content, I could do what needed to be done.

There's other questions I still have: why show me that vision of the future? Why take it from me, along with everything else? I remember that I had the vision, once, but I can't remember it directly anymore, because it has been removed. Why do that to me? 

But the primary question I had for going on six years is now quiet. And that quiet is such a blessing.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Eleven

 

You know, I finally had a lesson coalesce with this particular chapter session: if people want fantasy, they want a magic sword, the big fights with the monsters, the passionate romances, all that. That's how it is, that's what they want. For a very long I fought doing those kinds of moments in fantasy RPGs, and after this particular session I know why.

You see, supranatural good and evil only really as a breakthrough of the glass ceiling or floor. You must have a sense of the mundane of that world. You must learn what feels normal, boring, happy, sad, desperate. There’s a reason Tolkien writes about trees so much: so when you don’t have them, it hurts. And when you get them back, you’re relieved. 

And when Elendil’s light comes out of the vial, you feel that you are witnessing something unique, something you can hold as holy.

Crescendo sticks you in your character’s head, gets you in his darkness. His foibles. So that you yearn for goodness. For absolution.

For mercy.

That way, when it happens, you feel it. Because you have felt the continuum of wretchedness, and the mercy hits all these cracks that you felt, and there's one answer to so many questions, all at once.

Chapter Eleven: September 13th

This one moment, right at the end, when Seren pulls the Sword of Uriel out of the ground and destroys Eoc with it in one stroke, cannot be replicated in any other media. Everyone had been in this downward spiral. They'd lost their home, New Sota City, compromised themselves over and over, in some cases doing outright evil, and they couldn't stop. This wasn't a passive thing: it was active participation in rapid degeneration.

And then someone got a sword from an angel, and reminded us all, after all that pain and awfulness, that life really can be that simple.

And that, when goodness acts, there isn't even a body for evil left on the earth.

Notice it's the dude playing the monster who cheers louder than anyone else.

That exact feeling going through everyone's frame was why Crescendo was made. It is why the game exists.

I'm still in awe that it works.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Ten

 

The Ideal for Weaving

Crescendo's name for the host is the Weaver. I hate it when TTRPGs have a name different from the Game Master... and my game has a different name for it. So. The name was chosen for a good reason. The Weaver's function is to combine all the bits from his Setting with the Player's Beliefs and the results of Hitting the Books. His job is not to know what is going to happen, or to even do any starting scenario, but to know his Setting well enough to pivot on a moment's notice to what's going on. While GMs are expected to do this, it is not their primary function, unlike the Weaver: it is not a function of the the Weaver, but the primary function.

Because Crescendo takes away all session prep from the Weaver, their primary job is to build a world that they understand, and then take the punches as they come, weaving together all the seemingly disparate threads with the world they built.

Chapter Ten was a pretty darn good example of it.

August 28th Through September 5th

Unfortuntaely, Arriquard's player had to step out, due to a ton of scheduling conflicts. So we had to write him out. It was a sad day, but this is a long-running game, and it happens.

On August 28th, the werecrocodiles launch a short sortie against Newport, but are rebuffed, and Lord Arriquard sacrifices his life in the effort. King Lucian himself fought like a demon, earning the admiration of all.

August 29th

Lady Marie connects with the other heads of Newport, especially Lord Phillippe, and they begin to rebuild the city, on *their* dime. This doesn't go unnoticed. Or unappreciated.

From 28th-31st

Seren and Silvy venture out into the woods with the newly-consecrated exorcism cauldron, and spend the day exorcising the strange fire spirit from there. It flees south, away from the Serpent Forest... where it suddenly *vanishes.*

September 1st

The new year! Celebrations all around!

September 2nd-5

Lady Marie takes over the standing army that Lord Arriquard had built, making them the security forces of *all* the rice farmers, specifically. It was not accomplished without a fight: Silvy the elf, known for her deeds of heroism, tried to take over as well. In the end, however, Lady Marie won out.

By the end of September 5th it's clear that something disastrous is developing in the farms surrounding Newport: wives are accused of going into the city to cheat on husbands, en masse. Rumors abound about everyone, and morale in the farms is becoming disastrously low. If this isn't dealt with, you will all lose your food supply due to violence.

On September 5th, the monstrous Abbadon, along with his fell beast, parks outside the city walls of Newport. And sits. He's impossible to miss. He does not threaten everyone. He just sits.

September 6th Through 10th

Lady Marie provides support for stopping the forest fire. She takes over the Civilian Army, formerly led by Lord Arriquard, to help get the fire put out and supply the volunteers who are helping. Food is secured and spread.

Seren finds Bishop Tatius, and encourages him to go through the city, spreading encouragement and hope.

Unrest continues in the farms around Newport, which Seren begins to investigate. Abbadon has continued to sit outside the city walls. He doesn't threaten anyone, nor does he really comment upon anything. He just sits.

September 8th was the Feast of the Mothers, when all the mothers of the Outsider, and the mothers of all the heroes, saw the future, and knew what their children would become. Children are handed charcoal, and allowed to go into the churches and scribble on the walls. The priests use these scribbles for fortune-telling purposes throughout the year.

Chapter Ten: September 11th Through 12th

The Fallout

Unfortunately, Kuri was pretty upset with how the chapter went down. I offered to talk, and we figured out what happened. I was given explicit permission by her to write it down here.

I accidentally had blocked one of Kuri's turns. Kuri was set to Defy, dice literally rattling around in hand, and I accidentally skipped her, when I shouldn't have. Kuri, being a polite human being, tried to sit back and wait for a gap... but she was contending with Golden and I, who are both very extroverted and have a habit to get on a roll. Now, I know this about myself, and have spent most of my life working myself from it. But, occasionally, I'll slip up.

And that's exactly what I did here.

I told Kuri that anyone has explicit permission to just say "Nathan, shut the fuck up," and I will immediately do so, and assume that I missed a social cue. I apologized to her, and gave her an extra kicker, as she didn't get anything of what she wanted from the chapter. We didn't break anything that happened in this chapter, and it flowed naturally from the fiction that had played out.

I was gonna write what it was.

But you know what? No. Let the players be surprised by what Kuri's got now. I owe her.

This kind of thing happens, unfortunately, but it's a normal part of a healthy social game: cues are missed and things have to get addressed.

What Crescendo Feels Like

There’s a particular texture to a long Crescendo campaign (called an Epic), that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside one. It starts messy. It gets complicated, less a game you play and more a pressure system you inhabit for a couple of years.

This is my best attempt at putting that feeling into words.  

Honestly, the first six sessions are usually like static: random stuff happens, there’s not that much of a flow to it. At first, you’re just trying to win. Everyone is enjoying playing their characters to the hilt and causing as much damage as possible. There’s this sense that only your actions matter, and the world doesn’t really track what you’re doing.

Then you hit the first Storystein, where your gameplay is judged, and only one person doesn’t get kicked in the balls. The punishments are randomly assigned, with varying levels of harm handed out without rhyme or reason.

And then you’re thrown back into the mix. And you're told that the Storystein will happen another two times this Book, and may God have mercy on you, because the next time may be worse and nobody will know till we get there/

The game rewards you for good RP. It punishes you for being stupid, hard.

Around session six, patterns begin to emerge in Hitting the Books. Results begin feeding into each other, and suddenly you get the suspicion you are in something way larger than the group’s squabbles. The world is changing, and it’s changing in ways you can’t expect, and suddenly all those other players are starting to look more like allies… but the game rewards you hurting them. And you need those Fate Points. So you poke just enough to get your Fate, but not too much to get too comfortable. You never know when someone will harvest Fate from your misfortune, so you have to stay on your toes.

By the time the first Book ends, you are exhausted. You just went 12-24 sessions, brutal knock-down drag-out brawls, with your friends, and you feel different. Your character feels different. And maybe you feel like stopping. For good. 

But then you’re told there’s probably another… wait…. 30-50 sessions waiting? After a full arc, where you definitely feel like stuff got wrapped up. So the question becomes: "How???" It's a full story arc, what else could be lacking?

Crescendo has a secret weapon: the Book Number. It is a simple concept: each Epic is organized into Books, and you give each Book a number: 1, then 2, then 3, etc. This Book Number is factored into the difficulty of dice rolls as well as how explosive their results are, how punishing the game is, and how many resources the Weaver gets to throw at the players.

The Book Number is a difficulty and scale slider. Book 1 is generally pretty grounded and low-fantasy, Book 2 is a bit louder, and Book 3... well it's practically Armageddon. 

So, if you just give it one or two sessions in Book 2, after Book 1, suddenly those next sessions are harder. A lot harder. The Conditions are worse. Rolling dice is more expensive and they blow way up faster. And the Fate Point rewards go up substantially, more than enough to cover it and then some… opening up other avenues. Like slowing down or speeding up the actions of the Weaver and the other players. Suddenly a bidding war has become a big part of the game, as y’all squabble, more and more, over time. Book 2 becomes cerebral and more primal, at the same time, baffingly so.

Book 3 turns this up even more. Suddenly the apocalypse is always around the corner, yet you have more power than ever... and yet you've never had so little control. Things go sideways at the drop of a dime. The slightest mistake goes so far south that Antarctica is looking surprised. And it's fun! It's tons of fun! But... it's exhausting. The ending is coming up, and you can feel it.

I've never gone to Book 4. So I have no idea what that feels like, but my goodness I've never seen anyone want to go that far.

And that right there takes you about... two or possibly three years to play out, which is more than long enough to make you feel nostalgic for those early days. So if you go for it again, you suddenly are given a new tool: the journal from the previous Epic! And suddenly all that information you spent two to three years recording? It starts to filter into the next Epic, creating curious new through-lines over the next Epic that you weren't ready for.

So, even though you started all over, you can't, not really.

The early static is gone for good. You can still hear it in the distance—those first messy sessions where nothing mattered except the next swing—but you can’t live there anymore. The journal won’t let you. Every new Book One arrives already carrying ghosts: old debts, quiet vendettas, strange coincidences that only you and the Weaver fully recognize.  

And somehow that makes the whole thing heavier and more compelling at the same time. You’re not just playing another Epic. You’re continuing a conversation that started years ago, whether you meant to or not.  

That’s the part no rulebook prepares you for. Crescendo doesn’t simply get louder. It gets into your bones. And once it does, even the silence between campaigns feels like part of the music.

RPGs Have an Identity Problem

"We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand." 

— Gene Wolfe, Home Fires

"In so far as I am not loved, I am unintelligible to myself."

- St. Dimitru Staniloae, The Experience of God

The central problem of most RPGs is the lack of any real-group dynamics, also known as the "get along gang": people who are together and it makes absolutely no sense as to why. They haven't killed each other, but they're not friends, despite having lived through tumultuous circumstances together. There's a gray zone where nothing is truly established in the group, and people just sorta... muddle along. No matter what happens, nothing changes between characters, not really.

For an extreme structural example: in one game a player ran an openly evil character who began committing escalating acts of coercion and sexual abuse against an NPC. His alignment was known, yet it still left the table unable to read the situation. I thought it would do enough, but it didn't, because there were still too many gray spots. Was this coherent (if reprehensible) roleplay? Boundary-testing? A cry for help from a player who was personally deteriorating? Because the characters had no real relationships or shared moral baseline, and the players had no deeper knowledge of one another’s characters or states, everyone stayed stuck in that gray zone—uncertain how, or whether, to respond.

Old-schoolers will think that I am solely referring to modern DnD tables there, but no. The same things can happen at old-school tables, and it looks about the same, between the characters and their players.

See, both games do the same thing:

"Hi, I'm Nathan, and I'm playing Xenith, a lawful good paladin".

You see the problem? These are aspects of someone, but they're not who the person is. If anything, these are the makings of a parasocial relationship. Xenith is a lawful good paladin, sure. But nobody would know what to do with that. You get a picture, but you don't get a person out of that. How far can you push Xenith's lawful tendencies? He's a paladin, but why? What drives him in being a paladin? What get him to stop? And how might Xenith change his small and personal aspects, the stuff that actually makes roleplaying fun? These are questions that players actually need the answers to, in order to roleplay. And, let's be clear, sometimes players do need to ask these questions. A game that's about playing a role shouldn't make you guess as to how to address them. That utter lack of clarity makes the central point of the game a matter of luck or tons of trial and error.

Which games are specifically supposed to not do!

And before some smartass points out that DnD's source material doesn't do this, it absolutely does, even with Conan, who was said to wander because he was struggling with depression and black moods that he tried to avoid. You know exactly who Conan is: a man driven by his darkness to find life, however he can get it, morality be damned.

And, again, before some smartass points out this is theatre kids shit, I remind you that 1e ADnD literally has a table for how the races are supposed to interact with each other, and penalizes you for ignoring it.

Yes, RAW 1e DnD enforces RPing. But it also falls into the same problem: the center of what makes a character a character is not actually addressed. It has better tools, sure, and you could use them better, but better doesn't mean good, it doesn't make roleplaying a game.

This problem was solved, almost entirely, the instant I went to Burning Wheel. See, Burning Wheel has what are called Beliefs, and they are public knowledge. Here's Xenith's Beliefs, if I were to put him into Burning Wheel:

1. Bahamut the Platinum Dragon spared me from a life of hardship; my sword is his.

2. Honor is the only thing that matters.

3. Elkvor took advantage of my mercy. I will not let that happen again.

The difference really couldn't be starker, could it? You know exactly what Xenith is about now. The Beliefs are public, and nobody has to guess about what Xenith is about. And because the other players don't have to guess, they will treat Xenith in a consistent way, and that consistency will create a sense of identity.

And with identity, there's relationship in return. And now you have a cycle going. A loop that will keep people coming back for more.

Not only that, but thanks to the artha system, you know I am rewarded for playing my Beliefs to cause drama, and for playing against my Beliefs, if I think it a good idea. There's even a "Go do something so awesome that it just isn't captured by your Beliefs" reward, and it leads to some truly elevated roleplay. Now other players can decide to write Beliefs that clash with mine, or that work with it, and they get rewarded with power regardless. The most basic social element, choosing to ally or be against, suddenly becomes an actual choice in the roleplaying game. Alliances and grudges now have gameplay weight, because identity is clear.

With Beliefs public and rewarded, the gray zone collapses. Xenith is no longer a collection of labels; he is a person the table can see, push, support, or oppose. Alliances and grudges gain weight because identity is no longer a guessing game. Move the pawn to the last row, and the character can finally rise in armor, sword in hand—because everyone at the table now knows who he is, including his player.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Nine

 

It Has Begun

The beginning chapter sessions of Crescendo are always chaotic. The story begins to explode in different directions, seemingly without rhyme or reason, and players hang on for dear life, as the story seems to go anyway it likes. These sessions are incredibly fun, but they are the minority in an epic of Crescendo. Somewhere between six to twelve chapter sessions, the journals have built up enough critical mass that patterns begin to emerge. And then suddenly the players become aware that the game hasn't been exploding randomly:

It's been constructing a funnel with their journal entries.

And now they're in it. And they can't get out. Each twitch draws the net tighter, makes it more definite, gives it more shape, pushes you along the funnel.

The further you get into this seemingly random funnel, the less random and more inevitable things feel. By the time session thirty or so comes around... you're ready for it to close. You want to know how it ends.

The BROSR has "convergences". Crescendo has the funnel of consequences.

Last night, Chapter Nine started that process. A whole bunch of pieces clicked together, and a definite shape began to emerge. It's still too undefined at the moment, but mark my words:  by the close of the second crescendo session (which is coming in the middle of this month), people are going to start feeling it definitely.

There is nothing else like this in any other RPG: destiny is pushing you along, and yet it is your choice where you go while you're being pushed, so long as you keep going.

Chapter Nine (August 30th)

This was another session that just came out of left field... and yet the sense of purpose has begun to leak in. It takes players a long time to get used to just how differently Crescendo operates. It requires only that you put in journal entries, and that you RP to the hilt, and that you let the consequences be completely unexpected, like they were tonight.

(Oh, and in case anyone wonders if this kind of redemption is the actual point of Crescendo, beneath the PVP, the seeming upheavals, and the utter craziness of it all.... well it is a game based on Gene Wolfe. You shouldn't be wondering.)