Myths of the OSR Part 2: The Benedict Option

The cowardice of total cultural withdrawal

Welcome back to Myths of the OSR, a series examining the problems of the OSR from someone who heavily identified with it. Today we look at the insular and isolated nature of the movement and their seeming desire to whither away in obscurity. Harsh? Maybe, but I can’t think of any other explanation as to why the movement would behave in the manner it does. The OSR movement seems to have two speeds; unlikable abrasiveness and milquetoast weakness. For a number of reasons, mostly having to do with their generation, the OSR crowd is constitutionally incapable of winning. Instead, they cede the entire conversation to the worst kind of people; the wreckers and the dilettantes. Granted, some of the OSR do so with a sufficient amount of growling and grumbling about how bad things have gotten, but their inability to do anything about it and their refusal to improve their product has made all of that growling just as ineffectual as doing nothing. As a result, the OSR is little more than a cloister. It is the RPG equivalent of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. It’s counter to the current culture, but it’s not counter-culture. It poses zero threat to the current establishment and serves as a containment zone for those who might actually break through the static. RPGs don’t need a Saint Benedict but rather a Saint Boniface to destroy the current order.

Let’s begin with the milquetoast response. This is the default “friendly face” of the OSR crowd. This response usually consists of “Hey, I like this style but you do whatever you like, man. Don’t yuck my yum.” It’s weak and non-committal and unfortunately it’s the default that so many in this industry fall back on. This mindset comes from the erroneous belief that telling someone they’re playing wrong is mean-spirited and therefore we should tolerate all errors and hope that the people making those errors will realize their mistakes and come to you of their own volition. In fact, most of these types will tell you that there is no wrong way to play so long as you’re having fun. Correct and fun are two different things, but that is a topic for its own article. Suffice it to say you have to be willing and able to sell your ideas to people. No, not everyone is going to magically realize that you’re right. You have to convince them and part of that is being able to tell people that their current solution sucks. Can you do this nicely? Absolutely you can. You don’t have to come down like a sledgehammer on people and tell them that their games suck and they’re stupid for liking them. Instead you can present your preferred approach in contrast to theirs, highlight the flaws and explain how your game addresses the flaws without ever insulting anyone. This approach requires strong convictions and many of the people who embody this milquetoast OSR approach just don’t have that. They’re sensitive about their age in most cases and don’t want to be perceived as the grumpy old man who’s out of touch because they remember an old-timer yelling at them when they were young and whether or not that old-timer was right they never want to be that because to the Gen X mind, grumpy old man is the worst thing you could possibly be. You have to be eternally cool and down with the young people, even if the young people are wrong.

On the other side of the fence, you have people who have no problem being the grumpy old man. They will happily tell anyone who will listen about these damn kids don’t play right and they have no respect and this hobby has gone to complete shit because of them. Of course, there’s really no hope for these guys either because they are the polar opposite extreme of the milquetoast crowd. They’re too abrasive, too edgy and equally ignorant of how to sell to even the most receptive audience. They simply are not good ambassadors of their game and they don’t even try to be. The funny thing about these people is that, like their counterparts on the other side of the fence, they don’t really believe in their style. Rather, they position themselves in opposition to what the young people are doing. This is the phenomenon I spoke about in Part 1. If they perceive modern games as too soft, they’ll make the most harsh game possible. Too sanitized? They’ll make the edgiest game they can. Does it mean anything? Of course not, it’s just the opposite of what the kids are doing. Instead of being afraid to convert people like the milquetoast, they’re just too unfriendly and uncharismatic to do it. They’re like Hub and Garth McCann in the movie Secondhand Lions firing their shotguns from their front porch at anyone who enters their property. Unlike the McCann brothers though, they never learn to be more friendly.

The result of both is just a cloistered group aging and slowly dying off. The few converts they do find among the young are not enough to keep the pace with the vandals. Nor will this group of experts suddenly emerge from the underground once the apocalypse has come and gone. The movement would have to propagate for that to be possible and the rate of replication is extremely low and, as I will discuss in Part 3 of this series, their interpretation of the game is an extremely low resolution copy of the true game. All they can do is pass down an extremely bastardized version of the game to their progeny because they stubbornly refuse to return to first principles and read the original rules. These little cloisters of gamers from the 70’s and 80’s will eventually shrivel up and die out and there’s no saving them since they won’t save themselves. Instead, we need bold and decisive actors who are willing to point out the flaws of modern and traditional interpretations of the rules and implement something more correct built upon a more solid foundation. There are a number of people doing this. Kelsey Dionne’s Shadowdark is a good example, and Kelsey herself is the perfect example of someone who corrects the misconceptions in a polite and friendly manner. My good friends AlchemicRaker and The Basic Expert have done yeoman’s work to reorganize and republish those older rule sets to make their content more discernible. Even the oft-maligned but seldom understood BrOSR is making headway on proliferating the ideas of the Braunstein. Harmony Ginger has been an ambassador of their work taking a similar tact to Kelsey Dionne.

The fact of the matter is that the OSR is ill-equipped to play the role of a Saint Boniface. Their ax is dull, they fear repercussions from the pagans, they have nothing substantial to replace the current dogma and their beliefs are not supported by the indisputable truth. Instead they cower and labor away in vein making poor copies of poor copies and bemoaning the state of the outside world. Their time draws to an end and something younger and more vital must take their place.