7 Maxims of the OSR

Back in the aughts and the 2010’s, a decade ago now, there was a movement in older RPGs that I was part of - the “Old School Renaissance” or "OSR". The OSR still hasn’t really been defined, or at least its definitions have always been in conflict, now more than ever as it becomes a subject of nostalgic veneration. It’s uncontroversial to me (I’m sure others will feel incandescently differently) that one of the hallmarks of the OSR was the creation of instructive maxims about how to enact its desired play style. That play style in turn depended on and created an exploration focused elevation of player choice in a strongly referee controlled setting. The maxims of the OSR were commonly offered to newcomers and now linger in the communities of the PostOSR, where they are too often repeated as if they are unalterable, clear truths obvious to everyone. They aren't and they weren't. Like most maxims, aphorisms, and pithy bits of commonsense, these distillations of OSR gaming wisdom are useful … but only up to a point, and they work best as reminders for people already familiar with their goals.

Trampier from the 1st Edition Monster Manual

These days it feels like the Post OSR spends a lot of time reinventing things that people wrote on blogs in 2010, or stumbling into the same well known solutions and declaring they have "fixed" the play style. Part of this is a lack of information for people new to these kind of games, exacerbated by the lack of citations among the hundreds of retro-clones that claim to be OSR games. There's little help for this, and as much as introductions to OSR theory like Philotomy’s Musings, Matt Finch’s Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, or Milton, Lumpkin and Perry’s Principia Apocrypha are useful documents and helpful introductions, the majority of OSR wisdom exists as scattered blog posts and in the minds of people who have engaged with the play style over the past 20 or so years. People don't read blogs anymore, but even if they did ... these bloggers, designers, referees, and players have a tendency to fall back on maxims when asked to explain elements of the play style, and it’s not the most efficient way of communicating craft and knowledge.

Worse, as the actual creation of the maxims recedes into the past, clouded by memory's failings and wearing into the grooves of dogmatic repetition, they have begun to take on the force of natural laws rather than suggestions or explanations of design decisions and play culture. The power of nostalgia and orthodoxy transforms simplifications and shorthand for larger, complex concepts into definitions that are frequently misinterpreted or carried to lengths that subvert their original meaning and damage the very type of play they were meant to support.

YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN

Maxims have such a power in the OSR because it was forced to deal with the convoluted history of early Dungeons & Dragons. It’s often, and falsely, claimed that the goal of the OSR was to play games in the manner of some ideal past table: Gygax’s basement in Lake Geneva, or “the way D&D was meant to be played”. While some undoubtedly tried, this claim and any efforts towards it that actually happened is mostly nostalgic invention, a blend of cognitive distortions and bias that includes: rosy retrospection, survivor’s bias, selective abstraction, the masked-man fallacy and the halo effect. The problem being, that even where it’s discernible through faulty memories, self aggrandizing claims, and lies made up during IP litigation, the play style of early RPGs was constantly in flux. Dungeons & Dragons showed a great deal of conflict and transformation within play style from the first, and even within the 1974 edition. For example, the "Alternate Combat System" alone suggests an entirely different play style then the combat rules for Chainmail that were originally intended for the game. Worse, depending on one’s prior experience or influences a variety of play styles and design approaches all seem to fit within the description of “Old School” RPGs. The bloggers, referees, forum wits, and designers of the OSR struggled to articulate exactly what they wanted, which wasn’t uniform among them in the first place.

Instead of representing a “rediscovery” of a fully functional set of rules, procedures, design ethos, and play culture of Gygax's golden age -- somehow lost or destroyed by some ever growing cast of villains (the Hickmans, the Blumes, Lorraine Williams, Patricia Pulling and the Satanic Panic, Dungeons & Beavers, Hasbro, Vampire Larpers, Organized Play, or ... as always ... Young People), the OSR was always a place of invention, adaption, and revaluation. The OSR play style, to the degree any exists, was a new thing that evolved over time in the 2000's and 2010's, influenced by and partially formed from original early RPG texts and long-term play experiences of its members -- but necessarily taking in the various ideas and work in RPGs from 1974 to the present. Pithy maxims acted to anchor this decades-long aggregation of hundreds of peoples’ ideas and experiences into vague statements of general principle. "Rulings not Rules" is a phrase that one shares like a secret handshake, even if it's meaning isn't especially clear. Such statements are great for forming group identity (far more pleasant and long lasting than railing against a cast of villains and blaming them for a rupture from the nostalgic ideal) … but they don’t actually explain how to play the game.


7 MAXIMS to DeCODE
Maxims differ from aphorisms in that they present themselves as little truths, almost with the force of natural laws. Aphorisms instead ask their audience to think about them, and often hint at paradoxes or complexities in a way maxims don’t - and again this is where maxims are great tools for forming group identity, but less effective at teaching or giving their audience any sort of deep understanding.

The following maxims were common in OSR spaces and continue to be cited in much of the discussion around OSR and Post-OSR play style. I haven't generally listed their originators, though I suspect that most of them can be traced to a specific blog post or forum thread, largely because I am lazy, and they are always presented outside of their original context. Without it, they have changed meaning with time, and each is an effort to condense and simplify complex concepts or even arguments from or between numerous other contributors. Instead, all I can offer is my criticisms of the maxim (based on observations of how I've seen it used) and then my personal understanding as someone who was there, or at least peering though keyholes and standing in the shadows, when most of these maxims were hashed out. Generally this is a positive reading. 

I. “Rulings not Rules”

Perhaps the ... ruling ... maxim of OSR maxims. It’s not the most confusing of them either, but it often gets taken to extremes and sometimes it’s presented as a call for removing all rules or for justifying absolute referee control without regard to player expectations or consistency.

While rules-free fantasy adventure games (often called the “FKR” scene) and ultra-lights with ever more minimal rule sets became quite popular in the later OSR and post-OSR period (2016ish to now), the OSR, the old rule sets it took from, and dungeon crawling as I advocate for it all depend on the consistency and predictability of known rules. The play style depends on both mechanics and procedures for the majority of game events, especially the common, expected, reoccurring and core ones, and these rules also often provide models or at least references for ad hoc rulings.

I understand the maxim instead to mean an two related things:

• RPGs should offer the freedom for characters to act beyond scenarios already contemplated by rules. This is accomplished by referee decisions, ad hoc rulings that should (see the next point), become consistent table rules if the events requiring the ruling occur again.
  
  
• OSR, Classic and Dungeon Crawl games all demand a high degree of trust between players and referee. Players must trust the referee to adjudicate unexpected situations fairly, and referees trust players by allowing them to offer unexpected solutions with reasonable chances of success. Both players and referees should not appeal to or demand citations to the rules over the referee’s judgment about events. Meta-gaming and “rules lawyering” solutions that are against the “spirit” of the setting or lack fictional consistency (e.g. the “peasant railgun”) are considered cheating or unsporting and the referee can reject them even if the rules as written allow them.

II. “The Answer isn’t on your Character Sheet.”

Similar in intent and effect to “Rulings not Rules”, this maxim rejects the dominance of rule (or specifically mechanic) based solutions to game puzzles and problems. Players are supposed to observe and ask questions about the fantasy environment and then solve problems by describing actions that use the resources described to logically overcome obstacles rather than testing a skill listed on the character sheet. The OSR character finds secret doors by tapping walls with a 10’ pole and listening for hollow spaces rather than rolling to “spot hidden”. While there is truth to this being an aspect of the play style, the maxim speaks in absolutes that don’t match the rule sets or experience of most OSR style games. Dungeons & Dragons gains progressively more skills with each new edition, but even the earliest contains rolls for finding secret doors and avoiding traps. When the thief class is added in the first supplement skill tests become an established game element. Similarly spells and equipment have always been tools that players are meant to write on their character sheet and use to solve problems in play. A huge number of spells (especially ones named after early characters like Tenser's Floating Disc) are solutions to specific in-game problems.

So what does this maxim mean? Instead of being an admonishment against character complexity it’s more about adventure design and the focus of play:

• The game should present complex but logical obstacles and expect players to solve them using logical reasoning and using objects in the fantasy world around them in interesting and unexpected ways.
  
  
• The referee and designer should give clues relatively freely when players offer logical actions to uncover them and respond to logical solutions to obstacles and puzzles without hiding clues or success behind unnecessary skill checks or other rolls.
  
  
• Adding to these two goals or practices the best player solutions are those that don’t require any rolls or checks at all and don’t waste character resources like: equipment, Hit Points or spells. This sort of open ended problem solving is a core part of play rather than something secondary to combat or interacting with NPCs and shouldn’t be elided with skill checks.

III. “Role Playing not Roll Playing”

More Trampier D&D Illustration

Another argument for the essential nature of OSR play, though one that long predates the OSR (first offered in1980?) and has been picked up by numerous cultures of play. In the context of the OSR, early systems, or dungeon crawl games it's an interesting maxim because these games are often inspired by the earliest understanding of RPGs as an extension of war games -- the quintessential “roll playing” activity. That the maxim appeared somewhat commonly in OSR spaces and continues to appear in Post-OSR ones (as well as Contemporary Traditional communities for games like 5th edition D&D) is a response to specific foundational claims about the OSR. In OSR and Post-OSR context "Roleplaying not Roll Playing" tends to mean little more than disdain for the alleged focus of later editions on character building and tactical, feat centered, combat. As dogma though it’s more pernicious then most maxims here because it’s more vague and more contemptuous of other play styles. Obviously one rolls dice a fair bit in OSR or dungeon crawl play, and compared to several other play styles does so more often.

This doesn’t mean that “Roleplaying not Roll Playing” can’t be read in a positive way. In general removing unnecessary dice rolling and complexity from a game is good design because it speeds things up. Yet too much simplification, too much “minimalism” can detract from play -- not just abandoning rules, but failing to provide assistance to referees in other ways: a lack of sample monsters or equipment in a rulebook, or the tendency towards system neutral adventures that never consider how complex and strange monster attacks or effects can be mechanically modeled. There’s a point where demanding too much role playing and not enough roll playing runs counter to the dungeon crawl style of play which depends on risk taking and risk management as a key part of play. This problem of excessive minimalism is also found in the discussion of “Fruitful Voids”, the use of spaces left in game design (very common in early RPG design) that the referee must fill, often with the help of the players. Such voids are good when they mark areas of play (such as negotiation with monsters, or unpuzzling obstacles) that are meant to be free-form and depend on open-ended problem solving … but when they are everywhere one doesn’t have a game, one has a mediocre at best prose poem in the form of an instruction manual or gazetteer.

There is a more interesting lessons one can take from "Role Playing not Roll Playing":

• Avoiding unnecessary dice rolls is more then having a simple system, it’s also an aspect of role playing, in the case of older style dungeon crawl or OSR games, which are focused on problem solving (rather then say genre emulation and story creation) this means not making every solution require a die roll. When players come up with a good plan that doesn’t involve anything risky and obviously subject to fate, the referee doesn’t roll anything and doesn’t ask players to roll anything. In terms of the maxim they’ve role played their way through the obstacle or problem. Of course this is a referee skill, and it’s a key one - knowing when to roll and when not to - and that’s something to get to with the next maxim.
  
  
• It’s not usually worth it to ask for a roll that doesn’t involve a high degree of risk and consequences. If the goal of “Role Playing” for dungeon crawl games is to plan and scheme in such a way that dice never have to clatter across the table, it’s hardly fair for the referee to force rolls when there’s a tiny possibility of risk, risk that players have been lead to believe isn’t there through the meta-game (as when they are in town vs. in the dungeon or wilderness), or risks that the players don’t have the opportunity to anticipate or find clues about (with rare exceptions).

IV. “Don’t Fudge Dice!”

Given the advice in cursed 1990’s Dungeon Mastering manuals like “Play Dirty” and “XDM” which encourage tricking and forcing your players to experience exactly the plot one intends, this can be controversial advice in “Trad” and even 5th edition or other “Contemporary Traditional” game spaces. It’s also one of the only maxims here I can agree with fully. Though there are caveats. Not fudging dice assumes a sort of ideal referee who never drinks ⅔ a bottle of tempranillo during play or has a weird day at work that sticks with them while they are running the game... It assumes that the referee never makes mistakes that get the game into a situation where fudging dice feels necessary to maintain fairness. This sort of thing really does happen - though far less often then it can when pushing the players down a narrative path. Not fudging dice has a more important corollary in "Roleplaying not Roll Playing"(see above ) and recently a mystical, cultic sort of reading…let’s call it “The Oracular Power of Dice” or “The Cult Dungeon Masters Guide Appendixes”.

However, to get to why this maxim makes sense to me: 

• Don’t Fudge Dice… No really don’t. It's a sort of little test of the concepts above...refereeing shouldn’t feel antagonistic and fudging dice is usually based around softening antagonistic refereeing ... while giving the referee a sort of absolute but deniable power to inflict good or bad events based on a whim. If you roll constantly and dice are always mere suggestions then it’s really the referee and not the dice deciding when things matter. This creates distrust among the players who can no longer feel like their choices matter, and often creates the appearance of favoritism.
  
  
• Trust in the referee and trust in the integrity of the dice is important because players need to trust the referee to present the world in a way they can understand and where they can judge risks prior to rolling the dice. One of the skills for an OSR or classic referee is to have the authority to stand by decisions and the adventure design in good or bad circumstances. Fudging dice often looks like a referee trying to direct play while pretending dice are forcing them to do so. Accountability for and ownership of the setting’s response reinforces itself though, building trust between players, with the referee, and with the integrity of the setting. All of this is useful when one is running a game with high risk to the characters, because in moments where characters die or fail the referee needs to be perceived as a neutral arbitrator who doesn’t impede the players’ victories but also enforces logical consequences of their mistakes. No one wants to "lose" in an unfair game.
  
  
• As previously noted, when not fudging dice a key skill is picking when to ask for a roll. It’s often better to simply not roll the dice if there are consequences that one would avoid by changing the roll afterward — and if one realizes too late, it’s better to own up to making a mistake rather than trying to trick the players.
  
  
• Don’t depend on dice to do everything as a referee either, the point of not fudging dice is to offer a world with integrity and clear consistent rules (e.g. swords do 1D8 damage). Randomness is great, it’s part of what makes RPGs fun and different from storytelling, but while random tables can be inspiring they are not a substitute for referee intelligence or designer diligence in creating the setting. Creating random dungeons without later editing tends to create incoherent and/or extremely bland funhouses, while providing a small set of tables to fill fifty rooms won't offer a workable adventure. In play as well, there needs to be spaces where the referee simply says "no" for the setting to make sense. Even without fudging, rolling for every absurdity while using the popular “1 always fails and 20 always succeeds" rule breaks down referee responsibility to provide a reasonable reaction from the setting and player responsibility to puzzle through the game’s obstacle. Of course, it's better to simply say there's no chance rather then fudge this kind of roll.

V. “Play the World not the Rules”

A less common maxim at least in this form. Sometimes it gets phrased in other ways or as related maxims, like “Create Situations not Stories” or “Sandboxes not Railroads”. This maxim is an affirmation that the game is concerned with player choice and creating a setting or adventure where “anything is possible”, because things outside the rules as written follow logical patterns and likely results can be deduced from the players’ real world knowledge. For example: water flows down hill and wolves (or their equivalent) eat meat.

The maxim also speaks to world design, claiming that the adventure is not a narrative within a setting, but the players interactions with the setting as a whole. Adventures don’t advance in a predictable manner, but represent the exploration of locations to steadily increase character power and involvement with the setting's secrets, factions, and larger scale events. Both of these ideas can cause a lot of confusion, the maxim itself only touches on them, and the idea of a sandbox and absolute player freedom tend to be daunting. The referee might feel the need to design an entire world before the first session or prepare a huge number of locations. Likewise, the idea of absolute freedom can stun players. It’s hard enough to know what to do with your life in the real world, but an RPG player has little or no idea of what’s even possible in a new setting. What’s expected of them and their character? How do they go about it?

This isn’t the way to start a good campaign, and it’s intuitively obvious to a lot of people hearing these maxims that it won’t work very well. Of course that’s also not what the maxim means, or not exactly:

• A sandbox setting is open for players to do anything … but this has reasonable limitations built into the structure of the game and culture of play. Of course most players don’t start off with a plan, they don’t know the setting, and they don’t know what to do. The referee needs to provide clues about where the party can find adventure. This is the reason rumors and hooks are a regular subject for discussion in OSR and Post OSR spaces -- they are how the referee gives players information about what opportunities exist for them. Hooks and rumors are mere suggestions however, and they are a way to give players information without forcing them to read or listen to long descriptions of a setting and its lore. Generally this works for players, because they want to play a game about dungeon crawling or adventuring, and hooks and rumors offer that. Of course some players instead want to run cookie shops or go on a dating binge through NPCs. When this comes up it’s usually a mismatch with the group or an effort to test how free they really are to make decisions. I tend to ask the player to retire the wayward PC, making them into the local baker or cad, at least if the player's goal is outside what the rest of the players’ want to focus their few hours a session on. If the whole party wants to bake fantasy cookies or something that doesn’t lend itself to typical adventure activities, maybe it’s time to find a game or play style that supports these kinds of “slice of life” goals better.
  
  
• "Playing the World" shouldn't be daunting for the referee either. The joy of an open world might be infinite opportunities, but... Sure characters can go off and do “anything”, but the world doesn’t have to let them succeed or make it easy. Danger abounds, and the setting pushes back on player goals. The referee or designer isn’t required to “gate” or “zone” dangers for player level, reducing the risk of whatever the players want to seek out to something they can triumph over, and poor plans might not have a chance to succeed. Since most players are logical and want their characters to survive, this isn't an issue, they seek out the risks and locations they feel like they can handle rather than run straight at the most powerful and dangerous location they hear about. This means that the smart referee doesn’t need to prepare everything, just the content that characters have immediate access to for a session or two with enough options to provide some potential variety. Of course, a vague idea of what else is beyond this immediate area is helpful when players start to get wanderlust or overestimate their characters’ abilities.
  
  
• The scale of the world is large, one isn’t playing through a specific story, or to reach some condition set by the rule. The goal is more experiencing what’s possible in the setting aided by the structure the rules create. This becomes most important when looking at the comparably high character death rates in most original, OSR, or Post-OSR games. High lethality works because there’s a whole world to explore that can evolve and change regardless of a specific character’s fate. The player need only promote a henchperson or roll up a new PC (something they can do anyway on a whim - retiring their current PC to run a bakery or something) to keep the game’s “story” going. In many contemporary games, because they are built with the individual character as a centerpiece -- character arcs and back stories that set up a specific narrative for the whole campaign -- this seems unworkable or counter intuitive, but within the OSR and affiliated play styles there’s more emphasis on discovering the characters’ stories in play, even if this is dying early in the campaign to become an aspect of the surviving characters’ stories.
  
  
• Finally, and on a smaller scale, playing the setting and not the rules references the way OSR and similar games encourage players to find solutions outside the rules using previously discovered elements of the setting and from referee description to succeed in their goals. This isn’t the same as realism though. Like reasonable fictional limitations, player knowledge, innovation, and scheming isn’t limited by what’s realistically possible or with a great deal of specificity. Simple “game logic” solutions work without determining the exact science or chance of success from real world models. One doesn’t need to look at strength under tension and maximum loads by material to determine if a party can ascend a rope grappled to something - the combination of rope and grappling hook is sufficient.

VI. “Combat is a Fail State”

Trampier Still - Monster Manual

This maxim is somewhat dubious, but also acts as important pushback against certain tendencies in the older rule sets and play style of early Dungeons & Dragons and the common insult or complaint that OSR games are simply hack and slash combat — combat being where all the rules are. The OSR long denied this argument, but still had to grapple with the large amount of combat rules and tendency for games to constantly devolve into combat. Combat is of course one of the most obvious ways to resolve a lot of common RPG problems, and the OSR commitment to player choices and sandboxes tends to mean it’s almost always an option.

In early Dungeons & Dragons there may be some truth to the idea that combat is a major goal of and focus for play … parties were expected to be much larger: 8-14 players each with 1-2 characters and a henchman or five. These big parties can engage in far more combat with far more success then Trad and OSR style groups of 3 to 8 adventurers and fewer henchmen. Additionally, there’s some weight to the idea that when writing OD&D Gygax and Arneson saw it as a supplement to, perhaps even a “mini-game” for larger war game scenarios—meaning that the characters were closer to war game pieces then the RPG concept of the character.  This would make party losses fairly meaningless as they are simply soldiers in the player's army. Both early Trad (Hickman era TSR) and OSR play styles have dealt with this contradiction between rules and play conditions in distinct ways. Trad by creating the adventure path, where combat challenges are carefully structured with the aim of balance - testing but not killing the characters. The OSR has opted to retain a more open setting and player driven narrative … and so defensively calls out “Combat is a Fail State”.

Why defensive? Trad and now Contemporary Trad (or OC) players and designers (long the vast majority in the hobby) tend to fear and mock the possibility of open worlds and wide player freedom, often citing the worry that players will become “murder hobos” — wandering about and killing everything and everyone to gain wealth and with it XP. This is not a classic, OSR, or post-OSR problem though. An open world can (and often has baked in tools like factions) push back against marauding bands of killers … or alternatively let players experience a bandit or criminal campaign. The “murder hobo”, to the degree he exists and barring the most actively antisocial players, is not a threat to a sandbox campaign.  In an adventure path though antisocial characters are a threat because they make the character “heroes” into villains and disrupt the adventure’s structure which has no alternatives built in. This is the flip side of the danger that PvP poses in OSR and related games vs. the way it can easily be incorporated into adventure paths or story arcs.

So. “Combat is a Fail State” expresses a distinctive aspect of the OSR play style, an adaption to using rules designed for large parties with smaller ones in an open world full of asymmetric threats.  It unfortunately does so in an often angry, defensive, and reductive way that runs counter to most people’s actual game experience — combat will happen in an OSR game or dungeon crawl, and likely pretty often. What does the maxim capture then?

• Combat as War…another OSR catchphrase, serviced from a famous ENworld thread back in the 2010’s… the idea that newer types of D&D offer “Combat as Sport”: balanced tactical contests played out through the rules of the system. The OSR play style provides “Combat as War” instead -- conflict where following the rules is dangerous and likely deadly, because power between combatants is asymmetrical. Good players should stack every advantage and find solutions like traps, ambushes, and deception before fighting. “Combat is a Fail State” is broader though, it offers the possibility that it’s better to win without fighting. Deception, alliance, bribery, and simply going around dangerous enemies are better solutions than dangerous combat.
  
  
• Of course old D&D and most OSR or POSR games still have lots of combat rules. Plus even my own games usually include a combat encounter each session. My argument has been crushed underneath logic and praxis … or alternatively rules aren’t always the most dense around parts of the game where the players are expected to spend the most time or which represent ideal play. Rules are also necessary for parts of the game that are the most contentious and require the most clarity. There’s plenty of rules in most sports about what constitutes foul play, but that doesn’t mean that basketball is about throwing elbows and running around holding the ball. The same with OSR style exploration games. Combat is the most likely place where the players will “lose”, that is where their characters will die, and so players will try to scheme their way out of the risks even after combat has commenced - something the play style rejects, because combat is also how bad player decisions and risk taking manifest. Combat needs to be hedged in by rules precisely because in the OSR style of play it’s an area where player choice is constrained to a greater degree then in most parts of play. The extensive rules have a preclusive effect, filling the area of play and preventing even well thought out player schemes or referee rulings from lessening the impact of combat’s threat to character survivability.
  
  
• Perhaps better to phrase this maxim as “Combat is an Inevitable Failstate” - much like the way most poker hands end in a “call” and the players have to show their hands. It’s not the goal of play, it’s not the ideal way for a skilled poker player to win the hand, but it happens a lot because it’s easy and the rules push towards it, making the players work to avoid it. Again, the reason players want to avoid combat in OSR and related styles of play is because it’s the way characters most often die and get removed from play. This also touches on the alleged high lethality of these play styles - but characters only die a lot when players seek out combat, take excessive risks, or are extremely unlucky.

VII. “Strict Time Records Must be Kept”

On page 37 of the first edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide Gygax writes “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” A famous quote and not just because it’s in all caps.  For Gygax though it isn’t a general command, rather it relates specifically to campaign play, downtime, and upkeep cost. It’s not about dungeon turns or combat order but the logistics of a many session campaign, and the specific sort of open table public game that Gygax advocated for. Bookkeeping and a calendar to keep track of dozens of players and characters coming and going in the setting over months or years. So… originally this maxim isn’t even about most parts of play, and it was long treated in the OSR space as a sort of humorous overreaction by Gygax, an old man shouting at clouds. Of course this shows another fracture point between OSR design concerns and Gygax’s early play style — Gygax considered long, public, campaigns with more war game like feature the proper structure of play, while the OSR, especially in its middle years tended to focus on individual adventures or unique settings with even larger, but less committed casts of characters via the online “consta-con”.

More recently, Post OSR design has moved towards minimal rule sets, and many newcomers from the Contemporary Traditional game space are getting interested in older rule sets. In this context, “Strict Time Records Must be Kept” has become an actual maxim, and acts as a reminder that “Turnkeeping” and related rules are the legs that classic style exploration stands on. The actual maxim though doesn’t do much to explain this, still having the bizarre quality of Gygax’s original outrage, and can lead to confusion, focusing on the minutiae of tracking resources, distance,  and in game time rather than the essential element. The mechanics and procedure of turnkeeping, dungeon navigation, encumbrance, supply depletion and random encounters matter as structural supports to location exploration — but the specifics are malleable depending on many factors: design goals, session length, party size, and setting fiction.

To understand “Strict Time a Records Must be Kept” in the OSR or Post-OSR sense consider:

• In a play style about overcoming obstacles through problem solving and exploration, the first obstacle is the layout, size, and paths through the location (or dungeon) — navigation or orienteering. The dungeon of course contains fixed risks: traps, monsters, factions, and puzzles that limit access to its rewards, traditionally treasure. The best way to overcome or avoid these risks or obstacles is to go around them and approach everything with extreme caution. The common complaint about tapping 10’ poles in gray corridors exemplifies this. Its answer is built into old dungeon exploration design: the randomized risk of wandering monsters and the depletion of necessary supply - especially light. While there are mechanics directly supporting both, random encounter checks and encumbrance, they require turnkeeping to know when monsters threaten the party and when supplies are used. Regular turnkeeping also gives the players a rough idea of when supply loss and random encounters will occur (or at least have a chance to) and so let’s them make decisions about risk and reward — how much caution can they afford? That’s the core function or “loop” in dungeon crawling, so “Strict Time Records Must be Kept” (or at least the passage of time and accumulating risk needs to be supported with rules) precisely to avoid a boring game where exploration has no risk or danger associated, and is mostly a waste of time.
  
  
• The original Gygaxian concept of “strict time records” is campaign focused, and these days it is usually expressed as “one to one time”. One to one time an approach to campaign downtime where days pass at the same rate in the game world as they do in the real one (except during a session). This can cause issues of course, when the action of a single session takes place over many days in the game world, but it’s an interesting and generally functional way to encourage multiple parties (or even referees) at the same table and multiple characters (a “stable”) for individual players. It was never a common OSR practice however, despite interest, and works best for regular, public games at a hobby shop or large online community. For home style games with mostly consistent players it doesn’t offer nearly as much and down time can be organized in a more abstracted manner.

That’s seven maxims that were common in the OSR and still persist in its offspring and affiliated scenes, play styles and communities. Like any discussion of what the OSR was (or “is” for those that believe everything is the same since 2000 or whenever), it’s debatable and personal. These are simply what I take from these maxims, and how I understand them as usable. Even where I’m wrong, I think the process of looking at OSR truisms less dogmatically -- peeling them apart and deciding what’s polemic, what’s simplification, and what’s actually descriptive is worthwhile to understand the possibilities and future of dungeon crawl style RPGs.