I intend to get back into the White Box set... I'm just shaking off the holiday and the inspirations that come with it. But before I get my elbows covered with muck again in that dirty work, I was reminded by a friend the other day of what a piece of trash OSRIC is... and felt I might take a few kicks at that can.
"OSRIC" stands for "Old School Reference and Index Compilation." It exists because the Open Game License permitted a bunch of hacks to reprint the AD&D rules in a different order (not a better order) while essentially doing nothing else. The creators were quite explicit that they were not "fixing" AD&D, nor moderning it, nor making it more playable. They believed that it already functioned just fine as a complete game, while admitting that it was fragmented, inconsistent and in place opaque. Where AD&D relied on examples, sidebars, or prose explanations, OSRIC often replaced those with more declarative language. This (supposedly) made the rules easier to cite and easier to reference. Nevermind that it essentially meant that a DM familiar with the original books, and it's flaws, needed to graft into their memory an entirely different order of the same rules for no real gain.
It's a bit like having someone come into your house, steal nothing, but put everything you own into a different cupboard or closet. Or, in some cases, pack it in boxes and stuff it behind the waterheater downstairs, for you to find at random three months from now.
Moreover, for someone new to the game, the mastication of sidebars and prose explanations into declarative language (let me be more precise there, badly designed declarative language) gutted a lot of the inspiration portions of the original that evoked ideas surrounding worldbuilding and setting design outside of what the game rules directly expressed. From such tangents the DM was made to consider social order, economics, the logic of magic, the circumstances of danger and the ordering of in-game authority that were not stated as rules, but were embedded into how the rules were discussed. Further, the attempt at "legal-style" language failed on its own terms, because it repeatedly required users to already know the things being defined in order to grasp the thing being defined. In actual legal draughting, ambiguity is managed through exhaustive definition, scoped exceptions, cross-referenced contingencies and explicit heirarchies of right vs. wrong.
For evidence of OSRIC's failure at this, we need only look at the first page of content to see precisely the same kind of errors committed in 2006 that we've already found in the 1974 White Box set:
I'll start with "player," because the actual definition of the word player with respect to the game of D&D is in no way different from that of a player of any other game. Therefore, the dictionary definition of player remains correct and accurate: a person taking part in a sport or game.
What we have in the above is a total trainwreck:
In an OSRIC-compatible game, one participant must be the Game Master (see below). All the others are referred to as “players”. This term is sometimes used to distinguish between a player and his or her character.
(1) as opposed to any role-playing game, this specific rule set needs to specify that the player is something utterly different, while then indicating nothing of the kind. (2) no definition of any kind is provided, only the social arrangement between the players, whom the reader is already expected to understand as a term, obviating its inclusion here. (3) "Game Master" on the page is not defined as such, but rather as "GM"; (4) nothing in the passage about the GM clarifies anything whatsoever about why one of the players must "be" one, therefore not clarifying how the GM is a player that becomes a GM, nor does the presence of the GM coincide with the understanding of "player" that someone who has played other games but never this one would have; (5) it is not clear why sometimes the term player is used to distinguish between a player or a character; (6) because the character is the game piece, in fact the word player defacto MUST distinguish between the player and the character; (7) nothing her in any way helps a reader who has not played D&D understand why the word is being defined this way.
We can excuse the White Box Set as having been invented D&D and therefore being a "beta version" that would expect to have kinks in it due to not having been played widely. There are NO excuses here. This is unforgivable incompetence. It is a retrospective project produced decades later, after millions of table-hours had already exposed precisely which terms confuse newcomers and why, and is literally cribbed from the works of other people and presented as their own due to a legal opportunity.
Nor is that the only such example from the above that we can claim:
Monster; “Monster” is sometimes used interchangeably with “NPC”—thus, a wandering “monster” table might include helpful creatures and humans or humanoids. Generally, “NPC” means a human or humanoid character while “monster” could mean any creature the players might encounter.
As before, to make the least sense from this, we must know what an NPC is, along with what defines a "helpful" creature from some other (remember, this is a game and we know nothing whatsoever about how it is played, and have reached for these explanatory notes to help us), nor why humanoid does not describe human (which is where the word humanoid derives), nor how it relates to "encountering," which is a null word without knowledge of game play. Moreover, the definition is flat out wrong by every definition of monster that has existed prior to this statement. Monsters are not humans or humanoids, they are "monsters," which are creatures of abnormal size, shape and potency, typically viewed as repulsive and as objects of dread, awful deed and abomination. This is what everyone outside the game already understands when the word "monster" is used, and nothing in D&D that I've ever read states that "humans" are ever counted among them. The definition above trades entirely on the encounter tables from AD&D, which happen to include both humans, helpful creatures and humanoids beside monsters, and with the literal title of the "monster manual," which is assumed to mean that every creature named therein is by definition a monster. Which is a child's definition, not one that can be seen as legitimate here.
For a genuinely new reader, the result is actively misleading, and thus, again, literally exists to make the game harder to understand.
Character; A character is an individual featuring in the game. Each player controls one character, save the GM, who controls all the characters not controlled by a player.
As with the White Box, again we have this infuriating inconsistency. Why is "monster" in the above example included with quotes every time it is used in the definition, but "character" is not? What does this signify? How is "monster" different from character as a word to be defined. Do we know? Of course not. Because the inconsistencies in text, again, indicate that this was written by fucking amateurs.
Without knowing what a character is (and we're not told, it is not explained), we continue to have no idea what players control or what "all the characters not controlled by a player" remotely refers to. In the definition for monster, we casually used "NPC" without defining that acronym (and "NPC" in not included, infuriatingly, on the Explanatory Notes page), while we also casually use "humanoid character" as a monster that might be encountered. Since humanoid equals human in that same paragraph, this description of character allows the first-time participant to logically assume that the characters controlled here are "monsters." The text has created a closed loop of undefined terms that reinforce one another’s ambiguity. Q.E.D.
The authors envisage that OSRIC will be used primarily by people who are already familiar with 1e-compatible systems, so we have not burdened the following text with long passages of explanation concerning matters probably already familiar to our target audience. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that everyone who uses OSRIC will already be familiar with every term that we use, so we have provided brief explanations of some of the terminology here.
I left this to the end because I wanted to clarify that the entire page is meaningless filler. The above paragraph might just as well read,
Definitions are really, really hard, so fuck it, we decided to phone this one in. Enjoy.
And just think. The impetus for my writing this post was that my friend was furious that new players are using OSRIC as an alternative to learning AD&D from the original books. We can see from the above how well that's actually working.
Happy New Year.
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