A Lot to Be Learned

Yesterday I was advised by a reader that there was "a lot to be learned" from Kelsey Dionne's Shadowdark. So I looked further into it. Shown is a screenshot of page 9, demonstrating the depth, difficulty and text size of the Shadowdark product. By typing "Shadowdark pdf" into the Google search engine, it's possible for anyone to read the entire document with patience and a willingness to skip ads.

I'll begin by pointing out that this is quite obviously not an independently designed role-playing game. It depends heavily on D&D, which is a nice way of saying it outright stole D&D's mechanics, dumbed them down and removed everything of nuance. On a design level, this is more or less the equivalent of rewriting Shakespeare's plays as a book of short stories. It helps a LOT with creativity when the goal is, first, let someone else do the work, and second, dumb it down to a grade school level of comprehension.

Doesn't terribly impress me.

I was never a supporter of the Old School Renaissance. I want to make that perfectly clear. I wrote yesterday that "The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D." My philosophy about gaming differs from this premise in two important ways.

First of all, I don't think newer editions of D&D are very fucking complex. In fact, I think they're extremely stupified in design and mechanics, infantile in their reward systems and egregiously "non-game" in structure. Without hesitation, I automatically rank people who think 3rd, 4th or 5th edition D&D is "complex" as people not ready to for a grown-up career. Compared with what university educated professionals do every day, the "complexity" of D&D fits the status of learning how to Halloween as a kid. That is, not complex. We're not removing game resistance, we're not removing density... when someone carps about the need for D&D to return to the simplification of "The OSR", they're talking about removing adulthood.

People talk about AD&D and later editions as though they're equivalent to climbing K2. I'll remind the reader that I learned how to play the game at fifteen. My daughter did at nine. What are we to do with a bunch of adults who whine that D&D is so hard, they can't manage on the level of a nine-year-old?

My other reason for disliking the OSR comes from my having been playing this whole time, albeit with dark periods. By the summer of 1980, nine months after learning the game, I was so dissatisfied with the simplicity of AD&D that I began rewriting parts of the game to make it more complex, not less.  And mind you, I'm no superbrain. I do not have a PhD, I'm not an engineer or a doctor, or a lawyer; I've never had a technical job (I don't count writing). I've never worked in research or design or manufacturing. As a writer, I comment on things. This is not a superbrain activity. So when I say, "AD&D wasn't complex enough," I'm not writing as Steven Hawkings. I'm saying, the game was so egregiously simple, it wasn't sufficient to provide what I needed my game system to provide. That is millions (plural) of miles away from Shadowdark, 43 years before the launch of the latter.

I have continued to make the game more complex in the years since. As such, I have very little reason to embrace the OSR's ideology, and even less reason to consider the dumbification of AD&D as something I can "learn" from. If AD&D felt insufficient for me in 1980, before internet discourse, before "narrative gaming," before Critical Role, before modern bloat, before corporate overproduction, long before the presence of another edition or even the simplistic splatbooks of original AD&D, then my point of view could not have been in 2010 that D&D had "lost its way" through excess complexity. I thought the idea ridiculous at the time and I continue to think it's ridiculous. Moreover, I don't want to play with people who think the OSR idea has any validity. If that's you, for the love of all things sacred, stop playing D&D and go get a real fucking job, one with consequences attached to your actions. You need more life experience, not a dumber game.

Let me see if I can explain where a simple system utterly fails my perceived structure of player agency and opportunity. If you don't know me, you might want to read this, this and then this post.

If you're following along with the Discord Campaign, then you know that my party has recently been offered logistical support from a group of ethnic Hungarians seeking to destabilise the Ottoman Regime from the inside... an idea the party has embraced because they see it as a way of enriching themselves. Parties are, after all, always parties.

But now that the players have decided to onboard themselves (they were not required to do so; if they had not, I'd have simply given them some other opportunity), then the system they play in has to be robust enough to answer their intentions honestly and intelligently. A simplified system cannot hope to sustain deep agency in a setting that lacks the procedural density needed to answer the player's meaningful questions. Before Ottoman logistics in Hungary can be destabilised, they have to be comprehended, they need a logic. The players will need to know, ahead of time, what the blockhouse ought to contain, fairly, without that being strictly an arbitrary number of gold. They need to know which trade routes matter and why, what support the blockhouse has from the immediate area, how authority functions both in the blockhouse and in the surrounding region under Ottoman control. To make decisions on how to attack the blockhouse, they must have information on residents in the area, the probable consequence of the attack, what the next target might logically be, what an end-point of their engagement might be, where they feel they have a right to draw the line before getting in deeper... all with a legitimate agency that says "the players are in charge of what the players do," not me, not a story, not a convenient "adventure midway ride," nothing whatsoever that forces them, beyond the pure logic of the setting, to keep going in a setting large enough that if they walk two hundred miles west, they can escape Ottoman influence entirely and set up shop elsewhere with a clean slate.

Shadowdark's mechanics simply aren't good enough to provide this.

This is the real divide between the D&D I'm teaching and the D&D being sold, under various cheap-minded rubrics. The OSR often talks about "player freedom," but what that usually means is freedom inside a vacuum. The players may choose any direction, but the world lacks enough internal structure for those directions to materially differ from the players' perspective in any meaningful way. They can choose the left door vs. the right one. They can choose whether to enter the dungeon or not. They can choose whether or not this is the right time to return to town and resupply. The decisions are isolated, trivial and ultimately meaningless in a broader context. Players can make a choice, but they cannot engage their strategic reasoning because there is no rule structure and no complex setting against which to test their understanding of potential consequences. They can't have agency because there's nothing to have agency about. Without a detailed framework, the setting simply cannot respond to player choice.

Thus, complexity in the mechanics and the world is the medium through which player agency becomes functional. Detailed systems allow players to make deliberate choices, anticipate outcomes and respond to evolving circumstances. Without that depth, what appears to be freedom is in fact constrained and superficial. The richness of the system and the world is what allows agency to exist in a functional sense. In essence, the world’s complexity and the rules' granularity are inseparable from the player's capacity to act deliberately and with impact.

But as I said in the attached posts, DMs don't want that. They want controlled, managed, contained players who do as they're told, so they can move from points A to B to C in succession in a curated, Candyland-like structured game setting, where cardboard baddies are knocked down with dice, or fudging, since if the baddie doesn't fall then it has to be pushed over. This is what OSR celebrates as the "ideal model" for D&D, and I think that's gawdawful.

Finally, with regard to yesterday's post, one thing I did not comment upon was the lack of actual game discussion among the participants. I did not learn anything about Shadowdark from Dionne's own mouth, the matter of "State of OSR in 2026" was not in fact discussed because, in fact, OSR itself was not discussed. What was discussed was an hour of "engagement" in the least valuable, socially awkward manner imaginable.

To which I'd like to respond, can the reader see me on this panel?

It's a two-part question. First, is there any universe in which these people could imaginatively look at this blog or my content or my work and want to have me present? I think not.

And secondly, since I would talk about the subject, the State of OSR in 2026, which would be to say, it will be exactly what it was in 2025. "Advancement" is not being made in any sort of science or game play manner. It is just people churning out more product of the exact same kind. I would not be welcome with my comments. I would make everyone at the table extremely uncomfortable because I would not be there to sell anything. And where it comes to table sales, the purpose of this kind of video is to make sure no one looks incompetent, since we're giving everyone lip service in order to sell themselves as "real, authentic people" while needing to do nothing to perform that model except to sit in chairs and speak in vaguely conversational patterns. The panel does not exist to investigate anything, or talk about anything, or present a viewpoint that might damage their potential sales.

That is why, for me, I'd as soon be a member of a panel of real estate agents talking about "the housing market in 2026"... since, obviously, for real estate agents, the only answer to that question is, "It's going to be amazeballs!"

Thank you, no.

Can you imagine the seller of an OSR product addressing the question, the State of the OSR in 2026 with the answer, "This design trend, actually, has reached a dead end in these last fifteen years. I think we need to reconsider whether or not this OSR thing has actually run its course."