Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Carlo’s code” from 2008 by Jeff Rients
Next week we’ll discuss “On the Oracular Power of Dice" from 2008 by James Maliszewski. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
This one is short enough to reproduce in full here:
Adventure, not arguments,
Imagination, not indignation,
Fun, not fumbling for a rulebook,
Rulings, not rules,
Making it up, not making do with what they give you,
Getting on with the Game, not getting bogged down in BS.
That’s what Old School means to me!
Carlo is a member of the Original D&D Discussion board, where he goes by the username coffee. He has the text above in his sig there.
I’m guessing this is one of the earlier (earliest?) set of “maxims for old school play”, although one commenter points out “I don’t see how any of those distinctions line up with “Old School” more than other gaming styles”.
Some of these align with the earlier post by Jeff we discussed in Blog club #4 - reacting against a restrictive approach to D&D whereby mechanical calculation of rules and bonuses was preventing a more imaginative engagement with the fiction. (i.e. “Making it up, not making do with what they give you”). Several of these are more about the table dynamic of players (which he had presumably encountered problems with): “not arguments… not indignation… not getting bogged down in BS”.
The only one that I think has much relevance to today’s OSR/NSR/P-OSR scene is “Rulings, not rules” - that has cropped up again and again. Is this the first statement of it, and if not where did Carlo get it?
It strikes me as a generic prototype of the game/referee/player principles that are in vogue now. Although I’m not familiar with the history of that concept.
It’s acknowledging (and making explicit) that often the social code matters more for our experience together than the game itself.
Not much to say about the tenets themselves. They’re fine and I mostly agree.
I like the the “making it up, not making do with what they give you” aspect, as it is somewhat different to other maxims of the kind. It highlights the lacunae we mentioned before in another book club thread as the integral spaces where originality and creative fulfilment happens.
It does appear as a set of maxims, but the only one that seems to have really stuck around has been “rulings, not rules” and like all OSR maxims its something with a lot of interpretations at this point.
I do think its interesting that the majority of these are about table culture and against the “RAW culture” of resolving questions through discussion and dissection of the rules or arguing their interpretations. In that sense this entire mantra is “rulings not rules” repeated with slightly different emphasis.
The blog post is from 22 April 2008. The year 2008 was the year the expression “old-school renaissance” was coined, whence “OSR.” “Old-school renaissance” appears the cover of issue 1 of Fight On!, Spring 2008, about simultaneously with this blog post. Jeff Rients contributed an article to that issue.
2008 is the year talking about what “old-school” gaming is (a topic going back to the '90s) took on the character of a movement that needed to be defined.
I think @GusL is right that the maxims here are about table culture. That must mean that part of the “old-school renaissance” was the intention to cultivate a specific kind of table culture.
One interesting way to think about the maxims is to imagine a game of the kind they are advocating against:
arguments, indignation, fumbling for a rulebook, rules, making do with what they [presumably the game designers] give you, getting bogged down in BS.
Carlo’s code basically says, “Avoid rules-lawyering and bad feelings as you wing it creatively in play so that you can keep play fast.”
To me, this is a great example of how the earlier 90s idea of “old-school” began to be transformed. Previously, “old-school” gaming was identified with rules lawyers and “hack-n-slash” play. Here, rules lawyering was distinctly not old-school. We are still seeing the complete reinterpretation of what the term “old-school” was once taken to mean.
As an aside, back in 2008, some people still knew when to use a hyphen in a two-word adjective: You can participate in the old school (noun), but your preference is old-school (adjective) gaming.