In Lands Most Forbidden

Fear of Failure and OSR Play, pt. 1

This post is part 1 in a series of posts where I will talk about my experiences in the TTRPG hobby, especially as they relate to being a former trad player, and current OSR/NSR/adventure gaming GM.

Introduction and Ramblings

In my experience, there are many GMs who feel a degree of fear, anxiety, or overwhelm when prepping and running RPGs. This is both natural, since running a game is a relatively large responsibility, and unfortunate, since running a game is a very rewarding and entertaining enterprise. Depending on the game and the style of prep that a GM uses, it can feel immensely challenging to create maps, regions, cultures, pantheons of deities, schools of magic, NPCs, towns, villages, cities, business ventures, monster encounters, political intrigue, etc etc etc. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Prepping a game can feel like an impossible challenge, especially if you are the same type of person that I am, who is self-critical, wants to make something perfect on the first draft, loves to procrastinate, and feels that everything needs to be done the right way, dammit. This feeling, in my opinion, is exacerbated by play cultures that put little agency in the hands of PCs and rely on the GM to bring the story to the players, or to make the game fun, or whatever. There can be a multitude of expectations placed on a GM, and if your players expect to be taken along for the ride, this can be very anxiety-inducing since you may feel that you are responsible for having details and notes about EVERYTHING, or otherwise you're not a good GM and should obviously go watch 300 episodes of Ritical Crole to see how it's REALLY done.

My Time with Trad Play

I started out in the TTRPG hobby playing D&D 5E, with a group who were very much in the trad/neotrad style, as far as I understand these terms. Generally, the GM dropped hooks, we the players bit on one of them, and then played the game by generally doing what was optimal in the situation at hand. The other players and myself were doing the GM the courtesy of only going where the story was, because that's what was prepped. During this time, I was also watching a LOT of Dimension 20, the live play D&D show from Dropout (at the time it was still College Humor, I think). And by a lot, I mean I think I binged 3 seasons of it in a week or two. Basically, due to these influences, I began to believe the game worked like this:

  1. The GM comes up with a story they like or want to play
  2. The GM preps the story by plotting it like a typical story, with certain beats expected to be hit at certain times, e.g. "when the villain dies that will be the end of the first act"
  3. Players make characters who would conceivably have a reason to want to play in the conceived plot, usually due to long backstories that give the character a reason to be embarking on this adventure
  4. The GM takes certain elements from the backstories and incorporates them into the plot to make it more interesting to the players, since it directly involves their character in some way
  5. The GM plans sessions by establishing what needs to happen for the story to move forward in whatever direction they choose
  6. Players show up and play the game, following along with the story and engaging with what the GM has planned

And we had a ton of fun playing like this! The story was interesting, I enjoyed the combats, I liked the direction my character was heading in. All to say, the point of this post is not specifically to disparage trad play, because I can very much enjoy it with the right people. One of the points is however to explain my experience with this style of play, which is one of the things that led to my own issues as laid out in the introduction prior.

I eventually took it upon myself to start running my own 5e game for my friends, learning from my time as a player, D20 live plays, and Matt Colville's Running the Game series on YouTube. As a result of this, I prepped my games in a way that relied on a specific goal being achieved by the players at some point during the session in order for the plot to progress, because that was all that I had prepared. I usually really did have no backup at all, which quickly became an issue as my brand new players inevitably wanted to go somewhere and do something for which I had no material. This in turn led to me feeling like I needed to have something prepared for the entire game world at any given time, or at least in any direction that my players would conceivably want to go. But I was still tied to the idea of plot and story, and truly had no idea how to prepare so much material. I mean, how was I supposed to build out full locations in every direction that related to the PC backstories, had some clue that pointed towards my main story arc/villain, included "fun" combats with cool battle maps and set pieces, have interesting NPCs to talk to, I mean HOW?

Wrap Up

Anyway, long story short, I no longer play games that way. Hopefully you can see the sort of play culture I come from, and how that will relate to my newer experiences with the OSR culture of play, and prepping and running games in that way. These will come in later posts =). As an aside, I am not going to try to define OSR play, or what makes something OSR or not. Everyone knows D&D is a game about doors, so obviously, the more doors, the more OSR it is.