The OSR experience, affordance, and player agency

Inspired by a great playing session yesterday and encouraged by Che Webster over at Roleplay Rescue's Blog to talk more about our gaming, I want to share a couple of reflections about my new (and surprisingly old) experience with the OSR.

We are playing Barrowmaze for a year and a bit now. For most of us, this was the first introduction to OSR-style gaming. Over time, we not only visited many barrows and some deeper levels of the Barrowmaze, but we also appropriated the nearby village and filled it with life. One player mentioned that he didn’t think much of Heany at first (our name for the green hill village called Helix from the module), but fell in love with the place over time.

This reminded me about my first voyage into tabletop roleplaying thirty years ago. We used the German game The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge) to create, inhabit and extend a frontier settlement (the name was Loberg) over several real-time years. The characters became leading figures of that community, built tight relationships with the locals, and helped the community to prosper (with a lot of ridiculous monster hunting in between, as you would expect from a group of teens). Today, as then, the place became a living thing, charged with stories, emotions, and good memories. It gained a certain lived-in quality that made it more real, more believable than many other locations filling our games.

How comes? I think some of the mechanics that we picked up from the old-school type of gaming (or what we just did, because we didn’t know otherwise as kids) helped to achieve this:

• Firstly, the rule that you only get XPs from your hard-won gold if you spend it on special interests (inspired by an excellent article by The Alexandrian) led to the character heavily investing in Heany’s infrastructure and institutions. They restored the glory of an old god’s church, founded a new church worshipping one of the on-the-rise gods, and built an extensive poorhouse including alimentation for the poor. That brought them in contact with the local authorities, clerics, and common folk. It also made them into authoritative figures within the community, sought after for advice and support.
• Secondly, not following a certain plotline, based on an implicit social contract between players and game master that you won’t veer off the predefined order of events too much, supported this. Interestingly, the megadungeon campaign structure helps with this by providing a simple default action to take. Go to the dungeon, get out as much gold as you can, and get back to the green hill village alive. This gives certain robustness to the game and, after a while, spins off other options as the characters get more invested in the local communities. They can concern themselves with some non-dungeon-related matters for a session or two, always knowing that they can get back to dungeoneering afterward. In our game, the players seem to have gotten into a certain rhythm and appreciate these options.
• Finally, this list would be lacking, if not mentioning random tables here. I somehow knew beforehand that this rather simple tool can make quite some difference. I’m no stranger to them, having used wandering monsters’ tables in my early years of The Dark Eye. Nevertheless, I was astonished to see their power in action again. We started with using terrain-specific encounter tables, slightly adjusting the ones from the Barrowmoor and Barrowmounds encounters in the module. These helped to establish some common threats to look out for, most notably the strange and incomprehensible boggards, who killed our barbarian Stompf in the third session. But random tables became a real game-changer for me after I started to create small event tables we used at the beginning of each session to see what happened in the environment. Here’s an example (d6 table - the higher the roll result, the better it is for a favorable development of the current situation):

What happens in Heany?

1. The Orkus Cult sees their chance: the former waitress at the Smiling Eel Fionna returns changed (with an eye patch) as the new leader of the Orkus Cult. They erect a shrine on the outskirts of Heany. Guarded by the three Northmen, a five-man adventuring party, “The Emerald Torches” and the remnants of Ako’s (the All-Seeing Eye) squad.
2. Fionna is back with an eye patch and lets herself be seen in the village. Villagers are invited to the manor to worship Orkus.
3. Food becomes more and more scarce. Villagers leave Heany.
4. More refugees reach Heany and hope to be taken care of.
5. Count Jerdik von Falsraff comes through Heany with his relief army. They can leave some provisions.
6. The King’s sister, the Queen of the East, sends a relief army under commander Isalda Garwain to Heany. They also bring a good amount of food.
   

In the game, the players got lucky with rolling a 6 which saw us introducing the King’s sister which radically changed the fate of the whole kingdom. First, I tried out random tables with much less radical things and on a smaller scale, but build up more confidence with the tool over time, leaning into the surprise and suspense. It became a powerful tool of world-building, changing the face of the whole region and with it the player's options. It added to the believability of the world where the character’s actions matter and where other forces are at play as well.

To conclude, it’s no surprise that much mentioned here is related to player agency. By getting the characters invested in the community through an XP economy, providing interesting places rather than scripted events, and using random (but curated) tables the world comes to life. This increases the world’s affordance (borrowing a term from design here), making it easier for players to relate to the world and for characters to interact with the world. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, reconnecting with some of my roots in the hobby.

Makes me want to explore and experiment even more. Onwards!