The Basic Procedure of the OSR
You have probably been using a set of rules (more accurately a procedure) that you never read in any rulebook. And not just a little. It is probably the bread-and-butter procedure for your gaming group, even if you haven’t understood it as such. At first blush, the procedure hides itself as “conversation.” But I suspect that is just evidence for how powerful, how transformative and how natural this procedure is. I will quit stalling for now, but expect me to bloviate at length on what this procedure means; here is what I call the “Basic Procedure”:
Step 1. The referee describes the situation, what the player-characters see, hear, smell, taste or feel.
Step 2. The players ask clarifying questions about the situation, if they so desire.
Step 3. The referee answers any such questions that are immediately observable by the player-characters. If ascertaining the answer would require player-character action, the referee informs the players what they must do to obtain the answer, and resolves such actions if the players wish to do so. Upon the resolution of such actions, the referee answers the question and gives any other pertinent information.
Step 4. Based on the information at hand, the players state what actions their player-characters take.
Step 5. The referee and players resolve all such actions. If the situation changes (which it almost certainly will), repeat these steps.
This, ad infinitum, is how most OSR games operate. This understanding is nothing innovative; a similar description of the Basic Procedure of early D&D appeared in Monsters! Monsters! in 1976 (See page 43 of The Elusive Shift for more on this). It was also described by John at The Retired Adventurer blog and by Nick at the Papers Pencils blog. An interesting aspect of the question-answer-question procedure that Nick describes is the giving of options during Step 4, to prompt player action if nothing is forthcoming. In the comments, Gus L says he does this too but never provides the good options. I will also do this, if players are waffling, but it is not that I only provide bad choices necessarily, I just provide uncreative actions: do you fight, do you run away, etc.? Creative actions tend to be the best solution to any problem, so they are intended more as kindling to spark ideas than ideas themselves.
Most OSR procedures handle other, more specific situations, but there is almost nothing that the Basic Procedure isn’t capable of facilitating. The Basic Procedure is so, well, basic that it probably seems too obvious to be worth remarking upon. Indeed, most players and referees learn it by pure osmosis. I did. But what is obvious to one play culture may not be obvious to others. This is how I run my OSR (or POSR—put a pin in that, more on that later) games. But imagine applying this same Basic Procedure to a game like One Thousand Year Vampire—it doesn’t really cohere with that type of game at all. So what kind of assumptions are baked into the Basic Procedure? What would it mean to change parts of the Basic Procedure and how would that impact running games?
All games have procedure. As Gus L recently said over at All Dead Generations: “the order of turns in monopoly and how you use ‘Free Parking’ [in Monopoly] are procedures.” But what are procedures? Let’s turn again to Gus L for wisdom:
“[The] understanding about when to use specific mechanics (which can be reduced to an order of operations and provided by a system, but rarely is), why to use them (which is almost never provided by rules documents) and how they work together is the procedure, and if that sounds a little vague, it’s because it is. Procedure is the holistic set of mechanics, ethics of play and design principles that govern a specific sort of actions: combat procedure, exploration procedure, character generation procedure.”
According to Necropraxis, “[m]any old school games do not provide direct procedures.” However, that isn’t entirely true (nor is this quote a full and accurate encapsulation of his blog post on the subject). Instead, OSR games either (1) leave procedures mostly unstated, or (2) have a suite of more specific procedures. As examples of #2, Necropraxis offers combat, which is heavily proceduralized in all variations of D&D and its descendants. The Retired Adventurer identifies “five basic types of procedures,” which are Encounters, Site Exploration, Overland Travel, Recuperation and Downtime / Projects. To me, all of these fall within the Basic Procedure, but each specific procedure clarifies the time scale and acceptable actions for a given type of situation. The more specific procedures are essentially rulings, for use in the Basic Procedure.
The Basic Procedure, when spelled out, almost reads like a story game, with the idea that the game is a conversation and the rules intervene in and mediate that conversation, imposing some sort of structure. Here is how Apocalypse World (AW) describes it (as an aside, I am using AW as my touchstone because, even if it is not a cutting edge story game, it would be hard to argue against its influence on the play culture. You can’t throw 2d6 without running into a “Powered by the Apocalypse” game, even in 2021) (bold is added for emphasis):
“You probably know this already: roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine.
“These rules mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right?”
The presentation is different, but this is very similar to the Basic Procedure outlined above. In both, the players and referee (or Master of Ceremonies in AW) chat, and eventually something they do might necessitate turning to a specific rule (or move) to resolve it. Then they go back to talking and repeat this fruitful procedure again and again. There is even a similar division of authorial control; the Master of Ceremonies (MC) is responsible for describing the situations and surroundings in which the player-characters find themselves. AW, again (and again, the bold for emphasis is my own):
“Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.
Always be scrupulous, even generous, with the truth. The players depend on you to give them real information they can really use, about their characters’ surroundings, about what’s happening when and where.
However, a core difference is that the question-asking procedure is expected to go both ways in Apocalypse World. One of the MC principles for Apocalypse World is to “Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.” These questions generally pertain to the characters but can bleed into other aspects of the world when the MC builds on them. For instance, if the MC asks “What is your living space like?” and the player responds that their character lives with their tribe in tunnels beneath the bombed-out ruins of Disney World, it directs the MC in certain ways. The MC now knows (if it hasn’t already been established) that some tribes of humans live beneath the ruins of Disney World. The MC may build on that by having the player-characters encounter other expatriated tribe members from the Disney tunnels, or even introduce a new twist, like revealing that the surface ruins of Disney World are littered with radioactive zombies. Just like the players do in the Basic Procedure, the MC may ask follow-up questions in response to the players’ answers. The question-and-answer portion of the Basic Procedure and the AW conversation involve two roles: the person asking the question is conceding some level of authority over an aspect of the fiction and the person answering the question assumes that authority.
Despite the Basic Procedure being more of a tool for Classic- and OSR-style play, I am interested in the way more story game-style play broadens the conversation and shares authority over the fiction. One identifiable strain of the POSR (Post-OSR, a term I may one day expound upon—but that is neither here nor now) is a move towards dispersed authorial control in games. The work of Luka Rejec (although he may not define himself as POSR) in general and his seminal post on the Anti-Canon specifically, is a good example of this type of movement. Luka pushes back against what he diagnoses as “[t]he classical AD&D model of referee as source of all knowledge about the world, and players as fully-fleshed out heroes with backstories moving through this world” by “teambrewing.” By way of example, Luka describes his teambrewing approach as:
“A player was the only Halfling in the party? Now they’re responsible for making up Halfling culture and history. Not up-front in unreadable prose but live, at the table.”
I have been using this same teambrewed approach for many years, but my games are still very much in the broader OSR tradition. So what I described as the “Basic Procedure” only partially describes the Basic Procedure used in my games. To this end, I would offer a slightly supplemented version of the Basic Procedure for your consideration. It does not fully break into the type of loosey-goosey conversation described in AW, but it does take from AW the two-way flow of questions and answers.
Step 1. The referee describes the situation, what the player-characters see, hear, smell, taste or feel.
Step 2a. The players ask clarifying questions about the situation, if they so desire.
Step 2b. The referee may also ask clarifying questions about the players, if they so desire.
Step 3a. The referee answers any such questions that are immediately observable by the player-characters. If ascertaining the answer would require player-character action, the referee informs the players what they must do to obtain the answer, and resolve such actions if the players wish to do so. Upon the resolution of such actions, the referee answers the question and gives any other pertinent information.
Step 3b. The players answer the question, ideally from the perspective of their character and without contradicting anything previously established at the table. The referee may ask follow-up questions, if they desire. The referee and other players are to consider the player’s answer as canon and treat it (and any implications of the answer) as true, building on that truth when applicable.
Step 4. Based on the information at hand, the players state what actions their player-character’s take. The referee may ask the players about how they perform such action, to assist the referee in their rulings.
Step 5. The referee and players resolve all such actions. If the situation changes (which it almost certainly will), repeat these steps.
Why should you adopt this modified Basic Procedure? The first reason is that by distributing authorial control, you get more buy-in from the players. The second reason is that it is an opportunity for the referee to suss out what things interest and motivate the players and their characters. Conversation is a very fruitful process, particularly when there is a mutual exchange of information. But the way games structure their conversations are often invisible, especially if you are enmeshed within a certain play culture. It is worthwhile to interrogate how the conversation is structured in the games you run. You may find that by altering and amending those invisible procedures we take for granted, you are able to more easily tailor your game to one that works for everyone at the table.
