Is Story Hyphen Games Dot Com Hostile to the OSR?

A significant kerfluffle (those two words do not belong together) recently was raised when a person in the "story games" or "indie game" "community" ("scare quotes") called on that community to be more open and welcoming to the OSR "community". They're the last two posts on the Magpie Games blog.  Anyway, if you're reading this you definitely already read those posts because there's only 6 people and 2 dogs that read this blog and all of them also already read that post.  Before I start, a quick note about those scare quotes.

one of my beloved readers

First of all, it isn't clear to me that either of the two groups the poster was talking about is actually a community.  A community shares resources, risks, needs, intent, beliefs, and preferences - not absolutely identically, but with sufficient overlap that we can identify those in and out of the community.  Liking a particular type of game isn't a basis for a community, no matter what Google and Facebook want us to feel.  On social media, you won't see workable tools created to form and police actual communities because that would get in the way of the purpose of social media - to destroy communities, relationships, and in the end, identities, through commerce.  Letting Facebook convince us we are a community doesn't make us a community.  We're still just people that like things, and sometimes click buttons to tell Google that we do, in front of others doing the same thing.

There are several possible responses to this critique. "Well, JD, there's a community, but you're not in it." Fair enough, I am a filthy hermit living alone in a cave in the desert, so I can't deny that it's possible there's a RPG community somewhere out there.  Or, perhaps, there's a community, but not of game-players, but instead of game designers. Designers! Those godforsaken creatures! But even beetles love other beetles, if they can.

Similarly, my other scare quotes around "story games" or "indie games", exist because those conflate many things together.  "Indie games" doesn't even say anything about the content of the games, just whether or not the creator owns them. Unquestionably almost all OSR products are "indie games", for example.  But enough of the scare quotes for the rest of the article.  "You know what we mean, JD," they say, and I begrudgingly mutter that I do.

completely accurate picture
of me getting mad on the internet
(uh except for this guy has hair)

The general thrust of the Magpie blogposts describing these community problems was the perception that the story games community was hostile to the OSR community, and asking them to be kinder.  And my instinct when reading the post was, yeah, I can see that.  We live in a RPG cultural moment where D&D and its ambit hasn't been this dominant since the mid-1980s.  And I can remember back to those days when those of us who played games other than D&D-and-its-ilk were little shits about D&D.  There were even games that put opposition to D&D's dominance in their texts, back cover copy and advertisements.  So it made sense to me that since the OSR is a significant part of D&D's current almost complete dominance over RPG culture, those that are in its margins might be resentful, as we were last time.

But as the days since the (first) post passed, I started to question this. Yeah, it makes sense that story game people would be resentful and negative towards OSR people because the OSR people are part of the wave that has completely obliterated every non-D&D-ish thing in sight (along with Paizo's success, 5e's success, the 4th edition people who are still playing through all the free material, and the prolonged success of many indie d20 properties), but is it actually happening?  Forget for a second whether a just-so story about two communities clashing fits your hazy 9th grade memories of the last time it happened, JD; you were too interested in the girls playing Vampire to really be objective anyway.   Does the available evidence actually bear your feeling out? Are story gamers really hostile to the OSR?

So I thought I would actually do a survey.  I would look at the forums of story-games.com and determine the extent of the hostility of the posters of that forum to the OSR.  That forum was for several years considered the center of "story gamers" (by those who thought there was a center; "You know what we mean, JD!"; yes, ugh, I do.)

So if there is a lot of hostility against the OSR we should be able to find it there.  Now, eventually a lot of people migrated from forums to social media.  I can't think of a good method to sample most social media spaces, except for maybe being nice to people and trying to get them to share things with me on social media.  As you might imagine, this is impossible.  However, story gamers, by and large, went to those spaces from story-games.com (where most, though not me, landed during the waning years of indie-rpgs.com), so if there's a community-wide feeling towards the OSR, it makes sense to me that we should be able to spot that feeling at story-games.com.  (I don't know where OSR people discuss shit, so can't gauge feelings from the OSR to story gamers; perhaps someone who does could replicate this methodology...I'd read it!)

If you're not into inside baseball of this kind, skip it, and if JD Shows His Math seems boring to you, cool. But let's see exactly how bad things have been between story hyphen games dot com, and the OSR.

Methodology of Part 1 - "OSR" via Google search

The methodology of this inquiry is actually fairly complicated.  The search function on story-games.com has been broken for a few years.  Though it does return results, they're often incomplete.  So we turn to a Google site search.  Google says there are "About 350 results" when I search for "OSR" on story-games.com.  Note that Google does search into threads, not just the titles, so if the title is "[Old School] I killed a kobold" or even "What's a good D&D thing?", Google will still find the thread if, later in the conversation, it finds the term "OSR".

With 350 threads, what we want to do is pick a representative sample.  We want threads that cover a significant period of time, we want threads that are both short and long.  Based on my review of the results, it appears that story-games.com first began to notice "old school" stuff with that name in 2010 and 2011, though there were not enough threads to draw any conclusions then.  In 2012 the discussion began in earnest and continued for a little over two years.

If I can pick 5 threads from each year except this year, (and maybe 2 from 2016 if possible), at least one of which is short and at least one of which is long, I feel like that would be a decent sample of threads talking about the OSR (so, hopefully 15-20 threads out of 350).  We should be able to determine from this a general attitude; even if one thread is extra mean or extra nice, the other four from that year should average it out.

I will classify each post in each of these threads into the following categories:

1 - Unreservedly Positive/Gushing/just doesn't have enough good things to say/"I love..."
2 - Positive/thumbs up/"sounds cool"/"I like when..."
3 - Neutral/factual, or asking neutral/factual questions
4 - Negative, or asking negative/pointed questions/"I don't like"/a bad experience
5 - Hostile/Acrimonious, or asking negative/loaded/vicious questions, or "I hate..."
6 - Nonsense/not about the OSR topic at all.

The reason I divide them like this is because to really analyze whether an environment is hostile or not, it's not just the #5 posts that matter to determining the overall attitude of story-games.com towards the OSR. If there's a 15 post thread, 3 posts are Hostile, 5 are Negative and 7 are Neutral, that's an incredibly hostile thread, even if only a tiny proportion are actually acrimonious.  And please don't think that "Nonsense" literally means nonsense, it's just the normal drift and tangents that happen in forum conversations. I suppose if we discover a huge amount of derailing in OSR threads compared to regular threads that might be a red flag, but I am not sure how we could break that out.

Examples

Here are some exemplars for each classification of post that I think hit what I was looking for dead on:

A comment that is Unreservedly Positive about the OSR: Thor_O, in 2013, describes an old-school mapping method as producing "amazing" results.
A comment that is Positive about the OSR: Ludanto, in 2012, says he likes the OSR because of its game elements.
A comment that is Neutral, Factual or asks a Question about the OSR: Rafu, in 2013, likes some things about OSR play and dislikes other things.  Or, me, in 2013, remembering how I wanted to rob a bunch of villagers and wondering if levelling up from that was proper or a good idea.
A comment that is Negative about the OSR: Adam Dray, in 2013, says his group disliked OSR play because they were not into the challenges offered
A comment that is Hostile to the OSR: Zak S, in 2012, says what he likes about the OSR is "Getting chastised by people I'll never meet for opinions I don't actually hold."
A comment that is Tangential Nonsense to OSR discussion: I can't help myself! In 2013, I have to just rush into an OSR thread and post some dumb shit about Vampire: the Masquerade nobody asked about.

I picked these threads by letting Google sort them by relevance and going down the list, only skipping threads if they're duplicated, or if I already have too many threads that year.  That way we get a jumble of threads from many years, and we stick (at least at first) with the ones Google thinks are "most about" the OSR specifically.  This isn't a perfect picture of what's going on, but it should give us some idea of the broader picture of how story-games.com dealt with OSR ideas over time.

Here are the threads I analyzed and the results. You can check my work if you wish! Or just page down to the bottom if you want to see the summary.

2012

[OSR] Old School Mechancs (long thread)
Unreservedly Positive: 1
Positive: 5
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 33
Negative 2:
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 1

[OSR] What do we like about Old School? (long thread)
Unreservedly Positive: 6
Positive: 35
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 21
Negative: 3
Hostile: 1
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 14

[OSR] Starting Equipment Packages (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 1
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 37
Negative: 1
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 0 (shocking!!! notify the media, I found a forum thread that didn't get off track!!)

Are OSR-style play and Story Now play really antithetical? (long)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 9
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 76
Negative: 6
Hostile: 2
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 10

This one was hard to analyze. It doesn't seem right to classify a post in a discussion that compares two gaming ideas to each other as being "not about the OSR" if it's about the other idea.  Not to mention, as a guy who doesn't believe Story Now is a well constructed idea, it's too tempting to just classify it as Nonsense anyway.  In this thread, I classified on-topic posts as Neutral/Questions/Answers if it seemed to be trying to address the question in a factual way.  If a post was down on the OSR as part of the answer ("Well, of course Story Now is better/more reasonable/more well-thought-out because...") then I made it Negative or Hostile.  Same on the other side; for example, the OP says the OSR is closer to Story Now play in several positive ways than Story Now advocates seem to notice. And yes, I classified my own contribution as Hostile since, as always, I was being smug to "both sides".

Stars Without Number and OSR tactical gameplay. (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 0
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 3
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense: 0

Results for 2012:

Unreservedly Positive: 7 (3%)
Positive: 50 (19%)
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 170 (64%)
Negative: 12 (4.5%)
Hostile: 3 (1%)
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 25 (9%)
Total Posts Analyzed: 267

In 2012, if you came to a 50-post thread about the OSR, you could expect to see 1-2 posts that were extremely positive about the OSR, 9-10 posts that were positive, 2 posts that were negative, 0-1 posts that were negative, 5 posts that didn't talk about the OSR, and the rest would be attempts to ask or answer questions.

In 2012, if you came across someone expressing a judgment or opinion about the OSR on story-games.com, 80 percent of the time it would be a positive or extremely positive opinion.

2013

[OSR] The Mapping Problem (long thread)
Unreservedly Positive: 4
Positive: 8
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 21
Negative: 2
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 0

[OSR] Making mid-level combat interesting (Vs humans/mundane weapons) (short thread)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 1
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 12
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 0

Is the OSR naturally emergent? (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 3
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 21
Negative: 1
Hostile: 1
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 4

Talk to me about OSR (ultra ultra long)
Unereservedly Positive: 1
Positive: 14
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 127
Negative: 6
Hostile: 2
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 14

[OSR] XP for treasure vs. XP for non-treasure (long)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 6
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 52
Negative: 3
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 0

Results for 2013

Unreservedly Positive: 5 (1.7%)
Positive: 32 (10%)
Neutral/Factual/Questions: 233 (78%)
Negative: 10 (3%)
Hostile: 2 (.6%)
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 18 (6%)
Total posts: 300

In 2013, if you went into an OSR thread on story-games.com that went for 50 posts (a long but not gargantuan discussion), you could expect to find: 1 unreservedly positive or gushing post, 5 positive/excited posts, 1-2 negative/critical posts, 0-1 acromonious or hostile post, and the overwhelming majority would either be questions or answers/discussion that tried to address the topic but didn't necessarily express an opinion or value judgment on it.  3 would be people joshing around or weighing in on tangents.

In 2013, if you found a post in an OSR thread on story-games.com that expressed a clear point of view/judgment on OSR material (in other words, only the posts that I classified as Unreservedly Positive, Positive, Negative, or Hostile), 76 percent of the time the opinion would be positive or extremely positive.  24 percent of the time it would be negative or hostile.

2014

This was the year that story-games.com began to decline somewhat as people shifted (primarily) to Google+.

What Makes An OSR Game Feel Like An OSR Game? (long)
Unreservedly Positive: 2
Positive: 15
Neutral/Questions: 37
Negative: 1
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 5

Character Motivation in OSR Play (long)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 7
Neutral/Questions: 38
Negative: 3
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 3

This one's interesting because I think the opening question (which is usually neutral at worst) is expressing some pretty decidedly negative opinions. I classified a lot of the original poster's contributions as "negative".

[OSR-style games] Increasing Challenge Through Hidden Information (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 4
Neutral/Questions: 14
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 1

[OSR] Hexcrawl sandbox procedures (long)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 13
Neutral/Questions: 82
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 7

[Yet More OSR] The beauty of sub-systems (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 1
Positive: 1
Neutral/Questions: 17
Negative: 1
Hostile: 1
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 7

Results for 2014

Unreservedly Positive: 3 (1.1%)
Positive: 40 (15%)
Neutral/Questions: 188 (72%)
Negative: 5 (2%)
Hostile: 1 (.3%)
Nonsense/Not about the OSR: 23 (9%)
Total Posts: 260

In 2014, if you came into an OSR thread on story-games.com that lasted 50 posts, you could expect to see 0-1 posts that were extremely positive, 7-8 posts that were positive about the OSR, 1 post that was negative about the OSR and 0-1 that were extremely negative.  4 posts would be not about the OSR, and the rest would be asking questions and trying to answer them.

In 2014, if you came across a post on story-games.com that expressed a clear opinion or judgment about the OSR, an overwhelming 88 percent of the time it would be a positive or extremely positive opinion.  12 percent of the time it would be negative or extremely negative.

2015

The exodus from story-games.com is fully on in this year.  Threads are shorter and further apart.  Perhaps because of this I ended up having to discard a lot of threads from analysis.  Here are some examples:

•  Magic as an OSR Skill?  This seemed to be more in the game development arena than in commentary on OSR ideas or communities.  If you can see a way to pull a valid set of data from this thread, go for it.
•  OSR Folks! How do you do with D&D 5e? because, again, it didn't seem possible to analyze it for an in-community opinion when it was targeted specifically at overlaps with the OSR community.   
• Real life experiments with lighting is pitched as primarily of interest to OSR people as well.

To some degree this year shows the deficiency of my methodology. Certainly if someone feels like story-games.com is a good place to have an OSR-oriented discussion like about bringing torches into real-life caves (?) then it is a valid piece of data that addresses our question.  It shows that at least some feel like story-games.com is a good place to have OSR discussions.  But it would be hard to incorporate that data into the current methodology.  So I'll just note the threads and let you draw your own conclusions from them.

[OSR] Mass Combat Rules (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 5
Neutral: 16
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense: 2

Early D&D and the OSR - Perhaps the best source (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 1
Positive:3
Neutral/Questions/Answers: 3
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense: 0

Good D&D modules for sword and sorcery feel (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 0
Positive: 1
Neutral/Questions/Answers: 4
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense: 0

Results: There aren't enough detectable long threads in 2015 for me to make a sufficient analysis. The only thing I can really say is that if you have an OSR topic you want to talk about on story-games.com, by 2015 you can be quite certain that even a very small and specific topic can be raised without any negativity at all.

2016

Even for a year that's not over yet, the amount of threads and length of threads are even smaller and shorter than 2015.

Godbound: Review + Actual Play (short)
Unreservedly Positive: 1
Positive: 2
Neutral/Questions/Answers: 0
Negative: 0
Hostile: 0
Nonsense: 0

Results: There aren't enough detectable threads in 2016 for me to make any type of analysis, even the truncated type I did for 2015.  I will say that the Godbound thread is typical of a modern-day story-games.com thread - a cool thing people think is cool.  In this case it happens to be an OSR thing.

Let's summarize the years that we have some usable data for: 2012-2015. Over those four years, which is a significant chunk of OSR and story-games.com's overlapping history, here are the stats:

The OSR on Story-Games.Com 2012-2015

The Totals:
Unreservedly Positive: 16 (2%)
Positive: 131 (15%)
Neutral/Questions/Answers: 614 (71%)
Negative: 27 (3%)
Hostile: 6 (.6%)
Nonsense: 68 (8%)
Total Posts: 862

Between 2012 and 2015, if you viewed a 50-post thread about an OSR topic on story-games.com, you could expect to see 1 post that was gushingly positive about the OSR, 7-8 posts that were positive, 1-2 posts that were negative, 0-1 posts that were hostile, 4 that were off-topic and the rest would be asking questions or trying to answer them.

If, in that time period, you came across someone who was expressing an opinion or judgment on the OSR, there is a 67% chance that it would be a positive or extremely positive opinion.

Methodology 1 - Conclusion

Story-games.com was, overwhelmingly, receptive and positive to the OSR between 2012, when it started talking about the OSR routinely, and the forum's decline in 2015. At the height of its discussion of OSR topics, 2012-2013, story-games.com was also at its most positive and receptive.

Now, there are many obvious issues with this methodology. So in my next analysis I want to try to find out if the OSR is brought up in primarily positive or negative ways in posts not "about" the OSR. In other words, there might still be hostility to the OSR on story-games.com if everyone is "on their best behavior" in OSR threads but still slag it off in other threads whenever they can. Google is not likely to catch this since its relevance algorithm returns results that are "most about" the thing you're searching for. Fortunately (?) the semi-broken comment search on story-games.com can fill this gap!

That's what my next post will be about!