Quote from: Melan;584256Coincidentally, Kickstarter is starting to feel the heat from unrealised and delayed projects.

Can I call it or what?

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Quote from: SineNomine;584382All OSR games are cross-compatible with each other to a degree hardly imaginable for most other frameworks.

Yup, that's the beauty of it.  I can find material in ACKS that I might want to use in my LotFP campaign. My upcoming Arrows of Indra game will be further away mechanically from core D&D than either of the above are, but I think that someone who plays either of those would have ZERO problem taking a ton of stuff from AoI to put into their ACKS or LotFP games without having to do any meaningful "converting". Monsters, magic items, random encounter tables, cavern complex generation system, weapons, equipment, and setting info could all be ported over without any problem.

QuoteI don't worry about glutting because it's a self-correcting problem. If your latest effort doesn't actually bring anything new and exciting it'll just fall away into irrelevance. If you dish up something that people actually like, they'll strip the bits they enjoy and bolt them on to their house system, so it's not as if it was wasted effort.

Exactly.

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Estar, I sense you want to send me pdfs of your work for free for adjudication and I say .. that's ok ... let's see what happens.

Quote from: Benoist;584393let him fight his windmills in his corner of the echo chamber.

Windmills!! Awesome!! Im in the pantheon, baby!!

Quote from: _kent_;584400Estar, I sense you want to send me pdfs of your work for free for adjudication and I say .. that's ok ... let's see what happens.

Post your numbers Kent.

And if you know my work so well you know that Blackmarsh is free to download.

Quote from: Benoist;584393Not worth it Rob. This guy's idea of a moral/intellectual high ground is to post shit like this:



... all the while complaining that people post rubbish on the internet. I mean come on. Let's just appreciate the irony and let him fight his windmills in his corner of the echo chamber.

Thanks for the heads up there. I didn't see that until I after I posted.

And Boffo would have a bad surprise when he tries to eat me. I am wearing 40 lbs of armor in that picture. Mainly a Coat of Plates underneath the surcoat.
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And Kent when you read this, post your numbers.

Quote from: estar;584403Post your numbers Kent?

4 gamers per month.

Numbers, fortunately, put the likes of James Mal., Zak S and J Rients at the top and only Rients of those is an interesting gamer IMV. Ive seen some blogs more interesting than those implode in the last few years for lack of interest. Talent is not measured by counting the votes of the Talentless Innumerable but by a slow silent accumulation of respect from intelligent and creative types. But by all means gather your statistics if it makes you feel like you are accomplishing something.

Quote from: estar;584405Boffo would have a bad surprise when he tries to eat me. I am wearing 40 lbs of armor in that picture. Mainly a Coat of Plates underneath the surcoat.

Biffo !! not Boffo . Biffo ground you down over some hot summer months with a muck of saliva you would not believe. His Wool-Man looked exactly like you (at the beginning of the summer)

Quote from: _kent_;5844064 gamers per month.

Thanks

Quote from: estar;584408Thanks

No wait, 2 gamers per month Wool-Man!

I usually keep my mouth shut anymore, but I will take a stand here and say that there are dozens of excellent contributors to the OSR and many other games out there and it is a bit of a shame to see this devolve into making a punching bag out of those that wish to contribute to other people's games because I know that I am not the only one who has given material away FOR FREE for people to use. Some of the people maligned (although not all) were a part of TARGA and whether you know about it or not (I was one of the founders), we tried to get the word out and get people playing games, doing what we could, sometimes at our own cost, to help get the OSR word out there, not just for D&D either, mind you, but for any of the 'Lost Games' of years gone by. In addition, we strove to stay out of edition wars and infighting, although I broke that rule myself with the entire "Porngate" situation and I left TARGA over it. This conversation seems to have deviated from a particular situation to bashing anyone involved and a lot of people have given freely to the OSR and gaming in general that do not deserve to be spoken ill of.

Whatever is happening with James of Grognardia is a strange and questionable situation, but in time it should be resolved and should not reflect on anyone not directly involved with that project.

Quote from: EOTB;584373I wonder if Tavis is of the consideration that TARGA was the start of the OSR.

No, it wasn't even mentioned in the presentation I did about the OSR at Gen Con. I started there with the Open Game License and how it allowed for Necromancer ("first edition feel") and Dungeon Crawl Classics to demonstrate their love of the original approach and publish stuff that appealed to that audience; how WotC's reversal of T$R's fansite policy allowed early sites like Dragonsfoot and the Acaeum to flourish; and then got into the first retroclones, mainly C&C and OSRIC but also the arguably-even-earlier progenitor of Basic Fantasy. (I think I shafted ODDities and Microlite '74 for lack of space, sorry about that!) Much of this was before I was paying attention (although I did pick up the Wilderlands box set when it first came out) so I relied on other histories and queries at Dragonsfoot and the Acaeum to help me pick up the thread.

I do think that TARGA marks a particular development in OSR self-consciousness. It wasn't "we started a thing," but it was "we are willing to publicly identify ourselves as part of this thing" and also "this is a cool thing that we think other people will want to experience through play, so let's take the energy and enthusiasm of talking about games in the blogosphere and use it to create opportunities for gamers to roll in this style whether or not they've been doing so all along."

I think TARGA also marked a point where interest in sharing ideas with the outside world was emerging from a prior emphais on defending the boundaries of a nascent scene against outsiders. When a subculture is just starting out, you need a critical mass of people with shared interests and experiences. That might easily be diluted by an influx of people coming in from the majority culture; it'd be harder to have a fruitful conversation working out the principles of old-school dungeon design if most of the people posting thought that level-appropriate encouters were the only rational approach. When I first posted at Dragonsfoot back in '05, people were not like "gee it's awesome that you are interested in compiling every published reference to the stirge since the beginning of D&D, we can find some common ground there". The general consensus was that finding common ground was much less important than driving out people like me who were interested in commercial publication for the edition Dragonsfoot defined itself in opposition to.

TARGA advocated the opposite approach. I see that as part of the maturation of a subculture, and for myself reaching out is something I'm temperamentally better suited for than repelling intruders. However I understand why this can be seen as threatening or undoing the work of the boundary-patrollers, and I see some value in them doing that job even if it's not one I'd want.

That's interesting, Tavis, thanks.  I never hung out at Dragonsfoot and didn't start reading blogs and such until after the aforementioned "issues" with TARGA and such, so I have only the most general notion of how that went down.

The whole "what is the OSR" and "what should it be" discussions that crop up every couple months are pretty tedious.  I like stuff, I read stuff, I run and play and steal from stuff.  I don't much care if there's a name for it or if I'm running with the 'cool kids'.

The Dragonsfoot site, as well as Grognardia and a bunch of other blogs were all going full steam well before TARGA existed. Claiming TARGA created the OSR is BS. At most, it gave the bloggers a name to use for product identity.

I'm personally glad Targa failed, as many of its members were pushing the "clone the rules as close as possible and damn anything else" idea.

Quote from: danbuter;584418many of its members were pushing the "clone the rules as close as possible and damn anything else" idea.

Ick.

In the interest of post-train-wreck voyeurism, if anybody has a link or two that would recount this sordid saga, I'd be interested in reading it.