Sorry for the mess, everybody. I hope it’s now ok
Thanks yall! I’m making a quick blog right now and I’ll post updates there 
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The reason why I am hesitant to have players lead individual villages is because of the potential that the game would turn competitive rather than collaborative. It might be better that the players act as villages elders/nobles, and should they die they pass on their title to an heir.
I fear that, in this kind of game, there will emerge a competitive, political element. You either have to accept this or find something that might unite everybody like the danger of the dungeon does in more traditional OSR games. Maybe define a menace (war, famine, pestilence…) for the community at the start of the game, something so big that the community has to act as one in order to survive. Maybe you could change the danger every “adventure” (but, at some point, the village’s story would become comically dramatic).
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I’ve actually now accepted the competitive element to an extent! Like, why not go all-in on it? The players will elect a commander who can take what they want from the other players, but everyone has “loyalists” that they can call on to remove the commander from power.
Ha, I’m talking about this as if it’s a game that exists and not a bunch of scribble notes on my computer! But this is super interesting so far, and I’m excited to come up with scenarios where all the players have to work together.
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Welp, I’m super late to the party, but this discussion seems really cool (I’m a fan of the warm 'n cozies too) and I wanted to throw in my two cents. Hopefully I’m not too redundant. I’ll try to outline mechanically how I’d probably alter things if I wanted to run a game with this feel (hopefully not pushing the bounds too far).
-I actually outline this part of the method on a post in my blog. I’d use B/X reactions as is, with reactions defined as 2d6 with immediate attack on 2 and hostility with lower numbers and neutrality with higher numbers. I’d probably sprinkle in a table on “What do monsters want?” with some predefined items whenever they don’t attack. Depending on how friendly or unfriendly I want the world I could tweak numbers.
-Combat (AC/Attack/What have you) - I’d get rid of it. Outright. And replace it with a save system, something a la Maze Rats for example.
-Ok hopefully I don’t delve too deep into blasphemy here, but I’d also get rid of HP. Not death however. The way I see it, HP sort of defines getting “thicker skin” as you’re adventuring. Instead, liklihood or not of death would be based on the save system. That brings me to…
-XP. With no HP, XP would directly be moved, most likely, to improving saves. So instead of gaining thicker skin, as HP would imply, you gain a sharper eye and a keener mind, allowing for more saves. Earning XP would still be GP, since I like the system. Bringing me to my next point.
-Gold: You never find this lying around guarded by monsters. That’s boring in most games imo. Instead, you look for things. Again taking inspiration from Maze Rats (I like the game, if you can tell), you should be trying for an economy of things. Some of these things are wonderous, mystical, magical, and worth gold back home. Other things are random junk left by other adventurers, which you’ll need to use as tools to finagle your way through the world. Not like you can use your fists.
And that’s about it. Now you have a world where monsters don’t always attack, and may even be reasoned with in many cases (adjusted by a dial, I’d probably include fewer undead and the like and more fantastical beasts and sentient creatures, and crank the dial a little more positive that in B/X). You’re a small fry going out looking for things and using things to explore the world, and have to use your keen mind and sharp eyes to avoid dangers, because you’re not going to get a chance to really defend yourself in a fistfight. Disclaimer this is patently untested past the first point.
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This is just an aside, but I wonder if you have played many recent games? Coop games are big (pandemic, spirit island, ghost tales, for example) and story telling games are a plenty ( near and far, above and below, Arabian nights, etc) and many many games you really have no idea who won until the end (many games, including raiders of the north sea, caverna, etc).
With legacy games, you even have some world building.
I too prefer RPGs but I think modern board games might be more fun than you remember.
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I absolutely adore this, and it would be perfect for running a DND-like game in a friendlier world! 
I especially like the focus on items and on things that people (or monsters) want. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could go full gift economy and get rid of Gold. Then you could gain XP based on gifts that you give to people–and then lose XP based on how much you receive.
I also really like getting rid of combat and turning death into an immediate save throw! That will absolutely encourage players to play combat smart, but also encourage them to seek other solutions too. Thank you for this!
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You might want to check out Brindlewood Bay. It is an OSR adjacent game about grandmas solving mysteries. It has a very cosy aesthetic. I think it is achieved more through style and setting more than mechanics. One of the game’s elements is describing your cosy life, but apart from that it is pretty much a detective game. It might be nice to look into for inspiration.
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Oh wow, I love this! I knew it would be based off Murder, She Wrote before I clicked the link. 
This is super cool, thank you!
You’ve gotten me intrigued, care to elaborate? Would XP would be tied to social capital in this case? Would it still affect the same stats?
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Oh sorry that was just me spitballing! It would basically be social capital; maybe it’s not tied to leveling in the traditional sense, but more like how much the community at large is indebted to you. I think that this is a very slippery premise for a cozy game. I’m writing a paper for my class right now about how the gift economy is more coercive than it’s given credit for by some recent anthropologists. So, if the designer is not careful, it could end up that the player simply aspire to enslave their neighbors through debts that they can’t ever repay.
Of course, built-into the gift economy is collapse–once someone gives too much and has no more to live off of (not to mention no more to give), they fall back down.
So I can see this being a little too heavy/coercive for a cozy game, which I imagine must be more no-strings-attached. I think it was Marcel Mauss who said that altruistic gifts did not exist until the economy was no longer gift-based. I can see this is why cozy games often ignore any economic implications: food grows in trees or you can just catch fish, so gifts are 100% nice things to do that just make both people happy. I think these are the lines to think about either a gritty pre-monetary game, or a cozy-game when taking those caveats into account.
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Hi all!
As part of a game jam, I wrote a game to try to approach this question by changing the very structure of the game from linear development to repetitive cycles of activity! Usually, the solution to “softening” roleplaying games is to invent conflicts and situations that are non-violent, but this can be an unsatisfying answer when the mechanics strive to build up to something. So, WILWYF is a game about not really building up to anything at all!
Its immediate inspirations are Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon in how it attempts to break out of linear structures to become a repetitive, almost anti-game! I include some overarching “conflicts” to guide the player (ghostly grandparents, house debt, mail delivery), but these are intended to be sources of anticipation rather than completionary aims!
As of now, I prefer the execution of this to the settlement game I was working on because it utilizes a different structure from other RPGs to achieve its mood and guide player behavior! Whether it has stretched the bounds of OSR or broke free of them is an interesting discussion, because I avoid using mechanics to structure the game around the narrative and the precise aim is to create emergent play. At the same time, this has little to do with adventuring and dungeon-crawling anymore!
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Coming to this discussion late. This is an interesting thought experiment! It reminds me of similar design explorations on the Forge or SWORD DREAM.
I think your argument that the OSR is defined primarily by emergent story is an unusual one: that would make it essentially similar to conversations taking place among narrativist gamers.
Far be it from me to play tabletop-genre-gatekeeping (and anyway I know there’s already some interplay between the OSR / PbtA / Storygames crowd), but I’m curious why you see emergent story as the defining attribute of OSR games, over and above lethality, lateral thinking and creative problem solving.
I do think ‘emergent gameplay’ is really a very good overarching label for Storygames / OSR, and would explain why they’re both really very similar genres despite a history of bad blood. I always saw them both as attacking the same problem (railroad-y 90s RPGs design) from different angles.
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I had the same feeling, and saw it spreading across both communities. A thing I’ve seen in the Italian scene, which I’ve been told doesn’t make much sense to outsiders, is the concept of a Middle School. Like, we recognize there was an Old School of games, from which most of the OSR drew its inspiration, followed by the railroad-y Middle School, which brought a lot of issues addressed by the New School. The interesting thing is that, for a while, “New School” was only referring to the Narrativist / Forge-inspired games, but I’ve also seen the OSR labeled as New School because, some said, “it answered the same questions, albeit in a different way”.
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Yes, I’ve heard the term ‘New School Revival’ (I know @yochigal prefers the term) kicked around in lieu of the ‘OSR’, or ‘Old School Revolution’ vs ‘Old School Revival’. I honestly think the edge of the OSR-wave has moved far away from emulation and is now happily doing its own thing, but well, labels are what they are.
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I didn’t know that narrativist gamers use the same phrase to describe themselves! But, I think compared to them, I am using the word “emergent” differently. Whereas narrativist gameplay revolves around the collaborative creation of a story (no doubt without an end in sight), for OSR-like gameplay the story is a retroactive byproduct of the play. In other words: for narrativists the story emerges from the efforts of the players, whereas for OSR players the story is the narrativization of events past (a history, so to speak, of the game events).
So, the difference (in my understanding) also lies in that emergent storytelling is characteristic but not constitutive of OSR play because the story is not the aim or object of the play. The emergent narrative arises in the same way that stories “emerge” in real life, by interpreting and projecting meaning onto the past.
You’re totally right that it’s not a very useful designation for OSR because it’s not its goal! OSR is a win/lose game, with the caveat that a player cannot ever really win because the goalposts keep getting pushed back.
To be a pretentious Lacanian, I would “diagnose” the OSR gameplay structure precisely as an obsessive one with its ritualistic loops of gameplay that build up to an unsatisfying conclusion (in the sense that it never really ends). The drive to choose adventuring while risking death as opposed to living safely also appears to me like a sort of death drive. Of course, other games have the players caught up in a similar loop (like middle D&D with XP for monster-killing), so it might not be considered a structure unique to OSR gameplay. Yet, the asymmetry between obsession and hysteria might be a decent sliding scale between OSR and hard narrativist games (where the players try to slot themselves into the demands of the story).
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Wow, it’s been a long time since I heard anybody invoke Lacan. Not that I disagree with your perspective.
Addressing the thread in general, and what thekernelinyellow was just saying, I think that the idea of a chronology of different schools is mythical. A great variety of play styles could be observed in the early '80s (when I started), and the games, gaming magazines, and 'zines of the 70s demonstrate the same thing. There certainly have been tribal trends in recent times (like Story Games and the OSR), and maybe the trends became more self-conscious and distinct in the post-Ars Magica/Vampire age (the late '90s) when I stopped playing (until very recently). But I think that the tale of a series of “schools” doesn’t reflect what actually happened. Specifically, there was not an Old School, so there can’t really be an Old School Revival/Renaissance/whatever. There is only the fiction of such a thing.
Not that you can’t play however you want.
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Totally agree with you! I was lurking over the threads about the OSR identity crisis and Eurofantasy earlier,and your insights are really good and helpful.
I wish there were better terminology to describe the gameplay of the “OSR” without resorting to the term itself, along with its discursive baggage. I was initially attracted to the scene because I thought the style itself was super intuitive for how my friends like to play–on the spot, low-prep, and conversational.
The term OSR should not have sole rights to the playstyle it labels as itself. Since the summer, I’ve distanced myself from using the term and participating in the self-identified scene (someone here rightly called it reactionary), but diegetic and on-the-spot play feels like something that the scene has a monopoly on for some reason. Hopefully stuff like SWORDDREAM takes off, but (apropos the main thread) it still seems to base itself on the same dungeon crawling paradigm.
Oh! I research psychoanalysis as part of my school research, so I think it’s fun to throw in some bits here and there into my other interests
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lichvanwinkle is right, I think, about ‘schools’ being too neat a term. There’s a degree of mythologising there (and anyway, I think it’s clear the OSR actually contains several sub-groups).
Interesting to hear that your style of game is low-prep! That seems different to how I’ve heard advice in the OSR sphere to avoid the quantum troll, to map explicitly, that it’s impossible to make a good dungeon in 5 minutes on the fly etc etc, all advice that runs counter to how a low-prep game would play.
I don’t fully understand your distinction between Lacanian ‘obsession and hysteria’, but I think the idea of an obsessive ritualistic loop that is ultimately pointless is interesting.
The thing is, I’m not sure if the boundaries between OSR and Storygames are as clear-cut as you say! I say this as someone who dabbled in PbtA and devoured lots of best-practice blogs when playing Dungeon World, BitD and MotW. Both OSR games and Storygames are engaged in a moment-to-moment interpretation of events to create a narrative. I know it’s part of the OSR mythos that story is ‘retroactive’ and a byproduct, but the truth is that good OSR GMs are involved in fictionalising a narrative all the time, it’s just that it happens in the interpretation of random tables, wandering monster encounters, and responses from a ‘living’ environment. I practice reincorporation as an OSR GM: when I roll ‘bandits’ on a random table, I might decide that these are the same bandits from last session, or say that these bandits are on the run from the Count the parties are seeking.
It’s just that Storygames ground these emergent narratives in Player Moves and GM Principles, whilst OSR games ground them in random tables and ‘logical consequences’. Perhaps the other major difference is, as you’ve noted, the degree to which these narratives are crowd-sourced collaboratively or decided purely by the GM. And again, I think this is mythos because some PbtA tables lean more towards GM-creation and others lean more towards collaboration. OSR tables can also be collaborative too, especially when players are negotiating with the GM in the rulings-not-rules decision making.
As to obsessive death-loops…the Ur-Text of PbtA, Apocalypse World, is a remarkable bit of game design. The GM principles and the genre it’s emulating guarantees that the longer the players play, the worse the world gets. Their allies will die, power structures get upended, things fall apart. In some sense, the only way to win is not to play… Later PbtA games might gesture more towards traditional narrative structures, with a Big Bad, or a meta-quest, but that’s because PbtA was always about genre-emulation.
All of this is to say that I strongly believe that OSR and Storygames are often talking past each other when talking about ‘difference’.
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