Trad, OSR, Storygame - Three Cultures of Play

A "culture of play" is an expression of the way a game is played at the table. It's a term to describe the norms, expectations, and standards of a group of players. The reason I decided to write this post was to examine my own thinking about cultures of play, and also to help spread the shared language for my friends and fellow gamers who might not have read about these ideas before.

My understanding of this topic is largely informed by this seminal post from the Retired Adventurer and the excellent Principia Apocrypha by Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry, various topics on the Forge, as well as dozens of blog posts and reddit threads.

I'm limiting discussion to three broad cultures for simplicity's sake. I know these can be further subdivided and there are other cultures of play such as LARP and Classic that I am not qualified to discuss because I don't know enough about them. So, here we go.

A trad (traditional) game is one in which the players participate in a GM-directed story. This may be a plot the GM has architected themselves or one that comes from a published adventure module. But the key concepts are that:

1. The GM has a planned story and the players are expected to reasonably follow along with it. Creative problem solving is acceptable but taking the campaign so far off the rails that you're no longer pursuing the planned story is usually frowned upon and seen as disruptive.

2. Player narrative agency is limited to their characters and their backstories. The GM makes up the world, the setting, the plot, and everything else.

3. Situations where the PCs are at the center of the story and the use of their abilities and progression of their power creates a satisfying experience for the players.

There are a few other conventions common in trad, but a culture of play can be trad without having these features, and these features can exist in other cultures of play as well:

• Combat as a major focus, often structured as a tactical minigame. 
• Complex character builds through use of classes, subclasses, prestige classes, feats, spells, and other special abilities, wherein characters may be deemed gimped or broken depending on the utility and effectiveness of the characters' combination of abilities within the game mechanics.
• A reliance on skill or ability check dice rolls to solve challenges rather than creative thinking (hence the importance of an effective character build).
• Combat, social, and exploration challenges that are tailored to the PCs' levels and abilities.
• A focus on the PCs as the main characters and the development of stories that put the PCs at the center of the story. 
• A focus on highlighting PC backstories and actualizing characters through the development and resolution of those backstories.

Examples of games that are commonly run in the trad style are: D&D 5e, Pathfinder, Star Wars.

An OSR (old school revival/renaissance) game is one in which the players explore a sandbox environment or situation without a pre-constructed plot. The OSR style is ever evolving, and every blogger has a slightly different definition. But for the purposes of this article and comparing it to other cultures of play, OSR games have the following features:

1. There is often little or no planned story. Or if there is a story, it exists for the PCs to stumble across and is not created with the idea of PCs as main characters.

2. Player agency is paramount. With no planned story, the PCs are encouraged--even, in some cases, required--to pursue their own goals.

3. Creative problem solving is rewarded. Many OSR games eschew skills and feats in favor of encouraging players to look away from the character sheet and into the fictional world of the game when problem-solving.

OSR games often feature additional conventions, that will vary from game to game and may exist in other play cultures:

• Randomized or simple character creation
• GM as a neutral arbiter of the world.
• Rulings over rules
• Frequent PC death and a high degree of danger, reinforcing the need for creative problem solving
• Experience and progression awarded for acquiring gold and treasure, reinforcing the goal of exploring rather than fighting or accomplishing story-based goals
• Simplified (or in some cases, nonexistent) character progression and abilities and a heavier reliance on equipment, reinforcing the focus on player ingenuity.
• A focus on emergent narrative that is developed through play at the table, rather than planned ahead of time by the GM.
• A focus on what I would generally term flat characters in a fictional sense - characters without significant emotional or psychological depth and where personality is largely developed through play.

Examples of games that are commonly run in the OSR style are: Old School Essentials, Into the Odd, Shadowdark

A storygame is one in which the players share some level of narrative authority with the GM, allowing for the creation of a shared narrative experience in a way that has similarities to improv techniques. Key features include:

1. Players have agency to ability to establish the fiction not just of their PC, but other elements of the fictional world as well.

2. Rules exist only to facilitate a satisfying narrative; where friction occurs, the narrative supersedes the rules.

Storygames sit on a slightly different axis than trad and OSR games. Both trad and OSR games share the assumption that the GM is the arbiter of all things in the world outside of the PCs, but storygames toss this assumption out by giving the players narrative authority beyond their characters. Some other features that may be common to storygames:

• Games which may not have a GM - players take turns or share narrative authority.
• A reliance on playbooks instead of classes, leveraging moves that are less about specific abilities but are instead more like procedures that are triggered by keywords when they arise in the fiction.
• Clear agendas wherein the rulebooks explicitly state the intended culture of play
• Narrative progression is emphasized; character progression is deemphasized
• A move away from simulationist styles of play

Examples of games that are commonly run in this storygame style are: Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard, Blades in the Dark

Two important caveats:

First of all, these are broad categories and are not exclusive of all play cultures. For a more granular subdivision, definitely give this post a read. And as these are cultures of play independent of rules systems, the truth is that every single table will have a different culture of play, because culture is something that arises from individuals. Nevertheless, it can be helpful to have a shared vocabulary when trying to established shared expectations, especially with TTRPGs which require collaboration.

Second, while I have listed examples of games for each of three cultures of play, it's worth reinforcing that culture is a playstyle, not something endemic to a game itself. One can run Blades in the Dark in a trad style or D&D 5e in an OSR style. Rather, games tend to be labeled as trad/OSR/storygame because of the culture of play that has arisen around those games. Even games with rules that are intended to support a particular cultures of play or agendas that expressly try to define the style of play at the outset, there is a great deal of room for interpretation. 

A huge thank you to the many bloggers who have written on this topic and allowed me to gain a better understanding of cultures of play. If I have missed an important principle or overgeneralized a particular culture, please know that this is due to my own limited experience and not because I favor one style over another. You can help clarify by sharing your comments and feedback below. 

And a special thanks to this post from Save vs. Total Party Kill and folks in the Prismatic Wastelands Discord Server who encouraged me to share this, despite the fact that other people may have already explained it in other places.