Disclaimer: please do not take this personally these are just my thoughts and i bear no ill will to benjamin milton or any FKR enthusiasts
Complexity
Recently, I was taking a bit of a look around the tabletop RPG sphere. I've recently purchased Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e, mostly due to having someone run it for me, and my Blood Bowl group being generally interested in playing the system. It's a pretty big first for me, probably the crunchiest system I've run in my entire life. It should then go without saying that my favourite tabletop RPG systems are the simpler ones, and I will elaborate further why below, but as I read about this new 'revolution' in tabletop roleplaying, I seem to have stepped into an alternate universe where the way I have played OSR games for the last six years was in fact, a new 'emerging playstyle' that has been showing up in various discussions: FKR.
I've never been a fan of 'complicated' systems of like DnD 3e, for the simple fact that I was actually gate-kept out of various groups when I was a young lad. There's more history to it, but the person who was my 'in' to the group generally liked to keep his friends separate for insecurity reasons, something I didn't understand at the time. He would just hand me a character sheet and tell me to figure it out, and since I have ADHD, I just would try to, then get bored and it was back to video games.
When I finally started playing good and fun tabletop RPGs - I started with Changeling- the first thing I learned about Tabletop RPG players who played complicated and crunchy systems tended to be the most horrific and abominable players. I remember an absolute clownshow of a roleplaying session where a player tried to figure out reason to not let a character shake his hand, because while his character would never know it, he knew from reading every single book there was that this NPC would be able to spy on him from the act. Twenty six minutes of getting increasingly more obviously irritated that he couldn't argue that his character would never shake another person's hand due to blind paranoia(after 20+ previous sessions of accepting drinks, gifts, rides places, sharing confidential information and more) finally resulting in him being 'forced' to shake a friendly character's hand and grumbling about it for days afterwards.
RPGs and myself weren't on a way to becoming good friends. I dove into a multitude of systems, and I've read nearly ever RPG type under the sun, and the less control you have over building your character, the more I liked it. I dabbled in 5e, but the "treadmill to awesome" gameplay of having my players tell me how 'excited' they were to get to level X so they would use feature Y over and over made me feel like it wasn't a very good game, it just promised some cool shit way down the line, like Dragon Ball.
The OSR
The OSR was a breath of fresh air. My entry into the style of play was Dungeon Crawl Classics, a wonderful and exceedingly well thought-out little system with very granular but not overly complicated rules. At the time, I'd never read a system that didn't have less than 30(usually way more) rules for everything, and DCC was even more impressive in that the rules were almost nonexistent, aside from optional rules. Most of the rules were just "roll on this table if this happens" and the game was very much saying things that were flagrant blasphemy to the orthodoxy of mainstream gaming. No, you can't fight a Balor at level two, it's CR X and that means it'll slaughter you in 1-2 turns.
Beholders at level 3? Yeah, stick to the goblins, kid. Come back at level 10, you nerd. It was very nice to see adventures like Courts of Chaos where you are engaged with dealings of Moorcockian Chaos Lords of old. It was around this time I also read most of the Appendix N, which were many of my first forays into that whole style of fantasy, before that, I was very much part of the 'normie' "wow! game of thrones! so much cursing! it's so different to Lord of the Rings! thought process. Thankfully I can now me smug and clutch my copy of Three Hearts and Three Lions and know I am in fact, one of the blessed learned few in my ivory tower. Simply put, someone showing me his DCCRPG corebook in 2015 opened up to me an enriching look into a type of fantasy roleplaying and fantasy literature. It rewired my brain entirely on how these things of things were 'supposed' to work, and in fact, taught me that there were people who didn't think that you needed 40+ pages for combat alone to make an RPG worth taking seriously.
I've read many other OSR systems, always finding them almost what I wanted, and eventually, I just shrugged and wrote my own whole-ass system for my own use. I don't know how much of it is my own stuff, it was largely a collation of my favourite ideas and concepts. Maybe the surprise dice? Who knows. It wasn't made for commercial use.
Analyzing the "Brief Introduction to FKR"
After all of this, I think it's time to talk about the FKR plainly, and I thought a nice analysis of its six main points would be the best possible way to look at them. After all that stuff, let's get into the discussion.
#5: FKR is a high-trust style.
Starting with five because structure is for buildings! I have to say, this is a baffling point to me: all tabletop roleplaying games are a high-trust style. You cannot run any tabletop game while constantly breaking people's trust unless those people are so deep into geek social fallacies they'll literally allow you to physically and verbally abuse them all day because they can't understand this isn't what a friendship is. The majority of tabletop games require an expectation management game, and if you want evidence, go look up any and all Dungeon Master horror stories. Most of, if not all, involve people running the game in a way that breaks the trust and makes the game less enjoyable for everyone. You tell someone they're going to play Dungeons and Dragons, and then they get there and instead of Dungeons or Dragons, your DM is talking about how important it is to have sex with animals in his setting, and you're expected to do so or make major social faux pas and now your trust is violated. Most people will generally walk from a game where they're expecting PG-13 adventures killing orcs and saving damsels and you have them walk into the Orc Gang-Rape Room, because that wasn't part of the expectation, and most players are expecting you, trusting you to not throw them into that kind of a situation out of nowhere. Tomb of Horrors would be an aggressive trust violation unless your players were specifically expecting a nightmare TPK dungeon(and as everyone knows, the original players were) and the same goes with Death Frost Doom, a fantastic little adventure about how you should listen to the crazy old man telling you the place is fucked up, but running an adventure like that straight with no warning is a singular kind of dickhole-ry unless the entire group is generally expecting(and interested) in things like that.
Generally, when playing RPGs with people you're generally trusting them to be a pleasant person to play games with, same as any hangout. Any form of gaming is high trust when it's done in person, most people are trusting you won't suddenly flip the table or smash their teeth in if you start to lose. If you violate that trust, like FKR games and such, you can expect to lose players and sometimes even friends. There are gaming systems that attempt to mitigate DM fiat with metacurrencies that can brute-force change DM fiat but my take on this has always been "if you literally need rules to stop DMs from "rocks fall"-ing you, have you tried playing with a DM that isn't a complete bag of shit?"
Points #1-4, 6: LESS RULES
The entire rest of the post is a general abstraction of the same handful of points, in that you need to have fewer rules to play FKR. There's a lot of attempts to get to the style of a Blackmoor campaign, which famously didn't have anything remotely resembling a clear rules set, mostly some hand-scribbled notes and some creature descriptions and everything I've read from FKR is mostly just that.
So to the first point: " A common trend seems to be starting out very bare-bones and then adding in rules as the campaign continues, based on what it needs. These mini-systems are frequently tweaked, replaced, or thrown out as the campaign evolves."
This is how I've been running TTRPGs for years. I love the dungeon crawling procedure but I typically refuse to use it as anything but a narrative tool. Ask anyone on /osrg/ and they'll tell you you're not running an OSR game(get ye gone). Unless it's a new place, it's very dangerous, or they're transporting valuable cargo then I typically don't bother and just abstract it. If the dungeon is small and everything in it is dead, I just say "you leave the dungeon". I even put this in my ruleset as a thing to do, although sometimes I'll just randomly designate an area to never not use crawling procedures to mess with my players a bit. They'll not know the North Hallway is safe but they're always going to pay attention! This is also how the vast majority of OSR DMs I've had over the years ran the game. There was no Dungeon Master coming at us seventeen sessions deep and feeling the strong need to strictly time our trek back across the first floor of Stonehell to exit with our gold, the one time we did it was because we'd stolen a shitload of gold and were carrying it in very(his words) 'clinky' leather bags, attracting attention from the few things we'd bothered to leave alive.
Most people I know who run OSR games like them because they're simple and you can just bolt on whatever rules you want. There's enough different mass battle systems out there you can just pick literally whatever the hell you want and run it.
Most of the old DnD editions usually had FKR abstractions in them as well, Domain play never got good rules and generally just described tasks with no guidance how to run them. Clear the lands, you will start attracting followers, monsters will attack you. Where's the rules for levies? For managing a household of servants? For collecting rents? Defending against sieges? The answer is that you were generally just expected to wing it, and pretty much every single DM just winged it.
All of us do, by the way. Recently disgraced streamer Arcadum had a thing where he talked about "consulting the deep notes" in his streams, and people who knew him in IRL have stated the notes don't exist and were mostly just shorthand for him taking a few minutes to think about what the fuck he was going to do next. Any DM who tells you he never short-hands, eyeballs, or abstracts is either lying or hasn't had a group last more than 3-5 sessions. We all chuckle at the joke from Community where a player smugly tells the DM he's going in the opposite direction and the DM pulls out a massively over-detailed world. It's a fun joke but most of that stuff gets pulled out a hat. The stuff that lands gets used. Free DM Advice: never "create a whole world" without having it land for your players first. You will sob tears of bitter sorrow if you write an intricate legal system for your players to explore and they decide they're just going to run screaming from every lawyer they meet and use magical mind control to just force people to do what they want.
Another point: " FKR places a high priority on immersion and realism by giving the DM a lot of authority over the rules. They can decide what to roll, when to roll, the range of possible outcomes, etc."
Again, this is just the advantage of tabletop RPG playing over a computer game, and then zooming in a bit more, it's just the value of low-complexity OSR systems over metacurrency and feat-choked nightmare systems where manipulating numbers is the skill, not the gameplay. His minimalist example linked there is interesting, I've never read that before but I've had this happen many times. There's a class in my game where you can play as a Lich, and one of its abilities is that it can summon little shades. They're visible, anyone can stab them to death, but they can move through walls, can be infinitely summoned (max of 3 at a time) and never get stronger. One of my lich players tried hard to make them stronger(I added items that allowed extra summons and more damage to a point) but overall she just treated them as Pikmin and threw them at enemies nonstop.
The second player in a different campaign looked at me and said, "Can I talk to them?" and suddenly an ability the other one considered "mediocre" became the most powerful skill in the game, as was sort of the intention. I allowed him to summon specific dead people and ruled that the fresher the dead, the better the mind would be, and suddenly my players never needed to spend any time investigating anything. Dead body of a rival adventurer? "Oh there's a blade trap. Cut me in half. The trigger is right there, master." Dispute over the will? "No, the will has been changed. I intended to leave my estates to my daughter as my son is a lout and a womanizer who can't stop gambling." This led to(medieval) courtroom battles, seething Paladins and Clerics who didn't like the whole "bringing people back from the dead" thing, and social upheaval like you wouldn't believe. Grief-struck parents gave my player character everything they owned to just speak to their son one more time. Murderers were haunted by their victims until they went insane and confessed, we even did "A Christmas Carol" with one particularly shitty Baron who did not learn his lesson but he did commit suicide and left his more compliant son to let the party have the horses they wanted. The amount of mileage that player wrung out of my "osr" system sounds like something you'd find in a described FKR game. That also ties into point 3, which is "less rules to let players do more" and again, this literally happened because I thought I was following OSR principles of player skill and imagination being more paramount than rules. Rulings, you know?
Final thoughts
Obviously I'm neither offended or frustrated by the idea of the FKR. It's more of what I like from tabletop games, and I'm way into abstracted character advancement and simple rules. My current obsession with WFRP is an aberration, not an establishment of a norm, but I do wonder why we need a new label for such a way of playing games. I salute the FKR and I hope you guys start putting out some really great ideas. I'd love to see more modern blogging efforts like those heady days before 2018, where bloggers would just drunkenly dump an entirely new way of looking at class progression nobody had ever seen before onto a blog that you may never see. That feeling of searching through the blog "maze" of the OSR was amazing, there was a near infinite amount of fun and interesting ideas to find being posted every day at times, and I hope that the 'FKR' brings it back.
Arneson always seemed like a more fun DM, anyhow.
- Dicey
PS. What do you think? Am I way off-base? Let me know!
