These days it feels like the Post OSR spends a lot of time reinventing things that people wrote on blogs in 2010, or stumbling into the same well known solutions and declaring they have “fixed” the play style.
Gus L. shares his thoughts around “7 Maxims of the OSR”:
There’s little help for this, and as much as introductions to OSR theory like Philotomy’s Musings, Matt Finch’s Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, or Milton, Lumpkin and Perry’s Principia Apocrypha are useful documents and helpful introductions, the majority of OSR wisdom exists as scattered blog posts and in the minds of people who have engaged with the play style over the past 20 or so years. People don’t read blogs anymore, but even if they did … these bloggers, designers, referees, and players have a tendency to fall back on maxims when asked to explain elements of the play style, and it’s not the most efficient way of communicating craft and knowledge.
I would argue that the process of continual re-invention is important, because you never know when there’ll be some innovation to come out of it unexpectedly.
Put another way, if enough people reinvent the wheel we might end up with a better wheel some day
Yeah, of course.
But he goes further is more like: “There’s more meaning to these phrases that people like to throw around, let me try to give you what I know.”
That whole “on top of the shoulder of giants”-thing.