The OSR Isn't All Fat White Dudes

I saw this over on G+.

What does that even mean? I’m not sure. There is generally a constant stream of this stuff online, if you go looking for it. I normally don’t, but somehow it still finds me. This annoyed me more than other similar posts, for no particularly good reason. I guess this stuff gets tired after a while.

The OSR isn’t all fat White dudes. I didn’t think that needed to be said, but maybe it does? (Spoilers: it includes at least one skinny Brown dude.)

One of the first posts I made here was about not being an asshole to other gamers. At the time it was in response to seeing people in the OSR moan about 4th Edition or D&D Next. Fast forward several years and I see that the discourse is dumb all over.

Anyway, my pro-tip to you all remains the same: stop giving a fuck about the games people play. I promise you, no one else cares. No one.

Update 2015-09-10: I could have written this post about a million different things I’ve seen online since the first one from 2012. In the grand scheme of things the image above barely rates as obnoxious compared to what’s come before. Still, yesterday it annoyed me.

I had a brief conversation with Ettin on Twitter. He thinks my take away from his snark was incorrect. I’m not sure the point he was trying to make was much better, but sure. Later he had this to say: “If your problem is a tweet about your community but your pals obsessing over TLs of people who blocked them is OK I have some bad news.” That’s fair: trawling someones timeline is annoying, and that’s how I ended up seeing this. I am sure I say dumb stuff often, and having that thrown back in my face days or weeks or years later would probably get tired. That said, it doesn’t make what I originally said any less dumb. Calling people in the OSR garbage is something I think is shitty. I don’t think you can really massage that. Of course, Ettin is entitled to his opinions.

Update 2016-01-31: … but Ettin is probably a troll and his opinions are likely dumb.