Getting schooled in refereeing the OSR way
Ye olde TL;DR - Reflecting on games you run, success or failure, reveals lessons to improve your next one. Excited as I was to dive into the tabletop RPG hobby, I haven’t been here long. I’ve only played for a few years, and didn’t try my hand at running games until a year or so in. That said, I’ve been playing OSR games for almost the entirety of that time. As a result, I took the majority of my player and referee cues from the OSR school of gaming. Recently, I reflected on exactly what OSR refereeing has taught me. So for the sake of the fledgling OSR referees out there, here are some takeaways I got from refereeing so far. The game rolls faster when the dice don’t Just as in narrative fiction, pacing is important in RPGs. Progress too slowly, and it becomes tedious and players lose the focus that comes from momentum. Zip through the game, and players struggle to catch game world stimuli fast enou
