What is OSR? What is NSR? Survey analysis

18 May, 2026

I.

On Wednesday, Oleander Finch on the NSR Cauldron Discord server wrote, "hey all! just recently joined the community and really enjoying reading around. i'm curious how we define 'new school' in this server?"

Immediately Gio il Mago posted this image:

Now, look, I'm no stranger to "What is the NSR?" discussions. In fact, I once wrote a blog post titled "What is the NSR?" that set out to answer this very question. But that post has been described as contradictory and "highly dubious," and it does not seem to have clarified the issue for anyone.

The accepted answer to "What is the NSR?" was reiterated by Window Dump: "nobody actually knows anymore, if we ever did." In an earlier discussion, HiskiH said, "NSR means not that many things to not that many people." Tom (@mcmouse2k) wrote:

Mostly people can't agree on what the OSR is and they definitely can't agree what the NSR is. Most people agree that OSE and friends are OSR and that Oddlikes (descendants of Into the Odd) are NSR but beyond that the waters get muddy, quick.

During this earlier discussion, I joked: "NSR games are like that Jan Misali video on what games constitute the Super Mario series: there are like four games that definitely count and like 20 more that no one is quite sure about."

For those unfamiliar, Jan Misali is a YouTuber who has produced a series of hours-long video essays using surveys to determine what video games people think count as entries in the notoriously nebulous Super Mario series. A few messages later, I added, "In seriousness a big survey with a ton of games on it asking 'Is this NSR?' for each game might produce interesting results."

Apparently this idea stuck with me, because when Gio il Mago posted the image above, I immediately dropped everything I was doing to design a survey to determine which of 150 games were OSR and which were NSR.

Because, why should the NSR be impossible to define? Isn't there something at the bottom of all this? Your mileage may vary, but I still believe there's such a thing as objective truth. Can we approach the truth of the NSR... with science?

II.

So here's what I did: I grabbed this list of every RPG ever recommended on r/rpg recommendation threads, compiled by /u/azura26.

I cut every RPG I hadn't heard of and every entry that I thought was a scenario and not an RPG. Then, I arbitrarily cut a few more for good measure and added a few in because I'm not a real data scientist because why not? (I only added Many Rats on Sticks, Brighter Worlds, and Monolith to the list.)

I imported this list into a Google form and added two columns of checkboxes: one labeled "OSR" and one labeled "NSR." My instructions were simple: "For each RPG listed, check 'OSR' if it is OSR and check 'NSR' if it is NSR."

Then, I shared the survey on the Discord and watched the data accumulate.

A few NSR Cauldron users declined to participate due to specific grievances. Lysus wrote, "Unfortunately, my answer of 'it's gibberish to answer games for this as it's a question of play culture' was not an option on the survey."

Symbolic City wrote, "Got all the way to the E's and was like, you know what? No. I refuse. Good try, Tim B., but you will not discourse me. I refuse to be discoursed."

Fortunately, these sane human beings enemies of science were unable to prevent the march of progress I had so generously set in motion.

Over a couple days, 37 people responded to the survey. I have decided to present the results in two tiers for both OSR and NSR: a two-thirds supermajority tier (at least 25 votes) and a simple majority tier (at least 19 votes). Without further ado...

The definitive OSR games [with their vote count in brackets]:

1. Supermajority Tier: Old-School Essentials [34], OSRIC (any edition) [32], Dolmenwood [28], Basic Fantasy RPG [25], Labyrinth Lord [25].
2. Simple Majority Tier: Swords and Wizardry [24], Lamentations of the Flame Princess [23], White Box: FMAG [22], AD&D 1e [22], B/X D&D [21], OD&D [21], Dungeon Crawl Classics [20], Shadowdark [19].

(Did you think that we had all moved on from thinking that the OSR and actual games from the 70s and 80s were one and the same? Apparently not!)

The definitive NSR games [with their vote count in brackets]:

1. Supermajority Tier: Mythic Bastionland [32], Into The Odd [31], Cairn 1E [30], Cairn 2E [30], Mausritter [29], Electric Bastionland [29], Cairn Barebones [28], Mörk Borg [25].
2. Simple Majority Tier: Pirate Borg [24], Mothership [22], Vaults of Vaarn [22], 2400 / 24XX [22], Errant [21], Troika! [21], The Electrum Archive [21], His Majesty The Worm [21], Knave [20], Maze Rats [20].

So there you have it! A definitive OSR and NSR canon, whittled down from ~150 games to just 13 and 18 games, respectively.

...Except, hold on. Why do games like Best Left Buried, Brighter Worlds, Five Torches Deep, Grimwild, Macchiato Monsters, Many Rats on Sticks, Mazes and Minotaurs, Orbital Blues, Songbirds, Wolves of God, and Zweihander have so few votes for either OSR or NSR? Whether you think they should count as OSR or NSR, doesn't it seem like they should count as at least one of them?

Oh no. Are people just skipping the vote for games they haven't heard of? That would turn this into something of a popularity contest: it would mean that the canon is skewed by which games people are most familiar with.

III.

I guess I have to run a second round. I don't want to just reintroduce games that I personally think should be included; that doesn't feel very scientific. But I don't want to start completely from scratch either, so I'll have to set some sort of cutoff number for games to make it to Round 2. 12 (about one third of the 37 respondents) feels okay.

Then, I'll make it mandatory to select either "OSR", "NSR", "Both", or "Neither" for each game to submit the survey. In the final tally, I'll just discard "Neither" votes and add the "Both" totals to both "OSR" and "NSR."

I'll add a 1-10 confidence scale to account for anyone who wants to participate but doesn't know all the games and a comments section for people to vouch for games they thought ought to have been included in either category.

MagpieMirrorTest wrote, almost immediately after I shared the Round 2 survey, "While they may not have made it due to being not being familiar with those games, I am surprised Brighter Worlds and Sharp Swords and Sinister spells didn’t make it." They're onto me!

24 users responded for Round 2, meaning that this time, the two-thirds supermajority tier must have at least 17 votes and the simple majority tier must have at least 13 votes. Unlike Round 1, the OSR category will also have a unanimous tier for Round 2.

Before you ask, I tried weighting the votes by user confidence, but the weighted results did not strike me as meaningfully different from the unweighted vote totals. So this is as official as it's going to get. Let's get into it!

The definitive OSR games, Round 2 [with their vote count in brackets]:

1. Unanimous Tier: Old-School Essentials [24], OSRIC (any edition) [24], Labyrinth Lord [24].
2. Supermajority Tier: Basic Fantasy RPG [22], Swords and Wizardry [22], Knave [22], Lamentations of the Flame Princess [21], White Box: FMAG [21], Dolmenwood [20], Dungeon Crawl Classics [20], Whitehack [19], Blueholme [19], Shadowdark [18], The Black Hack [18], Neoclassical Geek Revival [18].
3. Simple Majority Tier: Worlds Without Number [15], Beyond the Wall [15], Into The Odd [15], Maze Rats [14], Mutant Crawl Classics [14], Outcast Silver Raiders [14], Cairn Barebones [13], Cairn 1E [13].

The definitive NSR games, Round 2 [with their vote count in brackets]:

1. Supermajority Tier: Cairn 2E [21], Electric Bastionland [21], Cairn Barebones [20], Mythic Bastionland [20], Mausritter [18], Vaults of Vaarn [18], Mothership [18], Pirate Borg [18], Monolith [18], Liminal Horror [18], Cairn 1E [17], His Majesty The Worm [17], The Electrum Archive [17], 2400 / 24XX [17].
2. Simple Majority Tier: Into The Odd [16], Frontier Scum [16], Mörk Borg [15], Troika! [13], Errant [13], Tunnel Goons [13], F.I.S.T. [13].

These lists would seem to confirm my theories about Round 1. Now that respondents are forced to make a decision about every game, 13 games were added to the OSR lists and 5 games were added to the NSR lists. Monolith shot up to the supermajority tier; I have to imagine that many respondents googled Monolith for the first time, saw it was based on Cairn, and voted it NSR.

AD&D, B/X D&D, and OD&D have also disappeared from the Round 2 OSR canon. The "Neither" option may have jogged respondents' memory; pre-2000 games had among the highest "Neither" votes in the survey. Knave received the highest "Both" vote at 10 votes, while Cairn Barebones followed closely with 9 votes. For some reason, Knave and Maze Rats fell out of the NSR canon from Round 1 to Round 2.

The only statistically significant finding to report from the final comments field is that two respondents felt strongly that Black Sword Hack should be included as an NSR game. No other game was mentioned by two independent respondents for either category.

So, there you have it. The definitive OSR and NSR canon. We're done here! Right? Right?

...This is not going to explain anything to anyone, is it?

IV.

The company that published Dungeons & Dragons from the 1970s to the 1990s was named TSR (Tactical Studies Rules). By the year 2000, third edition D&D and onward were published by Wizards of the Coast.

Some people didn't like the direction the new company took and wanted to keep playing with the old rules. The... old school rules. The... Old School... R? We'll figure out what the R stands for later. Just trust me, it'll look really cool if we republish new things for TSR D&D and we put "OSR" on the cover where "TSR" used to be.

Fast forward to the 2020s. Yochai Gal named his blog New School Revolution after a blog post he liked. He named his Discord server "NSR" after his blog.

When he opened the server to the public, people assumed that the NSR must be more than the name of the server: it must be a movement that was picking up steam. After all, there were a number of games coming out of the OSR community by then that didn't look like clones of old-school D&D.

Games like Into the Odd and its sequel Electric Bastionland were taking inspiration from the OSR, but changing the mechanics so much as to be incompatible with old-school D&D adventure modules. Yochai even had his own little Electric Bastionland hack called Cairn.

So why not make it a movement of sorts? People in OSR spaces got annoying and gatekeepy if you tried to talk about games like Electric Bastionland, so why not carve out our own space for them? We could try to center our values in it too: a hatred of gatekeeping in RPGs, a love of learning from different styles of play, a basic level of respect for other human beings, etc.

As the server grew and more styles of play and more varieties of human experiences were represented, some of us started to feel that the community itself was more important. Maybe an "NSR" game is just a game made by anyone in this community. Maybe we don't have to pin ourselves to the whole "rules-light offshoot of the OSR" thing.

But the NSR idea existed outside of us, mainly on Reddit, and the "rules-light OSR" idea had more inertia than the "our community" idea. So we lost control of what the NSR is, a little bit. We let it become a kind of game.

Out of the 23 games that the majority labeled "NSR" in either round, I think it's fair to say that 20 of them are dungeoncrawlers. The three exceptions are Mythic Bastionland (more of a hexcrawler), 2400 (more of an ultralight story game), and F.I.S.T. (more of a mission-based mercenary squad game). Liminal Horror may be an edge case; I honestly don't know how much the mystery scenarios designed for that game tend to be dungeon-like.

But the NSR Cauldron community has many regular users who don't care about dungeoncrawlers. As far as I can tell, the majority of the moderation team does not play or run or otherwise care about dungeoncrawlers. The #modern-dnd channel is among the most popular on the server. The #story-games and #pbta-and-fitd channels aren't too far behind.

V.

There have been certain doubts brewing that "NSR" is a useful term worth keeping around. In late 2024, Nova wrote, "In the time since the NSR community formed, the OSR community has become far more diverse and welcoming in its major spaces like the OSR discord (once purple, now rainbow), to some degree necessitating those that identify as NSR re-aligning their identity." She continued:

It’s not meaningful in my opinion to differentiate NSR from OSR... One person may place greater emphasis on a small difference than others (I’ve written three rulesets myself, I’m not judging anyone who places the emphasis on minutiae), but the experience at the table is virtually the same, which means to me that the OSR is really unified by those similarities rather than by the differences.

Early this morning on Discord, Yochai wrote, "I have mostly stopped using the NSR label for games anyway... Cairn use[d] to get trashed on in /r/OSR every day. Now it is rarely discussed as anything other than proper OSR."

Lysus, who I quoted earlier, also wrote in response to my poll: "I think asking whether an adventure/scenario corresponds to a given play culture is a much more fruitful question, but from that perspective I don't think there's a clear delineation between OSR and NSR (not that there ever was)."

Recently I rediscovered a note I kept as a teenager that I filled with quotes I found interesting or inspiring. One of them was by Alan Watts:

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

I know next to nothing about Alan Watts, but I have a feeling he's right about this one. If "what is NSR?" is a persistently insoluble problem, then how else might we ask the question?

How about... What do we want the NSR to be?

If we don't know what it is... then why can't we make it up? Why can't we develop it into something new? Didn't we make it up in the first place?

We might not all agree on what should come next. I certainly have my own ideas. But I'd certainly rather everyone be fired up and opinionated and thinking about how to move the hobby forward than be agreeing all the time.

Not that anyone agrees now. But we disagree in a flat, boring way, resigned to the fact that we will not agree. "Oh, we'll never know what the NSR is, so why bother talking about it?" As if we aren't making it up ourselves.

There's no scientific truth as to what the NSR is, because the NSR isn't a static thing that exists outside of us, somewhere to discover if we just stare at the games hard enough. It's a culture. It ripples out from all of us.

What do you want the NSR to be?