Reflections of a Grognard on Grognards

 

Staring into the face of a veteran, and a grizzled old veteran at that, can be an intimidating affair. Whether you are facing a veteran of your workplace, your field, your family, etc. you are dealing with the weight of experience, the implied sense of owed respect, the potential for wisdom and the practicalities of success that are inherent in someone who has lived and practiced something far longer than you. If for nothing less than the fact that they have survived longer than you, you are inclined to show a sense of respect. 

If you don't know, as most of the OSR now does, a grognard is a very historically specific term. Historically the term is French and was a specific title for "a soldier of the original imperial guard that was created by Napoleon I in 1804 and that made the final French charge at Waterloo." For those who don't understand this context, just picture any grizzled old first sergeant who has seen more than one tour of active combat duty, looking down his nose at all the green recruits just getting off the boat. Movies do a  theatrically dramatic sort of justice to these sorts. Vietnam is a common theme, where so many short timers wouldn't even form friendships with these new, brash, freshly-polished greenies so full of themselves. The "grognards" would grumble about them "not knowing anything", and that "back in their day " blah, blah, blah. 

I'm not sure who coined the term for old school gamers, but it has become common parlance that gamers who were there bitd and are extolling the virtue of the way things were are now called grognards. But how soon is too soon? Can 2e have grognards? 3e? And thus begins the endless arguments about what is old school anyway. If we assume here that we are talking about 1e AD&D that helps. But even then, it becomes an endeavor at picking nits. As I talked about in my previous post, your D&D may not be my D&D simply because we came to the game at different times and operated under different assumptions. Grognardia (not the blog of the same name) as a past time is relative to who you're grogging on, or in other words, who you're grumbling about. 

The reason I bring all this up, is due in part to my recent tour of the online media about the OSR, and the evolution of the OSR in the past almost decade or more. A clear dividing line has occurred in the consensus of Classic AD&D and 1e AD&D. What I mean about that is the sense of the game before 1e became what was commonly referred to as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Some say that AD&D really existed prior to that time as OD&D plus all the supplements, and to a degree this is true. Those who played in that Pre 1978 period and saw the game as inherently flexible and run by DM fiat more than by rulebooks, approached AD&D in a very different way than 1979 players did. 

Those of us who approached the game through AD&D as a complete product were different players than those who were raised on OD&D but bought the AD&D books later. Though many AD&D players, with the advantage of hindsight, have now realized they weren't playing AD&D btb. Moreover, they have now decided that AD&D btb is not really all that appealing to them. These OSR converts have changed their D&D religion and gone back a step into OD&D or B/X and it's many fine clones. This is quite a common OSR phenomena. James Maliszewski is one such artful  OSR commentator who outlines this process for him.

Truthfully the large bulk of the OSR movement consists of such material, the pre-AD&D genre that is. And though much of it plays well with AD&D, making this whole diatribe seem a moot point, the ethos of AD&D is often lost in translation.