"meatgrinder OSR" vs "picaresque OSR"

Valeria Loves recently released this blogpost on her findings surveying OSR players on the deadliness of their campaigns; it's a good read for anyone interested. near the end, she notes a divide between high-lethality "Meatgrinder" campaigns/systems, and more middling-lethality "Picaresque" ones.

this is a useful distinction for a few reasons. almost all OSR games include high lethality, but their reasons for including it - and how it's implemented - vary wildly. it put words to a preference of mine i've struggled to articulate. 

the Meatgrinder is widely known; Valeria makes the observation it dominates the OSR's reputation, with its loud, recognizable aesthetic. it's eldritch monsters ripping adventurers to shreds, it's deathtrap dungeons where one wrong step drops you into boiling acid, it's your own class abilities horrifically mutating you for daring to use them. it needs no introduction.

"Picaresque" usually refers to stories about self-serving lovable rogues & lower-class underdogs, scraping by with just their wits. it fits neatly between the meatgrinder & the grander superheroic modern-D&D aesthetic - you're not an important hero, but not just hapless monster-food either. 

things i'd consider defining traits of the two styles:

Meatgrinder OSR:

• high lethality as punishment for even small mistakes. PC death is expected to happen often.
• foes frequently attack on sight & go straight to combat (putting PCs' lives in the hands of the dice).
• danger is largely untelegraphed and primarily only avoidable through proactive means. traps, ambushes, etc are only foiled by suspecting them ahead of time and exercising constant caution.
• clever, creative solutions can save you from danger, but they're strict & often still need a successful die roll or flawless execution.
• class abilities & magic items often have brutal downsides or curses; they're risk-management puzzles as often as they're reliable tools.

Picaresque OSR:

• high lethality as a deterrent to combat as a one-size-fits-all solution. PC death still results from poor decisions, but it's never completely out of nowhere.
• foes rarely or never attack on sight, or at least not in a way that means death-out-of-nowhere is on the table at all times.
• danger is highly telegraphed and information is largely open; less predicting danger and more responding to it. a lot of care is taken to make sure player decisions are informed.
• clever, creative solutions tend to just work, with fewer hoops to jump through. 

as with all taxonomies, real games are fuzzier and don't usually fit neatly into one category; your OSR games likely have points from both lists. but they're useful ends of a spectrum (or i guess an end and middle, if you want modern heroic D&D at the other end from Meatgrinder), with distinct design goals. 

when i got into running OSR, i realized very quickly that running it like the 5e games i cut my teeth on (as OSR games were my first real foray outside of 5e) would be killing PCs left and right; a formative moment was when a player dropped down a short ledge, failed a DEX roll, took some fall damage, and died unceremoniously. turns out calling for die rolls for everything, when a failed roll could mean death, is a good way to swiftly turn your game into an unforgiving meatgrinder.

so i pivoted to, essentially, running OSR games on "easy mode". if any damage might kill you, it must only result from active risk, not everyday actions. if the players are expected to solve things with clever in-fiction plans, i'd greatly reward any honest try at cleverly circumventing danger, letting any good idea skip die rolls and go straight to success - that was the whole point. that's the fun.

the resulting campaign matched Valeria's description of Picaresque gaming: an "agency-maximizing middle ground between doomed and demigod". to me, that was the OSR, and i'd often get frustrated trying to find common ground with other OSR-heads - what do you mean someone dies every couple sessions? does this need to require a die roll? what do you mean you use the old-D&D thief class as-is??

we might be playing similar rulesets, but we were playing very different games - and seeing Valeria make the distinction gave me a word to communicate the game i'm actually running; one that's usually different from what people have in their heads when they hear me say "OSR".

the Meatgrinder style is popular for a reason, and i don't think it's a worse experience; just not my preference. but all kinds of game are best done with intentionality, and i'd have a lot more fun in someone's meatgrinder game if they like that style explicitly than if they're just applying the default GMing expectation - that GMing is throwing fights and die rolls at the players all the time - to a game where that kills you.