I’m not much of an “OSR” person. I started playing in the 90’s, and while I played some D&D here and there it was never my main system, and I moved away from it as soon as I found others I liked more. While I do feel some nostalgia when looking at some iterations of its rules, reading them again mostly reminds me why I stopped playing them in the first place.

There’s one specific thing that the very earliest editions of that game did that I feel should be ported to the present unmodified: the way they handled metaplot and “canonical” NPCs.

Before D&D was even published you basically had two campaigns being run using draft versions of its rules. There was Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, and Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk. They were separate settings, but as far as I know they were run in a similar way.

Each had one main GM, and started with an “original” party of players. This original party goes on adventures, slays monsters, finds treasure. The survivors level up and become more powerful.

And then new PCs start coming in. Maybe the GM convinces another group of friends to play on a different day of the week, or the older players roll up new starting characters for a bit of variety, or maybe they begin playing their henchmen when they go out on missions of their own. It’s likely a combination of all of the above, happening over an extended period of time.

So now there are multiple PC parties having adventures in the same setting! What each party does changes the setting in ways that can be felt by the others. If a party delves a dungeon on Monday, loses a fighter to a gelatinous cube and retreats, another one might go in there on Thursday and loot the dead fighter’s cool magic sword. If the high-level originals shake the pillars of Heaven on Saturday, the Monday and Thursday parties might hear about it and feel its consequences in their games.

And that’s metaplot in its original, “platonically ideal” form. It’s what happens at the table, propagating to the other PC parties that are part of the same gaming group. This is practical because the setting is owned by a single GM or a small circle of them, who run the games for all groups involved and keep track of it all. As for “canon NPCs”, there are none. It’s PCs all the way down, though I suppose some of them might transition fully to NPC status when they retire, becoming less active in the process.

To me, an ideal setting is one that enables groups to create their very own shared world in that mold.