in which I jump on a bandwagon without a plan

Doing something creative every day is, in the corniest possible sense, nourishing to my soul and so I look forward to this bandwagon.

What I'm not doing is any sort of planning or grand vision at the beginning. I have one room that came to me in the half-dream state of falling asleep, and everything else is just going to be one more room connected to existing rooms.

Process is all that matters. If I write something original, interactive, or compelling, that's nice; If I write "15'x15', orc guards pie for no reason," mission accomplished for the day. Once a connection to the surface is reached, hexes and settlements count as well. 

I'll be using Obsidian for my notebook, and posting results here every so often.  

Stable diffusion; prompt "bottomless pit, architectural diagram by Albrecht Durer and Gustave Dore"

 

"new game plus" ability score generation

Here's a small way to make dying more fun. 

When you roll up a new character, for each ability score you can either

1. roll 3d6 raw, or
2. take (21 - your last character's score in this ability)
3. cash in a relevant ability score card for a free 16

 When a character dies or retires, you get an ability score card depending on how they did so:

1. Strength if they died of starvation in the wilderness,
2. Dexterity if they died of a trap,
3. Constitution if they died in combat,
4. Intelligence if they died of a curse, doom, spell, or the like
   
5. Wisdom if they retired to settle down with a family, business, or the like
   
6. Charisma if they retired to nurse their wounds, too traumatized to either live out an adventurers' or a normal life

If multiple categories apply, choose your favorite. If none apply or if the death is really epic or weird, the GM can come up with an appropriate other kind of boon.

(Combine with ensemble cast ability scores as desired.)

leapfrog tables

Since my last post on eliminative progress tables, I've been playing around with some worldbuilding subgames and it feels a bit less chaotic than I would like. This is an attempt to iterate on the same idea but with a bit less predictability.

A leapfrog table involves more entries than the die used to roll it (for instance, 30 entries on a d6 table) where order matters. Use it as so,

1. When an entry is rolled, strike it off.
2. If landing on a stricken entry, roll again, advancing from the stricken entry (multiple times if necessary)

To add "declining marginal returns," you can regard upper levels of the die you're rolling as null results, e.g. roll 1d8, on 1-6 advance that many entries, on 7-8 nothing happens - such that if the first six entries are already filled up you only have a 57% chance of actually adding something, or whatever.

Tech tree adapted from the most recent edition of a popular 4X (1d10, null result on 9-10)

1. pottery
2. animal husbandry
3. mining
4. sailing
5. astrology
6. irrigation
7. writing
8. archery
9. masonry
10. bronzeworking
11. wheel
12. celestial navigation
13. currency
14. horseback riding
15. ironworking
16. shipbuilding
17. mathematics
18. construction
19. engineering
20. military tactics
21. buttress
22. apprenticeship
23. stirrups
24. machinery
25. alchemy
26. military engineering
27. castles
28. steel
    
29. banking
    
30. cartography
31. mass production
32. printing
33. square rigging
34. astronomy
35. metal casting
36. seige tactics
37. gunpowder
38. industrialization
39. scientific theory
40. ballistics
41. military science
42. steam power
43. sanitation
44. economics
45. rifling
46. flight
47. replaceable parts
48. bessemmer steel
    
49. refining
50. electricity
51. radio
52. chemistry
53. combustion
54. advanced flight
55. rocketry
56. advanced ballistics
57. combined arms
58. plastics
59. computers
60. nuclear fission
61. synthetic materials
62. telecommunications
63. satellites
64. guidance systems
65. lasers
66. composites
67. stealth technology
68. robotics
69. nuclear fusion
70. nanotechnology

goop -> ultrahuman evolution table (1d8)

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. live birth
12. hair
13. walking upright
14. grasping
15. vocalization
16. memory
17. empathy
18. display of emotions
19. reciprocity
20. dreams
21. sclera
22. breastfeeding
23. menstruation
24. opposable thumbs
25. immortal souls
26. morality
    
27. maths
28. metaphor
29. music
30. language
31. telekinesis
32. astral projection
33. telepathy
34. aura reading
35. psychic vampirism
36. personal survival through reincarnation
37. levitation
38. Speech of the Gods
39. body-hopping
40. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

goop -> anything evolution table (1d20, null result on 16-20)

This can become the ultrahuman evolution table

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. exoskeleton
    
12. flight
13. bioluminescence
14. pheremones
15. venom
16. ability to survive in vacuum
17. burrowing
18. exotic energy source
19. can see ghosts
20. darkvision
    
21. live birth
22. hair
23. walking upright
24. grasping
25. vocalization
26. memory
27. empathy
28. display of emotions
29. reciprocity
30. dreams
31. web-spinning
32. fire-breathing
33. shapeshifting
34. parasitic larvae
35. petrification
36. magnetic sense
37. phase shifting
38. antimagic
39. explosive
40. hallucinogenic
    
41. sclera
42. breastfeeding
43. menstruation
44. opposable thumbs
45. immortal souls
46. morality
    
47. maths
48. metaphor
49. music
50. language
51. telekinesis
52. astral projection
53. telepathy
54. aura reading
55. psychic vampirism
56. personal survival through reincarnation
57. levitation
58. Speech of the Gods
59. body-hopping
60. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

eliminative progress tables

 A d6 table has six entries, right? Not here!

The following sort of table is meant to represent when you have a sequence of events or developments where some things are biased to happen later and indeed can't happen at the start, but where there's still considerable randomness about the exact order, and an expected "early" thing might never kick in. 

To use this table, simply eliminate any results that arise for future rolls, decrementing every future result. Here's a toy example: a goop evolving into something like a person over millions of years:

d4 goop evolution table

1. mouth and anus
2. locomotion
3. brain
4. eyes
5. opposable thumbs
6. rational soul

So l roll 1d4 on the table and get a 1 - my goop is now a heterotroph with ingress and egress for nutrients. The table now looks like this:

1. locomotion
2. brain
3. eyes
4. opposable thumbs
5. rational soul

I roll 1d4 again and get a 2 - my sessile coral thing now has a brain, but it can't see or move.

1. locomotion
2. eyes
3. opposable thumbs
4. rational soul

1d4 on this and I get 4 - they've evolved a rational soul! So now you have a coral that's a full person. Maybe it just contemplates, since it can't really do or observe anything? Maybe these are the brains in vats I've been hearing so much about? Maybe their strange dreams call out to people from the sea, singing of a strange kinship... 

(Note this table could have given us sequences that make even less sense, like getting a rational soul before getting a brain - I would rather roll with and explain such oddities than try to fit everything into a more elaborate sequence.)

Potential uses of this could include:

• evolution, as in the above, towards people crabs
• the villain's plans progressing
• class abilities, especially in your bespoke GLOGhack
• a civilization progressing up a "tech tree"
• rewards from a patron for progressively crazier tasks

and so on. I've been thinking about telescopic isotime (which I've just learned is used in Lizardman Diaries' Empyrean Dynasty long before it occurred to me) and am thinking of some millions-year-long minigames involving evolution towards humanish people and millenia-long tech tree development - I'll post rules for those soonish.

the measure of all things

Why measure things in temporal units? 

1. It makes things concrete, dare I say materialist. 
2. It makes things comparable - at least, if a lot of things are measurable in time.
3. It builds in clocks, which many blog posts have written about as helpful to sandbox play and the avoidance of quantum ogres

What can one measure in time?

1. Damage - how long you can survive without receiving medical attention
2. Distance - how long to travel between points on a pointcrawl
3. Exhaustion - how long it’s been since you got a good night’s rest; how long you can function until you pass out
4. Mana - how long you need to meditate in a place of power to charge this, or how long the ritual needs to be, or how long a cooldown period you get
5. Morale - how long a unit  will endure dangerous battle; how long a force will endure crappy conditions marching/camping under hunger/plague/harsh discipline
6. Obscurity - how many days of research in the library, or buying drinks at bars, are required to uncover this fact
7. Proficiency - years of training in a skill
8. Projects - how many person-hours are required to create this
9. Rarity - a once in a minute/day/year/century event
10. Relationships - how long someone will care about you before needing the relationship renewed (by, depending on the type of relationship, patronage, or a date night, or whatever)
11. Resistance - how long you can get beaten up, or hold your breath, or endure ______ before folding
12. Standard of Living - how many people need to be working full-time to support both you and yourself (okay not technically a unit of time but integrates well with them
13. Stealth - how long you can do this without someone noticing
14. Wealth - how many hours of labor are embodied in this

How can one measure things in time?

1. Openly, so that players can tactically work with it, or secretly, so that they have to guess.
2. Smoothly, such that you know exactly how long something can take and can put it on Fantasy Calendar or whatever, or stochastically, rolling to see how much things advance or whether the event happens.
3. (If something doesn’t happen according to visible clocks in reality, being open and smooth is going to feel gamey!)
4. Using aforesaid Fantasy Calendar, or a physical timer like on your phone or a little hourglass (useful especially if you use some kind of microisotime where the time represented by a combat round is around the time IRL resolve it

What am I missing from any of the above? And what shouldn’t be measured in time?

fictionplay

Here's a bit of theory, or manifesto, or something. It's short and probably thought of by others, because I'm not all that smart, but I think it articulates the kind of roleplay I find most interesting. 

What I am most interested in lies at the intersection of:

1. fiction that is not stories, in the narrow sense of "story." Stories have a narrative structure, especially one based around a satisfying set of choices that change an individual, with the beginning pregnant with the end; fiction in the sense that I care about is just a set of claims that are consistent with each other but not reality, and which are asserted for interestingness rather than deceit. A description of a cool sword is fiction but not a story. A big setting supplement is also setting but not a story. A campaign that kind of meanders and does a bunch of interesting things may or may not be a story, idk, but it is certainly a fiction.
2. play that is not games, in the narrow sense of "games." Play in the general sense is ____________ ??????? but "properly" gamelike to the extent that goals are clear and actions are clearly delimited.

Thus, the answer to me re: "are RPGs games" or "are RPGs stories" is that they're neither, but adjacent to both.

OSR-Style Roleplay - what it really means

Is the OSR based on a false origin myth? Should it die? Is it an ineradicable discourse? Has it died already again and again? There are many stories you can craft. 

But unlike you heretics, I don't believe in crafting stories - I believe in procedures. As always, once you roll the dice, you should stick with result forevermore. Once you click on the below button, that's what the OSR is.

alone together: solo tools for trad PBP

Recently, a Knight at the Opera discussed how media stand in the shadow of each other; for instance, how early film served as a simple recording of play-like performances despite the possibilities being so different. I don’t know that there’s any RPG form living more thoroughly in the shadow of its parent than PBP versions of tabletop gaming, with more tragic results: it’s a direct transplant of the GM-player conversation loop that is so often strangled rather quickly when the medium simply doesn’t support it. Traditional RPGs, with their task resolution and strict GM/player division of labor, tend to fare worse than storygames, with their conflict resolution, weak or no role specialization, and oftentimes just explicitly passed around narrative control. OSR-style play falls squarely on the former side of this divide.

But OSR-style play has long emphasized a few ideas, like GM neutrality its enforcement through randomized tables, that mesh well with another style, one that’s been finding its legs recently: solo gaming. OSR procedures and solo oracles fit so well together because they’re a solution to the same goals: providing surprising challenges and the illusion of an independent world. 

But solo gaming is also solving another problem: doing without the conversational loop. (Indeed for solo play the former problems arise from the latter.) Perhaps they’ve progressed faster than PBP on this front because while each exchange from player to GM and back in PBP is achingly expensive, in solo it’s impossible.

The thing, though, is that nothing about oracle use and other solo tools makes having a GM impossible - it only makes impossible the GM who wants to tell a particular story. And a GM can do things an oracle can’t - like playing with secret but consistent information, and so on.

Here’s the general proposal, then: for a PBP game to describable either as 1) an OSR game where players know all or most all of the objective GM procedures and can execute the role of neutral referees themselves, 2) several solo games which take place in the same continuity.

This style can also play nice with:

1. Pendragon-style personality mechanics for narrating other PCs 
2. Using multiple systems (say Gary likes combat puzzles and I don’t, so he uses Pathfinder 2e to govern events in his posts and I use B/X or whatever) - since all or most all mechanical loops can be closed within any post, only diegetic continuity matters
3. Since I keep looking for ways to slot it into everything, using 1:1 time as a regulator of “how much” narration any post should be doing
4. GMs uploading tables to Perchance, dungeons to twine…

My more specific proposal: if you’d like to do this over the summer - I thinking a sandbox game set in Dolmenwood but can be persuaded into plenty - let me know!

It Takes a Village (ability score generation method)

 Rook asks for people's favorite ways of generating ability scores. Here's mine:

1. 3d6, down the line.
2. Give this person a name, something that keeps them busy (rolling on an appropriate background table works!), something they want, and (if this isn't the very first person we know about in this world) a relationship to one other person. Make sure it's all on an index card or a spreadsheet row, but nothing more than that.
3. Repeat (going around the table as you do so) until everybody's bored of it. 
4. All of these are now part of your stable of characters. Anybody can choose any and give them a single class level to start.

If you like, you can set things up for generational play by requiring half the rolls to be for minors - roll 2d6 for each stat and when time in the campaign has advanced enough, give them their additional d6 in each stat and make some suppositions about who they've become by that point. 

random factional alignment generator

Why still more posts on alignment? Maybe because as such an inherently slippery concept, there's so many ways to resolve it. Here I want to lean into the idea of alignments as really just being army factions to play Chainmail in. Those of you who grew up as the same time as me will likely recognize exactly where my conception of where Generic Fantasy Army Faction Components comes from.

Xd13 games to run in the same continuity

See previous. Presumably you'd want some kind of secret council chamber where the poor GMs of all of these coordinate everything, but the good news is they hardly have to come up with anything at all. I’ve suggested specialized systems for specialized purposes, but you could just as easily go with a single system that scales well, no system at all, etc.

1. The gods. Run using some sort of GMless narrative system. The referee team's only privilege is that they get to actually see what the gods are doing (or that there is a god game going on) and interpret the consequences for everywhere else. 
2. The game of empires. Run as a grand strategy forum game. 
3. The Chosen One and/or BBEG. Run as quest and represent their actions through the game of empires.
   
4. The marcher warzone. Run using Chainmail or something. Represents a particular front in the game of empires and overrules any more abstract rules present there.
   
5. The noble family. Run using Sword Chronicle. Owns a castle in the marcher zone. 
6. The West Marches. Run using your OSR system of choice (preferably something using domain rules so you can seamlessly scale up.) Keep used by the noble family as base. Probably the most familiar thing going on. Note that any of the above or below may go posting for “jobs” that these may answer.
7. The village. Run using the above, or Stonetop or Beyond the Wall. Or when paranoia strikes or an inquisition is launched, break out a game of Werewolf. Or for a different feel, The Quiet Year.
8. Dungeon factions. Run these as another forum game, or via Wicked Ones or something.
9. Ordinary people swept up in the tragedy of events surrounding them. Run as DCC-style funnels.
10. The inn. Run as a channel in the inevitable Discord. Let anyone join (perhaps in disguise if appropriate,) 
11. Shenanigans. All of the above have some boundary expectations. Although 1:1 time is an odd fit for it, an actual traditional table of people meeting once a week provides a fun chaos factor.
12. Why not? Use Bunnies & Burrows.
13. Licensing out. Use Shooting the Moon or any number of Solo games or just fiction to tell smaller stories without any referee to adjudicate or really even offer permission.

I’m presuming a cod-medieval extruded fantasy product for proof of concept and because that’s easy to coordinate shared understandings around, but there’s no need for your own megatable’s vision to be so limited. 

d10x10 [adverb] [allegiance] alignments

Posts on the alignment tag on this blog just keep growing, but so far they haven't added up to an kind of project. This post will not add up to anything coherent either. This is similar to my random alignment generator but a little more lightweight - I'd use the former to generate initial ideas for NPCs and this in conjunction with other sources, as perhaps a kind of reaction roll.

style

1. fanatically
2. fastidiously
   
3. hypocritically
4. naively
   
5. nominally 
6. self-loathingly
7. self-righteously
8. surprisingly 
9. trying to be
   
10. unwittingly
    

allegiance

1. traditional
2. progressive
3. benevolent
4. patriotic
5. selfish
   
6. malevolent
7. communitarian
8. individualistic
9. peace-loving
10. nature-loving
    

dumb tricks for isotime multilevel West Marches

Ben Milton's recent video on how at least Gygax's version of D&D starts making more sense when you consider the context - a gigantic West Marches with 1:1 time and lots of patron play - has got me curious. With my personal obligations about to be way bigger, I frankly can't do any of this - and I'm cutting way down on polish on these posts to just get out ideas while i still can - i do want to just jot down a bunch of ideas for people to raid as much as possible.

If you do some poking around you'll find there's an existing community around this style, with some interesting ideas worth stealing, but they're abrasive to a degree that 1) offering any condemnation more spirited than that is just offering encouragement, and 2) I'd rather let them continue to be in their corner of social space and they continue to be in theirs. 

The best resource collections that I can find on this date back to about 2012, with Nagora on the AD&D game loop and Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons on domain play. On the comments to Ben's video, though, you find lots of commenters saying they've been playing this way for decades, so it's clearly not so much lost as lost to us!

Telescopic Isotime

Gygaxian fundamentalist play prescribes 1:1 time - one day IRL equals one day in-world. This forces you to be aware of the passage of time, allows coordination of multiple groups, and - although this is a bit of je ne sais quois - is great for the eerie feeling that the diegesis is another world as legitimate as our own, churning along. 

This is great for individual-level play, where we experience people, but what about the grinding of continents, rise and fall of civilizations, that kind of thing? This amazing Wikipedia article and this suggests one approach - let each day of IRL time be a certain amount of diegetic time, shifting according to a set schedule: 

• starting very slowly, with days equally diegetic microseconds where new fundmental forces come into play
• then ramping up as players describe the kinds of matter these form into
• then going into tens of millions of diegetic years per IRL day as galaxies (or whatever equivalent in the heterophysics you've cooked up) form
• then millions of years as life evolves...
• and so on and so forth, with language evolution described and archived with sound change appliers and whatever...
• up until you're dealing with years, then seasons, then months, then weeks, and finally you've slowed down to 1:1 time

This could be great for worldbuilding! "Organic," aka an absolute mess but in the best possible way.

In particular I suspect a great way to spend the seasons and months would be to great for purposes of building up a stable of NPCs whom you've seen through their childhoods, even generations, and now you're able to zoom in and see them on a human or elf or gretching or whatever level...

Obviously this is insane but maybe you can cobble people together for it via...

use many game systems

Take a cue from Mosaic Strict and cobble together rules systems through diegesis. Use lots of different media entirely. Go to the sufficient velocity quest forums and have them be a god who creates your world, then head over to the grand strategy forum to generate a few centuries of history, deputize regular DMs to run the same shared world using World of Dungeons and Pathfinder 2e and whatever other shit players are into, let anybody who wants to access the maps to play solo play. 

 use Notion to keep track of canon

If you deputize enough then hopefully the whole thing becomes a distributed system, sort of like a blockchain but (insert your own joke here) and so it doesn't depend as much on a single failure point.

For a single auteur GM or worldbuilder Obsidian is probably the best system, because it's open source, but Notion is way easier to share and use with lots of people and you can even give different people access to different parts, and integration with spreadsheets is good. so i would use that

is god real????

A fun thing you could do especially if you have people playing worldbuilding games from the beginning is to have clerical magic work by influencing players who are gods, like, give clerics no spells but do give them a direct line to the gods. (or both, whatever)

okay so then the next phase of this is that you can do this regardless of whether there are any gods or not! you can tell people this and let them guess. They can send petitions to God or the gods and genuinely wonder whether anyone is listening or cares, having suspicions both ways, just like real life!

scryfall generators for follower recruitment

I mean, this isn't specific to any of this. and you'd have to adjust. But you can specify all sorts of things with the Scryfall API, and it's most coherent with creatures by far (like sorceries are sometimes events and sometimes spells and sometimes actions and sometimes who knows what and the diegetic translation never has much to do with anything you can search for, but the tags for creatures are all much more grounded - creatures with higher CMC are "higher level" and humans are humans and so on.) ANYWAY the follower recruitment tables are always very kitchen sink anyway so make them even wackier by inputting a few constraints into a Scryfall oracle.

Assorted links

1. Chris of Hill Cantons on news as campaign glue

cosmic alignment: Law, Chaos, & Evil

Why?

• if alignments are cosmic "teams," then three factions are more interesting than two
• am I saying that Good doesn't exist here? not as that kind of cosmic sports team, is all I'm saying. Goodness already exists in every universe with consciously choosing beings (see: Kant*) so you're letting things slide towards a naturalistic fallacy if you throw in like Goodonium particles or whatever
• and if you're outright told a team is Good, that's boring. and also teams with that designator tend to be as well - we all know the lower planes sell way better than the higher ones
  
• value is plural, really dedicated evil is all the same shit. evil is fundamentally monotonous, always interested in the same fundamental things, fascinating only in the way we can find other repetitive superstimuli fascinating. so one Evil and multiple things that can be good

I realized I accidentally re-created the Werewolf Triat, but I'm okay with that

 Law

• dangerous (Aslan is not a tame lion)
  
• can be good
• wants you to play a helpful role in building things you didn't really sign onto and might not really understand
• cosmic realm: you're living in it, baby. notice all these stable laws keeping up up and down down? obviously not completely because the project isn't finished yet, not barely, that's why all the bad and confusing stuff exists obviously, but we'll get there
  
• troops and tech: biblically accurate angels, ancient artifacts beneath the earth sending up dreams giving instructions for their repair, a keep with 5d100 men-at-arms clearing out a hex of monsters
  
• organization: you might think Law is monotonous and cooperative but in fact in terms of politics Law is the most diverse, pretty much any "system" that can appeal to some idea of the general benefit (communism, neoliberalism, theocracy, even anarcho-whatever if it's like a system for social organization) is Lawful at its core and of course these different things don't necessarily play nice with each other (see realm above and note that this is why multiple universes exist)
  

Chaos

• dangerous, in obvious ways
  
• can be good
• wants to make new things, go beyond, slip beyond the boundaries of what presently exists 
• cosmic realm: everything that hasn't been stitched into a cosmos in a way that law has - Faerie and the dreaming realm are nearby examples, on the periphery of our universe, and from there one can go into the Pure Chaos and perhaps find other islands of Law (to fuck up by bringing in your Out-of-Context Chaotic content)
  
• troops and tech: gretchlings, rolling on the mutation table, recruiting 2d20 knaves who then leave, unexpectedly open gates,
  
• organization: swarms, forming and splitting
  

Evil 

• cannot be good. i mean, any given evil thing might later be good, but Evil cannot be good (duh) except when it's consciously hemmed in as a game or whatever
  
• can be dangerous, but also a false feeling of security is one of the ways it sells shit to you
• moreover. Evil lacks the fundamental danger that Law and Chaos do, because when you sign on to each of the others, you're placing trust and faith in something whose outcomes you can't really know. but if you've felt the pleasures of Evil you've kind of encountered all there is there, and you know what you're getting into
  
• not everything immoral is Evil. cheating on your taxes because you want a beach vacation is bad but not Evil. Evil is about the high of omnipotence you get from cruelty and control over others.
• cosmic realm: big black hole, concentrating power, incapable of seeing beyond itself, confident that it will draw everything into it, and for what? you can feel its rays peircing and its gravity pulling from anywhere in the multiverse, which it feels itself to be the center of, but especially its cosmic projections, dark dungeons where it draws the greedy deeper into darkness
• troops and tech: turning yourself into a vampire, dumb Lawful troops who think you're the voice of God, sucking someone's soul out and using it to fuel _______
• organization: Evil has two organizational forms, exoteric fascism and esoteric pyramid schemes. these are both a response to the fact that nobody, including the Evil, actually wants Evil to win in general, nobody benefits from it; so either you set up an organizational structure that allows you to concentrate power and abuse and manipulate innocents, or if you're recruiting people into Evil you're offering them power over these others alongside ways that limit their ability to turn back (you're immortal but you have to suck blood, you can suck my cool vampire blood but you become addicted to that, you've signed a contract that sends your soul straight to hell so hey kid no backing out now, etc). obviously these can be combined in any number of ways

*okay, maybe "read Kant" isn't the best advice because when he's wrong he speaks with all the clarity of your most misguided relative on Facebook and when he's right he speaks with all the clarity of a French literary critic, so uhhhhh read Cathy Korsgaard or something. all i'm saying is that good is doesn't need to give you spells to care about it

running 5e OSR-style without changing any rules

I know what you're saying - "just use a game actually meant for this!" But maybe you game with people you like IRL and who don't want to learn another system. The truth is that you can run things in a more old-school style without changing any player-facing rules.

As with any campaign style, you want buy-inv - such as to the idea that you're running a sandbox campaign where character death may lack individual narrative heft, in which challenges are not guaranteed to be fair, and in which lateral thinking goes a long way. The goal here isn't to sneak in OSR play to people with no interest in it, but to work with the fact that many groups don't want to learn a whole new system specifically.

Ask "how do you do that?" when players declare skill use

GM: "There's a pie in the middle of a room, surrounded by a bear trap."

Player: "I use Sleight of Hand to disable the trap. 18! Does it beat the DC?"

GM: "Hold your horses - exactly what are you doing to disable it?"

Player: "Hmm, I throw a stick on the bear trap to activate it."  

GM: "Success! The trap snaps shut."

You know already know this: play the world, the answer is not on your character sheet, blah blah blah. But in my experience (especially with new players) this doesn't require the lack of a skill system or anything, it just requires you to remind them to describe the physical actions they're taking and to engage with that.

Encourage use of automatic character generators

It's a trivialism that character creation needs to be easy in order to allow comfort with lethality. The traditional solution to this is to make character creation simple, but the 5e market is so large that there's also a lot of tools.

As someone who hates character creation minigames but is in a 5e game with friends, the straightforwardly named https://fastcharacter.com/ has been a godsend. I just specify the level and anything else I want to determine and boom. 

Giving access to devices like these doesn't mean players who enjoy the minigame can't engage in it - but it does mean that they don't need to feel like every character is an irrevocable investment.

Use any XP system other than XP for combat and set milestones

Does this count as changing rules? I don't know, but as elegant as say XP for gold is or whatever, I think that really XP for combat and "XP for this particular thing the GM has in mind" are the most fatal to open-ended risk-reward play. You can use just about anything else (handing out cards with XP for possible quests, actual XP for gold/exploration, leveling up arbitrarily when people feel like it's time to out of character or after a certain number of sessions, leveling up when people surprise you) and it will avoid the main problems.

(Does this count as changing the system? IDK, but in my Curse of Strahd campaign nobody complained when I gave them checklist XP adapted from Into the Depths.)

Use GM-facing procedures like morale, reaction roles, and hazard dice

That's not changing the rules either!

Just use bears

More generally, don't engage with anything mechanically you don't have to or that doesn't have a meaningful payoff. Be sloppy and arbitrary about stats, if there are players who are sticklers about e.g. tripping rules or whatever let them be the resident expert and defer to them on that, and so on.  

interleaved spark tables

Sometimes you want things that are related.

emoji spark table from Lenormand

Lenormand is 36-card oracle deck - that is to say, a d66 spark table. Just about every card is iconic enough that there's an emoji for it, and plain enough that you can guess reasonably enough at its meaning. In the few cases where there wasn't an emoji, I took one that approximated suggested meaning (swords crossed for whip) or which felt right even if the associations were different (dove for stork.)

5d hexcrawl with multiverse timetravel

Imagine your standard hexcrawl. That's 2D - north and south. 

But what if you've got the underdark, as in Veinscrawl? (Notably, most long-form treatments of the underdark treat it as divided into vertical region that progressively weirder the lower down you go.) Then you've got your three classic spatial dimensions, so we're up to 3D. (This also lets you throw in your cloud giant castles and what-have-you.)

Take the conceit of the more recent editions, that sideways from our world is the Feywild, where everything is more alive and vibrant, and in the other sideways is the Shadowfell. 4D! (I know what you're thinking, and to answer your question, per the 4e underdark book the intersection of the underdark and shadowfell has the supremely stupid name of the Shadowdark, not the equally stupid name of Underfell. The name of the intersection of feywild and underdark isn't funny enough for me to remember.) 

And if you have calendars, not just maps, that's 5D.  

Some additional things that you can use to play around with this:

• Time passes more quickly in Faerie. The way I'd be inclined to play it is that the Feywild has the same seasonal calendar as our world, but it's just the same year over and over, so that if you enter in September 23rd our time, and stay in the Feywild from September 25th, you'll exit into September 25th - but it might not be of the same year. (The feywild is also more full of glittering treasure hoards, and you can get the equivalent of a full night's sleep by just taking a breather there, so time spent is more valuable as well.) 
• Time passes more slowly in the Dolorous Lands. You can spend an arbitrary amount of time there and when you exit, it will be the next 4AM or so. However, you can't rest there; at least, not meaningfully.
• Especially with a good downtime system, this works for games where not everyone is going to be able to make it to every session. 
• It also might work well with a very long-term calendar, NPCs that have some branching futures (like these), some kind of domain management...

(See also.)