(This is part of an ongoing discussion of the 2018 OSR Survey results. See the table of contents at the bottom of this post for links to the other parts.)

Respondents clearly preferred Renaissance (70% of responses) as the meaning of the R in OSR. Revival took silver, with about 20% of responses. After that was a long tail of many different alternatives. Third place was “Rules” (but at less than 4%). Consolation prizes for write-in snark go to: Fuck you, we won (okay dude but where’s the R?), R is for the R in OSR, Revanchist, Regurgitation, and (drum roll…) Reformatting.

Enough respondents wrote something close enough to Roleplaying that I created a category for that response. After coding a few of the Other values into existing categories when obviously warranted (such as when a respondent wrote in “rules” rather than selecting the offered Rules category), the final counts were:

Several people on Reddit suggested to me that question wording may have advantaged certain of the options. I attempted, to the degree possible while maintaining idiomatic English, to avoid reifying OSR as a social category in the survey up to that point. We avoided using the definite article (“the”) in the wording of the eight meaning questions that preceded the question about the R. We mentioned “the OSR” twice up to that point. The first was a mention in the landing page leading to the survey proper. The second was the participation question (Do you participate in the OSR? Yes/No), which would have been difficult or impossible to ask without the definite article. Additionally, we randomized the presentation order of the options, so Ruckus was just as likely to be first option as Renaissance. In retrospect, I might have avoided the definite article in the landing page also and asked the participation question on a following page, but this hardly seems like putting my thumb on the scale, especially given the overwhelming preference for Renaissance.

You can find the remaining write-in responses here, presented in alphabetic order without editing (n = 65). Also, for those interested, here is the exact presentation that respondents saw: meaning questions page 1, meaning questions page 2, and the page containing the question about the R. (Remember that we randomized presentation of the eight meaning questions across two pages in the actual survey.)

I also tested several categorical associations with tendency to choose Renaissance over other options. Of the categories I examined, only self-declared OSR participation had an association with choice of Renaissance. The number of observations varies slightly by test due to skipped questions.

Self-declared OSR participation : χ 2 (1, N = 1816) = 13.16, p < .001 Residence in North America: χ 2 (1, N = 1821) = .95, p = .329 Having published an OSR product: χ 2 (1, N = 1786) = .65, p = .419



(253 respondents reported that they had published an OSR product, around 14% of responses.)

OSR survey report

Table of contents