OSRS is OSR
INTRO
It's a well-trodden joke on the rainbow OSR discord server that sometimes well-meaning but lost players of OldSchool RuneScape (OSRS) enter, looking for a different server. My argument is that while the rainbow OSR server is definitely not for OSRS, OSRS is definitely OSR. I'm hardly the first to argue for this, see Benign Brown Beast's posts here and Ewen Macalister's post here on the topic.
THE WORLD IS DEADLY
OSRS is a sandbox MMO. That means that high level content is mixed liberally with low level content in areas all across the map. Even the newest of players can walk into danger a mere few minutes into their adventure, whether to dark wizards on the road to the nearest big city or to prison guards lurking in the woods to the west. Certain areas are locked behind one-off quests and storylines, but for the most part players can travel anywhere they can see and engage with the creatures and characters there.
There's no set-in-stone line of progression for which areas to tackle first and in what order. It's very possible for players to engage with creatures far beyond their capabilities, sometimes even by choice! There's no set "balance" to battles and the vast majority of them are completely one-sided in the favor of either the enemy or the player.
A FOCUS ON EXPLORATION
Runescape's world is both wide, with many areas and many different alternatives for any specific area, and deep, with each area added being multi-faceted in its uses. Areas very frequently have continued usage throughout the lifecycle of a character, leading players to spend much of their time travelling to and from areas all over the world. In-depth knowledge of areas is crucial to completing content, whether to find obscure items and NPCs or to find the most efficient way to train your skills.
As such, players spend a majority of their time up through the midgame exploring the world. There are quests and minigames and one-off upgrades scattered all over the world, and nearly all of them are crucial to have a powerful "endgame" character. Even veteran players spend much of their time exploring the famous wiki and gathered knowledge of past players to plan the best route for their character to their chosen destination. Quest unlocks frequently provide a new method of transportation through the world, leading to complex intertwined networks of travel as characters get more developed.
This focus on exploration as an activity mirrors the classic OSR method of play. Whether dungeoncrawling or traversing the open world, OSR tables spend nearly all of their time exploring. Fights, intrigue and puzzles offer momentary respites from creeping through maps and marking down points of interest and GMs can shortcut the process by providing their own map but ultimately the PCs still need to see it for themselves to know what's present.
CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
While the first two points could be chalked up to a shared descendance from old-school roleplaying games of the 70s and 80s, Runescape's focus on critical thinking comes from point-and-click mystery games of the same era. The primary content block of Runescape is a Quest, a storyline involving characters in the world and some small aspect or problem, typically in a series. Quests often start with a simple problem (the dark wizards are summoning a demon!) but never have a simple solution (gather the ancient sword Silverlight, locked away by three keys held by three NPCs scattered throughout the region, each with their own varied task to gain their key, ...). Direction is rarely straightforward, with vague hints or theories provided by relevant NPCs or the player character themselves providing the only guidance.
If players want to complete quests, they'll need to think outside the box to solve the micropuzzles within. How do you get a piece of a map from a foul little goblin on the other side of an impassable stiff metal grate? Shoot him with your bow and then use telekinesis to grab the map off his body of course. How do you cook a magical crème brûlée made with the egg of an Evil Chicken to free a knight from a spell of time-freezing? Kill a dragon and summon a faerie dragon to bless it with powerful flame of course. How do you defeat an immortal vampire terrorizing a local town from the site of a nearby haunted mansion? Wear garlic, strike quickly, and stake him when he's weak (OK, maybe not always thinking outside the box). Players completing quests for the first time end up filling their pockets with all manner of tools from chisels to hammers to saws to spools of rope to glass vials to ensure they have everything necessary on hand.
This aspect of puzzle-solving is admittedly limited by Runescape being a video game, sometimes to an infuriating degree (what do you mean a battle-axe doesn't count as a sharp object?). The limited number of solutions doesn't change how players need to think about the problem to solve it though, it's the same muscle as when an OSR party comes up against an obstacle they've never solved before. There are relatively few quests that are solved by killing the problem, and none without some level of preamble.
INVENTORY OBSESSION
Runescape is obsessed with inventory and the hoarding of items. Characters have their equipped items and 28 bagslots to store everything they want to utilize on site, from healing supplies to buffing consumables to utility items to transportation items. This isn't to mention any slots kept free to carry back loot! Nearly every activity in the game is controlled by the inventory and it's limitations, with the few where it doesn't matter being notable exceptions.
Characters can store unneeded items in their bank, accessible from most settlements. Individual areas are prized for their distance from resource to bank, with new rankings changing as characters gain access to new methods of transportation. One of the biggest flexes in the game is showing off a fully-stocked bank packed with valuables and powerful items. Typical endgame gameplay relies on consuming supplies and items you've gathered possibly months and years ago earlier on in your character's career.
This type of item-obsessed gameplay is very similar to how many OSR games are played. Encumbrance hacks to replace weight-based systems with slots are near-ubiquitous. Games like Mausritter and Knave show that what you hold and what you carry can make up the entirety of your character, forget the rest of the character sheet. Logistical challenges and restrictions forcing parties to bury caches of supplies and hire porters to haul thousands of copper coins are widespread throughout OSR design, mirroring in macro-scale the behaviors of OSRS players leaving piles of potions and food on the ground next to a boss and storing emergency back-up weapons throughout the world for use during their next catastrophic failure.
EMERGENT GAMEPLAY
It's no secret that Oldschool Runescape is relatively old in the video-gaming world. It's been around and running in one form or another with players constantly logged in since 2001. In that time, players have devised quite a few devious tactics to take advantage of the game's engine. Some lesser games might have called them bugs and patched them out, but Jagex (the makers of Runescape) have chosen to embrace many of these tactics and even built further gameplay on top to take advantage of the playerbase's knowledge of the same.
Players have figured out how to make themselves nigh-immune to damage by taking advantage of limited-use prayers and the game's clock to protect themselves forever. Players figured out how to abuse pathfinding and the size of some creatures to deal damage at range without allowing them to fight back. Players figured out that starting one action, then interrupting it with another action would cause the second action to finish at the time the first should have. None of these were intended game mechanics but relied on the player's understanding of the world (the game engine) to cleverly gain an advantage.
You could say the exact same for the many OSR players engaging in Combat as War. The embrace of such tactics by GMs and Jagex fosters environments where clever thinking is rewarded. New rulings ("yes, 1-tick prayer flicking is OK" "yes, the ability to speak to doors does mean you can influence them with propaganda to form unions" etc) that technically break or sidestep the rules becoming the dominant language lead to an environment where every obstacle does not need to be killed, it just needs to be bypassed. This is classic OSR play methodology.
COMMUNITY
Finally, the community aspect. OSRS and the OSR both feature large portions of time where you can't actively engage with the game, leaving ample opportunity for discussion and disagreement. Theorycrafting of various routes and new possibilities litter the OSRS discussion sphere, the same way that a new OSR theorypost or dungeonpost is written every day. Every new development cascades down to throwing new light on any number of old posts, causing the old theories to be rewritten and reposted all over again. The large spans of time spent waiting while "actively playing" give rise to a tendency to yap, whether you're fishing for lobsters or waiting for your flakey player to confirm that they can't show up for the 4th week in a row. Yapping leads to friendly collaboration (or alternatively fuels spite-fueled tirades) which begets more yapping which begets more yada yada yada. Eventually you realize that you're playing sometimes just out of habit, you're really only there to yap. Then a new update happens or a new post drops and you're back to playing the game!
It also bears noting that neither OSRS or the OSR would exist without their respective communities. OSRS is a fork of the 2007 version of "Runescape 2" made in 2012 at the demand of the community after a few updates gone bad. It stemmed from a community-run petition to return the game to a former state that then ballooned into new development and eventually rivalling the original version it forked off from. The OSR as a movement stemmed from dissatisfaction with TTRPGs in the late 2000s that became what it is today through messageboards, blogposts, discord servers and tweets. Just like OSRS, it's also still going strong with new developments dropping frequently.
CONCLUSION
I hope this post goes to show all those who aren't in the know about OSRS just how closely it's values align to those of the OSR. The next time someone comes into the rainbow server asking about Vorkath, maybe see if you can entice them into an argument about 10' poles and field their questions about the proper luring of dragons.