The Answer IS on your Character Sheet
There is nothing actually new or interesting in this post. A LOT of ink, both digital and physical, has been spilt about this topic, and in a lot of ways I think it's a solved issue that doesn't need someone else to chime in on it. But chime I shall, for I am great with ego and self-importance (not really).
Bad Phrasing
I intensely dislike the phrase (sentence? I guess grammatically it's a correct sentence. Anyway.) "The Answer is not on your Character Sheet." It's long been a maxim of the OSR, and is often pointed to as one of the key differences between OSR and so-called "Trad" style rpgs like DnD 3.0 and onward. In fact, a quick google search for the phrase turns back about 26,000 results, and anecdotally it's almost always among the first or second thing people say when they talk about what makes an old-school game old-school (usually paired with lethality or something similar).
The problem that I have with it is that what the maxim SAYS and what the maxim MEANS are basically two different things:
I've run a lot of old school games for people who are not familiar with the old-school style. Uniformly, when I tell them "hey, the answer isn't on your character sheet" they short circuit. "Trad" players are often very accustomed to looking for the right lever to pull from their sheet, or to find the right combination of words to prompt the GM to say "ok, that's great -- make an Acrobatics check" or somesuch to resolve whatever obstacle is in the way. And when we tell them "it's not on your sheet" the confusion hits like a ton of bricks and the sit there, staring for a bit before saying "ok, well...what do I roll to get past this pit trap?" And I contend that we're doing everyone a disservice by letting that happen.
What does it mean?
So what does "The Answer is not on your character sheet" actually mean? It SOUNDS like it means "don't look at your character sheet, it's not going to help you" which is completely false. Your inventory is on your character sheet. Your spells are on your character sheet. Your entire tool kit is there. So of course, the answer is there too. It's just not spelled out* there.
The idea behind the maxim, I think, is this: there isn't a discrete line of text on your character sheet which, when read out-loud, will bypass the need to think about solving an obstacle. Or, more succinctly, there is no Skill Check you can roll to get out of talking.
The solution to the problem is all in how you USE the things that are on your character sheet. To take an example from Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, let's look at a pit-trap.
In the "Trad" style, the exchange is thus:
Player: I check for traps.
GM: Ok, roll perception.
Player: 17.
GM: You see a pit trap about 10 feet ahead of you.
Player: I'll jump over it, Acrobatics 22.
GM: Ok, you clear it no problem.
And so on for each remaining character.
In the OSR style, that looks more like this:
Player: I check for traps.
GM: Ok, how are you doing that?
Player: Well, I have a ten foot pole in my inventory. I'll tap along the ground in front of us to see if it catches anything.
GM: Yeah, totally. After a few minutes of tapping you feel the stone give way under your pole as a 5 foot wide pit trap opens up at the edge of your lantern light.
Player: Shit, ok. Ummm...wait, you said it's 5 feet wide? Can I lay my 10 foot pole across it and use the pole to shimmy over?
GM: Absolutely! You all get across the pit no problem doing that, but I'm going to mark off a turn and check to see if anything noticed you while you do...
And so forth.
So, from this example, what's clear is this: The answer WAS on the character sheet (the 10 foot pole in the inventory), but the way to USE that to solve the problem wasn't. That required the player to think about what they wanted to do, describe, and then interpret the information that the GM provided.
Is this anything new?
I thought I already answered that question.
Fuck no.
TONS of people have come to this conclusion. But it was bouncing around in my head listening to a podcast talking about this exact issue and realizing that the problem that newcomers to the OSR have isn't how wildly strange and difficult the games are, it's that we do a bad job of explaining the first principles that we're coming from.
And I think that's really human nature. We like pithy, quick one liners that sound great and can be repeated ad nauseam. But the one liner doesn't actually explain the mindset needed to play the game in the style it's intended. So maybe, the 850 or so words that I written up until this point could be summed up better by saying "Hey, chuckle fucks, try actually explaining things to people instead of parroting maxims."
Anyway, that's all.