There's a running gag in some circles of the Old School RuneScape community that Slayer, a skill about hunting down set amounts of different monsters in what some MMOs would consider side quests, is everything. It's a way to train your combat skills, get resources for non-combat skills, and obtain a lot of valuable gear. Now, thanks to a custom companion app created by a self-described hobbyist-turned-professional game dev, Slayer is literally everything in a game mode dubbed SlayerScape.
OSRS is a strong contender for the game, or certainly the MMO, with the most inventive player base, and the SlayerScape series from YouTuber DanPlaysOSRS (or Broxxar on Reddit, where I saw this) is the latest to make that case.
After playing the MMO normally for years and slowly losing that wondrous spark, Dan has now tethered his new OSRS account's progression to a grid of randomized unlocks tied to the Slayer skill. He can't advance other skills, complete specific quests, unlock new regions, or even spend money without completing Slayer tasks, collecting Slayer keys (again, part of the app's design), and cashing them in for slots on the grid.
OSRS players have come up with randomized and restricted modes before, but I've never seen a thesis like this backed up by this kind of technical support, especially from the player themselves. The closest comparison might be the Nightmare one-HP series from Settled that used a client plugin cooked up by fellow creator Gudi. But this is a whole companion app.
Dan is outwardly just another Ironman who can't trade other players, but he's playing a version of OSRS that nobody has ever seen before. The SlayerScape grid is fully featured and impressively dynamic. It's also more dangerous than most restricted modes, running a real risk of saddling the account with nearly impossible challenges or bricking it outright with completely impossible tasks.
"I think these options are pretty terrible," Dan says early into the series as he sizes up his grid choices. "I'm now very nervous that our board is going to deadlock immediately. I think that can happen. I did try to build a system where the tiles would be placed such that you can't ever actually have an unsolvable random board – you know, pseudo-random – but I don't know, maybe I didn't think of some quest requirements that are Ironman-specific or something that kill us."
This series also proves just how much people, from active or lapsed RuneScape fans to MMO and challenge run enthusiasts, crave this kind of content. The first video on Dan's channel quickly passed 200,000 views – coveted territory for OSRS content. Follow-up episodes – we're up to four hour-long videos now – have done impressively well, too, with episode two already past 100,000 views.
The novelty is powerful. These restricted OSRS accounts reliably serve up can't-look-away carnage – countless hours of one player's self-imposed torture reduced to 30 seconds of highly consumable content by the power of editing – as well as obscure facts and creative problem solving. Through the lens of SlayerScape, there's also an added sense of unpredictability – the allure of what the grid is going to spit out next. I think this comment from Dan on the latest episode sums it up well: "Y'all ever seen a grown man lose his mind over a steel platebody before?"
As it happens, developer Jagex just recently ran an official Grid Master event that used a loosely similar interface of unlocks but awarded absurdly overpowered bonuses and items like infinite food or higher XP rates. The creativity and appetite of the OSRS player base has directly shaped and inspired many of the main game's more out-there modes and ideas, and the grid parallel here is especially striking.
