OSRS, like life itself, can be a long grind towards personal goals and objectives. Sometimes you’re afking life and diving deep into games, films, or hobbies, but what most people don’t realize is that we, as gamers, regardless of the game we’re playing, get a lot of passive XP from playing games.
There are so many valuable skills and lessons you can actually learn simply by playing. If we even look deeper than this, playing is a huge part of humans and that exact something which can bring a lot of joy in one’s life. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s gaming addiction which is very often intertwined with depression and anxiety and can actually decrease the quality of your life. We can go into a whole deep philosophical discussion about this very specific topic.
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Aware?
But let us keep on the topic. Regardless of where you are on this spectrum of enjoyment or addiction, by playing games you will gain passive XP that will help you IRL. This comes in the form of various skills and mental abilities you might not even be aware of.
If you’re an Old School RuneScape player, you have certainly gained a lot of these abilities, so here’s a moral boost for whatever you are trying to accomplish. You are one step closer to it because you’ve played RuneScape.
Passive XP – the concept
Passive XP is a concept well known to gamers and really well known to those of you who play Old School RuneScape. What it means is that you will get XP towards levelling something else, while doing something. For example, during your Slayer tasks, you will actively get Slayer and Combat XP and maybe even earn gold with some of the tasks, but depending on the monsters you’re killing you can get passive Prayer XP if you bring a Bone Crusher or an Ash Sanctifier.
While you train your Fishing with Barbarian Fishing you will actively gain a lot of Fishing XP, and some Strength and Agility as passive XP. Or if you’re bossing, your main focus is the KC and profits or maybe just mastering the mechanics of that particular boss, but you’ll get some passive Combat XP.
You get the point… Passive XP is a bonus to whatever you’re doing. It means that gaining that xp is a bonus besides your main focus, so it’s effortless. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when playing any game, not only Old School RuneScape, and while engaging in many other activities. For example, you might learn some new words all while listening to a song.
My point here is to make you aware of skills you most probably learnt while playing RuneScape by sharing what I’ve personally learnt. This is however, by no means, a complete list, but touches the main stuff.
Regardless if that passive XP is intentional or a pure bonus you were not even aware of, here are some example of passive skills that you’ve probably learnt also while playing OSRS.
Discipline for the goal
If you’ve played OSRS you’re certainly goal oriented. You know that you have to suck it up and level up your Fishing to 96 fishing or 91 with boost in order to complete the Morytania elite diary and get the full XP for the bones crushed with the Bonecrusher, access to the harmony island patch, and all the other good stuff.
You know you’ll have to endure and train your Agility to 86 to make your life easier when killing the Kalphite Queen. You know you’ll have to complete all the quests for the 6th Slayer block slot. The list can go on and on…
You know you’ve done and you’ll do activities you don’t particularly love because they will help you achieve something that you want and which will later on make your life easier.
You have it in you. You’ve learnt this self-discipline to do the momentarily not enjoyable work to benefit later on. And even if you never thought about it, if you can do that in a game, you can definitely do that IRL once you see how your goals will improve your life.
Picking mentors
It’s so easy for any gamer to understand how a mentor can help you advance much faster and progress your character. Be it that your Old School mentor is a friend who’s been playing longer than you, your clan mates, or various content creators you just know that you’ll progress faster if you listen to them.
However, many of us fail to pick mentors when it comes to IRL, for a large variety of reasons and this can slow us down from reaching where we want to arrive.
Once we understand that any path we’d take IRL mentors will boost our progression and achieve our IRL goals faster regardless of what they are. It’s easier to take the recipe from a chef than try to figure out what the ingredients from that amazing dish were yourself.
Sometimes, you’ll take more pleasure in figuring the mechanics yourself, but where you don’t pick a mentor and make it easier and faster for yourself.
Goal setting
Goal setting is a skill we learn in OSRS, even more than in other games, because we have to choose what we want to prioritize and what we’ll have to do. It starts with getting a certain level for a certain quest or achievement diary, but goes as far as doing various activities to get gp for very specific goal items… dreaming of the twisted bow, or Tumeken’s Shadow…
You can take any path, but certain paths will make it easier for you. That’s why you always ask your OSRS mentors what to work towards in order to have it easier, or what to do for gp with a certain skill level. For example, you’ll benefit from unlocking the dragon defender early in game and many older players will tell you to get it as soon as you can enter the warriors guild.
Low xp better than no XP
This philosophy is a very strong life mantra that most successful people follow and that we’ve all been doing all along in 2007Scape. The better low XP than no XP philosophy refers to putting effort every single day towards your goals without taking rest days, and varying the intensity of what you’re doing rather than stopping completely.
In RuneScape it could mean as little as exchanging one inventory of bones for Bonemeal and Slime at Robin every single day to contribute towards your Prayer XP gain, or training your Smithing semi afk with cannonballs, when something is preventing you from focused playing the game. IRL it can look like spending 5 minutes reading a page or answering an email, taking a relaxed walk instead of jogging, or taking those dirty cups to the kitchen on your way. It is that lower intensity or very short action that will put another brick towards your goals every single day. And remember, you already know how to set your goals.
Scam proof
Most of the Old School RuneScape players have become scam proof because… We’ve been scammed or lured or were really close to that at least one time in our RuneScape career. If you haven’t you’re either really lucky, or you just haven’t played long enough yet. Or maybe you had good friends or watched good content creators who gave you a fair warning about OSRS’ scammers.
But you certainly know or heard of someone who lost their bank to a scammer. Most of the Old School RuneScape scams have an IRL equivalent. I’m not gonna imply that losing millions of GP is not hard, but knowing the RuneScape scams and their IRL equivalents can prevent you from losing a lot of cash.
Scammers act the same, as they follow the same interactional and behavioural patterns both IRL and in game, or in other online environments you might find them. The pattern can be summed up by a few steps:
- Step 1: Fake offer of generosity like trading an item or offering something that sounds too good to be true, like trimming your kite shield. This step is done both to appeal to the victim’s desire and maybe even grindiness, but also to earn trust, and it appears in most of the scams and lures scenarios.
- Step 2: adding a sense of urgency and this is so that the victim doesn’t have time to rationally think about what they are doing or about to do, and because scammers don’t like wasting their time.
- Step 3: taking the goodies and parting away either by ghosting or laughing in the victim’s face
It happened to me quite a few times that I managed to dodge the bullet simply because I was aware of that pattern from OSRS.
Final thoughts
There are plenty of other skills that you’ve certainly learnt while playing Old School RuneScape or IRL, but I think these are the most important. Feel free to contact me if you think of any other I should add to this list.
