Every time Old School RuneScape The story emerges and there is an acclimatization period where I struggle to understand what exactly the players are doing and why. I’m familiar with the game, having played it once, but in extreme cases, RuneScape can be quite a wild place, a world where players suddenly burst a dam in a 16-year-old mini-game. suppressing security en masseor some thrill seeker risking losing a 370 hour account to get a fancy raincoat (to be fair, he has a flame).
But even by RuneScape standards, it’s just crazy. OSRS players have banded together to throw dragon bones at the famous Vtuber, apparently to help her make the most of one of the game’s hardest stats: Prayer.
Let’s unpack this. Nerissa Ravencroft is a holo-live streamer, supposedly straight from the seedy cobbles of Hogwarts, who has taken over OSRS in recent months and attracted a ton of gamers to her streams (Thanks, GamesRadar+). RuneScape remained RuneScape, and adventure soon fell by the wayside in favor of more esoteric pursuits, with Nerissa recently focusing on prayer training.
Prayer training is accomplished by gaining (wait for it) experience in prayer, and the quickest way to do this is to acquire or simply buy a whole lot of bones and then bring them to the altar. This maximizes the XP gain from the dice, and if you have dragon dice, it’s an XP bonanza, relatively speaking.
Nerissa’s recent stream was titled: Hm“I’m sick, but there’s always time for bones.” And in some kind of meta shift for RuneScape, a whole bunch of players lined up to kneel down and give Nerissa as many dragon bones and even superior dragon bones as possible (la-di-da). “It’s time,” said the Vtuber. “Now I’m just waiting for the bones to be donated.”
And the bones flowed. Nerissa’s fans, who for reasons unknown to me call themselves “Jailers”, literally drowned her in bones. The maximum level for the Prayer skill is 99, and Nerissa’s level is currently 96 (in OSRS, the experience required for each level increases exponentially, so halfway to level 99 is level 92).
This is all something of an OSRS joke. Prayer is one skill that is essentially a pain in the ass to get the most out of as it is extremely expensive in terms of dice cost (if you want to do it effectively) and time consuming despite this and the benefits from reaching higher levels isn’t even that good. It’s usually something players do after they’ve done everything else, rather than something important.
Unless you’re a Vtuber with an army of fans bringing you bones, of course. Nerissa never had to leave the altar (where you sacrifice bones) because a constant stream of OSRS players would line up to hand over their dragon bones, superior dragon bones, and even do the troublesome job of lighting the incense burners on the altar.
Nerissa is probably the most famous Vtuber associated with OSRS, which is probably why the gaming community has responded so enthusiastically to her interest. They don’t just offer bones to the bone god, they also create fan art of her in the game and even remix some of her songs in OSRS style.
As far as OSRS goes, it’s quite useful, not least because the appeal of some of the game’s banana stories is how much time some people devote to the game. Maximizing the Prayer skill is good, but what about grinding the worst version of a minigame for 149 long hours (and giving up 88 experience levels) just to get a cute raccoon without committing a crime? Heck, there are people who beat the odds of winning the lottery jackpot to get the rarest item in the game. In this context, getting crowds of believers to bring you bones seems like a reasonable approach.