Old School : Tucker's Kobolds and Trained Jellies

KesselZero said:

I think this is really the heart of the old-school/new-school divide, at least as I see it. Around the time of 2e the focus of D&D shifted from dungeon/hexcrawling to telling a coherent, epic story starring the characters. I read a good essay somewhere about how this started with the Dragonlance campaign, which let the players play the characters from the novels-- including, for the characters who get killed off in the novels, knowing exactly when, where, and how your PC will die.

So if your focus is on telling coherent stories and making the mechanics of the game fit them, then yes, nicely balanced encounters and no random monsters make sense. But if your focus is on letting the dice fall how they may and having stories arise from the game, then that element of randomness, balanced by player skill, makes more sense.

In both cases, the game tells a story. In old-school gaming, the story arises from the situations the game creates. In new-school gaming, the situations of the game are created to fit a pre-existing story. I personally love both styles of play, and think both can be taken to dangerous extremes.

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I think most of the D&D games that I have ever played in a third of a century have fallen into a middle ground. Even very early pre-1E games often had long term campaign hooks and re-occurring villains and plotlines. That didn't start with Dragonlance (although playing PCs of characters in a novel and being railroaded into a dozen or so specific modules did).

The DM tends to have some ideas for a pre-existing story(ies) and leaves hooks around for the players to work with, but even the DM changes his ideas and his monsters and encounters, sometimes from session to session. The DM might be running a given module and railroading the players a little with it, but the DM decides some portion of the directional options and the players decide some portion. I don't recall campaigns where either the DM forced the game to always go in one direction, or one where the players mostly decided to ignore the DM and go off in whatever direction they wanted. It's typically been a middle ground.


To me, the difference between old school gaming and new school gaming is one of rules light versus rules heavy and the resulting DM/player style differences because of that.

In old school gaming, the game system had a lot of charts. There were a lot of different tables and charts on how things should work. But, some of these charts were things like random monsters or random treasure or adjusting to hit based on armor type. They were unnecessary and often dropped in subsequent versions. The game seemed a bit more complex than it actually was and most of the real complexity was due to inferior game mechanics where the industry hadn't yet fine tuned some of those mechanics. As an example, early versions of Turn Undead had a complex chart, 3E had a much simpler chart, and 4E got rid of the chart completely.


But in old school gaming, although the game system was mechanically a bit more clunky with more table lookup, the game system didn't have as many rules. The 1E PHB is a lot thinner than subsequent PHBs. The game could be played with or without grids. The DM tended to have more power with regard to adjudication because there were fewer rules telling everyone how a given unusual circumstance could be handled. And even 1E was split off into a Basic version of the game system to make it even less rules intensive. The game felt different from table to table because DMs handled a lot of things differently because either there were no rules on the subject, or the rules were somewhat vague.

As D&D has matured, the number of rules and clarity of rules has increased. At the same time, many of those rules were simplified or became more efficient. As each edition of the game system matures, there is even more rules bloat as more and more splat books are released. The rules are more efficient, but there are more of them, so the complexity is constantly high.

But, that didn't happen in 1E. It took 2 years for 1E to release the PHB, the DMG, and the MM. Rules bloat wasn't the norm. There was no Internet. DMs couldn't just download pre-made adventures, they built them themselves or went to a hobby shop and bought them (and in that case, most DMs had limited choice and many different groups played the same modules).


So I think that a lot of the "old school feels more free form and more reactive to the situation created than new school" ideas stem from the fact that there were fewer rules, more on the fly adjudication on the part of the DM, and less access to pre-published material. The DM did a lot more "seat of the pants" decision making because he didn't have as many tools and rules to handle adjudication and world building. The work required to DM the game was so much more intensive that the DM often had less of the important parts of his world fleshed out and more unimportant things fleshed out. He had to on the fly adapt to the player situations because it did take more effort to create monsters and build his world and adventures. Plus, DMs were naive in the earlier days. They would create drinking charts (Constitution checks for consuming alcohol), NPC reaction charts, and a wide variety of other house rules and charts and such because they thought it was important and because the game system wasn't mature enough and DMs were not experienced enough to not know that this was unnecessary.

In latter versions of the game, a lot of this DM legwork was handled for them, thus freeing a DM up to work on more important game elements and fleshing out pre-existing stories more than previously, thus making them feel more like pre-existing stories.

But, I've never been in a game that I can remember that the pre-existing story wasn't often sidetracked with side quests and new situations because the game does evolve from session one to session N. The DM isn't actually telling a story, the DM and players together are telling a story and that story is always evolving and nothing like the pre-existing story that the DM originally set out to tell.

On the size of the PHB thing. That's not entirely fair though KarinsDad. So many of the rules that were in the DMG are now in the PHB. Most of the combat rules forex. To the point where you can play D&D without a DMG quite easily in 3e or 4e. About the only reason to open a 3e DMG is the xp value tables and possibly a magic item.

4e even moved those into the PHB. Although, to be completely fair, the magic item section in the 4e PHB sucks very badly. Bleah. Boring and bleah.

The DMG has shifted over the years from a rules reference to a style guide. Even in 2e, much of the actual mechanics had moved over to the PHB.

OTOH, this:

KD said:

So I think that a lot of the "old school feels more free form and more reactive to the situation created than new school" ideas stem from the fact that there were fewer rules, more on the fly adjudication on the part of the DM, and less access to pre-published material. The DM did a lot more "seat of the pants" decision making because he didn't have as many tools and rules to handle adjudication and world building. The work required to DM the game was so much more intensive that the DM often had less of the important parts of his world fleshed out and more unimportant things fleshed out. He had to on the fly adapt to the player situations because it did take more effort to create monsters and build his world and adventures. Plus, DMs were naive in the earlier days. They would create drinking charts (Constitution checks for consuming alcohol), NPC reaction charts, and a wide variety of other house rules and charts and such because they thought it was important and because the game system wasn't mature enough and DMs were not experienced enough to not know that this was unnecessary.

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I 100% agree with.

Mattachine said:

Leatherhead, that is why the combat stunt rules came out in the DMG2.

Like so much of 4e, the best stuff was not in the first three books.

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I should look into that then. I think I skipped over the DMG2 in favor of getting other books at the time.

Leatherhead said:

I should look into that then. I think I skipped over the DMG2 in favor of getting other books at the time.

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DMG1 is basically a big DUH book if you've been a DM before (important! but very DUH). DMG2 is fantastic.

Andor said:

in 4e it was pretty explicit that you could not "power stunt" your abilities in unexpected ways, nor need you fear a fireball destroying the 1,000 origami cranes that was the McGuffin.

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As others have pointed out upthread, this claim has no basis in the actual 4e mechanics or rulebooks.

Someone said:

Well, it's a bit wanting in how and why things work for many mechanics and powers. This makes a lot of effects and plans dificult to adjudicate.

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The rules for DCs and damage are fairly clear. I agree that there could be much better rules for inflicing conditions and other status effects.

Andor said:

My favorite magic item from 3e was the immovable rod.

<snip>

And not to pick an edition war, I genuinely do not know, was it put into 4e?

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Yes. It is in the Adventurer's Vault, as a 12th level wondrous item (and renamed from a "rod" to a "shaft", in order to avoid confusion with the magical sceptres that warlocks and invoker's wield):

Andor said:

I'm not completely ignorant of 4e. I own the base 3 books, I have read them. I have not kept up with 4e, because I have never once, since it came out, met a single person willing to run it.

<snip>

I think the expectation that PCs should be able to cope with any challange within the existing resources on their character sheets is a hinderance to creative or unusual use of resources or abilities to deal with problems in unexpected ways.

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And I believe that you are mistaken.

Andor said:

There is an expectation, which is stronger in 4e than is ealier editions, that life is supposed to be fair for the PCs.

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You may be confusing the PC and the player. There is no expectation in 4e that the fiction will be fair to the PC. For example, there is no objection to creating a scenario in which the PC must choose risk to him-/herself or risk to the prisoner s/he is trying to resuce. (There is such a scenario in H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth. My players had their PCs choose safety over courage. One of the prisoners died as a result.)

But yes, the game is designed to be fair to the players. In my experience, this provides a powerful underpinning for creativity, because the players have an assurance that they will not be mechanically hosed for trying stuff that no one anticipated when designing the scenario or the PCs.

KarinsDad said:

<snip 4e rules>

This last sentence does not imply objects.

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grimslade said:

The 1E write up of fireball talked about igniting flammable objects and melting gold. The 3.x makes no mention and 4E reads very cut and dry.

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This always gets brought up. But interestingly, the fireball description in OD&D and Moldvay Basic is almost identical to that in 4e - including referring only to creatures as targets of the effect. Yet players of those games worked out that fireball was hot. We didn't need the rulebook to expressly tell us that a ball of fire that damages all creatures in its area might also set fire to things and even melt them. Is it really the case that contemporary players are different?

Andor said:

These days, and this is not a mechanical feature of any system, the thought seems to be that it is not "fair" or "balanced" to allow sneaky bastard PCs to bypass or neutralize a threat with unconventional tactics. Likewise it is "unfair" for GMs to present a situation with no obvious or simple solutions.

I'm trying to foster discussion of where along the spectrum of the simulationist 'expolitable realism' to the gamist 'balanced abstraction' the good people of Enworld would like to see 5e set it's goals.

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The two things you mention here are completely orthogonal. I don't need "exploitable realism" (= wacky/gappy action resolution mechanics) in order to have a system in which PCs bypass or neutralise threats with uncoventional tactics. I just need good action resolution mechanics.

BobTheNob said:

The more strict the game rules become, why not just play a computer game indeed? (Players reasonable or not!)

Tabletop has the unique aspect of being able to step outside of the mechanics and that is its key draw.

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I don't agree with this. I want a game where the action resolution mechanics work. I don't want to have to "step outside" of them.

And that is irrelevant to any comparison to computer games. The creativity that I want out of an RPG has nothing to do with the rules - it is to do with the fiction - the range of conceivable situations and their resolutions. I want action resolution mechanics that will support and encourage surprising outcomes via their application. Not that I have to ignore if I am to have a fun and creative game.

Andor said:

The up-side is player and GM creativity, and the 'remember that time' stories.

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Games with tight resolution mechanics have these things too. It's just that the "remember that" tends to be in respect of some interesting or dramatic story event, rather than some wacky bit of improvised action resolution.

TheFindus said:

There is nothing plausible in being able to train a jelly monster. I do not consider this kind of challenge fun, either, but that may be just me.

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I have used "taming animal" challenges three times in my current 4e campaign - twice with bears, once with a behemoth (= dinosaur). None involved Pavlovian conditioning - the first involved befriending a bear, the second half the party taming a bear tha the other half of the party was cowing, and the third taking control, during combat, of a behemoth that enemy hobgoblins had already tamed.

Each time they were interesting challenges to run, but the interest didn't consist in coming up with a mad Pavlovian plan. The interest was in the drama of whether or not the animal could be tamed, and what would happen if it was/wasn't.

So I think I'm agreeing with you. I want a system in which the mechanics are clear, so that risks can be run and dramatic deeds resolved. Playing out a week of conditioning an ochre jelly strikes me as boring - let's roll a Nature check and be done with it!

TheFindus said:

There are a lot of people who like the fact that in 4E the players have more freedom to actually be heroes, that the GM is not their enemy and that they are not dependent on what only the GM thinks is plausible in a certain situation. And those people have just as many feelings of nostalgia thinking about moments in 4E, 3e and other non-old-school campaigns. And we are not less creative than old-school-players

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Yes.

Alan Shutko said:

Night's Dark Terror and Veiled Society were different.

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Night's Dark Terror, with a bit of tweaking and expansion here and there, has kept my 4e game going for 15 levels now. But I don't see in what way, at all, it is an "old school" module.

JonWake said:

In old school play, the rules existed only as a rough approximation of the fiction. That is, the players treated the fictional world as the primary source of information about their characters

<snip>

In new school play (and by that I mean 3e and 4e DnD), the playstyle has moved to an explicit interaction with the rules

<snip>

For example, a fighter want to shove a giant off a cliff. An old school player might look at his (you so cheated) 18/100 strength, ask the GM how far away the cliff edge was, and tell the GM that he's throwing his shoulder into the giant's knee and knocking him off balance with the haft of his great ax. The DM then makes a ruling, or has the player make a strength check, or any of a dozen different ways to deal with it.
Upside: The player is thinking in terms of the world.
Downside: The potential for five week long arguments about center of gravity and mass.

A new school player will ask the DM (or look at the battle mat) how far away the cliff is, then look for the ability that lets them push a creature 10'. The player makes an attack roll, hits, the monster gets pushed over the ledge and that's all she wrote. The DM then describes it as the fighter using the haft of the ax to shove him back, etc.
Upside: Clarity: the rules are explicit, without regard to particulars. The power works.
Downside: The player thinks in terms of how the rules interact with the story.

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I think you are talking about the right things, but your account of the fictional posititionin in the new school (4e) example is out in one respect - the giant's distance from the cliff is a state of affairs in the fiction, which is a necessary input into the player's decision making and engagement with the mechanics.

Harlekin said:

You (the player) can rely on being able to try the maneuver once a day with decent chance of success.

You (the PC) can't rely on anything. Even the first time you try the daily, it may fail (The PC doesn't see the dice roll). Maybe you are attempting the maneuver a second time but fail miserably (a miss is a miss, no matter which attack the player announced). Maybe you try a second time and sort of succeed (A critical on an encounter ability). Assuming that it would be easy for the PC to see a pattern in that he is able to succeed 0 or one time every day assumes that he can actually clearly define success and failure. It also assumes that the powers work exactly as described when the PC is off screen. I would argue that in practice matches or in fights that are not threatening to the PCs, dailys can probably be used multiple times.

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This is a terrific explanation of martial dailies. In the fiction, as a general rule they are no different from martial at wills or encounter powers - they are just the fighter "doing his/her schtick", and doing it well. It is only for the player that the mechanical difference exists.

Hassassin said:

I want the decisions I make as a player to parallel those the character would make, where feasible. I don't want a mechanical incentive to do one thing, when to the character another choice should be superior (I know the Double-Spin-Kick, so of course I use it now there's a chance), or a strategic concern that the character doesn't have (no, better save the Double-Spin-Kick for the BBEG). Resource management should happen in-game.

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I take it that you don't want Fate/Hero points, because these are a metagame resource?

Hassassin said:

You can increase narrative control by adding things like action/fate/hero points on top of a system that by default is focused on method acting. I don't think going the other way is as easy.

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I think I understand you - in that, yes, if you add Fate Points to a game like Rolemaster you can get something more metagame-y in character, but you can't take a metagame-y game like 4e and easily turn it into something sparse like Runequest or (some versions of) Rolemaster.

This is true, but I'm not sure what follows from it. For example, 4e is a much better game for getting the gonzo fantasy experience it provides than would be Rolemaster with Fate Points put on top of it. And a game like Burning Wheel, which arguably fits the description of simulationinst mechanics plus Fate Points, has a lot of other stuff going on besides those Fate Points (at a minimimum, Let it Ride, its rules for PC advancement, and its guidelines for adjudicating failed checks) that differentiates it from Rolemaster, RQ, 3E etc, and that make it a good vehicle for narrativism.

pemerton said:

Someone said:

Well, it's a bit wanting in how and why things work for many mechanics and powers. This makes a lot of effects and plans dificult to adjudicate.

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The rules for DCs and damage are fairly clear. I agree that there could be much better rules for inflicing conditions and other status effects.

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That’s true, but I wasn’t thinking on that. Expanding on what I wanted to say in the first quote, the problems so to speak are first that many rules have little fluff providing context. In the example mentioned in the OP, I’d have no qualms declaring that the origami collection is burned since the mage’s spell is an area effect that doesn’t discriminate between friend and foe and also the brief description provided evokes a deflagration of sorts.

However, say I use a monster with an at will power named “entrancing call” that’s a large close burst that deals psychic damage and pulls the victim. The brief entry on the creature’s fluff mentions that this thing lives near the shore and uses his powers to pull victims overboard, drowning them. Right off the bat, the player doesn’t have much to latch on: while the effects are well defined, there’s not much information to McGiver the environment to their advantage, other than trying to exploit the line of sight/effect rules. The player or the DM may very well think that the monster’s power doesn’t rely on sound and is more a telepathic thing; actually, by the power’s mechanics it shouldn’t be carried by sound since bursts are blocked by hard cover and sound isn’t (it makes more sense if the monster’s power is a gaze attack actually). So the idea of covering the rowers’ ears with wax may never cross the players’ mind, or if suggested, the DM may declare it fails automatically.

Second, on the other hand there are other mechanics that are much more gamist and outright defy acting against them. Marking, for example, is a nebulous concept with an explanation that often involves the marker “closely watching” the marked creature and disrupting his attacks, but this fluff doesn’t carry any actual consequences or meaning. If my fighter throws a javelin at an enemy 2 squares away, but then is petrified and swallowed whole by a giant frog, there’s no way he’s going to closely watch the enemy or disrupt his attacks, and I can’t think on any sane way that a javelin can be thrown is a way so disruptive than imposes a significant penalty to a creature even if the fighter isn’t around, but it doesn’t matter as the javelin target will carry the Mark penalty until is the fighter’s turn again.

This doesn’t mean I’m against 4e’s power structure; actually is the opposite. I think the rules overall could benefit from a bit more fluff and structuring the rules in a way that sparks the player’s out of the box thinking, instead of relegating this IMO very important part of the gaming discussion to a ghetto page in the DMG.

pemerton said:

Games with tight resolution mechanics have these things too. It's just that the "remember that" tends to be in respect of some interesting or dramatic story event, rather than some wacky bit of improvised action resolution.

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I've heard a fair number of "How we got out of that scrape" stories. I've never yet heard one boasting about how they resolved it with carrots, rubber dice and a hampster... at least not at the table level.

If I left the impression that I'm against coherant resolution mechanics, I am not. I am all for universal resolution mechanics.

Indeed I will go so far as to say I think 5e would do well to have something very like 4es page 42, and then assign bonuses to specific classes rather than have laundry lists of "Kick him in the shin so he falls back" and "Kick him in the shin so he falls down" abilities.

So a fighter might have +3 to hit with improvised abilities and get an extra square/5'/1" of movement to shove the badguys around with when using improvised abilities, whereas a rogue might get +1 and have an extra 1d6 damage, being a sneaky and vicious little git.

Andor said:

So a fighter might have +3 to hit with improvised abilities and get an extra square/5'/1" of movement to shove the badguys around with when using improvised abilities, whereas a rogue might get +1 and have an extra 1d6 damage, being a sneaky and vicious little git.

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This is what feats are for aren't they? I mean, the exact things you're looking for exist as feats in 4e. Well that's not entirely true. They don't usually trigger on "improvised" abilities. But, again, I'm not entirely sure how improvised you have to be to be considered "improvised".

Given that a 4e character, out of the box, at say, 7th level, has about 10 or 12 different abilities that he can choose from at any given point of time, and each of those abilities can do something different, I'm thinking that most characters have one heck of a big box. (I can't believe I just wrote that )

See, this is where I'm really having problems. Sure, going outside the box is easy when you have a tiny little box that the rules cover. Heck, swimming is an out of the box action in some versions of D&D. Do we really consider swimming to be creative play?

The problem is, every edition of D&D has had rules that cover more situations than the edition previous. Sometimes more complicated, sometimes just broader - but always covering more situations and more broadly applicable. Thus, the bar for "out of the box" thinking keeps getting set higher and higher. But, that's only a problem if you consider "out of the box" thinking to be a goal in and of itself.

To me, just because the rules cover a given action, doesn't mean that that action is no longer creative. Sure, using an immovable bar in 2e to trip something was creative. Neat use of the item. But, it is no less creative in 3e to do exactly the same thing despite the fact that we now have mechanics in place to adjudicate a trip attack.

It's the tripping with an immovable rod part that is creative, not the mechanics used to resolve the action.

Hussar said:

It's the tripping with an immovable rod part that is creative, not the mechanics used to resolve the action.

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Right. Again, I'm not against having universal mechanics, in fact I'm strongly in favor of them.

I am a fan of out of the box thinking however.

I'm wondering if, rather than having such characters with such large boxes, 5e might do better with just a page 42 like general improvisation system with classes and feats that play around with that universal resolution mechanic.

The upside is that the players are not conditioned to looking first and always at the listed block of abilities on their character sheet to accomplish all goals.

It seems from the hints of the stat driven skill system that this is the aesthetic they are going for in 5e. I hope so, but I was curious to see what the general opinion was.