An RPG Forum Lexicon: Clarity of terms

[Thunderfoot]

I don't think it is about death. It is about choices. OD&D, 1e, and 2e don't present the player with many mechanical development choices after character creation. There is, honestly, nothing to build with. Your classes and statistics were largely set at creation, and your didn't have choices in what powers you picked up as you advanced - no feats to choose from.

The first I saw of character builds planned out long before the advancement occurred was not in D&D at all, but with Vampire: The Masquerade, released well before 3e.

Don't know about TWoD - never liked that system, but I can agree with you on the choices aspect for D&D. I think the death aspect for me was the realization that some folks never imagine their character dying, more anecdotal than psyche, so I can agree with that too. What a shame though, a player never having to re-roll a character due to premature campaign departure. (I think I just created a new term. No longer is it a character death its a PCD. TPK, not anymore, it's a Group PCD or Mass PCD.)

 

[Tom Servo]

I don't usually post but this thread has me intrigued.

I've always considered Power Gamer and Min-Maxer to be two separate things. For me a Power Gamer is generally a player with rules mastery who builds their characters to be maximally effective and/or powerful (generally in combat). A Min-Maxer is someone who will sacrifice everything to be uber-great at one thing, even though it might not be the most "powerful" overall.

To me the min-maxer is the guy who will point buy one stat to the max and let all the rest suffer, the guy who spends all character wealth on one super great weapon, etc.

I did not realize many considered these terms synonymous.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Don't know about TWoD - never liked that system, but I can agree with you on the choices aspect for D&D. I think the death aspect for me was the realization that some folks never imagine their character dying, more anecdotal than psyche, so I can agree with that too. What a shame though, a player never having to re-roll a character due to premature campaign departure. (I think I just created a new term. No longer is it a character death its a PCD. TPK, not anymore, it's a Group PCD or Mass PCD.)

I've had a lot of Premature Campaign Departures.
Like the time Randy got arrested for fighting and could not escape that town for three months (by the time he caught up, the rest of the posse was dead).
Or when CJ had to head to a distant city and wouldn't be in the campaign again.
Or when Randolph was crowned and had to stay and rule over his people.
Not all campaign departures are fatal.

 

[Desdichado]

This is a player type that has nearly always been with the game. Again, as already noted, it is someone who attempts to use the rules to overrule the DM. This, in a game where the original approach was to solidly position the DM in authority OVER the rules in order to facilitate a better game. Now, sometimes the DM IS wrong and players have a certain right and expectation to be able to appeal to the established "rules". The Rules Lawyer is the one who makes himself a pest by repeated and frequently unnecessary insistence upon adherence to the rules when the DM's adjudication is quite sufficient.

I've long been a fan of the notion that rulings are more important than rules. Heck, some of the authors who have written, either in game or in supplementary material (Dragon articles and whatnot) have gone so far as to assert that there are no rules to D&D, just suggestions.

Curiously, although third edition was launched with "rule 0" prominently displayed in the first page or two of text, and the motto "tools, not rules" it's widely believed that this paradigm gradually shifted during the third edition era. I'm genuinely curious if the presentation of the rules... perhaps at some point after 3e migrated to 3.5... contributed to this, or if it's more of a gestalt thing that just happened amongst a portion of the player base.

Certainly our group didn't really adopt that approach. Although we like to play "correctly" more often than not, and don't mind asking the resident rules encyclopedia guy his opinion on thorny issues, in general, we're all perfectly happy to accept a GM ruling and move on. Although we like, often, to have the player impacted by the ruling try and look it up if he can to tell us later what we "should" have done according to the rulebook. Just for curiousity.

But we don't always do that. We're just as happy just having a ruling and go.

I believe it is a term that has arisen mostly out of 3rd Edition, though it may have seen some use prior to that. 3E in particular, however, was designed rather specifically to embrace the notion that a large part of the fun of the game was SUPPOSED to be found in manipulation of the rules - the concept of "Rules Mastery". In promulgating that concept the natural implication is that it would be contrarian to let characters evolve naturally. A player is intended to devote notable amounts of time and effort to gaming the system because that's where the fun is. Problem is that just isn't universally true but those rules were designed to focus on it anyway.

A character "build" then, is seen as a product of rulesets where players do not "get" how the game was originally played and intended to be played. Again, a certain amount of pre-planning of the career of a PC is to be expected but D&D is not supposed to be a competitive excercise. Too much emphasis on character "builds", upon gaming the system rather than playing the game with less... obsession?... with the rules rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That would include myself.

I heard the term used first with Champions, I think. I also associated it a lot more with systems like Hero or Gurps than with D&D, before 2000 anyway. I think the connotation of a planned approach to building a character requires nothing more than tools with which to customize the character, and then it's a natural outgrowth of that.

However, I don't really associate "character builds" with characters who start at first level and play through. Although certainly I've seen characters who grew according to pre-planned "routes" or paths, and I've done a little bit of that even myself, I consider "character builds" to be characters that are crafted for a certain purpose at a certain level. Either for one-shots, as NPCs or villains, or as characters who start at a game that's higher than 1st level.

I also think a lot of the perception you're noting here is just that: you're perception. There's nothing in the nature of the game itself that stipulates that this type of system mastery is necessary or even desireable; that's just an outgrowth of those who's tastes run that direction and wish to play that kind of metagame with their characters. For those who don't... well, the customization tools also serve plenty of other purposes too. Little things like the swashbuckler who takes a few ranks of Craft (needlepoint) so his frilly shirt can always be kept in top condition, even after he's been out and about adventuring, or the barbarian who has a few ranks of Profession (juggler) to make a little bit of cash between adventures add a level of character development that has nothing whatsoever to do with "gaming" the system or system mastery.

Of course, you could always have come up with that kind of character development fluff on your own, but I'd argue that without the mechanics there to suggest the, chances are that much less of it would be done.

In older versions there was little or no room for character customization except through roleplaying. All the abilities a character would ever have was clearly and perhaps narrowly defined at the time of character creation. There had long been a call for greater room to customize characters abilities without them being graven in stone by the simple choices of race and class. 3E is seen by some as having swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, giving players too much freedom and too much ability to "dictate" to the DM what they are allowed to do within the game through the exercise of "Rules Mastery".

Older editions didn't have any means of customizing your character, that's true. And for many people, that was a serious flaw with D&D. You refer earlier to how the game was "meant" to be played originally; I submit that that's an irrelevant consideration. How the game is meant to be played is the way that brings the most enjoyment to your table. If character customization isn't something that you want, that's all well and good, and I can hardly fault you for your taste and preference. But casting the addition of character customization into the game as if it were a case of the game having "gone astray" and fallen from its pure and holy state or whatever is a mistake, I think.

The inclusion of character customization options was, I strongly believe, done because WotC percieved a shift in demand in the marketplace that was asking for exactly that. I know in my case, it was one of the main reasons that I was willing to come back to D&D after having given up and left in frustration with the system way back in the mid-80s... before 2nd edition, even.

 

[1Mac]

Agreed with Tom Servo on the distinction between powergaming and min-maxing. Basically the latter is a subset of the former that focuses on improving one type of ability and the expense of all others.

Contrary to some other posters, I think "new schooler" is a real term. As I understand it, the New School coincides with the beginning of the OGL and continues today (despite big differences between 4E and OGL games). Qualities I ascribe to New School games include mechanics for more aspects of the game world (with a necessary interest in keeping all those mechanics streamlined), and a preference to longer stories over one-shot dungeon-crawls.

To me, Old School games have fewer but more diverse mechanics, and tend to be happy hand-waving aspects of the game not covered by the rules. They also seem more geared towards shorter, more straightforward games. I'll entertain the possibility that I'm relying on generalizations or ill-formed impressions.

 

[Desdichado]

Contrary to some other posters, I think "new schooler" is a real term. As I understand it, the New School coincides with the beginning of the OGL and continues today (despite big differences between 4E and OGL games). Qualities I ascribe to New School games include mechanics for more aspects of the game world (with a necessary interest in keeping all those mechanics streamlined), and a preference to longer stories over one-shot dungeon-crawls.

To me, Old School games have fewer but more diverse mechanics, and tend to be happy hand-waving aspects of the game not covered by the rules. They also seem more geared towards shorter, more straightforward games. I'll entertain the possibility that I'm relying on generalizations or ill-formed impressions.

I think that that only works if you consider D&D in isolation and not as part of a greater roleplaying game community, with other roleplaying games that did a lot of other things, including things that your "new skool" games incorporated, but which did them many years earlier. And, frankly, maybe it'd be fair to do that, I guess. You could make the argument that D&D was always big enough and enough people always only played D&D, that the other games in the market had minimal impact on them.

From my perspective, I'd say most of these so-called "new skool" innovations were happening in RPG space almost immediately after the hobby was created, either as houserules and homebrews, or later as various fantasy heartbreakers and other games attempted to do things differently than D&D to scratch other itches. Indeed, from my perspective D&D remained in a curiously fossilized "legacy mode" with regard to design direction that was more and more obsolete relative to demand in the marketplace over time until, at about the same time, 1) TSR went backrupt and 2) White Wolf games actually put forth a somewhat credible challenge to D&D's leadership in the hobby.

When WotC took over, they applied actual market research to the hobby (probably for the first time) and the changes in design direction, that led to 3e, were the direct result of that... attempting to give the market what it had been demanding for some time. Not to say that 3e did so perfectly, of course, but to me, the break you see in terms of old skool and new skool lagged very considerably within D&D relative to the player base and what they wanted, and for that matter, what other games were doing as well.

Also, I think that your definition of old skool with regards to the style of the game itself (not the design of the mechanics) can't very well be placed at the timeframe you put it at. The tendency towards longer stories over one-shot dungeon crawls was very evident throughout the lifetime of 2e as well. So that change doesn't match the mechanical changes... and in fact, came many years earlier, even within D&D... without regards to whatever may have been going on in other games.

 

[1Mac]

Also, I think that your definition of old skool with regards to the style of the game itself (not the design of the mechanics) can't very well be placed at the timeframe you put it at. The tendency towards longer stories over one-shot dungeon crawls was very evident throughout the lifetime of 2e as well.

I'll happily grant this.

I think that that only works if you consider D&D in isolation and not as part of a greater roleplaying game community, with other roleplaying games that did a lot of other things, including things that your "new skool" games incorporated, but which did them many years earlier. And, frankly, maybe it'd be fair to do that, I guess. You could make the argument that D&D was always big enough and enough people always only played D&D, that the other games in the market had minimal impact on them.

Yes. DnD is rarely on the bleeding edge of gaming innovation, but it's great for consolidating those innovations and mainstreaming them. I'd say that whatever New-School-type games existed before the OGL, they had nowhere near the impact that the OGL did. Since the OGL, I'd say that most non-DnD strive for the general goal of arbitrating more of the game by a broad set of more-or-less streamlined mechanics, and that games which don't do this are being self-conciously Old-School. A good example is a game like FATE, which does exactly this, even though it does it in a very different way from d20 games.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes. DnD is rarely on the bleeding edge of gaming innovation, but it's great for consolidating those innovations and mainstreaming them. I'd say that whatever New-School-type games existed before the OGL, they had nowhere near the impact that the OGL did. Since the OGL, I'd say that most non-DnD strive for the general goal of arbitrating more of the game by a broad set of more-or-less streamlined mechanics, and that games which don't do this are being self-conciously Old-School. A good example is a game like FATE, which does exactly this, even though it does it in a very different way from d20 games.

I'd say, rather, that FATE's been on an evolutionary path that has little to no reference to D&D other than that D&D started the hobby and crystalized the conventions of roleplaying games in the first place. Trying to fit FATE, for example, into some kind of old or new skool that references design direction of D&D probably isn't going to get very far. Much of the non-D&D RPG world has existed parrallel to D&D and has had little to no impact on it, or vice versa.

I think c. 2000 was a big exception to that in that the d20 system, via the OGL, permeated much of the hobby, and the implications of that are still working themselves out, and conversely, 3e consciously took a number of design cues from other games out there and incorporated them into D&D (although I don't know if that's true for 4e, which seems to be unlike any other game in the market in many respects.) Other than that, though... talking about old skool and new skool with your points of reference doesn't make much sense to me except as it relates to D&D only.

And I'm a little iffy on whether or not 2000 and the releaes of 3e really makes a hard dividing line between old skool and new skool too... as I said, a lot of so-called "new skool" trends had been fairly ubiquitous in the hobby, even within D&D, long before that time.

I think in many ways, old skool couldn't exist until it could place itself in contrast to whatever was going on currently. It seemed to manifest almost from nowhere, like Athena springing forth fully formed out of Zeus's head, with the release of 3e. We already had Hackmaster right then, we had Necomancer Games with their motto; "First Edition feel, Third edition rules" (or was it the other way around?) and even WotC tapped into that with their "Back to the Dungeon" slogan on the lead-up to 3e's launch.

Even then, old skool didn't really take on a real vital life of its own until games like Castles & Crusades came out, and everybody saw that OSRIC wasn't going to be legally challenged by WotC, and then retroclones and the OSR blogosphere sprang up again almost overnight.

I personally think old skool as a label can only imperfectly be applied to any specific game or product (yes, even the retroclones!), and is better suited as a more nebulous label about how the game is played at the table and the sentiments of the gamers themselves. And given that right at the birth of the 3e era, a lot of folks, including WotC were trying to claim some old skool territory, I think what old skool is in contrast to has to be something that happened before the release of 3e... in fact, I'd say old skool grew up as a reaction against 2e and a lot of what was going on in D&D throughout the 90s especially moreso than a reaction against 3e and the OGL.

Not saying it didn't pick up a lot of steam by scooping up disaffected 3e players or folks who were disheartened by the design direction of 4e, because clearly it did. But it was already there long before that.

 

[1Mac]

I'd say, rather, that FATE's been on an evolutionary path that has little to no reference to D&D other than that D&D started the hobby and crystalized the conventions of roleplaying games in the first place. Trying to fit FATE, for example, into some kind of old or new skool that references design direction of D&D probably isn't going to get very far. Much of the non-D&D RPG world has existed parrallel to D&D and has had little to no impact on it, or vice versa.

I simply don't buy this. Any big change in DnD has huge repercussion in hobby gaming as a whole because it is such a big part of the hobby. It's not like a Deistic god, winding the clockwork of what an RPG is in 1977 and then having no impact on the hobby's development. It's continued development through new editions is part of the development of the hobby as a whole. The OGL in particular was a major influence on gaming because it did not just affect DnD, but led to the development of several other games, each with their own effect and influence on top of the larger influence DnD exerts.

And I still say FATE is decidedly New-School. It has the same basic assumptions of what an RPG should do as post-OGL DnD, even if it's answers are strikingly different. A game like Castles and Crusades, or even something indie like Old School Hack, have decidedly New-School assumptions.

I think in many ways, old skool couldn't exist until it could place itself in contrast to whatever was going on currently. It seemed to manifest almost from nowhere, like Athena springing forth fully formed out of Zeus's head, with the release of 3e. We already had Hackmaster right then, we had Necomancer Games with their motto; "First Edition feel, Third edition rules" (or was it the other way around?) and even WotC tapped into that with their "Back to the Dungeon" slogan on the lead-up to 3e's launch.

This actually bolsters my argument: Think of New-School as the "whatever was going on currently" that the Old-School movement needs to contrast itself with. I think my definition, broad as it is, does a pretty good job of defining "what's going on" in current role-playing game design.

 

[Desdichado]

This actually bolsters my argument: Think of New-School as the "whatever was going on currently" that the Old-School movement needs to contrast itself with. I think my definition, broad as it is, does a pretty good job of defining "what's going on" in current role-playing game design.

Well, fair enough. I think that if you make old skool and new skool such that old skool is a very small subset of older editions of D&D and only some of the retroclones, and new skool is literally "everything else"--including games that are nearly as old as D&D itself, as well as games that deliberately have taken on an old skool approach to design, presentation and assumed playstyle--then that new skool label isn't very informative or useful. And it's probably very much a misnomer too. But maybe I'm missing something of what you mean by "new skool" and how you would define it.