Beyond Old and New School - "The Secret That Was Lost"

@pemerton
I more or less agree. I find many people play 4e because it is a high herioc game and/or if is very player informative, two traits with indie origins from the time that came before it.


@Mercurius
That was the issue with D&D, period. The settings or the mechanics of any edition got in the way for a lot of gamers. Every edition was fixable with houserules but the amount of work varied and was discouraging after a point. Each edition has its own set of tropes, preferences, and D&Disms which favored some playstyles. Many splatbooks contain things created because the base systems don't let ideas invokes by the game don't work in the base system (such as the ranger or assassin).

Like pemerton said, 4e was the edition best suited for Excalibur and LotR heroic play. If gave all the tools to play a certain play without relying on the DM to create a rule, making a subsystem, or judging your way. At the same time, it pushed out other styles of play.

@Zardnaar
I think you missed the point. The point was that the game gave access another playstyle, a more indie, heroic fantasy, player perspective style. The idea was they you roleplayed knowing almost everything your PC could do and were playing a very heroic game. It wasn't stupid, just different. Very different.

Just like for decade, the rules for half elves, rangers, charisma, and other things were different than I would have like. When I first encounter them, I did call it "stupid" to purposely print a bad race, force an alignment on a class, or have ability scores that did almost nothing for most PCs.

But later I realized it was a different style of play.

I think that WotC-D&D asked players to make different choices than TSR-D&D did. Obviously I think it's the system that did so.

In my opinion it's the "build" that makes the difference.

Mercurius said:

Lack of specific content leads to a more richly active imaginative experience...

Here's a (hopefully) very clear example of what I'm getting at. Two statements:

A: "The cowled warrior drew a curved blade, which shimmered with an indigo hue, silver runic forms along the blade caressed by the light of the moon."

B: "The warrior, wearing a long black and grey robe with a sash around his face, covering all but his eyes, which were dark brown or black, pulled a weapon from a scabbard - a scimitar of approximately three feet in length, with a slight to moderate curve, more like a katana than a sickle - but with a smoother sweep than a katana, like a crescent moon. The scimitar was dark blue-black in color and glowed faintly. Along the length of the blade, from about six inches from the hilt--which was curved liked a stylized and angular S--were symbols of some unknown language; the runes extended to about three inches from the tip. Each symbol was about half the width of the blade. The moon was very bright, so the runes - which were probably made of some kind of silver or white metal or stone - glowed slightly."

I may be completely wrong, but I'm guessing that for most people, A is much more richly imaginative - it inspire more vivid imagery and, most importantly of all, it allows you, the reader, to generate your own imagery. The second paragraph, aside from being poorly and awkwardly written, gives so much detail that it leaves little to the imagination. Now you could say that for some people, they prefer (or need) those guides to create an image. Maybe that is so, but my point is that in the former you have more freedom, more opportunity, to activate your own imagination, wherein the latter I'm telling you what to imagine.

In other words, the purpose of sentence A above is to inspire your imaginative to activate, whereas B lets you remain passive, so your attention is more drawn to deciphering the words and putting them together than to allowing your imagination to fly.

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The main problem I have with the above is that the lack of detail in the first example risks everyone imagining something different for the same scene, which is ok when passively reading a book, but not ok when using that information in a shared setting to decide on PC actions. For me overly minimalist descriptions can lead to lots of mutual incomprehension, cognitive dissonance and wasted or counterproductive actions on the part of players. I find it jarring when my imagined scene turns out to be totally incorrect due to the relevation of more detail that would have been immediately obvious to any witness.

For me the DM is the players window onto the gameworld, and starving the players of information, for any reason, risks robbing them of the opportunity to be effectively proactive. My primary motivation is not to just imagine the gameworld, but to take action within that gameworld, action that makes sense to the other players within that shared world.

Oh, and I think the OP shot the messenger in his original post, in that 4e made abundantly manifest that there are many differing tastes amongst D&D players, some not compatible. IMO this has been the case since the beginning of the hobby, but concealed by the lack of internet and popularity of houserules making every game individual.

Minigiant said:

I more or less agree.

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Cool.

Minigiant said:

Like pemerton said, 4e was the edition best suited for Excalibur and LotR heroic play. If gave all the tools to play a certain play without relying on the DM to create a rule, making a subsystem, or judging your way. At the same time, it pushed out other styles of play.

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And I agree with this.

Aenghus said:

4e made abundantly manifest that there are many differing tastes amongst D&D players, some not compatible. IMO this has been the case since the beginning of the hobby, but concealed by the lack of internet and popularity of houserules making every game individual.

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I think 4e did this particularly markedly because it is so transparent as a system.

pemerton said:

4e's core resolution system is in fact incredibly simple (and indie): GM describes situation; player nominates method - skill and/or power - by which his/her PC will overcome challenge, based on the interaction between the mechanics of that skill/power and the fictional positioning of the PC in the GM-described situation; the GM sets a DC; the player rolls the di(c)e; if the check succeeds the player gets what s/he wanted, and if the check fails then the adverse consequence is narrated by the GM.

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This is exactly the opposite of what I'm looking for in a game of the imagination. Lets take a look at whats happening here. The GM describes the situation; player nominates method.

Lets examine that bit for a moment. The player essentially chooses a programmed action from an available list. Its like a list of possible responses menu that the Terminator calls up. The player in this case is using an automated mechanical response and is interacting with the game mechanics instead of the game world.
The player selects a menu item and presses a button, presumably one that has been determined will have the greatest impact upon the present situation due to a variety of mitigating factors, all mechanical in nature. The button is pressed and the player watches the result to see if he/she will be rewarded with a success treat.

The game world and what is happening is a distant secondary concern being overriden by the grinding mechanical gears deciding on the best choice based upon how "the engine" runs.

This style of play is unsatisfying to me. Once the vehicle has been constructed (the character "build" is complete) the actual play of the game is largely an automated process. All that is needed to then play is a body to roll dice with some knowledge of rules interactions. The game world itself is a two-dimensional overlay "skin" draped over the mechanical engine. The biggest irritating thing about the whole process- nothing of consequence takes place without a mechanical process. The byproduct of such play is a group interacting with the resolution mechanics almost exclusively.

Why bother listening to descriptions of world elements if you can't really interact with them? Does it really matter about the details if, at the end of everything, all will come down to "make skill check X"? Players pick up on that quickly and cut to the chase with the ubiquitous "what do I need to roll'?

The end result of such a system is an automated process with little soul and no heart. The DM doesn't really need to adjudicate because the rules cover so much. The players don't need to interact with much because the resolution mechanics handle everything. The game practically runs and plays itself. I have better things to with my time than participate in games that don't really need me to function.

The best analogy the OP dicussed that relates to this issue is the hand drawn vs computer drawn art. Old school games are like the hand drawn art. They have a warmth created by the increased required human element that is simply missing in the automated programmed response systems.

All of this is of course, my subjective opinion based upon extensive personal experience. YMMV and all that.

Manbearcat said:

I, in part, agree with what you have written here but it is slightly orthogonal to what I was depicting above. You are postulating about resolution rather than structure. You can have structure of both high resolution and low resolution. You can have the area between boundaries be opaque or transparent. Your exemplars can be granular or they can be deeply abstract.

The point I was trying to convey was that there really isn't a "breaking point" with respect to structure. For a significant cross-section of the populace, if you asked them to imagine something or create something and you gave them little to no reference point, nothing to tether their cognitive style upon, they would be paralyzed into inaction. The inverse is also true. If you create well-defined boundaries, others may be partially, or wholly, inhibited. There are also cognitive styles in between. There are also people who have versatile cognitive styles

Generally speaking, one would think an engineer's cognitive style is different than an impressionist painter's cognitive style. However, how different was Thomas Jefferson (as an engineer) from Vincent Van Gogh from Thomas Edison from the Ming era Chinese?

I look at this board (and many others...and the market at large) and I see people who prefer high resolution setting galore...in fact, they can't play without it. Personally, I am not a fan of high resolution settings as I prefer setting to be very low resolution and have the details emerge as a product of live play at the table. But this is certainly unorthodox (sometimes outright heresy) with many proponents of D&D's high res settings.

Point being, by default, structure is not an inhibitor of creativity nor is it a facilitator. I'm not sure that resolution with respect to exemplars or the space between the boundaries is either. Some people prefer Cormac McCarthy while others prefer Stephen King.

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Manbearcat, I'm a bit confused by your word usage - cognitive styles, resolution, structure, granularity, boundaries, etc. Are you using them within a specific system of thinking or in an individualistic way? My main familiarity with cognitive styles is from psychology and education (I'm involved in both fields professionally). A cognitive style could be related to styles of learning, multiple intelligences, personality types, or something like Kirton's inventory (adaptive vs. innovative).

I generally agree with what you're saying, but am not willing to concede the idea that the "space between the boundaries" doesn't impact imagination. But it might not be a matter of how much or how little, but to what degree.

Your King and McCarthy analogy is interesting but, I think, a bit obfuscating because they're not quite apples vs. oranges, unless we're willing to to say that all art, all literature, music, etc is "equal" - and there's no degrees of quality or depth. I'm willing to say that we can't judge Miley Cyrus by the same criteria that we judge Miles Davis because they create(d) completely different types of music, but at the same I'm not willing to say that "some prefer Miley and some Miles" and just leave it at that. Miles Davis was a far superior musician than Miley Cyrus is, but more people "prefer" (your word) Miley Cyrus. Is this just a matter of cognitive style or is there something else at work? Dare we delve beyond the realm of "its all subjective" and look at words like "depth" and "quality"?

With regards to preference and quality, I think the old phrase "correlation does not imply causation" applies. The fact that more people love Harry Potter than Earthsea doesn't mean that they are equal artistic creations. More people love McDonald's hamburgers than Kobe beef, or Hershey's chocolate bar to Michel Gluizel Grand Lait.

(I realize you might think I'm going orthogonal again, but I see it as more isomorphic

KaiiLurker said:

I don't entirely subscribe to Mercurious ideas, but I don't think this is a waste, or just another talky rant on defense of the OSR, what I read spoke to me of a very different thing, mostly that it doesn't matter if a game is old school or new school or non-school, as long as it sparks your imagination. For many folks less rules or more mysterious rules are more in therms of imagination (and up to a point I agree), in that way OSR resonates better with them.

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And if he had said that, I'd agree. But the quote is there. It becomes, "It doesn't matter if it is old or new, as long as it sparks imaginative play. But this old stuff does it better!" If the real point is what you say, then he sullied it with that judgement.

However up to that I agree, some people can use their imaginations better when they are fully unbound or only bound by little. ("I want to be the best musician in the world!!" "no rule say you can't, go ahead"), but not all of us are like that and that doesn't mean we are less creative (I would argue that in fact it could be the opposite, but have no actual evidence I can only suggest it)

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There's no need to try to measure it as more or less. It isn't a competition.

But, I like to think of it in terms of poetry. Specifically, sonnets. Shakespeare wrote what is recognized as some of the best poetry in the English language in a highly structured form. If "loose rules" were the end-all, be-all of creativity, then free verse would have the best poetry in the world, hands down. But, we still wind up with haiku and sonnets in the mix, with a lot of other forms, some free, some not.

Let the makers of games give us many different forms, and we can each find what suits us best. No need to try to determine which is objectively best.

What D&D has lost is me being 17 years old, having no negative consequences to spending all day playing at my friend's backyard poolhouse for three months of summertime, us dreaming up new dungeons, exploring forgotten ruins, and figuring out new homebrew systems of customizing PCs because there was no such thing.

Sigh.

Umbran said:

And if he had said that, I'd agree. But the quote is there. It becomes, "It doesn't matter if it is old or new, as long as it sparks imaginative play. But this old stuff does it better!" If the real point is what you say, then he sullied it with that judgement.

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Umbran, as I wrote before, you're taking a single quote ("tree") and missing the total argument ("forest"), and then repeating that same mistake. No offense, but that's what politicians do when they're trying to smeer their opponents - they take quotes out of context to make them look bad.

Here's a (hopefully humorous) example. Let's saying you hear me say the following:

Black people are inherently better at basketball.

You might think, "he's a racist!" But what if that sentence was part of a larger sentence?

One might think that black people are inherently better at basketball because of the high percentage of African Americans playing in the NBA, which is much higher than the population; but that would be an over-simplification that we must better understand through looking at cultural and contextual factors.

I feel that you did something similar with my post, teasing out one sentence you disagreed with and missing the rest of it that framed it in a way that the meaning of the quote you pointed out wasn't as sharply defined or stated as you implied.

For instance, you seemingly missed the last part where I said it wasn't about what was old school or new school, but imagination itself.

Umbran said:

There's no need to try to measure it as more or less. It isn't a competition.

But, I like to think of it in terms of poetry. Specifically, sonnets. Shakespeare wrote what is recognized as some of the best poetry in the English language in a highly structured form. If "loose rules" were the end-all, be-all of creativity, then free verse would have the best poetry in the world, hands down. But, we still wind up with haiku and sonnets in the mix, with a lot of other forms, some free, some not.

Let the makers of games give us many different forms, and we can each find what suits us best. No need to try to determine which is objectively best.

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Yeah, I agree with you - but that's not the point of my OP or his thread, to "determine which is objectively best." What I was doing was exploring different angles around, not trying to argue for which is best. As I said in the OP, I wasn't (and am not) trying to write a Definitive Statement about imagination, old and new school, but paint impressionistic pictures and explore the relationship between imagination and rules, etc.

That said, I do think too many rules can obfuscate the flow of imagination and that there "better" and "worse" ways to facilitate imaginative flow. I'm not saying that there's a clear or definitive answer, but that its worth exploring.

Mercurius said:

Ha ha, thanks for caring. I like to write, so its OK if no one responds - I actually almost didn't post it as it started as a response to a different thread, then got out of hand. I like to work out ideas while writing, so the main thing is the process itself.

Yeah, I can agree with that and think it is why OSR folks don't like "railroady" games.

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I'm actually not a OSR person and I often run more story-centric games, ones I'm sure people would consider pretty railroady. I was speaking mostly in terms of the rules themselves. The individual games are the domain of the DM, the companies can't do much about how railroady or not railroady they are, but the rules, that's where the company has power, and that's where the majority of the game-based choice needs to lay. Take everyone's favorite but-shall-not-be-named feature of the new edition. Instead of "must", use "may", and I feel it becomes both more flexible and less intrusive.