Hiya!
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Celebrim, I think I get where you are coming from. From what I gather, you're arguing that having "stuff" in the rules, available to the players, helps fuel their imaginations and helps them reach for goals that are otherwise not mentioned/suggested. Is that a fair assessment?
If it is...then I agree. I am a firm believer that a two or three sentence description of an "adventure" (for example) serves a much better purpose than a two or three page description of it. I guess the "less is more" paradigm is at the fore in this case. For example, I would rather have a paragraph in the PHB, under Magic-User say something like:
"
Magic-Users are always striving for more knowledge. Many will head down various intellectual pursuits such as astronomy, geography/geology, flora and fauna, biology, etc, trying to find new ways in which the great mysteries of magic can be understood, harnessed, and used for creating new spells, items, construction, and so forth".
I would much rather have that (and I think it's preferable) than to have a multi-page chapter in a book detail a whole bunch of charts, tables, DC's, costs, times, and formula that move the game more towards "account and numbers management" thing. This is just a play style thing, probably. I think that it is in this "non-numerical focus" that a lot of people like OSR type "rules".
I think that there is something to be said for content that doesn't attach so much fluff to it that it becomes constraining on how you use it. As a DM that has always run a homebrew setting, if your content forces too much of an intrusion into my setting by way of explicitly stated culture or widespread effects on the setting, then your content is not very useful to me however much I might admire your imagination or setting.
But, a lot of the 'old school' content like the Monster Manual or the Deities & Demigods was basically just stat blocks and numbers and various sorts of crunch that left it entirely up to you what to do with it and to determine what, if anything, it meant to your setting. And a lot of people faulted it for that and said, "You know the fluff is more important than the crunch", and I can partly understand that sentiment and a lot of gaming history since that time has been trying to provide fluffier versions with a more imaginative defined setting. But incidentally, also a more rigidly defined and inflexible setting.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that OSR games were "less numerical"...
Oh good, because that would be false.
A Modern Player would, for example, "expect" to have access to rules on how to make magic items. Exact costs, in time, gold, XP, or whatever, that would yield X% chance of success. But an OSR Player would only "expect" that at some point the DM would inform them "You can now research how to make potions", and the DM would be the one in 'control' of all the numerical stuff. The player would only know that they can try and figure out how to make a potion of invisibility...but that's it.
I would argue that that is a very romanticized and unrealistic view of what happened back in the day. Back in the day, since the expectation was that players would be highly proactive, the expectation was that the DM would basically inform them of nothing, and that anything the player learned they would have to learn through play. So the DM would not say, "Hey, no you can research how to make potions.", and in point of fact (and to be honest I still DM this way), if the player asked me, "How can I make a potion?", if the character didn't have any preexisting knowledge that would point them in the right direction I'd tell them, "You don't know.", just as I would tell them today. They'd then have to search out someone that knew how to make potions and learn how it was done. But in point of fact, in the 1e era very few players would do that, because it would quickly become onerous.
The 1e system, since it was totally in the head of the individual DM, basically meant that the answer was, "No." And the system as written encouraged the DM to put as many hurdles in the way of that request as possible. Let's face it, Gygax's tone when it is involved with the acquisition of magic is downright adversarial. Put a road block up at every point along the way and make them jump an arbitrary hurdle. Even after the recipe is acquired by long labor, the DM still will say something like, "Ok, your potion requires fresh displacer beast liver which can't be more than a day old.", and the PC will be like, "Ok, how do I get one of those?", and the DM will be like, "Your character doesn't know that."
Now, there are two important things to note that I think you overlook. First, the 1e system here is just as burdensome if not more so to the DM than it is to the player. He has to invent all this crap and some how balance it so that it's not impossible but not game breaking either. That's not an insignificant burden. That's a headache. That's actually probably beyond most novice and some experienced DM's abilities. Now imagine how much the game changes if TSR publishes a new source book that lists out all the recipes for all the potions and spell inks in the game. Suddenly, all this new content empowers both the DM and the player to accomplish something that otherwise was probably too hard.
And the other thing to note is that if the DM actually goes and on his own initiative does that, because there is all these hints in the DMG that he needs to do that that inspire him, then again the extantiation of that changes the game completely. Suddenly, all this difficult headache enducing content becomes something the DM wants to share and tell the players about and he's not pushed, required or even desirous of passively aggressively denying those requests because there is this content out there that makes it easy to answer those questions and because after that labor he wants to share the system. That changes the game, but fundamentally his house rules are at that point no different than a supplement or a dragon article that pushes the table in a new unimagined direction. The thing is though, most DMs can't do the house rule version of that on their own.
I'd been gaming like 10 years and I'd done some stuff 'at sea' in ships, but none of that had ever had any depth; until my DM at the time read a newly published Dragon Magazine article about ships and sailing and it inspired him to add depth to that previously unconsidered portion of the game. We could have done that without the dragon article. Both of us have the skills in one way or the other. He's a great researcher and I'm a pretty decent rules smith. But until that push came along, we had nothing to cause us to turn our attention to that. It turned out that the rules in the Dragon Magazine article were in many ways terrible and had never been playtested and we probably more thoroughly tested them to prove that than any table in the country, and I ended up smithing out dozens of pages of rules to fix or extend what was in the Magazine. But I would have never done any of that without some push in that direction.
In an OSR system, the lack of something in the rules system frequently meant that it was up to the DM to inform the player of something...and not the designer/book's job to do so. Most of the stuff you mentioned in your above post (the telescope construction, observatory, etc) would fall into that category for OSR.
You keep using 'OSR' as a synonym for 'old school', and it's confusing me. But if you mean that they fall into the category of things that turned up in old school play, no they don't. I mean, there might have been a table out there that did something like that since it literally isn't forbidden, but because of the huge barrier to even imagining that much less implementing it, effectively it was forbidden and most DMs would have shut it down hard by allowing players to do it, but given no satisfactory reward for doing so. Most would have just said "No" no matter how creative they were or how willing they were to offer up rulings, because they would have feared it was some sort of game breaking or power gaming sort of request. So in short no, it wasn't then and isn't now a part of the game. It's not even really a part of my game, because although I am 600+ pages into writing house rules, that part of my game world hasn't been fleshed out enough for the players to really get inspired enough to pursue it. They don't know how cool it is to be a wizard because I haven't written the wizard supplements yet.
In OSR systems it's up to the DM to extrapolate his/her own rules and systems for such things and then inform the player of them.
But let's be frank, no matter how compliant the DM might be with the players rube Goldberg ingenuity with iron stakes, rope, sacks and the occasional livestock, they aren't going to invent those rules and systems for such things on their own. It's not even going to enter into their imaginations, and as such the silence of the rules effectively bans it from the game.
Players were always free to just decide "I want to make a boat! What do I have to do?", but then it was the DM that decided how easy, hard, simple, or detailed the task would be..
Sure, but that is to be frank, that's the first thing you've said that really misses the point. Because boats were implied by the game to be in the rules and boats exist in the real world setting. None of that requires a lot of conjecture on the part of anyone, although to be honest, until the DM actually made good reasons to own a boat, it never occurred to any of us that we would want to build a boat, and probably never happened that in most games ANYONE built a boat. In my game, the PC made dozens of ships-of-the line and had whole fleets of 'boats'. But that didn't happen because we were so much more creative than anyone else; it happened because we made a system for it.
Besides which, this conversation began as a discussion about player empowerment, and not DM empowerment. Which of your two examples more empowers the player?
Ok. I kinda rambled a bit there. Sorry.
No, it's quite OK. I appreciate actually honest attempts to engage in conversation, rambling or not. I can't possibly fault anyone for rambling in any fairness.
My point is that I think it boils down to a "The DM tells...." vs. "The Player tells...". With the first, there doesn't need to be detailed rules as the DM will create/modify rules and systems in the game to introduce to his Players. With the second, it is required simply because the Players don't get to decide it's only going to cost 1sp to build a Galleon and take only two days to build, so they need specific rules already printed in the book.
^_^
My point is that in your game, you probably didn't actually build a lot of Galleons at all. And you certainly didn't build any 50 'gun' advanced frigates.
