D&D General What Constitutes "Old School" D&D

[Guest 7034872]

"You've got it all wrong, Old School is..."

...anything I remember with fondness.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Wait.

After some research, I have an answer I shall stand by whenever someone poses this question to me from here on:

University of Oxford, est. 1096

 

[Jer]

except even that... is that style 1e only, or 1e and 2e? what about early 3e?
EVERY EDITION has a play style and as I pointed out in my "maybe I was always playing 4e" thread the style of play also is something that went table by table...

Oh I agree - I actually dislike the name "Old School" as a brand precisely because it's kind of meaningless in that respect. As this thread shows - ask a dozen people what Old School means in RPGs and you'll get 14 different answers.

 

[overgeeked]

I don't think that's true. A lot of actors and writers are drawn D&D specifically because they are good at story and drama.

I wouldn't say they're drawn to "D&D specifically" because they are good at story and drama, rather they're drawn to RPGs...and because D&D effectively is the RPG industry it happens to be the first thing they encounter so end up there rather than playing games that are more focused on story and drama. Over the years D&D has morphed into a less challenging, more easy going, more "story-focused" (by D&D's standards) game. But it's lightyears behind actual storygames in that regard.

Clearly some D&D players are bad at that stuff, but some are very good. Most are in between.

In my experience most are bad at that stuff. Some rare few are decent. The ones that are good at story and drama don't tend to stick with D&D because it's so bad at story and drama...unless of course they go on to launch a YouTube channel, a Kickstarter, and release an animated show. But that's the exceedingly rare exception that proves the rule.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I wouldn't say they're drawn to "D&D specifically" because they are good at story and drama, rather they're drawn to RPGs...and because D&D effectively is the RPG industry it happens to be the first thing they encounter so end up there rather than playing games that are more focused on story and drama. Over the years D&D has morphed into a less challenging, more easy going, more "story-focused" (by D&D's standards) game. But it's lightyears behind actual storygames in that regard.

In my experience most are bad at that stuff. Some rare few are decent. The ones that are good at story and drama don't tend to stick with D&D because it's so bad at story and drama...unless of course they go on to launch a YouTube channel, a Kickstarter, and release an animated show. But that's the exceedingly rare exception that proves the rule.

Games that are "more focused on story and drama" tend to have rules to compensate for players being bad at story and drama. Actors don't want rules to get the way of the performance, so D&D, which doesn't rulify that aspect, is ideal.

Your experience is your experience. People who move in different circles are going to have different experiences.

 

[Greg Benage]

Huh. I'll have to tell my AD&D group that we're all liars and that we haven't actually been playing that way since 1978. They'll all be shocked. They started with AD&D before me. I joined their group in 1984.

Don't do that! What if they're telling the truth?

 

[HammerMan]

1991-1997 is what I think of when I say old school

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This has come up a couple times recently, so I am just curious what the EN World community at large consider "old school" in context of D&D. In the poll, answer when the LATEST part of the Old School is (so if you pick Mid1980s, it assumes everything before that is also Old School.)

IME there are two main views based on RULES ALONE, which would be pre-Greyhawk D&D (before the thief) and pre-OA 1e AD&D, plus Holmes Basic and B/X (classic Moldvay).

OTOH if you want to discuss methods of play in there, then you could certainly play basically the same thing in 2e and most of Basic D&D and its supplements (some won't really work), though some 2e supplements may give you headaches as well. You WILL have to ignore some things, but not much.

IMHO I don't see how you could really play in an actual old school style in later editions. Some people may posit that a stripped down 5e can do it. I won't fight with them on that, if you can do it in 2e you can probably do something with 5e, both of them lack certain things that 1e has, but borrowing is a thing!

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

You should let us vote as many times as we like so we can cover a whole spectrum we believe is old school.

Excluding the mid 1970s 0D&D, I would include everything up to early 2nd edition.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

When I use the term Old School, I tend to have in mind the culture typology used in the Six Cultures essay. To quote:

To me, this is what old school is about. Much like the Renaissance actually based itself off of an imagined classical past that wasn't entirely true, the Old School that the OSR harkens back to is an imagined past developed out of rules-lite, simulationist style of play. I'm not saying something similar to this playstyle didn't exist back in the 70s and 80s as well, but I think the typical OSR concern about invisible rulebooks and emergent stories is a recontextualisation of old rules IMO. So to me, Old School is more an imagined past that's created by an amalgamation of B/X (but not OD&D's tournament style play), AD&D 1E and High Gygaxian simulationism. But to me, Old School is less about those and more about OSR, OSRIC and a modern "return" to the old rules.

Yeah, I started playing D&D in 1975. I don't really recognize what they are playing. It seems nothing like the ethos and approach to play that we had, anyway. I can't speak for inventors of D&D by any means of course. In our day it was all pretty much pure gamist play. So, the 'past that wasn't entirely true' certainly seems apt! In fact in terms of things like 'rules lite' or 'invisible rulebooks', or simulationist play as a general concept you'd have pretty much just gotten some weird stares and maybe a few hearty laughs at your silliness. There are some things they may also get right, to a degree, but overall I think they've just invented a modern form of play that pleases them and then some people tried to claim it was somehow more authentic or something than whatever us revisionists play nowadays. I bin that last part roughly with the people who insist their paleo diet is the 'right way to eat', etc.

That all being said, there's nothing wrong with the style of play, and honestly by understanding what they're doing in a more conscious sense than we did back in the '70s I can appreciate that it represents (some strains at the very least) a fairly coherent approach to RPG play. No doubt I could amuse myself in one of their games.