D&D General Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played

[Sacrosanct]

Yeah. I wonder what the reaction would be if I went on youtube and told people how they played 5e because I read the DMG and proceeded to explain to them that I knew how they played better than they did because I found a rule in the DMG that they never knew about.

Thinking

Oh, wait, no one reads the DMG! I could totally do that. I think I'm just going to start making stuff up.

As a general rule, I think it's a bad idea that if you (general you) don't belong to a certain group of people, you probably shouldn't tell them what they really experience. Especially when they are literally telling you the answer.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

As a general rule, I think it's a bad idea that if you (general you) don't belong to a certain group of people, you probably shouldn't tell them what they really experience. Especially when they are literally telling you the answer.

The Golden Rule is to treat others as you want to be treated.

The Platinum Rule is don't tell someone else that you know better than they do what they experienced or how they feel.

 

[Kai Lord]

Here's what this one Gen-X gamer remembers about the old way of playing:

• Adventure modules cost about as much as a comic book, and you could read the whole thing in an hour and be ready to play it. They were packed with content, too: most were only 30-something pages long, and still managed to include maps, NPCs, and new monsters.
• Rules existed only to settle outcomes...they didn't mandate what was possible or allowable (that was the DM's job.) You didn't consult a checklist of What Is Possible every time your turn came around; you just described what you were trying to do and the DM maybe asked you to roll something.
• The best artwork. I'm talking Easley. Elmore. Caldwell.
• If you had access to a ditto machine or Xerox, you were a literal god among your peers. I worked in the school library, so all of my friends had the snazziest-looking character sheets and staple-bound copies of the Player's Handbook.
• Action economy, bounded accuracy, damage-per-round? Pfffff. If these things even existed back then, absolutely no person I played with ever cared about them. "I attack the orc with my sword" was mechanically identical to "I do a backflip, brandish my sword in midair, slash at the orc's head, and then stick a three-point landing on the other side of the room like a superhero" and nobody cared.
• The bar of entry was incredibly low. Someone who had never even heard of D&D could be ready to play in 20 minutes, and be playing like a seasoned veteran 2 hours later. All the books and dice you needed were sold in a boxed set for $19 at the mall.

Ah, memories...

Perfectly said! Weapon speed factors? Nope. Encumbrance? Pfft, if we could picture somebody carrying something then they carried it. If the mental image was silly then we said no. And for all the groups I played in everything was theater of the mind with all kinds of cool cinematics being described of people juking in and out of combat without paying too much attention to where anyone supposedly appeared on an imaginary grid. Graph paper was used for maps and little else.

Future editions and modern games started adding mechanics to explain how most people (based on my experience) were already playing but then that inadvertently ended up slowing everything down and took away a lot of the charm of play as well.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

all the groups I played in everything was theater of the mind with all kinds of cool cinematics being described of people juking in and out of combat without paying too much attention to where anyone really appeared on an imaginary grid. Graph paper was used for maps and little else.

it was really late in 2e before we even tried drawing combat maps... it was into 3.5 before we started useing minis

 

[FrozenNorth]

When did I say I didn't like old people?

I don’t like old people… they’re coarse and rough… irritating, and they get into everything.

No, wait! I was thinking about sand.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Yeah. I wonder what the reaction would be if I went on youtube and told people how they played 5e because I read the DMG and proceeded to explain to them that I knew how they played better than they did because I found a rule in the DMG that they never knew about.

That's what all the 5e Youtubers do anyway. Go for it.

Except Dungeon Dad, who just makes fun monsters.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I don’t like old people… they’re coarse and rough… irritating, and they get into everything.

No, wait! I was thinking about sand.

Yes, now please stop trying to make a castle out of Grandma.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Hi, 28 year old here, my first TTRPG was 4e, I don't think anyone really cares about how ya'll played back then (well I do, but I like TTRPG history for its own sake.)

I think they find it interesting from the perspective of how it would be possible to play in terms of this very different vision, and that mostly comes from slamming their faces against the dominant play style as it currently exists and finding something unsatisfying. Basically, you have certain questions and we feel like we've hit a dead end with the answers that the historical development of TTRPGs have yielded, so its time to go back and maybe question those developments-- find different ways to solve ye olde problems, or even see if they're still problems when we combine them with other developments.

So the 'old players' are orthogonal to what's meant by 'old school' because they had 'new school' games. Its like how modernism is a genre of works that share qualities, rather than just a statement of what years their creators did the work in.

For me, video games already do a much better job of being a controlled story with strong narrative structure than my friends and a GM do, even with games designed for it, but the logistics of producing them constrain their potential as sandboxes-- so for a trad or crit role like experience (at least in terms of what people really like about their game) I would just play Persona 5 or something, while for something more open where I really need for the game to build itself differently depending on how its played, or be a space with story, rather than a structured story, I look at elements of the OSR sandbox ethos.

Not always of course, my upcoming Lancer game is shaping up to be a wargame experience of canned missions in sequence, with players primarily filling out the emotional component of the story, but that's a very specific style of game and the system itself is a major draw.

 

[pemerton]

What lent to old school gaming was not that we followed the passage of real life time between sessions into the game itself, but that the game was a living world where time in that world kept going regardless of what the players were doing, but the passage of that time was up the DM for what made the most sense for the adventure and not a real world calendar.

That doesn't sound very old school to me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ugh.

That's sums up what I think about this. Videos like this: There are...a lot of false assumptions here.

*Yes, I know there might have been some people who played like this, but I've never met one in real life and I'm confident they were the exception rather than the rule.

Hmmmm, well, I played from almost the very start. Back in the mid-70s I don't think there were any consistent approaches at all. Everyone had barely an idea of what D&D was 'supposed' to be and just did 'something'. I don't recall if there's any mention of 'campaign time' in the LBBs or not, there may be, but hardly anyone paid much attention to what was in those books beyond grabbing some stats, charts, and the basics of chargen. Heck, campaigns of the sort EGG was running barely existed anyway in most places. Half the time we just played our characters in whatever game was happening that day.

People IMHO way overestimate how much 'theory' there might have been, or concept of play, in early RPGs! It was just doing 'whatever', and you might do it one way on Tuesday and a different way on Thursday. (So I am not disagreeing with you, but I wouldn't say the video is accurate OR inaccurate, it is just mostly wildly far out in terms of proposing that you can actually SAY anything about '70s play, at least before '79).