D&D General Defining "New School" Play (+)

[payn]

I would say NS has pretty much always been with us. Games I've played have almost always emphasized the character over the combat, investing in who I'm playing over investing in more henchmen. Even back in the days of OD&D, I wanted to play a character who imbodied a protagonist from one of my favorite books, not a tactical unit likely to die. We just fudged things a bit and made raise dead readily available in order to make it happen. PCs still died now and then (including my elf back in they day when they couldn't get raised because they didn't have souls*), but it wasn't the meatgrinder that some people had. Even in the days of AD&D, it was the common way to play for most people that I knew.

So that's the reason I have an issue with the label old vs new, but I'm not sure what the labels should be.

*I don't remember if elves not having souls was an official rule or one we made up to justify the fact that raise dead didn't work on them.

You made houserules to get the type of play you wanted from the game. It wasn't in the design, you changed that out of desire for those particular results. Later editions made this less and less necessary by design to facilitate that style of play. This is what folks are talking about.

 

[CreamCloud0]

That essay has all kinds of problems of its own.

i remember the last, fairly recent, thread that mentioned that article about a fairly similar topic, quite a bit of it ended up being criticising how the essay was presenting and defining things.

 

[Oofta]

You made houserules to get the type of play you wanted from the game. It wasn't in the design, you changed that out of desire for those particular results. Later editions made this less and less necessary by design to facilitate that style of play. This is what folks are talking about.

Everybody house ruled and added to OD&D. You needed to. But even in AD&D where we pretty much stuck to the rules we played much the same. There have always been options to have relatively low lethality games if it's what you wanted. Not using some of the save or die options because it wasn't fun for us, if that makes it house ruled (I disagree) then all I can say is that when I started playing with other groups after high school they also ignored those options. D&D is a toolkit, bypassing some of the tools in the kit was very common in my experience. For that matter, if I wanted to kill off PCs in 5E it's not that hard even at mid-to-high levels. Double tap and if there's a cleric with revivify drag off the body. Better yet, target the cleric first.

I don't think it changes anything whether or not we house ruled and made the game what we wanted. Isn't that what everybody has always done?

 

[payn]

Everybody house ruled and added to OD&D. You needed to. But even in AD&D where we pretty much stuck to the rules we played much the same. There have always been options to have relatively low lethality games if it's what you wanted. Not using some of the save or die options because it wasn't fun for us, if that makes it house ruled (I disagree) then all I can say is that when I started playing with other groups after high school they also ignored those options. D&D is a toolkit, bypassing some of the tools in the kit was very common in my experience. For that matter, if I wanted to kill off PCs in 5E it's not that hard even at mid-to-high levels. Double tap and if there's a cleric with revivify drag off the body. Better yet, target the cleric first.

I don't think it changes anything whether or not we house ruled and made the game what we wanted. Isn't that what everybody has always done?

You are mistaking the forest for the trees here. The primary focus of the design is the old school play style, which had variant and houserules for a new school style of play. That paradigm has flipped over the decades making it the new school of design thought as the primary, with variants to provide old school play.

 

[Oofta]

You are mistaking the forest for the trees here. The primary focus of the design is the old school play style, which had variant and houserules for a new school style of play. That paradigm has flipped over the decades making it the new school of design thought as the primary, with variants to provide old school play.

The lethality level of every version of D&D has pretty much always been up to the group. No house rules required. Raise dead and options for healing have always been part of the game for example.

It's more difficult for a DM to accidentally kill a PC in 5E when they didn't intend to do so but that's the only difference that I see.

 

[payn]

The lethality level of every version of D&D has pretty much always been up to the group. No house rules required. Raise dead and options for healing have always been part of the game for example.

It's more difficult for a DM to accidentally kill a PC in 5E when they didn't intend to do so but that's the only difference that I see.

Again, you are missing the forest for the trees in some attempt to dismiss an entire philosophy of design on a single point.

 

[Oofta]

Again, you are missing the forest for the trees in some attempt to dismiss an entire philosophy of design on a single point.

There were killer DMs and killer dungeon modules back in the day. We never played Tomb of Annihilation because it just wasn't what we wanted out of the game ... just because an option is available doesn't mean it was ubiquitous. Maybe you played where you hired a bunch of henchmen to act as cannon fodder, were using a 10 foot pole to test the ground ahead of you for every deadly trap but it's something I never experienced in longer term games.

What you term "old school" games was a more prevalent option. But just like today, there was never a monolithic one true way of playing. Want to play high lethality game in 5E? No problem. Want to play a relatively low lethality game with zero house rules back in OD&D or AD&D? Every game I ever played was like that unless it was a one-shot.

To say that the majority of people simply ignored the rules or had significant house rules is missing the forest that we, and every group I was involved with, played in because you were trapped in the forest you personally chose.

 

[payn]

There were killer DMs and killer dungeon modules back in the day. We never played Tomb of Annihilation because it just wasn't what we wanted out of the game ... just because an option is available doesn't mean it was ubiquitous. Maybe you played where you hired a bunch of henchmen to act as cannon fodder, were using a 10 foot pole to test the ground ahead of you for every deadly trap but it's something I never experienced in longer term games.

What you term "old school" games was a more prevalent option. But just like today, there was never a monolithic one true way of playing. Want to play high lethality game in 5E? No problem. Want to play a relatively low lethality game with zero house rules back in OD&D or AD&D? Every game I ever played was like that unless it was a one-shot.

To say that the majority of people simply ignored the rules or had significant house rules is missing the forest that we, and every group I was involved with, played in because you were trapped in the forest you personally chose.

It wasnt an invitation to triple down. Have a nice day.

 

[Oofta]

It wasnt an invitation to triple down. Have a nice day.

We just disagree on what the label should be. There have always been and always will be different ways people will use the rules that have been provided when it comes to D&D. Not sure why that's an issue or even controversial in any way.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Heh, I refer to this process as the "domestication" of villains.

Vampire "villain" → vampire tortured soul exceptional individual → vampire a species like any other species.

Likewise, Drizzt the Drow, and recently Tiefling the Fiend.

The domestication relates to an instinctive fascination with danger, both to defend oneself against it and to repurpose its power with it.

There is a hiccup in this sort of idea though. Human villains... are generally still villains.

Bandits and criminals are a common example. There have been evil bandits and criminals in stories... forever. And they still exist, and even if we occasionally have "hey, the bandit is just trying to survive"... we also long have had redemption arcs for criminals and bandits in our stories.

I think it is less "domestication" and more "anthropomorphization" . We recognize that saying "all people from London are Evil" is a silly idea, because people are not a monolith. And if pumpkins are people in a story about talking pumpkins and pumpkin society... then they are also not a monolith, because not being a monolith is inherent in being a people.