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

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not convinced. Plenty of studies have demonstrated that people are more stressed and have less free time. It just doesn't feel accurate to me that "young people care less than they used to". It could also be an artifact of DnD being more mainstream and acceptable. Maybe the young people of the 80's were ONLY those 1 in 6 you see now, but before the other 5 of 6 wouldn't even attempt the game, and now they are willing to give it a chance.

I mean, it doesn't help that wages have barely kept up with inflation, unless you're C-suite.

 

[ezo]

Plenty of studies have demonstrated that people are more stressed and have less free time. It just doesn't feel accurate to me that "young people care less than they used to".

I don't believe it is that they have less free time, more that they have more things that will occupy their free time and choose to have those things occupy it. I have no idea why people would be more stressed currently than in the past, but that is a different topic.

Maybe the young people of the 80's were ONLY those 1 in 6 you see now, but before the other 5 of 6 wouldn't even attempt the game, and now they are willing to give it a chance.

I'd buy this possibility over most others....

And those 5 in 6 are the "don't care as much" casual-type players I don't enjoy playing with. Just my preference.

 

[bloodtide]

What, exactly, defines a "knowledgeable person" about the differences in various kinds of woods? Because I'd be willing to bet that unless you are a carpenter, woodturner, builder, etc. yourself, the absolute most a typical person knows is that some woods are "hard" and others are "soft", some smell nice (like sandalwood or cedar), and some are used for cooking (like mesquite).

Well, if you know more then a tiny bit about a topic is a good way to go. And the "average" person does vary. I'd guess your example average person has very little...or none...knowledge about things like wood. That is one type of person. There is another kind though...the person who knows at least a couple paragraphs about wood. And how to make a fire. Tie knots. Catch and clean fish. And so on. They are not "experts". But really the basic knowledge has not changed in over 1,000 years. Everything that was true in 1000 AD, is still true today.

Wait, so you're saying you have a shared style expectation and it's helpful to keep everyone on the same page?

You spent so long blasting the idea that everything has to be perfect, everyone has to be in mental lockstep. Now you're admitting that's something old school wants too. Seems kinda contradictory.

Is this not obvious? Does not each style or way want people that like that?

Yeah, I'd never give my players homework for the game. I'll share my knowledge--during or after session--but I'd never assign them a bloody reading list. That would kill their interest faster than you can say Bob's your uncle.

Again, this does highlight different people.

I don't think it's productive for me to engage with most of the claims in @bloodtide 's post, but I did want to remark on one point:

This is not an accurate characterization of the new school approach. And as others have pointed out, the way the contrast is posed here is obviously intended to imply that the new school doesn't allow for deep immersion. This is a false discrepancy.

Well, I'd say "does not want", not "is not allowed".

This is because 1) we're all adults with limited amounts of time on our hands, and we don't want to spend it doing homework for our hobby and 2) those of us who DO enjoy getting really deep in setting lore are free to do it, while those who don't aren't penalized for enjoying different aspects of the game.

Right, this is pure voluntary. Some "busy" players just show up to play the game. Other players want a more rounded experience. It is a difference.

I am sorry, but the average OS player is not much more knowledgeable about different types of wood or crime lore or what have you than the NS one… they might flatter themselves into thinking so however, and maybe even think their ‘vast knowledge’ is essential to the game they play when it really hardly matters and is mostly stereotypical / superficial… The one reason it does matter is the DM buying into this mindset as well

True enough. The average player of a set group of people don't know about wood or crime lore....they know about video games and what is trending on tic toc. Now there is another set of people that do know a bunch of real world skills...they can hunt, fish, prepare animals to eat, farm, and on and on.

And this is not OS vs NS.....this is just people. Once upon a time a group of NS players wanted me to run an OS Spelljammer game for them. So I did(and still am). As 'average' NS players, they were just confused about all "naval words and terms" I use. But instead of doing the "can we just drop the fluff and roll for everything"....they wanted to know more. So I made them handouts, gave them homework...and now like a year later when they play the game they are knowledgeable seafaring folk.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Is this not obvious? Does not each style or way want people that like that?

That's not how you've ever presented your style. And you've made very specific points about how newer styles allegedly only work in the vanishingly rare cases where everyone always perfectly agrees forever, as though it were almost never applicable in general.

 

[bloodtide]

Despite you saying it is common, myself and no one else who has responded to you, has indicated they have heard of this. In fact, we have all said the opposite. It may be common in your area, but it is not common in the larger communities most of us are aware of.

Ok, if you want to go with I'm wrong and you are right....that's all on you.

But you have to acknowledge that if you are going to reward people for a real life skill, you often end up punishing them for the lack of a real life skill or knowledge as well, correct? And what happens when the player's real life knowledge contradicts the DM?

Problems. This is, of course, why New School even exists. This is why NS loves the rules so much: page 11 in the rule book says what happens when you roll....it's not GM whim.

I am an expert in the field, and in trying to use my real-world knowledge, it was rebuffed because the GM didn't seem to know how kids work.

This is a problem. It's the same thing for New School games where the DM does not understand the rules.

I'm sure the game sounded fun to them on paper, the concept and the props sounded good... but the execution just left me frustrated. I came to play a superhero game and solve a mystery, not play with legos and twelve piece puzzles.

Not every game or adventure is for everyone....that is why there are so many.

But if I am limited to my real-world knowledge of thievery and criminals, then I can't play a great thief, only a bad thief. And what if I don't want to play an incompetent criminal? Then I either need to learn how to be a better criminal IRL, or I play something else.

This goes back to playing what you know.

But a great wizard can be played by anyone, because no one knows anything about wizardry. IF a fighter has good stats, then someone who knows nothing about how to fight, can still be a great fighter. You want a simulation, but only in the places where you have personal knowledge or expectations that allow a simulation to happen, in places where it is too hard for you to simulate, then you let it pass.

Well, a fair number of people do know about wizardry. And...um....you missed the part about OS being Hard Fun.

They sure act like a wise mystical teacher when they declare your character dead because you described something the wrong way, or didn't know something they expected you to know. And considering that it is often stated that people who advocate for old school feel that new school players are incapable, right here is sounds like you are saying we lack "at least average level of common sense, wisdom, skill, intelligence, knowledge, and drive" Which, again, is rather insulting.

There are people that lack those. Google "Darwin Awards", for example.

What are you even talking about? What flaw is there here? Do you think just because a rogue can't describe how to pick a lock they are only "feeling" like they are playing their character if the DM describes them picking the lock? This makes no sense to me at all.

The flaw is the player just sits there clueless and does what the DM tells them to do. An NS counts this as "playing the character". Like your smart wizard character finds a magical rune puzzle. You roll a check. The DM tells you the answer. Then you role play your wizard "solving" the puzzle....and feel like you role played a smart wizard.

And, no, they won't learn that. They will learn that they need to state that they are never far from their weapon. Most of my characters over the last decade have had a boot dagger, just in case, for this reason. I usually have a few daggers on my character sheet, but I don't tell the DM where they are. Because having a boot dagger has only mattered like... twice. But I know for a fact that with certain DMs if I was in a situation like a fancy party, and pulled that dagger, I would get told I can't do that. Not because my character doesn't know to keep a weapon handy, not because I don't know to keep a weapon handy, but because I didn't declare to the DM that I had a weapon handy.

So in many Old School games the location of items, equipment and weapons is important. There are even fancy character sheets where you can list exactly where everything is. And yes, OS you have to state to the DM...again in detail...if your doing something...before things happen too. NS is for the backtracks of "hey my character would have been smart enough to do X, so can we just say that happened?"

You claim neutrality, then consistently stack positively conotated words on your side, and negatively conotated words on the opposing side. Just as a baseline example, you claim your way is exciting and engaging, and my way is a way were no one really cares about the game. That isn't a neutral position to take.

I think your reading too much into it.

And you are simply showing that you don't understand how the New School games are run. Yes, my players were panicked about death. I rarely kill characters off, but there are far far worse things I can do to a PC than kill them. This idea that no death = easier game is just silly from my perspective.

Yea....character death is not the worst thing that can happen....so you rarely do it? If it's not so bad why not do it all the time? You said it was not so bad....

Also, no, we don't just tell people how to play the game. I even gave an example of this with the commander character. The player asked, the DM gave them the KNOWLEDGE of what their character would know. The actions they decide to take with that knowledge are entirely theirs.

Okay, so you do New School for the knowledge....but then what? The character is a hyper smart general, right? But you go Old School and just tell the player to figuer it out using their own skills and intelligence? Don't they get to play the super smart character? And if they do that NS, that is the DM telling the player what the character thinks should be done. Right?

Which brings up another point. Quite often many of the threats presented as instant-death in old school are only instant death if you don't know the trick. Which is something that gets brought up all the time with traps and puzzles. If they are only challenging because of ignorance, they aren't challenging. A puzzle where the solution is written on the ceiling, but the DM doesn't tell the party because "no one said they were looking up" isn't a challenge. It is a gotcha of "you didn't declare the correct action, so you lose". Not every challenge is defeated simply by knowing the silver bullet answer.

I think your missing the bigger challenge to not be ignorant during game play.

That's not how you've ever presented your style. And you've made very specific points about how newer styles allegedly only work in the vanishingly rare cases where everyone always perfectly agrees forever, as though it were almost never applicable in general.

Ah....I think I see it now.

It often comes up in the newer styles where the players can change something in the game. Like a player can use a "fate point" to alter reality. So if a character needs something they can "just say" they have it..following the offical game rules..and 'pop' it is there as the character 'remembered' to bring it. This works only as the player and DM are on the same page. The player will only "say" they have something appropriate that the DM will approve of...as they are all on the same page.

Like some DMs let players make things like taverns when the character walks into a new town. But the DM knows the player will make a tavern just like one the DM would approve of.

 

[pemerton]

I would say if it is optional it is new school. If the DM is requiring it, it is old school.

I think you've misunderstood me.

You gave examples like this:

there are a lot of things I will tell my players, because it is simply something that makes absolute sense for the character to know. "Oh, your character is a noble from this region? Then you would have heard about the scandal of this family, because it was the hot gossip of the last six balls your attended."

In the new school, a player might say "Hey, my fighter was the commander of a squad of soldiers in the war, he might know a better way to engage with these enemies." and then roll, and the DM would give information. Like, "Well, you know that similar troops often kept mounts near the walls, so you might be able to spook them to cause a distraction" Because that is the sort of thing a veteran of many battles in a long war could reasonably know​

These are things that are just made-up - they are elements of the fiction. You said that, in new school, the GM makes them up and then tells the player. My question was, what label should we give to the school where the player makes up this sort of fiction/setting element, as part of playing their PC, and then tells the GM and the other players what it is that their PC knows/remembers?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I think you've misunderstood me.

You gave examples like this:

there are a lot of things I will tell my players, because it is simply something that makes absolute sense for the character to know. "Oh, your character is a noble from this region? Then you would have heard about the scandal of this family, because it was the hot gossip of the last six balls your attended."​

​

In the new school, a player might say "Hey, my fighter was the commander of a squad of soldiers in the war, he might know a better way to engage with these enemies." and then roll, and the DM would give information. Like, "Well, you know that similar troops often kept mounts near the walls, so you might be able to spook them to cause a distraction" Because that is the sort of thing a veteran of many battles in a long war could reasonably know​

These are things that are just made-up - they are elements of the fiction. You said that, in new school, the GM makes them up and then tells the player. My question was, what label should we give to the school where the player makes up this sort of fiction/setting element, as part of playing their PC, and then tells the GM and the other players what it is that their PC knows/remembers?

I didn't misunderstand you at all. Those examples were specifically for the discussion I am having with Bloodtide. They were in contrast to his his points. They are not meant to stand alone and be the only way things are done.

If the GM is requiring you to make up details for you to be allowed to play the game, that sounds like something an old school game would have.

If the player is doing it because they feel like it, then that sounds like a new school game to me.

 

[Vaalingrade]

A different discussion led me to this old Forge thread about LotFP: Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies

...

What did I just read?

How can I expunge it from my brain meats?

 

[overgeeked]

As @Chaosmancer says, labels tend to be inaccurate and fuzzy, though I don't think that they are entirely without merit in terms of the reality that they are trying to describe. I do think that OSR involves revisionism about what old school D&D was actually like and then formed a more distinct play culture.

I would push back on this. I've played D&D since 1984. What the OSR describes is almost exactly how my long-time D&D group has always played. Interacting with the environment instead of rolling. Avoiding combat when possible. Stacking the odds in your favor with clever interactions with the environment. Unbalanced encounters. Deadly combat. Emergent story. Player agency. Etc. The singular aspect of OSR play that always seems to baffle me is signposting traps. Not because I'm a fan of gotchas, rather it doesn't make sense in the fiction to have traps be obvious. That's a staple of most OSR-style play that we never used back-in-the-day, but it's the only one that would be out of the ordinary for any Saturday night in the 1980s playing AD&D.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Ok, if you want to go with I'm wrong and you are right....that's all on you.

How did you get that out of my point that it might be common in your local area, but not for other people?

Problems. This is, of course, why New School even exists. This is why NS loves the rules so much: page 11 in the rule book says what happens when you roll....it's not GM whim.

Okay, we are at least getting to some agreement that there can be problems.

This is a problem. It's the same thing for New School games where the DM does not understand the rules.

Not every game or adventure is for everyone....that is why there are so many.

This goes back to playing what you know.

I would think you would ALSO have a large problem if the person running the game doesn't understand the rules in the OS type of game. Knowing the basic rules of the game is a pretty basic requirement for running the game.

But on your last line, this is sort of the point I've been driving at. OS games want to limit players to only doing what they already know (except for magic) but the point of a roleplaying game is not to play yourself. It is to play someone different. This is why we "give away" information, because it is information the character should likely know, but the player does not.

Well, a fair number of people do know about wizardry. And...um....you missed the part about OS being Hard Fun.

There are people that lack those. Google "Darwin Awards", for example.

Anyone claiming to use real magic is often incorrect about that. And you keep using the term "Hard Fun" but I've never agreed with that term. I accept you believe that, but I have not agreed that it is what is happening. And while I won't deny there are people in this vast world who lack common sense, implying that people who use one of two styles has it.. and other people play the other way... is rude.

The flaw is the player just sits there clueless and does what the DM tells them to do. An NS counts this as "playing the character". Like your smart wizard character finds a magical rune puzzle. You roll a check. The DM tells you the answer. Then you role play your wizard "solving" the puzzle....and feel like you role played a smart wizard.

That is almost never how that goes. The only time I ever did anything remotely like that, was a time I had a magical lock on a chest, and a player wanted to use identify in a clever way to pick the lock. I hadn't prepared for them to do that, and had to come up with an answer on the fly, which led to me making up a complex alchemical formula... which wasn't written down, and that they solved with a roll, because there was no other possible way to DO that. And that is the only example in the last 10 years.

If a player is sitting there clueless in front of a puzzle, I've already made a mistake. They should have some clue just from my description. Then, if they want to, they can roll or ask me. For example, I once had a party enter a desecrated shrine, and ensconced in the shrine were various figures to good-aligned deities, desecrated in unique ways (the Cat Lord devoured by mice, a fire goddess trapped in ice, a god of freedom in chains). I never told them the answers to the puzzle, but I did let them roll to see if they could figure out who these obscure deities were and how each was desecrated. Then, as long as they did something to mitigate it, I said it was close enough to the answer.

A riddle (which I always hate attempting to use because they always fail to be fun) might involve a roll to determine where a particular turn of phrase is that can give a more obvious clue.

One thing I have long, long noticed is that writers and GMs have a similar problem. You have perfect knowledge of a scenario, so you see the obvious clues. You know the answer, so the answer is obvious to you. But players DON'T KNOW. They don't see the situation like you are seeing it. And so I give chances for them to find the routes and clues, and if they still are struggling, I will let them roll to push them in the correct direction. I don't have a player walk into a puzzle, then tell them the answer to the puzzle, but I recognize that it is more fair to them to give them recourse to find the path forward, when they can't figure it out.

So in many Old School games the location of items, equipment and weapons is important. There are even fancy character sheets where you can list exactly where everything is. And yes, OS you have to state to the DM...again in detail...if your doing something...before things happen too. NS is for the backtracks of "hey my character would have been smart enough to do X, so can we just say that happened?"

Yeah, we do backtrack sometimes. Because yeah, their character would have been smart enough to do something. I once had a DM take us stating to a Sorcerer-King that we would "leave immediately" and have us walk over a week into the desert before informing us we were dying of dehydration, because in a DESERT none of our characters thought to pack supplies for a MONTH LONG JOURNEY because we said we would "leave immediately". And every single person at that table protested the ruling, because it was frickin obvious that we would have gotten supplies. No one leaves on a month long trip across the desert with three days worth of food and water.

Now don't take this to an unreasonable extreme. We don't retcon everything. But there have been plenty of times where a player spoke up and said "but wouldn't my character have known that/planed for that" and they have been correct. As a GM, I don't always remember every little detail of the characters, and it is not fair of me to penalize a player because of it.

To give an example, let us say that there was a fancy dinner and the players go to drink wine from a goblet, and I have them rolling con because the wine was poisoned. One of my players might speak up and claim "Wait, I have that ring that glows green near poison, wouldn't I have noticed that?" In the NS approach.. yeah, they would. Mea Culpa, they notice it before people drink, what do they want to do. But, my impression I've gotten from OS advocates is that their responses would include 1) "You never said you were wearing that ring, so you aren't wearing it." 2) "You never said that you were looking at that ring before drinking, so you won't notice it before drinking." or 3) "Well, this poison was enchanted to be hidden from your ring/someone stole your ring and you have a fake not the real ring" or basically anything else to avoid it being the DM's fault for forgetting to mention it.

But this sort of thing rarely happens. It isn't normal play. It is the edge cases.

I think your reading too much into it.

I don't think I am. I think this has been consistent this entire discussion.

Yea....character death is not the worst thing that can happen....so you rarely do it? If it's not so bad why not do it all the time? You said it was not so bad....

Because it is disruptive. It makes everything harder on me as a GM, and makes everything less fun for the players.

I think your missing the bigger challenge to not be ignorant during game play.

Players aren't ignorant, especially when you are intentionally misleading them, hiding information, ect which you have repeatedly claimed is the point of OS play. You have literally stated that things can happen for no reason that the players know, so how are they supposed to know about them?