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I've had this saved on my hard drive for years :D

This is exactly my experience. My campaign has similarly been running uninterrupted since 1982 and my houserules are an unholy mix of stuff from every edition of the game, plus Pathfinder, plus various other things I came up with. I do also run arcs with stripped-down rules but the main game...

Same - been playing since '82 and as I've said earlier in this thread, I don't really recognise much of what is claimed as "old school" play. The claims of universality and "this is how old school games were played" are just bizarre to me. As soon as we were able, we were leaning on narrative...

I think this is an accurate assessment and supported by accounts of the time. The boardgame was designed to mirror the dungeon explorations of Blackmoor after all, so its influence is strong. Cool article too - I really dig the analysis of comparative level size and how that affects the...

Totally agree. I mean, if you wanted to, you could point to the fact that Arneson's Black Moor game grew out of Wesley's Braunstein, and was popular because it specifically prioritised character-oriented narratives over the wargame framework. Given that this is what led to D&D, I think there's...

PHB backstab can get in the sea. That's one of the first things we changed. If they don't know you're there, you can backstab them - that's all that's needed. In combat, they probably know you're there so get sneaky. If someone engages the target in melee, they're probably distracted, giving...

Completely agree. I think there's a valid concept at work here but old vs new can't capture it. The primary obstacle is that there is no wholly representative record of how games have been played over the years. Sure, some people will say "oh we played like this" but you will always get others...

I quite like the idea that most people don't have an alignment. It's something that only applies to those who really, really act in ways that literally align them with cosmic forces of law, chaos, good, or evil. Most people are just people.

Yeah - my approach is always that alignment is applied after the fact. You can't decide what alignment you are - it's determined by the things you do. Same applies to "monsters" :)

Gotcha. 2e was pretty vague on that front in the Monstrous Manual - it just said alignment was "general behavior" for the "average monster" but that there were exceptions. Complete Book of Humanoids went further and just said monsters would "tend" towards one alignment or another but PCs could...

It's worth mentioning that orcs, goblins etc stopped being always evil with AD&D 2e, if not sooner. Orc and goblin PCs (not to mention a ton of other humanoid races) could be of any alignment. We had them in our games from pretty early on :)

I haven't played it but if that's the one where initiative is determined by what you do, and talking comes first and fighting last, then yeah, I think that's a great candidate for a game where mechanics drive the nature of play :)

I think this is a really interesting point. Games where the mechanics are specifically meant to create narrative-specific or genre-specific outcomes feel much more "new school" to me. But I agree - I don't think that's what the OP means by new school, which isn't necessarily all that new...

This is more or less my feeling on the proposed definitions. The style described as New School here is mostly how our games ran since about 1986 (4 years into playing D&D for me). Absolutely we played games that had high-lethality, a sense of very real danger, and other hallmarks that are often...

That is a super cool idea!! I haven't run X2 in years (although I ran it loads back in the day) and was thinking of busting it out again. Might have to nick this idea :) The first time a party completed it, we had three dead PCs by the end, with a fourth turned into a fly. One of the survivors...

Yep - this turned out to be very useful to us because one PC ended up becoming undead because of Campaign Reasons and wound up back at the Gorge. The other characters mounted a rescue mission into Ravenloft when they were much higher level so all this added detail came in very handy.

Well, on a general level, people like different things. I don't think there's anything more to it than that. But OK here's what we enjoyed. Out of the gate, once the players realised they were heading into the brand-new Ravenloft setting, they were excited to experience it from that...

Yeah, this is exactly how G1 panned out for us - an infiltration that went horribly wrong ("as long as I don't roll a 1, it will be fine..." :D :D :D) followed by large amounts of siege weaponry being deployed from the party's spelljammer. G2 was a bit more of a dungeon exploration but G3 was a...

Totally. And this is as it should be. How dull it would be if we all thought the same thing :) I think there's a lot to be said for leaning into the concept of a Ravenloft game, and that includes not only the gothic trappings and genre assumptions but also the more structured nature of the...