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I think stance is a complete red herring. The proposed stances muddle together a wide variety of separate phenomenon into arbitrary categories that only ever describe actual play of an OSR game by accident. Like a stopped clock being right twice a day. As they are muddled combinations of...

I definitely think a trade-off does exist. Once you turn up the concentration on story creation to the point where the decisions the players make in terms of exploration of situation no longer matter, you're leaving the feel of OSR. It'll be true that the players will be making important...

Yes, definitely. I guess the distinction might be that for an OSR feel, it's ideally enough to trust the narrative forming powers of our brains to create the second part. That as people who interpret everything that happens to us in the form of a narrative, we will interpret the events of play...

Given the development of games that do things differently than the earliest games, I'm going to probably side with the idea that there are lots of players for whom this type of play isn't enjoyable. It didn't take long, even if you stick with D&D, for story based thinking to arrive in both...

I think the disconnect here is that in old school play you don't attempt to "create the story" at all. The fiction I'm talking about is not a story in the literary structure sense. It's the content of the description of the participants. You play to see what happens and what you can do and...

This paragraph is definitely going to stick with me a while. It's a really piercing insight into how many people approach the hobby. I'm a huge "actual play" person and am largely the first to point at the things people do in a session as the actual game, but, as you've pointed out, there is a...

And a second exercise: Sheetless play or Black Box GMing. Again, you'll want a simple system as in this exercise, you'll be handling every single rules related thing there is. No one else will be using dice, looking at character sheets or anything at all related to the game system. It'll all...

Here's an exercise that might help break things down even further. It requires actually playing a short session. Pick a simple game. The Cthulhu Dark game would work great as it's truly simple. As would Moldvay Basic D&D. Or failing that pick a game you know really well in terms of rules...

If the rules themselves emphasized rules as a source for success, then the rules obviously are very capable of impacting play and are not just occasional tools, even when they fade into the background. I would say earlier games seem like occasional tools more because the entirety of them work...

That's a good insight. There's probably a technique that can be used to ensure these skill usages don't replace description and roleplay in favour of bypassing play. One technique, which also fits the list of what is common among OSR feeling games, is that the referee is the one who calls for...

I know it's drifting away from dungeon fantasy that often defines old school gaming, but I would highly, highly recommend everyone play at least one scenario using Cthulhu Dark, a rules light system Graham Walmsley designed for testing Call/Trail of Cthulhu scenarios quickly and painlessly...

I think that we should also consider that newer games, despite having very clearly delineated character capabilities vs player capabilities, are still about player skill. I know, it sounds strange, but think about it in terms of what is left for a player to base choices on. The players are...

It's definitely not a new phenomenon. Perhaps it only feels like it is because of how d20 took over the market for almost a decade and the original poster simply hasn't been exposed to the 35+ years of RPG history that hasn't involved classes recently. LOLwut? You seriously think not having...

I think presentation has a lot to do with it as well. If you're sharing a PDF, laying it out like an old version of D&D and finding some black and white inked art you can use from relatively amateur artists is probably a good idea as well. As for the ones under discussion, I'm still not sure I...

I remember seeing a signature in someone's post on Dragonsfoot that went something like "We don't explore characters, we explore dungeons." In the narrow subset of early gaming that has come to dominate the definition of old school, characters are often seen as pawns or avatars rather than as...

It's best to be wary of the primer. It represents one approach to one game and then presents it as representative of some sort of universal "old style." The truth of the matter is that early gaming is marked by heterodoxy, not by orthodoxy. There was no uniform approach and the "zen moments"...

For me, the main thing for the feel is that the game doesn't leave a circuit of description. The GM describes something One or more players describe what they do in response The GM consults the system as needed to determine the results The GM describes the new something that results The circuit...

Just wanted to add that our "each action spent on defense gives an effective +2 to AC" and the ability to spend them as a reaction really makes heavy armour more valuable. There was one character in some sort of good medium or heavy armour with a shield and he would love receiving the first...

Well, we kept it simple and used a grid. We used a version where each sacrificed action could improve your AC by a couple until your next turn and you can do it to as a reaction to interrupt a successful hit. So if someone really pressed the attack well and you wanted to block it, you could...

The fundamental purpose of most resolution systems in traditional RPGs is to answer the question of whether or not a given action is successful and how successful it is. That's what most mechanics in most RPGs are about. Many non-traditional games have taken the mechanics and applied them to...