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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8514137" data-attributes="member: 694">The usual OSR response to the very, very, very tired criticism that old-school play was never a monolith and has always encompassed a diversity of play styles — best articulated by a widely-shared 2009 <a href="https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5969" target="_blank">K&K Alehouse post by T. Foster</a> that the author of the article in the OP also links to in Part V of the essay — basically boils down to, "Yes, <a href="https://youtu.be/bJ12s2kx_-M?t=32" target="_blank">we know</a>. We already know that. We don't care; it's beside the point."Defining a specific 'old-school' play style, even if it's pure revisionism, all but necessitates drawing hard distinctions between the way, as best as we can reconstruct, that D&D's creators originally intended the game to be played (even if that changed almost immediately once the game was in the hands of the public; even if those selfsame creators changed their own minds a few years down the road) and the way the game actually evolved during the real course of the hobby's history. The revision is the point. The alternate-history, possible-path what-if-ery is the point. The only way to get that is to close off the avenues that the history of the game has already treaded (because they are what led D&D from old-school to traditional to modern gameplay).That, even at the risk of being a bunch of un-inclusive meanie-pantses who dare to imagine that a very specific play-style might have an actual definition to it.</blockquote>

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