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

[bloodtide]

Right, because it isn't very fun for you if you are going to have all of your abilities fail just because your DM got dumped by his girlfriend and he wants to lash out. The game was never about "whims" , I don't know why you keep wanting to insist on this as a difference.

Because it is?

Doesn't it? "anything anywhere anytime might happen regardless of what the character does or does not do. And very often the character...and player..will never know the how or why of anything that happens or does not happen......ever."

Your example is a bad DM that forgot to tell you an important detail. That is an example of a bad DM.

The only difference between your description of old school play and my example... is the DM told me the what and why instead of just keeping quiet about the mistake.

I'm not talking about bad dms that make mistakes.

Yeah, instead of the DM trying to overwhelm you with information to obfuscate and cause you to make a deadly mistake... the DM gives you a chance to not die.

This is an Old School New School difference. To be more of a "plus" said as: the DM gives you vast amounts of information, but you as a player must use your own skills and intelligence to use that information.......the DM gives you a chance not to die, ignoring any details or information.

Gee, I wonder why that is when the other option is for the whims of the GM to lead to them causing harm or death to the player with no warning or reason. Why might people want to insist on sticking to the rules of the game, which are clearly laid out and available to everyone.

Well, there is another side. The improv game! At any time, the DM might decide to just make up any 'rules' they feel like to cover anything in the game.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Would you rather we go back to the Forge terms of gaming, narratives, and simultanion?

 

[TwoSix]

Would you rather we go back to the Forge terms of gaming, narratives, and simultanion?

I never left!

 

[Chaosmancer]

So, you keep using both those terms - fuzzy and inaccurate. I'm saying really only one of them is true. There are two concepts we tend to conflate in our mind - accuracy, and precision. They aren't the same thing.

Accuracy tells us how "correct" a statement is. Precision tells us to what level of granularity the statement is valid.

Labels are often fuzzy - statements with them sometimes can't be very precise. A label is not accurate or inaccurate on its own. If I call my cat a dog, it is not the label that is inaccurate. The label is still fine. My use of the label is inaccurate.

If someone says, the label Foo means X, Y, and Z, and you don't agree, that's still not the label being correct or incorrect - that's just a disagreement over what the best definition of the label is.

Common vernacular is perfectly fine to utilize. This is not a scientific peer-reviewed journal. If your only point is I should have said "Fuzzy and imprecise" instead of "fuzzy and inaccurate" then fine. I recognize that my post would get rejected from a scientific journal.

But hadn't you just pointed out that "many people" were effectively doing that anyway? You didn't say that explicitly, but it sure seemed like it in context.


So, maybe this conversation isn't terribly valuable for you, and yard work is a better choice. "This isn't interesting, I'm going to go do something else" should always be an option.

The conversation I was having was interesting, and I believed useful. Quibbling over whether I should have said accurate or precise is not useful. And simply stepping away any time anyone disagrees with me to any extent, because someone else thinks I get upset over that is basically the same as asking me to leave the forums entirely.

I don't particularly think "never discuss any disagreements" is a healthy position to take, for the continued use of a DISCUSSION forum.

 

[Vaalingrade]

New School is pretty much a collective term for all the playstyles that aren't 'Old School', which I've rarely seen anyone apply to themselves.

IF we need to label them at all, it'd probably be better to label the individual style rather than the big ball of 'not Old School'

Annnnd then we kind of have to side eye 'old school', as while the OSR movement is a thing that solidified around the idea of this platonic original ideal of how the game is to be played, there's a ton of different approaches and also baggage that isn't being done justice by the single lump term.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Because it is?

I do not believe it is. I have rarely met someone who is a proponent of old school play who has insisted that the rules of the game were not to be followed and that instead they should always just make things up as they feel like it.

Your example is a bad DM that forgot to tell you an important detail. That is an example of a bad DM.

I'm not talking about bad dms that make mistakes.

No, you are talking about a DM who does it on purpose just because they feel like it. Which I would say is WORSE than someone making a mistake.

This is an Old School New School difference. To be more of a "plus" said as: the DM gives you vast amounts of information, but you as a player must use your own skills and intelligence to use that information.......the DM gives you a chance not to die, ignoring any details or information.

Well, there is another side. The improv game! At any time, the DM might decide to just make up any 'rules' they feel like to cover anything in the game.

You keep presenting those two things as opposites, but they really aren't. Giving vast amounts of information , at least half of which is useless, is not the opposite side of the spectrum from giving people the chance not to die regardless of details. The actual opposite would be the DM highlighting those details that are important and matter, instead of having the players sort through it and guess which things are important to pay attention to.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Things I would define as New School, though many of these came into play awhile back now:

• Session zeroes
• Character backgrounds/backstories
• Roleplaying as important as combat.
• Picking the character you want over qualifying for a character
• Characters are better than average
• Death possible but meaningful
• Character arcs
• Characters have relationships and important goals
• Character integration into the setting.

 

[bloodtide]

I do not believe it is. I have rarely met someone who is a proponent of old school play who has insisted that the rules of the game were not to be followed and that instead they should always just make things up as they feel like it.

Well, it is a basic fundamental part of nearly all Old School play. The scribbles in the books are just suggestions for the DM to follow if they want too. The players must follow all the rules...unless the DM says so.

No, you are talking about a DM who does it on purpose just because they feel like it. Which I would say is WORSE than someone making a mistake.

It depends. Old School style does not give the players much information for free....the players must find most of it through game play.

You keep presenting those two things as opposites, but they really aren't. Giving vast amounts of information , at least half of which is useless, is not the opposite side of the spectrum from giving people the chance not to die regardless of details. The actual opposite would be the DM highlighting those details that are important and matter, instead of having the players sort through it and guess which things are important to pay attention to.

It depends again. Like take traps. In Old School your given the description of a whole area, so things can get "lost" in that block of text or speech. New School is more focused, like "the room is uninteresting...But you noticed some long scrapes along the stone floor by the far wall." So by skiping the room details and just saying the one detail, it does signal that that one said detail is important.

New School characters are special in the game world, so they not only have plot armor, they always get a save. In Old School characters are "everypersosns" and get nothing.

 

[Oofta]

It's funny how we have all these statements of "This is how old school traps were handled." I just did some double checking and there's basically zero guidance on how to handle traps in OD&D. In AD&D they talk about how it takes time to progress through a dungeon if the PCs are searching for traps, but again no details or instructions on how to actually do it. Well except for wonderful advice like telling the DM gems like "Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice" and so on.

So, as I remembered from back in the day, some people invented this idea that there was one true way of handling traps and in some circles it became popular. It was not explicitly discussed anywhere that you must give detailed explanation of how you are detecting a trap, just that you are checking. This, of course, is pretty useless guidance so I understand how things developed into the weird (to me) adversarial relationship of DM and player when it comes to traps.

Short version: there were no rules on how to find or detect traps unless you had a class ability or magic. It was pretty much left up to the DM with virtually no guidance. So there is no "Older books told us to do it this way."

 

[jasper]

NSP the STORY is King.
OS PLAYING is king.