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

[Chaosmancer]

As noted, this type of fun is fun for Old School players. It is rare for Old School to even have the idea of consent. During game play the DM is free to have whatever they want to have happen. Even to PCs. An Old School player accepts this, even if they don't like it. Playing through hardships and adversity is fun to an Old School Gamer.

I get immediately, viscerally cautious whenever some states that there is no idea of consent, and that someone in power can have whatever they want to have happen, happen. If your players enjoy the adversity, then they will consent to whatever you have planned. IF you aren't asking them, because you don't want to hear them say no... then there might be a problem.

I'm not sure this is clearer or even part of one school. I think many players will say they don't want to loose their characters cool or favorite items.

This just highlights the differences, as plenty of Old School players would be fine playing Bark Bark the Dog Barbarian.

Would they? Or would they simply feel like there is no reason to rock the boat? You stated to my example of working with my DM to find a good sacrifice for my character's story that many if not most players don't want to lose things... and yet you also claim that plenty perhaps even most of OS players would be fine losing their entire character. There is certainly a disconnect here.

The games are very different. Many Old School gamers would never ask a player for consent or take there wish into account at all.....but it's not completely unknown to happen.

That is a problem to me.

And add

Every-person Heroes vs Chosen One Super Heroes

A New School character example is Luke (or Rae) Skywalker, Neo or Harry Potter.
An Old School character example is Conan, Dirty Harry or John McClaine

Actually, no. You specifically are pointing out "chosen ones" but that isn't how New School players make their characters. We do not make characters chosen by destiny.

Even the idea that Old School characters are "Everymen" is pretty suspect. Mordenkainen is an Old School character, played at Gygax's table. He is an archmage who has risen to the point of challenging gods and keeping balance in the multiverse. Now, you might challenge that he had to rise to that position... but so do all of our characters. My Fey Warlock Tharivol was a normal guy, who made a marriage pact with a Fey Lady. It even turned out that she had multiple simultaneous pacts, and every single one of them was "Tharivol". He had no special beginnings, but he was going to be an immortal Fey Lord sitting at the center of a rebuilt civilization... because the game was about rebuilding civilization.

We do acknowledge we are making protagonists, but that is very different.

Long Duration vs Short Duration
A New School game often has a set time limit, often a story goal, that once met ends the game. NS is often more focused and limited, so a campaign will be a set type of game...like an underwater setting, so all the players will make underwater characters.

Old School is often more Forever Campaigns. Players make whatever characters they wish, and then adventure endlessly. Very often for real world years, or more.

It can, I would say that New School does tend to lean more into having plots, as part of the character's being protagonists. The DM has a villain for them to fight, has an end goal of some sort to reach. But even Old School has this to a degree. You can't actually adventure endlessly, because you eventually max level the character.

 

[Desdichado]

I think the problem when that occurs is people have some variation of the "Back in my day, we walked uphill both ways to school in the rain" sort of thing, where doing things the hard way is considered a virtue even in an entertainment enterprise. This is fundamentally ridiculous, but you see it in other places (parts of video gaming come to mind).

Nods. Yep, absolutely. The OSR and modern old school isn't really the same as playing in the 70s and 80s. It's a highly curated attempt to mimic a tournament style game, but done more casually at home, is kind of the best way I've seen it described. I was playing back in the earliest 80s, and well into the hobby by the mid-80s, and I don't claim that my experience was universal or anything, but I know my games only had a few of what the OSR claims are the core principles of their playstyle, and I didn't know anyone who would have played it the way your standard Old School Essentials is probably played today.

I actually don't even think this has anything to do with an "old school" style game, this is just lack of consideration for your players.

You've discovered the key that has led to the failure to communicate for page after page of this thread.

 

[Desdichado]

But the rules not reflecting the intended play experience is OSR to the core. In OSR, the DM ignores the rules or beats into their preferred shape!

Ha! You're not entirely wrong with that flippant remark. But that's what I'm getting at; the playstyle preferences are OLD. But it took a while for everyone to figure out how to cater to them via system, which is why nobody's games looked alike.

 

[grankless]

I get immediately, viscerally cautious whenever some states that there is no idea of consent, and that someone in power can have whatever they want to have happen, happen. If your players enjoy the adversity, then they will consent to whatever you have planned. IF you aren't asking them, because you don't want to hear them say no... then there might be a problem.



Would they? Or would they simply feel like there is no reason to rock the boat? You stated to my example of working with my DM to find a good sacrifice for my character's story that many if not most players don't want to lose things... and yet you also claim that plenty perhaps even most of OS players would be fine losing their entire character. There is certainly a disconnect here.



That is a problem to me.



Actually, no. You specifically are pointing out "chosen ones" but that isn't how New School players make their characters. We do not make characters chosen by destiny.

I think that generally Bloodtide's commentary should be understood through the lens that the majority of posts he makes on this forum are essays about how all players in his games are selfish greedy jerks. The details he shares about these rarely match up with one another or are consistent which also leads me to assume he's making up most of them to get a rise out of people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah FFV has been around for sometime but I dont like using it. I mean, its apt for whats its indicating, but seems rather disrespectful. Im not sure exactly how the extreme survival sim came about, but I encountered it a lot. In fact, a few folks I know still expect the game to play that way. Most folks I play with moved away from that, but still want death to be possible, just not around every single corner. Its exhausting.

Some people always act like it was more endemic than it was, honestly. I mean there was some of that just because bottom level characters were so ruddy brittle, but above a certain level it was less true in the first place, and even when death happened to some extent Raise Dead and its kin made it cheap.

I think there can be some place for games where real risk is present--I ran and played RuneQuest for a long time after all--but some of this takes it to a ridiculous extreme, and there's still no automatic connection with the pixelhunting and other (to most people, frankly boring and annoying) micromanagement. And it shouldn't be acted like that's what everyone should want all the time, and they're lesser gamers if they don't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But the rules not reflecting the intended play experience is OSR to the core. In OSR, the DM ignores the rules or beats into their preferred shape!

Yeah, but the gig is that at least as presented, the "intended play experience" of the original game was far closer to modern games than what at least some OSR types are presenting. Its just that people coming out of miniatures wargaming had very limited tools to get there.

 

[payn]

I dont know if its strongly NS, but I do very much like background, trait, class features that tie to setting and particularly campaigns. I am the absolute biggest stan for prestige classes and campaign players guides. I know some homebrewers have a disdain for flavored mechanics, but I like to link my PCs as much as possible the source material.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Nods. Yep, absolutely. The OSR and modern old school isn't really the same as playing in the 70s and 80s. It's a highly curated attempt to mimic a tournament style game, but done more casually at home, is kind of the best way I've seen it described. I was playing back in the earliest 80s, and well into the hobby by the mid-80s, and I don't claim that my experience was universal or anything, but I know my games only had a few of what the OSR claims are the core principles of their playstyle, and I didn't know anyone who would have played it the way your standard Old School Essentials is probably played today.

Hey, I was playing in 1975 and we only played to a limited degree the way some of the OS guys act like we did. One of the ongoing themes about this is that while many OSR guys understand the difference, so of them waaay overuniversalize how much gritty and deadly was the default style then. If anything, ours was probably over-the-top and deadly (because short of housruling it, 1-3 level characters were just so brittle it was hard to get around). There was a certain degree of expected resource management, but barring short term things like spell slots, we often had no idea how much of what anyone had so it was pretty much on the honor system.

You've discovered the key that has led to the failure to communicate for page after page of this thread.

Though I think there's only been a couple of people who've taken this to a toxic level.

 

[Remathilis]

I always say that I'm not old school, but I am old fashioned. My tastes were formed mostly in the early to mid 80s, and I'm sympathetic to a lot of traditional ways of doing things in RPGs. That said, I never had any interest in a lot of things that the OSR claims as core to their philosophy. Then again, neither do I remember that many of those things were used in any group I was a part of in the early 80s.

There's a lot of cool people with OSR-like tastes, but I also find it a pattern that if there's smug, elitist behavior about how to play that it often comes from that quarter.

This is my overall opinion as well. I've been playing since 2e and have found the game has become more and more suited to my play style as the editions have rolled on. I can sympathize with some old school elements, but it's like going back to your old neighborhood; it's a nice place to visit but I don't want to live there anymore.

That said, I have also found a certain smugness that comes from that section of the Hobby as well. There is a certain "the old ways were the correct ways" vibe whenever a discussion arises. It's fine if your preference is toward traditional styles, but when people suggest things like "rolling randomly for PCs is the correct way and those who build the PC they want are entitled and ruining the game." Makes my blood boil.

 

[Mark Hope]

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 elements and character immersion and nobody had to go away and read books on The Best Way To Feign Elfdom. I think the OSR has done great work in highlighting the benefits of some of the procedural elements of earlier rulesets and is a font of creativity but it's quite reconstructionist. Which is totally cool and I dig the motivation for that, but games "back in the day" were incredibly diverse - as they continue to be now - and I think that truth is sometimes drowned out by a small number of loud voices proclaiming otherwise.