To be fair, the one difference is that some of the people doing this were actually around then. At most they're trying to recreate the games they had back then--or extend ones that have gone on on and off across the decades. So I don't think its quite as reconstructionist as you suggest in some cases.
I think they're very possibly duplicating, rather than reconstructing the experience they had many years ago (or more recently).
As I've said, the problem usually has more to do with people overgeneralizing, or outright universalizing an experience that certainly existed, but people have suggested was more common than there's any reason to believe it actually was.
This is correct, and I didn't mean to imply that everyone engaged in "old school" play is reconstructing past modes of play. There are definitely groups and individuals that have maintained some level of continuity. What I would say, though, is that
the OSR and things like it
are attempts at reconstruction. This is pretty clear from the writing of people within the OSR talking about it (see, for instance,
this collection). That's not a bad thing! But we can see how a game like OSRIC differs from an actual game that has been running for 40+ years, because we have examples of the latter.
There's Robert Wardhaugh, who's had a continuous campaign since 1982.
His site is interesting, in particular
the section on his house rules. He doesn't detail all of them, but among the rules mentioned are 1) spells are per-level, not per-day, implemented to disempower casters, 2) there is a "stance" system, where whenever you're hit you have to make a roll or fall down, 3) characters go up to ~40th level, 4) hit points and damage are doubled, 5) XP is per session and not tied to character actions, and 6) a reworked system for armor with ascending AC and armor-as-damage-reduction.
I'm not interested in whether or not they're quote-unquote "good" rules; they work for him and his players, and whether or not I would want to play in a game using them is irrelevant. What I find interesting here is the way the "old school" movement emphasizes "rulings, not rules"—Matthew Finch's "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" is, I think, the source of that phrase, and it ends with a reminder to the GM that "You are the rulebook. There is no other rulebook." But if we look at Wardhaugh's game, from his description it seems to be
full of rules. They're house rules, to be sure, but house rules are still rules. He's changed and hacked the rules of AD&D into their own thing, to satisfy his desires and those of his players, to meet demands for verisimilitude, and—importantly—for play balance. Long-running games like Wardhaugh's tend to accumulate rules as GMs and players adapt and convert stuff from other systems and settings, whereas games attempting to evoke "old school" play tend to strip things down.
