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<blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9383628" data-attributes="member: 2205">Ironically, player agency is one of the most strongly expressed tenets of most descriptions of the OSR playstyle, although they usually mean by that player driven sandbox exploration and player motivated goals.But again, that just drives home my conclusion that 1) &quot;old school&quot; is a modern rejection of certain playstyles and doesn't actually represent any genuine &quot;oldness&quot;; that's more an attempt to imply some kind of moral superiority through seniority than anything else, and 2) while the OSR playstyle is relatively well defined and bounded, the opposite, to which it is a reaction, is nothing more than an incoherent grab bag of stuff that OSR preferring players don't like and don't represent a single coherent playstyle at all and never did. 3) There are lots of playstyles, most of them are as old, or nearly so, as the hobby overall, and the only superiority any of them can claim is their ability to match the preferences of a given gamer or group, and finally 4) while &quot;new school&quot; was always an incoherent adjective that meant &quot;anything from a wide variety of playstyles that aren't specifically OSR&quot; in reality, old school as an adjective has been greatly diluted and has become itself somewhat incoherent by the over casual usage of it to describe anything that's vaguely D&amp;D-like, rules light, indy or vaguely &quot;old-like&quot;. Or, even more incoherently, new school and old school become value judgements for people who identify with old school in particular, and come to mean little more than &quot;what I like&quot; vs &quot;what I don't like.&quot;UPDATE: This is further complicated by &quot;within D&amp;D&quot; blinders that many have where something is considered &quot;new school&quot; like Universal Task Resolution mechanics, for example, which are clearly quite old; that just originate first outside of D&amp;D. But sometimes this goes both ways too and people talk about old school encompassing games like James Bond or Traveller just because they're old... even though they have very little in common in terms of assumed playstyle to D&amp;D.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Desdichado, post: 9383628, member: 2205"] Ironically, player agency is one of the most strongly expressed tenets of most descriptions of the OSR playstyle, although they usually mean by that player driven sandbox exploration and player motivated goals. But again, that just drives home my conclusion that 1) "old school" is a modern rejection of certain playstyles and doesn't actually represent any genuine "oldness"; that's more an attempt to imply some kind of moral superiority through seniority than anything else, and 2) while the OSR playstyle is relatively well defined and bounded, the opposite, to which it is a reaction, is nothing more than an incoherent grab bag of stuff that OSR preferring players don't like and don't represent a single coherent playstyle at all and never did. 3) There are lots of playstyles, most of them are as old, or nearly so, as the hobby overall, and the only superiority any of them can claim is their ability to match the preferences of a given gamer or group, and finally 4) while "new school" was always an incoherent adjective that meant "anything from a wide variety of playstyles that aren't specifically OSR" in reality, old school as an adjective has been greatly diluted and has become itself somewhat incoherent by the over casual usage of it to describe anything that's vaguely D&D-like, rules light, indy or vaguely "old-like". Or, even more incoherently, new school and old school become value judgements for people who identify with old school in particular, and come to mean little more than "what I like" vs "what I don't like." [B]UPDATE[/B]: This is further complicated by "within D&D" blinders that many have where something is considered "new school" like Universal Task Resolution mechanics, for example, which are clearly quite old; that just originate first outside of D&D. But sometimes this goes both ways too and people talk about old school encompassing games like James Bond or Traveller just because they're old... even though they have very little in common in terms of assumed playstyle to D&D. [/QUOTE]

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