Do you consider 2nd edition AD&D "old-school"

[Chainsaw]

That sounds very, very boring.

Guess that depends on whether he's going through the same 60 second description every 5 feet of a dungeon or actually roleplaying through an important setpiece - fountain, strange door, etc, eh?

I've been in games lately where people were irritated/confused that I'd actually ask for description of different pieces of a room rather than just roll a perception check. Different strokes, I guess.

 

[Chainsaw]

So what about 2nd edition though? Doesn't 2nd edition have its own type of feel?

I think I agree with the poster who said it was sort of proto-NS... Old schoolish rules, new schoolish approach.

Having said that, I learned on 2E and we had (in the beginning) PLENTY of one-shot dungeon romps that were not really connected (other than using same characters).

Funny thing though: while we eventually began playing more campaign style games, my players always criticized that aspect as being too video-gamey! Haha, so funny given all of today's arguments.

 

[Shemeska]

Only in the sense that it was around before I started playing in the game in 3e.

But I see it as very distinct in feel from 1e. I absolutely adore the flavor and feel of 2e, especially mid to late 2e setting material (Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, etc) but let's just say I don't particularly have any similar feelings for the 1e.

 

[Ariosto]

Yes, Doug, that is the dichotomy: whichever one is fun, the other is somewhat likely to be tedious!

It doesn't thrill me to read 90 pages or so and then spend half an hour trying to build "character" out of Attack X vs Y, +1, shift one square, etc., ... only to spend most of the next six hours waiting for my turn to engage in repetition of such trivia and roll some dice. But that's what rocks some people's boats. Roll scores for six abilities, pick a race and class, roll hit points and gold, and go? What are they supposed to come up with, personality traits or something?!

It wasn't "boring" to me to say, "As I go, I'm prodding the floor ahead with the butt of my spear." It's a thing we used to call role-playing. What would be boring to me would be having to stop in each square and say, "I'm rolling a perception check."

As boring would be having to look in the rulebook to find out in the first place what the game-mechanical abstraction was (maybe wasting time reading the "dungeoneering" entry first). If there even was such a thing, it used to be the DM's concern. (There's a shift in 2E: making the PHB the big book of rules!) But, again, some people thrive on looking up rules and rolling dice and doing arithmetic for every darned thing.

Anyhow, it worked. I found the pit trap and leaped across. It would have been really "boring" if I had had a chance to make fast the line that would let others cross safely ... before a less agile fool ended up in the pit. Instead, we got the "excitement" of wasting time fighting a swarm of stupid bugs I would simply have incinerated if not for my comrade being stuck among them.

I would have preferred to get on to the actually decisive fight with the villain, without weakening our party beforehand -- and maybe finish sometime before midnight in real time.

Yeah, taking 30 minutes of real time to resolve a fight that supposedly takes 30 seconds of game time is another "love it or hate it" thing. Ten minutes for a fight scene, maybe 15, I can handle; after that, I want to get on with the "story" -- even if what's next is another (but dramatically different) fight. It's about moving from one significant decision point to another, and just finding out how many dice rolls it takes to kill some bugs is not that.

Playing WotC-D&D keeps turning into something I can't wait to escape. I've seen people attain that release by falling asleep while waiting for their turns. By contrast, when we play old D&D (such as 2E the other night), the hours fly. I leave feeling not enervated but refreshed. No doubt some people have the opposite set of responses.

 

[Orius]

I'd consider nearly all of it old-school, with the exception of PO which was it's own school, really. Even after PO was released, most of the stuff after it ignored it anyway, so it's not like PO was a clean break in 2e that established a "before" and "after".

In any case, 2e was old school, more or less, as the rules were just a reorganized and updated version of 1e, with some stuff cut as a way of whitewashing the system. Some of the optional stuff in the splats weren't really old-school at all, but then the splats did all sorts of different stuff anyway. In any case, it was the DM's call as to just how much the splats applied. I always found it kind of a pain to try to reconcile a lot of the different and sometimes incompatible stuff in the optional material, which is why I liked 3e's early direction, it did a lot of that work fairly well.

 

[Coplen]

3e is old school to me now.

Either you're kidding or our definition of old school is worlds apart.

 

[Melan]

2e was one of the editions whose designers seemed to have been uncomfortable with D&Disms, and tried to fix them by applying contemporarily fashionable design concepts. The end result, although more digestible than its precursors, felt sanitised and somehow inadequate. I wouldn't consider it old-school by today's standards.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Small correction - accurate categorization can be a useful tool.

Agreed.

As I feel the old/new thing is a false dichotomy to start with, I find the categories to be inaccurate.

So you have said, although I am not aware of any rational argument you have made to explain why you feel this way.

The idea of "old school" and "new school" games, at its core, contains the claim that not every game system is going to be what every gamer is looking for. IMHO and IME, most of those who make this claim do so, consciously or not, to refute this very idea.

IOW, refuting the idea of OS and NS games is a means to refute the idea of OS and NS gamers, and therefore to remove the obvious conclusion that folks who do not like one's preferred game system might well have a valid reason for it (even if that reason doesn't apply to you).

Of course, you might not be meaning to imply this, but it is a slippery slope you are on, my friend........And I think that Gary put spikes at the bottom of the pit!


RC

 

[Mallus]

Mark me down as someone who doesn't quite get the utility of the whole old-school/new school divide as a discussion-framing tool.

To me, 2e was just... D&D. Which is to say it was a tool for creating our own fantasy adventure stories. My long-running 2e campaign turned into a epic quest set in a consistent and detailed world, but that had very little to do with the any of the material published for 2e. This was simply what we wanted to use D&D for.

My high school friends and I started gaming playing poorly strung-together AD&D modules, and evnetually wanted something different. So we played our version of 'campaign play', which didn't bear much resemblance to logistics focused swords and sorcery treasure hunt which defined the Gygaxian 'campaign' model. Neither was it a railroad. The two major goals of the quest where player-defined.

We used a mix of 'challenge the player' and 'challenge the character' obstacles (just like I did in 3e, BTW). Over the years we gradually moved away for certain kinds of 'challenge the player' situations. But this had nothing to do with a change in gaming philosophy. It was a time issue. Creating challenging puzzles for smart and creative players on a consistent basis is tough (and time-consuming)!

Ultimately, I think the 'old-school' and 'new-school' labels describe play style preferences that go back to the beginning of hobby and aren't neccessarily associated with specific periods of time. Some people want to play a strategic treasure-hunting wargame, other people want to star in a dinner-theater version of the Lord of the Rings. Most probably want something in between.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Mark me down as someone who doesn't quite get the utility of the whole old-school/new school divide as a discussion-framing tool.

Which is another way of saying that you do get the utility to some degree, correct?

I wouldn't be too hung up on the labels, either. They could be A and B and be just as useful. You can always play with a game whose rules are not intended to strongly support your playstyle, but the more you recongize the effects of rules on playstyles, the easier it is to choose a game that supports you well, or to modify a game so that it supports you better.

There is nothing objectively good or bad about OS or NS rulesets (A or B rulesets, if you prefer). They are only good or bad in terms of how they interact with a group's or individual's play preferences.

Recognizing differences in what game rules support well isn't limiting. Refusing to do the same is.....if for no other reason than it hinders in modification and/or selection of a ruleset that supports your playstyle.


RC