D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Multiple play styles co-existed, and were perceived to co-exist, in the 70s and 80s. In Part I of his series "D&D Campaigns" published in White Dwarf #1 (June/July 1977), Lew Pulsipher (@lewpuls) notes that "D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel." Pulsipher prefers the former style, which emphasises "player skill", considering the latter to be mostly "boring and inferior".

In Pulsipher's account of novel-style play that he seems to have experienced in California, referees "make up more than half of what happens" while "the player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." However in a "skill-oriented campaign" the referee "should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun." Players must be able to make decisions "which significantly alter the course of an adventure".

The one thing about old school games that is true of all tables is that everyone's table will be different than everyone else's.

 

[overgeeked]

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

We must be time travelers then as we’ve played D&D in almost exactly that style since at least 1984. The group of older kids I played with had been playing that way for years prior to me joining.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

Yep. That’s why they were almost never run at all or changed thoroughly before being run.