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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5058416" data-attributes="member: 82106">Seems to me, having started back in 1975 with the original game that the characteristics were something like:VERY simple characters. Like you had 6 stats, hit points, ac, gold, xp, stat bonuses, level, class, damage, and the list of whatever items you had. Casters had spell lists. Made for very quick and easy character generation (5 mins tops for a level 1 PC). Character death consequently was pretty trivial.AD&D did make PCs a bit more fleshed out, it was still fairly easy to gen up a new level 1 character and quite feasible to do it in mid game if you got killed off.So really it seems to me the most significant aspect of "old school" was just the sheer arbitrary lethality the game expected. Spring a trap, you die. Run into any of the plethora of insta-gank monsters, you die. Get a couple bad die rolls, you die. It did keep you on your toes for sure. Combat did go less rounds and the minor combatants were only important mostly because they acted as blockers. Usually there were one or two monsters giving you a threat and the rest just got in the way of the fighter clobbering the nasty one. There were of course those "a threat all by itself" monsters, which is something you don't really see that often in 4e. Of course most of those were of the insta-gank variety or else something that had multiple high damage attacks. Generally though those types were what you had your SOD type stuff for. At low levels things could easily devolve to a slugging match but it usually lasted 3-4 rounds and didn't often involve much maneuvering beyond "I run up to the monster". At high levels? Pretty much rocket tag.I think there was somewhat more of a feeling of being on the hairy edge of death at all times but it was usually much tedious exploring and skirmishing puncuated with the occasional close brush with death.Lots of other things of course and I'm sure it really depended a lot on the group. I seem to remember in our group there was a great deal of characters running around and trying to assemble the right group of PCs and items to go after a particular adventure once we were out of low levels, followed by the fairly linear dungeon crawling sort of phase, climactic encounter and either bugout or victory dance.</blockquote>

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