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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8297047" data-attributes="member: 87792">That's not a modern mindset. It is the logical consequence of the values advocated by the Old School Primer when the DM isn't good. And part of the point of most of the various more modern mindsets is to get away from this sort of nonsense.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rulings not Rules was followed to the letter with the DM making rulings in place of reactions and morale rules.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Player Skill not Character Abilities - IMO the only arguable point on this list. He didn't seem to have much time for character abilities...</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Heroic not Superhero - he was killed by a Random Act of Bear. A superhero would have coped.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Forget game balance - part of the point of game balance is so Random Act of Bear doesn't kill people out of nowhere. And another part is that RPGs aren't balanced to a 50% win rate - they are balanced to where the designer thinks they are most fun. "Forget what the designer considers fun" is not good advice</li> </ul>To me this is obviously a failure mode of an old school mindset (and a good reason the old school fell out of popularity back in the day) just as much as wandering around watching the NPCs solve everything while you did fetch quests for them was a common failure mode of both White Wolf and 2e adventures, and being buried under a morass of rules and stopping to look everything up was a failure mode of 3.X.One of the reasons I like a lot of the games I do is that they go out of their way to model good practice and when I look at the OSR there is a massive survivor bias. One of the reasons I want good practice modelled is that running a game of Stars Without Number is extremely different from running a game of Apocalypse World in many ways while in others they are closer than running a neo-trad Adventure Path is to either and if I try to run any one as if it was one of the others I expect a disaster. So I want each game to tell me how to run it - which is pretty much the opposite of both "Rulings not rules" and "Forget game balance".And this ties back to the original question. "Is there room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers?" Of course. A sufficiently enthusiastic and charismatic person can bring people into e.g. stamp collecting. But the assumption that DMs are good and should be above the rules rather than people that have to be trained to be good and should be supported by the rules means that the scope is far more limited than it should be. And before someone points out 5e, 5e has a minor GM shortage and it also has Matt Mercer to demonstrate good DM in a specific style that works well with 5e at a level of popularity no other game matches.</blockquote>

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