Interesting thread. Defining "old school" seems to be one of the hottest topics du jour in the murky backwaters of RPG fandom called internet forums and blogs.
I tend to agree with Joe on this one, because James Maliszewski seems to be making a claming act for the term "old school," in a divisive manner not unlike a marginalized minority that by trying to defend its territory actually creates more antagonism and "us-vs-themism" than was previously the case (Ariosto's posts are a case in point). In some ways it seems like a later variant, an echoing ripple if you will, of the nerds who got picked on in junior high back in the 80s fighting back. Maybe it is time to move on and realize that we're all nerds here in the RPG Funhouse
.
Some random comments:
Ironically, I think the need to categorize and have strict definitions is a "new school" RPG phenomenon that many old school players dislike.
Bingo. This is almost a coup de grace to JM's argument. That, in addition to the fact that the term "old school" is used by different people in different ways, whereas JM seems to want to trademark it to HIS way, or at least a manner codified by the editors of
Fight On! or some secret cabal of old schoolers. I mean, why not just drop the term and say "OD&D" if that is what old school, in his/their mind, is limited to?
I like playing 4e, yet I inject some old school style in it by having some plot-light regions, some site based adventures, as well as some dungeons with not-so-realistic ecologies.
I also play up the idea that the rules for PCs are different than the rules for NPCs, Monsters and their environs. Not that the world "physics" are different for PCs, but that there are options for NPCs and Monsters that don't exist for PCs. i.e. if I want a monster to have some cool ability or something, then they can have it. I don't need a book of stats to play it out. Also, for me, old school style presumes a fair amount of "winging it" and DM Fiat.
Now, because I inject these into my 4e game, I feel like I DM 4e in an old-school style.
Why would he "have no recourse but to accept" my ideas? There is a difference between playing an old school game and playing a modern game with some old school sensibilities. I am not playing an old school RULESET, but I like some old school style.
Is there be some need to prove that I am not playing an old school game?
Most of the reasons I don't like some of the old school games as much as I used to are because of game mechanics issues, but I an still try to achieve the FEEL that I got from old school games.
I quoted your post in full, Catsclaw, because you basically summed up my current approach to playing: contemporary ruleset, old school stylistics. It seems to me that the way we play has a lot to do with when we first played, the context we grew up in. Notice how a lot of 30+ year olds settle into a hair and clothing style that was crystallized sometime in their late teens or early 20s? I'm sure everyone knows that 39-year old woman who still wears her hair in a 1989-style bob, right? There is something about self image crystallizing; "stagnating" would be pejorative, and I don't mean it that way (necessarily). But in terms of gaming sensibilities, we're looking at generational splits. Most people in theirs 30s and 40s started gaming in the 70s or 80s, before the days of World of Warcraft and their ilk. The sensibility is of imagination first, virtuality second. The approach is more open-ended, free-form,
old school...
So yeah, to me the term mainly (but not only) refers to
how one plays the game, not
what game one plays. This is not to say that 4ed played with old school sensibilities is the same thing as playing OD&D; it isn't. But one could play 4ed in a free-form fashion, just as one can play OD&D in a rigid way. One doesn't have to play a Fender Rhodes to play 70s funk, just as one can play non-funk on a Fender Rhodes.
That part indeed was poorly put, conflating the claim to play "in an old school style" (early in the sentence) with "playing an old school game" at the end.
However, it is just such conflation that figures in the rhetoric of dismissal. It's a cherry picking of things, with the assertion that other things therefore do not matter. At its most egregious, it is the claim that there's no difference in the games because to some degree one chooses to ignore the difference.
Could one play Game X without the skill system, skill challenges and challenge ratings? Could one "house rule" it into a form that lets one get through four encounters per hour instead of just one, or that puts less emphasis on combat, or that involves the same resource management as Game Y?
To that and many other questions, the answer naturally is "yes". But that is to avoid addressing the designs in themselves ... which is of course the point!
Only because you're making it the point. The point to others might be, what is the feel of a game or a style of gaming? Again, what is the definition of old school? And whose definition should we follow? And who should make that choice?
Take the term "jazz," for instance. What is jazz? What is not jazz? Where is the line? And who gets to decide? Are we talking about the structure of the music, instruments played, the degree of improvisation, the feeling, what? There isn't an easy answer, is there?
Personally, I have to put my money with the Green Dragon blog: the old-school Renaissance ALREADY is excluding certain elements of the D&D back-catalog and focusing on others.....
Currently, the "old school" Renaissance mostly consists of people who gamed during the late 70's and early 80's trying to recapture the games of that era. The mood, tone, style, and even artwork and typesetting evokes the feeling of those pre-1984 gaming, and lets everything else go hang. It comes off sounding like the "rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia" because it ignores (willfully or otherwise) any and all innovations for the past 15 years.....
Now, if you enjoy that sort of game, more power to you. I reject the notion that OD&D, 1e, or a derived retro-clone is any more "pure" than 2e, Pathfinder, or 4e.
Good points. What is "real" D&D, anyways? Who gets to decide? We do, right? Maybe D&D is not a codified dogma of this or that, but a theme, a tradition, a flowing movement of becoming. Maybe OD&D is D&D; maybe BECMI is D&D; maybe 4ed is D&D; maybe D&D is still to come, in another form...
I would say that D&D is all of the above and more. It is an
archetype, a
living tradition, not a single crystallized form.
Nah. You'll never see anyone here at Enworld knocking any aspect of old-school play. And you'll never see anyone anywhere holding up AD&D in particular as a model of bad design, or World of Darkness as the light that led RPGs out of the dark age. Nope, there's no hint of superiority at all in the drumbeat of dismissal.
Or rather, the prejudices go down easy if one happens to share them. Maybe even easier when sugar coated with the sorts of false claims that might wear thin if reason were admissible. Instead, it must be dismissed with
Bulverism. Any positive statement concerning an "old school" design is nothing but silly "nostalgia", and therefore wrong.
When the shoe is on the foot of someone kicking it, the minority can be identified. Yet it is somehow improper for the minority to claim its
own identity.
Ariosto, this seems like self-marginalization to me. Psychologically speaking, why do self-proclaimed Old Schoolers feel the need to ghettoize themselves? Again, as I said above, it reminds me of 80s nerds circling the wagons against the big bad mean jocks and preps. Now it is the 70s/80s nerds circling the wagons against anti-OD&D purists...in other words,
other nerds.
D&D is such a subjective, personal thing that trying to push everyone's experience with it into a single box is a waste of time.
Maybe nothing else needed to be said?
To me, an old school game is one where the players cede much of the narrative and mechanical control of the game to the DM.
The specific mechanics behind the game and its setting are irrelevant. A simpler game does make sense, since the DM can pretty much do whatever he wants, but it is by no means a necessity.
I imagine that some people might agree with that, while others would completely disagree. The games *you* played define what old school means to you. It's a mistake to assume that there's some sort of platonic ideal of what gaming in any era was or is supposed to be. The beauty of gaming is that we all do our own thing.
I think there are a lot of parallels between the old school movement and the indie movement. Both started around what I see as fairly simple concepts. The indie movement eventually gathered a lot of baggage that hampered its growth, a sort of "us vs. them" vibe that turned away people. It'd be a pity to see the same thing happen again.
Good points, and I think the danger you point to is already happening.
Maybe we need to try to please both general camps, and offer "loose" and "tight" definitions of what Old School means? Mearls, Catsclaw, myself and others buy the loose definition; Maliszewski, Ariosto and others buy the tight one.
Everyone happy?
Old-school players tend to express "giving the DM narrative control" with the pithy term "railroad"; it has in most cases a negative connotation. There is also a pretty objective (but not exclusive) denotation that can become pretty clear if one makes a flow-chart of a scenario. What is often called today a "sandbox" cannot be reduced much more toward that than the map itself.
From an old-school perspective, "mechanical control of the game" in modern designs tends to reside (by cession) mainly in their voluminous rules-books -- not in the DM or players. The experience of reclaiming control when returning to older modes is often remarked upon.
You seem to be a big fan of exactitude, so notice that Mearls did not say "giving the DM narrative control" but "the players cede
much of the narrative and mechanical control of the game to the DM."
It is a subtle, but important,
difference, no?
Is it "us" or "them" so threatened by the suggestion that it is not "just a feeling" ("nostalgia" or otherwise) that differentiates one thing from another in some minds?
But that differentiation is at least influenced, if not based upon, the subjective feeling content of "those minds" making the differentiation. In other words, when James Maliszewski says "it is more than just a feeling" he is speaking from his own subjective/feeling basis. Of course this sets up an absurd infinite regression of "that's just your opinion" and "but
that's just
your opinion!" 'Ware the performative contradiction, I say (e.g. "everything is relative," which is an absolute statement). To put it another way, we must both recognize that there is "always" a subjective, feeling aspect to any view we have, but that we can also look towards building greater, inter-subjective validities by looking for worldviews that include as much as possible. I prefer to proceed in a Hegelian dialectical sense.
To me this is a discussion, an exploration, an inquiry. Where we run into trouble--and arguments--is when we start trying to lay claim to things, define them in a way that some feel is exclusionary. This thread was started because, essentially, James Maliszewski's definition of old school was exclusionary, and he was basically saying some folks' view on this is "badwrongdefinition."
My view is that this conversation can be more fruitful if we look at it as just that: a conversation, an inquiry--not towards some Final Definition That Explains Everything, but a deepening and a continuation. As I said, I see D&D not as a static ruleset of a specific era that caters to a set of personally and culturally bound proclivities, but a living tradition, an archetype of imaginative play that will continue to spew out manifestations for as long as we choose to proverbially, if not literally, roll the dice.
