Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ourph" data-source="post: 2440760" data-attributes="member: 20239">Old School - IMHO - means worrying less about story and ecology and more about just having balls-to-the-wall fun and adventure.  In every game I run, I usually try to run it "old school" and I think, for the most part, I succeed.  But there are times when I begin to feel a little burn-out or feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the campaign or just get writers block and I wake up to find I've drifted out of that "old school" mode and started trying to "novelize" the game - trying to make all the little pieces fit together, trying to arrange the challenges I set before the PCs into some coherent "story", trying to fit what I know the players want to do into some sort of framework where their characters have a very compelling reason to do it..It's at those times that I sit down, draw up a treasure map for the PCs to find, populate a new dungeon with a couple hundred baddies and some phat (but deviously well hidden and cunningly trapped) loot to reward them for surviving and just stop worrying about who's pissed off at the PCs for their last exploit or which organization may be seeking them to help with problem X or how many long lost relatives they have or have not tracked down.  In other words, I prioritize game over story and challenge over continuity for a while in order to kick up the excitement and fun level a little.For me, that's a cyclical thing.  Probably not so for everyone.  I'm not suggesting a game devoid of story is the way to go.  IME - story usually creeps in no matter what (through the actions of PCs and, in my case, due to my tendency to latch onto game events and expand the campaign around them - probably due to my simulationist streak).  But I think what most people recall and like about "old school" is that there was a time before the 2e Monstrous Manual and the Dragon "Ecology of" articles and convention lectures from "experts" on why verisimilitude is so important to a good campaign when we didn't really worry about why the baddies were in the dungeon or where the ancient treasure came from and why someone else hadn't been there to plunder it before the PCs got there.  We just kicked the door in, cut down the bad guys, looted the treasure, rode back to town on our trusty steed in a cloud of dust and glory and tipped the bartender with a big, fat gold piece because that's the kind of thing adventurers do - and pretending to be bold, ale-swilling, axe-swinging, devil-may-care adventurers was why we played (and loved) the game.  To me, that's old school gaming in a nutshell.As far as I can see, you can do that with just about any set of rules as long as you know what you want and focus on doing that rather than what the current gaming culture or the tone of the rulebooks might encourage you to focus on.</blockquote>

Verification