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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8247588" data-attributes="member: 18">Exactly - and this is an under-acknowledged point.It's really weird, because like, twenty years ago, no-one would fail to note that, nor failed to note that many DMs were in fact adversarial, rather than fair-handed.But here we have a bunch of people acting as if every table back in the day was run by some totally fair DM who absolutely was a "fan of the characters" (a distinctly new-school notion), and that any deviation from that was weird - when in fact that was pretty rare to see. I mean, of the DMs I played with from 1989 to 1999, only me, my brother, and one specific friend could remotely been have described that way. And I played with quite a few DMs in that period.Fair enough - I've been avoiding getting between you guys lol.I mean to me it looked like you were saying modern editions disempower players due to codified abilities, but I think I can pretty much objectively illustrate that is not overall sweep of things (though individual mechanics sometimes do!), because D&D and indeed all the RPGs I can off-hand think of have retained the ability for players to describe what their characters are doing, and to use dice only when randomization is needed. If players were FORCED to roll by new-school games, then there would be a starker divide.I think the real biggest issue with old-school stuff for me was the double-standard, where casters were empowered, and everyone else had to, Blanche DuBois-stylez, "rely on the kindness of strangers" (or rather the DM).It's notable that in a lot of more modern OSR-based design, non-caster classes do actually tend to have waaaaaaaay more codified abilities than they did "back in the day" (even than in 2E), and casters tend to have fewer spells, with narrower applications and more drawbacks, to prevent this double-standard being such an issue. Thinking of Worlds Without Number for example, esp. the "advanced" classes. The rules in general there tend to empower players more and the DM less than actual games did back in the day, and I think that's a good thing.But certainly, let's be clear - I feel like the circle has been mended almost. Like, in 2E, I loved that players could narrate what they wanted to do, and I could use simple rules for it, but as a player, I hated, loathed, abhorred dealing with DMs who didn't want to play that way, which was, in my experience, the slight majority of DMs (not the very first one I played with, thankfully). And now a lot of modern games manage to have a situation where it's still very much about a player saying what they want to do, and applying simple rules, but it's much more consistent, and the players are much empowered, and the DM is much more clearly delineated in their role, and much more clearly directed to be a fan of the characters, not there to ruin their day or whatever.</blockquote>

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