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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8248484" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like that article is a bit weird given that I started playing in 1989, and my main group all the way back has basically been what he calls "Neo-trad" and claims came out of 3E organised play. It's like, I'm pretty sure that fun-centric model which makes the players more important than the "trad" model he describes has existed since at least the late '80s, because I was taught to play that way by an older cousin in 1989, and she didn't seem to indicate it was novel. Also a lot of RPG material from the early '90s seemed to support that general approach.I mean, I definitely recognise Trad vs. what they're calling OC/Neo-trad, it was a conflict back in the 1990s, but it largely seemed to be an age-based division, like if someone was older than me, they were increasingly likely to be trad, and younger, increasingly likely to be neo-trad. I've almost never come across anyone playing something that genuinely matches his definition of Classic and I'm not sure I entirely buy his separation of OSR and Classic  - I mean I get the point he's trying to make, but some of the stuff he's attributing to OSR is certainly how people represented the games they ran/played in the 1990s. I'm not sure "Story Games" is  really a separate thing either, I think it's closely related to Neo-trad. Nordic Larp I can't really comment on.As an aside, the most interesting thing I found out about from that article was Warlock/CalTech-style D&D, which I had only a vague idea even existed, and then I looked into and which gave Thieves codified abilities all the way back in 1976, and frankly, their design of Thieves appears to have been more advanced than anything we saw from official D&D all the way until 4E with 2008, 32 years later (arguably 3E but it seems closer to the 4E/5E approach)! They also apparently had codified abilities for Fighters and so on. And a spell-point system for magic. Talk about ahead of their time! Unfortunately a lot of it wasn't very well-recorded.</blockquote>

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