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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9321714" data-attributes="member: 58172">I agree with the concerns about AD&D 1e and 2e. But I feel the characterization about them are unfair.AD&D is a "generic" game. It encouraged and even required DMs to invent their own settings. I have played old school games. They can be anything from Tolkien to amusement parks to the exploration of a scifi 4-dimensional hypercube.Actually the opposite.What 3e introduced, was "simulationism", where fantasy flavors acquire mechanics to quantify and actualize them.Before 3e, with little exaggeration, if one wanted to play a character that could fly, one simply pretended it could. One "roleplayed" a character that could.Flavor was everything.In AD&D, the mechanics were simple rough approximations without any expectation that they could adequately represent fantasy concepts.From the point of view of the AD&D players, it was mechanics that were problematic. They characterized the ethical problem as "roleplay" where unfettered imagination triumphs, versus "roll-play" where the limitation of dice and obsession with mechanics constrained everything.Personally, I find the old school AD&D ignoring of mechanics to be maddening. I appreciate the effort of 3e to quantify fantasy concepts mechanically. I even appreciate how 4e made mechanics everything, while making flavor fungible. With adequately sophisticated mechanics available to represent various fantasy concepts, it was viable to "roleplay" anything. If one wanted to play a bear, in 4e one can use the mechanics of the Monk class to represent it (or various other suitable mechanics), and it would work well. The imagination of the player is free.My experience of 5e is a synthesis of "roleplay" and "simulationism" − the flavor and the mechanics are equally important. As DM, flavor comes first to determine the outcome of an effort, and then mechanics shows up only if the outcome of the narrative is in doubt, and could go either way. The mechanics are vital but flavor is the context for interpreting the mechanics. Mechanical text is in a flavor context. This 5e approach can only work well when the flavor is suggestive rather than baked into mechanics, so players can use the flavorful mechanics for diverse concepts. Fantasy concepts have 5e mechanics to actualize during gameplay. But each DM or player still has much freedom to determine what the flavor of a mechanic is, exactly, likewise the conceptual flavor of an entire mechanical character.The main point is, for AD&D 1e and 2e, the "primitive" rules that were written down that we can point to today, were not the game its players were actually playing. The only way to understand what the AD&D players were doing then is to experience the oral tradition of a living AD&D tradition that survives today. Even the "old school renaissance" that exists today with its updated and clarified rules systems is nonidentical to the original AD&D experience where the rules simply didnt matter, in the way that gaming rules matter today.</blockquote>

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