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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7680849" data-attributes="member: 4937">And good luck to you.  It sounds like fun.  Hopefully the community stays large enough that the content has at least some commercial value, and isn't reduced to a community solely supported by ongoing labors of love.Well, feel free to disagree but when I said just about every sentence rung false to me, I meant it.  The big problem with being an 'old school primer' for me is that it is so obviously a modern document, shaped by modern attitudes and sensibilities, and with no apparent clarity regarding either how people thought about and played the game then, or how people have romanticized older games, or how he appears to be appropriating 'old school' for a particular very modern agenda.  Most of all, he fails to address whether his document as a whole represents very practical advice, or the limits of how gameable this advice would be if it is applied.   So much of the advice is crap that sounds good in theory but which in play doesn't really work.   And to a certain extent some of that comes through even in his examples of play, where if you really get into the scenario he describes, you realize that it doesn't sound particularly fun and satisfying and in fact doesn't even sound like the players playing in the 'old school' way are having much fun.   I mean sure, we'd expect the straw man modern GM's game to sound boring and dysfunctional, but he makes his preferred style of play sound at least as bad!I could pick pretty much any sentence from the rant as an example, but since it is very long, I'll just confine myself to one:I'm not sure that many people playing the game at the time would have conceded that was true.  Certainly no one I knew would have conceded that at the time.  In hindsight someone might say, "Well, as a simulation of what a of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence would do, they weren't very successful.", and that criticism was leveled against them at the time and various proposals were made and even certain alternate RPGs were made to remedy that.  But I don't recall anyone conceding that we should just ignore that aspect of the game because D&D wasn't about that, or that to the extent that they really believed it was a problem, that it wasn't a valid criticism to make.  People argued over whether it was a problem that needed a rules solution, but they didn't think that being a real character from a fantasy story wasn't part of the point.  No one would have conceded that in 0e you weren't roleplaying a character of a particular culture or race, and that that wasn't what the game was about.  For one thing, no one treated NPCs as if they weren't supposed to be character's of a particular culture or race that reacted to the PC's as if they weren't of a particular culture and race.  And no one conceded that the game was about 'keeping your character alive' to the extent that what ever you did to keep the character alive was appropriate.  If they had have conceded that, they wouldn't have invented alignment to be a marker of how you'd behave 'in character'.  To say that the game isn't, "a simulation of what a dwarf raised in a particular society, and having a particular level of intelligence, would do when faced with certain challenges.", would be to suggest that in old school play no one was particularly concerned about being in character, playing your character, and acting in character or that a DM wouldn't have penalized a player with higher training costs or whatever for poor play whose character had very low intelligence but was consistently played with the greatest degree of cunning and insight.  It was well know that the game didn't seem to have a way to deal with the problem, but I don't remember anyone at the time conceding it wasn't a problem.Compare and contrast real old school play with the example of play from the 1e DMG with what's on offer in the 'Old School Primer'.  There are some similarities but there are some noticeable differences.   Moreover, for additional perspective, note that the 1e DMG example of play is almost exactly reproduced in 3e and that version has at least as much in common with approach as this so called 'old school primer'.Honestly, it's not a very good primer on how to play old school.  It's a provocative proposal to think about older games in a very modern indy gamer sort of way that I'm not convinced works very well.   Even when it has something recognizable from period play, like how to find something behind a moose head, it doesn't strike me as very deep thinking about the problem. For example, this post is almost a year ahead of the old school manifesto: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?190714-An-Examination-of-Differences-between-Editions/page2&p=3396542&viewfull=1#post3396542" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?190714-An-Examination-of-Differences-between-Editions/page2&p=3396542&viewfull=1#post3396542</a>But where I'm struggling with find a balance here, for someone that claims to have found a one true way, there is a clear lack of explaining or questioning whether pixel bitching the moose head necessarily represents a fun game.   A poster named Rothe two posts later brings up one of the several problems with the 'fun' factor in the moose head example, but we could chase that rabbit very far down the hole.</blockquote>

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