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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5586277" data-attributes="member: 80487">K&KA is pretty explicitly focused on "Gygaxian D&D", and Gygax and TSR parted ways at the end of 1985. I am not sure, though, how many (if any) take "old school" to mean "TSR operations at some point in time". Those are certainly "old" a quarter-century later, but hardly seemed "a school" at the time, and I wonder how many people seriously consider them the same phenomenon as the Internet one we have seen in recent years.Certainly "old school" (or "old skool") often is just a figure of speech with a purely chronological meaning: the way things were "back in the day", in certain years. I do not think you will find that many "old school" D&D enthusiasts have quite such eclectic tastes. Indeed, I think you will find that most have little or no acquaintance with most non-TSR RPGs from the first decade of the hobby/industry. I reckon I may have encountered most, but I do not like them all very much, and I certainly do not consider them all to have a single "old school vibe" or something. Different games are  different.The notion that every member of "the old school" ought to or must embrace everything that is chronologically "old skool" makes nothing but trouble. "It was in 1981, too," is really no reason it should be incumbent on an old-D&D fan also to be a RuneQuest or Champions fan (although many are). Historical coincidence is really no reason it should be incumbent on an old-D&D fan also to be a fan of the "Hickman Railroad", or any other technique or variant."The old school" is happening NOW, in response to the "new school" in contrast to which it is defined.Dragonlance was a pioneering plot-line scenario, and there were I think a few more before 2nd ed. AD&D (1989). The '90s were the era of 2e, in which the Tracy Hickman style "storytelling scenario" became very prominent. From what I have heard, it indeed became the usual thing.The epics formerly were largely expected to be consequences of campaign play: YOUR epic in YOUR world caused by YOUR player-characters. The Temple of Elemental Evil package was compiled by Frank Mentzer from Gygax's notes on the sites of events briefly recounted therein, part of a larger saga that the players' actions and interactions created.My impression is that most of the K&KA guys are in much more modest affairs, with for instance The Party as a singular entity just as seems conventional among 'modern' games. The key difference (apart from lower-order 'mechanics') would tend to be the driving role of player choice. The DM sets up situations rather than preparing stories; "the adventure" is not a pre-game text, but whatever enterprise the players have undertaken.Such an enterprise may well be both large scale and altruistic, the more so as characters have the power to do large scale things and to be grandly altruistic without being suicidal. It is only with 4e, I think, that low-level characters have much in that department (and then perhaps only in combat).In 2e or 3e, low-level characters are I think not superheroes without considerable  'fudging' -- and 'fudging' is a big issue to people far removed indeed from the rest of the ethos of "old school" gamers!</blockquote>

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