D&D General The Renewing Charm of the Old School Play Experience

[Nebulous]

Hmm. I just realized you can't purchase Dungeon Crawl Classics in Roll20. I wish the system was fully supported, that would be fun to try out. I do see a good character sheet someone made a few years ago.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Some of them off the top of my head...

The fighter used nothing but a torch and several flasks of oil to kill a dozen zombies, single handed.

The Disco Room... surfaces with reflective surfaces... pillars firing laser lights. Getting struck by such can cause some interesting detrimental effects. Overcome by a clever use of a bag of flour.

The party is in combat with a massive skeletal snake... one of the players, in the middle of the fight, decides to flee through an unexplored passage. He triggers a spike pit trap and falls to his death.

Level 1 Dwarf in a party battling a pair of giant scorpions. Stays in the back ranks for most of the fight. But then decides to enter the fray. Kills one with a mighty swing of his axe, but the other gets him with its stinger. Despite being a Dwarf and having a really good poison save, he botches the roll, and dies a glorious death.

A party of 2nd and 3rd level characters, with a single magic weapon between them all, managed to defeat 4 gargoyles using the environment and clever tactics.

A fighter used his bedroll to cover the head of a monster, allowing a wounded ally to withdrawal, safely.

And the maps! My game was a megadungeon and the players had to map for themselves. To get anywhere they had to use the maps to tell me the directions. Over the course of a year and a half they have collected about 10 pages of maps filled with notes, scribbles and question marks. These maps have become a physical relic of the campaign.

I agree that trimming off a lot of the "rules" can lead to faster play and get the players used to being a little more creative than the powers listed on their character sheet...

However, I am curious as to which of your examples you don't think could have also happened in a 5e game?

I felt that 3e and 4e had the ability to let the GM and players go wild, but that when you did so you often felt like you were explicitly ignoring the rules for something and inventing your own. 5e, on the other hand, has really brought back the feel of "As the GM its kinda your thing to come up with how to do all the craziness" like in an old-school game.

 

[Monayuris]

I own a PDF of DCC. I've never played it, though. I like the concepts of it, though. Some of my favorite parts are the Mighty Deeds for Fighters and how spell casting works.

No experience with the game so I can't talk about if the spell casting is overly punitive, but the rolling for variable effects for spells seems neat. I like there being some risk and gamble in spell casting.

I used a house rule in my Basic Fantasy game to allow magic users to 'over cast'. They can attempt to cast more spells than they can normally can for a day but they have to make an ever increasing saving throw to do so. Failing the save causes some magical backlash.

It gave low level magic users a little more power at a risk.

 

[Nebulous]

I own a PDF of DCC. I've never played it, though. I like the concepts of it, though. Some of my favorite parts are the Mighty Deeds for Fighters and how spell casting works.

No experience with the game so I can't talk about if the spell casting is overly punitive, but the rolling for variable effects for spells seems neat. I like there being some risk and gamble in spell casting.

I used a house rule in my Basic Fantasy game to allow magic users to 'over cast'. They can attempt to cast more spells than they can normally can for a day but they have to make an ever increasing saving throw to do so. Failing the save causes some magical backlash.

It gave low level magic users a little more power at a risk.

I have not run DCC much, but I do see spellcasters failing a lot when they really need it. Although on the flip side it is very fun to "super succeed". As mentioned earlier, this would be easy to house rule, or even add magic items that narrow the window of failure.

 

[Monayuris]

I agree that trimming off a lot of the "rules" can lead to faster play and get the players used to being a little more creative than the powers listed on their character sheet...

However, I am curious as to which of your examples you don't think could have also happened in a 5e game?

I felt that 3e and 4e had the ability to let the GM and players go wild, but that when you did so you often felt like you were explicitly ignoring the rules for something and inventing your own. 5e, on the other hand, has really brought back the feel of "As the GM its kinda your thing to come up with how to do all the craziness" like in an old-school game.

I'm not saying you can't have such situations occur in 5e. It is certainly possible. In fact I've had 5e characters get instant killed by giant centipedes and I've had clever plans in 5e as well.

I just think that the nature of old school game rules encourage such situations a little more than 5e. The fact that it is so much easier to die and that the stakes are higher tend to force players to think outside the box and come up with clever strategies.

I've noticed more of a 'go in magic blazing' approach to encounters in 5e. Because the game system grants more tools and abilities to handle combats and the threat of death is less. Things like Second Wind, Bardic Inspiration, easy access to ranged heals, Rogue cunning action, Barbarian rage, ranged attack cantrips, etc.. tend to provide players with more tricks to handle the vagaries of encounters. So it is an easier decision to take on a fight head on. They have a number of tools available to them to bolster their characters or mitigate a bad hit or situation.

There are less such mechanics in classic D&D. You have your armor class, your saving throws and your hit points and that is about it. There are few game rules that can mitigate a hit or a save vs. poison. You don't have additional tools to keep your character alive. A combat is much riskier and I tend to see more thought put into tactical positioning and mitigation through indirect means.

This is obviously just an empirical conclusion of my own experiences having run both classic old school D&D and modern D&D.

Either way, I consider my examples to hold as 'old school' kinds of experiences, regardless of the game actually played.

 

[Nebulous]

I'm not saying you can't have such situations occur in 5e. It is certainly possible. In fact I've had 5e characters get instant killed by giant centipedes and I've had clever plans in 5e as well.

I just think that the nature of old school game rules encourage such situations a little more than 5e. The fact that it is so much easier to die and that the stakes are higher tend to force players to think outside the box and come up with clever strategies.

I've noticed more of a 'go in magic blazing' approach to encounters in 5e. Because the game system grants more tools and abilities to handle combats and the threat of death is less. Things like Second Wind, Bardic Inspiration, easy access to ranged heals, Rogue cunning action, Barbarian rage, ranged attack cantrips, etc.. tend to provide players with more tricks to handle the vagaries of encounters. So it is an easier decision to take on a fight head on. They have a number of tools available to them to bolster their characters or mitigate a bad hit or situation.

There are less such mechanics in classic D&D. You have your armor class, your saving throws and your hit points and that is about it. There are few game rules that can mitigate a hit or a save vs. poison. You don't have additional tools to keep your character alive. A combat is much riskier and I tend to see more thought put into tactical positioning and mitigation through indirect means.

This is obviously just an empirical conclusion of my own experiences having run both classic old school D&D and modern D&D.

Either way, I consider my examples to hold as 'old school' kinds of experiences, regardless of the game actually played.

I think you're absolutely right. 5e is geared toward keeping players alive and rowdy combats with lots of flashy powers. IMO D&D goes overboard with the flashiness way too fast, and by 8th or 9th level I don't like running the game anymore. I prefer the relative simplicity of the lower levels where say, a rickety bridge in Forge of Fury is a terrible obstacle to overcome.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Either way, I consider my examples to hold as 'old school' kinds of experiences, regardless of the game actually played.

I'd agree with you that those situations would go down differently in old-school (where 0HP=dead, wizards only get 1 spell a day, and fighters have no special abilities at all). I was just wondering what specifically about those situations you thought felt old-school. It seems like its not the situation itself that is old-school, but instead the lack of player resources to deal with them and the resulting solutions.

i.e. In 5e there might be 20 ways to save an almost dead ally from a monster whereas in Old-School the only solution might be a bedroll over the head.

 

[Monayuris]

I'd agree with you that those situations would go down differently in old-school (where 0HP=dead, wizards only get 1 spell a day, and fighters have no special abilities at all). I was just wondering what specifically about those situations you thought felt old-school. It seems like its not the situation itself that is old-school, but instead the lack of player resources to deal with them and the resulting solutions.

i.e. In 5e there might be 20 ways to save an almost dead ally from a monster whereas in Old-School the only solution might be a bedroll over the head.

What made these experiences old school to me was how they were organic to the situation and environment.

These situations all came out of a player choice or decision more so than a mechanical element or rule. The choice to use the blanket was more about the player realizing he had a blanket in his standard pack and decided to use it. Getting killed by scorpions was a choice to move from the back rank to the front line.

To me, it felt that the situation was born out of the actual narrative of the in game situation. Use of the environment, your gear, your own interpretation of the situation. A reliance on your own imagination over the mechanical options available to you (because you don't have much in the way of mechanical options).

Of course you can approach the game this way in any edition. But other editions give you many additional options and mechanical means to approach situations. I personally enjoy seeing (as a DM) and using (as a player) these more organic approaches to situations over just relying on a mechanic or ability.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

To me, it felt that the situation was born out of the actual narrative of the in game situation. Use of the environment, your gear, your own interpretation of the situation. A reliance on your own imagination over the mechanical options available to you (because you don't have much in the way of mechanical options).

That's what i'm saying. The lack of "other mechanical options" is what makes old-school feel like old-school. When players are faced with a situation where "I Attack" isn't going to work they have to get creative because "I Attack" might be the only button on their character sheet.

One of my favorite moments of organic environmental engagement in the past 10 years as a player was when we were fighting some bad guys in a mine. The mine had a cart and rail system, as shown on the battlemap we were using. There was a large concentration of bad guy miniatures standing on the squares of the battlemap that had the rails.

I asked the GM if I could cast lightning bolt but do so by placing my hands on the rail and shoot the lightning through the metal (making it bend and hit more opponents) because of the unique situation that had developed using a battlemap and minis that explicitly called out who was where.

In this case of a more traditional old-school theater of the mind style of game the thought wouldn't have occurred to me because the fuzzy relationship of bad guys standing near a rail when left to imagination.

Personally, I like to have more than just an "I attack" button when I am playing through a battle, but no matter how many buttons I have available to me I still like to mix up every combat by engaging the environment.

 

[MichaelSomething]

OSR: You are stuck in a dungeon full of monsters

Modern: Monsters are stuck in a dungeon with you