Variety of "Old Schools"

[Libramarian]

In any event, this conversation is becoming way too meta, which is increasing my sympathy for Iosue by a large measure. What's your experience of old school and new school anyway?

This is all I am advocating -- take the premise seriously at least for the moment, and ask questions to see what people mean by old school and new school.

It's a difference in attitude. What's worse, a false positive or a false negative? Being wrong, or being ignorant?

I want to say it's worse to be ignorant than wrong, at least when we're talking about styles of playing a role-playing game, which is more analogous to styles of art (e.g. impressionism vs. expressionism) than science. You don't go up to an expressionist and ceaselessly interrogate them on whether or not their style is valid or just a made up distinction. A style is not a scientific theory. It's a narrative that makes the activity richer with meaning. It's a lens you look at things through. The proper attitude is to try it on and see if you like it.

Anyway.

I think there are two strains of "old school". One is the Old School Primer approach of making the game up as you go along, the value of preserved ambiguity. Game design with open ends and rough edges that snag into the imaginary space during play. For ex, in Basic D&D the spell "Charm Person" causes the victim to behave as if the spellcaster were their "best friend". That's pretty vague. It means what it means in the real world; it's not jargon that links to a precise mechanical definition elsewhere. You have to use realworld logic and common sense to decide what it means in the game. You generally do more of this in pre-3e D&D. (I'm sure you will appreciate how this is a tendency, and not a binary distinction). The philosophy of old school gaming here (by which I mean the OSR, not the original game texts, which do not explicitly outline this philosophy, but have been interpreted to assume it) is that this is a feature, not a bug. It's good for the game to be "incomplete" in some aspects. (And not just because of simple handling time issues.)

The other is the aspect inherited from hardcore rules-heavy wargaming of having the patience to use non-unified subsystems and follow them through to completion, even when their value to the game is only in the long term and they may not appear to be immediately useful. For ex, having the patience to track time in turns, and to use random encounter tables and actually roll on them instead of just picking the coolest one, and roll for encounter reactions ("Hi I'm Gary Gygax, it's *rolls dice*...a pleasure to meet you!"). The patience to pore over a 240pg book (1e DMG) until you've memorized the idiosyncratic layout, so its organization or lack thereof is not such a big deal.

These two strains of old school are not completely at odds, but there are areas of tension. You'll have an AD&D DM who is an absolute stickler for following the rules, to the chagrin of a loosey-goosey Swords & Wizardry or Basic D&D DM. But, try as he might to play absolutely by-the-book, there will be cases where there are simply no rules to follow, so in practice the AD&D DM is also well-versed in the skills of DM judgement.

My personal experience with the first aspect is that it is a different experience to play D&D by just saying what you do in natural language, and have the DM interpret that into the game, rather than playing in a character ability-first fashion. We have the trust, chemistry, whatever you need, for me as DM to present the party with a complex problem (you've been stripped of all your gear and chained to the oars of a slave galley, what do you do?...you have reason to suspect the attic is full of stirges, what do you do?)without always shunting the dynamic into a setpiece battle or a skill challenge (whether explicit or hidden). The players do tons of "role playing" but very little just for the purpose of fancy description. They roleplay for game effect, which is more natural and more fun.

I am experiencing the second now as I migrate my game from very rules light Basic D&D to by-the-book 1e AD&D. It's quite a big difference in terms of rules-effort. There a lot of ing rules in AD&D and they use different dice and you have look them up and use tables and charts. Although it's kind of binary--either you lay around on couches with index cards for charsheets and the DM has the rules in their head, or you're willing to sit at a table where the DM has a screen filled with charts. Once you make that basic effort, it opens the door to using much more complex rules. I am making my own DM screen atm, which is kinda fun.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

At Anonycon, I played a 3.5 game using Dwarven Forge terrain and minis with a DM who had converted their longstanding campaign over from AD&D. It was old school in that they had been doing basically the same thing since the old days, 3.5 was just a souped-up version of their AD&D houserules, and in that it was fantasy f***ing Vietnam - everything was trapped and brutally lethal, EL was a guideline to be ignored and not the holy writ other groups made it out to be. It was new school in that they updated rulesets without looking back (4e was still a bridge too far), and in that there was no exploration - I was like "I'll be mapper, I brought graph paper and everything" and four hours later we had advanced like 30 feet against relentless opposition!

Recently I've played a couple of times with Michael Mornard, who was an original player in both Arneson and Gygax's groups. His game is old-school in every way, but the big difference from the OSR is lethality. It's really easy to die, but almost as easy to be raised. As I wrote about here the first time a PC died all us OSR types were like "let's see if your new character does better with 3d6 in order" but a new guy wouldn't rest until his companion was raised, and I was amazed that there really was a church in town who would bring back a first level magic-user at the cost of simply putting an as-yet-unspecified geas on all the rest of us.

Playing the DCC RPG with Joseph Goodman was a lot like playing Metamorphosis Alpha with Jim Ward: a linear room-by-room meatgrinder run as a gleeful gameshow where most of the prizes were horrible death. This is clearly the way lots of tournaments were run back in the day, but it's not the exploration-based, combat as war old-school style the OSR mostly celebrates.

 

[The Shaman]

. . . EL was a guideline to be ignored and not the holy writ other groups made it out to be.

That was how I ran 3e as well - I just eyeballed everything.