My experience, with any version of D&D from 1980 or from over thirty years later, or with any other system either, for that matter, is largely the same, and my tastes—at least in a broad sense—have not changed either.
I don’t much care for system. I prefer a game that’s fairly fast, loose, handwavey and definitely in the GM fiat (not an automotive joint venture, despite appearances) camp. If there are a lot of rules, I expect that the GM will utilize them fairly fast and loose. The old 3e motto “Tools, not rules” was how I had always played RPGs of any brand or era, and it still is. In fact, I remember being somewhat surprised that it needed to be stated in the first place.
No rule system really ever works for me exactly as is, at the same time. There’s always some significant element of the rules that just doesn’t “work” for me. Tinkering with the rules is an old tradition that goes back to the very beginning. I don’t believe in playing anything exactly as written—or at least I haven’t yet found a game that I liked exactly as written.
I was interested in fantasy gaming because I was interested in fantasy novels, stories, movies and TV shows (although at the time, the latter two were relatively rare. Still are, actually.) The very gamist, dungeoncrawling, killing things and taking their stuff, “pixel-bitching” or whatever you want to call it approach was never interesting to me, even in the late 70s. Swashbuckling action, intrigue, interesting characters, and a session that had as a product an interesting story was always preferable. Story has become a bit of a dirty word among some gamers, but to me, it was always what I was most interested in, and it was never about railroading or the GM’s would-be lame B-movie screenplay. It was a natural product of scenarios and situations that were more interesting than “here’s a hole in the ground. There’s probably monsters and treasure in there. Go.” and characters that were more than simply meant to be disposable and lacking in any characteristics that would involve them being a character rather than just a game piece.
I never really did very many games where death count was high. If anything, the games with the highest death counts were always one-shot Cthulhu games. Anything that was meant to be an ongoing game made at least some unconscious effort to preserve player continuity whenever reasonable. But we never outright avoided death either if that’s how the dice came up and player action made character death a possibility.
When I started playing, EVERYONE homebrewed. We hadn’t even coined the word homebrew yet, because that’s just what we called “DMing.” Products comparable to campaign settings of today hadn’t really been invented yet, really—Greyhawk was out there, but it was more a collection of houserules and a few notes rather than what we’d call a campaign setting today.
There wasn’t any such thing as manifestos. Matt Finch’s manifesto seems, in some ways, like an evolution of same concept that Clark Peterson’s Necromancer Games manifesto was also trying to accomplish. Ironically, I think it had a strange effect; people liked what they read, associated with it, and a movement started. In some cases, that ended up getting to dogmatism and “this is the RIGHT way to play D&D—everything else should just get a different name already because that’s NOT D&D.” To me, this is the antithesis of “old school.” When I read Matt Finch’s manifesto, I see a lot of the things that I HATED back in the day, and still studiously avoid even now. That’s not old school. That’s not how I played. To me, old school is do-it-yourself and make-it-your own. Games were eclectic, eccentric, and esoteric. Everyone made the game their own. Chris’s game would be sweeping and heroic, feeling vaguely like it was inspired by Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander. Trey’s game was notable for it’s interesting NPCs and chance to interact with them in situations other than combat—although he also was famous for his god-like “duel games” where armies of pit fiends clashed with hordes of angels. Tracy’s game started right at the dungeon without any context, and he yukked it up when you couldn’t get past the goblin guards at the door without having to run away. The Other Chris had sweeping overland travel and intrigue and plots. Etc. EVERYONE made the game their own, and nobody’s game really resembled anyone else’s game all that much. And we expected that, and embraced that.
To me, that’s what old school really is. This dogmatic approach to “this is old school” ironically is a very new, recent, and antithetical idea. My tastes and preferences were crystalized in the “old school era”—heck, I came to gaming with them already, I’d say. But I don’t really self-identify with the OSR because to me, the OSR is only one rather narrow facet of how games used to be during the old school era. Well, that and I don't really like old school rules anymore either, but that's another thing altogether. I still feel like many of my playstyle preferences have very long roots, though. Even thought they clearly are at odds with what is today associated with old school play.
