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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5824060" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are two things to consider about your thesis.First, humans are very bad at describing things in terms of quantities.  They tend to be rather digital in their thinking and in their language.  Things are either 'yes' or 'no'.  In reality of course, many things differ by degree more than by kind, and reality is analog and this is true even when there aren't obvious physical characteristics that you can measure.  When humans argue or debate, there is a strong tendency to want to assign everything to two easily differentiatable camps, so there is a tendency to always describe everything according to extremes so as to highlight how different the thing that you don't like is from the think that you favor.  Of course, in reality, even if the two debaters are as extreme as they make themselves, which is unlikely, the majority of people probably are not and the difference between them - while real - isn't as easily described or labeled.Secondly, from my experience of the 'old school' days, every table was different.  House rules and interpretations of the rules dominated.  Many people played mix ups of basic and the advanced game, and widely supplemented their game with ideas from Dragon and their own ideas of what would be 'realistic' and 'fun' (often at the time confused, as their was a prevailing idea that what took the game in a more realistic direction would be inherently more fun).   You could not make blanket statements about what sort of game people where playing.  This is of course true to a great extent of 'new school' as well, which explains to me quite well why the fan base as fragmented.I played several different games.  One was basicly D&D modules strung together.  Another was gritty and dungeon delving.  Yet another was high powered political stuff with artifact powered magic items distributed about the party.   I played a couple of sessions with a DM who didn't even like the players to have character sheets and was played entirely by game proposition without reference to the rules.  My own game(s) started at 1st level, but wasn't 'zero to hero', more like local hero (who might be a farm boy) to national hero.  Luke was a very compotent farm boy.  I had assumptions about player interaction via concrete game proposition, but I don't remember anyone thinking it was 'pixel bitching'.   I sometimes used modules, and sometimes wrote my own material.  Dungeons were often goals to be reached and where the climax of a story or chapter would take place, but they weren't the sole form of gaming nor where they usually more than 30 or so rooms.   Megadungeons were imagined and fantacized about by myself from the very beginning, but ultimately seemed to daunting to create or explore so I never ran them.   Players were expected to interact with NPC's as if they were themselves the PC rather than simply saying what they wanted the PC to accomplish in the conversation, but I sometimes rolled dice to determine how the NPC responded.   Magic items couldn't be bought, except for potions and scrolls of the more ordinary sort, and there was a general assumption that gear of +2 level wouldn't be obtainable before 3rd or 4th level at the earliest, and gear of +3 wouldn't be available before 8th-9th level.   More powerful items weren't generally placed at the level of play we'd commonly reach, but sometimes I'd also randomly roll for treasure.  In general, I expected my players or fellow players to obtain a high level of skill in the game above and beyond mere 'systems mastery', but I don't at the time remember differentiating systems mastery from other skills of play.   The DM was in charge and his word was law, but I don't recall more than one or two incidents where anyone had a problem with that.  There were often intense adversarial relationships between the PC's and the DM, but rarely do I recall that being a problem because players wanted to be challenged and they also wanted to 'win'.  Players were far more concerend that other players would consider their game 'Monte Haul' (by which they meant 'too easy' with 'unearned rewards') than with the DM 'disempowering them' - a concept I don't recall existing.  Traps were very common dungeon features, but I can only remember that being considered a problem once and then only when we hit college age and began to tire a bit of the same old same old.  Mostly players seemed to find them fun, and desired an 'Indiana Jones' feel to their dungeon crawling.   In short, I don't think I had any hard and fast rules nor purist approach to the game.  I did what seemed fun.</blockquote>

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