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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 5833966" data-attributes="member: 18017">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 <a href="http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/pledge-allegiance/" target="_blank">here</a> 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.</blockquote>

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