What are the characteristics of an "olde school game"?

[diaglo]

Any others?

use your own imagination and don't rely on the work of others to help you play your character or game.

 

[Rothe]

use your own imagination and don't rely on the work of others to help you play your character or game.

That's it in a nutshell. Do that and you'll have that old school vibe and fun.

 

[KenSeg]

<use your own imagination and don't rely on the work of others to help you play your character or game.>

Nailed it Diaglo!

-KenSeg

 

[JDJblatherings]

Nonsense. Sensible players revel in fighting EVERYTHING because when you AVOID fighting you're stupidly shorting yourself easily obtained XP.

Only if they want to be very DEAD,. Avoid the wandering monsters they aren't worth the xp. You want to find monsters in their lairs and stomp them there so yuo get the treasure the real xp source in old school adventures.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Only if they want to be very DEAD,. Avoid the wandering monsters they aren't worth the xp. You want to find monsters in their lairs and stomp them there so yuo get the treasure the real xp source in old school adventures.

Again, nonsense. Now, I may hit this nail harder than others would because I played very little pre-3E D&D where we got xp for treasure. My own old-school D&D experience then is one where advancement is VERY slow. Occasionally AGONIZINGLY slow. Even so, EVERYTHING living was worth XP. Everything. You don't avoid 400 orcs unless you're in a scorching hurry to get from A to B. Yes, those orcs may be worth diddly, but that is no reason NOT to take the diddly anyway as you move along. In fact, you look forward to them despite that, just to see how fast your small band of 5-10 PC's can take down HUNDREDS of low-level critters. You got to use that little 1E rule that gave you 1 attack PER LEVEL against 1HD creatures. Great fun!

Orcs are also evil. Evil things exist in the world for EVERYONE to kill - good, neutral, and other Evils. Take comfort in the roleplaying excuse you are given by default in old-school games - that evil things should die. UNLIKE 3E it never matters how overwhelmingly strong you are compared to what you fight - you get XP for it. Don't actually remember 2E but 1E you got a base amount of xp for the creature PLUS so much per hit point and we filled up notebooks with tabulations of just how much damage we'd done to any particular kind of critter. [I'm not actually joking about that.] And there was xp for every spell you cast. XP for every thief-ability you used. You NEVER pass up opportunities to gain easy XP like that without good roleplaying reasons to do so.

Frankly, the fact that you even CONSIDER avoiding anything but TPK-level encounters shows that you have never truly had an old-school experience. You just don't get it. You're brainwashed by PC notions of appropriateness and fairness from 3E. Pusillanimous crap! Think like Teflon Billy in KotDT. Kill it ALL. At worst your job as a player is to figure out an excuse to allow it - NEVER to avoid it. THAT'S old-school. If you wanted to avoid combat you should be playing Parchesi... Wait. We made nuclear rules for that one too... Okay, try Chutes and Ladders (which we know as Shoots and Scatters: The Bloodrace.) Okay then, Candy Cane L... no... play marbles. But we always used the "Trial by throwing them at the weenie" variant... Come to think of it, you should avoid all games if you want to avoid combat.

YMMV of course but Old School = Combat. Quote that for Truth.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

1) Definition of "Old School:" "Old school" is a term so broad as to be almost useless.

Quite so. In particular, there can be distinct, even drastic differences between someone whose gaming experience does not include 1E and thus knows only 2E as being "old school". And if you skipped the 2E era altogether then your perspective is undoubtedly colored by that. And then there's Diaglo.

History of the Development of this "Character as Pawn" concept. 1e and 3e are somewhat similar in their approach to the idea that a character earns his history and doesn't start with much of one. I'm pointing to the way the rulebooks describe the "flavor" of the games. Obviously the DM affects this CONSIDERABLY.

In my experience the DM has absolute effect upon this. My own gaming experience trained me to think of backstory as making a few rolls on a random chart the DM made up, or using the old "Heroes of Legend" from Task Force/Flying Buffalo to generate it. Yeah, we wrote up such things out of whole cloth as well but in all cases it was more of a personal exercise than a GAME requirement of some kind.

In 3e, there's a lot more work involved in creating the "pawn," because character creation is an area of the game where player skill is required.

This point needs to be emphasized. It can be CRITICAL. In 1E, or even OD&D, your character generation time was almost insignificant, whereas 3E was DESIGNED with the aspect of... what did they call it... Rules Mastery in mind. The idea that you can play and have fun without knowing the rules inside-out, but that formerly extremely negative epithets like Rules Lawyer and Powergamer were going to be largely INCORPORATED into the rules structure, and even encouraged. This affects the entire mindset of how to approach the game from both Role and Roll perspectives.

In general, 1e players expected to face some risks that could just blow them away.

Never stopped anyone from complaining about insta-death traps, effects, and encounters - but it WAS accepted as being something that just went with the game.

Older editions were very archetypal. Your mage was obviously a mage and just didn't cross-train to give himself optimal respond-to-anything skills. He couldn't. He had to work with what he had, as a big factor in player skill. Good or bad is your decision, but there's a lot to be said for having constraints on your character generation.

Another exceptionally salient point. 3E was designed ostensibly to remove roadblocks to player "creativity". The end effect, however, as is easily seen today, went just a bit too far and created an OVERdeveloped sense of player entitlement, and in particular - DM's who have been trained to think that they are NOT ALLOWED to set limits.

Meanwhile, Old School is about characters as genuine archetypes. Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief. 3E is about enabling players to eliminate ALL such dsitinctions as easily as possible, but without reinforcing the DM with the idea that HE is now allowed to say "no", rather than having "no" written into the rules.

MY GUIDE TO MAKING AN OLD SCHOOL 3E CAMPAIGN

Many more good points followed, though I think the list would serve better as "Making 3E seem like 1E" than as applying "Old School" sensibilities to 3E campaigns. Old School stylings are about RE-applying game elements that were removed, but that ADDED to the game, and which are remembered fondly and yearned for again.

1) Restrict classes to the ones in the core books and eliminate the prestige classes.

Start with this example. It's no more or less old-schoold to go beyond the core books. The differences are that in times past it was largely handled by the DM and players themselves, not with published rules, and that players of yore did NOT expect that playing character races and prestige classes outside the Core Rules would be their RIGHT - it would be something the DM allowed as a PRIVILEGE, or as something DISTINCTIVE about his campaign.

2) Don't allow purchase of magic items.

A THOUSAND times Amen. If there is ONE, single element of change between editions, that marks a break between Old School and New School it is this - magic as a common, readily available, commodity. It also cements a distinction between PC's as unusual, uncommon, individuals - heroes beyond the pale - and PC's as only-slightly-better-equipped than hundreds, or THOUSANDS of NPC's just like them.

13) Screw realism, screw ecology, screw explanations, screw economies, screw physics. The explanation is out there for why an ogre is wandering the city without molesting anyone until he sees the party. The explanation isn't what the game's about. Killing an ogre in a cool city brawl is what the game's about.

Can we get another AMEN?

15) Don't put the characters in constant or reliable contact with super-NPCs like Elminster or Bigby. Don't set up a situation where that NPC might ever, ever, ever, pull the character's bacon out of the fire. It's not a game of saving bacon; it's a game of keeping your bacon ... um ... raw, I guess. That analogy went to hell fast. I would eliminate Elminster from the Realms. Even Bigby only has local power -- some troops, a dragon, etc.

This is not an Old School design issue - it's a perennial issue of DM skill and experience. It's a roleplaying trap that DM's always have and always WILL fall into that has nothing to do with editions and only a problem with certain settings because DM's have NEVER been properly instructed on avoiding this pitfall.

Advice on DMing has never been particularly stellar in the D&D rules. That's forgiveable in that there have only been... five major versions of the game? And throughout its history the issues of the DM's role at the table and matters of skill and style have been in constant flux, constant development. But in the 3E era advice coming from WotC in this regard has, in my OWN perception, been shamefully deficient in favor of crunch that they can sell to players and DM's alike. The change is easily seen in how so many players expect the DMs to accomodate them, and how so many pitfalls (like using NPC's for deus ex machina applications) that have been with us since the dawn of the game are STILL with us and STILL insufficiently addressed in the CORE BOOK where such advice should be - the DMG. The emphasis is almost solely on mere mechanics, and it's the squishier areas [like alignment?] that remain the most common areas of disagreement and frequent stumbling blocks.

 

[Pierce Inverarity]

Old school = no skill system.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Old school = no skill system.

I guess. :\

But I'd disagree, anyway. In my own experience, for example, MERP was pretty "old school" at times. The way our GM ran it, anyhow.

And yeah, you can do old school with 3e, pretty easily.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I'd throw in instakill poisons. None of this "save or 2d4 CON loss for n length of time" nonsense.

 

[Flynn]

Another "Old School" feel appears to be limited character customization options. Before 3E, most fighters looked alike, ability-wise, and there were very few variables that made them different game mechanically. What made characters of the same race and class different was primarily how you played them. With 3E (and even 2nd Edition with Kits), there's a greater amount of customization allowed, and a lot of the "Old School" feel starts to drop off. I think that's the reason why games with simple classes, such as BFRPG, C&C and OSRIC, appeal to so many "Old School" gamers at the moment.

Two More Coppers On The Pile,
Flynn