D&D General What Constitutes "Old School" D&D

[Azzy]

To me it's all of the TSR-era.

 

[Charlaquin]

It’s nigh impossible to pin “old school” down to any particular era, because it describes a style of play, which continues to this day, and has also never been the only way the game has been played. But, if I had to pick a boundary, it would be 3e. The design-philosophy differences between TSR D&D and WotC D&D are more significant than those between different WotC-designed editions or between different TSR-designed editions.

 

[Charlaquin]

There are people playing dnd right now who weren't born when 4e was first released, and who would have trouble recognizing it as the same game as the current iteration of the game.

The point when this really sunk in for me was watching the D&D episode of Gravity Falls. There was a throwaway joke about “the dark times” when DD&D tried too hard to be cool, which to me was pretty obviously a jab at 4e. But it was framed as a bygone era of the game’s history that old-timers are relieved to be over and the new generation is lucky not to have lived through.

 

[Greg Benage]

For most old-school gamers I know, "It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition," is objectively false.

In my experience, that's exactly what it is. It's also interesting and useful -- I love OSR-style play -- but it's "revisionist."

 

[John Quixote]

If we're talking about old-school as a play-style — which, to folks who spend a lot of time discussing the history and categorization of RPGs, is not just some floating term with a definition that rests in the eye of the beholder, but rather a term of art with a pretty clear definition — it's what came before trad (the thing that the Forge and storygames were reacting against). The trad play-style was pretty firmly entrenched in the hobby zeitgeist by DragonLance and late AD&D 1e; old-school was already all but dead by the time 2e came out. And one of the key factors that inevitably leads old-school to evolve into trad — the replacement of open tables with (to borrow a term from Justin Alexander) dedicated tables — is already baked into B/X. So, as much as it pains me to say it, I have to admit that the only editions we can reasonably call "old-school" are the ones that the Knights & Knaves Alehouse calls "Gygaxian" — white box OD&D, blue box OD&D, and AD&D 1e pre-NWPs.

In my experience, that's exactly what it is. It's also interesting and useful -- I love OSR-style play -- but it's "revisionist."

Not revisionist, but a deliberate attempt at alternative history.

 

[Malmuria]

Post in thread 'A Historical Look at the OSR'
OSR - A Historical Look at the OSR

 

[Celebrim]

To me Old School is exploration based play where player skill is tested. It has a certain feel to it. I know I can do it with 3e rules, so it's not the rules. I probably could do it with 4e or 5e if I cared to learn new rules sets.

For me I don't consider Dragon Lance the end of the Old School, but the culmination of it. If you look at modules like Ravenloft, Pharoah, and Dragons of Flame they are still exploration based. You have stories built into them, but those stories are meant to be played out principally in the geography of a dungeon.

The module is king in Old School, and the module is fundamentally in Old School a keyed map. You've seen those big posters where it tracks some party's path and misadventures through a dungeon? If you can't do that, then it isn't old school.

The end of the Old School is marked by the introduction of Forgotten Realms, and the attempt to recapture the magic of DL by focusing on the living out the story of the novel part of DL if you took the narrative short cuts in DL at face value and took Krynn itself and not the adventure as the thing that was really interesting and worthwhile. I'd mark the publication of Shadowdale in 1989 as the end of the Old School, though really there is a gray period here so that if you didn't play before 1986 you probably never experienced old school except second hand via a DM that did cut his chops before 1986. The TSR modules beginning around 1989 have a very different feel to them for the most part. Second edition would eventually lose interest in modules and acquire a focus on this massive canonical settings like Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, and Planescape and that marks the Silver Age, but by that point we are already in new style of gaming with a very different set of focuses.

The new school is marked by a focus on something other than the adventure, and the adventure is usually something other than exploration based.

 

[Greg Benage]

Not revisionist, but a deliberate attempt at alternative history.

I think we agree. I used the word "revisionist" in the sense of "challenging the orthodoxy by taking a new look/reinterpreting something old." I think the OSR looks at how classic D&D was designed (regardless of how it was actually played at the time) and explores the implications of that.

 

[Ondath]

I really think that is way off. I started in 1984 with B/X and AD&D and that is literally how we've always played.

For most old-school gamers I know, "It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition," is objectively false.

Like I said, OSR obviously bases its reinterpreted rules on a something that did exist in 70s and 80s. But as @Greg Benage put it, it takes what may have been unexplored assumptions about a certain playstyle in the 70s and 80s and creates a robust play ideology. That ideology itself is new.

 

[Voadam]

I generally consider OD&D, the basic line, and AD&D as old school D&D rule sets.

OD&D and the basic line are fairly rules light at core while OD&D with all the supplements and AD&D and later BECMI and RC get rules heavy crunchy with everything from a specific bending metal bars mechanics to heavily granulated nonweapon proficiency and character kit systems to BECMI Gazetteer systems for trade empires.

For the most part though old school D&D kept out of social mechanics with a few outliers like reaction roll adjustments, alignment, and a few class things.

I do not think of 3e and later D&D as old school, though they can all be played in an old school style and be used to provide an old school feel.