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

[Bedrockgames]

I mean, the flip side is the way older games would regularly deliver "we were just bopping down the corridor and 2 orcs showed up, rolled really well, and cleaned the whole party."

This is what I love about older style play and systems.

I think it comes down to preference. The spirit of not being super lethal or unprectably lethal was strongly present by mid-2E, arguably earlier, and I think mechanically it was present beginning with 3E and into 4E (don't play 5E so no idea there). But its either a feature or a bug depending on what you are looking for

 

[Agametorememberbooks]

It was really hard to take down characters in 4e and it‘s very challenging to kill a character in 5e. I def equate lethality with ‘older school’ but I also think of old school as having to do with how the math changed from pre-3e to post-3e mechanics.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I dunno. I mean, one of the attractions IMHO to older D&D was the very hairy edged nature of most play. Even a 9th level fighter, on average in D&D or B/X, has 4.5 x 9 hit points, or 40.5 hit points.

In 1e, which I'm more familiar with, that became 5.5/level (average of a d10 roll), so 49.5 at 9th level assuming no Con bonus.

While that's far from nothing, you can fall 40' and be VERY close to dead with a small amount of bad luck! A tougher monster could easily hit you a couple times and deliver 20 points of damage, no problem. a 9th level fireball won't kill you, but again you're not going to take 2 of them (unless you save twice, which is less than likely).

Indeed. Also worth noting that in 1e the monsters and foes also had way fewer hit points than their 3e-4e-5e versions - it went both ways.

When it comes to 4e there's a good bit less of that swingy luck of the dice, but it is NOT gone! And there's plenty of chances to have bad luck which results in a lack of resources that leads to high tension or whatnot. This is going to be true of all versions of D&D. I can't answer for your taste of course, but in my games that I GMed (which was most of the 4e I was involved in) killing a character was a not incredibly unlikely happening. It wasn't routine, but PCs did get ganked. Once or twice a whole party got TPKed. I mean, they could have turned back and probably survived, but they didn't. It wasn't SAFE by any means. Yes, you could usually tell if you were in likely danger, but once you got to say where the fighter was down to one HS, anything could happen. Usually that was about when the BBEG showed up!

I mean, the flip side is the way older games would regularly deliver "we were just bopping down the corridor and 2 orcs showed up, rolled really well, and cleaned the whole party."

Thing is, the way older games were and still are (IME anyway) often played, two options were always on the table: running away, and splitting the party. Combine those such that just one or a few run away from a bad situation, and true TPKs become nigh unheard-of.

In 3e you had easy access to absurd amounts of healing via dirt-cheap wands of CLW; in 4e (and 5e) this same access comes via the players/PCs using even a tiny modicum of caution and long-resting whenever they can, as doing so gives back all your hit points. You also generally had bigger parties in pre-3e games. What this led to (ignoring for a moment 3e's save-or-die effects) was less emphasis on self-preservation and thus parties going down together: ease of healing led to whack-a-mole and if enough moles got whacked, down went the party; and smaller parties meant that if one character died the rest were far more likely to follow in short order. Hence, and rather oddly, fewer character deaths overall but a higher TPK rate.

 

[overgeeked]

In 1e, which I'm more familiar with, that became 5.5/level (average of a d10 roll), so 49.5 at 9th level assuming no Con bonus.

Indeed. Also worth noting that in 1e the monsters and foes also had way fewer hit points than their 3e-4e-5e versions - it went both ways.

Thing is, the way older games were and still are (IME anyway) often played, two options were always on the table: running away, and splitting the party. Combine those such that just one or a few run away from a bad situation, and true TPKs become nigh unheard-of.

In 3e you had easy access to absurd amounts of healing via dirt-cheap wands of CLW; in 4e (and 5e) this same access comes via the players/PCs using even a tiny modicum of caution and long-resting whenever they can, as doing so gives back all your hit points. You also generally had bigger parties in pre-3e games. What this led to (ignoring for a moment 3e's save-or-die effects) was less emphasis on self-preservation and thus parties going down together: ease of healing led to whack-a-mole and if enough moles got whacked, down went the party; and smaller parties meant that if one character died the rest were far more likely to follow in short order. Hence, and rather oddly, fewer character deaths overall but a higher TPK rate.

Combine the ability to split the party, the willingness to run away, and the near universal use of pre-battle shenanigans and you basically never see TPKs. And don’t forget that because of how deadly combat was and how long healing took, players were exceptionally cautious.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I don’t associate “old school” with an edition as much as with a style of play. But since there was no Internet (well, not in the sense we mean it now) each group was more isolated, so my “old school” may not be the same as others.

Oh, the other thing I guess I think of as old school is the physical form of the old modules.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Speaking of old school. DMed my first 2E game this weekend. Set in Dragonlance. Was one of the most fun times I've had with D&D in awhile.

 

[Voadam]

I think that was slightly different. Not that I am disagreeing with what you wrote, but 3e had that whole, "Back to the dungeons," thing going on.

So I would say that there were two distinct phases (IMO)- the first was "Old School" as rules - people who wanted to keep the flame of the TSR-era rulesets alive, and were using the 3e OGL to do so.

The second, which was more a philosophical movement, came out of a rejection of 4e (and also 3e). Which makes is more ... complicated ... for reasons I don't want to get into but are probably obvious.

I completely agree there are two different old school things going on, rules sets and play style.

I would not say the play style started as a reaction to 4e.

3e had its "Back to the Dungeon" tagline and ethos which was a bit of a reaction to late 1e-2e story focused AD&D, but it had distinct new play style options that arose from the new rule set. The CR and tighter suggested threat levels of encounters was part of it. Skill mechanics for a lot of things that were narrative before was another.

In 3e I got into discussions on here with people about styles of roleplaying interactions. I have preferred a more narrative and first person style of roleplaying a character. Play your fighter however you want, feel free to model them on any member of the A-team you want and go for it as your characterization. Others were advocating for designing your character to the concept. If you want to play Hannibal an-ex soldier who comes up with the plans you assign point buy stats to int even though there is no plans skill. If you want to play Face an ex-soldier who charms and fast talks people you dump points into Charisma, diplomacy, and bluff. Playing the stats you chose in character build. A third group was advocating no first person roleplaying, social interactions should be resolved solely through the mechanics of the character build so that socially awkward players could effectively play social characters and not be undercut by charismatic players.

My play style preference for direct roleplaying is a personal preference, but also a continuation of playing B/X and AD&D where the only relevant social mechanic was Charisma limiting number of henchmen and offering a modifier on the optional reaction rolls. Most all interactions were first person or narrative with almost no mechanics and most character generation being random rolls instead of point buy where you choose your stats (with some of the later developments giving you some options of stat choices). In coming into contact with people who wanted to instead use the mechanics of 3e to drive or limit roleplaying a character in social interactions I felt comfortable thinking of my play style preference as old school.

I am sure there were people in the 70s and 80s saying you should roleplay to your rolled stats as well, but the B/X and AD&D games were fairly set up and advertised for you to do whatever you wanted with your characterizations.

I don't remember when old school became a regular coined term, but I would say the discussions of these types of things has been there throughout 3e.

 

[Cruentus]

Speaking of old school. DMed my first 2E game this weekend. Set in Dragonlance. Was one of the most fun times over had with D&D in awhile.

Awesome. I'm re-booting my 2e Greyhawk campaign to use Old School Essentials Advanced (still on VTT). Going to include exploration, resource management, random encounters, resting rules, etc.

We are also playing in a separate Basic/Expert/OSE game, and loving the simplicity, the lack of answers on the character sheet, quick turns in combat, and generally being very careful about what we do and how we do it. I'm running a (currently) 5th level fighter whose highest stat is a 12. I still manage to pull my weight in combat, and dish out as much as the Dwarves with higher strengths...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is what I love about older style play and systems.

I think it comes down to preference. The spirit of not being super lethal or unprectably lethal was strongly present by mid-2E, arguably earlier, and I think mechanically it was present beginning with 3E and into 4E (don't play 5E so no idea there). But its either a feature or a bug depending on what you are looking for

Hated it myself. I mean, it was amusing, when we were between 12 and 16 years old perhaps, and until it happened for like the 49th time. After that it was just not interesting anymore.

My feeling is that the thrust of what you call 'non-lethality' is NOT a reduction in danger, which is nonsensical. It is a reduction in arbitrary nonsense. Its just like if you make up a mechanic that says "roll some dice and if you get result more than 80% of the range from the median you die." With a d6 that means you die 1/3 of the time. With 2d6 most of the safe range is under a bell curve and probability is greatly reduced, to like 1 chance in 10. With 3d6 you're down to one chance in 50 or something like that. Now that would be 'reduced lethality', but if your target range is under the control of the participants, then you can do things like concentrate all the danger in the really crazy stuff.

So, in my 4e campaigns I think the PC death toll was pretty much exactly the same as what it was in my '90s 2e and '80s 1e campaigns. Except PCs generally only died in some sort of fairly dramatic fashion, because the danger was controllable. Its not that 4e is somehow magically 'less lethal' than 1e, it is just that you die fighting dragons instead of due to rolling a 1 on a save vs poison for some 1/2 HD giant centipede. I mean, in 1e a dungeon full of 1000 giant centipedes is 100x more lethal than one dragon, trust me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hated it myself. I mean, it was amusing, when we were between 12 and 16 years old perhaps, and until it happened for like the 49th time. After that it was just not interesting anymore.

If you don't like it, you don't like it. It is fair to have different preferences. This is something I enjoyed when I first started, let go of because I embraced a lot of the zeitgeist of the hobby over the years, and by mid-2E that kind of character death was out of fashion (I remember a lot of GM advice at the time basically saying things like "only let the PCs die if they make a truly stupid decision or if it is dramatically appropriate"). But I became disatisfied with this kind of gaming by the early 2000s and found when I went back to my old edition books and modules, this was one of the elements I really enjoyed once again. So I still enjoy it now. But it is an entirely personal preference issue.