It's easy for the most charming and charismatic person in real life to play down to a gruff and off putting 8cha. Likewise, its easy to play down to the 'dumb barbarian' but there isn't a person alive who can convincingly role play a character who is ultimately, demonstrably smarter or more charismatic than they are. This is where having the sheet/stats matter in 'modern' games. It gives me the freedom to play a character who doesn't follow my own natural strengths and weaknesses and not be hamstrung.
I remember seeing a signature in someone's post on Dragonsfoot that went something like "We don't explore characters, we explore dungeons."
In the narrow subset of early gaming that has come to dominate the definition of old school, characters are often seen as pawns or avatars rather than as roles an actor is playing. This of course, runs contrary to the heavy character identification in games like Wesley's Braunstein, which was heavily about play acting and closer to a modern LARP than anything like D&D.
Is there a balance here that can be struck between 'relying on the sheet' and being able to emulate abilities that the players themselves do not have?
It's important to remember that the whole OSR thing was essentially a reaction to the popularity of D&D 3rd edition and the proliferation of d20/OGL gaming. As well as the ways that game completely abandoned the things people liked about the way they played D&D. With the internet finally maturing, people who enjoyed the older games started promoting them and doing great work in taking the OGL and reverse engineering retro-clones so the older versions of the games could once again become widely available.
So basically no, the well has been poisoned. False dichotomies have been forged and now, for many, any talk of resolving social situations by dice or rolling for bargaining is derided as "new style" or "not old school." Despite the fact that such mechanics exist in games from the 70s. Heck, even D&D has a mechanic for encounter reaction where the monsters might be friendly or something. Not sure where the earliest version of D&D's mechanics for social reactions were first published, but it's definitely in AD&D1E.
The other thing that stands out to me is that the players didn't actually have to know how to play the game when they started. The game was simple enough and narrative enough that as long as the DM understood the rules, the players just described what they wanted to do, and the DM could call for a roll as appropriate. This is a stark contrast to games where the players need to know and understand all of the options and special abilities before they can meaningfully interact with the system.
This is something the older games largely did have in common. It's from the wargaming tradition of a referee running a miniature wargame and the players showing up as guests and giving the game a go. Also, if you think about it, a new hobby being developed needs to have rules that are easy enough to play so that they don't act as a barrier to entry for new people. Given that the referee is the one who likely owns the rules and then is inviting people to try out this new hobby, it makes sense that the games would be simple enough that the referee can handle all the rules interactions for the whole table without too much difficulty.
Later, it was realized that players actually are interested in system elements and exploring the game system itself. Some even did this quite early. Like pouring over the spell list and imagining what magic your cleric might cast later in his adventuring career. By the mid 80s the system-ignorant player became less and less of a concern as D&D had become a full on eighties fad.
I can't comment on early runequest. The only version I've read is 6th, and I haven't actually played it. Though, now I kind of want to find a 1e version. Any ideas where to find it?
RQ1 & 2 are functionally identical, with very minor changes between the two. There's an SRD for RQ2 here:
http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=433
It's a reference document and doesn't explain things very well, but it's all there. The other thing I'd recommend checking out is the free version of Chaosium's Basic RolePlaying quick start rules.
http://www.basicrps.com/core/BRP_quick_start.pdf
There's been surprisingly little change in the core system since RQ1 was first published in 1978. The skill system is expanded in the BRP quick start to include settings other than fantasy and the combat system is slightly different, but largely it's the same system. Oh, an hit locations are removed so combat is way more survivable while still being deadly. RQ6 bolts on some subsystems like fate points and fatigue and other neat little semi-optional systems that make it play a bit differently, but it's still a great game.
Runequest is very traditional in a post-1974 D&D sort of way. Lots of people ran D&D the way Runequest runs, but it's definitely different than how those in the American Midwest ran their games in the 1970s (same goes for Tunnels & Trolls). So RQ doesn't exactly provide a great comparative contrast with more recently published games. It has a skill system, it allows for character skill to be used to overcome challenges, it emphasizes character role acting more than 1974 D&D and while it does emphasize that the rules can be used, modified and set aside as needed, it doesn't come across as expecting the referee to do that regularly.
In terms of "heroes, not superheroic" RQ outdoes D&D by quite a large margin as the hit location system combined with the critical hits and impaling rule means that there's never really anyone who's truly safe from taking a crossbow bolt to the eye and dying in one hit. In D&D you can see that you have 7 hit points and the most a crossbow is going to do is 6 and "take the shot" and charge across the room. In RQ2, that would be a very, very bad idea.
When Gygax published AD&D1E he wrote that the heterodoxy of original D&D play meant that people were no longer playing the same game. They'd house ruled and applied rulings to the point where one given group would be doing things so differently than another than they were essentially not playing the same game. So AD&D1E was his attempt at both standardizing things and creating a new product line where a portion of the sales revenue would not have to go to Dave Areneson as royalties (in the end, that legal battle didn't go Gygax's way).
I think Gygax was both correct and self interested in what he wrote about the state of affairs moving into the time of AD&D. People really did play the game differently in different places, often to the point that two different groups, each with a 1974 version of D&D, would essentially be playing two different games.
That's why I think it's best to concentrate on what they all had in common rather than make some sort of broken new-style vs old-style comparison that ends up excluding games published in the 70s.
It was also smart to concentrate on feel. If something has the right feel than people will be far more willing to overlook the presence of something they don't consider their "one true way" of old school.
