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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 6263079" data-attributes="member: 83293">Given the development of games that do things differently than the earliest games, I'm going to probably side with the idea that there are lots of players for whom this type of play isn't enjoyable.  It didn't take long, even if you stick with D&D, for story based thinking to arrive in both module and campaign setting design.I don't think play with an OSR feel has to ask that much of the players.  For many, the game simply asks them to experience whatever dungeon complex is put in front of the players.  One of the things people joke about is just how obvious the adventure hooks are in older modules.  "Looking for adventure?  Caves of Chaos you say?  Why yes, I can tell you exactly where to find those from this particular Keep on these particular Borderlands."I think it's not especially improv-focused or not.  You have improv only referees and those who run modules or completely pre-planned scenarios with box text they've pre-written for each locale.  I'd say a good improv sense is certainly helpful.By story game do you mean a game that is designed (or at the very least intended) to produce a story right in the moment of actual play?  Like a story in the literary sense of rising action, a climax and resolution?  Something like what some people talk about when they use terms like "story now!"?I think the default assumption of almost all the earliest games is "story after."  Experience now, then cobble together a story retroactively just like you do when you experience things in normal everyday life.We have a very good example of mystery play in early RPGs in the form of 1st edition Call of Cthulhu.  If you take a look at the scenarios for Call of Cthulhu, you'll again find they are loaded with situation and environment and are generally not scene-by-scene story structured like a Trail of Cthulhu scenario.  Since success at the investigation is not a given in Call of Cthulhu, the scenarios are often more like miniature sand boxes where the investigators may or may not successfully figure out what's going on before things turn against them.  In Trail of Cthulhu, success at the actual investigation is assumed and the clues and the scenes in which they are found can be strung together in a fairly predicable order and the story structure of the typical piece of mystery fiction (initial mystery, clues lead to important characters, big reveal, resolution).One local guy runs Dungeon World this way (I suspect many others do as well).  The game has it's fronts (packages of threats) that are prepped in advance and moves (participant actions) that can be chosen as appropriate.  Dungeon World is explicitly a "play to find out what happens" game while also being a story game.  To stick with Vincent Baker's designs & their derivatives, I'd say if you tried the same thing with In A Wicked Age, you'd have a massive failure, as the situation is front loaded with the oracle system and it is explicitly not the GM's job to create the situation himself and have the player's explore it.I always thought the only reason the "old style" vs "new style" thing came about was that Finch's primer was comparing one approach to a single game (1974 D&D and it's retroclone Swords & Wizardry) to a caricature of 3.x D&D play.  It was a crude attempt at trying to capture the key differences between the oldest games and the current popular ones.  Unfortunately it misrepresnted both old style and new style as one approach to a single game each in a way that both excludes other games released in the 70s as not being "old style" and ignored many, many games that don't play anything like 3.x in the "new style" category.  It got people thinking about the differences, even if Matthew Finch did a terrible job of categorizing them himself.Earlier in this thread, I think I advocated for a muddier approach as well, but throughout the thread, I'm actually reaching the conclusion that the differences between the earliest games in our hobby and later ones is easier to spot than I thought.  I think what makes it nebulous is that many games from the last decade have been focused on both recapturing the play of these early games directly (like in the retroclones) or taking elements of them and using them in new ways (like some of the storygames sometimes do).  Apocalypse World & Dungeon World are pretty much the result of Vincent Baker (and LeTorra & Koebel) looking at very old types of traditional play and asking "What things can the participants do that would be appropriate in play?"  Those things are the "moves."  If you make the moves those things that happen in play typical of the first games in the hobby, then you'll get a game that has that style.  Or you can go for something like Monsterhearts (same system) where the moves are things that are appropriate for teenage monster romance.  it all depends what is available to the participants as "moves."</blockquote>

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