Why is there a rush to define vintage gaming?

[tmatk]

AFAIC, any game played with funny dice, pencils, and no Xbox is an "old school" game.

 

[Ariosto]

You can have classes of adventure design, and mechanical structure, that you can then mix and match. Go for classification based on structure and intended function, rather than history, and you are unlikely to set off the same alarms. ... so many people have 'fessed up to using so many supposedly "new school" elements back in the 1970s that the historical classification seems outright false ...

Yep, the "old" and "new" may relate chronologically to trends in popularity, but the tendencies of the "schools" have been around since early days.

Rules-heaviness on one hand, and heavy dependence on referee rulings on the other, are preferences best dealt with in choice of rules-set. People with strong preferences gravitate toward what they prefer.

Other preferences have clustered around those, but the associations are not necessarily as they have always been. Some in D&D today seem to me just the reverse of those I see in other reaches of the RPG field. A lot of "play style" choices are about as practically feasible regardless of choice of rules-set (although there are also some practical synergies) -- but some styles may be more popular among players using some sets.

It's in the field of techniques related to those that there's a lot of room for productive discourse. If someone happens to want to run an old-style ("mega-") dungeon, or an old-style ("sandbox") campaign, then the advice of people with actual experience at doing so may be helpful. Some aspects have been dealt with only obscurely in all but the first rule-books, and a lot of practical lore has been worked out since 1974.

Many "old-school" people are themselves no longer spring chickens. Even in such a "frivolous" pursuit as D&D -- or the blues, or fencing, or animation, or what have you -- there are people interested in handing down old things, and people interested in receiving them both to enjoy and to pass on to the next generation.

At the same time, "the new school" is no more monolithic than the old. Developments since D&D first fired imaginations have not been on a single track toward "perfection of the form". The initial explosion of game forms has produced not just branches but threads interweaving in their growth.

As I have recounted elsewhere, when I experimented with a "narrative game system" design back in the '80s, I knew of no other examples. My initial excitement took a cold shower when play-testers averred that the concept would be too hard for many gamers to "get". When I saw it growing a few years later, it seemed to be significantly an "anti-D&D" phenomenon. Today, it is a well-established part of the D&D scene, not only among hobbyists but at the commercial level shaping development of the "official" game.

I happen to think it best addressed as a new form, as distinct from RPGs as they are from war-games. Because of that lack of personal interest, I have not kept up with efforts rooted in the RPG legacy. That does not mean there's nothing to learn from them, though -- and people versed in such experiments figure among "new school" D&Ders.

 

[Orius]

There are two reasons people want to hash this out. Not everybody is at it for both reasons, but the reasons are not mutually exclusive either.

1) Some folks feel there's actually an effective genre difference, and analysis of such can be enlightening.

2) It is an edition war with the serial numbers filed off - yet another way to divide gamers into "Them" and "Us".

I'd say there's three: 3)Some people are interested in the history of the game and how it developed.

That's my angle in these discussions at any rate; I'm curious about the game's past, and I like to draw upon the stuff from the past as well as current stuff as I feel it enriches my games.

When I see a OD&D/1e/2e thread started by Bullgrit (or Quasqueton), I expect a sort of "mythbusters" question or observation. Perhaps that's the kind of line drawing that Umbran means: quantification of details that subsequently get argued about (or at least, the analysis of the details gets argued about).

Quas and Bull generally have been pretty good at trying to make objective comparisons between older and newer editions of the game. And from what I've read, some of the arguments start coming in when the mythbusting shows some of the claims about the older games aren't based so much on the RAW but rather house ruling peple used back in the day.

 

[Ariosto]

A lot of stuff that originally was just empirical, in the sense of "this is what seems to work in our trials", seems only in recent years to have come in for much theoretical scrutinizing as to why it works. Why should a campaign dungeon have in the neighborhood of 60% "empty" space?

It's the people coming to it with fresh eyes, the people to whom it looks odd enough to notice and prod and probe rather than simply taking as received wisdom or dismissing out of hand, who seem to me to have contributed most to that enterprise.

 

[LostSoul]

One of the benefits of defining vintage gaming is that, for guys like me who never really did it before but are interested in it now, we can get advice on how to run a vintage game from people who know what they're doing.

So: thanks! Ariosto, Raven Crowking, Exploder Wizard, Melan, and others; you guys have helped my game out a lot.

 

[Orius]

A lot of stuff that originally was just empirical, in the sense of "this is what seems to work in our trials", seems only in recent years to have come in for much theoretical scrutinizing as to why it works. Why should a campaign dungeon have in the neighborhood of 60% "empty" space?

It's the people coming to it with fresh eyes, the people to whom it looks odd enough to notice and prod and probe rather than simply taking as received wisdom or dismissing out of hand, who seem to me to have contributed most to that enterprise.

Maybe it's because of WotC actually using the math to figure out game balance in recent years. Some people hate their approach to balance, but I have no problem with it, because it gives useful advice to fledgling DMs as to how much treasure should be given out, what kind of encounters will challenge a party without wiping them out and so on.

So some people go back analyze the old rule sets and see how much stuff is relatively balanced. Gary seemed to have an idea of how long things should take, he felt a year to 18 months for name level was about right. I think he and a few other had a good feel for how long things should take, how much treasure should be given out, but some of those conclusions seem to have been reached by trial and error. Also, some of those assumptions broke down as the game progressed through 2e and the rules changed. I've said befeore the one of the biggest things that affected the way the game worked was the de-emphasis on gaining XP for treasure that happened during 2e which probably resulted in slower level gain overall.

 

[Ariosto]

Actually, the example of encounter density and many other things besides have been excellently analyzed by old hands. I may have misrepresented the situation a bit, although the raising of questions by newcomers certainly has elicited many well-put explanations by the experienced and thoughtful.

So, "recent" and "most" may be misleading. Those fresh eyes do find insights, though, and the work of people picking up the original set (and the precursor Chainmail) for the first time has especially impressed me.