Worlds of Design: “Old School” in RPGs and other Games – Part 1 Failure and Story

For me, the difference between Old School and anything else is not in the rules, but in attitude. Is failure, even losing, possible, or is it not? Is it a game, or is it a storytelling session?

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Notice it’s “storytelling”, not storymaking. Every RPG involves a story, the question is, who creates the story, the GM or the players?
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Inevitably, 40-some installments into this column, “Old School” would come up.

“ . . . role-playing games do not have plots. They have situations at the campaign, adventure, and encounter level which the players are free to interact with however they wish– as long as they accept the consequences!” - Jeffro Johnson (author of the book Appendix N)​

This will be in three (oversized) parts, because understanding of this topic is fundamental to discourse about what some of us (at least) call RPGs, and there’s too much for one or two columns (I tried). I think of a Quora question that asked what a GM can do when a player’s character does something insane or ludicrously inappropriate during a game. The answers varied widely depending on the goals of the answerer. The Old School answer is, “let the character suffer the consequences of the action”; but for those on the New School side, it was a much more complex problem, as the character’s actions would make it hard if not impossible for the GM to tell the story he had devised for the adventure.

Likely everyone reading this has seen and perhaps discussed the term “Old School” in connection with RPGs. When I started to reconnect with RPG fandom a few years ago, I wasn’t sure what “Old School” meant. There seem to be many definitions, but I now see the fundamental divide as not about rules. Rather, it’s about the attitude of the GM, and of the players, toward losing and failure. That’s at the root of Jeffro’s rant, though he puts it in terms of plot and story, which are closely related.

As I said, this is in three parts. The second will talk about rules, GMing, and pacing, and about non-RPGs reflecting the two schools. The third part will talk about differences in actual gameplay.

I’m not going to be “one true way” the way Jeffro is (“thieves must have d4 hit dice” is one of his rants). I write about RPGs as games, not as story-telling aids or playgrounds, but I am describing, not prescribing even as I obviously prefer the Old School. Let’s proceed.

If it’s a game (Old School (OS)), there’s a significant chance you can lose, you can fail. If it’s a story session, with no chance you can lose, it’s something else. This is like a co-operative board game that you cannot lose: why bother to play?

In terms of story, in OS the players write their own story, with the benefit of the GM’s assistance. The GM sets up a situation and lets the players get on with it. (This is sometimes called [FONT=&amp][FONT=&amp]"[/FONT][/FONT]sandbox[FONT=&amp][FONT=&amp]"[/FONT][/FONT] in video games, though video games tend to impose an overall story as a limitation of using computer programming instead of a human GM.) The other extreme is when the GM tells the players a story through the game. (In video games this is called a linear game, where the story always ends up the same way.)

If a GM is Old School and runs the same adventure for several different groups, the results will probably vary wildly. If the GM is at the other extreme, the overall shape of the adventure will be the same each time, with variance only in the details.

Old School adventures are usually highly co-operative, because the characters will DIE if they don’t cooperate. New School doesn’t require cooperation, you’re going to survive anyway.

Not surprisingly, as the hobby has grown, the proportion of wargamers (now a small hobby) has decreased drastically. Many players are not even hobby gamers, that is, they’re not quite “gamers” in the old sense because the only game they play is their RPG(s). Many people want their games to be stories, so the shift from Old School to something else is not surprising.

D&D 5e bears the marks of the newer playing methods, as there’s lots of healing as well as the ridiculous cleric spell revivify for mere fifth level clerics.

There are all kinds of shades of the two extremes, obviously. And all kinds of ways of running RPGs. Next time, I’ll talk about more differences between Old School and newer ways of playing such as Rules and Pacing, and compare with non-RPGs.

This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!

 

[Lanefan]

One could make that argument. One could also make the argument that he says they were pretty arrogant at the start of the piece, and by the end shows that he didn't really lose the arrogance. *MY* version takes more thought and roleplaying. *Yours* takes less.

It's not like he's alone in this; I've seen/heard/read similar attitudes from defenders of all kinds of systems and-or editions, new and old ones alike.

The only difference is a certain degree of name recognition gives these statements a bit more exposure (and thus, for better or worse, popular-opinion weight) than anything people like you or I might say.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think the release of 1e is a decided change in the "school" of D&D. There were other equally consequential "school changes" but one could very easily make the argument that the biggest change to D&D came when D&D was turned into AD&D, and the experience was (and was expected to be) thoroughly different.

Agreed, but I don't think that's what this article is talking about.

Prior to 1996 or so, I would say that the audience was divided between OS war-gaming and NS role-playing. After that, I would say that the war-gaming roots were largely forgotten, and the new division was between OS role-playing and NS story-telling. This article seems to be about the latter conflict.

It would help to focus the discussion if he'd included a list of which games fall into each category.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I submit that the only way for a player to not metagame at all is for them to have no knowledge of the game mechanics. You can't use out-of-game information if you don't *know* any out-of-game information.

I submit that the only way for a player to not metagame at all is for them to have no knowledge of reality. You can't use out-of-game information if you don't *know* any out-of-game information.

If you didn't know the game rules, though, then you would have no choice except to rely on out-of-game information. You would be forced to meta-game.

For example, let's say you're fighting some goblins, and one of them shoots you with an arrow. OW! Depending on how much you know about the real world, you might expect to fall down and/or become incapacitated with pain, such that your best hope of survival would be hiding behind cover while your allies protect you.

But that's not the reality your character is living in; that's just our real world, which is a different place that follows different rules. You're drawing on out-of-game knowledge, to fill in for the in-game knowledge that you're lacking. If you had read the rulebook, you would know that being shot by an arrow doesn't cause crippling pain that prevents you from swinging a sword effectively. The in-game knowledge, which is observable to the character, is that you can keep fighting effectively as long as you stay conscious. That's the truth about how their world works, and everything that happens in that world will be consistent with that.

While it's unreasonable to expect anyone to remain completely ignorant about reality, just to make it easier to play a game, it's not unreasonable to ask that they avoid drawing on that knowledge while trying to role-play. They're going to occasionally slip up, because nobody's perfect, but they can at least make the attempt.

 

[Hussar]

We are okay, though, as the Laws of Thermodynamics are still working. XP is information, and transfer of information is lossy, especially when you are talking about accumulated life experience, and your transmission line is... a sword buried in the target's gut. It stands to figure a lot of the XP leaks away and is lost.

It's like broken cookies.

Broken cookies have no calories since all, or at least most, of the calories are released in the breaking of the cookie.

At least this is what I tell my wife...

 

[Desdichado]

One could make that argument. One could also make the argument that he says they were pretty arrogant at the start of the piece, and by the end shows that he didn't really lose the arrogance. *MY* version takes more thought and roleplaying. *Yours* takes less.

Yeah. Sure. :/

That article was written by Tim Kask, who was quite literally the first employee of TSR, the original editor of The Strategic Review, and who ran hundreds of convention games between 1975 and 1983 when he left the industry to go do something else. Not only that, he sat right there in meetings with Gary Gygax as they were planning the strategic direction of D&D and AD&D. He is perhaps better positioned than just about anyone still alive, with a few other old-timey compadres of his like Jim Ward, to have seen first hand the change in the player base between old school and new school.

If all you got out of that was, "Like, OMG, he actually prefers one playstyle to another, how dare he!" then you really should read it again. This time without such a big chip on your shoulder.

 

[Desdichado]

Agreed, but I don't think that's what this article is talking about.

Prior to 1996 or so, I would say that the audience was divided between OS war-gaming and NS role-playing. After that, I would say that the war-gaming roots were largely forgotten, and the new division was between OS role-playing and NS story-telling. This article seems to be about the latter conflict.

It would help to focus the discussion if he'd included a list of which games fall into each category.

You do realize that I'm responding to the specific question that I quoted, which was, basically, "If you disagree with what the article thinks is old school vs new school, what do you think the division is?", right? Because yeah, obviously that's not what the article is talking about.

Personally, I don't think anything significant happened in 1996 that changed the way people played the game. The only change was sales; i.e., people were burned out on D&D and White Wolf had their brief era of peak faddishness. But White Wolf wasn't espousing any kind of new playstyle strategy; they were basically just translating the Hickman style of gaming, which had been going on for the better part of 15 years already by 1996, into a new setting and a new system.

Maybe one could say that by about 1996 or so the old school grognardy D&D players were starting to drop out and play something else, but then if you are going to go that route, I think there has to be some consistency. 4e was clearly a wargamey, tactical version of the game, but it's lumped by most in with the new schooly "story-games", which is a passive-aggressive term that does much more harm than good. But it's especially ridiculous to talk about 4e as a story-game when it's the system that specifically eschewed all that to be a tactical wargame with RPG elements just tacked on.

 

[R_Chance]

Heh, no worries. Didn't see the before the edit stuff. I've got a pretty thick skin anyway.

It's all there, I didn't delete anything. Looking back at it I didn't like the tone of my comment. I never feel right about deleting something once it's posted. I figure an apology (or explanation) is more honest than a deletion.

But, I do disagree. RPG's don't necessarily simulate a game world at all. They don't have to. Some RPG's deal with primarily conflict resolution and leave most of the world simulation to the imagination of the players. AD&D wasn't simulationist in the slightest. It was pretty unabashedly gamist. The DM was there to challenge the players and the players were more interested in "beating" whatever the scenario was than dealing with anything like "Hrm, exactly how does the plumbing in this mega dungeon work anyway"

But, I'd point out that my HP idea is pretty apropos. No edition of D&D can EVER answer the question, what does 10 HP of damage look like. You can't. I can't. Not really. We ignore that and make stuff up, but, at the end of the day, any narration we create is entirely divorced from the mechanics. The whole AC/HP system is far too abstract to actually generate any answers.

I mean, for something to be a simulation, it actually has to simulate something. If I play a flight simulator video game, there is a very direct correlation between my actions and what happens in the simulation and we can easily identify the exact point in time when I massively screw up, sending that 747 into a flat spin only to turn into a large fireworks display somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas.

The same is very much not true in D&D.

Different levels of detail and a different take on what is important (or not) is what I call that. Everything happens in a game world / setting, no matter how much or little it, or any specific aspect of it, is detailed. That's my opinion of course. I think we are operating with different definitions of "simulation". Your definition is specific and mine is broad.

 

[Arilyn]

I submit that the only way for a player to not metagame at all is for them to have no knowledge of reality. You can't use out-of-game information if you don't *know* any out-of-game information.

If you didn't know the game rules, though, then you would have no choice except to rely on out-of-game information. You would be forced to meta-game.

For example, let's say you're fighting some goblins, and one of them shoots you with an arrow. OW! Depending on how much you know about the real world, you might expect to fall down and/or become incapacitated with pain, such that your best hope of survival would be hiding behind cover while your allies protect you.

But that's not the reality your character is living in; that's just our real world, which is a different place that follows different rules. You're drawing on out-of-game knowledge, to fill in for the in-game knowledge that you're lacking. If you had read the rulebook, you would know that being shot by an arrow doesn't cause crippling pain that prevents you from swinging a sword effectively. The in-game knowledge, which is observable to the character, is that you can keep fighting effectively as long as you stay conscious. That's the truth about how their world works, and everything that happens in that world will be consistent with that.

While it's unreasonable to expect anyone to remain completely ignorant about reality, just to make it easier to play a game, it's not unreasonable to ask that they avoid drawing on that knowledge while trying to role-play. They're going to occasionally slip up, because nobody's perfect, but they can at least make the attempt.

If your game characters can exist in a world where arrows and sword slashes don't cause crippling pain, than can't my Fate characters exist in a world where they know suffering a setback now will give them a karmic boost later? If the DnD abstractions aren't metagaming, but just a different dimension's laws of physics, than how come my unrealistic game mechanics can't be explained away in a similar fashion?

 

[Hussar]

It's all there, I didn't delete anything. Looking back at it I didn't like the tone of my comment. I never feel right about deleting something once it's posted. I figure an apology (or explanation) is more honest than a deletion.



Different levels of detail and a different take on what is important (or not) is what I call that. Everything happens in a game world / setting, no matter how much or little it, or any specific aspect of it, is detailed. That's my opinion of course. I think we are operating with different definitions of "simulation". Your definition is specific and mine is broad.

By that point though, I'd argue that "simulation" as a term is so broad as to lose a lot of meaning. Like I said, a simulation has to actually simulate something or it's not a simulation. That's the point of a simulation. My crumpled up piece of paper is not a simulation of a hurricane, no matter how many times I argued with my science teacher. For a system to be simulationist, it actually has to be pretty methodical in its approach to whatever it is it's trying to simulate. And, sure, we can be fine or broad grained in a simulation. That's fine, I get that. But, at some point, I should be able to look at that simulation and have it tell me what's going on within whatever is being simulated.

Thus, we get games like GURPS (very finely grained simulation), RoleMaster (Ludicrously finely grained to the point where my brain wants to crawl out my left nostril), Battletech (very broadly grained simulation, quick and dirty really) and various others including a host of excellent war games.

But, my point is, in all the years that I've played simulation games, never once have I heard anyone step up and say, "Hey, let's use D&D (any edition) to simulate our fantasy world". It hasn't been until kinda recently, mostly with the 4e editions wars, that this meme of D&D as sim game has gotten any traction and, honestly, I've only seen it on message boards. It always kinda smacks of "Well, real RPG's are simulationist. Everything else is just posing". Like I say, it's baffling to see anyone with even a modicum of wargaming background try to lump D&D as a sim game with a straight face.

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I would argue that there is something of the beginnings of change in the 90's that you see really bear fruit in the early 2000's though [MENTION=2205]Desdichado[/MENTION]. ((Hobo is that you? the icon looks so familiar)) The rise of games like FUDGE and the whole "indie press" movement really starts in the 90's. The 80's sees a bit of it, but, mostly 80's RPG's were pretty similar to traditional RPG's. I hate to Godwin the thread by bringing up the FORGE but, really, it's not until the FORGE that we see a consistent attempt (I'm not commenting on the success of that attempt, just that the attempt was made) to analyze RPG's in a structured, academic form.

The rise of critical analysis and, heck the tools for critical analysis (hey, look at the discussion I'm having above about whether or not D&D is a simulationist game - that's a direct Forgeism right there) starts in about the mid-90's and continues today. I mean, heck, the discussion about Old School vs New School is a genre defining exercise, at its heart.

Really, when you think about it, probably the biggest difference between old school and new school, is the ability to actually critique the game in a meaningful way. Prior to, say, 1980, no one had any idea how to discuss the game because we hadn't invented the language to discuss games yet. Old school games like AD&D were largely uncritiqued because there was no venue to disseminate any critiques broadly among the fanbase and no shared language to actually make any sort of real critique to begin with.

 

[Aldarc]

Seems like then, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], that a big aspect in what you are discussing about in that mid-'90s shift in discourse was simply the rise of the Internet.