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]

My first experience with D&D was way back in the early 80s. I was excited about the idea of creating a fantasy character, who would go on adventures like in the novels I was consuming at a rapid pace. What I got instead, was crawling slowly and carefully through a dungeon, meticulously mapping every inch, with long, out of character tactical sessions about getting past ridiculously complicated mechanical traps. Oh, and my elf couldn't be a ranger. Turned me right off the hobby, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. The desire for more story in rpgs and less random death is a debate which started almost as soon as ODD was released. Gygax didn't initially appreciate role playing in his game, and wanted no differentiation between character and player. This idea did not survive long, once the public got hold of the game, although, remnants of this idea still exist amongst the old schoolers.

I'm not sure Gygax didn't appreciate role-playing in his games; my guess - not having been there - is more that the whole notion of a player RPing an individual character was at the time still somewhat new, and he didn't quite know what to do with it or how to best incorporate it into his wargame-based system. In the end he threw in some suggestions and then left it for individual tables and groups figure it out for themselves - which in hindsight was probably the best thing to have done.

The desire for story in rpgs is, and has always been, strong.

Agreed, though maybe not quite in such absolute terms. In ongoing home-based games, yes. In tournament or convention games (a much bigger thing in the early days), not so much.

GM driven stories, which are influenced by player actions, so they don't become railroads, seem to attract the most players

And, as a pleasant side effect, are probably also easiest for the average GM to design and run halfway well. Agreed.

and it's not a new thing caused by critical role, or spoiled players, who don't want their characters to fail or die.

Ah, but here's the thing: there's two ways of approaching this, and I think there's an OS-NS difference to be found here too.

The OS one can best be summed up as 'the story is, or is made to appear, bigger than any character within it'. The best example of this is, ironically, qute modern: Game of Thrones. There's absolutely no guarantee, and no valid reason to expect, that any character who begins the story will still be around at the end - and this is true of a lot of OS play as well. Characters come and characters go but the party* as an entity - and thus the story - survives; and the only thing that really hammers this is a full TPK with limited or no backup characters. Also here the story in many cases is what it is no matter what characters happen to be involved, in part because the ongoing turnover means the GM doesn't always have much advance warning of what the party lineup will be at any given time, though the GM still has to be adaptalbe to players/PCs changing their minds as to what they want to do in the game world.

* - or parties, there can certainly be more than one on the go.

The NS one can be summed up as 'the characters are the story'. Here there's an expectation built in to the game that a character who starts the story will very likely finish it unless the player decides otherwise. This was first really seen on a big scale with 3e D&D with its move toward 1-20 character buildouts, because what's the point of building out 1-20 if you don't get to play it through? There's also a lesser but still extant - maybe expectation is too strong a word, perhaps 'trend'? - that the GM will tailor the story to suit the characters on either or both of a large or small scale. A side effect of this is that a GM often can't really plan out much (if any) of the story before the characters are rolled up, as she doesn't know what she'll have to work with.

In both of these there's loads of wiggle room as to how the story gets developed and-or told and-or played through at the table, everything from hard railroad to full-on sandbox to make-it-all-up-on-the-fly. The question is simply one of which is more important: the party overall, or the individual characters within it.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

My first experience with D&D was way back in the early 80s. I was excited about the idea of creating a fantasy character, who would go on adventures like in the novels I was consuming at a rapid pace. What I got instead, was crawling slowly and carefully through a dungeon, meticulously mapping every inch, with long, out of character tactical sessions about getting past ridiculously complicated mechanical traps. Oh, and my elf couldn't be a ranger. Turned me right off the hobby, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way.

100%, that happened to a lot of folks. I know I dropped away from really hardcore dungeon crawl fairly quickly myself. A little of that goes a long way. I'll throw it in there once in a while, especially to evoke a certain feel, but I'd really rather have cool fights, interesting RP moments, and the like. A TTRPG will never be a novel but that desire is much more common than in Ye Olden Tymef.

The desire for more story in rpgs and less random death is a debate which started almost as soon as ODD was released. Gygax didn't initially appreciate role playing in his game, and wanted no differentiation between character and player. This idea did not survive long, once the public got hold of the game, although, remnants of this idea still exist amongst the old schoolers.

EGG was a died-in-the-wool wargamer from the start. He wasn't really the person who pushed RP up front. That was Arneson and other folks. He went along with it, but that isn't where he started.

 

[Lanefan]

I expect this is just careless phrasing on your part, but no, having a game where you need the player's permission to kill the character is not "doing it wrong" in any absolute sense. It is just a different type of game.

The phrasing was quite intentional.

Okay, so, there's something interesting... you generally describe loss in terms of mechanical effectiveness. The only ting to lose... is how awesome you are in the game action resolution systems.

In large part because those types of losses are quantifyable in one way or another across many systems. Losses within the story or setting to do with reputation, social standing, etc. aren't always so quantifyable and often aren't measurable at all.

FATE, a decidedly New School kind of game, has mechanics that can easily deal with any kind of long-term mechanical loss to the character - including limbs. Heck, long-term psychical impacts to the character is an intrinsic part of the FATE core damage system. Don't want to die? Take an Aspect instead, with a clearly stated negative mechanical impact.

1E D&D? Did not have unambiguous rules for what to do when you lose a limb or an eye.

But did have the means for such to occur, at least with limb loss: sword of sharpness. Does that even exist in today's game?

There's a bit of (probably unintentional) eliding happening here

When we talk about success and failure, we have to be clear: Succeed or fail at what? We have to be consistent if we want to understand. Are we talkign about succeedign on an action, or in achieving a goal - these aren't the same thing, but you're swapping between them above.

I say they are the same, only on different scales. More later...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The newer mechanics that are found in Fate, Gumshoe, and even in 5e are there to support more narrative driven games, to help establish dramatic beats. They exist to help support the desire for NS, which isn't all that new, work better.

Whether they succeed at that, or whether they go way too far and abandon the concept of role-playing entirely, is probably a topic for another thread.

 

[PMárk]

I'm not sure if that generalization holds true.

Let's take the game Fate for starters. In the rulebook itself, Fate believes that players should be invested in failure. To that end, Fate encourages calling for rolls only when there are interesting results for success and failure. If the fail state of looking for unlocking a door in a dungeon crawl is "you don't find it, so the action stops," then the consequence of failure is not particularly interesting. But what if you fail but then trigger a trap in the process (e.g., Death Star trash compactor)? What if you succeed, but then break your locks in the process? What if you fail and then a patrol comes by? Or what if you succeed, but due to the time required, opening the door at an inopportune time causes a monster further down to catch your scent as a breeze flows past you into the freshly-opened corridor ahead? Or to change the scenario slightly, Han Solo is under fire on the moon of Endor while trying to open the lock of the shield generator bunker. He fails. Failure is not simply failure but, instead, results in an additional door closing.

Its dice resolution entails Failure, Tie, Success, and Success With Style, but players can opt for Succeed-with-a-Serious-Cost on Failure. Now you view Succeed-with-a-Serious-Cost as a mitigation of failure. I can see that. But in selecting this, you are inherently mitigating any success you would have otherwise achieved had you properly succeeded. The mitigation of failure inherently entails the mitigation of success.
These are the sort of highly memorable scenarios that Fate seeks to emulate.

Then let's move on to Dungeon World. Failure represents half of the possibilities for the dice resolution roll. Roll 2d6. Failure on a 1-6; Complicated Success on a 7-9; and Full Success on a 10-12. Failure will trigger a hard move (or counter-reaction) from the GM. This resolution would seem to run contrary to your assertion given how failure is not mitigated in this resolution, but success is mitigated on a 7-9.

Blades in the Dark also applies here. Roll a dice pool. Failure on a 1-3; Complicated Success on a 4-5; and Full Success on a 6. Again, the complication of success often entails the mitigation of success rather than the mitigation of failure. Another aspect that has not been discussed thus far regarding BitD in the mitigation of success entails several other facets of its dice resolution mechanics: position and effect. Position refers to your position of control in a situation: is it Controlled, Risky, or Desperate? Effect refers to the possible effect of your success: Great, Standard, Limited. The GM sets both the player's Position and Effect.

If you have a favorable position, but a low effect, the player character can even downgrade their position for increased effect. E.g., you are in a controlled position for crossing the courtyard, but you would have a limited effect, so you could not cross the courtyard in time; however, you could opt for a Risky or even Desperate position for your action to achieve a Standard or Great effect! That seems like mitigating success to me. The process entails the PC deciding which is more important: crossing the courtyard in time or crossing the courtyard safely. And the PC still has to roll, where failure and complicated success is still possible.

Overall, I think that a lot of Fail Forward and Success at a Cost/Complication emulate the flow of action in serialized action-adventure fiction incredibly well. To borrow from the Hobbit, it entails classic "Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire" scenarios. (And George Lucas clearly loved them for writing the adventure stories of Indiana Jones and Star Wars.) And given the serialized nature of D&D and many RPGs, often played in episodic segments, there is an almost natural fit here. As such, I am increasingly inclined to think that the purpose of these mechanics and GMing techniques is not about mitigating player success/failure, but, rather, about keeping the game interesting through meaningful consequences and maintaining a flow of action, opportunities, and choices.

Thank you, it was an interesting read. It sorta reassured in me the notion, that "new school" (or narrative) games tend to emulate stories (and genres, specifically), while "old school" (I'd call it "classic", or simulational") systems tend to emulate a world/reality (not necessarily a "realistic" one, but a comprehensive and consistent one). The first wants to keep the story rolling,t he second wants to present the game's background and overall rules of existence neutrally.

 

[R_Chance]

Too many people assume there was no "role playing" in early games. We had it and I first played D&D in late August 1974. Just before school started again. *sigh* We role played our generals when we played miniatures too. We wrote general orders out ahead of the game. We had an umpire / referee to make sure things stayed straight. If you wanted to change the orders for a unit (we were playing Napoleonic, 18th Century, ancient, and medieval miniatures) you had to send new orders by a courier to subordinate commanders. You could get killed. A friend of mine had a little carriage with his Bavarian general in it. A favorite, if elusive, target for "random" artillery roundshot (my general was on horse back)… Your orders could fail to get there or not get the job done. Sometime you just had to go do it yourself When we jumped from fantasy Chainmail miniatures to D&D we were already for role playing. It became much more personal and intense. And death sucked. But it was too d@mn fun to stop because of a PC death. And I know my grades suffered from it too If you weren't role playing early games it wasn't that it wasn't being done.

*edit* Oh, and there were good reasons to keep cavalry units in reserve to act as guards

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

In large part because those types of losses are quantifyable in one way or another across many systems. Losses within the story or setting to do with reputation, social standing, etc. aren't always so quantifyable and often aren't measurable at all.

Just because something isn't easily quantifiable doesn't mean it's not worth considering.

But did have the means for such to occur, at least with limb loss: sword of sharpness. Does that even exist in today's game?

Yes it's still there. However, D&D has a never really had much of a mechanism for effects like maiming in a consistent way, though.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Umbran]

And this different than the quoted example. IMO, this identifies something that is wildly and completely different than the play style that I am used to. The idea that a death MUST be narratively satisfying.

The quote you use does not contain the word "must". Much less "MUST", with all-caps emphasis. This may be the world's most common form of strawman - overstate the other's position using absolute words, and then argue against them as if they were an extremist. It becomes easier to score rhetorical points, but it is counter-factual.

Because that puts the narrative above the game mechanics, above (for me, at least) the idea that the story isn't just an emergent phenomenon of the interactions between the DM (world) and players (declaring actions) and dice. It feels very deus ex machina to me.**

That's why (in other comments) you get this pushback about idea like "falling forward." To some people, the idea of falling forward is bizarre- it sounds more like you running an improv class with some dice accessories than you are a TTRPG.

"Now and then, a player will die through no fault of their own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still a freakish roll of the dice will kill the character... You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye, or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done."

-E. Gary Gygax, "Rolling the dice and control of the game", 1E DMG, 1979

If Gygax himself is now no longer old-school enough for us, I think we should all just stop discussing, as we won't get anywhere reasonable.

Now, Gygax did include a warning that such GM-fiddling should be extremely rare, but the point is that even he acknowledged that it is fair to have considerations other than what the dice say. Who wants to claim that Gygax was off his nut, here?

That said.... there is a difference. To an old school gamer, the idea that a death (or anything, for that matter) must be significant is, well, anathema.

Great. Fine. Take the idea that it "must" be significant off the table. Because nobody ever said it. I feel no need to defend a position I didn't take.

**In fairness, I doubt that Umbran (or others) would describe their style of play as deus ex machina, or fudging, or forcing a narrative, but would also describe it as an emergent story determined by the dice. But that's why there are different preferences- I find meaning and stories narratively satisfying from gameplay differently than others might, and that's okay.

Quite. Very specifically, folks are bemoaning the emergence of mechanics and design points that were chosen because they naturally tend to give you the desired results for this style of play. There's no need to fudge, or use some other deus ex machina, if the way the dice fall out generally results in an appropriate narrative. And there's a variety of games along the spectrum of how much the mechanics are built to lean one way or another.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*