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?

View attachment 103704
​

Notice it’s “storytelling”, not storymaking. Every RPG involves a story, the question is, who creates the story, the GM or the players?
​

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]

You don't demonstrate that the story is not bigger than any one character in the second case. You merely point out the truism that 35 is a greater value than 5 and the same story content will inevitably be more thinly distributed between 35 than it would be for 5. And you do so in a manner that seems to aggrandize or artificially exaggerate the scope of the story for the former. So I still think that this notion that in OS gaming "the story is bigger than the characters" should be dropped in favor of more satisfactory and accurate explanations. And you seem to approach offering such an explanation: there is on average a higher PC turnover rate. If that is true, then examining that phenomenon would likely be more fruitful.

In the context of a different discussion regarding lethality or immersion or other things to do with character, sure. But here I'm not sure that looking at PC turnover is going to answer much about story-as-party.

About the only other way I can put it is - and you've probably heard this before from me - the party to me is analagous to a sports team over the long term. The Vancouver Canucks have been an NHL franchise since 1970 and over those almost 50 years have had something like 275* people don the jersey and play at least one meaningful game. This could line up directly as a near-50 year D&D campaign during which about 275 characters have been rolled up and joined the party for at least one session.

Some of those hockey players have done great things while on the team, and their individual stories are well worth telling. But none of those stories last as long as the team's does because none of those player's careers was anywhere near 50 years long. And while the stories of each individual player certainly contribute to the overall story of the team, the end result team story is greater than the sum of all its parts...and the same is true of a D&D party that outlasts its individual characters.

* - going by memory, not exact.

That said, you don't see that many groups in 5e having the sort of "ten-adventure existence" lifespan that you describe here. The loose connection of ten adventure modules (or DM plot hooks) isn't really the current mode of operation anymore. The 5e Tomb of Annihilation and Storm King's Thunder each take characters from 1-11. The Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat) takes characters from 1-15.

I can't speak to those paths specifically as I've not read them to see how they're structured internally, but I can speak to Princes of the Apocalypse and say that its internal structure very much looks like 15-or-so individual adventures (that don't even have to be done in exact sequence) strung together into an overarching story, and could very easily be run as such. The levels are supposed to go from 1-15, so about one per adventure.

And overall there is not a gruelling grind to these higher levels anymore, and yet most games stop around levels 6-8. So part of the lower turnover rate seems to stem from these patterns alone.

It would, yes. But to use the book analogy those short campaigns correspond to what amounts to a short story, where I'm looking more at the Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones scale.

And this is obviously speaking only pertains to 5e compared to Early Gen 1 TTRPGs. We may expand the scope of inquiry to other RPGs and likely also find disparate patterns requiring independent explanations.

Likely true.

Also, to return to your much earlier point about GoT: There are a lot of deaths. (More so in the show where it pays to kill off characters since actors eat into the budget.) There are a lot of various PoV chapters. But the metaplot clearly favors certain characters over others. The story was clearly always meant to revolve around certain characters: e.g., Daenerys and Jon Snow. (Almost blatantly so.)

The Jon-Daenerys focus is certainly blatant in the TV shows but we've as yet no way of knowing whether it would have been in the books. That said, while Jon is introduced very early on Daenerys isn't.

And the various characters are not organized into any semblance of a party so it's not the best comparison for D&D on that front either.

Not all at once. But there's certainly instances where different groups of characters get together for a while, do some adventuring, and then split apart - very similar to what happens in a big sprawling old-school D&D campaign where each player has a stable of characters all of whom are doing their own things when not running with an adventuring party. The one exception is the group that formed around Daenerys during her time in the desert: because they were isolated from everyone else for so long that group remained largely identifyable as a single party.

The death of Ned Stark is frequently cited as a case where people thought the story would center around him, but it turned out not to be the case. But GRRM had also intended that Book 1 would have encompassed what are now Books 1-3: Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords. So the death of Ned Stark was intended to be much "earlier" within the story's scope - a third of the way into Book 1. And I think that this also illustrates that for GRRM, the characters were much bigger than the story he planned rather than the story being bigger than the characters.

His plans may have been one thing but the result was another.

This seems more an indication of personal preference than a "bad DM," an accusation that honestly gets thrown around too liberally on this forum at times. Though it is not my own preference either, I have personally seen this work to great success.

I've both tried it as DM and played in games where another DM has tried it, and so far I'm 0-for-lifetime on seeing it be anything other than some version of a major mistake.

 

[Lanefan]

You say this as if the story of the group isn't *made up* of the stories of the individuals.

It is, but as I said in my other post the whole ends up being greater than the sum of the parts.

You've seen Star Trek: The Next Generation, or any other Star Trek series, yes? In the opening, they tell you: "These are the stories of the Starship Enterprise...". But each particular episode is a mixture and interweaving of A and B plots that focus on different characters. And yeah, sometimes you lose a character (Lieutenant Yar, or Dr. Crusher for a while), but the story of the ship goes on.

I'm not sure ST:TNG is the best example here, in that other than their occasional dealings with Q and-or the Borg there really wasn't much of a true overarching storyline - it was more "crisis of the week" stuff a lot of the time.

A better example would be Battlestar Galactica (the newer one). There you've got the individual character stories within the ships but you've also got the much bigger overlying story of their flight from the Cylons, and the planted clones, and so forth; and that story is clearly bigger than any one character.

Yes, if you make it so a single character always has the A plot, you can have a major problem if that character dies. But if you hand around that focus, and generally work so that the A-plots have multiple characters involved, no one character becomes indispensable.

True, but if you're going to have multiple characters involved in the A-plots why not just focus on the whole party instead and have done with it? That way even if things go wrong and half the party is lost the story can still continue with the remaining half if all involved so desire.

Oddly enough, the only TPK I've ever DMed in my life came from just this type of single-PC-focus adventure: a PC pulled the party into a quest she'd been given. It took them off-world to some mini-plane, whereupon the quested PC died in - I kid you not - the second combat they faced! They didn't have revival in the field (too low of level for that), so the rest of the party turned their focus to simply getting back home - which unfortunately meant having to go through a large part of the remaining adventure. They got through most of it but then got in a bit over their heads - and then very unlucky. Next party, please.

 

[Umbran]

Like I said, there are different ways that you could model it, depending on the nature of their relationship.

We have a fictional event, and the mechanics that model it. We are talking about one specific mechanic - so that is fixed, and we only have one model. That model is only appropriate for impacts of a fixed sort of severity. Anything lower or greater are not modeled by this mechanic. This is important to note, because "FATE would definitely bribe you to let your brother die," means one thing in the common parlance, but something different if you are using this particular mechanic.

The example in the book is of a thief being Compelled to steal jewelry. Doing so is very clearly against the character's interests...

I don't know which book you're using (there are several that have the base mechanics, related with different examples). But...

Really? The character IS A THIEF. That pretty solidly implies they steal regularly. Clearly, the character does not think stealing is against their interests, in general! They do this all the time and don't get caught! The *player* knows this will end in a less-than-optimal way, but the character does not.

Or, alternatively, the fact that it is "against their interests" is a bogus point, because people do not always make optimal choices. We choose to do things against our own best interests pretty commonly, or act without knowign for sure what the consequences will be, so this should not seen as problematic.

And, more importantly, if they steal now, they will be able to do that all-important triple backflip that will land them right behind the BBEG for the backstab later. Thus, in total:

The player knows that the short-term situation is annoying, but the long-term is in the character's best interests.

The character, being a flawed human (elf, dwarf, flumph, or whatever) being, either thinks they are acting in their own best interests, or they don't care, or are beyond their ability to resist the choice - the player can choose which, depending on how the aspect being tagged is written.

Remember that this is generally done in the process of tagging an Aspect that the player chose - it defines who the character is. Arguments about how this is "metagame" because it causes the player to make a choice not in the character's best interest miss the point that the aspect implies that the character makes such choices often enough to consider it a major trait. The GM, in effect, is asking for the player to act *in-character* in a specific way at this moment.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't think that the spirit of Fate is about bribing you to let your brother die. You are more likely to be bribed so that he doesn't (Trouble: "I owe my brother my life."), but that you may have to sacrifice something in the process, such as letting the BBEG escape so that you can save him.

Also Troubles in Fate are not so much about getting the player to act against their character's best interests, but so that they lean into their self-designated drama and embrace story complications. Troubles are self-selected. They are created by players to suggest to the GM what sort of complications they want their own character to experience in the story. If anything, it's meant to counteract the player's metagame-tendencies in which the player's rational overwrites what may be the more compelling in-character decision. This of course gets under some people's skins: "How dare you presume that my character would behave like this?! I know how best to RP my character! " Fate's Answer: "Because you made that issue the Trouble for your character, and now that this issue has come up in-game, you are pretending like it's not your Trouble."

 

[The Crimson Binome]

We have a fictional event, and the mechanics that model it. We are talking about one specific mechanic - so that is fixed, and we only have one model. That model is only appropriate for impacts of a fixed sort of severity. Anything lower or greater are not modeled by this mechanic. This is important to note, because "FATE would definitely bribe you to let your brother die," means one thing in the common parlance, but something different if you are using this particular mechanic.

Perhaps I should have said, "Bribing you to let your brother die is a thing that could definitely happen in FATE". It is exactly the sort of thing that could happen in FATE, assuming the relevant parameters were chosen accordingly. You could have a brother, who dies at an inconvenient time, which results in a complication.

Or, alternatively, the fact that it is "against their interests" is a bogus point, because people do not always make optimal choices.

To be fair, that's a legitimate complaint about OS role-playing games, is that they don't lead to interesting narratives because there's no reason why anyone would choose to have a flaw. Logically, we all know that flaws are bad; so all else being equal, there's no reason why anyone would choose to play flawed character. Any game that wants players to play flawed characters will need some way of addressing this issue.

Arguments about how this is "metagame" because it causes the player to make a choice not in the character's best interest miss the point that the aspect implies that the character makes such choices often enough to consider it a major trait.

It's not meta-gaming on the grounds of it being against the character's best interests. It's meta-gaming on the grounds that it's telling you-the-player to take the Fate point into consideration when making this decision, where the Fate point isn't something that the character could possibly know about; there's no causal link between stealing the thing and later doing the backflip, within the character's understanding of how their world works.

If it had just said, "the character should do the thing, because it's the in-character thing for them to do, which we know by looking at their traits," then that would be one thing. OS games also do that. (Sometimes, they'll give you a Willpower roll to avoid doing the thing.) That the book actually tells you something bad will come of it in the short term, but you should do it anyway in order to causally affect change later on, is another matter entirely.

 

[Aldarc]

But here I'm not sure that looking at PC turnover is going to answer much about story-as-party.

That's probably a good thing since story-as-party seems like a non sequitor discussion to hang your hat on when talking about OS vs. NS TTRPGs; however, PC turnover seems to be more of what you are talking about elsewhere, including your hockey example.

I can't speak to those paths specifically as I've not read them to see how they're structured internally, but I can speak to Princes of the Apocalypse and say that its internal structure very much looks like 15-or-so individual adventures (that don't even have to be done in exact sequence) strung together into an overarching story, and could very easily be run as such. The levels are supposed to go from 1-15, so about one per adventure.

Which moves the goal posts of discussion to debating what constitutes an "adventure." :shrug: Not sure if this is a helpful direction either.

It would, yes. But to use the book analogy those short campaigns correspond to what amounts to a short story, where I'm looking more at the Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones scale.

LotR has a 481,103 word count total. The Hobbit would only add 95k to that total. Storm of Swords and Dance of Dragons each have a word count of around 414,600 words. I don't quite think that the scope of the two epics are that comparable. In our contemporaneous publishing standards, Lord of the Rings would be a "short story" in comparison, and probably would have been published as one book.

The Jon-Daenerys focus is certainly blatant in the TV shows but we've as yet no way of knowing whether it would have been in the books.

It was fairly clear that these characters were central to the metaplot fairly early on. As early as Book 1, fans tied the two characters to the title of the series: A Song of Ice (Jon Snow) and Fire (Daenerys Targaryen). And the R+L=J was also solved fairly early by people on the Westeros.org forms, back in our EZBoard days, if not earlier. Adam Whitehead of Wertzone and Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson, who own the Westeros.org fan site and co-wrote the World of Ice & Fire, could likely tell you more about how people pieced all this together.

That said, while Jon is introduced very early on Daenerys isn't.

Chapter 3 of Book 1. That's pretty darn early.

I've both tried it as DM and played in games where another DM has tried it, and so far I'm 0-for-lifetime on seeing it be anything other than some version of a major mistake.

And if I have never experienced your style of GMing done as anything other than some version of a major mistake, should I conclude then that you are a bad or novice GM? Probably not. Nor would I feel that it's my place to throw around the "bad GM" label so liberally.

 

[darkbard]

It seems like one of the "story-now crew," such as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], or [MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION] would be better equipped to elucidate clarification on such matters then, if you are so inclined.

I appreciate the shout out, [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION], but I haven't read a word of this thread yet and am super busy right now in gearing up for the spring semester's responsibilities, so it may be a while before I feel ready to jump in with the conversation. Also, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], along with those mentioned, goes before me in such matters....

 

[R_Chance]

[MENTION=55149]R_Chance[/MENTION] You are all-knowing and all-wise, sir! I shall engrave your words into my psyche where I can grow it into a shrine, lest it become a beacon to guide me in my days of misery and despair for knowing that He Who Hath One Fan can depend on you to remind me that I don't need to read articles anymore!

Oh, I think my mood is improving.

Whatever makes you happy is fine with me. But the shrine would be a bit much

 

[Ovinomancer]

Perhaps I should have said, "Bribing you to let your brother die is a thing that could definitely happen in FATE". It is exactly the sort of thing that could happen in FATE, assuming the relevant parameters were chosen accordingly. You could have a brother, who dies at an inconvenient time, which results in a complication.

This still grossly misrepresents the mechanics. You're hiding the fact that your chosen example (death of brother) would only fit if that event was a mild complication instead of a critical event and then switching back to the assumption it's a critical event to show how badly this mechanics works. It's motte-and-bailey arguing at it's [-]finest[/-] normalness.

The Compel mechanic only keys off of things the player has indicated to the GM are what he wants his character to face -- ie, they're already part of the character. Further, the impacts are generally minor, on the order of things getting a bit worse in that scene, not "your bother dies, here's a die." To continue with the farce of the brother's dying example indicates not that you understand the mechanic but rather that you want to establish an example that a casual reader unfamiliar with your slight of hand will interpret incorrectly and arrive at the conclusion that FATE includes such things as killing off important persons for a meta-benny. It, however, does not, and you should drop this very bad example.

Full disclosure: I don't even play FATE and I know this from a reading of the rules. It's not hard unless you're trying to take the wrong impression.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes, I agree about absolutes....my comments were made in reply to another poster with the intention of summarizing what I was getting from their post (hence my use of question marks), not as a summation of how I view things. Of course players in AD&D made decisions for their characters based on story, and new school gamers make decisions based on their characters.

But I can see the distinction between trying to always remain in character, and in trying to play with a mind for what's dramatically satisfying...and despite the fact that both can be done in any play style, I can see how one might ascribe the former to Old School and the latter to New School. Would you agree with that? None of the terms or definitions we're using are perfect, so a little leeway seems to be in order for the sake of discussion.

I have no desire to paint anything as night and day. I enjoy elements of gaming that would be called Old School, and also plenty of modern mechanics or games that would be called New School. I don't feel the need to pick one over the other, and as I've said, I disagree with the conclusions from the OP in regards to loss and failure.

It's still a bad distinction, because playing for the best story over character is not a NS trait of play. It is, however, often a storygame trait of play, but NS roleplaying games tend to put character front and center and mechanics exist to keep character front and center. The FATE compel is an example of this, as the trait compelled is something that the player built into the character as something that is defining. So, compelling it is putting that character front and center when the player might not want to engage in that aspect of the character. Other system do this less obviously, like Blades in the Dark, where exhibiting your vice or your flaws earn you XP (and there's only a limited number of ways to earn XP, so doing so can potentially double your XP take for a session).