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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 7768371" data-attributes="member: 75787">This article seems to have two points, mixed up and presented as one. The first is that OS means players can fail, whereas NS means they cannot. Mixed up with tha are statements about player agency: OS is a sandbox and NS is a GM railroad. I am currently running two old-school style games: AD&D2 in a dungeon crawl, and Deadlands Classic. I have just finished up a new school game (GUMSHOE; Night’s Black Agents) that ran for ~60 sessions. I’ve played in very strict campaigns with little GM variance allowed (Living Greyhawk) as well as Fate campaigns. In all of them, players failed (in the sense of not having characters achieve objectives, which I believe is the point of this article. Players rarely fail in their actual objective, which is to have fun). The difference is not in the fact of failure, bu in how they failed. In OS games, players typically just roll badly and, if they are in a bad situation, their characters die. That’s what an OS failure looks like. It’s sort of binary; feat or glory. In a NS game, failure is rarely like that. I have had some player deaths like that, but I’ve also had characters die because their players thought it was right. Is that “failure”? Or a character defeats an enemy, but picks up a major disadvantage — NS has a lot more “you succeed at a cost” outcomes.The second concept; sandbox versus GM railroad. I’m afraid this is just not right. My GUMSHOE game started with “here is a book with over 100 leads in it; I also have materials for another 100 or so other scenes. Go get them”. In that campaign, I was all ready for the players to head to the USA and confront the child-stealing conspiracy they literally watched their target sail away and decided to go talk to some Italian communists and never left Europe again. Whereas my OS AD&D game (Maze of the Blue Medusa) starts coercively with a scene forcing characters to enter a door and become trapped. The Deadlands campaign is very sandbox-y; many NS horror games I run are pretty linear. I don’t think there is a real correlation here between OS/NS and railroading. NS school games, in my experience, usually allow more varied outcomes because they tend to encourage the players to get involved in the story. In OS games there are rarely rules for that, so they present one less avenue for variation in story. Now, this is just my experience. It might be that OS games tend more to sandbox campaigns because they need some way for players to affect story. In NS games there are many ways for them to do so, so it’s possible to affect story in a strongly plotted adventure. In OS games, if the GM has a strong plot, it’s hard for the players to do much about it (except fail and die) so maybe sandbox campaigns are more necessary to give the players a solid means of affecting the story?Like the other posters, I think this article misses the mark; for me OS games are characterized by binary outcomes, by strong contrasts in results — save or die, death or glory, good versus evil, law against chaos, success or failure. NS games tend to graded outcomes, and that leads to a different attitude. NS games tend to let the players modify results, whereas OS games do not, and that also makes a huge difference. Perhaps a better restating of the original article’s point would be “players fail in OS games because the games are built around binary success/failure outcomes, whereas a complete failure is rare in NS games as they are built around graded outcomes”</blockquote>

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