Worlds of Design: “Old School” in RPGs and other Games – Part 2 and 3 Rules, Pacing, Non-RPGs, and G

Worlds of Design: “Old School” in RPGs and other Games – Part 2 Rules, Pacing, and Non-RPGs

For me, the difference between Old School and anything else is not in the rules, but in attitude, as described last time. Yet the rules, and the pacing, can make a big difference; parts 2 and 3.

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“Old School Games have a lot of failure, more mediocre outcomes... and the brilliant stroke that suddenly feels astonishing because there is something there to contrast it with. New School Games are grey goo.” Jeffro
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Last time I talked about some differences between “Old School” and newer approaches to RPGs, especially related to story. Here are some more.
[h=3]Rules[/h] The difference in “schools” is not about rules. Rules are not sacred, nor do they fit for every person. I think about rules in terms of game design. Occasionally choices designers make in games are arbitrary, one is as good as another. Some of these choices, the game designer(s) might want to change after publication, if they could. And over time, a game designer might make different choices for rules simply because tastes/trends change. For these reasons it makes no sense, to me, to adhere strictly to every rule in an RPG set.

Jeffro Johnson goes back to rules before AD&D (first edition as we tend to call it), or rules intended to substitute, such as Moldvay-B/X-Basic rules. So Jeffro says thieves must have d4 for hit points, because the rules he loves specify that.

I’m much more willing to vary from the original rules in order to make the game better (from my point of view, of course), so my thieves/rogues have d6s, can use bows (Robin Hood), and vary in other ways from the original rules. My 1e clerics can choose one of three types of sharp weapons (two-handers, one-handed swords, bow and arrow) and use those weapons as well as the blunt ones - because it’s better for the game. They can memorize twice as many spells as they can cast. And so on.

But a GM can make his game Old or New regardless of the actual rules. Some rules make it easier to tell stories (e.g. FATE). Simpler rulesets in general give the GM more freedom to tell stories, as there are fewer rules to get in the way of the story, and likely less “rules lawyering”.
[h=3]GM Role[/h] In terms of the two major conceptions of the GM’s role, the GM as rules arbiter and the GM as a sort of god, which works better for the storytelling that’s part of New School? I think rules arbiter is much less effective, as the rules can get in the way of the story. GM as rules arbiter tends to go with long rulesets (which more likely need an arbiter), and rules-heavy games get in the way of story-telling. Rules-light games ought to be better for GM storytelling. Players who don’t want the GM to control the story may prefer rules-heavy RPGs. These are tendencies, of course, not certainties, and likely there are counterexamples.
[h=3]Pacing[/h] Pacing is a big part of the difference between the two extremes. Good pacing (in novel and film terms) calls for alternating lows and highs, to make the highs that much more effective.

Old School recognizes that there will be not-very-exciting or even unpleasant/horrific adventures, to go with super-exciting and terrifically rewarding adventures. New School “evens it out”, ensuring that nothing will be unpleasant but also effectively ensuring that nothing will be terrific – because you can’t fail. “Loot drops” are boring when every monster has a loot drop. Boatloads of treasure become boring when you always get boatloads of treasure. “No one ever gets in serious trouble” is boring. In other words, the New abandons good pacing in favor of enabling “no negative consequences” or just “no losses”. You can certainly do that, but it sounds tedious to me.
[h=3]Non-RPGs, too[/h] This Old/New dichotomy can be seen clearly in board and card games as well. Such games have moved away from the traditional direct competition, and from high levels of player interaction, to parallel competitions that are usually puzzles (i.e., have always-correct solutions) rather than games (which do not have such solutions). Each player pursues his own puzzle down one of the "Multiple Paths to Victory," that is, following one of several always-correct solutions provided by the designer.

"As an Action RPG, the best thing about Torchlight II is the way loot, skill choices, and chance bubble over into a fountain of light and treasure at the whiff of a right-click, every single time, for as long as you can keep going." PC Gamer magazine, 2012
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We see the difference in video games, too, but for commercial reasons those games have gone far into the New. To begin with, computers lend themselves to avatar-based "experiences" (forms of story) rather than games. Also, computer games of all types are far into reward (or at least, lack of negative consequences), having left consequence (Old School) behind some time ago. In other words, you’re rewarded for playing while not having to worry/take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. (There are exceptions of course.) In the extreme, players will blame the game if they don’t succeed. If you make a free to play video game (a very common type now), practically speaking you MUST make it easy and positive so that players will stick around long enough to decide to provide you with some revenue via in-game micro-transactions.

(Editor's Note: We decided to add in Lew's third article, below, so it puts all of his points in context; please see my comment below).

Here are some Old/New School differences in actual gameplay.
[h=3]Strategy Over Tactics[/h] Military strategy (what you do before battle is joined) is de-emphasized in opposite-of-old-school games. Why?

• Good strategy requires planning; tactics can become standardized, rule of thumb, easier
• If the GM is telling a story, he or she wants players to follow the script, not devise their own ways of doing things overall (which is what strategy is all about)

Tactical games, on the other hand, are all about immediate fighting, what 4^th edition D&D was built for, what many computer RPGs are built for because computers are at their best in tactics and worst in strategy.
[h=3]Hand-Holding[/h] Old School games are often about exploration, about finding/identifying the objectives. And recognizing when something about a location/opponent makes it too dangerous to take on right now.

Something like a secret door becomes a “dirty GM trick” instead of a challenge for the dungeon-delving skills of the party. “New” games are about being guided by the game (GM) to where the fight is, then fighting, then getting the loot. (You recognize the description of typical computer RPGs, especially MMO RPGs?)

In other words, the GM “holds the hands” of the players, guiding them rather than leaving them to their own devices. Every GM does this on occasion, but it’s the norm in the extreme of New School.
[h=3]What’s Important in Play?[/h] In Old School, it’s the success of the party that counts, much more than the success of the individual. This is a “wartime” attitude now quite uncommon in the USA, but common amongst the Baby Boomer wargamers who originated RPGs. In the extremes of the newer school, it’s the individual that counts (e.g. as expressed in “All About Me” RPGs), not the group. This makes a huge difference in how people play the game.
[h=3]Sport or War?[/h] I talked about this in an earlier column (RPG Combat: Sport or War?). To summarize, in war everything is fair, and stratagems – “a plan or scheme, especially one used to outwit an opponent” - are the ideal. If you get in a fair fight, you’ve screwed up: fair fights are for suckers. That style puts a premium on intelligence-gathering and on strategy. Combat as sport looks for a fair fight that the players will just barely manage to win, often as managed by the GM. Combat as War is less heroic, but it’s a lot more practical from the adventurer’s point of view. And for me, a lot more believable. If a fight is truly fair, you’re going to lose 50% of the time, in the long run. That’s not survivable.
[h=3]Nuance[/h] There are lots of “in-betweens”, of course:

• What about a campaign where the party can suffer a total or near wipeout, but someone has left a wish with a reliable soul who can wish away the disaster. They can fail (lose), but most or all of them will survive.
• What about the “All About Me” style I wrote about recently? Usually, there is no possibility of failure, but a GM could put a little failure into the equation if they wished.
• What about the campaign where everyone knows their character is doomed to die, likely before reaching (in AD&D terms) 10^th or 11^th level? Then glory (and a glorious death) often becomes the objective.
• What about the campaign where characters normally survive, but when someone does something egregiously stupid or foolish, the character can die?
• You can hand-hold players to the point of combat, and still make that combat deadly.

RPGs can accommodate all kinds of tastes. But we don’t have to like every kind, do we?

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!

 

[Bagpuss]

Top Right is Dread*.



* edit: I'm sure others apply that's just to most obvious one to spring to mind.

 

[Umbran]

Again, defining OS by system/time is a poor start. Play goals are a better start, and I think even there ut won't break evenly into NS vs OS.

I expect you are correct, there probably isn't a clean division.

And, if you are thinking of them as *genres*, then that's okay. Given that nobody can cleanly lay out what they are in the first place, claims that they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive should be taken with a grain of salt. There is a significant amount of tribalism and gatekeeping surrounding the topic that gets in the way of discussion. Set that aside, and we may find that something like 5e D&D has elements of both New and Old school designs - which may help account for its popularity.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Old School RPGs (OSRPGs) and New School RPGs (NSRPGs) do not seem like meaningful categories. Even if we speak more broadly in terms of "how (RP) games were" versus "how (RP) games are now," regardless of how we define those respective parameters, we are looking at a tremendous degree of diversity in the market. There are even some critical differences, IMO, between "OS games" versus "OSR games." And I would be somewhat more interested in comparing these two sets of games than OS to "NSRPGs," which in this article seems to include a wide berth of game systems, such as Fate, 4-5e D&D, Savage Worlds, and probably Powered by the Apocalypse.

Why OS vs. OSR?
Unless I am mistaken - and I would welcome clarification here - Old School did not seem to exist as a concept until the Old School Revival/Renaissance. And much like the actual Renaissance, I suspect that OSR created a false narrative of the current/preceding generation of games in favor of establishing a false narrative of "reviving" something that was not necessarily lost. But I also think that if we compare OS and OSR games we can probably have a better understanding of the contemporaneous influences on OS-inspired games as well as the play that OSR attempts to emulate. Because even if the OSR movement claims to represent a revival, a restoration, a renaissance, or some other highly romanticized 'r word' of Old School games, their design and writing will likely betray some of those nebulously-defined "NSRPG" influences, some consciously and others not.

For example, both Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures and Black Hack place themselves under the OSR umbrella. But both games also have decidedly contemporary influences, and consciously so even. BtWaOA, for example, incorporates PbtA-influenced playbooks and the character creation process entails the players filling out a village, its inhabitants, and their connections to other PCs. Black Hack incorporates some 4-5e inspired mechanics such as advantage/disadvantage while also seemingly streamlining the OS experience through a more unified mechanic: i.e., attacks, defence, saving throws, skills, and such are collectively turned into roll-under attribute system.

So through identifying some of the "novelties" and/or similarities that OSR brings to OS, we can potentially gain a greater sense for both OSRPG and NSRPG more concretely than comparing OSRPG directly to a more nebulous range of NSRPG systems.

I would suggest to people, particularly those concerned about research and facts in the article, to get their information on this stuff from the horse's mouth. The OSR is an enormous umbrella that encompasses everything from retro clones meant to emulate old D&D to newer approaches that take the core features of D&D but try to something new within that context. I wouldn't get too hung up on the particular meaning of the R, as that varies tremendously. I think there are some unifying features of OSR, but again, I am just one person who could give my point of view on it. I do think if you want to understand why it has value to people, you probably do need to attempt to see it through their eyes. When I want information on how narrative games work for example, I don't ask an OSR adherent, I ask a person who plays narrative games. And I try to understand what they are actually saying (rather than project my point of view onto what they are saying). Same goes here. I do think there is room for strong POV, rambunctious debate and honest opinion. But I think if your goal is really understanding something, you would do well to check out some of the OSR games and play them (not saying you are not doing this Aldarc, just making a general statement). Because I do have professional connections with people in the OSR, I don't think I should list off my goto examples as I am biased, but they are easy to find if you look around.

Keep in mind with 5E, a lot of OSR gamers are totally fine with the system. There are plenty who don't play it. But it was a system that was designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of playstyles, including the OSR, and something like advantage/disadvantage is a mechanic many in the OSR thought was a good idea. I think with the OSR there is more of a divide between the OSR style and 4E and 3E, than with 5E, 1E and old D&D (while I personally like 2E, I find a lot of people in the OSR don't like its aesthetic or the approach to adventure content that became the norm in that period). But 5E is a system I see plenty of OSR GMs willing to run or play.

In terms of what unifies the OSR, I'd say there is great emphasis placed on what people find works consistently at the table. There isn't an avoidance of innovation, but there is a mindset that innovation for its own sake, isn't useful. So any innovations that get adopted, need to be something that works consistently for people in the community. I think another feature is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think 'restoration' is definitely the wrong word to describe OSR here, because so many people in it are not interested in rebuilding a replica of classic D&D, as much as they are interested in taking the things that worked well (dungeons, tables, etc) and retaining them, while also innovating and making things easier to run at their own table. Basically I think the default starting point is a belief that there are core conceits and components of classic D&D that just work, and working within this framework can produce results that lead to good long term campaigns. There are lots of people who can do a much better job of explaining and promoting this than I can. What I can say is I've found tremendous utility in the OSR community. I definitely don't run Old D&D, and I do like a lot of newer concepts in my games, but some of the basic elements like 'sandbox', 'living adventure/world in motion', 'tables', 'letting the dice fall where they may', 'accepting lethality', 'accepting that it is a game with unpredictable outcomes', 'explorations and dungeons', 'emulation', 'tables as tools', etc I draw on all the time. And since I've been doing this, my table play has been a lot more successful (I started revising the old D&D books and older rules of other games in the mid-2000s when I kept finding myself frustrated by the current approach to adventures and game balance----eventually my business partner showed me the OSR via Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and I started getting into the advice and blogs, even if I didn't tend to use the classic rules as much).

 

[Aldarc]

I would suggest to people, particularly those concerned about research and facts in the article, to get their information on this stuff from the horse's mouth. The OSR is an enormous umbrella that encompasses everything from retro clones meant to emulate old D&D to newer approaches that take the core features of D&D but try to something new within that context.

Naturally. My aim with what I wrote was to propose an alternative tact or approach to what the author lays out, as the umbrella for "NSRPG" is perhaps too nebulous as a basis of comparison. Although OSR is indeed "an enormous umbrella," it's likely more concrete and similar within itself than across the gamut of whatever constitutes NSRPG. And comparing OS to OSR gives us something more concrete to work with in our discussions. Much as you say elsewhere, OSR is not neccessarily averse to innovations, but I think that some of these innovations provide a useful glimpse into would could be regarded as more modern NSRPG approaches alongside OSRPG approaches.

But I think if your goal is really understanding something, you would do well to check out some of the OSR games and play them (not saying you are not doing this Aldarc, just making a general statement). Because I do have professional connections with people in the OSR, I don't think I should list off my goto examples as I am biased, but they are easy to find if you look around.

I would certainly be curious about your list, bias or not. I do intend to try out some of these OSR games, as several players at my table have wanted to try things other than 5e D&D. I have looked at a few that have picqued my interest, including the aforementioned Beyond the Wall and Black Hack.

In terms of what unifies the OSR, I'd say there is great emphasis placed on what people find works consistently at the table. There isn't an avoidance of innovation, but there is a mindset that innovation for its own sake, isn't useful. So any innovations that get adopted, need to be something that works consistently for people in the community. I think another feature is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think 'restoration' is definitely the wrong word to describe OSR here, because so many people in it are not interested in rebuilding a replica of classic D&D, as much as they are interested in taking the things that worked well (dungeons, tables, etc) and retaining them, while also innovating and making things easier to run at their own table. Basically I think the default starting point is a belief that there are core conceits and components of classic D&D that just work, and working within this framework can produce results that lead to good long term campaigns. There are lots of people who can do a much better job of explaining and promoting this than I can. What I can say is I've found tremendous utility in the OSR community. I definitely don't run Old D&D, and I do like a lot of newer concepts in my games, but some of the basic elements like 'sandbox', 'living adventure/world in motion', 'tables', 'letting the dice fall where they may', 'accepting lethality', 'accepting that it is a game with unpredictable outcomes', 'explorations and dungeons', 'emulation', 'tables as tools', etc I draw on all the time. And since I've been doing this, my table play has been a lot more successful (I started revising the old D&D books and older rules of other games in the mid-2000s when I kept finding myself frustrated by the current approach to adventures and game balance----eventually my business partner showed me the OSR via Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and I started getting into the advice and blogs, even if I didn't tend to use the classic rules as much).

This is also incredibly helpful. And this seems like a far more useful summation for discussion than what the opinion piece provided.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Naturally. My aim with what I wrote was to propose an alternative tact or approach to what the author lays out, as the umbrella for "NSRPG" is perhaps too nebulous as a basis of comparison. Although OSR is indeed "an enormous umbrella," it's likely more concrete and similar within itself than across the gamut of whatever constitutes NSRPG. And comparing OS to OSR gives us something more concrete to work with in our discussions. Much as you say elsewhere, OSR is not neccessarily averse to innovations, but I think that some of these innovations provide a useful glimpse into would could be regarded as more modern NSRPG approaches alongside OSRPG approaches.

I would certainly be curious about your list, bias or not. I do intend to try out some of these OSR games, as several players at my table have wanted to try things other than 5e D&D. I have looked at a few that have picqued my interest, including the aforementioned Beyond the Wall and Black Hack.

This is also incredibly helpful. And this seems like a far more useful summation for discussion than what the opinion piece provided.

Aldarc, I sent you a PM with my list.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Naturally. My aim with what I wrote was to propose an alternative tact or approach to what the author lays out, as the umbrella for "NSRPG" is perhaps too nebulous as a basis of comparison. Although OSR is indeed "an enormous umbrella," it's likely more concrete and similar within itself than across the gamut of whatever constitutes NSRPG. And comparing OS to OSR gives us something more concrete to work with in our discussions. Much as you say elsewhere, OSR is not neccessarily averse to innovations, but I think that some of these innovations provide a useful glimpse into would could be regarded as more modern NSRPG approaches alongside OSRPG approaches.

I think mainstream play might be a better label than new school. But I do think there is something real here. Though honestly, I use the term new school all the time, and usually all I mean by that is 'the current and most prevalent style of play I encounter'. I will say I can understand where the OP is coming from, because when you do things more old school, you do often bump into people who have expectations that are more mainstream and current, and often it seems to come down to things like 'where is the story?', 'where are the planned encounters?', 'where are the character arcs' etc. I don't know that you can define a whole style of play this way, but I could easily compose a list of the most common issues that come up for players who are more accustomed to playing things like recent editions of D&D and Pathfinder. I will say, it isn't usually that big of a deal when it does arise. And I typically do try to cater to the tastes of all at the table as much as possible. But I think it just represents a divide that exists. Some people never had the problems or frustrations I had with gaming in the mid-2000s. I was getting very frustrated with how things felt too planned out, not spontaneous enough and too structured around things like encounter levels and other things that were the norm at the time. Not everyone had these frustrations, but if you did have them, and you went back to older editions or found the OSR, you started developing a whole different set of expectations from play than the mainstream of the hobby. And you often found these expectations led to a much more satisfying result. So when you bring in someone who just never had these issues, or is a newcomer to the hobby and isn't even aware of things like the OSR or older editions, then it can be jarring for them. What I try to do is establish if this is a person who would like my style of play once they understand it, or establish if they have genuinely different taste and expectations than I do. If the latter, I'll explain that I can only really run games in the way that I find manageable, but I will try to accommodate them. I am fine doing this with other styles as well.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would certainly be curious about your list, bias or not. I do intend to try out some of these OSR games, as several players at my table have wanted to try things other than 5e D&D. I have looked at a few that have picqued my interest, including the aforementioned Beyond the Wall and Black Hack.

This is also incredibly helpful. And this seems like a far more useful summation for discussion than what the opinion piece provided.

One thing I would add to my post is Brevity of text and books having an ease of use in play. This is why you often see OSR products that front load or backload tables in one location (which some people consider messy to the eye, but in terms of finding and using them in play, this really is a lot easier). My own text descriptions often are a bit too lengthy for your average OSR gamer. But I do think on the whole the focus on brevity makes greater sense, because it really is a lot easier to run the material if you only have a short paragraph of text to read rather than paragraphs or pages. Personally one downside I find is it can sometimes leave setting material feeling a little thin, so I prefer a majority of text to be on the short side, with some text being more lengthy as needed or as an extended example of how to elaborate.

I think a big part of this too is the OSR has a more optimistic attitude toward Gamemasters, and trusts them to be creative enough to use and flesh out material more fully in play. The same applies to the OSR emphasis on rulings. As you can see from me and Hussar's respective experiences, our attitudes toward GMs are quite different. Personally I think most GMs can learn to be fair, impartial and creative enough to run a pretty good game. But optimism will shape the experience. If you are very skeptical of a GM's abilities, your going to notice the flaw. It isn't about them achieving a pure state of objectivity. It is about whether they are striving for it adequately and delivering rulings that feel sound. So I think taking the Siskel Ebert approach of arriving rooting for the game to be good, is the way to go if your playing OSR stuff. Also, even though each GM will do things differently, they tend to be consistent with themselves. If Bill is running a game, his sense of what is plausible remains the same, and over time that creates a pretty consistent experience of a world. If I play in Rob's game, his sense of the plausible may be different, but over time playing in his game will feel like a consistent experience of a world as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Thanks. Hawkeye gives a good response in my opinion. But he also doesn't seem to question putting the article up. Instead he takes up the article point by point. He also notes it where he agrees (even if, on the whole, it seems he disagrees). I'd be curious how Hawkeye and others view the difference between old and new school play.

Yeah, my gripe with the OP isn't how dismissive it is; I'm not easily offended, and I think that in the context of games and design and discussion, there is very little at all that I would actually consider offensive. I think such an attitude very often shows more about the speaker than what they may actually be saying.

I just think it's pretty obvious from what Lew wrote that his understanding of New School games, whatever he even considers those to be, is very limited. He probably would have been better served by explaining what he meant the terms to be, so that the resultant conversation would have some kind of mutual ground. Instead, everyone is discussing from their personal take on what the terms Old School and New School mean, so the discussion has been a bit all over the place at times.

Based on his article, I'm taking Lew's definition of Old School to be OD&D, First Edition AD&D, and probably the Moldvay and Mentzer basic rules. There's plenty of variance in these different subsystems, but they're all early enough to say that they're Old School.

Then I think New School (again, based on this article) is anything that attempted to alter or improve upon the rules as established by the Old School games. So even AD&D Second Edition is New School to him, even though it was largely the same game mechanically as 1E.

Then, a kind of third classification, the Old School Renaissance, which kind of has a foot in each camp, so to speak.

My personal take probably doesn't have such hard lines of demarcation. I mean, 2E isn't all that drastically different from 1E when you boil it down. Some people may insist it is so, but they seem to be folks only familiar with D&D, so they see major differences among the editions that may seem minor to others.

I consider New School to be something modern. The intention is to improve upon game design. There is a mind given to improving the experience of playing rather than simply accepting the mechanics as they've existed prior. Often, the established practices are actively challenged and changed in an attempt to improve the gaming experience. There's also a shift away from testing player skill to a game more focused on character and story.

That's probably the biggest difference as far as I am concerns. Old School was about seeing if Rob could figure out how to get Robilar through the Tomb of Horrors, not about seeing if Robilar was strong/smart/fast/lucky enough to get through. Robilar is secondary to Rob. I mean, PCs didn't even have skills, with the exception of the Thief and the reason for this was that the player's skills at puzzle solving and knowing game mechanics substituted for those.

And that's not to say that New School games don't require player skill, I just think it's applied differently. It's not as much about solving the puzzle of the dungeon or location. It's not about removing challenge from the game as some have suggested, but rather it's about keeping the game moving. What is paramount to the GM? In Old School, it's persistently and constantly challenging the players, even if it means they're wandering around looking for a key of some sort that they missed but which they need in order to move forward. In New School, its' paramount to the GM to keep the game moving.

This is not comprehensive, and I expect others will disagree, but to me, that seems the biggest difference. And also, just to be clear, there are exceptions to everything I'm saying.

The OSR is similar to New School in that, as you have gone on to point out, its goals seem to be about innovation. However, with the OSR it seems that the focus of innovation is in presentation of data and facility of rules. The goal seems to be to improve the functionality and ease of use of as much as possible. To me, both New School and OSR are attempting to improve upon what's come before, but each focuses on a different aspect; New School on the play experience, and OSR on the functionality.

Having said that, I don't think that any of these different camps are anything like mutually exclusive. There are games that incorporate elements of both New and Old School. D&D 5E is probably the easiest example. Some folks who identify strongly with either School may scoff at this and insist that's not true, but I think that it clearly is of both worlds.

Ultimately, I don't much care about the distinction. To me it's all just about design elements and style, and how those two things interact. This is another thing that makes these discussions tricky; if you bring up an element of one game (like Fate Points) and then someone else views that through a lens of another game (like D&D), then of course it seems like a bad idea. Certain design choices only work when used in the system they're designed for, and to deliver an experience they're designed to deliver.

I mentioned Blades in the Dark earlier in this thread (or maybe the thread associated with the first article in the series), and it's a good example to simply disprove just about every point that Lew tries to make. The mechanics of the game are designed not to replicate OD&D but to do something else. The mechanics and the theme work together. The mechanics help to cause dramatic tension in the game for the PCs. But there is plenty of room for failure, plenty of danger, plenty of risk, strong pacing.....it is everything that Lew thinks New School games are not. Objectively so, I would say.

 

[Ovinomancer]

One thing I would add to my post is Brevity of text and books having an ease of use in play. This is why you often see OSR products that front load or backload tables in one location (which some people consider messy to the eye, but in terms of finding and using them in play, this really is a lot easier). My own text descriptions often are a bit too lengthy for your average OSR gamer. But I do think on the whole the focus on brevity makes greater sense, because it really is a lot easier to run the material if you only have a short paragraph of text to read rather than paragraphs or pages. Personally one downside I find is it can sometimes leave setting material feeling a little thin, so I prefer a majority of text to be on the short side, with some text being more lengthy as needed or as an extended example of how to elaborate.

This is a weird argument -- layout is a defining trait of OS play? Can't agree at all, as rulebook layout is much more dependent on the editor/designer than the content of the rules.

I think a big part of this too is the OSR has a more optimistic attitude toward Gamemasters, and trusts them to be creative enough to use and flesh out material more fully in play. The same applies to the OSR emphasis on rulings. As you can see from me and Hussar's respective experiences, our attitudes toward GMs are quite different. Personally I think most GMs can learn to be fair, impartial and creative enough to run a pretty good game. But optimism will shape the experience. If you are very skeptical of a GM's abilities, your going to notice the flaw. It isn't about them achieving a pure state of objectivity. It is about whether they are striving for it adequately and delivering rulings that feel sound. So I think taking the Siskel Ebert approach of arriving rooting for the game to be good, is the way to go if your playing OSR stuff. Also, even though each GM will do things differently, they tend to be consistent with themselves. If Bill is running a game, his sense of what is plausible remains the same, and over time that creates a pretty consistent experience of a world. If I play in Rob's game, his sense of the plausible may be different, but over time playing in his game will feel like a consistent experience of a world as well.

This is entirely wrong and exposes a large lack of knowledge and experience about new school games, as GM trust and objectivity are big factors there, as well. You're discussing good GM habits and principled play and assigning it to OS over NS. Stop doing this.

So far in this post, you've posited efficient layout as an OS trait and good GMing as an OS trait. Neither of these belong to OS gaming.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is a weird argument -- layout is a defining trait of OS play? Can't agree at all, as rulebook layout is much more dependent on the editor/designer than the content of the rules.


This is entirely wrong and exposes a large lack of knowledge and experience about new school games, as GM trust and objectivity are big factors there, as well. You're discussing good GM habits and principled play and assigning it to OS over NS. Stop doing this.

So far in this post, you've posited efficient layout as an OS trait and good GMing as an OS trait. Neither of these belong to OS gaming.

I think you really need to read my posts with a more charitable lens. I am happy to engage you. But most of your responses to me lately amount to 'you are doing X, I hate X, stop doing X'. I am just giving my honest opinion here. And I am not contrasting OS GMs as good and NS GMs as bad. I was contrasting Hussar's claims about rulings over rules and my own, and pointing out that if you buy into the OS school of thought about gamings, it requires an optimistic take on peoples' ability to be good GMs. If one is more skeptical of GM authority, the style may present an issue. That doesn't mean OS games are filled with great GMs and non-OS games are filled with lousy ones. If means there is a difference in attitude and how GM quality is measured.

Regarding my point about layout, all I can say is, as a Publisher I see OSR blogs all the time about the importance of brevity of text and the importance of putting tables in the layout so that they are easy to find and together. This is something that leaps out at you if you look at a lot of OSR products. There is an aesthetic. The aesthetic often stems from utility. And it is part of the OSR approach. Not everyone does it. But layout definitely is definitely connected with the styles of play. All you have to do is look at the way many narrative games do layout, the way mainstream games do layout, and the way many OSR games do layout, and you'll see striking differences that are about reaching their intended audience and, often, about presenting the material in a way that is functional for the intended play style.

Keep in mind as well. In the OSR, a lot of times, the layout guy and the designer are one and the same. And even if they are not, the designer often has a lot of input when it comes to how tables will be handled. If you are doing freelance, sure, you have to abide by whatever guidelines they give you. But many OSR publishers want brevity of text. That is pretty common thing to see.