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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7769366" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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