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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7769368" data-attributes="member: 6785785">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.</blockquote>

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