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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7769427" data-attributes="member: 16814">3.x was... an interesting beast.  Pathfinder had that ball and ran with it.  It was, largely, a rejection of DM authority, but it didn't really share it to the players.  It pushed it into the mechanics of the game.  As such, it sorta sits outside of most OS/NS discussions because it's sorta neither and both.  The player empowerment in 3.x wasn't because players got more authority, but because the DM lost most of theirs.  You still had DMs crafting world for players to explore, so bullet 3 to old school, but you had player-side empowerment through fixed mechanics that the DM wasn't supposed to modify, so that's a bit of NS bullet 1.  Action resolution was definitely still atomic, so solid OS bullet 2.Really, 3.x is more old school except for the bit where players gained more control over the fiction through fixed mechanics that bound the DM in predictable ways.  4e then did a really odd thing -- it actually was a game you could play in either style.  It continued 3.x's fixed mechanics, but you could play in a DM created fiction and explore it or allow players to create with skills and powers as they went along.  Same with bullet 2, skill challenges allowed a framework of adjudicating goal level resolutions through a changing fiction, OR they were a fixed set of atomic checks to accomplish the same.  It's a weird thing, 4e, and people still argue about how it should be played.  I think, because of this, it was a hard system to grasp because there were all these elements that could go either way -- that and it was a pretty big departure from 3.x in terms of core mechanical implementations.  I liked 4e, and played it more OS style (although I'd do that differently if I picked it up today, at least in large parts), but I have no desire to return to it.System does impact playstyle, though.  D&D, in general, is prep heavy -- monsters have a specific math they have to have to challenge the abilities of parties (or overwhelm them).  That means that it doesn't lend itself well to NS style play.  4e did this better through fixed maths at level, but other editions have too much variance in party capability to function this way without lots of GM system mastery.  This, in general, means D&D lends itself to OS play tropes much more than NS.  However, as I noted (and did [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] and others), OS/NS is across a range, with multiple sliders.  5e adds some NS elements (background abilities, inspiration, traits, etc.) but it's core is still a DM presented, atomic action resolution system,  with a focus on exploring a built world.  You can step further away from this with 5e than any edition after OD&D(1973) (h/t [MENTION=2885]diaglo[/MENTION]), but it's not well designed for much of NS play.  I think that it's enough designed for NS play that 1980's TSR purists are put off of it, but it's much closer to their play than 1980's TSR is to FATE or BitD.  I think it's also important to note that a game can be mostly one style or the other but you can still dislike how it does things.  I dislike 3.x/Pathfinder because I don't like the rule codification, but that dislike doesn't make it OS or NS -- I just don't like that aspect of it.  It still does thing pretty much like 1e, 2e, or 5e just with a slightly different way of doing it.  Compared to how FATE does things, these are are largely similar.  But, dislike of those near similarities can mean you don't like the game.  Most OSR folks seem like this to me:  they legit don't like how 3.x did things over their preferred editions and sought to create games that improved the pain points of older editions (borrowing ideas where they worked) but keeping the mechanical feels they preferred.  The result is a game they love, but one that is still much, much more similar to 3.x (or 5e, later on) than to NS games like FATE, or Burning Wheel (some quibbling here, as BW is the crunchiest of the NS), or FUDGE, or Powered by the Apocalypse games.</blockquote>

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