So what is the old school game style? How is it so diffident then the modern game? For refrence I consider anything before 2000 Old School. Modern games are anything after 2000. I’ve seen plenty of post about making 5E feel like an old school game, but they all focus on just changing a couple rules. Often like ‘don’t use feats’ or ‘have less hit points’. Though I don’t see it as just being about the rules. Old school and modern are two mind sets and play styles, and both go beyond the rules as to HOW the game is played. And how the game is played has a huge impact on the type of game it is. I have another post half done for how to alter the mind set and play style of a 5E game, without changing the rules.
The easy way of saying this is: If you want to run a game with an old school mind set and style is: Run the game Unbalanced, Unfairly and without any kind of “Gentleman's Agreement”. If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right.
Disclaimer- I’m a Die Hard Old School Gamer, so I have most defiantly picked a side. I do think Old School is the best way to game. But that is just my option. If you’re a modern gamer that loves the modern mind set and game style that is perfectly fine: be happy and game on! If you’re an old school gamer that disagrees with me about what old school is…well, I don’t really care….but if you want to post about it then type something up and hit send. If anyone has a reply: go ahead an send it.
The List:
The “rules” are little more then Suggestions- This is a big one. So page 33 has some text on it? Well, no one least of all the DM cares. The DM just says what happens no matter what the text says. The “rules” don’t matter.
No Balance- This world does not apply to an old school game, even more so in the whine of a modern players usage.
It’s Unfair- This world does not apply to an old school game, even more so in the whine of a modern players usage.
The Big Pot of Home Brew Stew- Not only does a typical old school game have very little official content, but what little content that exists might be hard to find. Most DMs had only one option: home brew their own stuff. While many modern players will whine and demand that they only want to play the game with official things, in an old school game you might find whatever your DM might have thought up.
Endless Mini Games- Quite often the text in the books only covers a tiny bit of things. So basically a DM must make up lots and lots of content for game play. Often each monster, thing or encounter has it’s own mini game.
Randomness- This is a big one. By default, a minimum of half of all the DM’s decisions will be made by a random roll for a random outcome. Of course, the DM can choose any outcome at any time. They simply choose to sit back and enjoy the randomness A couple books had random tables to roll on, though most DMs made their own. While odd and even work for a yes or no question, a typical table would have 12 to 20 outcomes. A couple of obvious ones, a couple of easy ones, a couple of rare ones and a couple of unlikely ones. And often a “DMs choice” and maybe a “players choice”. The best tables, of course, had the 1-100 outcomes. And the outcome of roll on another table. What is in a treasure chest? What is behind a close door? What does the guard think of your story? All would be rolled at random. This had the nice touch of allowing nearly “anything” to happen to be an outcome.
Let the Dice Roll Where They May- Whatever is rolled on the dice, that is IT.
No Take backs, Callbacks or Do Overs- Once something is rolled or a player says they have a character take an action. IT HAPPENS. No matter what.
Player Focus- An old school game has the focus on the player. The DM is making the game for the player, not the character. Many modern games ignore the player and have all the focus on the player character. The classic example is that after a DM describes an encounter: In an old school game the player will use their real life wits, skills, intelligence and abilities to move their player character through the encounter. In the modern game the player will simply look on their players character sheet for the appropriate skill or ability to use.
Lethally- To a modern gamer this would be “high” lethally, but it is really only following the rules. The rules are simple enough: “if a creatures hit points reach zero, they die”. It’s in every edition. Many modern games jump through endless hoops to make it so no characters die. In an old school game, death is an member of the Player Characters Group.
Long Lasting Debilitating Effects- In an old school game a character will be effected by many thing with will debilitate their abilities. And they will likely have to live with such things for a long time; many weeks of game time, and maybe many months of real time. Things could not just be fixed or cured with a simple spell or potion. Many modern games allow such things to be erased the very next round like they never happened.
Dangerous Costly Magic- The old school rules were full of this for spells and magic items. Powerful magic is dangerous and comes with a cost. Modern games make everything easy and safe.
Beyond the Farthest Star- A typical adventure took place far, far, far, far away from civilization. A group would need to travel quite a distance to go on an adventure. This meant there was no easy, safe spot to retreat too. When the nearest town to the Dark Dungeon is two weeks walking distance away, a character can’t just “run back to town to hide, heal and be safe.”
Into the Unknown- Much, nearly, all, of the world beyond the wall of a settlement is unknown. What is out there is a true mystery. You must discover things the hard way.
What is Known- Is not much. Facts are very few and far between. Much of what is know is little better then a rumor or a guess. Very unlike a modern game where the players will demand absolutely true facts.
A Dark, Cold, Cruel World- With a few rare exceptions, the whole world was a dark place. Danger was to be found everywhere from all sides. Evil forces might corrupt you; good forces might use you, natural forces might abuse you; and other forces might to other things to you. Anyhtning like a safe space was few and far between.
Hard Luck Life- The life of an adventurer is hard, and they are often down on their luck with only a couple coins to their name.
More things on Heaven and Earth then are dreamed of in your philosophy: A typical modern game has mundane and magic and leaves it at that. An old scholl game has much more. At least five large vague categorizes. Natural effects like lava or cold; Magic mostly being man made effects, Supernatural: effects that are like magic, but beyond mortal means and not effected much by man made magic; Super Science: this is things beyond typical science, into science fiction like gravity waves or photon decay. And last but not least is the unknown, beyond the known.
Weird, Bizarre, Strange, the Unknown and the Unknowable- The game is much more then just rocks and dirt and trees. Players should find things different to say the least. And much should not be understood, and some even not understandable. And some things will never be known.
Traps- Traps are a normal, logical part of the world. All most anything of any value will likely have at least one trap. Many modern games just dump traps completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Tricks- Tricks are a normal, logical part of the world. A trick is just as common as traps. Many modern games just dump traps completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Hazards, Obstacles, Challenges, Puzzles and Problems- Really anything that does not fall under trap or trick. Many modern games just dump them all completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Aggressive Foes- Most old school foes are out to kill characters. So they go all out in combat doing whatever they need to do to kill characters. Many modern games treat combat as a fun romp where the player characters have already won and the characters can never die. Many modern DMs rewrite the game reality so foes are not aggressive. So that, for example, when the player characters huddle together the spell caster will just just zap the tank character with a weak spell to loose a couple hit points. The old school spell caster goes right for an explosive area attack spell, likely killing a character or two.
Everyone is a Target- An old school game has no plot armor for characters or any special safe places for them. All characters are targets. Many modern DMs will only target tank characters and avoid targeting vulnerable characters. An old school DM will likely use random targeting, or what would be most logical to the foe.
Resource Tracking- This is in all D&D games, but old school games put a lot more focus on it. For example, a lot of modern games “just say” a character has whatever mundane equipment they want. Old school games have you keep track of everything.
Encumbrance- Another one in all D&D games, and another one often tossed aside. Old school games have you keep track of the weight each character carries. Not just for equipment, but also for found treasure.
Item Loss- Either by being out right destroyed or just being lost, any item any character has a change of being gone. ANY item. No matter how needed, important or special the item is to that character. And yes this includes the item the one trick pony character uses to be so great: should the character loose the item and become useless to play, then So Be It.
I feel there is merit to both styles, new and old school. I think DMs should be drawing inspiration from both, because there is no reason they can’t exist together.
Personally, I try to cut back on the tedious bits of old school D&D such as tracking exactly how long a torch last, food supplies and tracking the nitty gritty of encumbrance, and instead hand wave it so long as the party made a point of supplying up before the journey.
However I try to keep that old school feel of high lethality and if you want magic items and treasure, you need to actually play well in the dungeon to get it.
Take the bits and pieces that work best for you and your group and go with that.
And yet you don’t mention any rules that are actually from older editions. Just concepts and ideas that could equally as easily represent 5e games. I remember playing an Elf, when back in the day Elf was both a character class as well as race. That’s old school. When male and female characters had different max stats. That was old school. When you could play as a thief acrobat, a ninja monk, or gnome illusionists, and where bards and paladins were pretty much unheard of. That was old school.
Deadly traps are as much a part of 5e as they were 1e. Monsters that want to kill you…. Yep pretty much still a thing. Losing things, encumbrance, resource management, puzzles, exploration and hazards, yup fairly sure that they are as much a part of modern games as they were back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. So my first question is did you ever play back in the day or is this just how you imagined it? You don’t seem to actually know anything about how the game used to be played.
Clearly I was addressing the OP. And now I will address you. It should be taken as obvious that I know red box is not the same thing as 3rd edition, or gold box is different to 1st ed ad&d. I mean seriously, if your point is that I am just mixing them together willynilly then you clearly didn’t read or understand what I said, or what I inferred.
There have been a number of members recently who have claimed to be old timers that have made pretty horrendous and offensive posts about newer players and how they are playing the game wrong. But I don’t think they are real accounts. I think they are just people making fake accounts trying to stir up trouble. They are usually pretty easy to see through for the people like me that did play back in the day.
I’ve rewritten this post three times now. Suffice it to say that your cavalier, sneering dismissal of ‘new School’ players as a bunch of namby-pamby whimpering simpletons unable to cope with any degree of difficulty or challenge has most thoroughly irritated me, especially as difficulty has nothing to do with the difference between ‘Schools’. An “Old School” game can be a fun, lighthearted romp through a casual low-challenge dungeon as easily as a “New School” game can be a brutal, unrelenting death march through a dark, horrific world bent on your destruction or subjugation. Your fixation on lethality, and on punishing players for not being prescient enough to anticipate what the whims of random dice tables for EvErYtHiNg will throw at that, has nothing whatsoever to do with the difference between ‘Schools’.
The difference between ‘Schools’ is, in fact, very simple.
“Old School” is not ‘in character’. Characters don’t matter. Stories don’t matter, plot doesn’t matter, NPCs don’t matter, the world does not matter. None of it is anything but window dressing on the idea of doing an imagination-based escape room challenge with a generous side order of Mortal Kombat with your friends. Your characters aren’t characters – they’re costumes you put on that let you use certain tools and abilities within the challenge. Enemies are there to be killed. So are NPCs. Neither of them have any goals or agency of their own, they exist solely to serve as combat challenges. The dungeon exists to be looted by adventurers. The plot generally boils down to “this place is filled with Evil. Go in and cleanse it, or the Evil will escape and pollute the world.” An ‘Old School’ game is a mechanical challenge distilled to the purest form players can still immerse themselves in, dispensing with any sort of storytelling beyond the bare-bones justification for the game existing as unnecessary theatrical frippery.
“New School” is ‘in character’. The story matters. The plot matters. Characters are their own individuals, existing apart from the player as much as they embody the player. NPCs are actual people, with goals, desires, and fears. The world exists and things happen within it regardless of what the PCs do, but what the PCs do can also influence what happens in the world. Mechanical challenges exist, but they exist within the context of the overall narrative. The orcish war horde is attacking the countryside for a reason. The ancient deathtraps in the musty old tomb are still active for a reason. That NPC got trapped in that root cellar for a reason. ‘New School’ players concern themselves with the Reasons. The reasons their characters are doing things, the reasons the world is the way it is, the reasons the Evil Forces are threatening the world order.
At their worst, ‘Old School’ players are a bunch of antagonistic grognards who take sadistic delight in killing each other off and scoff at anyone who might want to play a less hostile, adversarial game as being a soft-skinned weenie who doesn’t deserve their d20. At their worst, ‘New School’ players are a bunch of poseur hipster dipshits over-pontificating about the tragedy of human life and forgetting they’re supposed to be playing a fun game with their friends. Neither ‘school’ should be judged by their worst elements.
Let’s stop putting on ******* airs and pretending one or the other is just intrinsically better, and also let’s stop pretending one or the other is ‘under attack’. Nobody cares how you run your table except you and your players. My doing a voice and talking in character for my tabaxi wizard and tailoring her spell list to fit her history as much as the needs of the game isn’t going to stop you from rolling 12d6 acid damage for the false-book trap your players failed to spot.
My game isn’t going to break yours. Stop acting like I’m ruining things for you.
[REDACTED]
Notes: Be civil when you post, and if you can't, don't post.
I was just trying to be clear about the difference between a conversation about the mechanical aspects of old school gaming and the conceptual aspects of old school gaming. These are different conversations and I was just clarifying that given how the OP described old school gaming he is clearly talking about the conceptual aspects of old school gaming.
There is literally nothing in the OP’s post that isn’t in modern games either. It has nothing to do with culture. Either the guy is genuinely an old timer ranting about a perceived difference that doesn’t exist in order to seriously wind up the new kids, or it is a new kid trolling to cause trouble. Either way, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that makes the community here on d&d beyond so unwelcoming and hostile. It is an attitude that needs stomping on. Before people like Yurie have an aneurysm.
I feel there is merit to both styles, new and old school
There is no "both styles". It's a false dichotomy
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I had the OP's number when they "defiantly" picked a side. I mean, I supposed within the OSR there are probably some who embrace the typographical missteps of the hobbies earliest products.
That said, I don't think the OP was necessarily challenging anyone (and am a little confused by some of the offense expressed by some of the responses) ... i actually don't know what the OP's intent was since, as Big Lizard has been saying, the manifesto is simply a parroting (and not the best impression) of some well articulated "essentials" to various articulations of the Old School Style or Old School Renaissance. From the disclaimer before the manifesto, I think they were putting their flag down, didn't want to engage with folks who don't like "old school". I guess they were looking for validation from some other "old school types" to say "heck yeah" to their claims, which is something you can do on a message board, I guess.
I'm also not sure why folks are pushing hard against "old school style," what I better know as "old school rennaissance," as not a thing. There is a whole cottage industry winning things like ENNIES that considers itself "Old School Renaissance." Five Torches Deep, the White Hack and Black Hack Books, I'd even say Mork Borg. There's a lot of fun stuff (there's also some not so fun stuff, but the more I learned of OSR the more I recognized a lot of that as outliers).
Anyway, I think my take on OSR vs WotC 5e D&D comes down to product minimalism. Yes, technically, all a table needs to play 5e is the PHB; but WotC sure does entice players to seek further support at least from the core MM and DMG, and then "take their game to greater heights" via further hardbacks and boxed sets and "products the likes of which we've never seen before." And that's fine because the DNA of WotC 5e is a business plan that wants consumers to embrace a product line. Much of the D&D creative community is happy with this and will put out SRD material with very similar formatting and product specification as WotC.
OSR stuff, from what I've seen, has a much more minimalist approach. The manuals are short and rarely have supplements produced to support them. And they can be a blast to play.
There's a DIY ethos to OSR materials that WotC, despite the decrees in the DMG, just lacks ... because it is a more corporate stakeholder beholden product (that's designed to get further consumption through supporting products) than the OSR stuff being put out (though the physical printings of most OSR are exploiting the edges of late capitalism, ahem, but political sentiment ain't always the same as perfect practice).
In the end, this is just like the prior "Style Wars" thread that Yurei was asking to be closed off. Someone posted something, that had a lot of bold text, but frankly wasn't as strongly worded as many other OPs. For some reason, some respondents decided to come at it with offense and age related chips.
I feel there is merit to both styles, new and old school
There is no "both styles". It's a false dichotomy
Yeah. I'm very much part of the 'new school.' Played a few sessions of 4E but then the group transitioned to 5E, and the games I've played in and run are very much narrative, RP/character heavy. Combat is still important but there isn't much focus on dungeon crawling for treasure. Though that does happen.
To respond to a few of these:
Randomness: This still shows up to a degree in the games I've been in. 1d100 travel rolls for instance to see what happens to the party. Do they run into an encounter, meet an NPC along the road, run into a natural hazard etc. But for other things, I tend to shy away from this. For what a guard thinks of the party's story, I'd simply have someone in the party do a charisma roll. Persuasion if telling the truth, deception if lying, putting the randomness in the hands of the player's roll and the character's abilities. For things like dungeon layouts, and what's in chests etc, I tend to downplay randomness. I might have some randomness, like having someone roll to see how much of something, but I've generally laid out the dungeon and the rewards to be found ahead of time.
Player Focus: While the games I'm in do have a big character focus, people are still actively RPing, working to solve puzzles themselves, etc. We don't get to a puzzle and then say 'roll investigation to solve the puzzle' etc. Creative problem solving is still a big thing. For example, in one game our ship was being chased by a dragon turtle. And the cleric came up with an idea to dump a bunch of gold into the sea and convincing the dragon turtle to just go for the easy prize rather than dealing with our ship which, while getting roughed up, was giving the dragon turtle more trouble than it anticipated. Players aren't just staring at what spells and items they have without thinking outside the box in our games.
Beyond the Farthest Star: Yeah, even in modern games characters travel a lot. Not everything is a half hour hike from a major city. And sometimes there are even in character reasons NOT to go back and take a rest. Maybe if the party does that, it will be too late to save someone that was kidnapped. Or the villain will get away. Or someone else will beat them to the treasure.
What is Known: Pretty common in the games I'm a part of for the party to be acting on incomplete information. Nothing surprising here.
Traps, Tricks, Hazards, Puzzles etc: Yeah these still show up a plenty.
This isn't really an 'all or nothing' thing, each table is different.
I'm also not sure why folks are pushing hard against "old school style," what I better know as "old school rennaissance," as not a thing
Because it's a re-writing of history
I ran Against the Giants, G1-3, the oldest of old-school TSR modules, in the mid-80s as my first attempt at being a DM. In that campaign we had a romance subplot, a double-agent "good guy" drow NPC helping the party (the first Drizzt book didn't come out until the early 90s), an entire section of the Underdark I added where a mad archmage would lure the party into areas with weird maze-like, but not particularly lethal, traps as an experiment just to see how they would react, and a bunch of other stuff that would be decried as "new school" by the same folks who like to pretend their way was the only way people played Back In Their Day
They can call it what they want, but what gets described as "old school" was just one of the many different ways to play the game that people have always been playing
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Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Tbh, this is a huge simplification to try and put things into separate boxes. There are many hues between what OP is calling Old and Modern, and that's being played by people all around.
People will mostly take offense on how the OP is describing things like: [...] If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right.[...] or [...] While many modern players will whine and demand that they only want to play the game with official things [...] - which is completely unnecessary to the text and transpires the mentality of us vs. them.
In the end, is as @BigLizard was saying on another thread - There are many ways to play DnD. And that has always been like that, I bet there are "modern" tables running games deadlier than some "old school" used to run and the proof of that is on the point **a big pot of homebrew**.
Anyway, tbh, I don't think this post adds much to any discussion and the fact that OP chose to write the post with an antagonistic POV just make it less digestible.
There are better and more productive threads on this forum that give the vibe of old school DnD.
I’ve rewritten this post three times now. Suffice it to say that your cavalier, sneering dismissal of ‘new School’ players as a bunch of namby-pamby whimpering simpletons unable to cope with any degree of difficulty or challenge has most thoroughly irritated me, especially as difficulty has nothing to do with the difference between ‘Schools’. An “Old School” game can be a fun, lighthearted romp through a casual low-challenge dungeon as easily as a “New School” game can be a brutal, unrelenting death march through a dark, horrific world bent on your destruction or subjugation. Your fixation on lethality, and on punishing players for not being prescient enough to anticipate what the whims of random dice tables for EvErYtHiNg will throw at that, has nothing whatsoever to do with the difference between ‘Schools’.
The difference between ‘Schools’ is, in fact, very simple.
“Old School” is not ‘in character’. Characters don’t matter. Stories don’t matter, plot doesn’t matter, NPCs don’t matter, the world does not matter. None of it is anything but window dressing on the idea of doing an imagination-based escape room challenge with a generous side order of Mortal Kombat with your friends. Your characters aren’t characters – they’re costumes you put on that let you use certain tools and abilities within the challenge. Enemies are there to be killed. So are NPCs. Neither of them have any goals or agency of their own, they exist solely to serve as combat challenges. The dungeon exists to be looted by adventurers. The plot generally boils down to “this place is filled with Evil. Go in and cleanse it, or the Evil will escape and pollute the world.” An ‘Old School’ game is a mechanical challenge distilled to the purest form players can still immerse themselves in, dispensing with any sort of storytelling beyond the bare-bones justification for the game existing as unnecessary theatrical frippery.
“New School” is ‘in character’. The story matters. The plot matters. Characters are their own individuals, existing apart from the player as much as they embody the player. NPCs are actual people, with goals, desires, and fears. The world exists and things happen within it regardless of what the PCs do, but what the PCs do can also influence what happens in the world. Mechanical challenges exist, but they exist within the context of the overall narrative. The orcish war horde is attacking the countryside for a reason. The ancient deathtraps in the musty old tomb are still active for a reason. That NPC got trapped in that root cellar for a reason. ‘New School’ players concern themselves with the Reasons. The reasons their characters are doing things, the reasons the world is the way it is, the reasons the Evil Forces are threatening the world order.
At their worst, ‘Old School’ players are a bunch of antagonistic grognards who take sadistic delight in killing each other off and scoff at anyone who might want to play a less hostile, adversarial game as being a soft-skinned weenie who doesn’t deserve their d20. At their worst, ‘New School’ players are a bunch of poseur hipster dipshits over-pontificating about the tragedy of human life and forgetting they’re supposed to be playing a fun game with their friends. Neither ‘school’ should be judged by their worst elements.
Let’s stop putting on ****ing airs and pretending one or the other is just intrinsically better, and also let’s stop pretending one or the other is ‘under attack’. Nobody cares how you run your table except you and your players. My doing a voice and talking in character for my tabaxi wizard and tailoring her spell list to fit her history as much as the needs of the game isn’t going to stop you from rolling 12d6 acid damage for the false-book trap your players failed to spot.
My game isn’t going to break yours. Stop acting like I’m ruining things for you.
[REDACTED]
Please note my hope is not to offend but to only provide some context or to state my point of view on the subject.
I think you made some very interesting points here,
1) Your definitions of Old School I call Video Game style and New School more "Acting" (in general) and I generally have been in your definition of New School since the mid 80's. To me your definition has noting to do rules before the year 2000 or after 2000. There is also a 3rd axis that I use what I call cartoon and that can define how silly and or comedic the game is, not this is not the simple act of animation but the difference in what is game logic in their game world.
2) I have played in and watched quite a few games over the years (home, game store (pick up and cons)) and have seen your definition of old school and new school in play at different tables running the same adventure. I have played in groups where you are almost required to speak in another voice and in ones that if you do everyone will laugh at you.
3) For some reason when reading the OP's post I got a very negative vibe from his definition's of what "old school" is in his game. I was put off by the statement that said basically "leave the game in a huff..." because I have played and GM'ed games in which a player wants to take over and change the game to focus on them. ie they deserve the spotlight by taking up time with things that have little to no impact on the game to the determent of the rest of the group or expect the GM to RP out every little thing they want to do. Simply there are ways to describe what the OP describes as old school and not to be so negative, but again that is my reading of their post.
4) I do not have a lot of data on it but at times I think New vs Old resolves around physical combat and social/environment challenge combat axis's and that things do not really matter do matter (ie do you like ribbons in your hair and that different color ribbons make a huge difference in game).
if you are running an old school system as written, there won't be any mistaking the experience. As such, I do think there is such a thing as an old school game, its a very specific thing built into a rule set that is wildly different than anything you could reproduce in 5e without some pretty extreme rules changes.
Of course there won't be any mistaking the experience, because the entire ruleset is different. Character classes are significantly different, lineage is completely different, stat and character generation are completely different. Having to just roll 3d and put the total into the stat box in order of the rolls is not something many new players have or will experience. It is why Paladins were so very rare, because the likelihood of rolling the prerequisit stats was so low. Likewise, in 1st ed, you couldn't play a Bard without being a multiclass with a set number of levels in fighter, magic user, and thief first. BUT it is ONLY the mechanics that have changed. We still interacted with other players and npc's, we still made stories for our charaacters, in one of our earliest games I had a character that was a follower of Tzeentch, he met an npc cleric, whom he fell in love with, married and had kids, before ultimately retiring from the life of an adventurer. In a later game I actually played one of those kids as a grown up. Nothing that happens in modern games is any different to what happened in older games - other than that the rules are different, and that we played them after school at a friends house and their mum made us our evening meal. Now we play online while drinking beer and order take out. D&D across the board is different based on what your own table likes to play. Some only play dungeon bashes, some like social games where physical combat is less important, and some groups like the fun of getting lost in the wilderness. But the one really important thing to take away is that none of those are wrong. Play the game you like and let others play the game they like.
I"m really thinking this should be appended to almost any conversation about "broad style" as opposed to specific mechanic or thematic discussions on this board, gonna pop it in before, and maybe later "dialogue" with the problematic "old school" poster. I think part of the issue here, and it's weird deficit given the nature of TTRPG, especially "new style" is there is an astounding lack of verbal judo when presented with offish base manifestoes (albeit derived from a legitimate craft space within the hobby, again, OSR is a thing with an actual paper presence in the hobby). But anyway, the camping in this thread resonates too much with the earlier thread, and this has bearing here as much as there:
I think actually discussions like these show a rhetorical deficit in the community that you also see reflective in alignment discussion in particular, but many other needlessly contentious spaces as well.
The OP's D&D is fine, everyone else's D&D is fine too. Even the dude with a passionate and lucrative investment in being a "great DM" gives it all a pass.
Gatekeeping in all forms absolutely ******* sucks. By all sides and all parties. The arguments that one side is better than the other only creates more vitirol toward the thing you are trying to show the other is better.
Since 1971 with Chainmail, and for the last 51 years we've been making additions, subtractions and alterations to what roleplaying is. I'm sure roleplaying existed before then, but I'm using that as the benchmark since this is a D&D forum. Gygax understood that the evolution of the game was important and to keep it fresh and fun, changes had to be made. Original D&D wasn't even meant for figures, Spells and Sorcery had to amend that as a huge example. If your table uses figures, you are not playing by the original design.
Arguments such as "If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right." are poisonous. If modern players are leaving, sure, your table isn't for them but if your table is doing things to be exclusionary for the sake of maintaining a gameplay style that never evolves or changes? I'd counter with "At what point do you think Gygax fell off the wagon? What specific evolution was the one where you said that it went too far."
I just don't get why it's so big of a deal that people care to such a Nth degree on how people run their tables. I understand Yureis point of view because I've learned a bit about them on these forums and I can totally grasp the kneejerk reaction of someone trying to impose something on them as being "The style" considering their personal history. I'm sure others feel the same. The difference is that Yurei doesn't tell people that their way is inherently good or bad, it's just their way.
Having played for 30 years, this has nothing to do with 'old school.' What a confused mess of ideas.
The rules aren't relevant, but you will abide by the dice
The DM decides nothing, but homebrews everything in advance
Nothing is fair, but you have to abide by a bunch of rules so that you can't say they aren't fair
Hard luck life? Dude, Fighters used to have a castle and 120 soldiers at their command by level 9
The whole mish-mash of ideas presented here seems to take umbrage with the way that strangers at tables none of us will ever sit at play the game by appealing to "the good old days" when character death was random, it wasn't worth building a character background, there were no rules, and players leave the table frustrated while the DM sits back and congratulates themselves on having killed a character with a random and unavoidable boulder trap.
These "old school" days never existed, and the game presented in the original post doesn't sound like any D&D game I've ever played in.
In general I think a clear list of what old school vs new school is and what point you agree with and do not agree with is beneficial in this discussion. That is because quite a few things people have said as old school has not always been my experience and I think some of the things I have described as new school is not their experience. Then once their is a common frame work (I hope) a grounded discussion can be had...but in all good humor saying world peace is going to happen tomorrow might be a better bet.
Having given the old school games vs new school games and "backgrounds" do not matter (or as much) comment, I think there are a few old school games that do take backgrounds into account. Rolemaster 2 and the later version Rolemaster Standard System are complex games and deal with backgrounds that tend to mean something as defined by the core book and or the GM. I think it was one of the following that had the first mention of backgrounds Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, Top Secret or James Bond 007 that had a build your PC's skills based on background, if I had to bet I would bet on CoC but I could be wrong.
As a poster said there are lots of games I would put into the OSG box such as Gamma World, Boot Hill, AD&D (D&D B/X), Arduin (spelling?), Tunnels and Trolls, Judges Guild broke away from AD&D and had some interesting rules, CoC, Stormbringer, Runequest, Paldium to mention the ones that come to mind. Most had issues some where in the systems and I think that is one of the biggest issues I see in some alpha and beta game designs in that they forget some of the things that have been learned over the years and are trying to do something different to make them standout.
All in all I think people should have a game they can enjoy and be able to find a group of people (or maybe an AI GM in the future) they can enjoy their style with.
Having given the old school games vs new school games and "backgrounds" do not matter (or as much) comment, I think there are a few old school games that do take backgrounds into account. Rolemaster 2 and the later version Rolemaster Standard System are complex games and deal with backgrounds that tend to mean something as defined by the core book and or the GM. I think it was one of the following that had the first mention of backgrounds Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, Top Secret or James Bond 007 that had a build your PC's skills based on background, if I had to bet I would bet on CoC but I could be wrong.
As a poster said there are lots of games I would put into the OSG box such as Gamma World, Boot Hill, AD&D (D&D B/X), Arduin (spelling?), Tunnels and Trolls, Judges Guild broke away from AD&D and had some interesting rules, CoC, Stormbringer, Runequest, Paldium to mention the ones that come to mind. Most had issues some where in the systems and I think that is one of the biggest issues I see in some alpha and beta game designs in that they forget some of the things that have been learned over the years and are trying to do something different to make them standout.
All in all I think people should have a game they can enjoy and be able to find a group of people (or maybe an AI GM in the future) they can enjoy their style with.
So Traveller's character generation was done via a much renowned at the time "life path" system (Cyberpunk 2013 used a lighter version of this) where you could put your character into things like elite military training which would give you some amped up combat skills ... but you character could also have died in a war before the character is fully generated. Basically you could "play safe" and wind up with vanilla character or "take risks" and wind up with complications including death. You could also go on the life path charts as long as you want but there was an eventual trade off factoring in effects of aging and the like. But that's background that is mechanically reflected in the character. I believe the "old school" style being proffered here resists background phenomena that I call "Tristan shandyism" where there is so much back story and threads requiring resolution, they actually outweigh anything the DM can put out there. Most D&D Backgrounds as written can be articulated in a few sentences, it seems the character construction guidelines for these and the character's values are in line with this too. Players have introduced the sort of "pre novel" to the character which a lot of DMs push back on (with house rules like only background to the tune of one paragraph for point of proficiency bonus, etc.). There's a "show don't tell" art that's often neglected in the D&D character bildungsroman. But that's a matter of aesthetics, not a prescription.
I think there's a mistake here, and BigLizard is doing a masterclass in respectfully trying to correct here, being made by some of the long time RPG players (red box initiate here, though honestly I got more acrtual play back then out of Star Frontiers and first and really cut my teeth in gaming with Twilight: 2000) that "old school style" proponents or the "old school renaissance" industries are attempts to reproduce how the game was actually played in the 70s or 80s (by the 90s there was a significant generational shift in gaming and codifying the storytelling aspects we were all allegedly doing anyway was coming more and more into print, like someone even made a whole system out of that notion...). It's not. No one's mentioned it but munchkins and monty haulism isn't OSR either.
I think folks need to realize what "old school" means when folks say "old school." "Old school" does not mean historically accurate. For example "Old school" masculine fashions were in vogue earlier this decade with certain pomade hair styles, and manners of dressing, and a generally "gentleman masculinity" was being pushed to largely middle class white folks for a while. Here's the thing, at no point in actual history did every white guy look and act like Earnest Hemingway. Old school in any medium or genre is always nostalgia and nostalgia takes great great liberties with "truth" and will actually embrace patent inaccuracies for whatever emotive effect the style is trying to evoke. Another instance is the sort of "retro future" gaming trend most recognized in Alien and Mothership, where there's a desire for fidelity to "cassette and reel to reel tape computing" but there's an irony of living in a future that has in some ways gone beyond the purported infrasctures of 70s Ridley Scott and whoever made Silent Running.
So really, saying "that was never in any manual I actually used, poser!" doesn't really refute the initiative of OSR or Old School stylings. Old School claims a sort of cottage industry approach, the major products of OSR going for a Zine or modest tract appearance, and artwork evocative of low or no gloss production value (lot of black and white line art or heavy scribble shading). Old School claims the sort of video game industry informed (Mike Pondsmith leaving CP behind and then coming back to TTRPG after a stint at Microsoft being the best known example, because he's talked about it a lot ... and is a really straight forward and entertaining interview subject, though Microsoft and others mined a lot of TTRPG talent in the 90s and early 00s and that talent returned to TTRPG with the notion that streamlining would lead to better play but more importantly bigger audiences, heck Coleville spends not an inconsiderable amount of time regaling his YouTube with his time in video games, not sure how explicit he is about what he brought back but it was definitely in the elipsis) streamlining abandoned a lot of idiosynchrasies found in TTRPG, not so much crunch so much as mess and wants table to double down on it. Lastly, as I wrote earlier, OSR and OS really takes a minimalist approach in required game resources/manuals. The rules are short works and the notion of expansion works don't really fit in the model as the short work provides enough impetus to really DIY (unlike WotC that relies on an expanding product line business model).
Now unfortunately, OSR and OS have been adopted by some who wish to air some cultural grievance against the contemporary TTRPG scene. And that's a shame because those trolls are really loud and actually drown out what creators in the OS OSR space are actually doing (with some exceptions).
Gatekeeping in all forms absolutely ****ing sucks. By all sides and all parties. The arguments that one side is better than the other only creates more vitirol toward the thing you are trying to show the other is better.
There are trolls that use OS and OSR as some sort of "you're doing it wrong" or "my way is better" manifesto, and I'll admit that reading the OP a few more times I can see how whatever flag the OP was trying to fly there were definitely some rhetorical turns where that flag could be seen flying in the face of other posters. But, honestly I don't think the OP was trying to say they're way was better, just that they were very set in their style of play.
Since 1971 with Chainmail, and for the last 51 years we've been making additions, subtractions and alterations to what roleplaying is. I'm sure roleplaying existed before then, but I'm using that as the benchmark since this is a D&D forum. Gygax understood that the evolution of the game was important and to keep it fresh and fun, changes had to be made. Original D&D wasn't even meant for figures, Spells and Sorcery had to amend that as a huge example. If your table uses figures, you are not playing by the original design.
Arguments such as "If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right." are poisonous. If modern players are leaving, sure, your table isn't for them but if your table is doing things to be exclusionary for the sake of maintaining a gameplay style that never evolves or changes? I'd counter with "At what point do you think Gygax fell off the wagon? What specific evolution was the one where you said that it went too far."
First off, folks really have to understand Gygax was only really involved with D&D up to around the Unearthed Arcana hardcover for AD&D, he wasn't involved in 2E, so about 30 years of its evolution. 2e was Zeb Cook. Gygax's plan for 2e was basically a consolidation of D&D up to Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures (I don't think he was involved at all with the Survival Guides or the Planesbook, but could be wrong). Some folks misunderstand OS and OSR as some sort of Gygax worshipping cult. It ain't. Quite the opposite. Going back to the cottage industry notion, it actually takes a more open sourced approach and a celebration of so-called house rules standing shoulder to shoulder with the published rules. It doesn't believe D&D should exist in some hermetically static RAW form. The only thing it wants to "restore" is messy idiosyncrasies that pop up as dice tables and the like. OSR seems to me to hold close to heart the notion that you didn't need a TSR or a WotC to play D&D.
I just don't get why it's so big of a deal that people care to such a Nth degree on how people run their tables. I understand Yureis point of view because I've learned a bit about them on these forums and I can totally grasp the kneejerk reaction of someone trying to impose something on them as being "The style" considering their personal history. I'm sure others feel the same. The difference is that Yurei doesn't tell people that their way is inherently good or bad, it's just their way.
C'est la vie I suppose.
So we're reading a thread called "My Old School" not "This is the Way." I honestly can't see anyone feeling "imposed upon." Yes, the OP in no uncertain terms said they weren't interested in debating styles of play (again, I guess they're looking to mix and mingle with other old schoolers?) but I wouldn't call that an imposition. We don't have to respond to or validate or challenge every topic introduced on the forum. In saying "I'm die hard" in no way says other play styles are wrong. They're simply intractable, and intractability is not uncommon in play spaces, unfortunately.
I think there's a mistake here, and BigLizard is doing a masterclass in respectfully trying to correct here, being made by some of the long time RPG players (red box initiate here, though honestly I got more acrtual play back then out of Star Frontiers and first and really cut my teeth in gaming with Twilight: 2000) that "old school style" proponents or the "old school renaissance" industries are attempts to reproduce how the game was actually played in the 70s or 80s (by the 90s there was a significant generational shift in gaming and codifying the storytelling aspects we were all allegedly doing anyway was coming more and more into print, like someone even made a whole system out of that notion...). It's not.
Old school in any medium or genre is always nostalgia and nostalgia takes great great liberties with "truth" and will actually embrace patent inaccuracies for whatever emotive effect the style is trying to evoke.
I really don't understand what point you're trying to make here
So, calling something "old school" is a tipoff that it's a deliberately dishonest and manipulative attempt to manufacture nostalgia, but pushing back against that dishonesty and pointing out that the nostalgia is fake is a mistake, somehow?
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So what is the old school game style? How is it so diffident then the modern game? For refrence I consider anything before 2000 Old School. Modern games are anything after 2000. I’ve seen plenty of post about making 5E feel like an old school game, but they all focus on just changing a couple rules. Often like ‘don’t use feats’ or ‘have less hit points’. Though I don’t see it as just being about the rules. Old school and modern are two mind sets and play styles, and both go beyond the rules as to HOW the game is played. And how the game is played has a huge impact on the type of game it is. I have another post half done for how to alter the mind set and play style of a 5E game, without changing the rules.
The easy way of saying this is: If you want to run a game with an old school mind set and style is: Run the game Unbalanced, Unfairly and without any kind of “Gentleman's Agreement”. If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right.
Disclaimer- I’m a Die Hard Old School Gamer, so I have most defiantly picked a side. I do think Old School is the best way to game. But that is just my option. If you’re a modern gamer that loves the modern mind set and game style that is perfectly fine: be happy and game on! If you’re an old school gamer that disagrees with me about what old school is…well, I don’t really care….but if you want to post about it then type something up and hit send. If anyone has a reply: go ahead an send it.
The List:
The “rules” are little more then Suggestions- This is a big one. So page 33 has some text on it? Well, no one least of all the DM cares. The DM just says what happens no matter what the text says. The “rules” don’t matter.
No Balance- This world does not apply to an old school game, even more so in the whine of a modern players usage.
It’s Unfair- This world does not apply to an old school game, even more so in the whine of a modern players usage.
The Big Pot of Home Brew Stew- Not only does a typical old school game have very little official content, but what little content that exists might be hard to find. Most DMs had only one option: home brew their own stuff. While many modern players will whine and demand that they only want to play the game with official things, in an old school game you might find whatever your DM might have thought up.
Endless Mini Games- Quite often the text in the books only covers a tiny bit of things. So basically a DM must make up lots and lots of content for game play. Often each monster, thing or encounter has it’s own mini game.
Randomness- This is a big one. By default, a minimum of half of all the DM’s decisions will be made by a random roll for a random outcome. Of course, the DM can choose any outcome at any time. They simply choose to sit back and enjoy the randomness A couple books had random tables to roll on, though most DMs made their own. While odd and even work for a yes or no question, a typical table would have 12 to 20 outcomes. A couple of obvious ones, a couple of easy ones, a couple of rare ones and a couple of unlikely ones. And often a “DMs choice” and maybe a “players choice”. The best tables, of course, had the 1-100 outcomes. And the outcome of roll on another table. What is in a treasure chest? What is behind a close door? What does the guard think of your story? All would be rolled at random. This had the nice touch of allowing nearly “anything” to happen to be an outcome.
Let the Dice Roll Where They May- Whatever is rolled on the dice, that is IT.
No Take backs, Callbacks or Do Overs- Once something is rolled or a player says they have a character take an action. IT HAPPENS. No matter what.
Player Focus- An old school game has the focus on the player. The DM is making the game for the player, not the character. Many modern games ignore the player and have all the focus on the player character. The classic example is that after a DM describes an encounter: In an old school game the player will use their real life wits, skills, intelligence and abilities to move their player character through the encounter. In the modern game the player will simply look on their players character sheet for the appropriate skill or ability to use.
Lethally- To a modern gamer this would be “high” lethally, but it is really only following the rules. The rules are simple enough: “if a creatures hit points reach zero, they die”. It’s in every edition. Many modern games jump through endless hoops to make it so no characters die. In an old school game, death is an member of the Player Characters Group.
Long Lasting Debilitating Effects- In an old school game a character will be effected by many thing with will debilitate their abilities. And they will likely have to live with such things for a long time; many weeks of game time, and maybe many months of real time. Things could not just be fixed or cured with a simple spell or potion. Many modern games allow such things to be erased the very next round like they never happened.
Dangerous Costly Magic- The old school rules were full of this for spells and magic items. Powerful magic is dangerous and comes with a cost. Modern games make everything easy and safe.
Beyond the Farthest Star- A typical adventure took place far, far, far, far away from civilization. A group would need to travel quite a distance to go on an adventure. This meant there was no easy, safe spot to retreat too. When the nearest town to the Dark Dungeon is two weeks walking distance away, a character can’t just “run back to town to hide, heal and be safe.”
Into the Unknown- Much, nearly, all, of the world beyond the wall of a settlement is unknown. What is out there is a true mystery. You must discover things the hard way.
What is Known- Is not much. Facts are very few and far between. Much of what is know is little better then a rumor or a guess. Very unlike a modern game where the players will demand absolutely true facts.
A Dark, Cold, Cruel World- With a few rare exceptions, the whole world was a dark place. Danger was to be found everywhere from all sides. Evil forces might corrupt you; good forces might use you, natural forces might abuse you; and other forces might to other things to you. Anyhtning like a safe space was few and far between.
Hard Luck Life- The life of an adventurer is hard, and they are often down on their luck with only a couple coins to their name.
More things on Heaven and Earth then are dreamed of in your philosophy: A typical modern game has mundane and magic and leaves it at that. An old scholl game has much more. At least five large vague categorizes. Natural effects like lava or cold; Magic mostly being man made effects, Supernatural: effects that are like magic, but beyond mortal means and not effected much by man made magic; Super Science: this is things beyond typical science, into science fiction like gravity waves or photon decay. And last but not least is the unknown, beyond the known.
Weird, Bizarre, Strange, the Unknown and the Unknowable- The game is much more then just rocks and dirt and trees. Players should find things different to say the least. And much should not be understood, and some even not understandable. And some things will never be known.
Traps- Traps are a normal, logical part of the world. All most anything of any value will likely have at least one trap. Many modern games just dump traps completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Tricks- Tricks are a normal, logical part of the world. A trick is just as common as traps. Many modern games just dump traps completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Hazards, Obstacles, Challenges, Puzzles and Problems- Really anything that does not fall under trap or trick. Many modern games just dump them all completely. In an old school game they are everywhere. They often fall under the “not fair” complaint.
Aggressive Foes- Most old school foes are out to kill characters. So they go all out in combat doing whatever they need to do to kill characters. Many modern games treat combat as a fun romp where the player characters have already won and the characters can never die. Many modern DMs rewrite the game reality so foes are not aggressive. So that, for example, when the player characters huddle together the spell caster will just just zap the tank character with a weak spell to loose a couple hit points. The old school spell caster goes right for an explosive area attack spell, likely killing a character or two.
Everyone is a Target- An old school game has no plot armor for characters or any special safe places for them. All characters are targets. Many modern DMs will only target tank characters and avoid targeting vulnerable characters. An old school DM will likely use random targeting, or what would be most logical to the foe.
Resource Tracking- This is in all D&D games, but old school games put a lot more focus on it. For example, a lot of modern games “just say” a character has whatever mundane equipment they want. Old school games have you keep track of everything.
Encumbrance- Another one in all D&D games, and another one often tossed aside. Old school games have you keep track of the weight each character carries. Not just for equipment, but also for found treasure.
Item Loss- Either by being out right destroyed or just being lost, any item any character has a change of being gone. ANY item. No matter how needed, important or special the item is to that character. And yes this includes the item the one trick pony character uses to be so great: should the character loose the item and become useless to play, then So Be It.
I feel there is merit to both styles, new and old school. I think DMs should be drawing inspiration from both, because there is no reason they can’t exist together.
Personally, I try to cut back on the tedious bits of old school D&D such as tracking exactly how long a torch last, food supplies and tracking the nitty gritty of encumbrance, and instead hand wave it so long as the party made a point of supplying up before the journey.
However I try to keep that old school feel of high lethality and if you want magic items and treasure, you need to actually play well in the dungeon to get it.
Take the bits and pieces that work best for you and your group and go with that.
And yet you don’t mention any rules that are actually from older editions. Just concepts and ideas that could equally as easily represent 5e games. I remember playing an Elf, when back in the day Elf was both a character class as well as race. That’s old school. When male and female characters had different max stats. That was old school. When you could play as a thief acrobat, a ninja monk, or gnome illusionists, and where bards and paladins were pretty much unheard of. That was old school.
Deadly traps are as much a part of 5e as they were 1e. Monsters that want to kill you…. Yep pretty much still a thing. Losing things, encumbrance, resource management, puzzles, exploration and hazards, yup fairly sure that they are as much a part of modern games as they were back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. So my first question is did you ever play back in the day or is this just how you imagined it? You don’t seem to actually know anything about how the game used to be played.
Clearly I was addressing the OP. And now I will address you. It should be taken as obvious that I know red box is not the same thing as 3rd edition, or gold box is different to 1st ed ad&d. I mean seriously, if your point is that I am just mixing them together willynilly then you clearly didn’t read or understand what I said, or what I inferred.
There have been a number of members recently who have claimed to be old timers that have made pretty horrendous and offensive posts about newer players and how they are playing the game wrong. But I don’t think they are real accounts. I think they are just people making fake accounts trying to stir up trouble. They are usually pretty easy to see through for the people like me that did play back in the day.
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...right.
I’ve rewritten this post three times now. Suffice it to say that your cavalier, sneering dismissal of ‘new School’ players as a bunch of namby-pamby whimpering simpletons unable to cope with any degree of difficulty or challenge has most thoroughly irritated me, especially as difficulty has nothing to do with the difference between ‘Schools’. An “Old School” game can be a fun, lighthearted romp through a casual low-challenge dungeon as easily as a “New School” game can be a brutal, unrelenting death march through a dark, horrific world bent on your destruction or subjugation. Your fixation on lethality, and on punishing players for not being prescient enough to anticipate what the whims of random dice tables for EvErYtHiNg will throw at that, has nothing whatsoever to do with the difference between ‘Schools’.
The difference between ‘Schools’ is, in fact, very simple.
“Old School” is not ‘in character’. Characters don’t matter. Stories don’t matter, plot doesn’t matter, NPCs don’t matter, the world does not matter. None of it is anything but window dressing on the idea of doing an imagination-based escape room challenge with a generous side order of Mortal Kombat with your friends. Your characters aren’t characters – they’re costumes you put on that let you use certain tools and abilities within the challenge. Enemies are there to be killed. So are NPCs. Neither of them have any goals or agency of their own, they exist solely to serve as combat challenges. The dungeon exists to be looted by adventurers. The plot generally boils down to “this place is filled with Evil. Go in and cleanse it, or the Evil will escape and pollute the world.” An ‘Old School’ game is a mechanical challenge distilled to the purest form players can still immerse themselves in, dispensing with any sort of storytelling beyond the bare-bones justification for the game existing as unnecessary theatrical frippery.
“New School” is ‘in character’. The story matters. The plot matters. Characters are their own individuals, existing apart from the player as much as they embody the player. NPCs are actual people, with goals, desires, and fears. The world exists and things happen within it regardless of what the PCs do, but what the PCs do can also influence what happens in the world. Mechanical challenges exist, but they exist within the context of the overall narrative. The orcish war horde is attacking the countryside for a reason. The ancient deathtraps in the musty old tomb are still active for a reason. That NPC got trapped in that root cellar for a reason. ‘New School’ players concern themselves with the Reasons. The reasons their characters are doing things, the reasons the world is the way it is, the reasons the Evil Forces are threatening the world order.
At their worst, ‘Old School’ players are a bunch of antagonistic grognards who take sadistic delight in killing each other off and scoff at anyone who might want to play a less hostile, adversarial game as being a soft-skinned weenie who doesn’t deserve their d20. At their worst, ‘New School’ players are a bunch of poseur hipster dipshits over-pontificating about the tragedy of human life and forgetting they’re supposed to be playing a fun game with their friends. Neither ‘school’ should be judged by their worst elements.
Let’s stop putting on ******* airs and pretending one or the other is just intrinsically better, and also let’s stop pretending one or the other is ‘under attack’. Nobody cares how you run your table except you and your players. My doing a voice and talking in character for my tabaxi wizard and tailoring her spell list to fit her history as much as the needs of the game isn’t going to stop you from rolling 12d6 acid damage for the false-book trap your players failed to spot.
My game isn’t going to break yours. Stop acting like I’m ruining things for you.
[REDACTED]
Please do not contact or message me.
There is literally nothing in the OP’s post that isn’t in modern games either. It has nothing to do with culture. Either the guy is genuinely an old timer ranting about a perceived difference that doesn’t exist in order to seriously wind up the new kids, or it is a new kid trolling to cause trouble. Either way, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that makes the community here on d&d beyond so unwelcoming and hostile. It is an attitude that needs stomping on. Before people like Yurie have an aneurysm.
There is no "both styles". It's a false dichotomy
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I had the OP's number when they "defiantly" picked a side. I mean, I supposed within the OSR there are probably some who embrace the typographical missteps of the hobbies earliest products.
That said, I don't think the OP was necessarily challenging anyone (and am a little confused by some of the offense expressed by some of the responses) ... i actually don't know what the OP's intent was since, as Big Lizard has been saying, the manifesto is simply a parroting (and not the best impression) of some well articulated "essentials" to various articulations of the Old School Style or Old School Renaissance. From the disclaimer before the manifesto, I think they were putting their flag down, didn't want to engage with folks who don't like "old school". I guess they were looking for validation from some other "old school types" to say "heck yeah" to their claims, which is something you can do on a message board, I guess.
I'm also not sure why folks are pushing hard against "old school style," what I better know as "old school rennaissance," as not a thing. There is a whole cottage industry winning things like ENNIES that considers itself "Old School Renaissance." Five Torches Deep, the White Hack and Black Hack Books, I'd even say Mork Borg. There's a lot of fun stuff (there's also some not so fun stuff, but the more I learned of OSR the more I recognized a lot of that as outliers).
Anyway, I think my take on OSR vs WotC 5e D&D comes down to product minimalism. Yes, technically, all a table needs to play 5e is the PHB; but WotC sure does entice players to seek further support at least from the core MM and DMG, and then "take their game to greater heights" via further hardbacks and boxed sets and "products the likes of which we've never seen before." And that's fine because the DNA of WotC 5e is a business plan that wants consumers to embrace a product line. Much of the D&D creative community is happy with this and will put out SRD material with very similar formatting and product specification as WotC.
OSR stuff, from what I've seen, has a much more minimalist approach. The manuals are short and rarely have supplements produced to support them. And they can be a blast to play.
There's a DIY ethos to OSR materials that WotC, despite the decrees in the DMG, just lacks ... because it is a more corporate stakeholder beholden product (that's designed to get further consumption through supporting products) than the OSR stuff being put out (though the physical printings of most OSR are exploiting the edges of late capitalism, ahem, but political sentiment ain't always the same as perfect practice).
In the end, this is just like the prior "Style Wars" thread that Yurei was asking to be closed off. Someone posted something, that had a lot of bold text, but frankly wasn't as strongly worded as many other OPs. For some reason, some respondents decided to come at it with offense and age related chips.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah. I'm very much part of the 'new school.' Played a few sessions of 4E but then the group transitioned to 5E, and the games I've played in and run are very much narrative, RP/character heavy. Combat is still important but there isn't much focus on dungeon crawling for treasure. Though that does happen.
To respond to a few of these:
Randomness: This still shows up to a degree in the games I've been in. 1d100 travel rolls for instance to see what happens to the party. Do they run into an encounter, meet an NPC along the road, run into a natural hazard etc. But for other things, I tend to shy away from this. For what a guard thinks of the party's story, I'd simply have someone in the party do a charisma roll. Persuasion if telling the truth, deception if lying, putting the randomness in the hands of the player's roll and the character's abilities. For things like dungeon layouts, and what's in chests etc, I tend to downplay randomness. I might have some randomness, like having someone roll to see how much of something, but I've generally laid out the dungeon and the rewards to be found ahead of time.
Player Focus: While the games I'm in do have a big character focus, people are still actively RPing, working to solve puzzles themselves, etc. We don't get to a puzzle and then say 'roll investigation to solve the puzzle' etc. Creative problem solving is still a big thing. For example, in one game our ship was being chased by a dragon turtle. And the cleric came up with an idea to dump a bunch of gold into the sea and convincing the dragon turtle to just go for the easy prize rather than dealing with our ship which, while getting roughed up, was giving the dragon turtle more trouble than it anticipated. Players aren't just staring at what spells and items they have without thinking outside the box in our games.
Beyond the Farthest Star: Yeah, even in modern games characters travel a lot. Not everything is a half hour hike from a major city. And sometimes there are even in character reasons NOT to go back and take a rest. Maybe if the party does that, it will be too late to save someone that was kidnapped. Or the villain will get away. Or someone else will beat them to the treasure.
What is Known: Pretty common in the games I'm a part of for the party to be acting on incomplete information. Nothing surprising here.
Traps, Tricks, Hazards, Puzzles etc: Yeah these still show up a plenty.
This isn't really an 'all or nothing' thing, each table is different.
Because it's a re-writing of history
I ran Against the Giants, G1-3, the oldest of old-school TSR modules, in the mid-80s as my first attempt at being a DM. In that campaign we had a romance subplot, a double-agent "good guy" drow NPC helping the party (the first Drizzt book didn't come out until the early 90s), an entire section of the Underdark I added where a mad archmage would lure the party into areas with weird maze-like, but not particularly lethal, traps as an experiment just to see how they would react, and a bunch of other stuff that would be decried as "new school" by the same folks who like to pretend their way was the only way people played Back In Their Day
They can call it what they want, but what gets described as "old school" was just one of the many different ways to play the game that people have always been playing
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Tbh, this is a huge simplification to try and put things into separate boxes. There are many hues between what OP is calling Old and Modern, and that's being played by people all around.
People will mostly take offense on how the OP is describing things like: [...] If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right.[...] or [...] While many modern players will whine and demand that they only want to play the game with official things [...] - which is completely unnecessary to the text and transpires the mentality of us vs. them.
In the end, is as @BigLizard was saying on another thread - There are many ways to play DnD. And that has always been like that, I bet there are "modern" tables running games deadlier than some "old school" used to run and the proof of that is on the point **a big pot of homebrew**.
Anyway, tbh, I don't think this post adds much to any discussion and the fact that OP chose to write the post with an antagonistic POV just make it less digestible.
There are better and more productive threads on this forum that give the vibe of old school DnD.
Please note my hope is not to offend but to only provide some context or to state my point of view on the subject.
I think you made some very interesting points here,
1) Your definitions of Old School I call Video Game style and New School more "Acting" (in general) and I generally have been in your definition of New School since the mid 80's. To me your definition has noting to do rules before the year 2000 or after 2000. There is also a 3rd axis that I use what I call cartoon and that can define how silly and or comedic the game is, not this is not the simple act of animation but the difference in what is game logic in their game world.
2) I have played in and watched quite a few games over the years (home, game store (pick up and cons)) and have seen your definition of old school and new school in play at different tables running the same adventure. I have played in groups where you are almost required to speak in another voice and in ones that if you do everyone will laugh at you.
3) For some reason when reading the OP's post I got a very negative vibe from his definition's of what "old school" is in his game. I was put off by the statement that said basically "leave the game in a huff..." because I have played and GM'ed games in which a player wants to take over and change the game to focus on them. ie they deserve the spotlight by taking up time with things that have little to no impact on the game to the determent of the rest of the group or expect the GM to RP out every little thing they want to do. Simply there are ways to describe what the OP describes as old school and not to be so negative, but again that is my reading of their post.
4) I do not have a lot of data on it but at times I think New vs Old resolves around physical combat and social/environment challenge combat axis's and that things do not really matter do matter (ie do you like ribbons in your hair and that different color ribbons make a huge difference in game).
Of course there won't be any mistaking the experience, because the entire ruleset is different. Character classes are significantly different, lineage is completely different, stat and character generation are completely different. Having to just roll 3d and put the total into the stat box in order of the rolls is not something many new players have or will experience. It is why Paladins were so very rare, because the likelihood of rolling the prerequisit stats was so low. Likewise, in 1st ed, you couldn't play a Bard without being a multiclass with a set number of levels in fighter, magic user, and thief first. BUT it is ONLY the mechanics that have changed. We still interacted with other players and npc's, we still made stories for our charaacters, in one of our earliest games I had a character that was a follower of Tzeentch, he met an npc cleric, whom he fell in love with, married and had kids, before ultimately retiring from the life of an adventurer. In a later game I actually played one of those kids as a grown up. Nothing that happens in modern games is any different to what happened in older games - other than that the rules are different, and that we played them after school at a friends house and their mum made us our evening meal. Now we play online while drinking beer and order take out. D&D across the board is different based on what your own table likes to play. Some only play dungeon bashes, some like social games where physical combat is less important, and some groups like the fun of getting lost in the wilderness. But the one really important thing to take away is that none of those are wrong. Play the game you like and let others play the game they like.
I"m really thinking this should be appended to almost any conversation about "broad style" as opposed to specific mechanic or thematic discussions on this board, gonna pop it in before, and maybe later "dialogue" with the problematic "old school" poster. I think part of the issue here, and it's weird deficit given the nature of TTRPG, especially "new style" is there is an astounding lack of verbal judo when presented with offish base manifestoes (albeit derived from a legitimate craft space within the hobby, again, OSR is a thing with an actual paper presence in the hobby). But anyway, the camping in this thread resonates too much with the earlier thread, and this has bearing here as much as there:
I think actually discussions like these show a rhetorical deficit in the community that you also see reflective in alignment discussion in particular, but many other needlessly contentious spaces as well.
The OP's D&D is fine, everyone else's D&D is fine too. Even the dude with a passionate and lucrative investment in being a "great DM" gives it all a pass.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Gatekeeping in all forms absolutely ******* sucks. By all sides and all parties. The arguments that one side is better than the other only creates more vitirol toward the thing you are trying to show the other is better.
Since 1971 with Chainmail, and for the last 51 years we've been making additions, subtractions and alterations to what roleplaying is. I'm sure roleplaying existed before then, but I'm using that as the benchmark since this is a D&D forum. Gygax understood that the evolution of the game was important and to keep it fresh and fun, changes had to be made. Original D&D wasn't even meant for figures, Spells and Sorcery had to amend that as a huge example. If your table uses figures, you are not playing by the original design.
Arguments such as "If modern players refuse to play, or leave your game in a huff: then you have done it right." are poisonous. If modern players are leaving, sure, your table isn't for them but if your table is doing things to be exclusionary for the sake of maintaining a gameplay style that never evolves or changes? I'd counter with "At what point do you think Gygax fell off the wagon? What specific evolution was the one where you said that it went too far."
I just don't get why it's so big of a deal that people care to such a Nth degree on how people run their tables. I understand Yureis point of view because I've learned a bit about them on these forums and I can totally grasp the kneejerk reaction of someone trying to impose something on them as being "The style" considering their personal history. I'm sure others feel the same. The difference is that Yurei doesn't tell people that their way is inherently good or bad, it's just their way.
C'est la vie I suppose.
Having played for 30 years, this has nothing to do with 'old school.' What a confused mess of ideas.
The whole mish-mash of ideas presented here seems to take umbrage with the way that strangers at tables none of us will ever sit at play the game by appealing to "the good old days" when character death was random, it wasn't worth building a character background, there were no rules, and players leave the table frustrated while the DM sits back and congratulates themselves on having killed a character with a random and unavoidable boulder trap.
These "old school" days never existed, and the game presented in the original post doesn't sound like any D&D game I've ever played in.
In general I think a clear list of what old school vs new school is and what point you agree with and do not agree with is beneficial in this discussion. That is because quite a few things people have said as old school has not always been my experience and I think some of the things I have described as new school is not their experience. Then once their is a common frame work (I hope) a grounded discussion can be had...but in all good humor saying world peace is going to happen tomorrow might be a better bet.
Having given the old school games vs new school games and "backgrounds" do not matter (or as much) comment, I think there are a few old school games that do take backgrounds into account. Rolemaster 2 and the later version Rolemaster Standard System are complex games and deal with backgrounds that tend to mean something as defined by the core book and or the GM. I think it was one of the following that had the first mention of backgrounds Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, Top Secret or James Bond 007 that had a build your PC's skills based on background, if I had to bet I would bet on CoC but I could be wrong.
As a poster said there are lots of games I would put into the OSG box such as Gamma World, Boot Hill, AD&D (D&D B/X), Arduin (spelling?), Tunnels and Trolls, Judges Guild broke away from AD&D and had some interesting rules, CoC, Stormbringer, Runequest, Paldium to mention the ones that come to mind. Most had issues some where in the systems and I think that is one of the biggest issues I see in some alpha and beta game designs in that they forget some of the things that have been learned over the years and are trying to do something different to make them standout.
All in all I think people should have a game they can enjoy and be able to find a group of people (or maybe an AI GM in the future) they can enjoy their style with.
So Traveller's character generation was done via a much renowned at the time "life path" system (Cyberpunk 2013 used a lighter version of this) where you could put your character into things like elite military training which would give you some amped up combat skills ... but you character could also have died in a war before the character is fully generated. Basically you could "play safe" and wind up with vanilla character or "take risks" and wind up with complications including death. You could also go on the life path charts as long as you want but there was an eventual trade off factoring in effects of aging and the like. But that's background that is mechanically reflected in the character. I believe the "old school" style being proffered here resists background phenomena that I call "Tristan shandyism" where there is so much back story and threads requiring resolution, they actually outweigh anything the DM can put out there. Most D&D Backgrounds as written can be articulated in a few sentences, it seems the character construction guidelines for these and the character's values are in line with this too. Players have introduced the sort of "pre novel" to the character which a lot of DMs push back on (with house rules like only background to the tune of one paragraph for point of proficiency bonus, etc.). There's a "show don't tell" art that's often neglected in the D&D character bildungsroman. But that's a matter of aesthetics, not a prescription.
I think there's a mistake here, and BigLizard is doing a masterclass in respectfully trying to correct here, being made by some of the long time RPG players (red box initiate here, though honestly I got more acrtual play back then out of Star Frontiers and first and really cut my teeth in gaming with Twilight: 2000) that "old school style" proponents or the "old school renaissance" industries are attempts to reproduce how the game was actually played in the 70s or 80s (by the 90s there was a significant generational shift in gaming and codifying the storytelling aspects we were all allegedly doing anyway was coming more and more into print, like someone even made a whole system out of that notion...). It's not. No one's mentioned it but munchkins and monty haulism isn't OSR either.
I think folks need to realize what "old school" means when folks say "old school." "Old school" does not mean historically accurate. For example "Old school" masculine fashions were in vogue earlier this decade with certain pomade hair styles, and manners of dressing, and a generally "gentleman masculinity" was being pushed to largely middle class white folks for a while. Here's the thing, at no point in actual history did every white guy look and act like Earnest Hemingway. Old school in any medium or genre is always nostalgia and nostalgia takes great great liberties with "truth" and will actually embrace patent inaccuracies for whatever emotive effect the style is trying to evoke. Another instance is the sort of "retro future" gaming trend most recognized in Alien and Mothership, where there's a desire for fidelity to "cassette and reel to reel tape computing" but there's an irony of living in a future that has in some ways gone beyond the purported infrasctures of 70s Ridley Scott and whoever made Silent Running.
So really, saying "that was never in any manual I actually used, poser!" doesn't really refute the initiative of OSR or Old School stylings. Old School claims a sort of cottage industry approach, the major products of OSR going for a Zine or modest tract appearance, and artwork evocative of low or no gloss production value (lot of black and white line art or heavy scribble shading). Old School claims the sort of video game industry informed (Mike Pondsmith leaving CP behind and then coming back to TTRPG after a stint at Microsoft being the best known example, because he's talked about it a lot ... and is a really straight forward and entertaining interview subject, though Microsoft and others mined a lot of TTRPG talent in the 90s and early 00s and that talent returned to TTRPG with the notion that streamlining would lead to better play but more importantly bigger audiences, heck Coleville spends not an inconsiderable amount of time regaling his YouTube with his time in video games, not sure how explicit he is about what he brought back but it was definitely in the elipsis) streamlining abandoned a lot of idiosynchrasies found in TTRPG, not so much crunch so much as mess and wants table to double down on it. Lastly, as I wrote earlier, OSR and OS really takes a minimalist approach in required game resources/manuals. The rules are short works and the notion of expansion works don't really fit in the model as the short work provides enough impetus to really DIY (unlike WotC that relies on an expanding product line business model).
Now unfortunately, OSR and OS have been adopted by some who wish to air some cultural grievance against the contemporary TTRPG scene. And that's a shame because those trolls are really loud and actually drown out what creators in the OS OSR space are actually doing (with some exceptions).
Spideycloned wrote some stuff,
There are trolls that use OS and OSR as some sort of "you're doing it wrong" or "my way is better" manifesto, and I'll admit that reading the OP a few more times I can see how whatever flag the OP was trying to fly there were definitely some rhetorical turns where that flag could be seen flying in the face of other posters. But, honestly I don't think the OP was trying to say they're way was better, just that they were very set in their style of play.
First off, folks really have to understand Gygax was only really involved with D&D up to around the Unearthed Arcana hardcover for AD&D, he wasn't involved in 2E, so about 30 years of its evolution. 2e was Zeb Cook. Gygax's plan for 2e was basically a consolidation of D&D up to Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures (I don't think he was involved at all with the Survival Guides or the Planesbook, but could be wrong). Some folks misunderstand OS and OSR as some sort of Gygax worshipping cult. It ain't. Quite the opposite. Going back to the cottage industry notion, it actually takes a more open sourced approach and a celebration of so-called house rules standing shoulder to shoulder with the published rules. It doesn't believe D&D should exist in some hermetically static RAW form. The only thing it wants to "restore" is messy idiosyncrasies that pop up as dice tables and the like. OSR seems to me to hold close to heart the notion that you didn't need a TSR or a WotC to play D&D.
So we're reading a thread called "My Old School" not "This is the Way." I honestly can't see anyone feeling "imposed upon." Yes, the OP in no uncertain terms said they weren't interested in debating styles of play (again, I guess they're looking to mix and mingle with other old schoolers?) but I wouldn't call that an imposition. We don't have to respond to or validate or challenge every topic introduced on the forum. In saying "I'm die hard" in no way says other play styles are wrong. They're simply intractable, and intractability is not uncommon in play spaces, unfortunately.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I really don't understand what point you're trying to make here
So, calling something "old school" is a tipoff that it's a deliberately dishonest and manipulative attempt to manufacture nostalgia, but pushing back against that dishonesty and pointing out that the nostalgia is fake is a mistake, somehow?
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)