I want to discuss in this thread the appeal and attraction of playing old school style game systems, especially to younger gamers who enjoy them with nostalgia not being a factor. I have introduced old school gaming to young players who were pre-schoolers in the early 2000's so nostalgia for them goes back to 4E or 3E at the earliest. Some of them really enjoyed these games and were interested in finding out more about them and others didn't really care for them. So for everyone, especially for folks who were not around when these were the only games in town, what is it about old school games, if you enjoy them, that attracts you when newer games are plentiful?

For myself as an old fart gamer, nostalgia is indeed a part of it honestly. Beyond that on a practical level is the enjoyment of quick and simple character generation, along with ease of prep of homebrew material for play. Monster & NPC stats are a breeze and I don't have to factor in so many regimented procedural rules to what I am writing up.

How about you?

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 21, 2023, 02:06:47 PM
I want to discuss in this thread the appeal and attraction of playing old school style game systems, especially to younger gamers who enjoy them with nostalgia not being a factor. I have introduced old school gaming to young players who were pre-schoolers in the early 2000's so nostalgia for them goes back to 4E or 3E at the earliest. Some of them really enjoyed these games and were interested in finding out more about them and others didn't really care for them. So for everyone, especially for folks who were not around when these were the only games in town, what is it about old school games, if you enjoy them, that attracts you when newer games are plentiful?

Well, it is a bit like chess being a centuries-old game. Some older RPGs just got it right from the get-go (or shortly after) like classic D&D, classic Traveller, Runequest 2e, and so on.

Right in the sense of RPGs means that easily understood by novices who tend to focus on the mechanics. And still flexible enough to be useful in the hands of experienced players and referees.

And some of their original shortcomings have been overcome. Mainly the ones that result from the author(s) assuming too much about their audience. Flash forward a couple of decades we have versions of these RPGs that are almost identical but now come with examples and advice that make them even more approachable.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 21, 2023, 02:06:47 PM
Beyond that on a practical level is the enjoyment of quick and simple character generation, along with ease of prep of homebrew material for play. Monster & NPC stats are a breeze and I don't have to factor in so many regimented procedural rules to what I am writing up.

I have found there is such a thing as being too minimalist.

In my view mechanics among other things, offer a terse explanation how the setting works and what character can do. When the mechanics are too minimalist hobbyist are left to question the referee as to what they can do. Often they don't bother asking.

Also it has been my observation that most hobbyists want some options to have meaning in the mechanics. My Majestic Fantasy RPG is on the low side but has been mostly acceptable among friends who like 5e. While OD&D 3 LBBs would not be. On the other side GURPS is definitely overkill in most hobbyists' opinions, and 5e with all its supplements now is feeling that way as well.  The ideal point seems to be above what I do in the Majestic Fantasy RPG and the D&D 5e core rules.

I'm another old fart who is highly nostalgic about OD&D but currently play a lot of 5E, if that helps anyone see where I am coming from, and may not at all fit your target demographic for this thread. When my original gaming group transitioned from OD&D to AD&D I could already feel a shift in the style of play because the game was starting to stress the details instead of the big picture. My current 5E group plays in a style similar to the old days, but using a framework of rules which are current, so maybe I can respond some to how they react to my "old school 5E" style campaign.

A few thoughts about the "old school" style of play as I have experienced it:

1. Rulebooks were a lot simpler, and the game was easier to learn. Rules were loose and a player didn't have to "master" them in order to have fun. Players would try stuff without looking at a complex character sheet to see if they "could" do it.

2. Character generation was quick, so if you died it wasn't as big of a deal. If a character takes an hour to create, it hurts a lot more to lose it. Not to say that we didn't care if we lost a character back then, but instead that we could make a new one and get back into the adventure quickly.

3. Characters were developed during play, without a pre-determined personality imprinted. Nowadays with backgrounds (and all of the extras) all determined before the first adventure, I feel like we're picking up the timeline halfway into the characters career instead of at the start.

4. Resource management was very different. Spells and hit points were precious, and it took more than a short or long rest to fully recharge the character. With that in mind, players were more cautious and usually didn't just charge into peril. Also, we didn't have "game balance" back then so players had to continually judge if attack or retreat was the best plan.

I'm not at all sure if this is what you are looking for, but these are the first ideas that popped into my head. After playing a few sessions of 5E, my son's friend happened to see one of my old OD&D rulebooks and asked to read it, then he told me that a lot of stuff in 5E made more sense once he could see where it came from. Instead of studying a textbook he felt like he had been given the "spark notes" for the game.

I started at the tail end of the old-school period.  I only got as much of the old-school experience as I did because we were rural, isolated, and couldn't afford many rules.  So we did stuff with Chainmail, Swords and Spell, B/X, and AD&D somewhat out of order, but had some of the same experiences of having to figure it out ourselves.  I wouldn't trade that experience for gold--and also have zero nostalgia for it.  I'm just not built that way.  I remember the fun and the warts.  Some of the fun was the massive screw ups (mainly on my part as a GM learning the hard way), but I have no desire to recreate that part of the experience. 

My players are at least 75% casual--will learn the bare minimum of any system to get by, and then pick up other things slowly by osmosis as they play.  We've never had a player that couldn't remember what "AC" was for after the first session, or anything quite that stark, but no one would mistake most of them for system gurus.  I've had a lot of younger players recently, mid-twenties down to pre-teens.  None of the younger ones had played any RPGs before they played in my groups, though some of them have since played 5E in other groups.

I ran 5E partly old-school style.  I house ruled it to make it a bit more deadly, but it was still 3-strikes to die.  And there's only so much you can do about the hit point distribution.  The players enjoyed it, both how I ran it and what it was.  Most of the complaints were about lack of meaningful customization.

With my own system, I consciously chose to get something closer in style to BEMCI/RC (if not in rules), though there are some sprinklings of Rune Quest and Dragon Quest in there, with a fair amount of my own ideas.  The way in which it most resembles D&D is in the old-school approach, though there are exceptions. 

The big positive response has been exactly the same thing others have said.  They've all liked that the threat of death is there.  It's shocking when it happens, but that makes the game more interesting. You scout and run and approach with caution or hope that you get lucky when you don't, or you die.  It's more rulings than rules.  The rules that are there are a mix of player and character things, such that the players are encouraged to act as their character in the setting as opposed to pushing buttons on their sheets.  I wrote spells with Gygaxian Naturalism in mind.  Resource management is a thing with bite.  Money is far more scarce than even B/X, more like Dragon Quest.  I had a player get excited because her character found a pair of boots.  Mundane, well-worn boots, as opposed to the home-made sandals she had been wearing--in the snow to the detriment of her ability to recover damage.  No kidding!  All of that is well-received.

A fine line I'm trying to walk is still a work in progress.  Many of these players like having "skills".  They felt like 5E didn't have enough.  I thought 5E/4E/3.*E list, the problem wasn't the number but the choices, how you got them, and how they worked.  I've pushed back on that some by minimizing the scope of skills, rearranging the ability scores, and setting it up so that using a skill is sometimes like getting into a fight in early D&D.  You'd be better off to act on the setting such that you got what you wanted without having to test the skill.  There's no doubt that the "skills" have detracted from the ease of character generation--though I knew that a certain amount of that was inevitable with the design goals.  I'm just trying to minimize it as much as possible within those designs goals.  If we can't do character gen in 5-10 minutes, at least I don't want it ballooning up past the 20-30 minute range.  So for the purposes of your question on that front, I can only say that I can observe a growing appreciation for keeping it as simple as we can, even while wanting some options that make it more complex.  The players are more minimalist than they were, but are not what I would call minimalist.  And really, with the Dragon Quest influence, there was no way it was ever going to be a truly minimalist game. 

I've always run games that were highly focused on develop in play, even with systems that didn't support that as well as others.  Near as I can tell, new players coming in seem to like that aspect a lot, though of course that could be self-selecting, since anyone that loves the opposite is unlikely to like my GM style for several reasons.  I do have a "random background" system as a means of speeding up character development by removing some of the choices.  I think I'm getting schizophrenic results on that.  The players like that it gives them interesting characters.  In every group, 1 or 2 players always gripe about something that they got randomly.  While still saying that they like the end result.  My instinct is that some people can't separate process from results in their heads when evaluating things. 

My counter in the design has to been to create a few key decisions that the player does have control over, while leaving the rest of the background random.   As I've said elsewhere, I started with ability scores being 3d6 down the line, options to toss "unplayable".  Now I have 3d6 down the line, swap any 2.  If your highest score is less than 14, set it to 14 (about the same effect as getting one 13 in B/X).  Everything is now "playable".  I've always preferred methods that are likely but not guaranteed to give one or two weak scores.  Didn't much like 4d6, drop lowest, even in AD&D, but we played that way for convenience.  But the B/X method is a little too much even for me.  In any case, I have demonstrable results that the former way, which on average produced slightly stronger characters, is preferred less than the current way.   Some key choice for a slight reduction in character power seems to be a winner.  This is not unlike the B/X trade ability score 2:1 option in effect.

Once you get off the Internet and messageboards, the average person who has never played any sort of RPG is going to respond better to something that is succinct and easily understood. No one new to the hobby wants to fucking read a 500 page book; something like S&W Whitebox (^^^^^) or whatever is much less overwhelming. Similarly, most people are willing to play a boardgame like Sorry or Yahtzee or Monopoly, but when you start dragging out Advanced Third Reich you aren't going to find anyone to stick around.

That said, my current gaming group is consists of 90% the gaming group I got together with almost 20 years ago with one new guy who had never played up until we introduced it to him (coworker of my buddy). He liked renfaires and crap like that, so it seemed like he would be interested in gaming in general. We played AD&D for a while until the DM found a good stopping point now I'm running Palladium FRP. Why? Because these games just provide a better gaming experience. When we originally met, we played D&D 3.X. Exclusively. I would have preferred AD&D, but since I wasn't running the game I went along with it. All the players with the exception of me were newbies. Over the years we played a variety of games, usually whatever I was willing to run which ran the gamut of WEG Star Wars, AD&D, Labyrinth Lord, Castles & Crusades, Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, Marvel Superheroes, FUDGE, and a ton of other stuff. Fast forward to today. We were talking about what to play next and we all agreed that 3.X was too much like a videogame. We all are married with kids (except the new guy) and don't have hours to spend doing all the accounting associated with more complex games. AD&D provides the right level of meaningful choice without tons and tons of rules. Half our gaming sessions are spent bullshitting about stuff while drinking anyway, so using a system that allows for a large degree of DM fiat is really almost required or we'd never get through a combat or encounter. And by fiat I don't mean arbitrary behavior, contrary to what a lot of people who dislike OSR games seem to think that is. I literally mean being a judge in the AD&D sense of the word. Whoever the DM is will sometimes ask the players what they think would be reasonable in certain situations based on real-world knowledge, and apply an appropriate decision to the situation. Once instance that stands out is when I was running a game and the characters were doing something on a ship, I asked my buddy what would make sense during a sea battle in some situation because he has degree in nautical archeology (yeah, I know) and so I used him as a resource to maintain verisimilitude. Try doing something like this with "current year RPG" with "current year players"...I can just imagine the shrieks about it not being in the rules. OSR games assume the DM is going to make decisions based on what seems reasonable, which makes for a better game. There is no arguing against this because it bears out once you have lots and lots of experience. Yeah, a bad DM will totally fuck up a game for sure, but who didn't have dumbass Monty Haul games in the 8th grade lunchroom? Eventually you learn how to improve; a set of rules aren't going to do this, only being forced to make meaningful choices and having to reflect on them will. The players are also expected to make meaningful choices to accomplish their goals, they can't just simply rely on die rolling to get out of sticky situations. I quit a 5th edition gaming group a while ago because I cannot count how many times the PCs would encounter problems that some of the players would just ask if they could roll a d20 for some skill they had. Zero questions or problem solving whatsoever. No thanks.

So that's a lot of words to basically say that OSR games are better because they expect that a good DM will run good games and a bad DM will run bad ones. More modern games try to curtail the DM to solve whatever problem they think exists, but in turn make bad DMs worse and hamstring good ones. They also tend to foster rules-lawyers which exacerbates the issue quite a bit; when I first learned the play it was pretty much verboten to argue with the DM unless you wanted to die. Now it's almost like you have to put the DM in his place or some crap.

And the new guy likes AD&D quite a bit. He looked over a copy of the 3.5 PHB and pretty much said "fuck this".

I can pretty much go along with what's been said: nostalgia (gaming since '81), encyclopedic knowledge of AD&D and B/X, and rules that fit what our group is comfortable with.

I just got done a few months ago running a campaign in the World of Greyhawk, based around Castle Greyhawk (the Adventures Dark and Deep version). I used Hackmaster 4E rules. Now, I love Hackmaster 4E. That's what brought our group together some 20+ years ago. But for me, the system now is way too bloated to the point where even at mid levels, it's difficult to come up with encounters to challenge the characters.

So I said I've got to end it. They did a huge battle with a dragon (Trogdor the Burninator) and took him out pretty much no problem. done and done.

I had to take a break. so my best friend Jeff took on running his campaign for a few months while I played in his, I did some research.

During that time, I looked at all of the OSR rules I liked to try. My final choice was between OSE and Adv LL. OSE looks real slick and the rules were in a nice binding. Adv. LL looked really good too. It's like the best of AD&D 1st ed and B/X put together. Plus the books are less expensive. So I decided upon Adv LL.

LL really does remind me of the days when we were kids. we had no idea what rules we could or could not use together. We used some of B/X, used the AD&D Monster Manual, maybe even the Fiend Folio. Some of us didn't have AD&D DMGs or PHBs. It was a mish-mash of all sorts of stuff.

And it was glorious.

I want to bring that back to my table. A sense of wonder and mystery. Where nobody had any idea what was going to happen. I think LL can bring that for me. The rules are light. No bloat to make the PCs to powerful. No over the top Talents and Skills. Just the few based around your character class. All you have left is your wits.

What's going to be even more of a leap for me, is the game world will be set during the Hyborian Age. Old school sword and sorcery. It will have elements of Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and HP Lovecraft. NO demi-human races. Only humans. Ability scores and what classes available to you is based upon what kingdom/race you are. I'm really excited about it. Can't wait to begin next month.

Quote from: blackstone on June 22, 2023, 07:33:46 AM
What's going to be even more of a leap for me, is the game world will be set during the Hyborian Age. Old school sword and sorcery. It will have elements of Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and HP Lovecraft. NO demi-human races. Only humans. Ability scores and what classes available to you is based upon what kingdom/race you are. I'm really excited about it. Can't wait to begin next month.

Are you familiar with the free "Age of Conan" for OD&D: https://www.grey-elf.com/hyborian-age.pdf? There are several additional resources there. Given your other inspirations above you might want to look at Hyperborea 3e too: https://www.hyperborea.tv/.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 21, 2023, 02:06:47 PM
I want to discuss in this thread the appeal and attraction of playing old school style game systems, especially to younger gamers who enjoy them with nostalgia not being a factor. I have introduced old school gaming to young players who were pre-schoolers in the early 2000's so nostalgia for them goes back to 4E or 3E at the earliest. Some of them really enjoyed these games and were interested in finding out more about them and others didn't really care for them. So for everyone, especially for folks who were not around when these were the only games in town, what is it about old school games, if you enjoy them, that attracts you when newer games are plentiful?

For myself as an old fart gamer, nostalgia is indeed a part of it honestly. Beyond that on a practical level is the enjoyment of quick and simple character generation, along with ease of prep of homebrew material for play. Monster & NPC stats are a breeze and I don't have to factor in so many regimented procedural rules to what I am writing up.

How about you?

Speaking for myself, I think nostalgia is over-credited when it comes to the appeal of old school gaming. That's not to dismiss anyone who feels genuine nostalgia. It's just that nostalgia is a quick and easy go-to for haters to explain away the allure. It's also a quick and easy go-to for people who love old school and don't feel the need to chart out a doctoral dissertation just to defend what they like. But the most expedient explanation is not necessarily the best or most honest one.

I violate the jaded internet formulation of the edition wars, where it is assumed that whatever edition you started with is your favorite. I started on B/X, moved onto a BECMI/1E/2E mish-mash, then moved on to pure 2E, even flirted with pure RC D&D, before I eventually settled on a pure 1E campaign. And that's where I stayed. Because despite not being the edition I started with, that's the one that actually is the best. If I were driven by nostalgia, I'd be playing B/X.

Now over the past 8-10 years, I have ramped trying to tap back into how I did things when I was a kid. Because I think when we look back fondly at old memories of gaming, it's not just nostalgia. I think there may have actually been things we did better in our ignorance and immaturity, and I think adults really do have a way of stomping all the fun out of things. We could see that quite clearly when we were kids. And I think a lot of the values of modern game design sensibilities are exactly that sort of stodgy, fun-killer stuff.

Like I've never once in all my years got up after a great game session and heard any player glowing about how awesome the unified mechanic is. Yeah, I can see how it's a nice thing to have for all the obvious reasons. But if you look at how tight, tidy, and neat a lot of more modern RPGs are, it's clear this sort of thing is given high priority, if not the absolute highest priority. And I have to wonder what displaced because it wasn't a neat fit.


My best guess is the reason 1E is peak RPG experience is because it came around at a time when there was already a lot of mileage and play experience to draw from, but it was before the one standard playstyle of ragtag band of borderline sociopaths getting caught up in wacky adventures took hold. And that's why all those little rules in the DMG especially provide so much support for so many different styles of play. Also, the mission statement for 1E was something like, to provide as much fun for as many people for as long a time as possible. That's forward-looking and visionary. After that, once the industry figured out what the market wanted, it started optimizing to that. 2E's mission statement became, hey, we're going to clean up and refine, we're going to look at what people are already doing and codify it. And that's backwards-looking. To me, the difference in the feel of the two games is palpable despite the level of similarity in their rules (in fact, if you look at the spell descriptions in 2E, you'll find that most of them were plagiarized word-for-word from 1E, just swapping out "magic-user" for "wizard" and so on).


There are other RPGs I like that I feel bring something new and different, and at a certain point trying to say they're better or worse than 1E is like comparing apples to oranges. But as far as D&D goes, as far as fuel for your game, it peaked at 1E and it's been nothing but rehash since. Though I do give some credit to DarkSun as being a cool game world. I'd love nothing more than to see some more exceptions that prove me wrong. But let's face it. Their best selling adventures are Return to [insert module published 40 years ago].

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 21, 2023, 02:06:47 PM
So for everyone, especially for folks who were not around when these were the only games in town, what is it about old school games, if you enjoy them, that attracts you when newer games are plentiful?

For myself as an old fart gamer, nostalgia is indeed a part of it honestly. Beyond that on a practical level is the enjoyment of quick and simple character generation, along with ease of prep of homebrew material for play. Monster & NPC stats are a breeze and I don't have to factor in so many regimented procedural rules to what I am writing up.

How about you?

While I started playing around the late '80s, I would not call myself nostalgic for games of the time, because I  no longer play the games I played the most at first (GURPS, WoD). I am nostalgic of certain experiences, and these are hard to replicate.

Anyway, I've played some TSR D&D, then moved on to other things, thought 3e to be too complicated, disliked 4e, went back to D&D with the OSR and 5e (I wrote several OSR books and even a few 5e books). 5e eventually became too burdensome for us,  and I am not excited with 6e.

Something closer to B/X is more fun for me because I don't have to  spend that much time dealing with the rules during the game. My players have an easier time playing these games too -  they would often get lost in 5e with all the powers and features.

I also appreciate having monster stats that occupy only a couple of lines.

One thing I'm starting to dislike running OS and OSR adventures is they insane amount of treasure and magical items that you find. The more I read TSR stuff the more I feel they were just too generous with treasure and had to come up of endless ways of spending it (training, upkeep, research, the disenchanter, etc.).

But overall I find the experience much easier and more enjoyable.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:36:42 AM
One thing I'm starting to dislike running OS and OSR adventures is they insane amount of treasure and magical items that you find. The more I read TSR stuff the more I feel they were just too generous with treasure and had to come up of endless ways of spending it (training, upkeep, research, the disenchanter, etc.).

The actual treasure tables in eg BX or 1e MM are not that generous. The problem is with the competition modules that became regarded as normative. The published adventures are vastly more generous than what you get from the treasure tables.

I'm also not a fan of editions wars.

Many D&D fans, especially "editions warriors" (i.e., those who fight seriously to defend one edition over others) are commonly affected by two logical fallacies: appeal to novelty (argumentum ad novitatem) on one hand, and appeal to tradition (argumentum ad antiquitatem) on the other. The fallacies are often disguised in something else.

They are both fallacies for a reason: a game is not better or worse because it is newer or older, and the fact that this was the first version of D&D you played does NOT affect quality whatsoever. It is obvious to me that improvements are inevitable, especially in a game that was born in a very rough shape like OD&D. However, some games are timeless (e.g., chess), and I'm sure that certain parts of D&D share the same trait.

We are allowed to have our preferences, of course, but we can also separate good design from nostalgia and "the shiny new thing".

In my case, I love basic D&D. Moldvay's Basic is my favorite, but I also like BE, some parts of the RC and AD&D, and even some aspects of newer editions. I might be biased when defending Basic over other formats, but even in Basic I can see where the game is clunky or just wrong (e.g., plate armor costing 12 garlic).

I also love minimalism and game design as much as I love Basic D&D... which means, I am always trying to improve my favorite game (the whole reason for writing my own clone, Dark Fantasy Basic).

Quote from: S'mon on June 22, 2023, 11:39:31 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:36:42 AM
One thing I'm starting to dislike running OS and OSR adventures is they insane amount of treasure and magical items that you find. The more I read TSR stuff the more I feel they were just too generous with treasure and had to come up of endless ways of spending it (training, upkeep, research, the disenchanter, etc.).

The actual treasure tables in eg BX or 1e MM are not that generous. The problem is with the competition modules that became regarded as normative. The published adventures are vastly more generous than what you get from the treasure tables.

Interesting! That could be the problem, yes, as I only run published adventures nowadays.

I wanted something grittier and more S&S (although not even in epic fantasy literature you find that many magic items).

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:41:35 AM

Quote from: S'mon on June 22, 2023, 11:39:31 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:36:42 AM
One thing I'm starting to dislike running OS and OSR adventures is they insane amount of treasure and magical items that you find. The more I read TSR stuff the more I feel they were just too generous with treasure and had to come up of endless ways of spending it (training, upkeep, research, the disenchanter, etc.).

The actual treasure tables in eg BX or 1e MM are not that generous. The problem is with the competition modules that became regarded as normative. The published adventures are vastly more generous than what you get from the treasure tables.

Interesting! That could be the problem, yes, as I only run published adventures nowadays.

I wanted something grittier and more S&S (although not even in epic fantasy literature you find that many magic items).

I just replied to you on Facebook a moment ago Eric, come to RPGsite and you're replying to me here! You own the Net! 

(Simon has had some Birra Moretti)

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:41:35 AM

Interesting! That could be the problem, yes, as I only run published adventures nowadays.

I wanted something grittier and more S&S (although not even in epic fantasy literature you find that many magic items).

I think it's ok to remove items from published adventures, and even take a 0 off the end of treasure values, until they feel right.

Quote from: S'mon on June 22, 2023, 11:58:55 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 22, 2023, 11:41:35 AM

Interesting! That could be the problem, yes, as I only run published adventures nowadays.

I wanted something grittier and more S&S (although not even in epic fantasy literature you find that many magic items).

I think it's ok to remove items from published adventures, and even take a 0 off the end of treasure values, until they feel right.

It didn't occur to me at first, until I started noticing that now my B/X players have to keep track of more items than 5e's features and itens combined. I'm certainly doing that for the next modules.

I'm thinking I should have replaced some magic items by "masterwork" items of ancient civilizations, maybe with +1 to hit OR damage. I think that would be appropriate and flavorful.

Still undecided on gold versus silver TBH.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I should have considered this before... Letting them pick tabaxis and running modules with goblins and kobods were not a great start to a S&S campaign!

Quote from: S'mon on June 22, 2023, 11:57:24 AM
I just replied to you on Facebook a moment ago Eric, come to RPGsite and you're replying to me here! You own the Net! 

(Simon has had some Birra Moretti)

Hahahhaha, yes, it's been crazy trying to keep in touch after the demise of G+! I'm trying to run multiple medias at once... and now they are talking about ending Reddit. Just added you in FB BTW!