Um, shut up Aos?

Since you asked so nice, sure.

Quote from: flyingmice;376436Dagnab Old Schoolers! Why don't you all take your gol dang hides over to the Citadel! They like your kind there!

How was that? :O

-clash

That works.  

C&S and DQ are the beginning of confusing the discussion. There wasn't a clear break, but somewhere between 1980 and 1990, published games changed. Not only in terms of mechanics (to crib from LV, they got heavier, included more skills, and got more balanced) but also in outlook. Gonzo was out, world-coherence was in, and in fact world-detail was in. The two aren't the same. GURPS 3e core is non-gonzo, implicitly world-coherent, but not world-detailed even in many of the sourcebooks. On the other hand look at 2300 AD or Harn. Finally in the 90's we got splats, with a special rulebook for every character type or faction.

I think in any era you have stuff that's outside the existing mainstream, and may or may not contribute to future mainstream development. E.g. En Garde if it was published today, but it wasn't.

Forge games are an obvious place to look. Out of the ones I've seen, the really radical ones that I've liked, at least on reading, include My Life With Master and the Shab al-Hiri Roach. Both are ultra-focused, a bit boardgame-like, with stereotyped characters and situations that make it easy to get into play. (At least in theory; the funny thing here is I've read but not played MLwM, and played but not read Roach.)

Another game I'd point to is Mythic. It's more toolkit-y, inviting use and abuse in a variety of ways including hybridization with existing rules. At the extreme end, though, what you get is a generic system for improvising as much or as little detail, at whatever scale you like, and resolving whatever happens. It can be used as an RPG, or as something related but different.

Quote from: Aos;376443Since you asked so nice, sure.

The question mark makes it polite.

That was my opinion as well.

Why don't we just pick an arbitrary date? Or event?   Easier than listing characteristics.  

For me I would say every game from the beginning of D&D up to and including the 1989 version of 2e is a "Vintage RPG."  But just the 3 core books.  From the point they started making "The Complete X Handbook", to the second version of 2e, and the Players Option stuff, all the way until the current date, that's non-vintage stuff.  

Isn't that easier than looking for characteristics?  Just pick a date when you decided "Shit changed too much for my tastes, and I now like it less."  

(Of course, I wouldn't be able to include 2e in that category if we didn't houserule away all the goody-two-shoes-ness of it, keeping the demons and devils names, assassins, etc.)

Quote from: Joethelawyer;376452Why don't we just pick an arbitrary date? Or event?

When Dragonlance was first released.  :rolleyes:

I think this is one of those cases where everything is relative to the observer.

I've been in the hobby for less than ten years, and AD&D 2e might be old-school to me, since it's still AD&D and I've never played it, but AD&D 2e might not be old-school at all to someone with a few more decades experience with RPGs.

The only reason AD&D 1e and older are even called "old school" is because a group of people claimed that descriptor for a subset of RPGs within a certain timeframe while leaving out other games.

Let's see... New School games I like....

Aces & Eights
Mutants & Masterminds 2.0
Spycraft 2.0

Two of these are based on the d20/3.x rules, the other, completely new. I'd consider Castles & Crusades old school, even if it does have a few nifty and very well done new game mechanics systems...

The Shard RPG looks interesting as well.

If one uses an arbitrary date or event, it may very well be specific to the person making such a determination.

In my case, I suppose an arbitrary date I could choose for "old school" is the time before I left rpg gaming altogether for 15+ years.  This would be sometime in the late 1980's before 2E AD&D was released, and after the 1E Forgotten Realms "grey box" was released.

"New school" could correspond to the era after I came back to playing rpg games after my hiatus, shortly after 3.5E D&D was released.

Offhand I don't know how I would classify the era corresponding to the years I was on hiatus away from gaming.  I picked up various books over the years from that era, from various "impulse buys" at 2nd handed book stores, thrift shops, etc ... Though I don't have much first hand experience playing many of these games (ie. VtM, RIFTS, Cyberpunk 2020, Earthdawn, etc ...).  The most I ever played these particular games, was several evening pickup type games over the last 5+ years.

I think the idea of this thread is: draw the line however you like, then pick some stuff on the "new school" side, and talk about what it does well.

Don't just draw the line, and don't just list names.

My own take is that the hobby has been something of a Rorschach test from the very beginning, at least once it went beyond people in Gary's group, in that people played the game in different ways, emphasized different things, and got different things out of it and I think that continues to today.  That's why you'll find articles like The Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook By Bill Armintrout in 1981 about his experiences in the late 1970s where he talks not only about a problem-solving campaign but also playing sub-optimal characters, balance, player problem-solving, storytelling, co-GMing, and involving the players in world-building, and also articles like Aspects of Adventure Gaming by Glenn Blacow in 1980, which talks about different types of players.  So even back in the beginning, there were people who emphasized player skill or getting into character or telling a story or something else or tried to find a balance between all of those things.  And what you see after that are people trying to come up with a set of rules that changes the emphasis or promotes a certain style of play and what it all really boils down to is an attempt to create a set of rules that supports the type of play an author likes or wants to support better than some other set of rules that was often designed with a different emphasis.  

So what I would argue New School is (and this definition will likely include the current OSR) is an attempt to deliberately create or encourage a particular style of play through the rules and advice rather than letting the GM and players sort it out on their own and make it their own.  And what I think it missing in some ways from the current gaming culture is the sense of experimentation and freedom to change things that one can find evidence of in early gaming magazines (e.g., variant rules, new rule subsystems, random tables, and so on) to the point where one of the oft-mentioned innovations of Fudge was that it gave people "permission" to tinker with the rules.  So if I had to point to something that seems to have changed, it was the idea that you don't have permission to tinker with the rules but should use the rules as written.

Is Dying Earth new school?  I think it's pretty cool.  I also kind of like Trail of Cthuluhu (although I remain a huge fan of BRP Call of Cthulhu).  I had some fun running The Pool for my family, too.

As far as D&D goes, I consider everything up through the early 80s to be "old school."  In the mid to late 80s, the focus and thinking about the game started to shift in a different direction (even during the 1e era).  Late 1e and very early 2e I consider to be about the same: not exactly "old school D&D," but not completely divorced from it, either.  Late 2e shifted away even more, and then 3e made the clean break into what I'd call "a related, but different game."  (Which is fine; I had some fun with 3e and consider it a well-designed game, but I don't get the same game experience with it that I do with traditional D&D.)  Obviously, I consider 4e in much the same way as 3e: nice design, but not the same game, despite the branding and such.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376458I think the idea of this thread is: draw the line however you like, then pick some stuff on the "new school" side, and talk about what it does well.

Don't just draw the line, and don't just list names.

That's kinda what I was thinking, Elliot, though it was pretty unformed. I was very curious about what people thought.

-clash