Quote from: flyingmice;376415More and more, this place is all about Old School Gaming, and I have less and less to post about. So - in an effort to keep involved here - what is New School Gaming?

Point buy?

Quote from: John Morrow;376459So 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.

I think this is a good definition of new-school, especially if we tweak it to better apply to D&D (which is, I agree with others, the axis along which I normally make this distinction) to say that there is also an attempt to make the rules:

- unified and coherent: new school games choose one resolution system (e.g. d20 + stats + modifiers, roll high) and use it for everything, old school games use a grab-bag of different sub-systems for different things

- predictable; random events won't make Trail of Cthulu a game about Inspector Clouseau failing to pick up clues, or D&D 4E a game about sad-sack heroes getting TPK'd by goblins or winning because of a single lucky spell choice, but a few rolls on wandering monster & treasure tables can abruptly make an OD&D or Gamma World game a story about miserable losers or world-conquering superheroes

I disagree with John's puzzling assertion that the OSR is new-school - I know I have enthusiastically created new subsystems and gonzo random tables for an OSR audience - but all is forgiven for that awesome MA Notebook link, which goes into more detail about fascinating things Chris Clark was telling me at Gary Con about how he loved MA because it had an explicit endgame. (Which was very different than the game-show deathtrap Jim Ward ran, but maybe that's just his adaptation to the convention format).

EDIT1: I think I have a better idea now of where John is coming from. New-school games have rules with a laser-like focus on the thing they're meant to do, and give advice about what that thing is, how the rules are supposed to achieve it, and (implicitly) how to tell if that's something your group is into. Old-school games have rules that are meant to do lots of different things, and give no advice about what any of them are; lots of important design principles have to be figured out by deconstruction of charts and tables (like OD&D fighters getting their unique higher-level powers from the magic swords only they can use & which show up as random treasure much more often than magic maces etc.). The OSR is engaged in explicating what the old-school rules are meant to do and giving advice about how to bring    those principles to life; and because the rules are the opposite of coherent, different people have different perspectives on that. So it's new-schoolifying things to some extent. But I think that, as OSR people are customizing their own houserules, they're leaning towards a "neo-classical approach" where you design rules to frame the central activity of play, without filling in the frame with mechanics.

Let's say your group wants a game that's about seduction. An old-school game says "well, you've got a Charisma score, you could use that as a tool if you want some guidance about how to adjucate seductions" (and it sets examples for other system tools, so that Bledsaw knew that the City State of the Invincible Overlord would need encounter charts for houris and random tables to determine their "vital statistics"). A new-school game says "OK, since this is the key aspect of play, all the character stats relate to aspects of seduction, and there's a tight mechanic for resolving seduction attempts". A neo-classical game says "let's leave it up to individual groups how they want to handle the seduction and not reduce it to a mechanical exercise; instead the system will provide structure for related stuff, so we'll need a pursuit sub-system for jumping out of windows and fleeing jealous husbands, hiding-in-the-closet rules, and a mini-game for dueling that can be adapted to two suitors trying to out-do each other, or to pistols at dawn."

EDIT2: I totally agree that even back in the day there were a zillion different playstyles that people used whatever RPG they had to support. What's different is the approach to designing rules to explicitly enforce a specific playstyle. I think this is not at odds with what Kim is saying about styles in RPGs. Different playstyles come in and out of fashion; but the longer that RPGs have been around, the more tools have been created with each style in mind, and the more RPG designers there are whose raison d' etre is making systems out of those tools.

Quote from: Settembrini;376519From a structuralistic perspective, anything outside the dungeon or a hex map is new school.

So, New School started in (at least) 1977, because that's when I started running mostly dungeonless? Somehow that doesn't sound right to me.

-clash

Quote from: One Horse Town;376523I think it's less about a time period and more about mechanics and mindset.

I would say that unified mechanics is the demarkation point between old school and new school. That and less of a focus on DIY and more of a focus on BIY (buy it yourself).

OK, that makes sense. Care to expand, Dan?

-clash

Quote from: Balbinus;376526The existence of old school doesn't imply a single new school.

Old school is where it started, but after that there was an explosion, stuff flying in all directions.  Many of those games have little to do with each other, old school has stuff in common because there were so few games early on they inevitably influenced each other and shared some common assumptions.  That's no longer true.

There is I think an old school, I don't think there is a new school, which is why nobody uses that term.

As for what gets discussed here, it goes in waves I find.  I'll be playing Bash soon, and hopefully running some S1889, I'll try to post about those when they kick off.  In the meantime it's S&W, which I appreciate is of less value in this context...

Heh! So RPGing is like a bush, with D&D and the D&D-alikes being the trunk, and there being a number of branches, all independent?

-clash

Quote from: GameDaddy;376524I never really noticed the wargamers in the D&D crowd, maybe because I was one of them. I adopted RPGs in their infancy though before many of my peers, because RPGs brought something more to my gaming table than wargames did.

I was a wargamer since the late 60s early 70s as a young teen. I can tell you I didn't bring my game mastering over from wargaming. Hell, I didn't use hex mapping outside of wargaming! What I did bring over was a willingness to kitbash and houserule right from the get go.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376539Heh! So RPGing is like a bush, with D&D and the D&D-alikes being the trunk, and there being a number of branches, all independent?

-clash

That's pretty much how I see it to be honest.

Quote from: One Horse Town;376523I think it's less about a time period and more about mechanics and mindset.

This is where I stand on this.  

I would add in that creating a duality of 'OS' vs 'Non OS' is a false duality.  I would rather see the different metrics we jusge games by (the heaviness of the rules versus the Liteness (hah), Prime Focus (Encounter, Dungeon, Adventure, Campaign), lethal/heroic/superheroic, simulationist vs gamist, etc) be the way this is judged.  I could easily see a gaming equiv to the five factor model here.

I'll look at this later after more coffee, but in this way, C&S and Arduin and Runequest make more sense to me.

Quote from: flyingmice;376540I was a wargamer since the late 60s early 70s as a young teen. I can tell you I didn't bring my game mastering over from wargaming. Hell, I didn't use hex mapping outside of wargaming! What I did bring over was a willingness to kitbash and houserule right from the get go.

It may very well be a coincidence that the dictatorial DMs I gamed with back in the day, predominantly had a wargaming background.

Back when I was a young teen, I went semi-regularly to a gaming club at a nearby university for about a year or so.  Many of the players there were around 5-10 years older than me.  It was the only venue I knew about at the time, which had people who played regularly.  (Outside of the university gaming club, my home/neighborhood games in those days were more like evening pickup games and/or games which fell apart after several sessions).  At the time, wargames were still somewhat popular amongst this crowd.  RPG games like D&D were in the minority at most game days.

Apparently quite a number of the DMs thought wrongly that D&D was to be played like a wargame, where the objective was to kill off one another.  Most likely they just read the combat rules section, without reading much else in the D&D books.

Quote from: Balbinus;376541That's pretty much how I see it to be honest.

Cool! Thanks Balbinus!

-clash

What I'm seeing here so far is that any effort at determining what is OS *or* NS is very much idiosyncratic and fairly arbitrary. Nailing jello to the wall in Elliot's colorful term. In other words, I'm getting a lot of "OS|NS is very like a snake" responses, which leads me to suspect the blind men are possibly noting different aspects of the same thing. That, coupled with the fact that my own memories of gaming at the time do not line up at all with what OS was supposed to be like, outside of a willingness to improvise rules-wise, leaves me very confused.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376548What I'm seeing here so far is that any effort at determining what is OS *or* NS is very much idiosyncratic and fairly arbitrary. Nailing jello to the wall in Elliot's colorful term. In other words, I'm getting a lot of "OS|NS is very like a snake" responses, which leads me to suspect the blind men are possibly noting different aspects of the same thing. That, coupled with the fact that my own memories of gaming at the time do not line up at all with what OS was supposed to be like, outside of a willingness to improvise rules-wise, leaves me very confused.

How much of this may be due to selective memory in recalling the "good old days"?

Quote from: flyingmice;376548What I'm seeing here so far is that any effort at determining what is OS *or* NS is very much idiosyncratic and fairly arbitrary. Nailing jello to the wall in Elliot's colorful term. In other words, I'm getting a lot of "OS|NS is very like a snake" responses, which leads me to suspect the blind men are possibly noting different aspects of the same thing. That, coupled with the fact that my own memories of gaming at the time do not line up at all with what OS was supposed to be like, outside of a willingness to improvise rules-wise, leaves me very confused.

-clash

well, that's because, as I was postulating, the duality is false.  Completely.

It doesn't help that the terms are based on a chronology but the actaul delineators are absolutely not.

Quote from: ggroy;376549How much of this may be due to selective memory in recalling the "good old days"?

Possibly the part about me remembering - I'm old as dirt, and old people have fallible memories. OTOH, I don't recall those as the "good old days" at all. My gaming is *far* better today than it ever was back then. It wasn't even in the same league. I have never been a person particularly afflicted with nostalgia. My games, gamers, GMing, and group dynamics are all off the charts compared to back then.

-clash

Quote from: ggroy;376549How much of this may be due to selective memory in recalling the "good old days"?

Not a whole lot, I'd say. I like the idea of Old School, but I will be the first to point out that AD&D had some major flaws (like grappling) and its retro-clone OSRIC also has major flaws (like not having XP values for magic items).