Pretty much my thoughts exactly, Benoist. I was just more economical and mysterious in relaying them.

There you go, Clash. I think The Butcher and Benoist have expounded on my views nicely.

Alternate, crassly stated definitions:

"Old school" - clinging pathetically to ancient versions of D&D as if it were a religion.

"New School" - actually having the balls to try something new.

Quote from: J Arcane;376599Alternate, crassly stated definitions:

"Old school" - clinging pathetically to ancient versions of D&D as if it were a religion.

OD&D LBB's = holy writ

:rolleyes:

Quote from: jibbajibba;376579Interestingly though you get this from old school gamers who encourage you to play old games RAW which is odd cos in my experience hardly anyone did that in the olden days.

Quote from: Balbinus;376580That's the thing, back in the day people played lots of ways.  It doesn't surprise me that plenty of real old schoolers don't recognise the old school.  After all, we only made it up recently.

Or, what John Morrow and Tavis have written upthread, which taken together has finally articulated a convincing case for the revisionism of OSR. I'll quote Tavis to highlight one of his points:

QuoteEDIT1: 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.

The new-school or revisionist element of the OSR is that unlike the old days, they're doing a much more critical (and sympathetic) deconstruction of the rules-as-written, in the process reconstructing the ethos of Gygax's and others' style. In the old days people simply houseruled unconsciously based on their own habits and preconceptions.

Edit

Quote from: J Arcane;376599Alternate, crassly stated definitions:

"Old school" - clinging pathetically to ancient versions of D&D as if it were a religion.

"New School" - actually having the balls to try something new.

EDIT:
(content removed by me)

Clash is right, I will try to turn over a new leaf.

Quote from: StormBringer;376607Or:

"Old school" - the ability and spine to play the game and make it your own through imagination and group dynamics in order to have engage in the primary purpose, which is to have fun

"New school" - waiting for someone to change your shitty diapers while you are bawling about your Dragonborn Spellstealer being gimped in the latest errata because you won't get as much spotlight time at the table now

I mean, we get it.  'Old School' pissed in your Cheerios.

I have been trying to avoid this crap, gentlemen. Up to now, we have been doing very well. Can we please avoid reflexively slinging poo at each other?

I'm very well aware that jarcane started it, btw. I don't care. I just grabbed this post as the latest in a series of things I wanted to stop. I could have grabbed any one of several. We've gone 100 posts speaking like civilized adults. Let's go back to that, shall we?

-clash

Actually it comes to me that this issue is why some folks can see 4e as more of a "return to old school" kind of game, and some of us can't. The terms are so subjective because of the tendency of late '70s to '80s gaming to be so "DIY" and varied in style. To some folks dungeon-focused "kill them and take their stuff"/combat-focused/high-power games are the "old school", while to many folks, myself included, it was more to do with more player-DM interaction/exploration/sandbox/impacting the gameworld/building strongholds stuff. I did my share of dungeon-crawling, but at the Boy's Club where I did that stuff we played them tournament style. We had between 15-20 D&D players for the one DM, so we'd do overnights and run timed dungeon module runs using the pregens, and the winning teams got to keep the pregens In my normal weekly games we very much did sandbox style almost from the beginning. There's so many folks, though, that played very different games and I guess to many I suppose 4e really is more "old school" than stuff like d20. Huh, I'm probably a little slow thinking about this, but there it is

In reading the thread the thought that kept hitting me was that for me the release of 3e was a real turning point in how we looked at what we wanted from games. Before all the bloat and power-creep, d20 D&D and the OGL enabling many games with a similar mechanic really rocked. For awhile there we literally played little else but d20 games, using them for espionage, fantasy, sci-fi, etc... The only exceptions were CoC and classic Deadlands. So I guess I'm saying for me d20 brought on the "new school", so it's not much a playing style, since my preferred gaming style can be supported by a great many games. It's a time & unified mechanics thing. Before d20 my favorite games were D&D (pre-d20 obviously), Dragonquest, Shadowrun, Top Secret, Cyberpunk, and Traveller.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376603The new-school or revisionist element of the OSR is that unlike the old days, they're doing a much more critical (and sympathetic) deconstruction of the rules-as-written, in the process reconstructing the ethos of Gygax's and others' style.

I don't know about revisionist; the whole thing about "D&D is always right" is to say that you should try to understand the rules-as-written for what they are, not try to shoehorn them into your preconceptions, revisions, etc.

An example is my fellow Mule-poster James' explication of the design consequences of Vancian spellcasting and experience for gold.

In the comments to the former, James is explicitly thinking about this deconstruction as a step toward yielding pieces you could use to kitbash something else:

QuoteI'm not saying the Old Ones designed the system intentionally to achieve all of these effects; they're consequences or epiphenomena of a design choice.

But if you're a designer in 2010, and you say, "I love 90% of D&D play, but this sub-system involving fire-and-forget spell slots is a loser! How can I replace the sub-system without affecting the rest of the game?" then these are some design goals to the extent you want to preserve the existing game.

So: Stan Lee may not have intended to write corny dialogue, but if you're going to play an ultra-faithful Silver Age comics game, corny dialogue is one goal among many.

It's entirely possible that a new designer won't LIKE point #8 – frankly I dislike #8 rather a lot, and it's the thing that kills Vancian magic for me. But getting rid of it is going to have an important effect on the experience of play.

Quote from: Sigmund;376582That rocks New one to me, and I'm going to shamelessly steal it and tell everyone I thought of it. Everyone look away...

Good luck.  'Nailing jelly to a tree' has been around the web since ARPAnet, and was used in various geek cultures since well before that.

You've got to plagiarize from obscure sources if you want to get away with it.  

Quote from: flyingmice;376609I have been trying to avoid this crap, gentlemen. Up to now, we have been doing very well. Can we please avoid reflexively slinging poo at each other?

I'm very well aware that jarcane started it, btw. I don't care. I just grabbed this post as the latest in a series of things I wanted to stop. I could have grabbed any one of several. We've gone 100 posts speaking like civilized adults. Let's go back to that, shall we?

-clash

You are right, my old friend.  I will go back and edit that, sometimes my 'counter the stupid' reflex kicks in before I know what is going on.

Quote from: Sigmund;376610In reading the thread the thought that kept hitting me was that for me the release of 3e was a real turning point in how we looked at what we wanted from games. Before all the bloat and power-creep, d20 D&D and the OGL enabling many games with a similar mechanic really rocked. For awhile there we literally played little else but d20 games, using them for espionage, fantasy, sci-fi, etc... The only exceptions were CoC and classic Deadlands. So I guess I'm saying for me d20 brought on the "new school" (...)

That's an interesting point. When did Dragonsfoot go online?

Quote from: StormBringer;376616Good luck.  'Nailing jelly to a tree' has been around the web since ARPAnet, and was used in various geek cultures since well before that.

You've got to plagiarize from obscure sources if you want to get away with it.  

Meh, my friends are all internet challenged, I think my diabolical plan will succeed :hmm:

Quote from: Tavis;376612I don't know about revisionist

I'm not sure I understand the nit you're picking with regard to my use of that term, just as I would quibble with the epiphenomena characterization*, but I certainly agree that the process of deconstruction is important if you want to modify the game while keeping an eye on unintended consequences.

(*I believe that many of the phenomena in the posted lists are either deliberate, engineered design choices (though often ad-hoc), or the product of an ethos ("feel") towards which Gygax and Arneson were grasping.)

Quote from: StormBringer;376617You are right, my old friend.  I will go back and edit that, sometimes my 'counter the stupid' reflex kicks in before I know what is going on.

Thanks, SB! You are a gentleman and a scholar - who occasionally flings poo, but regrets it after!



-clash