The lack of a functional skill system is actually a big part of the "old school" vibe that 4e supporters hearken to. The Skill challenge system doesn't work, so 4e players go back to the next best thing to having a funcitonal subsystem: making shit up as they go along. That's pretty damn old school. That's pre-D&D levels of old-schoolery.

The part that weirds me out is not the people who hold up making shit up as they go along as the be-all and end-all of roleplaying, to a very real extent that's exactly what it is. The part that weirds me out is the common 4e canard that making shit up as you go along is somehow something that 4e brings to the table, as if we weren't doing that before. And as if we weren't doing it in 4e games because the Skill Challenge System doesn't work.

-Frank

Thread from 1.5 years ago on a very similar topic - why do people want 4E to have an 'old school' feel?

Quote from: brettmb;4619764E love is the new storygames

Good point. Old School is fashionable nowadays. I think the Pundit said some time ago there were even Old School swine.

4E D&D feels more like a game than the previous editions. I believe that is where the feeling of 'old school' is coming from. That feeling may be largely inaccurate, because I believe people who actually played OD&D when it was first introduced had a much different experience with the culture surrounding the game than those who played it later.

I was born into 2nd edition as a gamer. Then I played the entire line of White Wolf games. Then 3.0/3.5 came, and I thought all of these were the neatest thing ever. Today, aside from 2nd edition settings, I can't stand any of them.

I've learned the term 'storygame' and what it meant, and was finally able to put a word to the increasing frustration I've felt with both D&D 3.0/Pathfinder and the older White Wolf games which my players ask for that I no longer wish to re-create. D&D 3rd edition was by far the most 'storygamey' version of Dungeons and Dragons in existence. It was a cultural change of the games around me, not a rules change. In my gaming groups, we never ran into the 'maxed out druid world breaker' that I saw tales of in so many message boards. That puzzled me, because it jsut never happened.

We did run into people who, because of prestige classes and tricked-out third party suppliments, were longer playing an elven bard...no sir, they were playing an elven /bard/sorcerer/yellow wraith knight/ninja who had a backstory nine pages long and whose player broke into RL songs every time we did a combat. In another thread people complained about bards 'being useless because of the people who played them'. We ran into that bard. That guy. Every time.

I began to get more and more frustrated because there was no action in these games. No adrenalin, no thrill of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat because defeat was unheard of. I began to see my fellow gamers as precious snowflakes who lived in there own little worlds. I began to hate playing under these DMs, because my character never got to do anything cool. I was not the hero of any stories. I was a prop, growing more bored and restless as the DM told his tale.

I've quit and came back to D&D 4E and just recently figured out why. 4E brough the 'game' back to role-playing game. It is much more like a video game and board game, and I've decided that's why I like it. D&D 3rd edition was the closet D&D ever got to amatuer theatre, with its steampunk art and a prestige class for every storyline (that were abused later by rules crunchers).

4E feels old school to people who weren't there. It has game elements of rpgs that modern rpgs got so far away from, to sacrifice in favor of 'telling a story'. It has cards, board games, appeals to kids, etc. People who played in the 70s remember the demons, the secret appeal of playing a naughty game that got mothers all riled up, and characters dying left and right, they have different memories. More modern players like myself think of the dungeon crawls, the simple chase of treasure by beating up goblins, etc. Its a different perspective of old school.

I have gone back and forth on 4E, and have decided that it is a fine game in the end. It's not truly old school in any sense, but the move away from storygames is why it captures that feeling.

Quote from: danbuter;462003Or every single adventure module for 1e and most for 2e.

I really liked B1, and B4 for that matter... the rest... not so much.

Modules never tripped my trigger, but I did look at most of them at least once to mine new ideas for my game. Was always happier though just making up my own adventures, and dungeons, secret hideouts, castles, npc's, and such. The exception for this was of course the original HARN and I.C.E. MERP supplements. Loaded with just great maps, detail, and supplemental information provided in a neutral manner, quite a bit of info from these made it into my games at one time or another.

I never really understood the preference of most GMs to use modules, and it didn't help that the RPGA at the time focused on utilizing "RPGA approved" adventures and "Official D&D" modules shunting all of the homebrew stuff into the nearest landfill.

Over the years, I found that more often than not, the hacked campaigns and adventures, especially from other GM's was at least as good as, and often better than anything you could get in shrinkwrap.

I always thought that GM's were missing half of the game, if they weren't scratch building their own campaign. In that same vein, I always thought that Players that didn't invest into creating interesting and unique characters were also missing out on some of the best opportunities in RPGs.

There's an old saying, Idleness is the handmaid of the Devil. True also for lazy gamers, who are too lazy to invest in making a better game, and instead queuing up to receive goodness in shrinkwrap.

Your choice... go to MacDonalds... or... dig up some recipes for home cooked goodness. Personally, I'll choose home cooking every time. Hot homemade bread, and garlic shrimp scampi with linguini and a light Mediterranean salad beats a big mac. every... time...

I'm not sure I'd argue that 4e has an old-school feel, but I will point this out: original D&D was an outgrowth of skirmish wargaming; 4e has a skirmish wargame its combat mechanic.

Its interesting that so much can be said in the name of edition wars. They're two different games. Why checkers is chess' bitch doesn't interest me in the slightest.

What does interest me is a game that ceased being published in reprints in the 90's (original AD&D) because of a behind the scenes war over creative ownership that started in the early 1980's. Of this I cannot comment because I had no power, was not there, and could care less. I just know now to avoid certain products by certain people (Ed Greenwood, Roger Moore, Zeb Cook, Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weis, etc) because I spent way too much money on them already and it never got as good as the worlds that I still create with the 1978 DMG. If anything they didn't know how to add to it they just went in a different direction and for many that new direction is what they enjoy. Does there have to be a war over it?

Within the original "edition" (anything by Greenwood, Hickman for example) is in a different theme so how can you have an edition war? How can you say they are different if we still have Elminster waving his feather-mopped, dreamcatcher-earringed head in Shadowdale?

For the average person working at HASBRO on D&D this is probably a no-brainer for them.

Everybody wants this "we're old school" mentality with some old pipe-smoking, smoking jacketed, monocled "stodge" playing chess in a library when a ballerina skirted, dreadlocked, quasi-gendered skateboarding "new school' teen jumps up on the chessboard with the skateboard and spray paints "feggit" on the old stodges jacket...

This is not whats happening.

Whats happening is a bunch of sometimes sensitive people with nothing better to do is whats happening. Thats it, no war. It is what it is.

"But, GENE, what about all the camps?"

There is no camps that I see. I play, I play on a case by case basis.

If some jackass said he wanted to play tomorrow and brought a totally bizarro character straight of 4e then I'd say fine. Bring it on, motherfucker.

Y'all can't be playing no checkers on no chess board yo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whwawZ1YoOc

Quote from: Esgaldil;462039Y'all can't be playing no checkers on no chess board yo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whwawZ1YoOc

Heh, I just watched the vid and I was just taken aback about how this street-grade "rule absorption" mnemonic sounded conceitedly condescending to say the least.

Look at the guy who wrote the scene:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0800108/

Thats just fucking hilarious imagining him approach those toughs with the same spiel. Heh!

"Yall want an edition war, yuh fat crackah?!?" or some shit as they pound the bundt cake out of him...

....are you serious?

Do you not know anything about that guy or what he does for a living?

Quote from: misterguignol;462036I'm not sure I'd argue that 4e has an old-school feel, but I will point this out: original D&D was an outgrowth of skirmish wargaming; 4e has a skirmish wargame its combat mechanic.

Not the same mindset at all, I would reckon. This comparison is based on the notion the chit, hex and fig wargaming culture of the 70s is similar to the eurogames/MTG culture of the 00s. I just don't see it.

Quote from: JDCorley;462045....are you serious?

Do you not know anything about that guy or what he does for a living?

I just don't see guys like that interacting here in NYC. Maybe there is some big love-in going in Baltimore where the drug dealers "go take Morrey for a sandwich" but it doesn't happen here "crime reporter" or not. They'd be raping his ass in an entryway within five minutes and thats just the NYPD with their batons...

Quote from: Benoist;462049Not the same mindset at all, I would reckon. This comparison is based on the notion the chit, hex and fig wargaming culture of the 70s is similar to the eurogames/MTG culture of the 00s. I just don't see it.

I'll be honest; I know nothing about Eurogames or MtG.  But I do know that when I've played 4e I get to move my metal figure around a battlemap and chose which tactics to use against the enemy models.

Again, I'm not arguing that 4e is old-school-esque (I don't personally believe it is); I'm just offering one point of contact that I've seen.  I'm not endorsing the conclusion that 4e is old-school based on that.

I do see what you mean, mate. What I'm saying is that beyond the very basic similarity of pushing a miniature on a board, these two cultures don't have much in common. It's a purely superficial appearance IMO.

Quote from: Benoist;462071I do see what you mean, mate. What I'm saying is that beyond the very basic similarity of pushing a miniature on a board, these two cultures don't have much in common. It's a purely superficial appearance IMO.

I absolutely agree that the two cultures are fundamentally different.

4e seems to serve a very "pre-fabricated" culture where the work is done for you; it seems oriented toward casual gamers (via the Encounters format) and gamers who don't have the time to come up with their own game content.

In contrast, old-school (and neo-old-school) seems to serve a culture of "tinkerers" who don't mind (and probably enjoy) writing their own gamable content, adventures, campaign settings, etc.

Culture-wise?  Yeah, I see no similarity at all beyond the basic "Role-playing a fantasy guy who kills stuff and steals treasure sounds like a good time."