Quote from: ggroy;376469old school (before 2E AD&D)
- very little to no semblance of "balance" in mechanics
- disposable characters (character death is common)
- sandbox play
- a lot of DM fiat (sometimes to the point of DM "dictatorship")
- more casual gamers

2E AD&D was published in 1989.  The point of those old gaming magazine articles I posted was that Bill Armintrout writes about running a game in the late 1970s with a mission-driven campaign, meaningful character story arcs, and involving players and co-GMs into things normally reserved for the GM as well as considerations of balance and recommended these things to other gamers in a 1981 article in The Space Gamer.  Similarly, in Different Worlds in 1980, we have Glenn Blacow writing about role-players who are attached to their characters and where "a high casualty rate is downright counter-productive".  

So while I think your list is a good list of what people mean by "Old School" these days, what the evidence and my experience shows is that people where breaking many of those principles very early in the hobby, if not from the beginning then certainly after people started teaching themselves the game from the books and were sorting out what to do on their own.  And as such, "Old School" has become a particular style of play to be encouraged and instead of an absence of balance, fragile characters, or GM fiat being unintentional or unchosen byproducts of how the games evolved and were interpreted that might be considered features or bugs depending on who was using them, those features are, in the OSR, becoming intentional choices designed to produce a particular type of game.  And that, along with concerns and arguments over fidelity to specific editions of old rule systems, is in itself, is very "New School" to me.

To put it another way, what separated the original Star Trek from what followed is that the original Star Trek was Gene Roddenberry's attempt to produce a "wagon train to the stars" with his own Horatio Hornblower in space and the science fiction and television writers who wrote for it were writing for a science fiction TV show and were making it up as they went.  The later Star Treks, by contrast, including the latest reboot, are consciously trying to make "Star Trek".  It has become a genre that people are trying to capture and, as a result, they are now working within a box that wasn't really there when the original series was made.

"There was a time when this whole quadrant belonged to us! What are we now? Twelve worlds and a thousand monuments to past glories, living off memories, stories, selling trinkets. My God, man, we've become a tourist attraction! See the great Centauri Republic, open 9 to 5, Earth time."

Quote from: flyingmice;376473Have you read or played Diaspora, as opposed to other Fate games? The designers have pushed almost everything down to Group level instead of Designer level. That's why I mention that game in particular.

No I haven't.  Perhaps I should.  Would you say that Diaspora is uncommon or different than what most other games are doing?

Quote from: John Morrow;376471It feels like something changed in there to me from people playing with sparse rules where they had to fill in the blanks to wanting the official rules.  

Given the history of RPGs do you expect anything different? We see somethings happen because of the personalities involved and other because of the circumstances. Regardless of what Gygax, the Blumes, Williams, or any other individual in the industry the internet would have had a tremendous impact. But if Ryan Dancey and Wizards hasn't released the D20 SRD OGL how would our hobby look today?

My personal belief the situation we have today is pretty ideal as far as creativity goes. Internet and Computer have driven down the cost of production to the point where if somebody is serious about publishing an RPG they can do so and that there will an audience (probably small).  Then where people are interested in just writing supplements we have a variety of open RPGs to choose from.  Each with their own type of market. Plus there no real barrier to putting out free products out there.

The problem of course is basically an editorial problem. There is so much out there how we find them and pick out the ones that are worth our time. Free or commerical that is probably the #1 issue. That is also one of the biggest difference between back in the day and now.

In 1980 it was possible to keep up with what was going with all RPGs. You even had a shot at actually playing most of them. But after a point is just became too much.

Quote from: John Morrow;376471To give you another example, it's not that difficult to run fairly quick combats in the Hero System if you do what my group does, which is strip it down and keep it simple.  The same with D&D 3.5 and other systems.  Yet I've heard people complain that their groups do exactly the opposite, that if a rule exists, their group feels compelled to use it.

After spending 30 years roleplaying and 13 years involved in running a NERO boffer style LARP I haven't figure out any of this myself. Time and time again I ran GURPS for people and they tell the way I GM it make it easy and simple to understand and follow. Yet I use most of the rules in GURPS.

I think it simply boils that people differ in their ability to deal with complexity. That there is no single scale of complexity either. Rather there are multiple scales and everybody differs which areas they are good at. This includes rules. RPGs, by their nature, have many complex aspects so it isn't surprising to me that everything is all over the place.

All I can do while publishing is explain the stuff I am good at in the clearest way possible.

Quote from: John Morrow;376479So while I think your list is a good list of what people mean by "Old School" these days, what the evidence and my experience shows is that people where breaking many of those principles very early in the hobby, if not from the beginning then certainly after people started teaching themselves the game from the books and were sorting out what to do on their own.  And as such, "Old School" has become a particular style of play to be encouraged and instead of an absence of balance, fragile characters, or GM fiat being unintentional or unchosen byproducts of how the games evolved and were interpreted that might be considered features or bugs depending on who was using them, those features are, in the OSR, becoming intentional choices designed to produce a particular type of game.  And that, along with concerns and arguments over fidelity to specific editions of old rule systems, is in itself, is very "New School" to me.

This sounds like a "chicken or egg" thing, to somebody who wasn't really aware of gaming magazines back then.  (I didn't read Dragon Magazine regularly in those days, and wasn't really aware of other gaming magazines).

Quote from: John Morrow;3764792E AD&D was published in 1989.  The point of those old gaming magazine articles I posted was that Bill Armintrout writes about running a game in the late 1970s with a mission-driven campaign, meaningful character story arcs, and involving players and co-GMs into things normally reserved for the GM as well as considerations of balance and recommended these things to other gamers in a 1981 article in The Space Gamer.  Similarly, in Different Worlds in 1980, we have Glenn Blacow writing about role-players who are attached to their characters and where "a high casualty rate is downright counter-productive".  

So while I think your list is a good list of what people mean by "Old School" these days, what the evidence and my experience shows is that people where breaking many of those principles very early in the hobby, if not from the beginning then certainly after people started teaching themselves the game from the books and were sorting out what to do on their own.  And as such, "Old School" has become a particular style of play to be encouraged and instead of an absence of balance, fragile characters, or GM fiat being unintentional or unchosen byproducts of how the games evolved and were interpreted that might be considered features or bugs depending on who was using them, those features are, in the OSR, becoming intentional choices designed to produce a particular type of game.  And that, along with concerns and arguments over fidelity to specific editions of old rule systems, is in itself, is very "New School" to me.

To put it another way, what separated the original Star Trek from what followed is that the original Star Trek was Gene Roddenberry's attempt to produce a "wagon train to the stars" with his own Horatio Hornblower in space and the science fiction and television writers who wrote for it were writing for a science fiction TV show and were making it up as they went.  The later Star Treks, by contrast, including the latest reboot, are consciously trying to make "Star Trek".  It has become a genre that people are trying to capture.

"There was a time when this whole quadrant belonged to us! What are we now? Twelve worlds and a thousand monuments to past glories, living off memories, stories, selling trinkets. My God, man, we've become a tourist attraction! See the great Centauri Republic, open 9 to 5, Earth time."

I buy all of that, John. We were doing most of that stuff ourselves back in the 70s. Hell, I ran a D&D game from 77 to 97, and we went into only about half a dozen dungeons. I was playing when Old School *was* the new school. I remember this stuff. So the current OSR is a post modernist reconstruction of a certain playstyle? I can buy that.

-clash

Quote from: John Morrow;376480No I haven't.  Perhaps I should.  Would you say that Diaspora is uncommon or different than what most other games are doing?

Different? Yes. I found it fascinating, yet it has a lot of echoes in what some OSR folks are doing.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376484So the current OSR is a post modernist reconstruction of a certain playstyle?

Or some people's revisionist interpretation of the "good old days"?

Quote from: ggroy;376486Or some people's revisionist interpretation of the "good old days"?

I don't know. I was there and adult at the time, but I can only speak for my group. We hardly ever went underground, politics, religion, and character lovelives were all important, they hated for their characters to die, and the longer they played a character, the better they played.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376487I don't know. I was there and adult at the time, but I can only speak for my group. We hardly ever went underground, politics, religion, and character lovelives were all important, they hated for their characters to die, and the longer they played a character, the better they played.

And I think if you look at that Glenn Blacow article (1980) and the Bill Armintrout article (1981 about the late 1970s) and others from that period, I don't think it was only your group or my (younger) group or Bill Armintrout who were experimenting and not doing the things that now apparently define Old School as a style.

The few hardcore "old school" types I know in person, have admitted that they are basically "brain damaged" and have a hard time accepting anything new.

They have described themselves as similar to the type of hardcore Beatles fans who think that anything released after the "Let It Be" record, is shit and not worthy of any consideration. (ie.  The solo records of John Lennon, etc ...).

One of these persons also admitted that if they were born 20 years later, they probably would have became a hardcore fanatic of 3E/3.5E D&D.  If they were born 10 years later, they probably would have became a hardcore fanatic of 2E AD&D.

Another one of these persons were willing to admit that the "object" of their fanaticism may very well be a fluke of the time period they grew up in, and a fluke of whatever series of circumstances which led them to it.  In this sense, their choice of being fanatical about 1E AD&D may very well have been incidental.  One admitted that if he had been born 20 years earlier, he most likely would have became a fanatical LSD guru in Haight-Ashbury during the 1960's.  If he had been born 40 or 50 years earlier, he thought he most likely would have became a fanatical communist or zionist.

Quote from: John Morrow;376479And as such, "Old School" has become a particular style of play to be encouraged and instead of an absence of balance, fragile characters, or GM fiat being unintentional or unchosen byproducts of how the games evolved and were interpreted that might be considered features or bugs depending on who was using them, those features are, in the OSR, becoming intentional choices designed to produce a particular type of game.  And that, along with concerns and arguments over fidelity to specific editions of old rule systems, is in itself, is very "New School" to me.

The Old School Primer takes the issues you mentioned and turns it into something playable. However to characterize the OSR as being about that style is a mistake. The only thing the OSR is about is playing older editions of D&D. There are several active OSR participants/publishers, like myself, who run older editions of D&D in styles that would be recognizable to anybody playing a newer RPG.

Quote from: estar;376491The Old School Primer takes the issues you mentioned and turns it into something playable. However to characterize the OSR as being about that style is a mistake. The only thing the OSR is about is playing older editions of D&D. There are several active OSR participants/publishers, like myself, who run older editions of D&D in styles that would be recognizable to anybody playing a newer RPG.

This is more what I had expected from reading folks here talking.

-clash

I don't think it was just two eras.

D&D went through:

1. Old School Wargaming style
2. Epic Fantasy(LotR/Dragonlance style) (late 1E through 2E)
3. Sim/character building(early 3E)
4. Anime/exotic/Lazor Beamz(late 3E)
5. Balance is King/Tactical based combat encounters/Freeform noncombat(4E)

I'm not familiar with the first wave of non-D&D games, but I saw a lot of complicated simulation style games with a lot of detail come out of the 80s. The 90s saw White Wolf and more experimental type games(at least I think so on the experimental games, they looked newer in production values compared to the Sim games I saw while gaming in the 90s). The 2000s were defined by the 3E/OGL/d20 bomb that produced the d20 booms and busts and sucked a lot of the life out of everything else.

Quote from: John Morrow;376488And I think if you look at that Glenn Blacow article (1980) and the Bill Armintrout article (1981 about the late 1970s) and others from that period, I don't think it was only your group or my (younger) group or Bill Armintrout who were experimenting and not doing the things that now apparently define Old School as a style.

Oh, I remember those articles. I tossed a complete library of Dragons dating back to the late seventies about 5 years ago.

-clash

Got to understand I love Old School Marvel Superheroes, and I'm going to do something remarkably old school with--make a game about Fantasy Swat Teams meet D&D tropes, in a corrupt and massive city that is filled with levels of terrible things--as each expansion and ruin of the city is built on top of the other.

On the other hand. It's very "new school" in that the idea has some humor, lots of violence, and a recognition of being a demi-Police procedural but in a world where magic allows you to do a lot of things, but shorten the legwork..


I think a lot of people doing the Old school thing---are in many ways trying to step back to a stage where gaming could be had for a small rule book, and a bunch of friends. Not big 100 dollar boxed sets, or 90 dollar tell you how to do everything rules-sets. Nothing wrong with amending the rules, but starting with something onerous and burdensome doesn't make it easy to streamline, anymore than starting with something light makes it easy to build desired heavy complexity. Sometime you need to start somewhere else to get where you are going. I think some OSR ideas are intentionally sort of what I did when I read preview/playtest material for BESM 3E. Realized "Well they wrote me out of this game, but I liked 1E, so I'll just go back and use that,."

D&D has written so many people out of the game play, that they decided to in short--go back to a point where the game play fit them.

Me? I say more power to em.

Clash! Go look at my H&S post! Get Klaxon to look

Other people. Go look!

Let's examine whacky new stuff and old school stuff..

At least it isn't a resolution mechanic based on roulette.