Quote from: John Morrow;377244I'm also told by a teacher friend about children who can't read analog clocks.

Digression: I couldn't read analog clocks till a pretty late date. I blame the idiotic teaching method. When it's 6:30, the big hand is on the 30, but the little hand is NOT on the 6. Also, an insistence on teaching "quarter past, quarter of" without explaining how that relates to the number of minutes in an hour. Ultimately after working with digital clocks for a few years, I developed my own (accurate) model of how an analog clock works, and I could tell time.

Had similar problems with tying my shoes. What is this "make a loop, over, under" malarky? My big sister (who's left-handed, so had to teach herself) finally showed me.

The problem in both cases is that the grade-school method is based on an inflexible rote that doesn't really explain anything.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;377337Digression: I couldn't read analog clocks till a pretty late date. I blame the idiotic teaching method. When it's 6:30, the big hand is on the 30, but the little hand is NOT on the 6. Also, an insistence on teaching "quarter past, quarter of" without explaining how that relates to the number of minutes in an hour. Ultimately after working with digital clocks for a few years, I developed my own (accurate) model of how an analog clock works, and I could tell time.

The problem in both cases is that the grade-school method is based on an inflexible rote that doesn't really explain anything.

Whoa!  I had the same problem, for the same reasons, Elliot!  The little hand not being on the number really threw me.

I taught myself to read by the time I was 4 - my dad would read the funnies to me, and ran his finger under the words as he read. One day he skipped a word, and I said "You didn't say "butter" (or whatever the word was!) Dad! It says "butter" here and you didn't say it." That's when they knew I was reading already. When I went to kindergarten, the school officials yelled at my mother for teaching me to read! They wanted to teach me to read their way! Idiots!

-clash

Quote from: Tavis;377334I like Clash's description of the loose tolerance that made old-school games functional even if you gunked up the works with whatever came to hand.

I trashed that post because it seemed to gum things up here. It was ust a copy/paste from my blog though - here if you want to read it in context.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;377097Let's see - here's all the SF games I know about, up to StarFrontiers:

Here's some I own/have owned/have played, published 1976 to 1982:

1976
Metamorphosis Alpha
Starfaring

1977
Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo (No GM, sort of an early choose your own adventure with a game system)
Space Quest
Space Patrol
Traveller

1978
Gamma World
Realm of the Yolmi
Starships and Spacemen
Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier

1980
The Morrow Project
Space Opera
Star Patrol

1981
Aftermath
Fringeworthy
The Mechanoid Invasion
Star Rovers
Universe

1982
FTL:2448
Space Infantry
Starfleet Voyages
Star Frontiers
FASA Star Trek
Timeship
To Challenge Tomorrow
Worlds of Wonder (3 BRP rules: one fantasy, one SF, one superheroes)

Quote from: RandallS;377201His Skylark and Lensman series pretty much defined "space opera".

Yeah, I thought it was something like that, but I am not a huge historian in that genre.

Quote from: RandallS;377351Here's some I own/have owned/have played, published 1976 to 1982:

Starships and Spacemen

I heard a rumour on Facebook or somewhere that a re-make is in the works.

So, two big lists, anyone care to tackle a synopsis of the rules?

Quote from: StormBringer;377352Yeah, I thought it was something like that, but I am not a huge historian in that genre.

Oh, it's definitely like that!

A Lensman would mop the floor with a Jedi...

-clash

I'd like to point out that, despite the lies Elloit and Clash are telling, stupid people who can't do simple math, tie their shoes, or read clocks are an invention of the 21st century. Like dice pools and preprinted character sheets, they are merely milestones on the road to Armageddon.
Perhaps if we give Kong a new bride, there is time to avert catastrophe. I nominate Koltar.

QuoteLike Clash mentioned about StarCluster designs, "Thing is, the simpler you make it, the more difficult it becomes to create if you want to retain any shred of verisimilitude...". So, for any specific genre or games in general perhaps, a good dividing line to consider might be the one that has been talked about before; rules complexity vs verisimilitude/"realism".

I think it was late at night or something, but that last part didn't come out right.

How about a delineation of 'rules complexity vis-à-vis verisimilitude/realism simulation' vs 'rules simplicity/streamlining vis-à-vis plot/story emphasis'?

So, an 'old school' game would have lots of wonky rules and subsystems to emulate the author's view of 'reality' (as in Rolemaster) or to emulate a certain genre (as in AD&D), but in both cases characters are mundane overall in the sense that they are subject to everyday experiences.  Even with the escalating hit point pool, I think AD&D was still very grounded in the mundaneness of the characters, with save or die effects, level draining, and any number of diseases (arcane or not) that had very debilitating effects outside of hit points.  In these kinds of games, there is very much the feel that your character is in some respects exceptional, perhaps even extraordinary, but not in a way that would be nigh impossible for anyone else in the campaign world with similar drive, if not similar ability scores.  In other words, actions make heroes; kind of a long explanation of 'player skill'.  Character skills highlight what you are best at, but don't define the character.  Essentially, PCs don't glow.

A 'new school' game would delegate that to the background to varying degrees, in that most actions would have a generally higher chance of succeeding overall, and in any case, the player would have all the tools necessary to overcome most obstacles in the form of skills, powers, talents or what have you.  These tend to define the character to a large degree.  The player only has to concentrate on wielding those abilities in a manner that is appropriate to the story of a hero, as they start out closer to or exceeding that threshold.  They are clearly the protagonists of the campaign, of a story that is meant to revolve around and respond to their actions.  One can always tell where the PCs are 'on screen' because of the coloured circle around their feet; PCs glow.

Quote from: Aos;377371Perhaps if we give Kong a new bride, there is time to avert catastrophe. I nominate Koltar.

It makes no difference.  Even if Kong is appeased, Mothra hates your story-based games, and will rain destruction upon your decadent gaming style.

Quote from: StormBringer;377376So, an 'old school' game would have lots of wonky rules and subsystems to emulate the author's view of 'reality' (as in Rolemaster) or to emulate a certain genre (as in AD&D), but in both cases characters are mundane overall in the sense that they are subject to everyday experiences.  Even with the escalating hit point pool, I think AD&D was still very grounded in the mundaneness of the characters, with save or die effects, level draining, and any number of diseases (arcane or not) that had very debilitating effects outside of hit points.  In these kinds of games, there is very much the feel that your character is in some respects exceptional, perhaps even extraordinary, but not in a way that would be nigh impossible for anyone else in the campaign world with similar drive, if not similar ability scores.  In other words, actions make heroes; kind of a long explanation of 'player skill'.  Character skills highlight what you are best at, but don't define the character.  Essentially, PCs don't glow.

I'm not sayin' your definitions aren't good, but that definition removes Tunnels and Trolls from the old school category, right?

Quote from: StormBringer;377377It makes no difference.  Even if Kong is appeased, Mothra hates your story-based games, and will rain destruction upon your decadent gaming style.

At least Ed will get laid.

Quote from: TavisI like Clash's description of the loose tolerance that made old-school games functional even if you gunked up the works with whatever came to hand.

I somewhat agree with the idea of loose tolerance vs precision, but 3x was in no way precise. It was a framework system, which made it pretty easy to hack stuff off or paste stuff in from other games, but the things hanging off the framework interacted with each other in ways the designers themselves couldn't predict. A handful of things were easy to homebrew (feats, spells, PrCs to a lesser extent) while a handful of other things were uneccesarily difficult (save and bab progression made core class construction a chore, and there was little good advice for it, plus the CR system was made of bad math and failure... monster class levels, HD advancement, and templates gave us options but upped prep time). Nothing was so bad by itself that if we needed to we couldn't find a fix for it. But the "designer level" was a laughable concept for lots of us because we could see that the wrong combination of psychic powers would allow a player to play as a sandwich or nuke an entire city with a divination spell or use vorpal pillows (that last one requires a little interpretation). We might have built stupid broken characters for fun outside the games, but most GMs had a list of "shit that won't fly, official or no" and a "run it by me first" policy towards anything out of a book not mentioned on the list. Of course, this was back in high school. Nowadays, I'm running, I'm the only one with books, and I decide what's kosher for my game and what variant rules to use.

QuoteI think the way that 3.x became BIY was that its unified, rationalized, tightly interconnected design tended to make people treat it as a precision-engineered machine. Arcana Unearthed is a good example of a 3.x product that went against this philosophy - "look, here's how to get under the hood and swap things around" - but didn't change the play culture in my experience.

I think 3.x did foster the idea that tinkering with the system would change the way the game played, but I think most of us that played all that much or toyed with the idea of power gaming knew that the game could be broken by the unintended interaction of rules from books that weren't supposed to interact (like using metamagic from complete arcane or what have you to stack damage onto a find city spell). This worked against official supplements as much as unofficial or homebrew material IME. If anything, we felt the need to constantly mess with the game.

QuoteAt some point - and it'd be interesting to think about the circumstances that led to this - it became really common for 3.x players to say "this is broken". Balancing challenges and equalizing everyone's awesome was clearly a job for a precision machine. You couldn't trust third party designers to get it right, and they're professionals; why should you expect yourself or your neighborhood DM to do a better job? The BIY mentality was that you had to look to official sources to avoid the dreaded possibility of brokenness.

Like I said above, brokenness is not small disparities in power. Brokenness is divination nukes and vorpal pillows... rules modifying rules and unintended interactions that lead to omnipotent offense (which changes the game for the worse) invincible defense (ditto) or stupid things like psychic sandwiches.

QuoteI introduced a bunch of houserules, new classes, etc. in the last 3.5 campaign I ran, and bought Fantasy Craft because the idea of a crunchy D&D toolkit still appeals to me. One of the things that brought down that campaign, though, was people worrying about whether someone else's character was more powerful than theirs - and by 2008 official was no longer seen as a guarantee; I saw as much carping about people who did "cheesy" multiclassing or took "broken" feats straight out of the WotC books as I did my homebrew classes.

Yeah... fantasy craft is a good looking game, either to cannibalize or use as an alternate base to port stuff into. I don't know what to tell you about the mentality that characters should be uniformly powerful. The old toughness alone should tell you that wasn't the intention of the design. For me and mine, we reserved the term broken for the truly absurd, knew the math well enough to know the designers didn't know shit, and half of us tinkered with the system until it was unrecognizeable.

Quote from: Thanlis;377382I'm not sayin' your definitions aren't good, but that definition removes Tunnels and Trolls from the old school category, right?

I dunno, honestly, I don't have the older versions.  I was under the impression that it has a fairly wonky set of rules that, while not as Byzantine as AD&D or Rolemaster, aren't exactly streamlined, either.

I think we might need some new terminology for this stuff.  With apologies to Clash, I think he has a valid question, it may just be one I am not answering.  I think I have a different question in my mind about all this, so perhaps a new thread regarding that would be in order.

Quote from: Aos;377384At least Ed will get laid.

Uuuughhhhh, thanks for that image.

I'm going to be in the shower.

For a long, long time.....