You can slice this "old School" pie nearly anyway you like, really.  I'd agree that my gut tells me neither Vampire nor AD&D 2nd edition are old school.  But I can point to people online who think 2nd edition Boot Hill is new school because it came in a fancy schmancy fullsize box, or that Gamma World is new school because it is a refinement of ideas originating in Metamorphosis Alpha.  Personally, I look to the period before big chain stores carried D&D as the era of the Old School.  That matches up pretty well with the games of the 70's, as I'm pretty sure Kaybee Toys, Toys R Us, and Kmart started carrying D&D stuff with the '81 boxed set.  So looking strictly at the 70s, what are the key games?  Off the cuff I'd say D&D, Traveller, Runequest, and T&T are most influential in terms of design.

looking at ian's list (and going with IMO) i'd put the cut-off at '84.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe correct list would be the following:

1. D&D (original)
2. D&D (first basic set)
3. AD&D 1e
4. Judges Guild products for D&D
5. D&D (basic/expert set)
6. D&D (red box basic)
7. Arduin products for D&D
8. Tunnels & Trolls
9. Traveller
10. Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha
11. Star Frontiers
12. Palladium Fantasy
13. Call of Cthulhu
14. Runequest
15. Chivalry & Sorcery

That's a good "top 15" list.

RPGPundit

EDIT: Yes, I'd probably add Villains & Vigilantes to that list.

That is a great top 15 list.  I'm with Pundit on this one, I can't believe any serious gamer would exclude DnD from the list.  Also, while Judges Guild didn't make a game per se, IMO their material for DnD epitomizes "old school".  I might add EPT to the list since it was the second RPG I ever purchased (after white box DnD) but since it used the same mechanics as DnD I don't know if it rates separate billing.

Rigour, people, rigour!

There´s obviously different eras of Roleplaying.
As it is blatantly clear, old-school is dichotomic term, that is of no help whatsoever when a LIST of games is discussed.
The power of binary variables is rather limited.

We´d need at least an ordinally scaled variable, a ranking, if you will.
Better though to categorize along qualitive lines and then sub-differentiate according to year of publishing.

Or you first stratify by publishing date, and then you draw lines of tradition/innovation through the eons of roleplaying connecting the ages of the Enlightened with the ages of the bland and finally the age of the downfall and corruption of American audience taste.

*SWOON*  TW boxed set....i'm so jealous. :deflated:

That list sounds about right to me.  That would be my personal list of "core old school games" right there. (without adding Bunnies & Burrows, which is ridiculously niche...and maybe I'd toss in Gamma World, too.  Just lost that 1st ed. boxed set twice within the last week on eBay :mad: )

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaHey, I was walking past one of my bookshelves and stumbled across the original Thieves' World boxed set by Chaosium from back in 1981.  It features character stats for pretty much all of the prominent games of the time.  I thought this might prove instructive.

• Advanced D&D
• Adventures in Fantasy
• Chivalry & Sorcery
• Dragonquest
• Dungeons & Dragons (basic)
• The Fantasy Trip
• RuneQuest
• Traveller
• Tunnels & Trolls

I also happen to have the Thieves' World Companion, published in 1986, which is arguably the era of the revised old school.  It adds RQ III and MERP/Rolemaster to the list.

Man.  Adventures in Fantasy?  Does anyone even remember that game?

!i!

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaMan.  Adventures in Fantasy?  Does anyone even remember that game?

According to John Kim's site, it was by Arneson and some other collaborator(s), which jogged my memory. IIRC, it was printed with a different color for each of the then-standard three books, i.e. the typeface in one book was red against a white background. In itself this made the game virtually unplayable (I guess nobody thought it was worth photocopying it.)

I sold my copy of AiF recently.  It struck me as bone dry fantasy at its most vanilla and least interesting.  The earlier JG-published Arneson work First Fantasy Campaign is much less coherent but also a lot more fun.

El, the collaborator was Richard Snider, he of Powers & Perils. And E. Gary did his own game in that vein, Dangerous Journeys. Both he and Arneson have said the design principle was to put in every rule they could think of.

Which leads me again to stress the point: very soon after the '70s Big Bang, game design de-differentiated itself at speed of light in a number of directions such that sometime in the very early '80s already Old School becomes a nigh-amorphous term.

I'll make my list based on what me and my friends played, and talked about. I was born in 76 - so I evidently missed out on the "real" old skool stuff while I was busy getting old enough to read.

FANTASY:

- D&D: AD&D, and basic boxed sets (79, boxed set was my intro) We dabbled with AD&D, but the basic sets got all the real play
- RuneQuest 3rd (way too fiddly for us - little to no play)
- MERP (Too chart heavy and fiddly, but being able to kill anyone with one good hit of a sword was a revelation, and is now something I look for in every game.)

SCI FI:

- Traveller (had ALL the supplements)
- Star Frontiers (but, this one got way more play)

SUPERHEROES:

- Champions
- Marvel Super heroes

Played both with a slight edge to champions

MODERN:

- James Bond 007 (some interest, the big bidding chart make our heads hurt. Very little play.

- Top Secret S/I  (This game was the shit, with Manuel the Invincible Hitman.(From, err... South America!)
Like Jaws in James bond, you thought you killed him, but then again, you didn't see the body...

HORROR/SUPERNATURAL:

- Ghostbusters 1st. ed (Yes, we are Gods.)


That's my "old" school list...


The "later" years:

The last few Years of play before an involuntary 10 year hiatus from the hobby.

- Cyberpunk 2020  (good stuff, going full auto on corprate security was just good clean fun.)

- Star Wars d6 1st ed. (fast and fun only a few games though   )

- Vampire the Masquerade (just the GM and Players guide, and that's all we needed.)

Heard of and played a little Shadowrun - But what are the elves/dwarves/orks doing in my Cyberpunk??? The Fuck. But hey, it was a hit. What do I know.


.

I'll throw in:

• D&D (B/X, BECMI)
• AD&D
• Star Frontiers
• Marvel Super Heroes
• Gamma World
• Traveller
• Runequest 2
• Call of Cthulhu
• MERP
• WEG Star Wars
• Palladium Fantasy
• GURPS
• Champions

I'm pretty confident that if you throw this list at that nebulous group of people who fall between "casual gamer" and "grognard" ends of the spectrum, they'll recognize each and every single game on there, if by name only.  That's always been my personal, functional definition of "core".

And I don't want to start a new thread on this, but I was always under the impression that the publication of the first Dragonlance series of adventures was the clear and undisputed border that separated the old school and the new school.

I think the only time when you have a distinct single "old school" is prior to the eighties.  i.e. D&D, AD&D, Traveller, RuneQuest.  The changes from the 70s to the 80s were at least as significant as the 80s to the 90s.  

Really, I think in many ways the 90s were less of a change than the variety that we saw in the 80s.  

The 80s brought a wide variety to games, ranging from Toon and Teenagers from Outer Space to ultra-realistic simulation like Aftermath and HarnMaster.  Story focus had already been broached by the Dragonlance series followed by games like Call of Cthulhu, James Bond 007, Star Wars, Ars Magica, and Pendragon.  The 90s brought dice-pools, darker PCs, and a narrower trend around how to treat story.  

Quote from: PeteAnd I don't want to start a new thread on this, but I was always under the impression that the publication of the first Dragonlance series of adventures was the clear and undisputed border that separated the old school and the new school.

That would be mid-eighties, 1984 being the start of the release.  I would tend to agree with that as an important transitional point for story focus, but I think there was more to the RPG scene than just two schools.

Basically with John on this stuff. The big moments of change came with Runequest I/II (1978/1980), Champions (1981), and Paranoia/James Bond 007 (1983/4). The first, like In the Labyrinth, is arguably still an old-school game, at the end of the first great wave; the latter two are not, and open up important new 'waves' in game design that really permanently changed a lot of things about the hobby.

John's also right that there were different play approaches before 1980 but by the time you get to the mid-eighties the diversity of system and ways people are playing the systems is so great there's not much left of what I'd consider to be the 'old school' any more.

i'd drop MERP and WEG star wars off the lists, just because i'd consider anything licensed to no longer be "old school."

that, and the broad-spectrum push of dragonlance, is absolutely "new school" as well.

i guess the turn of the 70s/80s would be our benchmark, then?  makes sense to me.

Well, while I indicated up-thread that the big change for Chaosium came when it licensed RQIII out to Avalon Hill for the 1984 release, really they began to depart from "old school" with anything non-RQ.  As John indicated, this first step out of the prevailing course is Call of Cthulhu in 1981.  And I'd forgotten about James Bond 007 from Victory Games.  I'm comfortable rolling the date back to about 1980-81, which is about the time that I really began to notice that companies were releasing games dealing with genres other than Sci-Fi and fantasy.

!i!

CoC's an interesting case because its original design imperative is directedly anti-old-school. Just for its success in this it's arguably the most theoretically important RPG ever, and yet the negative demonstration always remains more deeply connected to what came before it than the things which emerge freely into the space opened up by it.