Quote from: Cole;448429A variant that might be interesting would be if the 3 levels were unrelated to XP, but in-campaign achievements; for example for a fighter, second level might be dependent on being knighted or commanding a mercenary unit of X characters, while 3rd might require a character to be landed or become a chief, etc.

Oooh, now that is a really interesting idea. Whether or not it is tied to 3 levels or 4 or whatever--tying acquisition of levels to specific IC achievements.

Quote from: Phillip;448128Point the Fifth
Specific consequences of specific adventures -- e.g., Sigurd bathing in Fafnir's blood, Perseus going from the Graeae to the Hesperides to the very Olympians to obtain aids in his quest for Medusa's head, Orastes' s measures to acquire the Heart of Ahriman and raise Xaltotun from the dead to learn what that worthy knew of the artifact -- were typical of the mythology and fantasy with which I was acquainted.

This is interesting too - as a 3rd level character you have achieved all you can achieve through a "passive" mechanism but might be able to seek out rare or mystical improvements through specific, in-campaign means. A possibility here is that these "active" improvements might usually include a drawback.

Quote from: two_fishes;448431Oooh, now that is a really interesting idea. Whether or not it is tied to 3 levels or 4 or whatever--tying acquisition of levels to specific IC achievements.

You could go alternately with the basic OD&D-Chainmail correlation (for fighting men) that level 4 is Hero, and level 8 is Superhero in nature, or go with a later scale that level 9 equals a landed character with a stronghold, tower, temple or whatnot, then determine retroactively what the steps or milestones (e.g. levels and specific in-game achievements tied to them) are to get there.

Or give XP for followers and land, not for gold.

Since you mostly get followers and land by paying for them, them this might be the same thing in most cases, but you could lose levels if your followers were killed or your land taken away.

Quote from: Phillip;448410Yeah. It blows my mind that annoying punks like Pundit are still -- after more than 30 years, plenty of time for them to have grown up and gotten a clue -- so caught up in trying to tell us old hands that their snot-nosed fixation is The One True Way that they still can't understand the real Thing One about D&D.

The whole freaking 36-levels-plus-immortals game of BECMI is nothing but another, equally arbitrary, variant. To the little punks, though, the great Prophet Frank brought it down from Mount TSR graven on plates of gold or something. It's OFFICIAL, a Product of The Corporate Imagination, so of course anyone who actually uses his own imagination is committing some sort of heresy.

And the irony-challenged anathematizers have the chutzpah to accuse us of being fundamentalists.

Hardly. You can do what you like.  You just don't get to pretend that this is "old school".  

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;448521Hardly. You can do what you like.  You just don't get to pretend that this is "old school".

Wait wait.

By this logic, nothing that would deserve the moniker of "old school" could ever be anything else than some extreme reactionary conservatism cloning the exact same game over and over again. It's like a self-fulfilling statement then when you attack the OSR for being "too conservative." It's a logical fallacy, a rhetorical loop. It's bullshit.

By this same logic, Stars Without Number or the Majestic Wilderlands can't possibly be "old school," which -honestly- doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Quote from: RPGPunditYou just don't get to pretend that this is "old school".

Really? Says you?

Who put on red caps and made you Pope of Old School?

I don't give a shit whether Basic D&D is "old school" or not. It's old (1977-78), and we played it at school, and we had fun.

The attitude that's it's groovy is definitely "old school", though, by contrast with your "new school" of uptight conformity.

Quote from: Gygax & Arneson... for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!

As a point of reference, from games I knew about back then and recaps of old games online, it appears that there was much less consistency in game style in the 70's and 80's than there is now.  D&D was The Game and most people didn't even know about other games.  So, it was stretched to whatever people wanted to play.  There was also no internet so peeks of other games through Dragon magazine was the main source of what normal was.  You had slow grinds where it took months go gain a level and other games that were epic Monty Haul games vs. gods.  There was time travel, interplanetary travel, and whatever people pulled from books that they'd read.  Big lists of house rules were the norm.  

There's really no one thing that is old school.

The advocates of orthodoxy are not the ones who get accused of being such on this thread.

I made a couple of what I thought were constructive suggestions for Forward! To Adventure: if it's meant to be similar to a roguelike, go the whole hog and make a board-game version, and if you want people who like old D&D to play it, make it compatible with old D&D. Both times Pundit responded with insults. So there's a sense in which Pundit's beef with the OSR is a self-inflicted injury.

Quote from: Benoist;448537Wait wait.

By this logic, nothing that would deserve the moniker of "old school" could ever be anything else than some extreme reactionary conservatism cloning the exact same game over and over again. It's like a self-fulfilling statement then when you attack the OSR for being "too conservative." It's a logical fallacy, a rhetorical loop. It's bullshit.

By this same logic, Stars Without Number or the Majestic Wilderlands can't possibly be "old school," which -honestly- doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Nonsense.  Anyone who knows my record knows that few people have railed as much against the dinosaur excesses of the OSR as I have. And the problem I see with the "E-number" concept is that it comes from the same root as the guys claiming that "old school" means "trying to recreate some arbitrary ultra-narrow definition of games as they were played prior to some random date, and only those games".
It is based on pseudo-nostalgia: claiming that this is "how it was" back in the "good old days", when in fact it was nothing of the sort.  
The very idea of "old school" being restrictive is pseudo-nostalgic, because it runs completely current to what was the real zeitgeist of that time: an excitement for what was new and upcoming.  So saying "old school is playing OD&D and nothing else" is actually nothing at all like old-school, its a completely modern notion with made-up nostalgic trappings; because people back then loved all the new shit that was coming out and wanted to play new games.  Likewise, saying "old school is when you play only till 3rd level and then STOP" is absurd and likewise pseudo-nostalgia, because gamers back then wanted games that let them do MORE, not less, and wanted to have a character work his way to "name level" and beyond.

The notion that E3 is somehow "old school" is utter fantasy.  Its not even like trying to claim "back in the 50s women were happier because they were taken care of", its more like trying to claim "back in the middle ages people lived longer because they used crystal healing instead of modern vaccination".

RPGPundit

Quote from: Benoist;448537It's like a self-fulfilling statement then when you attack the OSR for being "too conservative." It's a logical fallacy, a rhetorical loop. It's bullshit.

Yes.

I am staggered by the close mindedness of many of the posters in this thread. E3 is an interesting experiment. Don't feel threatened by it if its not your cup of tea and for gods sake don't get excitedly caught up in whether it is old school or not.

I played through the red book era and E3 was certainly not a concept we had. I'm older and more mature now, however, and interested in exploring more aspects of the game than when I was 12.

Perhaps a large part of OSR is not so much trying to recreate a 'golden age' that may or may not have existed, but rather adult gamers revisiting the games of their youth but filtered through their experiences of 20+ years of gaming.

Spinachat and Phillip are not advocating a one true way, just a way and its as legitimate as any other.

Quote from: Fiasco;448621Perhaps a large part of OSR is not so much trying to recreate a 'golden age' that may or may not have existed, but rather adult gamers revisiting the games of their youth but filtered through their experiences of 20+ years of gaming.

Spinachat and Phillip are not advocating a one true way, just a way and its as legitimate as any other.

For me, This.  I don't want to go back to a time when our group totally misunderstood rule X.  I also find OD&D not to my taste.  For me, it's seeing if there are new things in the games that most veteran gamers know.  There's very little to teach players if you can say "it's just Basic but Y."

There does seem to be a small group of zealot's dedicated to Gary's Way.  But they're a small part of the people playing old games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;448609Nonsense.  Anyone who knows my record knows that few people have railed as much against the dinosaur excesses of the OSR as I have. And the problem I see with the "E-number" concept is that it comes from the same root as the guys claiming that "old school" means "trying to recreate some arbitrary ultra-narrow definition of games as they were played prior to some random date, and only those games".

Umm, no.  The "E-number" idea originated with a guy playing 3e, which is hardly "old school" and was never claimed as such.

Read the OP again; nowhere does it mention E3 being "old school."