Quote from: NathanIW;849281I can't for the life of me think why, after seeing your signature multiple times, I didn't click on the youtube link until you brought it up here.

After some suggestions from another forum I ended up moving all the mechanics off stage/behind the screen so everything that goes between the players and the referee is in natural language and I noticed the pace of the game accelerated rapidly.  I really had to keep things fast and furious.  In a given four hour session they ended up doing more than usually happens in 8 hours in a game where the players are thinking about the rules.

Just wanted to say thanks for the detailed response.  I printed out a good portion of that post and stuck in the front of my game prep binder.

Oh! Well, have a look, and see what you think. I tried to give people a better idea of what it is we do in the basement...

Yep; moving the nuts and bolts out of sight and off-screen really does speed the game up. It does make for more of a challenge for the GM, but I like that, personally.

And you are very welcome, too. I'm hoping that I can offer some handy tips for people to use; we tried a lot of things, back in the day, and some worked and some didn't...

The RULES for an OD&D fighter may be simple, but since "anything not explicitly forbidden is permitted," you're wide open.. especially since it was FIGHTERS, not clerics, magic users, or thieves who were the star of every Errol Flynn movie ever, every King Arthur movie ever, every medieval costume drama from "El Cid" to "The Vikings" to "Prince Valiant" ever.

And in fall of 1973, just a couple months before D&D went up for sale, Richard Lester's version of "The Three Musketeers" hit the movie theaters.

Not trying to sound snarky, but essentially we didn't need rules to tell us we could do cool things with our fighters, and virtually the entire corpus of films, literature, and TV shows D&D swiped from had fighters as the hero.

Really, the huge emphasis on magic users in fantasy books started in the mid to late 80s.

EDIT:  We play as we do/played as we did not because we played with Arneson, Gygax, and Barker, but because we partook in the same sources of "This is fantasy swashbuckling adventure" that they did.  I started reading Conan BEFORE I read Lord of the Rings.  Fighters are Heroes, wizards are targets.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;849216I don't mind a little spirited discussion, but when I read the words about referees/ GMs needing to be stated as impartial, something in me just died.

Part of that is, I believe, history that 'just happened.'

In the late 70s and early 80s TSR switched their marketing to the junior high and high school market.  I talked to Jim Ward last GaryCon, and he confirmed that it wasn't just coincidence, they made a deliberate decision to do this.

Which makes eminent amounts of sense; it's a marketing truism that the 11 to 20 age bracket has a fairly high disposable income.  Not TOTAL income, mind you.  But what 14 year old Johnny gets for mowing lawns is entirely his money to spend for fun (usually).

So, yeah, go where the money is.

But take a bunch of 14 year old boys (who are feral little beasts at the best of times) and give them a pretense of "authority," even as ephemeral an authority as being the "Dungeon Master," and remove adult supervision, and what do you get?

Hint:  We've all read Lord of the Flies.

And later on some of these kids grew up and went into the game industry and carried those memories of 14 year old games with them.  This is where you get Skip Williams, working for TSR and going on about "rules to protect the players from the arbitrary whims of the referee.

Whereas the FKR response is "If you don't trust the referee don't play with them."

And it's really amazing to me how many people, at least online, are willing to weep and wail about stuff that happened in games in junior high school into their 20s or even 30s.

It's one reason why, after much thought, I've come up (per Azimov) with

"Mornard's Three Laws of RPG Rules:"

1)  The rules cannot fix stupid
2)  The rules cannot fix asshole
3)  Anything that happened when you, or the referee, were 14 years old does not constitute a need to change the rules

Quote from: chirine ba kal;849216I don't mind a little spirited discussion, but when I read the words about referees/ GMs needing to be stated as impartial, something in me just died.

I can't imagine a style of game play where this isn't the case. Phil and Dave at their deadliest were always impartial, and we were the same way all those hot summer nights at Coffman. I'm geniunely having trouble getting my head around the idea that this needs to be said explictly; no disrespect intended to the poster, of course!!!

No offense taken. Impartiality is where I came from, too--although as I wrote earlier, I did have a few do-overs. But over the years, and especially in the last decade-plus it's become clear that a large contingent of modern gamers don't even understand impartiality as a baseline. (Case in point, but don't say I didn't warn you.)

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;849273I believe that it's both. The feature is that "low mechanical engagement" classes (as I've come to call them) exist; the bug is that they're overly associated with certain archetypes, so you often don't have a 'simple spellcaster' or a 'complex warrior' available to players who want them.

I've never been able to create a complex fighter class that worked in my old school rules because:

a) It is next to impossible (for me, at least) to come up with realistic fighter "powers/maneuvers" that cannot already be done by the standard fighter and as I refuse to limit the standard fighter to make a complex fighter viable, there is a problem. Especially when getting just getting hit and damage bonuses at certain actions at various levels (to actions that any standard fighter can try without the bonuses at any level) does not seem to satisfy those who want complex fighters. They seem to wanted siloed off abilities that only their complex fighter class gets. That's just incompatible with the standard old school D&D fighter.

b) I want fast abstract combat that does not need minis and battlemats/terrain. Most of the complex fighter classes I've seen that work in "new school" games all but require minis and battlemats or their equivalent.

There may be a way to do this that does not have problems A & B and still satisfies those looking for a complex fighter, but I have not been able to find it.

Old School today is largely what I had been saying Old School ought to be, since at least 2008.  Welcome to Pundit's World.

What is old school?

Not giving a hoot what So-and-So says is "old school."

Weren't no such thing back in the day!

Quote from: Christopher Brady;849171Gronan, you have a special and unique view of the class, because you've been at a table where it was explained that you can do whatever you want as whatever class.  But most of us have not, and we're limited to, as I already stated to Chirine, our perceptions and reading of the books we bought.

That may be special, but it's far from unique. It didn't seem all that unusual that I was introduced to the game without reading any books. Indeed, the usual thing in my experience was that buying the book or boxed set for a new RPG made one by default the GM; the players typically learned what the deal was from the GM.

Quote from: Phillip;850800What is old school?

Not giving a hoot what So-and-So says is "old school."

Weren't no such thing back in the day!

"Pan did not care at all about form, which of course is the best form of all."

Quote from: RandallS;849322I've never been able to create a complex fighter class that worked in my old school rules because:

a) It is next to impossible (for me, at least) to come up with realistic fighter "powers/maneuvers" that cannot already be done by the standard fighter and as I refuse to limit the standard fighter to make a complex fighter viable, there is a problem. Especially when getting just getting hit and damage bonuses at certain actions at various levels (to actions that any standard fighter can try without the bonuses at any level) does not seem to satisfy those who want complex fighters. They seem to wanted siloed off abilities that only their complex fighter class gets. That's just incompatible with the standard old school D&D fighter.

b) I want fast abstract combat that does not need minis and battlemats/terrain. Most of the complex fighter classes I've seen that work in "new school" games all but require minis and battlemats or their equivalent.

There may be a way to do this that does not have problems A & B and still satisfies those looking for a complex fighter, but I have not been able to find it.

FWIW I just wrote a few ideas of my own, but it might not be to everyone's tastes.

Basically, I would allow a fighter with multiple attacks to use those additional attacks as "strong attack", "parry", "dodge", "precise attack", etc.

So basically, while anyone can parry, the Fighter can attack AND parry in the same turn. While anyone can hit the head, the fighter does so without a penalty. And so on. No need for minis, etc.

The fighter gets more options. He chooses moves, like the wizard chooses spells.

Someone somewhere surely has a retroclone that uses this, I'm sure.

"Old School" means I like it.

That's what everybody thinks, but I'm old enough to mean it.

I feel "Old School" is all in how you approach a game, adhering to specific tenants and ideals instead of a particular system. For a more in-depth analysis...

• Char-gen:
- Stats rolled in order
- Limited number of options, usually fitting a Tolkien-esque style campaign.
- Tight reign on options like spells, feats, and other character-based choices.


• Resource Management:
- Making resource replenishment more difficult, costly to the group/campaign to take.
- Using existing resources in uncommon/out of the box ways.

• Obtaining Features:
- Getting new spells, maneuvers, options, etc. takes in-game time, research, and planning. Ex. A Fighter doesn't automatically gain/learn a new combat feat just because....game. He needs to learn from a warrior. A wizard doesn't automatically get new spells willy nilly, they need to research for them.
- Higher HP, saves, attack bonus, AC upgrades need to be applies during downtime in a safe area, not in the middle of a monster a infested dungeon.

• Healing/Hit Points
- Restrict healing on a daily basis
- Make afflictions more difficult to remove.
- Slower hit point recovery

• Adventuring/Exploration:
- No "standardization" on encounters
- No guarantee that encounters will be level appropriate or can be overcome through combat.
- Bigger emphasis on hex-crawling than planned or plotted games.

• Scope/Goals
- Rulings not rules, adjudication is far more important than a rules-lawyer.
- Game isn't designed to be "beaten" but rather experienced. You don't play to level up, leveling up is a by-product of your play.

These are some of the things that always jump out at me when I discussions on old school. Luckily every version of D&D can do this so its not tied to a specific version. At least, the way I see it

Old school is playing a role-playing game like it's a CLUE board game.

Quote from: Batman;851039- Higher HP, saves, attack bonus, AC upgrades need to be applies during downtime in a safe area, not in the middle of a monster a infested dungeon.

I don't think I've ever seen that except in a computer game; what non-old-school RPG are you thinking of?

Quote from: rawma;852324I don't think I've ever seen that except in a computer game; what non-old-school RPG are you thinking of?

It was something our DM enforced when we played AD&D and early 3.0 games. He said getting a extra HP and automatically getting better at accuracy, damage, and avoiding attacks in a span of a few minutes was too video game-y.