Quote from: SineNomine;791561That's all well and good, yes, but how exactly is that going to work at the table when you have the CT black book in one hand and Keep on the Borderlands in the other? What exactly is the GM supposed to do for magic-using character creation, spellcasting enemies, and the adventure's basic assumption that some humans are literally four or five times harder to kill than an average healthy person? What does the GM say when the first player says, "Okay, I want to be a magic-user with a Sleep spell."?

The system doesn't only provide randomization and task resolution, it provides systematic assumptions about how this game world works. CT assumes flat PC power curves in a world where their human and humanoid enemies are mildly-inflected versions of the same. D&D assumes drastic PC power curves in a world where the opposition ranges from kobolds to dragons. You rapidly reach a point where D&D-based resources are useful only in the sense that they give you some basic inspiration for making a completely rewritten version for CT.

I'd disagree with this last part. Combat encounters while wearing street clothes and wielding a sword would be very different from combat encounters while wearing battle dress and wielding a FGMP-15. The power curve for CT is based on wealth and equipment while the power curve for D&D is based on levels.

(And as a caveat, you can actually do a Collossal Red Dragon vs an Imperial Lift Marine Squad using D&D 3E and d20 Traveller. It was a hoot.)

As I see it, the OSR currently has two main factions:
1. AD&D Revival
2. Old School Revival

The mainstay of the OSR is the AD&D Revival where you have people enjoying TSR era D&D products (either original books or retroclones) and making/reading/playing new stuff written for those games. Of course, this is the much larger faction simply because far, far more people played AD&D than any other game in the 70s and 80s.

The Old School Revival faction is about the rediscovery of non-D&D games from the 70s and 80s, and the playstyle of those games. In this community, you have the retroclones of those games, and the creation of many new games "in the flavor" of those older games.

As for this "I am more Old School than thou", fuck that shit.

If you have been playing OD&D nonstop since 1974 or just downloaded SWN or Mutant Future yesterday, I don't give a damn. All I care about is (a) are you fun to play with? or (b) are you creating cool stuff for me to play with?

Everything else is bullshit.

Quote from: TristramEvans;791542That's absurd. Of course you can. Well, maybe not you, personally (I don't know you, maybe there's some special reason you couldn't), but I could easily as could any GM barring any aforementioned "special reasons".

It takes less work to run Keep on the Borderlands with Stars without numbers than it does Traveller. That what is meant when X can't be run with Y. Of course any RPG can run any setting or adventure made for another RPG.  What differs is the amount of work you have to do to run it.

Quote from: Spinachcat;791566As I see it, the OSR currently has two main factions:
1. AD&D Revival
2. Old School Revival

The mainstay of the OSR is the AD&D Revival where you have people enjoying TSR era D&D products (either original books or retroclones) and making/reading/playing new stuff written for those games. Of course, this is the much larger faction simply because far, far more people played AD&D than any other game in the 70s and 80s.

The Old School Revival faction is about the rediscovery of non-D&D games from the 70s and 80s, and the playstyle of those games.

Here's where we fall through "not Holy, not Roman, and not an Empire" into the Mad Hatter's tea party.

"Old" stands by itself, though it's a movable feast. D&D 3e is now almost as old as OD&D was when AD&D 2nd Ed  was published.

The closest thing to a unified "school" here, though, is a D&D-specific, post-2000 phenomenon. What single "playstyle" identifies a bloc of En Garde!, Bunnies & Burrows, Chivalry & Sorcery, Man Myth & Magic, Pendragon, Ars Magica, Starships & Spacemen, FASA Star Trek, Traveller, Star Frontiers, Star Ace, The Mechanoid Invasion, The Morrow Project, Fringeworthy, Gangbusters, Call of Cthulhu, Witch Hunt, Ghostbusters, Paranoia, Marvel Super Heroes, Champions, Mekton, Toon, Teenagers from Outer Space, Morphius, and Sandman: Map of Halaal - opposing a similarly monolithic block of post-1990 product?

I don't see it.

 

QuoteIn this community, you have the retroclones of those games, and the creation of many new games "in the flavor" of those older games.

As for this "I am more Old School than thou", fuck that shit.

If you have been playing OD&D nonstop since 1974 or just downloaded SWN or Mutant Future yesterday, I don't give a damn. All I care about is (a) are you fun to play with? or (b) are you creating cool stuff for me to play with?

Everything else is bullshit.

Quote from: SineNomine;791561That's all well and good, yes, but how exactly is that going to work at the table when you have the CT black book in one hand and Keep on the Borderlands in the other? What exactly is the GM supposed to do for magic-using character creation, spellcasting enemies, and the adventure's basic assumption that some humans are literally four or five times harder to kill than an average healthy person? What does the GM say when the first player says, "Okay, I want to be a magic-user with a Sleep spell."?

The system doesn't only provide randomization and task resolution, it provides systematic assumptions about how this game world works. CT assumes flat PC power curves in a world where their human and humanoid enemies are mildly-inflected versions of the same. D&D assumes drastic PC power curves in a world where the opposition ranges from kobolds to dragons. You rapidly reach a point where D&D-based resources are useful only in the sense that they give you some basic inspiration for making a completely rewritten version for CT.

Not sure how to explain it to you, to be honest. Let's just say I ran Pendragon for years without a magic system and it worked just as fine as the game did once a magic system was introduced. I guess it all depends on how much one wants/needs the game to be defined by the system, vs how comfortable one is making judgments based on common sense and the accepted "reality" of the fantasy situation. I've never really felt that rules were 100% necessary to roleplaying, a sentiment Gygax himself shared (at least until he decided later that there was an "official" way to play). They're training wheels at best IME. I can sit down right now with a map, 2d6, and 3-4 friends and spend a month roleplaying any given situation/world a person pulls out of a hat. Even the dice arent strictly necessary.

Quote from: estar;791569It takes less work to run Keep on the Borderlands with Stars without numbers than it does Traveller. That what is meant when X can't be run with Y. Of course any RPG can run any setting or adventure made for another RPG.  What differs is the amount of work you have to do to run it.

I think the amount of work one "has to do" is bound up in their preconceptions of how muuch of the game needs to be defined by set rules.

Alive?  FOOLS!  THE OLD SCHOOL REVIAL WAS NEVER ALIVE!!!

If you didn't cut your heart out and store it in a phylacrity you can't possibly be old school.

Quote from: estar;791569It takes less work to run Keep on the Borderlands with Stars without numbers than it does Traveller. That what is meant when X can't be run with Y. Of course any RPG can run any setting or adventure made for another RPG.  What differs is the amount of work you have to do to run it.

Sort of, it takes more work to run it with Trav as DnD, then use SWN; but if you are running Trav, it isn't that much more work.


Pundit, I would go big tent and forgo the working definition.

Quote from: dragoner;791701Sort of, it takes more work to run it with Trav as DnD, then use SWN; but if you are running Trav, it isn't that much more work.

The same with me, however what true for me or you is not true for everybody. And the issue might not be ability but interest. The easier a person can use a adventure or similar setting out of the box with a given set of rules the more likely that people using those rules will use that adventure.

I been involved long enough with people not only running Classic D&D, but Hero System and especially GURPS to see how people vary in their attitude and ability to convert adventures.

Quote from: estar;791726I been involved long enough with people not only running Classic D&D, but Hero System and especially GURPS to see how people vary in their attitude and ability to convert adventures.

I have found that those systems sort of breed the various people who want to play them. Sometimes you get crossover and sometimes not. I've seen huge arguments erupt over different points of view like such as in "Across the Bright Face" if you give the rebels the briefcase, they won't shoot you. Which is a very different sort of mindset, I have a tendency to believe they would shoot you, or at least imprison you.

OSR ceased to have any practical utility as a term when it became synonymous with old-school. For the term to have any use to me, the 'R' part has to mean something.

It's possible to love old-school systems, adventures, and play modes, while having little interest in OSR systems, adventures, and forums. But the way the term has expanded means that distinction is lost.

Quote from: TristramEvans;791625Not sure how to explain it to you, to be honest. Let's just say I ran Pendragon for years without a magic system and it worked just as fine as the game did once a magic system was introduced. I guess it all depends on how much one wants/needs the game to be defined by the system, vs how comfortable one is making judgments based on common sense and the accepted "reality" of the fantasy situation. I've never really felt that rules were 100% necessary to roleplaying, a sentiment Gygax himself shared (at least until he decided later that there was an "official" way to play). They're training wheels at best IME. I can sit down right now with a map, 2d6, and 3-4 friends and spend a month roleplaying any given situation/world a person pulls out of a hat. Even the dice arent strictly necessary.

Same here. Manipulating an abstraction can be a  lot of fun, but it's a sub-game added to the essential role-playing game.

The latter we can play with the referee's algorithms remaining a black box to the players, and even amounting to "Ref applies Mk1 eyeball, assesses situation." What's most important is what we can talk about in ordinary language.

Quote from: Premier;791448You have it all wrong. You're asking "Why don't the OSR people do Traveller?"

Wrong question. The right question is: "Why don't the Traveller people do OSR?"

Plenty of reasons.

1) You can buy a CD-ROM with ALL the Classic Traveller stuff (very many books/adventures/aliens/games) in PDF for $35 from FFE. Another $35 and you get ALL the JTAS magazines. You can buy The Traveller Book on PoD. So all the OOP stuff is easily and cheaply available... The same goes to essentially every edition of Traveller, with the exception of GURPS Traveller and Hero Traveller.

2) FFE has a VERY liberal fair-use policy. You can essentially write ANYTHING you want for Classic Traveller, and openly claim compatibility with Classic Traveller, as long as it is provided for free.

3) There is an official, commercial, supported, in-print "retro-clone" for CT, AKA Mongoose Traveller.

4) Mongoose Traveller has an OGL and an SRD and even a compatibility license; all allow for commercial publication. A good number of commercial third-party products are now available for Mongoose Traveller, which are perfectly usable with CT (I wrote one - a whole setting, Outer Veil). Also a good number of Traveller fan-made settings and blogs around. In essence, you can publish ALMOST ANYTHING you want, commercially, for Mongoose Traveller and openly claim compatibility PROVIDED that you don't touch the official setting outside of Foreven. And MGT is close enough to CT so that your products will be quite compatible with it as well.

5) Many CT fans were playing their game straight for 30+ years, with no big edition break, including finding new players.

So there is little actual need for an "OSR" for Traveller.

Quote from: Phillip;791531The OSR is movement among fans of TSR-era D&D - including AD&D 2nd Ed - to produce new material for it as well as derivative spinoffs.

Unfortunately its also become a cover for bootlegging. "I have filed all the serial numbers off of MSH and am selling it totally legally under the OSR license!" Which is why OSR gets a bad rep from some game designers and some think its a haven for thieves. Hence the hostility you see now and then.

Quote from: golan2072;7920733) There is an official, commercial, supported, in-print "retro-clone" for CT, AKA Mongoose Traveller.

IIRC, Pundit's review of Mongoose said as much.