Quote from: CalithenaCoC'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.

bwa?  in english, this time? :confused:

I'd accept 1980-81 as a demarcation line, more so to include The Fantasy Trip.  If SJ hadn't taken so long to write the thing up he could have beat a 1979-1980 cut-off (5 years from D&D's first release).

I like the idea of a date, versus style of game.  The early date conveying more a sense of the beginnings of the RPG movement and hence "old-school" in the more popular hip-hop sense.

1980 is the demarcation line, though of course you'll find people coming up with old-school games and in an old-school style even today.

Quote from: XantherI'd accept 1980-81 as a demarcation line, more so to include The Fantasy Trip.  If SJ hadn't taken so long to write the thing up he could have beat a 1979-1980 cut-off (5 years from D&D's first release).

I like the idea of a date, versus style of game.  The early date conveying more a sense of the beginnings of the RPG movement and hence "old-school" in the more popular hip-hop sense.

Yeah, but even once you start drawing arbitrary demarcations like date, you can still look back and find elements of style in common anyway, and even then the lines start to blur when you talk about newer stuff with older feel.

To use your hip-hop example, Jurassic 5 have a decidedly, and deliberately old-school sound to them, but while many of the guys have been in music for a long time, they only really got wide attention in the 2000's.

Given this cacophony, it may be useful to try and define, not old school for once, but, uh, middle school. 1981 to 1990. Games before Vampire which weren't just precursors of this and that or refinements of the other thing but which were original and awesome in their own right.

So, for once, NOT James Bond as precursor of movie gaming, or C&S as the better D&D. But rather, games that worked in and of THEMSELVES, and whose in-and-of-themselvesness has meanwhile been buried by too much focus on old and new schools alike.

I think the fact that Balbinus used the word "core" pretty much requires old-school by date categorization.  I mean you don't get much older-school at heart than Aces & Eights these days, but I wouldn't be throwing it on any core old-school lists due to the fact that it was only released a few months ago.

Pierce -

The big developments in the eighties as I saw them were

1) The universal RPG - GURPS coming out of Champions/HERO, many others.

2) The highly focused setting RPG - Paranoia, James Bond, Toon, Ghostbusters, Ars Magica, etc.

Both of these were new ways of doing things in the post-old-school period. Prior to that almost everything was a broader genre RPG - Bunnies & Burrows and CoC being partial exceptions perhaps, but still.

Quote from: beeberbwa?  in english, this time? :confused:

What Cal's saying is, CoC differed strongly from what came before, and was a trend-setter for what came after. How, exactly? Following the post above, I'd suggest focus on a fairly narrow type of scenario. And, what is almost but not quite the same thing, focus on a very different type of scenario than what might be considered the default for previous games. While I don't know CoC much at all, I don't get the impression that the broad arc of game play is a sort of mythic wandering--the elaboration of character and setting which unified games as different as D&D and Traveller.

CoC permanently put the skewer in a bunch of ideas generally shared about RPGs up to that time. One big one was that long-term identification with the character and/or its improvement was at all necessary for fun play. Another, maybe even bigger, was the idea that character death was supposed to be experienced as a bad thing by the player - breaking down ego-identification with the in-game token. Not that these things suddenly became bad or wrong, just that before CoC it hadn't clearly been experienced (by a lot of people anyway) that it could be some other way.

The reversal did however come in the context of a traditional second wave, BRP driven system and adventures that involved perilous scenes of action and/or sanity assault, meaning that when the rubber hit the road play did in fact resemble most other games of the time, except that you went into it fully expecting to die or go insane, and that was part of the fun (as opposed to high-lethality D&D, where it was something to be avoided).

The longer one thinks about it the longer CoC is quite the unique entity. There's PC lethality, but on the other hand there's the model of campaign-length play, which was introduced into gaming, on a systematic basis anyway, for CoC (Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and after).

So you have a game in which your individual characters may die easily but your games last a long while. There's plot continuity, but the protagonists change all the time.

Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Mopnsters! are way earlier examples of D&D reversals, although a lot more obvious in their counterpointyness.

OK, I admit I had to check the rpg.net index for that Monsters thing. Love the cover!

Sett,

I get what you're saying about Monsters, Monsters, but I don't see as how that reversal is as conceptually important. I don't understand how you think T&T is doing this.

Pierce,

Actually, I think that all the campaign stuff that grew up later with CoC is more a function of the fact that 90% of non-dungeon-crawling gamers do essentially the same thing with all RPGs, and they did it with CoC too. Not to say that your possible configuration didn't also happen though.