Quote from: Sigmund;369075Well, I am not an adherent of the "OSR", so that's probably part of the issue. I like and play "old school" games such as OSRIC and LL, but I'm not up on the OSR scene or into fiddling with S&W or any other game to make it my own. Another issue for me is that DnD is not the only, and perhaps not even the main, game I think of when thinking of "old school" (which for me means a feeling approximating the one I had in the "old" days). I played Dragonquest, Top Secret, Superworld, 1e Shadowrun, Stormbringer, Traveller, and TFT as much or more than DnD back then, so they have at least as much of an influence on what feels "old school" to me as DnD. GD3 feels "old school" to me. YYMV, and of course even without an "old school" feel, GD3 still rocks

That probably makes a big difference, Sigmund. Traveller, for example, is not at all Accretive, which is why I call it the oldest of the New School, though it is very simple. Superworld and Stormbringer are both BRP IIRC, and thus examples of the Disappearing system model. I never played the others. What is Old School to you is not Old School to most of the OSR. That's pretty much focused on old TSR games, primarily D&D, from what I can see.

And yes, GD3 does indeed rock!

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;369078That probably makes a big difference, Sigmund. Traveller, for example, is not at all Accretive, which is why I call it the oldest of the New School, though it is very simple. Superworld and Stormbringer are both BRP IIRC, and thus examples of the Disappearing system model. I never played the others. What is Old School to you is not Old School to most of the OSR. That's pretty much focused on old TSR games, primarily D&D, from what I can see.

And yes, GD3 does indeed rock!

-clash

Heh, yep. So lets leave the "old school" tag aside for a moment and I'll try to explain why I like GD3 for a moment. Like you pointed out it's robust, but it's still very simple. It supports the modern genre very well, which is pretty much my favorite, and also seems to be able to handle at least sci-fi, horror, and western games very well too. Combats are quick and fun, character creation is fast and surprisingly flexible, and it so far seems very easy to create subsystems for (I've been looking into an alternate magic system, for example). Plus, the game itself, and the various settings/supplements that can be used with it (all the GDi stuff and IG stuff) are very reasonably priced.

Gah, coming across as a shill/fanboy again, but what the hell, I really do like it I really get taken back to my Top Secret/TFT days messing with the game. Maybe because so far my favorite game of genreDiversion has been my GD3 Miami Nights game that I ran for some friends over a few weekends, which was a blast. Got a chance to jam the old 80's tunes and talk about Vans, Members Only jackets, and Camaro Berlinettas again.

Quote from: Hairfoot;368234For me, "old school" is genre-neutral and about mechanically fast and fluid rules that allow a game session to roll along at a good pace without frequent pauses to look up the rules for firing an arrow at a target 25' away who's looking through a window, or stopping every two minutes to add together half a dozen different bonuses to get a value which is modified by a die roll and charted on a table.

Yes, that's exactly how I feel and that's exactly what GD3 delivers.

QuoteAnd don't pay any attention to Pundit.  He published a game that he thought would become the gold standard for classic gaming, but turned out to be as popular as syphilis.  He has a lot of self-esteem invested in wanting others to fail where he did.

I reviewed FtA! when it first came out and although it's been awhile since I've looked at it, I remember it being a solid fantasy rules set that was more focused than 2E and less complex than 3E. What I liked most were the stunts which incidentally, Brett does something similar with GD3's exploits.  I never got the feeling Pundit was trying to set any standard, just that he was creating the kind of game that best fit his playstyle.

Quote from: estar;368343I see some people like the cover I designed.

Count me as one.  Awesome job.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;368368I haven't seen GenreDiversion, but I feel there's a bit of a disconnect when some people try to claim their game is "old school" largely on the basis of simplicity.

-snipped--

Again IMO, old school games revolve around providing not-very-complicated mechanics for doing stuff, in the concrete in-the-moment sense. As such the mechanics are an adjunct to the real core of the game, which is highly analogue "playing pretend". The mechanics are there to answer questions about stuff where the group (the GM in particular) can't come up with an obvious result without thinking about it. But they treat that stuff as real stuff, not as an abstract "simple contest" or "opposed contest".

Hey, just to be clear, to my knowledge Brett has never billed his games as old school. It was an observation I made, based on my feeling of what an old school game feels like to me--basically red box D&D, Star Wars WEG, and to some extent Shadowrun 2E. All of these games happen to share fairly universal mechanics and all of them provided fast and fun gameplay that focuses more on action than social conflict. GD3 has that same feel to me.

But now clash is talking about secretions and stuff so I don't know what to think.  

Quote from: Sigmund;369082Maybe because so far my favorite game of genreDiversion has been my GD3 Miami Nights game that I ran for some friends over a few weekends, which was a blast. Got a chance to jam the old 80's tunes and talk about Vans, Members Only jackets, and Camaro Berlinettas again.

Dude if you don't post an Actual Play report, I'm going to be highly upset.  Writing Vice Squad: Miami Nights was more fun than I can say--the "research" alone was a blast.  Weeks of 80s music, I Love the 80s shows, and Miami Vice episodes. Just hope that came across in the writing.

Pete

Quote from: pspahn;369134But now clash is talking about secretions and stuff so I don't know what to think.  

Hey, lots of people talk about secretions, but I *do* something about 'em!

-clash

Quote from: pspahn;368015Okay, I see posts about the OSR and I get the fact that it's a return to simpler systems and promoting fun gameplay. So why is precis intermedia's genrediversion line, particularly Genrediversion 3, never mentioned as part of the OSR?  

Because as with gaming in general, so with "old school", it's all about D&D.

Quote from: pspahn;369134Hey, just to be clear, to my knowledge Brett has never billed his games as old school. It was an observation I made, based on my feeling of what an old school game feels like to me--basically red box D&D, Star Wars WEG, and to some extent Shadowrun 2E. All of these games happen to share fairly universal mechanics and all of them provided fast and fun gameplay that focuses more on action than social conflict. GD3 has that same feel to me.

But now clash is talking about secretions and stuff so I don't know what to think.  

You should be thinking "Run!"

Yes, I get that Brett hasn't ever done that, didn't mean to imply that he had, but others do it on behalf of their favorite game from time to time.

Anyway, I've never read WEG SW or SR, so I can't comment. Basic D&D (I know Moldvay best) IMO doesn't really have universal mechanics--rather, it just has a small set of mechanics, which incidentally aren't very consistent in approach (spells slots vs. %-ile skills vs. d20-to-hit), plus a few ad-hocs (morale, surprise, random encounters), all cemented together by description and judgment.

YMMV but to me, simplicity is less central to old-school-ness than that overall structure of rules-as-adjunct.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;369197YMMV but to me, simplicity is less central to old-school-ness than that overall structure of rules-as-adjunct.

I think rules as guidelines that the GM can modify as needed by the campaign/players is the fairly primary to the old school experience. However, rules lite is almost as important to many because such rules are much easier to modify without having to worry about breaking something elsewhere in the game AND because they define less about the game world, leaving the GM freer to design his campaign as desired without pre-written very specific rules getting in the way. Also, smaller sets of rules are generally easier to homebrew adventures for as it is far less work to create NPC and monster stat blocks and the like.

Note, however, that rules light is relative. AD&D1e is rules-medium-lite (compared to the D&D of) today but was rules heavy (compared to D&D then) when it came out in the late 1970s.

Quote from: RandallS;369217Note, however, that rules light is relative. AD&D1e is rules-medium-lite (compared to the D&D of) today but was rules heavy (compared to D&D then) when it came out in the late 1970s.

Yup. Depends on which side of the screen you're sitting, too. By design.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;369197Anyway, I've never read WEG SW or SR, so I can't comment. Basic D&D (I know Moldvay best) IMO doesn't really have universal mechanics--rather, it just has a small set of mechanics, which incidentally aren't very consistent in approach (spells slots vs. %-ile skills vs. d20-to-hit), plus a few ad-hocs (morale, surprise, random encounters), all cemented together by descript.

I guess I mainly remember the D20 to hit and saves. I don't recall any skills and only a d6 roll for surprise and initiative. I think we may have houseruled skills to work off attributes so that was d20 too. It was a very easy simple system.

Quote from: RPGPundit;368217The basic answer is because it isn't a nearly-identical copy (right down to the artwork and cheap production values) of something they read (and maybe masturbated to the artwork of) some 32 years ago.

GenreDiversion has a very old-school feel; but to appeal to the OSR Brett would need to claim its a Traveller Clone, write every book to look like a Traveller manual, hire some has-been amateur artist to draw art for his books that are horrific by our modern standards (and was not even actually considered good art, just cheap art, back in the 70s), and then write an article in some fanzine about how everything produced in RPGs after 1983 has led to the moral corruption of our grandchildren.

Then it may have a shot.

RPGPundit

Pundit nails it again.  This whole OSR bollocks is essentially the reactionary right wing of the hobby, the real opposite pole from the Forge, a Tea Party movement with dice.  

I have to say I'm pretty fucking sick of it, and sick of the way it's attitude has basically taken over this website.  What was once a site about how mainstream play was actually fun after all, contrary to the claims of the Forge and RPGnet sets, has instead become dominated by an attitude every bit as hostile to normal gaming, just from an opposite pole.

It's enough to make a man want to take up 4e, despite his own misgivings, just to give the present userbase the finger.  

For god's sake, DO NOT worry about what the hell the OSR thinks of your game, anymore than a congressman should worry about what the Tea Party movement thinks about the health insurance bill.

The percentile skills are the Thief stuff...hard to miss, but maybe easy to forget.

Saves BTW are another "pebble" in the conglomerate. Yes, they use a d20 but you need a completely different chart--it's quite different from to-hit.

I realize that's been simplified and regularized in some of the recent clones (S&W? C&C?) so that it could be seen as part of a generic base-bonus-plus-advancement approach. But originally they were separate.

Quote from: pspahn;369134Dude if you don't post an Actual Play report, I'm going to be highly upset.  Writing Vice Squad: Miami Nights was more fun than I can say--the "research" alone was a blast.  Weeks of 80s music, I Love the 80s shows, and Miami Vice episodes. Just hope that came across in the writing.

Pete

Gah, that was a bit ago, and I'm not very good at writing APs anyway. I'll dig through my notes and recollections when my girlfriend is out of town next week and see what I can put together, she leaves Saturday to visit her parents for the week so I'm going to be spending time with her for the next couple days. Nobody died, I can tell ya that I set up Miami Under Fire with talk in Vice about the investigation of the Drug Lord Murders and how the PCs were being assigned to investigate alongside the original investigating officers, then did the first part of The Deal from Miami Nights, then switched back to MUF. I remember they blew the interrogation of Richie Fulmer, so I had to pull out Lucky Bust. It was a blast. I love your handling of investigations and will be carrying that over to all my games, your No Dead Ends section is brilliant.

Quote from: J Arcane;369288For god's sake, DO NOT worry about what the hell the OSR thinks of your game, anymore than a congressman should worry about what the Tea Party movement thinks about the health insurance bill.

Well it would be stupid from a marketing standpoint to disregard the OSR if your game happened to fit their criteria of old school. Once the game is written it's all about getting the attention of those who would be most interested in playing it.  I mean if there was a large AIOE Renaissance (alien invasion of earth) going on that felt that only alien invasion of earth rpgs were worth playing, I'd certainly be a fool not to market Stormrift to them, even if I felt other genres were still playable.

Pete

Quote from: Sigmund;369344Gah, that was a bit ago, and I'm not very good at writing APs anyway. I'll dig through my notes and recollections when my girlfriend is out of town next week and see what I can put together, she leaves Saturday to visit her parents for the week so I'm going to be spending time with her for the next couple days. Nobody died, I can tell ya that I set up Miami Under Fire with talk in Vice about the investigation of the Drug Lord Murders and how the PCs were being assigned to investigate alongside the original investigating officers, then did the first part of The Deal from Miami Nights, then switched back to MUF. I remember they blew the interrogation of Richie Fulmer, so I had to pull out Lucky Bust. It was a blast. I love your handling of investigations and will be carrying that over to all my games, your No Dead Ends section is brilliant.

Awesome! A lot of people ripped on No Dead Ends saying it took away player responsibility and encouraged Illusionism but I don't care. I write what I play and that techniques served me well for 27 years now so I'm not changing.

Pete

Quote from: pspahn;369352Well it would be stupid from a marketing standpoint to disregard the OSR if your game happened to fit their criteria of old school. Once the game is written it's all about getting the attention of those who would be most interested in playing it.  I mean if there was a large AIOE Renaissance (alien invasion of earth) going on that felt that only alien invasion of earth rpgs were worth playing, I'd certainly be a fool not to market Stormrift to them, even if I felt other genres were still playable.

Pete

You will never fit their criteria, because they don't even understand what the criteria are, other than that Your Game isn't in it, because it's not Old School Enough.  

Unless you've plagiarized a forgotten edition of D&D and reprinted it in your own name, you will never garner anything but whining about it.