Quote from: BillDowns;846782You came to a game with no expectations except the pitch the GM gave.  You role-played the character you rolled - that was a big part of the game.  You character could die at any time - that was part of it.  Getting to 5th level in D&D was doing well; 10th level was fantastic. And the GM was the final arbiter of the rules, although only bad ones changed these from session to session.

This is probably the best definition of old school I've read.

Quote from: Ravenswing;846576Old School: That which was standard practice (or what I thought to be "standard practice," or how people at my school gaming club played, anyway) when I discovered the hobby.

New School: Any way of doing things I encountered starting about 9-18 months later, most of which is crap.

Ancient History: Anything people did before I discovered the hobby, of which I will only begrudgingly acknowledge the existence if someone flashes me a publication date, most of which is crap.

""Old School dates from 19XX until 20XX." - Translation: the date when either (a) the system I've always played went into a new edition or overhauled the setting or (b) I switched to playing this way cooler newer system.

""New School" dates from the explosion of indie games on the market" - Translation: it dates from when I picked my head up and noticed there were more game systems out there than I'd previously been aware of, especially when the Sunday afternoon gaming group wanted to check them out.

""New School" means a shift in focus to setting plot, as opposed to strictly character goals." - Translation: I've never particularly gamed in Tekumel, the Third Imperium, Glorantha or anything like that, but I'm sure they only involved dungeon crawls anyway.

Sorry, but damn near about everything the definitionists are trying to label "New School," someone was doing in the 1970s. Point buy? Check. Getting people out of the dungeons? Check. Storytelling? Check. Innovation? Check. Rules light? Hell, White Box D&D had that. Proliferation of new ideas? Christ on a crutch, Alarums & Excursions had heaps of them from 1975 on, and The Wild Hunt started shortly after that. Heaps of supplements and splatbooks? OD&D had those too. Indie games? Everyone, his sister and the family dog were churning out variants and homebrews like crazy.

Alright, I've given my take on what Old School/New School really is, but what I believe the serious advocates think it is is basic: first they make a decision whether "Old School" or "New School" is the side they want to pick, based either on the "lame geezer antique/modern, hip, cool" or the "first & greatest/all glitz no substance newbie crap" dichotomies. The games and styles they like are slotted into the one side, the garbage they dislike into the other, and a gentlemen's agreement is made to ignore the dozens of games contradicting the premise on the wrong side of the agreed-upon date. Voila.

Folks, you know something? I GM a game (GURPS) that's 25 years old. It didn't pioneer a whole lot; there weren't many core mechanics that no one had ever before tried. It's sure as hell not obsolete. It wasn't the first game I played, and I've tried dozens of others, from OD&D to homebrews to published systems to games just out in the last few years. I can GM with any play style I want with it. Nothing prevents me from allowing character play free rein, just the same way that nothing prevented me last year from hauling a 31 year old homebrew dungeon out of mothballs and refurbishing it for a nostalgia spin.

Fuck the labels. Someone in 1985 might have described it as "new school;" some of the posters in this topic would call it "old school." The distinctions are meaningless, they're very arbitrary, and I'm waiting for the first poster to explain why we need them at all. Go out, play the games you want to play, have fun doing it, and who in the bloody hell cares whether your school is old or new?

Sounds about right to me;).

Quote from: NathanIW;846778Me neither. I just found it funny how what is essentially the same game suddenly got a lot more acceptable when it wasn't WotC publishing it.  For those of us who were concerned about how it actually worked at the table, the "it's an underdog competing against big bad WotC" narrative was just silly.

It's actually much more than that.

Maybe you weren't part of it, but you might remember the outcry that switching over from 3e to 3.5 caused?  The whole "WoTC is evil because I have to buy my books all over again!  WoTC SUX!"  It was everywhere, and I admit I was part of that crowd annoyed that we'd be forced to 'rebuy' our books to 'keep up to date'.

A few years later, Paizo come around and DOES THE EXACT SAME THING!  Even the fans called it '3.75'!

But instead of bitching and moaning about someone changing their game again and invalidating all their books (which Paizo, despite the original claims of backwards compatibility, did), these very same 'fans' praised Paizo, loved Paizo for doing it.

But if Wizards did it?  I'm pretty sure people would have bitched about it, but caved in anyway.

I still find it immensely amusing.

On the whole PF vs. OSR thing: a good part of Pathfinder (or 3E) being accepted as 'more OSR' is that 4E redefined all the benchmarks for what wasn't old school - martial encounter powers, warlords, healing surges... It was a beautiful time where 3E fans and grognards were united in hatred, much like Americans and Russians suddenly cooperating against an invasion from Mars.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;84654616) The game is not about running a predefined, prewritten setting. A GM has to make the game and the setting his own, even if he does use "official" material (like that gorgeous Greyhawk map...), and bonus points if he builds it from scratch.


(I always had more respect for GMs that did that. Even if their maps were sketchy - they were theirs.)

I also respect a GM for doing that but I don't think it's easy to claim that as uniquely 'old' as in there were loads of predefined settings in the 'old' days.

Quote from: AsenRG;846792Sounds about right to me;).

Yup that's hit it on the head.

'Golden Age', 'Silver Age', 'Bronze Age', 'Iron Age' nonsense most of the time.

Quote from: tzunder;846915I also respect a GM for doing that but I don't think it's easy to claim that as uniquely 'old' as in there were loads of predefined settings in the 'old' days.

Mmmm, no. There was just three. The Judges Guild Wilderlands Campaign Setting (1977), Blackmoor (1978) and Empire of the Petal Throne (1975-76).

I probably would have bought and used any one of them, I did end up running quite a few games set in the Wilderlands in the late 70's/ early 80's, because buying one or two of the modules was affordable, However never did manage to get the complete campaign setting until 2004. It was just too big to buy all at once.

EoPT was not too large, the boxed set was however very expensive, and there was a limited 1st edition print run of 5,000 or so... So I never even saw that in the old days, only heard stories and would sit in on games at GhengisCon. Once again was unable to buy it, until Lou Zocchi brought several boxes containing the Gamescience Tekumel sourcebook Swords & Glory, with him to Origins in 2003, where I picked up a copy at this booth.

TSR didn't even have a campaign setting until 1980 when the Mystara setting was released for 0D&D and Greyhawk was released for AD&D.

Aside from a few games set in the Wilderlands, all my wilderness campaign games from 1977-1980 were home brewed.

At first we just made up whatever suited us for our maps, adding inspirations and ideas from SF&F books that we had read. There were some early articles that came out in the Strategic Review and Dragon magazine that helped us with campaign world generation, and were very influential for me when I designed my fantasy campaign worlds.

Originally published in Dragon Magazine #8, The Development of Towns in D&D by Tony Watson was one inspiring article, that later made it into the Best of Dragon, Vol I.

Another early article that got plenty of use was Designing for Unique Wilderness Encounters by Daniel Clifton from Dragon Magazine #10.

Two other articles gave me the idea to make my own random generation tables for wilderness campaigns was Jim Ward's Deserted Cities of Mars which first appeared in the Strategic Review Vol 1, Issue 3 (1975) , and later Campaign Law (1984) from Iron Crown Enterprises.

While I did not use the 1e DMG (1980) for much early on, I did make extensive use of the random dungeon and wilderness generation tables located in the back of the book for my homebrew campaigns throughout the 80's and designed many charts and tables for random campaign generation.

So, no. There really was not much available in the 'old days' and we spent lots of time creating our own sandbox campaign worlds, because there was nothing else available.

When campaign settings finally did become available in the early to mid 80's we very rarely bought it. It had to be really good to compete with what we had already created on our own...

opps, I almost forgot Glorantha, which was Runequest's default campaign setting. First time I saw that was when it was released at GhengisCon I in 1979... Chaosium had this other supplement though with a duck and a sword artwork on it that looked so completely retarded, that I shied away from it, and didn't buy a copy of Runequest until 1987 or so. Turned out to be a tremendously good game system, and I really liked the Fantasy Europe campaign setting along with the really goo artwork that came with the Avalon Hill boxed set. Never did dig the Glorantha campaign setting, always thought the authors there were trying to be too smart and were secretly insulting their gaming audience by having them play intelligent pigs, and ducks, and whatnot.

That was one case where the terrible early artwork pushed me away from what was otherwise a really great gaming system. ...And Runequest included an awesome random campaign generation section.

Quote from: tzunder;846917'Golden Age', 'Silver Age', 'Bronze Age', 'Iron Age' nonsense most of the time.

Yep, absolutely.  Unless some widely-agreed upon standard takes hold in a field (like those terms with comic books), it's widely subjective, and it matters a lot where you stood.

I remember reading a column in the Hockey News from Joe Falls, a bunch of years back, in which he bemoaned modern hockey, and pronounced that the only good hockey ever played was in the 1940s and 50s.  Well, no kidding, Joe, thought I.  He was a Detroit sports writer for nearly 50 years, the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup or was a finalist eleven of those twenty years, and at the time he wrote that column, the Wings had only four winning seasons in the previous quarter-century.  Of course he found his own era lacking in comparison with the glorious times of old.  It's human nature.  (Me, a Bostonian of a younger generation, when the Boston Bruins blew chunks for most of the 1960s but were at the top of the heap in the 1970s, I had a different take on it.)

And the same thing applies to us.  The pull isn't to a set of rules or a style of gaming: it's to that wonderful time, for a certain cross-section of grognards, where we'd clutch scrawled sheets and polydice, spending night after night playing that wonderful game.

Quote from: GameDaddy;846924Mmmm, no. There was just three. The Judges Guild Wilderlands Campaign Setting (1977), Blackmoor (1978) and Empire of the Petal Throne (1975-76).

Which brings us back to the question of what 'old' means. Tegel Manor was published in 1977. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and the rest of the G and D series, along with Tomb of Horrors were published in 1978. In Search of the Unknown, Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, and Village of Hommlet were published in 1979. A bunch more were published by TSR and Judges Guild in 1980. They sold many tens of thousands of copies.

Outside D&D, the Spinward Marches for Traveller was published in 1979. I wasn't a big Traveller guy, but the guys I knew who were into it definitely used that book (as well as their own material).

So it's safe to say that using pre-made material (though not necessarily using it exclusively) was already very widespread by 1979. For people who weren't connected to the college or wargaming scene - and that was a large and growing proportion of players once the Holmes boxed set was published - published adventures were pretty much the only exposure into what D&D and other RPGs were actually about. That doesn't mean they only used published adventures - given the low number of modules and their level spread, that wasn't practical.

So some published and some home-brew was probably the case for most groups by the time of the Holmes boxed set. If by 'old-school' people mean only OD&D, then they should probably be explicit about that.

Matt Finch's primer is interesting and describes to me what I thought of (circa 1980) as the "original D&D" games, where people weren't even really playing a rule set, because there was no good solid rule set, so they just used what little printed material there was as inspiration, and made up most or all of the rest.

My experience with D&D was circa 1980 5th grade for me. I bought the white box collector's edition D&D set, which seemed amazingly incoherent, incomplete, and practically unusable to me. Attempts to use it just led to rants about how it didn't make sense. Other kids bought the AD&D books and tried playing those, but they weren't quite up to really understanding all of the rules or knowing what to do with the holes in the rules or their knowledge, and made a lot of stuff up and spread their inventions as if they were accurate. It was semi-playable if/when people agreed who was DM and they had a dungeon, but seemed highly flawed, particularly because players started lying about what they'd achieved and looted in play, and were all bluffing and insisting they really had level 10-100 characters with "5-button swords" etc, in an escalating imaginary arms race that didn't really involve playing a game and almost all of them stopped pretending they played D&D by 6th grade.

What I, my dad and my friends chose to actually play, was The Fantasy Trip, which we made campaign worlds for and played through about 10th-11th grade, when we started making up detailed house rules for more advanced tactical combat, and then switched to GURPS when it first appeared, because it was essentially what we had been trying to create with our house rules ("Mega-Detailed TFT") only far more playable and without us having to design rules instead of play. Also, it was more or less compatible with TFT, so I could and did adapt my existing TFT campaigns to use GURPS.

But I do have my own sense of what Old-School is, but it's Old-School TFT, which is still a sentimental favorite, and is quite unlike what Matt Flinch outlined, largely because my bad experiences with D&D led me to look at it as what I didn't want.

My flavor of Old School TFT, if expressed like Flinch's list, and in contrast to it, is more like this:

1) There are good mostly-realistic rules for most things, but GM discretion can cover everything else when needed.
2) Character abilities define how competent characters are, and the rules show how good they are at most tasks. These rules involve three basic attributes (ST, DX, IQ), IQ governs what talents and skills you can have, ST governs what equipment you can carry and use, and all your capacities and chances to succeed are based on these in a logical realistic way.
2b) However, as long as players stay in-character, they can come up with clever schemes and techniques and try to do things that don't bypass or break the rules or their logic.
3) PCs generally start at "above average" level (32 points vs. 30 average), and have the potential to become much more capable, if they somehow manage to survive and earn tons of experience points, train new talents, or spells, etc. But no one has the power of a comic book superhero. Though there are some pretty powerful magic items.
4) Game balance exists in that most all characters use the same system, have a comparable number of points, and the combat system is dangerous for everyone, and rewards experience earned in play, and using good tactics. And yes, the world doesn't magically warp and scale to match PC power levels... although the more trouble you get into, the more powerful people may be involved. Even a hero who survived ten or even twenty years of adventuring still isn't going to be inherently super-powerful and able to just overpower dragons or dozens of men... unless he does what he did to survive that long, which would be to use friends, tactics, magic, and/or avoid getting into deadly situations.

And I'd add:

5) Almost every combat will involve laying out a tactical hex map and counters, and using all of the relevant rules from Advanced Melee. The tactical combat system is the foundation of the game, and is often the focus of most of the gameplay. Much of the fun of play is deciding exactly how to maneuver, which weapons to use in which way against which targets, and watching the mayhem unfold, with your characters' lives and limbs on the line.
6) Practically every combat is dangerous and has meaningful consequences. People can take about 7-15 points of damage, and weapons average 3-11 per hit, with occasional double- and triple-damage results, and rules for losing body parts.
7) There are no healing spells. Medicine can heal 2-3 points. Healing potions are rare, heal 1 point of damage each, and have a market value, when available, of $100. Resting up from serious injuries takes more than a week of bed rest. So, yeah, it's really best if you take that combat seriously.
Everything you own is written down and has a location in the game world. We use the encumbrance rules, which require you to list where/how you carry everything on your person, and which have effects in play. Carrying stuff and wearing armor slows you down and makes you less agile, which have serious effects on ... combat (q.v. above).

Quote from: NathanIW;846564In old school games the referee describes a situation and the players describe what their characters do in response to that situation.  The referee uses the rules and describes the results.  This creates a new situation that the players then respond to.  In an ongoing circuit.

Yeah, people forget that the term referee or game master wasn't some sort of douchebag way to put the GM on a higher plane than other players; it as a way recognize that one player was responsible for administering the rules of the game.

And yet there are people on TBP today arguing that D&D players have always taken a mechanics-first approach to play. I don't know how much of that is impenetrable ignorance and how much is outright trolling.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;846797Maybe you weren't part of it, but you might remember the outcry that switching over from 3e to 3.5 caused?  The whole "WoTC is evil because I have to buy my books all over again!  WoTC SUX!"  It was everywhere, and I admit I was part of that crowd annoyed that we'd be forced to 'rebuy' our books to 'keep up to date'.

A few years later, Paizo come around and DOES THE EXACT SAME THING!  Even the fans called it '3.75'!

But instead of bitching and moaning about someone changing their game again and invalidating all their books (which Paizo, despite the original claims of backwards compatibility, did), these very same 'fans' praised Paizo, loved Paizo for doing it.

But if Wizards did it?  I'm pretty sure people would have bitched about it, but caved in anyway.

Also, see: 4E to 4E Essentials nerdfury, with 13th Age standing in for Pathfinder.

Quote from: Ravenswing;846925
And the same thing applies to us.  The pull isn't to a set of rules or a style of gaming: it's to that wonderful time, for a certain cross-section of grognards, where we'd clutch scrawled sheets and polydice, spending night after night playing that wonderful game.

  Why this is old school, nor am I out of it.   
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of Gygax,           
And tasted the eternal joys of OD&D,   
Am not enrolled forevermore in old school,   
In seeking always that everlasting bliss?

  (With apologies to Christopher Marlowe and the OSR. )

Quote from: Ravenswing;846925Yep, absolutely.  Unless some widely-agreed upon standard takes hold in a field (like those terms with comic books), it's widely subjective, and it matters a lot where you stood.

I remember reading a column in the Hockey News from Joe Falls, a bunch of years back, in which he bemoaned modern hockey, and pronounced that the only good hockey ever played was in the 1940s and 50s.  Well, no kidding, Joe, thought I.  He was a Detroit sports writer for nearly 50 years, the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup or was a finalist eleven of those twenty years, and at the time he wrote that column, the Wings had only four winning seasons in the previous quarter-century.  Of course he found his own era lacking in comparison with the glorious times of old.  It's human nature.  (Me, a Bostonian of a younger generation, when the Boston Bruins blew chunks for most of the 1960s but were at the top of the heap in the 1970s, I had a different take on it.)

And the same thing applies to us.  The pull isn't to a set of rules or a style of gaming: it's to that wonderful time, for a certain cross-section of grognards, where we'd clutch scrawled sheets and polydice, spending night after night playing that wonderful game.

While I think your definition is pretty much "how it's used", I don't think you can generalise to "old school not existing" in other areas of life. In fact, it exists even in RPGs, to a degree (the right way is, of course, the way I'm using it, it's just that all those people that are using it wrong muddy the waters:p:D!)
But, back to the question of "old school", I find that it means (not only regarding RPGs):
A greater emphasis on improvising.
A greater emphasis on practicality instead of showmanship.
A greater reliance on hierarchic relationships.
Less importance being attributed to feelings and not hurting them.
Systems in general being less codified.

Granted, I have no idea whether this holds true in American football, but in several areas I can think of, it is true. Seems to be true in RPGs as well:).
Well, at least it seems to fit my impression of what the OSR has as far as shared values are concerned;).

(nods to Skarg) I was, in my own time, a devoted TFT GM, and shifted to GURPS largely out of its much greater granularity and its divorcing of the direct link between XP and stats.  But when I started GMing again in 2003 after a few years' hiatus, I very nearly went back to it.  It's still a perfectly sound, clean system.