Quote from: RPGPundit;538537Bah.   If I was going for a "Devil's Dictionary" definition, I would actually go for the more subtle:

Modern Gaming: Any RPG released after the year you personally started roleplaying.

Which would then give us...

Old-School Gaming: Any RPG released during or before the year you personally started roleplaying.

Although they both lack bite. Subtlety is fine, in its place, but I prefer tweaking noses.

"...and is thus utter shit." should be added to the end of Modern Gaming.

"...and is thus utterly perfect." should be appended to Old-School Gaming.

These may lack subtlety, but they more accurately convey the attitudes so often on display.

Quote from: beejazz;538145Sorry, I'm not terribly familiar with ORE. How does it compare to the other games on the list, besides being (presumably) recent?



Dude, stop being terrible for a second. You're a bit more qualified to get into specifics than a lot of the people on this board, being an actual fan of this kind of game. If there's a place where you should make yourself useful, this is it.

It's recent, last 5-7 years or so.
One Roll Engine uses a d10 pool and looks for matches, it measures the number of matches and the value of the matched number to track different information within a single roll, such as speed and skill for attacking.

Quote from: beejazz;538491Assuming the rituals I described above had concrete casting times and such, would you use them?

I might -- it would depend on whether they would drop in to one of my homebrew worlds without requiring rewriting history because the magic system of the rules would not allow events to happen as they did. If your magic rules would require changing my campaign worlds to use, I would probably not use them unless they came with a setting so interesting I wanted to use it. In 35+ years of fantasy gaming only two worlds have managed to do that for more than a few sessions: Tekumel and Glorantha.

QuoteIn the system I'm writing, effectively everything is concentration. You can only keep one duration spell going at any given time (maybe more at higher levels).

That right there would make the system unusable for my Arn or Hidden Valley campaigns. History could not have happened as it did with magic working like that.

This isn't really commenting on your rules, however, as there probably aren't that many GMs who come to the table with the "campaign baggage" I do.

Like a few others have pointed out I don't find any real meaningful distinction in how we define old school or modern. Sorry I know that's not too helpful, but there it is.

Quote from: RandallS;538643I might -- it would depend on whether they would drop in to one of my homebrew worlds without requiring rewriting history because the magic system of the rules would not allow events to happen as they did. If your magic rules would require changing my campaign worlds to use, I would probably not use them unless they came with a setting so interesting I wanted to use it. In 35+ years of fantasy gaming only two worlds have managed to do that for more than a few sessions: Tekumel and Glorantha.

I'll keep that in mind. It's one of those "one of these days" projects, but I figured I would need to provide settings and aventures suitable to these rules, and might lose some people thanks to setting compatibility issues.

QuoteThat right there would make the system unusable for my Arn or Hidden Valley campaigns. History could not have happened as it did with magic working like that.

This isn't really commenting on your rules, however, as there probably aren't that many GMs who come to the table with the "campaign baggage" I do.

It's cool. I tend to build my settings at the same time as I'm running them, work at a smaller scale, and get sick of them eventually (rather, I get the itch to try things that wouldn't fit with what I've established), but I can see the convenience in the base of ready-made custom content. Homebrewing is really what the hobby is all about, however we choose to go about it.

I know at least Vreeg is like you in that he's got a home-brew that's probably been going since before I gamed at all. I can think of a few other examples as well.

Quote from: beejazz;538882I'll keep that in mind. It's one of those "one of these days" projects, but I figured I would need to provide settings and aventures suitable to these rules, and might lose some people thanks to setting compatibility issues.



It's cool. I tend to build my settings at the same time as I'm running them, work at a smaller scale, and get sick of them eventually (rather, I get the itch to try things that wouldn't fit with what I've established), but I can see the convenience in the base of ready-made custom content. Homebrewing is really what the hobby is all about, however we choose to go about it.

I know at least Vreeg is like you in that he's got a home-brew that's probably been going since before I gamed at all. I can think of a few other examples as well.

I am very much on the fly but I'm horrible at scratch building so ready made stuff that I can alter on the fly is perfect for me.

Here's the modern RPG testing procedure:

Hand the core book to an old whiny fuck. If the OWF shits his diapers, it's a modern game. If the OWF drools while mumbling about his totally rad 8th grade character, it's not a modern RPG.

Quote from: Spinachcat;538900Here's the modern RPG testing procedure:

Hand the core book to an old whiny fuck. If the OWF shits his diapers, it's a modern game. If the OWF drools while mumbling about his totally rad 8th grade character, it's not a modern RPG.

What a thin minded drone you are to allow yourself to be shaped by such stereotypes. Its like saying all Coke drinkers are fat. Not only is it wrong, but it's small hand-me-down thinking

BTW, 90% of the people I have ever roleplayed with DO NOT live in their parents home or basement

Quote from: deMonica;538974What a thin minded drone you are to allow yourself to be shaped by such stereotypes. Its like saying all Coke drinkers are fat. Not only is it wrong, but it's small hand-me-down thinking

BTW, 90% of the people I have ever roleplayed with DO NOT live in their parents home or basement

Non-sequitur much?

You know, if we answered this seriously, it might be something relevant.

What about picking out some specific trends or innovations and when they were introduced?

Once skills were defined as being something that modified a base attribute which was then rolled against a static difficulty number or an opposite skill was significant. The earliest that I saw this was in R. Talsorian Game's Mekton II which came out in 1987 where a score 1-10 attribute is added to a 1-10 level skill and a d10 is rolled vs a static difficulty number of between 1-35.

A very similar system using dice pools came out in the d6 Star Wars game which also arrived in 1987.

EDIT: Come to think of it, this is now considered the standard for skills as even the d20 system is based on this.

Quote from: beejazz;538977Non-sequitur much?

Perhaps via a self serving or agenda driven approach, yes

The only other game I played after Dnd was GURPS so I wouldn't be any help here. At least before White Wolf came out.

GURPS is d6 + skill rollover iirc.

Quote from: beejazz;538091The fun part of the list though is wondering why the traits get associated with each other. There's no reason an adventure-scale focus and an encounter-scale focus can't coexist.

I have been pondering not only more recent games, but the direction the gaming blogosphere has taken, and what I see is that these two scales are no longer emphasized.  What seems to be the primary focus is character-scale.  The game revolves around the actions of individuals, which leads to some confusion in design; the major problem these days is the adherence to a vaguely defined 'balance'.  Are they balancing characters at each level?  Across some arbitrary set of levels?  Most assume it is at each level, and I think that is probably accurate; enough for our purposes, anyway.

How does this affect game design overall?  I don't see too many recent games that are for generalized play, and more that seem to be a very narrow genre instead.  Much of the decrease in size of the hobby can be laid at the feet of games that may scratch the designers' itch, but appeal to few others because of this narrow focus.  

That was the strength of the Vintage Games: versatility. In some ways, their weakness as well.  You maybe can't play a clone of Conan, but you can get within sighting distance.  The genius was in the flexibility of rules that also let you play a Grey-ish Mouser, a Merlin-esque magic-user, and a Hospitallier-like Cleric at the same table.   Which isn't to say no rules can work well with constraints.  But those constraints, by definition, will limit the audience.  For example, if Marvel Super Heroes was written so only the X-Men from the 60s were playable characters and didn't include character generation rules, it would have clearly had a much smaller audience than the actual game.

QuoteBetter advice for (say) building dungeons or running mysteries or whatever would greatly improve a number of modern games. And I'm sure setpiece encounters or aspects of them have had their place at tables running older games. The practice had to emerge from somewhere is naive, given that the people who make games are also the people who play.

I agree; further, I think your suggestions for advice would fall neatly into guidelines covering a more generalized play.  If a particular group chooses to play the 60s X-Men, that's great, but advice for them would be the same as advice for a general game as well.

So is there a solution that hits a middle ground? I love genre heavy stuff so ignore my preferences if need be.

Quote from: beejazz;538977Non-sequitur much?

Not wrong though, is he.