What is Old School?

[tdenmark]

Was discussing the OSR with someone whose first RPG was 3rd edition D&D and they called 2nd edition Old School. That caught me by surprise since I'd always considered everything before AD&D to be Old School. Maybe 1st edition AD&D.

What do you think?

[mgtremaine]

I think Matt Finch did a nice job going over this in his Old School Primer back in 2008.

-Mike

[jeffb]

keep in mind it's early..and I'm only on my 1st cup of coffee after a shirtty week at work..but I'll try.

I think it's relative to the individual and we create our own definitions- it's a "taste" thing, like art, or entertainment, or..food.

For me, "old school" is not that easily determined by rules set alone.

Dungeon World uses modern mechanics that are very different, but to me encourages old school play much like when I was a kid in the 70s playing OD&D.

C&C encourages old school in it's own way, but the mechanics are also a derivative of 3.0.

DCCRPG throws out "old school" all the time- but I'm not sure it qualifies (in my mind) as it's become more of a caricature of old school over the years- sort of like Hackmaster without the 16 yo humor.

Considering D&D only: In the mid 90s when I first encountered 2E after being completely out of TTRPG gaming for about 8 years, I felt it was the same game as I owned previous, just different themes introduced with a few settings like PS and SJ etc. DS,GH,FR, Mystara, even DL, were all sufficiently "old school" themed, and RL was a thing in 1983 too. Scrub the logo off your character sheet and most players would never notice the difference between 1E and 2E. Today, my aged self finds 2E far more old school than anything Wizards has produced, and even more old school than a large chunk of OSR products from a rules AND style standpoint, especially if one is only considering the core rulebooks (which is always my default when talking 2E).

3E tried to introduce old school themes ("back to the dungeon") but the "game within the game" gameplay elements were so strong they overrode any sort of style.

4E approaches things in a completely different manner (and I applaud it for that).

5E sits in a limbo like area where the rules are inoffensive to many "old schoolers" but stylistically is confused- it's all regurgitated Spam, and intended style of gameplay (and player) keeps morphing at WOTC's whim.

So I voted for "something else". Feel and style of play are ultimately more important to "old school" than rules details, but that's not to say rules are unimportant- it all goes hand in hand.

[tdenmark]

Oct 29, 2022 5:39:55 GMT -6 mgtremaine said:

I think Matt Finch did a nice job going over this in his Old School Primer back in 2008.

-Mike

The Old School Primer is brilliant, but quite a narrow definition. And that was 14 years ago, is it time for an update? Or is that forever the definition?

[Finarvyn]

My gut reaction would be that old school is "anything pre 3E" because I feel like most of the stuff from OD&D, AD&D, BECMI, and 2E are somewhat compatible with one another. Sure the AC changes a little, and HD vary from one edition to another, but I used to have the 2E Monsterous Manual as my primary go-to in my OD&D campaigns and never sweated the details. By the time you look at 3E the scale of attributes changes, the scale of HD seems to vary, monsters have individual actions and sheets that look like character sheets instead of stat-lines, and the game doesn't have the same feel to me.

Both DCC and C&C are newer but still feel like old school to me. It's not just a publishing date, but instead more of a philosophy and/or style of play.

But, as others have noted, old school means different things to different folks.

[hamurai]

I think it heavily depends on the frame of reference. Today, I find many if not most RPGs of my youth "old school", in the way that the game system and/or the representation (mainly writing style & layout) is.

AD&D 2e was the first edition I regularly played over several years, and while it was more modern than the B/X edition I had encountered earlier, it feels old school to me today.

But also the quirky, sometimes bloated games of the 90s feel old school when compared to modern games of the last 10 years or so. When I think of Shadowrun 2.01 (which we also played many years in my youth) or Vampire the Masquerade, I can't help but feel it's old school, too - the way it was written, the way the books were layed out, the (awesome) artwork...

I guess it also comes down partly to the way we played as youths. At some point we adopted a more modern/grown-up way of playing the games which was more story-driven and less about defeating enemies and grabbing their valuables, but that was not connected to a specific game system.

[dicebro]

“Old School” : A group of teachers and students pursuing knowledge together about RPGs that are no longer young.

[geoffrey]

Oct 29, 2022 7:32:40 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

My gut reaction would be that old school is "anything pre 3E" because I feel like most of the stuff from OD&D, AD&D, BECMI, and 2E are somewhat compatible with one another. Sure the AC changes a little, and HD vary from one edition to another, but I used to have the 2E Monsterous Manual as my primary go-to in my OD&D campaigns and never sweated the details. By the time you look at 3E the scale of attributes changes, the scale of HD seems to vary, monsters have individual actions and sheets that look like character sheets instead of stat-lines, and the game doesn't have the same feel to me.

Both DCC and C&C are newer but still feel like old school to me. It's not just a publishing date, but instead more of a philosophy and/or style of play.

That's pretty much my opinion as well. I'll add only that I think that some 3rd edition modules (in spite of the fact that they were published for 3rd edition) are old school. I'm thinking of the original three Rappan Athuk modules and The Tomb of Abysthor (both published by Necromancer Games).

[Desparil]

It's a sliding scale, just like classic cars. The Corvette C4 ZR-1 (1990-1995) wasn't considered a classic car in the early 2000s, just like AD&D 2E wasn't thought of as old school. Twenty years have passed since then, however, and definitions change over time. In another twenty years, the ZR-1 will be an antique car rather than a classic car. In the RPG world, with Paizo having made some significant changes in Pathfinder 2 that mark a break from its origins in D&D, I give it another ten years or so before there's a sizeable cohort of people who consider D&D 3.5 to be old school.
We already have a perfectly good term to cover the very earliest era of the game, it's in the name of this forum. Back to the example of the ZR-1, while it will eventually come to be considered an antique car, it will never be a vintage car because only cars produced from 1919-1930 are considered vintage. "Original" is to D&D as "vintage" is to cars. "Old school" is the big tent that covers a broad swathe of the game's history, at least until the time comes when the community decides to make a further distinction between "classic" and "antique" versions of the game.

[tdenmark]

Oct 29, 2022 7:32:40 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

My gut reaction would be that old school is "anything pre 3E" because I feel like most of the stuff from OD&D, AD&D, BECMI, and 2E are somewhat compatible with one another. Sure the AC changes a little, and HD vary from one edition to another, but I used to have the 2E Monsterous Manual as my primary go-to in my OD&D campaigns and never sweated the details. By the time you look at 3E the scale of attributes changes, the scale of HD seems to vary, monsters have individual actions and sheets that look like character sheets instead of stat-lines, and the game doesn't have the same feel to me.

Both DCC and C&C are newer but still feel like old school to me. It's not just a publishing date, but instead more of a philosophy and/or style of play.

But, as others have noted, old school means different things to different folks.

I think this is where I'm at too now. For the longest time I was contra 2e but have come around. You could grab any pre 3rd edition book (even those 2e Powers & Options books) and any OD&D book and they are more or less compatible enough you could find a way to combine them. 3rd edition was the first real break.

[Deleted]

My first game was AD&D 1E, but through all the reading I have done on this forum and the exposure to OD&D, I have come to the conclusion that the Original 3LBB is Old School and everything after that is less so. I have played a lot of 1E over the years, but it is not old school in the same way that OD&D is old school.

[Deleted]

Oct 29, 2022 19:30:24 GMT -6 @sonofbear said:

My first game was AD&D 1E, but through all the reading I have done on this forum and the exposure to OD&D, I have come to the conclusion that the Original 3LBB is Old School and everything after that is less so. I have played a lot of 1E over the years, but it is not old school in the same way that OD&D is old school.

Kind of like the difference between c (AD&D 1e) and assembly language (OD&D). Both can write on the skin of the machine, but assembly language does nothing but.

[talysman]

I picked the "descending AC (2e and earlier)" option, although I wouldn't have phrased it that way, and I think it's more complicated than that. I have a lot to say on the subject.

To me, it's pretty obvious that in terms of D&D only, "old school" means "TSR-era D&D". Descending AC is one obvious distinction between TSR-era D&D (and D&D knockoffs from that era) and WotC-era D&D + newer games that are more or less D&D-like, but there are other features I'd say are more important.

Also, there's the question of "old school feel". This is harder to pin down to specific mechanics, but is more a matter of focus. This is why 1e sometimes feels less old school than 0e or the Basic/Classic line, 2e feels even less so to some people, and why Dragonlance is frequently cited as a turning point. I can go into this more later, if needed.

I've said elsewhere I think there needs to be more than one term, other than just using "OSR" for everything (and conflating "old school" and "OSR".]

• Literally Old School: RPGs published in that first wave of games beginning with OD&D and ending somewhere in the mid-'80s.
  
• Old School Renaissance/Revival (OSR): TSR-era D&D, other class-and-level systems from that time like Tunnels & Trolls, and their clones. This is what the term was originally used for.
• Old School Adjacent (OSA): Non-class-and-level systems from the same time period, and their clones. Runequest, The Fantasy Trip, Traveller and the like. Not compatible with OSR or (usually) with each other, but still has an old school feel.
• Old School Playstyle (OSP): Games not based on or compatible with any old school systems, but played in an old-school manner. Ranges from existing games like D&D 5e modified to play old school through new designs like DCC.

[Greyharp]

I voted for descending AC, although if there had been an option "OD&D through to 1e AD&D" I probably would have gone with that. I do like talysman's "TSR-era D&D", a phrase I've often used myself in discussion about the OSR. Gabor (Melan) has a very interesting post about 2e not being old school and I find it pretty convincing. I've got a couple of the core books of 2e, but only for interest's sake. I saw nothing in the day to tempt me away from the older versions I guess.

[Deleted]

Oct 29, 2022 19:59:03 GMT -6 @doublejig2 said:

Oct 29, 2022 19:30:24 GMT -6 @sonofbear said:

My first game was AD&D 1E, but through all the reading I have done on this forum and the exposure to OD&D, I have come to the conclusion that the Original 3LBB is Old School and everything after that is less so. I have played a lot of 1E over the years, but it is not old school in the same way that OD&D is old school.

Kind of like the difference between c (AD&D 1e) and assembly language (OD&D). Both can write on the skin of the machine, but assembly language does nothing but.

Not a programmer, so I am not quite sure what you are trying to say or what you are implying about the two games.

[Falconer]

Anything before 1980 (AKA the 1970s) works for me. At least in a D&D context, the 70s products define old school. Plenty of later stuff adheres to or participates in that school to a greater or lesser extend. Obviously lots of the 80s. All of 2e vestigially; WotC 2e in a more intentional sense. Some aspects of the early 3.0 scene, initially from WotC and carried on by Necro and Goodman. Our OSR, of course, looks back at the 70s and strikes out in new directions.

[Deleted]

Oct 29, 2022 21:53:49 GMT -6 @sonofbear said:

Oct 29, 2022 19:59:03 GMT -6 @doublejig2 said:

Kind of like the difference between c (AD&D 1e) and assembly language (OD&D). Both can write on the skin of the machine, but assembly language does nothing but.

Not a programmer, so I am not quite sure what you are trying to say or what you are implying about the two games.

It's enough to consider that there is no OD&D at a lower level, and AD&D 1e builds on that.

[dicebro]

I hate to break it to you. But even Original D&D (1974) isn’t Old School. It clearly states on page 13 of the Dungeon Masters Guide that “old”, as far as human aging goes, is 61-90 years. At best these editions are “middle aged”.

[waysoftheearth]

I find no meaningful equivalence between between old school and the now current OSR. One is a pragmatic approach to fantastic medieval wargames. The other is branding/marketing who-haw.

[Mushgnome]

pre-1983

[gusty84]

I voted something else, and will take the potentially controversial position that it's whatever the current crop of people over 40 played when they were younger. And that 3rd edition will, in a couple of decades or so, be considered old-school as well.

[howandwhy99]

It's the intellectual culture and conceptualization of the entire hobby. From the players conceptions to the designers. RPGs were simply an extension of wargaming culture and deservedly so.

It is treating a fantasy reality as a strategic simulation game where the game-changing killer app was hiding the game board and all of the rules behind the screen. Where role-playing means scoring points and going up in level for your class. Where narrative conceptions and thinking in character were not relevant to the hobby.

[terje]

When the term was first used (referring to rpgs) it was explicitly (or at least implicitly) "old school D&D" which I think was understood to mean D&D from the early 80s and before. As the term spread it was also used to refer to other games from the same era, and new games that were compatible or at least made with the same kind of sensibilities. And as is only natural people started experimenting with different ways to implement the rules or the underlying sensibilities.

"Old school" is so vague that it can mean just about anything so long as it's not the newest thing, and as time marches on, more and more stuff can be considered "old school". Depending on one's perspective it's entirely possible to argue that 3e/d20 is old school.

Lately, I've been leaning towards "wargames style D&D" (as Eero Tuovinen calls it in Muster), but then again people will have different ideas about what "wargames" implies. I guess language is inherently imprecise and trying to pin down the exact definition of a word or phrase is a fools errand.

But having said all that, for me "old school d&d" is 0e to 1e and B/X.

[Finarvyn]

Oct 30, 2022 8:03:23 GMT -6 gusty84 said:

I voted something else, and will take the potentially controversial position that it's whatever the current crop of people over 40 played when they were younger. And that 3rd edition will, in a couple of decades or so, be considered old-school as well.

I suspect this is the case. As time passes, more and more games seem to be swept into the OSR corner. Games like Vampire the Masquerade (1991) were made to be different from the traditional RPG at the time, but now they are old enough that folks look back nostalgically at the first edition compared to the current one and call it "old school." True old school looks a lot like the banner at the top of these boards, but that's very limiting for most folks who weren't around then. And that's the problem with trying to define "old school" because for most its more like "whatever I started with" or maybe "whatever happened before I started" so games like 3E and maybe even 4E start looking older and older.

I think referring to old school as "TSR style role playing" at least defines what I think of as a batch of games with a particular style and philosophy but honestly the Indiana Jones game doesn't fit that style in my mind, nor does Marvel Superheroes and those are TSR products. Picking a date isn't the best, either, as "pre-19xx" can include some games which don't fit that style either. I don't see Chivalry & Sorcery or Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming as that style but they are certainly older than most.

I think therein lies the problem. Date isn't useful, nor is publisher. It's like going to eat at Steak 'n' Shake, which clearly is fast food but is served on a glass plate so it defies a lot of the common definition of fast food. I don't see any simple definition of "old school" which will account for all of the variants. If you were there and you saw it, you know it. If you weren't there I can show you, but it's hard to tell you.

[Deleted]

"Old School" as a term is so subjective and broad as to be essentially meaningless, IMO, especially in the context of this 50 year old hobby. Calling it "TSR era" is a little better, but not much since that covers a ton of ground in and of itself.

I think what most people really mean to imply is something in the 3lbb through Moldvay range, including Holmes and early AD&D. These releases have a common core "feel" that's absent going forward. The Mentzer line is actually a really solid teaching line, but the "feel" of the game is already evolving at this point.

[captainjapan]

You might say that old school is the "crawl", either dungeon or hex. I think Melan has something, there. Nu-school would then be the character-build. The war game would be old, old school; and with no exploration to speak of.

[DungeonDevil]

Chainmail, OD&D, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, Moldvay/Cook Expert, 1E AD&D.

I personally wasn't familiar with Mentzer Basic when it came out, but instead learned of it in the early 2000s -- quite late, really.

[oldskolgmr]

Hmm...I chose something else because the phrase, "What is [an] Old School [game]?" is a subjective question to me.
I enjoyed reading peoples responses, though.

[Deleted]

Oct 30, 2022 12:23:52 GMT -6 DungeonDevil said:

Chainmail, OD&D, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, Moldvay/Cook Expert, 1E AD&D.

I personally wasn't familiar with Mentzer Basic when it came out, but instead learned of it in the early 2000s -- quite late, really.

I had no idea there were even different editions or versions of the game until an embarrassingly late age. I always just assumed the game I played in the early nineties* was the way it always was, and still was. I didn't find out until years later how intricate and convoluted the evolution of D&D has been. (*That set was technically of the Mentzer lineage too, by the way, but it was one of those revision deals in a black box. That one doesn't get talked about as much as it's not as iconic or long-lived as the red box, but it's essentially the same game.)

[Desparil]

Oct 30, 2022 15:17:45 GMT -6 @ampleframework said:

Oct 30, 2022 12:23:52 GMT -6 DungeonDevil said:

Chainmail, OD&D, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, Moldvay/Cook Expert, 1E AD&D.

I personally wasn't familiar with Mentzer Basic when it came out, but instead learned of it in the early 2000s -- quite late, really.

I had no idea there were even different editions or versions of the game until an embarrassingly late age. I always just assumed the game I played in the early nineties* was the way it always was, and still was. I didn't find out until years later how intricate and convoluted the evolution of D&D has been. (*That set was technically of the Mentzer lineage too, by the way, but it was one of those revision deals in a black box. That one doesn't get talked about as much as it's not as iconic or long-lived as the red box, but it's essentially the same game.)

Interesting how you started with Basic and it was not at all clear to you that there were different editions. I also started in the '90s, but I was playing AD&D, and the fact that there were editions was really front and center. The first Player's Handbook that I ever bought had "Foreword to the 2nd Edition" on the very first page, and immediately after that on the second page was an additional foreword specifically for the black cover printings assuring the reader in large print that "This is not AD&D 3rd Edition!" followed by a more detailed explanation that the rules were the same other than fixing typos and other errata, and that only the only major changes were the layout and artwork.