“Old School” Antecedents & Ambit

[dwayanu]

I just got Chaosium’s RuneQuest: Role-playing in Glorantha. I like how much it feels to me like “coming home” to the 1980 edition that was my start — albeit a lavishly expanded and embellished ‘deluxe’ version beyond even dreams of that era.

RuneQuest was one of the games featured at the old Knights & Knaves Alehouse despite that venue’s explicit focus on “Gygaxian D&D.” That was all the more curious because back in the day it had struck me as a “new school” of design, and indeed some habitués of the Alehouse categorically disparaged some aspects.

As “old school” became a widely current term, it was interesting to see which non-D&D (and more so non-TSR) games that tended to embrace. What made them not just old but OS was sometimes a topic of discussion.

*OD&D* was the seminal archetype to which every other early RPG was necessarily a response. Their different directions were what made the standouts stand out. Those are what I’ll initially focus on in a retrospective, which may inspire anew discussion that’s both contrast and comparison. (Or it might not!)

[dwayanu]

Tunnels & Trolls

Ken St Andre found the D&D booklets too complicated and confusing, so set out to create something simpler and clearer (that also would not require the polyhedral dice which were then not commonly available).

A notable difference, still evident in the 5th Edition — which hit the scene in 1979 alongside AD&D, and remained the current version for 30 years — was the absence of an official canon of monsters and magic items. (A bunch of monsters were described in the related game Monsters! Monsters! but that was less widely distributed than T&T.)

That’s part of how it more broadly continued to reflect the OD&D ethos that what was being presented was more in the way of exemplary starting points than prescriptive rules. Before the OSR, T&T epitomized the DIY hobbyist approach.

It’s most famous for pioneering solitaire game-books, and the T&T line for being especially ‘gamist’. However, my impression is that Ken as GM also brought a lot of attention to letting story outweigh mechanics. Compared with Arneson and Gygax, he and his friends were not so much into wargames.

[dwayanu]

Empire of the Petal Throne

As Gary Gygax quickly recognized, M.A.R. Barker’s Tekumel stands with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth among the deeply imagined worlds of fantasy. Nonetheless, the opinion that it’s “too much” for anyone but the creator to run as a game seems a stretch when I look at the volume of detailed canon for the Forgotten Realms.

EPT’s mechanics are very close to OD&D. In clarity of presentation, I’d say it was the best introduction to D&D before Holmes Basic.

That said, it was the attention to world-building, giving characters a social context, that importantly informed subsequent RPGs.

[dwayanu]

Chivalry & Sorcery

Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus developed a D&D variant with more attention to the Medieval world as a basis. Before publication, they stripped that of specifically D&D references.

More explicitly than D&D, it addressed the “grand campaign.” The first edition even included miniatures wargame rules in the core book.

The sheer complexity of C&S has kept it rather on the margins, more often borrowed from than played in its own right. It was certainly a watershed in the ‘simulation’ branch of development.

[dwayanu]

Traveller

This may not have been the first science fiction RPG, but it was The Big One! Arguably it’s still that, for those who consider Warhammer 40K and Starfinder just fantasy in outer space. Later entries in the field were in response to Traveller just as fantasy games were in response to D&D.

Differences from D&D are immediately very obvious. However, I think the designers started with a remarkably insightful appreciation of what made OD&D ‘tick’, how it worked as a game in terms of fundamental paradigms. The exploration aspect especially stands out.

[dwayanu]

RuneQuest

Greg Stafford’s Glorantha is another magnum opus among fantasy worlds. RQ epitomized the “skills system” (of which Traveller was a not quite systematic precursor). It was very close to having a “universal mechanic” in how much was covered either by a direct % roll or by the Resistance Table.

I think one way it has old-school appeal is the real element of danger to PCs, and another is the ‘sandbox’ approach of which Griffin Mountain was a great example. Attention to simulation seems generally in contrast with recent D&D developments, for all that RQ goes far beyond early D&D in simulation.

The Basic Role Playing (BRP) framework has given rise to a whole family of games from Chaosium and others. In particular, Call of Cthulhu is an enduringly popular game. (I understand that it’s the most popular RPG in Japan, D&D in third place after a natively created fantasy game.) The overlap between “old school” and “new school” demographics when it comes to CoC is remarkable.

[dwayanu]

The Fantasy Trip

From a modern perspective, Steve Jackson’s TFT was arguably not a proper RPG until In the Labyrinth supplemented the tactical combat games Melee and Wizard. One might note however that the definition was pretty fluid in the 1970s, and OD&D itself had been advertised as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable With Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.”

TFT introduced, albeit in simpler form, the point build approach that Champions popularized. Filtered through RoleMaster, that came back to inform the design of D&D 3.0.

Compared with Steve’s own GURPS, TFT is a very lean machine. For all its simulationist tactical detail, it seems to me also light compared with the more dissociative tactical engine and character build system of D&D 4E.

Being perhaps not what many would call “rules light” but lighter than WotC editions of D&D seems a key part of appeal to a significant segment of the OSR.

[dwayanu]

Villains & Vigilantes

The first really successful superhero RPG started as a hack of EPT. The roots are less apparent in the Revised Edition, but it’s still recognizably a descendant of OD&D. The designers have produced a new system, Mighty Protectors, which does not literally resemble D&D 3E but has an analogous relationship with V&V 2.0: the two are basically different games.

The line of V&V adventures and villain books have continued to find appreciation among GMs who have moved on to other game systems. Co-creator Jeff Dee was among the illustrators of TSR’s D&D products; contributor Bill Willingham was both that and creator of the Elementals comicbook series.

V&V is like old D&D in being very sketchy, often played with house rules, not very concerned with balance and seemingly messy to people accustomed to more recent developments. TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes has much to commend it if more simplicity is what one is after, and ‘retro-clones’ of it are widely considered part of the OSR. However, so is playing V&V (which is itself currently available, so requires no clone).