An essay on Old School

[Deleted]

In my web wanderings I found this ;
www.mrlizard.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77&Itemid=59
A nice piece that has me rethinking my idea of what old school is. I like the idea of old school but think perhaps the movement is misnamed. Give it a read and decide for yourself.

my gaming blog: diceofdoom.blogspot.com/

[Deleted]

It is an interesting read but, as someone who was around and playing D&D back in those days, I feel compelled to point out that some of what he says is either fabricated or drawn from his personal experience and universally applied to everyone else. This is the danger of examining one aspect of a movement, in this case (for instance) the Dragon magazine, and trying to extrapolate from that what was really going on at the gaming table.

That being said, he is as entitled to his opinion as anyone else. I find him rather ill-informed but I was not offended by what he had to say.

[greyharp]

Yes, I saw that and wasn't overly impressed.

[Finarvyn]

I have to side with dubeers on this one. I'm playing OD&D pretty much the way I learned it in 1975. I agree that the white box set alone is somewhat incomplete, in that our group migrated to OD&D+Greyhawk right away and considered that to be the more complete game.*

In my own experience AD&D provided options of structure versus freestyle, and our group wasn't unified in that preference. I chose to stay with free-wheeling OD&D while other DMs in our group chose the more rules-solid AD&D, and the DM got to pick his rules set when we played. The two philosophies were firmly in place by 1979 or so, and perhaps that essay author only experienced the AD&D one.

As far as the flood of rules go, I know that our group didn't play with most of them. We added a few of the classes from Strategic Review and early Dragon, but we didn't feel the need to play with more and more rules just becasue they were out there. I think the fact that the rules were being published shows that folks back then were tinkering and being creative, not that they felt the need to have more rules. The larger rulebooks weren't a "grass roots" movement to have more rules, but instead represented Gary's wish to have a standard rules set that could be used in tournament play.

Anyway, and interesting read but I'm not convinced the author actually played back then. At least, not in a group anything like mine was.



* Ironic that I was chosen to author S&W Whitebox since we didn't play WB only for long, either.

[coffee]

Aug 11, 2009 5:42:21 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

I think the fact that the rules were being published shows that folks back then were tinkering and being creative, not that they felt the need to have more rules.

Yeah, that's what stuck me, too. There was an explosion of creativity, much of which was expressed in The Dragon and the supplements.

And that's what we here at this forum are doing today: Starting from the same (or similar) initial conditions and applying our creativity to mold it the way we want it.

Want rules for X? Add a system for X. Doesn't work? Scrap it and start again.

And I don't understand how that's different from how things happened back in the day.

[Finarvyn]

Aug 11, 2009 10:26:44 GMT -6 coffee said:

And I don't understand how that's different from how things happened back in the day.

It's not. ;D

[thegreyelf]

"What I consider to be revisionism, or at least rose-colored-backward-facing glasses, is the idea this was a conscious decision to keep things "simple" and encourage freeform play. It was mostly a consequence of limited book size due to the economics of the time."

...has anyone actually argued any differently? I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that there was a conscious choice towards free-formism (if you'll forgive the coinage); indeed, the books even say things have been left out or not covered well due to space considerations. I've always taken the spirit of old school freeform play to be the result of the way the books were produced, not the goal. I thought that was generally accepted.

[James Maliszewski]

Aug 11, 2009 13:30:47 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

I thought that was generally accepted.

It is, except by certain ideologues on the Net, who've recently made it their holy crusade to reveal the old school revival as a sham built upon revisionism, rose colored glasses, and false consciousness. I find it very tedious, honestly, especially since most of the traits the self-professed debunkers attribute to the old school revival are ones they possess in far greater quantity.

[Deleted]

Thanks to everyone for their replies.
I guess I made the classic mistake of assuming my personal experience was universal. And apparently so did the author of the essay. The group I started playing with looked at rules as a collector. They seemed to feel that the more rules you had the better your game was. And it seemed to me that the wealth of material being produced was meant to meet that need. My style of play changed over the years from complex to simple. I thought this might be the natural progression of a gamer.

[Deleted]

Hey Pulcherius (cool name, btw)! You mention, yourself, in your post you've progressed from complex systems to simple. Many of us read the Dragon and I'd guess we all found some neat ideas within the pages, but I seem to recall much of the complexity began popping up with AD&D rather than OD&D. And much of that, according to Dragon essays by Gary (and on-line postings, too) were an attempt to standardize the hobby for tournament play. OD&D campaigns were too different to give any kind of baseline from which to proceed.

While I've known gamers who loved additional complexity in their games, they were the exceptions; most of the house-rules I came across seemed more concerned with clarifying a rule as written over adding layers of complexity. Or, adding a missing system (initiative for someone who didn't own a copy of "Chainmail" for instance).

Let me emphasize, however, I was in a region of the USA (Texas) far removed from the hot-spot of gaming in the early days. What the original essay described may very well have been what was happening in the Great Lakes area. Thus, it could very well be that both sides are equally correct. All I can speak to is what gamers in the North Houston area of Texas, and a decade later the Hill Country west of Austin, were doing.

[Deleted]

Pulcherius is Latin for my given name, Kevin.
I guess everyone's RPG experiences are different. It seems as there wasn't any one way to play back then, as there isn't just one way now. I am still a believer of the OSR. What it means to me might be different then what it means to someone else. As I posted in my blog;

Old school is a term for an attitude about a style of a play inspired the earliest editions of D&D and other RPGs.

[Deleted]

Aug 14, 2009 21:53:04 GMT -6 @pulcherius said:

I guess everyone's RPG experiences are different.

Sure, we've all come to the hobby by different paths. At any rate, thanks for sharing your thoughts here.