I wonder: What is an old school RPG?
What makes an old school roleplaying game? I mean, the term gets thrown around a lot now. It’s a marketing term, but it’s one a lot of people seem interested in. I recently wrote about two games (Dungeon World and Hackmaster Basic) that make claims to taking old school philosophy and marrying it to current design and I actually agree both games do that, even though they do it in extremely different ways. And that’s the thing, I think: Old school RPGs were a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I got into roleplaying with AD&D 2nd Edition and I would thoroughly submit that it is old school, but if I consider Dungeon World to have old school sensibilities (I would suggest that Dungeon World, perhaps, is meant to re-create the old school experience of dungeon crawling), then it is certainly not the complexity of the rule system we are talking about here. In fact, I would argue – to me – the thing the makes an old school RPG is the very hand-waviness that many people seem to find off-putting in other games. It was the idea that the game was just a giant book of suggestions that you used when they were convenient and ignored when they weren’t. Early on, my group – young as we were – tried to use every rule in the various AD&D handbooks. Every one of them. Needless to say, that didn’t last long and – in fact – the game eventually went the other way – to a mess of house rules and ad hoc justifications that existed to fit the moment. No one really worried about what the rule books said. We knew the skeleton of the system, but – beyond that – no one was terribly interested in balance or what it said we could or couldn’t do (races and classes were frequently made up whole-cloth and left to the approval of the Dungeon Master). I guess, to me, that is what old school roleplaying game philosophy is: the idea that the rules are not only to be bent when it is convenient, they should be viewed as little more than suggestions.
So what makes an old school roleplaying game to you? Hobble down to the comments and talk about it.
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My first experiences of OSR stuff was with people who took great pleasure in playing the game they way you used to. It’s what put me off a little, and these days, barring some fabulous settings like Unhallowed Metropolis – I spend most of my time playing games like Savage Worlds, that you can do what you like with, or CP2020/Feng Shui, and ramping up the action in the former to just have some cinematic fun.
Yeah, I mean it just became clear to us that trying to use all of the rules (at least in a really non-unified game, not something elegant like Savage Worlds, which is probably the game that initially got me into smaller press RPGs, I spent a ton of time on the GWG forums back in the day). The stuff is really great for people that want to relive memories or see what people are talking about, but I’m a huge fan of the current school of game design, with simplified rules that cover a lot of ground and unified mechanics, it just brings back memories for me to be given a pile of rules and be told, ‘Now figure out what to do with that.’ I missed CP2020 (I always loved Shadowrun, though, cyberpunk plus Tolkien that it is), but I hear good things. I’m the guy that just wants to try out new systems all the time. I’d love to just get a one-shot group together, but I have found most people don’t have the love of rules that I do…
For me it’s games that emulate the RPG’s from the early days of the hobby. They usually have simpler mechanics, core books that aren’t 500+ pages long and have plenty of wiggle room in the rules for GM’s to make judgement calls. Personally, my favorite is Swords & Wizardry but Labrynth Lord and OSRIC do great jobs of being old school as well.
I’ve spent a little time looking over OSRIC, and it looked like a nice game. People apparently love Swords & Wizardry, since it’s killing it over on Kickstarter. I do think simpler, but not unified mechanics that are just a mish-mash of a toolset that players can use to play whatever game they want might be part of the key for me. Certainly that was important to my early gaming.
To me, old school is settings based on fiction books, not the other way around. Old school is pages upon pages of tables that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but ended up forgotten in play in favour of a unifying mechanic, or nothing at all. Likewise, old school is needing to own every type of polyhedral dice, not multiples of one type. Old school is a setting that isn’t just one gimmick different from everything else out there, it’s really its own thing.
Yeah, when it comes to applying the “old school” tag on any of my own posts, I always fight with myself over whether or not it fits. I generally go with a rule of thumb that if I’ve got a copy of a game and the front cover has at least one serious fold in it or the pages are falling out, it’s old school.
I dig it. I miss the tables sometimes. Like, ‘oh, you want to buy a cookie at a local bakery? Roll 2d8, subtract 1d6 then roll a d100, compare result to table for what kinds of cookies are available.’