Topic: What is Old School Gaming to you?

[RandalThor]

Are the games better or are you remembering the times in the past that you played?
MDC

Of course, this. We do it all the time: "Our grand old youth" scenario. I regularly remember my youth with fondness, of course I do: I had no responsibilities, I was as free as I ever was going to get. None of that negates all the social, political, and military pressures around the world - just that they did not impact my life (much).

[RandalThor]

I actually spent eight hours DMing Castles and Crusades only yesterday, using an early 2e Greyhawk module. Was good fun. We hadmlots of beer and lasagna, although it's fairly often pizza. With beer.

Egads, I remember the 18-20 hour (average) gaming sessions as a young-un. Who said you needed 2-3 sittings to finish a module?!? Not us! We would get so excited that we would just stay up and continue playing, raiding the fridge as needed. Good times. (Now I am doing that with Skyrim...)

[providence13]

Right now, old school gaming is converting modules that we played ~30 yrs ago into RMFRP. Keep on the Borderlands, Vault of the Drow and a few others lined up. The players are reveling in the nostalgia.

[frnchqrtr]

It's not nostalgia if you've never stopped playing.   

What says old school more than anything else to me is in the testing of player skill instead of testing character ability.

[markc]

   IMHO you could make RM Old School by making a chart with the needed info for each profession with the combat skills you need. No DP to spend or other choices just read the info from the chart and play.
MDC

[bpowell]

Old School...well for us it means to "Go back to the beginning".  Most of us started with D&D 1e.  We pull that out for a quick adventure once a year or so.  As for RM we use the "Laws".  I have even combined them and run the "Against the Giants" in RM....nasty, very nasty.

[jasonbrisbane]

Pen n paper as opposed to mmorpgs.

[arcadayn]

Old School Gaming:

The game dictates the story – In old school games, you don’t come to the table with a five page character background story.  That’s what levels 1-3 are for.  This also ties into the next two points.

Let the dice fall where they may – Old school games are lethal.  There are no fate points, bennies, or karma for characters to guarantee success.  Characters have a very real chance of death at all times.  Subsequently, coming to the table with a five page story about your first level character is a recipe for disaster and woe.

Sandbox play – Related to the first point of the game dictating the story.  There is no over arching plot that the characters have to become involved in.  No railroading.  The PCs always decide where they want to go and what they want to do.  This may mean that the PCs will stumble upon something that is way too powerful for them to handle.  Tough cookies.    They will learn to run when they need to.  Sandbox play definitely takes a different GM style.  This is where a lot of the reputed random tables come into play.  You can’t be prepared for everything in a sandbox, but good random tables will usually spark your imagination enough to get the improve ball rolling.

Player skill vs character skill and power gaming – old school play discourages power gaming and encourage player ingenuity and skill.  Old school play doesn’t discourage skill systems per se, but rather certain skills and the way skills are handled.  Searching skills are the most obvious example.  In old school games, you don’t walk into a room and roll your observation skill to find hidden items, traps, or treasure.  You have to tell the GM exactly how you are searching and manipulating the environment.  Success does not rely on a die roll.

[intothatdarkness]

Old School Gaming:


Let the dice fall where they may – Old school games are lethal.  There are no fate points, bennies, or karma for characters to guarantee success.  Characters have a very real chance of death at all times.  Subsequently, coming to the table with a five page story about your first level character is a recipe for disaster and woe.

Not quite true. I can think of a couple of old school games that had fate mechanisms for characters to use. Interestingly, they were both non-magic games.

[arcadayn]

Very true.  The original Top Secret is the first one I can think of.  However, for the old school play style, those kind of mechanics are frowned upon.  Keeping your character alive is the ultimate demonstration of player skill.

There are several game mechanics that many old school games used that are considered breaks from that style.  The first point of contention for many old schoolers was the Thief class introduced in the Greyhawk supplement to OD&D.  Some feel that the class took away from what other classes had normally been able to do.  Thieves' abilities are also considered by some to be the introduction of "skills" into D&D.

[intothatdarkness]

Very true.  The original Top Secret is the first one I can think of.  However, for the old school play style, those kind of mechanics are frowned upon.  Keeping your character alive is the ultimate demonstration of player skill.

Top Secret and the James Bond RPG both had such a mechanism, and I think there might have been something similar in Gangbusters. And in a game with firearms and a decently-lethal modern combat system player skill don't mean squat when you take a round to the head and there's no magical healing available. Boot Hill didn't have a Fate mechanic, but its combat system was also a bit anemic when compared to TS and some of the others.

Actually I think the best "old school" combat system out there for firearms would have to be RPG Games' Recon rules. Hit points were d100 if I recall (based on your Con, so anywhere from 01 to 100), but ONE ROUND from an M-16 did 5d10 damage. Ambushes in that system were decidedly lethal, and it wasn't always possible to avoid combat.

[arcadayn]

I just recently picked up a copy of James Bond on Ebay for $1.75 + $5.50 shipping.   It had the GM screen and pad of sheets from the Game Master Pack as well.

I never did own or play Recon.  I did buy Phoenix Command back in the day, but never actually played it.

[RandalThor]

Sandbox play – Related to the first point of the game dictating the story.  There is no over arching plot that the characters have to become involved in.  No railroading.  The PCs always decide where they want to go and what they want to do.

I don't agree with this. Back in the day, a well developed world that you just ran around in (i.e., Sandbox) was not common. Generally, there were very few areas "developed" and the adventures were started by the GM saying, "The next adventure is White Plume Mountain. Now, you are all in town doing (X) when a guy in fancy garb comes up to you...." Technically, you had the option of declining, but that didn't happen because you were there to go on adventures and that was the next one.

[arcadayn]

That was pretty much the way we did it in the early '80s as well.  However, the old school style is based more on the time before published modules.  1974 OD&D, pre supplements, is the gold standard.  Hex crawling (eg. Judges Guild Wilderlands) and mega dungeons (eg Gygax's Castle Greyhawk campaign) are the main focus.  It doesn't take a well developed world to play those type of adventures, just the tools and abiilty to wing it.  I'm not saying this is how everyone played back then, but it is one of the focuses of the old school movement. 

[arcadayn]

   IMHO you could make RM Old School by making a chart with the needed info for each profession with the combat skills you need. No DP to spend or other choices just read the info from the chart and play.
MDC

Actually, I think RMC is very old school as is.  The way the GM adjudicates certain skills would be key in attaining the proper tone.

[yammahoper]

old school for me was very free form, or dungeon crawls, though those were rare for me (my dongeons tend to have a reason to exist, such as locking away a crature or magic item).

When I started, I created maps that covered a large area, placed terreign and city states and kingdoms and mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, wildlands, etc.  Notes on locations were sparse: Cassidine, a Kingdom ruled by the warrior Iconoclast, yet lacking much formal law.  Highly values freedom, tends heavily towards worship of benevalent gods...Arcus, a kingdom ruled by the mostly kind but egotistical Don parnell, dominated by the castle Arcanum, all law flows from the archmage, which tends to end with a Hellbomb Burst cast at level 99...

My players freely wandered as they wished.  I rarely had an intial adventure planned.  I let thier decisions and random encounters develop the story and create a story arch, operating under the idea everyone and everything has a reason behind it.  Quite often, the players handed me the plot and I simply shaped it on the fly.  As the GM, I focused on vocabulary, places, names, histories, magic items, creatures, and wove them into an adventure/story.  My worlds were fairly cruel, violent and dangerous.  Death of PC's was not uncommon. 


My first MERP module was Rangers of the North, then Court of Ardor.  They were perfect for my style.  So much good detail, names, languages and backdrop.  Also lethl.  RM became my game and I left RQ for it.

Truth be told, I remain always the GM, and my free time aint what it use to be, so I find myself regressing to those early days of freeform.  SW is my prefered setting, but I ran a middle earth based game just a few months ago.  I have highly developed worlds with lots of good lingo and places that can draw the players in, which has always been my goal number one; entertain the players.  Thats about as old school rule as there is I guess.

[intothatdarkness]

Sandbox play – Related to the first point of the game dictating the story.  There is no over arching plot that the characters have to become involved in.  No railroading.  The PCs always decide where they want to go and what they want to do.

I don't agree with this. Back in the day, a well developed world that you just ran around in (i.e., Sandbox) was not common. Generally, there were very few areas "developed" and the adventures were started by the GM saying, "The next adventure is White Plume Mountain. Now, you are all in town doing (X) when a guy in fancy garb comes up to you...." Technically, you had the option of declining, but that didn't happen because you were there to go on adventures and that was the next one.

Concur. That's how I remember those days, too. In fact, my whole GM style really developed as something of a reaction to those channeled games.

My actual style is close to yamahoper's, although I do retain a fondness for some structured adventures. Usually my structured adventures are loose enough that the party can find (or make) things to do outside of their framework...or they're set up so that there are exploration breaks between the "designed" stuff.

[yammahoper]

What was education in this so called sandbox style was how the players created the political intrigue.  A farmer is killed and two cows carried off.  The party ranger finds the tracks and knows it was two orges.  Here is were I was indeed blessed, because my players would ask questions, such as "is it normal for ogres to come this far into human farm land?"  This forced me to think of  why, which could lead to a nice organic adventure, such as a giant conscripting most of the hunters into an army and the females are forced to hunt on their own, or a monster eating local food sources, or a nasty planar virus destroying their lifestock/crops, etc.

In time this sort of thinking became routine.  Every random encounter and treasure generated became yet another story. 

[RandalThor]

What was education in this so called sandbox style was how the players created the political intrigue.  A farmer is killed and two cows carried off.  The party ranger finds the tracks and knows it was two orges.  Here is were I was indeed blessed, because my players would ask questions, such as "is it normal for ogres to come this far into human farm land?"  This forced me to think of  why, which could lead to a nice organic adventure, such as a giant conscripting most of the hunters into an army and the females are forced to hunt on their own, or a monster eating local food sources, or a nasty planar virus destroying their lifestock/crops, etc.

In time this sort of thinking became routine.  Every random encounter and treasure generated became yet another story.

That didn't happen for me the same way. For me, it was watching a lot of Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (later on), as well as Wild Kingdom (in my earlier years, and just you shut up about me dating myself ). But, beyond that, I just like things to make sense. So when things didn't, I looked into it - as best as one could about such things as the physics of a fireball - and made the best determination I could. That include interactions, both personal and political, as well as how the hell someone could get hit by a battleaxe 8 times, but not actually be hurt until the 9th. I have even gone so far as to try and figure out how the various monsters one could find in any given area inter-reacted. So, which would have overlapping territories and which would not. How do the local humanoids deal with X creatures etc...

Oh, and in the last 10+ years I have really started to dislike the "typical" fantasy village. I mean really?!? You are going to have a settlement of a bunch of Little House on the Prairie style homes, right next to the wildlands, and there aren't any defensive structures at all?!? (If I walked into that village, I would assume that everyone there is an uber-bad a$$ and treat them accordingly.)

[intothatdarkness]

That didn't happen for me the same way. For me, it was watching a lot of Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (later on), as well as Wild Kingdom (in my earlier years, and just you shut up about me dating myself ). But, beyond that, I just like things to make sense. So when things didn't, I looked into it - as best as one could about such things as the physics of a fireball - and made the best determination I could. That include interactions, both personal and political, as well as how the hell someone could get hit by a battleaxe 8 times, but not actually be hurt until the 9th. I have even gone so far as to try and figure out how the various monsters one could find in any given area inter-reacted. So, which would have overlapping territories and which would not. How do the local humanoids deal with X creatures etc...

Oh, and in the last 10+ years I have really started to dislike the "typical" fantasy village. I mean really?!? You are going to have a settlement of a bunch of Little House on the Prairie style homes, right next to the wildlands, and there aren't any defensive structures at all?!? (If I walked into that village, I would assume that everyone there is an uber-bad a$$ and treat them accordingly.)

That's more or less how my stuff came together, too, although the instigator for me was my interest in history. To me most fantasy worlds just didn't make sense. Only interior towns in my world are not walled...anything close to a border is walled and normally has a garrison of some sort (if it's in a major realm, at least). I actually mapped the animal populations in my world (major herd animals and migration routes at least) and then figured out what would feed off those herds and filled in the population gaps.

I also made my history much more dynamic. Nothing bothered me more than fantasy worlds with "for X thousand years nothing important happened" in their background. Just didn't make sense to me. So in my campaign the baseline time is about 1000 years before the game starts...things are still somewhat new and open so that characters can actually carve out realms for themselves if they want.

Sandbox only works for me if there's a good structure to the box holding the sand. If not, it's just "roll the dice and see what we fight/steal/run from tonight."