Mike never played any of the RPGs that now count as “old school,” and Jason never liked them, so we invited John Scheib to come on the show and talk to us about the “Old School Renaissance.”
- 0:02:34 What does “old school” mean?
- 0:05:15 Social contract
- 0:07:06 Fear the Boot‘s Group Template
- 0:08:30 Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
- 0:09:17 “Rulings rather than rules” vs. “System matters”
- 0:18:33 Killer dungeons, player challenge, and the paranoid play style of the 10-foot pole
- 0:20:16 Creating characters in play
- 0:25:17 Challenging the player
- 0:31:29 Hack & Slash in Penny for My Thoughts
- 0:33:20 Can any system be broken?
- 0:36:51 What OD&D really rewards you for
- 0:38:34 Light rules vs. elegant rules
- 0:41:03 Retro-clones: Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry
- 0:42:03 Have games gotten better?
- 0:43:53 How much has really changed?
- 0:49:42 Unfortunately, no one can be told what Old School is. You have to play it for yourself.
- 0:53:05 Philosophical differences rather than mechanical differences
- 0:59:03 “Generic” games vs. “System matters”
- 1:01:41 Can anyone (even the game) tell you how to play your character?
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I loved this part of the podcast and the concept for old school RPG characters:
John:
“His story is that he managed to scare the Ogres out of attacking the village…In good novels, The character becomes more defined from the actions in the story rather than ‘here he is fully formed’”.
This idea has really been lost in modern RPG gaming, in both table-top and video game derivatives. This is a concept I’ve been re-creating through a RPG that I’ve been developing for the past year (see my link). Don’t be put off that it runs on a web browser, I believe it is a much truer role-playing experience than even table-top games can emulate.
However, here’s another part of the podcast that I have a problem with:
John (speaking of the old-school game):
“No one can dictate what your character does, but you”.
What I’m about to say may sound a bit outrageous, but this is a point that has bothered me for a very long time.
Explain to me how John’s quote could be considered “role”-playing when he is advocating using the players (real world) knowledge rather than the character’s knowledge to adjudicate encounters? To do this, wouldn’t the player have to step outside the role of the character?
So why do so many “old-schoolers” praise this method of play (and claim it to be true RP) until they are blue in the face? The answer lies in the fact that the table-top method of simulating a true role-playing experience does not have a very great suspension of disbelief which is the primary reason why we want to role-play in the first place. Rolling pieces of plastic, relying on stat blocks and endless pages of rules removes the emotion of the game…and thus the feeling that you are truly stepping into the shoes of someone else and living a life of adventure.
While I love the old-school game, by John’s very definition, it is less a true “RPG” experience than modern games that rely more on die rolls and character stats. My advice is that we leave our tables behind and start looking elsewhere for a better, truer RPG experience. We need to find a RP medium that indulges our senses more, that hides the die rolls and the rules and allows us to be whomever we want to be, and tell whatever story we want. Unlike John’s statement, however, we must be able to do all this strictly within the confines of our character’s abilities or we will have lost the meaning of role-play entirely.
I started with the Red Box. I still have it. Booyeah!
And I still have all the AD&D stuff.
So, old school D&D to me was me being creative to get through situations. I did roll dice here and there. Most of my interactions were not hack and slash. When I was playing AD&D? Hack and slash. 3.5? Cleave my way through mounds of things. 4E, squash the gobbo, heal the party.
My first D&D experience was more about exploring, the longer things went on, it was more geared to stomping things guts out. It’s a transition.
Not that I don’t like a good dungeon crawl. I do! However, I got hours and hours of enjoyment out of playing Zork. There’s two oppertunities for combat. The rest? Exploring, figuring out how to use what is there to complete all the tasks set before me.
The Shadowrun games I’m involved in are similar as well. We usually find all kinds of interesting things to do to complete a task, rarely does that come down to fighting. Of course, the GM loves me because I RP my character well.
Now, from my experience, 4th Ed of D&D just sets itself up nicely for stomping some critter skulls in. Great action movie material. RP? The mechanics don’t play well with it. It can be done, and with our group, we know enough about the rest of the people at the table that we can do it and have fun doing it, which is the important part.
I like the explore and think methodology that seemed to work so well in the old school realm. If you’re not thinking and the rest of the schmucks aren’t backing you up, it was a death fest… however, if the group was working together, exploring places was just awesome. What is the DM going to throw at us next?
In the end, it depends on what flavor you’re looking for and what game/mechanic works for you.
Lumin, naturally, I can’t really tell you what John would say in response to your comment. We invited John on pretty much because I don’t agree with him. I don’t like “old school” games, so we thought it’d make an interesting show to get somebody who does to come and talk about them.
Short answer is, I agree with you. I prefer indie games and story games, because they align the “roleplaying” and the “game” into a single activity.
As for characters defined in play, it’s much less forgotten than you might think. I had a hard time finding it, but I remember someone (Judd Karlman? Ron Edwards?) using the term “99%-er” or “95%-er,” referring to the enormous backstories players would bring to the table, because they’d already played 95% or 99% of the game before they sat down. I read somewhere else, and I wish I could find this old thread (probably on Story Games somewhere), someone speculating that this happens when players have no autonomy over the story—in other words, because of GM’s—as a kind of safety mechanism. They only have agency in their backstory, so they make the backstory bigger and more complex, because there, they can get creative. They can’t engage the story at the table, because the GM shuts them down, so they take what they can get.
In the episode, John mentioned how 3:16 creates characters in play. I’ve done this in my own game, The Fifth World. In a Wicked Age gives you characters who come from nothing more than an evocative sentence pulled at random; everything else, you discover in play. A lot of the indie and rules-light games do things like this. If it takes a long time to create a character, then you have a lot of investment in that character, and you want more and more backstory. Characters discovered in play has little to do with “old school” or now; it has to do with the complexity of the games you play.
Felix! For those who don’t know, Felix plays D&D 4E and Mouse Guard with Mike and me.
Now, you said that D&D 4E sets up a lot of hack-and-slash. And I’ll agree with you insofar as it provides a very robust, very fun system for combat, so when you have a bunch of combat powers and a bunch of stuff for setting up combats, it naturally makes you want to focus more on the combat. That said, I’ve never seen an edition of D&D that supported roleplaying very well. It set up a particular situation, and if some roleplaying happened during that time it wouldn’t (always) squash it, but that’s about the best I can say. The closest John came in this episode to selling me on old school games came when he pointed out the XP value of a gem compared to a goblin. I like a system that makes combat something you want to avoid. I liked it in L5R, too. The first thing I played in L5R was a practice combat; in the first round, an arrow laid me out. I spent the next hour lying on the ground, bleeding to death. It taught me a good lesson! That said, creeping through dungeons doesn’t exactly open up a lot of roleplaying any more than combat does. Sure, both can; and, at its best, an action movie allows for the expression of character in the action. But just like a really good action movie, a really good D&D game that actually achieves that occurs but rarely.
A lot of people just leave it at that, and accept roleplaying as this magical thing that might happen or might not, but there’s ultimately little you can do to make it happen. I might even accept that view, had I not had my exposure to indie games and story games. Compare our D&D game to our Mouse Guard game. Games can create better roleplaying experiences through elegant design; we don’t have to leave this to chance.
And of the editions of D&D, 4E is the only one where I’ve seen any attempt to do that. Quests and skill challenges fall well short of the kind of elegance you see in a game like Mouse Guard, but it’s a nod in that direction. At the very least, it presents the opportunity to progress in the game by some means other than combat. Sure, previous editions advised GM’s to hand out XP for non-combat accomplishments, but since they provided no support for that (as opposed to the clearly printed XP totals for monsters slain), it once again fell into the trap of just hoping that roleplay would happen.
I think we’ll soon switch up some of the show’s format, including a new regular section where we review the games we’ve been playing. I’ll soon start up a new D&D 4E game with a heavy fey influence. I want to see if you can run a campaign filled with encounters that are simultaneously narratively, tactically, thematically and mythologically interesting. In our first D&D campaign, I just wanted to learn the game; now, I want to see just how far we can take it. Can you storyjam with the most traditional of traditional RPG’s? I don’t know; we’ll see.
Well now you people are dragging me out of my cave…. hehe
First of all, Jason – 2e is not old school. It had fallen prey to the urge to have rules for everything.I can even drag out examples from my collection. Keep that in mind when you judge old school games.
Second – Ive only scratched the surface of old school gaming. I could easily have enough material for another episode just on Original and Classic D&D. And thats before covering other fantasy games or other genres…
Third, I found a phrase that might explain “you cant really know Old School, you just have to play it” better. “The truth can never be told, only heard”. I can talk until Im blue in the face, but until YOU understand what Im trying to say I’m just talking.
And finally – 10 foot pole isnt about paranoia. If you are going into a place where a grue might really eat your face if you go in the wrong dark spot wouldnt you be a little bit cautious? When Indiana Jones is in the various dangerous underground areas isnt he cautious? Doesnt he explore things before he touches them? Its all a matter of play style – some people like handling a trap with a roll of the dice and some like handling a trap by poking it with a stick and spiking it shut.
I am currently working on a sample OD&D dungeon if you are serious about being interested in trying the game. It will be as much a demonstration of how things work under the old rules as anything else, so Im going to try and show both how roleplaying can easily occur in OD&D and other things that I just dont know how to describe properly.
Did I call 2E “old school”? I said it was the earliest I played, and you said it didn’t really count as “old school.” I don’t think I made any claim for it other than it’s the earliest version I played. Older than that I’ve only read.
What you describe about using a 10′ pole as “cautious” doesn’t really seem to disprove that it’s a paranoid play tyle. I agree, it’s a matter of play style. It is, indeed, realistic, in a dangerous dungeon, that you would poke everything with a 10′ pole, check everything out, and generally move very cautiously. It also seems incredibly boring to me. Which isn’t unexpected: realistic play often is boring. Which is why I’m glad that style of play was abandoned. The more I talk to proponents of old school games like yourself, the more I see just how quickly it was abandoned. You started your comment by noting that 2E doesn’t count as old school, and in our discussion, you even said the first edition started moving away from gritty play towards heroic play. So it seems like as soon as old school play appeared, even its developers started moving away from it. I have to presume that they did so in an attempt to improve the game, which all seems to indicate that they had the same reaction I have: that realistic play is pretty boring, so, since this is a game, let’s sacrifice realism in favor of fun.
But, I’m also totally open to the possibility that this is just a failure to communicate something, and maybe there’s some kind of Zen awesomeness to old school gaming that I’ve totally missed, that cannot be explained and ultimately must be experienced, so I’d love to play through this dungeon you have in mind. I’ll come with as open a mind as a human being with previous life experiences can have.
Just a note on the episode–John mentioned Dark Heresy as a throwback to old school games because, among other reasons, it used percentile dice. And he mentioned Traveller in this context. First edition Traveller, and to the best of my knowledge this is true of all subsequent editions, used only 6-siders. So no percentile dice.
I listened to the Walking Eye‘s latest episode, and I wound up kicking myself for not hitting harder on the points they raise there. I think they did a better episode on “old school” games in the first half of that episode than we did here.