The Old School, Smiting It Hip and Thigh

I have mixed feelings about the Old School.

I’m talking about the movement to return to earlier versions of D&D. I’ve long been interested in older versions of games, particularly elements that fall by the wayside as design trends change. I’m also skeptical of the notion that games get objectively “better.” When OSRIC came out I even released some short supplements for it. They sell okay.

But I think the Old School is going down a bad path where it is not only becoming insular and less of a contributor to the health of the hobby, but is actually squandering the heritage it wants to uphold. Here’s why.

False History: The Old School movement focuses on a monolithic style of play and often represents this as a true revival of something that we lost, but when we go back to what people said and did it doesn’t hold up. There have been divisions in what people anted to do with D&D since the dawn of the hobby. I’m not talking about whether the Thief is a good idea or anything because that’s trivial. I’m talking about folks who thought Vancian magic sucked in the 70s. I’m talking about folks who thought D&D combat was unrealistic in the 70s. In short, people have been radically at odds with some of the Old School’s tenets about what makes for good D&D ever since there was a D&D. But they don’t count.

This definitely extends to play style. How many people played OD&D like this? The answer is more than none, but less than everyone — in fact, I’d say it was less than the majority, particularly when we look at the history of other fantasy RPGs, which were obviously designed as a reaction to D&D. In fact, there are signs in older editions that definitely deny the historical heritage of the Old School “style.” How many of you play with 20 people (the top end of the recommended number of OD&D players)? Or use a caller? Not too damn many, I’d guess.

There was no Golden Age – just people arguing about D&D, playing D&D however they wanted to. There was no consensus. This can easily be seen in Gary Gygax’s old columns, which were all about cleaving to orthodoxy because so many people thought orthodoxy sucked.

Design Conservatism: This is one folks will deny. They’ll tell you about all the new Old School gaming supplements, but I know from experience that this argument is . . . bunk. You’ll get plenty of modules, new character classes and such, but no radical deviations from a roughly imagined set of principles that is in essence “anything that smells like the ideas came from 2nd edition or later.”

As I said, I produced a number of very short supplements for OSRIC. One of them is a hack of feats for the system. The results were interesting. It sells pretty well, but customers’ feedback resembles a kind of shamefaced slinking into the porn shop, leaving with a plain paper bag clutched in hand. People wanted the remix but didn’t want anyone to necessarily think they approved of it. Openminded communities don’t make people feel this way.

Elements of the old ae defended more as articles of faith than either statements of preference of arguments from principles. For example, there’s certainly no consensus from lower-better AC proponents about why it’s better. I’ve heard plenty of them. That’s because it’s the kind of apologetics where any argument will do, as long as it advances the position. I think this is a tragedy because in my opinion (as I said earlier in this article) is that older versions of D&D are an underappreciated (by disinterested gamers and by the Old School scene) storehouse of fascinating design ideas. Faith-based appreciation gets us nowhere.

Where’s the gold in old D&D? Here’s where I think it is:

Situation, Not Principle Driven Rules: Old D&D isn’t about shoehorning a situation into a core system. It’s about developing a system for the situation. A few games preserve this idea, including the Palladium system and more recently, The Riddle of Steel and Aces & Eights.

Manipulating Game Balance for Atmosphere: This is one of the real treasures that modern RPGs have consistently stamped out. Save-or-die is part of this, but the element that stands out for me is the difference between dungeon and wilderness encounters. Dungeons are “leveled” with challenges appropriate to ether depth or party competence. Wilderness encounters (and planar) are not; it’s the luck of the draw. The wilderness comes across as the darkness amongst the “points of light” in a way the current “points of light” edition doesn’t portray nearly as deftly.

Asymmetric Design: This is a big one for me, and I’ve talked about it before.

Old Schoolers point out that many games are laden down by unnecessary rules, but they rarely express this as a positive design principle about how the rules they do have contribute to the shape of the game. Because the game’s systems are added situationally instead of the situation being ported into an existing core rule there’s no aesthetic demand for equal time for all situations. There are many modern games that are stuffed full of rules because it’s easy to create a core mechanic variation, or because the designer feels that he or she needs to rescue the game from being focused on one thing. 3e had this issue.

(In modern games, I always think of computer hacking rolls, because many games include oodles of rolls for hacking, but outside of cyberpunk gaming nobody cares. People want to know if they get the data or control the system. But it’s so easy to ask for a standard roll again and again.)

You’d be hard pressed to get OD&D fans to admit it but 4e has actually moved back in this direction by loosening up skills simply because a skill check doesn’t need the same detail as a power. Classic D&D has no skills because the basic relationship with the world uses your own problem-solving skills. The dogamtic route would be to call this part of the “essence” of the game, but that’s not true.

The essence of the game is that you only add what you need to accomplish a particular goal in an interesting fashion. Once you loosen your grip on how you expect other people to play something, the possibilities of this idea reveal themselves, and provide insights into how games evolve. Rules get added to meet a play requirement until they get too cumbersome, get streamlined by core mechanics, and then those mechanics get extensions because once you have a core mechanic you can easily be seduced into elaborating it.

(This makes me think that 4e’s nonspecific damage – you don’t have to declare subdual – is actually more OD&D than OD&D.)

Without these more fundamental points of view the Old School becomes an increasingly tight box, limited by its ideology and genre. There should be an Old School horror game. An Old School modern game. An Old School game about transhumanism. I don’t think any of these things will come from the Old School except as a reaction to something like this post.

Hm. Maybe I’ll design one.

Tags: D&D, fantasy RPGs, RPG Culture, RPG design