What exactly is the appeal of "old school" role-playing games?

What exactly is the appeal of "old school" role-playing games?

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Define "role-playing games".

multiplayer roguelike unconstrained by the limitations of vidya

The lavender smell.

This PDF is a little bit "guy handing out pamphlets to tell you what's wrong with America today" but it still manages to get the general idea over..

A simpler time when you didn't have to worry about "builds" or "trap options" or "system mastery", because the rules were kind of a clusterfuck and it didn't matter what kind of character you made because the mindset of the players was more focused on having fun than outdistancing the rest of the party.

See the thing is that most of the time the mindset isn't one f outdistancing the party. It's one of "I want to have fun" on different levels. The problem arises when 2 people make "fun" characters, one of whom totally invalidates the other and makes him no longer fun to play. This is really common if you don't have people talking a lot about what their characters are going to do prior to creation. Of course, there are systems that make it happen less often, and systems that make it more common. No matter what, a system CAN be fun. I'm sure if you tried hard enough, you could have fun with FATAL or Realms of Atlantasia. But some systems are "better"/more balanced. for preventing accidental powergaps between players more passively than actively.

Simplicity and ease of management. There are fewer rules to remember, and situations tend to be more abstract instead of requiring the GM to study rules and probabilities for every possible contingency.

OSR materials are very limited in scope though. There aren't many character classes to choose from, and characters didn't have skills or feats to juggle. A lot of things were broken down into simple ability score checks instead. I suppose that's both a strength and weakness, since it doesn't really do anything to set one character of the same class apart from another. Some people might prefer later D&D editions with their class kits or paths.

Because hispters come in every shape and size, including nerds who "liked TTRPGs before they were cool."

They're fun to play with friends.

>before they were cool

Someone wasn't there during the nationwide D&D fad of the early 80s. I remember when all the kids were talking about it and loads of them were playing it, because it was the big new thing.
It didn't really become "that nerd thing" until the mid to late 80s.

>hipsters

No. We're just old.

They tend to have a very immersive style of play. Most of the game is about the interest between the players and the DM. Most things are handled by player description rather than dice rolls. You end up asking a lot more questions about the world you're in and become more detailed in how you interact with it.

The character sheet becomes more of guideline and reference for handling things that can't be handled by you're brain. When facing a challenge, instead of look at the sheet for an ability to solve it, you start asking the DM questions. It moves very fast and results in a very real feeling world.

More white men.

Fewer socially-progressive, fluidgender, green-haired tiefling manlets of eternal darkness.

DND 5e - 12 classes in PHB
DND 3e - 11 classes in PHB
DND 2e - 11 classes in PHB
DND 1e - 10 classes in PHB

So I guess old school includes 3e and the cut off for "many" is less than 12. But that's not right because 3e includes feats which user said was not part of old school. And kits were in 2e. user's argument does not make sense.

Exploration.

Simple rules.

A focus on playing a game vs system-mastery or metagame story mechanics.

Being able to play D&D like a board game and more easily invite new players.

Referring to White Box, B/X, Rules Cyclopedia and other pre-AD&D materials. Back then, players could choose from about 5 classes, with demihuman races being classes of their own.

>So I guess old school includes 3e

AD&D and 2E are discussed in the OSR general at times, but when anyone mentions "old-school," OD&D is usually the topic of discussion.

I like the idea of OSR, but without the nostalgia the systems are not great compared to new indie games that focus on dungeon crawls. The only OSR I like is Classic Fantasy which just takes the exploration, distinct fantasy races, and character (story) development, and uses the RuneQuest 6 rules as a base to make a dungeon crawling game.

I will say I like being able to strip 5e down to a simple and dangerous game, so I tend to do that and modern players still like it a lot.

Fighting-man
Magic-user
Cleric
Dwarf
Elf
Halfling
That's 6. But I'll admit I might be missing some.

I liked it, thanks user

mein nigger

>B/X, Rules Cyclopedia
>Pre-AD&D
Might want to check your calendar, mate.

If you're referring to OD&D, there were only three classes in the core book.

Fewer numales who turn their nose at the idea of rolling for your stats play them.

>If you're referring to OD&D
Nah, just what I remember of basic. I think holmes basic? I don't know. I might be mixing several things.

All the Basics have the Thief as well.

Holmes Basic is kind of odd, since it's halfway between the race-as-class of the later Basic versions and the separated race and class of OD&D and AD&D.

Man, my memory is all sorts of shit when it comes to old editions of DnD I guess. But now that you mention it I do remember the thief, I just always ignore it because it's fixed table for thief skills (I come from 2e, I like some choice in what kind of thief I am).

The fixed table is nice if you want to whip up a few NPC thieves/bards real quick, but not really that great for PCs.

Interesting read, thanks.

Less crippling accessibility compromises.

Balance was not considered a priority.

The rulesets are generally more willing to have your character die if you fuck up.

Less influence from SJWs (Paladins can actually be referred to as holy warriors, etc.)

Less influence from MMO video games that have a homogenizing effect on character builds.

Better art.

I feel like all the things that are expressive of "old school" gaming are present in most modern good rules systems as long as you have a decent GM who respects critical thinking and creative solutions.

If you feel like removing all your rules is going to fix the fact that you're not getting an immersive gameplay experience, you may have some misconceptions about what's going wrong

It's hard to pick out what specifically makes the top image more aesthetically pleasing to me.

I prefer the background; sure, the bottom might have a more polished vapor effect, but the top feels more rough hewn than the digital perfection of the bottom.

The characters are easy to explain; their wardrobes and kit look actually functional and proportional - one might conceivably imagine these characters standing in the room next to you.

The bottom is more cartoonish.

Thanks user, definitely gave me some ideas and helped me assess my DM'ing style.

Not that user, but I really enjoy this take on perception rolls

hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-perception-and-observation.html

Is that the old EQ cover?

Grognard nostalgia.

It was fun when I was young, so clearly its fun now or else I'd be wrong and I am not wrong.

Pic related.

Interesting but full of misinformation and only makes one point, just makes it over and over again.

> Original D&D and Swords & Wizardry are games of skill in a few areas where modern
games just rely on the character sheet. You don’t have a “spot” check to let you notice
hidden traps and levers,

1st ed has a stat for Find/Remove Traps. D&D Basic beats that, it has two stats. Find Traps. Remove Traps.

>This is why characters have so few numbers on the character sheet, and why they have so few specified abilities.

Top is 2e sheet. Bottom is 4e sheet. Grey areas for non-stats things like equipment and spell lists. Green for stats that are directly related like str, dex, save throws, save throw modifiers. Yellow for things that seemed mostly related like special attacks. White for things I couldn't be bothered thinking about. Doesn't seem like there's much different in stats cept 2nd ed has some more.

> Many of the things that are “die roll” challenges in modern gaming (disarming a trap, for example) are handled by observation, thinking, and experimentation in old-style games.

The whole article seems to rest on "in old school we made things up rather than used a die roll and we described events". News for that guy, that's how my groups play modern games and I've played with old school people who played like he treats modern stuff.

tl;dr
Article is interesting but at least 50% wrong.

>Top is 2e sheet. Bottom is 4e sheet.
Typo, like file name says, bottom is 5e sheet, not 4e.

As a referee, it's the fact that the game rules themselves are doing all the heavy lifting for me.

>Stock a dungeon with monsters, traps, and treasure using a few simple procedural tables in the Basic Set
>Comprehensive wilderness encounter tables in the Expert Set

These two features mean that I can slap an entire yearlong campaign together in about a day of work.

>Interesting but full of misinformation and only makes one point, just makes it over and over again.
That's the problem with the past. All we have of it is memories and recordings, both of which are often stripped of the context of the time. No matter how well any of us remember the good ol' days, it is still just that... a memory, of which all are to some extent not accurate.

Hell, I remember the shit-ton of houserules our table had to make to use 2nd Edition. That's not to say that Old school play was bad or anything, but it certainly wasn't nearly as rosey as people nowadays try to make it seem. There's always been shitty rules. RPG development has always been about improving on what's already around... but sometimes we take steps back when we try to innovate (3rd Edition, for example, added options that were largely unheard of for characters in D&D, but also created the clusterfuck of rules that people love complaining about).

Y'all niggas need to quit with all the nostalgia. You can't have the past back. Keep moving forward.

>1st ed has a stat for Find/Remove Traps. D&D Basic beats that, it has two stats. Find Traps. Remove Traps.
Those are thief skills, not the same as stats. Stats are something every character has.

I know it sounds like an excuse, but it's not. Those specific abilities were a unique exception to the rule that characters had to do the searching the hard way. That was what was so good about the thief... you could leave to dice rolls what other classes had to resort to actions for.

Or that the dice rolls were a second chance that other characters didn't get

>1st ed has a stat for Find/Remove Traps. D&D Basic beats that, it has two stats. Find Traps. Remove Traps.
Notice isn't "find traps"
It's "realize there's someone sneaking up on you", and similar things
Tinkering isn't "remove traps"
It's "mess with mechanical things you've found to see what you can do with them"

While, yes, a lazy GM could read the skills and let players use them to find/remove traps, that's not the intention
To go back to the example given in that PDF, a player couldn't roll Notice to realize there's a trap door in the passage. He might realize that there's a slight click when he steps on the trap(whether or not it goes off), but that gives him precious few seconds to react, if the trap IS going off, or fools him into thinking it is if it isn't.
A player couldn't roll Tinkering to disarm the pit trap just because he realized it's there. He still doesn't have access to the mechanism that makes it work.

>Top is 2e sheet. Bottom is 4e sheet.
2e isn't Old School
At least, not to the degree that Basic(0e) and 1e oD&D are
Pic related is the Basic character sheet; I'm not gonna go through the trouble of highlighting it like you did, but as you can see, there's significantly fewer boxes to fill in, because its based more on player creativity than what's on the sheet.

>The whole article seems to rest on "in old school we made things up rather than used a die roll and we described events".
In other news, anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that doesn't mean you're right, either. Most people will read a book with 200 pages of feats and rules for how to do specific things, and say 'if you don't have the feat that allows you to do X, you can't do X', or 'if you don't have points in X, you shouldn't even bother rolling to do it', because that's the impression the book gives.

(It's worth noting, my response to the first bit was typed based on having read LotFP, and never having actually had my hands on the rules for anything older than AD&D 2e)

>2e isn't Old School
In what way?

In my arbitrary way.

Most people, when they talk about OSR/Old School Rennaissance, are referring to games like B/X, oD&D1e, or AD&D1e(a lot more rarely than the other two)

OSR games are based around mechanical simplicity for the sake of the game being run on player creativity, rather than having to check the books every 5 minutes so you know how to handle the current situation
2e, as said, has more skills than even 4e does. There's more rules for more types of situations than any of the previous editons.

Sure, it's an old game, but it's not what most people think of when they say "Old School D&D"

>(It's worth noting, my response to the first bit was typed based on having read LotFP, and never having actually had my hands on the rules for anything older than AD&D 2e)
Yeah, we can tell.

Before proficiencies were introduced in AD&D, classes had no skills, and simply did attribute checks. The thief was unique in 0D&D for the fact that it had unique percentage-based skills that it could utilize which no other class had. Here were the actual skill names:

— open locks by picking or foiling magical closures
— remove small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)
— listen for noise behind closed doors
— move with great stealth
— filtch items and pick pockets
— hide in shadows
— strike silently from behind
— climb nearly sheer surfaces, upwards or downwards

And they were originally percentage-based and required a d100. Later editions changed it to a save-style roll, before 3E rolled it together with the standard skill system other classes used.

Based on what is said here, is it correct that 5e has a more lean on old-school style if play? I just got into DnD early this year so I am not familiar with old editions but with how 5e is said to be ease of rules and decreases the crazy math to calculate results, among other reasons, I wonder if I am thinking it right.

>has more skills than even 4e does.
In a chapter explicitly marked 'Optional'. And all of those proficiencies come from 1e anyway.

Yeah, 5e is more similar to Basic and oD&D than anything from 2nd to 4th edition.

Strangely, people still play baseball, football, soccer, chess, poker and many other games that they played when they were young.

In fact, all of these games are actually OLDER than D&D! I don't know how people manage with such ancient game technology. Is it just nostalgia?

Nobody is saying sports are shit and haven't aged well like they say about video games or tabletops, a better allegory would be say, katanas. Oh sure its a big sharp blade that cuts people up but its a world of guns, but they wont acknowledge it because they spent so much time and money on it, their experience with it was so fun that if they denied it all those memories of happines wouldn't be RIGHT and human psychology 101 is basically to be right/not wrong or die trying.

Its true if they've put their life into it because or else they would fall into self doubt and disbelief they are a good person.

Are there any .pdfs of od&d floating around?
Can't seem to find any, and I'm pretty keen to read through it.

Real talk: I honestly think all those games are coasting on legacy.

They are not exceptional or better in any way than what any competent designer could design. The versions actually played by people who are not professional athletes are often simplified down to their core principles (i.e. "get this ball into that goal without touching it with your hands"), their simplicity being their strength, something that the "official" versions lack.

The only thing keeping poker afloat is the money, while chess has entirely stopped evolving at some point because people seem to have collectively decided what is the "right" way to play it and anything else is a deviation for the plebs.

>Strangely, people still play baseball, football, soccer, chess, poker and many other games that they played when they were young.
Baseball, football and soccer are all dealing with major controversies, from league corruption to concussions. Hard to say that things are just kosher for them.

Many in the Chess world feel the game is stagnant. FIDE has unfortunately killed all development of the game since the 19th century, whereas it used to see new rules regularly in the years before that.

Poker is seeing a similar problem to Chess, as players are no longer interested in creating new games. When people want the rules to stay the same, development inherently stagnates.

Also note how 5-draw is nowhere near as popular as it was in the 19/20th century. And Texas Hold'em (the new gold standard of poker) isn't even a century old yet.

So yeah, these aren't as evergreen as you imply.

I was going to say something, but basically covers it with
>Interesting but full of misinformation and only makes one point, just makes it over and over again.
It also turned me off of OSR games.
I'm now playing an OSR game and have been for a month and a half of two sessions a week. I kind of hate it, and the way that I often have to play 20 questions to figure out what my character sees/hears/experiences is frustrating, as is the ability to do anything that relies on skills (foraging for food, healing each other, understanding magical objects, etcetera) relies on a 1 in 6 skill chance that no one has, because most classes don't get skill increases, and our Ability Bonuses are all only +1 or rarely +2 since LotFP feels [Ability-10]/3 makes sense. Better would be to use a system like M&M and have *only* the bonuses, but that would be too easy.
Nevermind the way that there's three or four different roll types, with combat being d20+, skills being 1d6 roll under, and Saves being 1d20 roll over

Not to mention that half the things that stupid PDF complains about people have no problem doing in Chronicles of Darkness or even Shadowrun, and certainly in more vague systems like Apocalypse World or Dogs in the Vineyard. Or even Dungeons & Dragons!

Nevermind that not having rules for things tends to slow a session down as people figure out how they'd handle something. The OSR threads are filled with people asking how they should handle things like Cleave and Whirlwind Attack. Because giving wizards spells makes sense, but apparently giving other people Feats is too ~modern~ and against the spirit of the game of pretend. Yeah, 3.pf has stat bloat. Feat taxes are garbage. But "Old School" gaming often treats archaic and outdated ways of thinking as being objectively the best. It also amounts to freeform roleplaying with random, often arbitrary dice rolls thrown in

And makes the decision that combat needs rules and arbitration, but everything else? Nah

"Stat" is any numerical statistic that governs the character's traits.
"Abilities" are traits that every character has.
"Skills" are the specific type of stat you're talking about.

>OSR games are based around mechanical simplicity for the sake of the game being run on player creativity, rather than having to check the books every 5 minutes so you know how to handle the current situation
There are several modern games that do that far better than Lamentations of the Flame Princess and other "let's use MS-DOS" type games. Powered by the Apocalypse games for instance have playerbooks that are rather simple.

>I'm not saying you're wrong, but that doesn't mean you're right, either. Most people will read a book with 200 pages of feats and rules for how to do specific things, and say 'if you don't have the feat that allows you to do X, you can't do X', or 'if you don't have points in X, you shouldn't even bother rolling to do it', because that's the impression the book gives.
I've never understood this kind of complaint. I get that most Feat systems are far too restrictive, but why do people not mind the wizard not being able to do all the spells, but if the Fighter isn't trained in a specific style, that's somehow bad?

"You need to be trained to fight using two weapons" isn't unreasonable, and certainly not more so than "you need to have learned a fire spell to set things alight".

Then again, I don't know why I'm even arguing in this thread. New School versus Old School doesn't matter when it's D&D either way, and games have moved far beyond D&D in both mechanics and philosophy. The idea of restrictive class and arbitrary level systems is already shitty and old-fashioned, as far as I'm concerned.

so...you're surprised that conservative measures to handling something subjective leads to people celebrating problems and promoting the wrong thing because they never learned to move forward with what they're doing?

that pamphlet is pretty fucking good at explaining the worst part about OSR in a nutshell, though. the bloated and tedious "okay i won't tell you what this is so you'll be trying to figure it out for 30 minutes" shit that literally is the reason nobody liked nerds or TTRPGs back in the day. yet it touts it like it's just such a good and wholesome experience, to get a fucking runaround over something so simple.

The transsexual elf deity was right there in 1e.

>"Stat" is any numerical statistic that governs the character's traits.
>"Abilities" are traits that every character has.
During the 70s and 80s, "stat" colloquially also referred to Attributes, as separate from other elements of your character.

>"Skills" are the specific type of stat you're talking about.
They, oddly enough, didn't have a specific name. In fact, the book Greyhawk refers to them as "attributes" (remember, this is the days before gaming companies had glossaries and well-established lingo for their games; unless it was a word established on your sheet, everything was informal). I just called them skills earlier because it's what people would know from newer games.

>I like the idea of OSR, but without the nostalgia the systems are not great compared to new indie games that focus on dungeon crawls.
This.
I want to make a system that calls to mind the early Final Fantasy games and that sort of "D&D by way of an NES game" feel, but OSR is definitely not it, because OSR is restrictive nostalgia bait.

Although I also want a system where money is used to level up, like in Dark Souls, since experience was based on treasure in early D&D. Have Souls and spend that to buy a level up, or maybe poison arrows to cheese a miniboss...

The top looks more cartoonish to me, with the way the art looks like the cheap toys you'd get at the Dollar Tree.
I'm not too fond of the Warcraft shit going on, but the bottom is better because of the dragon and because buff chicks are my fetish, even if the bottom one has even more ridiculous female armour.
Neither of their 'kit' looks functional and proportional.

>fewer progressives
>numales
>SJWs
Apparently OSR is for /pol/ and /r9k/.

>so...you're surprised that conservative measures to handling something subjective leads to people celebrating problems and promoting the wrong thing because they never learned to move forward with what they're doing?
I'm not sure what you're saying.
What I mean is that most of the problems that book assures me modern gaming has seems to be almost entirely... well, not really "made up", but when they talk about things like searching for traps or searching rooms, and how modern games expect you to roll, it just makes me feel like the gaming experience they want is much different from what I want.

For instance, there's a reason I don't play dungeon crawling games. I play story driven games where you're trying to uncover a mystery or stop a plot. Rolling to search the room is not because I just don't UNDERSTAND the glory of how things USED TO BE. It's because searching the room is not important, and the roll is to determine the degree of success randomly, as opposed to me arbitrarily deciding what the player learns based on 20 questions. I mean, my WoD games are pretty slow, but this OSR game has us clearing one room an hour basically. They're not even complex rooms.

The reason skill checks became a thing is because that shit isn't fun. Getting to the meat of the game is fun. Searching a dungeon and trying to be clever is fun, sure, but I literally cannot see shit. I need the ST to tell me what my character experiences. And skills certainly help with that. Am I knowledgeable enough to know this language? Am I perceptive enough to see the marks on the ceiling? Do I know enough about magic to know what these trinkets are? These are the kind of things that keep coming up in this game and can't even be solved with "is it bigger than a breadbox?" style questions.

And really this is just one of my complaints.

www90.zippyshare.com/v/HKMRboX1/file.html

I can't tell if you are trolling or if you really are this much of a disgusting grog.

Some people have bad taste. They play skirmish wargames and call them RPGs and that gets them off somehow. Personally I find the whole concept revolting.

Make a ruling to search by rolling.

If you mod out the touted benefits of OSR, why play OSR?

It's almost as if that's what most modern systems do. The problem with is that it's a system of paranoia. Though most of the time characters will take 10 or 20 unless they're pressed for time, because that's a great balance of describing what you're doing and not rolling, while also using the character's traits to determine their success or failure.

I believe humanity is not progressing, but degenerating. That's why I find more joy in things the older they are.

Fucking legend
Thanks so much

This is why I only play games that have rulebooks carved into stone plates. PDFs are degenerate.

>Sent from iPhone 7 using tapatalk

less metagaming, you are not limited to features that the developers had time and resources to think about and put in the game

most MMO'RP'G nowadays boil down to "mash the attack key and run around the level, until you level-up and look up perfect builds for your character class online"

>What exactly is the appeal of "old school" role-playing games?

>pretend to be somebody else
>don't bath
>beat up lots of people
>do it your y'lady
>everybody thinks you're a really cool guy

The original -4 Str was fuck controversial back in the days, and they actually had to make an effort to shitpost back then. Also gender-changing items and transsexual deities.

Old school gaming is about exploration. You are a relatively regular guy in a fantasy world with crazy races, magic and monsters. You don't know what weird threat is around the corner. Even if you are a magic user, you are more like a scholar that is curious about these things rather than a sorcerer whose life is full of magic.

Newer style gaming is more about immersion. From level 1, your character can belong to those weird races (dragonborn, tiefling...) or use magic daily for paltry tasks like it's nothing. You are not an outsider exploring a fantasy world, but a regular citizen of that fantasy world.

>The original -4 Str was fuck controversial back in the days
You do know that was never actually a thing, right? People made that up. I think it was what FATAL's penalties would be in D&D.

Yeah, that's from EQ.

I feel like neither of those are inherently true, nor are they concepts tied to their 'era'.

There's an article from an important fanzine discussing the concept within D&D mechanics from way back. It's what I'm refering to.

Considering that Gygax berated stat penalties for men and women in AD&D, they had to have existed somewhere.
Then again, there were a lot of derivates even back then.

Nobody who's played 1st edition D&D seriously believes that the rules used to be simpler. Part of the reason that Vampire was so huge in the 90s was that it was an entirely new play style, but also part was that the rules were so crazy simple. Not very good, but very very simple.

If you read his follow-on posts, he explains that he makes traps obvious. It's not "mother may I" because everything relevant in the room is up front, but tagged with more detail.

>There's a chest-of-drawers, suit of armor, and painting in the room
>I search the room
>You see nothing except for the chest-of-drawers, suit of armor, and painting
>Fine, I look at the painting
>The painting is a portrait of an ancient nobleman. The dust around the frame is disturbed as if it has been moved.
>I move the painting from it's hook
>There is what appears to be a safe behind the painting

Resolving that with a dice roll is just yawn inducing. There's nothing inherently exciting about it, unlike combat. And taking 10 or 20 because you're afraid of "mother may I" means that you should have a talk with your DM about expectations - and frankly, "mother may I" isn't fun behind the DM's screen either; so it's worthwhile to come to an understanding with the DM that he's not trying to play gotcha either.

Shadowrun and GURPS came first. There was a big shift in the 90s as companies realized "1d20+modifiers, then roll XdY+modifiers for damage" was not the only way to do RPGs.
During the 00s we had another shift, where games realized they didn't have to simulate everything.
Now we're in one of those "Diamond Age" type situations where people realize they can merge mechanics and narrative concepts, and that things don't need to be comprehensive mechanical situations OR freeform abstractions, they can be both. Mechanics reinforcing the FEEL of the game is the big thing now, as opposed to mechanics that are really only there for randomness or arbitration.

While at first I was thinking of Chronicles of Darkness and things like Conditions, even more than that (though it's a bit old at this point) is stuff like Dogs in the Vineyard turning all conflict into a series of escalations and risks, or how MonsterHearts makes the complicated social ties of messy hormonal teenagers and turns them into a currency.

My point is that that's already how most of the people I've seen playing play it. Noticing the dust would be the result of your Perception take 10. Hell, I've even seen Pathfinder GMs ask *where* people are searching when they do roll.
(and often it really does just seem like players want to use any excuse to roll dice)

When it was just White Wolf, having political messages in an RPG was new and fresh. Then it was Shadowrun, too. Then a few more.

Now, left-wing political messages are kind of mandatory in an RPG if you don't want to be twitter-mobbed or boycotted. It's become cliche and kind of forced, even if you agree with them.

It's not fresh anymore.

Not sure if autism

>Now
Holy Race War and FATAL have always been outlyers and not really needed as D&D's alignment-system is about as conservative as the Holy Inquisition and the Board of Un-American Activities.

Talking about the players, not the characters.

No it's not. And the companies that do have ~political messages~ seem to do pretty well for themselves. It's almost as if people actually do like diversity, and don't find "people other than whites exist" to be forced.
I also can't think of any RPGs that were twitter mobbed or boycotted. Can you even boycott an RPG? A boycott sort of implies you would have bought the product in the first place.
I mean, I have a boycott on Chik-Fil-A, but considering I don't eat fast food, I also have a boycott on McDonald's and Burger King and basically anywhere but Hardee's, which is my first choice if I do end up eating out.

Nevermind that Onyx Path and Paizo are the only companies I've ever really seen do more than just say "you can be a pansexual genderfluid elf in this game! Or even a girl!" Companies other than those two barely pay more than lip service to diversity, so I'm not really even sure where this "all these SJWs are ruining games" bullshit is even coming from, besides getting mad at barely-there sidebars.

Nevermind all the political messages in RPGs that you agree with and therefore don't care about. "Everything is politics" says Voltaire [or really Thomas Mann]. Ai Wei-Wei adds that everything is art. Personally, I like pic related.

House, not Board. HUAC.

Does playing with people who are different from you make you uncomfortable? I'm so sorry user. There there.
Spoilers: I know a transwoman who wrote a LotFP hack. And frankly OSR seems filled with hipsters.

Is it me or this is essentially a point and click adventure?

I mean, for how much shit modern games get for being MMORPG for babbies, this sure feels like only those three things have the hand/eye icon on them in the room.

>Noticing the dust would be the result of your Perception take 10.

That's not interactive, though. And "Well, to find that, you have take 20" is tedious in the sense that it's both arbitrary and passive. It doesn't reward player interactivity.

This is certainly a matter of opinion, but "I roll to search" and people making spot rolls everywhere is something I found not-Fun about 3.PF both as a player and DM. It's not nostalgia; I started out with 3.PF; I was converted to OSR stuff not having played old D&D before.

>this sure feels like only those three things have the hand/eye icon on them in the room.

Certainly, but I think being upfront about keyed areas-of-interest is better than pixel-bitching

Hermaphrodite, not transsexual.

Man I miss getting my hand crushed by unsafe factory machines, getting fired for being one handed, and dying of communicable diseases due to lack of adequate sanitation or medical care.

I'm not arguing in favour of rolling every five minutes to search. I'm just saying that the character's stats should determine what they see, not the player describing their actions well. I mean, looking in the right place, sure, but there's no "stunting" a perception check. If their character would succeed passively, that means they find it. If they wouldn't, that means they'd overlook it. Not everyone is going to be perceptive enough to notice the dust is moved.

As an aside, systems like Gumshoe (and CofD's 2e rules) suggest handling searches in a much more meaningful way than simple pass/fails, even with rolls. The roll should give you more information, but you should always get at least the minimum necessary to push the plot forward. Better rolls or more thorough searching means more than the minimum.

Pretty sure shapeshifting is involved, so I'm going to count it.

In most cases it's simply that it's what you grew up with.

I mean that's kind of a simplistic view of old-school games, dungeon crawling isn't exactly the extent of the experience. Or even integral to the experience, really.

>I'm not really even sure where this "all these SJWs are ruining games" bullshit is even coming from, besides getting mad at barely-there sidebars.
Veeky Forums's clan of SIWs get shrieky about any acknowledgement of homosexuality outside of a monster manual entry. They're basically the craziest tumblr stereotypes, just from the opposite end of the political spectrum.