I'm 23, which means that I am young. All the rpgs I have played have been of the newer generations, and hence I have a question; how does old school/OSR games play? All I ever find or hear is that OSR games play like "back in the days/OD&D", but what does that mean? How does it compare? What are the differences? What kind of play do they encourage?
I thought I'd ask before potentially investing in an OSR game to see for myself.
It's like wiping your ass with leaves: rough, kind of a chore and obviously not the best way to do it, but it reminds you of the past, when you were strong, healthy and without responsibility.
There's a HUGE INTERNET FIGHT about what osr means and who gets to decide that at the moment. Its mostly older grogs vs art weirdos. Older grogs are more traditional, play raw, etc. The art weirdos use the flexibility/lightness of many older DnD materials to make neat shit. Its mostly not very important, one of the key aspects of osr being modularity and homebrew anyway.
Basically it focuses on early, pre90s dnd, dungeons, wilderness exploration, simplified character generation, higher lethality, being a game with abstractions, highly GM dependent, being able to modify parts you want and being easily compatible with DnD TSR products. Some people play it more codified with time tracking sheets torch duration and monster checks every 30 in game minuets on the dot, some people play it looser.
As someone who was around back when "old school" was the only thing around, my 2 cents on the matter are as follows:
"Old school" games are much more fluid. Largely because the rules were so much more amateurishly written back then, you only had a vague idea as to how 3/4 of the actual game actions in the game were supposed to take place. "I want to convince the guard to help me look for the lost orphan"; well, you've got a charisma score, and there's something there about an attitude adjustment, but how much of an attitude adjustment do you need to get him to abandon his post for what is an important thing to him? The rules weren't helpful about the subject in a way that newer games often are, giving guidelines for this sort of stuff.
As a result, the DM/GM/Referee/Storyteller/whatever you're calling him has an enormously greater role, not just in building the setting and challenges, but actually determining how the game itself works, and hard and fast rules were much rarer, and it was if not exactly encouraged, at least understood that every play group would have its own ad-hoc collection of rulings and ways they did things, which might or might not even be consistent within that one group.
Agreed. This fellow has a good understanding of it.
1) GM fiat was more liberally used. Most adventures were homebuilt. Pre-constructed adventures. when they existed, were either linear, or narrowly branched, and so you couldn't sandbox with them and you'd have to adapt (ad-lib and GM fiat) to explore beyond the boundaries. Adjudicating rules was the GM's area to enable smooth gameplay. It was advised strongly to not let your players read the GM rulebook. Players were meant to be immersed in the story, but kept ignorant about the rules (to a certain degree), because rules-awareness broke immersion.
2) Old school games were about the story, generally. You had your character, and you did what you could do. Your actions and processes mattered more than your listed abilities. Anybody could check for traps, by poking a 10ft pole around - you didn't need to be rogue to do this. You could Bar a door, or try to pickpocket, or try to convince someone - no abilities were off limit by nature of "not having that ability". Problems are solved by creative outside-the-box-thinking. Fighting a tough bugbear? Can't beat it? Try to bribe the cave goblins to fight it with you. Maybe you can climb the cave wall and dislodge a boulder onto it from high up? Maybe you can lure it to a narrow point in the cave and get it stuck.
Modern RPGs are very heavily focused around your build, or your progression. Yes, the story has importance, but modern RPGs expect a "class balance" - having a caster, a rogue, a fighter, and a healer. Or some other combination. Problems are solved by leveling up to the point where your abilities overcome challenges, as long as you play to a certain level of competence. Modern RPGs play out like videogames. You wouldn't think to hire the goblins to fight the bugbear - because goblins are foes, and should be killed for EXP. Dropping boulders doesn't become a plan because my character sheet isn't statted to have a 'boulder-drop" ability.
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3) Old school RPGs may have designed a boss encounter or a scenario as a challenge, but the dungeon was dynamic. Random encounters were rolled when you entered a room, or moved through a map. There was no concept of "clearing out" a dungeon. It could be dead empty, and you could still find a random encounter. The goal was to get in, solve the encounter, and get out, (ideally with as much loot as was reasonable). Loot gained counted as EXP and could help advance your character, so treasure raiding could just just as valuable as monster slaying.
Modern RPGs tend to design dungeons in their entirety. You don't have random encounters. You have set monsters of a weak mook nature, captain mooks, sub-bosses, and bosses. Each encounter is expected to be chained in context to the next and previous.
4) Old school stuff generally rewarded exploration. If you went looking, you found something (Sometimes you found loot, sometimes you found trouble). There was risk/reward along the exploration axis.
Modern stuff again has loot preset. Wealth by level guidelines influence this, or the Challenge rating of the monster influence treasure gained by defeating foes. Combat is the main risk/reward axis, and exploration is reduced to simply clearing the dungeon (a closed system)
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5) Old school RPGs were heavily influenced by caving, spelunking, and such. Hence the focus on exploration. Maps weren't premade in PDFs, or drawn on whiteboards. The players were responsible for mapping as they progressed. This meant that clever DMs could trick them with unusual geometry, or use of 3D space. Caverns above other caverns, could get the players lost, or give tactical advantages, etc.
Newer games tend to follow a videogame style - The map is an expectation. The map provides the backdrop for the main focus - tactical combat.
Child, you haven't lived until you've retrieved the Amulet of Yendor.
Piggybacking off what the other user said, "Old-School" playing is more or less a style. You can run old-school style games using modern systems.
Old school D&D is rather ad hoc and clunky, with a bunch of different subsystems that work differently (they use different dice, sometimes you want to roll high, while others you want to roll low) -- you can tell that it organically evolved. There are also big areas it really doesn't address, leaving more up to DM fiat. And the character-building options tend to be very limited, at least if we're talking about mechanics (though character backgrounds and so forth may play an important role given that heavier stress on fiat and improvisation, and the lack of detailed rules to get in the way of that). But it can be a breeze to run and play, especially if you're talking about the simpler end of old school (AD&D certainly has more options than Basic, but it has a lot of junky, fiddly details and unnecessary restrictions and so forth).
Old school D&D has a tendency to be more gamist. It's you vs. the dungeon in a more narrowly-defined niche sort of game (which can actually be to its benefit, because D&D does that well, and other things less so). It's certainly not universal, but old school D&D tends to be less heroic, more fantasy Vietnam with looting, higher death, and less story-driven. Of course, a lot of this comes down to play styles and isn't strictly encoded into the rules.
Coming from modern games, OSR can be quite a shock. If you're interested in checking it out though, you might want to go to the OSR General thread , go to the "treasure trove" linked in the opening post, and download Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D (go to 08 TSR / 02 Basic / '81 Basic Rules and download "Basic (Moldvay - BX)" and "Expert Rulebook (Cook - BX)"). Moldvay/Cook Basic is a streamlined edition, consisting of two 64-page books (the Basic Set covering levels 1-3, and the Expert Book covering levels 4-14). It is the thing that most retroclones seem to be based on and is regarded by many in the OSR thread as the pinnacle of old school D&D.
I am 23 and I am old. You might wanna check before making bold statements.
I don't think your blanket statements about 'modern RPGs' are actually true at all. I started with 3.5 and have played 4th and 5th, as well as a handful of non D&D games, and I've never encountered the attitude that you couldn't do something like drop a boulder on someone because there wasn't an ability for it on your sheet.
I've also played in lots of games with random encounters in 'modern RPGs' and I've never encountered a mandatory mook->captain mook->sub-boss->boss chain.
OP is Ageist
When I started (back in the day), 2nd edition had just came out, and honestly, those were the best games.
Clunky system with lots of weird Thac0's and saves? Maybe, but it wasn't weird at the time, it was normal. There was much less 'one size fits all' pc's. It was much more customized. (i know some would argue that)
4 Players could roll up 4 Human Fighters, and they'd each be vastly different. Just based off weapon choices.
Less of a call for oddball races, like drow, or cat/furryfags/dragonsomething. Just the basics really, but it added more fun by not having the freakshow of PC's.
Somewhat less unique classes (no Soul Severing BladeBorne, or shit), but still lots of flavorful classes.
Magic was much better balanced.
All in all.......2nd edition rocked.
Of course, any game can rock, if you have a good group and good dm. And they'll all suck if you don't.
Understood. I've also played in 3.5 and pathfinder games. A lot of these playstyle decisions are more based on "With whom you play" rather than by "what system you play"
However, as you rightly pointed out, these are broad strokes and blanket statements. Not definitive, and certainly different groups play in different ways.
What I mean about the mooks and bosses is that, generally, modern games will have monsters matched to the power level of the players. For each encounter, the combat should be challenging, but expected to be possible for a player victory, or very likely that the players win. Old-school games sometimes were balanced, but were more likely to have foes of a challenge beyond the ability of the party. (Either as a result of random dice roll generation, or a dropped in monster by the DM who maybe wasn't fully aware of the impact of that monster).
I've played Dark Heresy 1st ed, Deathwatch, Call of Cthulhu, Dragon Age and DnD 3.5. GM'd Dark Heresy, Deathwatch, Edge of the Empire and, most recently, Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
Of the more modern games, common themes included reasonably complex character creation with a plan for optimal progression by stacking feats, bonuses etc. You can go for suboptimal character builds, but that means that your fellow players may have to try harder to pick up the slack for you in a "balanced" encounter. We tended to play story-driven games where characters have some kind of motivation or long-term goal beyond that of the current adventure. Combat was fairly tactical with a range of specific rules; combat in CoC and Dark Heresy could be pretty lethal but characters still had plenty of opportunity to realise that they were outmatched and leg it.
I played through Tower of the Stargazer with three friends on Saturday; I put down a character sheet in front of each of them and handed out some paper chits representing food and supplies. The player characters' backgrounds were that they like money and that money's hard to come by in England in 1639. With no rules and no feats to rely on, the flow of play was that I described a situation to the players, they told me exactly what they wanted to do and I told them the result, occasionally needing to roll a die to do so. This close interaction with the environment resulted in them doing a load of things that I didn't expect and they actually made it in and out of the place with nobody dying (one did lose their nose and another was down to 2hp after being impaled by a rib attached to a reanimated length of intestine). The players immediately began discussing their plans to return to the site next week, which left me a bit chuffed since I expected it to be a one-shot session.
If you're honestly thinking about investing in an OSR game, I'd recommend going to the Trove and downloading the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules and character sheet (they're also available free on the main site) and Tower of the Stargazer. Read the adventure first, maybe print it out; it's got a lot of good advice. Then read up whatever rules from Lamentations you'll need (character creation, encumbrance, exploration, lighting, combat, maybe retainers if want to give them someone to hire). Then invite some people over, sit them down and run the game. They don't need to know or care about the rules, just the choices they have to make.
In some ways this is the biggest weakness of OSR gaming; complex systems like 3.5/4e and the Fantasy Flight games let you theorycraft, build complex NPCs with a page worth of stats, plan out balanced encounters or plot intricate campaigns. Because OSR games place so much importance on the interaction between player and DM, you can't really get a feel for it until you sit down and play with someone. On the pages of the adventure an object or door can be described in half a sentence, but the players may interact with it in any number of ways according to any wacky idea that they may have and you will never be able to fully predict that. Thankfully it needs minimal player investment to get started, so give it a go and see how it feels.
>how does old school/OSR games play
It still comes with all the bad traits of the D&D, but much less clutch. Doesn't make it good, or even better, just different than modern D&D, but it's still D&D, with all the core elements and NOTHING ELSE.
tl;dr if you somehow like Vancian magic, retarded armor rules, levels, classes and alignments, then go ahead. If not - you are missing nothing
Also, those games require a grog GM that knows how to run this shit, or it will be just modern game using ancient rules.
Fine, but have you thrown cheese at the Warlock of Firetop Mountain?
Didn't think so!
>Most adventures were homebuilt.
This is still true if you aren't playing D&D (which is a roll-playing game not a roleplaying game).
Also worth mentioning is the entire old school AESTHETIC, which helped set a tone for games which was very different from what you see now. RPG artwork from ~2000 onwards is almost universally abominable.
I was going to make some snarky ass comment but this says anything I would, except better.
One of the main things I've seen for older games is that they drive home the idea that you are NOT the hero of a fantasy story. To paraphrase Daffy Duck, you're a coward, but a greeeedy little coward, so while actual meeting the enemy head on in glorious battle or whatever is just going to get you and your friends killed, you're given a lot more leeway in the dirty tricks category, bribe the orc guards to look the other way, lead a dozen peasants that you hired as porters through traps like a meat-grinder, stock up on oil and burn everything, you generally have to "think outside the box" because doing otherwise is suicide.
>4 Players could roll up 4 Human Fighters, and they'd each be vastly different. Just based off weapon choices.
see in my experience it was the exact opposite, every time I've played 2nd, once a fight started it felt like everyone of the same class was neigh identical the only difference being what die they rolled for damage and a point of AC if they had a shield. Casters had it better because each wizard or cleric could have different spells prepared, but for the fighters, the DM could have just had everyone use the same generic sheet, just with their own choices of non weapon proficiencies, and I'd of noticed no mechanical difference
It's not so much that "you are not the hero" as much as you need to survive long enough to earn the title.
"1st level characters have no backstories. Your first 5 levels are your backstory."
But yes, the intention (often reflected in the artwork) is that the world(s) is a very dangerous place, full of monsters that will devour you, and powers beyond your reckoning. The modern tone (again often reflected in the art) is more of "Look how cool and powerful your characters are! Adventuring is fun!"
>I thought I'd ask before potentially investing in an OSR game to see for myself.
Do you mean, like... a time investment? Or what exactly? Asking Veeky Forums is a less efficient use of time.
The old vs. new RPG debate is a pretty dumb debate as you're comparing old DnD with new DnD. Yet, you completely omit the fact that both are shitty RPGs and barely deserve to be called RPGs at all - the first one being a roleplay wargame, the second being a tabletop MMORPG simulator.
Yes, before the DM had more power, using DM fiat. Yes, modern games tend to either being more complex (make rules for everything to avoid DM fiat), or less complex and more narrative (players want to use fiat, too).
The only difference between old and new games is that the new ones sometimes have clearer rules and better editing, and a different group of social outcasts jizzing all over them (and sometimes not even that).
First of all - pic related. Read it, judge for yourself. Warning: it's highly idealised version of old-school games, glossing over all their glaring isssues
If you don't play D&D you are missing nothing, as those games are nothing else but collection of the most core rules of the entire D&D.
If you joined the D&D crowd with 3.X, then you are going to fucking hate it, as almost everything is based on GM fiat and the game is brutal meatgrinder where you stand zero chance.
If you joined the D&D crowd even later, then you are going to be puzzled where the hell is any rule covering anything else than killing things.
And if you dislike D&D for this or that reason, then it's the very thing responsible for those reasons, as shock and terror, all the shittiest rules and concepts in D&D (aside maybe THAC0) were introduced from the very start.
It will never cease to amaze me how clunky the rules were from the very start, despite being collection of only the most important mechanics.
Also - don't even bother if you don't have a GM capable of running old-school dungeon crawlers. If your GM doesn't know how to run such game, he will kill in the process the entire fun that the game could possibly bring
They encourage all the worst imaginable traits you can expect from a player: a greedy powergaming murderhobo arguing with GM about fiat made-up on the spot 10 seconds ago.
It's basically like playing Pathfinder: Lite, with outright ban on role-playing.
Seconding this. Interesting how the aesthetic shift is also manifest in play-style. Modern D&D has become a fantasy-themed superhero game and the art reflects that.