Old School – a review of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
Like lots of people, I got my roleplaying start with the Red Box basic set for Dungeons & Dragons back at the ripe old age of 7 or 8. Weirdly enough, I never actually played a roleplaying game until high school, and then only once. I was at university before I took up the hobby in earnest with second edition AD&D and only really got into it with the advent of third edition in 2000.
In those early days I made up a lot of characters and read a lot of books. But that was the limit of my ‘old school’ gaming. So it was with some interest that I cam across the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming today. It’s a free, thirteen page download by Matthew Finch who wrote the Original D&D ‘retro-clone’ Swords & Wizardry and it goes into the differences between ‘modern’ gaming and ‘old school’ gaming.
I’d normally find this sort of thing slightly patronising and annoying, and indeed the Swords & Wizardry site has pretty strong elements of that, to whit:
To reawaken the hobbyist-gamer and put to rest the consumer-gamer, to break out of the miasma of RPG consumer-think, and to re-ignite the original wide-horizon view of fantasy roleplaying and its potential.
Blah.
But the PDF itself is actually a fairly fun and compelling read. It lays out different examples of play and how a modern game would run them and how an ‘old-school’ game would run them, with a modern game focusing on the skills and stats of the character sheet and the old school game focusing on the player’s imagination. One example searching a room – in the modern game the room is searched by a dice roll against the search skill and in the old-school game, it’s searched via role-play. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s been the way my modern games have gone sometimes and the Primer provided a quick way to reflect on that.
There are clearly some limitations to this – as Sophie would be quick to point out, a lot of the modern games she plays encourage exactly this sort of free-form roleplaying – yesterday’s 3:16 actual play is a case in point (it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons!). But it’s clear what Finch is talking about here – old D&D versus new D&D – and so it’s silly to get too hung up on the limitations of his definitions.
I’m going to be playing in a first edition AD&D game on Australia Day for the first time in a long time and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to use the primer to get in the mood and frame of mind and hopefully it works!
1 Comment to Old School – a review of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
“it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons”
Very true. It’s interesting how everything is a cycle in the end. Will be interested to read the actual play from this.
January 15, 2009