"Old School", to Me

In the world of tabletop roleplaying games, one topic that I have found fascinating has been the comparison of "Old School" gaming as compared to "New School" gaming.  It seems that a lot of the focus is on game mechanics.  However for me, the rules have almost nothing to do with "Old School" gaming.

Even in the early days of the hobby, there was no "industry standard" for rules.  Just looking at some of the early games, such as OD&D, Rolemaster, Traveller, GURPS and Palladium FRPG, I see quite a divergence in both the approach and rules in all of these games.  For me, I think the "Old School" idea is more about a mindset, playing style and expectations, not the rules you use.

First, a little about my background.  I started playing roleplaying games around 1980ish.  I was in the Gifted & Talented program in my school, and my G&T teacher suggested D&D as my year-long project.  My school purchased the Basic D&D game, and I even got to keep the game at the end.  I've been hooked ever since!  In my formative days, I also played a LOT of Dragonquest.  I also played Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, AD&D and GURPS.  I think this qualifies me to at least have an opinion on "Old School" gaming, at least in the chronological sense.

I can't speak for other groups, but most of the time, we were just winging it.  We lived in a small farming town in Wisconsin, about 30 minutes from the birthplace of D&D.  We didn't have the internet and instant access to millions of people with which we could compare notes and share ideas.  We viewed the rules mostly as guidelines, and many times, we just made things up on the fly because the interaction and keeping the story moving was more important than "getting it right".  We rarely used game terms, because we didn't know the rules by heart.  Much of the "work" was left to the GM, which was always me.  The players just described what they wanted to do, and it was my job to figure out how to make it work in the game.  "Table talk" was frowned upon, as players wanted to "feel" like they were actually in the situation.  The players weren't interested in having the story revolve around their characters.  They just wanted to react to the world as it was unfolding before them, as a group.  We were teenagers, so I think that played a big role in our willingness and ability to "get into character". I think that also contributed to the fact that we didn't require complex characters or a deep, twisted plot to have a good time.  At the time, this was such a new thing that just the experience of playing a game like this was thrilling enough.  As a child of the 70's & 80's, I was also growing up at the dawn of video games, and I think there is a similarity there.  How could we play pong for 4 hours?  It was something completely new and revolutionary, so being lucky enough to be a part of something that was in its infancy was a large part of the appeal, at least for me.

I'm not pining for the "good old days" in the previous paragraph.  I was really just reminiscing, and trying to remember my feelings and emotions about gaming at that time in my life.  But doing so did kind of help me define what "old school" gaming means to me.  I think the biggest aspect of "old school" gaming for me is the mindset of just letting yourself go, to be completely immersed in the shared experience of playing a game where you can be anyone and try anything.  I also think that the GM/Player relationship is extremely important.  Before I really discovered modules, I had to create the world for the characters.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I would whip up a city, add some area villages, and then a vast wilderness, and that was about it.  I was no writer, and I had no training in the construction and management of plot lines, developing tension and so forth.  I just created a calendar, made up some "events" that I thought might affect the characters, revealed those events to the group as they occurred, and just went with whatever grabbed their interest.  I was a fledgling "sandbox gamer" before I even knew what that was! 

To sum up this blog-turned-novel, I think that "old school", to me, simply means playing the game with the mindset and goal of recapturing the magic of our earliest gaming experiences, whether 30 years ago or ;ast week.  I think the most important aspect that make a game feel "old school" to me is when the emphasis is on what's happening, and not how it's happening.  Gaming will always feel "old school" to me, because when I game, I'm always trying to recapture that feeling I had when I first discovered roleplaying games.  "Old School" is, to me, a state of mind, not a set of rules or even a playing style.