RPGaDay 2019 Day #5 Ancient

The theme today is “Ancient.”

This is probably the best opportunity to talk about what I like about the Old School movement.

I started out as a thoroughly modern gamer, eager to try the latest and greatest games. Even when I didn’t have the resources to keep up with the Joneses of gaming, it was still a goal. So how did I get sucked into the OSR?

The thing that appeals to me in modern games is that they are often tuned to telling a certain type of story particularly well. Whether that’s interpersonal drama, heist narratives or super heroic action, I can point to a game on my shelf and say “If you want to run this kind of campaign, this book is going to have the mechanics and resources to tell the best version of that story.”

While I’ve described RPG mechanics through the metaphor of a video game physics engine and a Magic 8 Ball, here’s another one that’s useful: Pinball table. Each one is designed a little bit differently, with different themes and mechanical elements to give a slightly different English to the ball and alternate paths for the ball to follow as it bounces around the play area.

Story games often do this sort of thing deliberately. Games that are Powered by the Apocalypse ask specific questions with the Moves that you’re able to take and offer specific answers with the results that they provide. Fiasco players are guided through the session angling for positive or negative results to achieve the best result in the Aftermath phase.

While D&D is considered “generic” by many, and there are efforts to steer more recent editions to be more broadly accessible, the early editions were actually very specific in their intended play style. Much like a modern story game, early D&D had an intended shape that play was supposed to take. It was a well-tuned engine for killing monsters and taking their stuff.

For example, there’s a clear synergy between wandering monsters and XP awards for gaining treasure. If you encounter a monster in its lair, you will generally find its treasure nearby. Kill the monster and take its stuff and get XP for both activities. If you encounter that same monster as a wandering encounter, it will be away from its treasure. No treasure to loot means less XP gained from the encounter. Loot was also typically worth much more XP. A typical orc was worth only 15 XP or so, while the 100 gold pieces in the chest it was guarding was 100 XP. Without that treasure chest, the encounter is much less worthwhile. A waste of resources that could be better spent on acquiring treasure.

The fact that I didn’t learn from original sources might have an impact as well. Those rulebooks were famously obtuse, while modern retroclones skirt copyright law by using different wording for the same ideas. This also tends to be clearer language. And some retroclone writers fancy themselves designers and offer their own improvements to the original engine.

By having a clear shape that play is supposed to take, Old School D&D qualifies (in my mind) as the original story game.