Knights and Knaves and Lunacy

There's been some hilarious and depressing stuff at the Knights & Knaves Alehouse recently. Via Kellri, there's this amazing thread, where a handful of reasonable people try to have a discussion while surrounded by jibbering, bile-filled idiots. It reminds me of one of those chat room discussions on virgin.net circa 1997, where you'd have two people in a room having a pleasant conversation, punctuated by obscene and nonsensical comments in the background from adolescent boys. Then there's a thread accusing Zeb Cook of being a liar because he doesn't think the 2e ranger was based on Drizzt. (Can you get a more geeky discussion subject than that? It even beats "That idiot thinks Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk!" in the nerdliness stakes.)

And finally there's a nice dollop of Old School Orthodoxy on top, to finish off a particularly bitter-tasting and stodgy cake. Yep, if it was ever in doubt: the OSR isn't so much a revolution as a counter-reformation, and I sometimes get the feeling that some of its supporters rather wish they had the methods of the Spanish Inquisition at their disposal, if only it was legal.

I'm not a member of the Knights & Knaves Alehouse but this sort of thing makes me want to join in. Far more entertaining than what's on TV, at any rate.

Swords & Wizardry Sighted in Tokyo: Millions Flee

I just noticed that somebody is going to be running a Swords & Wizardry game at the monthly Japan International Gamer's Guild meet up in Yoyogi-Uehara in May. Just my luck that I'll be out of the country for the entirety of that month.

Anyway, this is the first evidence I've had that the retro-clones are actually making their presence felt outside of the blogs and forums. (Unless the game is going to be run by a blogger...although I don't know of anybody else living in and around Tokyo.) An encouraging sign for sure.

I've fallen by the wayside a little when it comes to the 'old school renaissance'. I think my initial enthusiasm for the thing was based on the fact that I didn't like the look of D&D 4e or any of the self-styled 'indie' games. I've come to the realisation that, no, I actually just like old games and want to play them, and haven't actually stopped - which is an altogether different thing from a renaissance. Adding to that, it has to be said that my favourite old games (AD&D 2e, Cyberpunk 2020, MERP, Advanced Fighting Fantasy) probably aren't old school enough to be proper Old Skool anyway. And as a natural dyed-in-the-wool contrarian I was never comfortable with the idea of any sort of movement.

But I do really like Swords & Wizardry. The toolbox approach, and the fact that it allows people to come up with things like Ruins & Ronin, is a huge boon. It's nice to see that it's making at least a vague splash in the Far East; perhaps there's hope for us S&Wers after all.

The Winter of Our Discontent; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shibboleths

An interesting coincidence (or something more sinister...?) sees a mild flamewar erupt on the rpg site about growing discontent with D&D 4e, while at the same time wailing and gnashing of teeth comes over the 'old-school' blogosphere about the revival/renaissance or whatever you call it and the retro-clones it has spawned. The moral of the story? People like complaining. And I am no exception.

Here's my own stance on the retro-clones. As I've said a few times in this blog, all they really boil down to is glorified shibboleths. I don't believe that they provide a solution to an otherwise insurmountable legal problem with publishing 'unlicensed game supplements'; that problem almost certainly doesn't exist. Nor do I believe they are necessary to preserve the older versions of D&D - all of which are available to buy as pdfs.

What they are useful for is as a means for like-minded people to easily identify one another. "D&D" will generally always mean the current or latest edition of the game to most roleplayers. At the moment, it's synonymous with "4th edition D&D". Fine, no problem, that's the way the world works, whatever ones personal likes and dislikes might be. But it does mean that saying "I like D&D" is problematic for someone who likes older editions. Other people might get the wrong idea and assume you play a game involving 'controllers', 'daily powers' and half-orcs with origins that absolutely do not involve anything bad.

However, say the magic words: "Swords & Wizardry", "OSRIC", "Labyrinth Lord", and if anybody within earshot is 'in the know' - Bingo! - they'll identify you as somebody who probably shares a similar gaming style. And vice-versa. Love, or at least mutual satisfaction, (ahem) will blossom. What's more, saying "Swords & Wizardry" has a kind of cache that saying "I like AD&D" or "I like B/X D&D" doesn't. It immediately lets the right kind of person know that you are in the club. Probably you read all the blogs and forums that the cool people read, have the right playstyle (sandbox, megadungeon, 'rulings not rules'), and possess a healthy disregard for Wizards of the Coast. You are one of the special ones, and all the other special ones will identify you as one of their own. This is a nice feeling to have. Belonging. And a hint of superiority over 'ordinary gamers'.

Nothing wrong with this of course - it's natural human behaviour that we all exhibit, no matter what hobby we have. In my circle of friends in school, saying that your favourite Smashing Pumpkins album was Pisces Iscariot had much the same function - it meant you were in the know, and to be trusted as somebody with impeccable taste. More usefully, the Flemish used to get people to pronounce the words 'schild en vriend' as a means of rooting out French speakers, who would pronounce them 'skild en frend'. And be killed.

Also, I should point out that I like Swords & Wizardry a lot as a cleaned-up version of OD&D, so no complaints about it on that score. But let's stop pretending that it's all just a way of getting around a legal problem now, shall we?

EDIT: Somebody in the comments to the post at LotFP makes the excellent point that the retro clones are free. Also, they are presented better than the older editions. These two factors make them excellent tools for spreading the word. But hey, I have broken ribs and have been writing bullshit insightful stuff about international law all day, so I can be forgiven for the extemporaneous nature of this post.

What the Public Wants is the Image of Passion, not Passion Itself

One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy! - Gary Gygax

In another life, I took what literary theorists said seriously - seriously enough at least to disagree with many of them and consider them a blight on humanity; very well educated but fundamentally not-very-intelligent people are responsible for a lot of what's bad in the world. George Steiner in particular always struck me as a very eloquent and very widely read fool, but I reserved a special place in hell for Roland Barthes, a man I considered not far removed from Satan. I was a very angry and far-too-intellectual-for-my-own-good 20 year old. (One of my favourite quotes is by the writer Jonathan Franzen, who said that he spends around ten minutes a day fretting about the fact that, when he was in his 20s, he used to spend ten minutes a day fretting about things like the fact that Americans have substituted medical products for genuine psychological healing. I understand what he means in a very deep and meaningful sense - why was I so serious about things like that?)

Anyway, these days I'm a lot mellower and I think I can see a little bit of what Barthes was getting at, especially regarding Death of the Author. This was a famous essay by him in which he basically argued that in interpreting a text, it is the text and the reader's understanding of it alone which matters - not the author's intent. As soon as the author has produced a piece of writing he no longer owns it and no longer should be seen as having any relation to it - it is not his or her history or views which inform analysis of it, but the reader's. And each new reading by each new reader, or even each re-reading, is a new interpretation of a new text with a new meaning.



We can see this process in Dungeons & Dragons, you see. When Gygax and Arneson and their circle created the game, they had an idea of what they wanted to do, and a whole history of reading and playing and thinking behind that idea - a witch's brew of Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, Avalon Hill and a thousand other cultural artefacts from their own experiences. But if we interpret that in light of Barthes, where the author has 'died' the minute he has produced the text (and I should say straight away at this point that I refer to this in a purely metaphorical sense which has nothing to do with Gary Gygax's actual regrettable and very sad death), we should really throw all of that out of the window and ignore it. The text of Original D&D and 1e are for us to take meaning from for ourselves, irrespective of the intentions of the authors; if we want to use it to play games utterly different to what they envisaged, then we can do so. In fact, it could be argued that we ought to do so.

This is one of the reasons, really, why I'm not a great fan of stick-in-the-mud-ism when it comes to 'old schoolers', although I've never previously thought to articulate it in reference to Roland Barthes! The vast majority of old schoolers are, of course, creative individuals who just like to play. But there is a certain section who seem unduly wedded to what the orginators intended and to their vision of the game. Indeed I wrote a long rant about the very topic back in June, which I still mostly agree with, even if the painful stridency of the piece irks me. (I think I tend towards the painfully strident a little too much.) Gary Gygax and his generation created a great game, but it's not theirs anymore; they were the 'scriptors', to use Barthes' term, but we are the readers, the interpreters, and the ones who give the game meaning for ourselves. If we want to use the OD&D rules to play a campaign about mutant monkeys invading the star ship Enterprise at the edge of the universe, or about heroic halflings saving the world from the Dark Lord, then we should just go for it and devil take the hindmost.

We're so evil!

There's a big fuss being kicked up about Geoffrey McKinney's new homebrew campaign setting for OD&D, the grandiosely titled 'Supplement V: Carcosa'. It has generated a lot of understandable outrage about its depictions of demon-summoning rituals (most of which seem to involve a level of sexual violence against children which would put Gary Glitter to shame), and a predictably vehement defense from some quarters to the effect that the violence is fictionalised, we should respect free speech, villains in the source literature do similar things, etc. etc.

This post isn't about that issue, directly. All my points have been made already, more eloquently, by other people, and you can and will make up your own minds. I should also say that I absolutely support the production of new 'old school' products and I'm glad the author has made the effort to put his creativity out in the public domain. I also think he's a very brave individual for risking the obvious backlash his publication would invite. However, I think that 'Supplement V' brings up some other worrying issues for the little niche of the RPG world we call 'old school gaming'.

My biggest concerns about 'Supplement V', rather than the infantile - and I use that word advisedly - reveling in blood and gore, are these. First, there is the near unforgivable hubris of its title, deliberately setting the supplement up as some sort of spiritual successor to the OD&D supplements. I find this distasteful. It's grandiloquent. It's putting oneself up on a pedestal. Frankly, it lacks class. More seriously, it panders to the notion that people who play older versions of D&D have to continually walk in the shadow of its creators. Again I'm forced to ask the question that I have before in this blog, numerous times: what's wrong with doing something new? Why does this have to be 'Supplement V', unable to stand on its own two feet as something novel?

Second, the continued use of paranoid shibboleths like "Supplement V: CARCOSA is a book of rules options for the original fantasy role-playing game published in 1974" really gets my goat. It's a completely unnecessary rhetorical genuflection designed to avoid being sued by Wizards of the Coast for using the words 'Dungeons & Dragons' - something which has a likelihood of precisely nil. Wizards of the Coast do not own the words 'Dungeon', 'and', or 'Dragon'. They own trademarks of certain logos and sets of lettering which happen to have those words in them. The level of concern exhibited by some members of the 'old school' in this regard is completely misplaced.

Third, I have a broader anxiety about 'amoral' games, and I've noticed a tendency among various old school bloggers to over-egg that aspect of Original D&D to the point of absurdity. Yes, grave-robbing and theft of treasure in an amoral (or immoral) manner was a cornerstone of the game, and the fantasy genre, for many years. It's a trope, and happens to be a lot of fun. It's also a truism that D&D characters are almost never truly 'good' in any meaningful sense of the word, unless ones definition of 'good' includes unthinking slaughter. And the characters in the source literature which inspired/inspires D&D were never angels.

But there's a point at which behaving amorally in a game turns a corner into the vicarious acting out of urges - urges that are better left at the very bottom of the id. Murder, theft, and even matters like torture and rape (on the part of the villains) are not something that I would absolutely forbid from ever arising in my games. And the moral ambiguities associated with the killing of 'evil' creatures are worthy of exploration. But there is nothing morally ambiguous about, for example, sexual abuse. I don't have any interest in exploring that as an outlet for the player-characters (villains are a different story), because it's an intrinsically negative, destructive and, dare I say soul destroying thing to do. Just as I gave up playing the original Grand Theft Auto because I realised it could have a numbing effect on my attitudes towards other people, so I don't wish to be involved in D&D play which involves something similar.

Where's the Innovation? Or, Forget the Realms

A while ago I made a post lamenting the lack of innovation in the so-called old-school revival. Basically, I felt it weird and faintly obsessive of people to only use old-school products to create endless pastiches of musty adventure modules from the early 80s. I thought that the whole revival movement would live or die by the creation of genuinely new stuff, and to that end even started up my own campaign setting for labyrinth lord, "OzCthulu", to prove it could be done. (Work on this was temporarily postponed when I lost absolutely everything in a laptop hard drive catastrophe.)

I was thinking about this the other day when participating in this thread over at therpgsite. It was started by somebody complaining about the 4e iteration of the Forgotten Realms setting. (You can read an excellent negative review by Nitessine, of Worlds in a Handful of Dice fame, here. Suffice to say, they've made a whole raft of changes mainly for change's own sake - or in other words to justify selling a whole new range of books to gullible fans.) Now, I should say straight away that I'm no fan of the Forgotten Realms. I always felt that it was bog-standard high fantasy of the most bog-standard kind, and if I was going to buy into a campaign setting it would be one I'd never think up for myself - for example Dark Sun or Planescape. But I know that a lot of people love it, and fair play to them. It seems unfair to slaughter all of their sacred cows. (The argument here always comes back: nobody's putting a gun to their head and saying they have to accept the changes. But they will if they want to play any newly published FR adventures.) More to the point, though, I just don't understand why WotC are even bothering with a new FR edition at all. Here's what I wrote in the thread:

Just so long as they keep away from the one D&D setting I actually like.

Seriously though - talk about creative bankruptcy. I was never into FR, but I recognise the tradition means a lot to a lot of people. So why fuck it over when you could be, I dunno, creating a new setting?

I mean, does anyone else find it odd that TSR managed to come up with Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, Birthright, Planescape, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, etc. etc... and all WOTC have ever created is Eberron (and that was developed by somebody else through a competition)? Get a grip, Mearls et al!

In other words, what on earth are they doing fiddling about with Forgotten Realms and annoying its fans, when they could be flexing their creative muscles and coming up with new and interesting settings for the new edition they're so proud of? Even though it was a financial basket case by all accounts, TSR was a veritable hive of innovation in its heyday: settings like Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Planescape are amongst the most interesting ever created in the fantasy genre, full stop - way superior to the vast majority of what even most best-selling fantasy fiction authors come up with. (Don't agree? Pick up a novel by David Eddings or Terry Goodkind or heck, even George R. R. Martin - who I love, by the way - next time you're in a bookshop.) The people who worked on those settings were titans of world creation. So what's WotC's excuse for not following suit?

The mean part of me wants to say: they just want to milk Forgotten Realms and Eberron for all they're worth. But I don't credit Mike Mearls and the other designers with that level of cynicism. I may not like 4e a great deal, but Mike Mearls has never struck me as anything other than a thoroughly nice individual. And he's obviously a very thoughtful, creative and intelligent person. Is the problem that he and the other designers are directing too much of their creativity into the mechanics of the game, and not enough into what the games are actually about? Another possibility is the financial one - it's often argued that a superfluity of campaign settings somehow watered down the market for TSR and contributed to their demise. I've never bought into that: what's the difference between one FR book which a million people buy, and ten Dark Sun books, each of which are bought by 100,000 people? Cost of production? In any case, I'm not arguing for twenty brilliant innovative new settings. Even one would do.)

Anyway, in light of these thoughts, I feel much more charitably inclined to the old school revivalist movement, which at least makes no bones about rehashing old material. If people are going for creative bankruptcy, at least let's be honest about it.

A Gauntlet Has Been Laid Down

So Max, of Malevolent and Benign fame, has gone and given the bee-hive a good kick.

"Tell you what, noisms," he says, "If you work on an Oz sourcebook (or whatever you see fit) [for one of the retro-clone systems] perhaps I'll put together some notes for Dark Hollow, my own folkways heartbreaker based on Appalachian Werd setting based on tall tales, bilues and old time ballads, and Manly Wade Wellman."

Well, I'm not one to turn down a challenge, so I hereby state that I will go ahead and do just that. Within an indefinite period of time, there will be a new Labyrinth Lord Australian-Aborigines-and-Cthulu-Mythos-sourcebook out there on teh internets for your perusal, enjoyment, and/or derision. This is, I believe, what is known as putting one's money where one's mouth is - rather than just ranting about unimaginative old-schoolers from the sidelines.

But let's not let my readership off the hook. If I'm going to do this, I want to do it properly, and in order to do so I'm going to want people to read through, playtest, and offer advice on what I come up with. Even better than that, if we're talking pipe-dreams, I'd love to have some budding artists, layout people and computer-nerds to give the thing the veneer of professionalism, and turn it into something that people are really going to want to read and play. In other words: collaborators. What do you say, talented people of the role playing blogosphere?

The Changing Face of Cyberpunk

If ever there was a chance of me ditching D&D as my favourite role playing game (there never has been a chance of that, but just for argument's sake) it would have been for Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun. Something about the cyberpunk genre just got its hooks in me at the age of about 14 and didn't let go for quite a few years; whenever I wasn't running AD&D Planescape games during that long post-adolescent nerd period, I was off in the bright lights of Night City or California Free State, haggling with Mr. Jones and hunting cyberpsychos with smartchipped 6.5mm assault rifles. It didn't matter that I didn't even really like Shadowrun (come off it - elves and Gibson?) or most of 2020 (stupidest system ever, outside of combat) but it was cyberpunk and that was all that really mattered.

(During that time I also read William Gibson's first trilogy of books and Burning Chrome at least ten times each; I didn't understand much about them at the age of 14 except that they were brilliant. Whenever anybody criticises sci-fi or fantasy as poorly written I always want to sit them down and force them to read though Burning Chrome twice - before choking them with it.)

Recently a couple of things have made me start thinking about cyberpunk again as something that I should be doing in a game. Firstly, Dr. Rotwang made a post a few days ago in which he basically spewed out a great heap of cyberpunk love into the internet ether, and it reawakened something inside me - something dark, dirty, wearing mirror shades and carrying a railgun. But then, somebody over at Story Games brought up Cyberpunk 2020 as an example of how older games didn't really 'do' their chosen genre properly, and it's only down to Ron Edwards that we are now able to play games that really get to grips with a genre's themes. Well, hey, Cyberpunk 2020 is one of the most flawed games that has ever seen wide distribution, but I'm allowed to say that because I'm a fan; I'm damned if I'm going to hear some johnny-come-lately story-gamer person level criticisms at it, no matter how valid! (And I don't really think they are valid; Cyberpunk 2020 didn't explicitly explore the themes of the literary genre, but it certainly did implicitly.) My goat has well and truly been got; I'm going to dig out my old rulebooks and give the thing another whirl, and devil take the hindmost if anybody says otherwise.

First stop, I put up a thread on rpg.net entitled Cyberpunk in 2008. Cyberpunk 2020 was released in 1990, but it is 1980's concerns made real - communism, street crime, the rise of Japan, and new international Zaibatsu. Those concerns are not present these days in the same ways; what self-respecting societal reject in 2008 is motivated by incoherent hatred of global megacorporations? But cyberpunk was always about more than that, at root - its heart has always been in what Bruce Sterling called "the victims of the New"; the people who the Brave New World of the Future has left confused, damaged and trodden underfoot. From our perspective in the new millenium, what are the kind of things that will make people into outsiders, rebels, dropouts and scumbags, and what will those people - the ones with the pizazz to do anything, that is - be directing their rage against?

Well, you can always rely on the good folks at rpg.net to deliver something interesting. You can read through the thread yourself - it's full of goodness - but pick of the bunch has to be this post from E. T. Smith:

IP laws keep getting more strident and more invasive until a Rights Economy dominates all. The only people who really truly own anything anymore are the Rights holders, a tiny percentage of the population who ultimately hold the IP rights to everything, absolutely everything. The shoes on your feet, the clothes on your back, your home, the food on your plate, even the process by which the food is prepared can never ultimately belong to you. Sure you still pay an initial acquisition fee but you're really only leasing it, every individual use recorded by a dusting of nanobots and leading to a incremental debit from your financial worth....

Like that? Pure cyberpunk goodness for the new millenium. But it gets better:

Then there's Inscape. Once you establish high data volume wireless networks, and personal devices receiving constant feed from them, its not too many steps to making the virtual overlay a constant supplement to normal sensory input. Directly fed into your optic and aural centers, the real world gets a virtual overlay and makeover. Data windows drifts in the periphery of your view, remodeling an apartment (or whole building) is just a matter of changing what default 'skin' observers see, and as often as not the minor functionaries (secretaries, waiters) encountered over the course of the day are really just virtual constructs. It also offers real control over personal subjective reality. Set your preference to "Aladdin" and everything around you looks like its from the "1001 Nights". Never want to hear a dirty word again? You won't. Obviously the potential for abuse is enormous. Uptight governments love to 'white-out' sensitive (or just inconvenient) sights, and if Inscape is universal enough and you've got master over-rides, you can kill a target literally in broad daylight in a crowd and be assured that no one saw or heard anything. Worst of all are the ads, they're omnipresent, diabolical both in their ubiquity and subtlety. The ads are one of the only free things in the Rights Economy; it costs to turn them off.

Gold, my friends; pure gold. Ads are the only free things in the Rights economy; it costs to turn them off. That there could be the first line of an entire cyberpunk campaign.

What I chiefly need is a Labyrinth Lord / Rules Cyclopedia based cyberpunk game...

(I'm joking about that bit. But only just.)

Further Notes

Just to expand briefly on what I wrote yesterday; I think the best way to sum up what I was trying to say is this. I don't really like the d20 system, and I'm certainly no fan of 3rd edition D&D, but there is no doubt that it has been used to do some really creative things - from Iron Heroes to Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts to Nyambe, African Adventures. But the thing is, we have things that are even better than the d20 system: we have OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy. These rulesets can surely be used to create products that are equally if not even more interesting and innovative than anything that the d20 market has to offer, if only we get off our backsides and do so, rather than forever referring to what has gone before.

In the comments to my previous post, the point was raised that "modern gamers" are probably hard wired not to appreciate systems like OSRIC because they are so used to a completely different set of role playing sensibilities. I think that's overstated, because we don't know what the popularity of forward-thinking OSRIC products would be given that nobody has tried making one. But even if it's just for the sake of our own hobby and our own entertainment (as self-confessed "old schoolers" or "retro gamers" or whatever label you prefer) I think it's important that we use these tools that we have to try out new things -because the alternative is stagnation.

What do I mean by "trying out new things"? Off the top of my head, here's an example: I once tried to create a setting for pre-colonization, aboriginal Australia, which mixed native legends with the Cthulu mythos. It was going to be a kind of stone-age Call of Cthulu affair of Bunyip, Star Spawn and Rainbow Snakes. To make it I was using a mixture of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D rules and had no ambitions for it as a distributable product. But this was before I knew about OSRIC; nowadays I would have used that. And if I'd been properly satisfied with what I had, I would have been able to publish it as an OSRIC-compatible OGL product. That's an amazing advance, and one I think more people should be taking advantage of.

I'm not saying my idea was particularly good or interesting or worthy of publication. But at least it would have been something different for old schoolers to play. And surely that would have been a good thing, no?

Regarding Old School Sensibilities; A Rant

James, author of the Grognardia blog, complained in a recent post about the tendency of "Old School" products to "go beyond homage to the past and verge on fetishization" in terms of layout and design. I agree with him, and that has been one of the major turn-offs for me when it comes to accepting Older D&D clones like OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord. Why do we always have to hark back to a far-off golden age that might not have been all that golden to begin with? Why does using an older ruleset always have to mean older aesthetic sensibilities? Why is 'modern' like a four-letter word to some people?

Art is a minor thing, of course. Although it goes a long way towards setting the tone for a game, players are free to ignore it. More worrying for me is the tendency of these products to fetishize a certain tone of play itself - that is, the same hotpotch of influences, trends and game settings that were popular in the mid-late 1970s and 1980s heyday of the D&D genre. I often feel that to play an adventure like The Pod Cavern of the Sinister Shroom is to look at a museum exhibit as much as it is to play a D&D module; I almost feel like these pieces would be more accurately envisioned as exercises in cultural anthropology as they would role playing games or game modules. (Speaking of course as a non-grognard myself. To those who were there at the time, I suppose the analogy would be to somebody looking at old pictures in a dusty photo album.)

I'm not talking about mechanics, please note. To me, the Rules Cyclopedia and earlier incarnations of AD&D are highly eccentric systems, but they are systems that work surprisingly well, and which make up for their lack of unified mechanics with comprehensiveness and ease of modification. (There is certainly nothing about them that is any worse than, say, the Storyteller system or the Burning Wheel engine.) No; I'm talking about the use of the old tropes of game design, and the same old expectations of what a D&D adventure should be, that were present in the 70's and 80's.

To use a cooking analogy, it's as if the Old School world is mostly interested in rehashing the same old (albeit hearty and delicious) recipes: Take 100 ml of Robert E. Howard, 3 table spoons of Fritz Lieber, a dash of Michael Moorcock, a pinch of Tekumel and a good helping of Arduin, then bring to the boil. Baste your breast of Greyhawk with the resultant sauce, bake in the Mystara oven for 40 minutes, and allow to cool before serving. It tastes good, of course, and when it comes to a Sunday roast, there's little better. But it's as if all the curries, salads, bisques and sashimis that have become popular in recent years never existed. It's like Old School players are still eating lamb shanks and bread and butter pudding in willful unawareness that they could be tucking into a mutton dhansak that tastes even better.

For one thing, I yield to nobody in my appreciation of pulp fantasy and the effects it had on shaping early D&D. But there have been leaps and bounds in the genre since then - not to mention expeditions backwards to rediscover lost influences who were writing long before the likes of Howard. Why shouldn't we be incorporating the sensibilities of the modern greats - people like George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison and Guy Gavriel Kay - into our games? Why shouldn't we be mining the works of Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald and Edmund Spenser for inspiration? And more to the point, why on earth shouldn't we be designing and writing new products which take these sensibilities into account?

For another thing, there have been great advances in gaming since the 1980s, too. I'm not talking about 3rd or 4th edition D&D, of course, or even other game systems at all; I'm talking about the fertile settings and ideas that have been and continually are being created and which are exemplified in games like Iron Kingdoms, Ptolus, and Reign, to name but three. Such settings show what can be done by people writing with imagination, flair, and a greater awareness of what is possible within the fantasy genre. Setting aside the mechanics issue entirely, their creativity should be spurring on the Old Schoolers to put their collective money where their collective mouth is, and use their much-vaunted retro systems to create something fresh.

In OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord and the Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game we have the tools with which to do anything possible within the huge boundaries of the fantasy genre and beyond. Powerful, versatile tools. And yet still the vast majority of designers insist on using them for - oh look, a dungeon crawl in a mushroom infested cavern. I mean, don't get me wrong; I love dungeon crawls through mushroom infested caverns. But I rather think I have enough of those modules already, 99% of which I designed myself. Where's the imagination? Where's the Reign or the Ptolus - or hell even the Planescape equivalent in the Old School world?

Until somebody uses OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord to create something genuinely new, instead of churning out same-old same-old products, I don't believe the so-called Old School revival will amount to much more than pissing in the wind. You're telling me that a 16 year old player, new to the game and the mind-blowing things that fantasy has to offer, is going to be satisfied with what his Dad enjoyed playing back in his almost-forgotten youth? Well, maybe he will if he realises that though the system is the same, it doesn't matter because the system can let you create just about anything. That sure won't happen if all that's available are clones of 1980's Dungeon modules, though.

Styles of Play and Making the Most of What You Get

There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the creation of something called the Old School Gaming Association, which would have the stated goal of promoting the style of play and/or rulesets that are variously defined as "Old School", as well as uniting the highly Balkanized geography of Old School gaming under one banner of shared objectives.

I like the idea, but as others have pointed out, a big part of the problem is identifying what Old School actually means. What exactly is this "style of play" which Old Schoolers venerate and New Schoolers (for want of a better word) despise? What is the Shared Vision behind which we are all supposed to unite?

For me, what it boils down to is one passage in the 2nd edition Player's Handbook, which had a great effect on me when I read it as a 12 or 13 year old, and which you could say has informed my D&D philosophy every since. Now, bear with me. I know that, for many, 2nd edition D&D is the point at which Old School is no longer Old School. Be that as it may, the writers of that book had been playing what we now consider "Old School" D&D for years, and the edition they came up with had many points of continuity with the older versions of the game.

The passage in question is What the Numbers Mean, and it can be found early on in the book just after the descriptions of the various Stats and what they stand for. The writers introduce a character called "Rath" - a recurring, enigmatic figure who reappears at various stages throughout the PHB and the DMG, although in various different incarnations (rather like the Eternal Champion or the archetypal characters in Viriconium). Rath has rather 'poor' stats - a Strength of 8, Dexterity of 14, Constitution and Intelligence of 13, Wisdom of 7 and Charisma of 6 - but the writers demonstrate both how to turn those stats into an interesting character (twice!) and how to have fun doing it.

The key section is this one:

Obviously, Rath's ability scores (often called "stats") are not the greatest in the world. Yet it is possible to turn these "disappointing" stats into a character who is both interesting and fun to play. Too often players become obsessed with "good" stats. These players immediately give up on a character if he doesn't have a majority of above-average scores. There are even those who feel a character is hopeless if he does not have at least one ability of 17 or higher! Needless to say, these players would never consider playing a character with an ability score of 6 or 7.
In truth, Rath's survivability has a lot less to do with his ability scores than with your desire to role-play him. If you give up on him, of course he won't survive! But if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun, challenging, and all-around exciting time. Does he have a Charisma of 5? Why? Maybe he's got an ugly scar. His table manners could be atrocious. He might mean well but always manage to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. He could be bluntly honest to the point of rudeness, something not likely to endear him to most people. His Dexterity is a 3? Why? Is he naturally clumsy or blind as a bat?
Don't give up on a character just because he has a low score. Instead, view it as an opportunity to role-play, to create a unique and entertaining personality in the game. Not only will you have fun creating that personality, but other players and the DM will have fun reacting to him.

Don't you just love that? It is exactly the spirit in which I think D&D should be played and in which I love to play it, and if I could define Old School Gaming it would be in one line taken from that passage: if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun, challenging, and all-around exciting time. In other words, what is important is what you, as a player, bring to the set of dice rolls that make up your character. The game is about you making the most of what you get. Later editions of the game changed the emphasis to the power of the character, and that is where, I believe, the line in the sand between Old and "New" Schools lies.