Old School?

Before getting my sleeves all rolled-up in here, let’s get one basic thing out of the way: Refereeing Ethos.

Tail a’wag & salivating, thus spake the war hounds: “Edition-war time!?”

Nay, my bannermen of ruin, no shots fired from my end of the peninsula. As concerns RPGs, I’m both too liberal and too agnostic to embark on that children’s crusade. Let me explain that I began playing with 4th edition, which to many isn’t even proper D&D and that, I would concede, is something of a nadir of RPG design in general, but a perfectly serviceable tactical combat game in its own right. One that I enjoyed heartily, for all of its many faults.

I inscribe my gaming ethos firmly in the old school camp (or, at least, our contemporary perception of what that must have been), but I find that has precious little – though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “nothing” - to do with which edition one is actually abetting. To me it is a matter of how the running of the game is approached.

I, personally, am fine with THAC0, descending AC, Race-as-Class and Save vs. Breath. My player-base? Not so much.

They belong with the crowd of “I’ve purchased every single edition of D&D since 3rd hit the shelf, and I’ll only play the most recent one”.

To which I’ve replied “fuck that noise”, and more than once too. It’s how I got to know that people weren’t too thrilled about having their characters die, not levelling precisely once every three sessions, not having the gold and xp from a slain chimera’s pubic lice equally distributed to the farthing and, above all, a deep-seated resistance to the conceit that the game should be in any way demanding, thought-provoking or, well... interesting.

In the guise of interlude, allow me the good grace to cop-out like a motherfucker and aknowledge that everyone’s mileage varies; I think I shall do this precisely this one time, just so I have a reference to point to whenever I put up with bullshit whose raison d’être hinges on accusing me of never having said anything of this sort.

Now, appreciate that given I’m on the metric system, I don’t even do mileage.

Let that shallow metaphor sink in for a bit as you contemplate the dearth of shits I have to give about narrative storygaming, playing “for fun”, and folks who play _any_ rpg by the book.

This is something that I forgot to mention in the previous post, that the approach I intend to take, no matter how old-hat and dogmatic in your neck of the internet woods, is locally new, different and unheard of, such that in casual conversation with one of the oldest running local rpg’ers, I was astonished to discover that, to him, the notion of experience for treasure was /completely/ unheard of.

Can this approach become, more than just novelty, actually relevant, impactful and vital? That’s what I’m aiming to find, through engaging in some cultural subversion on an unsuspecting microcosmos and braving the consequences. 

Spoiler alert: people don’t usually take well to change and tend to reject it out of hand. I don’t expect things to proceed smoothly and a bumpy ride is pretty much a given.

But then I wasn’t all that popular to begin with…