"Feel" and Old School RPGs

 

Around here we've had a lot of talk comparing DCC and other old-school rules to D&D 5E and our recent Tales of the Valiant campaign. It has a very different feel from 5E D&D and its variants which tend to rapidly develop into superheroic levels of power. While that's fun, some of the group is very interested in the more bare-bones stuff where the answer to every problem is not "what class ability or feat can I use here?" Some of these old-school games not even having a skill list is a real shift in perspective back to the old days. We've had plenty of fun with the more modern games but this experience had me thinking back to 10-15 years ago when I was introducing the boys to Basic D&D and they were just doing all kinds of improvising and thinking on their feet too. 

I don't hate modern games of course - I've run them quite a bit over the past ten years+ - but I do see the difference in attitude that much more clearly right now. Online discussion is so tied up in "balance" - between classes, party vs. monsters, and encounters in general, that it amazes me. It feels like so much of the talk around the game gets wrapped around its own axles that it misses the point of what the game is for: you're supposed to play it!

Someone in this picture may well be complaining about balance ...

I think there are far more people talking about RPGs than are actually playing them. This is not a new or revolutionary take, I'm just feeling it more after diving in to a different game for a few weeks. People comparing builds, people doing a bunch of math comparing classes to each other, people running the monster numbers in similar ways ... it feels like pointless electron burning to me most of the time because most of it occurs in a featureless clean-room situation with no campaign details of note. Stuff like "this dragon is a poor opponent for a party of 8th level PCs because it's AC and damage output are under-spec for what's expected at that level". OK, sure. Is there a lair involved? Offspring" Worshippers? A mate? A river of bubbling lava flowing through it's rest chamber? Does the party have a sword of dragon-slaying?  Does the dragon have some magical trick or effect that makes it immune to normal weapons? Does it speak? This kind of stuff is mostly ignored in these mathematical exercises which brings me back to wondering  - what's the point? 

If you love the game, maybe it's D&D 5.5, is this all you have to say about it? Is it what you want to focus on? Anyone with the books or PDFs can run the math on these things - it's not hard. What about your campaign? What's the setting? What's going on there? How many people are playing in it? What kinds of characters do you have in your group? Is there something going on you've never seen before? Tell me about the special parts - the math of the game is not the special part!

It just feels like so much energy is expended on stats, product announcements & debates, rules talk, edition talk, and balance yet far less is spent on things coming out of actual play in actual campaigns. You know ... the thing we're all trying to do with this mass of paper & words & possibly electrons.

A wizard, a warlock, and a sorcerer debating who is breaking the game this week

I can say digging into DCC conversations there are no balance debates about a new warlock subclass and whether it's free zap power should be 1d4+1 auto-hitting or 2d4 with a hit roll. There's very little complaining about monster damage or AC or hit points. Questions about encounter balance tend to be coming from people new to the game who are coming over from 5E and similar games, not from people already playing the game. The atmosphere and mechanics of the game help point out that not everything a party encounters is meant to be defeated in combat by using character powers. This leads to some interesting situations and some creative thinking, moreso than I typically see in more modern games. I've seen PCs run away, set up traps and ambushes, use the environment, and generally just engage with the game more, beyond doing some math and burning some metagame resources. 

Now I'm not going off into some one-true-wayism here. I'm just enjoying a refresher course in why these games work for many people. By all means, if a game tells you that balance is tremendously important and gives you an elaborate mathematical framework to ensure it, then it really should should work. If it doesn't then the company should be griped at for it - the later D&D 3E Monster Manuals were notorious for violating their own monster creation rules and there were people whose main claim to fame in the forums was going through and checking the math on every monster as the books came out. If that gives you some joy then hey, that's cool, but hopefully you're also using them in your campaign while you do this. I can read the monster entry myself - if it looks interesting I'll end up using it somewhere. If it looks boring I probably won't - the math doesn't really affect me one way or the other because I don't care that much about theoretical balance in a roleplaying game!

I don't get too caught up in edition debates for say, D&D, because I've run and played every edition and I've had fun in all of them! Balance and edition-warring is not really a thing that comes up at a table during a game in my experience. It mainly shows up in online forums. 

Even newer but say, less "rules-heavy" games tend to fall into that old-school side of things. If you don't have a detailed skill system then tasks tend to be resolved fairly quickly and you don't have endless debates about the utility of various skills.  

Classless games avoid some of this as well - a lot of the Traveller discussion I see is more about the setting, its technology, and interesting situations than it is about "builds" and balance. 

Maybe "were mad" ...

Savage Worlds does this too - discussion tends to be more settings, using tests and tricks in play, and "would you allow this" type questions than rules. I mean there are rules questions but they tend to be from new players trying to figure out initiative, arcane backgrounds, bennies, and shaken vs. wounds ... so many questions about "shaken" ... the single most misunderstood part of the game for the last 20+ years.

The last thing I'll point out here is that games (like a lot of OSR games) where there is a real threat of character death do tend to play differently as well. Aside from all of my other takes up there, Feeling like their pc is vulnerable makes a huge difference with the players I know. Low level D&D in most versions, most OSR games, DCC, GURPS, Traveller, and Savage Worlds all have some of that feel because even an experienced character in those latter games can die with a few bad rolls of the dice.

So hardcore they named a station after it!

Anyway that's enough ranting for today. Crossing the streams by sampling the online discussion around some different games sent me down a rabbit hole so I thought I would share. Tomorrow: 40K talk, where balance is never a topic of debate.

See it's a cloud giant because I'm shouting at ... oh never mind ...

My RPG List Ten years On - 2016 vs. 2026

 

I keep track of my RPG and miniature purchases as I go each year and I have done this for more than a decade. I was updating my list for this year and it occurred to me I ought to go look at what I was buying and what I was playing and compare it to now plus mix in some hindsight.

What I was playing:

• The year started off with some Marvel Heroic
• Most of it was spent running my Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous campaign into the ground
• Lots of talk about the new Savage Worlds Rifts books that were getting Kickstarted back then. Lots of Savage Worlds talk in general from cards to using it with different settings.
• Managed to work in some Deadlands and some d6 Star Wars
• Later we managed to work in some FFG Star Wars
• Holiday time meant it was time for the Time of Crisis in Mutants & Masterminds!

It's funny that it took me ten years to finally finish Time of Crisis - at least it was with a couple of those same players! Otherwise this year it's been playing DCC and then hopefully in a bit it will be back to some Savage Worlds. I do have some consistency I guess even a decade later.

Miniatures-wise it was Eldar ... so much Eldar. This was the year I built what is still the core of my Eldar army.

What I was picking up:

• Perhaps not surprisingly it was a lot of Savage Worlds stuff
• There was also quite a bit of Pathfinder
• A fair amount of d6 Star Wars
• A little FFG Star Wars - they were still putting out new material then
• Some Mutants & Masterminds books
• Some DCC books and dice
• A few 5th edition items

It is good to see that most of what I was adding was being driven by what I was playing or thinking about playing. This year was effectively the end of that Pathfinder campaign as it just ran out of gas after 3 + years. I officially ended it in January 0f 2017.  Both Star Wars games and M&M and Deadlands remained intermittent occasional games for years.

For 2026 so far it's been a few DCC books, catching up on some 5.5 D&D books, and then weirdly picking up some old GURPS books. I don't know exactly what bit me there other than some long talks with Blaster about old school non-D&D grittier systems where I mentioned GURPS as a very different flavor of fantasy campaign compared to modern D&D. I then went to look for it on my shelf and at some point, maybe in a move, I lost half of my old GURPS books - I didn't even have an old 3rd edition core book anymore. So I went on a tear for a bit here recently filling in some of that stuff - you know Magic, The Grimoire, High Tech, Ultra Tech, Supers, a core book or two. They are not particularly pricey especially if you can find several of them in a lot and I wanted them back on the shelf.

Considering how much of what I am doing now is similar to (or the same damn thing) I was doing then I guess I can claim a "consistency" medal. Some might whisper "stuck in a rut"* but I prefer to think of it as being at a point in my life where I know what I like and I prefer to spend my time there. I still do a little exploring now and then. We try new games via one-shots or short limited campaigns, get a consensus on them, and then either put them aside or consider them for a bigger campaign down the road. I see people online struggling to find people and places to play - well, I have time, a place, and a group of friends that are interested so let's spend most of that time playing stuff we like. It makes sense to me, anyway.

* Considering the number of games I've run and played over the last few years it's a pretty wide rut.