Thursday, September 25, 2014

Old-School is the New "Organic"

DarkgarX said the above line, and there is some truth to it. He contends D&D 5 is not an old-school game, it is a modern design and lacks the certain clunky and vague areas of a true old-school game. Those are typically all the places designers left something important (or tangentially so) out of the rules and the referee was told to "make it up."

D&D 5 is a very streamlined design, and I agree, it is more of a modern game that wears the old-school clothing and supports old-school settings. You see a lot of D&D 4 innovations in D&D 5, and some of those design goals are kept here. The thought that "casters should always be able to contribute" from turn-to-turn is a more modern theory. In the past, it was wands and darts, nowadays, they get infinite ranged attack spells like something out of an MMO. Ritual magic is in, and the concept of bounding to-hits and defenses is another more modern theory.

On the whole, D&D 5 is a very modern game indeed. It has an old-school inspiration, and I would humorously compare it to calling Olive Garden and Italian restaurant. Yes, Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant, but it gives you a feeling of an Italian-inspired establishment that overdoes it in some places, and isn't true to the cuisine in others. It's a good place (most of the time lol) that I'd return to, but I accept it is not authentic.

I feel the same with D&D 5, it is a great story RPG with old-school inspirations, simplified and streamlined, but sometimes I prefer the original old-school games with their boardgame feel and simple motivations. We can enjoy different games, so I don't subscribe to system domination or one replacing the other - games are like books, meant to be read, played, and enjoyed.

Granted, there are some things about old-school that I don't miss, like the ambiguities, the omission of critical rules systems, how easily the games go out of balance, uneven complexity, and some other aspects old-school games have in common with each other.

So yes, I am a little wary of calling anything "old school" just because it subscribes to the feeling or design elements of the era. It's like new films calling themselves "Noir" and all the flak that critics give that designation nowadays. There can be no more true Noir films since that era has ended, so everything made in the Noir style nowadays is a tribute, neo-Noir, imitation, in the style of, or even parody of the genre. It's why you see paintings called "Renaissance style" instead of "Renaissance" - the art world has already went through this and worked out how they name things inspired by one era or the other.

I have no problem with calling D&D 5 or other games "old school inspired" or "old school style" in regards to the simplicity, world support, and design goals. There are some very modern elements of D&D 5 that do not fall into that category, so we need to be careful just throwing words around because they make us feel good or support our arguments. It's like a Noir film created today where they use a 3d camera that didn't exist in the era, while visually striking, true to the genre, and possibly cool - it can't be called true Noir because of how the movie was made did not exist back then.

Otherwise, it's like the "organic" quandary some food producers get into calling some foods "organic" just because of some of the modern chemicals and additives they put in them are "organic" as well. Pretty soon, everything is called "organic" and the word loses its "wholesome and natural" meaning.

So yeah, there is a difference between old-school and D&D 5. The new D&D has a number of optimizations and streamlining that clearly make it a newer game, and it is an interesting set of design decisions and goals, some of which I agree with and others I don't. Like all games in a way, they have good and bad points, so you keep an open mind, mod them, play them, and discuss them without wasting time on silly system wars or advocacy.

Mod them? Now there's an idea.

Darn it Wizards, get your community publishing license out and done already. Walled gardens do not let us play, and there are always other games out there to mod and bring new ideas into.

Or I'll just end up writing my own.

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