Some gamers are uncertain when “old school” became “new school” Dungeons & Dragons. There are some who argue it was the publication of Dragonlance that marks the boundary. Others say the 2nd Edition splat book extravaganza was the moment “old” became “new.”

One might argue that it wasn’t a singular moment but a progression, and there is some merit to that.

I place the boundary line between “old school” and “new school” at 3rd edition.

One of the major differences between them is centered on the responsibility that Dungeon Masters have to interpret rules and make rulings. There are other important differences but this one is the key to the door where the treasure is hidden.

Rulings, not Rules

“Rulings, Not Rules,” is a common phrase used by gamers in the Old School Renaissance. It was probably coined by Matt Finch and definitely popularized by his Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. The “rulings, not rules,” concept has become a defining characteristic of OSR games and playstyle.

One of the fundamental design goals of 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons was to eliminate the Dungeon Master’s need to make a ruling by creating a rule set that did not require them.

3E was the opposite of the old school. Its goal was “Rules, Not rulings.”

The early designers were wrong. It comes down to this: If you want to be in control of your character, you have to have some idea how anything you might try is going to come out. and you can’t know that unless you have some idea of how the rules are going to handle the situation. If the GM is making capricious decisions about what happens in the game, you’re always shooting in the dark and you have no real control over your character at all.

The game just works better if the DM and players have similar expectations about how the rules handle things.

Skip Williams interview on Grognardia

This is when “old” became “new.”

The 3E designers were trying to limit the situations game masters had to make rulings. If rules are in the players’ hands, then they knew how almost every situation “should” play out before telling the DM what their character was going to do. Good rules remove the possibility of bad rulings was the hypothesis.

Context for the design of 3rd Edition

As an employee of TSR, Skip had the unenviable task of answering questions in the Dragon magazine column Sage Advice. These were questions enthusiasts sent to TSR about how to interpret a rule or how to deal with an edge case. Sage Advice was kind of like a “Dear Abby” advice column for D&D.

Skip spent years reading these letters and responding to them. The letters from readers are a masterclass in bad Dungeon Mastering.

Reading the interview, I get the sense that Skip’s long experience in gaming and as respondent for Sage Advice led him to believe that bad Dungeon Mastering was a pervasive problem in the TSR era of the game. He seems to believe that bad DMing can be prevented by a comprehensive ruleset that allows very little interpretation by the Dungeon Master.

The referee is there to keep the game moving. As Patton once said, a good answer today is better than a perfect answer next week.

A well-written rules set is the best friend a DM can have. It helps manage the player’s expectations and gives the DM a leg to stand on when things don’t go the players’ way.

This statement about the role of the DM is particularly telling. He insists on a limited role for the DM. Certainly, one of the things a referee can do is “…keep the game moving,” but I don’t see that as being the reason the referee is there. There are many other more important tasks for a DM. Skip also says the DM needs some support when a player complains that their character has a bad outcome. Rather than having a logical line of thought that they can explain, the DM only needs to point to the book and say, “Thems the rules.”

The player no longer has to trust the DM to be fair. The DM doesn’t need to be interpreter of the rules who can alter them as needed. The DM is expected to follow the rules as written. The players are expected to know and use the rules when making decisions about character actions.

This approach is appealing if you believe that most Dungeon Masters fail in ways that damage the game play. This line of thought also assumes that players will know the rules as well as the Dungeon Master knows them. Both of those assumptions are faulty to say the least.

The problem with Skip Williams’ premise.

Skip and the 3E design team based their edition on an idea that was rife with selection bias.

The people writing into Dragon with horror stories about bad DM rulings were bad DMs or players in games run by bad DMs. They were not the majority of people playing D&D.

The Sage Advice column probably received hundreds of letters a month at the height of Dungeons & Dragon’s popularity in the 80’s. When your job is to read through hundreds of letters a month describing stupid DM rulings, it probably seems like an out of control problem.

What Skip did not receive were hundreds of thousands of letters that said, “We had a weird thing come up in our game last week. My DM had us roll a D20 and said the attempt was successful. We all cheered and moved on to the next encounter. None of us cared that there was no rule that fit the situation.”

Most game sessions using the old rule sets were enjoyable for their participants. Nobody was going to write a letter and spend $0.32 for a stamp to inform the Sage that they had a competent DM and the system worked.

If Skip had considered that for more than twenty years, millions of DMs got along without the constraint of tightly designed rules; those gamers mostly didn’t send in letters to tell TSR how great their game was (they voted with their dollars), and that very few changes were actually necessary; then the 3E design team might have made some different choices.

The problems that Skip was trying to fix were inexperienced game masters and assholes sitting behind the screen.

The problem of inexperienced or unskilled Dungeon Masters is not insurmountable. I’m not an aficionado of 3E so I can’t say for sure but I think the designers knew that DMing is a teachable skill. I am told the 3E DM’s Guide had good advice. This indicates that the designers were at least aware of the notion that new DMs could improve their skills with guidance of the elders. I’m sure Skip was aware of the Second Edition DMGR series of books that were written for training new DMs. The internet was just starting to become a mass market service and also provided a means to disseminate more DMing knoweldge. TSR and WotC had the knowledge and means to address the never ending issue of training DMs and helping them develop.

The asshole problem is not something the design department can do a lot about. Rules and dice mechanisms can not prevent a jerk, ego-maniac, or idiot from ruining a game. Jerks will find a way no matter what rules they are using.

At some point, players have to deal with that issue themselves. You can provide them pointers, suggest books or videos on effective social skills and how to negotiate but it’s not something that rules can fix. Dealing with jerks is not the game designer’s job.

Rulings, Not Rules

Matt Finch put the “Rulings, Not Rules” statement at the very beginning of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming for a reason. This idea, is at the heart of what makes old school fantasy role-playing games different from contemporary games. It allows the game play to have an openness or permeability which is constrained in more rules heavy editions of the game.

The OSR was, in part, a reaction to the “Rules, Not Rulings” approach of 3rd Edition. If Skip and the designers of 3E had kept on with the old ways, the OSR would have been merely a hobby of nostalgia seekers and collectors of old games. The is OSR far more than the “nostalgia’ market that some claim it to be. Games like Shadowdark, and Knave are evidence enough of that.

The “old school” method is a play style that expects players and referees to trust one another. It is a play style that requires the referee and players to communicate when there are differences of opinion. It relies on maturity, common sense, and collaboration.

Rulings are there to fill in the gaps in the rules because no rule set can be complete in the sense that no rule set can account for every possible scenario that might come up.

That doesn’t mean that OSR referees ignore the rules or that the rules don’t matter. This is a very important misunderstanding of “Rulings not Rules.”