I participate in some of the discussions about “the world’s greatest fantasy role playing game” on the local Facebook D&D group. I occasionally bring up some element of the Old School Renaissance play style. Almost without fail there will be a dismissive comment from another gamer who started playing D&D around the time I did back in the mid 1980’s.

They’ll claim to be “old school” because they started back in the 80’s like I did.

That’s not being “old school” that’s just being old.

Playing for 40 years doesn’t make you “old school.”

Embracing 5E mechanisms and play style, character build mentality, “D&D is collaborative storytelling” and the rest of it is not old school. If you are in your late 40’s or 50’s and are drinking the 5E flavor-aid that makes you an old gamer who is “new school.”

“New School” isn’t new

The reason starting in the 80’s doesn’t make you “old school” is because a lot of “new school” ideas about how to play D&D started to form in the 80’s. Many GenX gamers started when these ideas were taking hold and have themselves been a part of their development. “New School” ideals were developed by people who started when “old school” was just “school.”

The rejection of emergent narrative and using D&D to tell the story if the player characters got its first big push from Dragonlance setting and modules. New school ideas about game mechanisms started to firm up in the 90s and solidified into a concrete game design philosophy with 3rd edition. That design ethos has prevailed since.

“Old School” isn’t entirely old.

Many of the geezer 5Eers are not aware of the depth of the OSR. Because they have a bias against anything that’s not current, they dismiss anything that has anything to do with the old rulesets as being mere nostalgia and not worth consideration.

They are unaware of the collective genius of OSR design concepts and the ways it influenced the development of 5E. They are ignorant of the many possiblities that classic adventure gaming aficionados have explored with great results.

The OSR uses new concepts from recent scholarship in ludology and narratology to understand “old school” gaming.

The term emergent narrative or emergent gameplay is commonly used in OSR discussions. That term comes from video game researchers who noticed that players were doing interesting things in open world games like The Sims. Sandbox or Open World were not terms you will find in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide but that is what Gary was describing in the section about building a campaign.

Personally, I’m very interested in some of the developments in neuroscience around the concept of immersion. I’ve been putting thought into how it explains why D&D became so popular in the first place and how the results of that research can be used to make better adventures and encounters.

The OSR studies the old rule sets, concepts and methods that were developed during the earliest days of the hobby, and innovates with them. Themes, aesthetics, variants of mechanisms, book layouts, and graphic design are all areas that the OSR have experimented in ways that far exceed the creative exploration that we’ve seen in most areas of RPG hobby.

By accepting constraints in design intent and play style, the OSR has opened up many areas of creativity.

There is a lot of “new” stuff coming out of the “old school” movement.

Anti-Nostalgia

GenX 5E gamers wallow in presentism while suggesting that the Old School Renaissance is deluded by its antonym, nostalgia.

I find that the gamers who really like 5e and started playing in the 80’s frequently have an anti-nostalgia about the D&D of their youth. They will often describe their D&D experiences from those years as being not so great, and they are right. Their experiences were terrible.

They played with power gamers, min-maxers, rules lawyers, and all the worst examples of bad gamer stereotypes. They had adversarial Dungeon Masters, suffered through stupid monster zoo dungeons, absurd homebrew campaigns, broken homebrew character classes, bad rulings, Monty Haul campaigns and more.

This leads them to the conclusion that Basic, Expert, and Advanced D&D are bad games, and 5E is the best version of Dungeons & Dragons ever.

What never seems to occur to my correspondents is that the problem was not the rule-sets.

We were playing it wrong

Many of us in the Old School Renaissance who also happen to be just plain old will readily state that back in the “good old days” we didn’t know what we were doing.

We were having fun but we were playing it wrong.

We misinterpreted the rules. We ignored rules that seemed stupid, boring, or pointless. We made up ridiculously overpowered characters. We designed stupid dungeons and stupid villains. We backstabbed and stole from PCs in the party. We burned down villages, murdered merchants and innkeepers…and we liked it that way.

That was not how the old timers played in 1975 and Gary didn’t intend for the game to be played that way. We didn’t know that, nor did we care. We played the way we played because that was what seemed fun to us in the moment.

We didn’t know any better. We were immature idiots. Gaming was as unsupervised as the rest of our activities. We had no idea what we were doing and nobody cared. We were stupid but we were having fun.

I got better

I don’t play now the way I played when I was 14 or even 24.

I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was 14.

I will never forget some of those games, but I don’t play old school D&D because I’m nostalgic for my teenage years.

By my current qualitative standards, those games sucked.

My games are WAY better; more complex; more engaging; more immersive.

That’s because I’m a fully formed adult with some sense.

Without a doubt my best gaming has been as an adult.

Now, I know better.

Today, I play with a child-like joy but without the child-ish immaturity of my teen years.

That the old farts playing 5e can’t get that is frustrating.

A lot of us played old school D&D like idiots when we were 14.

That doesn’t mean the game was the problem.

I give up

I have given up trying to convince GenX gamers to revisit older versions of the game.

I’ve given up on oldsters who are all in with 5E just as I’ve given up on WotC.

It hasn’t occurred to many GenX 5E fans that the reason their current gaming experience is better than what they experienced in their teen years might have a lot to do with their own maturity.

My games are much better at age 48 because I play with reasonable human beings with fully formed brains instead of 14 year old dumbasses I played with back when I was a 14 year old dumbass.

If you happen to be one of those old “new school” gamers, consider the following:

There are many new variants of the old rules. There are new adventures for those old rule sets that are superior to anything TSR published, and way better than anything WotC has published for 5E.

Old school referees are running games that are more mature, more engaging, and more immersive than you realize.

Maybe the OSR is not for you and that’s OK.

Maybe you prefer the “new school” way. That’s rad.

It might be, that what you think you know about “old school” is not really “old school” but a half remembered misinterpretation of how a bunch of munchkins played the game 30 years ago when we didn’t know any better.