This post is so familiar and alien at the same time. Familiar because it describes the make-do of roleplaying in the 80s, but not the scene I remember since as a Brit I hardly played D&D. And thanks to that I can wax lyrical about old-school Stormbringer or WFRP or Fighting Fantasy and there’s just not enough interest to create any kind of argument. No-one’s invested in being right about that particular “Old School”.
It’s the comments to Rick Stump’s rant that are illuminating. “This kid who wasn’t even born in the 80s had the temerity to tell me about the Old School”. Etc. Which is fair enough, but let’s unpack that a bit.
First, this veneration of the Old School… it’s not cool. The Old School is frequently reactionary, outdated, and harmful — how about “old school” industrial health and safety? Or gender roles or family units? Or methods of disciplining children? Or attitudes to women in engineering roles? Or punitive teaching by rote? There are a lot of instances of Old School that can just piss off, as far as I’m concerned.
Second, since roleplaying was so localised and cobbled-together, there really never was any “school” or single coherent body of thought and practice back in the 80s.
Third, it’s ironic that the normally reactionary older generation is admonishing millennials for being so prescriptive and inflexible in defining “the Old School”.
But fourth, it’s not really Old School, it’s the OSR. And all the OSR really is, is an evolving collective of modern ideas which uses the one component of “the original roleplaying game”, the system, as a basis — because that’s the one part of the Old School that actually doesn’t need updating, because it’s still functional 40 years on.
What the OSR is doing is more like what we do in HEMA — we take historical treatises, some of which are incomplete, and turn them into functional modern systems that can be taught and used. As such, the age and experience of people in the OSR is irrelevant, it’s their output and participation that matters; but just like the MA world, there’s an expectation that the most senior members will be able to wear their 20, 30 or 40 years long-service badge and hold court over their juniors forever.
Of course I’m lucky because no-one is going to come back from the 18th century and tell me I’m doing it wrong. But then if they did I could just stab them because they’d be undead.
I think it was Hobsbawm who argued most things considered to be ancient traditions were often quite recent (maybe a generation or two old) and often inventions, retrospective filling-in. I have experienced some of that with gaming too. My RPGing started with Whitebox D&D and Blackbox Traveller, in Rochester, NY, which had an early and healthy gaming scene, but was relatively far from the Minneapolis, MN-Geneva, WI gaming scene. After moving to Minneapolis, and meeting some of the locals from the original generation, it is pretty clear to me that many of the debates within the OSR are abstractions of conflicts in taste/preference among the circles of gamers in the local scene. These have somehow become hypostatized into conflicts between different essential principles governing how gaming is supposed to happen, but NONE of them mattered at all, or were visible in the 1970s in Rochester, NY. At least I never heard them discussed in the game stores, in our game group, or in later decades in local gaming conventions.