James Raggi, who is one of the judges for our Design A Dungeon Room Contest,recently posted his outline for a presentation on Old School RPGs. After reading about how some bloggers were feeling excluded from the “Old School Reformation” (OSR) community of bloggers, I thought I’d take a look at how our current game compares to James’ outline:

Random Character Generation — No! Diceless character generation.

Character Backstory Optional, Perhaps Wasteful — Yes/No. A little is needed, a lot is not.

Focus on Player Skill, Not Character Stats — Yes! Or rather “in-game skill” rather than “pre-game skill”

Slow Leveling — No! Characters level up at the end of each game session

“Eternal” Campaign – No, Predetermined End — No! An ending is loosely planned out.

Rules and Expansions are for GM, Not Players — No! All the players should understand the rules.

GM as God of the Game — No! GM as Referee and Player.

That’s around a 20% match for James’ list. Probably a bit more or less if you asked some other blogger to come up with their own list of “what is Old School”.

And yet I still get a lot out of reading Raggi’s and others “Old School” blogs, and lots of those bloggers in turn leave comments here as well. I definitely don’t feel excluded from any sort of community. Whether or not our game matches anyone’s definition of “new school” or “old school” or “neoclassic school” really doesn’t make much difference where it counts:  are we having fun?

Yesterday I put together the first set of cards for this weekend’s Weird West game. CCG style cards are definitely not Old School. The rules are built upon the foundation of Swords & Wizardry, which is a restatement of the original ’74 edition of Gary Gygax’s RPG. That definitely is Old School. So our game is a mash-up of new, old, private, junior-high, and reform school gaming.

My advice to anyone who wants to run 1974 D&D with superheroes and battlemats, or Exalted using Matt Finch’s “Old School Primer” would be to just go for it and have fun.  Don’t worry about whether you think your game fits into any “school”, and just focus on having fun with it.