Yesterday, following on from an unexpected sequence of events, I took the time to take a look at MicroLite74. Written by Randall S. Stukey, this is a roleplaying game built from the “Primary Fantasy SRD rules” to:
“recreate the style and feel of that very first (‘0e’) fantasy roleplaying game published back in 1974 without giving up all of the clearer mechanics of modern D20-based versions.”
Aside from being a fascinating read, the game contains a really useful and interesting introduction to the concept of “Old School” play. You can read this for yourself by purchasing any of the editions of the MicroLite74 rules. Although it features at the front of the Ultimate Edition of the rules, you will find it towards the end of the “pay what you want” Basic Edition too.
In this post, I wanted to highlight some of the points and ideas that I think help to clarify my own preferred approach to fantasy roleplay, especially in the light of more recent styles of play.
Elements of Old School Play
Stukey begins by outlining two major styles of roleplaying games:
The first (and older) style says “Here is the situation. Pretend you are there as your character, what do you want to do?”
This style has been superseded over the years with a style that says “Here is the situation. Based on your character’s stats, abilities, skills, etc. as listed on his character sheet and your knowledge of the many detailed rules of the game, what is the best way to use your character’s skills and abilities and the rules to solve the situation?”
Old school play strongly favors the first style and frowns on too much of the second.
– (MicroLite74 Ultimate, page 4)
From here, the text outlines a list of 10 major points upon which old school play is different. While I don’t agree with all of them as general rules (most notably, “Limited Magic Items”), I do broadly recognise these points as areas in which the greatest degree of discomfort arises when I am playing a new school game, such as D&D5e.
One easy example is the point that older systems were “Heroic, not Superheroic”. In other words, the characters (at low-mid levels, at least) were fairly normal people “put in situations where they can be heroes”. This is distinct from the modern tendency to create extraordinary characters who can do things that would “make a four-colour comic book superhero proud”.
I think looking through this list alone is worth the $0.00-$0.99 you would need to invest in a copy of MicroLite74 Basic so you can read it for yourself. It was far more illuminating (in a practical sense) than the famed “Quick Primer For Old School Gaming“.
But that is not all the article has to offer…
Styles of Old School Play
From the initial discussion, Stukey then enters into a discussion of four styles of old school gaming:
- Power-Gaming
- Wargaming
- Role-playing
- Story-telling
While I (as ever) take issue with the third style being titled “Role-playing” (as if all the others aren’t), I followed his logic reasonably well. That said, this discussion was far more… controversial. The saving comment of the section was the author’s good grace to both point out where they came from (Blacow’s October 1980 article, “Aspects of Adventure Gaming“) and to state that:
The important thing to take from this section isn’t the four styles or their labels (as there are other systems for describing this with their own labels), but the idea that there were many different styles of “old school” play back in the “old school” days – not just the single style stressed in some “old school” blogs, forums, and web sites.
Don’t let those sites make you believe that you aren’t playing old school right if your campaign isn’t strongly in the wargaming camp. Most successful campaigns back in “old school” days were a mixture of all four major styles – and a heaping helping of minor styles.
– (MicroLite74 Ultimate, page 9)
On “roleplaying”, or rather what a roleplaying game is, I subscribe to The Angry GM’s definition of it as:
A role-playing game is a game in which players take on the role of fictional characters in a hypothetical universe. The players attempt to make the decisions that they feel their characters would make if they were real and if their universe were real. Those decisions are based on the characters’ motivations and the games goals. The results of those decisions are played out and new decisions are made.
That means I’d probably use a different term to describe a game in which the emphasis is that, “players create the personality of their characters in great detail and players generally have a large emotional investments made in them and do not consider their characters expendable” (emphasis mine).
But, hey ho.
Let’s not miss the central point: old school roleplaying is not one homogeneous thing; it’s a blend of different styles expressed through an approach in which the emphasis is, “Here is the situation. Pretend you are there as your character, what do you want to do?” over what abilities are on the player’s character sheet.
I like that approach. Thanks, Mr Stukey, for explaining it to me.
Game on!
As a piece of observational social psychology the Blacow Model takes some beating, in my view. Most people who dislike it home in on the role playing category: but I think it has the implication that practitioners of that style prefer amateur thesping. I seem to recall that the original Gygax formulation was that the ‘role’ was the class.
I tend to agree, although I would probably steal that lovely word you just used for the “Roleplaying” style and call it, simply, “Thesping”.