Playing an old-school game is very different from modern games where rules cover many specific situations. Well, I’ll tell you.įinch wrote a thirteen page tract, A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, which you can download free. I just wanted to give them a different experience. There’s a pretty fair chance that my Pathfinderlibrary is at least equal to yours. Now, don’t think I’m talking about “this is how we did it back when I was growing up” and shaking my fist at those young whippersnappers on my front lawn. So, I decided to essentially run a scaled down game that is less rules heavy and more in the style of a game from the seventies. In the aforementioned post, fantasy author and Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones described the retroclone movement as, “A real backlash against the rules-heavy material that bogs down games.” S&W brought all that together, added some options (like the Ranger class), and presented a coherent version of that system. Players of original D&Dmay remember how inconsistent (and undeveloped) the rules were. S&W, created by Matt Finch (and who was also involved in the creation of OSRIC) is a streamlined and moderately expanded version of the original D&D ( 0 Edition). ![]() OSRIC( 1 st AD&D) and Labyrinth Lord(Tom Moldvay’s Original Basic D&D) are two of the better-known retroclones. But another group emerged, for those who wanted to recreate prior editions of Dungeons and Dragons using the OGL. The OGL (Open Gaming License: see Part One of this essay) resulted in whole new competing RPGs, like Mongoose’s Conan: The Roleplaying Game, and Pathfinder, from Paizo. I talked about retroclones in Part Two of my history of the RPG companies, Necromancer and Frog God Games: The only other system I’ve looked into over the past few years is Swords and Wizardry ( S&W). Understanding the scope of opportunity offered to PCs by the game system will certainly discourage the intelligent player from such useless activity. Such creativity, if it can be called that, amounts to a perversion of the game. ![]() Too often, new material purporting to add to a game system is nothing more than a veiled attempt to dominate the game milieu through power, not skill. The last game I ran, I limited players to the core rulebook just because I didn’t want to deal with so much “stuff.” Also, I’m not particularly interested in half-angel, half-goblin mammoth-riding gunslingers.īTW – Gary Gygax had some very specific thoughts related to the expansion of the game (presumably through options), in his book, Role Playing Mastery: ![]() I’ve seen it grow over the years and, as seems inevitable for any ongoing, lively edition, suffer from rules bloat and options bloat. ![]() I even have a Beginner’s Box, still in the plastic (how about that, John O’Neill!). I have a lot of resources available, and I definitely know the system well enough to teach it to them. I decided to run them through a dice-rolling, paper mapping, minis on said paper, character-sheet adventure. Both have also played the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords (which I LOVE!) with me. One (she) is a hardcore World of Warcraft player, and the other (he) is a veteran PC gamer, with a lot of hours on Baldur’s Gate and Oblivion (among others). Two members of my gaming group have never played an actual pen and paper RPG. I was familiar with 3 rd Edition and the plethora of rules, skill checks, etc… I’m still pretty well versed in Pathfinder, which is a great product, and I’m a big fan both of Golarion, the campaign world, and of the company, Paizo. When I got back into playing RPGs, I chose Pathfinderover 4 th Edition D&D (as a whole lot of people seemed to do).
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