A few years back, I first discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and then I found my way into the old-school renaissance sub-genre of table-top gaming, and since then, I’ve become obsessed with games like Old School Essentials and Maze Rats, and adventure settings like Dolmenwood.
Unfortunately, I’ve had little opportunity to play any of these old school-inspired games. I’ve got a sporadic DCC RPG campaign going, but we’ve been meeting less and less frequently. And I’ve only ever DMed ONE session of old school D&D (Rules Cyclopedia version).
My gaming group is more interested in 5e, so that’s what we play. There’s nothing wrong with 5e. It’s not a bad system.
It’s just… not my favorite thing. It doesn’t sing to my soul the way the old school stuff does. The simplicity of the old school games (and old school-inspired games) coupled with the grittier, more classic sword and sorcery flavor excites me a lot more than the rules and flavor of 5e.
For many players, the fun of 5e is in character creation. The character-building process is a huge part of what they like about role-playing. They can choose from a host of different character options: different feats, different skills, different race and class combinations, different bonus actions and powers. For many players, the fun isn’t just playing at the table, it’s creating the character and studying the supplemental books, looking for cool stuff to add to that character.
As a mostly-DM, I’m less enamored with this focus on character creation, but even as a player, I’m not particularly interested in it. Making the character is one part of the fun, sure, but it’s not the main part. I would go so far as to say that playing the character (as in, playing “in character,” i.e.: talking like my PC, exploring my PC’s backstory, etc.) is not the main attraction for me.
What I love about RPGs is the exploration. I get to imagine myself inside a fantastical world. My character is my window into that world, but it’s the world that I’m interested in, not the “character build.”
Of course, I enjoy playing a character and growing an attachment to them, but I’m not interested in “playing a part,” like an actor. I’m interested in discovering a new world, of seeing what’s around the corner of a dark dungeon passage, or what’s hidden in the depths of an enchanted wood. The character’s growth happens when they explore the world. They change as they explore, not by leveling up and gaining new feats and skills.
The other thing I love about old-school RPGs is the aesthetic, which, I’ll admit, is my personal preference and nothing more.
And there’s nostalgia too. Old school RPGs take me back to Saturdays at Waldenbooks looking at all those Dragonlance covers on the shelves. They take me back to third grade when I discovered the Endless Quest books, to playing MERP and HeroQuest, to watching movies like Legend and Dragonslayer over and over and over again. The old school gaming stuff–even when it’s really weird and acid-y like Ultraviolet Grasslands–gives me the same vibes I used to get as a kid. I don’t think it’s the rules per se that do it; I think it’s the DIY spirit of the scene and the messy creativity.
But yeah, the rules are great too because they ARE simpler. The rules leave a lot of things open to the imagination of the DM and the players. I like that freedom.
I sometimes think of 5e as one of those adult coloring books with amazingly detailed and gorgeous pictures inside. They are fun to color because at the end of the process, you have this amazing piece of art. But old school games are more like one of those “Child’s First Art Book” things, where on page one there’s an outline of a fishbowl and the directions say to draw a bunch of fish, but what the fish look like, how they’re shaped, what they’re doing, and what else is inside the fishbowl is entirely up to you. And each page is like that: a suggestion of what to draw, but everything else comes from your imagination. That’s what old school gaming feels like. Suggestions and outlines, but you get to draw the world.
So anyway, I wish I knew more people who wanted to play stuff like OSE and DCC RPG. When I’m feeling in the mood, I sometimes roll up a couple of characters and start sketching a simple dungeon and wilderness area, and then sorta run my own adventure in my head. I know it sounds lame, but sometimes it’s all I can do to satisfy my desire to play old-school stuff. Sometimes I read modules and adventure settings and get ideas for games I want to run or even for stories I want to write. Even if I’m just flying solo, the old school stuff ends up feeding my imagination. I might not be able to play a campaign with a full table of people, but at least I can let the old school stuff inspire me.
