The Promiscuousness of Play - D&D as an Emergent System and 'Old School' Gaming

Image by Juan de la Corte - Battle Scene with a Roman Army Besieging a Large City (17th century)

Another day on Twitter another person saying stuff about ‘old school D&D’ that doesn’t line up with my experience. 

Must be a Tuesday.

Thing is, I don’t speak for all old school players, as a matter of fact, no one does. If there is one thing I’ve found over the years is that “old school” points to different things for different people. For some “old school” means a lot of power for the DM and an adversarial attitude between players and DM. For others it means “rulings over rules”, not being beholden to the RAW. For others it means trying to figure out what RAW was for older editions and playing EXACTLY THAT.

In short, “old school” is really only useful insofar as it is a term that points to a VERY BROAD SET of playstyles and picks out ONE or MORE of those playstyles and amplifies them. So maybe your “old school” group is heavy on the hack n’ slash and light on the social role play, maybe your group is heavily improvisational and rules light. 

I thought that it might be fun to highlight a few of the things we do in our “old school” D&D games. None of these are “required” by the rules, but they are great examples of how old school D&D hews to different play styles. I virtually guarantee that some old school players will look at these and think, “what the hell”, others will find some of them familiar.  Maybe in the process I’ll change some stereotypes about what “old school” D&D gaming is about.

Rather than talking about the RAW, I’m going to look at things that I feel are definitely important to the type of D&D we play, but are not explicitly addressed in the rules. The point here is that, for a game as open ended as D&D, there are a LOT of things that go beyond the game rules that are important to the quality of play, and thus there is a lot of variation in old-school D&D no matter how you treat the RAW.

1. Open Books - For us D&D is a game, and as such, the goal is for anyone who wants to run their own game to learn while they play. To enhance this, the rule at our table is this: you may consult any rule book at the game table with the following exceptions:

1. You may not read the monster book while you are monster fighting

2. You may not read the treasure listings while going through treasure.

Other than that, the players are encouraged to get to know the rules for the game so they can eventually run their own. This means that sometimes they will guess things before you “reveal” them, that’s just fine. 

2. Running PCs in Absentia - At our table if you are not there for a session your PC is run by someone else in the group you have chosen. If they are not available, then the referee runs these characters. They are given “minimal” roles while being ‘remotely’ run, but they are targets in combat, and generally will have their actions randomized by the referee to ensure fairness. 

3. Rules Discussions - For the most part, if we can’t hash it out and agree on something in 5 min then the referee decides. We can then talk about it post session and decide on a ruling going forward. There are generally no ‘take backs’ or ‘rewinds’ related to adjudication. We move forward with whatever ruling we agree upon, but the past ruling, even if it is out of step with the new ruling, stays as is. 

4. No Fudging - Once the dice are rolled they stand, and everyone, including the referee, rolls in the open. This is done for fairness, and for excitement. Publicly rolling for something that carries risk is an enormous source of excitement, and the possibility of harmful failure gives successes their value and sense of worth. 

5. Extreme Randomization - The referee errs on the side of randomization of most NPC/monster actions, so rather than a monster or NPC doing the “obvious” thing, they sometimes do the ‘non-optimal’ thing that no one is expecting. Generally the referee sets 'probability spans’ based on their assumed set of options. Take an example, a party has entered the cave of a dragon, they are looking at the treasure hoard when they dragon returns. I roll for surprise and the dragon gets surprise, so she can decide what to do. Now, I could just have the dragon attack, but I prefer to add a random element to the process. In this case, as the dragon didn’t communicate with the party (and thus an encounter reaction roll is not used), I would randomize it as follows: 

1 - Dragon attacks with breath weapon

2 - Dragon attacks with CCB

3 - Dragon extinguishes party’s torches with wings

4 - Dragon announces its presence but stays at distance

5 - Dragon pretends to be blind and treats the PCs like pilgrims bringing tribute

6 - Dragon claims to be in need of help against another evil dragon nearby

That sort of thing. The idea is that “attack” all the time gets dull, so as a ref I try to keep things somewhat unpredictable. 

6. Unpacking the Rules - Every once in a while a player will ask about a certain rule or house rule, e.g. why do we use dice X to do Y, that sort of thing. These are learning opportunities associated with the game that are too good to pass up, particularly in light of item 1. Sometimes this means a half hour of game design discussion, sometimes this means we consider alternate rules, sometimes it means us discussing how a spell or spell works. Sometimes we spend significant amounts of time discussing these things, it depends on the particular group. The point is that “rules discussions” don’t have to be acrimonious arguments, they can instead be opportunities to learn.

7. Games within Games - I like it when the PCs decide they want to play a game in the game world, that gives me an excuse to bring out games that we play at the table within our D&D game. So we have played variations on checkers, chess, Onitawa, Jenga and various card and dice games, some I have made up, some I have borrowed from other sources. The point of these games is to actually play them (and sometimes wager on them), there is no ‘metanarrative’ point or abstract goal, they are just games, and we like playing games as PCs as well as ourselves. 

8. Post Game Discussion - When the game is over it is not uncommon for the players who are interested to take part in a ‘post game discussion’ about what worked and what didn’t. In particular it is an opportunity to review strategy and for me to ‘pull back the curtain’ on both adjudication and game design elements. My players want to eventually be able to run their own games, so discussing how I, as the referee, handled things in game is a great way to show them how to do it. So for example, I will tell them which elements I had planned and which elements I improvised, so they can get a handle on just how much improvisation goes on at the table. Or if I’m running a published adventure, I can tell them which adventure elements were there in the product and which I added. Included in these discussions are things the party did badly and things the party did well. I have often told them what could have happened if they hadn’t done X or Y. It’s important to let them know when they did a good job too.

9. Player Involvement - as a referee I like to randomize as much as possible about the game world to keep it unpredictable and fun. But that puts a lot of weight on my shoulders. So sometimes I just ask the table, “What would be a good payment for this service”, or “what do you think would be a consequence of that decision”. The players don’t decide if something bad or good happens, that’s up to the dice to decide, but they might get a say in which good or bad option comes up. Generally I take their suggestions and present a random roll where there are a number of options, so not guaranteed, but they do get to have input.

10. Damage to PCs is Described - rather than report the exact HP damage done to the PC, their damage is described, and based on the description you know how damaged your PC is at the time. The point is to remove some of the certainty from combat and to keep the players focused on damage their character takes. Damage to monsters by the PCs is also ‘described’ in the sense that I will describe the damage done to the monster so the party has an idea of how many HP the monster has left. 

There are no doubt many other examples of rules from our table, but the point is that none of these are required by the game, only the last one is even mentioned as a possibility in the 1e AD&D books as far as I know. However, these are all crucial elements of what makes our D&D game OUR D&D game. I would posit that ALL D&D games are like this, a mix of RAW, house rules that change existing rules and rules like those I have enumerated here, rules that are not in the game but help you to define how the game runs at your table. 

What this means is that there is as much variation between ‘old school’ D&D games as there is between them and many ‘new school’ games, as old school D&D has had decades to develop these local variations in play. Since these are ‘extra-textual’ rules, rules that are not found in the books, there are endless local variations. 

So really, if  you are interested in ‘old-school’ play the only real way to find out what this means for any given table is to play at that table. It also means that much of the discussion here about old school play by people who use the books, or what they have heard about the books and the game, rather than actual play as a guide, are talking nonsense. 

And I see a lot of this nonsense on a daily basis. Things that would be screamingly obvious to anyone who had sat down at an ‘old school’ game for even one session, but are completely hidden if you just stick to the books. Things that are not enumerated in the rules proper, but still shape the experience of the game as much or more than the RAW. You can’t know any of that by reading the rules. 

And if you think about it, over 4 decades of playtesting by millions of players will produce variations in how the game is played. Every day on Twitter I see advocates for ‘old school RAW’ lamenting the fact that people have strayed from playing the game “as designed”. I think they are wrong, I think it was meant to be tinkered with, but their basic observation, that lots of people house rule the game and play a “local variation” is quite sound.

To me this is the greatest strength of D&D and the source of its longevity. Any game can appeal to players as written, but D&D is pliable and plastic, people have been kit-bashing it for decades, and it has allowed the game to continue to grow and thrive. For me, any game that was produced by playing D&D and then customizing it to your group is D&D, no matter how ‘different’ it looks. Admittedly sometimes the end products look a lot different, but in practice what you find is that D&D has a lot of parts, and everyone changes a different set of those parts in their gaming, but they also leave a lot alone. So almost every retroclone I have seen, and most subsequent editions, have some shared and some uncommon DNA. 

But they are all D&D to me.