Grumpy Old GMs

  Hey, there, Old School Gamers! Today we have Part 5 for you of our series on "What Even is Old School Gaming". Part 5 here is called "The Monsters Actually Have to be a THREAT." This is an extension of Part 4 about how player characters should actually be able to permadie, although it should be rare. One of the things that I noticed about 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, is that the monsters and creatures are incredibly, incredibly nerfed. Now, the whole reason to get into this is because nerfed monsters mean that they're not challenging. Not being challenged eventually makes D&D, for Old School Gamers anyway, seem stale. After several sessions of simply stomping through every situation like you're a god,  it's going to get a little old for the true old school gamer, kind of boring. And that's because there was no risk and with no risk you never really earned anything. These days there's a pop culture awareness of brain chemistry in term...

  Hey there, Old School Gamers! The picture today is a coffin because today's episode is about death. Part 4 of our series about "What Even Is Old School Gaming?" is titled Yes, Characters Could Actually Die in Old School. This topic here, Part 4, is going to continue into the next two episodes with some points that I think should be expanded into their own topics. Part 5 will be about monsters being nerfed these days. Part 6 will be about how NPCs have been nerfed. So as far as Part 4: Death goes, yes, in the olden school days characters could and often did die. Now, just because they died often doesn't mean they stayed permadead. It is a fantasy game after all. So, it was fairly easy to get your character back, and characters came back almost as often as they died. It was a rare occasion that a character became permadead usually simply because the character died and the player was through with that character and didn't actually want them back. What this did ...

  Greetings, old school gamers! Today we are into Part 3 of our series about what even is "old school" gaming. The picture today is of a medieval merchant counting gold pieces. That's because our third point concerning what old school gaming even is is about resource management. I was first exposed to this idea in a very old module from the 1980s called The Throne of Bloodstone. That module begins with an article that is several pages long by none other than Dave Arneson. The module was written for levels 18 to 100. Now you may say, “Level 100? That's unbelievable!” Here's a brief explanation of how that worked in first edition D&D.   These days level limits in D&D are in the form of a hard cap. If you are playing rules as written from the core books, the levels just stop at 20. Yes, there are some boon type things after that, but the levels just stop at 20. That's a hard cap. In first edition D&D, instead of a hard cap on levels, there was ...

      In Part 1, we discussed the idea that PCs in a world such as D&D or Pathfinder might eventually become kings, queens, generals, martial arts masters founding their own schools and styles, archmages, thieves' guildmasters, assassins' guildmasters, clerics founding religions on whole new continents, etc.     Several campaigns were written back in the day for a whole party of diverse walks of life (religious clerics, druids or paladins, more secular warriors fighters, rogues, mages, etc., and mystical monks) to jointly, as a party, clear virgin wilderness of monsters so that commoners could settle there and found what would eventually grow into cities like Waterdeep or Blackmoor. These cities were originally founded by PCs at tables that Ed Greenwood and Dave Arneson GM'ed.     But in order for things that to happen, campaigns have to run for years of time in real life. Traditionally, groups would meet each week for 5, 10, or 15 years. It was th...

      "With great power comes great responsibility, Peter." Uncle Ben's sage advice to his nephew encapsulates one of the aspects of Old School Gaming that WOTC left behind years ago.     This idea first came to me in 2016 when a friend of mine showed up to a game with a huge tote of vintage game books that he had acquired just that day from some sort of garage sale or something.     The first item I picked up was a 1980's D&D Master's Set module. One of the important chapters of that quest involved a war, a mass combat between two navies of flying ships among the stars. (Fantasy flying ships, not sci-fi flying ships. Such a thing would, about 10 years later, be called Spelljammer.)     In the module, the player characters were to be the admirals in charge of the navies. Several pages of material existed to explain how to run the naval battle. It was more like playing Risk than D&D, more a strategy board game than a straight-up role-p...