What Does "Old School Gaming" Even Mean? (Part 2) Looooooooong term campaigns.

     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 the nerd version of old-timey bridge club, or the nerd version of poker night.

    People would rarely switch characters. Only in the case of character permadeath, or if someone really got bored with their character or got an itch to try something else would that happen. After years of play, characters would slowly advance to epic levels, having lots of adventures and misadventures along the way, making lifelong memories with a group of like-minded friends who became a regular weekly part of their lives like family.

    At my own personal table, I would have players pick their characters' birthdays. I would keep track of the time in the campaign world versus time in the real world. So, if players had two weeks of downtime between adventures, or if they traveled uneventfully overland across the map for a month to get to the next part of their lives that we would role-play, I would mark off the two weeks or the month of in-universe time. At one point, in college, I noticed that 3 years had gone by in real life and 7 years had gone by in the game world. PCs actually had birthday parties in-universe that we role-played.

    What I see today, in the D&D player culture, for the most part, is one-shot wonders and people who jump from character to character to character with very little investment. Milestone Leveling is all the rage. The idea of a regular campaign down through the years and of your character being as developed from actual events that you actually played, and decisions that you actually made over time, as opposed to some backstory that you wrote, is unheard of. There's nothing wrong with backstories, of course, in themselves, but they are no substitute for actually playing the character through the years.

    According to some statistics I've heard from the gaming industry, the average player of D&D plays at a given table for 8 to 9 sessions. Period. Then they either quit the game or find a new table.

    This is not going to produce what I think of as Old School Gaming. It's not going to produce what this Grumpy Old GM experienced growing up in a Game Shop's Basement.

    What do you think? Was this an important statement about the current state of gaming culture? Or just an old farty rant? You decide. We will share and respond to as many of your comments and questions as we can.