Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." 

Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.

A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case, unhappiness with the state of Third Edition played a big role, which is ironic, since 3e had brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place after having largely abandoned the game several years prior. However, I suspect the roots of the OSR go back even farther, into the dying days of TSR, when AD&D Second Edition was itself a bloated and incoherent mess of a game. Some might stretch things even farther back, looking at the rise of "narrative" and "storytelling" games in the '90s as important data points.

I mention all of this simply as background to what will be my first reconsiderations post. Given the wide range of topics that I'll likely be covering as I write this series, I thought it useful to begin with something very basic and indeed foundational. I also thought it an important subject, because, in the eighteen years since I started this blog, my perspective on this matter have become clearer, if not necessarily different from what I have previously written. In the past, I might have been more circumspect in how I defined "old school" and what I understood it to mean, now I feel as if I have a more solid sense of things.

For me, "old school" is, paradoxically, a modern term. It's obviously not a term anyone "back in the day" would have used to describe D&D or any other RPG, for the simple reason that "old school" is a comparative term, one that depends on time having passed and there being multiple iterations of a game to compare to one another. "Old school" is, therefore, a retrospective category, one invented after the fact to identify certain common features, assumptions, and practices associated with the hobby's earlier years. Like all such categories, it is necessarily imperfect. The people who created and played these games in the 1970s and '80s did not think of themselves as participating in an "old school" style of play; they were simply playing roleplaying games as they understood them.

This is one reason why I have always thought the "R" in OSR stood for "renaissance." A renaissance is not a simple return to the past. It's an attempt to recover something from the past that is believed to possess enduring value, even though the very act of recovery inevitably reshapes it. The artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not recreate the art and ideals of Classical Antiquity they so admired. Neither did the Protestant Reformers did not restore the primitive Christianity they felt had become obscured under centuries of accretions. Both were instances of later generations looking backward for inspiration while simultaneously creating something new, whether they intended to do so or not.

That's also true of the OSR. Whatever else it may have been, the Old School Renaissance was never merely an exercise in preservation. Certainly, there were those whose chief concern was keeping older games alive and accessible. Without their efforts, many important texts and traditions might well have disappeared. Yet, from its earliest days, the OSR was also a creative movement. The proliferation of retro-clones, house rules, and entirely new games inspired by older ones quite quickly made that abundantly clear. Even when its devotees claimed to be "returning" to the roots of the hobby, they were doing so from a historical vantage point that could not help but influence – and, occasionally, distort – their understanding of those roots.

That's why I would argue that the category of "old school" only emerged because the hobby had changed. Certain features of earlier roleplaying games and styles of play came to be seen as distinctive precisely because they were no longer taken for granted. I think this helps explain why debates over the meaning of "old school" were (and remain) so contentious. The term refers neither to a specific type of rules nor to a particular historical period. Rather, it points toward a collection of loosely related ideas, assumptions, and practices drawn from the hobby's formative decades. Different people naturally emphasize different elements of that inheritance. Some focus on rules, while others focus on adventure design, campaign structure, referee authority, player agency, or any number of other factors. None of these perspectives is wholly wrong, because "old school" is itself a modern effort to make sense of a diverse and often contradictory past.

That's why nowadays, when I speak of "old school," I do not mean a museum piece or a slavish recreation of how roleplaying games were played in 1977, 1982, or any other year. Neither do I mean a particular game, edition, or collection of mechanics. Rather, I mean a tradition of play, one that took shape during the hobby's formative decades and whose characteristic assumptions can still be discerned beneath the considerable diversity of the games now associated with it.

Those assumptions are precisely what I mean by "old school." They have less to do with descending armor class, race-as-class, or any other rules idiosyncrasy than with a particular understanding of the relationship between players, referees, characters, and settings. They concern what roleplaying games are for, how they are meant to be played, and what kinds of experiences they are best suited to provide. The details will necessarily vary from game to game and table to table, but I think there is nevertheless a coherent thread running through them. It is that thread, rather than any single rules system or historical period, that I now understand to have been the true subject of the Old School Renaissance (and, by extension, this blog).