Old School RPG — what is it?

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In GURPS Social Engineering, for example, the goal is to enable players to play "face" characters, as the goal of GURPS Martial Arts is to enable players to play combat monsters. But the final page of main text is titled "Throw Away This Book" and is about the "just roleplay" approach.

"The game" is what you make of it. If I use all of the rules from Social Engineering and you ignore them all and just make stuff up as you see fit, we're not playing the same game. Yours is "more old-school" than mine is because you use more old-school techniques than I do.

On the other hand, there is a difference akin to what you're describing: old school games are action/adventure; new school games commonly try to enable drama as well as action.

Playing GURPS plus Martial Arts is just as "newer school" as GURPS plus Social Engineering. Both provide a great deal of detailed rules to "compute" what a character can do. The difference is not in what genres the rules work with, it's how much freedom the GM has to just make stuff up and still be working within the framework of those rules. (If you ignore rules to make stuff up, you're not working under those rules.)

As has been pointed out much recently, GURPS is a game-making toolkit more than it is a game. The game you create with GURPS make have more or less old-school elements than another's game.

I don't completely approve of the term old school in this context, but it's what the old-schoolers believe. I, for one, enjoy a wide spectrum of styles, from the almost complete reliance on the referee of early D&D to the strong reliance on detailed rules of a complex GURPS game.