Ready Gamer One, the Other Old School Gaming …

TL;DR. I’ve already mentioned that when I was a kid, we were not really fond of corporate backed game design, but as I think about it, there is more going on here than meets the eye. Just as biological organisms evolve over time, so have TTRPGs. And there are two branches of gaming evolution which trace their origins to the 1970s. The first is nowadays called OSR which stims from D&D and licensed products. And the second is represented by the d100 family of games which emerges from Runequest. This second branch has a very different OSR feel, but it is still going strong. The games of this family use the idea of “homebrew” as a positive element of gaming, rather than a negative.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision which provides the greatest profit to the corporate IP holders.

 

Background Links. I’ve already talked about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Northern California gamers, my friends and I were not big fans of corporate-sponsored games. If a game was published by TSR, it had to work harder for our acceptance. They were the mega-corp of gaming just as cyberpunk was taking form. Here are the links to my old posts on this.

Old-school Leftcoast Gaming. 

Magic systems. 

I think this attitude has had an important influence on the development of TTRPGs over the last half century, an influence that can still be seen in games today.

But, hang-on kids, our writer is a science nerd, and he’s going to make his point in his own way.

A Primer on Evolutionary Biology. Stay with me, I think this is important. When most people think of biological evolution, I suspect they think about mammalian evolution, or really almost any large, multicellular eukaryotic organism’s evolution. There is a slow change of a complex organism as it adapts to changing environment. Populations get isolated and eventually change until one population is different enough from the other that they are considered separate species. The normal stuff that most people learn in Highschool. There is a nice wiki page on it.

But there is another kind of evolution. Something called reticulate evolution (reticulate means basically “net like”). This is when two or more organisms merge large parts of their genetic material and create something new. It also has a nice wiki page, but it is shorter.

Complex multicellular organisms have a really hard time experiencing reticulate evolution. This is because developmental biology is really highly tuned. The slightest mistake can lead to a completely dysfunctional organism.  Our developmental programming locks us into a ridged state where we can only make tiny, little changes.

But single celled bacteria don’t have this limitation. They can change their genetic code wildly and still be a viable cell. Bacteria of very different linages—different species—even further apart—like to swap genes with the folks the met, at least from time to time. And this lets them explore a much wider range of living states.

In a sense, this is exactly what happens with TTRPGs.

Copyleft. In the 1980s, particularly in Boston and the Pacific Northwest, there was a strong sentiment against copyrights. Particularly with software. This is when we see the Free Software movement and the Berkely BSD license and so much more. This would eventually lead to modern open-source software and Linux and so much more. I suspect, but I don’t know, that it is even the earliest development in the modern Open Science movement.

So as a teenager in Northern California, this was a real thing. We understood that copyright, as it is usually represented, was a corporate thing. Cyberpunk was king, and copyright is what the corps do, copyleft is what the punks do.

And this showed in out TTRPGs!

Early Leftcoast Games. The first real Leftcoast game (that I can think of) was the Arduin Grimoire. But, let’s be honest. It was never a stand-alone game. It didn’t have enough rules. It was always meant as an extension for D&D. It was, in effect, a massive homebrew. You could grab bits and pieces that you liked and add them to your game. The background tables, of course. Kill Kitties, maybe. Phraint, sure.

And Arduin’s author David Hargrave famously had a falling out with the other big name of Northern California gaming Greg Stafford (who I never met). But both these authors worked in a much more left-leaning environment than our corporate friends at TSR.

And their games have evolved differently.

Evolution of Games. We can make an interesting comparison between the ways different games evolve. Early D&D (until it was bought by the Leftcoast company, Wizards of the Coast) was controlled by an American Midwest corporation that locked the game into a profit-driven evolution that resembles that of multicellular eukaryotes. Slow, structured change with minor variants being tested to determine their profitability. Those that win move on and those that fail are abandoned.

Hargrave’s work hasn’t moved on much—reasons. But Stafford’s games, and those published by his Bay Area company, Chaosium, still represent one of the largest, most popular family of games in the world.

“But Richard,” I hear you yell, “The d100 games represent hundreds of different games, published by countless small and mid-sized gaming companies. They don’t represent any ‘one thing’.”

And that is because the d100 games have always been advancing with reticulate evolution. Games like Call of Cthulhu and DragonBane and Mythras at first blush look to be completely different (and all appear different from my Rubble and Ruin). But they are not. With the d100 world of games, we take parts that we like and kludge them together into a functioning system. If you look at Basic Roleplaying  (The Big Yellow Book) it has countless optional rules that are included or excluded as the GM sees fit. And over time, more and more options have appeared.

But the underlying skill-based structure remains unchanged. Characters are not forced into roles based on “class” but rather develop organically with skills going up during play as independent of any corporate-ordained structure.

The Second Old School. I have a WIP, a new game I’m putting together. I call it Rustic Fantasy and it is the game I wish I had in 1980. The rules are a combination of a number of open RPGs, most are ORC Licensed, including Mythras Imperative, BRP, and Open Quest. And I would say this game is strongly in the second Old Scholl.

In the second Old School, you take the parts of all the games that you have, and you assemble something new and unique. Frequently you are creating a world and the rules that go with it. You, as a GM and invested players, are trying to fulfill a vision and make that vision come alive.

The current best example, in my mind, is DragonBane. This game is currently hot. I bought my copy at a local, independent bookstore. Didn’t need to special order it from my FLAG.

But it is just a form of Basic Roleplaying that has undergone decades of reticulate evolution. They’ve divided skills by five and added D&D “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” on rolls. And they have added new elements to match their vision. It’s a great game. A buddy of mine is running it on Monday nights and I’m really enjoying it. It is one strand of a net of games that are now and have always been popular.

Homebrew is Old School. Some folks use the term “homebrew” in a derogatory way to refer to games that are not run according to the rules written and approved by the corporate owners of the intellectual properties of a given game. I argue that this is where “the art” is. This is where the creativity comes in. Corporate games are so automatable that if you want to experience D&D 5e you can go play Baldur’s Gate. To me, the interesting part of the game is when you start changing the mechanics to reflect a different imagined reality.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision that provides the greatest profit to a corporation.

We’ve been doing it since the dawn of gaming. It’s popular. It’s fun. If you haven’t, give it a try.

As always, thanks for reading my posts and I invite comments and questions below.