Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Mystic Pull of the Old School - Part 3: The road ahead

I think one of the main points of the previous two posts in this series was to make a point about old school play and to what it owes it attraction. I've seen it accused of being mainly nostalgic in nature and not having anything of interest to offer modern players. Even stalwart old shoolers are sometimes apologetic of the style and admit to some degree that nostalgia may indeed be part of it.
As you've probably guessed, I disagree. Having come later to the hobby, and mainly having played story-oriented games most of my life, nostalgia is out of the question on my part. What I have been trying to demonstrate, particularly in part 2, is that there is indeed something in the early days of the game that holds a different sort of quality from what we see nowadays.
That being said, I don't think I will ever be a hard core old schooler myself. It's just that the entire phenomenon holds such an ensnaring attraction, and giving in to that attraction has opened a lot of new doors in my mind. When I am done with the PF-campaign I am currently running, I will most certainly start a Labyrinth Lord campaign, but my focus will be on developing some systems to allow the most compelling aspects of old school play to be combined with a more narrative approach. This is not as straightforward as it may seem, but I have some ideas on how to do it, and I am looking forward to trying them out.

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