Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

I’m a veteran gamemaster. I recently started using wandering monster rules for the first time . This entry is about why I never used wandering monsters before and what I learned using them several times in the last month or so. Yes, it may scandalize card-carrying OSR gamers: I never rolled for wandering monsters in 1981, or in ’82, ’83, ’84… I never rolled for wandering monsters ever . I never saw anybody else do so, either. This is one of those “old-school” myths; practices widely varied in the old days and there was no single “old-school” way to play. It wasn’t just that nobody I knew used wandering monsters. It was mostly that I thought they would disrupt the game with superfluous encounters that distracted players from their goals and were incongruous with the setting in the moment. (More on that below.) Before I left D&D behind to take up other systems, I had used many D&D published scenarios. I simply ignored wandering monster tables in them (though not every module...

This is what I have pieced together about the death of the OSR, or "Old-School Renaissance" (of Dungeons & Dragons) based on statements of those involved. In 2001, Wizards of the Coast created its Open Games License. Now players could copy and publish old editions of Dungeons & Dragons with impunity. They did. OSRIC (2006) replicated AD&D and Swords & Wizardry (2008) revised and replicated OD&D. Other clones appeared thereafter in great number . In 2008, Gary Gygax died and the Fourth Edition of D&D appeared. Both were lamented by players of older editions of D&D. Calls to "take back our hobby!" began and talk of an "Old-School movement" grew into assertions. The blog race was on to identify the genetic code of early D&D rules and practices that would resuscitate the Original Way of gaming. For a couple of years, there was a lot of energy and debate about what that would mean. In 2010, the first OSR blog devoted to slanderin...

Critics of role-playing games with skill systems sometimes support the idea that the Gamemaster should decide outcomes by fiat or by ad hoc rulings on the odds, be it in negotiation with players or by assessing the quality and likelihood of the player’s description of the character’s action. Though often presented as a return to the sources and a putative original play-style, and away from more complicated “modern” rules, the impulse to go back to the sources is quite modern. It’s also right in line with the most ardently free-form storytelling gamers, only with a strongly empowered GM. Fewer rules, more GM fiat. Some seem to think that the original D&D rules of 1974 do not include skills. In fact, they do. It’s just that they did not call them skills, just as they did not call it a “role-playing game” in 1974, either. The original skill rules were disorganized. They have no uniform method of resolution. Some are “have/not have” skills. If you have them, they work, and if you do...