Old School, New School and Gygaxian Naturalism (or not)

Here’s the post that I promised wouldn’t write since it could be construed as a comment bait.  However, since I spent 2 hours reading arguments and trying to define some fairly controversial terms, I’m not going to waste that!  No siree!

Now, just so we’re clear on this, I’m interested to read your thoughts and opinions on this but PLEASE, lets leave out any bad-wrong fun arguments and personal attacks at the door.

While I prefer to play newer editions of D&D,  I like to know about the other manners of playing D&D out there.

Since we’re in the final stages of the One page dungeon contest, I’ve been hard at work trying to clarify/define the various categories under which we’ll judge the entries.  While the contest is not about editions of D&D and such, the two co-sponsors: Chgowiz and I are respectively old and new school DMs.  Thus we made categories for “best  old School” and best “new edition” type entries.

I knew from the get go that this old/new divide would be subjective, hard to pin down and open for arguments.  This is the kind of things that means vastly different things for many.

The perception of old/new school is highly  influenced by the period at which a person was introduced to the hobby.  It is muddled up further by the fact that new players get introduced to the hobby through modern retro-clones of D&D, making them neo-old school players.

Arghhh, my freakin head hurts already!

Anyway, I sat at my desk, fired up my IM client of choice (I use Digsby by the way) and got a hold of Chgowiz and Graham to help me define what new/old school would mean in terms of dungeon designs so I could offer the judges common example to work from.

Here’s what we came up with. It’s not complete, it’s not precise but it’s what we agreed on.

Oh and for the sakes of argument, I put A D&D 2nd edition as the transition between the old school and new school of dungeon designs, mostly because it’s the edition that saw a major shift in how adventures were written and was heavily influenced by the storytelling wave of the 90′s.

It also marks the period I left D&D, I came back with the third edition, but that’s a story for another day.

Also take note that I wrote those to help judge the one page dungeons, so some of the characteristics I defined make sense in that context only.

Old School D&D Dungeons(Pre AD&D 2nd ED and Retro-Clones)

• Classic maps (Blue, Crowded, etc)
• Overblown titles like Lost tombs of the Omniscient Arch-Lich Prophet (Goodman Games went for that 100% in their Dungeon Crawl Classic line)
  
• Limited story outside of the dungeon key (you discover the story as you read the keys).
• Numerous rooms (More than 10 per “level”)
• Presence of empty rooms for random encounters and DM creations
• Tricks and Traps separate from Combat (Major defining point)
• Extensive and varied random encounters with limited regards for PC levels and dungeon restocking
• Encounters that challenge Players over PCs
• Expectations that the party will retreat and regroup in some of the encounters.

The following 2 articles helped me come to these definitions:

• Grognardia’s Old School guidelines.
• T. Foster’s reply in this Knights and Knaves thread.

I’m open to suggestions on things I might have missed that really should be in there.

And yes,  left out Gygaxian Naturalism intentionally from that list, I’ll come back to it later.

New School D&D (3rd Edition and Fantasy derivatives, 4th edition)

• Less numerous rooms or grouped rooms
• Large areas to allow space for miniature play
• Extensive background and story around the dungeon instead of in the key.
• NPC motivations and goals spelled out
• Focus on set-piece encounters taking into account PC resources
• Encounters with defined interactive elements above and beyond monsters (Hindering terrain, Obstacles, traps, etc)
• Tricks and traps embedded in combat
• Encounters designed to progressively use party resources (without implied retreating) until natural resting point or final confrontation with ‘”Boss”
• Level-appropriate encounters.

Now for that list I plunged into my (and Graham’s) personal experiences having read Dungeon magazine voraciously and having played so many D&D 3e/4e adventures.

Of course, some elements of old school designs appear in newer adventures and by the same token, some classic adventures feature some items that I put up as new school.  What I was aiming at was tendencies seen in adventures of one school vs the other.

Once again, do chime in if I missed an element that should be crucial.

About Gygaxian Naturalism

That term was coined and later defined by James Maliszewski at Grognardia.  Whenever I discussed the contest with our old school judges, they all mentioned that Gygaxian Naturalism was part of what old School gaming was all about. To a certain extent I agreed with them.

Then my good friend Graham crashed the apple cart and argued, quite energetically that Gygaxian Naturalism as defined by James, was mostly applying the entries of the 1st Edition of the Monster Manual to build dungeons and lairs that had a certain verisimilitude in regards to the game world.

What complicates the debate further is that James’ definitions of Gygaxian Naturalism have since been broadened by various people to encompass many different things, including how dungeons are to be believable by featuring non-combatants and a certain food chain pattern throughout the dungeon’s fauna.

With such a broader definition, saying that Gygaxian Naturalism is old school is misleading at best and quite possibly downright false.  Any adventure, old or new, can feature elements of naturalism that do not directly challenge the players.  While D&D 4e clearly assumes that noncombatants get no combat stats, I’m sure that many DMs have used naturalistic elements in their 4e adventures to push a story or present setting elements to the players.

That’s why I came up with a different dungeon-focused definition that isin’t bound by a ‘school’.

Dungeon Naturalism

A group of elements that define a dungeon as being an area where creatures live and function above and beyond their role as challenging Player Characters.  Non-combatants, lairs, sources of food and water is a staple of adventures with naturalistic elements.

To me then, Gygaxian Naturalism is Gary’s own touch in making his D&D world feel alive beyond the existence of monsters trying to kill PCs.  In fact, when James M. says that newer editions of D&D abandoned GN, he’s entirely right.

Older adventures and later ones that emulated them had more naturalistic elements probably because the core books of the time (the MM and the DMG) had plenty of material on this.  But this does not prevent DMs from other games (later versions of D&D and everything else) to create their own naturalism.

In fact, I think that naturalism has been taken out of rules book to give this responsibility solely to individual DMs to do as they see fit, modeling their own worlds and deciding how much, if any, naturalistic elements are to be included in it (because for many, this was never important).

In later editions of D&D, I think that’s unavoidable because of the existence of several campaign settings with conflicting rules of naturalism. Its especially true in 4e’s case where the design decisions were to provide a default non-setting (Points of Light) to allow DMs to build whatever they want once they had tamed world building basics.

So like Graham said, while Gygaxian Naturalism has its place in discussing the history of the game, and while James M’s strict definition is old school (roll 1d4X10 for adult Orcs in a Warband), the concept of naturalism, as defined by other writers, is a design philosophy that transcends editions and game engines.

What do you think?

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