Jason, you want to "kill" old school gaming, why would I want to argue about it with you? I'd much rather have a non confrontational discussion about the style of gaming I like rather than listen to you describe how your favorite style is better. I'm not interested.
If someone else wants to argue go ahead and ill chime back in when there is something to talk about
That's an interesting response, since I went to some pains to go back and clarify what I meant by "kill," particularly insofar as this does not mean that "I want to 'kill' old school gaming," but that modern trends in gaming have "killed" certain tenets of old school gaming, i.e., they have fallen out of fashion (which, I thought was one of the founding notions of the Old School Renaissance, that old school styles of play have fallen out of fashion, otherwise, why would you need a renaissance?). Your usage here might range from willfully misconstruing what I said, all the way up to choosing to interpret my words in the most negative manner possible, that is, refusing to discuss the matter in good faith. Which is interesting, given how much time I've devoted to considering your opinions, and trying to interpret them in the best possible light. Particularly in the context of dismissing me for "being confrontational," such a confrontational response says a lot.
Psychoanalysts have often made the point that the things that we hate most in others, we hate because they remind us of the things we dislike most in our own behavior. I don't think I've been confrontational at all, but it's a point you've brought up more than once. Do you think this might indicate why? Do you find yourself confronting people who disagree with you in this kind of manner more often than you'd like?
The problem I have with Abrahms approach is the neccessity that the GM knows that an event is a big thing. And the director or writer of a tv show or movie had better know that. On the otherhand when I run a game its a sandbox where I don't know what's important until the players decide what is important
Yes! I totally agree. Let's run with this.
So, we want to see how things build. We want to see little unexpected things wind up having big consequences. And, we want everybody at the table to enjoy this process, including the GM.
So, how do we find a game that achieves that?
I know no better way to achieve this than a GM-less game, where everybody understands the principle of "Yes, and." In fact, you'd have a hard time
not achieving this that way. No one can know what will end up important. As we layer on detail after detail, we discover the really important bits, which almost always springs from unexpected, unlikely sources. We get the "Riddles in the Dark" effect
every single time, and
everyone gets to enjoy it.
Now, an old school game, you might get lucky every so often and hit this. More likely, you'll just face ignominious death in a deep, dank dungeon, slain by some scurrilous slime. But, let's ignore that for the moment, and focus on that rare, golden time when it all works out. As a GM, yes, I won't know what matters until the players decide what matters. At least, at the campaign level. For tonight, I need to know what lies in that dungeon. I have two options for tonight. One, I can have the dungeon planned out in pain-staking detail, so I know
everything inside it. Maybe I can enjoy the mystery on a larger scale, but only by forfeiting it at the scale of what I do tonight. Or, I can go for hardcore illusionism. I make stuff up on the fly. Or, I run Schroedinger's Dungeon. I'd planned the final encounter on the right, but they decided to go left, so, viola, it now lies on the left. They don't see my notes, they have no idea I changed anything. And, so long as they don't know that, you might keep this up. But eventually, they'll figure it out, and that becomes a huge problem, because now they know that their decisions have no consequences. Therein lies the problem with illusionism: it winds up making the game a solipsistic exercise on the GM's part, and eventually, the players figure that out.
I don't see any escape from this conundrum in old school games--or even, for that matter, in their newer heirs. You choose between hard-and-fast notes so the players can never surprise you, or illusionism, which makes the choices that the players make meaningless. More likely in practice, you treat these as two opposite extremes, and try to find a balance between them. I don't think that offers an escape, though, because it just means finding a blend of the two effects. Maybe you're 50% never surprised, and 50% negating all the players' choices, but that's still not a very good outcome, is it?
Which is not to say that there's no way around the problem. As I said, I get to enjoy precisely this every time I play a GM-less game.
But we're talking about the virtues of old school games here. This is why the point about the "Riddles in the Dark" effect confuses me. It's precisely this that I consider one of the stronger arguments
against old school games. If you enjoy the "Riddles in the Dark" effect, it seems to me, that is a reason that you should avoid old school games. I'm sure there are things that old school games deliver better than any other kind, but this, in particular, does not seem like one of them.
But you and Frost have made the argument that this is actually
what old school gaming is about. This confuses me. Can you explain it to me?