This column occasionally takes a little heat for being head over heels in love with the hippie elves of the “indie gaming community,” to which charge this columnist pleads emphatically guilty. But a year after Gary Gygax’ final leveling up, it’s time to look back at the original indie gaming community, which is to say at modern-day players of the original indie game: Dungeons & Dragons, B.C. (Before Corporatism). Forget 4e vs. 3.5 vs. Pathfinder — in the “old school” community, AD&D is still just a little bit too slick and citified for some folks.
I’ll have more to say on the storied rivalries — and eerie similarities — between indie elves and old-school dwarves in later columns, but I figured I should start out with an introduction to the whole concept. And who better to introduce me, and through me you good people, to it than James Maliszewski? James has written a lot of gaming material, of which I might select the Gear Krieg RPG as one of my personal favorites, but is perhaps best known now for his retro imperial-SF game Thousand Suns and — the reason he’s here now — his tetchy, diamantine, opinionated, finely-researched, downright amazing blog Grognardia. From that pulpit, he’s become, if not the Pope of Old School, certainly its William Phillips, and he’s been generous enough to answer us some questions.
Kenneth Hite: Give us just a taste of your gaming history — where did you come from, and why did you ever leave the white box behind?
James Maliszewski: Truth be told, I never picked up the White Box [Colloquial term for the original three 1974 D&D rules books. -- KH] until many years after I’d already started playing D&D. I started gaming in late 1979, with the D&D Basic rules edited by Dr. J. Eric Holmes, which I used in conjunction with the AD&D Monster Manual I ordered from the Sears catalog with money my grandmother gave me for Christmas.
KH: I started gaming a few months before that, with exactly the same books.
JM: The Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide followed soon thereafter and AD&D, along with Traveller, were my two great loves gaming-wise until the late 80s, by which time both AD&D, then in its second edition, and Traveller, mired in an ill-conceived metaplot, lost their appeal for me.
I dabbled in a lot of games throughout the 90s, but none of them really caught fire with me. When Wizards of the Coast published 3e in 2000, I was ripe to return to my gaming home and plunged headlong into multiple years-long campaigns and even did some writing in support of the game. Fun as it all was, I nevertheless found 3e a bit too “heavy” for me after a while and was looking for something a bit more like the games I played in my wasted youth. Once it became clear that Fourth Edition was not going to be that game, I first gravitated toward Castles & Crusades and then to OD&D. ["Original" Dungeons & Dragons -- Although definitions vary, essentially D&D as it existed between 1974 and 1976. --KH] I’d owned a copy of the White Box for years, but I never had a chance to delve deeply into it, let alone play it, so I set out to do both. I haven’t looked back.
KH: Give us a sense of the old-school field — what should newcomers to it know, do, and read?
JM: “Old school” is a broad and slippery term, especially when you’re dealing with a hobby whose enthusiasts come from many backgrounds and even generations. As colloquially understood, old-school games are generally those produced between 1974 to 1984 or thereabouts. [And modern games intended to emulate those games' rules and feel, which we'll get to below. -- KH] There are some outliers and anomalies here and there, but that decade pretty well encompasses the vast majority of the games considered “old school.”
Games of this vintage are notable primarily for two things. First, their rules, even the very complex ones, are much more explicitly meant as guidelines — aids to the referee and players in adjudicating in-game situations rather than the final word on any topic. Second, old-school games place a larger burden on the player, as opposed to the character, when it comes to overcoming in-game challenges.
There’s always been a community of gamers who prefer these old games and their approach to the hobby, but it’s only been in the last few years that they’ve started to organize and get in contact with one another in a significant way. That’s why there’s suddenly all these forums and websites and blogs dedicated to them popping up all over the place nowadays.
If someone were interested in learning more about these games, I’d recommend they drop by forums like Dragonsfoot, Knights & Knaves Alehouse, or Original D&D Discussion, among many others and interact with the people there. Old-schoolers have a well-deserved reputation for being a prickly, opinionated bunch, but we’re also happy to answer sincere questions from gamers looking to learn more about our mysterious ways. I’d also recommend reading Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, which is a free PDF that talks at some length about these topics.
KH: Why old-school gaming now, for you and for others? What specifically makes this kind of fun your kind of fun?
JM: There are lots of reasons. In my own case, as I said, I was tired of the overly complex, deracinated game that D&D had become in its later editions. I wanted a game that was more “primal” and in touch with the early days of the hobby, as well as more consonant with the pulp fantasy literature that inspired it in the first place. So, naturally, I gravitated back to OD&D. My story seems to be one shared by a lot of old-school fans, so there must be something in the air. And of course there are lots of gamers who never stopped playing the older games. These are the guys and gals who were already out there, waiting for us Johnny-come-latelies to join them.
For me, the appeal of these games lies in their open-endedness. They’re very free-wheeling, almost improvisational in nature, and pretty much demand that you engage them actively in order to be able to make heads or tails of them. There’s nothing passive about playing OD&D, because the rules, as presented in those three little brown books, are unclear and indeed incomplete in places. But there’s magic in those lacunae and it’s exactly this that makes it all so enjoyable for me and others.
KH: What’s your sense of the size of the “old-school” community? Is that different in scale from the size of the old-school market?
JM: I honestly have no idea of the size of the community. The Original D&D Discussion forums, where I hang out, have about 400 members, of which maybe a quarter are very active. Dragonsfoot, on the other hand, has about four times as many members. My old-school blog, Grognardia, gets about 1100 unique visitors daily, but many of those people aren’t old-schoolers as such, but gamers who find my idiosyncratic scribblings amusing enough to stop by. So, I’d say that the community is larger than one might expect, given that most of these games are long out of print, but still pretty small compared to, say, the number of people who play the latest edition of D&D. The market for old-school products is probably smaller still, since old-school games encourage a do-it-yourself ethos that many of its players really take to heart.
KH: What’s your personal favorite of the emulator systems — and does it beat its rivals on any metric besides sincere imitation?
JM: My personal favorite is Swords & Wizardry, which is an OD&D emulator. What it does best, I think, is nicely capture the succinctness of the original game — the rulebook is only 74 pages long. It’s also more like a “tool box” than any of the other retro-clone games, since, like the game on which it’s based, each referee needs to make judgment calls about how some aspects of its rules will be interpreted in his or her own campaign.
KH: What do the others accomplish nonetheless?
Labyrinth Lord is a pitch-perfect emulation of the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh rules from 1981 — those 64-page rulebooks with the groovy Erol Otus art. [The Basic and Expert sets. -- KH] Those books were many gamers’ first encounters with D&D and LL is for them. OSRIC [Old School Reference & Index Compilation! How Gygaxian is that?! -- KH] is my beloved AD&D reborn, so if that’s what you’re after, it’s the game for you.
KH: Is there an “old-school” designer (original or retro) whose work you’ll buy sight unseen? How about a modernist designer?
JM: I think Matt Finch comes the closest to being the guy whose work never fails to inspire me, though I could say the same of James Mishler and Rob Conley. Over the last couple of years, I’ve fallen out of touch with contemporary game design, so I don’t think there are any modern designers whose work I’d buy sight unseen. I think very highly of writers like Erik Mona, James Jacobs, and Jason Bulmahn.
KH: What can the old-school movement learn from the various modernist schools — from the D20 creativity boom, from Heinsoo and Mearls’ 4e, from the various indie movements, from Exalted — or from the supplement-driven “bronze-age” line design methods of GURPS, HERO, and the World of Darkness? What can it teach them?
JM: I think the one area where modern games beat the tar out of old-school games is presentation. Most modern games are much better organized; they’re written with an eye toward intelligibility and clarity. That’s a huge improvement over, say, OD&D, the precise interpretation of some of whose passages is still debated today. Of course, that improvement can sometimes come at a price. Modern games are often a lot more focused on rules as the final arbiter of in-game actions, which can lead to a more “mechanical” play style that I find less enjoyable. I also think modern game design is too focused on selling gamers more products to the exclusion of all else. There’s a certain sense in which the old-school movement is an implicit rejection of the very consumerist model of game design we see nowadays.
KH: James, what purpose did you think Grognardia would serve when you started out? What purpose do you think it serves now?
JM: I originally started the blog on a whim, as part of my grappling with the fact that Gary Gygax had died less than a month earlier. His death hit my unexpectedly hard; I felt like I’d lost a close relative, even though I’d never met the man in person and the extent of my connection to him was primarily through the occasional exchange of emails as I was having my Damascus moment about old-school gaming.
I had hoped that I might be able to “talk out loud” on a variety of topics and that I might get a dozen or so likeminded people with whom to share my thoughts. I ended up with a lot more than that, much to my surprise. Grognardia seems to have become a gateway for a lot of people who decide to poke around the old-school community and see what we’re all about. For good or for ill, many people see the blog as the “face” of the old-school movement, which is at once flattering and exasperating. My main virtue is that I’m very prolific and can turn a good phrase now and again, but my perspective is my own and it’s a highly idiosyncratic one in many cases. One of the joys of the old-school community is that it’s highly individualistic and no one of us, no matter how articulate we may be, speaks for us all. So, I see Grognardia as simply one voice among many, albeit a loud and opinionated one.
KH: You wrote a bunch of D20 Modern stuff back in bubble times, and your current work with Thousand Suns more reinvents Traveller than D&D; do you plan to publish any major opus in the old-school fantasy field?
JM: I do, in fact. My partner in crime at Rogue Games, Richard Iorio, and I are hard at work on a RPG called Shadow, Sword & Spell. It’s our take on the “humanistic fantasy” of the 1930s through 1960s — Howard, Leiber, Fox, Vance, Pratt, De Camp, and so on. Like Thousand Suns, it’s intended as a “tool box” game, so that each referee can use it to create his own vision of the swords-and-sorcery genre. The full game is scheduled for a Fall release, but a playable preview should be available at GenCon this August.
KH: Thanks so much for chatting (tapping?) with me, James.
JM: You’re quite welcome!
And there you have it — we’ll look at some of the more idiosyncratic and interesting of the old-school releases in future columns. But one of the more idiosyncratic and interesting features of the old-school movement is how many of the games are available as free PDF downloads, so go explore the surrounding hexes and find those treasures for yourself!
